Red Dead Redemption 2 is a gorgeous open-world adventure that has hundreds of missions you can take on. The main missions alone can take hours to complete, but there are great side stories worth exploring because of the great world-building, voice acting, and narrative in each tale.
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When you have that many encounters waiting to be discovered, there are bound to be a few harrowing ones that get under your skin and get in the way of a hog-killin’ time. Here are some of the creepiest ones you can find in the Old West.
Updated June 24, 2023 By Ben Jessey: While Red Dead Redemption 2 isn't a horror game of any kind, it still contains the odd creepy moment. From unsettling characters to uncomfortable situations, there are plenty of things in the game to send a shiver down your spine.
For this list, we highlighted several missions that may creep you out. Yet, when looking back on it, we realized that we'd overlooked a few of the most unsettling. So, we added them in this update.
11 Money Lending And Other Sins 4
Most of the money-lending missions make you feel like a horrible person as you strong-arm vulnerable people into giving away the last of their money or belongings. But most of them aren't creepy missions. That is until you reach the fourth one, where you attempt to get cash from Winton Holmes.
He tries to pay his debt with the pelt of a rare cougar, but you have to help him acquire it first. This means heading into a dark cave where the cougar is living. Roaming around the place with the knowledge that a wild cat could jump you at any moment is unsettling.
10 A Bright Bouncing Boy
Most of A Bright Bouncing Boy is rather tame. To start with, you meet a professor and drive his boat around a little. Then you visit him in his workshop and assist him in powering up his robot that immediately falls apart. It's all pretty humorous and light-hearted by this point of the mission.
The tone changes when you visit him again, though, as all you find is his dead body in a pool of blood. His robot is the main suspect who is nowhere to be seen. You can find it on the other side of the map where it's crying for its "papa." It makes for a creepy moment.
9 Help A Brother Out
When you talk to Reverend Swanson, he will direct your attention to a monk speaking of strange happenings in Saint Denis. This monk is Brother Dorkins, a truly kind man that insists he is more of a penitent brother than a man of the cloth, who asks Arthur to help the poor.
More than just asking for a donation, he also asks that you free some slaves from the local fence. Here, you find two disheveled and clearly emaciated young men who only speak Spanish. Not only is the human trafficking aspect disturbing, it just feels even creepier to think that these operations have been upheld by a person you would have otherwise done business with.
8 The Mercies Of Knowledge
The Mercies of Knowledge doesn’t immediately feel chilling. You just do a bunch of fetching and fighting for an eccentric professor to help him create a “machine of love.” Things start looking grim when you learn that the professor is actually trying to invent the electric chair.
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Since his goal is to create a more “humane” alternative to hanging, the culmination of this questline is testing out his invention on one Wilson J. McDaniels. Sure, he’s a criminal, but you’re essentially torturing him as a guinea pig for science. The worst part is you watch it all go wrong as he slowly fries in extreme pain. The professor also ends up fatally electrocuting himself in the process.
7 Aberdeen Pig Farm
This questline isn’t actually marked as a Stranger mission. As is the nature of great open-world games, this is just one of many random encounters you can experience.
When you chance upon the Aberdeen Pig Farm, you are greeted by Bray and Tammy Aberdeen. They will invite you into their home, where you quickly realize the “couple” are actually siblings. They killed their parents because of their disapproval of the incestuous relationship, and now the two lure travelers to take their money and leave them for dead. Even worse, it is implied that they kill and cook some of their victims, and that is what they fed Arthur. And things can get worse for the protagonist if he is drugged.
6 The Saint Denis Vampire
The Saint Denis vampire serves as a creepy and well-hidden encounter. You trigger it by finding five pieces of strange writing around Saint Denis before meeting the beast in a dark alleyway at midnight. So, the whole set up is pretty unsettling.
Things get worse when you actually meet the blood-sucker, who is feasting on somebody at the time. You interrupt him, and it doesn't take long for the creature to get hostile. He may even run at you. Even if he doesn't, the whole interaction is creepy nonetheless.
5 A Fine Night For It
Once you’ve had a couple of encounters with the Night Folk, you may meet an old man at his camp asking for help. The Night Folk have taken his home, and he is unable to safely get rid of them.
The Night Folk are already creepy in general, stalking victims at night, committing extremely violent murders, and acting like terrifying zombies. When you agree to help the old trapper, you walk through the woods and get spooked by bats in the dark, fresh corpses tied to trees and thrown in the grass, and eventually the Night Folk themselves. The ominous clicks they make and how they barrel toward you can truly make you jump out of your seat.
4 The Ghost Of Bluewater Marsh
This encounter can start when Reverend Swanson mentions seeing the “ghost of a girl in white”, Although unmarked as an actual mission, you can witness this ghost yourself and even learn her entire story through multiple meetings. At first, you just hear a spectral voice of a woman lamenting over a lost lover. This alone can make the hair on your neck rise, especially because she directs these calls to you.
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Eventually, you can see her apparition in the Bluewater Marsh. You can continue to seek her out and learn how she had a lover she would meet here. He would leave her pregnant, get killed by her father, and cause the woman to lose her mind and commit suicide. If you listen to her whole tale, she tells you she knows you’ve been watching her and will beckon you to come to the tree where she hung herself.
3 American Dreams
A serial killer is on the loose, and you can find him by coming across one of his murders or being informed of his crimes by Sheriff Curtis Malloy. There are three locations where you can find his murders and the messages he leaves behind.
He leaves eerie messages like “look upon my works” and always dismembers his victims. The gruesome sights are upsetting enough, but you also have to seek out their heads to get the proper clue. Once you put all the pieces together, you will get a map of the killer’s hideout. His hideout is dark, full of trophies from his crimes, and essentially a collection of body parts displayed for his own twisted machinations. You eventually encounter the serial killer himself and serve some well-deserved justice, lest you become the next victim.
2 That’s Murfree Country
This mission is a major part of Red Dead Redemption 2’s progression. There are tons of impactful plot points in this chapter, but the spine-chilling nature of Murphy Brood Country cannot be looked past. You follow your targets on foot with Charles, and you must eventually decide whether to sneak into the cave where the Murphys are hiding, or try to flush them out with dynamite.
If you sneak, you must deal with the tension of navigating the dark caves without alerting them all. Throughout this whole time, you hear the screams of an imprisoned girl that has suffered their abuse. You can feel a pang of fear as they all rush at you with machetes, and it’s just as bad if you go the dynamite route and witness them go at a full sprint toward you.
1 Country Pursuits
Arthur needs to get a boat because Dutch says so, but the truly petrifying part of this mission is the Bull Gator. Of course, navigating gator-infested waters in the middle of the night that is intensely terrifying. You also lose the comfort of having a boat between you and the swamp, as you must wade through the water with just a torch in hand.
Thomas leads you but urges you to follow his movements carefully, only adding to the tension of this moment. You can’t even see anything because of how murky the swamp is. The water also gets chest-deep, so movement feels limited. You eventually see and hear a massive beast circling you. This leads to an escape sequence with Jules that quickly turns this adventure from creepy to heart-pounding.
Next: The Best Hidden Missions in Red Dead Redemption 2
