24 Super Sketch U.S. Cities We Rarely Hear About

What do you think of when you imagine "scary American city?" Chances are you are thinking of big name places like Detroit. But the truth is...

By PocketEpiphany

Published 5 months ago in Wow

What do you think of when you imagine a "scary American city?" Chances are you are thinking of big name places like Detroit.

But the truth is that America has countless sketchy cities that we never hear much about. And here are the absolute worst offenders.

1
I visited Denver, and while I quite enjoyed Denver proper & downtown, the motel I stayed at in Aurora (which is I guess a satellite town that got swallowed by Denver) was some shockingly sketchy stuff lol. Sign on the door telling guests to keep their rooms locked at all times. Signs of multiple previous break-ins. Cages on the windows and counters of the liquor store and gas station across the street. Rusty old cars with 20” chrome rims rolling around the block constantly. Good times

2
Lebanon, MO is currently investigating a guy who could be linked to the "Springfield 3" (3 missing women in the 90s) someone tipped off the FBI saying he is killing people and when they busted in he was laughing eating a human sandwich, and said he fed his neighbor ribs and so far they found 18 peoples remains around his property. Also after they started investigating the suspects house burnt down to nothing?? AFTER he and the trucker were arrested?!

3
Gary, Indiana. Used to have a prosperous steel economy, but now it's just home to abandoned buildings, failing infrastructure, and lots and lots of crime. Just look up pictures.
4
McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Industrial Town on a steep decline into heroin, poverty, gangs, and criminality.

5
Monroe, Louisiana. It's gotten the nickname gunroe, shootings every day, most of them unsolved, drugs galore, especially meth and crack, homeless everywhere, poverty is rampant, part of the city is an actual slum.
6
Huntington WV. It's less than affectionately known as little Detroit for a reason. I've been stuck in there exactly once to fix something on my car and watched 3 drug deals and a lady walk in tweaking out without any clothes on, into a dollar general in the span of 30 minutes.
7
Rolla, Missouri. A tiny college town, if you stray out of the downtown/campus area it gets real sketchy real quick. “Deliverance” meets “Breaking Bad”

8
Modesto, Ca Our logo is “Meth, Death and Auto Theft”
9
Waikiki, where the drug dealer who sold to the 'ladies of the evening' outside our hotel tried to sell to my 13-year-old sister.
10
Camden New Jersey. was in a group home traveling home for new years day. Had a 3 hr wait for my bus. at midnight shots fired. a 65-year-old woman was the first homicide of the year.

11
Maryvale, AZ. It’s a neighborhood/“urban village” of Phoenix. Used to be nice— my mom grew up there in the 70s— until they found a huge chemical waste dump that was raising cancer rates in the area through the roof. The “affluent households” (read: white people) fled in droves, and now Scaryvale is just… blighted. It’s not the kind of neighborhood you want to be in after dark. My grandma stayed in the neighborhood until her last few years, moved out when someone broke into her house on Thanksgiving. I get such a sense of sadness driving through it.
12
Española, New Mexico. Per capita heroin capital of the US
13
Stockton, CA There's also Fresno, CA Both are SKETCHY AF. You can EASILY tell when you hit the ghetto in both places, as suddenly there are bars on all the house windows

14
Myrtle Beach SC, promoted as a family-friendly beach destination, in reality, it lacks any meaningful infrastructure, is rife with poverty and drug addiction, teeming with S.A. and offenders, and is very familiar with murder and/or missing women and girls. Stay away from the outskirts especially.
15
Daytona Beach, FL. Imagine a bunch of alcoholic high school kids came for spring break in 1984, and never left, and never grew up.
16
Yakima, Washington. I lived in a neighboring town for a while and bodies would always turn up in farmers’ fields that cartel in Yakima had dropped off there.

17
Guntersville, Alabama. If I were to ballpark it, over 80% of the population are meth addicts and traffickers. I remember a story where a man walked into the Walmart, took all the supplies and equipment required to cook, and proceeded to cook meth in the bathroom.
18
Reading, PA. A run-down town that is mostly used as a central point to run drugs between New York and Philly.
19
Butte, Montana. Small town almost entirely comprised of violent meth heads

20
East St Louis, IL. Blocks and blocks and blocks of blight. Streets shut down bc there's no use for them anymore. Suburban poverty.
21
Saginaw, MI is one of the strangest cities in America because in the central part of the city near the water treatment plant and Oakley Street you have some of the worst, most dangerous, urban blight on the planet, literally the murder capital of the country at one point. But then you drive more than twenty minutes in any direction and you are in cornfields with no houses around for miles. I feel like most people think of Michigan they think of urban decay in areas like Detroit, Flint, or Saginaw, but most people don’t realize the vast majority of Michigan is fields, forests, and farms.
22
Coolidge, Arizona. More of a town than a city, but it's such a weird-a** place, bordering on Twilight Zone. You'll see a meth house right next to a youth theatre.

23
Topeka. They boiled a hippo to death.
24
Peoria, IL I hear all the time how back in the day the town was a hotspot for companies who were trying to find a market for their product and services. The town even has a slogan, if it plays in Peoria it plays anywhere, because of how diverse a market it used to be. Now it's just a couple of manufacturing companies and your standard slew of retail and small businesses, but what I think makes it Worthy of being here is the fact that with barely over 100,000 people in it, we are consistently in the top 10 cities in the US for murder and crime.