“It May Be The Single Worst Thing I’ve Ever Seen”: 50 Urban Explorers Share Their Creepiest Finds

A live goldfish in an inch of black water, in a slowly evaporating tank in an abandoned house. I took him home and he's still alive over a year later.
Here's a picture showing Wilson when I got him home that day and today, a little over 15 months later.

How about a gravestone marked "specimens" behind what was a mental hospital that dated back to the 1800s? Link.

I came upon a house a good twenty minutes outside of my tiny town while looking for fishing spots once. It was a large 2-story, 4-bedroom farm house. It looked like the owners had just gotten up one day and left. All of their belongings were still there. Some dishes still in the sink. A skillet on the stove. In the closet I found tons of state fair ribbons dating back to 1912, among other things you'd probably want to keep. The beds were unmade, like someone had just thrown back the covers and gotten up. A bunch of church programs from the church I actually attended when I was a kid, with the name of a pastor I assumed was well before my time. There was an old typewriter on the desk with a paper in it with the word "The" typed out. Birdcage with a long-gone bird in it. Photographs still hanging on the wall. The door to the basement was locked, though, and I still sometimes wonder what was down there and why it was locked.

Everything was covered in a very thick layer of dust, though. You could see that animals had gotten in and left footprints and droppings everywhere (lots of raccoon prints).

It was all just insanely eerie being there. Like, it was clearly abandoned and had been for quite some time, but I still felt like I was intruding on someone's home. I mean, I've explored tons of places, but this place felt different.

Edit: For those asking, this was in Iowa. I haven't researched the history of the house or know who the prior owners were. I've pondered the worst, but one of my theories is that there was probably an old couple who lived there (there was a walker in the closet and one of those bathtub rail things in the bathroom) who were put into a nursing home or something. Maybe their kids just didn't care about the house? The bird was pretty sad to see.

Beneath the streets of NYC there is a community of people living in abandoned subway stations with their own functioning economy and currency.
The Mole People of NYC.

I was exploring this old sardine factory.

Tons of caved in roof, cool washing room and then we smell this smell.

It was something rotten, so of course we have to find what it is.

After 5 minutes one of us has puked already, the girls are long gone and only 3 of us remain. We round a corner. We see a body. Me and the other guy jump back and our favorite weirdo kicks the body. It clangs.

Some guy filled a jacket and pants with broken sardine jars, genius.

8 decapitated doll's heads hanging from wires tied to pipes on the ceiling.

That wasn't really the creepy part, though. The creepy part was that they were gone when I came back through that room on my way to the exit.

I went into this abandoned chocolate factory. I loved that place, graffitti everywhere. I opened this closet just built on the side of outside wall. Homeless guy sleeping with candels all around him. I saw him another time.

I was going through an old storm drain tunnel thing. It was pretty large and you could walk through it without crouching. The walls started off with your general graffiti but as you got in further the tunnel got smaller and smaller until we were almost crawling. The graffiti changed further in. It started to get demonic with pentagrams and notes about Satan. The path was then blocked by a shrine looking thing with old flowers and it had a man made out of sticks like something out of the Blair Witch. We were about to knock it over to get passed it but right before we did we heard a rattlesnake go off in the dark right behind it. We booked it out of there real quick.

I have a good one for this. Definitely scared me, and I'm not one to typically get on edge.

I had just got a new camera and wanted to go take some photos of our downtown area. Nice buildings and a riverfront, so seemed like a good place to practice some shots and see what o could come up with. A couple of buildings were shut down. Blared up windows on the first floor and chains on the front doors. One of the doors had enough of a gap, we could squeeze in so we did. The building was about 7 floors I suppose, totally empty on the bottom level. No dividing walls, and other than some columns/beams standing, there was one wall with metal stairs leading to the next floor. The second floor, which was not fully intact, had some planks that lead across huge holes, just an unfit place to be in. Well, decided to walk up to see what the second floor had. There were maybe 30 steps leading to the second floor. My friend started up first and I was behind him. We got up about 10 steps, and the sound of someone running down them was heard, "Boom, Boom, Boom". We felt the vibration of the footsteps coming down towards us. The strange thing is, we could see the top of the stairs and no one was there. We turned and ran out, pretty scared. The only thing that I could think of that would explain the noises and vibrations felt would be the steps collapsing or coming unbolted. I know the sound was foot steps coming towards us, but have no clue what it was.

Walking down a street in Pripyat and a window falls out of one of the buildings and smashes in the undergrowth. It sat in its frame for 30 years and fell out as we were walking past it.

When I lived in Rostov on Don, Russia a couple years ago, I got lost between some old apartment buildings on my way home, and I stumbled upon an alley courtyard area with an abandoned Soviet helicopter. It was totally covered with graffiti and had no doors, but it was quite cool. I have no idea what it was doing in a residential alley.

I used to live really close to the grounds of a psychiatric hospital that was built in 1916 and abandoned in 1996. My family moved to the area in 2003 and my brothers and I would explore it and we found all sorts of neat eerie [things] like the morgue, hidden underground tunnels, an old shock therapy machine. The most unsettling part of that hospital though was the children's ward. Opening that door and seeing a bunch of old dolls staring back me really creeped me the [hell] out.

Edit: this site has some great pics of the place if anyone is interested The Old Whitby Psych.

Human bones. Police were called. Remains unsolved.

A huge abandoned apartment complex. Had to climb in from the roof and working our way downstairs bought us past at least 200 individual apartments. Every door was open or at least unlocked except the third floor end of the hallway C46. I have a lock pick set I'm pretty okay with and we camped out for at least 30 minutes trying to get in the room. Couldn't get in so we left a little creeped out. Got outside to the truck, and checking out the building one final time, that room has a light on and it may have been the curtains or just my head, but it looked like someone was standing there. Probably just a homeless person but really freaked us out.

We were climbing a utility shaft behind a lecture hall that ran up the length of the building. At the bottom of the shaft were 2 or 3 boxes filled with these black and white pictures of mannequins. Some were out of focus head shots of the faceless mannequins, some pictures of them in compromising positions, and some just kinda generic looking shots. Creepy but w/e.

After climbing up 3 or 4 stories we found a mattress and blanket. On its own the mattress would be curious/sad, but the pictures below added a layer of creepy.

Whenever we'd explore around campus I always figured (facetiously) that I could live in one of these spaces if [things got hard]. I guess we found someone who was actually doing it.

I live in Louisiana. Me and a couple friends were around the French Quarter and we found an abandoned bar. All the mirrors were cracked and all the beers were full of brown murky stuff. The building was old and creaked a lot as we walked. I remember one of my friends tripped and knocked over one of the mugs of brown stuff and we heard something make noises behind the wall of the bar/singing areas. We booked it out of there.

I was in San Francisco helping out for an event for one of the beaches a few years ago and one of the side projects they had going on was clearing this wooded area that was a old bunker hill back before ww1 I believe for the machine gun posts. Needless to say the main bunker you had to slide through the small slit of the structure and it went down into a 2nd level was the only way in. So a group of people and me enter and go down into what can only be described as a dark hotel corridor with side rooms with a crumbling infrastructure. If this wasn't creepy enough on the first wall was written in graffiti "Satan awaits". S

o we enter go down to the basement type level and all the rooms are pretty far gone from age and weathering we come upon the room labeled 6 and this rooms door frame was graffitied clown esque design the only room with some type of graffiti besides the words upstairs so it's pitch black we all have our camera flashlights on to see and this room has 3 voodoo dolls on the walls with each of them having a 6 in the middle of the body with the words on the right saying "until the light takes us" this sent everyone into a I don't want to be here type vibe. So we finish up for the most part make our way down to the end of this winding corridor and at the end is a large metal door with a small peephole and the metal door wouldn't open due to rust it was just freaking weird. Still have a slightly terrible video of the event.

Oh, one that I can answer!

Down in Florida, there is an abandoned hotel on an island that hasn't been touched in YEARS.

I broke in and got some pictures, and I'll share them if there is interest.

In the pictures, you can see that the hotel was clearly abandoned overnight and on a whim because there are still flat screen TV's on the wall, glasses of water on the tables, news papers that were being read, all kinds of weird things.

It was creepy because it looked like this hotel experienced the rapture and everyone just upped and left.

I explored an abandoned brain trauma rehab center in my area. The most unsettling things in there were the dated wheelchairs of patients with the patient's names on them throughout the building as well as one room at the end of a hall that had a seat with straps that looks like it was used to restrain patients. The hand rests of the seat had scratch marks as if the patients were clawing to get out which kinda creeped me out.

Explored an abandoned toilet factory. Found a room full of lung xrays. Then heard something walking on the tin roof above us and the creak of a door swinging open in another room even though we were all in the xray room. Very spooky. 10/10.

Edit: Just some clarification because I did some research after we got back and this huge factory (like seiously you probably gotta measure the square footage in acres) had some sort of health issue of workers i guess breathing in porcelain dust and they just up and left the whole thing. Other people had deffinitely been there before us. There was grafitti on the walls and some copper had been pulled out and some of the hundreds, maybe thousands of toilets had been smashed. If I ever need a hundred toilets for cheap i know where to go.