There's nothing on this Earth that beats the feeling of hearing an eerie tale. You know the type: They send a chill down your spine and give you the sudden urge to look over your shoulder. I'm addicted to reading them — so you can imagine my delight when I stumbled across a Reddit thread full of Aussies sharing their own creepy encounters.
1. "I got chased down a really dark street going around 140km in a car, pursued by a giant white light — there were five of us in the car and we all remember it the same way. It was 1 metre from the boot and then suddenly vanished."
"The street is dead straight and the light was around 1.5 metres in diameter and super fucking bright, like perfect white. Once we got near town it stopped dead and vanished. It's near a place called Jenny Dixon Reserve. Jenny Dixon was murdered and dropped off a cliff nearby. It's said that her ghost haunts that stretch. I'm very scientifically minded, but I have no way to justify that. Super weird."
2. "I once woke up in the middle of the night with a dark shadowy figure standing over my bed. I tried to scream and move, but I couldn't. I wasn't a religious person at the time, but I started to say the Lord's Prayer and it went away."
"Years later, I found out there is actually this supernatural phenomena that is quite common across a lot of cultures. The night hag or old hag is the name given to a supernatural creature, commonly associated with the phenomenon of sleep paralysis."
—u/FranzBaker1
3. "Driving outback SA to the NT (not the main highway) we stumbled into some weird community in the middle of nowhere. About 50 or so houses, but not a single soul in sight. We went to the fuel station and no one was working there. The door was open, but there was no one inside. We just had an eerie gut feeling, so we jumped in our car and hightailed it out of there."
"Later on that same trip, we slept in our car on the way to Mt Isa at some roadside pullout in the middle of nowhere. Woke up to something nudging the car and sniffing loudly. Turned my flashlight on just in time to see a cow running away."
"Wycliffe Well is supposedly known for UFO encounters, though when I was last there, they had a change in ownership and said there had been no sightings since the new people took over!"
4. "I recently got the full monty haunting at a motel in Bright, Victoria. It was a super cold room, I experienced weird feelings, a heavy weight on my back, the bed shaking — I was scared at first, but then I got pissed off with 'it' and told 'it' to fuck off. And it did. Never in my life would I have thought that what happened was possible and I doubt I will ever forget it."
—u/thepitscars
5. "I recently had an experience in Tasmania, at the Pub in the Paddock hotel. The manager drove off at sundown after locking the place up (WTF?). My partner was asleep in minutes and all I could hear was soft whispering in an empty hotel and a voice in mid-air said, 'Look, she's asleep'. I told them politely to go somewhere else to chat and they did. Yes, I was shit-scared for a few minutes, but then I got pissed off because I was tired."
—u/Quinkan101
6. "Belanglo State Forest. I visited the shrine where the victims of Ivan Milat were found and for a national forest, there were no birds, no insects, no signs of life at all. Elsewhere in the area, there were ants and stuff, but not at that spot. Just...nothing."
"Me and my friends went camping there once, and had a similar experience, except at about 2–3 am. One mate asleep and another passed out — I went to take a piss, turned the flashlight on and about 30 kangaroos were around the campsite, all staring at me, they didn't make a single sound."
7. "Go to the quarantine station at North Head in Sydney. It was established after World War I to clean up after ships coming from Europe with smallpox. Lots of deaths and ghost encounters. We went after a storm and freaked out, as I swear I nearly vomited after seeing the morgue. I couldn't even walk into several buildings as there was a presence that just freaked me out. At the end of the tour, other rangers said other people had similar experiences. Never again."
—u/JacquiTS
8. "The Terrace Shopping Centre in Mooroolbark, Melbourne, is not spooky, but quite eerie. The doors still open and all the lights are on, but almost all the shops are abandoned. It’s still got the '80s interior decor too, so it feels like going back in time (in a parallel world where all the humans have become extinct, but the lights are still on). I think the locals are used to it, but I accidentally stumbled in there while in the area and I was really taken aback. It felt like at any moment Jack Nicholson would appear around a corner with an axe shouting 'Here’s Johnny!'"
9. "I was riding my motorbike to Young, NSW, to do cherry season and it was very late and I was looking for a good spot to pull over to throw my swag down. I passed a house in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no lights, street or otherwise."
"There were about 10 people standing in a line out the front just staring across the road, but they were there from well before I got level, just standing there saying nothing or moving, just staring directly across the street. They didn’t acknowledge or look at me passing at all. I kept riding for about 30 minutes and pulled over in a rest area — there were no cars there and I hadn’t passed any since the house.
As I went to set my tent up, I looked up and about 150 metres away there were three people in the scrub standing in a line staring at me. I really casually let out a manly squeal, jumped on my bike, left my tent and fucked right off straight to Young. All jokes aside, I've camped since and still do a lot through work, but this traumatised me and I was on edge while camping for a good year afterward — when previously I wasn’t easily rattled."
10. "I was walking down the Harbour Bridge steps one night when the lights went out. A silent woman wearing a long skirt passed me. Unnerved, I made it out into The Rocks to find the area in darkness — a power outage."
"Walking down that older street, near the small replica shop by Susannah Place, I saw in the distance someone walking towards me with a hunched back, in what appeared to be rags, rattling chains. Refusing to believe in ghosts, I approached and greeted him. Turned out he and the woman were actors on one of those nighttime walking tours."
—u/Flying-Fox
11. "I worked at Royal North Shore Hospital years back before the new expansions. The old hospital near the mental health unit was spooky as fuck at night. I swear you could always feel someone watching you. Especially around the museum and archive basement areas — they just made your skin crawl. The old 'Denison' building was the same before it was torn down. The hair on the back of my neck stood up many times walking through there at night."
—u/Olasko
12. "We had some weird stuff happen to us in the You Yangs Regional Park, Victoria. It was probably just someone fucking with us, but we had rocks thrown at our tent during the night and we kept hearing what sounded like a party, but when we tried to get closer it stopped. The whole area had a weird atmosphere and it kept going completely dead silent."
13. "A few years back, when I doing a bit of urban exploration, I did a solo Christmas Day visit to Queen Victoria Sanitorium. For those who don't know the place, it's located in bushland in the Blue Mountains, about 40km past the western edge of Greater Sydney."
"Of all the abandoned buildings I have explored, this one was the only one that turned the creep out level up to 11. I put no credibility on stories of the place being haunted, it was that it was so damned quiet and remote.
Similar in nature, but without the eerie/spooky factor, were some of the outbuildings at Callan Park Hospital for the Insane in Lilyfield, Sydney. Scattered through the buildings are reminders of the people who lived and worked there. In one kitchen a note saying: 'Who took my orange-coloured wok? Please return before Wednesday 11 Sept. 1996. Many thanks, Miche'. In one of the wards, attached to the wall with heavy packing tape all the way around the perimeter, a picture of a toddler playing in the sand on a beach, with the legend 'you can paddle in the sea or play in the sand'. I found the potential irony of that unsettling.
Some places are eerie, but seeing that sort of stuff in that sort of environment, the feelings evoked tend to settle into your gut and stay there."
—u/sydney_cider
14. "Some of the old abandoned buildings at Callan Park in Rozelle, Sydney, on the site of the old mental hospital are certifiably creepy as fuck. I managed to get into one with the girl I was seeing at the time about a decade ago. There were paintings and drawings presumably done by the patients left stuck to the walls. Even though this was in the middle of the day, I could still feel my skin crawling."
—u/cannonadeau
15. "I was driving from Albury back home with my dad, as I was on my L's [learner's permit] and getting my hours up by doing a drive to Albury and back. I was coasting at 90km/h and noticed a truck coming up behind me. I thought it'd go the same way as me and then overtake when it had the chance."
"I exited the highway to head towards home and I looked back in my rearview mirror, the truck was nowhere to be seen. It didn't go past me when I exited and there was nowhere for it to pull over between where I spotted it and the turnoff towards home. Every time I drive past that particular spot when I drive through Albury to go home, I always wonder what happened to that truck."
16. "I have this weird memory of a triangle, almost like a mirror in the sky. I forgot about it soon after it happened and remember it now and then. But it's like my mind wouldn't decide what it was. I live near an airport, so it being a traditional flight machine seems more likely, but because I live near an airport, I kind of know what low flying aircraft and helicopters appear like. I completely under-reacted at the time too. It was super weird."
—u/athrawon
17. "I lived up in the Blue Mountains [NSW] as a teenager and would always be out walking up along the cliffs, all by myself. There were killer views and I never really saw anyone else, because it was all the clifftops that you could really only get to by goat tracks/bush bashing and the tourists would never."
"One day, I was just out on this outcrop taking in the air, sitting near the edge when a big man approached me silently from behind. I began to freak out, because I'd never seen anyone out there before and it was a real hike to get to where I was — not to mention I was all alone, nobody knew where I was and there was no cell service.
I suddenly became very aware that I was a teenage girl sitting at the edge of an outcrop surrounded by a steep drop on three sides. If this man wanted to pick me up and toss me over the edge, nobody would be any wiser. Thankfully, he was harmless and just out there to look at some signs of past habitation in the area. Best believe I was terrified and made a lot of small talk with the man while trying to figure out how to get out of there. Needless to say, I was a lot more hesitant to go in the bush by myself for a while afterwards."
18. "I was in the outskirts of Camden and it was around 6 p.m., dark and the roads were devoid of life. While I was heading home, this bright white light appears behind my car. At first I thought it was just some Toyota Hulux driver with a really bright light bar per usual, but as I went around a corner near the fire station it sped up and also turned the corner at a non-gravitational speed."
"At this point I realised that it wasn't a car or truck. At this point in time, I sped up faster and faster until I was going over the speed limit. It also sped up and came way too close for comfort to my car, so I start speeding. I headed on into the main area of Camden, near the still open McDonald’s and I saw more people as I came out of the bare open road surrounded by fields. I looked back — the lights were gone and my pants were full of shit."
19. "I was travelling as a passenger with a friend on the Western Port Highway between Hastings and Somerville in Victoria back towards Melbourne CBD about 10 years ago. My friend and I witnessed an eerily-green, forensic-suited 7ft tall man-like ghost on the side of the road shuffling around one of those roadside safety barriers. At the same time, we looked at each other saying 'What the hell is that?'"
"When this thing looked up at us and we saw it, it had no eyes at all — just black eye sockets. No word of a lie, the area was dead quiet and there were no parked cars, no farm gates open or anything to indicate this was a human doing a prank on unsuspecting drivers or just shuffling around working in the dark.
We got back to the hotel in Melbourne and my friend driving said that she felt like she needed to ask a clairvoyant about what we'd seen. She rang one of the premium service ones ($5 a minute or something) and the lady on it said we'd seen the spirit/ghost of a police officer who was searching for clues for a fatal accident that'd happened out there many years ago and even in his afterlife was still searching.
That was probably the most unusual, creepy thing I've ever witnessed."
—u/drewd2020
20. "One night, playing kick to kick on the Croydon Sports ground behind the leisure centre, three bright red lights were observed by a group of four of us travelling through the sky in a beeline for Mount Dandenong, before disappearing over the mountain. No sound, no jet trails, no nothing — just bright red lights. The path was not a usual flight path and the lights were too low for normal flights in the area."
21. And finally, "As a kid we went to this place — Martindale Hall in South Australia, where they filmed Picnic At Hanging Rock. I'd not seen the movie at that stage, so had no idea what it was like. I've never been somewhere which made me feel so very uncomfortable and somewhat out of control before. It was the '80s, we were free to roam around. My sister stayed with my parents and felt rather off."
"My brother and I went to explore this huge Victorian-style mansion. About 30 minutes into the experience, my bro said he wanted to go outside and left me to go off on my own (I was nine at the time). I wasn't a kid who got creeped out very often, no fear of the dark or ghosts, etc, so I walked around some more until I came to a room upstairs that was set up as a sitting area with all period furniture, and really felt like someone was pushing me towards the windows. No one else was in the room and it really freaked me out. So I trotted (no running inside) back downstairs and went outside to find my brother taking photos of the place. He refused point blank to set foot into that mansion again, and was the only one in my family that did not mock me for being scared.
Once we got back home and my brother got his photos developed, he found what he thinks is a ghost in one of them. He sent it to a bunch of places and it was never debunked.
After that experience I've read online and in books about that place being haunted, and lights turning on and off during the night. It's one place you couldn't pay me to go back into, the feeling of your own body moving forward towards a window big enough you could fall out of just gives me chills still. Never had that happen again either."
—u/shadow-foxe
Now it's your turn — have you encountered anything super creepy or eerie in a specific place around Australia? Let us know in the comments!
Note: Some Reddit responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.