30 Anonymous People Admit To Dark Things That Happened In Their Secluded Hometown 

30 Anonymous People Admit To Dark Things That Happened In Their Secluded Hometown 

You don’t want to move to any of these towns mentioned on Ask Reddit.

1. My mom told me this story once that back when she was growing up in a small farming community in Ohio, there was some kind of neighborhood party attended by a bunch of families with kids all around the same age. All the kids (including herself) had this like big slumber party in the basement.

They wake up the next morning and one of the kids is found in the middle of the road, having been hit with a truck, but with his whole body zipped all the way up in his sleeping bag. None of the kids owned up to doing and it the adults could never figure it out either. After a while people just started moving on with their lives and everyone pretty much forgot about it.

2. So there is this building that used to be a hotel and one day this guy shows up and he takes multiple trips going in and out with a bunch of equipment. They found him a little while later in his room. He had assembled an entire guillotine and cut his head off.

3. I was delivered by a serial killer doctor. I don’t remember all the details but he was killing patients in Canada.

4. Small Town of about 2000-2500 in the Midwest, when suddenly about 1/4th of the population just up and left. No word, no nothing. None of them had kids or extended family and none of the papers said anything about it. This was back in maybe the late 80’s.

This happened when I was pretty young but I just remember one day one of my teachers wasn’t there and I found out from my parents a ton of people had just left overnight. Most personal belongings were taken with them but mattresses and furniture was still in their houses.

I still have no clue what that was about and when I’ve asked my parents more recently they said the rumor around town was that all those people worked for the CIA or FBI and were re-assigned all of a sudden.

5. In mom’s seaside hometown, there’s a decommissioned lighthouse offshore.

Even though utilities to the lighthouse have long been disconnected and the building locked, residents have noticed the beacon turn on at late hours of the night – just for a few minutes, then mysteriously grow dark again. It happens so infrequently that the time of illumination can’t be predicted.

As I once described here, no one has figured out how or why this happens.

6. The “doctor” who tried all these wacky treatments to save his young patient from tuberculosis and became infatuated with her. After she died he eventually robbed her grave, mummified her and lived with her body for seven years before being found out. Did not go to jail and lived his years out in town I believe.

7. Over the summer there was a guy found hanging from a tree on the sheriffs property.

The sheriff disliked this young man and treated him poorly during his incarceration at the county jail. Many witnesses said that the day he got released from jail, the sheriff invited him to his secluded property and told him he could help him get back on his feet.

2 days later, a couple of teenage boys fishing in a creek discovered the guy hanging in a tree. Authorities was notified, no investigation was done, and it was immediately ruled a suicide.

This boy was a known drug addict with no family or friends, so there was really no one to press the issue. The local news wrote a small article on “man found dead from apparent suicide” and then it was hush hush after that… It’s just one of those things we will never know.

8. When my mother was in school her best friend got a job working for the Sheriff. She later came to school and told them that the sheriff had been molesting her.

She also began telling people about what they have been using the tunnels under the town for. The police supposedly, had been filming child pornography.

After that day she never made it home. She was found later naked, hog tied and shot in the back of the head. No one could prove it, and the sheriff had been suspected of many things but nothing ever came of it. They just announced that there was a man seen in a white van abducting people.

But her friends knew. Her family knows.

This is Red Bluff California btw. The tunnels were originally used by Chinese immigrants, they go through our Main Street and through Rio Street, they lead to houses and some businesses but they have been condemned. There are sensors down there though so if you get in the police are right there to get you out.

9. Several young boys (age 9-11) went missing in the village and it was suspected that a group of boys from the same school were responsible. They were heard talking about it on two occasions, about how they kill whoever they don’t like. However, their parents apparently attested that they never let them out of sight outside of school hours. This group of kids was known for skipping school to sniff glue and and drink alcohol btw, but their parents obviously denied it. Only one of the 6 missing kids was ever found, in a creek, with injuries like he was stoned to death. Police said he fell down the creek accidentally, though. This was about 20 years ago in Europe btw.

10. Nothing with me but when my mom was a kid she lived near a state park in New Hampshire. It’s called bear brook. In the 80s multiple dismembered body parts were found in a blue barrel. An investigation happened but the killer was never found. In the early 00s another barrel was found, dating back to the time of the first barrel. The killer was recently found. His name was Robert Evans. The park is in Allenstown if you want to look it up.

11. Not far from where my parents grew up is the town of Skidmore, MO which is honestly a supremely fucked up place of weird sinister stuff. The most commonly known incident is from the 1980s when Ken McElroy was shot to death while sitting in his truck with his wife, in front of the pool hall in town in broad daylight. There were dozens of witnesses who saw the shooting which came from multiple firearms, but they denied seeing the shooting or whom may have been responsible. The news stories from the time sort of painted McElroy as a “town bully” almost like Biff from Back to the Future, except he was a fucking violent monster who had beaten (figuratively and literally) over a dozen charges including theft, rape of a minor (remember his wife? yep she was one of the know rape victims and carried Ken’s child at 14), and other general violent acts. Leading up to his town sanctioned execution, he had the gall to appeal a two year sentence for shooting a geriatric grocer in the neck with a shotgun and nearly decapitated him. So, why did he do it? Because the grocer asked Ken’s daughter to put back a piece of candy she hadn’t paid for! People appeared fed up with this rampaging 6’5 270 pound thug who thought he could get away with rape and wanton violence. So somebody or a group of somebodies shot him at least twice and emptied quite a few rounds into his truck. No witnesses and even his wife who was in the truck refused to identify the shooter(s).

12. When my mom was growing up, a teacher and his wife were killed by an axe murderer. Someone broke into their house and killed them in the middle of the night. They found the husband in the house and the wife in the woods behind it, indicating that she tried to escape and was chased down. Really gruesome stuff. The attack was seemingly random, and they never caught the person responsible. My elementary school was named after the teacher, which wouldn’t necessarily be morbid except for the fact that there was a dedication plaque that mentioned his murder. In an elementary school. The 90’s were fucking wild.

13. The Garnerville Pits Massacre. Multiple women murdered at a remote swimming area in an old abandoned quarry. One girl survived but the killer was never identified. Not long later a woman was found dead in a storage shed owned by the Sheriff at the time. They arrested a black man who was from out of town with no connections to the woman and sentenced him to life. It later came out that the sheriff had been having an affair with the woman but charges were never filed. Some speculate that the sheriff could be responsible for multiple murders including the Bloody Garnerville Pits Massacre.

14. A guy in my hometown was dismembered and left on someones doorstep.

15. In my hometown there were quite a few times where we’d find random bodies floating in the swamp and little investigation was done outside of identification.

There was also a cop who only arrested blonde haired girls in attempt to get them to fuck him instead of going to jail. He was fired but we as a town quickly “forgot” about it.

16. When I lived in small town Alberta someone kept finding bags of dead cats in the lake.

Never did find who was drowning cats.

17. Some guy in the 90s murdered his girlfriend in the local park with a baseball bat after she tried to break up with him. He smashed her head in and left the body.

18. Well. We had the 32 year old son of a prominent member of town rape and sodomize a 14 year old girl. Notable quotes from the Kangaroo court: “She was begging for it. You see the tits on that one, how was I supposed to know? She didn’t try real hard to stop anything.”

Anyways, he got off with a slap on the wrist. Two weeks later, he was found by cleaning staff in the local gym, beaten with a wooden broom handle shoved up his ass.

Rumor was that it was a group of guys from the high school that jumped him after another chick lured him there. Honestly, a lot of people know who did it, but no one breathed a word.

He survived, but left the area and basically just disappeared.

19. Local high school girl gets in a fight with mom and leaves to walk to her friends house. She never makes it. The family reports her missing. I don’t remember the exact time frame but there are leads that don’t go anywhere. Then maybe a month or more later a farmer finds a body in his field about 20 miles away. The catch being that it’s off the same road her step father, who has records for domestic abuse and even has a file for hitting this same girl on top of the wide variety of abuse against mom and previous partners, well this road is the one he takes to work every day.

Ultimately it cant be proven. It was over heard by his coworkers him saying she had it coming anyways. Now the mom posts on Facebook a picture of a man and swears up and down everyone needs to leave her and her husband alone and that the man on her FB is the real killer. It’s clear to most locals her husband did it and she’s covering for him. Nancy grace talked about it on her show for like 2 weeks straight.

20. I returned home from school one day to a very powerful smell of gasoline throughout my neighborhood and every emergency responder our town had. It was later found that a father of three little girls, who wasn’t living there, tucked all three girls into bed and slit their throats. He gained access to the house by dismissing the baby sitter. He then tried to blow the place up by flooding the basement with gasoline and calling the mom telling her “come home, I’ve hurt the girls”. Thankfully the mom went to authorities instead. If he was successful, my house would have blown as well. The father turned himself in and has been in prison ever since. The daughters were memorialized with a playground and the house has been torn down. I’m not sure what happened to the mom but I’ve heard here and there that she has found peace in a new town.

21. I wouldn’t say that it’s kept secret, but it’s so horrific no one really wants to bring it up. A young(early 20’s) mentally challenged women was out with a male family friend and his friend who were a little younger, I think 18 and 19 at the time. They picked her up and drove her to the woods where they repeatedly stabbed her and then lit her on fire while she was still alive. If that wasn’t awful enough, they went back to re-burn her body a few days later. She had rejected advances that they were making on her. Her body was found by hikers a few days after she was killed, and a few weeks later both boys were arrested. Both of them plead guilty, but offered no reason for why they did what they did.

22. Coal mine country PA. Lots of stuff happens. Guy was molesting his daughter and her friend. Went to jail for a few years. When he came back, his house mysteriously burnt to the ground with him in it. Another guy got caught selling crack to a couple of local kids (yes I’m that old). He was found in the middle of the street having been run over by a large vehicle repeatedly. A woman stole some jewelry from her elderly neighbor. She lost her hand in an unknown accident. Guy beat his wife. He left town with 2 hands that were destroyed by a ball peen hammer. Teenage girl killed another girl’s dog over a boyfriend. Now she sports a nasty scar across her face and is missing an eye. That and lots of smaller stuff. Justice is handled locally.

23. The daughter of divorced parents was raped to death by the mother’s boyfriend. She was 6. Her father was contacting CPS and presenting evidence that the man was abusing his daughter under her mother’s care. Nothing was done about it until she was LifeFlighted to Salt Lake where she died of her wounds and early in the investigation the mother admitted to letting her boyfriend “play with her”. The worst part is, is that because the abuser/murderer was part of the tribe all he had to do was stay on tribal lands to not be taken into custody. So while the long process of an FBI investigation and the FBI jumping the correct hoops to make an arrest on tribal land, this man walked freely as long as he was on the reservation.

Most people rejected the abuser/murderer entirely but what hurt more is seeing the people who went out of their way to help him. His family tried to open a food truck where the highway passes through the rez so he could have a job. It earned a large protest considering the size of the town and few out of towners stopped for tacos, so they fortunately had to shut down. The man’s cousin was chief so he was given a job in the dispensary. Some other members of the tribe who worked there walked out on the job and went to the council to try and stop it.

Fortunately as of now the FBI has taken the mother and boyfriend into custody and they’re awaiting trial. I’ve been called for jury duty twice now and it’s been cancelled each time.

24. A 17 year old girl was raped and murdered when walking home from school. The while town went into panic mode, and a homeless man was caught and arrested for the crime. Case closed, right?

Later it was found out that she was in a relationship with a judge’s son, and he plus some other guys from wealthy local families were seen in a car picking her up around the time of the crime. They all moved to different cities. Nothing ever came of it.

Homeless man is still in jail.

25. Probably that old guy who had like 8 children, sexually assaulted 2 of his daughters, raped his step-daughter multiple times, getting her pregnant and completely mentally impaired in the process, also mentally and physically abusing the rest of his family, letting one of his sons die from pneumonia because he refused him any treatment and in the end tried to force his wife to buy him the way out of prison. Ask anyone outside of my town and they will have never heard of him but I remember him pretty clearly since I was also friends with one of his sons my age and almost the entirety of the rest of the family. I was at their house pretty often when I was younger until my parents forbid me from going there again, because how I later found out around that time the first accusations became public since one of his daughters had moved out and reported everything to the police.

26. In the 80’s and early 90’s my town was run completely by dirty cops. Drugs were run by the cops and people who didn’t do as they were told would go mysteriously missing and eventually, most of them, wind up dead. It took the Feds to clean the place up and install a new set of clean cops.

27. My grandpa’s father was murdered by the wealthiest man in town a long time ago. Not 100% sure of the exact year. Money exchanged hands with law enforcement, and nothing ever came of it. Until one day my grandpa’s anger about the situation boiled over, and he threatened to kill the man in retribution. Law enforcement caught wind of it, and in order to save the coverup, forced him to leave town or be arrested. He moved from that small town bordering two southern states (hint, it’s a mashup name of the two states into one), up to Ohio. He met my grandma, and now I exist. So at least I can blame a murderer for every bad thing that happens to me, since I wouldn’t have existed without his crime.

28. A father held his wife at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her in the head in front of their ~7 year old daughter. Went on a wild police-chase. He still lives in the town.

29. A cop was a child molester and it was widely known. He went with a group hunting in the woods and never came back.

30. In the early 1990s, a town in my small county in the southern US had a fire in a chicken processing plant. When workers tried to escape, it became apparent that the fire exits and other exits had been locked. Dozens of people died around the exits in desperation in a town of around 2000.

Our state suppressed the investigation, due to lobbies, and families received almost none of the compensation funds.

Pretty sure there’s a song about it. Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

January Nelson

January Nelson

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.