Before you start reading, sorry if I had left out any details, I’m lazy sometimes.
Me and my younger brother loved exploring abandoned places. However, this incident made me stop exploring abandoned sites for good.
It was a warm Saturday night when me and my brother (let’s call him Nathan) decided to go urban exploring. We decided to search on Google for abandoned places near us, and we found an abandoned parking lot about five minutes away. It was perfect. We decided to walk there because it was really nice out and nothing’s wrong with taking a short walk.
Once we had arrived, we went straight into the parking lot. We found it to be very dark and eerie. We also noticed that it had four floors and, surprisingly found elevators that still worked. We decided that we would explore the floors one by one, looking for anything that would be interesting like creepy signs, notes, etc.
After we had explored three floors, we had found nothing except for a few cigarettes, broken glass bottles, and no graffiti, which I found weird. Plus, we were left disappointed as we had found nothing to interest or scare us. But there was still one more floor.
Once we had stepped foot onto the fourth floor, I immediately had a bad feeling. My gut just kept telling to turn back. The reason why was because there was a white van parked on the right side of the lot. Me and Nathan seemed to notice it and the same time and we ran back to the elevator and rode it back down to the first floor.
I was considering walking back home since the lot gave me a bad feeling, and of course, the sketchy van that was suspiciously parked in a parking lot that was abandoned. Plus, we got what we asked for: something to creep us out. But Nathan wanted to go up to the fourth floor again because he wanted to explore some more. I, of course, said no, but Nathan kept insisting, so, being the stupid teenager I was, told him that he could go, as long as I came with him. He agreed. Little did I know that that was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
As the elevator doors opened to the fourth floor, that same feeling came back. I really wanted to run and turn back and never come again. Maybe I should have listened to my gut.
As I walked out of the doors, I felt the sensation that someone or something was watching us. I scanned around the lot, but I couldn’t see anything or anyone that could be watching us, only the van was still there. That’s when I noticed that Nathan had gone ahead of me, so I rushed to catch up, but when I turned to face him, his face was fixated on something that seemed to be behind me.
I turned around and saw a silhouette of a man standing in the corner, about five feet away from us. I froze. I couldn’t move, breathe, or speak. How did I not notice him before? How long had he been here? I convinced myself that it was just some cardboard cut-out of a person, and whoever had done it was the person who parked their van here, and that it was just a prank.
I was just about to grab Nathan’s hand and walk away, but before I could to that, the “cut-out” began to slowly walk towards us and I swore I saw a knife in his hand. He started to quicken his pace and I whisper-yelled to Nathan that we need to get out of here.
Before we could even do anything the man started to RUN TOWARDS US while laughing and screaming while saying “I’m gonna get you!” like a psycho. Me and Nathan bolted towards the elevator (since there was no stairs for some reason) which seemed to take forever. As we finally reached it we were pressing the button like crazy until the doors finally opened and we spammed the button for the first floor. Luckily, this psycho was slow so right when he was just about to catch us or something the doors to the elevators closed.
We stood there in silence; the only thing I heard was our fast breathing and my heart pounding in my chest. We didn’t say anything the entire elevator ride or while we ran all the way home.
The next day I looked up “abandoned parking lot kidnappings/killings” but found nothing similar to what me and Nathan experienced. I’m still waiting for that weird dude to show up on the news as a kidnapper or something. I also believe that that white van had something to do with him. I also don’t know what would have happened if my brother didn’t see that man and if he had gotten any closer.
I still think about it to this day. It gives me the chills. But also, it could have been some hobo on drugs or a college kid just trying to scare us, which of course worked, but I will never see parking lots the same again. I also learned a lesson that day to always trust my gut.
I never went urban exploring again.