Creepiest, bleakest places you've ever been to

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Downtown Washington, DC during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Agree. Was there yesterday - terrifying.

[Anonymous]

A hotel in Inari Finland in January. I was a 20yo woman and everyone else at the hotel was a burly older man. I don't speak Finnish. All TV was in Finnish or Russian. I just stayed in my room. I went to the Sami museum though and that was great--it was just the hotel at night that was bleak.

I also got a weird vibe in Molokai. It was beautiful, and the tour of Kalaupappa was fascinating, and I didn't get a sense of hostility from the people I met, but I felt like I would not understand anything even if I lived there for 30 years. It was like half of what was said was a lie/inside joke/myth/historical reference and 50% was not and I couldn't tell which was which. It also felt like a place where it would be so easy to die in the sea or some remote area and never be found, or to be killed and have nobody fess up.

And a Microtel in Syracuse NY. I wish we'd gone with our initial plan of camping even though it was chilly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The ghost towns of North Dakota. My husband grew up in one of them, and we go back and visit. The creepy part is that the entire town will be abandoned...except for one house. So you'll be surrounded by wind and sky and abandoned buildings, but then see someone pull a curtain back in a house. Its beautiful and bleak and sad.

I was going to say, an acquaintance on FB posted about the teeny town in North Dakota where she grew up long ago. I Googled it and man, is it bleak and isolated looking. Willow City, I think. Just looking at it's location on the map, so far from anything, give me the willies. But I'm a city girl.

I just had a look at Willow City on Google maps. Not much going on. But I want to visit just to go for a few beers in Shooters bar!

[Anonymous]

Orting, WA. It's in the shadow of a volcano that could erupt and bury the town at any time, and there is basically one road out but too many people to evacuate in time. The school has been trying to raise money for a footbridge to get kids to higher ground quickly but there isn't one yet. https://uccs.edu/ges199/rainier/mit/orting/evac

I also once went to a nuclear power plant in a small town in the Czech Republic. A lot about that trip had a weird vibe for me but that was a low point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Atlantic City

Absolutely.

I was expecting Las Vegas with a beach. Oh lord no.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m sure this has been mentioned but South of the Border on I95

Yes, this is now super creepy, was the place to stop 30+ years ago.

For some reason, Colorado Springs completely creeped me out when we visited there. Just a weird vibe, I couldn't wait to leave. It creeped me out more than abandoned places because it seemed so vibrant yet the vibe was all wrong.

Huh.. . why do you think it creeped you out? I used to go there all the time for work and loved it.

[Anonymous]

Johnstown, PA. Lots of the NE cities that used to be thriving steel mills are now deserted, but this one sticks out in my mind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Johnstown, PA. Lots of the NE cities that used to be thriving steel mills are now deserted, but this one sticks out in my mind.

My son's girlfriend is from there (they're both college aged). He absolutely hates visiting her family because he said it's a creepy little Trump town. It's not deserted, but it feels stuck in the 80s.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Chernobyl.

Also, Soviet era apartment blocks and apartments in Ukraine and Russia.

I know it will sound weird, but I grew up in one of these blocks and they are nostalgic to me. In fact there is a FB community where people post pictures of Soviet era landscapes, so I am not the only one.

Wow, that's interesting. We were posted in the region for work, and in the first year were talked into taking an apartment in a Soviet building that was minutes' walk from work. It was the entire top floor of a Khrushchyovka, and the apartment itself had been fully renovated and looked great. But outside the windows and in the rest of the building itself, it was bleak as hell. The crumbling walls and general run-down look, plus the filthy, dog waste-strewn land childrens' "playground" areas outside the blocks were super sad, especially because there were often empty alcohol bottles and cigarettes thrown into the childrens' sand pits or under the swings. I made friends with a local family who lived in a non-renovated little flat and you could hear EVERYTHING from the neighbours above and around them.

We moved into an expat type building after that one year.

Since you didn't grow up there, you won't understand the nostalgia. Many of us grew up in those buildings and associate them with happy childhood memories.

I know it's hard to imagine and of course my parents have their own tales of Soviet-era struggles, and post-Soviet too (there's a reason we left, after all). But overall, where you see bleakness and sadness and dirt, I see a place where I was a carefree happy child. Our apartment wasn't fancy, but it was home. People didn't move around much in the former USSR, so my mom had grown up in the building, and many of the neighbors were like family. That dirty playground was where I spent many fun days playing with friends, while my grandparents, now long gone, sat on a bench nearby to supervise and gossiped with the other pensioners. I've since gone back, and while we sold the apartment decades ago, one of my favorite things to do on those trips is visit our old neighbors who still live in the building and to walk around my old neighborhood.

All in the eye of the beholder.

I also grew up in the region and don't find the apartment complexes particularly bleak, but I came here to say Irkutsk. I've never been anywhere that felt that beaten down. I think it is the combination of post-Soviet neglect and the dominance of organized crime there. Maybe a tie between Irkutsk and Murmansk, both of which have interesting stuff going on but just had this oppressive and hopeless vibe.

[Anonymous]

West Baltimore. I drove my son through there a few years ago and he said "What IS this place?" So many abandoned homes and crumbling buildings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m sure this has been mentioned but South of the Border on I95

Yes, this is now super creepy, was the place to stop 30+ years ago.

For some reason, Colorado Springs completely creeped me out when we visited there. Just a weird vibe, I couldn't wait to leave. It creeped me out more than abandoned places because it seemed so vibrant yet the vibe was all wrong.

Yes, I totally agree about Colorado Springs. It's not desolate like Gary, IN and parts are lovely but it felt oppressive. Like if you aren't a high-ranking, conservative military family, you're nothing. It's very strange.

Mine would be Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Really sketchy and such extreme poverty. Like a different world.

+1

This explains so much, thank you!

[Anonymous]

Salem, Mass.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The ghost towns of North Dakota. My husband grew up in one of them, and we go back and visit. The creepy part is that the entire town will be abandoned...except for one house. So you'll be surrounded by wind and sky and abandoned buildings, but then see someone pull a curtain back in a house. Its beautiful and bleak and sad.

I was going to say, an acquaintance on FB posted about the teeny town in North Dakota where she grew up long ago. I Googled it and man, is it bleak and isolated looking. Willow City, I think. Just looking at it's location on the map, so far from anything, give me the willies. But I'm a city girl.

I just had a look at Willow City on Google maps. Not much going on. But I want to visit just to go for a few beers in Shooters bar!

It seems like the kind of place Frank and Mike might find themselves "freestyling" on American Pickers.

[Anonymous]

When I was younger, I remember being scared of the buildings at Sheppard Pratt mental hospital in Towson, MD. They just looked old and creepy. I still live in the area and drove through the campus last week and loved the beautiful architecture. I guess age changes your perspective.

[Anonymous]

Baltimore in the years between the Freddie Gray riots and the pandemic. Just a constant air of menace and lawlessness at night, even in the parts of the city that were considered safe.