If Shaniko was a ghost town with a grin, Antelope is its evil twin, a town that doesn’t just look dead, it feels wrong. The moment we rolled in, the air tightened. Streets empty. Windows shuttered. Two people moved through town the entire time we were there, and they weren’t strolling, they were lurking.

We decided to stay the night anyway. Call it curiosity, call it madness. Antelope is the kind of place that dares you to linger, just to see if you’ll crack. The silence there isn’t peaceful, it’s predatory. It presses against your skin, crawls into your ears, makes every step echo like it doesn’t belong.

When the sun went down, the stillness turned heavier. It was as if the whole town was holding its breath, waiting. I couldn’t shake the sense that we weren’t just visitors, we were trespassers.

The next day, we followed a back road, thinking we’d trace the ghost of Rajneeshpuram, that cult empire of Rolls Royce and red-robed disciples. Instead, the dirt spat us out onto a ranch. Two ranchers rolled up, hard-eyed and suspicious, and that’s when the real unease sank its teeth in.

They talked. Maybe more than they should’ve. Stories about “cult-like activity” still bubbling up out here. About cattle mutilations. Ten head gone in two years. Carcasses torn apart, bones shattered with no explanation. They swore they’d found one corpse with every bone broken, like something had dropped it from the sky. Their words hung in the dust like a curse, and suddenly the hills around us felt alive, watching, waiting, carrying secrets no sane man would want to dig up.

We left the ranch with those stories rattling in our skulls and stumbled onto an old graveyard on the edge of town. The stones were cracked, names fading back into the dirt. But what hit hardest were the children. Too many of them. Row after row of tiny headstones from the 1800s. Standing there, I felt the mood shift, curiosity soured into grief, grief curdled into dread.

The heaviness of the place wrapped around me. It wasn’t just history; it was sorrow that hadn’t gone cold yet. I couldn’t breathe right. Couldn’t shake the feeling that we had no business being there, cameras or not. The graves didn’t want visitors. They wanted silence.

We left Antelope, but the weight clung to me. Shaniko’s ghosts had been playful, almost inviting. Antelope’s were sharper, eyes in the dark, whispers behind closed doors, grief that cuts into your bones. It wasn’t just haunted by the past. It was infected by it.

Driving out, the silence followed us, like the town itself was watching us go.

Antelope is a wound that never healed. And when you stand in it, you feel like it wants to pull you in too.