Mood
🫥 Unsettling
Something is slightly wrong, deliberately.
82 sites · page 1 of 2
Starts as one button beside a dying fire and quietly becomes something much larger. Best played without reading anything about it first.
- 1 hr+
Photographic essays on ruined institutions that are far more interested in why the places closed than in the broken glass.
- 10 min
Guided write-ups of the city's empty hospitals, airfields and amusement parks, complete with directions and a note on the fence situation.
- 10 min
A famously unforgiving airline simulation that keeps running in real time whether or not you are logged in to watch.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Fingerprints your browser and compares it against a research dataset of hundreds of thousands of others. The verdict is usually: unique.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Drop an asteroid of your chosen size on any address and read back the fireball, wind speed and earthquake radius it makes.
Streams clips uploaded straight from phones with default filenames and no audience, drifting past like a broadcast from nobody.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
One page per leak channel — WebGL, canvas, WebRTC, DNS — each showing precisely what your browser hands over without being asked.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The EFF's test showing how uniquely identifiable your browser is from fonts, plugins and screen size alone. Most people are one in millions.
- 2 min
- Desktop
Blind items published daily since 2006, unverifiable by design, and treated as scripture by a very large comment section.
The tidied-up archive of internet horror folklore, from Slender Man to the stories a school friend swore blind were true.
- 1 hr+
Reader-submitted horror stories with narrated versions, sorted so you can pick your poison: rituals, dolls, or something in the loft.
- 10 min
An explorable on how ideas and riots spread through a social network, with the contagion thresholds under your control.
- 10 min
The animator who taught the internet to be afraid of cows, with every looping nightmare he has made collected in one place.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Screenshots of manipulative interfaces caught in the wild, named and dissected. Grimly entertaining reading.
- 10 min
Field reports and photographs of American shopping centres in decline, written by people who cared about this long before it was an aesthetic.
- 1 hr+
Harry Brignull's catalogue of interfaces built to trick people, complete with a hall of shame and the resulting case law.
- 10 min
Google's hallucinating network turned into a service, still perfectly capable of putting dog faces into absolutely everything.
- 10 min
Photographs of the city's abandoned schools and factories, paired with the records of the people who taught and worked in them.
- 10 min
Thousands of strangers claim to have dreamt the same face. Read the whole thing: the explanation is better than the hoax.
- 2 min
Point-and-click cabinet of grotesque curiosities where every drawer you open contains a small, beautifully animated unpleasantness.
- 10 min
- Sound on
- Desktop
Search any Android app and see the tracking libraries baked into it. The results for the popular ones are routinely grim.
London has been dragged underground by bats, and the writing is far better than that sentence suggests. Free, endless, faintly sinister.
- 1 hr+
Three infinite layers of colour falling forever over a low drone, from the net artist behind half the web's cult toys.
- <1 min
- Sound on
Long-form expeditions into Japan's abandoned mines, hotels and theme parks, written by somebody who actually climbed in.
- 1 hr+
Climb a mountain of junk using nothing but a hammer, and lose an hour of progress to a single bad swing.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Directory of the emptied-out settlements of the American West, one short paragraph and one faded photograph at a time.
- 1 hr+
Long-running newsletter and link hoard for glitch art — tools, artists and the occasional genuinely disquieting find.
- 1 hr+
Satellite-derived tree cover loss for anywhere on Earth, week by week, with alerts you can zoom in on until you are looking at one hillside.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Type an email address and find out which breaches it turned up in. Troy Hunt's index now covers billions of leaked accounts.
- <1 min
The cult's own website, left exactly as it was in 1997 and still quietly maintained. A sobering artefact rather than a joke.
- 10 min
Net art from 1995 that looks precisely like your computer failing. View the source: the mess on screen is hiding the actual work.
- 2 min
- Desktop
The channel that turned the Backrooms into found footage, shot with unnervingly good camera work and almost no music.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Documentation of the vast Victorian asylums built to one architectural theory of curing madness, most now empty or demolished.
- 10 min
Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.
- <1 min
Analogue horror shaped like a small-town TV station's broadcast archive, including the night it advised everyone to look up.
- 10 min
- Sound on
The looser, stranger sibling of the main lost media wiki, with more speculation and considerably more unresolved threads.
- 1 hr+
MIT's trolley problem for driverless cars: decide who the car kills, thirteen times over, then read your own bias summarised back.
- 10 min
Los Angeles museum whose exhibits may or may not be true, with a website built in exactly the same ambiguous spirit.
- 10 min
Fictional US national park built inside a colossal living organism, documented entirely as tourist brochures and incident reports.
- 10 min
The American government's public database of missing and unidentified persons, searchable by absolutely anyone.
- 10 min
Active fire and thermal anomaly detections from NASA satellites, updated within hours of each pass and quietly sobering at continental zoom.
- <1 min
- Desktop
The official Atlantic and Pacific hurricane advisories, cones of uncertainty and discussion notes written in plain prose by duty forecasters.
The riddle that calls itself the hardest on the internet, played by editing URLs and reading page source.
- 1 hr+
- Sound on
- Desktop
Tagged great whites ping their position whenever a fin breaks the surface, each shark named, weighed and given its own profile page.
Eldritch horror podcast set in an alternate Appalachia where the mountains are older than people and considerably less friendly.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Twenty years of large-format photography inside abandoned asylums, power stations and factories, catalogued site by site.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Drag mildly biased shapes around a grid and watch a segregated neighbourhood assemble itself without anyone intending it.
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Unsettling websites: questions
How many sites are in unsettling websites?
82 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
79 of the 82 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
64 of 82 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 82 are safe for work and 74 work with the sound off.