Nightmare Fuel / Red Dead Redemption 2

Moments pages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is a big, big place. The environment is so big and diverse that this game can be very disturbing at times.

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General

Animal and Environmental Encounters

• It must be noted that the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 lives on Paranoia Fuel and Nothing Is Scarier. The better hardware allows rendering more foliage than before... which also means that dangerous animals have more places to hide in. In the previous game, shallow water (such as the lake in Tall Trees) was your best way to avoid dangerous animals, as they could not follow you. Well, this game adds alligators to counter that. Besides, you may be attacked by a pack of three up to seven wolves randomly, have a cougar chase after your horse out of nowhere, be bitten by a snake that only shows itself once you're right next to it, or be put into a death roll by an alligator while traversing the bayou uncarefully.
• Getting mauled by a bear, cougar, or other wild animal is depicted much more realistically than in the previous game.
  • Bear attacks are particularly horrific, due to the fact that shooting them usually just makes them angrier.
  • Hunting panthers at night is pure Paranoia Fuel, particularly if you're in a wooded area. Picture it: The darkness. Heavy vegetation. You won't see or hear it until you're almost on top of it (except for the glow of its eyes in the darkness). Then, with a roar, it attacks.
• Want some Paranoia Fuel? You can get killed by lightning. Your current equipment doesn't seem to matter, so during any thunderstorm, you may get killed by a completely random lightning strike.
• Sometimes you can find a hunter looking for a bear. If you follow him he tries to shoot it. Only to be violently and horrifically mauled to death, screaming in agony the entire time.
• One that was found in the game files but not in the game itself. For a year, players spent countless hours trying to catch the legendary channel catfish, and it became a common belief it was a joke on the expense of the player (they were being catfished). Once the PC version came out, players found its model in the game files. It's clearly not meant to be in the game as it's obviously unfinished, but here it is! Players immediately went from "We want to catch this thing" to "Throw that monster back to the lowest levels of hell where it belongs".
• Similarly to the online animal drought mentioned below, glitching out of the map results in no animals spawning and/or animals that cannot move because their A.I doesn't work. Since some parts of the off-map area (especially Mexico, the area above Grizzlies East & Roanoke Ridge and some areas north of Colter)^note Their detail seems to be because they were originally explorable look almost as detailed as the main map, not seeing any wildlife results in the feeling of Nothing Is Scarier and Uncanny Valley. If you do encounter an animal in these areas, they'll never move, making it seem like the area is cursed or the game is telling you to stop.
• In the Tall Trees area of the map, you can find a hastily dug shallow mass grave filled with the bodies of people clad in athletic's uniforms, clearly slaughtered and then left to rot out here in the wilderness. Reading a newspaper called the Blackwater Ledger reveals an article about how the local Blackwater Athletics Club has mysteriously gone missing, and nobody knows why; whilst there has been some speculation of Indian involvement, the article refutes this by noting that there have been no tribes in the area known to have engaged in livestock theft or kidnapping for many years. It also notes that the Athletics Club was the strong local favorite to take top honors in the fencing, wrestling and baseball events at a competitive meet in the next month, leaving the player with the obvious implication being they were murdered by a rival team (or at least on said team's behalf).
• In the mission "A Really Big Bastard," Sadie and John are tasked to go after a Bounty Target hiding out in a ruined log cabin. Before calling out for the man, Sadie finds a body outside the cabin that has been HORRIFICALLY mutilated. His torso has multiple giant wounds in it, and his head has been graphically caved in and mutiliated, with an eyeball dangling out. When John and Sadie finally threaten the target out of the cabin, they are then jumped by the cause of this attack: a bear.
• Smaller but no less unpleasant encounter for the Online version: If you miss a shot while hunting and your quarry only gets wounded, it may run a while before falling over and crying in pain. There are three ways it can end: If you lose track of the animal, it probably just "heals" and respawns somewhere else. If you find it collapsed and give it a Mercy Kill, your honor stays steady. But if you actively chase after it just to watch it bleed out (or if you're barely too late to Mercy Kill it), you lose honor.

Combat and Violence

• Much like Scarface: The World Is Yours, the gore system is pretty detailed. Not only are there Ludicrous Gibs, but the gibs themselves can be shards of shattered bones with some flesh still stuck to them. And not only can Your Head A-Splode, but not all of it will come off most of the time. Oftentimes, a point-blank headshot with a shotgun will leave behind just part of the jawbone and a big flap of skin, as seen here.
• The game allows you to strangle people to death. In first person view. It's just as disturbing as it sounds.
• If you dismember someone anywhere but the head, they scream and writhe in pain on the ground until they bleed out. It's usually quick, but the screams are loud and knowing you caused that amount of pain on someone can almost be uncomfortable.
  • Do it on a female. It's ten times more blood-curling.
• The revamped hit detection system actually gives you plenty of places to inflict pain on your victims. You can shoot someone in the artery, which will cause them to spurt out a HUGE amount of blood from their wound. They'll run away leaving a blood trail, but will eventually collapse and die. You can also shoot people in the throat, which causes them to slowly choke on their blood until they perish.
• To make the above worse, if you kill someone and leave their corpse alone, you can watch their body realistically decay in real-time. The body will even be stiff from rigor mortis if you pick it up after a while.
• Seeing a firefight from the opposing side can be quite a Mook Horror Show. Imagine: you're part of a rival gang with your buddies hiding out in some abandoned farm. You see a lone man, seemingly unarmed riding toward you. Easy pickings, so you marshal up toward the entrance and land a few potshots. Then, the horror begins. The man ducks for cover and in a span of seconds, your buddies fall dead with bullet holes in their heads. You panic, reload and keep firing yet more and more of your buddies get killed by this cowboy with freakishly fast reflexes. Just when you think you've nailed him, he drinks from small flasks and is at full, roaring strength again. Eventually, you are huddled in a corner, the sole survivor of the massacre and you hear ominous footsteps creaking closer and closer...
  • And then he tackles you. Only then shooting you in the head. Or worse, strangling you to not waste a bullet.
• Some of the ambushes that can be sprung on you can really inspire paranoia. Imagine, you're headed out of St. Denis and back to camp and go through a covered bridge. Once you're nearly out, the Lemoyne Raiders block you in and start firing. Now, after this, try going through that bridge without a gun in your hands again.
• In "American Distillation", the surrounding moonshine stills can be used as an Improvised Weapon. If shot, it will emit a jet of steam which would knock down nearby enemies, making their head and limbs explode into Ludicrous Gibs.
• One sinister weapon is the poison throwing knife, made from oleander sage found in the swamp. When used in fighting, whether in close combat or ranging, a person hit by it will have a few seconds to either try to flee or struggle to stay up before dying.
• Just like in the first installment, it's still entirely possible to lasso people and drag them behind your horse, or tie them up on train tracks and watch them get crushed into pieces.
• If you shoot someone in the back, typically with a gun that doesn't immediately kill them, they'll fall to the ground, curl up, and bleed death in a puddle of blood. Even worse, they will gag, cough, and whimper as they slowly die.
• Think the damage from regular bullets is bad? Some rounds have explosive results. Then there's the fact that the dude with a shotgun, a repeater, a pistol, and a revolver, will have 200+ rounds for each type of gun.... and that's before getting into the special rounds. Dude could hold up in a hotel for a month if he wanted to.

Other

• Simply reading the various in-game descriptions of the various items can do this. For instance, in the description of the Mauser Pistol, a woman, who believes her husband to be a good and faithful man, has a knock on her door, and another man tells her that her husband was arrested due to some trouble at a house of ill-repute. Believing him to be a liar, and that he's intending to make her his, the woman shoots him. Makes one feel sorry for the poor chap that brought her the bad news.
• Go to those movies, and it's possible to see plenty of scary stories:
  • One is about a young man and woman, who go into the woods, only to get jumped by the ghosts of British Redcoats, with the man losing his head. When she tries to warn the townsfolk, one old man calls her a witch, and the crowd burns her at the stake. Don't go courting in the woods at night indeed. Listen to the ghostly whispers in Roanoke Ridge carefully and you will find that the story was Real After All.
  • Another involves Jeb Blackwater, who, at one point, turns a pair of bear cubs into sausages and makes their mother watch. He then murders a group of Indians, and marries the sole survivor: A twelve year old girl who he watched bathe in a river. Then there's the possum, that was his pet, that, when it died, was turned into a hat. Then he becomes a congressman. This is all portrayed in a heroic light.
  • Another involving a bear is told by Old Man Winter that the cold season would be extra harsh. So he eats. A lot. Some of what he eats, are those who were friends of his, disgusting the other animals, including the predators. Then, when winter finally hits, all but Bear die, and when Bear wakes up from hibernation, and sees all those bodies, he eats them.
    • Though at least Bear can say "now who's laughing".
• The Death of Molly O'Shea is equally parts tearjerker and terrifying. Arthur can tell she's drunk and acting out to get attention, and appears to succeed in talking Dutch down from killing her. Then Ms. Grimshaw shoots her dead with a shotgun. The worst part is, Grimshaw then proceeds to chastise Arthur about wanting to spare Molly, stating that 'she broke the rules'. It's a splash of cold, cold water on the face of the player, a grim reminder that this merry band of misfits you've been riding with are bad people.
  • Made even worse when you find out Micah was the one that ratted the gang out, and Molly really was just drunk talking for attention, making her death pointless.
• According to Roger Clark, Arthur's son Isaac was actually in the game at one point. He was going to be a baby that froze to death during Chapter 1. That's right, folks, you almost witnessed a goddamn baby freeze to death in a video game.
• Eavesdropping on some Enemy Chatter near a group of the Lemoyne Raiders can lead to the player overhearing an elderly raider telling the story of a battle they participated in during the Civil War. He mentions a cannon blast blowing him "as high as a house", blacking out upon landing, and waking up surrounded by smoke, thinking he was at the gates of Hell.
• The loot from random enemies includes things like rings, jewelry, watches, metal teeth, and ornate belt buckles. Did those belong to the jerks that attacked you, or to some other prior victims? Of course, if the player is the one going around murdering folk, then the horror is that you're the jerk robbing the dead of their possessions, and then selling them for money.
• The Fences will occasionally make interesting comments. "I'm sure the prior owner no longer needed it."

Gangs

Chelonian Cult

• While it's relatively tame compared to some of these, the Chelonians are scary in their own way. Mary is terrified of what they'll do to her brother, Jamie. You can read in the first New Haven newspaper that the locals don’t like them because they’ve been recruiting the young, fit men in the area. They've been having meetings at the church to try to figure out what to do about it. Jamie tells Arthur that he's given money to them. They preyed on him because he's got money and Daddy Issues and he almost shoots himself rather than go back. He also threatens to shoot Arthur. No telling how many Jamies out there are out there that weren't so lucky. You can find a man giving out pamphlets for them in Saint Denis and when you come back as John in the epilogue, he'll tell you there's an initiation with the new prophet. When you go back to the same location where you found Jamie, they all jump off the cliff. While cults are nothing new, especially not during the Old West, seeing such a blatant expy of the Epsilon Program outside its usual modern setting is also very jarring.

Murfree Brood

• Similar to The Skinner Brothers are the Murfree Brood, a demented, nightmarish family of inbred lunatics who are feared throughout Roanoke Ridge like they were banshees or trolls. We soon find out why. They rob and murder anyone that strays too far from civilization, and they're the lucky ones. The rest are dragged down into their cave hideouts, kept in cages and eventually eaten by the family. The worst part? They seem utterly unfazed by the absolute atrocity of what they're doing. If the Skinner Brothers are clones of Edmund Lowry Jr., these guys are clones of Randall Forrester.
  • It's also heavily implied they're worshiping some sort of Lovecraftian entity that's not referenced anywhere else in the story. How do we know this? Because they've made an idol of it out of human and animal parts all stitched together.
  • Fridge Horror: "That's Murfree's Country" involves saving a girl from this gang. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is that the girl is severely traumatized, which makes us ask: What has she seen? Why's she so horrified? Keep in mind, we are talking about a bunch of depraved hillbillies who practice cannibalism.
• There is a possible encounter at night where Arthur can meet a cart driven by two Murfrees and a woman screaming her lungs out in the back of the cart. If you save her she'll pretty much tell you Don't Ask, Just Run before doing so herself.
• If you venture into Roanoke Ridge before the main story directs you there, then your very first encounter with them will likely happen when you set up camp outdoors and two visibly deformed men appear out of nowhere to threaten you. Up to that point in the game, there have been no perils associated with sleeping outdoors, so seeing these weirdos sneak up on you at a moment when you assume you're safe is a big shock.
  • Although it's a bit of Nightmare Retardant if you choose to shoot them as they leave ^note Which, based on Youtube videos and comments, the vast majority of players choose to do, with Arthur calmly stating:
    Arthur: How about I camp where I want to?
• Their hideout, Beaver Hollow, is a cave filled with stolen goods, campsites and the horrifically mutilated bodies of their victims. One at the mouth of the cave serves as an introduction to the Murfrees, as one is standing over it eating parts of it. It's less of a headquarters and more of a vision of Hell itself.
• To top all that listed above, the music that plays during "That's Murfree's Country" is absolutely horrifying. That dissonant-sounding saxophone played by Colin Stetson, combined with the ominous ambience just sends chills through you, especially if you take the stealth option. Then once the action kicks in, it takes on a more desperate, almost frightened tone that lets you know that you've truly angered the Murfree, and that failure to end them is not an option.

Nite Folk

• Imagine you're riding down a road near Saint Denis when, off to the side, you happen to see a dead body hanging in a tree. That's... Odd. So you get off your horse, trudge through the mud, and go up to see if you can cut him down... When suddenly, three or four red icons appear on the minimap. You turn around and there's a group of men, painted in white, coated in mud, stalking towards you with knives. At first you might think they're zombies, an added supernatural element to the game... But no, they go down like any other man. Well, undeterred, you cut down the hanging man and, as par for the course, loot his body. On his person is a note, describing how if you're reading it, he's already dead, and that the "Nite Folk" have infested his dreams and are coming for him in real life. That's when you realize. Those people were the Night Folk. And there's more of them hiding out in the swamp.
  • Think you're safe from the Nite Folk if you cut down the body during the day? Think again.
• One particularly disturbing story involves a player running after their scared horse, only to find a Nite Folk holding the reins before their hidden pals ambush the player. They can plan.
  • Not only can they plan, but they're the only enemy faction in the game that will actively try to kill or critically injure your horse first instead of just going directly for you. Even during the most heated encounters with the O'Driscolls, the Lemoyne Raiders, bounty hunters, or the Pinkertons, they never try to shoot your horse out from underneath you.
• In another encounter you can hear a woman sobbing a little way off the path in the swamp. Approach her and she'll continue to cry, until you're right next to her; then she shrieks like a demon and stabs Arthur so hard it almost kills him outright and five more of the Nite Folk pop out of nowhere to finish the job.
• There are some reports^note Links in the post contain epilogue spoilers of Nite Folk having some kind of unseen attack animal with an inhuman scream, and has been compared to a rake. Worse yet, it may be invisible on the minimap. Fortunately, there's a good chance that the sightings of a humanoid monster are merely just Nite Folk themselves, but if it actually exists...

Skinner Brothers

• Every single aspect about the Skinner Brothers is Nightmare Fuel dialed way past eleven. Their favorite hobby is torturing and mutilating any enemy or innocent person that crosses their path. They also like to scalping them or roasting them to death over an open fire, For the Evulz. They are basically Mufree Brood 2.0.
  • Heck, they are scary even when they are casually speaking. If you hear them speak, you will notice that even their conversations are weird and disturbingly bizarre.
  • The way they charge towards you with machetes and hatchets is quite unnerving, considering you've had a whole game of people avoiding that kind of stupidity.
  • Some comparison has been made to Edmund Lowry Jr., the Ax-Crazy Serial Killer. Much like him, the Skinners know what they're doing is wrong, that it terrifies the local towns and cities, and that no sane person would be able to comprehend doing it. That is exactly why they're doing it. Just imagine if there were clones of Edmund Lowry Jr. scattered around the forests doing God-knows-what. That's exactly what this gang is.
  • In the Playable Epilogue, John and Charles have to go rescue Uncle, who's been kidnapped and being tortured by the Skinners. When you find him, he's bleeding from two wounds on his chest and his entire back is a horrifying shade of red from burns and similar treatment. In fact, if you look closely at the torture device he's strapped into, you can see a lit fire under him, implying that they were slowly roasting him like some sort of animal. It's hard not to feel bad for the poor guy at all the pained sounds he makes while you're escorting him back to the ranch.
  • And when Charles and John are riding to save Uncle, Charles very grimly and frankly tells John that, depending on how bad of a state he's in, it might be more merciful to just put him out of his misery once they find him, saying that if they've taken his scalp he'll live only for a week. Simple, yet chilling.
  • Not long after your first encounter with the Skinners as you ride towards Blackwater, there's a chance you'll pass by a slowly moving wagon on the road between Blackwater and Beecher's Hope. It's easy to pass right by it without realizing what you're seeing, but attentive players might notice that it's being driven by two slumped-over corpses and is absolutely riddled with arrows.
    • Similarly, you can also see a lone horse carrying the corpse of its rider with his back full of arrows.
  • There's another encounter in the epilogue where John will find the aftermath of a camp the Skinners have attacked. The place is littered with bodies, some riddled with arrows and others horribly burned. However, one man is still alive. Except he's been scalped, disfigured, has an arrow on his chest, and is covered in blood. He talks about the awful screams of his fellow campmates and John can choose to give some word of comfort to him as he slowly dies.
    They came... in the night... like jackals from hell... The screams! Something awful...
  • Finally, if John camps out in their territory, they can sneak into his camp. If they do, one of them immediately puts a knife to John's throat while the other aims a gun at him, and they both begin to joke about whether or not to kill John.

Individuals (van der Linde gang)

Arthur Morgan

• Tuberculosis. For those who don’t know, it’s a disease that basically infects the lung tissues and robs it of the needed oxygen. As the body tries to fight it, scarring in the lungs occur and the victim gets to enjoy a slow death of fatigue, coughing (with blood) before they finally die of asphyxiation. This illness is spread through the air, meaning if you’re coughed on or sneezed at by someone who has it...you have it. And there is no cure. You will die. This was a deadly reality for everyone living in the time this game is set in — that person with a cough? Better hope they don’t cough on you...
  • It's worse if you have had/currently have tuberculosis or another disease that affects your breathing, like Pneumonia, Asthma or something more severe like HIV/AIDS, cystic/pulmonary fibrosis or, most recently, COVID-19. Watching Arthur struggle to breathe in later chapters may hit pretty close to home.
  • If you think death by tuberculosis is bad, the deaths in the Low Honor endings are horrifying. Seriously, watching Arthur get either shot in the head with a gunshot (if you go with John) or knifed to death In the Back in a frenzy by Micah Bell while crawling away (if you go for Dutch's money) is so downright painful (and getting knifed a bit and wounded if you went for the loot in High Honor mode is a little less painful but still doesn't help matters a bit)! Suddenly these death scenes kinda make the aforementioned "death by tuberculosis" scene in High Honor mode seem a lot tamer (and a little more heartwarming and peaceful) in comparison.
• Arthur beating up Tommy. Completely averting Tap on the Head, Tommy is hit so badly that he's left an incoherent, lethargic hulk with a dented skull and brain damage, the complete opposite of his former belligerent and rowdy self. And that's considering that the fight stopped when it did; though Arthur offers an excuse that he didn't want to kill a man next to a crowd of witnesses when Bill brings it up, it really seems like he was going to commit manslaughter, and only Mr. Downes intervening saved Tommy's life.
• If you choose to kill Anthony Foreman, Arthur will ruthlessly stab him in the stomach and growl out "Can't take no chances with the likes of you." and coldly toss him to the ground. Though he absolutely deserves it, he's completely helpless as his hands are tied, and it puts all the other people you may or may not have Arthur kill into perspective. Just imagine those cold blue eyes staring at you as he strangles/stabs/beats/shoots you to death, possibly for no reason.
• Arthur getting physical with Strauss's debtors can be a very sudden and disturbing reminder of the violence that lives inside him and is visited on anyone deemed an enemy of the Van der Linde Gang. The player is able to spend hours after hours in the early game earning High Honor and making him the nicest guy around: helping with chores, greeting everyone he meets, aiding random people on the road, giving money to charity. And then, just because they took a loan from some random moneylender that most of them now aren't able to pay, the Gang's enemies suddenly include a Polish immigrant that barely speaks English, an irresponsible young farmhand, a maid with an abusive leech of a boyfriend, and a terminally ill Good Samaritan rancher trying to provide for his family despite his sickness... and Arthur comes down on them mercilessly like the wrath of God, even beating Thomas Downes so badly that he either dies from his injuries or can't find the strength to fight his TB any longer. This is a very different man, the man Mary is afraid of, that's wrestling with a giant — and even though the giant may lose one battle when Strauss is kicked out of the gang, Arthur's brutality still sends him to an early grave.
• Combined with Moment of Awesome: If you choose to "Go for the loot" in the final mission, after Arthur parts ways with John and hands over his hat and satchel, Arthur himself becomes the Nightmare Fuel when he starts making his way back to the camp that is becoming engulfed in flames, making a Badass Boast (as if he were Not Afraid to Die) and fighting off the Pinkertons while an aggressive 1980s hip-hop-esque beat version of "Unshaken", called "Mountain Finale", plays in the background (at least in High Honor mode).
  Arthur: [muttering under his breath] Dutch... Micah... COME AND GET ME, YOU BASTARDS!!!
• Even on the least bloodthirsty playthrough, with no Stranger missions undertaken, Arthur's kill count easily adds up to over a 1000. That's the minimal carnage that can be caused in the game.

Charles Smith

• Charles is one of the kindest and most stoic members of the gang, but when you go on a bison hunting trip with him and come across several bison that have been slaughtered and left to rot he goes ballistic. When he confronts the men responsible he shoots one down without batting an eye all while screaming in an almost feral tone of voice that's rarely ever heard outside of this event. When Arthur has to choose what to do with the other person Charles says in an uncharacteristically dark tone "Just kill him, Arthur!" Beware the Nice Ones indeed.

Dutch van der Linde

• At one point in camp, Dutch will call out to Arthur and tells him Dutch expects Arthur to betray him. Dutch's tone is cold and distant and downright hostile for a moment. If you calm the situation, Arthur asks Dutch gently with a touch of genuine hurt what that was all about. Dutch shakes himself out of it and seems genuinely taken aback, not sure exactly what came over him. This foreshadowing of Dutch's eventual madness comes out of nowhere, especially if you've been doing chores and working hard to support the gang.
  • This by the way can happen in Chapter 2, at the Horseshoe Overlook campsite!
• The whole scene of Dutch drowning Angelo Bronte to death. It's a very disturbing scene, because at that precise moment we can finally see some of the insanity that he is going to show in the future.
  Dutch: Hey, big man. We gonna ransom you or what?
  Bronte: You're pathetic.
  Dutch: Oh, I am? Cause' from where I'm sitting... you're the one deserving of pity, my friend. All your men, all your money, it weren't no match for a bunch of bumpkins.
  Bronte: You are nothing. You do nothing. You mean nothing. You stand for nothing. Me? I run a city, and when the law catch up to you, you will die like NOTHING. I am this country. You... you are what people are running from.
  Dutch: I possess things that you will never understand.
  Bronte: You don't even possess your own men. A thousand dollars to the man who kills him, and sets me free.
  (The gang is shown unaffected by Bronte's bribe)
  Dutch: What are you gonna say now?
  Bronte: They are even bigger fools than you.
  Dutch: No doubt.
  Bronte: The law will find you, already the dogs are on their way-
  Dutch: Oh yeah. Oh, you're right. You are so RIGHT. They are good at smelling filth, huh?! So filth has got to be DISPOSED OF! (forces Bronte's head into the water) Your friends, the Pinkertons, gonna come and RESCUE YOU?! (pulls Bronte out) You repulsive little MAGGOT?! (throws Bronte's head back into the water) CALL THEM NOW! YOU CALL THEM! (Dutch continues to drown Bronte until he is unable to breathe. After that, he throws Bronte into the water, letting the alligator eat his corpse.)
  • Perhaps the most chilling thing is how Dutch's emotional state changes at that moment, throwing a spontaneous tantrum and drowning Bronte without mercy. It's just a reminder of what Dutch is capable of doing when he is truly angry. What's worse about it is that he attempts to justify it.
    John: Jesus! What part of your philosophy books cover... feeding a feller... to a goddamn alligator, Dutch?!
    Dutch: The part that covers... weakness... that part.
    John: I don't know.
    Dutch: Well, I do. It ain't nice, I know it... but it is US, or HIM. I figure it might as well be him.
• While not shown, the fact during the Blackwater incident Dutch apparently shot a woman in the face for no reason (at least non that's explained.). And whenever Arthur brings it up, everyone (sans Hosea, who was with Arthur during it and knows about as much as he, and by proxy the player, does) give vague answers before quickly changing the topic.
• During one of the Guarma missions, Dutch has an old woman guiding him through the caves pull a knife on him and demand more money. Without hesitation, he disarms her, but rather than stop there, he slams her into the wall and chokes her to death. Afterwards, when Arthur calls him out on it, he's completely nonchalant that he just strangled an old woman.
• To initiate the mission "That's Murfree Country" and exit Chapter 5, Arthur must approach Dutch on the deck in Lakay playing a chess game with himself. That is not a euphemism. It's utterly chilling to listen to, as he will do this in an endless loop until the player has Arthur speak to him, and as seen in the linked video, a bug will sometimes cause him to still be in his disheveled appearance after returning from Guarma, which makes him look like he's completely and utterly lost it (which by this point in the story, of course, he has). As a bonus that is either a bit of levity or makes it ten times creepier, the move he's describing is an opening gambit called the Dutch defense, which is used to protect one's king piece.
• By the time of "Our Best Selves", Dutch's mental and moral degradation has already reached a new low, and he's becoming a senselessly paranoid, raging madman who no longer holds onto his ideals as anything but an excuse to wage violent war on anything he considers part of civilization; Arthur, meanwhile, is succumbing to his illness, fully disillusioned with Dutch's goals and leadership, and barely managed to escape Cornwall Kerosene & Tar, knowing that Dutch abandoned him to die rather than rescue him. When they finally clash on whether John (who Dutch has shown he doesn't care about, either) should leave the gang, for the safety of his family, Arthur puts his foot down. At that moment, Dutch sounds like he's just a hair's breadth away from killing the closest thing he has to an adoptive son — not even because he needs or wants Marston to stay, but because Arthur was directly insubordinate.
  Arthur: Hell, I ain't got much to lose, but... y' gotta do what's right and cut some loose. John, and his family, I — I'm afraid I have to insist, I mean, we gotta let 'em go! 'Cause if the Pinkertons come through again, they will kill everyone.
  Dutch: [Dreamily, in disbelief] ...John? [Voice drops to a low and dangerous tone] Insist?
  Arthur: ...Yeah. Insist.
  [A beat; Dutch takes a breath and speaks again in a strained, almost childish innocent voice]
  Dutch: A' course, pal... whatever you... th-think is best, I will... see to it. Now, we gonna rob a train?
  Arthur: [Quietly and deliberately] Sure.
  Dutch: We will survive. We will flourish. We have work to do, my friends, let's go! Come on, we are gonna borrow a little money from old Uncle Sam, and be out of his hair, once and for all. [Seething; under his breath] He insists upon it... insists...

Kieran Duffy

• Early on in the game, poor Kieran gets tied up, left there for several days without food and water, and very nearly gets castrated on Dutch's orders on suspicion of being an O'Driscoll. Even if only in jest, Bill is very eager to wield a pair of red-hot gelding tongs.
• Kieran's death is quite possibly the most disturbing scene in the game. After being absent from the camp for a few days, he rides back to the camp... carrying his own severed head on his lap. With the eyes gouged out. And knowing Colm O'Driscoll, the eyes probably went first. While many of the deaths are shocking, the sheer brutality present in this one is chilling.
  • During the party, he's encouraged to finally loosen up, have a drink, and enjoy himself. For once, he does. And because of that innocent lapse, the O'Driscoll Boys silently ambush him in the night off-screen and drag him off to be tortured, and there's not a thing you can do to stop it.
  • Kieran's death is not only depraved even by O'Driscoll standards, but symbolic. Like the martyrdom of Saint Denis himself◊, he has his head cradled in his hands as he makes a final journey to the place of his own burial, sending a clear message to the entire Van der Linde Gang — "you shouldn't have come here, and you're going to die".

Micah Bell

• Let's be honest: everything. He's Ax-Crazy, sociopathic, and unpleasant whenever you interact with him. He is practically a mix between Trevor Philips and Michael DeSanta without redeeming features and not Played for Laughs.
  • To add more horror to his awful personality, a newspaper excerpt from 1877 documents a crime committed by a 17 year old Micah and his father. They committed a double homicide, then hung the bodies from the rafters with their throats slit For the Evulz. There's no doubt he was an Enfant Terrible too.
  • He also is heavily implied to have killed the camp’s dog and even tells little Jack that the dog is not coming back.
  • His own brother is so scared of what he’ll do to his family, that he says he will kill Micah himself if he comes within fifty miles of them.
  • Late in the game, Jack can tell Arthur that Micah offered to take him fishing, and Arthur tells him to stay away from Micah no matter what. The idea of a little boy spending time alone with someone like Micah is just chilling, especially since we find out in the epilogue that he killed a little girl and is more than willing to find Abigail and Jack and "pay them a visit" once he's through with John.
  • He can tell Bill and Arthur that he slept with Jenny at the camp in Blackwater. She’s not around to tell her side of the story but one must wonder how consensual it was if it actually happened, especially since he previously had complained that the women in the camp wouldn't sleep with him even if threatened at gunpoint—which implied that he'd tried.
  • Micah's behavior after finding Sadie Adler — who's already been widowed, held hostage, and, implicitly, raped by the O'Driscolls — in the cellar is the first real indicator in the game of what kind of man he is: instead of staying still and calmly trying to reassure this traumatized woman that she's safe, he's laughing and chasing her around the table, getting a sick thrill from how afraid she is. There's a good chance that he knew she wasn't an O'Driscoll, despite what he claimed, and if Arthur or Dutch hadn't been around, a possibility that he would've raped or killed her as well.

Sean MacGuire

• If Arthur doesn't do it for him, Sean will coldly stab and kill the Gray guard that he befriended earlier.
• Sean's death. It's a complete Jump Scare, because the poor fellow is talking completely casually one second and then, right at the other, his head is suddenly blown open by a rifle shot, with blood and brains scattering everywhere. It stuns you completely because of how sudden and gruesome it is.

Sadie Adler

• After grieving in Chapters 1 & 2, Sadie adapts frighteningly well to the outlaw life, and is even colder towards murder than most of the men. If the gang remained stable a little longer and Arthur and the Marstons weren’t there to keep her grounded, Sadie would likely have turned out as bad as Micah.
• On a simple grocery trip, Sadie pulls out a gun and prepares to murder the shopkeeper before Arthur scolds her.
• Sadie’s battle cries while fighting the Lemoyne Raiders (“The only one paying a goddamn toll is you sons of bitches!”) and Pinkertons (“We’ll kill every last one of ya!”).
• In the final mission, Sadie, Charles and John track down Cleet up in Strawberry. After beating him up, they drag him to the gallows and put a noose around his neck. Even after he tells them Micah’s location, Sadie orders John to hang him, and if he refuses, shoots him himself. After seemingly being a Reasonable Authority Figure for most of the Epilogue, seeing Sadie act so cruel is jarring.

Individuals (other)

Blind Man Cassidy

• Stop and speak to him enough times, and you may unlock one hell of a disturbing prophecy:
  Prophet: Two strangers seek thee. One from this world... perhaps one from another... One brings hatred... I'm not so sure what the other brings.
  • Considering that this prophecy is for John, the two are likely Edgar Ross and the Strange Man, and it just adds more creepiness to the Strange Man. Even a prophet who knows events 4 years away has no clue what the Strange Man wants from John.

Catherine Braithwaite

• Catherine being dragged out of the mansion by the Van Der Linde gang as revenge for kidnapping Jack Marston, kicking and screaming like an upset child as they set the building ablaze. When the gang finally lets her go, she calmly staggers back into the inferno, laughing like a maniac.
  • You can find her immolated body in the ruined manor afterwards. It is NOT a pretty sight, and is much more gruesome than the usual burned bodies you see when using fire bottles.

Colm O'Driscoll

• Heck, Colm O'Driscoll is made of this. Unlike Dutch, who at least has standards, moral codes, cares about his gang and is a charismatic leader, Colm is the exact opposite: he is a terrible leader, has no standards and is a psychopathic man who could willingly commit Rape, Pillage, and Burn.
• On the day of his hanging, attended by the van der Linde gang, Colm laughs off the charges against him, insisting that his boys will arrive to save him, like they've always done. When he gets Bound and Gagged, and seconds pass, he starts realizing that his boys won't be there this time, and in a panic, he looks around for any sign of rescue, only to see Arthur (the survivor he had tortured weeks earlier) give off a smug grin and a handwave goodbye, as if to say, "See ya!" In his final moments, Colm has become completely terrified at the thought that he will eventually die, suffering a Villainous Breakdown. It's hard not to be grinning when his smug, sleazy, psycho exterior is shattered by the impending realization that he is going to hang, and Arthur's the reason why. We wouldn't want to be in Colm's shoes now.
  • Sadie slitting the throat of one of Colm's men, in broad daylight, in front of a crowd, screaming "DIE!" the entire time.
• Watching Colm viciously pistol-whip Arthur, who he has chained by his ankles from the ceiling like a deer carcass. Keep in mind this is the first time we've seen Arthur not only completely helpless but exhausted, injured, and in pain. Not to mention certain disturbing implications about why he felt the need to strip Arthur down to his union suit...
  • In fact, the whole mission Blessed Are the Peacemakers is pure nightmare fuel. First he's knocked out by an O'Driscoll while acting as a sniper for Dutch. The next time we see him, he's at an O'Driscoll camp, conscious, but so out of it that his escape attempt ends within seconds when one of the O'Driscolls shoots him. Then, after being strung up in a dark cellar and tortured by Colm for what seems to be weeks, he's forced to sterilize the gaping, infected gunshot wound with a heated up metal file, putting some gunpowder into the wound and then has to jam a lit candle into the wound to cauterize it. Brrr...

Dying Man

• One of the Stranger random events has you find a man with a heavily damaged arm. It’s visibly bleeding and infected, and the poor guy can barely stand. You can offer to take him to the nearby city of St. Denis, and in doing so bring him to the local doctor. If you get him there in time, the doctor manages to stabilize him- but unfortunately his arm has to be amputated due to the infection. The doctor knocks him out, and the player is free to watch him saw off the poor man's arm in real time, averting Gory Discretion Shot as hard as the game possibly can. Even with the game’s usual gore in pitched gunfights, the fact that the game allows you to view this is just a reminder of how far we’ve come in terms of medicine and healing.

  • Topping all of it off, returning to Saint Denis at a later date, you may see this man being hanged for murdering a woman, with his final words expressing no remorse whatsoever. Arthur can comment to the police officers overseeing the hanging about his shock at seeing this, with the officers expressing sympathy.

Edmund Lowry Jr.

• You can stumble across three of a serial killer's crime scenes, gory messes that all have a headless torso hanging from a tree, rock, or underpass, and the eyeless head not too far away with a note shoved in its mouth. Collecting all three will let you unlock the cellar to an otherwise burned-down house, where you will find the killer's lair, full of bloody and decaying body parts. Press through it to a somewhat hidden room in the back that is nearly pitch black and you will be prompted to examine a knife holding a mutilated body to the wall. Doing this will bring you face-to-face with the killer himself, and he captures and nearly kills you before you drag him to the sheriff.
  • Edmund calmly identifies himself as he is walked into his cell...before he spins around and lunges at the sheriff while jabbering like a rabid animal. If you're able to shoot Edmund before he kills him, the sheriff just throws you the bounty, visibly shaken, and demands that you leave immediately.
  • If you read the articles in his lair in chronological order, you discover that Edmund's murders were more quick and "clean", gradually upping his game until starts outright tearing his prey apart.

Giaguaro

• Upon finally clearing level 9 of the Master Hunter challenges, you are given your final task to earn level 10 and unlock the special holster: Hunt a legendary panther named Giaguaro. He's as swift, dangerous, and stealthy as a typical cougar or panther, and what's worse, you hunt him in an area just full of thick foliage, all the better for him to hide in. The other legendary animals, you find them. Giaguaro finds you.

Miriam Wegner

• There is a house in Emerald Ranch in which you can see a girl in the window. Players first believed she was some sort of ghost, but later found out she's part of a much deeper story that's entirely optional for the player to go into and investigate, going into several characters, including abusive guardians and a boyfriend being shot to death in a saloon.

Professor Bell

• The "professor's" attempt at creating a more humane method of execution, the Electric Chair. While the mission to find the test subject is funny, the actual execution is anything but, with the chair malfunctioning and the prisoner screaming in pain, reminiscent of a milder version of the botched electric chair death in The Green Mile.

Rhodes Gunsmith

• In Rhodes, you find out that The Gunsmith is keeping a prisoner in the basement: a teenage boy dressed in a child's sailor suit. Investigation leads you to find the gunsmith is a deranged, bereaved father. He chained up the boy in his basement as a replacement for his (much younger) dead son, and is treating him like a six year old. The implications of all of this are chilling, and the prisoner is scared out of his mind. If you don't rescue him, he'll be found dead two days later.

Sam Freeman

• The sheriff from Tumbleweed, Freeman. You first encounter him by watching the man execute a tied up Del Lobo gang member right in front of his deputy and the entire town. He, then, coldly invites you into his office where he offers you a bounty. The bounty must be brought alive to be executed in front of the entire town by the sheriff himself, since he has lost his mind to power and wants to be the ultimate authority. You're essentially bringing a bounty target to a serial killer with a badge.
  • The next day, you'll see him in the middle of town, spouting about how Tumbleweed is a place of rules, at the end of the civilized world and that if someone's not with him, he's against him. He then looks directly at you and asks if he was clear, twice, all while holding that gun over his shoulder.
  • He is also the only black lawman in the entire game. Considering the... uncharitable attitude towards African Americans at the time and the sheer anarchy that runs rampant through New Austin, it's entirely possible that the combination of racial adversity, lawlessness and an obsession with law and order has driven Freeman to the very brink of madness.
  • Of course, given the story events of Online, wherein among other things, he was almost a victim of a gang of vicious outlaws, his strict attitude in the main game becomes more understandable.

Sonny

• Major sexual assault trigger warning for the following entry! Just southeast under the N in Bayou Nwa is a cabin you can run across, where a stranger calling himself Sonny asks if you want to be 'friends' and offers to feed you. If you go in the cabin, it's... bad. Really bad. Knocked out and violated bad. If you accept the man's invitation and follow him inside, Sonny knocks you out with a plank of wood immediately, without any option from the game to fight back. You hear a clanging of metal and what is most likely the sound of clothes hitting the floor, before Arthur wakes back up for a brief moment, now on the bed. Sonny tells you that you fought him hard but he still won (as he calls you his 'pet'), and as your consciousness fades he says, "See? Friendship isn't so tough. And neither is you...", his voice getting more and more distorted before you pass out again. After more metallic sounds you hear the sound of crickets chirping and Arthur getting tossed off a horse onto the ground. Arthur wakes up a good distance away from the cabin with no indication of how much time has passed, completely disoriented with all of his cores drained and some money missing- and when you get back up, he is very clearly walking bow-legged for a few seconds. Rockstar straight up put in a random encounter where it's all but outright stated Arthur gets raped. Fortunately you can go back to the cabin and kill Sonny (in whatever fitting and creative way you can imagine, such as feeding him to the swamp gators), but the latter has even more disgusting lines for you, especially if you tie him up. Plus, closer examination of the bed reveals chains and shackles attached to the head and foot of the bed frame- and what appears to be a large blood stain on the sheets. To add further insult to injury, some have reported Bill coming up to them in camp and saying, "I met an interesting feller in the swamp. ... He seemed to know all about you. I mean... all about you..." and Arthur responding with a very angry "Get outta here...!" Needless to say it viciously defies the Double Standard: Rape, Male on Male trope, with several players having felt violated themselves for what happened and reloading their saves. Long story short, don't go in the cabin.
  • What's worse? The man has various newspaper pages hung on his wall. One of these pages is from the fucking Vietnam War. In 1899. Just who the hell is this guy?!

Tucker and his Friend

• If you go exploring up in the West Grizzlies (not too far from where the game began), you can encounter a hunter who is desperately looking for his friend Tucker and asks for your help. If you do so, you will eventually find Tucker's lifeless body, lying face down on a rock. You turn him over, and a good chunk of his head has just been destroyed by God knows what. Complete with a nasty ripping sound as the cold fused his face to the rock. You then return to his friend and are given the choice to either lie about Tucker's fate or tell the truth. If you are truthful, he runs off to Tucker's mangled body, and when you follow him, he mourns his friend for a moment... before screaming "Oh Jesus, no!" as a gigantic grizzly bear charges in from out of nowhere and mauls him to death.

Winton Holmes

• One of Strauss' loan shark collection runs takes Arthur into the mountains north of Strawberry. The poor fool in question, Winton Holmes, can't actually pay Arthur, but he has a line on a rare, white-furred cougar whose pelt should more than cover the debt. He's tracked the cougar all the way to its lair, a cave high in the mountains. Arthur and the mark head inside to track the cougar, splitting up to explore the darkness lit only by their lanterns. Arthur is left in the dark with only his lantern and his pistol when a bloodcurdling scream breaks the silence. He comes upon the dead body of the mark, and it dawns on you the player that you're alone. In a cave. With a cougar. The literal cat and mouse is pretty terrifying, especially when it rushes Arthur from the shadows.
  • On top of that, you can't equip your weapon and your lantern at the same time so you can either keep sight of the cougar, or you can have your weapon drawn and wait for it to pop out of the dark. (Unless, of course, you found the Miner's Helmet, which works as a hands-free light source.)
  • Even Arthur is just about to lose his cool when he begins muttering under his breath; you can hear his voice trembling as he struggles to keep a hold of himself.
  • Heck, even if Arthur initially goes down the same path, Winton tells him to go down the other anyways — this means that there was no way to save Winton, even if you tried to prevent his death.

Marko Dragic

• Marko Dragic's fate. After helping the man briefly power up his robotic automaton, Arthur leaves the man as he marvels over his short success. He can return to Dragic's lab later on to discover his corpse in a pool of blood, and his creation completely gone. If you look at his notes and use the electric lantern he gave you to follow where the red light goes, it’ll take you aaaaalll the way to Colter, where you will find the robot sitting on the edge of a cliff. And all it ever does is just slowly repeat "Papa…" in a robotic monotone, until you decide to shut it down for good with your revolver. It never moves from its sitting position, and its head barely moves as you walk around. What the hell did that robot do to Dragic, and how did it end up in Colter?
• Dummied Out dialogue from the robot reveals that it would have also been able to feel pain. Just sitting there. Alone. Able to feel both physical and emotional pain.
  Robot: Ouch. Why, papa?

Porter Family

• There is a homestead named Chez Porter in the West Grizzlies which you can rob alone or with help from Javier. Turns out, the criminal family there have been isolated for so long they have their own dialect. Going there alone and spying on them outside of the companion activity reveals that's not all: they can be heard talking about how outsiders will "blandish" their souls, and how they need to be ready for "the awakening" and "the world to come". Yeah...
  • And some Fridge Horror: they keep talking about how they need to maintain their "purity" and the boys complain that their father doesn't like them talking to pretty girls at the market. This, combined with a cursory glance at the sole female members face and the general mental stunting of the family, makes it clear that they're severely inbred.
• The above-mentioned conversation between the boys about not being allowed to talk to the girls quickly turns disturbing when they begin reminiscing about how they were keeping a woman out in the woods, which given the context has some horrifying implications. Things get worse when they remember how their father got angry when he found out about her, followed by this exchange revealing what he actually did.
  What the hickory's her name now?
  Digs her up and asks, why don't you?

Other Strangers

• One of the characters you meet at random is a crazed preacher who seems to be talking to God, ranting and raving and soaking himself in various rivers across the map. At one point though, he will ask you if you've spoken to "him", and reveal that "he" hates the preacher. After the revelation of the Strange Man's shack, the thought slowly dawns on you that the madman might not be talking about the almighty.
• Several of the random events can be extremely chilling, such as rescuing a woman in the middle of being kidnapped, or watching a hunter get torn apart by a bear due to having open bear bait on his person and not knowing about it. Another Random Event involves a man being brutally bitten by a wolf. In another random event you at least had the possibility of saving the man, but not in this one. The man is so damaged that his death is inevitable.
• The random event with the incestuous couple, Bray and Tammy Aberdeen. Who turn out to be serial killers are after their victims' money and belongings. You know something is not right with them from the moment they appear and invite you to come have dinner with them in their home, treating you like a long-lost cousin while making some very public displays of affection towards each other. From there, the tension builds as you are kept wondering what dark secret they could be hiding and what they intend to spring on you/when they'll do it. It's especially bad if you get this event when it's dusk or nighttime outside in the game, as very unsettling music will be playing in the background of their dimly lit house. Try a taste of their cooking or alcohol. We dare you.
  • The incest is bad enough, but the details you learn if you explore the house is even worse. They offhandedly mention their parents' death during dinner, but they actually killed their parents themselves! There's even a photograph of the family with the faces of the parents scratched out. They've been poisoning travelers, robbing them and then dumping their bodies in a mass grave some distance from the house, which they try to do to Arthur as well, though he manages to survive. They also keep their mother's skull in a creepy shrine inside a cupboard.
  Arthur: You creepy bastards...
  • In an absolutely chilling attention to detail, if for some reason you decide to hogtie Tammy and drag her to the mass grave, she starts to scream and cry and apologize to their dead mom.
• The Braithwaite Family has a rumor about a female cousin who wasn't "quite right", and was kept locked up somewhere to keep her out of sight to avoid disgracing the family name. Beau Gray thinks it's probably just a story, but unfortunately, it's all too true. The poor girl is kept locked up inside an outhouse with chains over the doors, hidden away in the woods behind the family manor, with only the small hole in the door for light and food. She's understandably stark-raving mad when you find her, if she wasn't before they locked her in there, the confinement would have done it. Making it even worse is that she's just left behind to die from starvation in the shack after the manor burns down, John can find her skeletal remains inside during the epilogue.
  • Among her rants and ravings that hint at the actions of her Abusive Parents, she'll be heard chanting a stream of random numbers like some kind of code.
  • Take a closer look at the outhouse and she'll thrust her arm through the hole in the door, grasping at you while making some very unwanted propositions.
  Gertrude: I'll let you fuck me!
• At Emerald Ranch, you randomly encounter a boy who says he's lost his dog and asks you to find it for him. You agree, you find the dog hiding and it start following you whimpering all the way. When you return the dog to its owner, the boy calls the dog stupid and threatens to step on its paws if it ever does anything stupid again. The dog runs away and the boy runs after it threatening to starve it if it doesn't stop running.

Locations

Armadillo

• In the second half of the epilogue you can go to Armadillo from the first game. Based on what you saw in Blackwater, you expect to see a town under construction. Instead, you find a town half burned to the ground and everyone scrambling to get the hell out. The only immediate explanation as to just what the hell happened here is a town crier shouting at everyone to stay away from town because of cholera.
• You can discover an explanation as to what happened in Armadillo, and it's not pretty. One of the travelers you can meet in the game will occasionally tell the story about the town fell to a horrible cholera outbreak, with bodies being dumped into mass graves and eventually burned because they couldn't be interred fast enough. But the real horror comes when the traveler remarks that there have been reports of a certain someone seen in the town...dressed in a suit and top hat, a "Reaper in his Sunday best." That's right — the Strange Man. He's back, and it's heavily implied that he is linked to the plague. If you explore his cabin, you can discover a map of the town with the words "A Plan for Armadillo" on it, along with a message to Herbert Moon, the only survivor of the outbreak. Did the Strange Man cause the plague? Is he a Rider of the Apocalypse? No answer is given, so we're left yet again wondering just what the hell this guy is.
• While it's almost unheard of in the industrialized world, in the time period that RDR2 takes place in, cholera was a very scary reality for countless people. Spread by drinking unclean or contaminated water, victims suffer from extreme dehydration, lethargy, seizures and white diarrhea. Because they've lost so much of their fluids and electrolytes, Armadillo's residents look and act like zombies. Severe, untreated cholera has a 50% mortality rate. In a place as hot and dry as New Austin, death is guaranteed.

Fort Riggs

• East of Beecher's Hope and across a river is a burnt-out ruin that appears to have been a small patch of reservation land reserved for the natives: there are burned out buildings and teepees and a large graveyard just beyond the remnants of a large fence. Inside the ruins of a schoolhouse you can find a scrap of paper with an English exercise on it, but no indicator as to just what the hell happened here. The English exercise only offers brief clues, with all the words relating to the ongoing misery, such as "reservation", "chill", "sickness", "ice", "die", "soldier," and "nothing."
  • In case you didn't know, the "English exercise" paper is actually coded. If you take all the first letters from a series of words, you get this message:
  Waziya comes with winter breath
  His trees stand guard whispering all night that we sleep in our grave
  Father fought and died so quickly
  Mother dies slow
  • In Lakota mythology, Waziya is a deity described as a giant who guards the north, bringing cold, famine and disease. Observant players have noted the link between this message and the cave giant to the north.
  • You can actually come across a stranger at his campfire who will offer to tell you about his misdeeds for some alcohol. If you give him some he recounts how he and other government soldiers killed and mistreated the Native Americans held at Fort Riggs. Not long after sharing his sins, he passes out drunk.
    Stranger: I ain't knowin' what's worse... seeing the ones we killed, or... watching the other ones die... the slow way.
  • It's also theorized that the entire premise of Fort Riggs is a chilling reference to the Wounded Knee massacre, where the Lakota men were gunned down instantly in the winter cold, and the Lakota women were pursued and killed along with their children. Be forewarned: it's not an easy read.

Isolated cabins

• In Osman Grove, just east of Emerald Ranch, you’ll come upon an abandoned shack with a locked door. Kicking down the door will present you with a gruesomely horrific sight: an entire family dead in poses that suggest asphyxiation. If you investigate the flue to the wood stove, you'll find it leaking smoke back into the cabin. One can then only imagine the horror of being the last one left alive, still coughing and wheezing up a storm...
  • A chilling question comes to mind — if you had to kick the door to get inside, then why was the door still locked?
• Clawson's Rest is even worse. Upon breaking down the locked door, you find the heavily decayed bodies of two children. Looting the nightstand reveals a note from their mother stating that she was leaving the cabin to get some money back that was stolen from them. The boys were not to answer the door for anyone, and they would have enough food and water for four days until she came back. She didn't come back.
  • There's also some Fridge Horror about what happened to her. Clawson's Rest is quite close to Chez Porter. The same Chez Porter containing a family of robbers, two of whom boasted about keeping a woman in the woods as a Sex Slave before their father killed her. Hard to tell who had it worse, her or her children.
• "Meteor House", located on the northeast portion of the map, is named such by Arthur after he finds a piece of a meteor inside it... in a small crater surrounded by human limbs and burnt bodies. So basically, a bunch of people were completely safe in their little home, and then they all die brutally by something they didn't even know existed. The meteor the piece fell from can be found nearby, but it's hard to appreciate it after finding out it killed a group of people in their own home.
• Out in the snowdrifts of Ambarino, you can find a collapsed house with the only thing you can interact with being a drawer. You open it up, expecting some sort of reward for going off the beaten path to find this house and all you get is the words “You flourish before you die” carved into the bottom of the drawer. It’s very jarring and unexpected. And if the first of these messages you encounter just so happens to be "You want more than you have," located inside a drawer in another unoccupied cabin, it is very easy to get the impression that someone, or something, carved it there knowing you'd break into the cabin to loot it, and could now be behind you, waiting patiently for you to turn around. ^However  These phrases lose their creepy factor when you realize these are actually cheat codes, but it's still startling to come across them.
• Vetter's Echo, a cabin in West Elizabeth where a pipe that Dutch needs is located, popularly known as the scariest cabin in the game. The moment you enter the front door, you come across the unexpected, unskippable and pants-shittingly horrifying sight of a bear roaring right in your face! Better kill it, quick!

Limpany

• Near the beginning of the game, southwest of the Horseshoe Overlook camp (you can even see it from camp), is an abandoned, absolutely immolated town called Limpany, with the jail the only remotely intact building, and two long-dead prisoners in one of the cell beds. There is next to no information as to what happened here or why.^note  There are various oil barrels from Cornwall Kerosene & Tar scattered across the town, which may indicate they had a hand in it, but that's only a guess.

Pleasance

• The town of Pleasance, an abandoned settlement in Lemoyne, complete with some small houses, a church, and a schoolhouse. Looks normal enough to make you wonder what made it empty, until you notice the barn, because painted on its locked off doors in big letters is "STAY OUT PLAGUE".
  • What the ten gravestones near the church say add some horrifying detail: All ten were murdered in various ways the year the town was founded, all within the same month, possibly on the same day. Makes you wonder just what kind of "plague" they were able to keep the source of locked in the barn.

• Just south of Pleasance you can find the corpse of a giant red snake stretched across the branches of a tree. Scary enough on its own, but it's made more so by how unexplained it is. Why is it there? How did it die? Are there more of them? Considering how close it is to Pleasance, did it have anything to do with whatever happened there? If so, was it really only just a giant snake? Neither Arthur nor John remark on it and it never comes up anywhere else, meaning that it remains a singularly unsolved, and creepy, mystery.
  • The church is also the only one in the game without a cross. The cabins have "ill with sin" and "unclean sinners" painted on them. The inhabitants died violently on the same month or even day. There's the aforementioned snake nearby, stretched across the tree. We'll let you put two and two together.
• While the most obvious implication is that the "plague" was some kind of mass hysteria, there's still the unanswered question of what in the world could be inside the barn? Did the residents capture some supernatural thing and imprison it inside? Is it another meteor that drove nearby villagers insane? Or could it have been the sight of some horrible ritual, to go along with the other implication that the town had become a Religion of Evil? Whatever they did, the terror appears to be contained...at least until someone comes along and opens it up.

Strawberry

• Micah deciding to slaughter what feels like the entire town of Strawberry for seemingly no other reason than For the Evulz. And you are forced to go along with it if you want to escape Strawberry unscathed and quickly.
• While it's also darkly humorous, there's a random encounter where you will meet a man who has been sold a fake aphrodisiac. He asks for your help in finding the con man, who is hiding in an outhouse. You can cover for him or tattle on him; if you choose to rat him out, the first man will kill the salesman by drowning him in the sewage. Squick doesn't even begin to cover it.
  • Should you mislead the guy and save the con man's life, he'll thank you profusely and begin to climb out... before he loses his footing, knocks his head on the rim, and drowns anyway. There is no option to help.

The Strange Statues

• Just east of the Donner Falls, there's a cave in the hills that's extremely easy to miss, as the entrance is little more than a crevice in the rockface. If the player squeezes through, they'll eventually find themselves in a chamber lit up by daylight from a hole in the ceiling... and in the middle of the chamber are four statues of humans, circling a smaller statue of a Greek sphinx. The statues are actually a harmless puzzle that gives you three gold bars if you solve it, but the entire thing is so out of place that it gets rather disturbing. It's completely unexplained as to why the statues are there, and who built them.

The Tiny Church

• Out in the Bayou just north of Saint Denis, the player might come across a long-abandoned chapel, except there's something... off about it. When you walk up to it, you'll realize that the chapel is far too small to fit a normal human, and it's implied it might have belonged to a dwarf community. It's actually possible to go inside, but there's nothing there except a few tiny pews and a regular-sized cross. No hint to what happened to the original owners, or why it was abandoned, but it's possibly a reference to the old urban legends about freak show performers and other people with physical deformities creating their own communities in isolated, rural areas.
  • Problem is, the pews are way too small for even little people to sit in, so if they were used at all, they had to have been used by someone smaller than a human infant.

Missions

Outlaws from the West

• After a Hope Spot where it looks like Dutch can talk his way into a homestead out of the blizzard, Micah spots the body of the previous homeowner in a nearby wagon. That's when Arthur sees a second man sneaking round the side towards Dutch...
• We then find out that the O'Driscolls have been holding the man's severely traumatized wife Sadie captive in their house. The implications are horrible.

Blessed are the Meek?

• Micah killing Skinny and his wife. It's considered the moment that most players start to realize Micah's true nature.
  "Hello Maddy, did you miss me?"
  • The whole mission, in essence. Much as 'Further Questions of Female Suffrage' was for Sadie, this mission presents us with an opportunity to be properly acquainted with who Micah really is.. and it speaks volumes that he deliberately massacres half of what's usually regarded as one of the most peaceable towns in the game out of spite, bloodthirst.. and because he wanted to retrieve his favourite guns, which as far as he's concerned are the only things in life that he truly values.

The Iniquities of History

• It seems like a simple fetch quest at first for a pathetic old drunk named Jeremiah Compson who's lost everything dear to him. But while searching through his old house, you find letters and notes uncover his past, all read by him in a voiceover. It culminates in finding a hidden cellar full of manacles, revealing that this pathetic old man was once a slavecatcher. And in this cellar is one slave's diary, still read by Compson, who seems amused at the plight of the man he caught. And finally, there's his ledger, with dozens of slaves listed in it, alongside the money Compson got for catching them. Jeremiah Compson may not be a dangerous outlaw, killer, or cannibal, but he's still a sobering and unnerving example of a man who saw chattel slavery as a fact of life, and who prided himself on making money off of treating human beings as property.
  • If you look on the porch, you'll find a notice of foreclosure on the property. The person responsible for approving the foreclosure is a judge named Holden. The very idea that the western genre's biggest monster exists in the game's universe is not a pleasant one.

Country Pursuits

• The mission in the swamp plays out like a straight horror game: Dutch and Arthur head to the swamps in order to hitch a ride from Dutch's friend Thomas. Thomas agrees but first ask that they help him finding his friend Jules. You are then forced to to traverse the alligator infested swamp in the middle of the night. You're expecting something to pop up but nothing ever does. Afterwards Dutch and Thomas split with you and you're tasked with finding Jules By. Your. Self. After you find him, he warns you of a giant alligator but the gang thinks he's exaggerating; on the boat ride back the boat gets stuck and when they send Jules to pull it he's pulled under...
  • Thanks to first person you can enjoy a full Resident Evil 7 experience with this one mission.
  • It is possible to kill the thing, but he just takes so many bullets and comes back for more so often that pretty soon you'll be panicking and thinking it just can't fucking die.
  • Right before the gator makes its first attack, Dutch informs Arthur, "Just don't look behind you!" Naturally, most players immediately did and got a face full of teeth. Cementing it is that even Dutch sounds absolutely terrified, which really drives home how dangerous the situation is.
  • You later have the option to kill the gator as a legendary animal. And holy shit, it is big. You wouldn't be blamed for thinking that the game was pitting you against SCP-682.

Banking, the Old American Art

• The failed Saint Denis heist is one of the most heart-breaking events in the entire game, ending with Hosea and Lenny shot dead, John arrested and the other remnants of the gang hitching a ride on a boat to escape the law. But the moment after Hosea gets shot, the mission quickly becomes one of the most stressful encounters the player will ever experience. Right after Milton kills Hosea and Dutch whispers out his name, an unsettling chord will play, seeming to signal Dutch's mind shattering and then the frantic Drone of Dread and adrenaline pumping drums of The Firefight Score kick in as Dutch and the gang go on a carnage filled Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the Pinkertons. Not only are you fearful for the gang's safety throughout the fight, the barrage of bullets are seemingly endless, no matter how many Pinkertons you kill, more keep coming in to replace them and close in on the gang; at the same time, it's rather frightening how bloodthirsty, understandable though it may be, everyone, perhaps including the player, becomes once Hosea is shot. No matter how many Pinkertons keep charging in, the gang seems to be determined to kill as many of them as possible in a way that's never seen before or after this event, You'd be forgiven for never wanting to replay this mission again after the first time through.
  Bill Williamson: THIS IS WORSE THAN BLACKWATER!!

He's British, of Course

• Special mention goes to the (real) lion from the otherwise lighthearted sidequest "He's British, Of Course!": failing to shoot it in time results in the beast tearing open Arthur's throat with a single swipe of its claws, leaving Arthur to slowly collapse as he chokes on his blood. Have fun listening to Arthur gag and cough as he drowns in his own blood.
  Farmhand: He's as big as a mule and as mean as a hellcat!

Wisdom of the Elders

• Though "The Wisdom Of The Elders" is mostly funny as hell, there's some very horrific moments in it.
  • The first mission has an elderly man, delirious, unable to explain why he's afraid or what attacked him, and when you bring him back you learn nothing except that the town is afraid of "the darkness"... Whatever that is.
  • The next mission? The town's beset by "demons" that attack the livestock that turn out to be rabid, mangy, feral dogs and you have to defend the townsfolk from them.
  • Then there's the final reveal that the town has been poisoned by arsenic and lead from the nearby mine leaking into the water supply and the realization that that's contributed to their confusion, illness, sickly looks, and why they were so easy to manipulate by the "medicine man" really gives the whole thing a sinister vibe.
  • Not to mention the "medicine man" attempting to collapse the mine and have you buried alive.
  • The brutal reality of arsenic and lead poisoning: warts, lesions, vomiting, seizures, miscarriage, muscle pain and brain damage. These people were living through hell.

Supernatural elements

Ghosts

• There's the ghost of Agnes Dowd (whose grave can be found near Shady Belle) in Bluewater Marsh. You can see her in the distance, glowing as she wanders, crying about a lost lover and her cruel/uncaring parents over the course of several nights, and on the final night you encounter her, it's revealed that Agnes knows that you've been watching her and asks you to come over to her tree (where she hung herself) there you'll see her swing from an old noose tied to one of the branches. Walk closer and Agnes wails "I Love You!" before vanishing. This has reportedly freaked out some players into turning off their game.
• In a specific area of Roanoke, you can hear the ghostly whispers of a young couple by the names of Eugene Hutton and Ethel Boshared. Their backstory (as revealed in a viewable Magic Lantern film) was that the two got lost in the woods while courting at night when they were confronted by the ghosts of dead British Red Coat soldiers, one of them decaptitates Eugene with his sabre. Ethel ran back to Annesburg (carrying Eugene's head) to warn the village about the ghost army, however they accused her of witchcraft and proceed to burn her at the stake that same night.
• There is a Ghost Train that you can find in Scarlett Meadows at around 3 AM. You first believe it's a real train, but notice that the whistle sounds a bit...off. The reverb and pitch on it is drastically different than usual. As you stop by the tracks, you notice there's no train arriving, but then, this light blue mist in the shape of a train drives right past you, making creepy noises all the while that hint a derailing. If you try to follow it, your horse gets spooked and throws you off. The worst part about this is the train only appears once in your playthrough, and there is no information as to where it came from or why it roams the tracks at night.

The Giant In the Cave

• One of the most bizarre and unsettling encounters in the game is the mysterious Giant In the Cave, not to mention the strange and arbitrary method of triggering the encounter. After studying 30 different animals for the compendium, the player must follow a flock of birds into the hills east of the Indian reservation. There, you find a blocked off cave, and a mysterious voice from inside. The man, or whatever he really is, claims he lives there because he's "too big", and he can't find any friends because of his size, then trying to convince Arthur to be his friend. While he isn't hostile, Arthur and John seem to like and trust him, and even his voice sounds fairly normal, there's something extremely... off about the way he talks, often sounding disturbingly cheerful, and we never even find out anything about him, not even what he looks like. There's not even a character model for him, it's possible to get inside the cave through a glitch, but it's simply an empty space. There's an extra layer of creepiness if you know about the legend of the "Si-Te-Cah", a tribe of red-haired cannibalistic giants in Native American myth, and considering the cave's proximity to the Indian reservation...
  • And if you've been to Fort Riggs, he could be Waziya, the giant that brings cold and death in his wake, and who the Lakota trapped there blamed for their eventual deaths...
  • Deleted dialogue reveals that he's a harmless escapee from a circus freakshow and has been unable to find a place in society, taking to living in the wilderness instead. Of course, he could also be lying...
  • There are hidden audio files suggesting that you could interact with him like any other NPC. And even when he's hostile, he never loses the treacle in his voice. Even when he threatens to stamp on your head.
  Giant: People think I'm a monster...

Man-Made Mutant

• Players can find a large house to the west of Van Horn Trading Post that is entirely locked and boarded up except for one second-story window with a light shining out of it. Climbing up onto the porch will let you climb inside, where you will find a room full of chimeric taxidermy, with the centerpiece being a ghastly, multi-limbed "man-made mutant" with a boar's head, bear body, bird wings, and various other animal pieces attached to it suspended from the ceiling. In the center of the room is a table mounted with leather restraints in a roughly human shape and some bloody instruments. When you first enter the house, the fireplace is still burning, meaning whoever lives there hasn't been gone long.
  Arthur: (In his journal) And I thought I knew folks with strange hobbies.

Pagan paraphernalia

• Strange writings and symbols have been encountered in Blackwater, on trees, under a shed and so on. It's all connecting to some sort of Aztec mystery that probably relates to Undead Nightmare.
• In the hills west of Owanila, you can find something that gets entered into the journal as “Pagan Ritual.” It consists of a symbol written on the ground in chalk, four stakes driven in around the edge of the symbol like a diamond, and the crown jewel, a body impaled upright on another stake in the centre of the symbol, with the legs and head hacked off and what looks like a whitetail buck’s skull stitched on top instead.
• Butcher Creek contains a partially collapsed cabin that, at 0400, has a glowing red pentagram appear under the floorboards.

River Monster

• There were originally plans to put a goddamn Sea Monster in this game, but sadly (or thankfully, depending on who you ask) it was doomed to the cutting room floor. There are no models or textures for the beast, but based on its audio files it would have been huge. And intelligent - its roars are meant to mimic the boat horns, suggesting that it would have operated right in the middle of densely populated rivers.

Rock carvings

• One of your quests involves Francis Sinclair asking you to find the location of various rock carvings. No mention is ever made of who carved them or why, let alone why Francis needs them, and they depict things that should not be known by people of this era. Things like zeppelins, DNA strands, atoms and even a mushroom cloud.
• Other, smaller rock carvings depict tall, otherworldly humanoid figures. Some look like aliens while others look like Slenderman.

Skeletons

• The skeleton of a giant has been found, with a huge fracture in its skull. What caused that is unknown but, what if it's out there?
  • Recent observations point to the skeleton being Paul Bunyan himself. It's still haunting, though, to think that the great folk hero was lying dead there with his famous ox, and nobody to move them both.
• Strange, inhuman skulls have been found in various places around the game world, sometimes mixed in piles with human skulls. They don't seem to resemble any animal found in-game, and more resemble some kind of ape. Combined with some players reporting strange sounds while traveling at night, there's speculation that an as of yet unseen Sasquatch is lurking somewhere in the game's dark woods and swamps.
• Out in the Grizzles, you can find a herd of frozen cattle. In a cave by Lake Isabella, you can find an abandoned wagon and several human bones. How are these two sorry sights related? According to both a local camper and a newspaper article, you will learn that they were a wagon train that got stranded in a snow drift after their oxen froze to death. After their rations ran dry, the families hid in a cave where they were forced to eat each other to survive.
• In a rock wall in Ambarino, you can find a fossilized man embedded in stone. Problem is, modern humans have only existed in North America for less than 13,000 years and this fossil looks way too tall to be an ordinary person.

Strange Man

• While you don't meet the man himself, you can find a shack in Bayall Edge that apparently belongs to the Strange Man.
  • One creepy detail is that one of the writings in the room changes depending on how you handled an earlier side quest. Meaning not only was the Stranger there somewhat recently, but he's been watching you.
  • If you can't watch the video, inside the shack is a painting of a black silhouette, a black top hat, some scribbling on the walls (Such as "The water is black with venom", "His final toll will sound my greatest coming", "I know you" and "From the snow to a cave"^note Either a summation of the game's story, or a summation of Dutch's fate. Either way, these texts can be read way before the story moves to Beaver Hollow) and a map of Armadillo with the text "I offered you happiness or two generations. You made your choice." Considering Armadillo is suffering from a cholera outbreak and you can find a picture of the strange man in Herbert Moon's shop, (John actually mentions that the man in the picture reminds him of someone, presumably Josiah) an innocent-looking shack becomes much more sinister. Some of the other paintings also change depending on your honor; with good karma, there are paintings of deer and with low honor there are pictures of wolves; both just happen to be Morgan's spirit animals.
  Carved to a table: "There was a man called Jimmy Brooks, who was always running into crooks till one chased him down and he had to talk his way'round. That Jimmy isn't as dumb as he looks"
  • Most horrifyingly, after a certain number of times visiting his shack, he will eventually appear. Right behind you, in the mirror.
  • And considering that the event flag for his appearance can only trigger in the epilogue, you have to wonder; why is the Strange Man so fascinated by John Marston? While he has connections to Morgan, Herbert Moon and possibly the mad priest, he isn't nearly as involved in their lives as John's.
  • The video also reveals that you can find a letter on Herbert Moon from his daughter, who he disowned for choosing to marry a Jewish man and go into charity work rather than become a shopkeeper like him. This begs the question - which of the two options did he choose, and what were the consequences of that choice?

UFO

• UFOs are back and this time, they don't hold back. One can be seen floating above a shed in which you find out there is a cult idolizing these things. Another has reportedly being seen abducting someone. There is another that eerily floats above you as you watch it over a hill. More sightings are probably coming as time goes on.
• The UFO-worshiping cult is worth an entire entry all by it/themselves. Mainly because they're all dead. You come across a shack by a pond north of Emerald Station, and decide to see what you can loot. You open the door... and the background music suddenly stops. The place is overgrown, filthy... and packed with bunk beds loaded down with skeletons. In front of them is a makeshift altar with another, hooded corpse seated behind it, and a "sermon" that you can read:
  "At the Second Hour under the Half Moon, By the great love and grace of our savior Kuhkowaba, Voyager of time and galaxies, We cast off our corporal shells So his vessel can take our spirits to the Promised realm. To live in peace and power until the two Thousandth year, When we will return for the new chosen And worship once again at the peak of Mount Shann. In his love, we rejoice always"
  • What makes this even worse? They're based on a real religious cult.
  • And even worse that that? Come back at the right time, and you'll see an actual goddamn flying saucer hovering over the shack. So apparently aliens exist, and require you to kill yourself if you want to come with them. Wonderful.
• Its also worth noting how creepy UFOs are within the context of the game. In Grand Theft Auto V for example, a game drenched in parody and full of wacky elements, UFOs are an amusing easter egg that fit with the tone. Here however, in a game with a grounded tone and serious plot set at the turn of the 20th century, they stick out so much more, and that just makes them eerie.

"Vampire"

• Read the newspapers and you'll soon learn of a series of murders in Saint Denis where bodies were found with what appeared to be bites on them and totally drained of blood. The attacks are similar to another string of killings ten years prior, and rumors abound that the killer might be a vampire. Of course, there's no such thing...right?
  • And on top of that Arthur can find and confront the killer after the latter claimed another victim. Surely he's just a normal guy, if a murderously insane human? Well, hello Count Orlok!
  Vampire: Stay back for your own sake... I walk with the undead!
  • Fortunately, while he is capable of one-hit killing Arthur/John if you let him get too close, the player can likewise one-hit kill him, and to add insult to injury, loot his ceremonial dagger.

Zombies

• Visit the Fence in Saint Denis and look at the shelf directly behind him, specifically the upper left-hand corner. Does that mask look at all...familiar? It should, it's the mask that leads to Undead Nightmare.
  • Want some more high-octane terror? If you look around the Fence's shop you find an identical mask on another shelf. If the first mask unleashed a zombie hell, what does the second mask do? And, most importantly, where is it now?
• Going back to Undead Nightmare, depending on how wide spend the curse was, that would mean that all the fallen members of the gang Hosea, Lenny, Sean, Grimshaw, Micah, Javier, Bill, Dutch, etc. all came back as the undead for who knows for how long till John put the mask back and ended it. Till Seth took it again. Even Arthur may have rose again as a undead monster without a soul, unlike John who was buried with Holy Water. Same for all the old Van der Linde gang enemies and people they killed coming back.
  • In Arthur's case, it may be somewhat mitigated by his friendship with Rains Fall, who at least once gives Arthur a trinket he believes to be sacred, and thus allow him to rise as an undead with a soul like John. Although, given the sort of nightmarish creatures that come from Native American legends, Arthur as a zombie might not be the worst thing he could become....

Red Dead Online

Mechanics

• If your character drowns, the screen doesn't cut to a still like it does with pretty much every other death. Instead, the picture just fades to black-and-white and the camera lingers on their body as they sink further and further beneath the surface, gradually fading from view until the respawn timer runs out. There's something... Spooky about that.
• Recently, Red Dead Online has been having a strange glitch where wagons and boats having been popping up randomly around the map with the drivers on it slumped over completely dead, with no wounds on them showcasing any sign of being attacked by bandits or even other players. Coming across one of these in the middle of nowhere, at night, is surprisingly eerie.
  • Picture this. You're out hunting at Roanoke Ridge, one of the most cursed locations on the map, at night, listening to nothing but the sound of crickets and the creepy soundtrack, and then, you end up coming across a wagon completely still in its tracks. You see the driver slumped over dead and throw him off the wagon for further analysis. His body is completely clean, but his eyes are wide open and his mouth is hanging agape, as if he's seen something before dying, maybe something he weren't exactly supposed to see. Suddenly, you don't want to hang around that spot for much longer anymore, but as you get on your horse and make your escape, more and more wagons appear on the tracks with all of the drivers lifelessly slumped over on top of them. The feeling of something chasing you gets stronger and, in a fit of panic, you shut off your console. Glitches can be very scary.
• Make It Count can be a very scary game mode, supplied by the game's heavy atmosphere and brilliant use of soundtrack. 16 players sneak around an area of the map hunting each other with bows or throwing knives. Every death is unexpected and you have to watch out for every single sound. Of course, the fact that you'll be so attentive to the audio surrounding you, the sound of a throwing knive hitting you or an arrow going through your head is loud and works as a very effective Jump Scare.
• Sometimes, the game may spawn you right next to a crocodile or an angry grizzly bear. Because, you know, Rockstar!
• A half amusing, half terrifying glitch could result where a campfire's placement could end up a bit screwy and end up somewhere else, and persist even after said campfire was put out or just never spawns in the first place. If it happens to be on a major thoroughfare, a road near a settlement for instance, anyone or anything that passes through this will catch on fire. Not only would this result in NPC's bursting into flames and screaming in pain seemingly at random, but also leaves their charred corpses scattered around the area in ever-growing piles.
• The horrifying sound the game makes when you're in Sergio Vincenza's sights, meant to warn you that your head is about to be blown clean off.
• Phillip Carlier is a bounty that's all about nightmare fuel. The start of the mission itself is your player character arriving at his camp, only to be drugged and knocked out. What follows is a hallucinatory drug-fueled mission straight out of Far Cry 3 where you'll be seeing the animals of Red Dead Redemption 2 ten times bigger their original size, all while your character stumbles around with a creepy drone playing in the background. And Carlier? He's coming for you, over and over again, as each time you shoot him, he disappears into smoke and appears somewhere else. Sometimes, you won't even see or hear him until he's literally right behind you, which, by then, it might be too late to react, as his attack is an One-Hit Kill.
  • The rest of the bounty doesn't ease up on the spookiness either. After a few minutes of battling hallucinations, your character finally sobers up and decides to go after Carlier for good. What this means is that you have to go deep into the swamps, filled with the insanely creepy Nite Folk who managed to tame alligators to defend them. And when you find Carlier? Make sure you know when to hogtie him, because the chance of an alligator sneaking up on you and immediately turning you into their dinner is very high.
• The Great Animal Drought of 1899 is currently on-going, as a result of many players being in the session, forcing the game to nerf animal spawns to the point that not even fish will spawn. How does this count as Nightmare Fuel, you may ask? Well, it makes the game feel extra empty. You can wander through Tall Trees without seeing even so much as a jackrabbit scurrying by your feet, bringing this Uncanny Valley feeling to the game which resembles the emptiness of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas's woods. You never know when the next animal will spawn or what it's going to be and the dead silence makes it all that much more creepier.
• To add to the list of growing bizarre bugs this game has, some players have reported their character simply just up and leaving their control. Apparently, interacting with some collectibles in the game (specially the ones buried under the ground) has a chance of making your character simply stop doing what they were doing and walk off into a random direction, some even going as far as entering vehicles on their own, like an NPC. While this may sound humorous, this is literally your character gaining a mind of their own, leaving your control and basically doing things in the game their way. Those who are afraid of things such as A.I becoming sentient or haunted video games will find this glitch specially creepy in its own way.
  • What makes this bug even more strange is the fact that once your character starts walking off, it's nearly impossible to regain control of them unless you commit suicide via the interaction menu. That's right, you have to kill your own character in order to get their control back. Somehow, Rockstar managed to create one of the most morbidly creepy glitches in an online game in recent times.
• The entire build-up for the fight against the Legendary Cougar in its own Naturalist mission. It begins with the player overhearing a conversation between some NPCs about a runaway wild cougar that has been going around New Austin causing trouble. The player proceeds with tracking it down as usual, only for them to eventually run into a panicked man next to a broken down wagon screaming about a cougar attacking and killing everyone in the nearby vicinity and also clearly in hysterics about said cougar having just killed his friend Jerry, who can be found dead next to their broken wagon whilst the man says his face had been severely damaged (in reality, there's just some blood all over it, nothing as brutal as the gore seen in singleplayer from actual animal attacks). The player character continues tracking down the cougar despite the man warning them to just run away and they'll find a horse that has been completely gutted by the animal. The entire area after that is filled with clues which just are ruined camps, dead bodies and overall a complete bloody rampage. When you finally find the cat itself, the cutscene literally shows it breaking out of its own cage to kill you. You better climb on top of something tall fast too, otherwise you're dead meat.
• Rockstar broke Red Dead Online. Again. But this time, they managed to make it special, by completely removing almost every single NPC in the game. That's right, every new lobby you join as of Patch 1.21 will be completely empty and you will be the only one in it along with possibly another player, who will also be bugged and impossible to interact with. Every NPC, every animal, even birds and fish, are all gone. Remember The Great Animal Drought of 1899? This is that, but worse. And as such, the loneliness and emptiness of Red Dead Online's world proves to be incredibly Uncanny Valley, with people already comparing it to a popular horror game with a similar premise called No Players Online.
  • Worse yet, there have been sightings of a strange bald man appearing around the map and following players around. We are not joking.◊
• Patch 1.22 has fixed this nightmare, for the most part. But bald man is still out there somewhere, waiting...
• Shepherd Edwards, Legendary Bounty and Cult Leader, is a veritable fount of Nightmare Fuel who marks his followers by engraving an upside-down 7 into their foreheads. Even setting aside how maniacally devoted his followers are, or how much he clearly buys into his own Messiah Complex, he leaves behind some lovely little Paranoia Fuel if you bring him in alive. As you carry him to the Jail Wagon, he mocks you, claiming that he has far more followers than you may think, and advises you to tilt back the hats and bonnets of your friends and see how many have the inverted 7 mark. As you arrive at the jail wagon, he seems downright jolly, proclaiming that he won't be behind bars for long. Sure enough, the man driving the wagon has his hat firmly pulled down over his forehead, not speaking a word to the player, only giving them a silent nod as the wagon pulls away.

Other Players

• Once again, the online counterpart is much like Rockstar's earlier games, full of players who are very unpredictable. Some may ignore you, but others definitely don't hold back in shooting you dead shall you cross them, making every encounter tense.
  • You can also be taken down with a lasso and hogtied by other players. Luckily, you can break free, but if you're caught by a posse of griefers, they can put you in a loop of being lasso'd repeatedly until your patience is drained dry.
  • There is a large amount of players in the fandom wanting the existence of "Hardcore lobbies", where player blips are turned off. While the idea certainly sounds very entertaining, the amount of Paranoia Fuel will go straight through the roof. Imagine hunting out in the Bayou at night only to hear the sound of a repeater being cocked right behind you...
  • Posses of six players can be very frightening, specially if they're scattered around the map. Kill one of the members and everyone in the posse is notified of it, meaning that you just pretty much pissed off a bee hive.
• A recent bug is happening where certain players somehow manage to go completely off the radar and are only able to be identified by their name tag over their heads. Now, you can't see these players on the map but, if you're unfortunate enough to be close to them, they can see you. Paranoia Fuel, much?
• Players can now become Bounty Hunters and, if they've ranked the role up enough, they can chase down other players with a bounty on them. This alone should encourage you to play nice and pay off your bounties before they get too high. Wouldn't wanna be hogtied and taunted on the way to jail now, would you?
• Players in Defensive Mode have their blips appear as transparent on the map, to the point you have to squint to see said blips. That said, if you're not paying much attention to the map, it can be quite the Jump Scare when a player appears out of nowhere beside you. While you'd think that they're thankfully in Defensive Mode, that doesn't stop some other kinds of players from using that system to sneak up onto unsuspecting victims...
• The character customization can lead to some beautiful characters, but it can also lead to characters like Bert. Imagine having a beer at your camp at night and then out of nowhere, that thing comes out of the dark and starts stealing all of your beer.

Characters

• Bluewater John. A mysterious, wandering blues singer and guitarist that was left for dead by his own gang in the titular marsh. Which as any player would know, is an absolute death trap. From the get-go, players will notice that there's something...off about him. After his first mission, he vanishes without a trace save for a rattlesnake slithering in the place he once stood. He frequently sings about making a deal with someone and his eyes are literally reptilian. Yeah. Starting to notice a pattern? Oh, and the best part? He's based on a real person. Sweet dreams.
• Madame Nazar, the Romani fortune teller. The music she plays from her grungy phonograph is haunting enough, but she also gives cryptic references to numerous easter eggs found throughout the game. Details that she couldn't possibly know about.
  • Listening in on a conversation between a gang of outlaws will reveal some rather creepy rumors about Nazar casting curses on their friends or feeding human meat to her pet birds (which all have the names of sheriffs in the game). Dubious at best, but considering her near omnipotent knowledge of events in the game and her habit of appearing out of nowhere...
  Nazar: Steal a trinket and they will never find your bones.

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