The 10 Scariest Places In the United States of America
Reading Time: 8 minutesIf you want horror this Halloween, these are the cities to travel.
If you want to take a cross-country road trip filled with scary places for Halloween, read on. The ten locations here are spread across our whole, terrifying country from California to New Jersey and are haunted by forces like institutional cruelty, ecological disaster, and, of course, ghosts. Also: clowns.
Clinton Road in West Milford, NJ is less than an hour’s drive from New York City, but the desolate 10-mile stretch of roadway is the location of so many reports of strange and paranormal activity—UFOs, witch covens, hell hounds, murderous ghosts, KKK gatherings, a haunted castle, Satanists, a druidic temple, murderous albinos, and more—it suggest a nexus point to another reality.
As far back as 1905, travelers warned about the road. Author J. Percy Crayon wrote, ‘It was never advisable to pass through the ‘five mile woods’ after dark, for…tradition tells us they were infested with bands of robbers, and counterfeiters, to say nothing of the witches that held their nightly dances and carousels at Green Island, and the ghosts that then made their appearance in such frightful forms.’
Here are only some modern legends and true stories of Clinton Road:
- Dumping ground of notorious serial killer: On May 14, 1983, a bicyclist riding down Clinton Road spotted a turkey vulture by the side of the road. Curious, they checked it out to discover the bird was eating the corpse of Daniel Deppner, a victim of notorious Mafia hitman/serial killer Richard ‘The Iceman’ Kuklinski. (This one actually happened.)
- Ghost Boy Bridge: According to legend, a young boy drown in the reservoir under this stone bridge on Clinton Road. If you throw a coin into the water, his specter will either give your coin back, or push you into the water to your death, depending on who’s telling the tale.
- Cross Castle: Built by wealthy banker Richard Cross in 1907, the impressive, 40-room stone Cross Castle once loomed above the woods around Clinton Road. After a fire in the 1940s, only the stone walls were left, and the castle’s ruins became a popular destination for hikers, bikers, satanists, ghosts, witches, and more. Cross Castle was demolished completely in 1988, sadly.
- Longest traffic light in the United States: The red light at the intersection of Clinton Road and Rt 23 is two minutes and 15 seconds long. The green light that follows is eight seconds long. It is (most likely) the longest red light in the country.
If you like desolate, apocalyptic places, lemme tell you about the Salton Sea. The place is a literally disaster: hundreds of miles from anything, this Southern California ‘lake’ was formed in 1905 when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal and filled a low-lying area in the SoCal desert. It’s fed through agricultural runoff, and because it’s a terminal lake, the saltiness of the water continually increases, so the fish species once brought in for sport fishing died, and so did the birds that fed on them. The ‘sand’ surrounding the sea is composed of crushed fish and bird bones. The only thing that grows in the lake now are huge blooms of algae. Sulphuric gases bubble from deep under the water, surrounding the area with the stench of hell. An optimistic 1950s stab at turning the sea into a vacation resort died too, leaving the landscape dotted with rotting husks of motels and restaurants for added disaster decor.
The nearby community of Bombay Beach started during the optimistic times, but slid into near desolation as everything around it died. It was notable mainly for the large number of abandoned houses slipping into the toxic lake. But people are sometimes awesome, and recently, a small community of artistic types, drawn by affordable real estate and the freedom of total isolation, moved to the near ghost-town to create strange installations (like the ghostly driftwood galleon pictured above), folky galleries, and performing spaces nearby the end of the world.
In 1985, siblings Leona and Leroy David built a small motel in the tiny town of Tonopah, NV, right next to a cemetery for long dead silver miners. ‘Let’s decorate it with clowns, to make people happy,‘ they apparently decided. Over the years, the motel’s owners amassed thousands of clown figures, paintings, and just… clown shit. It’s everywhere.
While the Davids’ clown-o-filia was heartfelt, the current owner is (understandably) leaning into the ‘stay at the creepy clown-nightmare motel’ selling point, so it’s a little less special. Still, there are a lot of clowns.
Though there are legends of ‘Night Marchers,’ ghosts of long-dead warriors, haunting the Hawaiian island of Molokai, the real horror isn’t supernatural; it’s historical. Molokai was the home of Kalaupapa, a leprosarium built to quarantine sick people against their will.
Between 1866 to 1969, around 8,000 people were separated from their families, friends, and communities and forced to live in often harsh conditions in a colony built on a remote spit of land surrounded by the raging Pacific ocean on three sides and jagged, 2,000 foot sea-cliffs on the fourth.
The colony is now a National Historical Park, leprosy (aka hansen’s disease) has been all but eliminated globally, and residents have been permitted to leave since 1969, but a handful of the original exiles remain on the island to this day, the last living witnesses to a shameful chapter in American history. If you can brave the trip there—the colony is only accessible via donkey or small airplane—it’s a fascinating place to visit.
I’d like to apologize for this lazy and obvious joke.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but if there was a place where the restless spirits of the damned walked the earth, it would be Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary. The castle-like prison was completed in 1829, and is a monument to the old adage ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’
The sprawling complex was designed by the ‘progressives’ of the era (mostly Quakers) to be visually impressive and feature then-modern amenities like hot and cold running water. Its mission was to produce the penitence that the name ‘penitentiary’ promises. This was done by forcing criminals into monk-like solitude with the hope that they would commune with God and mend their wicked ways. Maybe a good idea in theory, but in practice it meant nearly complete isolation within the cold stone walls of the prison—no books, no visitors, no community, and no hope, just damp stone walls. Unsurprisingly, the theory did not work and was abandoned almost entirely by the 20th century.
Nowadays, Eastern State Penitentiary is something between a museum and a tourist trap. It offers both daytime historical tours and nighttime ‘ghost tours,’ hosts a Halloween festival featuring bars, bands, and five ‘haunts’ built in the actual prison, and invites seemingly every paranormal TV show on earth to shoot content there. I guess you have to pay the bills on your abandoned prison somehow, but considering the legitimate suffering inflicted upon the powerless at Eastern State, it seems tasteless and crass. This place should exists as a sober lesson in inadvertent institutional cruelty, but is monetized as a fun, spooky place where you might see a ghost instead. I wonder what the prison’s residents think as they silently float through the gloomy cellblocks.
It’s officially known as the Colchester Overpass, but the locals call the small stone overpass ‘Bunny Man Bridge.’ Local legends say a patient escaped from a nearby asylum and murdered locals with an axe while wearing in a homemade bunny costume. It’s also said that if you go to the Bunny Man Bridge at midnight, the killer will appear with his shiny axe and leave what’s left of you hanging from the bridge.
While there’s never been an asylum anywhere near the bridge, and he didn’t killed anyone (yet), the Bunny Man is actually real.
According to police reports, in 1970 an Air Force cadet and his girl were parked on road not far from the bridge, and someone suddenly smashed the front passenger window and screamed ”You’re on private property, and I have your tag number.’ The couple drove off, and later found a hatchet on the car’s floor. According to the victims, the perpetrator was wearing a white bunny suit.
A few weeks later, a security guard at a construction site happened on a man in a black and white bunny costume attacking the porch on an unfinished house with an axe. ‘You are trespassing. If you come any closer, I’ll chop off your head,’ the Bunny Man yelled.
Over the following weeks, more than 50 people reported sightings of the Bunny Man to police, but no one was ever connected to the sightings. That means it’s still out there.
Tom Sawyer Park is seemingly normal neighborhood park on the outskirts of Louisville, but it holds a dark secret: Beneath the baseball fields and picnic tables lies ‘Sauerkraut Cave,’ a manmade tunnel dug near the site of the Lakeland Asylum for the Insane. It connects to a series of subterranean passages, including one that once led directly to the basement of the asylum.
As with any mental institution built in the 1800s, there are too many tales of abused inmates and dangerous escapees to recount, but stories of Lakeland tend to revolve around the atrocities committed in the ominously named Sauerkraut Cave. It’s said that pregnant patients were taken down there when they were ready to give birth, but none returned with children.
The abandoned Lakeland Asylum was torn down in 1997 and all that’s left of it are two cemeteries, where an estimated 5,000 people who once resided in Lakeland are buried in unmarked graves, and the cave, which is just waiting for you to explore its haunted depths.
Multiple visitors have reported hearing a little girl’s voice yell ‘mommy’ from within the cave, and an unsettling feeling ‘like entering a room full of people who have had a terrible argument right before you arrived.’
Opened in 1999, The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, doesn’t look scary, and that’s a the problem. The WIPP is where the U.S. stores the waste from research and production of nuclear weapons, so it presents humanity with a problem: How do you make sure people in the future understand that something incredibly dangerous is under the surface?
Our nation’s nuclear detritus is stored a half mile below New Mexico, in caverns within a 3,000-foot thick salt formation. When the site is filled up by 2035, the caverns will be collapsed and sealed with 13 layers of concrete and soil, and the surrounding salt will fill in any cracks that develop.
But we can’t just brush off our hands and leave it. The nuclear material will still be radioactive in 10,000 years, and we have no idea who might be poking around in the far future, so we still have to find a way to warn them. The proposed solution is an outer perimeter of thirty-two, 25-foot-tall granite pillars, with a granite building at its center with slabs of rock engraved with warnings translated into English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo. Another possibility: Small discs buried randomly in the dirt inscribed with line-drawings influenced by Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
Whether the elaborate warnings will dissuade future archeologists, or make them think, ‘This must be where the treasure is buried!’ remains to be seen.
Dunlora Plantation is doubly-haunted, first by slavery, and secondly by a witch who supposedly killed some boy scouts. I’ll leave slavery aside for brevity’s sake and focus on the witch.
Legend has it that in 1920, a group of six boy scouts and their scoutmaster got lost on a hike in the woods around Charlottesville. They inadvertently wandered onto a witch’s property and set up camp for the night. The scoutmaster was awakened in the night by a noise and checked on the boys, only to find their tents were empty. He began searching, calling their names in the night, but could find no trace of them. Then he saw a light in the distance in the woods. He followed it, only to arrive at an abandoned mansion on the Dunlora Plantation. He searched inside the dark house, and lifted his lantern to reveal the face of a wizened crone, who cackled, I’m sure. Freaked, the scoutmaster ran. Down the road, he looked back and saw all six of the children standing stock still by the side of the road staring at him, their stomachs ripped open. He collapsed and went insane. The boys were later found in their tents, dead and disemboweled.
A few weeks later, seven fully grown trees appeared on the road to the plantation—six straight up and down, and one gnarled and bent over. Legend has it that the straight trees each contain the soul of one of the boys, imprisoned by the witch for all time. The seventh was the scoutmaster, his soul twisted for eternity.
Dunlora is now a private community of rich people now, descendants of slave masters and maybe witches, and they’re being haunted by teenagers who drive through their community in the middle of the night looking for the mansion and the seven trees. The residents and ‘historians’ deny that any of the events described above actually happened, but isn’t that exactly what they would say if they were trying to cover up unspeakable evil?