Red Dead Redemption 2 has a cursed road on Rhodes that always sets horses on fire

Today in nightmare fuel: in Red Dead Redemption 2, there’s a specific patch of land that has invisible fire on it. The AI characters have no idea it’s there, and therefore, they have no reason to try to avoid this contaminated road. This means that players everywhere are leading their horses to a fiery, horrifying death, thanks to a bizarre glitch.

Since the game’s release last week, strange clips of horses spontaneously catching fire have been floating around on social media. At the time, fans chalked it up to typical open-world shenanigans: when a game is this large, there’s no telling what can go wrong. Recently, however, players deduced that the glitch tends to happen at the same place. Specifically, the invisible fire is located on a road near Rhodes:

One player, Haruna Miyazawa, discovered that if you hang around near the road, you’ll watch NPC repeatedly die in a fiery blaze, despite there being literally nothing there. Here’s a clip, but be warned that this is kind of upsetting to watch, given that it’s basically a big pile of dead, burning horses.

Other players have uploaded clips of this glitch that appear to also be located near Rhodes.

Glitches of this nature aren’t unusual in open-world games: this year, a Watch Dogs 2 player found an area where NPCs will always hop over a set of stairs.

That said, unexplained glitches that affect the game’s AI aren’t typically this awful. Thankfully, most of the other horse bugs in Red Dead have been a lot funnier.