Creepiest places that you have spent the night

In My Humble Opinion
1

After this past weekend, I realized that I’ve spent the night in some pretty creepy places. Here’s my top three:

(1) Last weekend, after camping plans at a state park went awry, we ended up pitching a tent at an abandoned airfield, surrounded by old forest on all sides. Near the back of the airfield by an old boarded up shed were abandoned – yet mysteriously not vandalized – carnival trailers from Maine. One had the gigantic image of a grinning clown painted on it. Several still contained the prizes and games from when they were in use – stuffed animals, darts, basketballs. One teddy bear had a dart embedded in his chest. At least one of the trailers had loose doors that clanked in the dark when the breeze blew. Stephen King would have been ecstatic. The second night we stayed, there was a thunderstorm.

(2) In college, I once spent the night in a graveyard. I had driven for hours on a motorcycle and had no place to stay and no desire to spend money on a hotel. I noticed a graveyard with a pile of planks in the back and pulled some of the planks over a gravestone for a crude shelter. Not the best night’s sleep I ever had.

(3) Years ago, while traveling across the country in my truck, I found myself driving late at night looking for a place to pull over and sleep. A small dirt road led away from the highway, wound around for a bit, then ended up at some kind of deserted factory. It was dark and I could see very little of where I was. Without the inclination to explore the area, my mind was free to come up with all sorts of unpleasant ideas about my surroundings.

What creepy places have you stayed in?

2

I once spent the night on the stone floor of a tomb.

3

I toured around Greece the summer I was 20 years old.

I once visited an island where I scored a GREAT room right off the ferry. Private bathroom, beautiful terrace, big room. Unfortunately I think the guy who met the ferry and sold it to me screwed up, because the next morning I was told by the owner that I must leave that day. I was forced to find a room very quickly, and ended up in a really scary hotel down a dark street. Bathroom was down the hall. Room itself was dark, dingy, not very clean. The window looked out onto a brick wall not a foot away.

The first day I took a shower, I left the shower room to find an old, stinky, overweight, disgusting man in the room across from the shower. His door was wide open. He asked me in broken English if I’d like to share his sandwich.

I spent the entire next day looking for a new room. Thank God I’d found one; I was very creeped out at the idea of spending another night there.

4

My sister lives in a rural college town, next to a house that was once owned by two married professors (yeah, married to each other.)

They were naturalists and the half acre lot is a tangle of paths and semi-cultivated specimen plants. The small two-story house is custom designed with concrete floors, built in mahogany beds and cabinetry. Most of the rooms are very small.

The husband has been dead maybe 35 years and the wife 20.

They deeded the house to the college and it has been maintained with their possessions intact. Drawer are filled with post cards, playing cards, diaries. Their photos on on the nightstands. Bird watching notes are by the back window with their 1950s era pens. The shelves are filled with their books and magazines. The medicine cabinet has old razors.

The college uses it as a guest house and lets my sister use it for visitors in return for keeping an eye on the property. Bedding down there on an ancient mattress can make your mind wander strange paths.

5

The first place that came to mind was when Mrs. J. and I were moving halfway across the country and spent the night in a rundown Motel 6 in Memphis. It was filled with such scuzzy characters that I went out to our truck and got my .22 automatic to keep in the room for protection.

There was the KOA near the South Dakota Badlands where a band of coyotes howled outside our tent (from the amplitude, it wasn’t far away) starting about 11 p.m. That actually was more fun than creepy.

Probably most disturbing was an isolated camping site up in the Rocky Mts., where we kept hearing stealthy noises and steps around our tent all night long. I did not rest well, nor did I ever find out what the hell was creeping around out there*.
*In Bill Bryson’s book about hiking the Appalachian Trail he mentions his fear of bears, and of the time he heard nighttime noises by a stream near his tent, looked out by flashlight and saw glowing eyes. (“The eyes were three feet off the ground!!!”)

6

Haunted leper colony.

I went to school at a private boys’ school which had a lease on an old leper colony on an island in the bay next to my city. The lepers had been brought back to civilization years ago, but the buildings were still maintained and the school leased it for biology excursion weekends to look at the flora, etc. You went about 3 times during your school career.

The boys were all put up in a communal room in an old wooden building with a tin roof.

As is the way of things, revolting older boys would terrorise the younger ones with tales of the Mad Leper who had remained behind on the island. When possums ran across the roof, that was attributed to the Mad Leper on the hunt. And so on. You can imagine was schoolboys used to do to frighten each other.

The stories were cool, but the place was really creepy.

7

Well, there was this time when three of us were out in the woods doing a documentary about a witch and an old murder case…

8

One night is nothing. I grew up next to a cemetery. Next to the cemetery was my middle school. Above the middle school was my first college. The college and middle school were built over an ancient native burial ground. What irritated me the most? The fricken bus.

9

When I was in Venice once I stayed in the Hotel Danieli, which is this enormous, ornate building originally constructed as a palace in 1400. This is the spookiest effing place I have ever stayed. I think even their promotional photo is [=en&param[loc_country]=ITA&param[loc]=HIV&param[idhtl]=76&page=gallery&source=-venice+luxury+hotels&image_url=lobby.jpg"]rather creeptastic.](http://danieli.hotelinvenice.com/zoom/?param[lang) You have to unlock thick, creaky hotel room doors with a heavy brass key, and the rooms are enormous, drafty and filled with antiques. (Don’t let the pretty picture fool you–turn down the lights and you’re basically on the set of a horror movie.) The halls are dim, lonely, and filled with freaky medieval paintings.

In fact, it was the paintings that really sealed the deal. One I will never forget. A medieval-style detailed depiction of maybe 30 squat, pasty creatures with sharp, angular features, all crammed into one landscape. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be serfs going about their business–each is doing something different–but they all look miserable. Staring at them gives one a pervasive feeling of dread–rather like the boy/wolf painting in 1408. Standing in an empty hallway looking at that painting is not an experience I’d like to repeat.

10

Two places; My dad used to own an old house built in the late 19th century. It was a classic Victorian, all rooms and no hallways. The upstairs was a bunch of rooms and always smelled like creosote because the chimney leaked. I always had a feeling of dread sleeping up there, but I didn’t know why at the time. He never really did much with those rooms, I assumed it was because he lived there alone most of the time so he never bothered to decorate/unpack boxes.

Years later, I found out it was worse than that. He told me about one time he was watching TV in the living room which was adjacent to the kitchen. He heard a small pop, and the lid of a bottle of vegetable oil hit the floor and saw it roll into view. Thinking it was just air expanding (it was a warm day) he picked it up and screwed the cap down tight. A few minutes later, he heard it again, and saw the bottle cap roll into view again. As he was telling this story I remember him saying once he never went upstairs, with the emphasis on never.

Next place, the conference room down the hall at my work. On my lunch break I’ll sleep since I can eat lunch during my shift. There’s a conference room that, while during the day is alright, at night becomes creepy for some reason. I started getting random, then frequent nightmares. They’d be about zombies breaking in, or I once felt a ghost touch my face, once it was a vivid dream about the building falling over in an earthquake. It became too much for me so I sleep in a different room now.

11

I once stayed in the hotel that the first Hammer Horror Dracula movie was filmed in, as well as the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Gothic and gargoyle-tastic.

The most creeped out I’ve ever been though was camping in the middle of nowhere near Carlsbad Caverns, where we felt amazingly vulnerable already, then in the middle of the night something very big and very wild was outside our tent munching on stuff. I’m sure it was a deer, but it could have been something… else…

12

So my Mom and my brother and I (aged around 8-11) travelled from Western New York to around the Woodstock area in the Catskills to visit a relative. Well, we couldn’t find their house, so we pulled over into what looked like an empty lot to sleep for the night.

In the middle of the night a cop knocked on the door of the car and informed us that this is private property, but for some reason did not kick us off the lot.

When daytime came and we woke up, we found we were in the middle of a construction/mining zone, and only about 100 feet from us was a limestone wall where they were either mining or levelling a hill or both. As in, right now, right where we were sleeping. Construction machines going at it right near us. It was sort of creepy to wake up in the middle of all that.

13

That sounds fantastic! If I’m ever in Venice, I’ve got to scrape together the cash to stay at this place. I assume it’s pricey as hell - but for one night, it’d be worth it. :smiley:

14

Creepiest place I ever spent the night was LA.

Some of those plastic faces scared the hell out of me! :eek:

15

The emergency room of our local cuckoo’s nest.

16

A men’s dormitory in Bamako, Mali. I can’t remember the name. The bathroom was the filthiest ting I’ve ever seen. It was apparently nearly empty when I stayed there.

My room looked exactly like a small elementary school gymnasium built in the late 19th century – very high ceiling, huge windows, a big empty box maybe 40 feet on a side – except that it contained maybe 25 or 30 cots placed around the room in random fashion. And no other furniture. Nobody else was staying in the room. It’s hard to explain, but waking up there felt exactly like the opening scene in 28 Days Later.

17

This one place I stayed was not creepy at all. It was quite charming, had a pool and hot tub, comfy beds, and always smelled like baking bread in the afternoons. We loved it.

And then the owners sold it.

There was always a no smoking policy in the rooms, but then-GF and I routinely broke it. After the first day there, we’d usually find an ashtray in the room for us. We were old-timers, and the owners valued our business enough to look the other way.

The new owners were not as forgiving. On our first day there that year, we didn’t even meet the owners yet They were out for the day. We walked in and on the table was a note and our room key. When we got into our room, we debated whether it would be OK to smoke. We decided that it was, and lit up. We weren’t even half way through out cigs when we noticed that a note had been slipped under the door. It said something like “We noticed that your room smelled like smoke. This is a reminder that there is no smoking in the rooms”, etc. etc. It was very politely worded, but rather lengthy, typed up, printed out, and delivered, in what couldn’t have been more than two minutes.

From that point on we were careful to follow the rules and respect the new owners’ wishes. But every time we went out, one of the owners was sitting at his desk in the office. Always watching, at all times, day or night. If we went out at 3am, he’d be there.

We never felt like we had any privacy. We always felt like tabs were being kept on us. Other guests there told us that they felt the samer way.

But the rooms were nice, with one exception. We went there one winter, arriving on Christmas. We got a special rate on the suite, as we were the only guests there that week. It was nice and big, but the decore was dismal. Everything was a shade of gray, including the artwork. Coupled with the fact that we were not only the only people in the B&B but also in that section of town, and also that there weather was cold and gray, it felt lonely, creepy, and depressing.

That was the last time we stayed there.

18

Tell me it was a lot of formal Victorian portraits :slight_smile:

19

Actually, no. It was all seascapes of various sorts. One was of a lighthouse, but it was light gray paint on black burlap.

They had also replaced all the charming and comfortable furniture with dismal gray furniture that was really uncomfortable. The “couch” in the living room had no seat back, no cushions, just iron bars set really far apart.

Oh, and they put clocks in every room. Not one of them worked.

20

What happened to the film?