I’ve done a fair amount of driving across this great country of ours, and I feel like I’ve seen the good and the bad.

When I say that, I mean the well-kept, well-attended rest areas and truck stops, and the places that seem like they belong in a horror movie.

Now I’m shuddering…

There really are a lot of creepy places out there and highway rest areas and truck stops off the interstate just happen to be at the top of the list.

AskReddit users shared the weird things they’ve seen at rest areas and truck stops.

1. At the weigh station.

“I worked at a weigh station for big rigs.

There were two of us at the station working nights waiting for trucks to pull onto the scale. If anything weighing more than a pound got on the scale it would send an audible beep into the booth and light up the computers.

If it wasn’t a trucks then most of the time it would be the wild life wondering out onto the scale which we would ignore then quickly go back to watching Netflix or whatever. One night though it was something weighing 132 lbs.

We couldn’t see it from the windows but checking the cameras we noticed it was a hunched over naked man shaking like a sh*tting dog and scratching the side of his face. While my co-worker radioed for the State Troopers I used the intercom to tell him to get off of the scale.

Instead he lurched on over and began licking the window. He did this until he was checked out by EMS and taken away by Law Enforcement for public intoxication.

It was later discovered he was using meth.”

2. Oops.

“Years ago when i was a kid we were travelling with my mom, her best friend and my sisters.

We were pretty tired and pulled into a truck stop for some food and bathroom break. We walk in my mum asks a guy where the bathrooms were he points us in the right direction and off we toddle.

We come out, take a seat and wait for the waitress to come take our order, she seems to be taking awhile but we figure she’s probably busy and will come when she can. eventually she comes over and tells my mum that everything is okay and the police are on their way, my mum pretty confused asks her what she means.

Well turns out we had walked into the middle of an armed robbery and my mum had actually asked the robber where the toilets were.”

3. Looks like the end of days.

“Weirdest was pulling up to a truckstop to fill up in southeastern South Dakota during the height of the mayfly hatch, millions of bugs all over.

I started filling up and was getting ready to clean my windshield and I happened to look over across the way and there was some dude driving a big box truck in the diesel fueling area.

He was scraping them off the front of his truck…and eating them by the handfuls. Ah the days before cellphones were a thing.”

4. What’s that smell?

“My mom, her ex boyfriend and I lived at a house directly next to a rest area because they worked there and I guess the house came as a package deal since we were so far away from everything.

I was around 6 or 7 and would used to adventure around it every day and find some neat stuff people had left behind for however long.

I remember that one day my mom was coming to get me and I was near the dumpsters, and she stopped right in front of them taken aback because she had smelled something so foul (you know more foul than usual) that she immediately just told me to go into the house without even looking.

She didn’t tell me until I was in high school that they had found dismembered body parts in there, as well as scattered around the rest area once they investigated further. Im really glad I didn’t find anything myself.”

5. Wow…

“A little over 10 years ago my band was on tour somewhere in Texas or Oklahoma (we were riding along the border so I dont remember exactly what side the truck stop was on.

It was about 3 in the morning in the dead of winter and I stopped for food while the other guys slept, I was talking to the clerk waiting for my chimichanga and this dude walked in, went straight for the bathroom/shower area.

About 10 minutes later dude walks back out, butt*ss nekkid with what we can only assume was sh*t covering his entire front side, like face to ankles full blown sh*t mask. Dude walks outside jumps on the hood of a white car, and walks back in to buy a single slim Jim stick.

The cashier vehemently tells the dude to just take it and go. The guy takes said Slim Jim outside, sticks it up his *(ss, and full sprints out of sight.

I paid for the chimi (even though I wasnt gonna eat it) and my energy drink and went back to the van just f*cking befuddled over the whole thing when the singer who’s in the passenger seat asks if I saw some naked dude running away.

I guess he stopped by the van and asked to borrow some weirdly specific amount of change and ran off before he could answer.”

6. All kinds of stories.

“We had a guy come in with four stab marks to his chest and all he wanted to do was call his mom. We called the cops for him and it turned out that his girlfriend had stabbed him. When the cops showed up they told him to just go home…

One of my coworkers had a gun pulled on him because he opened a can of soda and it made a loud pop that it scared the customer. Had this person accidentally put their car in drive instead of reverse and they drove into the store.

The power went out in the store and as protocol we have to evacuate when that happens. We had a customer screaming at the top of her lungs that we were trying to s*xually assault her when we tried to get her to leave the store.

A semi truck driver drove over two of our gas pumps because she couldn’t turn correctly and then she fled the scene. Gas was literally spilling everywhere. Luckily we caught it all on video so we were able to contact her company and get her to take responsibility for the damages.”

7. Creepy lady.

“Once at a rest stop I parked and exited my car to have a woman approach me and start screaming in my face that I stole her pet turtle when she wasnt looking a few miles back up the road, and that she had followed me to get it back.

I was completely confused and didn’t know what to say but really had to pee, so I went inside and did. When I came back out she was gone but my car was covered in napkins with writing on them I couldnt read.

I never saw her again.”

8. Lot lizard.

“I worked at a truck stop in east Tennessee for a summer. We kept getting reports of a “lot lizard” (a pr*stitute that works truckers) but we could never catch her.

Turned out, the lot lizard was one of our employees. And her madame was another one who would sit in her car with a CB radio on her breaks setting up the meetings.

The girl in question was an East Tennessee eight (which probably translates to a big city 3).”

9. Is that chocolate?

“When I was a maintenance worker for a truck stop, I got a call over the radio saying there were two women in the parking lot covered in chocolate. I thought, “well, as long and they don’t come into the store.”

I went outside to find two women, completely naked, covered in a brown substance (I hoped to God it was chocolate). The sheriff was called and apparently, they were both completely sober.

They were there for a sorority thing. They were issued a ticket and it was, indeed, chocolate.”

10. Armed robbery.

“I worked at a dairy queen in the truck stop as we all got robbed at gunpoint.

I feel like the story is pretty self explanatory. There were no customers in at the time. This guy walks in with some pistol I couldn’t tell ya the name of. Waving it around like a foam finger.

Tells me to empty the register of all the paper money. I stood there blankly, completely unsure of what to do. I politely inform him there’s no way for me to open the register without a supervisor code and I just made minimum wage.

He calls me a f*cking dumb*ss and tells me to ring up a blizard or something and hit cash. I said oh. Ok. He collected his payment from the mini wendys and the convenience portion and just f*cked off. The cops took notes but there was no follow up.

It was only like 350 bucks. The gas station part probably had more to offer. Anyway, I quit like a month after that”

11. On the road.

“I saw a guy on a leash that was tied to a tree.

That same trip there a guy saying, “have you seen my dog? He’s a good boy” the next rest stop over.

I always wondered if the two were
connected…”

12. What a freak!

“I worked for a truck stop for a summer in Montana circa 1993. What an experience. This gorgeous blond fills her van and comes to the till to pay. I am behind the counter and she starts flirting with me. I was smitten from the get go. I go on break and we have coffee together in the lounge. We exchange phone numbers and addresses. She was from Florida.

She gets up to leave and runs to the washroom before I returned to work. She comes back and gives me this beautiful purple vile saying it contains something to remember her by until meet again. She hugs and kisses me goodbye. I am over the moon.

Later that night I open the vile and take a whiff of what was sure to be pleasant aroma. Instead I inhale what must be toxic sludge collected from a public porta potty on a hot in Juarez.

The woman calls me a couple days later and I ask what she put in the vile. She said she defecated in the washroom and gave me a sample of her excrement to remember her by and it was very intimate gift in her religion. She asked if her smell made me hard. Gross!!!

13. Sketchy.

“One time a friend and I walked into a rest area bathroom late one night. We were traveling from Dallas / Ft. Worth, TX to Ft. Collins CO. We were in Kansas and in the middle of nowhere.

Empty parking lot save for a few cars. We walked into the men’s room and stumbled into what HAD to be a big time drug deal. 5-7 well dressed but shady looking dudes in a circle facing each other. There was a briefcase. Me and my friends stop immediately.

They’re looking at us. We’re looking at them. We then walk over to the urinals. In our fear it just seemed like we should just play it off. Be cool. We’re obviously not cops. We were a couple of dirty longhairs in B*tthole Surfer t-shirts and smelled like weed.

I’ve never been so scared taking a leak in my entire life. I swear I thought we were going to be shot in the back of our heads. We pissed and gtfo. I know what you’re going to ask.

No, I did not wash my hands.”

14. Dead body.

“Overnight shift supervisor 15 years ago.

On Valentine’s Day, then 18 years old, I was the only lonely shift supervisor to be able to work 2nd shift at McD’s rest area because, again, lonely with no date. I’m half asleep working the shift, guy comes in high as a kite, actually he’s higher than kites can go.

He orders his food and leaves. An hour later, my cleaning guy (we’ll call him Pedro) tells me there’s a guy on the toilet that won’t come out. We go in, keep knocking and we’re thinking he’s sleeping on the sh*tter. We can see his pants around his ankles, and he’s leaning down.

While I go call the cops, i tell my cleaning guy to block the bathroom so know one goes in to that part of it – there’s two sides to the bathroom. Pedro comes out and tells me the guy is purple and dead, on the sh*tter. He overdosed on something, not sure what. The kicker is that Pedro decided it was in his best interest to run the guys pockets before the cops show up – which is how he found out the guy was dead.

Pedro took the guys stash and money before leaving. I found out a week later as I overheard it through the crew talking. Fun times at that place. Felt bad for the guy. I wouldn’t want to go out that way.”

Now we want to hear from you!

What the weirdest or scariest thing you’ve seen on the road or at a rest area?

Tell us your stories in the comments!