Every town has that weird old place everyone thinks is haunted. So, we decided to ask the good people of BuzzFeed Community to tell us about theirs. Here are their ~spooky~ responses:
1. "Marquette, Michigan. The Holy Family Orphanage. It opened in 1915 as a place for Native American children who were taken from their families to learn how to be 'white.' Later it became an orphanage run by (allegedly) abusive nuns. Rumor has it many of these children were beaten and some died from their injuries. There is a story of a little girl who died in a snowstorm, and the nuns put her body on display as a warning to the other children to listen to the nuns. The place was abandoned in the 1980s but has recently been revamped into an apartment complex. People who live there claim to hear children laughing or screaming, seeing figures in the windows of their apartment when no one is home, shadows of children running in hallways, etc."
2. "My Upstate New York high school’s auditorium is allegedly haunted. The school was built in the 1960s and had a once-state-of-the-art auditorium. It was a cement floor that gradually sloped down, and had a huge ceiling kind of like the Sydney opera house. The story goes that when it was being built one of the workers, George, fell from the catwalk and died upon hitting the cement floor. As dramatic theatre teenagers, we THRIVED on this story. Props were constantly moving, lights worked when they felt like it, mics went in and out, and you could hear footsteps in the seats from the stage when there wasn't an audience. Rumor has it that if you go down to the local newspaper you can find the article that was written when George died."
"He was never malicious and if the students acknowledged him like, 'George please we need the prop back,' he would oblige. Maybe he’s just lonely. The scariest thing that ever happened was when the musical director’s son was about three, he would go to rehearsals or I would babysit him. After a rehearsal, he was talking about how he saw George and there wasn’t a student named George, so I asked, “What does George look like?” and this 3-year-old who couldn’t POSSIBLY have known the myths about ghosts said, “George looks like water.” I get goosebumps just thinking about it. I can’t say I 100% believe in the afterlife but after that, I believe in George completely.
—Anonymous
3. "I live near Ojai, California, and we have a local legend called "Char-Man," who lives on Creek Road. He is the evil spirit of a man whose house caught on fire with his family stuck inside. Some say he burned to death trying to save his family, others say he started the fire and was trapped. Everyone I know in Ojai avoids that road at night. I don't know what happens if you are out on that road at night but I'm enough of a believer of staying away."
4. "This is an area out in Long Island, New York. When I graduated high school, my friends and I would drive around at night listening to music and stuff like that. It was the fall of 2016 (prime time of the killer clowns). This particular night, it was just my best friend (BF) and it was very dark and foggy outside. We thought it would be fun to drive around where clown sightings were in this spooky weather. We didn’t spot any clowns, so we decided to drive our usual route. Deep by the water, there’s really tall grass and it looks like something straight out of a horror movie. My BF suggested we drive through there since we were on a spooky vibe kick, so I agreed."
"It was around 11 p.m. at this point. We’re driving around in the fog and spot some deer and cats which freak us out because we were on edge waiting for something to pop out. I turn onto one of the roads we oftentimes go down and we eventually get to a stop sign where I usually turn to circle back around. But I go straight toward the tall grass area. We’ve been to that area during the day because we have friends who live down there, so we are familiar with the area, but what I saw made me slam on my breaks.
Out of nowhere, literally, right in front of us, there was this straight wooden bridge that was covered in fog with trees arching over it — like a scene from something like The Cabin in the Woods. We had never seen this bridge before either. So, we noped out of there.
There was nowhere to turn, so I started backing up. I slowed down for a second thinking maybe I missed a turn when all of a sudden we hear a blood-curdling scream.
My BF and I looked at each other and I slammed on my gas and got the heck out of there. Once we made it back to a street we knew with actual street lights, I pulled over. I looked at my phone and it was nearly 1:30 a.m. We were so freaked out because we only drove a few minutes into the grass area. There was no way 2.5 hours had passed by. It was just a very weird experience.
I will never forget the bridge, it’s like a picture in my mind. A few days later we went back to the area during the day to try and find that bridge, but we couldn’t find it. Every time we went driving for the next few years we tried looking for it, but could never find it. It’s still so weird to me!"
—Anonymous
5. "Kings Park Psychiatric Center is an 'abandoned' asylum on Long Island, New York. I put abandoned in quotes because people constantly trespass there to the point that it's a joke. But, yeah, absolutely haunted and I don't even believe in ghosts."
—esjm
6. "There's a neighborhood in my hometown that was built for blue-collar workers in the 1940s. It has lots of little boxy-looking houses with postage-stamp lawns. They don't look creepy, and one of my aunts and her husband at the time lived in one when they were first married in the 1970s. While they were there, a horrific murder happened a few houses down. One of the victims managed to escape and ran down the street knocking on doors trying to get help and leaving behind bloody handprints. Eventually, someone did answer the door and let them in, and that person was able to get help, but a couple of people died."
"In the end, it got mostly swept under the rug. There's a couple of little article stubs about it but it never got a lot of attention from the public.
Rumor has it that sometimes handprints will show up on the doors that were knocked on, and sometimes the people who live in those houses will hear someone knock frantically on the door late at night, and no one will be there."
7. "This is a classic 'haunted prison' thing, but the old state penitentiary where I grew up was built in the mid-1800s, shortly after a military fort was built in the area. It functioned as a military prison until the town started coming together. It housed both male and female prisoners in segregated parts of the complex. The female prisoners were housed near the warden's quarters and the yard, and they had a pet cat who is still spotted sometimes in the area where the prison garden and the barracks were before. The cat shows up in a lot of photos of the prison from that time period, and the cat that is seen today is a carbon copy of the one in the photos."
"Now, the place acts as a museum and botanical garden featuring native plants and seeks to educate people about the early years of crime and punishment in the state. The room with the gallows is also supposed to be haunted, as are the isolation cells, the old towers on the walls, and the administration building. It's definitely a creepy place but that could just be the weight of the knowledge of what went on there in the past."
—Anonymous
8. "My town turned the old railroad tracks into a bike/walking path. At the main park, there was an old two-story conductor's house. Stories were told about the old conductor that refused to leave his post and died in the house after being hit by a train. Rumors were you could see his lantern on the path at night and if you tried to follow it it would lead you onto the porch of the house before it disappeared. And if you looked up, you would see him in the top window of the house still looking for the train to come by."
"My brother's boy scout troop got permission to use it as a haunted house the year before they tore it down. There was a trap door that was the only entrance to the basement area that we were never able to get open. When they tore the house down, they just filled in the basement area and planted grass. So now the story is the old conductor murdered his wife and buried her in the basement which is now under the soccer field."
9. "I work at a restaurant in a building that has been around since before the prohibition era and it has a lot of history relating to the town. At one point it was an ice cream parlor, but once prohibition was over, it became George’s Tavern (key name). It was eventually three different restaurants leading up to now. Now, I work back of the house and have early hours to prep, and we have a lot of ghostly activity on a daily basis. Things will get flung off of shelves, pots will fall off of racks on their own, and you can hear footsteps constantly. I have also heard low murmurs of conversation when starting my shift even though it's just me and another coworker in the building. Then my coworkers and I found out about this man named George who apparently owned the building (hence George’s Tavern)."
"I have a metal reusable water bottle that I bring every day and 'George' has flung it off of the counter and created a dent in it, my coworker and I have been locked out of the building knowing very well that neither of us would do something like that even as an accident. The security system will often say there’s activity in the bar when nobody is out there. The head chef has even said that ‘George’ has helped him on multiple occasions avoid slicing his finger off with his knives/meat cutter. Who really knows the whole story, but my coworker and I always start our morning by saying, 'Good Morning George,' throughout the building so we can work in peace and hopefully get on his good side."
—Anonymous
10. "When I moved to my new house, I met with some of my older neighbors and they told me about this little bench and area we had near our house, called 'Anne's Bench." Apparently, she used to live there in the late 1800s–early-1900s but tragically passed away and now haunts the bench dedicated to her. Once, my friend and I went there at night for fun and tried to summon ghosts, and I saw a completely transparent leaf and heard some noises even though there was no one around. It really creeped me out. This summer they removed the bench to add more space, but I still wonder about that encounter."
11. "I grew up in Mukwonago, Wisconsin, and there are numerous stories of haunted places. One of them is Heaven City. It has since closed, but it was a very popular place for underground-type individuals to get away, with it being out of the city but only 30 minutes to Milwaukee and about an hour to Chicago. Most famously, Al Capone would visit there. Anyway, most of the land in my hometown was beloved by Native Americans who lived there before. (Mukwonago translates to "place of the bear") and it was found that Heaven City was actually built on top of a Native American burial ground. Guests staying there overnight would claim to find shattered glasses, banging, and supposedly, screaming."
—Anonymous
12. Finally, "A street I lived on for about seven years had a set of stone steps that led up an alleyway. On the middle step, there was a drain right in the middle of it. Everyone would actively step over the drain as there was a story that had been going around for years that a witch lived inside and would drag children down the drain if they stepped on it. Everyone refers to them as the 'witch's steps' and it’s considered bad luck to step directly on the drain."
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.