Why Abandoned Stairs Keep Appearing in Woods Randomly

You’re hiking in the wilderness, looking for a safe spot to set up camp, all you can hear are leaves and branches cracking under your footsteps... Some squirrels are running up a tree over there! But suddenly, something unexpected happens. You notice something weird in the distance in between the trees, it kinda looks like a concrete structure of some sort! Weird...

At this point, you’re at least 20 miles deep into the woods and there are no nearby towns or villages...as far as you know. So, you decide to go off the trail with your friends to get a closer look. But as you get nearer you realize that it’s actually a 12-foot-tall staircase, and it’s leading to... Nowhere? Hmm. What’s it doing there, in the middle of literally nowhere? And it doesn’t even lead to anything.

You put on your Sherlock Holmes cap and investigate. So...maybe there used to be an old house or mansion here that collapsed over the years and the only thing left is this staircase? But weirdly enough, after circling the bizarre structure you realize there’s no trace of any ruins or even foundations! It’s like someone just sliced a staircase off their house, cake style, and plopped it here, for no reason. Ok...

You and your friends aren’t really into getting a whole lot closer. Something feels wrong... the longer you look at this weird structure, the more you feel a super creepy presence... something tells you you should probably leave the area, as fast as possible. You can’t explain the feeling, or take your eyes off the creepy staircase. You take out your phone and snap some pictures.

Then, after a lot of hesitation, you take a few steps closer and notice that the stairs don’t seem to be all that ancient, a few decades old at best. There’s moss growing out from some cracks. Your friends have had enough. They ditch you and run off back to the trail, leaving you alone on the staircase. You put your foot carefully on the first step. Wham! Adrenaline rush.

As you ascend to the top, someone touches your shoulder. You jump and turn around. All you see is black. As weird as this sounds, discoveries of random staircases, illogically found in the woods, are surprisingly common! Some are made of wood, others of bricks or stones. Some look ancient while others...look like they were finished yesterday! The one thing they all have in common... they all lead to absolutely nowhere, and they’re all found in super-mysterious locations!

One of the most famous ones is in Chesterfield, New Hampshire. A long medieval looking staircase made of stones with roman arches in the middle of the woods. It’s believed to have been part of Madame Antoinette Sherri’s Castle. She was a big singer back in Paris. The castle dates back about 100 years... and it was later discovered again in 1962. This time, there was nothing but a staircase.

Another mysterious ancient staircase dates back to 9,000 years ago. It’s in a forest in Italy. It looks like a series of stairs that lead to a tiny platform at the top. Why go through all the trouble of building the thing if it leads to...nowhere? Well, some experts think it could have been some sort of ritual tower, but your guess is as good as theirs.

Some of the more modern staircases found in the woods also have an added bonus: they come with their own urban legends! Gee, would that be a two story or three story staircase? Ha ha. One of the most popular stories comes from the Philippines, where a forest ranger called Torkik allegedly went out on one of his routine patrols to look for missing people deep in the local jungle. That’s where he claims he found some seriously out of place stone staircases. They even had weird markings on them!

To get a better look at what was around him, he decided to climb up one of them. Just then, he was approached by a vicious stray dog, that forced him further up the stairs. A few hours later he came back to the village. Only thing was, he had been missing or 5 years! Was that staircase a time traveling portal? Hmmm.

Another account allegedly dates back to the 1940s, around the time of the Roswell UFO mystery. A man who claimed to be a disease scientist was sent to assist in investigating one of the many animal related cases that kept popping up. Little did he know, this 1 to 2 week investigation would end up lasting 6 months! His team encountered a random wooden staircase in the woods that seemed to emit some type of frequency. They camped around 100 feet [100 ft 30 m] from it that night, but the next morning...it vanished.

All that was left was a black burn mark where the staircase was! 2 days later, it reappeared out of nowhere, 160 feet [160 ft 48 m] from its original location! The team wanted to get a sample of the wood to send off to the lab. There was one problem. No matter how hard they tried, it was impossible to chip off a piece, the wood from the staircase was apparently indestructible!

These weird mystery-stairs have been around since ancient Cambodia. Right in the middle of the jungle, is an abandoned 2000-foot-long staircase leading to... yup, nowhere. According to experts, this staircase was built about a thousand years ago. They don’t know for sure, but they think it led to an ancient city. Sadly, over the years, that city is now completely covered by the dense jungle. Maybe it was an important meeting spot for travelers and merchants coming from all over the continent!

Well, back to your story. You feel a strange presence behind you. You turn around, probably one of your friends snuck up on you or something...but then you realize there was no one behind you, you’re the only one around. You freak out. Something is definitely wrong here, so you rush down the stairs, and bolt back to your friends, panting and startled.

You start to tell your friends what happened, but they don’t believe you. They think you’re just trying to scare them even more. But the emotion on your face... it looks legit. There’s real panic in your eyes, the kind you just can’t fake. Shadow or wind or whatever that thing was, your fear’s real.

You all agree that you should stay away from the stairs, and it’s probably best if you go back home. Right now. I guess camping out there overnight just wasn’t meant to be. As soon as you get home, you open your phone and check out your gallery. But... no you scroll through photo after photo. The staircase. It isn’t there!

None of the pictures have any staircases in them... Just a small flat clearing with nothing but trees around, no weird shadows, nothing. Your friends have the same experience. Your eye twitches and you look over your left shoulder... you’re in the safety of your own home, but you suddenly feel the same presence you felt on that staircase. Oh, no... Everything goes black.

But you can relax, most of these stories are just urban legends, told to give you the heebie-jeebies! (Which is a variant of the Cooties virus.) The internet has a way of spreading rumors, faster than the speed of light! Most of these stairs might’ve even been built on purpose, just recently. One weekend wood-shop project, a couple of photos, and you too could be a sensation on every urban legend website! Then you just tear it down, take a photo to show it magically disappeared, and just like that, you’re an internet super-star!

But let’s say you find some real stairs on your weekend camping trip... They’re most likely the remnants from an old house or a cabin that got demolished or just collapsed after it was abandoned. Hey, it’s 2021, there’s a logical explanation for just about everything these days! That presence you felt was most likely your own mind playing tricks on you.

When you see something in real life that looks like something you saw on a website or a scary movie, your mind starts to work overtime, and you can actually see something or feel something that’s not even there. That’s what some people say happens when you get hypnotized... you want to see something so bad... and you do. That’s probably what happened. Or was it...