u/rickety_biscuit

When I was younger I traveled around a lot. Primarily I was just hopping trains and hitchhiking inside the United States, but I also backpacked around Europe, Canada, and central/South America as well.

This story happened right as a friend and I were gearing up to fly to Europe for three months, so we were heading to Boston to catch a cheap flight to Copenhagen. One night on our trip to Boston We went to stay with someone my friend knew in Eastern Massachusetts.

It was the middle of the night and they lived in the middle of nowhere so they met up with us at the nearby grocery store so we could follow them back to the house in my friends truck. They lived in a cabin on some family property where some other relatives also have a house and when we pulled up to the main house, the mother comes out with a shotgun, yelling, “who’s there?!”

After her son announces that it’s just him with his friends, she lowers the gun, apologized, and says “sorry, I thought you were the killer”

I’m instantly like… “The KILLER?! wtf does that mean”

So they explain the story. Apparently if you continue down the road past the house there is a really high bridge, and a day or two earlier a man had stabbed someone a bunch of times and then supposedly jumped off the bridge, but authorities never found a body in the river below, so many people believed the person had fled and just parked their to throw off the police. Apparently it was more of shallow rocky creek, than a real river and all the locals claim that bodies are typically found right away when people jump off that particular bridge, as it’s happened before.

I was kind of pissed. Not only did we already know that this was a small one room cabin with a wood burning stove, that was already someone’s house, so we would be camping outside where they had a little fire pit and stuff set up. So they knew we would be camping outside, and a killer had potentially fled into the forest a day or two earlier. Their house was surrounded by wooded areas, so everyone in the area was still on the lookout for this guy.

Back then I was all about roughing it, so I didn’t carry a tent, and just had my tarp laid out like a mat with my sleeping bag on top of it. I was laying there in the dark just creeping myself out thinking about the killer, and I started looking all around me. Suddenly I notice something moving, and i thought to myself that it looked like a person and then it turned and I could see the clear outline of a person behind some bushes. I was terrified. I whispered to my friend to look, and he saw it too and we were both freaking out. It turned out to be some kind of dummy for shooting bow and arrows at, but at the time, I was so scared. Needless to say, I did not get murdered.

I used to travel around and hop trains and hitchhike around for about 8 years. I usually traveled with a friend or a group of friends and we would either camp outside or find abandoned buildings to sleep in. Sometimes we would get motel rooms. It really just depended on the town we were in. In the country I tended to camp more, in the city I tended to squat in abandon buildings more.

This story took place in Minneapolis Minnesota in 2013, I was 19 years old. I was traveling with a good friend of mine named Jess and we went to Minneapolis to attend the mayday parade in south Minneapolis. The parade was this huge event with tons of punk shows and parties, a group of welders in town make these dystopian mad max style bicycle powered parade floats with caged half pipes and flames and all this crazy shit, it’s really incredible and totally worth the trip.

After the parade most travelers were clearing out of town. We had been sleeping in an abandoned house on Chicago avenue for a couple weeks, it was this creepy multifamily apartment building that had been gutted down to the studs so each floor was one big open space with studs separating the different “rooms” if you could call them that, since they had no walls between them. We would sleep at the very top floor in the back corner where you were mostly hidden from anyone coming up the stairs. Jess and I were staying at this building with two other travelers and we had been partying and drinking in this house for a couple weeks during the festivities.

During our time camped out here, we realized that the outside walls of this building were all insulated with old news papers from the 1910’s and 20’s. Like stacks upon stacks of these old news papers lined the studs on the inside of the outer brick walls. We pulled some out and found original Walt Disney comics in the paper, the old school kind with the old version of Mickey Mouse.

One night, after drinking some whiskey, we found a candle and a baby doll in the basement, and being the dumb crust punk edge lords that we were, we decided to make a satanic shrine in this abandoned house. Our idea was that it would look really creepy and then when teenagers or people break into this abandoned house in the future they will think someone was doing some kind of black magic or something and get freaked out. It was a joke. We made a pentagram with the melted wax and we melted wax onto the eyes of the baby doll. We took news papers from the insulation and cut our pictures of faces from the paper and stuck them into the wax. It legit looked so creepy in the dark in there. We thought we were hilarious, but we moved on.

Over the last couple weeks there was four of us sleeping there, but two of the travelers had left town already, and my friend Jess that I was traveling with had met a guy at a show and went to stay at his place for a couple nights. I didn’t want to be a third wheel so I just decided to stay by myself at the squat and give them some space. I’m not sure why I thought sleeping in an abandoned building by myself was better than being a third wheel, but I was young and dumb and far more reckless than I am now.

Once it got dark I realized how stupid I was. This house that didn’t seem scary at all with a group of people laughing and talking and having fun. My friend has a Pitt bull, so we also had the dog as security. Suddenly I had none of that and no one and the big three story building seemed silent and dark and creepy as hell…

To make myself feel better, I took all the bottles from around the room, mostly whiskey, soda, and plastic water jugs from our two weeks of staying in there, and I set them up around my spot in a huge circle. My idea was that if someone stumbled into the dark room they would knock over the bottles and it would wake me up, giving me time to react or at least give me some warning that someone was in the room.

I slept like a rock and woke up with sunlight streaming by through the windows, my bottle ring was intact and nothing had knocked any bottles over. I went to the park and charged my phone and texted Jess and asked her when she wanted to meet up and leave town. It was still super early in the day and I wasn’t hearing anything back from jess so I decided to go back to the abandoned house and take a nap.

I went back to the house and headed through the back door from the alley, went up the stairs, and crossed the top floor to my little corner. That’s when I noticed something right in the middle of my spot. A pile of something. At first I thought I had left something but it instantly looked out of place. Most of the windows were boarded up so it was still pretty dark in there even with light shining through a couple unboarded windows. As I approached my spot I finally saw what I was looking at. Directly in the center of my ring of bottles, right where I slept the night before. Was a big pile or news papers taken from the insulation in the walls, it was piled up right where I slept in the shape of a human body. My mind was racing as I tried to figure out what was happening. To me the message was clear. “Your bottles didn’t keep you safe, I watched you sleep right here”

I ran down both flights of stairs, out the back door, across the back lawns, down the alleyway, and didn’t stop until I reached the corner store. I called Jess to make sure she wasn’t fucking with me and she said she didn’t place the newspapers there. That’s when I remembered the satanic shrine we had built. I think I cling to the idea of a paranormal encounter because the alternative is so much more disturbing. We didn’t see or hear anyone in that building over the weeks we had been staying there, but was someone living in there with us the entire time? Maybe watching us from the attic or the floor below? Either way, someone or something watched me sleep that night. Something knew exactly where I had been laying and they clearly sent me a message “you were not safe last night” either that or there was a really hospitable ghost trying to lay out a little bed for me. I was only gone for an hour or so, so whoever did it couldn’t have gotten far. I wonder to this day if they were in the room with me, watching me discover the pile of newspapers….

The house has since been remodeled and is currently someone’s house, I wonder if those people have experienced anything strange happening there.

I used to travel around the USA and Canada hitchhiking and hopping trains. I traveled for almost 9 years, but this story happened during my first summer on the road, so this was 2012 and I was 18 years old. I was still pretty new to traveling, but I had been up and down the east coast all summer from Florida to Maine and then back down to Tennessee. I was traveling with a few friends and we all sort of went our separate ways in Knoxville because we all had different winter plans, and summer was ending quickly. Everyone in our group had left Knoxville except me and my friend Cheyanne, we both had megabus tickets to different cities in the morning, I was heading to Wilmington North Carolina to meet up with some friends I would travel to Florida with for the winter, and she was heading back to her home town in the Midwest.

A friend of ours told us of an abandoned house across the gay street bridge from downtown Knoxville where we could sleep. they said two people lived there, but that they were nice and would let us stay there. Our friends insisted that they had become friends with the people and assured us that it was okay to go and ask them. But when we got up to this abandoned house at night, both of us were too nervous to go up and wake them up. We decided we would hang out nearby and play magic the gathering and wait to see if we saw them coming in or out so that we didn’t feel like we were intruding or something. It was this big open area with the abandoned house on one side and we were across the way by some bushes and trees, down the way from us was a wooded area that had a lot of trash and other junk around it.

As we played magic the gathering some homeless looking dude stumbled up, he was clearly fucked up and could barely walk, he kept tripping and stumbling and almost falling over, he went all the way down the hill and into the wooded area, he didn’t notice us at all. As soon as he went into the woods we heard a crash, and he cried out. It sounded like he was tumbling down and falling and hurting himself. He screamed, and it sort of sounded like he was being attacked by something. We both were super freaked out, we even considered calling the cops, but we thought, if he just fell over and he’s fucked up and yelling cause he’s pissed off, I would feel bad calling the cops and getting him arrested and making his life any harder. We didn’t hear anything for a while and decided to move away from the abandoned lot. There was a busy bar near a McDonalds and we went behind the bar to the back alley where we were completely hidden and continued playing magic the gathering. After a while we heard this blood cutting scream, it was coming from around the corner from the bar in one of the neighborhoods, it sounded like a woman screaming bloody murder, to this day I’ve never heard a more blood curdling scream in my life. It was so terrifying that we immediately knew that we needed to notify someone. Both of our phones were dead at this point. This was before everyone had smart phones so we weren’t as worried about our battery life back then. It was late at this point and the bar was closed and everyone had gone home. The McDonald’s was drive through only at that hour, we scared the shit out of the lady banging on the window, but we told her that we heard a woman screaming and it sounded like she needed help, it sounded like someone was running away and screaming, I distinctively remember it sounded like the sound of the scream was moving like she was running.

We didn’t want to deal with the cops, they fucked with us a lot just for existing in most cities so we were never eager to force an interaction with the police. We decided that we should get off the main road and find somewhere we can lay low and sleep for the night, so we went down the street and around the corner away from the abandoned house and the bar and we found this little side road with a clearing next to a wall, totally surrounded by bushes it was a good spot to camp. So we thought.

We put my tarp on the ground and got our sleeping bags out and went to bed. We had barely even drifted off to sleep when we woke up to screaming, this was different than the pained cries of the old man, or the blood curdling scream of the woman, this was like pure insanity, like someone screaming angrily, violently, mumbling words like a mad man. Like the kind of mentally ill person that you feel nervous being around because they suffer from something so intense and violent that they are raging and screaming and making creepy noises. It literally sounded like someone who was possessed by a demon and they were just outside our little clearing, on the other side of the bushes that were concealing us. We were both awake and looking at eachother with terrified expressions, we stayed as quiet as we could until this person moved on. As soon as we couldn’t hear them mumbling anymore we decided to pack up and just walk until we weren’t on this side of town at all anymore. We walked back towards gay street and to make everything even more annoying it started raining on us. There was an office building near the gay street bridge with a parking garage and we decided to just go sleep in there, we figured it would at least be safe from all the weird shit going on behind us.

After getting maybe 45 minutes of sleep, we are woken up in the parking garage by a police officer shining flashlights in our eyes telling us we had to move along. By then the sun was coming up, people were showing up to the parking garage and seeing some people camped out on the back corner. To this day I have no idea why so many weird and terrifying things kept happening in one small two block area, but I spent the next 7-8 years on the road, and had many sleepless nights, gotten woken up by cops, or sprinkler systems we didn’t know about, I’ve had encounters with crazy bums, but never anything like that night!