Crazy Creepy Places In America You'll Never Want To Visit
By
Editorial Staff in
Entertainment
On 29th February 2016
Truth is stranger, and sometimes creepier, than fiction. Don't get me wrong, a good horror movie can pack a lasting chill. But there's nothing like standing in a real creepy place to make your hair stand on end.
It's a funny thing how your body can pick up on the signals a place gives off. Some areas you just know something bad has gone down when you walk in. You can feel it on your skin and in your bones. You might not see any ghosts there, but that doesn't mean you won't have trouble getting to sleep that night.
Those places usually pick up their strange auras from past events, the tragedies and horrors of people who lived long ago and met an untimely demise. In many places, the visions of their suffering come with ease.
#1 West Virginia State Penitentiary
Not only was the abandoned facility the site of 92 executions 83 by hanging and nine by electrocution but it was also built on the site of the Adena tribe's burial grounds. It's no surprise then that it has long been associated with paranormal activity, including its most famous ghost, Shadow Man.
#2 Bachelor's Grove Cemetery, Illinois
There are many bigger graveyards, but this one just outside of Chicago has been a hotspot for ghost hunters for decades. And even if you don't believe in ghosts, you can't help being creeped out by the few remaining headstones marked with simple, anonymous markings.
#3 Athens Lunatic Asylum, Athens, Ohio
As if an abandoned facility for the criminally insane wasn't creepy enough to begin with, the asylum at The Ridges in Ohio has a horrifying past filled with cruelty, forced labor, liberal use of electric shock therapy, and lobotomies. The site visitors must see? The imprint of a patient's corpse remains on the concrete where it was found.
#4 Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama
For a tour of a what a post-industrial apocalypse would look like, it's hard to beat Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham. If the steel mill's maze of corroded pipes isn't enough to give you the creeps, just think of all the horrifying industrial accidents that claimed men's lives there. Everything from a plunge into a vat of molten ore to the quiet action of poisonous gases.
#5 Shanghai Tunnels, Portland, Oregon
You'd never think it, but scenic Portland, Oregon is home to a network of tunnels once used to sell unsuspecting men into service on ships in the Pacific.
#6 The Myrtles Plantation, St. Francisville, Louisiana
This plantation, which dates back to 1796, is grand and beautiful. However, the grounds obviously have a troubled history since it's a plantation. And there have been sightings of several apparitions, including a slave girl referred to as Chloe, who appears to be in the photo below.
#7 Dudleytown, Cornwall, Connecticut
The former settlement in the Cornwall area of Connecticut has since been overgrown by forest and is no longer accessible to the public. It's on private land owned by the Dark Entry Forest Association. The surrounding forest, however, remains eerily quiet, and grim folk tales about the former residents still pack a good chill.
#8 Danvers State Hospital, Massachusetts
Originally designed as a mental health facility for 500 patients, by the 1950s Danvers housed more than 2,000. With such terrible overcrowding, the hospital resorted to lobotomies to curtail violence, making the hallways home to hordes of shuffling zombies. After it closed in 1992, Danvers attracted many urban explorers who reported terrifying wails, groans of agony, and disembodied voices.
#9 Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, West Virginia
The building itself is a remarkable structure, the largest hand-cut stone masonry building in America. But, as with all too many other mental health facilities from the past, it has a troubled history. The Civil War stalled its construction, and it took in patients 16 years before construction was finally completed. Overcrowding, more than 2,400 patients in a facility designed for 250, led to terrible abuses and, again, lobotomies. Among the spirits who are said to haunt the halls are a former inmate named Ruth and a young girl named Lily.
#10 Texas Killing Fields
Along a 50-mile stretch of highway I-45 between Houston and Galveston, more than 30 young women and girls have disappeared or have been found murdered since the '70s. Federal agent Don Ferrarone called it "just the perfect place for killing somebody and getting away with it."
#11 Leakin Park, Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore's sky-high murder rate should account for enough creepiness on its own. But if you want to take a quiet stroll through Baltimore's largest park, you might find more than you bargained for: it's where people like to dump bodies. Since 1946, more than 70 bodies have been found in Leakin Park.
#12 Lake Shawnee Amusement Park, West Virginia
There's nothing like a rusty swing set creaking in the breeze to send a chill through you unless it's an entire rusted-out amusement park. This amusement park closed in 1966 after two patrons died, which brought the park's body count to a total of six, and it has been the scene of ghost sightings ever since. Fueling the creepiness further? The park was built on the site of an early settler's turf war that ended in a massacre
#13 Ewing Hall, University of Texas Medical Building, Galveston, Texas
Galveston is generally considered one of the creepier cities in America thanks to the 1900 hurricane still the deadliest natural disaster in US history that decimated the city. But one particular site in the city has been chilling visitors and frustrating caretakers at the University of Texas for years. Just above one of the doors to Ewing Hall, the apparition of a face supposedly the face of a former landowner whose family sold the land against his wishes on the wall has resisted attempts to paint over it or sandblast it.
