4. I Feel You, Gramps
One Monday, out of nowhere, I started to worry about my grandpa. The moment of worry passed, and I went on with my day. Later, I posted an article about automated lawnmowers, saying that my grandpa would love this since lawncare was his hobby. Literally right after I hit share, my phone rang. I got a sinking feeling when I saw that it was my dad calling.
We all know that feeling. It’s that drop in your stomach when you know something terrible has happened or is about to. My dad told me that my grandpa had been rushed to the hospital with a bladder infection followed by several heart attacks, but he was still alive. I didn’t make the connection to my earlier worries—until I woke up the next morning.
That night I had an intense dream that made everything click together in my head. I dreamed I was sitting in my grandpa’s shed, and he sat down next to me and said, “The next few weeks are gonna be hard, and they will test you. Don’t worry about me. In a few hours, I won’t have any use for it.” We ended up spending what felt like hours talking about a lot of personal things.
Most of the stories we talked about in my dream were things I honestly didn’t know about my grandpa. My dad and his brother later confirmed most of them to be true, although some were a little exaggerated, apparently. Grandpa didn’t leave us until around noon on Tuesday, which was just a few hours after my dream. I’m not religious, nor will I be, but wow.
5. A Ghostly Fan Club
I had so many paranormal experiences when I was a kid, but the one that has always stuck with me happened when I was about four years old. Back then, I used to randomly wake up in the middle of the night for no known reason. I was still sleeping in my parents’ bed at the time, so I would just lay in bed and look around. That's when it would happen.
Whenever I was looking around and trying to get back to sleep, I would see two really tall figures just standing there. They looked like the old farm couple in that famous painting, except they had hollow eyes and they were even thinner. At first, they didn’t do anything but stare back at me. One night, in particular, was especially weird…
I woke up as usual and saw the couple standing there in front of the doorway again. Only this time, something felt a bit more off than usual. It got downright terrifying. The ceiling fan was on high and the blades were going so fast that the entire fixture was shaking. I looked back at the figures and they had some really dark, creepy grins on their faces.
I was petrified. I buried myself under the blankets, hoping they’d go away. All I could hear was the ceiling fan spinning faster and faster. The beads at the end of the fan’s pull chains were tapping furiously against the glass light cover. I peeked out from under the blankets and the two figures were right next to the bed, standing right over me with their ugly smiles.
I screamed and the glass cover on the light flew off and shattered on the floor. My dad jumped out of bed immediately and turned on the light to see what happened, but the two figures were already gone. I was crying so badly that it took my mom a long time to calm me down. That was definitely the worst house I have ever lived in.
6. The Cat Whisperer
When I was around six, we had a cat that had kittens. We knew it had kittens because it was pregnant and then one day it wasn’t pregnant anymore. The problem was that we had no idea where the kittens were. I was wondering about it, and so I looked right at the cat and sort of thought in my mind, “Where are your kittens?” but without using words, if that makes any sense.
Immediately, the location popped into my mind. I could picture the broken boards just above our porch that our cat could jump into from pillars on the side of the porch. I just KNEW that the kittens were there. I walked straight over there, climbed onto the stone pillar, and looked through the hole in the boards. The kittens were right there. I’ve never had a similar experience again in my life.
7. Written In The Stars
When I was a kid, I was out in the mountains near Mammoth, California, stargazing with my dad and a few family friends. I was from Los Angeles, so it was the first time I’d ever seen the stars without any light pollution, and I was fascinated. I pointed at a cluster of three stars and said, “Hey look! It’s Orion’s Belt!” Only being a kid, I got it wrong.
My father corrected me and showed me where Orion’s Belt was actually located. So I pointed to the one from before and said, “Well, what constellation is that then?” He conceded that it did look very similar to Orion’s Belt, but that he couldn’t tell what it actually was. A little while later, we noticed that what appeared to be the middle star of the three started moving—quickly.
It zig-zagged through the sky for a few seconds before its brightness intensified, and then it disappeared. To this day, the only thing I think it could possibly be was some kind of experimental drone. And if it was a drone, it must've been a super-advanced one because a) this was the early 90s and b) it stood still for long enough for us to think it was a star.
8. A Ghost In Plane Sight
When I was in fourth grade, I was sitting in class one day, bored out of my mind, just staring out the window. It was overcast, and I was gazing at the clouds. Then a cloud came into view that looked like the fuselage of a commercial airliner. There were no wings, but the rest of it was there. It floated smoothly by and then the nose lifted and it rose into the clouds.
It was really freaky. It was like watching the ghost of a plane.
9. Kids See The Darndest Things
When I was about 14, I witnessed my Uncle Jerry’s passing. He had lung cancer, and we brought him home so that he could go peacefully. At some point, I got a very strong mental image of a man leaning against the wall, with his arms and legs crossed, watching Jerry slowly fade. He was wearing a brown suit and was very tall and lean.
I told my mom and aunt about what I was imagining—explaining that it was just something that popped into my head. Their faces went white and they started crying. “Your grandfather used to stand like that. And he wore a brown suit to work.” This person I saw had been Jerry’s father, and he had perished way before I was born.
I don’t know where this vision came from, but it definitely meant a lot to my mom and aunt.
10. Trust Your Gut
I have a very strong danger sense that can be terrifyingly correct. Once when I was in high school training for cross country, I would usually run past a lake near my house. One day, however, when I was close to the lake I got a very strong “NO” feeling. With every step forward, it felt like I was struggling against a strong animal instinct telling me not to go any closer.
I turned right around and went home. When my mom commented on how short my run was, I told her what happened and she seemed alarmed, wondering if I’d had some sort of panic attack. A few days later, law enforcement found a body in the lake.
11. Time To Face The Music
My mom passed when I was seven. Flash forward to middle school, when I was attending a music clinic at my mom’s old high school. As my class was waiting around to perform onstage, we were just chatting away as a group. Suddenly, I looked over and saw a woman who looked identical to my mom standing at the back of the room.
This woman had the same red hair, glasses, height—everything—as my mom. A few times I even caught her looking at me and smiling. I turned away to tell some friends about what I had seen, but by the time I looked back, the woman was gone. Sadly, I didn’t see her again after that. It was super eerie, but also kinda comforting.
12. What Did I Just Witness?
When I was about 10 years old, I saw a large rocket fly almost vertically straight down into the sea. This was on a small Mediterranean island and there was no explosion or mention of anything on the news. It just slipped into the sea and there was also no sign of it after it entered the water. No one else was nearby to see it.
13. Somebunny Loves You
My grandpa, who was a tough-as-nails WWII Marine veteran, had a little stuffed bunny. He kept the bunny out in the open, and when he thought no one was looking, he would pet it whenever he walked past. It was pretty adorable to see this big, tough guy furtively petting a little stuffed bunny, and it became an ongoing family joke.
Sadly, my grandpa took his own life. When my family went over to his place to deal with the medical examiner and everything, we stayed in his house that night. It had an overall creepy vibe because of what had happened. We were all upset and struggling, and to help us cope, we started doing dumb things to try to make ourselves laugh. Until horror struck.
Suddenly someone realized that the bunny had moved. At first, it had been on the dining table, but then we saw it in the den an hour later. I definitely thought someone was moving it as a joke, but everyone swore they wouldn’t do that. We also never caught anyone moving it. I kept an eye on that bunny the entire week and I never saw anyone touch it, but it would still be moved.
14. A Scary Snack Situation
Late one night, I decided to make some toast for a midnight snack. I sat on the kitchen bench and ate for about 10 minutes. Then I gathered my plate and got up, but when I turned around, I saw that every single cupboard door was open and so were all of the drawers. I am 100% certain that they were all closed when I entered the kitchen.
There was no way that anyone could have snuck in and opened them because I was home alone. I also didn’t hear them open at the time I was there. I was so scared that I froze, let it all register for a few seconds, and then calmly closed everything and went back to my room to hide until daylight. It was one of the weirdest things that ever happened.
15. That Sinking Feeling
On June 30 of last year, I had the sudden urge to call my father at around noon. I was feeling extremely anxious and just felt like I really needed to talk to him for some reason. I knew he was at work and on his lunch break, though, so I figured I would let him enjoy his break, and I’d call him later on when he finished work. I wish my odd feeling hadn't been proven right.
My sister called me about an hour later and told me that our dad had died, right around that lunch break. He parked his work truck, turned it off, and took his last breath. It was a massive heart attack. He was suddenly gone. I really wish I would have called. Maybe I could have told him that I loved him before he passed. Always make the phone call.
16. A Brush With Fate
I listened to an ominous gut feeling, and it is the reason that I’m still alive today. I was 19 years old and on my first deployment with the Marines on the Iraq/Syria border. I had a weird anxious feeling that kept me glued to my seat in the rec room of our base without any reason for it. I finally got up, and a concussive wave knocked me to the ground.
The origin of the blast was an enemy driving a car loaded with explosives through a checkpoint that was attached to our base. On days that are very hard on me, I think back to that day. There had to be a reason why I felt that uneasy, anxious feeling that kept me from working out on the roof of our base—the shrapnel would have cut me in half.
I know it sounds untrue, but it’s real. I don’t talk about it often, as I try not to be that guy. So I feel kind of stupid writing this, but I have really had that inexplicable gut feeling and I guess want to let you know that it is a thing. I think it’s spiritual in nature, but I’m not really the kind of person to say what exactly it is, or what it means.
17. Strong Vibrations
I was living in a college dorm, and every night I would put my phone on top of my wallet on my desk so that the vibration from the ring wouldn’t wake me. This was a conscious effort—every night! Then one Friday night, when I had nothing to get up early for the next day, I started to put my phone on my wallet, but a thought suddenly popped into my head.
“Hmm, what if someone tries to call me?” I decided to put the phone directly on my desk this time. I had no expectations of anyone trying to call, that was just the thought I had in my head. It all came clear in the end. A few hours later, my sister called and woke me up to tell me that my cousin, who had been very close to me, had died.
18. Someone’s Dropping Dimes
I’ve heard that people who’ve lost loved ones will start finding dimes in random places. These dimes only show up in the moments when the living are missing them the most or are going through something rough. I never believed any of it, though, until it happened to me. When my friend was in critical condition at the hospital, her aunt started telling me about her experience.
She said that they found a dime outside her mother’s hospital room, and after her mother passed, they started to find dimes everywhere. By now it was about 10:00 p.m. and I decided to go home. Just before I left the hospital, my friend’s little sister found a dime in the waiting room. When I got home, I found a lone dime on my dresser while looking for my earphones.
My friend passed the next day. The night before her funeral, I found two dimes right by my drawer. I looked all over to see if it was just loose change, but the dimes were the only coins there. I had lost another friend three years prior, so I felt that the two dimes instead of one meant that they were both still looking out for me.
19. Talk About Tempting Fate
One day, my family and some family friends were going to go on a four-wheeler ride. For some reason, I had ridiculous anxiety, even though I normally enjoyed ATV rides quite a bit. On this particular day, however, I would not stop complaining because I did not want to go—at all. Finally, my family was able to convince me to go with them.
We didn’t usually wear helmets, but since I was being difficult because I didn’t want to be there, I made a huge deal out of it. My dad responded with, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll be going slowly,” but it still irked me. I kept whining for most of the day, and a family friend kept asking me, “What’s the worst that could possibly happen?” Well, the worst did happen.
I kid you not, he probably said this to me 20 times throughout the day. After we got out of the mountains and onto the main road, and I thought the ride was mostly over and done with, my friend, who was driving the four-wheeler that my mom was on, lost control. Their four-wheeler went off the cliff, and my mom was seriously injured.
My mom ended up with a broken collarbone and shoulder blade, six broken ribs, a broken back in four places, a shattered pelvis, a collapsed lung, and a serious head injury. She actually had a pretty miraculous recovery, though. No one knows how, because it was truly unheard of considering the severity of her injuries.
20. I’ll Catch The Next One, Thanks
When I was a kid, I would always ask my mom to tell me stories about her father because I never got to meet him. So, she told me a story that she had never told anyone. One night, she said she had a dream that her dad got on a bus, walked to the back, and from his seat he waved goodbye out the back window. He passed the next day.
Fast forward to when my mom was in the hospital, nearing the end, and we were all there to say our goodbyes to her. My mom’s brother said he had a weird dream the night before. In it, my mom got on a bus, sat at the back, and waved goodbye out the back window. I totally lost it. I immediately told him the story about what my mom said to me and everyone’s mind was blown.
21. The Eyes Have It
When I was about 10, we lived on the north shore of the Shuswap Lake in British Columbia. It was very rural with a population of approximately 400 spread out over 15 kilometers (10 miles) of beachfront with farms up in the hills. There was just a store, a post office, and an ancient Indigenous trail that wound through the forest near where I lived.
One afternoon, my parents and a friend of mine went for a walk along the trail. My friend and I ran ahead at one point, out of sight of everyone. We were exploring the woods when we discovered something terrifying. We came across a man slumped over a rotting log with chickens pecking the ground around him and his face, too.
I can still feel the adrenaline blasting up my back as I type this, even though it happened 50 years ago. The figure slowly lifted its head and just looked at us with empty pecked-out eyes. We both screamed and ran back to the adults. When my parents came to the spot with us, only the rotting log was there. Before the incident, I would play on the trail all the time.
To this day, I would not dare to walk that path by myself.
22. Pole Position
When I was in fifth grade, I was walking under a section of my school’s covered walkways. It was raining but not too heavily. I was going in a straight line when someone yelled “Ball!” to my right. I turned my head but kept walking forward. When the surprise of a ball coming toward me wore off, I remembered there was a pole nearby.
I stopped in my tracks to make sure I wouldn’t hit the pole. When I looked around, however, I realized that it was behind me. I could see where my wet footprints were leading up to the pole, and where they were leading away. I got chills when I realized that somehow or another, I had walked on the same path that the pole was on, but I didn’t hit it.
23. The Demons Have Spoken
One time, my friends and I were playing with an old Ouija board we found. It started to say some pretty threatening things about my girlfriend, so we threw it away in a church dumpster. This was a bad idea. The next day that church was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. Oddly enough, after the fire, a bunch of my lost objects reappeared: television remotes, old wallets, and toys I thought were long gone.
24. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
First, you should know that I’m a very rational person and I don’t believe in the supernatural at all. Back in the day, my best friend Travis and I used to play guitars together almost daily. That’s not important now, but it will be later. So, one day, we decided to go to the beach with our girlfriends and eat some mushrooms.
After the mushrooms started to take effect, Travis said that he wanted to wander off alone. I stayed with our girlfriends, and we were having a great time. As it started to get dark out, Travis’s girlfriend asked, “Where’s Travis?” None of us knew, but I could hear him playing the guitar, so I suggested that we follow the sound of his music until we got to him.
The girls told me that I must have really good hearing because they couldn’t hear anything. I said, “Well, I can definitely hear it, so just follow me.” Now here’s the strange part. I followed the sound into the forest and went directly to Travis, but when we reached him, he did not have a guitar—I realized that we had left our guitars at home! I still have no idea how it happened.
25. A Nightmare Come True
When I was about 12, I had a very vivid dream that I was at the funeral of a young child, but no one could see me. At some point in the dream, I figured out that that child was my older sibling, but as far as I knew, I was the eldest. I woke up raving to my dad about “being there,” and that “I saw them bury the older one” before falling back to sleep.
I remember my parents being extremely shaken up when I woke up again. That’s when they revealed the awful truth to me. My mom had had a miscarriage a couple of years before I was born. She had never told me that before, and it really freaked me out. To this day, I get a little creeped out when my dreams are a little more vivid than normal.
26. That Was A Lifetime Ago
My wife and I were making dinner and our four-year-old son was in the adjoining room. We suddenly heard him say, “Hey, that’s the job I had in my last life.” He was watching a blacksmith shaping metal over a fire on TV. We were shocked because we had never discussed reincarnation with him or in his presence. I tried to get him to elaborate, but he just went back to what he was doing.
27. That’s OK, I Didn’t Want To Sleep Anyway
The other day, my mom was telling me that when I was really little, like four or five, I would have this recurring dream about a girl named Katherine. It was super vivid and I still actually remember some of the details, though she filled in the blanks for me. The dream would start with Katherine in her room playing with her dolls.
The dream seemed like it was set in the early 1800s or so based on what the dolls looked like. Katherine had just finished putting them back into her trunk when the window slid open and a man came in. Katherine screamed, but there wasn’t anyone around to hear her. She tried to run away, but the man grabbed her roughly by the arm.
This is one of the parts I remember well because of how I could actually feel how tightly he gripped her arm. In the dream, the man would hold Katherine down and suffocate her. I never got past when she lost consciousness, as I would always wake up. One of the creepier parts of this story is that I have a birthmark exactly where the man had grabbed Katherine.
28. A Tale From The Crypt
Let me tell you, kids are pretty freaky. Either they’re tuned into something we’re not or there’s some trickery about. For instance, I’ll use myself as an example. My grandfather passed when I was young and I never really knew him, but he was important to my mother so we’d make pilgrimages to his resting place pretty routinely.
It was as normal as it could have been that day, my mom was praying and paying her respects in the mausoleum when she noticed me. When she saw what I was doing, a chill ran through her. I was standing by the opposite wall talking and laughing like I was with an old friend. She walked up to me and asked who I was talking to.
I said I was talking to a "Mr Jones". Up at about my mom’s eye level was a slot with Mr Jones’s name on it. This was incredibly unsettling to her because a) I could not yet read and b) even if I could, his grave was several feet above my head. There I was, just chatting and laughing with a man who’d been gone for 20-odd years.
The world is a pretty weird place and as much as we’d like to believe it, we don’t have all the answers.
29. No Guidance Counselor Needed
When I was three or four years old, I distinctly remember thinking that I loved my previous life as a great artist. Later, as a rational adult, I dismissed it, but the urge to get back to that space and continue my work has haunted me all of my life. Now I’m carried by five galleries and my paintings sell for thousands of dollars.
It’s so weird how a childhood memory can determine the course of an entire life. Despite my success, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten to the place where I can “continue the work". I haven’t let go and experienced the freedom of a child making art. That’s how I’ll know I’ve made it. Maybe there is simply more to life than we currently understand.
30. Poltergeist-In-Training
I came home from work one night to find my darling two-year-old blonde daughter in her jammies, standing at the top of the stairs and staring up at the full moon. She should have been in bed by this time. Not wanting to scare her, I walked up the stairs, knelt down next to her, and asked her what she was thinking about. Her response freaked me the heck out.
I was imagining she would say something cute and innocent like, “Is the moon really made of cheese, Daddy?” Instead, she turned to face me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very creepy monotone voice she said to me, “We are all in the same cage”. She was only two years old! I couldn’t believe it. I nearly croaked with fright.
I literally recoiled from her and ran down the stairs backward so that I could keep my eyes on her. Growing up, she said a few more creepy things like that, but it eventually stopped as she got older. That was 12 years ago, and she has since turned into a very happy and well-adjusted teenager who is only slightly in league with Satan.
31. How To Ruin The Vibe
Me and some of my buddies were partying in a hotel room one time and at around 3:00 am, we decided to play Bloody Mary. Two of us went first and nothing happened. Then my buddy Ali went in, said “Bloody Mary” three times, and came back unscathed. While he was grinning about how scared we had been, something crazy happened…
Blood started coming out of his nose! We couldn’t believe it. When he realized what was happening, he went into a bit of shock and just sat there shivering like it was the middle of winter. The rest of us also just kind of went numb and sat there trying to figure out what on earth had just happened. No one slept at all that night.
32. A Mind-Bending Medical Mystery
One night it was just me and my younger nursing assistant working at the hospital. She wanted to look something up on the computer, so she was sitting beside me at the desk. I was looking at a printout on the counter and suddenly the colored lettering started to look dim. As in the color wasn’t strong. It was almost like there was a haze in the air. It didn't stop there.
I looked across the room at a poster and, again, the colors were muted. Everything appeared very muted and the colors were so dim. I started to quietly freak out and worry that I had a brain tumor or multiple sclerosis, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want her to think I was crazy. Suddenly, the nursing assistant looked up and out into the hallway.
“Does the hallway look gray to you?” she asked. I was immediately relieved because at least that meant I wasn’t suffering from some sort of mysterious illness. But it also made it worse. Knowing it was really happening, we watched this grayness that seemed to saturate not only the hallway but also our entire surroundings.
It seemed to begin to concentrate in the hallway. Then it slowly disappeared. Afterward, it was like someone turned on the lights and the colors were back to full saturation. To this day, I have zero explanation for what this was and nothing like this has ever happened since then. nor have I ever heard of anyone experiencing something like this.
33. Shop Til You Drop
I had a chilling experience not too long ago. I was walking through an antique store in a really old part of town. It had three levels, including an old, creepy basement. I walked around a corner down there and suddenly had an overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t explain. It felt almost like an anxiety attack combined with dizziness.
I felt like I was being watched or followed. It’s really tough to explain, but I felt severely uncomfortable. I told my wife that I needed to get the heck out of there, and she could tell by my face that I was truly weirded out. When we got upstairs, my wife stopped to look at something by the counter while I stood there trying to process everything.
The lady behind the counter made eye contact with me and said, “You alright?” I replied that I was, and then she asked if I got creeped out downstairs. I replied, “Actually, yeah. Right by the—” And she interrupted me to say, “…by the corner down there?” I froze, and said, “Uh, yeah.” To which she said, “That’s because it’s haunted as heck down there!”
She laughed at my shocked face and said, “It happens to a lot of us. Something bad happened to a past owner of this place, WAY back. At least that’s what they say anyway.”
34. Moonlight’s Legacy
When my brother and I were little, there was a stray calico cat we’d always see around the neighborhood. She eventually had kittens by a Manx cat, apparently, because one of the kittens was a Manx. My brother and I would go out to the woods to play with them, and we gave them all names. We totally would have taken them in, but our parents were allergic.
We named my brother’s favorite kitten Milo. It was an orange tabby. My favorite kitten was a black cat I named Moonlight. The litter grew up and started roaming everywhere, but Milo and Moonlight stayed in our woods the longest. One night, I dreamed that Moonlight approached me and thanked me for our kindness and goodwill.
Moonlight said that her daughters and granddaughters would know that our area was a safe place and that as long as we lived here they would return. I’m 27 now, still living in the same house—and it’s true. I’ve seen multiple black cats grow up around our area. It’s never a group of them, always one at a time, but we can tell when they are the next generation.
35. Youse Better Watch It!
I live in New Jersey, and one night my friends and I decided to go looking for some of the places described in the book Weird NJ: Your Travel Guide to New Jersey’s Local Legends. We went looking for a tunnel that was thought to be a gateway to the underworld. It was supposed to be located under some train tracks in Clifton, but we had no idea which ones.
We thought it was just a bit of a lark. We quickly realized we were in serious danger. As we drove under some random train tracks, it suddenly got extremely hot in the car for no apparent reason. The temperature rose 20 degrees almost instantly. My friend then pointed out that the thermometer in the car, which measured the outside temperature, should have read something like 30F but it was up to 105F!
This all happened in a matter of about 15 seconds. As soon as we got about 10 meters past the underpass, everything went back to normal. We noped out and kind of sat in silence for a little while not knowing what to think about the whole experience.
36. Field Of Screams
My father passed when I was 33. I am the youngest daughter of three, but I was very much placed in the role of “son.” My father became my closest confidant, my best friend, and my worst critic. When my dad had a massive heart attack, I was completely bereft. Of course, my dad being my dad, he left no will, but he did leave verbal instructions for what to do with his body.
Instead of a funeral, he wanted his ashes spread in a ballpark. My father adored baseball—especially the Detroit Tigers. Our first plan was to sneak his ashes into Tiger Stadium, but they tore the original down, so we scrapped that idea. His instructions were to scatter them on “any” baseball field, so we found a beautiful park that was suitable.
I had an idea to play a pickup game on the night we were to spread his ashes. As I came up to bat, I hit the ball, which is a miracle unto itself, and ran like the wind. I had the distinct impression that someone was running after me. I kept giggling and laughing like crazy. I thought it was my brother-in-law or my new husband.
It was as if someone was chasing me in a game of tag. I cried out, “Stop it! Stop it!” in a playful way as I ran the bases until I got to home plate. I finally turned around to see the person who had been chasing me. My jaw dropped at that point. No one was there. I looked around confused. I looked at my family and said, “Hey guys, which one of you was chasing me?”
“No one,” they said. “We were wondering why you were screaming like a madwoman. We thought a bee was chasing you.” I struggle daily with the concept of a higher being. But I feel, for some reason, that my life has been touched in some way, I just don’t know by what or whom. I do know in my heart that my father was with me on the field that night.
37. Nightmare At The No-Tell Motel
For my 15th birthday, I went to the Six Flags in Atlanta, Georgia with a couple of my friends. While we were driving home, my mom’s car broke down and we had to go get it repaired. By the time the dealership got it working again, it was almost dark. We decided to stay at a motel for the night, but it wasn’t anything fancy that’s for sure.
We got a single room with two beds, a rattling A/C, cig burns everywhere, and a TV that was probably made in 2000. In the back, there was a tiny bathroom with a cockroach floating in the toilet. It’s important to note that the bathroom didn’t have any windows, vents, or exits other than the one door. I even checked later to see if the ceiling was tiled, but it was solid concrete.
I managed to get some sleep, but I woke up at 3:00 am to someone turning the bathroom light on and off. I just figured it was my mom or one of my friends and ignored it. After a minute or so of flashing, it got annoying, so I said, “Dude, cut it out, I’m sleeping.” The flashing stopped but the light stayed on, so I sat up to see who it was.
As soon as I put on my glasses and looked over at the door, the light went out. I laid back down, figuring whoever it was was finished. Then all heck broke loose. Someone grabbed me by my ankle—hard. I could feel their nails cutting into me. I’m not a very expressive person, so I didn’t scream, I just gasped and floundered to turn on the lamp.
When the lamp didn’t work, I used my phone’s flashlight. There was nothing there, but I did have several fresh cuts on my leg that were starting to bleed. I probably should’ve been more freaked out, but I just thought one of my friends was trying to scare me. I got up to go wash the cuts and see if I could make some sort of makeshift toilet paper bandage.
The door to the bathroom was locked. I knocked, but I didn’t get any response. I turned my flashlight toward the beds to see who was messing with me, but everyone was sound asleep. There was no way any of them could’ve climbed back into bed after grabbing my ankle without getting my attention as the beds were VERY creaky and I would’ve heard them.
I tried the bathroom door again and it opened. I turned on the lights, and was chilled to the bone. Nobody was there. It was completely empty. I searched the bathroom, and then the main room. Nothing. The worst part was that when I was inspecting the bathroom doorknob, I realized it didn’t have a lock. Somebody had been holding it shut from the other side.
I don’t believe in the paranormal, but I’m not stupid either, and I know when it’s time to say “screw that” and get out. Don’t get involved. It’s not your problem. When a horror movie monster writes “leave” on your mirror in blood, you leave. I woke everybody up, told them there was a raccoon in the room with us, and we left immediately.
38. Whisper To A Scream
One night, in our old house, my father went downstairs to use the bathroom at around 2:00 am. In order to get to our bathroom, you need to go through the living room, the kitchen, and then the porch. It was a pain. My dad got to the bottom of the stairs and when he went to open the living room door, he could hear people whispering.
He couldn’t make out what was being said, but he thought it must be burglars. He grabbed a golf club that was in the hall and went to open the door. As he grabbed the door handle, it was RED HOT. It gave him a nasty burn on his palm. This time he pushed the door open with his foot, and the whispering stopped. Complete silence.
My dad rinsed his hand under cold water, used the toilet, and went back upstairs. His shouting had woken up my mother, so he showed her the burn. She vividly remembers seeing the huge pink welt, but here's the twist. The next morning it was completely gone. For years I thought that maybe they had had a bit too much Chardonnay...
Fut then it happened to me too. I had been up playing Dragon Ball Z: Budokai all night, and at about 2:00 am I needed some snacks. As I approached the living room door, I could vividly hear hushed, rapid voices that sounded like arguing. I opened the door and there was silence. I tried to turn on the lights, but all three bulbs in the ceiling fan popped and glass shattered everywhere. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
39. Fast Track To Terror
A friend and I were walking home on the train tracks one night. It had rained the night before and there were large puddles all around. After going far enough that the street lights no longer illuminated our path, we heard splashing up ahead. We stopped and looked at each other, both expecting some sort of wild animal to scurry into the surrounding woods.
Instead, we saw a skinny bald man crawling out of the water with a look of fear painted on his face. Half concerned, half terrified, we stared at him as he struggled toward us. We soon realized that he had no legs. His eyes were wide and he seemed to be screaming with no sound. We quickly turned around without speaking a word and took the long way back to my house.
I haven’t seen this friend in about seven years, and I always wonder if he remembers what we saw. I still pass by those same tracks regularly, and I always think about that night. I think we must have seen the ghost of someone who had been killed by a train. Many people had been struck and killed by trains in years leading up to that night.
40. Things That Go Smash In The Night
When I was around nine years old, we rescued a dog that we named Billy. Billy was a 90-pound pit bull mix. He was fiercely protective of me and my mom, and he loved to sleep in bed with my parents. One night, I woke up to some commotion. My dad was downstairs and my mom was in the hallway. I quickly asked what was going on.
My mom told me that my dad had heard someone breaking in. He was a sergeant on the force and after hearing a crashing sound on our first floor, he grabbed his sidearm and went downstairs. He came back up a few moments later looking really worried. He said the house was empty and no signs of forced entry or anything stolen. But there was something else.
He said that all of the pictures on our mantel were face down and a few of the frames were shattered. He also said that Billy, normally the first to rush to defend the house, had sat on the stairs crying and growling and would not follow him down. We all settled back into bed slowly, but what started to worry me was that Billy came to sleep in my room.
As I said, Billy adored my mom. He always slept with my parents but on this night, he laid on his belly by my legs and never went to sleep. He just kept looking around on high alert. I finally drifted off to sleep only to be woken by him standing with his entire body covering mine, and growling the most ferocious growl I’d ever heard come from him.
He was growling at the doorway, but there was nothing there. I screamed for my parents and I’m not ashamed to admit that I slept in their room for the rest of that night and a few more after that.
41. Just Another Trippy Day At The Office
One time I watched a guy fall off a loading dock and then defy gravity by inexplicably popping back up onto it. He seemed to just hang in midair for a second. He was pretty much completely horizontal to the dock, but then I blinked and he was standing next to me again. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who saw this. One co-worker was so freaked out he wouldn’t work with that guy ever again.
42. Ghosted
In the early 90s, I was a home health nurse taking care of a girl suffering from advanced AIDS. She was legally blind and in such bad shape that it took two nurses to bathe her and change her bed. Another nurse was with me when this girl asked, “Who is that man standing behind you?” The girl described him in quite a bit of detail. The other nurse went pale.
She then stopped what she was doing and left the room. When I went outside to find her, she pulled an old picture out of her wallet. It showed a guy who looked exactly as the girl had just described. It was the nurse’s dad who had passed years ago. I would have called it a fantasy, but the nurse was literally shaking and had never even been to that patient’s house before.
43. Aaaand Scene!
I once managed a movie theater that had an automated audio system that would play a prerecorded radio-style program in-between shows. The company that created these recordings wouldn’t update them for months, so we all got used to hearing the same 12 songs and silly jingles and banter over and over until we had it memorized.
When we would shut down the projector at night, we’d also turn off the lights in each auditorium. This turned off the speakers as well, so a shutdown booth meant a silent dark theater. One night, I had my closing usher come up to me and tell me I left the music on in theater 10. That’s funny, I thought. Theater 10 last had a show two hours ago.
I specifically remembered shutting it down, but I went back to check it out. Theater 10 was the last door at the end of a long hallway. It’s hard to explain, but in the theater, there was a blind corner before you reached the door to the projection booth. I went into the theater and it was pitch black. I knew something was off immediately.
If I hadn’t shut the booth down, the aisle lights would have been on. Yet, as my usher said, the music was still on. This was different music, though. I knew every terrible pop song on that program by heart and this was not it. The music I heard sounded like the kind of piano playing in an old silent movie. Then I heard an older woman’s voice singing.
This voice was NOT coming from the speakers. It was coming from around the blind corner. I knew that I wasn’t alone in the pitch dark theater. I bolted right out of there and as soon as the last show ended, I locked up and went home. The next day, I came in and checked the cameras. From the moment I shut down the booth, until two hours later, nobody went in or out of that auditorium besides the usher and myself.
I saw my flee of terror. I watched the whole tape and nobody came out. I even checked the emergency exit camera, but there was nothing. I closed for years after that and I never heard her again, but I ALWAYS got chills going into that theater. I started leaving the emergency lights on when I closed it. I would never be in the dark in that theater again.
44. Welcome To Camp Fear
I worked at an all-boys summer camp for a few summers. We used radios to communicate. Now, I don’t know much about radios, but these were not your everyday walkie-talkies that one buys at Walmart. They had a crazy far radius—I’m talking miles. I could be at a hiking spot many miles from camp and would still be able to reach out.
Our camp was the only group that ever used that frequency, and I don’t think anyone could just hop in and talk or listen to us. One night, I woke up to static from my radio. I could barely make out someone saying something. This went on for a few minutes before the voice became easier to understand. I was dozing in and out of sleep with this sound in the background.
My co-counselor woke me up asking if I had heard that voice on the radio. He quickly got down from his bunk, grabbed the radio, and turned on the lights. The kids in our bunk were waking up. Everyone sat in silence with the static on in the background. I’ll never forget what I heard next. This voice sounded like a young girl…
“Help me I’m stuck.” I ran the radio to the office, where more counselors had already gathered. They all had heard the same thing, and the static was still there. We woke up all of camp and did a headcount and a radio count, but nothing was out of the ordinary. We never found out where it came from or who it was. We called law enforcement, but they couldn’t do much about it.
I worked there for a few more summers after that, and every once in a while the static from my radio would wake me up. It would always freak me out.
45. I Never Promised You A Rose Garden
About 40 years ago, my mother split and then transplanted a rose bush from my grandfather’s farm. It took, but it never bloomed. She only kept it because it grew into the fence nicely and kept us kids from climbing it. My grandfather passed about five years after she transplanted it...and that spring it bloomed with red roses.
A few years after that, my grandmother passed and that spring it bloomed with white roses. These are the only two years that it has ever bloomed.
46. Casper The Tidy Ghost
At one time in my life, I lived in a house where if the dishes were clean and the sink was empty, everything was fine. But the second someone put a dirty knife, cup, or dish in the sink and left it there, the faucet would start to drip. Nothing too freaky ever happened, it was just a little reminder to keep things tidy. Still creeped me out, though.
47. It’s All Japanese To Me
A friend of our family had her elderly mother move in with her when she was too old to live on her own. One night, her mother had fallen asleep on the couch. Just as her daughter was about to wake her to bring her to bed, her mother started mumbling and then speaking clear as day in Japanese. She didn’t know any Japanese people and she definitely didn’t speak the language.
This woman was a total country bumpkin who just did her chores and tended to her garden. There was no reason for her to be speaking Japanese. Anyway, it happened again a few times and her daughter was finally able to get a recording of it. She had it translated, and apparently, it was a poem or prayer that Japanese kamikaze pilots would say before a flight.
48. A Bloodcurdling Bedfellow
One time, my brother went through a period of several weeks where he kept having chronic nightmares. It got to the point where he didn’t want to sleep in his bed anymore. In the dreams, there would always be a shadowy old woman who was trying to get at him. One night, I decided to sleep in his bed and see if anything would happen. I wish I'd never done it.
That night, I had one of the freakiest dreams I’ve ever had. In mine, the woman my brother had been having nightmares about slid up through the gap between the wall and the bed, and she was trying to grab me and pull me off the bed. I woke up sweating and screaming. Finally, my mother decided to look into the situation herself.
Apparently, my parents had bought the mattress secondhand and my mother found out that one of the previous owners was an old woman who had perished in bed. Safe to say, we immediately threw the mattress in the trash because that kind of thing is way too spooky for my family. I think we definitely should have burned it instead.
49. A Sibling’s Messages From Beyond
At the time I didn’t live at my parents’ home, but I was there watching their dog while they were out of town. My sister had died in their house about a year prior. While I was there, I witnessed a picture of her fall off the wall. But it got so much creepier. I then discovered that EVERY picture of her in the house had fallen off the wall, seemingly at the same time.
I chalked it up to something shaking the house, even though we live in Ohio and I felt nothing. I went home to my apartment. There, sitting face-up on my desk, was a picture of my sister and me that I knew I had packed away. I don’t believe in things like this, but this occurred at a time when I was still very much actively grieving the loss of my sister, and it hit me really hard.
50. Crikey!
I have a twin brother. When we were around six years old, we were in central Australia with our dad and older brother. We were on a nature walk and my twin fell behind us a bit. The next moment shocked me to my core. We then heard him scream and saw him running to catch up with us. Through his tears, he told my dad he had just seen something really scary.
He didn't say what it really was then. Later that day, we were in a nearby town and my twin pointed at a painting in the window of a gallery and said that the figure in it was what he had seen on our walk. My dad went into the gallery and asked about the figure. They said it is an Aboriginal spirit that takes children who wander too far from the camp or their families.
51. Nice Bedside Manner
When I was around nine years old, I caught chickenpox. I woke up in the middle of the night and called for my mom because little kids can’t do ANYTHING for themselves when they’re sick. I got so much more than I bargained for. A different woman came into my bedroom and sat on my bed and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.
In the fog of illness, I thought it was my grandmother in a strange outfit. When I woke up that morning, I went downstairs for breakfast and asked where my grandma was. My mom told me that she was at her house like she always was. I told my mom that grandma had been in my room the night before, but she just laughed and said that I must have been dreaming.
When I told the story to my aunt while she was babysitting me that day, she had a very different reaction. She asked me to tell her about the person’s unusual outfit, and I described a nurse’s uniform from the 1950s. My aunt was shocked. What I was describing was something much eerier. I was describing the wife of the previous owner of our house.
That woman had been a nurse in the fifties and had passed a few months previously. The whole encounter definitely gave me a very spooky feeling.
Sources: Reddit
