37 Underground Workers Share The Most Disturbing Stories, And They’re Not For The Faint Of Heart

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 webalso know that in some places manholes will exist in the middle of nowhere for future developments.
Anyways the room has 3 other suoer 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 headlamos he cant tell. We coerce him to climb over it. Then comes me. Hes freaking out saying s**t is all over his clothes and he didnt 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 s**t almost puking. My buddy behind me comes next. Same story.


We keep going. Asking ourselves why we even do this s**t in the first place. Exploration. Etc. Into the unknown. The forbidden.

We crawl another few hundres 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 s**t 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.

Where I grew up there were a few storm drains that all went to the same pond. My friend A and I were messing around in the woods near one of the openings and we could hear this really sharp echoing cry that made us both nervous. We thought it was the wind at first and then A threw a rock into the opening and it stopped for a minute so at this point we figured it must be something alive.

We climbed back out of the woods and went to the next pipe and could hear it there too. Now I'm scared and A is trying to prove how he's not afraid of anything so on we go to the next one. This one is quieter so we go back in the other direction. Now I'm being a baby because its raining a little and I'm not supposed to get my clothes wet (I was around 9) so I'm begging A to go home.

As he stops to assure me we are safe we hear this horrible, deep, wailing noise and I start to panic. I can feel my pulse in my neck and I'm sweating and A puts his face into the opening for the drain. The noise happens again and A takes off down the hill and into the pipe opening.

I am now crying because A abandoned me in the rain and there's a monster in the pipes. A starts yelling my name and I have to put my face to the opening to hear him so now I'm really crying and he tells me to call the fire department so I run to the nearest neighbor and tell them to. I explain I don't know why we need to call but that A is in the pipe outside their house. They get all snotty because A is the heaviest kid in the neighborhood so they assume he got stuck. They call the non emergency number and a truck comes to remove the cover.

Turns out A recognized the sound of an angry cat and ran into the pipe. It was a mama cat and her kittens but the kittens were stuck beneath the wire grate inside the drain so the rain was drowning them and they were crying. Thanks to A they got all but one kitten out and the mama cat in time before the rain got worse. He got to keep one of the kittens and no one believed us even though we were both there and there were firemen. No one believed he could fit into the pipe.

Recently, I was visiting NYC and stayed in a hotel inside the city. It was a fairly nice place, but it was also a pretty old building that was not built with the intention of it getting so much use. For example, there were only two tiny elevators available for guests (and the hotel was at least 15-20 floors). The wait for elevators took so long that I decided I'd use the stairs. For some reason, there were 4-5 stairwells in the building, accessible from each floor and most wound up in different parts of the lobby. I remembered using one of them the day before, and I thought it was stairwell D, so I took it. After descending for a while, I passed level two. The next exit wasn't marked, but I thought it had to be level one. I went through the exit door and found myself in an unfamiliar hallway with a very low ceiling (it could only have been about 7 feet) and sparse lighting. It wasn't eerie, but it definitely didn't look like it was intended for guests. Still, a little curious, I decided to check it out and see if I could find the lobby.

I walked for a minute down a long hallway with a kind of dirty stone floor and some [industrial double doors]. There didn't seem to be anyone around and it was pretty quiet. I rounded a corner and to my immediate right was this big window set into the wall. Through it was a clean white room that reminded me a little of my high school's cafeteria (I remember thinking that, but I'm not sure exactly why). There was also a man, sitting and looking at his phone. He must have been about 5 feet away from me and only the window separated us. He saw me and looked a little startled. I waved and was about to ask where the lobby was but he quickly pointed for me to turn back. Neither of us ever said a word. It was just the weirdest experience being in such a silent, dirty place and then seeing a modern room with a person. I speed walked out and took the elevator.

In retrospect, I probably just stumbled into some storage area under the lobby (it definitely wasn't the same level), but it was the strangest discovery, and I like to imagine what could have gone on down there and why I wasn't aloud to be there.

Edit: I definitely agree that there is a rational, boring explanation for this. I just thought it was an interesting story.

At a hotel in my hometown that everyone breaks into, (its the most famous building in our town and our downtown is super run down). Anyway, me and my two friends crawl through the basement from a side entrance and initially, all we see is spray paint graffiti, but as we make our way up some really steep steps, we see a bunch of dead cats that have been dragged around and left blood stains on the ground. We pretty much booked it the f**k out of there after that. We're probably going back in a couple of weeks, and that s**t better still be there.

I currently attend a state university full time. By the description you might be able to figure out which one. I'm currently a senior living in private housing downtown, but sophomore year I lived in the university's only downtown quad. It was built in the early 1920's and definitely looked it compared to the uptown campus and housing quads. I was in the basement lounge area grabbing my mail when I noticed a nearby door that wasn't usually open and a nearby maintenance worker. I casually asked the guy what was down there. He said, "Dunno, we just store our materials on the stairs." My curiosity got the better of me and I asked him if I could take a look to see what was all the way at the bottom of the flight of stairs. He said, "I don't see why not, just don't get hurt on anything down there, and try to be back before my supervisor gets back in 15".

This guy should definitely have not let me down there because he clearly hadn't seen it. There was friable asbestos literally everywhere, particularly the decomposing ceiling tiles. I turned on my phone flashlight to find that it was some kind of sealed off research area. The stairs led to a hallway which looks like it may have been hospital-like at one time, but it had since experienced some heavy water damage. There were approximately 7 rooms on either side with one way glass pane in each, with some kind of 90's intercom panel to the right. Inside each room were heavily rusted bed frames, a sink, and a toilet. All the way at the end of the hall were a series of file cabinets. I would have looked to see what they contained but figured it would only be a cloud of black mold spores, so I decided against it. Nothing inherently creepy about the area I suppose but definitely interesting.

Explored an abandoned factory? I think I'm not sure what it was. Extremely sketchy. In the middle of the floor there was a square cutout and just a dark room below it with no light source, around a 8-10 foot drop. Woulda been f****d if someone fell down. Also many children toys and random musty books. Tons of bat and pigeon s**t and it went up about 4-5 stories. Stairs were very sketchy. Worst part about it was the decapitated animals there but oh well.

I'm not sure I qualify, since the explanation seems rather straightforward to me - another group of explorers. Still, I have a pretty good story. I attended the University of Huddersfield, and one of the accommodation facilities for students is called Storthes Hall. Storthes Hall was previously a psychiatric hospital, an asylum. Most of the buildings were demolished, I believed two are currently in use to house students, and then off site there's the main building and the mortuary. The main building was off limits and I believe security guards were in place, but when you have several hundred drunk students living nearby you're basically just grabbing sand. I went with a group of people and we intended to have some kind of DIY seance (Derren Brown had done his not long before), so we toddled off with tarot cards and a Ouija board. It was all pretty funny to be honest, none of us really took it seriously, and having seen the Derren Brown seance I was really sceptical. Then the torch died, and we heard several loud knocks. We f****d off sharpish. But again, it likely was somebody f*****g with us after hearing the panic caused by the torch going out. Might have even been the security guards, I wouldn't blame them.

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 f**k out, like someone was trapped in there and then someone opened the door and shot them in the head.

I feel like i should contribute. Walking along the track one evening doing an inspection. It was in a station, kinda crowded and lots of people watching me work because people are naturally nosey especially when some one is walking on the track that their train is coming on. So im walking along and i see a rat run across the track about 10 feet in front of me. I know a rats in the area, now i know to not be startled when i see it again in a minute. I keep walking and go to step over a pile of garbage, see the first rat out the corner of my eye plus a bonus dead rat in the garbage pile. As im stepping over the
garbage, the what i thought was a dead rat ran in-between my feets and scared the f**k out of me.

This story isnt what your looking for in terms of scary or creepy, but it f****n hate rats.

A little late to the party but here's my story.

There's an abandoned insane asylum in Northville michigan that my friends and I explored 3 times. This is the story of the third, and final time we ever broke in. I still get chills every time I remember this night.

The first two times we went, the asylum was actually more interesting than creepy to explore. Both times we happened to run into very friendly people there (the first time we ran into another group of high school kids, scared the s**t outta them at first, the second time we met a couple stoner vietnam vets that gave us a tour of the place.) It's an entire complex complete with underground tunnels, morgue, and lots of files and things from the 50s. This time, however, we were alone, and only had 2 flashlights between 3 people. Much like the guy with the story about the WWII base, the echoing footsteps sound like they're coming from behind you, and always seem to take one more step after you stop.

So after exploring much of the asylum like this and being consierably creeped out already, we decide to head to the main building. It's about 18 stories tall and the view from the top is pretty cool, because it's by far the tallest building anywhere remotely close, and you can see detroit from up there. Any way, we're nearing the top of the seemingly endless stair corridor, when the girl that's with us freezes, and whispers for us to stop. "I heard footsteps" she whispers. I tried to tell her it was just or footsteps echoing, but when both of them made me shut up and listen I could here it clear as day - the unmistakable sound of foot steps coming from the top floor. Now the building is tall, but very small area-wise, so we were very close to the sounds. Still standing on the stairs, we whisper amongst us about what we're going to do. My very stupid friend insist that it's probably just another friendly person and we should go up and say hi. I try to explain to him that you don't want to meet the kind of people that pace the top floor of an old asylum in the middle of the night. We couldn't convince him and he goes to head up the stairs, but I was like "f**k this" and just started running down the stairs. Fortunately he followed us, and we got out of there without ever finding out who - or what, was walking around up there that night.

To top it all off, a cop passing by on the road spotted us after coming out of the building and we had to run into the asylum complex to get away. I still think back to that night some times and wonder who was up there. There were definitely no guards, so it was probably either a gang (there's gang graffiti all over the asylum, for the "guppies"), or the tortured soul of a crazy person. Either way, that was waaay to close.

Tl;dr: heard footsteps coming from the top floor of a long abandoned insane asylum, about 50 ft away from us and noped right out.

I remeber having an experiance once while not in "break rules take pics" mode I was just riding on my local ... subway? underground slow train basically. It got even slower because of a bend in the tracks. I always loved this area to look out of the windows because it was super old and super big spanning out into like an insustrial cave if you knew the angles to look (they tried to make it look all posh and hidden) and its almost impossible to get down into there without tripping one of the 15+ security systems (I suppose homeless could probably figure it out) usually the most exciting thing I saw was a construction vehicle. This day I saw a person hopefully just sleeping in a little cubby I thought I was the only one to know about. Threw me off balance a little bit. I almost reported it but decided if I was in that situation and alive I wouldn't want someone to report me and if I was dead I wouldn't care so decided not too.

I found a gigantic cement vault under the Arlington national cemetery. It was super spooky and not on any map.

I once found the basement door (door on the unused but open basement level) at university open and followed the hallway for maybe a mile or so.

Near the end I felt a sudden cold. Was spooked until I remembered the stream that runs across the grounds.

Went exploring with a bunch of friends at the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. While this is not underground in its entirety, portions of it are. The buildings were left with hospital equipment, beds, books, patient files... literally everything. It's eerie as if a zombie apocalypse occurred and everyone left. It operated from 1864 to 1994. The facility was self sustaining, (i.e. The "patients" farmed the land, and had all resources on campus. The years this was open a lot of horror stories came out of this place, this wasn't the modern day psychiatric ward. More like a prison, where families paid a lot of money to hide their mentally ill, or the state put undesirables. There's an underground network, that was heavily blocked off with chains. However, the main buildings were easily accessible. But, the access ways to the underground were blocked off inside as well. Every time we got near one of the underground tunnel systems we could hear faint music playing, sounded like a music box playing. We found a bent wired gate and attempted to file in, the music got louder and we were all pretty freaked out. We were all promptly arrested before attempting to go into the tunnels. There's a lot of speculation about the tunnels still to this day. The new owner said he was afraid of asbestos, and was fearing for our safety. He was very grim,he agreed to drop charges if we never went back. We obliged happily. Still, I sometimes think of my interactions there, all of the remnants left behind and get severely creeped out.

There used to be an abandoned rubber factory on the edge of my town before it was torn down a couple years back. I went there once and tried all the doors but they were barred, but I did find a crack in the concrete wall around the back that was just big enough to slip through.

The inside was really neat. There were abandoned boats that must have been in storage for decades there, a bunch of old conveyor belts and factory equipment, all kinds of d**g paraphernalia. I found a random painting of Jesus in a makeshift shrine. But that's not the creepy part.

I was walking around this abandoned factory at about 8pm, just after dark. I look around for an hour or so, and aside from some old s**t there's really nothing out of the ordinary. Then I hear music start playing, something sort of blues-ey somewhere in the factory. I'm not easily scared, and I kind of wanted to figure out what sort of freak was listening to old records in an abandoned factory because that's something I would do. I track down the noise after about 5-10 minutes and it's in this room in the basement that has the doorway covered with a tarp. I go inside and the room is a huge contrast from the rest of the dingy, dull old factory. The walls were bright purple, and the room was warm like there was a space heater in it whereas the rest of the factory was freezing. There's a cassette player on the floor playing a song (which I later tracked down to be called "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles, but I never found out what the other songs were) and a bunch of papers taped to the walls that all say "She gotta run. She gotta run. She gotta run." If I were to guess, there were at least 100 sheets that said the exact same phrase just plastered on the walls and laying on the floor. There was a chair that looked like it had been detached from a school desk in the corner and a statue of an animal that was really badly chipped and burned, like someone was trying to destroy it. There was also a stack of VHS tapes that had the names of women on the sides (I only remember seeing "Jessica" on multiple but there were a few other names).

I left shortly after because I got worried whoever owned all this s**t would come back and find me there, and I figured they were in the building with me. I couldn't stop thinking about it for a few weeks (I was convinced it was either a serial killer or some guy with a p**n collection that he couldn't risk having at home - or something worse on the tapes) and went back with a friend, but when we got there they had already started demolishing the place and it was inaccessible. I'll always wonder what was on those tapes, but part of me is glad I don't know.

Goddammit, I know it's late, but I'll put my s**t in with the rest of the pile. It wasn't really exploring, but One time the librarian at my old high school, literally old because the place was about 100 years old, asked me and two other friends if we could stack some boxes at the library attic so they wouldn't be a fire hazard. We went up and it was a treasure trove or cool stuff like rare antique books and 100 year old newspapers. I thought it was really cool. Also, even though the library is only one floor, there was a rumor that it had a basement level where they kept all the rarer antique books. I never asked her if it was true because I ended getting on her bad side a while later.

As a kid, a friend's sister fell down a storm drain while trying to retrieve a ball and when she got fished out by her dad it looked like she'd been bitten by a rat. She had to get the infamous rabies shots rumored to be twenty directly into the stomach with a long needle (not sure if that was true at this point). However, a Saturday of 'going down to the creek to play' would often involve exploring drainage pipes. We'd watch for storms to make sure we wouldn't get flooded out and die, so it was a bit scary and a bit fun and sometimes we'd find little 'rooms' that were outlets with metal ladders embedded in the side. But it was super easy to get scratched up on the concrete, and just as easy on Monday morning to imagine you'd been bitten by a rabid rat and had days to live before the symptoms manifested and you'd go insane and die horribly.

But you couldn't tell your parents you'd been somewhere off limits. Oh, no.

e: I guess I should include something unexplained. Any toy or rock or anything we left in the drains seemed to move, even if it hadn't rained lately. I'd like to think some raccoons were having fun down there at night just like we were in the day.