Discover the 7 Most Mysterious Places in the United States

From UFO sightings to bottomless pits and eternal fires, this country has many strange and eerie places. While many phenomena can be explained, others are still a mystery. Check out these picks for the top seven most mysterious places in the United States and discover why Americans find them so creepy.

Read on to learn more about these weird places and the explanations, or lack thereof, for their existence.

1. Eternal Flame Falls

Located in Chestnut Ridge Park in Western New York, the Eternal Flame Falls is a small waterfall featuring a natural gas grotto at its base. The grotto produces a fire that eerily never goes out. Well, almost never. Occasionally, the wind gets inside the grotto and knocks out the flame. But all you need is a lighter to get it going again. The site of Eternal Flame Falls has a macro hydrocarbon seep that produces over two pounds of methane per day. This phenomenon is likely due to tectonic activity that opened faults in the Rhinestreet Shale about 1,300 feet below the surface. People from all over the world can now view this fire spectacle year-round.

2. Skinwalker Ranch

Consisting of 512 acres in Uintah County, Utah, Skinwalker Ranch has been the subject of unexplained paranormal and UFO activity. Over 100 incidents of strange happenings have been reported on the property, including vanishing animals, mutilated cattle, sightings of UFOs, destructive magnetic fields, strange lights, and animals with glowing red eyes. However, all attempts to legitimately research and recreate these occurrences have proved futile. Many believe that the owners made up these claims, as the owners of the property before them never mentioned anything strange happening. But that hasn’t stopped people from making movies, shows, and documentaries about Skinwalker Ranch.  

3. Georgia Guidestones

This monument was commissioned by a group of people and completed in 1980. It consisted of six granite slabs, standing over 19 feet tall and weighing more than 200,000 pounds. It stood in Elbert County, Georgia, and was the subject of much debate over the decades. Many found the inscriptions on the tablets to be unsettling as they were guidelines for humanity to follow after what the creator believed to be an imminent nuclear disaster. The themes of the inscriptions deal with world government, population control, and reproduction control. Since its unveiling, people around the country have expressed their concern for the work, claiming the tablets were linked to satanism. The man in charge of sandblasting the inscriptions said he spent hundreds of hours around them and claimed he heard disjointed voices and strange music. The stones were dismantled in 2022 after a bombing left them heavily damaged.

4. Marfa Lights

Marfa is a quaint art town in West Texas with a strange paranormal phenomenon. The Marfa Lights are ghostly-looking lights that appear at night near US Highway 67 in the desert. They look like distant bright spots of varying colors that pulse, growing and fading in intensity. And then they take off, flying above desert vegetation. Many have attributed them to car headlights, ranch lights, campfires, or atmospheric reflections. But those who have witnessed them have said they are clearly distinguishable from anything normal. Reports of these ghost lights go back as far as the late 1800s when early settlers used to chase them in the dark, coming up empty.

5. Mount Shasta

Mount Shasta, located on the southern end of the Cascade Range in California, has acquired many myths and legends over the centuries. This mountain was highly reverenced by the indigenous tribes in the area who believed there was a hidden city inside the mountain, featuring complex tunnels filled with jewels and treasures. A British prospector was traversing the mountain in 1904 when he claimed to have found an underground village with gold, artifacts, and giant mummies. But when he was supposed to help an exploration team find the village, he never showed up and was never heard from again. Some believe there was a village inside the mountain but that it’s no longer inhabited. Others believe an advanced civilization remains inside Mount Shasta to this day. 

6. Roswell

Roswell is a city in New Mexico and the site of proclaimed alien activity and government coverup. In 1947, a man and his son came across metallic and lightweight debris on their ranch. He took pieces of the wreckage to the Roswell sheriff, who contacted Colonel Blanchard, commander of the Roswell Army Airfield composite group. As he worked his way up the chain of common to figure out what the wreckage was, an intelligence officer made a public statement that the Roswell Army Air Field had come into the possession of a flying saucer. Decades later, the US Air Force published a report identifying the wreckage as a nuclear test balloon from Project Mogul. Since the incident in the 1940s, the Roswell Incident has received complex conspiracy theories surrounding the alien activity and the government trying to cover it up.

7. Mel’s Hole

Located on the property of a man named Mel Waters in the Manastash Ridge of Washington is a bottomless hole that many claims is a portal to another dimension. For many years, Mel and his neighbors used the hole as a trash dump, filling it with everything from household trash to broken appliances. But the hole never filled up, no matter how much they put down it. And there were other eerie things about this neverending hole; radios picked up strange signals, and dogs wouldn’t go near it. But a man once tossed his dead dog into the hole only to have it come back to life, kind of like Pet Sematary. Waters also claimed a black beam occasionally came from the hole and that portable radios would play music from the past. When trying to measure it, he stated it was longer than 80,000 feet and that he never reached the bottom. Waters claimed that the government forced him to lease his property to them. But to this day, no one has ever found this mysterious hole.

Most Mysterious Places in the United States: A Recap of the Top 7

The photo featured at the top of this post is © Quentin Melson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons – License / Original

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