Urban Exploration Gone Wrong- Top 5 Urbex Horror Stories
If you’ve ever been Urban Exploring you’ve probably driven excitedly to a location only to find a pile of rubble, or impenetrable fencing patrolled by security. If these Urbex horror stories complied from Reddit are anything to go by, a wasted drive or bring promptly kicked out by security could have been the least of your worries.
Creepy Bunker
“Was playing in the woods and tripped over something solid. Found it was a cement circle, and realized it was an underground door. The next day I come back with a crowbar (to open, and like hell I’m going in unarmed). Pull it up, and it’s a cold war era personal bomb shelter… that failed? There was a giant crack in the roof, the floor was covered in slime. But what was worse is the walls are covered in writings. ‘This is the end.’ ‘We must die.’ ‘Everyone is gone.’ Then I find the back wall, and a giant red scrawl: “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOME.” That’s it, fuck this. I’m fucking out. I sprint up the door, and close it. I don’t want to know what the hell that was. But I come back the next day… it’s burned out. I didn’t set a fire intentionally, and I didn’t smell smoke leaving.” Secretly_psycho
Murder House?
“I was in a house that the police confiscated from a biker gang. My job was to assess the damage for an insurance company. The walls were all painted white and the floor was sheets of plywood painted dark red. I was going around measuring each room, opening doors, no problem. I then open the linen closet and it had deep scratch marks on the inside and dents on the back of the door like someone was trying to escape, the freaky part was straight ahead at my head level was a round red splatter pattern on the back wall that had been painted over with a coat of white paint. Freaked me the fuck out, like someone was trapped in there and then someone opened the door and shot them in the head.” YaSeeTheThingIs
Something Dead in The Sewers
“My buddy and me spent many years crawling through sewer pipes. One day we were out in the woods. Me him and another friend. We were deep in the woods. We found some pipe sticking out of a hillside and agreed to explore it. Well we crawl down this thing a good 600 feet or so, on our hands and knees. At times it gets smaller and we are on our stomachs. Finally it comes to one of those big manhole rooms, and we get the impression were under a house. Of course we also know that in some places manholes will exist in the middle of nowhere for future developments. Anyways the room has 3 other super small pipes heading off into different directions. Like slither on your stomach size. We choose one and make our friend Z go first. We go down about 300 feet and he shouts back that theres something in the way. He thinks its a dead animal. But since we are using weak headlamps he cant tell. We coerce him to climb over it. Then comes me. He’s freaking out saying shit is all over his clothes and he didn’t know what it was. I climb over this dark lump of refuse. Feels like a body but not human. Not even animal. Just alien. Smells bad. Smells horrible. I slide over this nasty shit almost puking. My buddy behind me comes next. Same story. We keep going. Asking ourselves why we even do this shit in the first place. Exploration. Etc. Into the unknown. The forbidden. We crawl another few hundreds feet. Z starts complaining about a horrible god awful stench ahead. We cant for the life of him get him to continue. He ends up throwing up. We start throwing the idea around of gas of some sort. He says with his headlamp theres something big up ahead. Looks like a honest to god body. Human maybe. We slide backwards quickly until we get to the manhole room. We crawl out quickly. We get into the daylight and investigate the shit stuck to our clothes from the thing we slid over. Its dark. Bloody dark. Refuse dark. Looks like fur. We agree that it was probably a trapped animal. Never go back ever again.” XRebirth_Pilot
Strangers in the Darkness
“This was in the San Bernardino area, in southern California. I was inspecting the bridges that run over canals for lead and asbestos. Most bridges that run over canals have a small space on either side of the water to walk, usually small enough that you have to bend over. One bridge appeared to have a small crawl space under it, but once I got inside it opened up into a huge, dark, low-ceiling room that extended back below the highway. I entered alone ahead of my supervisor and carrying my tools and flashlight. As I passed the flashlight over the darkness about twenty people stared back at me from the back of that room, all standing. I must have ducked out of there immediately but I clearly remember seeing a nice rug, multiple large couches, a TV, a table with a vase with flowers in it, beds, paintings on the walls, a nice floor lamp, but none of it was powered…. and just twenty people, living there in the dark…” cavt949
Cat Lady
“Although its technically not urban exploring, as a former electrician I think I can still share one moment from a job I had to do about 13 years ago. Me and my job partner were called out to a larger restoration job that was being done to an older house from the early 1900’s. The house was until this point, a family owned house which had 2 owners since it was built, and the last owner was an old lady who had passed away there whilst being the last person in her family line (sad story on its own) and nobody could take over the house. So the house got auctioned to a younger couple that bought it for an insane amount of money due to how large the house was, but it was now time to get the old house up to modern standards, which included a completely new installation from scratch, as the old cables around the house were the type of cables that was insulated with black cotton and fastened with hand crafted wooden clamps. While working in the 1st floor was quite easy as the entire installation process was made to fit inside the new wallframes that the carpenters were setting up, we eventually had to move on to the 2nd floor and prepare for setting up a new intake from the attic which would then pass down to the new main fuse box on the 2nd floor. We opened the hatch to the attic, and while using the flashlight to look up there, we could surely see that the attic was very cramped, so the smallest of us would have to go up there to fix everything to get the intake cable settled while removing the old one. As you might guess, I was the smallest of us and had to do that shitty job of going up where nobody probably had been for many many years. So I decided to grab a lunchbreak and mentally prepare myself for what I expected to become a pretty shit job. After eating, I grabbed my flashlight and toolbelt and started climbing up the stairs, and while climbing upwards I noticed that the smell (that we thought was pretty much “old people smell” after they die) was getting increasingly stronger. But I had to continue, so I got to the top and crawled myself onto something stable when I got up, while noticing that the smell up there was pretty damn bad. So I grabbed my flashlight to look around and get somewhat oriented about where to crawl. Looking forward it seemed like a pretty straight forward route towards the intake point that I could see in the distance, but out of curiosity I wondered if there were anything up there, so I looked to my right, only to light up 5 carcasses of what once was the old lady’s cats that probably had died, one of them were more or less ‘intact’ whilst being visibly partly eaten by various insects (or whatever eats such stuff), while 2 of them were more or less just rotten dried skin and bones. At that moment I absolutely regretted my decision to eat lunch as the sight of this along with the realization about what I had smelled all along was these dead cats, and immediately threw up on the spot before VERY swiftly noping the fuck out of there. After some talk back and forth, we came to the possibility that the old lady had been throwing her cats up there when they died, one by one, but we will never know for sure since the lady had died. The new owners had no idea about this when buying the house, but our company ended up denying to continue the work until the attic had been cleaned appropriately. This apparently took them about 1 month to complete, I guess there are not many companies who wants to deal with that kind of nasty stuff, but my partner at work ended up finishing the work on the attic afterwards as he felt kinda bad for me. In the end, I decided to not continue being an electrician anymore, as this was not work I really enjoyed doing, especially not after this event.” Tekowsen
As mentioned, all of the above are compiled from unknown online sources, so perhaps some should be taken with a pinch of salt. And don’t let them put you off Urban Exploration- we’ve never had anywhere near as scary an experience as any of these, there’s plenty of less terror-inducing exploration to be done.
Last Updated on 4 February 2022 by Michael
