People love the thrill of watching a scary moment unfold on the screen while watching a horror movie, but when it happens in real life, it's quite a different experience. These Redditors came together to share stories of their own eerie encounters and they're absolutely unforgettable. Fair warning: You may need to sleep with the lights on after reading these.
1. Watch Party
I was driving to pick up a friend who was at this cabin party about forty miles west of where I lived. It was close to 2:00 in the morning. So I'm driving down this back road to find this random cabin somewhere, and I come across this red four-door sedan with all the doors open—but that’s not the scariest part. There are four limp figures in the seats with their heads slumped over.
I was way too freaked out to stop. Later on, I'm driving by again after a failed attempt at picking up my friend. Mind you, it's getting close to 3:00 in the morning by now. This time, only the front seat passenger door was open—and every person in that car was staring with a blank expression directly at me as I drove past at ten miles per hour.
I’ll never forget it.
2. High-Speed Chase
When I was 20 years old, I was taking my girlfriend home late one night on small country roads. I went to take a left turn then suddenly there were bright headlights coming through the passenger window. She screamed, I screamed, we were about to be killed....and nothing happened. We didn't get hit; the car just vanished. She was hyperventilating and crying.
I was scared, confused, and my adrenaline was racing. We sat there five minutes before I could drive again. But our nightmare wasn’t over yet. I started up the road and suddenly there were intense headlights behind us. They flew up behind us, easily going 50 mph faster than us. We braced to get rear-ended...and nothing. My girl was screaming so loud that she was hoarse.
All I heard was, “GO, GO, GO.” We drove the next 10 miles on little country roads at 110 mph, making curves that should have sent us into ditches, with the headlights either mere feet behind us or pulling alongside but we could never see anything but lights. Then my girlfriend suddenly screamed something that made my hairs stand on end. She yelled, "What did you do with the stars?!"
I glanced up, not daring to look away from the road very long, and the sky was black. Not moonless night black, I mean GONE black. I know how crazy it sounds but I am driving with the gas pedal on the floor at three times the safe speed, scared to death, with a screaming girl beside me and I distinctly remember watching the trees in the headlights.
This was to figure out if everything literally vanished, ceased to exist once my car’s headlights were past it, because looking out the passenger window things seemed to just pop and vanish. She curled up in her seat and passed out. There was a sharp 90 degree turn ahead with a huge, deep gully just past it and there was no way we could make it at our speed.
I don't know why, but when I saw the lights beside me, I slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. The lights zipped past us and vanished, the stars were back, and somehow sitting there I just knew it was over. I woke her up, and she just kind of oozed into her seat and quietly asked me to take her home. We didn't talk about it at all, she just got out and ran inside.
I sat in her driveway and trembled for 10 minutes. I was terrified of going home the way we had come, so I numbly drove 20 minutes in the wrong direction and slept in the parking lot of a truck stop because there were people around 24 hours a day. We NEVER discussed it and three troubled months later broke up. I have never heard of anyone else seeing odd lights and I've never seen them again but SOMETHING was out there with us that night.
3. It Follows
This is something that happened to me back in 10th grade. I couldn't sleep and I was feeling restless, so I decided to take a walk along the greenway near my house. Most people would have reservations about walking through the woods alone at night, but it was a safe neighborhood and I knew the greenway like the back of my hand.
After no more than five minutes of walking through the woods, I hear a girl singing. I recognize the tune right away, it's “Camptown Races.” You know, "Camptown ladies sing this song, Doo-da, Doo-da." I look around for the girl, but it's pitch black. Not wanting to suddenly come across her and frighten her, I shout out, "You have a nice voice!"
No reply, she just keeps singing. Weird. I continue walking, but the singing isn't getting any further away. Is she following me? Or are we just coincidentally walking in the same direction? So I make a sharp turn and start walking down another path. The singing follows. Another sharp turn. Again it follows. Okay now I'm 100% sure this girl is following me.
I start trying to pin the location of the voice with no luck. I think she was purposefully changing her volume to prevent me from knowing when I was getting closer or further away. Now I'm really starting to get freaked out. I bolt and start sprinting back home. I was running track at the time so I was pretty certain I could ditch her.
I get home, kick off my shoes, and turn on my TV. I'm about 10 minutes into an episode of Aqua Teen when I hear a voice that's not coming from the TV. It's a girl's voice singing frigging “Camptown Races.” For a brief moment I just sit there in pure terror. This can't be happening. I run outside barefoot and frantically look around.
I realize that the voice is coming from above me. She's on the garage roof. I kept a ladder on the side of the garage so I could climb up. The ladder was the only way up or down unless you wanted to jump and chance a sprained ankle. This is it. I've got her. I race up the ladder just in time to see a figure in a red hoodie disappear off the side of the roof leading to the backyard.
She had jumped. I watched her race across my backyard, completely unfazed by the fall, and book it over our six-foot fence like it was no big deal. I briefly considered chasing after her, but I couldn't in my bare feet. Frankly, I don't know if I wanted to. I don't believe in ghosts and ghouls but I'm still freaked out by the whole thing to this day.
4. Barking Dogs
I was home alone with my old roommate’s pit bull, Hamburger. She was very sweet but would bark at strange noises or if she heard something outside the house. That night it was around 11:30 pm and I was chilling in my room when she started barking. Normally a quick “Hey, cut it out!” would hush her up, but not this time.
So, I figured something had riled her up for real. I went out into the hall and she was looking from the living room down the hall in my direction but past me. So, I looked to where she was looking and couldn’t see anything. The hall was mostly dark except for the light from my room. I looked back at her, and she whimpered for a second.
Then, out of nowhere, she started growling and barking like I’d never heard before and ran towards me and a couple feet past me. She continued barking aggressively at the end of the hall. She was not an aggressive dog at all, so this freaked me out. And it was definitely not a mouse, because she was looking around human head height.
I went to the living room, turned on all the lights, and sat on the couch because it was nice and far from the end of the hall where Hamburger was barking. I called her back to me and she sat by my side doing a low growl for the next five minutes. When I calmed down and wasn’t feeling so alarmed anymore, she refused to come with me to my room. But all that was nothing compared to what happened next.
Later that night woke up to what I swear looked like an adolescent girl in a white dress at the foot of my bed. Here’s the catch though. My room at night in that house could get really dark. I shouldn’t have been able to see anything as distinctly as that. It might have been night terrors but I doubt it. Also, I was completely conscious when all that with Hammy went down.
I never told any of my roommates, and I’ve only told one other person before. Even writing it out I’m doubting myself. All I know is that I loved that dog, and if there was something there, she put herself between me and it.
5. I’ll Be Watching You
I'm a journalist and was told this doozy by a woman I interviewed for a story. When this woman was a young girl, say eight years old, she started to come downstairs at night to tell her father that there was a man in her closet. He tells her there's no such thing as the Boogeyman and sends her back to bed. This happens on and off for like a week.
Finally, he gets frustrated and walks her back to the room. He says, "I'll show you there's nothing in your closet" and goes to open the door. It opens an inch and then he feels someone slam it shut. It turns out there really was a man in her closet. This guy was a creep who would come into the house every night and stare at the girl from the closet while she slept.
The dad kicked the heck out of him and the creep had to serve a sentence for many years—but the horror didn’t end there. I researched her story 20 years after this happened. The guy had just gotten freed again and no one could find him.
6. It’s Coming From Inside The House
I was once in a hot tub with some friends late at night, and we were all telling some stories. One of the guys told us this one, a story of a girl he knows—the people he was with verified it was true. So one day, this girl was called over to babysit. She did it a lot for these people, so it was routine for her. Anyways, she was told to put the kids to bed at 9, and she did.
After she put them to bed, she started watching TV and doing homework, waiting for the parents to come home. But then, she started hearing some noises coming out of the basement, like pans falling and stuff. She just ignored it, and thought it was the washing machine or something. Anyways, a little later, she starts hearing the noises again.
She decides to call the authorities. The lady at the station told her there's a patroller in her area, and that he'll be at the house in about 20 minutes. Anyways, in about five minutes, she hears a knock on the door. She answers, and it's a full SWAT team. She asked, "I thought they were just sending a patroller..." One of the guys told her, "After you hung up the phone, we heard a second phone on the line hang up."
Apparently, there was a man in the basement listening to the conversation. The lady in the station waited and heard him hang up, then immediately sent the SWAT team to help. They went downstairs and caught him; he was wanted for multiple cases of assault.
7. The Gentleman Caller
About five years ago, I lived downtown in a major city in the US. I've always been a night person, so I would often find myself bored after my roommate, who was decidedly not a night person, went to sleep. To pass the time, I used to go for long walks and spend the time thinking. I spent four years like that, walking alone at night, and never once had a reason to feel afraid.
I always used to joke with my roommate that even the dealers in the city were polite. But all of that changed in just a few minutes of one evening. It was a Wednesday, somewhere between one and two in the morning, and I was walking near a patrolled park quite a ways from my apartment. It was a quiet night, even for a weeknight, with very little traffic and almost no one on foot.
The park, as it was most nights, was completely empty. I turned down a short side street in order to loop back to my apartment when I first noticed him. At the far end of the street, on my side, was the silhouette of a man, dancing. It was a strange dance, similar to a waltz, but he finished each "box" with an odd forward stride. I guess you could say he was dance-walking, and headed straight for me.
Deciding he was probably tipsy, I stepped as close as I could to the road to give him the majority of the sidewalk to pass me by. The closer he got, the more I realized how gracefully he was moving. He was very tall and lanky, and wearing an old suit. He danced closer still, until I could make out his face. His eyes were open wide and wild, head tilted back slightly, looking off at the sky.
His mouth was formed in a painfully wide cartoon of a smile. Between the eyes and the smile, I decided to cross the street before he danced any closer. I took my eyes off of him to cross the empty street. As I reached the other side, I glanced back...and then stopped in my tracks. He had stopped dancing and was standing with one foot in the street, perfectly parallel to me.
He was facing me but still looking skyward. Smile still wide on his lips. I was completely and utterly unnerved by this. I started walking again, but kept my eyes on the man. He didn't move. Once I had put about half a block between us, I turned away from him for a moment to watch the sidewalk in front of me. The street and sidewalk ahead of me were completely empty.
Still unnerved, I looked back to where he had been standing…to find him gone. For the briefest of moments I felt relieved, until I noticed him. He had crossed the street, and was now slightly crouched down. I couldn't tell for sure due to the distance and the shadows, but I was certain he was facing me. I had looked away from him for no more than 10 seconds, so it was clear that he had moved fast.
I was so shocked that I stood there for some time, staring at him. And then he started moving toward me again. He took giant, exaggerated tip-toed steps, as if he were a cartoon character sneaking up on someone. Except he was moving very, very quickly. I'd like to say at this point that I ran away or pulled out my pepper spray or my cell phone or anything at all, but I didn't.
I just stood there, completely frozen as the smiling man crept toward me. And then he stopped again, about a car length away from me. Still smiling his smile, still looking to the sky. When I finally found my voice, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. What I meant to ask was, "What do you want?!" in an angry, commanding tone. What came out was a whimper, "What the…?" Regardless of whether or not humans can smell fear, they can certainly hear it. I heard it in my own voice, and that only made me more afraid. But he didn't react to it at all. He just stood there, smiling.
And then, after what felt like forever, he turned around, very slowly, and started dance-walking away. Just like that. Not wanting to turn my back to him again, I just watched him go, until he was far enough away to almost be out of sight. And then I realized something. He wasn't moving away anymore, nor was he dancing. I watched in horror as the distant shape of him grew larger and larger.
He was coming back my way. And this time he was running. I ran too. I ran until I was off of the side road and back onto a better lit road with sparse traffic. Looking behind me then, he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the way home, I kept glancing over my shoulder, always expecting to see his stupid smile, but he was never there. I lived in that city for six months after that night, and I never went out for another walk.
There was something about his face that always haunted me. He looked completely and utterly insane. And that's a very, very scary thing to see.
8. Guess Again
When I was seven, I woke up in the middle of the night with an earache. I decided to tell my mom and stepdad about it, so I walked out of my room—and saw something that filled me with dread. Someone was sitting on the chair in the living room about three feet away from my bedroom door. The person looked strange. The face was just kind of distorted. But it was dark and I couldn't see well.
"Mom?" I asked. The person shook their head, and I started getting scared. "Mike?" The person shook their head again. I decided the best course of action was to go back to bed so I wouldn't have to walk past this person. I climbed in bed and closed my eyes for a second, before opening them and seeing the person standing in my doorway, smiling madly and nodding furiously.
I screamed at the top of my lungs and closed my eyes. My stepdad came running out of his room in his underwear with a baseball bat. That was a scary sight in itself. When the lights came on, there was no one there. For the longest time, I told myself it was my cat, sitting on a pile of my clothes.
9. Black Magic
My dad died from cancer the day I turned 16 after about two weeks in a coma. It was really fast. There was a total of less than two months between diagnosis and his passing. He passed in the house. We had a hospice attendant and my mom was very good about seeing to him in those final days. Anyway, a lot of weird things happened after all that happened.
But one thing that happened still freaks me out to this day. It happened about twelve hours before he took to bed for the last time. He was in our living room napping on the couch while my mom was in the kitchen cooking. No one else was home. Suddenly, he jerked awake and was shouting for my mom in a very loud, agitated voice. Clearly angry with her.
"Beverly! Don't do that! Don't EVER do that again!" She ran into the room, alarmed, and asked what he was talking about. And, without any explanation, he simply said, "Don't do that. Don't walk past me like that in that long, black wig." Sometimes I think he saw the grim reaper. It was the eeriest thing I’ve ever experienced.
10. Four Goodness Sake
I was in Taiwan one year when I was younger, and had traveled to a busy night market. These are popular gatherings of food and shop stalls that usually operate in the evening. Nearby, I spotted a sign for a net cafe in a five or six-story tall building. Thinking I’d fire off some quick emails, I walked in through the dark, small entrance of the building.
The building was older and hadn’t been well maintained, but it’s not out of the ordinary in Taiwan. The entrance just had a dark hallway that led to a small elevator. I pressed the elevator call button and entered. The elevator was uncharacteristically new compared to the building, but I didn’t think much of it. Like some Chinese and Taiwanese buildings, there wasn’t a fourth floor.
The number four is considered bad luck in that culture, so it just read 1-2-3-5-6, which was usual. I looked for the floor the net cafe was at, which was the sixth. I pressed the button. It lurched into action quietly and began the ascent. When it stopped, I figured it was my floor, so I instinctively began to step out. Right before stepping out, however, what I saw outside the elevator stopped me.
It was pitch black, only lit by the light in the elevator. It looked like it hadn't been occupied for decades, with some random pieces of furniture covered with white cloth or similar things. It was a small building, so each floor was single occupancy. I could see pretty much the entire floor from the elevator. Thinking I must have gotten the wrong floor, I checked the light that indicates which floor you’re on.
Strangely, there was nothing. None of the indicators were on, but the floor button to the net cafe was still lit so I knew I hadn’t gotten there yet. All this happened within a couple of seconds. That’s when I noticed a figure moving in the distance of the floor. It was not very visible, but I could make out what looked like a person dressed in some kind of gown, moving slowly towards the elevator, where I was.
I was thoroughly creeped out, so I started pressing the close door button. As soon as I pressed it, the elevator light flickered off and I was in pitch-black darkness. I was very close to peeing my pants, and it’s actually kind of freaking me out thinking back to it. The lights flickered back on a few seconds later, and the door closed. The elevator jolted back to life.
A few moments later, it opened again to the net cafe. I was beyond relieved at this point. I walked out immediately and sat down at a computer. After gathering my wits a bit, I walked over to the cashier’s desk and told them what I saw. The girl working there listened. Her reaction was chilling. Her face turned a bit ashen, so I asked her if she heard of something similar.
She told me that she’s never experienced it, but some coworkers and occasional customers have brought it up. Basically, the building has six floors, and the fourth floor had a history. Apparently, the floor used to be a hair salon of sorts, until one of the employees took her own life there for some reason. She slit her wrists over the hair wash station.
The store continued operations despite stories of weird appearances. When customers got their hair rinsed, the water would look a little red, like the customer was bleeding. Little things like that. And a couple of people reported seeing someone’s figure walking away in the mirror, but wouldn't see anyone when they turned to check. Naturally, the business closed down a few months later.
The building owner tried to re-rent the place out, but never had any luck. Most businesses are quite superstitious, and no one wanted to rent the fourth floor after someone had lost their life on it, even at a very cheap price. Finally, after dropping the price to nearly nothing, a stationary supplies store wanted to rent. During the renovations of the floor, however, several accidents happened.
Tools would end up in strange places, a mirror from the previous business shattered when no one was near it, and finally, a worker had his hand jammed between the elevator doors when it closed on him unexpectedly. The workers refused to continue working and, finally, the business left and the building owner gave up and shut down the floor.
He then had the elevator company come in to replace the panel so that the elevator could not go to the fourth floor. Let me repeat that. The elevator was programmed to never go to the fourth floor. It doesn’t even have a button. But for some reason, sometimes when people take the elevator, it would go to the fourth floor and the doors would open, and some, like myself, would see a figure walking around in the dark.
11. They Walk Here
I do deep forest, as far from civilization as possible, camping and one experience creeped me out. It's the middle of the night, 2 am roughly, and I was traveling through a forest a couple of miles from civilization because I got a call on my sat phone saying I needed to get home immediately. I stumble upon an old graveyard.
The most recent tombstone I could read by my flashlight was 1831. That’s when I heard a sound behind me. I whip around and there's nothing but the still unending blackness of the night. Then I hear another sound from my left. I look over there and again nothing. I think to myself I'm probably imagining it since I'm alone in a forest, miles from civilization.
I turn around and head back to civilization. Just as I'm about to pass the last tombstone that I can see, I hear a little girl giggle right in my ear. Now I think I'm going crazy because things like this don't happen in the real world, only in horror movies. But it gets worse. Suddenly a rock hits my back. Not a pebble but an avocado-sized rock. I know I'm not crazy and I just book it out of there as fast as possible. I refuse to re-enter that forest to this day.
12. Is Anybody There?
I worked with a lady once who was pretty old—I'd say about 70 years old. Since our job was pretty boring, we talked a lot and she had all kinds of crazy stories. But this one creeps me out still. She said when her grandma died, they had her buried in a wood box in the backyard, as was pretty customary in those days. Well, years later they have a family plot in a cemetery and decide to dig her grandma up to move her to the family plot.
She paused at this point. Then she said when they took the lid off the coffin, their eyes went wide. It had claw marks all over the inside. The grandma had apparently been buried alive.
13. Want To Play Ball?
I was house-sitting for my parents at my childhood home, no big deal. They have a couple of little whiny dogs that refused to settle down and sleep without my dad since they sleep with him every night. By about night 3, I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to sleep in my dad’s room on the bed with them. About 2 or 3 in the morning I woke up to that low guttural growl dogs have that instantly makes your hair stand up.
Keep in mind these are little yappy dogs that bark constantly, but this was something entirely different. The room was cold as ice even though it was a tropical mid-July at the time. I just knew that something was wrong. Really, really wrong. Both dogs were growling nonstop so I rolled over and opened my eyes partially.
I saw these two little kids in what looked like vintage turn-of-the-century Victorian-age baseball uniforms. There was nothing inherently scary about how they appeared but the feeling of dread was almost indescribable. They are just looking at me but, somehow, I knew that whatever these were, they were evil for lack of a better word.
I honestly don’t even know how to explain it, but I just knew that something was very, very wrong with whatever I was seeing. The absolutely primal terror feeling told me this was not the harmless dream variety. I couldn’t stop looking though, I swear I blinked 100 times trying to convince myself it was just a night terror—until one of them smiled at me.
It was just a smile, but at the same time, it was malicious and somehow just off. I just got this overwhelming urge that told me to stop looking, close my eyes, pray, pray hard, and do it NOW. I just squeezed my eyes shut and prayed out loud like I never had in my life for what felt like forever. It finally passed, and about an hour later, the dogs calmed down.
As soon as I felt like it was “safe” to get out of that room, I called my parents and made them cut their vacation short and come home that day. My brother still sleeps in there every night with no problem, but something is wrong with that room. I’m not a big fan of the whole “evil” tropes, but I honestly don’t have a better word for it. Whatever was there that night was evil.
14. Too Close For Comfort
When my mom was young, she and her mother lived in a trailer in the backyard of a family member’s house. My mom was about 12 at the time, and the man in the neighboring house started to stare at her from time to time. She got a creepy vibe from him but figured her was just a harmless lonely guy. She soon found out how wrong she was.
One night when my mom was alone, she heard something on the roof of their trailer, then she heard what sounded like footsteps slowly walking along the metal rooftop. Given they were dirt poor at the time, they did not have a phone so she eventually ran out of the trailer and into the house without looking on the roof. When her uncle went outside to investigate, nothing was on the roof.
A few weeks went by with no incidents and my mom figured she must have been overly scared of nothing. More weird stuff would randomly happen, but only when she was alone, and it was always spaced out by a week or two. If I remember correctly, this occurred over maybe a couple of months…before it stopped completely.
Months go by without any weird instances at all—until one fateful night happens. My mom wakes up to find the trailer is unbelievably hot, like she could feel the heater on full blast. She got out of bed and was about to go to the control for the trailer's heater but she was overcome with a bad feeling and decided to just go into her uncle’s nearby house.
The uncle went out to the trailer again and this time noticed that the lock on the door was broken or messed with. He looked inside quickly but didn't see anything. His wife made him call the authorities and when they came out, they searched the trailer and made a horrific discovery. They found one of the kitchen knives behind a chair next to the heating controller.
They suspected that the neighbor went into the trailer, turned the heat up, and crouched behind the chair waiting for my mom to come by and then…who knows. It's been a long time since I heard the story but from what I remember, the officers questioned the neighbor but really couldn't do anything about it. Luckily, my mom and grandmother were able to move out of that town right after that.
My mom told me that about five or something years later she was visiting her other family who lived in a nearby town and she saw the neighbor at the grocery store. She bolted out before he saw her.
15. Lending A Hand
I used to live in a mobile home trailer park growing up. There was a hallway that went from one end of the trailer to the other, with the bedrooms coming off it on one side. My bed was on the wall opposite the hallway, so I could see into the hallway but not down either side. This happened when I was about 6-8 years old.
If I stayed awake after my dad went to sleep and stared at the doorway, I would see something that absolutely terrified me. I would start to be able to make out a hand stretching from beyond the doorway in the hall, from the right side of the door to the left. The longer I looked the more of the hand would appear until eventually, over the course of a few minutes, I could see a red and white striped shirt/sweater sleeve.
If I continued to stare, after a longer period, the body of a boy would appear in the doorway. I specifically remember hiding under the covers most nights when this would happen, mostly at the first sight of him. I was never antagonized further than him slowly moving—facing my bed—from the right side of the door to the left.
If I continued to stare, he would eventually disappear beyond the left threshold. We moved out of that trailer into a home when I had just turned nine, and that was the end of it. I never really thought about it. About 15-20 years later, my dad and I were talking about his best friend that had lived next door but sadly was no more.
We started talking about our trailer and the older lady that had moved in after us. My dad said something that made me blood run cold. He told me, “Funny enough. My friend told me a few years ago that that woman used to see a little boy in a red and white shirt, like a ghost or something.” I was obviously taken aback and told him about what I had seen almost every night for a few years and we were both just a bit shocked at what that might mean.
16. Passing Through
I was in my 20s and hadn't been back to my nana’s for ages since I had moved away. But me and my mam stayed over one night visiting. I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Mam slept in the smaller "box room" that was a narrower room to the left of it. Nana and grandad were in the back bedroom. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
Then I tried to lie down and go back to sleep, and I suddenly felt really awful. I can't describe it. I felt sick, sad, and terrified all at the same time for no reason. As if you were hiding somewhere from somebody and your heart is going crazy as they walk past looking for you. I tried to close my eyes and to nod off.
To the left of me, the bed started dipping as if someone was trying to stand on the mattress and walk across it. There were two more dips one after the other to where my legs were. The mattress was actually making noise under the weight. But there was nothing there. It stopped as it got to the end of the bed. Then, something touched the hand that I had out over my blanket. I thought I was going to cry or retch.
When the terror subsided enough for me to move, I burst out crying and ran to my mam, trying to tell her what happened through the gasps. She was already awake, woken by a spider, and had heard me come back from the bathroom. She left me in her bed and got up to check the front bedroom. She told me that when she went in she felt sick and angry.
The hairs on her arms were sticking up but she couldn't see anything. She came back and told me not to go in there. Of course, then nana and grandad woke up to me crying and grandad dismissed the experience as a dream. My nana wasn't too bothered and said something like, "Ah yeah, I've felt and heard strange stuff for years but nothing dangerous.”
Mam and nana didn't tell grandad, and called a priest to come to the house. He was told everything and checked the house. He took some photos in that front room. He took a few photos of the wall over the beds and made a disturbing discovery. There was this blurry area in the middle over the headboards. He said that apparently from what he's seen before it was a sort of gate where things can get in and out.
So, they were obviously coming out, landing on the bed, and continuing through the house. The housing estate itself is next to the biggest children's hospital in the country and he thought that maybe there were a lot of confused "entities" passing through that didn't know where to go. So that explains what my nana says.
But also older, meaner things were coming in and out and that could've only been happening recently. My uncle told me afterward that he stopped house sitting for them years ago because he could hear running across the house’s upstairs and couldn't take it anymore. Mam had to stay there a few more times for work and she said the night disturbances were getting more and more aggressive.
My nana told me she locked up the house but when she came back and unlocked the front room the iron was plugged in and red hot. The house could've burnt down. Grandad still denies everything, but won't sleep without TV or radio on.
17. For Whom The Bell Tolls
When I was nine, my parents took me to some kind of Renaissance-historical reenactment event in a pretty remote area of the country. About an hour before the event is over, at around 5 pm, the people in charge gather all the kids up, and are telling stories and historical facts, etc. One of the guys mentions that the bell tower is haunted by a ghost who is either very nice or not depending on “whether or not you’re a good person.”
I immediately snuck away to the bell tower to see for myself. I went over the little chain they had put up to keep people out, and climbed the tower. After getting to the top, I just waited for a while, and eventually, I heard someone coming up the stairs. A woman opened the trap door in the top floor. The best way I can describe her is brown.
She had brown eyes, brown hair, dress, shoes, and even a tinged brown veil. I must have assumed she was one of the staff, and I said hello. She asked me who I was, and I told her my name. She asked, “What made you come to the tower?” I said I wanted to see the ghost. She laughed and said that I should probably go back down before my parents got mad.
I did and rejoined the group. The next day, my parents took me back. Soon I run up to the guy who said the tower was haunted, and tell him it’s all made up, and that I didn’t see any ghosts. He’s angry that I went in an off-limits area and says that I was lucky that I didn’t get hurt; because the tower is so unstable and old.
He told me that not even the staff are allowed in. I say that’s not true, because the woman was there and told me to go down. He’s confused and asks me to describe her. I do, and he freaks out, telling me that the bell tower is supposedly haunted by a woman of the same description. He then ran off to talk to someone else about it.
18. You Think You Know Someone
Once, my father went camping at a non-commercial campground, which is usually more secluded, with no camp manager or outhouses. It was during early spring so it was still pretty cold out, and there wouldn't be many people out there camping. There was only my dad, a few of his buddies, and a rough-looking old Chevy with a makeshift, Frankenstein-esque camper mounted on it just a few sites down.
Being sociable and considerate campers, my dad and a couple of other guys went to say hi to their neighbor and let them know to holler if they were being too loud while they were there for the weekend. The guy they met was a seemingly nice man who was minding his own business and politely thanked them for introducing themselves.
He looked like he'd been out there for a few weeks, with a clothesline up and everything. During my father's three-night stay, the group would wave at their neighbor occasionally and invited him over for coffee in the morning once. After they didn't hear or see him for a couple of days, they didn't think much and ended up finishing their stay.
On the way out of the campground, they passed his camp, which was still set up the way it was when they went to say hello. My dad was driving his truck toward the exit with a friend in it, who shouted at him to stop because he thought he saw something. My dad saw it as well from the corner of his eye while driving, but assumed his mind was playing tricks on him. What they had just seen was haunting.
He really did see the guy hanging from the tree and not just a plastic bag. They got out and dialed 9-1-1 their spotty reception. The scene was pretty horrific. My dad recalls a note stuck to the tree with a buck knife. He was too sickened to read it, but he felt bad for the guy and always says how badly he wanted to cut him down from the tree, although he obviously couldn't save him because he had been long gone.
Officer and the ambulance showed up. The group got a "thank you" and were sent on their way after getting some information about the situation. The creepiest part of this story, though, was the fact that it occurred at my dad's favorite campsite, which we were staying at when he told us. He waited until we weren't kids anymore to say anything about it, but it still gets to me.
19. A Scarring Memory
One of the scariest things I ever heard was when I worked in retail. My store used to do layaway and that was where I worked. Right by the layaway counter, we had three bathrooms—a men's multi-stall, a women's multi-stall, and a family bathroom. Well, only the family bathroom had a door that locked. All the others had a push-and-pull swing door.
I was in the back cleaning up and I thought I heard screaming, so I walked out front by the counter. I heard more screaming. I was not sure at first where it was coming from. I ran and checked the men's and women's bathrooms and they were empty. But I still heard the crying and screaming. I made a terrifying realization. It was coming from the locked family bathroom.
I banged on the door but the yelling, screaming, and crying kept going on. It sounded like a child and I had no idea what was going on. I called for a manager because I had no way of getting in the door since it was locked. This whole time there is still crying, screaming, and banging. After several attempts of trying to open the door, we called for a rescue crew.
We had no idea what we were getting into, but it didn't sound good. I think it had been about 15 minutes at this point, although it felt like forever. Then the sound just stopped. No more banging or crying. Nothing. We banged on the door until the authorities came. When they finally did, they had to kick the door in since we had no key.
As we all stood around and looked in, it was absolutely horrifying. All we saw was blood all over the place. We were not really sure what happened at first, but the officers told us to back up. That is when they pulled out a lady and a child. A bloody child, maybe three years old. We all just stood there in shock. The child was not moving. We all thought he was deceased because of all the blood.
They took the lady away in handcuffs and the child to the hospital. We all had to give statements. Later, my manager told me what had happened. She just snapped. The kid wouldn't stop crying and she just had enough and did whatever she could to make him stop. He did survive. I was sure he was a goner, but he wasn't. She had just knocked him out from hitting him so hard.
For that to happen right behind the door and not know what is going on or be able to help was pretty scary to me.
20. A New Haunting
My high school girlfriend said she saw an old man in her house in the study. I laughed it off because her house was no older than 20 years old, so how could it be haunted? I jokingly said that must have seen the wooden carving her parents had that resembled Jesus. This was plausible, because she described the man as having a big white beard.
A few weeks later, I was walking from the stairs and into the kitchen where she was sitting. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an older man sitting at the head of the table in the dining room. I told her but have to rule out my prior claim, as the seed of belief had been planted in my head. Months later her friend from Brazil was visiting.
During this visit, one day, my girlfriend and I were fooling around upstairs and her friend burst through the door crying. My girlfriend asks what’s wrong and her friend says she was listening to music with her headphones on and was walking around on the main floor when she ran into an old man with a white beard in the study.
There was absolutely no way my girlfriend told her friend as she wasn’t a believer in the paranormal, and didn’t make a big deal about it when she told me. To this day it is the one case in my life where I have to truly believe we all saw something in that house.
21. A Message From Beyond
One night, there was an altercation in the middle of our street at 2 in the morning that woke our whole house up. My stepfather and my uncle were still up drinking and went outside to see what was going on. There was a young man kicking the heck out of one of our older neighbors. We found out afterward the young man was dating the older man's daughter.
My stepfather and uncle went out to break it up and in the commotion, the guy plunged the weapon right into my stepfather. He stumbled back on to the porch and fell, and I tried to catch him. His blood smeared down the front of my shirt, and the younger guy took off and we called 9-1-1. This is where it got truly chilling.
We were in the hospital until the early morning. When my mom and I got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was a friend of mine from school, crying and apologizing for calling in the middle of the night, but she had just had a dream that there was screaming and a fight, and I was covered in blood. She begged me to call her back.
The time stamp on the message was the same time as the fight. This is in the late 80s, before computers and even cell phones really. I lived on the other side of town from her. There was no way she could have known what had happened.
22. Window Shopping
I was about 15 minutes from finishing the night shift at work when there was a massive crash on one of the windows in the office. So I get up and go to check it out. Someone has thrown quite a sizable rock through one of the windows on the front of the building. This is made especially weird because I'm working in the industrial district at 11:30 at night, with none of the other businesses in the area open.
I go back to my desk, put a quick call through to security to let them know, and decide to head home. As I'm leaving the building, I'm freaking myself out about it more and more. I end up running to my car, getting in, and taking off. I'm almost home and I've started to calm down a bit when I make a disturbing realization. I hadn't unlocked my car when I got in back at work.
It had been unlocked the whole time. I do a quick check with my hand in the backseat for any possible creeps that might be hanging around there, but there's nothing there. Fast forward 30 minutes. I've called a friend of mine who says he is out drinking. So I decide I'm going to join him. I jump on my bicycle and start riding over.
I'm doodling along the road on my bike. It's a nice night and I'm in no big rush. I’m just enjoying the moonlight when I hear someone riding behind me. I straighten up and stick to one side of the road. He passes me really slowly and, when he is right beside me, he shoots me a smile I can only describe as purely insane. I kind of flinch and am taken aback as he rides on.
All of a sudden, sheer terror washes over my body. I realize he is riding my mom's bike. Needless to say, I sprinted the heck home. When I got there, sure enough, her bike was missing and one of my car's doors was open. The back left one. I was driving, and had no need to open that door.
23. A Shadowy Business
It was August, and I went over to a friend's house to stay the night. The only people there were me, my friend, his girlfriend, and my friend at the time. It was 2:30 at night, my friend was laying down for a bit, and the girls were chilling in the living room, and I went outside on my own to have a quick smoke. After I spark it up, I'm looking across the street from their house, and right behind a small concrete brick wall I notice a head that looked like a straight shadow slightly poking above the wall, looking at me.
I thought it was just someone being really weird—until I put two and two together. There's a streetlight shining directly on where this thing is and it STILL looks like it's complete shadow. I am watching this thing, making sure that I didn't take my eyes off it, and it's just kind of watching me and bouncing back and forth, slowly getting faster as I smoke. By the time I'm done, this thing looks like it's doing a ritual dance or something with how fast it was going.
I slowly start backing up to the front door. When I know I'm there, I fumble for the doorknob for a few seconds and as soon as I get a firm grip on it, that thing stops completely in its tracks. For what feels like an eternity I'm standing there in a staring contest with it, and slowly it starts creeping towards the side of the wall. Only then do I decide to nope out of there, burst the door open, and slam it shut behind me making sure to lock it.
I scared my friends when for like a solid 10 minutes, I'm just constantly peeking through the windows looking like I just had a run-in with death itself. Eventually, I explain what happened to them and confirmed they were all still inside the house when I was outside. We all collectively decided that we didn't need sleep that night anyway.
It never showed up again throughout the night. The next morning, I didn't even bother looking in the area that I saw it. I just wanted nothing to do with it. I still don’t know or want to know what exactly I saw that night. I'm no stranger to the paranormal, have had experiences with it all my life, so not a lot of it scares me, but whatever I saw that night, I could tell just from a glance that it was purely malevolent, and it absolutely terrified me.
24. Running Joke
I had a tickle-me Big Bird toy. It was possessed. At first, I just thought it was a normal toy like Elmo. Nope. Big Bird would go off saying "Ha ha ha, that's funny" or "Ha ha, that tickles" or he would just laugh. He would also do things like, appear in a different room than I had put him in, and blink his eyes even though his eyelids were not movable.
But one experience with him in particular really freaked me out. Big Bird laughs in the dining room of my dad's house. Dad was outside doing something and mom was in the bathroom. So, naturally, I decided that it was high time I buried that stupid Big Bird under all of my heaviest toys in my toybox. I do so and put the heaviest of all my toys on top.
The rest of the night goes fine so far. Until sometime after midnight. Somehow this thing made it to my room and under my bed after midnight. What does it do? He laughs. Just as I was getting close to sleeping. I look under my bed to see those soulless eyes blink and that yellow beak twitch. I then put that toy in the basement.
Fast forward to age 18. I was at my dad's house for the final time. I go through my old bedroom and what do I hear in the old heating vent? "Ha ha ha, that's funny!" Needless to say, I hope my dad has fun with the thing and I am so glad I don't have to deal with either of them.
25. There’s No Place Like Home
My parents bought their first house back in 1972. It was a fixer-upper, but they decided to move in right away and fix things as time and money permitted. Within a few days of moving in, the new neighbors came over to introduce themselves. They also let my parents know that the previous owners had moved out after a nasty divorce.
They had lost their second baby from an illness, and their relationship went downhill from there. My parents were horrified, more so because they were newly pregnant and couldn't imagine going through such a thing. They eventually pretty much forgot all about it. Life went on. They were in love with their new life and their new house.
In preparation for the baby, they decided to wallpaper the nursery. Now, my dad told my mom there was no need for wallpapering the inside of the closet, but she insisted. She was kneeling down, scraping off old paint inside of the closet when her eyes fell upon something that made her blood turn to ice.
Written in crayon, at about eye level for a kindergartner, in childish scrawl were the words: “I KILLED THE BABY.”
26. That’s My Chair!
It was 2009, late evening after my grandmother's funeral. My aunt and I are at my grandmother's house going through her paperwork in preparation for the coming disbursement of her estate to the rest of the family. I had my dog, Jack, with me as he went everywhere with me in those days. He was the most chill dachshund anyone ever met.
My aunt and I are discussing some random memories of my grandmother when Jack jumps out of a dead sleep on the couch, runs to just a few feet away from the empty chair my grandmother always sat in, and starts going absolutely insane, barking toward her chair—not the chair itself, though. The angle of his gaze suggested he was looking at someone in the chair.
Now, Jack never barked at anyone in his life, but here he is going absolutely bonkers over...nothing. It was the singular moment in his life that he seemed upset. He wasn't angry, he wasn't excited, he just clearly had a big problem with something in the chair. This went on for a solid 60 seconds as my aunt and I could only stare in shock and disbelief, occasionally exchanging baffled glances.
Then, as quickly as it began, Jack stopped barking, stared at the chair for maybe another three seconds, then went back to the couch. My aunt and I exchanged one more puzzled look before she said, "Very funny, mom!" I had never seen my dog act that way before and never saw it again. I'm on the fence about believing in ghosts or anything, but that experience was very difficult to rationalize.
27. The Place Under The Stairs
Just a few months ago, while I was still in school, I rented an old house with two of my friends. I lived in the basement and they each had a room upstairs. Several strange things happened to me while I was living in that basement. The first was that I had just gotten a dog and he was about four months old at the time. Now and then, right when I turned the TV off to go to sleep, my dog would start whining and growling at one corner of my room.
He would usually not get on my bed because he wasn't allowed, but during these times, he would jump on my bed and get as close to me as he could, all without his eyes ever leaving that corner. This happened about five times over the course of four months. Then, toward the end of the school year, when I was about to move out, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my life occurred.
Under our stairs was a little door that led to a small space that had a dirt floor. There was also a really weird, old wooden piece of what looks like a map nailed to the inside of the door, so it's a pretty spooky place. Up until the day before this incident, we had kept a small chair in front of this door that I laid my coats and things on, but we had some friends over the night before, so we brought that chair upstairs.
It was dark (probably 8 pm) and I had just been upstairs in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the stairs and was about to open the door to my room, when the door to the little closet under the stairs opened so slowly and with THE loudest creak I've ever heard in my life. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen in fear, staring at the closet, waiting for whatever was about to come out of it to show itself.
I literally stood there for about five minutes, absolutely terrified. Eventually, I opened the door to my room and locked it as fast as I could. I wasn't sure either of my roommates was home, so I called my female roommate and she was there. I spent the rest of that night upstairs with her, still too scared to go back downstairs. I do not scare easily.
Now I know many of you will probably say it was the wind or the fact that I had just come down the stairs or something just as my roommates did, but I've had those things happen to me before and been kind of creeped out, but this was different. The second I heard that closet open and looked over to see it opening so slowly, I felt this sheer terror.
It honestly felt like there was someone or something else in the room with me that wanted me to see that door open.
28. Tuning In
As a kid, I was playing around with a radio once, just slowly spanning through the static trying to find a station. I had found an old television antenna, attached it to the side of our house, and ran a wire out my window to it with an alligator clip attached to the radio antenna, allowing me to get a way broader range of signals.
So I'm sitting there, middle of the night, slowly sweeping frequencies, and suddenly I get to this station that's playing this very weird crackling sound. It sounded sort of like cracking knuckles, or maybe Rice Krispies cereal, but with a fixed, rhythmic pattern instead of being random. I sat there listening to it for a second. Then it suddenly stopped and I heard something bone-chilling. This faint voice said: "It doesn't work. We're already gone. We're already gone."
It took a second for the weight of the words to hit me, but when they did I freaked the heck out and almost threw the radio across the room. I'm pretty sure it was just someone messing around with a radio transmitter, but it sure scared the heck out of me at the time.
29. Santa Claus In The House?
So, growing up I went to a Catholic school, and we celebrated St. Nicholas Day in the beginning of December. The tradition goes that you leave your shoes out, and “St. Nicholas” will leave presents in them. When I was in elementary school, one year the day after St. Nicholas Day, my friend came into school all excited.
He said that the night before, he saw St. Nicholas in his room putting presents in his shoe! He described him as having a big white beard and putting something in his shoe that he had left out, before leaving. At the time, we were excited because it proved to us that Santa was real. Twenty years later, I’m having some beers with this friend.
We had not seen each other in a long time as he had moved away shortly after elementary school. We’re buzzed and telling old stories, and I bring up the St. Nicholas Day story, and ask him if that really happened. That’s how I found out the bizarre truth about what really happened. Very nonchalantly he goes, “Yeah, dude. It did, but it wasn’t St. Nicholas, that was a ghost.” He then basically tells me that his old house was built in the 1700s, and was definitely haunted by one of the original owners.
He said that on the said night he woke up to see an old man with a long white beard, tugging at his foot. When my friend saw him, the old man waved, and then floated up through the ceiling. He didn’t actually leave anything in my friend’s shoe. It took my friend several years for the experience to sink in, and it scares him now.
30. Midnight Visitors
This happened to my friend's dad. This guy isn't the type to make stuff up, so I believe him 100%. My friend's dad, Jack, and his brother Tom lived with each other in the 80s. It was just the two of them living in the house, no one else. So, this one night Jack is coming home at night and walks into his living room to see a bunch of old people sitting around talking.
As he walks in, they all just quiet down and awkwardly look at him as he walks by. He doesn't see Tom anywhere, so he just assumes Tom will be back to tend to his strange guests. Jack has work the next morning, so he goes in his room to get some sleep, but is kept up from all the people talking. He walks out from his room and is promptly met with Tom, who is coming out of his room to tell Jack to keep his friends quiet.
However, Jack was coming out to tell Tom to keep HIS friends quiet. They walk out from the hallway into the living room…only to see that it's empty with the leftover smell of musk.
31. Curtains For You
When me and my mom moved to a new house, she had some redecorating to do. One of the things she wanted to change was to get some new curtains for our bathroom. The curtains in there were torn, dirty, browned, and just ugly. So she bought some new curtains. As she is quite short, she can't reach our attic, which is where she wanted to store the old curtains.
I put the old curtains into a box, then put them into the attic. The new curtains went up. All was good. The next day, when I came home from school, the horrible, dirty curtains were back up in the bathroom. The new curtains were nowhere to be seen. I asked my mom why she had changed the curtains back over. Her reaction was terrifying. She had no idea how it happened.
Still bothers me to this day.
32. We’ve Got Company
We had a two-story house as a kid, with me, my mom, stepdad, and stepsister living there. Every once in a while, you would hear plates in the cabinets rattle a little bit, almost like something tried to pick up the top one and put it back down. But then, there was a disturbing escalation. One night, my mom's hairdryer randomly turned on; a few months later, all of our windup Christmas music boxes go off in the middle of the night.
Another night, me and my stepdad are at home alone watching a movie on the couch. Our kitchen is also behind the couch. From our couch, you can see someone coming down the last stair out of the corner of your eye. My stepdad thought he saw someone like three times within an hour. THEN right after, our dog perks up and follows something around into the kitchen. He doesn't bark.
Sometime after that night, on another night, he groggily opens his eyes to find a woman standing over him. Once he does a double-take the woman is gone. One day my parents are talking to our neighbors and all this comes up. They ask what the lady staring over my stepdad looked like. He says that she had brown hair and she had older-style clothes on. Their reaction was chilling.
My neighbor and his wife immediately stare at each other and say that before we moved in they kept thinking they saw someone with that description in the front window of the house every once in a while. Then our other neighbors on the other side said the same exact thing. Whatever that thing was, it wasn't trying to go all Paranormal Activity on us, but man it is freaky when you're 10 years old.
33. Peeping Tom
I have to preface this by stating that I am a guy. I used to run quite a bit—five miles every day without fail. One day after finishing my run, I got a knock at the door and it was a young man about my age, like 27, asking about the duplex next door, as it was for rent. Typical questions about the neighborhood and the street and whatnot.
I was cordial and informative, but I had some food cooking and needed to get back inside. I told him to call the number on the sign, but before I could excuse myself inside he interjected. The conversation went something like this: Him: Wait...do I smell pot? Dude, do you have weed in there? Me: No, I'm cooking salmon. Him: Oh, cause if you were, I'd be totally down with that. By the way, you've got really nice pecs. Do you work out a lot?
Me: Yeah, I guess...look, I really gotta go. If you have questions about the duplex, call the number on the sign. Him: Cool, thanks. I go back inside the house and he drives off. I instantly call my landlord and tell her to under no circumstances let that guy rent the property, because he gave me the creeps. Well, fast forward two days.
It's a Sunday night around midnight. I'd just finished watching a movie on the couch and I had played a lot of soccer that weekend. Generally, I've found that if I can soak in a hot bath for about 20 minutes, my knees feel better in the morning. So I get up from the couch, walk by my bedroom, and notice that, since I'm kind of a restless sleeper, I must have knocked the blinds and curtains adjacent to my bed askew.
No biggie, I'll fix it tonight before I go to bed. Then I get into the bathroom and notice that someone must have opened the window to the bathroom when I had friends over several days ago. I don't have a bathroom exhaust fan, so it only makes sense to raise the window and blinds a bit. I close the window and shut the blinds.
I've got one of those nifty kitchen timers that I set to 20 minutes and I just sit in the bath, waiting for the time to expire. During this quiet time, my mind starts replaying the weekend's events, and I start to get an uneasy feeling. Subconsciously, I felt something was wrong, but maybe I was just being paranoid. Then I thought about the bedroom window and the bathroom window both having blinds askew.
And come to think of it, I believe the blinds behind the TV had one little slat that was sort of peeled up, too. But, no, now I'm really just being paranoid. And I hadn't even thought about the weird encounter from two days ago. But now, I'm sitting in a bathtub and the darn timer seems frozen at this point. I tell myself that I'll get up when the timer is done, put on some clothes and take a look around the house. Well, I snapped.
Five minutes left and I couldn't take it any longer. I don't know how to rationalize what I did next. It just seemed purely instinctual. I hopped up and got a towel around me. I turned off the bathroom light, made my way quickly through the bedroom door and then the living room area. I then cut the kitchen and living room lights. In the darkness, I pulled a pair of pants up so that I was at least wearing something.
I wasn't going to go back into the bedroom for a shirt. The only light on in the house was my bedroom light. I went over to the front door and flung it open quickly to peer out. Nothing. Crickets. This was the middle of the summer, and the crickets were overwhelmingly loud. Louder than the sound of my squeaky storm door opening.
I decided I was definitely being paranoid, and turned to go back in. I turned, but at the last second I had that thought: I won't be content to sleep tonight unless I properly dismiss the paranoia with a walk around the house. So I barefootedly and cautiously make my way down the front porch stairs, and down the sidewalk to the side of my house where the bedroom windows glow.
The front of the house is definitely clear. I then tiptoe to the corner of the house to get a view of the side of the house. As I peer around the corner, not 20 feet away from me, I see the stranger from two days ago, his face glued to the bedroom window. His hand is in his shorts. I'm instantly enraged. Apparently, he is completely unaware that I have exited the house, much less flanked him.
I decided in that instant to surprise him. The following conversation was a mix between my anger, his fear, and most strangely of all, the feeling of amusement that this is actually happening to me. Keep in mind, the conversation doesn't really make a lot of sense because the guy didn't really have time to think. It really couldn't have been more than about 15-20 seconds before the ordeal was played out.
Me: YOU SICKO! Him: (Surprised and mortified) AHHH!! Me: I'm going to catch you and beat the heck out of you. Him: You don't know me!?!? (backing away) Me: (Aggressively approaching) I know exactly who you are, and I'm going to catch you. Him: (Transitioning from backing away to turning away and starting to run) Please don't hurt me. I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! Please don't hurt me!
At this point, it's an all-out chase across a neighbor's yard. I'm wearing nothing but a pair of warm-up pants, but I'm gaining on him. I was playing soccer daily at the time, so I was definitely going to catch him. But he made it easy. I chased him across one gravel driveway, which wasn't fun, but I was on his heels by the time he reached the second one, and he took a nasty fall right into the middle of the gravel.
I very nearly kicked him across the face with my shin, but I suppressed the urge. I tell him to get up. At this point he knows he is caught, so he is completely compliant...well, kind of. I ask him where he parked, and he lied and said a few blocks down. I ask his name, and he gives me one. I take his keys from him and tell him we're going to his car. We walk about 30 feet and he stops and says, "Actually, this is my car."
Wow, ok, so you parked basically right next to my house. So, I open his car and he's like, "What are you doing?" I explain to him that there's no way for me to know who he is, since he has no wallet with him. I open his glove box hoping to find some real ID. Bingo. I found a receipt for tire rotation or something. The car shown on the receipt matches the car he's driving. But the name doesn't.
I call him by the name on the receipt and he starts crying again and apologizing about lying about his name. I'm convinced I have him scared, and now I just want to go to bed. I know the authorities will take hours and it's already like 1:00 and I've gotta be up early. So, I take the little folder thing the receipt came in and I told him to write down a confession of what he did.
It was only just becoming apparent to me that not only was he a peeping tom, he had come into my house when I wasn't there to adjust the blinds in order to see in. Now I've got a written and signed confession. I write his license plate down and then I decide to make sure I never have to see this guy again. I take his phone and write down numbers of obvious relatives: Mom, Dad, etc.
Just a few. And then I tell him "I never want to see you again." I made it clear for him that if he saw me somewhere, he'd better make sure I don't see him. Anyway, at this point he's sitting in his car. I toss the keys and his cell phone into his car and tell him to get lost. He sits in the car sobbing for a while as I'm walking away, but he's got the engine started and leaving by the time I'm back in my house.
At this point, I sit down and pour a drink. And then I decide I wished I had called the authorities because I'm not getting any sleep, so I call the officer to show them the confession and all the information. The officer who shows up writes a few things down and tells me I should have detained him. Two days later, I call them and ask them about a report.
No news, and no news would come. No report. Oh well, he's never coming back. Wrong! He knocks on my door about a year later. I open the door, and he must have seen the anger. He backs away from the door with his hands up and says he came to apologize. He said he was very sorry. I told him I accepted his apology and to not screw up like that again. And then he said thanks and walked away. Very strange.
34. The Man In The Mirror
When I was about eight or nine years old, my mom’s friends took us to see the puppy they were going to buy. The owner offered us to walk the parent-dogs. They were two Rottweilers, and I remember their names to this day. They were super friendly and walked off-leash with the two kids of my mom's friend, and myself.
When we arrived in a grassy area surrounded by trees, a tall guy approached us. He grabbed my shoulder and the dogs went completely nuts. I remember he had a mirror and tried shining light into the dog's eyes. The mother dog stayed circling me while I ran to the house and the other dog chased after this guy until he was gone.
It was terrifying, but what really sticks with me is that those dogs didn't know me from before, yet they protected me and my friends as if their lives depended on it.
35. Shaking It Off
We were visiting my in-laws around Christmas and we were chatting in their den, having some drinks, and catching up. They had a Christmas tree in the corner of the den. Nobody was sitting near it. My husband and father-in-law were sitting in lounge chairs and I was sitting with my mother-in-law on the couch on the opposite side of the tree.
The two dogs were napping between us. We were all at least six feet away from the tree. All of a sudden, their Christmas tree begins to shake violently. It was as though someone had grabbed the trunk and was shaking the dust off of it. A few Christmas ornaments fell to the ground and then it stopped. It shook for a good 10 seconds.
The thing is, we were the only four in the house, the dogs were sleeping on the couch with us, the tree had been up for at least a week so no woodland creatures were hiding in it and nothing else in the house shook. No glass clinking, no other rumbling sounds, just the tree. We still checked the news to see if there was an earthquake.
We checked both websites and newspapers and there were no reports of an earthquake. We also live in an area where earthquakes are rare. So, I have no clue what shook the tree. We all saw it, and the dogs slept through it. They did not care a bit.
36. Gone In The Night
I lived in the Hollywood Hills, and this happened in the early 80s. One night, I heard crazy knocking at my door at 9 pm. I go to answer the door and there's a lady there just beside herself, talking about "There's so much blood..." She looks normal and is dressed in clean clothing, so we let her in. She tells a story about seeing someone get hurt.
I call the authorities and two uniformed LAPD officers arrive in 10 minutes. They take the lady away, and tell us that she was reported missing, has a mental condition, and lives up the street. All good. 30 minutes later, another knock at the door. Two different officers this time, responding to the call. They have no idea who the other two officers were!
They take our information and statements, our description of the officers, and the lady as well. Radio conversations back and forth ensue, and they really don't have any idea how any other officers could have picked her up, because they were given the call 40 minutes ago. Still no idea what happened to this day.
37. Standing Ovation
When I was around 20, we had this weird neighbor that we didn't think about too much. One night, I was awake at 2:00 AM and noticed out my window that I could see the reflection of a fire. So I went into the completely dark living room and peeked through the window to make sure it wasn't someone's house. It was the neighbor, with a bonfire in his driveway.
He was just standing with his back to the fire, staring directly at me. Now, I hadn't made a sound or anything. There is no way he heard or saw me coming. He was just staring directly at me. So being completely freaked out, I went to bed and couldn't fall asleep because I was convinced he was going to murder me. About half an hour later, I hear crunching, and I'm like, "It’s probably just a raccoon in the driveway."
Then I hear the clapping. I look out from my window to the driveway, and there he is standing in my gravel driveway, clapping, and staring directly into my bedroom window.
38. Come A Little Closer
When I was about 19, I was coming back from seeing my grandparent from the hospital and had to take the last underground train back home. I arrived at the station which was completely quiet, but I assumed it was something normal, as it was very, very late. I don’t remember seeing anyone at all. So, I pay for the ticket, arrive at the departure platform, which was also silent, and wait.
And then I feel something off in the ambiance. Something just felt wrong, and even if it was summer, the ambiance was weirdly cold. So, I take a seat and start looking around because my phone was almost dead and didn’t have anything better to do. And then I see this girl. You know, the typical cliché lady, in a ragged white dress, with long and black hair, looking at me from the tunnel entrance.
I look around and think that maybe she is a worker, and I just need to change my glasses because a girl so young can’t possibly be alone at that hour. Still no one on the platform with me. I look at the girl again. She smiles and waves her hand as if she is calling me. Something clicks inside me. I blink several times, with a really bad gut feeling.
At the same time, I was mesmerized and unable to look away from her. I didn’t feel horror, just the feeling that I was seeing something I shouldn’t. I blink again, and then the image gets more vivid, and I start seeing more details of her face—and I’m suddenly struck with terror. Her eyes are empty. Not just black, pure empty. Her smile was off, her teeth were like white needles attached to the skull.
And worst of all, she kept waving to me. 15 minutes have passed since I came. By now the train has come but I haven’t heard anything. The worst part is yet to come, though. The train enters the station as though it was breaking the black mist that was floating behind the girl, and I didn’t even see the front lights until it had gone through her. I am still a bit confused.
Apparently already standing, I enter the train and leave her sight. Of course, after a few seconds, the doors close, and suddenly all the chill and the cold disappear. The train starts moving again and then I look one last time to the girl’s position, and that is when I make a horrifying realization. She was just an empty shell—a decoy.
A huge figure—black and horrific solid mist, or some kind of semisolid black liquid like oil—pulls the girl in the air. The ‘girl’ moves in front of my window like a rug, horrifying and amazing me in equal parts. The creature, or whatever that was, was angry. I was absolutely sure of that. And I was absolutely sure It was afraid of the light, as it crawled to the side as soon as the illuminated windows touched its figure.
I have spoken with many people about this, and I’m 200% sure I wasn’t asleep. There was something in there, something that expected me to come closer and actually made me do it with that ‘human decoy’ in front of him, waiting in the shadows. I still marvel at it, and it hasn’t been my first paranormal phenomenon but it’s probably the one I have felt least safe, by far.
What would have happened if the train had just arrived a bit late...? It still gives me chills.
39. Window Watcher
This happened to my friend. She told me that when she was little, she was playing with her little brother and sister one night. Her little brother looked out the window and said, "Who is that man?" They all went to the window to see what he was talking about. She said there was a white figure sitting on top of the telephone pole, and it looked like a man.
He was staring at them with a huge creepy smile. Then he just stood up and jumped off the pole and simply vanished before they saw him hit the ground. She said it scared them so much, her sister won't even talk about it.
40. En Route
My friend was taking a scenic route in the middle of the night to get to a certain town. He was driving up a hill, and came upon a car accident with two cars on the side of the road and a person lying down on the ground. For some reason, he caught a bad vibe from it and slowly drove past the scene. He stopped about 100 feet past it and looked behind him. What he saw was horrifying.
The person on the ground was standing up and staring at him. As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, there were about 20 other people coming out of the woods. Nope.
41. The Final Countdown
I delivered newspapers in a fairly rural area the summer after I graduated high school. One night, it's pouring rain and I'm driving down this dirt road that is a cul-de-sac to a farmer's house. I've been down this road a few dozen times and know the routine—drop the paper off in the box at the end of the drive, turn around, and go back up the road and off to my next stop.
This time, as I am getting out of my car to place the newspaper in the holder, I see this man in the ditch wearing a drenched white shirt and running at me as fast as he can. He got within 20 feet of me, and I could see what my mind pictured as a hatchet or axe in his hand. I had never ran so hard in my life to the front of my car, jumped in, and took off.
Everything happened so fast that I almost didn't realize where I was. It must have been about 5-10 miles later that I attempted to call 9-1-1, but there was no signal using my Motorola flip phone in the middle of nowhere in the year 2000. I had to stop at a farmer's house to call the authorities at 2:00 am. Turns out the guy took his own life within an hour of his run with me in that wooded ditch.
42. Introductions
Me and some friends were counselors at a music camp in Northern California, and we always stayed in this old dorm that had been a hospital at one point. My friend Nate was into those ghost hunting shows and we used to do these EVP sessions for fun after a few drinks. One night we start doing the session and we start hearing some bumps and sounds in relation to the questions we asked.
We are still not being really serious but are getting quieter. Then one of us asks, “What is your name?” A few moments go by and we hear Nate ask, “That was a joke, right?” He had his headphones hooked into his recorder, and we sat watching him puzzled ourselves, because he had this look on his face. He had heard something we didn’t.
After some discussion, we play back the audio through the speakers on the recorder so everyone can hear. “What is your name?” we hear our friend ask. What we heard in response will haunt me forever. It was a whisper, but still just as clear as a bell: “I’m Timothy.”
PxHere
43. Late Night Snack
My parents were out one night, and my brother and I were home alone. We were probably 12 and 10 at the time, respectively. Anyway, there's a knock at the door and I hear a voice say "Pizza." Initially thinking it was my father playing a joke, I instinctively went to open the door. That’s when I made a disturbing realization. It wasn't my dad's voice.
"We didn't order any pizza," I said. There was no reply and no audible movement. I went to my bathroom window, which allows some vision of the footpath leading from the front of our property to the front door, but you can't see the door itself from there. So we waited for about 15 minutes, clutching a cricket bat and some ornamental fireplace poker until finally the dude moves away from the door and walks away.
Just some guy with dark hair in a long ponytail, a long dark coat…and no pizza.
44. A Noisy Neighbor
My mother lived in an adjoined flat in a nice old wooden place when I was in my 20s. We both worked odd shifts and often it was easier to go to her place after finishing at 3 am than heading all the way home. A number of times I was there on my own overnight because she was at work. Every so often I would wake up hearing shuffling in the hallway, on the carpet.
It sounded like slippers or socks. I just attributed it to my neighbor moving around and assumed I could hear them through the shared wall. When I eventually mentioned this to my mother she said “Yes, I hear that too. I seem to wake up paralyzed later in the night when I hear it. It feels like there’s something on the bed with me.”
Thinking back, she obviously was experiencing sleep paralysis and didn’t know what it was. The kicker is there was no neighbor, he’d died about two years before I first heard it. So, all this time I was alone lying in the dark listening to someone walking along the hallway without the good sense to be scared!
45. A Glitch
It’s not my story but a pastor I know and his wife, plus another couple on vacation. The men were in a large RV and their wives were following in a sedan. They were taking a "scenic route" winding road through a hilly forest area in late afternoon. The pastor’s wife said they were driving at 45-50. Two large trucks were driving toward them and one tried to pass the other immediately in front of the RV.
She screamed, expecting a head-on collision. All of a sudden, the truck wasn't there anymore. The RV driver was badly shaken up and pulled over, the women behind them. A third vehicle stopped behind them. A man got out and came to her window. He said: "Where did you go?! You and that RV were in front of me and then you weren't. I had to swerve to miss that fool truck driver, then he passed behind me."
They all talked for several minutes until everyone calmed down. There was no explanation and they continued on their way. They thought it was, "A glitch in the matrix."
46. A Body At Rest
When I was in high school, these four girls went to a concert in a city that was a five-hour drive away. They tried to get a hotel room after, but they were too young and were denied, so they had to drive all the way home. About 20 minutes away from making it home, the driver fell asleep at the wheel, and the car rolled. One of the girls lost her life.
A couple of days later, the girl's parents invited a bunch of us over to their house. When I went to her room, I nearly passed out. We were shocked to see they had her body laying in her bed.
47. Deja Vu
This whole thing still freaks me out. I was waiting at the bus stop around two years ago, and just start chatting with this lady who was waiting for a different bus. It was just a normal conversation, but there was an odd undertone that I could just barely make out, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I don't know what it was. but I know it was there.
Finally my bus comes, I get on, and I am the only one there. All of a sudden I hear "Hey!" I glance up and there's a little girl who says "Remember me?" She reminded me strangely of the woman I was speaking with at the bus stop, but younger. You could cut the tension with a knife, and when I got off I swear she watched me as the bus left.
I'm certain that I was the only one on the bus when I got on.
48. The Other Side
When I lived in South Africa, I traveled a lot with a Christian missionary and humanitarian aid worker named Piet. He handled the spiritual stuff, while I tended to work more with the local (mostly Xhosa) people, helping them with non-spiritual issues. In July 2010, we went to a village in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we stepped out of the truck, we knew something was wrong.
We hadn't been able to contact our guy in the village all day, and there was no one around at all. Piet and I went from house to house, looking for, well, anyone, but everywhere was completely empty. Eventually, we saw a figure run around the corner of a building on the far side of the village. It was a young woman, stark naked, running straight for us.
Her arms were flailing, and she was running like an animal, occasionally dropping to all fours, then back on her feet. As she got closer, Piet told me to get back in the truck, then he screamed at me to get in the truck. I'd seen this guy watch a Xhosa witchdoctor burn a dozen chickens alive and not bat an eyelid, so when he lost his cool, I knew it was serious.
I closed the truck door as she reached us. She was covered in blood; there were cuts and slices all over her face, arms, and breasts. One of her ears was missing—I think, there was a lot of blood—her teeth were bloody, and she had a look in her eye of absolute, untamed rage. The screeching sound she made is unlike anything I've heard before or since.
I can still hear it so vividly in my mind. Looking into her face, seeing her wide psychotic eyes and gaping mouth as she made that unholy sound froze me in my seat. Piet had started the truck, and already started reversing up the dirt track, but she followed. He turned the car, and all the while she was scratching at the windows and metalwork.
Then he sped off up the track. She followed us still. She didn't keep up, obviously, but for a while I thought she was going to. I've never seen someone run that fast in bare feet. The journey back to our base town was almost silent. I spent most of it concentrating on the sound of my own breathing, and the rumble of the road. I asked Piet what that was, and what we should do.
He said the girl was no doubt insane, had a psychotic break or something, but the locals would have immediately thought her possessed. If she didn't kill herself, the other villagers would within days. He suggested that they had gathered in one house for safety. This happened in the Eastern Cape, which I would argue is the darkest, wildest, and most bizarre part of the country.
Strange things happen there a lot, and often just get buried or only picked up by one of the crazy tabloids like the Mercury, and subsequently ignored or written off. There are vast swathes of grassland punctuated by the odd settlement, without any adequate law enforcement. A lot of people live in these isolated settlements, and will only leave to work or to get food.
Many spend their whole lives in the village of their ancestors, as do their children, and so on. We did call the authorities, and the officer said “we will look into it.” We never heard about it again. South Africa has some very developed areas (the major towns and cities, for example) but there are enormous parts of this country that have remained almost untouched for decades.
The further you go from Johannesburg or Cape Town, the more rural and strange things can become. I'm not saying that all of rural South Africa is like this. A lot of the villages we went to were nice, simple settlements where the people welcomed us, gave us food, gaped at us for being white, and so on. Some were more sinister.
We eventually got in touch with the guy we were originally trying to see a day later. Piet asked him if everything was all right, and he said “We had a bad presence in the village. It is now gone.” I don't know for sure what happened, but I can guess, based on what Piet said. Piet's been back once since to that place, without me, and they seemed fine.
He told me he didn't ask about the girl, as he didn't know what had happened, and he didn't want them to react. I don't think he wanted to know.
49. Door Man
This happened to me when I was about eight years old, and it still scares me to this day. One evening, I went to let my dogs in from the back garden at around 9:00 PM. It was pitch black so I quickly opened the door and my dogs came bounding in. As soon as they came in, I locked the door and, at this moment, a person on the other side pulled the handle down trying to get into my house.
We had a glass door, so even in the dark, I could see the outline of a man standing there. I ran to my dad and he ran into the back garden after this man. He saw him running down the road. Since then, I have closed and locked doors at the speed of light.
50. Looking For A Playmate
The house I grew up in, which my parents still own, was always very creepy. One night I was standing in my room. When I looked next to me, I got the fright of my life. There was a little girl wearing a white nightgown and she had blonde hair. My mom had a daycare so I always used to the daycare kids. However, it was 11:00 pm and she was not a daycare kid.
For some reason or another, I said that she should go back to the playroom. Then I realized what was happening and looked back. She was gone, with the door slowly shutting itself. There were more sleep paralysis instances where I could just open my eyes and see the floor next to my bed and see her legs and shoes while she was standing there.
I told this story to a girl who lived next to me at a campfire one night and before I explained the girl, she came out and asked, “Was she a blonde in a white nightgown?” She told me that she had also seen her at her house one night.
51. Alone And Vulnerable
My boyfriend works the night shift, and I was asleep alone in the house. Suddenly, I got woken up in the middle of the night by my puppy whining in the living room. I assumed it's because he wants outside. I'm just about to open the back door when I hear this weird scratching or clicking sound at the front door, like someone was sticking something in the lock.
I go to check, and I can see the silhouette of somebody standing there through the window in the door. I then notice there is a second figure in the living room window, although it's too dark to make out any features. I know they can see me because I didn't have any blinds at this point, and they just stood there. I totally freaked and called the authorities, then my dad.
I huddled in the kitchen out of sight of any windows and waited for someone to come. My parents live across town and showed up before the officers. The strange figures were gone at this point, but the neighbors across the street were up and saw the car they had come in. I ended up staying at my parents’ place that night, and when I came home the next morning, I noticed the basement window was partially kicked in.
I got a security system installed the next day. I still have no idea who it was.
52. A Load Of Trouble
I survived a kidnapping attempt in the 1980s. This was in a Sacramento neighborhood late at night, when I was visiting a friend when I was maybe 9-10 years old. Three of us walk out to go play at this park at an elementary school several blocks away. It was around 10:00 pm at night. We were playing Frisbee in the street in front of the school, and our Frisbee lands in the street.
Just as it touches on the pavement, a white van pulls up and stops, as if to allow us to get our Frisbee. I walk toward the van and grab the Frisbee, then move to the side to allow the van to pass. As the van passed, the most terrifying thing occurred. The sliding door opened and a guy dressed in black like a ninja came flying out and tried to grab me.
He had a harness on and the van had been rigged with a telescoping mechanism that allowed him to come out around five feet while hanging from this harness. The harness was operated by another person inside, also dressed in black. So there were at least three people involved in this attempt, including the driver of the vehicle.
I barely dodged his attempt to grab me and all three of us ran toward the elementary school and hopped the fence, ran along the fence through bushes, and then hopped a second fence that allowed us to be inside the school. We were scared as heck and could hear the van driving around and assumed they were in hot pursuit of us.
We found a way to get onto the roof of the school from inside, thank God, and proceeded to observe the van driving around the school for at least 30 minutes in an obvious attempt to find us. This scared us even more because one would think the would-be kidnappers would flee, but I suppose they thought we couldn’t identify them.
This was before cell phones, so we stayed up there until around 45 minutes after we last saw them. It appeared that some of them were searching for us on foot also, which added to the fear. We eventually escaped and went back to my friend’s house, and never told anyone in our family out of fear of being punished for being out late playing.
53. The Scent Of You
Several years ago, when my mother passed away, I didn’t talk to my grandfather for several months. Then, finally, after getting my head on straight, I helped him in taking care of himself. When he died, he left his house to my niece who sold it. I revisited the property to ask for permission to get cuttings from two of the fruit trees—a fig tree and a mango tree—that my grandfather loved.
The owners invited me in for coffee and as we sat in the den, I was enveloped by my grandmother's perfume, which I hadn't smelled in over 10 years. The owners said that that had never happened before the owners said they never had that happen before. Then, in the living room, I was enveloped by the smell of cherry smoke.
My grandfather used to smoke it, but none of the current residents did. No one could explain it.
54. Night Of The Hunter
My old co-worker had a son who was in his mid-30s, and he had a son of his own named Hunter who was four or five years old. She said that Hunter would have bad dreams and that he would sleep with his dad when he got scared. One night, his dad woke up because he heard Hunter calling him. But he was calling him by his name, not “dad.”
So he went to his room and he was asleep. He woke him up and said "Hunter, you were calling me. Is everything okay?" Hunter’s reply was chilling. He said, "Dad, when they call you you're not supposed to answer." He then fell back asleep. His dad asked him about it in the morning, but he said he didn't remember saying it. I get chills when I think about this.
55. Trailing Behind
I used to work in a trailer park for my parents. Quite often, people would start using controlled substances, begin to fall behind on rent, and get evicted. Whenever we evicted someone, their trailer was usually too torn up to actually do anything useful with it. Essentially, to prevent having a pile o' garbage trailer in the middle of the park, we'd buy it from them and just tear it down.
Anyway, here comes the creepy part. Many of these occupants had children. More than half of the children's rooms I found had locks on the doors, from the outside. Inside the children's rooms, it was always quite evident that the kids would sometimes be locked inside for days at a time, due to the "bathroom" corners that would sometimes appear.
It gets even more disturbing. The doors on the insides of the rooms typically had scratch marks along the edge of the door and the door frame. Getting rid of all of the stuff inside before beginning demolition always frightened me. I was always afraid that I'd end up finding a deceased child somewhere among the filth. It never happened, but the odds of it potentially happening were, in my opinion, quite high.
56. A Final Goodbye
I had a dream that I was at this cottage party, and though I didn't recognize anyone there but I felt like I knew them. All of a sudden, someone is knocking on the door and about 20 people crowd around it. I'm walking up and then everyone turns to look at me saying, "They're here for you.” I don’t want to go, but I still walk up.
It's this old lady kind of lying on the ground, as if she crawled up there. She's got stringy long hair and white eyes. I’m creeped out but also somehow feel comforted. I leave her at the door and walk to my room at the cottage and there's this old man sitting in my bed. The man says something like, “Someone died recently in your life and you didn't get to say goodbye. Now is your chance."
I look out the window and he's also there. I again feel comforted. Then my friend’s dog woke me up! I definitely know this was about my friend who had passed a month before. She had stage 4 stomach cancer and died within a month of knowing. It’s crazy what our subconscious can do!
57. Sister Acts
I'm a female, first of all. I'm 21 now, but when I was four years old, my sister had just turned 16. She had just gotten her license and was so excited. It was probably only September, and she got her license in July. My sister is from my dad's first marriage, and she lived with her mom and stepdad while I lived with our dad and my mom.
We lived about 30 minutes apart. My dad worked late hours, and my mom frequently traveled for work, so I had to spend a lot of time at a babysitters (which was costly) until my sister got her license. My dad finally gave her permission to pick me up after she got out of school and take me to her mom's until he was off work. She was so excited to finally be able to use her license!
I know I said I was only four, but I remember this event so vividly. It took years for my sister to even ask me if I remembered it, but when I told her all the parts I remember (about 80%) she filled in the rest for me. It was one of the first times my sister would get to pick me up from my babysitter, which means it would be one of the first times she'd been allowed to drive with me alone.
Almost as soon as we pulled onto the main road, a white pick-up truck swerved behind us. Weird, but whatever. After a few turns, my sister noticed that the truck still followed her. Even when she would just switch lanes, he was right there switching behind her. My sister, being a bit of a paranoid person, tested it a little and switched lanes several times.
She said she heard his tires squealing by his quick cuts to get behind her again. She told me not to worry, and I remember being an oblivious little kid. She looked scared, but I had no concerns. The man started to get really angry. I don't remember anything about what he looked like, but I do remember that he had this look of pure hate on his face
It’s strange that you can sometimes remember expressions but not the faces they were on. He wasn't only angry, he was full of hate. He was honking the horn repeatedly, just laying on it, and he was very close to our car. He was swerving back and forth, trying to get our attention. He would pull up beside us occasionally, flip us off, and honk.
The first big event came about when we pulled up at a four-way stoplight. It's a bigger one, so there was a lot of room in the intersection. We were the first ones at the stop light in our lane, and nobody was beside us. The man used this lane to pass us and pull his car in front of us almost in the intersection. He was now blocking us.
I so perfectly remember that white pick up truck. He got out of it, and started storming towards our car. He was screaming so hard I remember thinking his face almost looked purple. Neither one of us remembers what he was saying, but he pulled up his shirt to reveal to us that he had a gun. He pointed to it and at us, threatening us and closing the gap between us. My sister put her hand over my body, told me to close my eyes, and floored it through the intersection.
She said she was worried we were either going to hit him, or get hit in the intersection, but it was a better chance than sitting there and waiting for the psycho to shoot. But that was just the beginning of the nightmare. He hopped back into his car and followed us. My house was closer to where we were than my sister’s, so for some reason, she decided to go to my empty house.
Obviously, he followed us and blocked us into the driveway. He got out and walked towards my sister’s parked car. Once again, she had to think fast and swerve her way across our lawn back out onto the road. This was before cell phones, and she had just started driving and was still young. She had no idea what to do, really.
He followed us back onto our neighborhood road, pulling up next to our car and hitting his truck against us, trying to make us skid or wreck. There is a smallish area of grass between my neighborhood road and a major busy road, and it was obvious he was trying to push our car hard enough to send us into the traffic beside us. I remember him doing that little gesture where you drag your finger along your throat, like you're slitting it.
His face was still purple. There was a gas station nearby and my sister decided on the last Hail Mary move she could think of. I remember her talking to me so seriously and sternly. She told me she needed me to be a big girl and the second we pulled by the door of the gas station, to undo my seatbelt and jump out, and run inside so fast that I shouldn't even worry about closing my door.
I was to run inside and go directly to the person behind the counter and tell them to call 9-1-1 because a bad man was following us. We pulled in and she threw the car in park and I jumped out and did as I was told. She was only a few seconds behind, but she had to actually stop the car, park it, turn it off, whatever. She closed her door and mine for me, and just ran inside with me.
The man came into the parking lot behind us, and when we were inside, he went through my sister's car. By the time officers arrived, he was gone. They never found him, and we never knew what provoked him or what his plan was. The only thing he took from the car was my sister's ID and the cash she had on her. I can still so vividly picture what was happening, but I don't remember being scared.
I don't remember my sister ever showing that she was freaking out, although later at her mom's she did lose her mind, sobbing her eyes out and yelling, understandably. I think the way she handled it really prevented it from being a really traumatic experience for me. It's still scary, but it's not something that haunts me, and I have her to thank.
58. Nighty Night
This happened to my cousin, and my other cousin and aunt witnessed it. My younger cousin's name is Jenny, my older cousin’s name is Jane, and my aunt's name is Myra. So Jenny and her mom Myra are in New York to visit Jane while she's in her master's program. They tour around NYC and stay at a hotel in Manhattan somewhere.
Anyways, in the middle of the night Jenny is having nightmares. After talking with her after the fact, she describes sleep paralysis to the tee. Apparently Jenny was being drawn in and suffocated by a massive TV that drove her through the bed and into the ground. She woke up screaming and crying, and vomited and peed her pants in the bathroom.
My aunt Myra goes to help her and wash her off, and they both head back to bed sometime later. A while later, my aunt checks on Jenny again, who is now staring directly at her with a blank expression. She's sleeping with her eyes fully open. My aunt is creeped out, but then a new terror came to visit. She and my other cousin Jane are starting to hear whispers and children's voices.
They leave first thing in the morning…but one more creepy thing happened. There's a photo of my family from this time where Jenny has fully blackened lips. Not Photoshop blackened, but they're perfectly black. Almost as if she had put on some makeup or lipstick. But of course she didn't. To this day, we have no idea why her lips showed up like that.
59. Manifesting Power
One day I was in the blackest mood I've ever been in. I wasn't just sad or angry, I had been betrayed by some friends and a lover and I was just bitterness personified. I was lying in bed and I didn't want to move and I didn't want to think and I didn't want to do anything. I was finally tired enough to sleep, but there was a lamp on across the room and the light was shining directly in my face.
I glared at it and for a fleeting moment it represented all that I hated in the world and I just wanted it off without me having to actually move... and in that instant, the bulb blew. It actually shocked me out of my funk a little bit. I casually mumbled, "I'm a witch, burn me." And then went to sleep.
60. Paint By Numbers
My parents were on their honeymoon in Key West. When they arrived at the hotel to check in, they were told that the room would be non-smoking. With my dad being a smoker, they requested a different room. They got the room switch and went to their room. As they got off the elevator, the smell of fresh paint was overwhelming.
Down the hall there was a painter with all necessary supplies laid out around him, and he was painting the wall. As my parents walked passed him, they casually greeted him and the painter gave absolutely no acknowledgement of their presence. Whatever. When they got to their room, the smell of paint was even worse in there, so bad it wasn't even bearable so they decide to go to the front desk to change rooms again.
When they explained the situation, the attendant looked very confused and informed them that there wasn't a scheduled paint job on that floor for that day but agreed to change their room. My parents go back to their floor to grab their luggage…and the painter is completely gone. All the supplies are cleaned up and gone within 10 minutes, and the smell of paint was completely gone.
At this point, my parents were freaked out but didn't think much of it and go to their new room. The next morning on their way to breakfast, they overhear a tour guide talking to a group. My parents tuned in when the guide mentioned the floor that they were originally supposed to stay on. Apparently a long time ago there was a painter on that floor painting and he fell down the elevator shaft.
Now, my parents don't normally believe in the paranormal but after an event like this that they had no explanation for, it freaked them out a good bit.
61. Whistle While You Work
This one hits me every now and then when I wake up in the middle of the night. So I was around 17 and had gotten home from work rather late. I went straight to my room to change and found myself hungry. It was probably around 1 am by this time and I didn’t want to cook anything and make too much noise as I was afraid I’d wake the parents.
So when I ventured to my kitchen, I started shuffling through the cupboards looking for a quick fix of snack food to tide me over until the morning. Now, our kitchen was positioned so that the kitchen door led to our back yard. The door itself was an old wooden door, but my dad had added one of those metal security gates on the outside for good measure. It was one of the security gates where the holes on the door were small enough so that insects could not get through, and therefore we could leave the wooden door open in the summer to allow for a breeze to go through the house.
In addition to the security door, my dad had also installed one of those auto security lights, you know the ones that go on automatically whenever their motion sensor is triggered. Usually the light would only go on when I would let my dog outside to pee at night. However, on this night my dog was already lounging in my room waiting for me to come back with some snacks for him as well.
Anyways, getting ahead of myself. So, I was busy creeping through the cupboards and finally hit the jackpot with some pop tarts. Knowing my dog, I didn’t want to chance him snagging the tart from my hand as I ate it, so I busted those things open then and there and ate them raw. As I am standing there eating the first pop tart, I hear a faint whistling sound from outside.
The wooden door was open. At first I thought it was the wind, but then I noticed that the whistling was a distinct tune and not random whistling. I didn’t know the tune but I could tell that it was from a song…it sounded like a happy and sad song all rolled into one. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s the best way I can describe it. It was odd.
After standing there for around 20 seconds, I decided that it must be one of my friends who lives down the block screwing with me. Maybe they were on the other side of the fence and whistling there to scare me. Right when I am thinking this thought, I see the security light suddenly turn on. I quickly looked around the surrounding area but don’t see anyone or anything that could have set the light off.
The whistling is still going on……Now I am in panic mode. Is it one my friends? If so, where are they hiding? If it’s not one of them, then who is it? I am stuck standing there now and can’t move as I stare outside waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. A minute or so goes by, with the whistling continuing and the light remaining on.
Suddenly the whistling gets louder and I see the doorknob to my metal door start to move up and down. I can see through the metal door to see that there is no one there. The whistling sounds like it’s right outside now and the door knob keeps moving like someone is trying to get in. The security light is still on so I have a clear view of the front of the door and know for sure there is no one there.
Screw the pop tarts. I dropped the box and jetted back to my room, slammed and locked the door, and hid under my blankets with my bat and dog. I never went out to the kitchen at night after that.
62. Picking Up After You
You know when you’re sleeping and someone is staring at you, you can feel it and wake up? I got that feeling and opened my eyes and saw a man staring at me as he was leaning over my bed. That scared everything out of me. He’s come to visit a few times since then, but he never got as close as he did that particular time.
I dropped a small skin serum bottle in the bathroom and heard it bounce on the tile and couldn’t find it. Two days later it was placed back in the cabinet. I live alone and had no visitors during that time, so no one placed it back in the cabinet.
63. Take A Deep Breath
My old house was a pretty large run-down looking house, the floorboards creaked and everything and it kind of looked somewhat like a haunted house. Once, late at night, I went downstairs to grab water. I heard some sort of breathing so I turned around and saw nothing. I followed the sound and it was coming from inside a cupboard. It scared the life out of me.
I opened the cupboard, and I saw this thing crouching there. So, I closed the cupboard and ran like anybody else would. The next morning there was nothing there.
64. Knock, Knock
I was taking a shower while my family was out. I had talked to my sister a few minutes before and she'd said she was on her way home so we could go pick up food. I was notorious in my house for taking long showers, so when I heard someone knocking on the bathroom door halfway through my shower, I assumed my sister had gotten home and was telling me to hurry up.
I finished my shower, got dressed, and walked into the living room while calling out to her, but she wasn't there. I called her to see where she'd gone and she said she was almost home. No one was home but someone had definitely knocked on the bathroom door.
65. The Room Where It Happened
My mom told me one that's creepy. When I was a baby, maybe about six months old, she put me into my cot to sleep one afternoon. It was a high sided wooden thing with a drop side for access that required you to press in two little nubs, one in each corner, to release the side. Well, she came upstairs one day and found me outside the cot, asleep in the middle of the floor about two metres from the cot.
The sides were up and there is no way I could have opened it; I couldn't stand and the sides were far too high to jump over. Apparently she never felt comfortable leaving me in the room after that. Also, when my younger brother was born he was put into that room as his bedroom. One evening my mom and I were on her bed playing with my baby brother and we heard this noise coming from his room.
Panicked, my mom went to look and one of his musical toys was in the cot playing to itself despite not being activated.
66. An Unwelcome Visitor
When I was about six years old, I was playing with the kid next door one afternoon. Then the lights went out all of a sudden. We were by ourselves since all of her family members were at the hospital with her mom, who was suffering from leukemia then. When the blackout happened, my friend went out of the house to the porch. I was by the door looking outside when something made me look back into the house.
There, in the living room, was a shadow figure walking around—tall, dark, no recognizable features whatsoever. It was as if someone was wearing a black whole body suit, but not as definite as a real person would be in a room. It wasn't too blurry either, but I noticed it moved around the room as if it were looking for something.
I actually wasn't scared at this point, since I've never seen anything like it and I was a curious child. The next thing I knew, it went up to the second floor, so I followed it and continued to watch the shadow figure walk around the bedroom. Again, it seemed like it was looking for something. Then it started moving towards the wall on my right.
I remember thinking “Oh my god, is it gonna disappear!? Is it gonna disappear!?" And sure it enough, it vanished through the wall. I forgot about all this until I was around 17 and was watching one of those "Real Ghost Stories" on TV. One guy talked about his own experience of seeing shadow figures in a hospital where he was confined for a few months.
He mentioned that he sometimes saw them beside people who were about to pass. Chills ran up and down my spine when I heard this. I remember my friend's mom died just a week after I saw that shadow thing. But at least I now have my own understanding of what that dark figure I saw might have been: some kind of grim reaper.
67. Bread And Circus
I was at Wal-Mart standing in front of the French bread. Suddenly, I notice this strange guy standing there, starring at the food. He’s about 40 years old and wearing jeans shorts. He’s a little overweight with a handlebar moustache, tight shirt, and flip-flops. I pick up one loaf of bread and he turns to me with a strange smile. I put the load down and walk away, shivering.
After 30 minutes or so, I change my mind and go back to the bread aisle and that dude is still standing in the same spot...just staring. So I put the bread back...He IMMEDIATELY grabs it, the one I just put down, and storms to the cash register. Pays and leaves. That is the only thing he bought...What the heck?
68. What Happens At Sleepovers…
I was at a friend’s house spending the night when I was in middle school. As expected, we'd stay up to all hours, which didn't matter most of the time except the bathroom was right near his parents’ room. About the only time we'd get in trouble was when someone would wake them up when nature called. To avoid this, we'd go out the basement door and just pee in the woods.
The door stayed unlocked most of the time because we'd managed to lock ourselves out more than once. This was also compounded by the fact that we'd all wander out and find something to do in the woods on a regular basis. This night, his older brother was home and kept barging in the basement door and raining chaos from above, so we decided to lock the door just to deter him.
Not that it really would have kept him out, but at least he'd have to use the key and that took the “barging in” fun out of it. About midnight, we heard the handle jiggling and didn't think much of it, figuring it was his brother. After about five minutes of off and on handle fondling, we finally hit the door and yelled for him to stop. Quiet.
No response, and no more clattering of the handle. Great, we can move on right? Wrong. About 10 minutes later it started again, and the process repeated. This went on for about two hours, until finally after telling him to stop we just said, “screw it” and ignored it. He continued for about 30 minutes after our last attempt for him to stop and then just gave up.
Well, fast forward to about 9 am. We were just stirring and one of my friends had to go to the bathroom. If you've ever had a sleepover like that, there are bodies strewn wherever there is space, and once the first person starts walking around it kind of stirs the nest. We all started stretching and making our way to relieve ourselves of all the soda we'd binged on the night before.
As I go walk outside, I grab the door handle to close it behind me and noticed it felt rough. After looking at it, I saw that the space around the keyhole was all but destroyed. There were giant scratch marks on every surface and the metal guides were bent and skewed. I asked my friend that lived there what had happened, and he said it was the first he'd noticed it.
Not really wanting to get blamed for something his brother did, we went upstairs and told his parents about the night before. After his dad went down to see what we were talking about, he went completely white and ran upstairs to call the authorities. Evidently someone had been trying to force the lock open while we were all inside.
That's actually happened to me more than once on different occasions, but what completely freaks me out about this time was that this person knew we were in there and that we knew someone was trying to get in. Even so, he REPEATEDLY tried to force his way inside, heedless of our complaints. God knows what sort of person that was.
69. Middle Of The Road
When I was younger, maybe around 12 years old, I was alone at home with my sister who was 10 at the time. Our mom had gone down the road to a family friend's house, but it was really late (past 10) and she was still not back. We were watching TV when suddenly someone hit the letterbox twice really hard, and without looking we opened the door straight away, since we assumed it was our mom.
When we opened it, there was no one at the door. Instead, in the middle of the road there was a lady just standing there, staring at us. It was really dark so we didn't see the face or anything properly. We just shut the door and freaked out. Our mom came back around 20 or so minutes later, but it definitely was one of the creepiest moments ever.
70. Mommy Dearest (Not)
One of my friends’ girlfriends growing up had a really cool house. She lived basically in a mother-in-law’s suite with her parents. So, it was really cool to hang out there because we could be as loud as we wanted. One night I went upstairs pretty late to go grab a snack and saw her mom at the top of the stairs to their room.
I apologized and felt really bad because I didn’t mean to wake her mom up. I went back downstairs and told my friend that I hope her mom doesn’t yell at her. Her reply was bone-chilling. She frankly said that her parents were out of town and that I must have seen the ghost. I guess there’s a ghost at the house who looks exactly like her mother, and they even have old records and photos of the families who lived there forever ago and the resemblance is uncanny.
71. The Last Straw
So I have these cousins who have always somehow lived in haunted houses. It probably makes more sense to say they're haunted. My uncle and aunt used to live in a small house first, and they had just one child at that point. Whenever they were downstairs, they'd hear someone walking upstairs, and whenever they were upstairs, they'd hear someone walking and doing things downstairs.
They eventually moved and then at their third house, strange things happened too. Blankets would get pulled off when they were sleeping, you'd see family members walk into a bedroom that no one stayed in but when you walked in, no one was there. This all happened regularly. Eventually, my aunt started going slightly crazy and said it was after she saw this scary ghostly woman standing in the hallway in their house.
72. My Deja Vu
A couple of months ago, I was exiting a Home Depot parking lot and saw a big truck coming in. Something came over me. I immediately knew what was going to happen and said out loud, “Driver has a blue hat and will honk the truck’s horn twice while turning,” as a way to actually believe myself if it did happen. Well, guess what? It certainly did.
I couldn’t see the driver until the truck cleared the entrance but when he did, I saw that he had a blue hat, and he also honked the horn twice as he was turning right beside me. I felt like an idiot for the whole day for saying out loud what I thought was going to happen, but felt weirder when it did really happen.
73. A Heavy Burden To Bear
I was out at a restaurant with some friends a long time ago, probably 10 or 11 years ago. We were all eating at some Italian place. We had just ordered our food and were all chatting when some random, creepy-looking dude came out from the back area. He walked to the front of the place, turned around, looked at everyone in the restaurant, and then stopped at me.
He looked right at me and said, "YOU! I need your help." I sat there thinking, "What the heck is this guy talking about?” Whatever, though, I got up and went to "help him." Apparently, he needed help putting on a backpack because it was "heavy." There was literally nothing in the bag. There was no weight to it at all, nothing whatsoever.
After that he thanked me and walked out. I still have no idea what the heck was in his bag or why he chose me out of a full restaurant of people. Weird people like talking to me for some reason.
74. Tickle Monster
When I was about seven years old, I was sleeping in the same bed next to my five-year-old sister after a long day playing on a hot summer day. I always slept with my arms above my head. That night I awoke to someone tickling my ribcage. I immediately looked at my sister to blame, but she was in a deep sleep. I was so terrified I pulled the sheet over my head—but my scare wasn’t over yet.
Then a small, child-sized hand pressed against the sheet and pulled away. I've never slept with my arms above my head since, and to this day, I'm terrified of someone tickling me. I'm now 40 years old.
75. The Ghosts Come Out To Play
One time my friend and I slept on the floor in the lounge of my house overnight. We got pretty tipsy and decided to go for a walk. So at about 2 am, we walked to the cemetery on the other side of the block and looked inside. At the same time, we both screamed and ran like heck. We had both seen a clear, white object move quickly across the cemetery.
We initially thought one or the other of us might have imagined it, but we had both seen it at the same time. We ran all the way home, and didn't leave the house again until morning.
76. Jazzing It Up
My husband and I had the "hang-out house" of the cul-de-sac. Everyone hung out in our garage. We had a friend named "Tony" who would stop by after work, take a nap on my couch, and then hang out every night playing pool or just being there. Sadly, we lost him in a vehicle accident. For nearly a year after that, we would wake up to the stereo in the garage turning on and playing the jazz radio station.
Tony was the only one who liked jazz—and our garage radio was never tuned to that station. Even if it was turning on due to some strange power surge, it would have turned on to the station we kept it set to, not the jazz station!
77. Guardian Angel
When my aunt was in college, she took a night lab class that would let out late. One night she was walking back to her car and someone came up behind her, pressed something into her back, and told her to keep walking. Suddenly a man coming toward her who she had never met before looked at her, threw open his arms for a hug, and said, "How are you? I haven't seen you in so long!"
He then whispered, "play along. He has a gun." My aunt immediately played along, hugging back and acting excited to see this stranger. The guy who was behind my aunt quickly backed off and walked away. This hero then took my aunt to the nearest emergency alert post, pushed the button for her, and told her to stay put while he went to get help. He never returned.
78. A Screeching Success
About 10 years ago when I was in high school, myself and a few of my friends decided to go on Ghost Adventures and check out some of the haunted sites near my hometown. One of them was an old graveyard a few miles from where we lived. I drove, parked outside it and we walked through it to find a grave of a former captain that was said to have haunted the graveyard.
We read his gravestone and lingered for a few moments to see if we felt a presence or if we would hear anything. Nothing happened, so we proceeded back to the car. While sitting in the car trying to find our next destination, we all looked up as a loud screech that sounded like nails across the hood of my car startled all of us. I still remember the frightened look on my friends’ faces as I proceeded to fly out of that graveyard as fast as humanly possible.
79. A Narrow Escape
A few years ago, I taught English in Slovakia. One Friday night, I went out with the rest of the teachers for pizza and other, assuredly wacky, shenanigans. Eventually we wound up in this weird, underground club. Not really my scene, but whatever. I went to the washroom, and while I was occupied, another guy walked in. He said something in Slovak.
I don't speak Slovak, so I said, “Sorry, can't help you.” Then I heard this click, like a lighter. I started laughing and made some joke about smoking wasn’t allowed, washed my hands and left. Then we all decided to head for home. Since I can't speak or read Slovak, I didn't follow local news outside what my co-workers told me.
Monday morning, bright and early, I found out what really happened that night—and I couldn't believe it. Someone had shot up that club not long after we left. Apparently his weapon jammed and it took him ages to fix it in the washroom. I think I used up every piece of luck I will ever have that night.
80. Deux Ex Machina
Last summer, I once prayed off-hand for a bottle of vodka while walking my uncle’s dog one day. At the time, I was preparing for the emotional response to the then-incoming passing of my grandmother. One bottle of vodka literally fell from the sky into a bush on my right-hand side a few seconds later, intact and unopened.
I walked around the block once again to make sure what had just happened had actually happened, then picked it up, opened it, drank it, and did seven more laps while thinking of rational explanations as to where it had come from. There was nowhere obvious it could have come from.
81. A Tall Dark Stranger
I was walking to the store late at night, probably around 11-1 am. I don't fully remember, but the streets were isolated. I live in the Bronx in a not-so-nice area, but I've grown up around the "not-so-nice" people in this neighborhood all my life, so I’m not afraid that anything will happen to me because a lot of them actually look out for their neighbors.
Anyway, while I was walking, the streets were completely empty—until I heard footsteps behind me. Being the cautious person that I am, I turn around to take a good look at the man for a long minute just in case I had to identify him later. I'm a short girl (5'1) and this man was twice my height. I was a bit creeped out now but kept walking like normal.
After a while, he caught up to me and asked if I was Dominican. I sternly said yes and kept walking. He then asked if I was 18 (I was 17) and I replied no. I was ready to cross the street because he was freaking me out. As soon as I said “no,” he looked at me, disappointed, and said, “Oh never mind,” and ran away from me. It was such a small thing, but it really creeped me out thinking about what may have happened if I had told him I was 18 and what exactly this guy was planning.
82. Party In The House
I think I was around 8 or 9 when it happened. My mom owned a restaurant that my sisters and I had to go to after school so that we weren't home alone. Well, on one of these nights, some drama happened and my sister drove us all home earlier than usual. When we arrived in our driveway, we saw that all the lights were on and there were silhouettes of people walking around upstairs.
It looked like a party. We didn't think much of it because we did have a roommate and he was in a band and sometimes he brought his friends home. We walked into the house and nobody was home. Not a single person, but all three of us saw the silhouettes from outside of the house.
83. The Milk Of Human Unkindness
There I was, a young man in a crowded Chicago bar. It was 2 am, and I was slightly tipsy. I had just been denied by the girl I foolishly spent the whole night talking to, and I "celebrated" by taking a couple more shots. Suddenly, all the drinks from that night came rushing to my bladder, so I decided to head to the bathroom before calling it a night.
After stumbling through the crowd, I finally made it to the dilapidated bathroom that was located downstairs. When I walked in, I was met with a shocking sight. There, standing in the middle of the men's bathroom in a dive bar at 2 in the morning, was a blonde breastfeeding what looked like a newborn babe. Whether I was too far gone or just in shock at what I was seeing, I couldn't seem to move or speak.
The silence was broken when the woman, clearly appalled that I was staring, yelled, "Do you mind?" and proceeded to squirt her breast milk at my face. The woman's attempt to hit me was successful. Without saying a word, I walked out of the bathroom, wiped the milk from my face, and exited the bar. Since it all happened so fast, it wasn't until the next morning that I was able to process the absurdity of what had happened the night before.
84. Playing Possum
I saw the ghost of a possum, or a phantom possum. Years ago, I lived out in the country, in a rented house. I went to the shed to get my fishing poles one day. I opened the door, and BAM...there was a possum right there. I was startled and took a step back, staring directly at him. The possum never moved, or even flinched.
For a second, I thought it was playing dead. Then IT DISAPPEARED RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES. Just faded out of sight. I could still see it for a second or two after it faded away, like it was a vapor, then gone.
85. No Laughing Matter
About two years ago, I was in my room reading a book when I hear it. Soft as ever, two little girls giggling. Not just any giggle. It was the kind of giggling you hear in horror movies. I immediately put down my book and listened. After about a minute of holding my breath, I decided it must have come from outside. Then that night, just as I'm about to drift off to sleep, I hear it again.
Two little girls giggling. Now it was 2 am and I was pretty darn sure there weren't two little girls outside my window at that time of night, so I began to freak out. I sat up in my bed and waited for what felt like forever just listening. Then I hear it again. I jumped out of my bed and go spend the rest of the night in the guest room. By the next morning, I was convinced my room was haunted.
For the next week, I avoided my room and spent my nights in the guest room unbeknownst to my family. I was afraid to tell anyone for fear I was going crazy or they wouldn't believe me. But every time I spent more than an hour in my room, I would hear those two little girls giggle. By the end of the week, I was a mess. I could barely sleep and was terrified of my room.
Then one morning my brother walks up to me and says, "You deaf or something?" Obviously, I was confused, and after further questioning, he tells me about this small device he had placed in my room. Apparently, its like some sort of prank device that's easily hidden and can make a variety of different noises, my brother, however, choose the creepy as heck little girls giggling sound.
He wondered why I hadn't heard it or said something about all week and I just wanted to punch him in the face. So my room wasn't haunted after all! Moral of the story, sometimes your brother is just a jerk.
86. Speeding Spirit
There is a haunted road near where I live. Numerous people have seen the ghost car. The first time that I saw it I was driving and my mom was dozing off in the passenger seat. I see a cloud of dust and a large, old, black car speeding out of a road on my right. I just know that he is going to exit that road at the same time I am passing by that road.
We are for sure going to collide. So, I slam on the breaks. I don’t even look in the rearview mirror first, I just lock it up. We come to an abrupt halt; mom wakes up. The car is gone. No dust cloud coming from the road on my right, no black car. I am shaking, asking repeatedly where the car went. She just laughs and says, “You saw the ghost car.”
87. Bon Appetit
My mom just recently told me the story of her friend's creepy dad. One night when she was younger, she stayed over at this friend's house. The friend's creepy dad offered them "fresh venison" for dinner. My mom had never had venison, but of course, she ate it so as not to be rude. Well, the friend later tells my mom that her dad is not a hunter. The truth was so much more gruesome than she was prepared for.
Years later, we learned that creepy dad had cannibalized several women over the course of his life. Mom is pretty sure she ate human meat.
88. A Pre-Natal Experience
I was asleep one night, and I heard a voice whisper in my ear. It sounded like my friend Jennifer, and it said, “Sarah had her baby.” Sarah was a good friend of Jennifer's but just an acquaintance of mine. I was aware she was pregnant but had no idea how far along. We didn't follow each other on any social media either.
As soon as I woke up, I texted Jennifer and told her that I heard her voice whisper in my mind that night that Sarah had the baby. Later, Jennifer ends up texting back that she reached out to Sarah. Sarah then confirmed with her that she did have the baby. Jennifer said that when she read my text, she had no idea that Sarah had the baby, and I was the first to tell her.
89. Face-Off
When I was like five years old, I was laying in the corridor of my house when I saw a man appear. I didn’t recognize him, and he wasn’t my dad. It looked like he had a face, and when he appeared, the corridor went dark. He started walking towards me so I closed my eyes, and when I reopened my eyes, he was gone. I still don’t know who he was.
90. Booked
I was getting ready for work one day and was in the bathroom when I had a distinct feeling that someone was watching me. The bathroom door was partially cracked but no one else was home at the time. The feeling became a little overwhelming, so I pulled open the door quickly and a large, textbook flew off the bookshelf.
I was so shocked that I actually instinctively apologized out loud and left for work early. It was one of those history textbooks that was so big it didn’t fit on the shelf standing up, so it was lying flat on its face. It was about two feet from the bookshelf when it landed, like it was propelled and didn’t just fall off.
I left it there and didn’t pick it up until I got home from work. A lot of weird things like that happened at that house. For instance, the faucets would turn on by themselves, full blast. Completely locked and shut doors would be found open. There were more. The book incident was the most intense though.
91. Repeat Offender
I was hitchhiking home from high school (I know, I know) and got picked up by a really weird guy with stereotypical creepy thick glasses. For the record, I am a guy. It was really hot in his truck—he probably had the heat on in retrospect—as we drove along a main road. At one point he mentions the heat and said that it was OK if I wanted to take off my shirt. I had the perfect response.
I said, “No thanks” then opened the door and rolled out into traffic when the truck was coming to a light. Thank God the door handle hadn't been removed or anything. Bonus: I hitchhiked around a year later and the exact same guy pulled up and asked me if I wanted a ride. He didn't recognize me and I said no, then realized at that point that he must do this kind of thing often. I never hitchhiked again after that last day.
92. Home Sweet Home
So when I was about seven, maybe younger, I went to my mom's best friend's house with my mom in another city. It was just me, my mom, and her friend. Nobody else in the house. Except, when I was there, I saw a family which consisted of a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls who looked really burnt just walking around the house together without taking their eyes off me.
At one point, they even told me to go with them. I didn't think anything of it at that point because I assumed they were house guests. But many years later when I told my mom, she mentioned it to her best friend. Her best friend told her they actually had to move out of that house because they had had many haunting experiences, such as finding all her new baby's toys out in the middle of the night after she tidied it, things moved around, and blankets and pillows on the floor as if people slept there.
She asked her husband thinking maybe he did it, but he was just as scared as her.
93. Ghost Busters
I supervise the night crew at a Subway. The day crew has never mentioned it, but the night crew always make jokes about our "SubGhost,” although I've stopped being sure that it's actually a joke. Now hear me out. I'm not saying the Subway I work at is haunted...but I'm not saying it's not haunted, either. It's open 24/7, so past midnight just one person stays by themselves until day crew rolls in around 6 am.
I always spend at least an hour a night alone, and quite a while with just one other person. Sometimes we hear voices. The music is off, there's only one or two of us, but we can hear people having a conversation, although it's too quiet to pick out words. The first time I heard voices I looked at my supervisor and asked if she heard them too, and she looks me in the eyes and casually says, "Yeah, it's the SubGhosts talking."
It sounds like a joke, but now I realize when I'm training a newbie on the late shift I've given the casual "It's just the SubGhost" response more times than I can remember. There are voices, there are weird crashing noises, and sometimes when no one is in the room things fall off the counters for no discernible reason. Once our owner bought new paper towel auto-dispensers to replace the old push dispensers.
I was alone right before the graveyard guy came in when I heard a towel dispense. I walked around the corner and everything was quiet. I was about to walk away when another towel came out. Then another. Then another. Finally it goes full SubGhost and dispenses the entire roll continuously without stopping, much like when a cat finds out how to unroll your toilet paper.
It only stopped when there was no paper left. No one else was around, but a few days later the owner switched them back, so we now have the manual paper towels back. If there is a SubGhost, I don't really mind. Stupid day crew is oblivious, but us night crew tend to become quite familiar with the sandwich spook, and its presence is so constant that the voices have almost become comforting.
Wikimedia Commons, Corey Coyle
94. Innocence Lost
When I was six, my mom and dad took my younger sister and me to a baseball game, leaving my grandmother to babysit my youngest sister. When we got back, my grandmother told my folks that two guys had come by the house with photography equipment and asked whether a young girl with red curly hair lived there, a description that sounded just like my sister who was at the game with me.
They said they had spotted her and that she would be a great child model for some advertising work they were doing. When my grandmother said she wasn't home they said they would come back another time. My grandmother and mom didn't think much about it, but my dad got an awful feeling in his stomach. He said "Something's not right here" and called the authorities.
15 minutes later, several FBI agents showed up and began conducting interviews with my grandmother and my parents while I ran around and showed the agents my helicopter. The truth was bone-chilling. Turns out we had been targeted by a child theft ring; the photographers would take a bunch of photos and wait until the toddler threw a tantrum and then they would ask the mother to go grab a toy to keep the child entertained.
While the mother was out of the room, they would grab the child and bolt, leaving everything else behind. The FBI told my folks that my sister had likely already been sold and would have been out of the country within 24 hours if they got her. We were advised to change preschools and other aspects of our daily routine. It still gives me the chills to think about what could have happened to her.
Needless to say, my mom became pretty overprotective; it was a few years before she even trusted us with a babysitter. We are just fortunate that everything worked out.
95. The Widowed
So, my mom remarried about two years ago. My dad died when I was twelve so she had been widowed for over ten years. This new relationship was very whirlwind with her meeting the guy, dating him, and getting married within three months. I didn't know much about the guy, but my mom was happy, so I just tried to be supportive. She moved into his house in upstate Virginia and invited me and my fiancé to spend a weekend in her new home getting to know her new husband.
My mom's new home was pretty isolated. It sat on a few hundred acres of lovely rolling hills, and was very picturesque. I was nervous about getting to know this guy, but really trying to make the most of it. Over the course of our first day there though, I started to feel more and more uneasy. We were being made to feel very at home, yet I still couldn't shake this oppressive feeling. I finally chalked it up to me being more upset about my mom getting remarried than I was willing to admit to myself.
That night, my fiancé and I showered together. When I turned my back to him he stopped talking mid-sentence and asked, "What did you do to your back?" Well, nothing. Why? "You have a large bruise." I hopped out to try and see it in the mirror. He was right. It was so strange; I had no idea how it got there, and the whole thing made me feel even more creeped out.
The next morning I had a complete meltdown. I woke up and just couldn't stop crying. I told my fiancé we had to leave. He tried to calm me down by telling me all the things I had been telling myself. My feelings of anxiety were just a result of seeing my mom with someone. The longer I spent with them the easier it would become. But I just had to leave, I felt completely hysterical. I knew I was on the verge of a panic attack, so in the end, my fiancé drove me away.
As soon as we were on the road I felt like a weight had been lifted. I was even feeling embarrassed for my behavior, hoping I hadn't insulted my mom's husband by leaving early. Then my fiancé broke the silence, "That bruise on your back....did you get a good look at it?" I had. It looked like some had touched the middle of my back, with fingers spread wide, with their hand at a tilt. I want to make completely clear, no one had touched my back the previous day, especially hard enough to bruise me.
Cut to three weeks later. My mom comes to visit me. The entire time she's hounding me to come stay with her again. After finally trying to change the subject for the fifth time, I level with her. Before I've even finished telling the story her face is white as a sheet. She tells me she has been feeling the same way in the house. She hates it. She wants them to move as soon as possible. And the real kicker...her new husband's previous wife shot and killed herself in the house.
96. The Call Is Coming From Inside The Pool
I worked as a night auditor at an old hotel. One night at around 2am, I got a phone call from the pool room, which was supposed to be closed. I picked up the phone to answer and all I heard was very heavy breathing. I hung up the phone to check the cameras, and all the lights are on in the pool room. So I go down the hallway to kick out whoever it is in there.
As I get close to the glass door, it’s so cold that I can see my breath, the door is completely fogged over, and all the lights are out. I open the door and the light above me comes on, because they’re motion sensor lights. I am looking around but I don't see anything. Then the light comes on across the pool from me, but again, nothing is there.
Then every light in a path begins to light up around one side of the pool as if something is walking towards me. I ran out of there so fast and locked myself in my manager's office and stayed until sunrise—but the worst was yet to come. I had played it off in my head as insects causing the motion sensor lights to go off.
I was telling my manager about my whole spooky experience, thinking he would get a good laugh. When I told him about the phone call from the pool, he didn't laugh at all. He asked me if I was 100% positive the caller ID said the pool room, and I said yeah. Then he told me there hasn't been a phone in the pool room for 30 years.
I told him there was no way, because that would be impossible. I knew what I saw on the call display. He told me to go look for myself. I looked and there was no phone. I didn't believe in the supernatural at all before that. But to this day, no matter how many ways I try to rationalize it, I just can't. It is completely unexplainable.
97. The Others
My mom and older sister describe how I used to randomly start crying and asking where my mom was, even when she was right in front of me. When my mother would try to comfort me by saying she was right there, I would shout for my other mom. I would then describe this person, who apparently always held a bloody hammer. They said it scared them out of their wits, but one day when I was two years old, they tried to ask me about it and I couldn't remember anything.
98. Never The Right Time
While I was living in Denver, I had a friend fly into town to visit. The Denver National Airport was about 30 minutes away and her flight was scheduled to get in around 11:15 pm. At exactly 10:30 pm, I got a text message from her. She said: "I just landed. Are you here?" Assuming her flight arrived early, we immediately started rushing to the airport while I kept trying to call her, only to have her phone go to voicemail.
I thought maybe her phone had kicked the bucket or something, so I continued to refresh the flight information page on our way there. It just kept saying the plane was still in transit. We ended up getting to the airport before 11:15. With no word from my friend or new information about the flight, we circled the airport and waited...then I got a text that sent a shiver down my spine.
At 11:15 pm or so, I got the exact same text message she had sent me at 10:30 pm. I called her and I asked if she texted me while she was on the plane. She said there was no way she could have since she had her phone turned off the entire time. When I finally met up with her, I asked to compare our text conversations on our phones.
I had two of the same texts from her, one at 10:30 pm and one at 11:15 pm, while her conversation only read 11:15 pm. She confirmed that she hadn't typed it out prior either. Her phone was completely off. This glitch in the matrix made me waste 15 minutes circling an airport.
99. Watch Out For That Last Step
I was on vacation in Ithaca with my boyfriend at the time. We had literally, I'm talking ten minutes, just gotten into town and stopped at a suspension bridge near Cornell's campus. I'm terrified of heights, so my boyfriend was coaxing me step by step over the bridge. It was gorgeous and we stopped in the middle to take a picture.
On the side we had come from, there was a parking lot with steps leading to the bottom of the gorge. But on the far side, there were hiking paths with no barrier. A woman walked past us and offered to take a picture for us. We declined. What she did next was absolutely chilling. She smiled and walked quickly to the far side of the bridge where she smoothly jumped off into the gorge.
There was not a second of hesitation. It was almost like she expected the path to keep going. The sound of a person hitting the ground from a jump like that sticks with you.
100. Doom From Above
When I was seven years old, my mom gave birth to my little sister. My dad and I went to visit her in the hospital to check out the new family member. As seven-year-olds often do, I got bored, so my parents sent me to the kiosk right outside the main building to get an ice cream. As I was walking towards the kiosk, I cut over the lawn as it was a shorter walk.
Suddenly I feel and hear a really heavy thud right behind me. I turn around to see an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the warped, mangled body of a man in a hospital gown maybe 40-50 cm from where I was standing. The man had jumped off the hospital roof after receiving the news he had terminal cancer.
My mom and a lot of the others in the birth ward even saw the guy flying past the windows. The guy basically just fell short of taking me with him. A group of doctors and psychiatrists asked me to get emergency therapy, but I insisted on getting my ice cream and going home. To this day, I can still recall the thud of the body hitting the ground and his body lying next to me, clear as crystal.
101. Home (Almost) Alone
Once, my brother and I were sleeping, and my dad had just left for work. A little while after, someone entered the house and told the dog to be quiet. I didn't recognize the voice. I was 100% sure it was a burglar who thought the house was empty as my dad had just left. I sneaked into my brother's room, shaking with fear, woke him up, and told him that a stranger had just entered the house. He called the authorities on the spot.
Two tiny minutes later (we were impressed!) two official cars and four law officials were at the door of our house. Oh, how uneasy was my dad when they called him and he had to tell them he had come back because he had forgotten something and pretended to have a "funny voice" or something for no reason whatsoever. It was about 15 years ago and my brother and I still (jokingly) blame each other for it.
Sources: Reddit, , , , , ,
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