Sometimes in life, we come across situations or events that are just so crazy they leave us completely frozen in fear, without the capacity to fully comprehend or appropriately react to what is unfolding in front of us. These types of shocking moments can leave such an impact on us that they become core memories, forever haunting and traumatizing us. Read on for some real-life horrors these unlucky people have experienced:
1. Behind Closed Doors
I was in the basement of my friend's place with his dad and sister. Without warning and for no reason I can remember, his dad did the most despicable thing—he grabbed my friend and his sister by their necks, thrust them up into the air, and pinned them against the wall. I had no idea what to do. He let them go and I thought…maybe I should go home now. I don’t think I even told my parents when I got home.
2. An Unwelcome House Guest
My mum would, from time to time, mention that she'd heard "someone" coming up the stairs at night when everyone was in bed. She would say that she could hear footsteps on the stairs which stopped when they reached the top. Neither my dad, younger brother, nor I ever heard anything like this, but my younger sister did…and experienced other things.
We used to share a room and she would tell me that she would also feel a presence sitting on her bed, tugging her duvet and sometimes scrabbling about underneath her bed. The family dog would also react, staring at a fixed spot, hackles up and growling. She told me that this mostly happened when I was away from the house.
However, one particular incident occurred when I was at home. I had done some studying and gone to bed. My sister told me that she came into our room at bedtime, only to be stopped dead in her tracks. She found me sitting, upright, staring directly at her with a huge rictus grin on my face. She described the grin as being "demonic," as though my face was being stretched.
She said my name twice. Apparently, I didn't respond or move. I just kept staring at her. She closed the door quickly, before reopening it and switching on the bedroom light to find that I was sleeping normally. My sister was terrified and got no sleep. She kept looking over at my bed for the whole night. I have no memory of this at all, and was only told about it some years later.
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3. Somebody’s Watching Over You
A disembodied voice may have saved my sister's life. When I was about 12, my family lived in my great-grandmother's house. She had passed in that house before my sister and I were born, but we knew that it was her home we were staying in. I'm sitting in the front room as my sister walks toward the front door, and she suddenly stops and turns to me.
"What did you say?" she asked. I hadn't said anything, I was sitting quietly with headphones on. We're looking at each other, confused, and suddenly a car spins out in the street in front of our house. The driver regains control and takes off at high speed again. My sister was about to walk to her friend's house and might've crossed paths with that car if she had left the house earlier.
We're both startled, and my sister tells me that a stern voice that sounded like mom told her to "SHUT THAT DOOR." Mom was in her bedroom, but when we asked her, she hadn't said anything or left her room. Thing is, my sister had talked about dreams she had before this where she would come home and speak to an old woman.
One day, my mom finds an old photo album and my sister instantly recognizes a picture of the old woman from her dreams. It was our great-grandmother, whose home we were staying in. From what I've learned over the years, things like this are common for the women in my family. Even so, it still really freaks me out sometimes.
4. Silver Linings
When I was five or six years old, my mom used to never want to get out of bed and just kept saying she was sick. Finally, my stepdad took her to a hospital where she stayed for nearly a month. I thought it was so cool that her hospital let her do arts and crafts all the time. I remember telling her that I wished I could go to the hospital and draw all day.
She sat me down and told me that she hoped I would never get sick as she did, but that if I did, there'd be nothing wrong with needing help to get better, even if I had to go somewhere for a little while to do it. It wasn't until I was probably 12 or 13 and didn't want to get out of bed myself that it clicked. The truth was hard to swallow—the hospital she had gone to was a mental health hospital.
But because of her, I never feel ashamed about needing therapy when things get bad, or even just to maintain a healthy mindset.
5. Scaring The Ghosts
My great grandmother was talking in her sleep, or so I thought. I went into her room, and there was a butt-print on top of the covers. She was angry and said, “You made him leave!” She even remembered it the next day. I still don’t know who she was talking to or why they left a butt-print. I didn’t think ghosts did that.
6. Not All Ghosts Are Nice…
My family was having a giant party for my dad. The house was completely packed with friends and relatives. Two of my girl cousins were upstairs doing their own thing when suddenly they came rushing down. One of them is trembling and clearly shaken. They claim they thought they saw somebody in one of the rooms, but didn't think much of it. They continued on for a bit like nothing happened, until one girl (the one trembling) said she saw a hand reach out and pull her leg.
The adults basically say to just not go upstairs anymore for the rest of the night. So the party continues. Later that night, my baby cousin comes tumbling down the flight of stairs. Apparently everyone had lost track of her. She's completely fine, but she keeps looking up at the stairs and pointing. She says she was pushed by a man up there, but of course, nobody was up there. We don't even know how she got up there herself.
7. The Harmful Aftermath
My worst memory ever was my mom pouring hair gel on the sunburn on my back. I thought it was normal, and that it was supposed to help. I realized later that she had a disturbing motive— she literally tortured me on purpose. It made a thick film all over my back and every movement I made would pull all my skin, causing the worst pain ever.
8. An Unexplained Miracle
One day when I was about seven years old, I tried to get out of bed, but found that I couldn't walk. I didn't receive any injury that could have caused this sudden phenomenon; it just happened for seemingly no apparent reason. My parents rushed me to the hospital, where we waited all night until the doctor finally ushered us in.
He told me that my condition was completely unexplainable, gave me some crutches, then sent me on my way. Once I got back to my house, my dad told me to stay upstairs because I didn't know how to walk down the stairs on crutches. Obviously, because I was seven, I didn’t listen to him and decided to go down the stairs in crutches.
I launched myself off the top step and crashed face-first into the wall at the bottom of the stairwell. Immediately after the impact, I got right back up and started walking like nothing ever happened. Nobody has any explanation as to what happened to me that day.
9. You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger
I was hiking through the remnants of a remote, long-abandoned town and the surrounding area. To get to as far into the woods as I was, you had to cross fallen trees over a creek three times. I had just crossed the third "bridge" and was about five miles in and something blue caught my eye just ahead of me. What I saw made me stop in my tracks.
There was a man, in his sixties at least, wearing blue satin pajamas and sitting in a tree. The closer I got to him, the louder he laughed. It wasn't a maniacal laugh, but it set off all the alarms in my head nevertheless. He also wasn't wearing any shoes, yet he looked well-groomed and cleaned. I gave him a friendly nod as I passed, and he just kept laughing. Then it stopped.
I turned and he was gone. There was no branch cracking, plants rustling, nothing...He was just gone. Still rubs me the wrong way. The area I was in was a pretty rough hike, very secluded. Not very many people venture as deep as I was that day. No idea what was going on there, and honestly I’m not sure I ever want to find out.
10. Rock Bottom
My dad got laid off from a job and we started to struggle financially for a year or so. He woke up early every morning to make breakfast for us all before school and cleaned the house while doing side jobs just so we would never know we were struggling. Here's the kicker, though—apparently, he would always say he couldn’t get a job because he was always “overqualified.” Now that I'm older, I'm skeptical of that.
11. A Night Of Terror
One night, about a year or two ago, I was in my room, trying to sleep. It was around midnight, and I was on the edge of falling asleep. My parents were down the hall, watching TV. Suddenly, there were two loud bangs on my door. I got up and opened it. Nobody was there. I asked my parents if they had knocked on my door, or if our dog was banging her head on the door.
They said that neither of them had gotten up, and our dog was completely asleep on her bed. I shrugged it off and went back to my room. I figured maybe the house was settling, or something like that. I laid back down on my bed for a few minutes. I was laying completely still when my coat, which had been laying in the middle of my bed, was PULLED down the bed.
I wasn't moving. It didn't slide because of gravity. It looked like it had been PULLED. I don't live on a hill. It wasn't possible for it to have moved on its own. When I finally fell asleep, I had a weird dream. I was being chased down a never-ending hall by a black shadow figure that was wearing the coat that had moved on its own.
I still have no idea what happened that night. Other weird things have happened to me before. I would hear things like what sounded like footsteps in my room one time when I was home alone. I swear I could hear unexplained breathing in the house as well. But none of those events were like this one. And nothing like this has happened since.
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12. The Thing That Walked Through Walls
My mom has the best paranormal ghost experience that I've heard recounted to me, and it’s impossible for me to find a believable rational explanation for it. She's Kate. It happened when she was on holiday with her parents. They were on their way to Devon from Suffolk, and this journey took a long time and required an overnight stop.
She was around 14 years old at the time, very precocious and wilful, but enjoying the prospect of a small holiday with her mom and dad. They arrive at a hotel for the overnight stop, and Kate goes to relax for a bit in the TV alcove they have upstairs while her parents go for a drink at the bar. Happily watching TV, she's surprised to see a man poking his head into the alcove.
The only way she can describe how he looks is "he had very old skin." Despite being startled, she apologizes and offers the use of the TV to the man, who just stares back at her blankly, and then leaves just as suddenly as he arrived. Kate is a little freaked out by this, and upon reuniting with her parents before getting to their rooms for the night, she remembers telling them about the man, hoping she hadn't upset anyone.
She expected an "Oh, that's probably the man in room three...." but instead they seemed confused and "perturbed" to use Kate's words. Kate has a room to herself, so she says goodnight to her parents and goes to bed. Once in bed, Kate starts to read her book, fully enveloped in the story. Then the strangest thing happens.
I'm going to use the words she used when she first told me this story; "I felt a man walk through the wall behind me to my left. I was so scared that I immediately hid under my bed covers and shut my eyes as hard as I could and wished for him to go away. I felt him slowly walk down the left side of my bed, around the end of the bed, and he continued in that direction until he went through the wall facing the right side of my bed."
When she couldn't "feel" him any more, she came out from under the covers, and decided that she must be going crazy, letting her imagination get away from her. To this day, she is a very pragmatic, skeptical person, so she thought it was in her head and that was the end of it. Fast forward to 10-14 years later, and she's having dinner with her parents.
This isn't a regular occurrence as she's moved to London, where she would meet my dad and later have me, but her parents still live in Suffolk. They are talking about weird experiences they've had or their friends have had, and my mom remembers this experience, leading with, "I got myself all worked up in that hotel we stayed at thinking someone walked through the wall..."
Once her mom hears this, however, she goes white and has a very serious look on her face. She explains that she had exactly the same experience. Upon discussing the night further, they work out the wall the "thing" walked through from my mom’s room was the wall straight into her parent's room. Absolutely bone-chilling.
13. The Darndest Thing
My worst memory is a conversation I had with my grandma when she was explaining to me she had a miscarriage after her last child. I was only nine years old, and I made an incredibly tactless comment—I said it was for the best because my mom, aunt, and uncle were troublemakers, so it was better for her. She got extremely mad with me and I was so confused at the time. I didn’t realize how messed up it actually was.
14. Not Quite Done Living Yet
I work for a funeral company. One afternoon, I did a viewing for a man who was having his funeral the next day. Usually, we put the bodies back in the fridge, but we’d been really busy, and we only had a very small fridge that was already full. On occasions like this, if they’ve been embalmed, we’d leave them in the chapel with the air conditioner cranked up.
So the next morning, I was the first one in, and I walked into the chapel, only to be greeted by a horrifying sight. The man who was embalmed was somehow out of his coffin, laying face down on the floor. Not sprawled, but perfectly neat, like he’d floated up out of his coffin, turned face down, and floated down to the ground. Obviously, I nearly had a heart attack.
My first thought was that someone had broken in and had done this. Maybe staff members were playing a prank? It was a very sackable prank, and I couldn’t imagine any of our staff doing that for any reason. And what’s more was that we had security cameras and motion detectors and swipe cards so you can see who had come and gone, but there was NOTHING!
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15. Gone Forever
When I was a kid, I was playing outside at our farm with a Dr. Fate action figure. I was in the middle of the lawn and I was throwing it up in the air and catching it, pretending he was flying. I go to throw it up…and I swear it just disappeared and didn't come down. I thought I lost it squinting in the sun or something, and searched the whole yard for it.
No trees or bushes around, and the house was too far away, so it couldn't have ended up on the roof or anything. There was nothing around me but freshly mowed lawn. It was my favorite toy, so I spent so much time searching that day and even into the next. I never saw it again. All I remember it that feeling of it flying away from me.
16. Finding His Way
When I was a kid, I ended up in a chat room with someone who also claimed to also be a kid. He claimed to be 14 or 13 years old; I can't quite remember the exact age. Well, he gave me this phone number and told me that if his voice sounded really deep, it's just because he has a deep voice for his age.
While still in the chatroom, he also tried to find out where I lived. Thankfully, I didn't tell him even though I did know my address by heart at that point...I just didn't feel like telling him. I told him I'd give him a call in a few minutes, then I logged off and proceeded to grab the house phone to call the number.
I don't know if I entered the number wrong or what, but the voice I heard was incredibly strange—this automated message came up and asked if I wanted to accept some charges for the call. If there was one thing I knew, it was that if I had any money charged to the house, I would have gotten a good whooping, so I hung up on that call pretty quickly.
I never wanted to call another number that someone gave me online again. It wasn't until a few years ago that I realized he was an online predator, trying to find his way to a very young child.
17. Not So Easy To Get Rid Of
I was helping my mom clean out her garage, and we ended up coming across this old teddy bear that belonged to my great-grandma. She told me to take it down to the dumpster and throw it away. So I did. Later that night, we were digging through the garage a little more, and there it was. The teddy bear that I had thrown away earlier that day. Neither me nor my mom knew how it got back there.
18. We Are Not Alone
I used to work at a place that had to be manned 24 hours a day. I handled sensitive documents and files, and if somebody needed this information in the middle of the night, I would have to fetch it for them or confirm that I had it. So security is really tight. I’m talking bars on windows, and multiple locked doors to get to where I am.
They would give me work to do during the night, but they underestimated how quickly I could get it done. So like most nights, this one, I finished my work in like 30 to 45 minutes and pulled out my phone and played games. No one else was in the building with me. It was getting to be the last third of my shift when all of a sudden I hear a door close.
I look to the security camera and see someone walking down the hall toward my room. At first I thought it was just somebody who came in ridiculously early, so I turned around and waited for them to come in. But nobody came in. Now the hairs start rising on the back of my neck. I decide I’ve got to do something about this or I’ll go crazy.
This isn't a really big building, so I figure I'll find the guy wherever he is and start checking offices and storage rooms. I come up empty handed, but I do see that a fire door had shut. I go to try and rewind the camera, but the digital recording is password protected and I don't know the password. The whole thing freaked me out.
I mean, the way the person was walking down the hallway, like a determined walk right to where I was. So, I sit with my spine tingling for the last couple hours of my shift and finally people start coming in. My replacement shows up and I tell her what I saw. At this point, I figured I must have imagined the whole thing. I'm told to go home and the manager and girl who replaced me would look over the camera.
After getting home, I call my manager and ask what was on the camera. They said that the video showed the fire door closing…but then the video froze for about an hour, and the next thing it records is me reopening the door.
19. A Bad Sleep
A horrible memory of mine was when I walked in on my mom having an anxiety attack in her sleep. I think she was having a really bad dream. She had her eyes wide open and was crying, yet she didn't wake up when I nudged her. She took rattling breaths. After a few moments, my brother came in and she woke up.
We ended up rushing her to the hospital because she had a spinal procedure and was only two days out of the hospital. The truth of her condition was shocking—apparently, the operation had been botched earlier and the device that was put in her wasn't properly cleaned, so she contracted a very severe form of meningitis. If we waited to go until the morning, which is what she wanted to do when she woke up, she definitely would've passed.
20. Careful What You Wish For
When I was about nine or ten, my dad took my brother, sister, mum, and me for a random drive on a quiet Sunday afternoon. We’d been out for a while when our parents said it was time to go home, but us kids didn’t want to. So we kept chanting, “Break down, break down,” so we didn’t have to go home. This evolved into us holding hands, closing our eyes, and continuing to chant.
All of a sudden, the car lost power. The car had a full tank of gas, and there was no reason why it should break down. We had to call for a company to come check the car, and they couldn’t identify why the car wasn’t working either. The car had to be towed to our house. Upon trying the car later that day, it worked as normal.
21. Astral Projection
When I was seven years old, I was in my bedroom doing some coloring. Because I live in a 300-year old cottage, my room was only divided from my mom's room by a thin partition wall, no hallway or anything. My door opened straight into her bedroom, and I always used to leave it open when I was a little girl because it comforted me to know she was near.
So I look up into her supposedly empty bedroom (she's downstairs), and see a Buddhist monk sitting, cross legged, smiling on top of her closet. It wasn't scary, just completely weird and out of place. He was there for maybe 10 seconds and then gone. I was a seven-year-old white kid in Wales in the 90s; I had never even seen a Buddhist monk!
For years after, I just called him “the Indian” because I knew some Indian men wore bright silk robes. It wasn't until I started watching more TV that I realized the person I had seen was a Tibetan-looking Buddhist monk. I really think some guy meditated real good and found himself projected onto the top of a little Welsh girl's mom's bedroom wardrobe.
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22. Forever Traumatized
I was 10 or 11 at a church camp that had kids from multiple different churches. I had a crush on this girl whom I knew from previous camps and everyone knew that I liked her. She was the daughter of the camp nurse who is part of a well-connected family within the denomination, which to a kid means nothing...I just really liked this girl. She had no interest in me.
I don’t know who allowed this to happen, but it's very, very, messed up. Anyway, there was this “competition” where you write a letter to your crush and whoever wins gets a “date” with them. I had a chaperone help me, and they read mine in front of the whole camp of around 400 kids. I ended up winning.
I don’t remember if any other poems were even read. They took me to the stage along with the girl. I sat next to her and she slid far away from me, understandably. Here’s what really got to me...That evening, I was so excited. I tried to look my best and that’s when things got really bad. My “friends” all took me to the cafeteria.
They were wearing handmade security shirts and were armed with super soakers. They made me put on a shirt that said something shameful written on it. Then, I got anxious during the walk. When I got there, it was a candlelit table. The girl was not amused and everyone was staring. I sat down and then said something to the girl.
That's when I got squirted by my “friends.” Everyone laughed and I just lost it. I ran back to my bunk and started bawling. Looking back, it seemed like a whole plot to shame me into not expressing my feelings for a girl. Now that I’m a father, I would be furious if this happened to my child. Needless to say, religion is no longer a part of my life and this is a big reason why.
23. A Surprise In The Basement
I was a junior in college. Me and five other guys rented the upstairs of a college house. There were two separate apartments on the first floor, and the basement was communal with a washer and dryer and a bunch of rooms which were boarded up. The landlord said it was because they needed work, and he didn't have the time or money.
Anyways, I knew the downstairs occupants. Some I had classes with, and one I worked with. My coworker went up to me one day and asked, "Do you ever hear anything…weird in the basement?" Come to mention it, I, and my roommates, had been hearing odd sounds. My coworker said he just heard it again and thought it may be a person.
I snuck down. Sure enough, I heard movement in a room. The boards were removed. Now I was sketched out—but I had no idea what was coming. I threw open the door and this man, in his mid-30s, who I had never seen before, casually turned around. He was in a nice, three-piece, dark blue suit. He smiled and said, "Well, hello there, fine day today, isn't it?"
Honestly, I was so caught off guard by his demeanor. "Who are you? How did you get in here? And why?" I asked him. "Ah, yes, I bet this seems odd. I used to stay here. I just…I just like to stop back from time to time. Tell [landlord’s name] I said hi." He then swung his jacket over his shoulder, said excuse me, and walked past.
I know I should have grabbed his name or called the authorities, but he knew my landlord's first name, which wasn’t listed on the property. I called the landlord, and asked who this guy was and why he was there. The landlord was speechless. He replied, "Those rooms are boarded up for a reason. I'll have to secure that again, now."
"What about the guy?" I asked him. The landlord just hung up on me. Every time someone asked him about it, he just left, hung up, or changed the subject.
24. The Tell-Tale Foot
My parents’ house was brand new in a really nice subdivision, and I was five when we moved. I wasn't ever an anxious kid or anything, but I was TERRIFIED of the house. I refused to be upstairs alone, and I had really frequent panic attacks. We lived there for 15 years before I moved out, and I was never comfortable. I live in a 75-year old farmhouse now, and I don't get uncomfortable the way I did in that house.
Only one creepy thing actually ever happened to me there, though, and this is it. Last year, 32-week-pregnant me went back up to see my grandmother before I had this baby, and I was staying with my parents. My dad was traveling for work, so it was just my mom, my sister, and me. My mom had gone to the grocery store, and I was lying on the sofa.
The way the living room is set up, you can see the reflection of the bottom two feet of the foyer and staircase in the TV, and also the kitchen on the other side of the living room. So I'm lying there messing around with my phone, and I hear the stairs creaking. I look up at the reflection in the TV and I see a pair of bare feet standing in the foyer.
I think it's my sister, so I tell her to come and sit with me and feel the baby kicking. There's no reply, and the feet turn and walk toward the kitchen. So I sit up to say hey…and there's no one there. At all. My sister wasn't even home—she'd gone to work. My parents have moved closer now and they're closing the sale of that house at the end of this month. They're a little sad, but honestly I'm incredibly relieved.
25. Hanging By A Thread
I once saw a girl standing on the wrong side of the barrier, holding onto the railing while my family drove over a bridge. There were also some people on the path talking to her. I thought nothing of it and just wondered how she was going to get back on the right side. I used to hang onto the railing and walk on the wrong side of a path at school that wasn't too high off the ground.
So, I just thought she was mucking around in a more extreme adult level way, chatting to her friends. Then the reality of the situation hit me. As an adult, I don't remember what the outcome was. There’s been petitions to raise the height of the safety barriers on that bridge to reduce the number of times this occurs, but unfortunately, nothing has been done.
26. Divine Intervention
I was sleeping in my dorm room in college in 1988. Suddenly, I heard a voice clearly telling me to go to the roof, where we often went as kind of a macho tough guy thing. My friend Eddie was sobbing on the edge of the roof. I went swiftly over to him and caught him by the collar, just as he jumped. I pulled him back from thin air. It felt like he didn't weigh anything at all.
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27. Living in Slow Motion
When I was a little kid, I remember I was running around my room and I decided to go on the bed and jump from it. As soon as I jumped, suddenly, everything went into slow motion. It was like there was no gravity for some time. I got really scared, so I just closed my eyes and I slowly landed back on the ground eventually. I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t a dream.
28. Yes, That Actually Happened
When I was four or five years old and my sister was eight or nine, we were playing in the yard in front of our house when suddenly, a hooded motorcyclist stopped in front of the driveway and didn't move for a while. He just stood there. Moments later, he made a shocking move—he took out a firearm and pointed it at us. I ran for cover, but my sister stayed in the yard and kept jumping rope because she didn't want to show him she was scared.
I was so scared for her. Fortunately, the motorcyclist drove on again. The interesting thing is that my sister and I both forgot about it for a few years after that, and we both thought it was just a dream, until at some point I told her about it. To my surprise, I found out that she could remember it too–and it actually happened.
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29. A Helpful Ghost?
Ten years old, I was in Maine with some friends. We decided to get "lost" in the woods. This wasn’t actually possible, because the road went around in a circle. Somehow, we got into a swampy area, and couldn't find our way out of the woods. We started screaming for help, and finally we saw someone picking blackberries.
He gave us directions and told us the way out. As I turned around after we passed him, he was gone. It was super weird. My sister later told me that the cabin we were staying in was actually haunted.
30. Leave the Boy Alone
We lived near an American Civil War battlefield and cemetery for a few years. There were trails through the woods that we would hike a lot. One day, we were looking at the cemetery, and my wife hears me walk up to her. We were the only ones there, so she turns to say something. Well, I'm nowhere nearby. I’m on the other side looking at a cannon. From that day on, we started experiencing things that were just...odd.
My wife's car was always kept in the garage, and its inside mirror kept moving overnight. It wasn't drooping from a loose fitting, and it would be in a random direction. Sometimes it would be pointed up. Other times, sideways. Weird, but I dismissed it as her bumping it while getting her purse or other items when getting out.
Then her car went into the shop, and the next morning I went to go to work and the mirror in my truck, which I parked in the driveway with the doors locked, was moved upward. Next morning, same thing, different direction. She got her car back and my mirror never moved again. There were little goofy things too, typical "haunting" stuff like things moved, the sense of somebody behind you, etc.
Also, our house was a ranch style with the master bedroom on the first floor and our son’s bedroom on the second right above ours. The flooring job was substandard, so we heard his every movement. He started going to the bathroom, which was down a hallway and halfway across the second floor from his room, a lot. Yet every time we'd go check on him, he'd be asleep.
So one night, we decided to catch him coming out of the bathroom for no reason other than to make sure he was okay and to tell him to quit stomping like an elephant because come morning, he never remembered going. We never were able to. Every time he'd go to the bathroom, one of us would head upstairs while the other stayed in bed.
We wouldn't hear him return, and the other would find him asleep in his bed. The next morning, we asked him if he was up and walking around last night. His reply made me turn white as a sheet. He said no, but that for weeks something would walk up to and away from his door but not open it. My wife turned to the room and said, "You're welcome to hang around, but please stop walking up to our son's room at night, you're scaring him."
The footsteps never reoccurred after that, although the car mirror thing kept on. Could she have been pranking me? Maybe. But one of the times my truck's mirror moved was after I'd gotten home and I went to go to the store a couple hours later, the only set of keys to it had never left my pocket. Could our son have been pranking us? Again possible, but the darn flooring was so bad in one spot that even our cat walking over it caused it to squeak, making it nearly impossible for him to get back to his bedroom without us noticing.
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31. Just Need The Proof
This feels strange to think about to this day because I still believe it to be true, but nobody else in my family does. I had only just started walking and I remember throwing a teddy bear back and forth with my grandmother, who was pretty ill at the time. I could never catch it because I lacked hand-eye coordination, so she would throw it a little short, and I kept throwing short as well because I wasn't very strong.
I had just started practicing walking, but couldn't fully walk yet. Whenever I would throw the bear way off course, I would get up to try and walk to it, but I kept stumbling, so she would always go and get it for us. Now, my grandmother passed when I was about a few months old, so everyone in my family swore this never happened.
They said that even if I somehow remembered something from that early of an age, there is no way it happened because by the time I started to walk, my grandma was too ill to walk herself. But the creepy part about all this? I vividly remember my aunt taking a picture of us on our really old film camera while we were playing with that bear, but I could never physically find the photograph.
I hadn't gone back to my home country for a few years, but I went back to visit when I was 11. We were going through old albums and it was there. My aunt swears she never took that picture. Everyone in my family I've asked swears they never took it either. The picture is me and my grandmother sitting across the living room floor, with that same teddy bear, both of us looking at the camera with her holding the bear out as if she was about to throw it.
My aunt, or whoever took the photo, caught us by surprise, so we both looked at the camera. It wasn't on my mind as we were leaving, so I didn't think to take it back. I wish I did. I was maybe a one-year-old in the photo and did not look like I could walk at all, so I'm not surprised my grandma didn't even let me try. The memory is so clear in my head and to have everyone tell me it didn't happen is just off-putting.
32. The Ballroom Of Horror
I used to work in hotels. This one particular hotel was well known in the area for its paranormal events, but once you'd been there a while you'd get used to it. The events were rarely frightening. When I was hired, another employee had told me that our large ballroom was haunted, but I was just like, "Yeah, whatever."
So we’d had a week of wedding receptions. The ballroom in this hotel was large enough that it could hold two or three smaller parties at a time. Every night for that week, we'd had at least one party going in the evenings. On Saturday night, this one reception was plagued by issues. Lightbulbs were blowing out, breakers were tripping, equipment was malfunctioning.
I felt bad for the bride and groom because of all the issues. Soon, Sunday rolled around. The hotel was quiet, and there were no events scheduled. I headed over to lock up the ballroom, and that included making sure all the lights were turned off. To get to some of the switches, I would have to cross the room to the opposite side.
I walked in the door and just stopped. It sounds like a cliche, but all the hairs on my arms and neck stood up. The atmosphere in there just felt really, really tense. I felt like I was intruding, and I just hastily backed out and closed the door. The two guys who set up audio and visual gear then showed up to set up part of the ballroom for a meeting the following day.
They went into the ballroom. Just as quickly, they promptly come right back out. One of them said it felt like something was physically stopping them from going any further. The other said he heard something or someone growl something, but couldn't make out any words. I believed the stories about the ballroom after that.
33. A Ghostly Message
I must have been sleep walking during the creepiest moment of my life, because I don't remember it, but my family insists that it's true. On the night that my grandpa passed, I apparently woke up, walked into my mom's room, shook her awake, and told her that papa loved her and wanted to her to know he would always watch over her. She was ushering me back to bed when the phone rang. That phone call was my grandmother telling my mom that papa had passed.
34. It Never Happened
My brother managed to get his head stuck in the scrollwork of an iron or wood banister at a hotel, and in the ensuing panic, I wandered off to this wonderful place where there was a table full of cookies and candy. As I was eating the cookies and the candy and whatever I could find, some really angry adult yelled at me, picked me up, and carried me out of the amazing room filled with sweets.
I was about three or four years old. Now that I'm older, I think I know exactly what that magical place was—I think I crashed a wedding or a bar mitzvah's dessert table while my brother was being extracted from the banister. It was amazing, but my parents claim it never happened.
35. Heed His Warning…
While visiting a theme park when I was younger, I ran into a dude that looked just like me. He warned me that I would lose my money today, and to watch my pockets. Later that day, I noticed my money had fallen out of my pocket, but luckily, it was on the ground nearby. I wouldn't have noticed if that dude’s comment hadn't been stuck in my mind.
36. Seeing Double
I own this really random photography book called 100 Young Americans that I bought around 2007, maybe earlier. I know I still own it because I recently reorganized my bookshelf. Just last week, though, I was getting into my car and I saw something sitting on top of the trunk of my car. I get out. It's a copy of 100 Young Americans, just sitting on my hood.
Why is that random photography book that I've literally never seen anyone else have sitting open on the hood of my car? Also, yes, my copy is safe and sound in my bookcase.
37. The Happiest Place On Earth
My most messed-up memory happened at Disney World. We were standing in some sort of line getting tickets, and I was distracted by something on the ground. Later on, when I looked up, I was shocked—my parents and family were gone. I decided that would be a good time to go the opposite way and look for them. I ended up with some park worker finding me. He ended up using the loudspeaker to call my parents.
38. More Than Just Imagination
I found out only a few months ago that my parent’s friend, who was deaf and always visiting us when I was very young, didn't exist. They apparently don't have a deaf friend. It might seem like I had an imaginary friend, and that would be the end of it. However, I remember learning how to speak a bit with my hands from him.
I really don't know how I learned what I did from this person that supposedly never existed. How did I imagine the knowledge and ability to sign from someone that existed only in my head? It really weirded me out when I found out my parents didn't have a deaf friend, because he was a big part of my memories from that time.
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39. A Bridge to Another World
I was driving home late one night, somewhere between 1 and 3 am. The stretch of road I was driving goes through the back end of a couple of counties in the Deep South. Nothing around but forests, fields, and the occasional group of shacks huddling under a light that only barely keeps away the night. I'd driven this stretch of road many times before, even at this time of night, so it wasn't really a big deal. Just a long trip.
Since there was rarely any traffic that time of night, I was able to turn the stereo up and push the pedal down. And then I came to this bridge. Nothing really noteworthy about it—it's not ancient or a covered bridge or all that spooky. Just a concrete span over swampland, trees growing right up near the edge and turning the road into a dim trail at the bottom of a dark canyon.
I didn't think anything of it. Until that night. It was humid out, and as the temperature dropped there was a little bit of fog. Not enough to really slow me down, but I had to turn off the high-beams. So I'm shooting across the bridge and it hits me that it seems to be taking longer than normal to get across it. Maybe I was just tired? Maybe my mind was playing tricks on me?
And when I thought I was finally getting to the end of it, I saw a figure walking on the opposite side of the road. At first, no big deal, right? Guy walking in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Probably lives nearby, probably not sober. Watch them to make sure they don't fall in front of the car. But my mind is already racing.
I mean, this is the middle of nowhere. There are no houses around. There are no lights but the stars and my headlights stabbing out at the darkness. And as I whiz by going way too fast for my own good, I notice two terrifying things: First, the figure is wearing what appears to be a straight jacket, the sleeves undone, and the straps trailing to the ground. Second. It has no face. Not like, there's no head there. There's a head shape. And the place where a face should be, but no face. Just an expanse of darkness that I took to be his skin.
I chalked it up to going really fast, contrast between white jacket and dark skin at night, and thinking creepy thoughts. I mean, surely I couldn't have just seen that. I tried to spot him in my rear view mirror, but it was so dark there was nothing to be seen. I slowed down a little, and was suddenly off the end of the bridge and on normal two-lane blacktop again.
I briefly considered turning around and seeing what it was. Surely it was just a trick of the light or my mind playing tricks on me. Right?
40. Intruder Alert
A guy tried to abduct our neighbor's baby over a $20 debt. We lived in navy housing in Charleston, South Carolina when I was a kid and this was in the '80s. We were at the neighbor's house, and he owed someone else in the neighborhood $20. While we were all in the living room, we were suddenly startled by a bone-chilling sound—we heard glass shattering from the baby room.
The baby cried and everyone rushed down, but the guy was gone before we got there. The guy apparently tried to pry open a locked window with a putty blade and he put pressure on the frame, causing the glass to shatter. The dude left the putty blade and the note he'd written on the window sill when he took off. The baby was fine. I heard the grown-ups talk about knowing exactly who it was.
I also remember them deciding not to call the law enforcement officers and to go deal with it in person.
41. Listen To Your Kids…
When I was a toddler, probably about three, my mom, siblings, and I had just gotten home from a trip to the store. She was busy with my younger brother, so she didn’t notice when I waddled upstairs to my room. A few minutes passed, and I came downstairs and stood in the kitchen doorway with a “weird expression” on my face.
She asked me what was up, and I said, “The man upstairs told me to come back down.” My dad was at work, and there was no one else staying with us. My mom was freaked out and we immediately left to stay at a family friend’s house until my dad could come home to scope out the house. Nothing was missing, no signs of entry, nothing. We still don’t know what I saw.
42. A Mysterious Ailment
A woman I knew began to have pain and fatigue and a whole suite of other vague symptoms shortly after being treated for mastitis, as she'd recently had a baby. She went to the doctor, who pretty much dismissed her. She continued for years to suffer with extreme fatigue, migraines, low-grade fevers, etc. without any relief.
She got diagnosed with fibromyalgia pretty much as a "no one knows what the heck this is, so we'll stick a label on it and call it good." She got referred to psychologists, and even her husband started losing patience with her. One night, she'd made up her mind to wait until her husband was at work and her daughter was at school the next morning, then take an overdose of pills.
As she was falling asleep, though, she heard a voice, loud and clear, tell her, "It's your implants. Get them taken out." She'd had breast implants years before, when she had done some modelling. She called a plastic surgeon and set up a consultation, and midway into describing her symptoms, the surgeon interrupted her by saying she'd seen this before, and the implants had to come out as soon as possible.
When the surgeon removed them, they were black. They were completely full of mold, which had been playing merry havoc with the woman's immune system. Once the implants were out and she was treated with an antifungal, she recovered quickly. Oh, and her husband felt terrible for doubting her when he saw these black implants.
43. Just A Normal Kiss
When I was around seven years old, I would see my father kiss random women, not my mother, passionately upon my first time meeting them. That was bad enough, but then I realized a disturbing truth—this happened a lot. Since I was used to thinking that kissing passionately was just like a normal kiss on the cheek as a greeting, I didn’t think anything of it.
When my father spotted me while he was kissing some woman, he came up to me and gave me $20, just for standing there. I realized what he was really doing a few years later and I was immensely disappointed.
44. A Guardian Angel
I grew up in a very old family home way out in the country. I was quite a responsible child and my parents would allow me to stay home from a very young age. They always figured I was safe enough with our big dogs, and we were off the main road and behind a gate. One Saturday afternoon, when I was about 9, they ran into town to do some errands and left me alone.
I remember it was summer, so I was out in the yard reading a book with my dogs, Roscoe and Lady Sara, on the lawn next to me. All of a sudden, the dogs both quietly stood up and moved in front of me with their hackles up. The two of them were very protective and would never allow someone they didn't know to come close to me.
A minute later, a man came walking up our driveway. He was quite polite and doffed his hat and asked if the lady of the house was home. I explained that they had run into town but would be home soon. He was dressed in clean, but dated clothing, and he had a sharp beard and a small gold pocket watch that he fiddled with as he talked.
He was polite and well-spoken, and never once did I feel frightened. That was a tad strange because I was a shy, untrusting child who didn't cotton to strangers. All this time, my dogs had been standing in front of me but not growling. They were just watchful. He looked down at them and said their names, except he called our girl “Sara.”
Now, this was where it started getting really weird. We only ever called her by her first name, “Lady.” As soon as he said their names, they cocked their heads, sniffed him over, then whined and wagged their tails before lying back down. I figured he was friends with my folks and didn't think much of it. My mother had raised me to be very polite so I asked him if I could offer any refreshments.
He said he'd be glad of some water and he would bide out on the porch for a bit. So I bustled into the house and made up lemonade and put some lace cookies on one of mom's pretty rose plates with a cloth napkin. He didn't talk much, but just sat back, rocked for a bit, smoked a pipe, then thanked me for the refreshments and said he must be on his way.
He started across the yard, and my dogs walked on either side of him to the driveway as calm as you please. He knelt down and gave each one a pat and lifted a hand in farewell, and faded into the dusk. I went in and laid down for a bit and when next I woke up my folks were home. I forgot to mention any of this to my mom until we were headed to church the next day. She didn’t think much of it.
Now, every Sunday, the dogs would ride with us to the church and wait in the back of the truck. Afterward we would all go down and have a picnic at the lake while my dad did a little fishing, and my mom read in the shade. The dogs and I would wade in the shallows and hunt for lizards. This time Roscoe wouldn't come when we called. He just sat on the porch and whined.
When we got home that afternoon, the sheriff was waiting there, and he had a big man in cuffs. The man had several deep bites on his hand and leg. Roscoe was shut up in the garage and angry, with a pretty deep gash on his side, some broken teeth, and a knot on his head. The sheriff told us someone had happened to see this man turn into our drive and called it in.
It turned out that this man had been robbing rural houses in the area. He was caught with pillowcases full of my mom's silver. When the sheriff questioned him, the man said he had snuck up the drive to the treeline the evening before, but had seen a man sitting on the porch, so he left and came back when he saw us leave for church.
Dad questioned the neighbors about who had called it in, and also who had stopped over, but no one ever admitted to either the call or the visit. My parents chalked it all up as a very lucky coincidence, and we went on with our lives, but with better locks on the doors and instructions to me to be more wary of strangers.
Some years later, we were at an elderly relative’s home for a visit. She and my mom were flipping through an old photo album and reminiscing about the family, when I looked over and very excitedly told my mother that the man in the photo was the same man who visited back when we were robbed. My mom went white as a sheet.
She explained that it couldn't possibly have been the same man, because that was her great uncle Hap, and he had passed when she was nine years old. That picture was the last picture taken of him. In the picture, you could see our family home, with two dogs laying on the porch. On the back of the picture, in faded pencil were the words, “Hap and Essie with Roscoe and Sara at grandma’s.”
45. The Lady in the Rocker
My grandmother passed when I was in 8th grade or so. After a few years, my grandfather came to live with us for a bit, and then had to go into an assisted living home. I am in college and we have decided to open up their house for a family reunion. One of my cousins, Kate, flew in early with her 5-6-year-old son, Tom, to open the house and air it out.
This was in rural Mississippi. Kate and Tom were going to a hotel that night, and come back the next day. As they pulled away, Kate notices Tom looking out the back window and waving at the house. "What are you waving at, buddy?" "I'm waving at the lady." "What lady?" "The lady in the rocking chair on the porch." Now, there were several chairs on the porch, but only one rocker.
It was the chair my grandmother sat in and waved at all of us as we drove away from a visit. She always sat and waved until we were out of sight. The next day, some aunts and cousins open up the one room they hadn't opened the day before; my grandparents' bedroom. As they are sweeping and dusting, Tom wanders in. Then his words chilled us to the bone.
He points to a picture of my grandmother on the bedroom mantle and says, "Hey Mom, there's the lady I was waving at yesterday." To Kate's knowledge, that was the first picture of his great-grandmother Tom had ever seen.
46. Nightmare Origins
I was maybe six years old or so. One day close to Halloween, someone had been chased by law enforcement officers and crashed into the house a few doors down from mine. The whole street was blocked off. We weren't allowed inside our house at first. Glass and blood were everywhere, and the aftermath was absolutely jaw-dropping—The driver had ditched the car and had run into the woods nearby, and the person on the passenger side had passed on impact with the house.
The neighborhood was filled with row homes, so they were pretty much pure stone. I had seen them, but it didn't click until my brother told me that what I was looking at, was in fact, the person's body. Helicopters were all over next to my house the whole night, searching for the driver, and I had nightmares for a week straight. I remember nothing else, except that when I'd play on the street after that, you could still find bits and pieces of the car and glass.
47. A Glitch In The Matrix
I saw a guy accidentally drop a 16-inch concrete drill bit from shoulder height. It never hit the ground. It's like it stopped existing on its way to the floor. No sound of it hitting the floor, nowhere to be seen, just gone. Three witnesses all saw the same thing. This happened in a completely empty newly constructed building.
48. Monsters Are Real
Once upon a time, I lived with a couple and their child. They asked me to babysit so they could have an evening together. I agreed. Fast forward to bed time: The child doesn't want to go to sleep because of the "monsters." The child is adamantly sincere, which creeps me out a bit. But I play it cool. I look around the room, pretending to scare them away.
This does the trick and the child falls asleep. Later, I'm sitting in the living room, which is oriented so the couch faces away from the main entry. I'm watching TV, expecting the couple back at any minute. That's when I hear the entry door open and close, just like I've heard it many times before. With a smile on my face, based on my success with the child and the knowledge of my good deed, I stand and turn towards the door.
There is no one there. I'm skeptical of the paranormal, but this unnerved me. Once the couple actually returns, I tell one of them about it. He says, "Oh, yeah, we were going to tell you that stuff happens here all the time, particularly in the child's room, but we didn't want to scare you." Needless to say, I slept poorly in my basement bedroom for several days.
49. Hard Swallow
My worst memories stem from the fact that my parents go through about two of the biggest sized bottles of 80-proof booze a week and they justified it by saying that they have no other way to have fun on their days off. They always told me that they spent money on booze because they weren't like normal people who go out once a week.
One time, my uncle asked me to make him a drink because I told him that my mom showed me how to make them. So, I proceeded to make the drink for my uncle like I would make my mom's, with half 80-proof booze and half cranberry in an eight-ounce cup. I gave it to my uncle, and his reaction was priceless. He then looked at me in disgust and said, "Sheesh kid, what the heck are you trying to do to me?"
At that very moment, I was 17 years old and I realized my parents were heavy drinkers.
50. A Real-Life Horror Movie
I was driving in rural areas in New England. It was late, and there was fog. It was extremely dense fog, and I was driving on back roads. Suddenly, things started going wrong. First, my headlight just up and went out. Next, the car started making noises, and the check engine light came on. So, I pulled over, with nothing much around except fields and fog and dark.
I looked at the engine and did what I could, but the car now wouldn't start. My cell phone had no service as well. It was like one big cliché, but I was not stupid enough to go wandering the roads right now. So I reclined my seat and decided to take a nap for a couple hours until the sun came up. When I woke up, the sun was coming up.
Slowly, the fog was going away...and I was on the main street of a tiny town, parked in front of a motel. There were houses everywhere. I was sure I was just off the woods. There was a service station 50 yards up the road. I walked up to it and talked to the guy there. He walked over to look at the car, asked me to try to start it...and it did. And...BOTH headlights were working. I drove on, but never got the name of the little village, and I couldn't find it on a map. I always felt like I was in this big setup for a horror movie that just didn't pan out.
51. A Glitch in the Matrix
My sophomore year of college, I lived on campus but my boyfriend didn't. He worked on campus, however, and would often hang out in my dorm with me between class and work. My bed was lofted with my desk underneath it, and sometimes I would take a nap while he sat at my desk doing homework. One afternoon I woke up from a pretty vivid dream and started telling my boyfriend about it.
I remember hearing him respond, and in the middle of my response, I felt this eerie shift in the atmosphere. It was like the whole room suddenly became slightly darker and colder. I quietly said his name, but he didn't respond. That’s when I remembered he had been at work for about three hours. I grabbed my backpack, ran out of there, and did homework in the library until he was off work.
52. Body At The Book Fair
When I was nine years old, there was supposed to be a book fair in my school. As I left the toilet to return to class, I peered into the main hall and saw a man clutching the end of the table, leaning on it as if desperately trying to stop himself from going down. He looked right at me with a pained expression and sort of spluttered something.
I had only paused a beat to see this, and quickly got back to class and said to my friend, “There’s some guy who's really hurt in there,” and my friend brushed it off. I sat there trying hard to figure out what I’d just seen. Probably 10 minutes passed, and a teacher burst in from the hall, trembling in fear. She said we needed an ambulance. All the assistants and remaining teachers kept the kids away from the scene.
The ambulance comes, and the book fair is canceled. The following week, we had an assembly where it was announced the fair wouldn’t go ahead as the lovely man who arranged it had passed. There was a little talk about what passing is, and it doesn’t always happen when we are in bed. For some reason, I took the events to be separate...that a new book fair had been arranged but the lead man had come to school to meet the head and passed.
It was probably 10 years later when it popped into my memory. I connected the dots. He’d clearly been having a heart attack, he had probably spluttered for me to go and get help, and no help came until someone else came along. All he’d seen was a kid pause and stare at him, then scarper off.
I think he passed right there by that table. It left me with the thought, “Would he have survived if they had gotten to him sooner?” I still think about it often, over 20 years later.
53. Never Truly Alone
I worked in a building with keypad locked doors. On video, at least five doors were violently thrown open in the same hallway, seconds apart. There were cameras on both sides, and neither showed anyone there. I 100% cannot explain what I saw, even today, but I ended up working nights in the building, alone. I did, on occasion, got the feeling I was being watched.
54. When a Stranger Knocks
When my family first moved to California, the house we lived in had a lot of weird things occur. My room happened to be close to the front door/dining room area, and I could hear the front door open and close. So one day, I'm in my room playing games. It's after school and everyone is home except my dad, who's not home from work yet.
I'm almost 100% concentrated on a game, but I hear the front door open. I quickly turn to look out and I see somebody walk upstairs, who I assumed to be my dad. Immediately after, I hear my youngest brother yell out, "Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!" My siblings and my mom all rush upstairs to go after my dad. I don't think much of it and kept playing.
Just a few minutes later, they all bolt downstairs. There's a big commotion, and my little brother is in tears. I'm still into my game, but I can kind of hear what's going on. My brother saw a figure go upstairs and thought it was my dad. When they got up there to the master bedroom, no one was there. I knew I heard the door open, and I also saw somebody go upstairs…
55. Scrambled Eggs And Coke
I learned how to make scrambled eggs at six years old. But here's the kicker—the guy who taught me was the same guy who sold my mom and stepdad substances. I thought he was a friend since that's how he was introduced to me. My siblings and I were hungry, and I am the oldest. My brothers were five, three, and one, and I was trying to make scrambled eggs for us. He showed me how. It's all sorts of messed up, but at least he kept a six-year-old from getting badly burned and he helped me feed my siblings.
We ended up okay-ish. My grandpa helped us. I didn't realize how messed up that was until I was much older.
56. The Nightmares Are Real
My wife and I lived in a small apartment. I got up one night and just had a creepy feeling while I was standing in the bathroom. I shook it off, and got back to bed. The next morning, my wife told me she had a terrible dream about a demon that was watching her. I didn't tell her about my feelings because it would have scared her even more.
57. It’s Coming From Inside the House
My sister was visiting my parents for the weekend. That night, I called her about something, just wanting to chat, but when she picked up, she was clearly very upset. She told me she was home alone and "something was happening." I asked her if there was someone in the house, like an intruder. She told me there were animalistic growling noises coming from the corner, and my mom's dog was going nuts.
She also said the hallway lights were flashing on and off. I told her to get her jacket and calmly walk out of the house, taking the dog with her if she could, and that I would be by soon to pick her up. She went outside and brought the dog with her. Her friend was even closer than I was, so she picked my sister up and they hung out at her friend's house for a while.
About twenty minutes after that, my brother, who also lived nearby, stopped by the house to return some tools he'd borrowed for my dad. He went inside because he saw the lights going on and off, and he's an electrician. Once he was inside…they stopped. He kept hearing someone walking around in the other room, but when he'd go in there, no one was there, and when he called out no one responded.
He checked the whole house and then also heard animal growling noises from the same corner as my sister. This is an outside wall corner, with windows, not enough space for a raccoon or something to be trapped inside the wall. My brother felt really unnerved and left.
58. Without A Word
My parents, who co-owned a campground with my grandfather, took three-year-old me and my one-year-old brother on a road trip in the middle of the night. They called it an adventure. I didn't know until I was an adult that my mom and grandfather had gotten into an argument the day before and that she had come up with a brilliant plan for revenge—she planned to abandon a fully operational campground in the middle of the night without telling anyone.
No one in the family knew where we were and my grandfather had to get my aunt's help to take over the business. How mom got my dad to go along with this, I don't know. We ended up living in a camper for two years like nomads, picking oranges with immigrants in Florida, and working odd jobs until somehow my mom filed a lawsuit for their half of the campground investment.
They bought some property with that money in the middle of nowhere. It was another year before we saw any of the family. They still talk about my mom doing this 45 years later.
59. A Message Unheeded
This happened to me and my sister. It was summer break in the 90s and my mom needed my sister to take our van to get new tires put on. My mom managed a finance office and did not like taking time off work because everyone always depended heavily on her. My sister took me along with her and her boyfriend, now husband, to get the tires put on.
When we were done, we took her boyfriend home and headed back to our place. The highway we took to get home from her boyfriend’s was known to be pretty dangerous. There were a lot of bends and curves. When rounding a particularly bad curve, a truck swerved into our lane. Before we knew it, the truck had flipped our van over and into a ditch.
After the impact, the first thing I remember was looking over and seeing my sister bloodied from the face to her stomach. She was trying to unbuckle my seatbelt to help me out, but she couldn’t even hold her head up. First responders found me in the back of the van trying to get out and screaming for help. They used the jaws of life to get my sister out.
I was taken to a local hospital for observation, and my sister was airlifted by a helicopter. The family in the truck was moving house, and a little boy holding a lamp had the lamp puncture into his neck when it broke. Now for the creepy part. The night before the accident, my mom hadn’t slept well at all, for a very eerie reason.
She had woken up to the sound of chanting at the side of her room. She said it sounded like three voices all talking in unison, saying, “Take a floater and do it yourself.” At her job, a floater was someone who came in during the week if someone took a day off. Hearing the voices scared her, and she didn’t really understand the meaning of what she was being told.
When she woke up the next day, she felt sick to her stomach all day and had a massive migraine to boot. Around 4 o’clock, she called my aunt to come and pick her up from work because she couldn’t function any longer and her illness was worsening. She called my dad before she left her office and asked if we were home yet.
When he told her that we had not arrived, she told him he needed to leave now and go look for us. As he pulled up to the highway, he noticed that everything was blocked off and there were first responders everywhere. He rushed up to the sheriff and told him that it was his girls in the wreck. They hadn’t identified us yet and were still working on the scene. They turned him away.
A few minutes later the sheriff came over, telling my dad that it was us, and gave him an update on our condition. It took my mom a long time to forgive herself for not understanding that message. If she would’ve taken a floater that day, we would not have been on that highway. The boy in the truck may have lived, and my sister would not have spent three weeks in the ICU.
60. It Came in a Dream
I had just moved into a new house. One day, I was downstairs when I heard what sounded like furniture moving around upstairs. I went up to investigate but when I got up there, everything was quiet and nothing had moved. I then went back downstairs, only for the dragging sounds to start again. I go back up; nothing. This went on for about an hour. I almost called the authorities because I was positive that someone was in my home.
I ended up calling a friend and kept them on speakerphone while I searched the attic, thinking maybe an animal could be hiding, but I never found anything. Eventually, I gave up my search and went to bed. But it was far from over. That night, I had a dream that I was driving to work in the rain and fog and crashed my car. Someone approached me and asked "Are you ready to move on?" That's when I woke up.
At the time, I was working mid-shift, so around 10 PM that same day I got in the car on a foggy and rainy night and made my way into work without any issue. The building I worked in had security cameras all over, and it being so late, I was the only person coming in. When I get inside, the person I was relieving asked who I came in with. I was alone, but she swore someone followed me inside. It was a very unnerving 12 hours to say the least.
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61. A Wave Of Fear
We were at some kind of resort. One day, instead of heading down to the sand, my mom and I stayed near the lobby in some kind of kid's playroom for the day. Suddenly, alarms started going off and we rushed outside. I felt my mom's arm tug me as we began to run through the lobby. I dropped one of my drawings and bent down to pick it up.
When I looked back up, I froze with fear—I saw ocean water rushing up toward my heels, I survived the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and what I was most concerned about was a picture I drew with crayons.
62. A Ghostly Dine And Dash
I was doing some prep work early in the morning in a completely empty restaurant. I went to the washroom, and while in there, I clearly heard the sounds of the patio door open and close. No one was supposed to be in the restaurant, so I bolted up and out the washroom. No one was out there, so I checked the security cams.
I saw myself walk into the bathroom, and then the screens went all white and fuzzy for a few minutes. Then it clicked back on, and the footage captured only caught me running out of the bathroom. Very eerie.
63. Guardian Angel
Way back when I was in junior high, I was sitting on some bleachers after school watching an intramural floor hockey game. Now, these bleachers were pushed all the way in, so we would literally climb to sit on the top of them, which I'm estimating was probably about 10 feet. So I'm sitting up there, and I stand up to move and my foot gets caught.
I try to save myself, but I end up falling. What's really odd is that I don't remember the fall at all. I remember starting to, but then I "wake up" just as I hit the floor, but it was like I had fallen only a few inches and landed on my back. I heard the gym fall silent as I popped right back up. The teacher asked in a panicked voice if I was okay, I said "Yeah," and then just climbed right back up. I should've bounced my head off the floor and had some kind of injury, but I felt literally nothing.
64. Secret Ops
I was around eight years old and we lived in this mountain town about five miles from the border of Mexico. My best friend and I would take turns staying at each other’s house. Most of the time, I would stay at his place for longer periods of time because my dad was a truck driver and my mom worked two jobs “in town.” San Diego was about an hour away.
One night, my friend's dad came in and told us he wanted to take us night driving so we could see the stars and do some off-roading. As I got older, I realized the timing was weird. It was like two or three in the morning. I mean, a lot of it was weird. Well, we got in their awesome '66 Mustang and drove for about 30 minutes. Then, his dad turned off the headlights and slowed to a crawl.
He said we wouldn’t be able to see the stars with the lights on, even though we could. All of a sudden, we heard what sounded like a plane, but we couldn’t see anything. He started driving through this field a little faster. Off-road time! Well, weird off-road time. We would slide around, then stop. His dad would pick something up, and then go back to sliding around.
This happened about 10 times. Years later, I looked my friend up online and found his sister. I sent her an email and she called me. We caught up and she filled me in on some disturbing details—my friend's dad had been executed in a substance raid a couple of years after we had moved. They were collecting packages of narcotics in a field and the border patrol had been waiting to catch them.
His dad tried to get away and drove off of a cliff. After that, I started remembering things like running through their house and stumbling across them trying to heat up a vase. I remember cut-up straws all over the place when we would clean up. It broke my heart to hear about what happened because there were so many things I just didn’t understand.
65. The Song That Never Ends
When I was 12 years old, I joined a rock band with my friend, who was 14. His dad had a PA system and all other types of musical equipment, so we had band practice in his basement. One day, we were goofing around, listening to weird cassette tapes his dad had. We put in Kermit's Rainbow Connection and started swaying around like idiots.
We were playing the music through the PA system, which had the music coming out of two huge loudspeakers. He stopped the tape midway through the song, and was about to put something else in…Except the song was faintly still playing out of the speakers. We looked at the tape. It was stopped. Yet the SONG WAS STILL GOING.
As you know, this song has a dreamy quality to it, which made it REALLY CREEPY. He took the tape out. The song was still going. The song was quiet, but definitely audible. We started freaking out a little. He unplugged the entire PA system at the power strip. THE SONG WAS STILL GOING. We just sat there frozen, with our mouths hanging open.
We kept on listening and kept on looking around. After a few, very long seconds, we couldn't hear the song anymore, but it wasn’t as if it suddenly cut off. It was almost like it faded away so slowly that we couldn't perceive it. We tried to recreate it several times with that song, and other songs, but it never happened again.
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66. The Bad Omen
I was living in New York in 2001, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Early on the morning of September 11th, my roommate came downstairs for breakfast, but she looked so exhausted. When I asked her what was the matter, she said she hadn't been sleeping well the past few weeks, and that she kept having dreams about lots of people perishing. We shrugged it off…until a few hours later. She didn't have any more of those dreams after that night.
67. Across The Fence
There was an old couple who lived on the other side of my backyard fence. They had grandkids who were a bit older than me or younger than me, so we weren't friends. When I was three or four years old, I met a kid who was visiting them, across the fence. He told me they were his grandparents and I would talk with him through the fence every day.
It was awkward; we would mostly just sit there and play with our own toys in silence or just look at each other for hours. A lot like the two kids in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. His name was Brian and every time I played with him, his grandfather would give me a weird look. We moved cities shortly after and years later, I brought it up with my brothers and my mom. Here's the weird part—they don't remember the neighbors having a grandkid my age.
They remember the older kids and the younger ones, but not anyone my age. They don't remember me ever playing with anyone out there, they don't remember anything about it at all. It still freaks me out to think about that.
68. A Coincidence, Or Something More?
The guy I was dating in college started having terrible stomach issues. I went with him to the GI doctor, who decided to do some extensive and unusual testing for a fairly rare digestive cancer that was very uncommon in young people. It turned out he didn’t have it, but 6 weeks later, I was rushed to the ER with sudden gastric distress.
They took me into emergency surgery to remove my appendix, and when I woke up, they told me they had discovered the exact semi-rare, uncommon-in-young-people cancer that my boyfriend was just tested for. A part of me believes that the doctor has some sort of extrasensory perception, and he was just off on who had the tumor.
69. The Road That Never Ends
My daughter and I still wonder what happened that night. We were traveling along the 401 highway in Canada from London to Kitchener. We'd done this trek many, many times over the years. My daughter had to go to the bathroom really badly. We were almost home, so I tell her that the next exit ramp is ours and we'll be home in 15 minutes, tops.
So we keep going, watching for our exit, which should be no more than a few minutes, but it doesn't come. We keep going and going and going, all countryside. Finally, an exit comes up—but it's not the one we're expecting. Somehow, although we hadn't thought so much time had passed, we had missed at least four exits. We were watching for them and passed through two cities without seeing them.
70. Snatched Up
One time when I was about eight years old, we were at a relative's cabin and I went to tell my dad it was lunchtime. I saw him standing stock-still in the river. I called out to him and he just slowly motioned for me to be quiet. I watched him standing there, looking into the water for maybe a full minute. Then, he made his mind-blowing next move—he lurched into the water and snatched up an enormous carp.
I just watched my dad hold onto this giant, glistening carp for several seconds before he threw it back into the river and wade out of the river as if nothing happened. He didn't say anything about it when we got back to the cabin and we've never talked about it. I could ask him about it now, I suppose, but there's something magical or surreal about the fact that it was never spoken of again.
71. Back For Revenge
When I was maybe 10 or 12, I went to visit my grandparents' house to spend the night. I woke up in the middle of the night and needed to use the bathroom, so I went down a hallway that led to the bathroom, which had a screen door leading to the back porch. When I went down the hallway, I stopped to look out the screen door.
In the distance was a figure in the field behind the house. When I looked at the figure again, the figure turned, facing me. Our closest neighbor was at least two miles away. Later I learned that the farmhouse was built on a slave plantation.
72. The Friendly Ghost
When my wife and I were in our second apartment, I saw stuff all the time, but the first encounter was the weirdest. I was hanging curtains, standing on a poufy chair, when I started to lose my balance. I felt a hand on my butt steady me. I finished drilling in the last screw, then turned around to thank...Nothing. I expected my lady there. As soon as I turned around, that's when the feeling of the hand left my butt. My wife had been in a completely different room the whole time.
73. A Serious Situation
This is one of my most vivid childhood memories. I just accepted it as true until recently when I gave it an extra mull over. I don’t know if it was a dream or what, honestly. There was a caterpillar on my tricycle and I remembered being told not to touch them as they can be poisonous. My parents were telling me to get onto my tricycle, but I was telling them no since there was a caterpillar on it.
My dad was asking me where the caterpillar was and I told him that it was near the handles. My parents kept telling me there was nothing there and made me get onto my tricycle despite my screaming. Then, my worst fears happened—the caterpillar crawled onto my hand and ate through the fleshy part between my fingers and my thumb on my left hand.
This obviously didn't happen the way I thought it did when I was a kid, but until I really thought about it, I would just remember that bite as where the worm ate through, each time I looked at my hand. If I wasn't screaming beforehand, I was definitely screaming after. I remember my parents not being able to see it and telling me nothing happened, but eventually, I got my dad to put some TCP on it.
74. Get Out!
My hubby traveled to another city for work which wasn’t that far from where we lived. He was staying at his uncle’s condo. My hubby is the type who tries to power through everything, so when he called me and said he needed me, I went. I arrived at the condo and found him in the living room asleep. I went to gently wake him up and let him know I arrived.
He got up rather quickly and, with his eyes closed, began to talk. He said “they” don’t like him and “they’ve” been hurting him. I asked him, “Who are they?” and he said, “The ones that stay here.” I didn’t know why or how he’s talking to me because he’s not awake, and it’s starting to freak me out. So I asked again, “Who are they?” and he said, “The ghosts.”
I said, “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” but then he got excited and said, “They’re here.” Before I could ask another question, he told me that the lights will go off, letting us know they aren’t happy with me there. Sure enough, the lights in the living room turned off, as well everywhere downstairs. My hubby then laid back down and started sleeping.
I stayed the night with him, and he talked on and off again without opening his eyes, saying that they pushed him down the stairs, and made his clothes fly out the closet. I tried to sleep but kept having weird dreams of an Asian family looking at me from the stairs. Finally, morning came. My hubby woke up and asked me what I was doing there.
He said he didn’t remember calling me, or the conversations he was having.
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75. Sleepless Nights
Not my story, but my maternal grandmother's. She was born in 1910, and lived to be 97. One story she used to tell me took place when she was a young girl, when she and her family lived in an old house in Tennessee. Her parents often experienced the sheet and blanket being jerked completely off them during the night by an invisible presence.
76. Just Like A Cartoon
When I was little, I was at a lakeside restaurant with my dad. He was inside hanging out with the owners at the bar while I played out on the deck. I had found a hook on the floor and one of the patrons gave me enough fishing line to reach the water below us. Out in the distance, there were these people partying on a really nice boat.
It was two men and three women all in swimming attire. I heard somebody on the deck near me say that whoever was driving the boat had no idea what they were doing. Anyway, I was just walking around with my fishhook when suddenly, I witnessed a shocking scene—the boat exploded into a huge ball of fire. I could feel the heat hit my face. I heard the women screaming and I saw people jumping out.
My dad took me inside. When I was allowed to come back out, there was a tugboat pushing the boat to shore and a bunch of fire trucks was on the grass. It was still a big fire and they were struggling to put it out. Nobody ever really explained to me what happened. We didn't talk about it. I was so little, I thought it was like a cartoon where everyone just jumped out after the boom and was okay.
But now, as an adult, I'm pretty sure it was worse than I thought.
77. Lost In Time
I had a doctor's appointment and took my dad with me. It was in another town about an hour away, and since the appointment was for 11 AM, I left at 9:30 to give us plenty of time. We pulled into the parking lot at 10:30. I remembered checking the clock in the car when we arrived, and remarking to my dad that we made good time.
We went into the office, and the receptionist pointed out that we were a little late, but that it was okay because the doctor was running behind. I told her that we had an 11 o'clock appointment, and that we were actually a half-hour early. She pointed to the clock on the waiting room wall...which said 11:15.
My dad checked his watch. 11:15. I ran out and checked the clock in the car. 11:15. Somehow, in the few dozen steps from the car to the office, we lost 45 minutes.
78. Don’t Make a Move
About 15 years ago, I played with a Ouija board with two friends. I felt I was just playing along and didn't take it seriously at the time. I left that night, walked home, and went to sleep. Then I had a dream like I've never experienced before. This demon thing dressed in plain clothes paralyzed me, and my vision went blurry and I fell over in the dream.
I woke up, and I was in the same state. I couldn't move and I couldn't see straight, which lasted for a good 30 seconds. I know it was sleep paralysis now, but I’ve still never had a dream like that before or since.
79. Pay No Mind
When I was in preschool, I was about to head to class when I saw my neighbor smacking the back of her baby harshly with a whip. The baby just sat on the dirty concrete ground with no clothes and only a diaper. The baby cried non-stop, and I just stared at her as she did it. I did not know how to react to it at all. The woman saw me too.
She glared at me, but it was a split-second and she acted like I was not there watching her harm her baby. Eventually, my aunt came out of our house. I was waiting for her at our front gate while she got my things for school. As we walked away, I asked my aunt why that woman was doing that to her baby. My aunt's response was so messed up—she told me just to pay no mind at all, and focus on our own business.
It is still such a vivid memory for me until now. I don't even know what happened to that baby anymore since they were a big family and I do not know who is who when I occasionally see them outside.
80. The Ghost In The Closet
When I was about 12 years old, I spent a night with a shadow person in my room. Every time I looked at the gap between the foot of my bed and the dresser on the opposite wall, I could see an eight feet tall shadow in the shape of a man just standing there. I was too scared to move and too scared to fall asleep. I just huddled under my blankets.
Eventually, I must have just passed out from exhaustion, and woke up the next morning, fine but rattled. I slept with my closet light on for like two months after that.
81. Bizarre Mementos
A few years ago, I ran into someone from high school at a pub in my hometown. I was never really close with "Ryan" in school and I don't think we ever talked, but this night we actually spent a lot of time chatting and having fun with a couple mutual friends. He was so friendly and we shared a lot of interests, so it felt kind of incredible that we'd never hung out before. Our city isn't that big.
After the group of us concluded the evening with a terrible rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody at around 2 am, I went to leave and walk to my boyfriend's house nearby. When I mentioned that I was walking alone, he insisted that he and a couple of his friends walk me. It was a short distance and I didn't want to impose, but they were going the same direction. I said sure, and off we went.
As we finally reached my boyfriend's street, I turned to head toward his house and Ryan gave me a pack of cigarettes with three inside. I'd been mooching them from him all night. About a month later, I woke up for work on a Wednesday and was craving a cigarette. This was really unlike me. I leisurely enjoyed the last of the three from the package Ryan had given me and headed to work.
During my lunch break, I was on my Facebook and saw many "RIP Ryan" messages posted by mutual friends. I thought it was a hoax because he was known as quite a jokester. Turns out, he had committed suicide the night before. Why that day of all days to wake up craving a cigarette? I've always been interested in the symbolism of the "meaning" of the number three, so to finish the third and final cigarette that day—hours after his end—felt odd in retrospect.
44. In The Deep End
I have this one memory that haunts me. I most likely had just turned two years old, and my family and I were at my grandparent's backyard pool. My mom was in the shallow end of the pool with my older brother, and he was clinging to her, too afraid to dip even a toe into the water. My dad was on the patio on the side of the shallow end with my Bumpa and Nana.
They were chatting about one thing or another. I remember thinking my mom looked a little annoyed that my brother was being unreasonably afraid of the water, so my two-year-old mind decided I would show my brother how it was done. That was a big mistake. I got out of the pool and ran down to the deep end. I took off my water wings and life jacket then proclaimed proudly to my family about some random nonsense before jumping in.
The next part of my memory takes a very different tone. I just remember how serene and peaceful it was...to essentially be drowning. Everything was quiet and calm. To this day, I haven't ever experienced anything similar to it. The next thing I knew, I saw my dad and Bumpa plunge into the pool fully clothed swimming towards me.
I don't know who got to me first to pull me out, and I don't remember anything after that. I asked my parents and grandparents about this and they essentially changed the topic on me, so I have a suspicion it is true. It just sticks out as an extremely vivid memory from my childhood.
83. Nowhere To Run
So this girl who I was seeing at the time and I needed to have a talk, and we decided that we would go to our local college town’s statue to do so. Many kids that go to our college went there to hang out, take pictures, or climb on the statue. This statue was 30 minutes away in the middle of farmland. It’s a popular and safe place.
So we decided to head out and it was probably around 1 AM at that point. You could see the stars and all of that; it was pitch black outside. When we got there, I got a really creepy feeling, but we wanted to take a look at the statue, so we got out of my car and proceeded to walk to the statue. We took a look and decided to get back in my car because it was dark and cold outside.
About 10 minutes into our conversation, I saw a large, white SUV drive past us. I didn’t think anything of it, but it was the only other car we had seen all night. The car drove maybe a quarter mile down the road, and suddenly did a 3 point turn. He then came back towards us and took a right onto a side road that sat directly in front of us.
About a quarter-mile down this side road, the SUV did another 3 point turn, and stopped a hundred feet or so in front of us with its headlights glaring down my car. At this point, I was thinking of getting out of here. Suddenly, the car drove straight ahead into our gravel lot, partially blocking off the only way in or out.
At this point, all of my spidey senses were in full gear and I was ready to book it. The girl with me was like, “No, we need to finish talking. He’s just being weird.” I decided to leave anyway, and as soon as I squeezed my car out of the lot onto the road, the SUV was tailing me. I told the girl to call the authorities, but of course, in the middle of nowhere, there was no service.
I started to push my car and was going over 120 mph on this small country road, surrounded by nothing. And of course, the SUV is right on us. Once we finally started to reach civilization, there was an intersection with other cars. I finally gave a sigh of relief and thought this guy would leave us alone, so just to test him, I turned on my left turn signal and got ready to turn.
I turned my wheel enough so that it would look like I was going to turn, then quickly put my entire weight on my gas and went straight. He followed me exactly. With the turn signal, turning, accelerating, everything. A couple of miles later, we finally got reception and called the authorities. As we were on the phone with them, a brightly lit gas station appeared, and we turned into it.
I figured, if this guy was going to kill or kidnap us, he was going to have to do it where other people can see. As soon as I turned into that gas station, he booked it to wherever he was going. We gave a description and what happened to us to the dispatcher. To this day, I don’t know what that person wanted or what their objective was, but I’m glad I didn’t find out.
84. As Seen on TV
Nickelodeon used to do these commercials in between the shows where they'd have a celebrity and one of the animated characters "interact" as they would introduce the show. One day when I was probably around 9 or 10, I'm about to turn off the TV and the commercial goes something like "blah blah blah, you better watch this show Taylor." Still haven't been able to explain it, but I know it happened.
85. Totally Brainwashed
I grew up in an extremist religious group that many consider a cult. I tend to agree, but it’s less culty in other areas. It was very bad where I grew up. I grew up in their school system and went to church every week. They were very focused on extreme doomsday scenarios. When we were very little, elementary school-aged, they began teaching us the most horrible things—they'd tell us that we would be the next Holocaust victims and that the world governments would essentially begin hunting us down.
They told us we’d witness our families being slaughtered because of our religious practices and would be driven into the wilderness to live off the land. We read all kinds of Holocaust books very early in our lives. While I think it’s very important that we remember history, we learned about this stuff at a very inappropriate age. Then, we were brainwashed into believing that was what awaited us and our families.
It honestly went way deeper, but that’s just an idea. I was born into this belief system and didn’t escape until I was about 18. I’m still unpacking a lot of this stuff. The terror they instilled in us kids back then still lingers. It was normal. That’s what we truly believed. It wasn’t until much later in life that I started realizing how messed up and insane their fear tactics were.
86. Too Close For Comfort
I was driving through New England. I came around this one bend in the road and saw this car just stopped, kind of off to the side, with the horn blaring. There was someone passed out on the steering wheel. I wanted to stop and help. I slowed next to the car, but something inside me made me book it. In my rearview mirror, I suddenly saw a large group of people staring at my car as I drove away, including the guy that was at the wheel.
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87. The Last Goodbye
A few years back, I was preparing for an overnight camping trip in an area that didn't have any cell phone service. My mom called me to tell me my grandpa was going in that day for a quick routine surgery and that I should give him a call before I headed out of cell service to send him my love and well wishes. I did so, and went off camping without a worry in my heart.
That night, I had the most incredibly vivid nightmares of my life. I dreamed that I was at the hospital where my grandpa was, and that things weren't going well. I was watching my mom panic and worry, as well as my grandma. They discussed whether to "let him go" or not. I saw him on the operating table. I was THERE, I swear it. I was with him when he passed.
When I woke up the next morning crying, I told my boyfriend that my grandpa had passed and that my mom was probably trying to get a hold of me. He reassured me that it was just a bad dream brought on by the worry of someone I love being in the hospital, but I knew. I just felt it. So we drove to the nearest town and I called my mom.
She answered in tears and told me that my grandpa had indeed passed from unforeseen complications. But then it got even creepier. I told her about my dream, and she was shocked. The scenes and conversations I described were exactly what happened in the hospital. I described what the hospital looked like, even though I had never been there, and sure enough my mom confirmed my descriptions.
I have never before or since experienced anything like this, or anything paranormal whatsoever. I know though, that I was with my grandpa in his final moments, in that hospital.
88. The Love For A Pet
My worst memory is when my neighbor's dog ambushed my dog. I must've been 10 when this happened. I was home alone and I heard my dog yelping outside. I went to see what was wrong and I found the neighbor's dog on top of mine. I freaked out and called animal control. The neighbor’s dog had gotten into our yard before, so we knew the number.
Animal control stopped by and started asking questions. The lady point-blank asked me how the other dog was hurting my dog. Being 10 and not knowing any better, I leaned over my dog from behind and told her “Like this, but Cooper, the other dog, was growing." The animal control lady nodded, wrote some stuff down, and drove away. Looking back, I realize I had just embarrassed myself big time—those dogs were clearly getting it on.
But I was 10, and Dandy, my dog, was 14 at the time. I was so scared that she was hurt.
89. A Dream Come True?
I recently dreamt about the people who adopted me. I do not like those two, at all, and we hadn't spoken in literal years. I woke up in a pretty bad mood, and got a phone call from a social worker later that day about the people who adopted me. I simply told her that I couldn't care less about those two, and that unless one of them had passed, I really didn't need to know anything about their shenanigans. Turns out one of them HAD passed.
90. Life in the Strange Lane
I had a glitch in the matrix experience just today. I was doing a damage audit and an inventory audit on our fleet vehicles today. I did the damage audit first. I found a vehicle with significant damage and listed out the details. This was among about 10 damaged vehicles inside of about 30 we have on our lot. Well, upon turning in the damage audit, I'm told this vehicle is not on our lot.
Befuddled, I went and checked. And it was not where it was when I inspected it. I searched the whole lot. Gone. We had no transports today, meaning the vehicle was never moved. We also checked the location history of it and it had only been rented and returned out of one location about 20 minutes away. It's never been on our lot before. Here's where it gets creepy.
I'm thinking "Okay, I just had the unit number wrong." Nope. I pulled up previous inspections and it had the exact same damage on it that I had written out. So somehow I inspected a vehicle properly that was not, and had never been, on my lot.
91. Not Just A Dream
I had a weird memory from my childhood about my mom beating some old lady with a bat, like a small one from a baseball stadium. A man came up to her and she picked up a big blade that must have come from the old lady. She cursed a threat at him, but I don’t remember what she said. She NEVER curses. The man then threw over the keys to her car. I recognized them because they had a He-Man keychain, which was the prized possession that I gave her for Mother’s Day.
I asked her about this when I was 15 years old because I dream about it on occasion. It turns out, the whole situation was much darker than I initially thought—My grandparents on my dad’s side had tried to abduct me. I was missing from my other grandma's yard, so she drove to their house on suspicion that I was there. When she was searching for me, my grandfather had gotten her keys to trap her there.
I had managed to get to the car on my own before my mom realized I was even there. The windows were always open on her Gremlin, so I likely climbed up. I was yelling out of the window that I was ready to go. Apparently, I wasn’t even two yet. They still try to contact me via Facebook on occasion. I just block whatever account they send it with. I always send the same message to them because they are staunch Catholics.
“God is punishing you for your sins. He doesn’t forgive you, and neither do we.” I am an atheist. Maybe I should tell them that just to really get at them?
92. The Cabin In The Woods
My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin. I used to spend time there in the summer tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One extremely early morning, when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and told us it was time to go fishing. It was still super early and we were all confused because it was pitch dark.
He hustled us down to the dock where he kept his little fishing boat and quickly launched us into the water and away from the house. At this point we were all getting a little freaked out—but this was just the beginning. My uncle wasn’t talking. We just sat, shivering under a blanket at the bow of the boat, while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline and waved a flashlight furtively ahead of us.
We eventually arrived at my uncle’s friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled into his house. Our uncle sent us to the loft to sleep. He and his buddy locked the doors and left, not returning until well after sunrise. Eventually, our uncle showed up with the truck and trailer already packed with all of our gear, and he told us it was time to go home.
Many years later, my uncle confided to me that the reason he’d hustled us home was because he’d woken up around 3 AM to a strange “Thok! Thok! Thok!” sound from outside the cabin. He’d gone out to investigate, when a massive jack pine fell directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line.
Just in time, my uncle saw a man, holding an axe. The man slinked away into the dark of the trees and woods. He and his buddy returned to his cabin later, and had to take turns chainsawing the tree that fell across our narrow driveway apart, while the other stood watch with a rifle. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
93. A Waking Nightmare
I once had a test coming up on a Saturday that was a really darn important English test. My parents had paid a lot of money for my classes, and the test itself wasn’t cheap either. So I was under huge pressure. Well, I didn’t study the whole week, even though I felt really guilty. I took the test. It went okay. Not too good and not too bad. A few weeks later, I get the results. I failed.
I had a breakdown and couldn't tell my parents how recklessly I had failed. I was legitimate going crazy and then...I woke up. It was Monday. I still had five days to Saturday. I took the test and passed it. The dream was so real. I knew what I had done on each day during the dream. I had even imagined facts that I had studied and could recall them in my dream. It was so real, it made me feel uneasy. Thinking about it today still gives me the creeps.
94. Gone, Baby, Gone
On a day out with my dad when I was little, I was playing in the park with a girl the same age as me. I didn’t know her, but she was on her own. We left after an hour or so, leaving the girl on her own. Again, my dad asked her where her parents were. Later on that night, there was a big story on the news that gave me chills—it was about a girl who had been abducted, and all my family members kept asking me questions about this little girl.
It went right over my head at the time, being about five years old. 40 years later, I still think about her.
95. The Disappearing Child
My dad and my stepmother got married when I was ten years old at a countryside estate, which was now a wedding venue. All of the other kids and I were playing hide and seek in this massive house, when my sister started chasing my younger cousin, who had long blonde hair and was wearing a blue dress, down a long hallway.
Halfway down the hallway, my younger cousin dipped into this old, blocked-off, spiral staircase. My sister jumped around the corner and shouted, "Gotcha!" Except NOBODY was in this blocked staircase. She ran back to my dad crying, saying that our cousin disappeared through a wall. Everyone laughed it off, because said cousin was right next to her.
Fast forward five years. I was 15, and I got a job as a waiter at the same wedding venue. The estate had an orangery, which is where they hold the ceremonies, and I notice a small stained glass window depicting a blonde-haired girl wearing a blue dress, with the dates 1931-1937 underneath her. Naturally, I'm dumbfounded, so I asked about the stained glass window.
The venue manager told me that, after being sold by the original owner, the estate was a boarding school for girls. She told me that a young girl fell out of a top-floor window. The hallway that my sister chased “my cousin” down was an old servant's hallway. The staircase was the central staircase that leads directly up to the old girls' dormitories on the top floor.
96. The Eeriness of Ordinary Things
One time, I was coming back from a fly fishing trip up with my friend Caesar. We stopped at a Mexican restaurant for lunch. While we were waiting for the chips to arrive, both of us looked at each other and simultaneously, without prompting, sang the exact same stupid made-up song to each other, "Mex-i-caaaan Restaauuraantt!"
Neither of us had ever sung it before, or sung anything out loud before. Neither of us sing. We both kind of furrowed our brows at each other in surprise and have never spoken about it again. It was weird, and completely stupid, but I have never forgotten it.
97. Already Ankle Deep
Our neighbor came home after his wife had called a plumber for a pipe break in the basement. The husband accused the wife of having an affair even though the plumber was just standing there trying to shut off the water, which was already ankle-deep in the basement. The husband's next move was bone-chilling—he got a firearm and went after the plumber, and then went after the wife.
Their six kids ran over to our house screaming that their dad was aiming at them. My mom let them in and called for law enforcement officers. I was six years old and their youngest child was a friend of mine. My mom gave her my Big Bird slippers because she was barefoot from running from the house. At the time, all I could think was that I would never get those slippers back.
Looking back on it, that was the most awful thing for my mom, worrying that the dad would come looking for the kids. My dad was at work and only arrived after the law enforcement officers had gotten there. The neighbor executed his wife, the plumber, and himself. I never saw the kids again, and I was right about my slippers.
98. The Mysterious Radio
My husband was sleeping in the back of our truck, and I was starting to get super tired while driving. I heard another trucker on the radio, and started chatting with him. He helped me stay awake until I stopped off at a truck stop, where my husband could take over. The next morning, I told my husband what happened. He told her the radio was broken, and that what happened was impossible.
99. Not Feeling Secure at All
I used to work in a small office, which was about 60 people at maximum capacity. We had a security guard on duty 24/7. One night, I had to stay super duper late by myself because I had to leave early the next day and needed to finish my workload. All of my other co-workers are gone by around 10pm, cleaning crew comes in, and now it's just me and the security guard.
The place is dark, but I'm not at all frightened because I'm not scared of most things, the security guard is a really nice dude, and we're in a safe neighborhood. The security guards are required to make their rounds every couple of hours just to make sure things are fine. Sometimes they say something to us, most times they don't.
Tonight, nice guy security dude stops by my cubicle and asks, "Everything alright?" Big friendly grin on his face as per usual. "All good here, thanks!" I go back to work. 20 minutes later, he's back again. Big grin. "Everything alright?" "Yup! Nothing yet!" 20 minutes later…he's back. Big grin. At this point, I am getting a little creeped out.
There is no need for him to come by this frequently. In fact, it's disruptive. I also noticed that the way he interacts with me is always exactly the same, as if I were in a time loop. Same big grin, same intonation, same rhythm of speech. Not only that, I noticed that he whistles the same thing at around the same time, so if I turn off the music on my headphones, I can HEAR his whistling coming closer before he asks..."Everything alright?"
It's around midnight and I'm totally freaked out. I try to rationalize this with myself because I have to get this work done. I'm rushing through my work and I keep hearing that whistling behind me. Surely, he won't come back again..."Everything alright?"At this point, I'm fully terrified. I no longer trust this guy I used to feel so safe around.
I was a young woman in her mid-20s, and the security guard was a dude in his 50s. I couldn't finish everything, but I wrote an e-mail to my supervisor saying that the security guard was acting VERY strange and I didn't feel safe. I shut everything down and tried to rush to the exit. I don't run into the security guard…or so I think.
Just as I'm feeling free and clear, I hear "Bye now," behind me. He's standing there in the dark hallway, big grin. Just standing there and watching. I mumble something and sprint to my car. The next day, I rush to my supervisor to try to explain what happened the night before. In the light of day, it kind of felt like I might've overreacted or maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. Then I learned the dark truth.
Turns out, the dude just disappeared. He's missing. I'm pretty sure they still haven't found him to this day. The security guard company just kind of dismissed it as some flaky guy who quit for no reason and no one seemed to be pursuing it much. He must've been suffering some kind of mental health issue or SOMEthing, but up until that night, he was just a super nice, trustworthy, reliable security guard who everybody loved. It also felt like some kind of weird paranormal stuff because it really felt like something had "taken over" inside of him.
Pikist
100. The Secrets We Keep
I was maybe nine years old, and my 40-year-old sports coach was one of my best friends. He took me on trips, bought me presents, and made me captain of the team, even though I was probably the worst player! He always treated me really well. Then, all of a sudden, he just left town. There was no word of goodbye. I was always really sad and felt like I lost a real mentor.
Even when I became an adult, I didn't even think anything of it and wondered why he vanished. People would whisper rumors about him, but I knew that he was a great guy. A couple of years ago, a friend showed me a website. I was shocked at what I saw—my sports coach's face was on it, and it said that he had been charged with offences against children. The charges dated back to a couple of years when he spent lots of time with me. It was only then that I accepted that our 'friendship' would have probably 'evolved' at some stage. I was so oblivious.
101. A Beastly Encounter
When I was very young, we had a particularly nasty snowstorm that wiped out power for days. We lived in New England, in the middle of farmland, so while our neighbors were within walking distance, it was a short hike to get to them. I don't recall exactly what led to this, but my mother needed to visit a neighbor to lend them something while my father got the generator running.
I wanted to go with her, so she put me on my snowsled and pulled me along that way. It was dark out, and everything was covered in snow. When we hit the midpoint of the walk back, we both heard this horrifying howl like something out of a monster movie, which echoed through the forest. My mother picked me up out of the sled and ran home. We both described the sound to my father, who didn't believe us…And then we found something terrifying the next week.
We found a bunch of deer that had been torn apart just 30 feet into a wooded path near our house, and not by poachers or hunters. I've been around coyotes my whole life, and they definitely didn't do this either. Coyotes will pick apart their prey and run off with pieces. This was four or five full-sized deer with large chunks missing.
102. 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.
Pxfuel
103. Crocodile Tears
When I was 14, I went for a walk by myself on a dirt path. I passed some guy who was just sitting on a rock in the middle of the forest. I didn’t make eye contact with him, but I could see that he was crying. I wanted to help, but my gut told me not to. Three days later, I turned on the news and saw his picture. That's when I learned a shocking truth about that man—he had savagely slaughtered his wife and five-year-old daughter.
104. 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.
105. I Can See It in Your Eyes
My boyfriend’s younger brother and I were taking a bike ride down the street to the shops late one afternoon. As we get onto the main road, we notice a dude across the street heading in the opposite direction. He is walking with a limp, his head is bowed, and he’s got a plastic bag in his hand. We're only a few metres away from him when he crosses the street onto our side.
As the bro rides past him, this stranger lifts his head up and smiles in his direction as they pass each other. I'm a little while behind, so I don't pay too much attention to this—that is, until the bro stops, turns around, and gives me a funny look, just as this guy is passing him by. I still don't think too much of it at this point, assuming that he had just stopped to let me catch up.
As soon as I myself passed the stranger and made eye contact with him, I realized that this was not the case. When the stranger looked over and nodded at me, I saw nothing in his eyes. When I say nothing, I mean like black pits where his eyes should have been, or just an eyeball that looked entirely black. I don’t know how else to describe it.
When I finally catch up to the bro, we stop around the corner and he says to me "Did you see that???" "You mean his eyes?!" I asked. "Yeah, it looked like they weren't even there!" he replied. We then kind of sat there for a while processing what we had both just seen. Had the bro not related the same feeling and experience to me as I had felt when the stranger looked at me, I doubt I would have ever thought anything of it.
I probably would have just assumed it was the light angles playing tricks on me or some such thing. It was a sunny afternoon, so glare certainly could have played a part. He could've been wearing contacts, I don't know. But none of those explanations feel like they fit. We got home later on and told everybody what had happened, but no one believed us. They still don't to this day.
106. Bridge Over Troubled Water
There was a girl during my freshman year who went missing. They ended up finding her body in the river. There were rumors that she was seen on a bridge with her boyfriend the day she went missing and that maybe he had a hand in it. Nothing was ever discovered, so, it was assumed that there was an accident, or that she took her life.
Twenty-five years later, the boyfriend did away with his best friend of several decades, set a fire to cover it up, and went on the run. A couple of days later, he killed a woman at a rest stop in the bathroom to take her car. They reopened the case about the high school girlfriend. That rumor was correct all along. He will be behind bars for the rest of his life.
107. Total Lifesaver
I work as an ER nurse and had a patient with a little dizziness, a little nausea and a swollen abdomen. She was fairly bright, able to talk, and nothing seemed too horrific. But she was turning a grim gray color and breathing quickly. Our average wait time today was two hours. I could have put her back in the queue and moved on.
But I had a little dark feeling that there was something sinister happening here. So I called our most senior doctor out of a consultation and asked him to see her. Right now. Ever heard of your abdominal aorta? Enormous blood vessel that can pouch out, suddenly rupture, and make you bleed internally to death in minutes?
It’s called a burst AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm). You’ve heard of it now. That’s what she had. I’ve never seen one before. But now I have. Within five minutes, she was barely responding. Within ten, her blood pressure had dropped to a barely sustainable level. Within twenty minutes, I was pouring blood into her and eight people were around the bed.
Within an hour, she was on an operating table clinging to life. But because I raised the alarm, and because my team worked their butts off, that woman is still, somehow, alive. Feels good, man.
108. I'd Rather You Didn't
My six-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat a few days ago and looked at me and said, "Dad, when I'm seven I'm going to kill you. No wait, when I'm eight." I asked, "How are you going to do that?" She smiled and said, "I'm gonna drive over your head with this car."
Shutterstock/Getty images
109. 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.
110. 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.
111. Kids Know More Than They Let on
My mom told me this story the other day and it freaked me out. When my oldest sister was little, like 3 years old, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up to hold her. My mom said she was like "She can't pick you up, honey, she has a baby in her tummy." And then my little sister was like "That baby is dead!" My mom freaked out, but my aunt and grandma were fine and were telling my mom it was all good, she was just a toddler and didn't know what she was saying.
Well, lo and behold my aunt goes to the doctor the next day for a routine pregnancy checkup, and the baby was dead. Give me the willies just thinking about it.
112. Getting Dumped
At the restaurant where I worked, we had a garbage corral behind the building. One night, one of the staff came running back and said “I heard something in the corral. It sounded like an animal!” So, being the manager on shift at the time, I made the decision that I would go out and investigate with a big guy on staff.
When we opened the corral door, we couldn’t see anything. So, we shone the flashlight around. Still nothing. But suddenly, we heard a weird echoed grunt, which I then realized was coming from inside the cardboard dumpster. I immediately thought it must be a bear or some other large animal, so we called for help inside.
Officers came with a ladder to take a look. When the officer was done, he asked if any cameras were out there. We said yes, and he asked to see the footage and said that we were going to want to see it too. Two people with no clothes ran into frame. The man falls off the fence and lands face-first on the corral’s side.
He then falls into the dumpster which was right against the wall. The woman climbs the wall somehow, and she tries reaching down to help him climb out but then ends up falling inside too. The officer told us that when he shone his flashlight down there, he saw them huddling together for warmth and sobbing hysterically.
113. Haunted by a Boy in His PJs
Not long after I met my current boyfriend I would spend the night at his house. Normally I fall asleep as soon as I hit the pillow, but at his house I would be awake super late feeling creeped out. I blamed it on being in a strange house. After a while, I used to fall asleep at a decent time, but I would wake up around 2 or 3 AM and try to let my eyes adjust to the darkness (small town = very little light pollution).
When my eyes adjusted, I felt like I could see a little boy on top of the grandfather clock. This would happen every night for a while. I never felt scared just confused. It looked like a boy wearing older style pajamas kicking his legs on top of the clock. Still, I would blame it on sleep paralysis/dreaming or my imagination.
When I would go back to my parents’ house for school nights I would start waking up in the middle of the night seeing the same apparition sitting on the dresser or ledge in my room. I slept alone in the basement of the house, and after months of seeing the “little boy,” I wanted to sleep upstairs again, as I figured my mind was just getting to me.
One evening, I was home alone as my brother and parents were gone to some appointment. I happened to fall asleep on the couch in the living room, only to dream that the little boy was knocking down my mom’s ornaments that were on the coffee table. I woke up in a cold sweat and looked at the table: sure enough, the ornaments were broken.
Of course, they could have been broken beforehand and I never noticed. It started to get chilly in the living room so I moved to my mother’s bedroom to watch television before they came home. In her bedroom, I kept seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye that looked like the “little boy,” but I never really had a full-on view.
At this point, I was sure it wasn’t sleep paralysis/dreaming because I could move when I woke up and sometimes I would be wide awake. I fell asleep in my mom’s bed and woke up to the little boy laughing and running in the closet. Friday of that week, I went to my boyfriend’s house and he knew something was up but I wouldn’t tell him out of fear that he would think I was crazy.
That night, I was helping his mom bake and I happened to mention that I was having really weird dreams about a little boy and she asked me if he “was a young one with his jammies on?” She knew what I was talking about. She told me that their house was pretty old and all throughout the time they lived there strange stuff would happen such as stuff being moved or hearing voices or laughter, but the past six to eight months, things had stopped happening.
It’s been three years and I’ve moved out with my boyfriend to start post-secondary. I’m still seeing, sensing, and dealing with whatever it is. Things are still being moved and voices are still being heard.
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