Speaker 1: This happened almost four years ago. Now on a road
trip I was taking across the country. I'm a frequent
traveler and adventurer, going on long road trips and stopping
at great hiking and camping locations all around the nation.
At the time, I had been on the road for
well over a month and was taking a short break
at a small town in Nevada. While at the bar
talking with the locals, they asked me if I was
here to see the mines. I didn't know exactly what
they meant and asked for more details, and they all
talked about how there were hundreds of abandoned mines and
mining towns all over the state. When I went back
to my camper that night, I looked it up and
found all these interesting mines not far from where I was.
I had planned to just pass through Nevada as a whole,
but after seeing this, I couldn't help myself. The next
day I set out for one of the abandoned mining towns.
The actual hiking portion only took an hour and a half,
but it was mostly uphill. When I arrived, the town
was on a flat portion of the large hill. There
were twenty to thirty small wooden buildings, and in the
center of the town was a railroad leading into the
hill where the mine entrance was. I walked along this railroad,
looking at the identical rows of wooden structures. I was
more interested in the actual mine than I was in
the ghost town, but it was still cool to see.
I checked out one of the structures, but it was
full of dirt and rubble, and I was sure that
all the others would probably be the same. At the
entrance to the mine, I took out my flashlight and
when I pointed it through, the tunnel was so long
that I couldn't even see the end. I started walking,
and the further inside I got, the more quiet everything was,
until eventually it was just the sound of my footsteps
echoing through the mine. After a couple minutes, I reached
the end of the railroad tracks and was met by
a sign that said the area beyond was closed. Of course,
I walked past it. The tunnel very quickly became shallower
and less well rounded. There was then a turn that
started going down at a slope, and at one section
of it the floor had caved in. Someone before me
had set up some makeshift walkway to get across the opening,
but it seemed incredibly dangerous and unstable. I pointed the
flashlight down, and the drop was enough to have me
permanently trapped if I were to fall. I decided to
turn back and went down one of the other side
passages that had passed up previously, and found myself at
a ladder going down a steep tunnel again. I shined
my flashlight and saw that the bottom of the ladder
wasn't even visible. I started my scent, but not long
into it I heard something from below. It was a
loud thud echoing through the mine. The echo made it
hard to know how close or far it was. I
pointed my flashlight down, and while I didn't see the
cause of the sound, I did see the bottom. I
climbed down and found myself at the base of another passageway,
and a few feet in I found what caused the thud.
There was a large rock sitting in the middle of
the tunnel, which I thought could have fallen from the ceiling,
but it wasn't hard to tell that it was an
entirely different kind of rock, which begged the question how
did it fall and create a thud? I got my answer.
When I pointed the flashlight further down the tunnel, two
almost unidentifiable people stood in the middle of the passage,
about ten feet down, one man and one woman. I
knew from one look that they were not explorers. The
way they looked at me was like they didn't even
know I was a person. I started backing up, being
cautious with my movements to not make them feel threatened
in any way. When I got to the ladder, I dreaded,
putting the flashlight in my pocket and started climbing up.
Part of the way up, I swear I heard someone
grab onto the rungs below me and begin climbing up quickly.
I looked down and saw nothing but darkness. I screamed
and began climbing up as fast as I could. I
sprinted out of the mine and away from the ghost town.
During the hike back, I collected my thoughts, thinking maybe
what I heard was their footsteps, and in the moment
I'd just mistaken it for them climbing up after me.
But it was still terrifying. I drove down to a
police station in the area and reported what had happened,
But as far as I know, the police didn't do
any sort of search or anything, despite me telling them
that they looked malnourished and deeply insane. Even if they
didn't know it themselves, they seriously needed help. I did
some digging online since then and thought of some interesting
theories as to why they may have been there. To
begin with, there were several cases from around the area
of couples that went missing within the past ten years,
mostly due to committing horrible crimes and likely running away
from the police. It just makes me think, how if
that were to be true, and these were two people
who'd committed terrible crimes, then I was very lucky to
have escaped after seeing them. Me and my best friend
Glenn grew up in a small town far from any
big cities. The population was less than a thousand, so yeah,
it was very local and everyone knew everyone. Growing up,
rumors would spread about various creepy things that would go
on in the town, al most likely fake, but one
of the words that would spread was of this small
community a few miles out in the surrounding woods that
was abandoned decades ago. By the time Glen and I
were in high school, we found out from multiple people
that the community was actually real and there was a
whole history to it. After finding that out, it was
impossible for us to resist the urge to go out
there and see what all the talk was about. We
tried planning the whole trip out, but in the end
we just packed a backpack with some water and flashlights,
then headed into the woods. We got some basic directions
to this poorly made trail that supposedly led there, and
we followed it down for about three miles, but then
it ended there were no other trails or anything. It
was just a dead end. My immediate thought was that
we'd been set up by some elaborate prank, but Glenn
wasn't convinced. He somehow got me to follow him for
another half mile through the woods, not following any trail
or directions. By then, we'd already been out longer than expected,
and the sun wasn't at its highest. I was nervous
about getting lost without the sunlight or a clear path
to follow, But just before we turned back, Glen spotted
a shape in the distance. It was too far to
see exactly what, but it was rigid, indefinitely man made.
As we got closer, the shape revealed itself to be
a worn and broken down cabin. The roof had caved in,
and it looked like people had been around here recently.
But when we walked around to the other side of
the cabin, there was a large field where all the
trees had been cut down. In the field stood six
cabins of varying sizes, along with a few other structures
that I couldn't really identify. Both of us were shot
to actually have found this place, and in person, it
was way creepier than we ever could have imagined. The
houses were all falling apart in one way or another.
We walked over to one of the cabins close to
us and went inside. It was trashed, but it looked
like most of the furniture, like wooden chairs and tables,
were still intact and sitting in the same place they
had been decades ago. The sunset was casting long shadows
on everything, which really just gave it all an eerie feeling.
I went into what I think was supposed to be
the bedroom, but as I looked around, I heard someone
walking outside the cabin. I turned around to give Glen
a nervous look, but he wasn't there, staying quiet, I
looked through a track on the wall to see if
the person outside was Glen, but as the footsteps came closer,
I caught sight of them. It was a tall, old
man i'd say mid fifties, half naked, and the clothes
he did have on were torn and disgusting. He walked
past the cabin and I turned back and started looking
through the rooms for Glenn, but he must have left
at some point. I exited through an empty window frame
and stayed behind the cabin as I tried to scan
the whole field for any sign of Glen, but I
saw no signs of him. I assumed he was exploring
one of the other houses, but I had no idea
of if he was even aware of this man that
had just entered the abandoned community. In my frantic state
of moving around the outside of the cabin and searching
for Glen, I realized I'd lost sight of the man.
I was struggling to keep myself calm, and the whole
woods was getting darker by the minute. Then all of
a sudden, there was a horrifying scream from the other
side of the abandoned town. I peered around the cabin
and saw Glen running through the open field. Once he
saw me, we both ran into the woods back toward home.
Thankfully we found the trail before the sun fully set,
because once the sun went down, we could only see
a few feet ahead. When we finally got back, I
asked Glen what happened. He said he was exploring one
of the houses, and as he did, he started to
realize that it didn't look as abandoned as the others,
and someone was likely living there. When he turned to leave,
the same man I'd seen was standing on the other
side of the cabin holding a knife. He described his
eyes as having a look of hunger, and without hesitation,
the man charged at him. Glenn screamed and ran, and
I guess the man didn't chase very far. We don't
know what that man would have done to us, but
it was stupid to have even gone to that abandoned
town in the first place, and it almost cost us
our lives to figure that out. Last year was my
senior year of high school, and my friend group was
always full of dumb ideas. All it took was a
boring weekend night for us to go out and find
anything to entertain us. That's exactly what happened this night.
It was me and my two other friends hanging out
and just trying to think of something to do. One
of them, Mikey, had been talking of this abandoned place
nearby for the past few weeks. We pushed it off
for a while, but now with nothing to do, it
didn't sound all that bad of an idea to go exploring.
He said it was a house on the edge of
town where all the farmland was, but aside from the locate,
that was about all he knew. Me and the other
friend shrugged and said why not, and within fifteen minutes
we were on the road. We drove for a half
hour until we reached the point where Mikey said to
turn off onto an unpaved road, and a few minutes
later we exited the tree line and were right in
front of the house. It was a very large house
with a huge plot of abandoned farmland around it. We
got out of the car and each took a flashlight,
then approached the front door. I turned the knob and
it was unlocked, but when I tried shoving it open,
it was blocked by something heavy on the other side.
We went around to the back and tried the back door,
but that door was locked. We resorted to crawling through
a busted window on the side of the house. As
soon as we were in, a strong, awful smell took over.
It was like a mixture of mold and rotting animal carcass.
I mean, this was the worst smell I'd ever experienced
by a long shot. My friends didn't seem as fazed
as I was, so we kept moving in. Right away,
we noticed footprints all throughout the dusty hallway floors. We
thought nothing of it because we figured this place had
basically been a tourist attraction for stupid teenagers like us.
The whole place was unnervingly empty, though there wasn't any
old furniture or garbage on the floor. As we walked
through the first few rooms, we reached the hallway that
led to the front door, and against the front door
was an old couch with a bunch of boxes on
top of it. Whoever had done that had taken what
looked like everything from inside the house just to block
the front door from opening. We continued up the stairs
to see if the upstairs rooms were emptied too. At
the top of the steps, I shined my flashlight down
the hallway, there were three doors. We opened the first
two and they were both empty bedrooms. Then I opened
the third, and not surprisingly, it was empty two. But
this room was much smaller than the others. The reason
this confused all of us was because there were no
more rooms next to it, so based on the layout
of the house, it was easy to assume that this
room was supposed to be double the size of the others.
Since there were no more doors. With nothing left to see,
we started back down the stairs, but as we got
halfway down, we all heard the same thing. It sounded
like a ball hitting the floor, rolling, then quickly and
intentionally being stopped. It came from upstairs, where we just
were Cautiously, We checked each of the rooms again and
found nothing. All of us hearing the exact same thing
made it extra odd because we all knew it happened,
but there was nothing upstairs. After that, we were all
getting uncomfortable and we quickly left the house through the
same window we came in from. We walked to the
front where the car was and got in. Just before
I pulled out, though, I noticed two windows upstairs on
the left side of the house, and I specifically remembered
that the small room we were confused by only had
one window. I pointed this out to my friends and
we all sat there staring at the second floor windows
and trying to figure out what was going on. Then
there was a sudden flicker of a shadow moving across
the blinds, followed by a dim light glowing from behind
the window. In the light, the figure of a man
could be seen looking out the window at us. I
put the car in drive, did a U turn, and
sped down the dirt road, getting out of there as
fast as possible. After some discussion, Mikey convinced us to
call the police, but the police found nothing in the house.
Whoever was there had moved out and probably took everything
with them. When I think back on it now, I'm
just happy that we didn't try too hard to search
for any more rooms when we were up there. If
we did, I wouldn't doubt it if whoever was hiding
in there was prepared to take drastic measures not to
be found.