The United States of America is filled with many great places that are lovely to visit and live in. However, just like everywhere else, for every amazing city, there will be some creepy town that you would rather not stop in when passing through.
When one Redditor recently asked people online about their opinions on which one of these towns is the creepiest, netizens were quick to fill the thread with answers, sharing all kinds of stories and making some of those places sound like something straight out of a horror movie. Scroll down to see what they said!
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Colorado City, Arizona. F**k you, Warren Jeffs.
YUP! 100% YUP! I've been through here multiple times and NOBODY has ever been even a hint of friendly. The town is basically one giant sect of the mormon cult consisiting of a few men, their multiple wives, their herds of children, and the town itself looks like a copy and paste job of itself. They stray heavily from the stereotypical mormon kindness in attempts to cover up the incredibly authoritarian, patriarchal set up that guilts and forces children (yes, children, 15yo little girls) to become another wife for the few men there. Boys that grow up in this town are either pressued to be a subservient laborer when they grow up or risk being excommunicated.
Salton Sea, CA went to clean out a family members house after they passed…didn’t see a single car on the road…or human…that whole weekend. Felt sooo creepy.
Was curious, so I checked it out in Google Street view. WOW, how can people live out there? It's all desert and the houses are so far apart. Good if you don't want neighbors by you, but weird!
There is something eerie about small towns around the world, and they don’t necessarily need to be in the USA. After all, it is not without reason that there are many successful horror movies set in places with small towns.
In fact, there’s even a whole movie genre called Small-Town Horror. Among some of the top films of the genre in the list on Ranker are classics like Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Jaws (1975), Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), and the more recent title It (2017). And that is without going into all the series, like Twin Peaks (1990) and Stranger Things (2016).
Gotta say it. My wife and I were vacationing in Bar Harbor, Maine, and decided to drive to the easternmost point in the US. So we made it Lubec, Maine. It was kind of foggy and looked totally deserted. I get Stephen King novels now.
Amboy, California
All of the stories are true. I lived out in 29 palms while my husband was stationed there a few years back. I heard stories of people getting run off the road, people pretending to have gotten in a car crash so you stop and help, candles being set up in the middle of the road, etc. His chain of command even had a meeting with them before the marine corps ball about not stopping on amboy because of how dangerous it was. I worked out there too and I know at least 10-15 bodies have been found in the last few years.
I heard quite a few years ago that someone had bought the gas station/cafe and was trying to put Amboy back on the map. Looks like he didn't succeed.
Whittier, Alaska
Most of the town’s residents live in a single apartment building. There’s nothing else there. The town is accessible by water and a one-way tunnel through the mountain.
Of course, it’s easy to argue that some of the imagery we now have in our heads might also have been created by these very movies. It could also be that big cities are very different in comparison or that our minds simply find it hard to accept that everything that looks so calm and perfect can just be like that without any hidden agenda.
As Horror Head wrote on Medium, places like these tend to look picturesque, with many trails, wide open parks, warm homes, and stores, as well as friendly people welcoming you with open arms—all of it looking as if it hasn’t changed one bit in the past few decades.
How has no one said Harrison Arkansas? It's the home of the [infamous clan with a 'k'], and they aren't shy about it.
I lived in Arkansas for 8 yrs and been there once while I was passing through and I'm a goth gal with tons of ink. I literally heard one woman say I should be burned at the stake and immediately I knew I was in danger. I didn't even finish filling up my gas tank and said eff this. If you're not "normal", light skinned or anything but "Christian" I suggest avoiding Harrison. Also I did see their sign that said "If you're dark and out after dark you're dead!" I wish I was joking but yeah that was one of their signs next to townhall. Absolutely disgusting town 🤢
Most towns in East Texas, close to the LA border. They don't want you there, and they'll let you know it. I'm a white Texas native, and I don't even feel welcome.
Towns in East Texas might as well be in a whole other state. Things get a little weird when you start going east of Houston, then things get pretty bad as you keep going east on I-10. Don't use any roads other than Interstate 10 between Beaumont and the LA border unless you know where you are and where you're going, especially at night. And if it were up to me, don't get out of your car after you pass through Beaumont.
This type of scenery usually makes one feel like what they see in front of their eyes is too good to be true, and so, the mind wanders, looking for whatever could be lurking beneath this beautiful surface.
And sure enough, every small town has something to say. If you find the right person to talk to, you’ll likely hear about all kinds of things, from myths and urban legends to haunted historical tales and dark secrets. While it may be difficult to tell how much of it is true, it will most likely sow a little bit more doubt in you, making you doubt the perfect exterior just a little bit more.
Covington VA.
I've told this story before and I'll tell it again.
A few years ago I worked as a subcontractor to banks. I was the guy who would knock on your door and tell you to call your bank on a missed payment.
Anyway, I was driving in a new job territory. And as I'm driving down the road, all of a sudden, I come upon a massive fog bank. It takes a good 5 minutes to drive through it. Then once I reach the other end, it was like someone just cut the fog with a knife. It suddenly ended, and it's stone cold quite. I mean I even stopped my car and listened. No birds. No wind. No sound.
Feeling creeped out, I slowly drive a bit more. And come out on top of a mountain looking down into the city valley. And it smells like hotdog water. I didn't know it then but that was due to the paper factory.
As I drove into town, it was just one store front closed after another. It all felt like a Steven King movie. The whole town seemed like a zombie insect. Dead but still moving somehow.
As if all that wasn't enough, the cherry on top was seeing a few [totalitarian] flags flying in front of people's houses.
After seeing those, I got out of there as fast as I could.
as a virginian, just don’t go to any small towns. they’re all falling apart and depressing, especially when you get to the mountains and west of them. if you’re driving through, try not to make any stops you don’t have to
Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The Moth Man is hiding there, somewhere.
I know it's meant to be something to do with horror but that is an amazing statue.
East St Louis, IL. Never seen a town that looked post-apocalyptic before going through there.
80 years ago, East St. Louis was a white middle class neighborhood. A few black families moved in, and the whites panicked. They'll bring down property values! The whites sold low, causing property values to plummet. Poor families started being able to buy there. With the loss of the middle class, businesses went as well. Things just crumbled all to hell, and 20 years later, the city was almost all poverty-level blacks. If the whites hadn't been idiots, property values wouldn't have gone down, and it may well have become a nice place for people of any color to live. Instead, we have extreme poverty and all of the problems that stem from that.
When talking about small and unsettlingly perfect towns like that, there's another great example that we learned about when Bored Panda reached out to the OP, u/Scrambl987.
The creepiest place in the USA, according to the author of this thread, is Celebration, Florida. "The idea of a Disney-controlled city is just odd," said the Redditor.
My vote is with Las Vegas. Lotta desperate and creepy people and that is just the tourists. The flashing lights and constant sound failed to distract me from the dark underbelly that is right in your face.
I vouche for this too. It's a heavily mixed bag of drunks and d**g addicts who came for a visit, partied too hard cuz they were stupid enough to believe that Vegas comes with no real-life consequences, and go stuck in said Dirt Town....so a bunch of addicts stuck in an aggressive loop. The other half are the typical, self-righteous "christian" crowd that live there because it's the easiest way to feed their holier-than-thou attitude in juxtaposition to the people that come to party....cuz of course they must be better people than a bunch of addicts.
Barstow, California. It’s the convergence of highways in the middle of nowhere. It’s like an entire town of unhinged hitchhikers who got dumped there. Freaky s**t.
I like CA, I've lived there a few times, and have traveled it extensively...I can vouche for how much Barstow sucks.
As a minority, Kingman az. I used to live near there. It’s such a f*****g racist a*s sundown town, that sasha baron cohen did a piece there for his show Who is America? He f****d with them in a fake town hall meeting where he was proposing to build a mosque in town. It was not received well, and that town of racist f*****g lunatics showed their true colors!
As Celebration Info writes, the town that used to be part of the Disney World Resort no longer belongs to the Walt Disney Company and is now part of Kissimmee and Osceola County. And yet, the idea of a functional city built by an entertainment company as an experiment in community planning somehow feels a little unnatural.
The OP revealed that it was their recent visit to Celebration that inspired them to ask this question online. "The thread becoming so popular was a definite surprise to me," shared the person.
I've traveled through a lot of tiny little back towns all around the western US. In southeastern California, the towns up the west shore of the Salton Sea have a unique kind of eerieness I've never felt anywhere else. Towns like Salton City, Desert Shores, and Oasis.
The Salton Sea, for those unfamiliar, is an inland body of saltwater. Back around the 1960s, a bunch of little resort towns popped up along its shores. But sometime in the 70s or 80s, a combination of agricultural runoff and wild variations in the salinity of the sea caused fish to die off in massive numbers. The stench of rotting fish pretty well killed the tourism industry, and the towns along the sea have never recovered. They're not quite ghost towns, there are still a few thousand people living in each of the cities I named. But they're only a fraction of the population they once had. I could definitely feel sort of a depressing weight on the towns, and the dead fish smell is still to this day a constant presence all along the seashore.
The little towns “popped up” in the 1910s and ‘20s. They were quite the resort towns for Hollywood stars. However, the lake has no outlet and with evaporation and agricultural runoff, it became quite toxic, and Hollywood abandoned it. It is, nevertheless, a great place to go birding (if you can stand the stench). The Feds and the state have been trying to negotiate a clean-up for — oh — aboyt 25-30 years. You know how joint projects between the Feds and states go …
Florida, Missouri
Creepy, creepy, creepy.
I just checked. It's now listed as uninhabited (by the living). I'm not surprised.
But in the end, every place is different in its own way, and every city or town has its own plusses, minuses, and horror stories. So, if you’re planning a trip where you might visit any one of these spots that these Redditors mentioned, it may be wise to remember what they said. But try not to take their words as an undeniable truth because every experience is personal, and there’s no guarantee that whatever you read will come true.
What did you think about this story? Do you know any other creepy towns in the USA that you’d like to add to the list? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Tonopah, Nevada. Clown Motel next to a cemetery full of infants and workers who [perished] in a silver mine.
I grew up in the poorest town in America. Littleton , West Virginia. It's not even Incorporated anymore and is literally been articled on Google as the poorest most depressing place in America and most definitely in Appalachia.
My parents moved us there when I was about 3 out of the city in Pittsburgh when a flood destroyed the whole street of houses we lived on. The city bought it out to put a trolley track through. My parents were off with the wind.
I think at the time my parents thought we were going to move to the country and it was going to be peaceful and quiet and we could start over. Between the [substance] epidemic, the poverty levels, and the reality of living in such a rural area with limited access to close jobs and stores was far different.
I wouldn't change it now that I'm grown , but I definitely saw some things that fit the Appalachian uneducated narrative, trauma and bad parenting etc . However though, I also met many people who are incredibly kind , well-educated , well-rounded human beings and I do not think that the stereotype is fair.
A lot of people hear a person is from West Virginia and immediately assume that they're uneducated , don't wear shoes and are inbred living in a shack with No electric.
Sadly not true at all and all of those things can be relevant in other places across the world.
But Littleton , West Virginia definitely is a wasteful black hole of a place , and not a pleasant place to grow up By any means.
It'd be nice if investors were attracted to these abandoned towns rather than buying up cities and pricing the locals out of the real estate market.
Picher, OK. It’s an EPA superfund site that was being cleaned up and bought out. The town was dying literally and figuratively, then a tornado came through and took care of enough that whoever had remained left. Now it’s a ghost town.
This place is a lovely example of capitalism privatizing all the profit, while leaving cleanup of the mess for everyone else to pay for.
It's barely a town anymore but definitely Mineral Springs, Missouri.
It was once a bustling town with a famous hot spring, but it dried up. Now various people live in very old houses with no electricity. No one knows their names but they send one person into town a month for groceries.
If you're there very long at all, they WILL shoot at you.
Sooooo, not a good idea to stop for a selfie in front of that Insta-ready, picturesque barn? /s
Beaver, Oklahoma. Way out in the panhandle. Don’t go there if you’re a minority.
Elgin Kansas.
The motto of the town is “A town too tough to die”
A person told me a story about a time they stopped there on a cross country motorcycle trip. When they parked they could see people peaking round the corners of buildings. Shortly after a woman in an old dirty wedding dress came around a building pushing an old Victorian baby stroller. There wasn’t a baby in the stroller it was a toy baby.
There are trees growing out of buildings. The Main Street is an out of place, super wide, brick road for herding cattle through the town back in the way back times. For such a small town of nothing, in the middle of nothing. It was for a short time “one of the World’s busiest cattle shipping towns”
It’s a creepy place.
Edited: town motto. Still just as cool.
Shreveport is like The Last Of Us at night time.
It's the kind of place that when a stranger walks into a restaurant, everyone stops eating and stares.
Medicine Bow, WY. I only stayed in the hotel for a night but it was super creepy. Lights off in the front and hasn't been renovated since early 1900s with a bunch of creepy Victorian Era paintings and mouse s**t everywhere.
I stayed there!! Fifty bucks a room. Bathroom down the hall. I peed in my disposable drink cup rather than go out of my room after bedtime. LOTS of weird unexplained noises. And I was told at check in that I was the ONLY one checked in! I left as soon as the sky was getting light--5am! However it had the BEST cheeseburger in the vintage restaurant!
Tenderloin in San Francisco is an experience to say the least. Especially at night.
I haven't been here post covid but the tenderloin used to be my go to for some drinks and friendly banter. It was the city's hub for homosexual people to find their niche. Dunno what's happened since then.
I'm surprised Cairo, IL didn't make the list. I drove through a few years back, and I'm not sure I've ever felt quite so uncomfortable. Everything was boarded up. No other cars. No one on the street. Just urban decay and sadness.
I drove through it last year, and I'd describe it the same way.
Load More Replies... Parker Arizona is a s**t hole. It's a mile square on the border of California. I grew up there. We moved there from Illinois and we used to beg our parents to take us back. I can't even tell you how disgusting that place is. It's all of a mile square and hasn't changed a bit in the 40 years since I lived there. The amount of domestic violence I witnessed in their s****y bars and the number of native american kids in my school who committed suicide to escape abuse. It wasn't a town for a naive white boy.
I'm surprised Cairo, IL didn't make the list. I drove through a few years back, and I'm not sure I've ever felt quite so uncomfortable. Everything was boarded up. No other cars. No one on the street. Just urban decay and sadness.
I drove through it last year, and I'd describe it the same way.
Load More Replies... Parker Arizona is a s**t hole. It's a mile square on the border of California. I grew up there. We moved there from Illinois and we used to beg our parents to take us back. I can't even tell you how disgusting that place is. It's all of a mile square and hasn't changed a bit in the 40 years since I lived there. The amount of domestic violence I witnessed in their s****y bars and the number of native american kids in my school who committed suicide to escape abuse. It wasn't a town for a naive white boy.
