20 subway workers, tunnel rats, and urban explorers share the weirdest things they've seen underground.

If you grew up on a steady diet of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then you're already deeply aware of the exciting and terrifying possibilities of the underground. The dark sludgey atmosphere of underground subway tunnels has captured the imaginations of generations of people, who see them as mysterious places to explore or do drugs in peace.As anyone with experience knows, traveling into dark underground tunnels, bomb shelters and creepy attics is not for the faint of heart. You have to go ready to ruin your shoes and sense of smell, while potentially traumatizing yourself with what you find. Still, the stories are worth it in the long-run.In a popular Reddit thread, people who have explored underground tunnels, subway routes, or bomb shelters share their most memorable stories.1. SoreWristed has had some strange times inside the boarded up WWII fort. There's an abandoned and boarded up WWII fort in the southern part of Belgium, that we often sneak into with the scouts. Getting in there requires scaling a sheer wall (where we've placed anchoring points for ropes and climbing gear) next to a relatively busy road. So you're being super quiet, making no light and cowering every time a car passes by so he doesn't spot you in his lights. The atmosphere is set. The moment you enter it, it's like diving into water. Sound stops and the entire place is at a constant 14 degrees Celsius, with a slight breeze passing through. The tunnel is barely large enough for me (slightly broader than the average person) to pass without turning my body sideways. The tunnel is just high enough to work up a decent gait while hunched over. If someone ahead of you blocks a passage for a moment, the breeze stops and it feels like the entire tunnel network takes a breath. Because of the way the tunnels are constructed, they echo in such a way that your own footsteps seem to be coming from behind you. They also seem to take one more step than you do when you stop. Of course we don't allow the guys and gals to take any source of light in there, so it's pretty scary overall. So I'm in there, posted at a side passage to ensure everyone takes the same path and doesn't get lost. I go in first, before any of the climbers arrive, so they don't know there are friendly faces in there to help them. I'm in there for a while, just waiting for the first to come by, when I see a dancing little light coming down the long hallway. I quietly settle back in my nook and wait for whoever was smart enough to hide some matches and take them away. The light quietly bobs closer when I realize there aren't any footsteps accompanying it. I poke my head around the corner just in time to see it disappear. I hear no footsteps still. I settle back and wait some more, when I realize I do hear some scuffling. Very faint. Breathing noises, but still very faint. I become aware of a wet heat coming from right in front of me, with a faint smell of... person, sweat, dirt? Suddenly I realize, there's someone there. Right in front of me. Inches from my face. The breathing stops suddenly, whatever it is is aware of me as well. Whatever or whoever it is, we're both holding our breath, both acutely aware of each other. It takes ages. I'm sitting there, unable to move, speak or breathe properly. The wet heat passes and some minutes later I become aware of very faint light coming from my right side, which soon dissipates and leaves. Some time later still, I hear the familiar stomping of combat boots coming down the hallway from my left. I stop the person, tell them to keep following the passageway and take the first right they come to. Out of curiosity, I ask who went in first. No one, he went in first... it was explained much later. the first guy got lost down a dead end side passage and the second girl passed him by. She got nervous from the footsteps and removed her shoes. She saw me poke my head from around the corner and dropped the match. She passed me very slowly. One of the later checkpoints said she was crying her eyes out. 2. TSCHWEITZ has walked into other people's showers. I work for the MTA in NYC. The underground train system is the perfect place for homeless people to escape the elements. I walked into a fully naked man bathing under a leaking hot water pipe. That was pretty terrifying. 3. hubble-oh_seven still thinks about the tunnels under the school. Freshman year of highschool I noticed this large panel under an old staircase in the basement of a school building. For years my buddies and I talked about opening it, but it was across the hall from the office of the lady in charge of misdemeanors and suspensions. Fast forward to the last day of senior year after most everyone had left. My two buddies and I, in formal attire from the day's events, unscrewed the panel from the wall. Sure enough, there was a tunnel about 5 feet below the floor. Luckily there was a sturdy stool for us to climb down. There was a system of tunnels down there but our exploration was limited since we were in good clothes and there was standing water down some of the tunnels. The unexplained part is that, while there were pipes where we went, there were tunnels without pipes that went out from the buildings footprint and not towards any other building. These tunnels had inches deep standing, nasty water so we couldn't go in them in rented dress shoes. But we could make out that they connected to other tunnels which seemed to serve no purpose. I doubt there was anything sinister going on, but we thought it was pretty creepy at the time. 4. renegade_donut did not love the underground mines. Many years ago I worked as a technical assistant at a coal mining company. This was basically doing the grunt work for those with degrees, taking samples of things, doing data entry, driving the surveyors around etc etc. One of my duties was to go into the underground mines and take coal, dirt, and air samples on a regular basis. often this'd be a little away from other workers. One place I'd hate going because every time it'd feel and sound like there was someone standing just behind me to my left and whispering in my ear, even when the nearest other person was 30 yards away or so. Probably just weird acoustics but f*ck I hated those days. 5. beechknoll's grandpa got lost in a Mammoth Cave. My grandpa got lost in Mammoth Cave after he got back from WWII. Apparently before he was drafted it was not a National Park and the rules around exploring it were very loose, the property it was on was privately owned and locals were known to trespass to explore the cave (or that's what my grandpa used to tell me, he and his friends vary well may of been the only people trespassing). While my Grandpa was serving in the Pacific Theater the cave became a National Park. After arriving home my grandpa and his friends that survived the war went back to explore for old time sakes. They were wandering around with flashlights when they heard a tour group, considering they weren't in their 'legally' and had bypassed many Federal trespassing signs, they cut the lights and slowly but surely tried to walk unnoticed back to the entrance. Unfortunately they went deeper and spent 17 hours in there before getting out. He didn't have many stories because apparently you inch along in complete darkness without being able to see your hand infront of your face. But he said one of his friends kept saying "we didn't survive that shit to die in here" 6. My6thRedditusername has been unpleasantly surprised by bee nests. I've popped hundreds of manhole covers in Boston working for dig safe. The only thing I can think of is surprise bee nests. Of when the noxious gas meter starts beeping which means "stay f*ck out of this hole or you'll pass out and die" 7. ICantProcessThis wonders how the old man died. I used to wander the old abandoned mines, cabins and grounds of Montana (areas people hadn't been in at least 3 decades). I knew every cabin too. I knew people who'd been there decades prior when there were still crazy old gold panning loony types who'd never given up hope of the big find. I remember one story my father has with one of those people. My father and his brother were looking in this one area and a shot went over their heads. My father and uncle froze and said they were just hiking. The old man said they were trying to steal and my father said who his grandmother was (who lived on the mountain since the early 60s). The old man then stopped, said to thank their mother for feeding him when he was starving one winter, but that he wasn't taking visitors that day and to get lost. About a decade ago my father and I found the dilapidated cabin that man was in by chance wandering randomly through the woods. It was really hard to find and we had just barely come across it. Everything that old man had was still there, the roof was partially caved in, pots and pans were still on the stove like he had died in there or nearby. There was no body though. Just everything was there, covered in decades of normal decay, frozen in time, tools and all. It was a museum 100 years in the past, but only my father and I knew how to visit it. The old man must have died over 30 years ago at least, since he was so old when my father saw him. That cabin was bulldozed to build millionaire cabins 8 or so years ago, along with dozens of other secret museums of the gold rush past. I used to know every secret path of that woods for miles in every direction to every secret cabin, game trail and serene natural rest stop. It is all now empty cul de sacs with no cabins, because the money stream ran dry. I think that is the scariest and saddest part, frankly. 8. Secretly_psycho is still skeeved out by the bomb shelter. Was playing in the woods and tripped over something solid. Fund it was a cement circle, and realized it was an underground door. The next day I come back with a crowbar (to open, and like hell im going in unarmed). Pull it up, and it's a cold war era personal bomb shelter... that failed? There was a giant crack in the roof, the floor was covered in slime. But what was worse is the walls are covered in writings. "this is the end" "we must die" "everyone is gone". Till I find the back wall, and a giant red scrawl "GET THE F*CK OUT OF MY HOME". That's it, f*ck this. I'm f*cking out. I sprint up the door, and close it. I don't want to know what the hell that was. But I come back the next day... it's burned out. I didn't set a fire intentionally, and I didn't smell smoke leaving. 9. martinmlaw had a weird find at school. I currently attend a state university full time. By the description you might be able to figure out which one. I'm currently a senior living in private housing downtown, but sophomore year I lived in the university's only downtown quad. It was built in the early 1920's and definitely looked it compared to the uptown campus and housing quads. I was in the basement lounge area grabbing my mail when I noticed a nearby door that wasn't usually open and a nearby maintenance worker. I casually asked the guy what was down there. He said, "Dunno, we just store our materials on the stairs." My curiosity got the better of me and I asked him if I could take a look to see what was all the way at the bottom of the flight of stairs. He said, "I don't see why not, just don't get hurt on anything down there, and try to be back before my supervisor gets back in 15". This guy should definitely have not let me down there because he clearly hadn't seen it. There was friable asbestos literally everywhere, particularly the decomposing ceiling tiles. I turned on my phone flashlight to find that it was some kind of sealed off research area. The stairs led to a hallway which looks like it may have been hospital-like at one time, but it had since experienced some heavy water damage. There were approximately 7 rooms on either side with one way glass pane in each, with some kind of 90's intercom panel to the right. Inside each room were heavily rusted bed frames, a sink, and a toilet. All the way at the end of the hall were a series of file cabinets. I would have looked to see what they contained but figured it would only be a cloud of black mold spores, so I decided against it. Nothing inherently creepy about the area I suppose but definitely interesting. 10. tttttttypo still thinks about the disappearing man. I once was alone at Moorgate station in London after staying for a few after work drinks with my buddy who also works in central. It was around 10pm so I left the pub and walked to the station and found I had missed the previous train by about 5 minutes. Moorgate station is an underground station but the overground trains depart and terminate there. The train that I needed to catch always departs from one of two platforms that are in their individual tunnels adjacent to one another but accessible by foot as they are connected by paths that connect the platforms every 15 feet or so. I was sat on the bench right at the end (near where the front of the train would be when departing). As I sat there I saw some movement in the corner of my eye so I turned and stared to see just a regular guy dressed in dark clothing come through from the other platform passage about 10 meters from me and thought nothing of it. He went by the track, starred down, backed away and ran back through the passage to the other platform. I thought to myself that was weird and quickly got up to follow him and find out why he was running/if he was ok. I was no more than 5 seconds behind him and the exit/entry to the platform is right by the other end which was a good 150 meters or so away. As I go through the passage to the other platform I look to see no one there. I then went back to the other platform and again I was the only one there apart from a women who just reached the bottom of the escalator to the platform entrance right down the other end. It was something I couldn't explain and I was sure I couldn't recall any footsteps that made is even weirder. London is an old place and has a lot of history so not sure if there was an event that could give reasoning to what I experienced but it's a memory that will always stick with me. 11. drone42 noped out of the crawl space. Do crawlspaces under houses count? Because if they do I once went into one that had asbestos everywhere. Terrifying. 12. digitalis303 barely missed a corpse. As a teen I was into urban exploration. There was an old ice plant near my house that had burned (I know- ironic) around 25-30 years prior. Anyway, it wasn't really underground, but was so overgrown that it felt more-or-less like it. I go climbing around over and under mangled concrete and rebar and graffiti for a while and finally decide I'm done. Couple of days later I hear about how the police pulled a corpse out of there. Pretty sure I walked right by it and didn't even notice... 13. Buzzkill1591 noped away from the voices. There's a sewer system under my old neighborhood and I would go in there to smoke weed with my buddies. We started to notice "messages" left on the walls in red paint, like " were watching you" "smoke the reefer meet the reaper". One day while we were down there we heard a couple of voices laughing and were getting closer and closer. We panicked and lifted a manhole right above that opened up to a busy road street. We never went back down again. 14. voice_of_craisin traveled a mile via water tunnel. Well, not unexplained as the explanation is "I am an idiot" but definitely scary. Houston is criss-crossed with bayous because it a swamp that needs to be drained a lot. There are these gigantic tunnels that lead to the bayous and collect water from the storm drains. When we were kids, these were great to explore. We'd make maps about how to get from one area to another using these tunnels. Well, we set aside one Saturday to try to make all the way to a mall a couple miles away from the starting point. Our hand drawn map was about halfway done. We got lost. And then, as it is wont to do in Houston in the Summer, it started pouring down rain. This happened before but we were usually close to an exit. Not this time. It kept raining. The water got high enough that the current knocked us over. Eventually we got spit out into a bayou from a tunnel we had never even explored. After finally getting out of the bayou and getting back to safety we realized we were almost a mile from where we started. 15. Vokudlak wonders where the family went. I grew up in Frederick, Maryland. Back in the mid 90s to early 2000s when I was a teenager, the city still had a very rust belt vibe. Before its fairly recent "revival" into a hipster-infested douche mecca, it had a fairly large blue collar presence - particularly along the city's open air drainage canal, which back when I was growing up was flanked on both sides by tons of abandoned and/or condemned buildings, both residential and industrial. Now it's all sushi fusion joints, hilariously overpriced condos and vintage thrift shops like every other city on the east coast. Anyway, back then we would roam around the city and break into abandoned buildings for fun. Sometimes we'd vandalize the place, but usually we were just exploring and using them as a hangout spot where we could drink and smoke weed without having to worry about cops. There were a bunch of creepy moments, particularly when you'd break into a condemned house only to discover that one or more homeless people had set up in there - my city kind of had a reputation for having a LOT of severely mentally ill homeless people back then, paranoid schizophrenics and such, a bunch of whom I knew by name back then. One memory that stands out, though, was an abandoned house we broke into which had clearly been vacant for many many years, with visible black mold growing on the walls. It was weird because it had clearly been occupied by a family previously because all of their stuff was still there, like the Rapture happened and they just disappeared. Beds, dressers with clothes, family photos on the walls, all of that (we didn't dare open the fridge). It really seemed like for some reason the family drove away one day and just never returned, it was super creepy walking through their home with flashlights and just getting this rotted glimpse into their lives before whatever happened. 16. Tekowsen found an attic full of cat carcasses. Although it's technically not urban exploring, as a former electrician I think I can still share one moment from a job I had to do about 13 years ago. Me and my job partner were called out to a larger restoration job that was being done to an older house from the early 1900's. The house was until this point, a family owned house which had 2 owners since it was built, and the last owner was an old lady who had passed away there whilst being the last person in her family line (sad story on its own) and nobody could take over the house. So the house got auctioned to a younger couple that bought it for an insane amount of money due to how large the house was, but it was now time to get the old house up to modern standards, which included a completely new installation from scratch, as the old cables around the house were the type of cables that was insulated with black cotton and fastened with hand crafted wooden clamps. While working in the 1st floor was quite easy as the entire installation process was made to fit inside the new wall frames that the carpenters were setting up, we eventually had to move on to the 2nd floor and prepare for setting up a new intake from the attic which would then pass down to the new main fuse box on the 2nd floor. We opened the hatch to the attic, and while using the flashlight to look up there, we could surely see that the attic was very cramped, so the smallest of us would have to go up there to fix everything to get the intake cable settled while removing the old one. As you might guess, I was the smallest of us and had to do that shitty job of going up where nobody probably had been for many many years. So I decided to grab a lunch break and mentally prepare myself for what I expected to become a pretty shit job. After eating, I grabbed my flashlight and tool belt and started climbing up the stairs, and while climbing upwards I noticed that the smell (that we thought was pretty much "old people smell" after they die) was getting increasingly stronger. But I had to continue, so I got to the top and crawled myself onto something stable when I got up, while noticing that the smell up there was pretty damn bad. So I grabbed my flashlight to look around and get somewhat oriented about where to crawl. Looking forward it seemed like a pretty straight forward route towards the intake point that I could see in the distance, but out of curiosity I wondered if there were anything up there, so I looked to my right, only to light up 5 carcasses of what once was the old lady's cats that probably had died, one of them were more or less "intact" whilst being visibly partly eaten by various insects (or whatever eats such stuff), while 2 of them were more or less just rotten dried skin and bones. At that moment I absolutely regretted my decision to eat lunch as the sight of this along with the realization about what I had smelled all along was these dead cats, and immediately threw up on the spot before VERY swiftly noping the fuck out of there. After some talk back and forth, we came to the possibility that the old lady had been throwing her cats up there when they died, one by one, but we will never know for sure since the lady had died. The new owners had no idea about this when buying the house, but our company ended up denying to continue the work until the attic had been cleaned appropriately. This apparently took them about 1 month to complete, I guess there are not many companies who wants to deal with that kind of nasty stuff, but my partner at work ended up finishing the work on the attic afterwards as he felt kinda bad for me. In the end, I decided to not continue being an electrician anymore, as this was not work I really enjoyed doing, especially not after this event. 17. winch25 doesn't know what the wind was warning them about, but listened to it nonetheless. So I've done a lot of things like this and there is usually an explanation for anything that seems untoward. Disused mental hospitals, train tunnels, sewers, abandoned stations, utility tunnels, military installations, the lot - it's usually just your mind if you think something is weird. One story that springs to mind was being in a storm drain in London. The storm drains are generally dry but there might be water elsewhere - the tunnels can stretch for miles at a time. We would always listen out for moving water and any changes in air pressure or temperature, just to know whether there was going to be any change in water level or something dumped into the tunnel further up the line. I was in this sewer and there was a massive gust of wind. No idea what caused it but the chap I was with looked at me and we both just said 'we're leaving, right now'. We stomped up the tunnel and made our way out into a dry night. Something in that change of air pressure and temperature told us something and I'm not sure what it was, but we both knew that leaving there and then was the right thing to do. 18. jake502120 still doesn't know where the music was coming from. Went exploring with a bunch of friends at the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum. While this is not underground in its entirety, portions of it are. The buildings were left with hospital equipment, beds, books, patient files.. literally everything. It's eerie as if a zombie apocalypse occurred and everyone left. It operated from 1864 to 1994. The facility was self sustaining, (i.e. The "patients" farmed the land, and had all resources on campus. The years this was open a lot of horror stories came out of this place, this wasn't the modern day psychiatric ward. More like a prison, where families paid a lot of money to hide their mentally ill, or the state put undesirables. There's an underground network, that was heavily blocked off with chains. However, the main buildings were easily accessible. But, the access ways to the underground were blocked off inside as well. Every time we got near one of the underground tunnel systems we could hear faint music playing, sounded like a music box playing. We found a bent wired gate and attempted to file in, the music got louder and we were all pretty freaked out. We were all promptly arrested before attempting to go into the tunnels. There's a lot of speculation about the tunnels still to this day. The new owner said he was afraid of asbestos, and was fearing for our safety. He was very grim, he agreed to drop charges if we never went back. We obliged happily. Still, I sometimes think of my interactions there, all of the remnants left behind and get severely creeped out. 19. dtsrd2 believes there's a rational explanation, but still felt strange in the moment. Recently, I was visiting NYC and stayed in a hotel inside the city. It was a fairly nice place, but it was also a pretty old building that was not built with the intention of it getting so much use. For example, there were only two tiny elevators available for guests (and the hotel was at least 15-20 floors). The wait for elevators took so long that I decided I'd use the stairs. For some reason, there were 4-5 stairwells in the building, accessible from each floor and most wound up in different parts of the lobby. I remembered using one of them the day before, and I thought it was stairwell D, so I took it. After descending for a while, I passed level two. The next exit wasn't marked, but I thought it had to be level one. I went through the exit door and found myself in an unfamiliar hallway with a very low ceiling (it could only have been about 7 feet) and sparse lighting. It wasn't eerie, but it definitely didn't look like it was intended for guests. Still, a little curious, I decided to check it out and see if I could find the lobby. I walked for a minute down a long hallway with a kind of dirty stone floor and some industrial double doors. There didn't seem to be anyone around and it was pretty quiet. I rounded a corner and to my immediate right was this big window set into the wall. Through it was a clean white room that reminded me a little of my high school's cafeteria (I remember thinking that, but I'm not sure exactly why). There was also a man, sitting and looking at his phone. He must have been about 5 feet away from me and only the window separated us. He saw me and looked a little startled. I waved and was about to ask where the lobby was but he quickly pointed for me to turn back. Neither of us ever said a word. It was just the weirdest experience being in such a silent, dirty place and then seeing a modern room with a person. I speed walked out and took the elevator. In retrospect, I probably just stumbled into some storage area under the lobby (it definitely wasn't the same level), but it was the strangest discovery, and I like to imagine what could have gone on down there and why I wasn't aloud to be there. Edit: I definitely agree that there is a rational, boring explanation for this. I just thought it was an interesting story. 20. Skryptix knows firsthand that hell is other explorers. I'm not sure I qualify, since the explanation seems rather straightforward to me - another group of explorers. Still, I have a pretty good story. I attended the University of Huddersfield, and one of the accommodation facilities for students is called Storthes Hall. Storthes Hall was previously a psychiatric hospital, an asylum. Most of the buildings were demolished, I believed two are currently in use to house students, and then off site there's the main building and the mortuary. The main building was off limits and I believe security guards were in place, but when you have several hundred drunk students living nearby you're basically just grabbing sand. I went with a group of people and we intended to have some kind of DIY seance (Derren Brown had done his not long before), so we toddled off with tarot cards and a Ouija board. It was all pretty funny to be honest, none of us really took it seriously, and having seen the Derren Brown seance I was really skeptical. Then the torch died, and we heard several loud knocks. We f*cked off sharpish. But again, it likely was somebody f*cking with us after hearing the panic caused by the torch going out. Might have even been the security guards, I wouldn't blame them.