Private investigator or detective stories – May 2026

Follow-up comment by u/rsae_majoris:

Abandoned industrial site

Not disturbing but generally creepy.

I hired a PI for the work I do. We were trailing a man who we believed was committing fraud. His home address was a burned out trailer, so we had to find where the guy actually lived. PI follows him one day and ends up in this abandoned industrial site, but loses sight of the subject. Upon further research, the PI discovered that this land is in fact owned by the subject. So he went back, found a discrete spot to set up shop, and began more surveillance. PI is waiting and watching, when one day, a CLOWN emerges from one of the buildings on the property, gets in a vehicle and drives away.

Apparently, guy had multiple side hustles, including working as a clown doing face paint, etc. at local carnivals, all the while living on the property of an old abandoned industrial complex. I remember hearing all this and thinking “What in the Scooby Doo…”

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Follow-up comment by u/deleted:

Border town bar

We had a case years ago where two best friends ran a bar in a border town. One guy was a hard working, professional business person. The other was not, and was running drugs through the bar for the drug cartel.

The good guy discovered what his friend was up to, and confronted him. Next thing you know, good guy was found dead on his balcony with a gun in his hand but the scene appeared staged to look like a suicide.

The good guy's mom knew it wasn't a suicide and begged us to help her prove it. We sent a PI down there to do some digging, but my boss started receiving calls on his personal cell, warning us to back off.

We could not jeopardize the safety of our investigator so we turned everything we had over to the police, and withdrew from the case. I felt so bad for his mom, he was her only child.

No trespassing

The summers are fairly cold up here, but at least there's no snow. I'm sitting in my office, finishing up one of my previous cases. Just general reports left; lots of paperwork. Boring stuff that seems to cause the world to drown in a cacophony of summer insects.

The tedium is broken when my phone begins to ring. I pick it up, only to hear the voice of one of my closer PI friends on the other end. We chat casually for a few minutes, mostly just me trying to get my mind off of the writing pains in my wrist, but it's obvious that he's called for a reason.

He explains that he's been on a missing person case, a small boy around the age of four. His mother and father had divorced a few years ago, and his mother is currently holed up here, in my area. The boy has apparently been missing for quite a while now.

The police had been contacted first, but they turned up nothing. After a week passes with no sign of a missing person, you kind of have to start assuming the worst. Nevertheless, we're usually the last resort for these cases.

So my buddy goes asking around, and apparently he manages to dig up a couple of accounts saying that the kid was seen boarding an olive green SUV with a woman looking to be in her early thirties just hours before his disappearance was reported. Nobody thought to note the license plate. His dad, my friend tells me, had left his son home alone for a half-hour or so to run out for groceries. Why he didn't take his son along with him, I don't know.

At first, I thought it might be deliberate, like he had for some reason done it on purpose. Of course, the human brain works weird sometimes, and dumb little human errors are always possibilities. I can only imagine the grief that must be felt after realizing one of those tiny bursts of idiocy may have caused something so heart-wrenching.

Long story short, he matches the description of the woman--short, mid-30s, long brown hair, overall rather average looking--to a fair amount of other women. One sticks out, though: the boy's mother.

The child's father had been granted sole custody of the kid. Apparently the kid's mom had a little cabin out here which she would regularly visit and spend days worth of time in without alerting her husband, and whenever she was back home she'd either be asleep or out somewhere.

So my buddy says he wants to team up for this one, split the pay. He's in a slightly larger town, and the closest one to mine, but that's still a good five-hour drive. Since he still has a few leads over on his end, he wants me to check out the mother, see if anything comes of that. It appears to me at this point that the case is pretty cut and dry, so I accept.

He emails me the address and a picture of the kid and his mother, and I finish up my paperwork before setting off. I drive around, semi-lost for a few minutes before I finally catch sight of the gravel road that breaks through the wall of bark created by the forest's border. I glance down at my phone and sigh, placing it into my pocket. Guess it was stupid to expect this to be on Google Maps.

Now, I always despise having to go into the forest. As I begin to slowly pull down the path, towering green giants blotting out the sun overhead, I'm starting to regret taking this case. The gravel slowly turns to dirt, and the small break in the treeline slowly begins to disappear at my back. It's dim in here, dense pines doing a damn good job of casting an impenetrable veil of shade over the woods.

Now, don't get me wrong… The Canadian boreal forests (and this one is no exception) are absolutely stunningly beautiful. Birds chirp their cheerful tunes, small rock faces jut out from the land like mother nature's own sculptures, and streams of sparkling clear water babble across the rocks into cute little waterfalls, and occasionally picturesque lakes and rivers. But that's exactly why I hate these forests more than any other. More than anything, it always, without fail, seems like some horrible, spritely facade. Like the entire forest is attempting to scrape this movie set together in order to offset the constant gnawing that I feel at the back of my neck and in the very core of my stomach whenever I come in here.

The silhouette of a small building finally begins to come into view off on the horizon, so with a small sigh, I park my car and get out. As much as I'd love to stay cooped up in that metal haven of protection, I am here on a private investigation job. I do have to remain relatively covert. That's not happening if a car just suddenly pulls up onto the front lawn of your isolated cabin.

As I get a little closer I begin to notice that something is... Off about the trees.

I can't place exactly what it is, they just seem strange, somehow. The path eventually opens up into a small clearing, a makeshift wooden gate sitting at the end of the path. It's not stopping anybody as there're no walls on either side of it. Its only purpose seems to be presenting a tattered "no trespassing" sign.

Past the gate is the cabin. It looks to be in surprisingly good shape and from the outside appears rather modern. In front of it is a small patch of grass which acts as a parking space and a few areas in which it's been worn down by tires, the tracks leading right to the gate and the path I've just come down.

Slowly but surely my eyes drift up from the patch of grass to the car that's been parked in it, my heart suddenly beginning to dance around in a mixture of joy and dread.

Not surprisingly, it's an olive green SUV.

I pull my camera up to my face and peer through the viewfinder. The SUV. The license plate. I snap a picture of each.

Slowly but surely, the frame drifts over to the cabin. I snap a picture, and it's at this exact moment that I realize the front door has been wide open this entire time.

I go quiet on instinct, the surrounding area suddenly feeling like it's been hit with a blast of cold air.

Then I hear it.

A faint humming, coming from inside. Soft, like a woman's voice.

Once I hear it, I suddenly become unable to stop hearing it. It's a haunting, drifting tune, equal parts melodic and eerie. Every once in a while it stops or skips a little bit as if its source is running out of breath or having voice cracks.

Before I really even know it, I'm taking a step forward. I know it's a stupid idea, but my legs are moving faster than my mind. Just a little peek, I tell myself. Just one peek to satiate my curiosity. That's it.

The cabin looms over me as I get closer. The grass crunches under my feet until finally, just barely, the inside of the building begins to come into view. I stop dead in my tracks.

Branches.

It takes a moment to register, but there are tree branches covering the floor.

When I say covering, I mean covering. These are not sticks, they are long, spindly, thin tree branches, deliberately cut off of their trunks. Like a natural line, my gaze follows them to the single piece of furniture in the room.

A small, white coffee table and a CD player perched on top.

And I realize why the humming sounded like it was skipping.

The trees around me suddenly feel like they're closing in on every side, like the earth below my feet is trying to swallow me whole. I don't take another moment to sit and deliberate on it, I just book it out of there as fast as I can goddamn will myself. I launch towards my car, slam the door shut, put it into reverse and punch it out of there.

That place simply felt wrong.

The first thing I did was contact the police. I sure as hell was not going back there, but there was no way I just going to let it sit there like that. They investigated and were just as weirded out as I was, but ultimately didn't turn up anything of use.

The house was deserted, save for the sea of branches, the white coffee table, and the lone CD player. The SUV, too, was near pristine, not unlike a new car. Investigations continued for a while, but it was more or less a dead-end. Nobody ever returned to the cabin. My buddy's leads never panned out, either, and the child's mother suddenly went missing as well..

NO this isn’t a fucked up joke.. We never found any of them. In the end things, unfortunately had to be called off.

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