These small town people from Ask Reddit have some horror stories to tell.

1. About a year after I graduated high school a local girl a couple years younger than me went missing. Turns out her boyfriend killed her for trying to break up with him and he buried her in his grandmother’s garden.

2. The ghost of the first priest of our local church was shot and killed by an arrow a (really long time ago) on his doorstep. He was buried where he fell and – until the church burnt down like 30 years ago – was seen commonly around the church on weddings, funerals and christenings held at the church.

3. There is a convicted cannibal in our town. Seriously. He killed his friend while drunk, then ate his jaw.

4. Guidance counselor stalked a student and tried to break into their house when they knew the student was home alone. Jail.

5. There’s a religious cult that makes up roughly 50% of the population of my town (~1200 people). Low-key some things have occurred. Excommunication is one of their primary methods of dealing with people who don’t follow their “laws”.

6. We had a dad who killed his wife and kids and then himself. The house was on the way to one of the big schools so everyone went past the police tape in the morning (and again in the afternoon). Wondered if they’d ever manage to sell it since anyone in town could tell you why it was for sale. Ended up selling it to someone who opened one of those Ayurveda / holistic practice type things in there, which always seems slightly ironic to me.

7. A girl hid her entire pregnancy, all while having her boyfriend at the time try to literally beat her into a miscarriage. She eventually gave birth in her bathroom, hid the baby in her closet then went and had dinner with her mom like nothing happened. She ended up killing the baby, putting it in a duffel bag with a bunch of stones and throwing it in a quarry.

8. Some lawyer’s wife went missing, there was a big search effort to find her including air force jets flying over the surrounding woods to find recently disturbed ground (indicating a possible burial). They couldn’t find her for days until finally a neighbor went to the media to point out the lawyer had remodeled the sitting area in his garden recently including pouring himself a nice big concrete slab right outside his back door the day before he reported his wife missing. Sure enough, they dug up that area and found her body. What was really stupid is the neighbor told this information to the police as soon as he heard the wife was missing, then again two days later, and they did nothing with it until he went to the press.

9. 5 students and a teacher committed suicide all within a week of each other. The youngest was 8 years old. All cases were unrelated and murders and suicides are very common in my town so our 5,000+ population keeps dropping.

10. Students were not supposed to leave campus for lunch. Some students were allowed to leave campus. They might be gone for some time.

It turned out they were going with one of the secretaries to the nearby National Guard armory, and were drinking and fucking some of the guardsman. These were 15-17 year old girls.

11. A professor from our small community college was shot and killed by his son with a crossbow. Also some high school wrestlers waterboarded another student, and all they got was a suspension from a wrestling match.

12. I wasn’t from there, but I was living in town when the Dee Dee Blancharde case happened: a woman with Munchausen’s by proxy medically abused her daughter to convince the community that the daughter had terminal everything. The daughter played along until her internet boyfriend came and butchered the mom. Gypsy Rose is apparently adjusting very well in prison.

13. An ex- friend of mine from high school beat his nonverbal autistic 5 year old son to death and hid the body. It will be a year next month and they still haven’t found his body.

14. We had a serial killer that murdered multiple women, and seemed to dump them in the country off 7 bridges road. He’s suspected of killing at least 10 women.

15. A pizzeria and a convenience store blew up about a year apart from one another in the 90s. No one charged but basically every local my age or over knows who did it.

16. When I was in grade school my best friend’s mom and her friend were murdered by allegedly her boyfriend but nobody ever found out because he dipped. Anyways, he ended up dumping the two women in a creek next to a road that my bus drove on to go to school. Needless to say the entire bus was traumatized and we didn’t make it to school that day.

17. The city I live in a husband and wife raped and murdered a bunch of people including some of their own kids, then buried them under the house.

18. At some church about a mile from my apartment back in the early 2000s there was an investigation because a kid came home from church camp missing the tip of her finger. Turns out the pastor (or whatever Baptist churches have) and his buddies were running a child sex ring/Satanic church in the basement of the church. By the time they caught all the guys involved the church had paid someone to keep it off the news channels but not the news papers.

They found blood stains on the floor, pentagrams cut into the hardwood floor, semen on the floor in another room. Local gossip said they found the words for Satanic chanting in a journal, a torn up Bible, and a Quaran with a book mark but of course the church leaders had that kind of talk stopped. 2 of the men were found guilty but not for child molestation (just for the finger tip missing) The others walked free and the church population dwindled.

19. Not in my current town, but the last town I lived in. Fella there killed two little girls, said God told him to do it. After a ludicrously short sentence (less than ten years for torture, rape and murder of two kids), he moved right back into his old home. He still lives there and lives an invisible, ghostly life. Everybody obviously knows his name but everyone acts like he isn’t standing right next to them. I used to work in the pharmacy, and the rule was to take his prescriptions out of the drawer and put them on the counter without actually acknowledging his physical presence. The coffee shop across the street knew his order and would just get it ready and he would put change on the counter. Sometimes I would see stuff like this happen and start to feel sad before I remembered he murdered two children.

20. Cheating husband came home to find out his wife knew. Fight ensued, he stabbed her and fled. She light the house of fire as she was dying with their three kids inside asleep. He then hung himself in jail after being arrested before his trial.

21. There’s a long, singular nature trail the runs through my town and several others. A few years ago, a 14 year old girl named April Millsap was stalked and beaten to death right off the trail. The man who was convicted keeps trying to appeal so it keeps it fresh in everyone’s minds.

22. Local boys raped and murdered a girl years ago and dumped her body in front of the high school. One of the boys was the sheriffs son. They managed to pay off the girls family and sweep it under the rug. Those boys are now prominent members of the town.

23. The police chiefs daughter caught her husband cheating on her. Took a gun, killed her 5 month old baby and herself.

They kept in well under wraps but it happened. Its this thing no one talks about but everyone knows happened.

24. A while back, a girl I graduated with wanted to break up with her boyfriend, and the boyfriend got pissed and killed her. He took her body, put it in a trunk, and drove the car out to a random spot in the city and left her there in the trunk. He got busted not too long after and is in jail.

25. There was a kid who murdered his grandmother down the street.

26. A guy who’d been convicted of pedophilia got out and went home. Half the neighborhood turned out to unwelcome him back. Trapped inside, he came up with an escape plan. He set his own house on fire (with himself inside) and called 911. There was a large heating oil tank attached to his house, and if it’d gone up it would’ve lit off the whole neighborhood. So he got quick emergency response to escort him out of the situation. But he wasn’t in good shape when they dragged him out.

27. Apparently there was a 9 hour shootout in my old home town yesterday.

28. Music teacher in my grade school molested several students, probably over the course of a few years. As I remember, students talked about it, but he remained our teacher for quite a while, and didn’t even get convicted until four or five years ago.

29. Lorraine Bobet cutting off her husbands penis and then throwing out the window while she fled, then the cops having to go look for the severed penis, found it in the field next to a 7-11. They then took it inside the 7-11 box put it in one of their Togo hotdog containers with ice!

30. Small neighborhood in Las Vegas Nevada. Serial pedophile gets jumped several times by angry/paranoid fathers. One day though, they plot to kill him late at night. They break into his house at like 3 am and start another fight. He got away with a broken arm and several cracked ribs. When asked by police, everybody clammed the fuck up.

31. The ice cream guy was a drug dealer on parole. Apparently you could get “extra toppings” if you knew how to ask. I thought people were pulling my leg, until he was arrested outside of a high school.

32. A mobster went missing after murdering a police chief in another state in 1980. He was suspected of returning to town at some point as his wife lived in the area, but despite finding his car at a nearby hotel the case went cold.

In 2017, the FBI threatened his wife’s son (his stepson) with jail time over questionably legal gambling machines, and managed to get her to spill the beans to protect her son. Her husband hid out in her suburban home in a “secret room” hidden behind a closet in the basement, until he died of natural causes in 1999. She then buried his body in her backyard. The FBI had her home under surveillance throughout the 1990s but never managed to get enough evidence for a search warrant.

The case was one of the first highlighted by America’s Most Wanted, and the guy was on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list for two decades.

33. I live in a town of about 700 in rural Oklahoma. We’ve got one restaurant in town and it went up in flames last weekend. At first, everyone was pretty sad and did everything they could to help out the family that owned the restaurant. But now there’s a rumor going around that the owners set the building on fire themselves to collect the insurance payout. It’ll be interesting to see how the story develops over the next few weeks.

34. There’s still an ‘ unsolved ‘ murder. The whole town and most of the next county knows who did it but no one will come forward. It was a terrible story- teenaged girl vanished while in plain sight. Seriously- from the middle of the town, in a place where you got a phone call because your 17 year old kid was walking down Main Street, what was he doing there? You couldn’t blow your nose there without 20 people reporting the next day they saw you do it. There’s only one genuine suspect- it really was kinda a done deal but….. no arrest.

It’s a weird, weird place anyway. 1/100th uber wealthy, the rest poverty level. This suspect was from the 1/100th of the population, the whole family owned half the town for generations. Suspect ‘ remains at large ‘ although comfortingly was mysteriously beaten up a few years ago. He’d walked into a bar and made a joke about the missing girl.

Case was on one of the TV shows asking for help solving it, there were billboards put up by her family for years and it’s still a major source of scandal. Dirty secret indeed.

35. Not exactly a small town, about 100,000 people, but one of the local high schools has an unusually high amount of sex offences.

About 8 years ago, a coach killed himself days after being questioned about whether he had an inappropriate relationship with a student.

About 2-3 years after that, a female teacher was arrested for having an explicit relationship with a student.

About 2 years after that, a wealthy man in the area was found running paying numerous high school girls from a few schools for sex, with at least one girl being from this school.

And just a few days ago, another teacher was arrested for possession of child porn.

This is all at one normal sized school (not the district, only the wealthy guy incident involved other schools) in less than ten years.

36. My mom’s hometown. The local gyno was sticking his dick in instead of the metal thingy and basically having a good ol’ time molesting unsuspecting women. Luckily my gma knew of the rumors about him and never took her daughters to see that doctor. Others were not so lucky.

37. There’s a girl from my town that was kidnapped and found 29 days later. Kidnapped by three men who did some horrible shit to her. Her mom has really tried to push it for publicity, and she is going to be on the Dr. Phil show soon. She goes to my high school, and she always looks so sad. The sad thing is because her parent is using her for publicity, she will never have a normal life without people knowing who she is. I feel so bad for her, she’s such a sweet girl who has gone through too much.

38. This happened literally on Monday. A car, a large truck and a motorcycle were involved. Motorcyclist was looking at his phone on a dual carriageway, crashed into the back of a truck, truck was so busy looking behind him that he hadn’t realized he was about to hit a taxi. It was a fucking disaster. 4 people were involved; 1 survived. The whole front half of the taxi was literally flattened. Nothing this major has happened in our town since we’ve been living here (almost 7 years). The whole motorway was obviously closed and we got home about 30 minutes late. There must have been about 25 police cars there, and even an air ambulance was there. I’ve never seen anything like it. People are still talking about it now. People who don’t even live in my town are talking about it.

39. One of the teachers that worked in my school invited young boys to sauna and raped them.

40. We have a man made lake, three dead bodies floated out of that bitch.