NewsSeptember 4, 20266 min read

How a Reddit Thread Helped Shape Strange Route

We asked people about the weirdest places they had ever visited. Their answers helped turn a personal travel database into a map built for other curious travelers.

Strange Route did not start as a plan to build a travel site.

I travel a lot, and I have always been interested in places that are a little harder to find. Strange histories, local legends, abandoned sites, unexplained events, and places you usually hear about because someone has actually been there.

I started keeping a database of them mostly for myself. It was a way to document places I might want to visit and keep the research somewhere other than a growing collection of bookmarks and notes.

It was really just a hobby project.

Earlier this summer, while I was still building that list, I posted a simple question in r/HighStrangeness:

What is the weirdest place you have ever visited?

The response was much bigger than I expected. The thread eventually reached 143 comments, but the number was not really what made it interesting. It was the answers.

People mentioned places they had stumbled across while traveling, places they grew up near, places they had deliberately gone looking for, and places they still remembered years later. Some came with a whole story. Others were just a name and a sentence explaining why we should look into it.

A lot of them were places I had never heard of.

That thread was one of the first things that made me think the database could become something more useful if other people could contribute to it too.

We started looking into the suggestions

We saved the thread and started researching the places people mentioned.

Not everything could go on the map. Some places no longer existed. Some were impossible to identify from the description. There were duplicate suggestions, a few that we could not verify, and at least one recommendation for "hyperspace," which we appreciated but still have not figured out how to put a pin on.

But a surprising number of the suggestions were exactly the kind of places Strange Route was meant to document.

Afterglow Vista was one of my favorites.

A commenter mentioned a strange mausoleum hidden in the woods on San Juan Island in Washington. That sent us looking into what turned out to be the McMillin Memorial Mausoleum, where the family's remains were placed around a limestone table surrounded by stone chairs.

You reach it by walking through the cemetery outside Roche Harbor and continuing into the woods.

I had never heard of it before that Reddit comment.

It became Afterglow Vista on Strange Route.

Then there was Okunoshima.

Most people know the Japanese island because of the rabbits that live there, but its history is much stranger. The island was once home to a secret chemical weapons facility, and it was removed from Japanese maps while the program was operating. Remnants of the facility can still be seen today.

That suggestion became Okunoshima.

Another commenter sent us toward Druid Heights, a former bohemian community hidden in the woods above Muir Woods. Artists, musicians, writers, and other residents built an unusual collection of homes and structures there beginning in the 1950s. Much of what remains now sits on National Park Service land.

That became Druid Heights.

And then there were suggestions that led somewhere interesting but could not become Strange Route entries.

Some of the places were already gone

One commenter remembered a spiral staircase rising out of the sand below the bluffs near Pismo Beach.

It sounded perfect for the map.

We found photographs of it and confirmed that the commenter remembered it correctly. There really had been a steel spiral staircase sitting by itself on the beach, disconnected from anything around it.

Then we found out what happened to it.

The staircase was dismantled in November 2015 after concerns that the aging structure could collapse.

So that one never made it onto Strange Route. The place was real, but there is nothing left for someone to go see.

Another commenter remembered visiting a medieval ghost town somewhere in southwestern France.

The description was good. The problem was that they could not remember the name of the village.

We searched for it anyway.

We still have not figured out which one it was.

That suggestion remains in our research notes as, essentially, "medieval ghost town somewhere in southwestern France."

If the person who left that comment ever finds this, please tell us where you went. 😅

Fourteen places from the thread are now on Strange Route

So far, fourteen places suggested in that original r/HighStrangeness thread have made it onto the map:

There are others from the thread that we are still looking into.

Seeing those places go from someone's Reddit comment to an actual entry on the map is a big part of why Strange Route eventually stopped feeling like my personal travel database and started becoming a proper site.

The gold pins came from this

As Strange Route grew, I wanted there to be some way to distinguish places that came from other travelers rather than from our own research lists.

That is why community submissions are outlined in gold on the map.

The regular pin color still represents the type of place. The gold outline simply means that someone in the community pointed us toward it.

If you suggested one of the places from the original Reddit thread and it is now live, you can also claim your contribution. Create an account and send us your username through the contact page so we can connect the place to your profile.

It is a small thing, but I like being able to see which parts of the map exist because somebody took the time to say, "I've been somewhere strange. You should look into this."

There are probably thousands more

The original Reddit thread also changed how I think about finding places for Strange Route.

Some of the most interesting locations are not necessarily the ones that appear on every "10 Creepiest Places in America" list. They are places somebody knows because they live nearby, found them on a road trip, heard about them from someone else, or went looking for them years ago.

Those are much harder to find through a normal search.

And they are exactly what I want more of on Strange Route.

So we built a way for anyone to suggest a place.

You do not need to write a full history or prove that anything paranormal happened there. Just tell us:

What the place is called
Where it is
What makes it strange or interesting
Anything you experienced or know about it

If you have a useful source, send that too. If you took your own photos and are willing to let us use them, even better.

We will take it from there and do the research before anything is added to the map.

Help us find the next one

The suggestion form is open to anyone.

If there is a strange place near you that most people have never heard of, somewhere you found while traveling, or a place you still think about years after visiting it, send it our way.

That is how some of our favorite places ended up here in the first place.

If yours makes it onto Strange Route, look for the gold outline!

Also, please upload your photos and comment so we can continue to have the most up to date visuals and status for the locations.