7 True Scary Urban Exploration Horror Stories (Vol. 2)

[Music] about 13 years ago a few buddies and I were really into urbex we didn't call it that back then we weren't part of any sort of community nor were we into taking photographs of places we visited we'd find some old apocalyptic looking derelict on my Friday or Saturday night get some beers and some smokes then spend the night getting wasted and fantasizing about zombies survival scenarios I've pretty much settled down now I'm in a long-term relationship and we're even talking about having kids I doubt my girlfriend would be too keen on me exploring old abandoned buildings but that's not exactly why I don't kerbecs anymore and the reason I stopped is because of what we say at the Danvers State Medical Hospital shortly before it was demolished back in 2007 so there's this movie that came out in 2001 called session 9 we saw in the movie theater near Boston Common and were instantly obsessed sure it's a good movie but the star isn't really David Caruso the real star is Danvers state medical hospital location scouts must have giggled like schoolgirls when they laid eyes on Danvers it looks more like Hogwarts than a place where some of Massachusetts most dangerous mental patients were housed the huge Gothic building was built in 1874 and it was quite the sight to behold seriously google it and you'll see for yourself but in the early 90s it was abandoned when all remaining patients were transferred to other sites once we learned that the Magnificent looking building was only 13 minutes north of Boston and we were already making plans to visit for a little midnight drinking session one Friday night we make the drive up there parking our buddy's car about a mile away before walking over to the abandoned hospital we may or may not have committed criminal damage and breaking through the flimsy perimeter fencing I'd rather not say anything too incriminating I don't want to get arrested over some dumb reddit posts but once we were inside it's as incredible as we imagined the place didn't feel like it had ever been a hospital we picture hospitals these days as being these white on steel sterile places but Danvers really did feel like it was straight out of the Harry Potter movie intricate patterns on the tiled floor grand staircases more like an old mansion than a treatment center we're still in awe when we decide to make our way up on one of the staircases to explore the upper floors wandering down long dark corridors with the only light being from cheap plastic flashlights we were carrying one such corridor had lots and lots of smaller rooms running off of it it was clearly some kind of high-security wing the rooms look more like prison cells than hospital rooms there were even rusted iron shackles still attached to some of the walls evidently some prisoners were restrained when they became too violent but when I shine my flashlights into another one of the smaller cell like rooms I froze carton my torch beam was the Dahle steel of a steak knife I can still remember how its teeth glittered in the bright white light next to it a rather dirty looking sleeping bag lay on the cold tiled floor someone was here with us I can't remember who said it but one of my buddies muttered something about us not being alone here and when a strange voice spoke through the darkness I think all of us just jumped out of our skin hi that's all it said at first anyway there's a young dirty homeless guy walking down the corridor towards us hands up and palms out I can't remember the exact exchange my adrenaline was pumping the entire time but I'll try to paraphrase we were just about to leave dude we don't want any trouble ah it's all good he replied something friendly in his voice set me at ease I really didn't mean to scare you guys it's cool uh kind of a scary place anyway he's separated from what I assumed was his steak knife but I still kept my eyes on where it was sat in the darkness making sure he won't be able to grab it if he decides he doesn't like us so much but as I said he was actually pretty friendly for a guy who seemed to be living in an abandoned insane asylum we gave him a beer a kind of peace offering and then spent about a half an hour just wandering the corridors and talking none of us wanted to press him on why he was there he seemed nice enough so we passed the time talking about Boston complaining about the socks that sort of thing after a while he does in fact tell us some of this story how he's been a drifter for a while not exactly homeless but not exactly the nine-to-five kind of dude either he liked to explore weird old places too so that was like another half hour listening to all the awesome abandoned places he'd visited across America he'd even been to Bodie California which has like this legendary status among urbex enthusiasts because it's an entire mining town that was abandoned after the gold rush or something so about the point that we're thinking this is one of the coolest guys we've ever met he asks us something that at first we thought was some kind of joke so uh you guys are human right one of my buddies actually laughed but the guy shot him this look and man if looks could kill he was serious and the more dawn on us that he was 100% serious the more freaked out we became I just you know hate meeting cool people than finding out they're reptilians you know you can only really tell once you appeal that fake layer of skin off I mean that's what the knife is for he'd seen my eyes flicking towards it don't look so nervous dude you guys seem cool but sometimes it just gets real tiring they've been after me for so long now and they never ever stop sometimes thing I think I should just kill everyone just to be safe an uncomfortable silence came over us I wanted to run from this crazy monster but that might anger him and we really didn't want to anger him oh dang dude we're almost out of beer when my buddy says here man uh why don't you take our last one we'll we'll go buy some more and be back in like an hour again probably not word for word but I'll never forget the relief I felt when he said those words it was a stroke of absolute genius to be able to get ass out of there so quickly without raising too much suspicion in the guy the homeless looking crazy person seemed very happy at this like he'd made himself a trio of new friends guys he could finally trust and as we walked out of Danvers and back towards the car I felt a new fresh feeling guilt [Music] I'm an urban explorer urban exploration or urbex as we call it in the community is the exploration of man-made structures often abandoned or hidden from the general public and generally speaking photography has played a large role in its popularity but historical documentation has also become a factor in recent years as austerity has taken hold in the UK urban decay has become much more prominent with abandoned factories amusement parks and other such places becoming increasingly common across the country to my knowledge the term urban exploration was invented in the mid 90s by a Canadian guy by the name Jeff Chapman but one particularly harrowing story tells of a French urban explorer by the name of Fela ban F spare the story goes that mon cas spare was a hospital porter in the 18th century who had heard rumors that there were riches to be found in the deep whining catacombs beneath paris priceless jewels golden medallions and a hundred year old bottle of expensive spirits waited for those who were brave enough to search for them mole Sierras spare have packed a knapsack bit his wife adieu then wandered down into the catacombs in search of his fortune his skeleton was discovered in the damp dark tunnels just over eleven years later now I'm not sure if I believe that story there's always been a kind of glamour that came with the apparent dangers of urban exploration and I'd be lying if I said I didn't find that attractive but the story of the French explorer seems a little too far-fetched for me not to mention that the risks involved these days are minimal it's pretty much impossible to get lost and an emergency mobile phone means that medical assistance is usually just minutes away that being said it doesn't mean you find some genuinely weird or disturbing things while exploring and not too long ago myself and a friend of mine explored a place that actually made me question if I wanted to involve myself in urbex anymore just out of Farnham in a leafy rural place called Surrey in England stands an old abandoned puppy mill the building has been deserted since 82 year old John Lowe was arrested for killing his former partner and her daughter with a high-powered shotgun he had shot his wife christine lee at point-blank range with a shotgun later telling police that he wanted to put her down his daughter lucy lee made a call to the emergency services before courageously returning to the scene of the crime to face her killer one final time in the building has a sinister air about it before we even laid eyes on it but when we'd actually seen the thing the apprehension was palpable it looked like a typical haunted house all red brick and Victorian arches like it was just waiting to be the cover art of the next Stephen King novel we took a few pictures nervously chuckling to each other as we made our way inside the interior has been almost completely gutted there it wasn't a scrap of furniture to be seen and almost all of the electrical fittings had been torn out to prevent accidental fires the glass windows of the conservatory attached to the house had smashed wholesale not a single pane of glass had survived some previous visit from local vandals it only added to the eerie feeling of the place like some terrible vengeance had been wrought by angry locals trying to destroy a place that was haunted by so many terrible events my friend and I separated as I ventured upstairs while he remained on the ground floor searching the kitchen the upstairs bedrooms were still carpeted but leaks in the roof meant that larger patches of black mould were growing on the walls and floors the place wreaked of rot yet just as I was headed back downstairs I heard my friend call out for me to join him in the kitchen and all the time I known him I never ever known him to sound too scared my initial thought was that we'd been joined by some police who'd received reports of us exploring the murder scene the empty alcohol containers in the first floor told me that this place was probably the haunt of drug users and criminals Hollywood take was a simple explanation maybe with us walking away with cautions as I entered the kitchen there were no signs of police just a friends staring wide-eyed at one of the white painted walls when I asked him what was wrong he just pointed at the spot on the wall he was staring at not saying a word there on the wall was a small jagged hole in the masonry framed by some dark muddy stain it only took me a moment to realize just what I was looking at it was a hole made by the shot that killed Kristin Lee it must have been the money stain around the ragged opening must have been her blood I appeared closer recoiling and revulsion as I saw something that clung to the jagged edges of the roughly cut hole a few fibrous strands of something dark and glassy matted together with the same muddy stain that marred the white painted walls it was hair human hair and all my time taking part in urbex trips I had never felt so utterly terrified have been chased by the cops punched by angry security guards but I'd never felt like anything like this the death was thick in the air it was a horrible feeling just knowing that something so terrible had happened right where we stood I've never believed in ghosts sir anything remotely paranormal but there's absolutely no denying the feeling that came over us as we stared in horror at that hole that fatal gunshot had made it was haunting the police felt haunted it felt exactly as if we were transgressing on some kind of hallowed ground disturbing the restless spirits that lingered in the place they had so horribly lost their lives it felt wrong I turn to my friend giving him a look that said far far more than words ever could he just nodded before we quietly made our way out of the building not once looking back as he walked back through the woods towards town I'm still very active in the urbex community although I did take a prolonged break from it after what I saw in the low house down in Surrey I now actively warned people against a visiting former murder scenes telling them that some places are better left undisturbed like I said I'm not a believer in the supernatural but that doesn't mean that some places aren't haunted not haunted by ghosts but by the reality of just how cruel and heartless human beings can be toward each other even by people they love [Music] I'm an urban explorer from Scotland over in the UK and I have been involved in the urbex community for coming up on 15 years I've probably explored more than 500 abandoned places over the years and at least 99% of them are exactly what you'd expect rundown houses factories and hospitals creepy enough to make for amazing photography but nothing remotely sinister about them honestly the number one feeling you get from urbex is kind of sadness especially when the site in question is an old gothic building that's more deserving of investment and not demolition I've been to pretty much every stereotypically creepy place you can imagine old Victorian hospitals haunted stately homes in the middle of nowhere several morgues and operating theaters abandoned graveyards creepy basements and tunnels you name it and I've explored it but one place was different from all the others out of all the places I've explored only one genuinely scared me a bit of background information we absolutely adore finding new places but it's not exactly easy it takes a lot of research and we get most of our locations from Google Maps news articles land registries and the obvious shares from other members of the arabic set so often unless someone has left kind of an herb x review we don't know what a place will be like before we turn up sometimes they're sealed empty or demolished and sometimes I wish this place had been like any of those we would have turned up found the place inaccessible and simply gone home or found a pub to drink our disappointment away a lot of the time my urbex pals and I will organize a kind of day trip something to look forward to and bring relief from the stresses of our boring or stressful jobs we'll go about visiting a certain town or city that has a few potential urbex sites and then exploring them all throughout the course of a day we get a hotel find a few nice places to eat but it also helps to socialise with the locals a wee bit after a few pints even the most hard hearted that people will spill the beans on derelict buildings in the area this one place was the last abandoned building on the trip it was getting dark and rainy as it often does in rural Scotland but we decided to push on and get a few photos before sundown we had a kind of a long drive to get to the hotel so we couldn't just put it off until the following day at first it didn't seem abandoned just a church in the middle of a very well kept cemetery my friend assured me that from his research it definitely wasn't in use and I was pretty keen to get inside because abandoned churches can make beautiful photos only by this point and we were losing daylight at a rapid rate we'd have to get in there if we wanted to make use of the last of the natural light iPhone camera flashes just don't make for good photos only natural light produces the kind of results that get noticed on photography forums the rotten back door to the church was wide open old paint peeling and patches from the splintering wood it was hardly the most inviting entrance but the only visible way of getting into the building one by one making sure there was no one around report us for trespassing we made our way inside no side note a lot of urbex enthusiasts talk a good game about climbing into places through open or broken windows want to ruse to find service hatches and all that I can categorically say that climbing an abandoned site is definitely not a good idea from experience the fastest way to the emergency room is trying to climb something that is literally falling apart inside we came to what appeared to be a small kitchen I'm not remotely religious so it did kind of surprised me that's whoever the priest was actually used to live in the church - that kind of dedication is something so intangible was just beyond me but I suppose that's why they call it faith the kitchen naturally led onto a small corridor before opening up into the main church hall that was the last time we spoke for a long time there were beautiful color stained-glass windows albeit a little grimy from the abandonment but that's not what drew our eyes a distinctly uneasy feeling overtook us as we saw just what was laid out in the hall before us I for one was completely lost of words while one of my friends went deathly pale as if he'd seen an actual ghost in that old church instead of the standard empty pews and religious iconography the interior of the church was filled with children's toys they were stuffed neatly and uniformly into every pew all facing the same way forever listening to some silent sermon all of the children's toys and dolls were worn in filthy in a creepy kind of style that kids toys haven't been made since like the 70s or 80s there were little ornate prams that's strollers for Yanks and match' about cars all facing the same way towards the empty priests podium it dawned on me that since there were no toys there the Webber had arranged them this way had stood at the podium and admired their handiwork there was also a kind of bedroom area one bed having been clearly made up for a child and surrounded by children's books no adult sized beds not a single one so I don't think it was anything like a homeless family squatting there how long they had been there was anyone's guess but one thing was clear whatever the reason these toys were arranged like this it was not a good or pure one we left the place still in silence to creep down to discuss the scene as we drove back to the hotel we were staying at the mood of the whole day had changed in mere moments it was still too raw to try to make sense of the things we had just seen the spite our outward appearances the place was collapsing inside a huge hole in the floor had formed and damp was setting in so any evidence of the toys the bed and the sinister atmosphere may well be lost or buried soon I don't know if anyone else had discovered this place or knows what happened but it's not somewhere I'll ever return to I refuse to share the location even with my closest Explorer friends for fear if that they visit they'll run into whoever had arranged those toys into such a ghostly congregation I've seen a few scary urbex posts on the subreddit over the past couple of days even some amazing stories but they've reminded me of my own terrifying experience that I haven't actually thought about in some time I've never really told anyone this story but now I feel like this is the right time I mean I am pretty much anonymous here and it really has been years since this whole thing went down I live in Liverpool over in the UK you know the place where the Beatles came from it's a beautiful city with a rich cultural history but beneath the old Victorian streets there are old mysteries that had never been solved dark secrets that pass from the world along with the dead men who kept them let me tell you the story of when a friend and I explored the Williamson tunnels the Williamson tunnels are a bunch of massive subterranean excavations in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool which were created under the direction of a tobacco merchant landowner and philanthropist Joseph Williamson between the early 19th century although generally described as tunnels the majority of the complex is comprised of brick or stone vaulting essentially a series of interlocking rooms have been carved out from the rock underneath the city the purpose of the works remains unclear although querying a philanthropic desire to provide an Williamson's own eccentric interests have all been suggested now this all seems pretty harmless just some rich old guy providing jobs for the local people but when a local journalist by the name of stone house became suspicious of William Simms motives he went about researching the true purpose of the tunnel network one hearing that stone house plan to publish his research on Williamson's excavations Williamson's friends the artist Cornelius Henderson threatened to sue stone house both for libel and trespass leading to his journalism being suppressed for many many years eventually the British Army got involved in a mandatory survey of the tunnel system was ordered yet despite the massive amount of work that went into the surveying Army engineers simply did not have the manpower to cover all the grounds larger excavations such as the vaulted great tunnel have yet to be located still think the whole thing is harmless no neither did we so it came to pass that myself and a friend of mine will call him Chris began to plan a clandestine exploration of the Williamson tunnels namely the parts that hadn't already been explored we stocked up on a few snacks two flashlights each along with a lot of batteries there was no way either of us was getting caught short in some dark underground tunnels that would be like the start of a bad horror movie or something some warm clothes one first aid kit between us and we were set I gotta say it was incredibly exciting planning a little expedition like that knowing we'd be venturing into places that no one had stepped foot in for almost 200 years we joked about finding a huge stash of treasure Spanish gold and silver doubloons but I think I half believed we might why else would a man dig so deep into the earth unless he had something really worth hiding the whole real way to get inside the tunnels is to use the official visitors entrance the plan was to get inside look like a pair of well-meaning tourists then hide out somewhere until closing time when we would have the place to ourselves simple but effective nonetheless naturally it worked we found some dark corners far deep as we could manage without cutting away at the chain-link security fencing that kept us from the deeper recesses after 5 p.m. a solitary security guard made one final sweep of the public areas with his flashlight turned off the main power and then went home for the evening maybe it was a bit early to be high-fiving each other but we were still pretty estatic that the first phase of our plan had gone off without a hitch the next phase involved finding a way around the previous mentioned chain-link fences that had been erected to keep tour groups from venturing into restricted supposedly dangerous areas with a little help from a pair of pliers my friend had borrowed from his dad's toolbox we were in we got out our flashlights and began to wander deeper and deeper into the unknown it didn't take long until we were hopelessly lost inside an unending series of pitch-black rooms I had assumed that there would be some sort of order to the layout but each adjacent room seemed to take us deeper into what had to be a huge labyrinth underneath the streets of Liverpool the deeper we got the more debris covered the floors chunks of hewn limestone that we began to stumble over as we pushed on I noticed that my ears were popping just in time to hear my friend let out a Yelp as he slipped among the rubble and crashed into the rocks beneath him it looked bad I rushed over to him struggling to find stable footholds among the rocks and was incredibly relieved to discover that all he had were a few cuts and grazes I don't quite know why I did this at the time maybe it was because I knew from the look on his face that he had had enough but I left him for a few moments to go see if there was any of that treasure stashed away in the rooms ahead of us of course he wasn't there when I got back but of course he wasn't there when I got back of course the room he was saddened was empty no sign of him anywhere hell is kicking myself he'd obviously got an annoyed that I'd left him alone and was now marching back on his own bleeding and tired I tried to find him heading back as fast as I could to catch up with him yet there was no sign of my friend at all no torchlight in the darkness no one responding when it caught on his name and it was about at this point that I started getting pretty freaked out either he was playing a bad joke on me or there was something terribly wrong then from the rooms behind me I heard footsteps not walking pace not at all these feet were sprinting hurdling through the rooms towards me in the darkness I wheeled around and shined my flashlight relieved beyond belief to see my missing friend but his face I've seen a look of terror so etched into someone's features he didn't have his torch or his backpack and he almost crashed into me as he sprinted through the tunnels he just whimpered one single word as he ran run to this day he's never talked about what he saw down there that made him run like that he started drinking a lot even getting up late and getting drunk all night it wasn't long before we drifted apart and he ended up moving down to Portsmouth way down in the South of England he was never quite the same after it but that doesn't mean I haven't stopped wandering and one day maybe over a few drinks I asked him but that's not asking him that I'm afraid of that's what he might tell me that really scares me [Music] when I was in the university I used to work the closing shift in McDonald's here in the UK which is without a doubt the weirdest shift to work that happens to be the most consistently busy shift of the day yet somehow it's invariably worked by incompetent teenagers who are somehow corralled by a manager who are barely out of their teens themselves and before you go saying that's a mean thing to say or that I should have more respect for hard-working young people I think I've earned the right to say it and because I used to be one of those previously mentioned incompetent teenagers at about 11:30 each nights when the closing shift ends myself and a few of the guys who worked there used to go have a smoke at a nearby play park before going our separate ways only one night in particular one of the guys has the idea to drive over to the grounds of an abandoned psychiatric hospital and have our smokes there and granted it didn't seem like the best idea at the time but the guy was offering to drive us there and back and even said that he'd had a few beers in the cooler tucked away in his car and trust me if you finish a late shift at McDonald's stinking of grease and sick to the back teeth of rude customers you jump at the offer of a free beer my only question was where this place was exactly he said it was only a few miles away at a place called Winningham so the grounds that Winningham hospital is built on are absolutely gianormous there are about four or five different annexes constructed around a cricket pitch a duck pond and even a small train station built specifically for the purpose of receiving patients I'm not actually from the area I moved to attend the University in nearby Preston so unlike the locals I had no idea of the story behind Whittingham hospital one of the lads starts to tell it as we parked the car and began to walk over to the grounds I think if he had told me before we left I had have been much less keen to accept the free beer basically back in the 60s the hospital was the subject of a huge controversy involving abuse of staff and illegal medical testing but whatever the truth was it had been lost in the subsequent rumor mill is the local population embellished and exaggerated the story until it was something of an urban legend people talked of haunted buildings mass graves and patients who refused to leave when the place was shut down in the 90s with those thoughts rattling through our brains we climbed the large stone wall that surrounded the complex and began to explore each time we would wander into one of the dusty old buildings we would often find that the floors would give way or that they'd rotted away entirely it was pretty dangerous but the sense of adventure was palpable I'd never done anything quite like it in my life the sight of such magnificent buildings being left to crumble was sad but exhilarating knowing we had them to ourselves there were long wards lined with damp moldy beds housed inside huge Victorian buildings complete with towers there was even an old church which was just as creepy as you can imagine I mean it was like the perfect place to shoot a horror movie or something and we relished the opportunity to scare the everliving Dookie out of each other I remember this one place an old operating room then we were exploring one of my mates ventured into the middle of the room when we heard the rotten old floorboards creaking ominously beneath his feet then watched an absolute horror as the ground beneath him gave way and he plummeted into the darkness below it was honestly horrible to watch but I can't even tell you how relieved we were to discover he'd gotten away with nothing but a few scrapes the worst part was trying to get him out it was absolutely filthy down there and he wreaked of rot when we finally pulled him out of that hole but that wasn't the worst part not for a long shot we were exploring one of the larger buildings when we came to a locked door by this point the other guys had done a fair bit of climbing and crawling to allow us entry into each of the building and it was my turn to pitch in so after crawling through a small jagged hole in the wall I got to the door opening and we all went inside it was a huge mansion style building with those stairs that are split at the bottom and curved round two joined together at the top and we used our phone torches to cut through the pitch blackness as we ascended following a long dark corridor until it became clear what this building was used for there were scores of smaller private Ward's with bars attached to the windows it was obviously some kind of secure unit where the most violent of the patients were held we walked into one and it was like a loop background to the main corridor again evidently designed to make it difficult for the patients to hide or escape so we wandered down noting that all the beds were just metal frames with nothing else but as we turn the corner there was one larger bed the only one which had a mattress on it what's more this mattress had a large dark stain marring the once white sheets it was a big stain a horrendous smell emanating from it out of nowhere one of my mates freaked out he was pointing at the filthy dust covered floor pointing towards a few patches of a similarly looking muddy stain that led from the ward I would say that the most scared I've ever been was then we were already a bit panicky but seeing that had us fleeing the building as fast as we could we decided to enter one more building before leaving only it just so happened that this building was locked lucky we found a basement door around the back but you know those creepy thin stone steps that lead underground with a wooden door at the bottom yeah it was one of those hardly the most inviting threshold we'd ever seen we pushed our way in and found ourselves in some kind of underground corridor that had all of the pipes on the ceiling running the length of it at 6 foot one I'm a big and I had to crouch a little bit just to get through so you can imagine how it felt tight low ceiling and pitch-black we dared each other to go first but surprise surprise no one would volunteer themselves anyway this corridor seemed to go on for ages and we concluded that we were definitely in the underground network of utility tunnels that connected all the buildings there were a couple of staircases leading off every now and then but most were blocked off so we just continued as we could after a good few minutes of walking we arrived at the end of one particular corridor it had a huge steel door like one of those classic hospital jail doors you see in films with the little window hatch at eye level with apprehension we push this open the room was empty except for one thing there was a single metal chair in the middle of the room fastened down to the floor and above it hanging down from the ceiling were two metal chains with manacles attached to them even if we didn't know the rooms true purpose it may be the most disturbing thing I've ever laid eyes on none of us knew what it was and what had likely happened there but we could guess and there's no way it was good I realized that as we were leaving this was kind of a bizarre rite of passage had just undergone this place was famous as a place of evil among the locals but I'd never even heard of it now after a night of exploring the most haunted place in Lincolnshire I appreciated that now I too had my own little Winningham story I would be able to regale both locals and my friends back home with the story of how I ventured Winningham but that came with a price the price of never ever being able to get the image of that final room out of my mind and the inability to stop wondering about the horse that went on in there [Music] there is an abandoned factory complex in Detroit that I've often seen posted about both on reddit as well as various other urbex sites around the internet I personally explored the place about eight or nine times over the course of a decade and each time I found something new this is because the complex is absolutely massive I mean it must be a few square kilometers all in all what I've never seen posted nor even mentioned however is the maze of tunnels that run underneath the subterranean network or underground passageways is filled with pipes and wiring that provides everything from steam in freshwater to chemical compounds and electrical power the tunnels are all extremely low and narrow that descend at least 15 to 20 feet under the earth each one leads into a series of basement rooms under each section of the complex in so the relief of many urban explorers are complete with emergency escaped hatches that take you way out into the woods surrounding the factory complex I can't tell you the peace of mind that kind of feature brings in urbex enthusiasts not many of us have died doing what we love but the number is high enough for us not to want to become just another statistic one weird thing about this particular site is that most of the entrances in the tunnel system are hidden in the walls I pushed my way through an old plastic panel door once and found myself in a room that was the complexes mailroom a place that I'd literally been five or six times before but had never noticed that there was a hidden passage integrated into the network's plastic paneling the complex has been abandoned since the late 80s so entire sections of the tunnels are practically flooded from leaky and busted pipes when you're down there you're constantly hearing ambient noises creaking pipes the rumbling of the railroad above echoes from your own movement there is nothing remotely reflective down there and aside from your own flashlight there's absolutely zero sources of light plus if you skimp on the after mentioned flashlights and get one with a weak beam it can get kind of difficult to make out details in the darkness often your left relying upon the slight tonal differences of what you can see to determine what something is before you're right up on it first of all I had a really dumb and dangerous habit of going to these places alone it's hard to find people willing to commit to doing such scary stuff but the bottom line is that if you don't have a buddy to urbex with you shouldn't go at all pretty much every urbex veteran will tell you that and many people actually end up travelling too far out places just so someone has a buddy to explore somewhere with but the last time I was in the tunnels I was by myself with a single double-a battery powered 75 to 100 lumen LED flashlights to the uninitiated that won't mean anything but any heart and urbex enthusiast will tell you that that's way too weak a torch for underground tunnels was zero ambient light you really do need something powerful to cut through the darkness and that was my first big mistake so while I was down in the factory tunnels all on my own I decided to follow one particular passageway down to what was probably the water treatment facility for the complex the tunnel sloped quite steeply downward so the leaking water I mentioned previously has collected at the tunnels lowest point at the end of the tunnel I entered this large room with two huge water storage tanks each of them at least 15 foot tall there is probably an inch of filthy stagnant water on the floor stinking and making a loud splashing sound as I walked in it not exactly a deafening sound I know but when everything around you is completely still in silent even the faintest noise sounds incredibly loud I'm standing still looking around with my flashlight and from the opposite side of the room around twenty or thirty feet away I hear that same splashing sound only it's not an echo there's someone else in this underground room with me I shined my flashlight across the huge dark room but I don't see a thing all I'm hearing is that horrible wet sloshing sound of footsteps in the water all of a sudden I shined the light on this human shape that is completely covered in black clothing I mean it was so black but there was no difference in the shading or anything it's just like a shadow against the peach colored concrete wall I stammered out a nervous greeting and all of a sudden I can see this person's two eyes flash up a distinct pale blue back my flashlight I mean I knew it was a person I'm not a believer and ghosts or the supernatural so it's not like I was scared out of my mind but people can be weird I know that firsthand I don't know if the person was in some kind of body suit or what but it's impossible to make out anything distinguishing about them other than the color of their eyes I don't know what kind of weirdo sets out and a full black getup to rummage around the underground but this guy silence was beginning to seriously creep me out what's more I noticed that he didn't have a torch he didn't have anything in his hands for that matter so how was he able to find his way around in the dark sure he could have turned it off when he heard me coming but at the time it really made me feel uneasy after all it's fear of the unknown that's without a doubt the man's biggest fear then out of nowhere he just rushes me splashing through the shallow pool of water sprinting in my direction I just freaked out spinning on my heels and absolutely bolting back the way I had come I'm flying up the incline tunnel slipping and sliding all over the place in the slippery slimy concrete I fell down a bunch of times grazing my knees quite badly and almost straight up breaking my wrist at one point but I didn't feel the pain pure adrenaline just kept me flying through those tunnels towards the emergency exit it must have only taken a couple of minutes to get out of there but it felt like an hour of sprinting through this tunnel network praying I wouldn't get turned around praying the man in black wouldn't find me that was the closest thing I've experienced to a living nightmare I've never been so terrified in all my life I'm sure whoever I met down there in the dark was probably as terrified as I was maybe they thought I was going to attack them hence why they turned off their own light source and rush me that was just my gut reaction kind of a primal self-preservation now looking back I have no reason to believe they actually followed me and they probably ran back the way they came same as I did but just so we're clear I've never visited an ER backsight loan since and even if it takes waiting a while to find a buddy because Noah been building is worth meeting that one weird stranger who wasn't scared [Music] back when I was a sophomore in high school my friends and I got heavily into urban exploring and we spent a lot of time in urbex forums online uploading photos and sharing experiences but it wasn't long before we found ourselves in a kind of friendly competition with a group from Ohio the Michigan Ohio rivalry is very real and although we weren't exactly into college football we still relish the chance to show up our counterparts in the next state over it was a playful rivalry however I mean who could ever take pride in the whole my state is more messed up than your state thing so one summer my urbex friends and I were on a long bike ride scouting for potential urbex sites in an old run-down industrial area out near Kalamazoo we take a break in this wooded area and one of my friends goes off into the bushes to pee about a minute later we hear them shout excitedly for us to come look at something once we make a few jokes about his junk being nothing to write home about we follow and lay eyes on his sweet little discovery it was this creepy old cave I mean it seriously looked like it could be the secret entrance to the bat cave or something but a little preliminary exploration revealed that the place was an abandoned cement mine mines required a lot more specialist equipment any seasoned herb XAR will tell you that it's crucial to bring respirators to anywhere where air quality might be compromised mines are filled with all kinds of stuff that you really don't want in your lungs so about two weeks later after a fair amount of planning and preparation all four of us returned to the abandoned cement mine with the appropriate safety gear and a camera ready to properly explore we discovered there was basically one main shaft that sloped down into the earth so we followed that main route it was wide enough to drive a pickup truck through and was still in a pretty decent condition so traversing the mineshaft was much easier than we'd first thought there were many rooms old machinery and rusting equipment off of this main shaft but we mostly avoided it in the beginning we were just trying not to get lost or turned around in the darkness as we shown our flashlights along the smooth rock walls we saw that they were almost covered and spray-paint graffiti mostly just the classic abandoned building stuff Jimmy was here swastikas initials and dates but as we got deeper and deeper the graffiti really thinned out whoever was hanging out here before us obviously didn't go too deep into the mine probably for good reason as we wondered deeper and deeper into the old abandoned mineshaft all natural light had faded and we were relying solely on our high powered flashlights the air was so stagnant and hazy with particles that even the light from expensive flashlights would only go about 20 feet or so before getting totally obscured by dust oh and that dust has us thanking the big guy upstairs that we'd remembered to pack the respirators and the glow sticks that we had brought were basically useless because they would disappear in the haze only a few steps after dropping them and we had only bought a handful once we are about 30 feet below the earth we started arguing among ourselves our little crew was nervous about going deeper with the air quality being so terrible and without a good way to prevent us from getting lost we somehow managed to override our anxieties by assuring ourselves that the path was easy and straightforward so we'd have a hard time getting lost we were going to rely on level-headedness sense of direction and flashlight battery life to get out despite the agreement to push on it was becoming very creepy for everyone we walked in total silence for a long time hearing nothing but our own footsteps in the steady drip of water coming from somewhere deep in the cave I think we were all pretty scared at this point but nobody was willing to admit it to each other call it bravado or whatever but we just kept pushing on pushing further and further into the mind we stumbled across something that had has stopped in our tracks dug into the side of the deep stone shaft we were slowly descending was diverging tunnel little more than a passageway cut into the rock it was narrow he'd have to crouch to go through it and it was also a good few feet of ground so it required a scramble to reach it but that wasn't what made us stop it was the graffiti we hadn't seen any of it for a while and like I said we assumed the graffiti artists had never gone this deep but someone else clearly had and the messages they left were disturbing to say the least the tunnel was lined with words written in a white chalky substance words like rot decay plague and carrion they were just words scrawled by some degenerate but it scared the life out of us who else would come this far just to write such a terrible message in a mysterious tunnel that broke from the main path however no matter how scared we were there was no turning back now we had to see where the tunnel led to despite our fear we were overwhelmed by the intense curiosity so as foolish as it seems now one by one we crawled through the tunnel to the other side what we found was a strange flooded chamber around the pool of water was a series of these large carved stones each covered with dozens of burned-out candles there must have been hundreds of pieces of melted wax dripping down each of the stone pieces the walls had a few twisted malformed faces scrawled on them and the tunnel entrance back to the main shaft was ringed with a spray-painted blood-stained mouth what was this place some bizarre cloister were black masses were performed or something an elaborate hoax set up by a bunch of kids we couldn't find much evidence to figure it all out and we were all absolutely exhausted by this point both from the exertion and the adrenaline crash we all crawled out of that weird little chamber and back into the main mineshaft where we promptly headed towards the exit when we finally saw natural lights coming from the main entrance we were relieved beyond words we never did figure out what that mysterious cavern was for and I think I'm content to leave it in a mystery no we didn't hear any eldritch creatures howling in the depths of the tunnel nor did we find any entranced devil worshipers but just finding that room buried deep in an old forgotten mine was enough to creep all of us out for a long time hey friends thanks for listening be sure to subscribe and click that notification bow to be alerted of all future narrations if you got a story be sure to submit them to my subreddit our let's read official and give and receive feedback from the community and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video and join my discord to interact with me and other listeners directly and if you want to support me even more grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on patreon and maybe even pick up some let's read merchandise from Spreadshirt all links in the Bayeux thanks so much friends and remember the worst thing about prison was the Dementors

Channel: Lets Read!

Views: 165,034

Rating: 4.8500543 out of 5

Keywords: true scary urban exploration stories, urbex stories, urban exploration stories, true scary urbex stories, true scary stories, true scary stories from reddit, true horror stories from reddit, subscriber submissions, scary true stories, reddit scary true stories, true horror stories, scary stories, horror stories, true stories, scary horror stories, stories from reddit, lets not meet, reddit, lets read, asmr reading, asmr sleep, ASMR, true creepy stories, creepy stories

Id: LGgndn6w-iA

Length: 54min 33sec (3273 seconds)

Published: Mon May 27 2019