"Have You Ever Been Somewhere During A Road Trip That Just Didn't 'Feel Right?'" (30 Answers)

I've been to 43 states. I've seen odd things.

The creepiest thing was getting in gas off of I-95 in NC, and seeing a camo painted Bronco driving around a parking lot of a shopping center that was focused on a Wal-mart. It had two *gigantic* flags. One Confederate, the other full on Nazi flag - I was never more concerned in my life.

Coatesville, Pennsylvania. I was with a friend who had come up from Mexico and we were staying a few nights at his grandmother's ranch nearby. Coatesville was the only town around where we could find Mexican ingredients. This is an old steel town that feels post-apocalyptic, everyone there didn't really seem to be doing anything or going anywhere, it was so creepy. The store we ended up going to had nearly empty shelves and I think the guys were a bit surprised to see us there. All in all just very strange and eerie.

My family was driving through a really rural part of the Philippines when my sister announced she had to go asap. It was very late.

My dad stopped at the first place he could ~ a little shop that sold weird antique stuff, with an old lady at the counter. My dad talked to the old lady while us kids headed for the bathroom (an outhouse separate from the shop/main house).

We didn't think much about it and stayed a few days in our province. On our way back to the city, my dad said he wanted to stop by that shop again to thank the old woman and when we got to the place where my dad swore the store was, there was nothing. Just the highway and thick forest on both sides. We still bring it up sometimes because thinking about it gives everyone in the family chills.

I am a skeptical person but this one experience I had in Berlin still confuses me to this day.

Me and my girlfriend were on holiday walking through central Berlin, a weekday morning. The streets were fairly busy, a typical day, when we turned down a long wide street with large buildings on either side. As we walked down we noticed it was very quiet and that there was no one else on the street at all, which was strange in itself considering it was 10-11am. As we carried on walking, I can’t really describe what happened but I noticed that the buildings we were walking past weren’t actually real, but like movie set buildings? The windows and doors looked normal from a distance but up close they were waaaay too big to be normal, I just felt really uneasy the whole time but we didn’t say anything until we turned off the street and back into the hustle and bustle of Berlin.

I have absolutely no idea what happened at all but my girlfriend said she felt/seen exactly the same thing. It was like we stepped into a different world for a few minutes. Totally bizarre

On my first trip to Europe, we started in Rome, and drove down to Sicily, and on the way back north, we decided to stay the night in a small town instead of a major city. We ended up at a town called Lauria right on dark, and hadn't booked any accomodation yet (we didn't know where we were going to end up, wanted to get as far as we could). As we drive around the town looking for a hotel, every local is stopping in their tracks and watching us like we are very out of place. We find and pull up at the only hotel we could find, a multi level building with an empty car park, no guests or staff around. Went in and booked a room, and the guy who served us took our bags, put us in the elevator and sent us on the way to our room. we get up 3 floors and here he is waiting for us with our bags, not puffed out having out ran an elevator while carrying 3 bags. It's the classic horror movie hall ways, seemingly too long for the building and only half the lights are working. It's dead quiet inside so we put our stuff in the room and get out to see if the town is really that bad. We head out for dinner, again every stopping and staring at us as we walked down the streets. The next morning, we wake up early to GTFO and find all the doors are locked and cannot be opened from the inside without a key, no staff anywhere so we left the key on the desk and had to break out of the hotel window to get out. 10/10 was spooked. Rest of the trip was amazing, through Switzerland and France, quick trip around England and Scotland then home.

Back in 2011, my ex and I took a trip to go visit my dad, who at the time lived in the tiny town of Middleton, Tennessee. I lived at the other end of the state, so it was about an eight hour trip. Decided to go it at night so I wouldn't have to deal with anyone on the interstate other than truckers and the occasional car.

The trip was fine until we got off the interstate and went through some small town maybe an hour or so before Middleton? My memory's hazy on exactly where it was, but at that point it was about four in the morning. We were rolling through the town, and it was foggy and dark, minimal streetlights, all the houses were completely dark and still... it was a little creepy looking but nothing really out of the ordinary.

Until we got a little further down the road and there were f*****g newspapers *everywhere*. Scattered all on the road, in the empty fields and the yards of the houses we passed, just loose pages of newspaper everywhere we looked. I'm sure there was a reasonable explanation, but both of us just suddenly felt like something was off, and it was creepy as hell. One of us cracked a joke about suddenly landing in a horror movie without realising, and I sped up the car a little bit, but for about ten minutes it was just us and the newspapers and the fog in the complete stillness in this dark town, and we both sighed audibly in relief once it fell behind us. We talked about it for years after that trip.

On a second trip to the same town years later, once again in the early am hours, we stopped at a gas station I always stopped at, and though I'd always felt safe at it before, that time I felt a little uneasy, but didn't know why. We went in the store and this group of guys and a girl came in yelling at this other guy, cashier made them leave and they tore out. Came back not five minutes later and beat the guy they'd been harrassing with some kind of bat. It was a mess, cops were called, ambulance... I'll never forget how dazed that poor guy looked with blood coming all down the side of his head. So I guess that time I had a legit reason for things feeling off.

tl;dr I should stop making the trip from east TN to west TN.

I have a few but this one stands out in my mind.

This starts with me, my boyfriend, his brother and the girlfriend all deciding to split off from the rest of his family during vacation and head to the Winchester mystery house... now since this is like 6 or 7 years ago I can't remember if we were headed to or back from there. I was driving and my bf was the navigator, we started our trek a few hours before and expected to be at our destination before nightfall. Somewhere along the lines we took a wrong turn, although we had a map and both our set to gps. I didn't think about it at first and nobody else mentioned it until what felt like a few hours of me driving, now this wasn't in silence from what I remember it was a normal a*s roadtrip with taking laughing and music... but we get down this particular road and it all feels like we snapped outta a dream everything is dark there's shadows of trees bunched here and there along the road but past that is pitch black... I'm taking a void of darkness where you feel it goes on for miles on end but you can't see it. One of them said something along the lines of where are we, and joked that we entered the twilight zone. But I tell you, I got this really uneasy feeling like I shouldn't drive any further than I already have and I think everyone else felt that too cause we got real quiet and just kinda stared out the windows. We hadn't realized that there were literally no cars around us, what was supposed to be a highway was a narrow strip of road and nothing, just this stillness like we entered a place we shouldn't have. I flip a b***h and start speeding off in the opposite direction but lo and behold the scenery we saw "going back" wasn't the same as we saw coming in... it was still pitch black but none of it was familiar. You know how you can make out odd shapes from the shadows... but literally nothing looked like it was before. It took me about a good 15 or 20 min. To get out of the void... but to this day every one of us swears we were driving for hours in it. We can't find that turn although we've taken that route a few more times tbt throughout the year... and it really does seem like it was a dream except for the waking part it was scared me, it's like everyone was stuck on auto pilot and no one remembers what we said or even what sounds we heard during those hours. Gives me the creeps.

I know it was a Sunday afternoon in January; it must have been either '96 or '97. I know it was on I-30 somewhere between Little Rock and Texarkana, but I can't find it on a a map any more. But there was a microscopic little "town" at one of the highway interchanges, that consisted almost entirely of a gas station and a Denny's; I think there might have been a couple of other buildings, but I don't remember anything about them. When I saw the Denny's sign on the highway, I decided to stop there for a fill-up and a bite of lunch.

And while I was filling my gas tank, something about the scene just seemed ... off. Uncanny valley territory. But I couldn't put my finger on it. The place was busy but not slammed, pretty much what you'd expect for right-after-church at the only businesses open within 50 miles. Everybody going about their business. Nothing obviously weird. Just ... off.

I moved my car, went into the Denny's, waited until the waitress seated me. Again, crowded, but not full, there was no wait for a table but most tables were full. So there was a delay before the waitress came back to take my order, and, just casually looking around the room, it finally sank in what was weirding me out. The room had me, three obvious truckers, and ... maybe 40 or so copies of the same person. Both genders, all ages, but exact same skin tone, same brown hair in the same two haircuts, same facial features. The same "person" I'd seen maybe a dozen or so copies of at the gas station.

Hours later, up on the highway and miles away, I figured out what I *think* that I was seeing. (And Reddit being Reddit, someone from there will see this and tell me whether I'm right or not, after all these years.) I think this was one of those towns whose best high school students have all left for college, married someone from somewhere else, and then moved to that other person's town because that other person's town had jobs. I think this was a town that nobody new had moved to in over 100 years. Which means no genetic diversity at all; at at most the second-cousin level, everybody's related.

Nothing dangerous, nothing harmful, just ... well, look, I'm from St. Louis, which I think of as a small town, under 3 million population. Also a town that hardly anybody new ever moves to (little or no reason to), so any two random similar-aged strangers who meet have a 50/50 chance of knowing someone in common. But if you took, say, a random Metrolink train's worth of us, we wouldn't be nearly as homogeneous as that tiny little whistle-stop town in Arkansas. I imagine if they came to my neighborhood, they'd see that all the people look different and they'd be just as creeped out as I was when I went to their neighborhood and everybody looked 100% identical.

So that red covered bridge, West Montrose AKA the Kissing Bridge, from the movie IT is about 2 hours away from me. A couple of years ago, me and some girlfriends went there to take some pictures because it was cool that it was so close and it was a perfect day for a road trip (I think the kids nowadays call it a VSCO Hangout). I drove and when we got there, there was no parking anywhere. I finally pulled over to the side of the road and asked a lady if I could park in her store lot (said no tourist parking) she said since I asked so nicely, *fine*.

We went for a walk and the locals would peek out their windows at us, some of them in plain view. There were signs on the grass that said that so and so were to be contacted for use of property and that use of which was prohibited without permission, no lingering, park closed, etc. They even had ropes and stakes on their property lines to really take it home. It was also strange because there is a lane way between the properties and the creek that runs under the bridge and other signs had prices for photo sessions. At one point a couple walked past us and the lady craned her neck to look back at me even as she had already walked past.

That was about all the Get Out vibes I could handle till we packed in and headed home. There was just something strange in the air there, it felt like I had eyes on me at all times. All I wanted was to see the last covered bridge in Ontario!

Back in the late 80s and early 90s when I was a teenager me and my friends were in a hard core punk band. We mostly played shows in our medium sized city, the surrounding area and occasionally the major city 2 hours away. A member of one the bands we would play with had set up a punk showcase in their home town about 3 or 4 hours away and asked my band if we could play. It paid and we were able to sell merch so we decided it was worth the trip. Most of the time we played just for fun since we rarely made any money on shows and we would be lucky if we sold 10 t-shirts and CDs. But playing small towns we could usually sell everything we brought with us.

So we loaded up our gear in 2 cars and convoyed to this town. None of had heard of it and we had to spend an afternoon with a map trying to figure out where it was and how to get there. We got there hours before the show and all I can say was that we constantly referenced "Footloose". People were looking at us like we were from Mars or something. According to movies we should've been flattered but the reality is that we were more than a little put off. It's like c'mon; you people have cable TV so it's not like you haven't ever seen a person with a mohawk or blue hair in the 15+ years that style has existed.

The show was cool though. And we did sell everything we brought. But everyone we met smoked really shitty weed so luckily we brought our own.