Las Vegas Man Goes into the Tunnels. Then He Saw Something He Shouldn’t Have: ‘Don’t Leave Tools’

Exploring underground tunnels is not for the faint of heart, but some people have no choice but to head in. John, who worked in Southern Nevada, thought that his job was routine and boring. That was until one shift, when he saw something that looked “neither human nor animal” in the tunnels.

He told Ashlee (@ashleeinc) about his odd encounter in an unnamed dam near Colorado. John is a civil engineer, technician, and inspector. His job largely revolved around flood control infrastructure around Las Vegas, which is also why he worked with stormwater tunnels and drainage pipes. Because of this, he’s also acutely aware of the stories about people living in the drains of Las Vegas. John has also seen some of these campsites during one of his routine inspections.

Despite knowing about the area’s eerie reputation, John didn’t believe conspiracies or occult gatherings happening in the abandoned service tunnels. He brushed them off as “urban legends” that every city with a massive underground infrastructure has. The Backrooms is a genre that encapsulates the fear very well, but one unsettling encounter made John rethink his beliefs.

A random pile of metal in the tunnels

Working at an unnamed dam, John said that the drainage galleries of the area stretched to long, narrow tunnels that have pipes running along the ceilings and walls. While some sections of the tunnels were well-lit, John claimed that others looked like they were frozen in time—like they were stuck in the 1960s. During a routine inspection, John is expected to walk miles and miles of tunnels to check if there is water seeping.

He saw something he didn’t expect to. It was a pile of metal items—including a bent spoon, some metal rings, old coins, heavy bolts, and a pocket watch with a cracked face. At first, he thought another coworker must have been collecting the items to throw away.

John would later stumble into the same pile with the broken pocket watch. It moved to a different location. It would keep happening, and he would end up finding the pile in different places throughout the tunnel. Every time that he found it, the pile seemed to grow bigger. Later on, other inspectors like him would also report the same phenomenon—finding random piles of metal in low-traffic areas.

It happened so frequently that they’d joked that there was a “tunnel goblin” among them. Nevertheless, none of John’s coworkers ever admitted to owning the piles of metal, nor did any of them investigate it. But John finally caved in his curiosity upon finding footsteps near the pile.

Who was collecting the piles?

The floor in the area was muddy, and John saw tiny footprints that had five toes and a distinct heel. John said it looked human, but the footprints were only four inches long. He followed the tracks, and they stopped at an eight-inch trench that John said couldn’t fit anything larger than a rat.

He shined his flashlight, and there was nothing. When he called his supervisor to investigate the footprints, the man told him that it was merely raccoon tracks. John wasn’t convinced.

Some time passed, and John was doing his regular inspections. He turned a corner, and he saw what appeared to be the biggest pile of metal yet. The scrap was all arranged in a perfect circle. John called out to his coworkers, but none of them answered.

When he moved closer, he noticed that there was a narrow, three-foot gap in the walls. He shined his flashlight into the gap, and he saw something.

It was three feet high, pale, and had thin arms and an oversized head. John didn’t know what the creature was, but it must have been responsible for collecting the strange piles of metal in the tunnels. Then, it moved—scuffling quickly just as an insect would in a tight space. John heard scraping, and then silence. He tried to squeeze in to see where the creature had disappeared into, but there was only a dead end and an even smaller drainage pipe, which he assumed the creature could not fit into.

After 20 minutes of trying to find the creature, John gave up eventually and went back to the circular pile. Then, he noticed something old painted on the walls.

It reads, “Don’t leave tools.”

He asked one of his older coworkers, who’d been working there since the ’80s. The man told John that the words he found had been written on the wall even before he had started. He didn’t know why it was written, but the man said that tools used to disappear in that area without any explanation.

John left the job a few years ago, and he’d like to believe that there is a logical explanation for what he has seen. But John is struggling to convince himself. Whatever it was, John believes it couldn’t be human.

(featured image: Artem Makarov)

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