I've explored many abandoned buildings over the past two years, but the scariest was an abandoned mall I explored once with a friend. It was late at night, and it took some work to get into the shopping center as it was locked up tight. We had to get onto the roof of the mall by going through a multi-story parking ramp that was next to it, which was also abandoned.
There was a 10-foot wall we found, and we piled random things and debris against the wall so that we could climb over. Once we were in the mall, we did some normal exploration, checking everything out. We had explored almost the entire mall when we went downstairs to the ground floor for the last parts of it.
As we walked around, we heard the sound of a radio and saw a light coming from an office. We thought it might be security, so we walked back up to where we had come in on the roof, ready to leave. As we were walking onto the roof, my friend suddenly stopped in our tracks and said that there was a guy blocking our exit up ahead.
This guy was wearing all black, had no security badge on, and he hadn't seen us yet. We decided to hide for a bit, waiting for him to leave, thinking he was another explorer just smoking a cigarette or something. However, when we came back from our hiding spot a bit later, thinking he was gone by then, he was still there, this time holding a metal pipe.
We instantly knew that something was going on here, as he looked at us as if he was guarding the entrance. It seemed like gang activity, and that they might be doing something or maybe hiding something in the building down on the first floor that they didn't want anyone to see. We went back down to the second floor and hid in a display window that was concealed from the rest of the floor.
We were there for about 20 minutes at most, but it felt like years, our hearts pounding the whole time. We heard another man walking around our floor, dragging a piece of metal across the floor. My friend and I had no idea if maybe somebody had seen us walking around or if they knew that we were in the building, but we didn't want to take any chances since these men looked sketchy.
My friend remembered that there was another door on the roof that would bypass the guy guarding the other route and would take us straight into the parking ramp. We decided this was the best plan to get out without anybody noticing. We waited for the guy to leave our floor and decided to make a break for it to find the door.
We couldn't rush or run, as it would be easy to hear somebody running around in the abandoned mall. So, we quietly sneaked around the back rooms until we reached the other door. We found our escape, but it was blocked by debris.
We took a risk with the noise at this point and started pulling the debris away from the door, and my friend kicked the door open loudly. We sprinted across the roof, and I have no idea if anyone saw us because I was focused on getting out there fast. We finally got into the parking ramp and made our way down to the bottom.
There, we saw that there was another presumably gang member sitting in a blacked-out Ford Transit van. The engine of the car was on, and I'm guessing the guy was in charge of guarding the entrance to the abandoned parking lot. Whoever these people were, they clearly did not want anyone entering the abandoned mall.
Maybe we just got caught in the mall at the wrong time, but we still weren't going to take any chances. At this point, our only option was to find a fire exit to the outside. The fire exit we found was screwed shut, so I basically launched myself through the door, which luckily flew open, and we got out and climbed down to the main road and onto the street.
The only thing I can think of, being all coordinated as the guys were and how they were dressed, was gang activity. Once again, we had no idea if they originally knew that we were in the mall or not; probably not. But we didn't want to take any chances with them, especially if they thought we saw something.
That day has stuck with me as a scary moment in my life. I'm still exploring, but just being more careful with the places I choose to explore. This happened one summer after in 2018 when my partner, my stepdad, and I decided to check out an abandoned factory near my parents' house.
We were just picking up my partner when we passed by it, and without thinking much about it, we started talking about exploring the place. My stepdad, who tends to act on impulse like us, pulled over right by the building, and we decided to go for it. It didn't take long to find a way inside.
The factory was falling apart, with broken windows, walls crumbling down, and most of the roof was missing. The only real obstacle was a doorway that had some debris in front of it. We cleared that away, and as soon as we stepped through the door, something felt off.
It was the middle of summer, but the air inside the building was freezing cold. I don't mean it was a little chilly; it felt like winter. It wasn't even a damp kind of cold, like what you would expect from an abandoned building.
Anyway, there were enough holes in the walls and roof that it shouldn't have been that cold. The inside was just as trashed as the outside, piles of broken. .
. Machinery, rusted metal, and old wooden beams lay scattered around as we moved farther into the building. My partner and stepdad went ahead to check out another room, and I wandered off by myself to look through some cabinets that had been left behind.
It was like everything had just been abandoned overnight; files, worker IDs, and even older sheets from the late '90s and early 2000s were scattered everywhere. Most of the orders were packed and ready to be shipped, but none of them had ever been sent out. My stepdad pointed out how strange that was, and the factory looked like it had been closed for many decades, even though the most recent date I found was 2002.
The building, at most, had been abandoned for 16 years. I have no expertise in something such as how quickly buildings decay, but the whole place seemed very rundown for only 16 years. As we were talking about how weird the place was, I started feeling something else; it wasn't just the cold or the dust or the abandoned vibe.
I was getting a feeling of danger, like something was watching us or maybe waiting for us to leave. I can't describe it any better than that—it was like my fight-or-flight response kicked in, but I didn't know why. I told my partner and stepdad, and they agreed that we should head out.
It was odd; we hadn't heard anything or seen anything strange, but we all felt it. We made our way back to the car, and just as we were pulling away from the building, my partner and I both noticed something in the doorway we had just come through. Standing there was a figure.
It was hard to make out clearly; it kind of looked human but not exactly. Something about it didn't sit right. It was like a person, but not.
The figure didn't move as it just stood there staring at us. My stepdad didn't seem to notice since he was too busy driving. My partner and I looked at each other at the same time and asked if we had seen that thing in the door, so it was definitely not our imagination.
We never went back to the factory. I can't shake the feeling; whenever I drive past the building to my partner's house, I drive past the abandoned factory so often, and I wish I had never gone inside because I think about it every time I drive by. About a 30-minute drive from where I live, this big retirement home building has been left abandoned since 2014.
I don't know why it was abandoned, but I always thought it would be a cool place to explore. So finally, in 2020, when I was 16 years old, I went to the building with a few friends at night. When we arrived, we started looking around the outside of the building, shining our flashlights at the broken windows and stuff.
Suddenly, one of my friends stopped in his steps and said, "I don't think it's a good idea to go inside now," and pointed out two reflecting dots in one of the windows. We still wanted to check out the building, but we decided to come back in the morning since it would be safer during the day. The next morning, when looking through the window where we saw what could have been a pair of eyes, we saw nothing at all that could reflect light.
I found this a bit strange, but we were determined to get inside. We found a small open window that we could fit through and went in. It was quite a cool place; there was a lot of graffiti and stuff, and we decided to explore.
Eventually, we walked next to the room where we saw the reflecting lights the previous night and looked around in it but found nothing—just a weird bathroom with writing all over the walls in red marker. I found it kind of creepy, but there was graffiti everywhere, so we thought nothing of it. Everything was going smoothly until we were on the highest floor of the building.
We were casually walking around through the hallway when one of my friends and I heard voices coming from the floor below us, where we had just come from. My friend and I forced the other friends in our group to be quiet, and we all heard some voices that sounded like they came from about two or three men. We wanted to leave as soon as possible, but the building was designed so that we had to walk down the stairs next to the voices we heard.
Out in the hallway, that would lead us to an exit. So we finally walked slowly and silently down the first set of stairs. When we went down that hallway, we heard voices coming from the room where we had seen the pair of eyes reflecting the night before.
Once we passed by that room, we sprinted through the rest of the hallway and exited the building. While walking away, we looked back at the room from the outside and saw an old, scruffy-looking man waving at us. I didn't go back for a while, but eventually a new friend I made really wanted to go there, so I reluctantly went with him because I knew the layout of the building, and so they wouldn't have to go alone.
So I was back inside the abandoned building again, this time at night. We explored, and after about half an hour, we went into the basement and sat down somewhere to smoke. Right when we lit our cigarettes, we heard footsteps above us, and we stayed still from fear because we had just been there talking in the hallway pretty loudly.
My first thought was that it was likely the weird scruffy man from last time, because… Another explorer would have said something to us. The footsteps became louder and closer, but we could not go anywhere because this person was blocking our exit. So we stayed still for what felt like hours.
The person just stood at the end of the dark hallway. We eventually saw some light going up and down the hallway after the footsteps went back upstairs. We waited about 5 to 10 minutes before bolting out of there and going into the forest nearby.
We didn't talk about it for a month until I saw in the news that they found someone living in the abandoned building. When police came to arrest him, he started throwing Molotov cocktails at them, so he ended up getting shot and died later in the hospital. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we ever got too close to that man during the multiple times that I explored the building.
This happened just a few days ago, and it still terrifies me so much that I can't help but look over my shoulder whenever I'm alone in a room. I work in construction, and I mostly work from the office, but this day we were going out into the field. My team is made up of a few guys and one girl, Jane, who happens to be one of my good friends.
A few days ago, we got the chance to check out a building before it was demolished. The place was huge, and we were given strict instructions of no cell phones, no pictures, and no distractions. We had walkie-talkies to communicate, but that was it.
We all had safety gear on, including steel toe boots, hard hats, safety vests, and gloves. My boss and the safety manager were going towards the top of the building doing their technical work, and they gave us the green light to explore a bit. So Jane and I, along with a few guys, went down to the lower floor to mess around a little away from the bosses.
The place was full of old furniture, tubes, pipes, and other random stuff; it used to be an office building. We were goofing off like typical young people would, having a laugh and messing around. Long story short, one of the guys, Brian, got a bloody nose during some silly roughhousing.
Jane and I took him into the bathroom to clean up before we had to report back to our boss upstairs. We shoved a bunch of paper towels up his nose and used the sink to rinse him off since the water in the building hadn't been shut off yet. While we were trying to get him sorted, there was a knock on the bathroom door.
I shouted out, "Very funny! " thinking it was one of my other co-workers playing a prank. I went to open the door, but it wouldn't budge; the door was jammed.
I began shouting to let us out, thinking that it was my other co-workers still holding us in the bathroom as a prank. I was still tugging on the door when suddenly all the bathroom stall doors slammed shut. It wasn't like a gentle close; each one slammed so hard they bounced off their stops.
The lights went out immediately after that, making it totally pitch black. I don't know who screamed first, but we were all screaming at that point. Brian was cursing like crazy.
I started clawing at the door, yelling to let us out. The bathroom had no windows, so it was dark as a cave in there. I could barely see my own hand in front of my face.
It was also really cold in the bathroom now, too. The most terrifying feeling I've ever felt was when something touched me in the pitch black bathroom. I felt a sticky hand crawling up the back of my hard hat.
It wasn't a tap or a brush on my neck; the hand was climbing up slowly and deliberately. I yanked my hard hat off, and it hit the floor with a loud clatter, making the sensation stop. Finally, there was a huge bang as our co-workers from outside were able to get the door open, letting us out of that nightmare.
We were all yelling at each other, trying to explain what had happened, but no one was making sense. I was shaking so badly that I could hardly stand. My boss checked the bathroom later, and all he saw was the blood in the sink from the nosebleed, but nothing else.
He just gave me my hard hat back, and we all left the building as fast as we could. Once we were out of the building and calmed down a bit, the three of us who were trapped inside the bathroom heard the others' version of the story. They were still walking around, just exploring stuff, when they thought they saw a figure run across a gap between two cubicles.
Very soon after that, the lights began flickering on and off, and that was when they heard the loud bang on the stall doors coming from the bathroom and heard us start to scream. They were not holding us in as a joke, and they weren't anywhere near the bathroom by the time the three of us inside had started screaming. They eventually were able to pry open the door with a metal pipe, and one of the guys who had pried at the door said he also felt the sensation of a sticky hand slowly going up his arm briefly.
Because this happened so recently, I'm still kind of a wreck since it happened, and I'm scared to go to the bathroom alone now, even at home. I always have my dogs come in with me. I don't know what happened in that bathroom, but I don't ever want to be anywhere near that building again, and I'm glad it's going.
. . To be demolished soon, this story happened to my cousin and me in 2018.
We both love photography and taking long drives, listening to music, so that's exactly what we did on this particular day. We drove about an hour north to a small town and found an abandoned barn that was also for sale. At the time, we didn't spot any trespassing signs, so we decided to be adventurous and go check it out.
The barn was in semi-decent condition, although the paint had begun to peel off; structurally, it was pretty sound, though, and I didn't feel uneasy about going in. I'm an avid urban explorer and have been in far worse buildings, so we went inside. Once we got inside, we somehow ended up in the basement of this barn.
I immediately was getting some weird vibes from the stuff that was in that barn. There were little girls' clothes, toys, and furniture littered throughout the basement of this barn. My cousin and I both thought it was creepy.
Behind the barn was a big cornfield that came up right to the back of the barn, so we decided to get some cool photos of the barn with corn stalks in the frame of view. I snapped a few shots of my cousin, and we were ready to head back to the car. Walking through the first row of corn on my way back to my cousin's car, I saw a bone sticking up from out of the dirt.
It was a vertebra bone. At this point, I stopped dead in my tracks in disbelief. I was wondering if it was what I thought it was or if it was an animal bone of some kind.
I started looking around, and there were several more bones. They were too big to be a deer. I yelled at my cousin, who was almost back to the car, to have her look.
We both started examining and digging around in the dirt, and we kept finding more and more bones. In college, I took a lab in human anatomy, so I'm very familiar with the human body. We found a fibula and a fully intact femur; that's when I really started to freak out.
We decided to call the cops because we knew this was serious. We waited in the car until they arrived. Once the pair of cops arrived, we all started looking through the corn and a nearby trash pile.
The cops, I don't think, believed us, and I distinctly remember them saying they thought it was a deer carcass. That was until I found a full rib cage in the trash pile and showed it to them. The cops told us that they would need to leave and that they were calling a full forensic team out to start collecting evidence.
We left, totally shaken up. On the way out, I did see a no trespassing sign, which we missed on the way in. I don't know if the cops saw the no trespassing sign, but if they did, they didn't bring it up at all and didn't care.
We gave the cops our information, but we never heard anything more from them. I also watched the news closely for the next few weeks and didn't see anything. I wish I could have got the full story of what happened; it was like an episode of Law and Order, and it was definitely one of the creepiest things I've ever experienced.
