The weird and spooky stories told by people who explored the internet's hidden websites

The "Dark Web" is a hidden corner of the internet that is home to many things people want to keep in the shadows: drugs, counterfeits, stolen items, and so on.

But there are also far stranger elements.

A popular thread on Reddit once asked the simple question, "What's your Deep Web story?" In other words, the Reddit user was asking people to share any weird experiences they had encountered while using anonymous web services to access secret websites.

Services like Tor, which mask a user's identity and let them browse the internet anonymously, give access to a slew of websites better known as the Dark Web (or Deep Web). These sites won't work on a typical web browser like Google Chrome.

Silk Road is the prototypical example of a Dark Web site, a now-closed black market for goods, whose notorious founder is now in prison. Silk Road is closed, but what else is out there?

Here are some of the bizarre and creepy things you can stumble on when accessing the dark underbelly of the web, as told by the people who actually experienced them.

The post is based on a previous post by Cale Guthrie Weissman.