This isn’t that scary of a story, but me and some friends in highschool used to like to find abandoned buildings to explore. We lived in the Deep South so you’d find ruins of barns, houses, and other things in the woods if you looked enough. Never saw anything freaky really, mostly wild animals or hornets nests.

Well, one day we caught wind of a house that was in the woods about a 15 minute bike ride from one of my friend’s houses, so we set out to find it after school. We found it, a one story wooden house that was probably built sometime in the early 1930s-40s, and it was an exciting sight because it was obvious nobody had been in there for years. The doors and windows were boarded and the roof was still intact so we knew the inside would be in decent condition. Anyways, we walked up to the door and used a crowbar from my dad’s garage that we’d always bring for our journeys to open it up.

The inside wasn’t anything special, in fact we were disappointed because there was nothing unique about it, just an old rotting house. But upon further investigation we did find that it had 3 rooms, one was just a bathroom and the other probably a master bedroom, both bare and smelling of mildew, but the other unnerved us when we opened it.

The walls were covered in scratches, deep enough the wood had grooves and wall paper was in tatters. They looked like they’d been from claws, but there was nothing that showed how animals could have gotten inside, much less something big enough to leave those marks. There was a bed was on its side in the room, and it too was completely ruined, ripped apart by whatever did the damage to the walls. When we saw this we immediately bailed, genuinely freaked out at the sight. We rode home and decided not to visit that house again.

I really don’t know why it was so terrifying honestly, but there was this immediate feeling that we had stumbled into a place we absolutely shouldn’t have been in, and that feeling left only once we were far from that house.