We’ve all felt that feeling in the pit of our stomach. The sense that something isn’t quite right. Whether it’s an eerie moment that you just can’t explain or a very real situation you know could turn wrong, no one ever wants to feel that feeling. We’ll stick to reading these creepy stories rather than seeking them out for ourselves.
1. Two-Faced
One day 16 years ago, when I worked at a gas station, I was watching a teenage couple get slushies at the back of the store. I was taken aback when the young man looked toward the till, because I noticed that he had a very severe facial deformity. But then, when I kept watching, I noticed something bizarre. When he looked to the girl, he looked perfectly normal in profile. Confused, I assumed I imagined it the first time.
Well, they eventually came to the front of the store. Then his face was distorted again, like a terrifying gargoyle. I kept looking at the girl to see if she could see what I was seeing but she didn’t seem to. And every time he turned to her, his face was normal. Trust me—this was like a Halloween mask. It was not an expression anyone could possibly make.
It was SO DIFFERENT and terrible. Anyway. As he looked at me and finished paying, I felt like a massive black cloud of hate inside me, like an actual thing. It was like I had drunk a glass of liquid hate. Then they left. I’ve never been able to explain it.
2. The Twilight Zone
In the 80s, my aunt had won $14 million in the lottery. With her winnings, she built her own house from scratch on this big plot of land. It's still there today, but owned and renovated by its new owners. My uncle who bought her the ticket had unfortunately passed on in 2000 from an abrupt heart attack, so needless to say, she moved out of her dream home because it was too much for her to bear. It sat there empty for over a decade.
Before she sold it, my younger cousin, my older cousin, and I, as well as our dads, uncles, and a close family friend, went there to get family mementos and reminisce about the "good times." From the beginning this was hard to do because, after years of abandonment, it had no lights or water and was overgrown on the inside.
At around 4 in the morning, we’d been hearing the weirdest noises ever, which I now think was just an old house deteriorating. I mean the house was huge and had a basement, and then another basement underneath it, and was built in the 80s. We decided to go out back and decompress and say our goodbyes around a fire before going home.
So, there are four levels to the house, two above ground, and two below ground, and on every level, there was some way to get out of the house directly to the yard. We were all walking up these long creepy stairs from the bottom basement to the yard. My older cousin's friend who came with us, B, had to go back down for something he left.
The stairs came out of a hill so it was such a long hike up, we were all like, "We just walked all the way up, we aren't going back down." About 10 minutes pass after coming out and we had the fire all set up and were sitting around it. All the adults noticed B hadn't come back up. They joked, saying he got stuck or lost or something, but eventually the jokes weren't funny anymore.
My dad and uncle went down to look for him and came back up to say they couldn't find him at all. My younger cousin and I started freaking because we were scared and young, like 14 or 15, and the other adults started tripping out and worrying because all the doors got locked before we left. We all left by the sub-basement door, which was the only one left to lock. My dad and uncle went down again to check if all the doors were still locked, and they were.
We all decided to sit there, waiting for B to come out of this door that's about 10 yards away from us. All of a sudden, my older cousin gets a call from him. What he said was so disturbing, it’s impossible to forget. B told my cousin, "I don't know what to tell you, but I just woke up at my house, dude." B lived over 40 miles away at this time. My older cousin started uncontrollably sobbing.
My younger cousin's dad, Z, said, "Nope, it's time to go now," and starts to get up to throw water on the fire. Then, out of completely deafening silence, this sound that was unbearably loud just shook all of us. It sounded like a giant generator getting shut off. Me, my younger cousin, my dad, and my older cousin immediately start screaming, "Did you guys hear that?"
What happened next still haunts me. My uncles were totally stuck like something out of a late-night episode of The Twilight Zone. One of them was in a position of getting up, but was just stuck where he was. The other was laughing at everybody, but wasn't anymore, he was just open-mouth crinkled-eyes smiling like he did while laughing.
My dad and older cousin started shaking them. My dad was freaking out and must've thought they died, because he just kept saying, "Please no, please don't do this!" My younger cousin and I were absolutely terrified, in every meaning of the word. My dad and older cousin took us back up to the car and locked it, despite us crying our eyes out because we didn't want to be left alone, and then went back.
I don't know how much time passed but soon enough, lights came up from the hills and it was all of them walking toward us. My dad decided my younger cousin was going to stay with us for the night, and my uncles just went home…without looking in our direction or saying anything to us. We kept asking my dad and older cousin what exactly was even happening and what was going on.
My dad just kept saying, "For as long as we live, we will never talk to you guys or anyone about this night ever." He said those words four different times, during this long rant about not knowing what life was anymore. My older cousin turned and looked us in the eyes and said, "There are some things you just want to accept as never being able to know the real answers to.” We rode home in silence.
My younger cousin and I talk about it at least once a month since it happened, but have never dared to talk to them about it—except for one time. We tried to bring it up, but they all got extremely mad because we kept pressing about it and they wouldn't give answers.
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3. A Double-Edged Sword
My friend Ian and I had been on Cape Cod for three days, staying at my grandfather's beach house. We started drinking around 11 pm. By 1 am, we had chatted, smoked, listened to music, the usual. We were feeling good, but not hammered, and decided to go outside for one last smoke before bed. On the way out, we spotted my Grandpa's collection of swords and knives on the wall of his garage.
Being buzzed, young, and stupid, we decided, "Let's have a sword fight." Smart right? We took a couple of swords off the wall and began dueling immediately. A little clanging and a few good laughs later, we found ourselves on the main road. It was empty at this hour, just a streetlight and the two of us, "dueling" away.
This is where things got weird. After a few more minutes of silly swordplay, we found ourselves in an intense battle. Soon, the battle turned from friendly idiocy to something more intense. I have no idea what started it, but we were really having it out. I lunged, he lunged, things escalated, and it was quickly out of hand. Then, out of nowhere, I got the better of him.
I'm still not sure how it happened, but my final attack ended up being much more than I had bargained for. He went pale after my final thrust, and my hands shook as I released the sword, but it didn't hit the ground. I never meant it; but my sword ran straight through his abdomen. I stood there in disbelief, wondering how this happened.
After what seemed like forever, with moaning and me in shock, I ran for help. I rushed into the house yelling. My grandfather came out of his room, and I told him to call 9-1-1. I then ran back to the street to stay with Ian until someone arrived. Law enforcement showed up first, then an ambulance. After they saw what had happened, we were rushed to the hospital and taken into the ICU, where we were split up and I was forced to wait.
After a couple of strenuous hours, a doctor and a policeman entered the waiting room. I expected the worst...and I was right. Ian had passed on from massive internal bleeding, and hemorrhaging in his liver. I went outside for a smoke, still trying to comprehend what had happened. Midway through my smoke, a man approached me from behind, asking for light.
I nodded, took out my lighter, and faced the man. The man I faced wasn't who I expected. It was Ian. He looked at me, puzzled at my hesitation and shock. I lit his smoke, speechless, and immensely confused. "You alright dummy?" he said. I looked around, and we were back on the main street swords in hand. "Let's fight coward."
He swung his sword around in the air, then smacked me on the arm, jolting me back into reality. I took a drag of my smoke, picked up my sword, and parried his second swing. I wasn't myself, and he knew it, so we went back to the house, watched TV, and passed out. I didn't tell him what I had seen until years later, and even then, he didn't believe me.
He still teases me about "murdering" my best bud, and calls me "the swordsman" whenever we drink together. And that's my glitch.
4. A Helping Hand
I work as a summer camp counselor every summer at a sleep-away camp. Although I'm a counselor now, I grew up going to this camp as a camper. This story takes place when I was 12. This camp is basically in the boonies of Missouri, next to a gorgeous river and surrounded by forest. One of the activities at this camp was "exploring" this cave that's a short drive away from the camp.
A long-time employee of this camp who has worked there for over 60 years always takes the kids out to the cave and teaches them about different cave formations, salamanders, etc. We will call him B. At the end of the caving trip, it is tradition that B takes everyone to a very back room of the cave and tells a scary story. Pretty much all of his stories are creepy. He is one of the most fascinating people I have ever met.
Anyways, he leads me and the rest of my cabin to the story room. We are all getting settled down, excited to hear which story he was going to tell us. Just as he starts the story, one of the girls who was much younger than the rest of us gets scared and wants to be taken out of the cave. B asks one of the counselors to take her out to the front of the cave and wait for us to finish with the story. All of our flashlights are out and the cave is pitch black, to set the ambiance for the story, of course.
Someone says "I'll take her" and the two get up and leave. B tells the rest of his story and we all head out to the front of the cave. On the trek to the entrance of the cave, he counts everyone to make sure that nobody got lost. Since the two left before the story, we should've been two people short. However, we were only missing one person. When we got to the front of the cave, the camper was just sitting on a large rock, playing with some of the mud from the cave.
Completely alone. We all asked her who brought her out here and where they went, and her response was one I will never forget. "This old woman walked me out, she sat with me and talked for a bit but then she said she had to go. She just kind of walked off into the forest." Who was that in the cave with us? She certainly wasn't with us when we went in.
5. Non-Playable Character Failed To Load
I met a girl at university and after we graduated, we decided we'd move in with each other. The plan was whoever got a job first would pay the rent etc. while the other looked for a job in the same city. I got the job and we moved into a small house together. Months later, she's still having no luck finding a job. I feel like garbage one day, which is unusual for me, and come home from work extremely early, before lunch.
I walk in through the front door and I’m greeted by a bizarre sight. I look into the lounge and see her just...sitting there. The TV isn't on, nor the radio, and she's just staring straight ahead, not even moving. I stood there and watched her for a while out of curiosity. I'm sure everyone wonders what their partners/friends do when they think no one is around.
She did nothing, just stared dead ahead. The closest I can describe it is like in older computer games where you'd get into a room and an NPC hadn't noticed you yet and would still be stood there, waiting for you to get in and "activate" them. We'd had a fight the night before so I just shook my head and went off to bed.
At around 4, I get up and go downstairs again and she's still there staring dead ahead, at which point I obviously worry and try to get her attention. Nothing I did, even shaking her or shouting would wake her up from whatever it was, so I called my dad—he's a dentist but knows a lot about medicine generally—and ask him what I should do. He says he'll be round in 20 minutes, and to keep an eye on her till then.
Around 4:30 she suddenly gets up, goes into the kitchen, and starts doing chores, washing up and getting tea, etc. I follow her and watch before asking her if she's okay and she says she's fine, pretty casually like nothing had happened. I asked her what she'd been up to that day and she launched into this long explanation of how she'd gone out job hunting and where she'd gone and managers she'd spoken to that day. It was creepy.
I told her what had actually happened and she looked at me oddly like I was the crazy one, insisted that she'd been out job hunting and had only just got back. I told her I wasn't judging her and it was fine that she hadn't been out job hunting, but I was worried about her and she had definitely been sitting there all day.
My dad came by and suggested she may have been having an "absence seizure," which is a type of epilepsy. She had scans, etc., and nothing showed up (no tumors either). Since she didn't believe MY story things got pretty tense between us, especially because after possibly having an absence seizure, she had been banned from driving for a year.
Over the next six-ish months before we broke up, I did some pretty odd things to try and prove what had happened, including booking days off work without telling her and then pretending to go to work, only to park around the corner, come home sneakily and then observe her. A lot of the time I'd find her stood there doing nothing again.
When I asked her about it she'd still have these long explanations of what she'd done that day. It happened so often that I kind of got the feeling my girlfriend was only really "on" when people were around, and when she thought no one was around she'd just go into a default "off" state until people got back. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s all I could come up with.
Weirdly, some of her stories were backed up by other people. Like she said she'd gone to meet a friend that day, and later when I checked with the friend, she said that it was true. This is the only part I can't really explain to myself, and I've kind of just dismissed it as the friend being nice and trying to back up her friend. We broke up, though we're still friends, and I haven't mentioned it to her since.
It still freaks me out though, and I worry about what other people are like when they think no one is around.
6. Seeing Double
My dad used to get up around 3 AM every morning for work. Starting at a very early age, I would wake up on my own and wander downstairs to see him before he left. One morning when I was about four years old, I made it to the bottom of the stairs and noticed that the front door was ajar. I opened it up and saw my father in his favorite work shirt making his way down the driveway to his truck in his typical work outfit, a plaid shirt and Dickies.
I swung the door open wide and yelled for him to come back for a hug before he left. I’ll never forget what happened next. He slowly turned around and just STARED at me and started walking back towards the house. He was looking so strangely at me that it started to scare me and I began crying and asking what was wrong.
Just as he had almost reached me, a pair of arms encircled me from behind in a bear hug. I turned my head to see my understandably freaked-out father staring at his doppelganger in the SAME outfit—and that’s not even the creepiest part. The double took one look at my dad and ran down the driveway. Meanwhile, my dad yanked me in the house and locked the door.
Weirdest morning EVER. Never did quite figure that one out. I would not trust my four-year-old memory of the event if it wasn't also witnessed by my father. He won’t really talk about it these days but my mom has since told me that he called out of work and she spent the day reassuring him he wasn't a nutcase.
7. Defense Mechanism
I had been dating this guy for a few months when I had this dream about him. In the dream, I was sitting in a completely dark room under a spotlight, and he was sitting in a chair facing me, and we were having a conversation. It was one of those things where you know a conversation is happening but there is no actual content. I briefly looked away from him and all of a sudden I felt this pang of fear.
I looked up and he was smiling at me, but not a normal smile—his chin tilted down, he was staring at me through the top of his eyes, it was nothing short of demonic. He didn’t say anything, just stared. I knew something was wrong and I was terrified. I then became conscious I was dreaming, which was the only time that has ever happened to me, and I said over and over again, “You can’t hurt me this is a dream, you can’t hurt me this is a dream.”
And then suddenly he disappeared into a pile of sand on the floor and I jolted awake, completely beside myself. That relationship turned out to be utterly toxic. After I ended it, he stalked me for a little while and I had to get a no-contact order. I think back on the dream frequently and I’m pretty sure my subconscious was picking up warning signs even then. It was pretty symbolic of how the relationship turned out, which creeps me out.
8. Halloween Story
When I was 14, I went to a Halloween bonfire at my buddy’s place in a rural area. He had a large backyard that was surrounded by some woods. I took a break from the bonfire and headed to a nearby bush to take a leak. When I was going to the bathroom, I saw something out of the corner of my eye in the woods, which was about 50 yards away.
I looked directly at it and saw nothing. I went back to my business but then, out of the corner of my eye I saw the large shadowy figure once again. I looked over and saw nothing. At this point, I remember in science class that your peripheral vision is better in locations with very little light. So, I look towards the area where the figure was without looking directly at it. That moment, I witnessed a chilling sight: It appeared as if someone was pacing the edge of the woods looking over towards the bonfire. I rush back to the group and tell them.
The kid who lived there ran into his house and told his dad. The dad comes out with a pistol and heads to the edge of the woods. He comes back and reports nothing. It's possible my eyes could have been playing a trick on me, but I'm almost 100% sure I saw a person stalking us kids. The nearest neighbor was a mile down the road. It's just creepy that someone in the middle of nowhere would be watching a bunch of kids…
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9. The New House
When I was 3, my family had just moved into a new house, and I mean brand-spankin’ new. We were the first people on our street to move in, and they didn't finish building all the houses until a few weeks after we moved in. Anyway, here's my story. One night when I was about 4 1/2, for some reason I woke up in the middle of the night.
This was around the age where I was sure if I thought long and hard enough, that I could get x-ray vision like superman, and whenever I'd wake up in the middle of the night that's what I'd try to do. I'd sit there in bed for 10-15 minutes, trying really hard to see through walls, or my dresser, or even just the back of my hand before eventually giving up and just going back to sleep.
This particular night wasn't any different from any other, I woke up, saw the Toronto Blue Jays clock on my wall, saw it was around 1 am, and went to work trying to see through the back of my hand. About 5 minutes into my routine (I never did get x-ray vision in case you're wondering), I heard what sounded like a whisper.
I thought maybe it was my sister, who was just a year older and in the next room so I kept on trying my best to just see through something until I heard a man call my name, and I just about peed myself. I sat there frozen in fear, I didn't know who it was, my father at the time worked the night shift and didn't get home until 4 am most days.
I don't know how to rightly express just how terrified I was at what happened next, or to really express what was running through my mind, but the voice laughed at me, and said it was going to get me, and then silence for the next 5 seconds until I screamed out loud. I woke everyone in the house up, my mother ran into my room and asked me what was wrong, but I was crying a lot.
She sat with me for what must have been close to half an hour until I calmed down and was able to tell her what happened. I asked if it was dad and why would he be playing such a mean joke on me, but she said he was still at work and that I must have been dreaming. The thing about that whole ordeal, about how terrified I was, is that I never again felt comfortable in that house.
I never again slept with my door closed, and at least once a week, for many YEARS, I would wake up and just yell for my mother because something didn't feel right. It turned me from a self-assured child into a child that was afraid of everything. To this day I'm not sure if it was my father or not, my mother said it wasn't, but the house was brand new, the land it was built on used to be farmland, and there was nothing else on the land but massive fields of crops.
My parents still live in that house, and nothing like that voice ever happened again, but the room that was mine still creeps me out if I'm over there at night. I don't know what it was.
10. Zombies Galore
About a year ago, I was lying in bed after having just finished reading an excellent zombie novel. It was the middle of winter, and slightly after midnight. I couldn't sleep, as my mind was still crawling with zombies, so I lay awake staring at the ceiling with the dog snoring away next to me. Suddenly I heard three loud thumps from the glass of the window across the room.
Very hard and very steady. Like someone pounding on the glass with the flat of their hand. The sound scared the daylight out of me and woke the dog, who started barking. I sat there trying to reassure him (and myself) that it was OK and there was some sensible reason for it. After a few minutes we both calmed down, he went to back sleep and I followed about half an hour later.
I was woken up in the middle of the night by the same sound. THUMP THUMP THUMP. The sound came from the same window, with the same steady interval between thumps, and just as loud as before. The dog woke and started barking again. Both of us were freaking out, and I couldn't bring myself to turn on the light and go look out the window.
The only thing I could think to do was run out into the living room curl up on the couch with the dog, a blanket over both our heads. The next morning, I woke on the couch feeling exhausted, having slept only intermittently. The dog was sitting at the door to my room looking alert and looking back to me and whining. I went back into my bedroom and looked out the window.
There was nothing unusual looking. No marks on the glass or anything. My apartment is on the top floor of our 6-story building. The fire escape was on the window nearest to the bed, not the one near the window where the sound came from. Whatever had hit the window had had a six-story drop beneath it. At a loss for any other explanation, I figured it must have been a bird running into the window.
I had no explanation for the fact that it seemed to do so three times in a row, at very steady intervals, on two separate occasions, and with a sound much louder than could be made by a lightweight creature bouncing off the glass. The fact that it had happened late at night, a time when birds aren't typically flying around, I also carefully ignored in my hope for some sane explanation
Somewhat satisfied with my rationalization, I went to work and felt much better for the rest of the day... that is until one last fact filtered into my mind. It dwelt there for the rest of the workday nagging at me and I rushed home to confirm my suspicions. Reaching the window again, just as the sun was setting, I felt a chill run down my spine: my troublesome suspicion was accurate.
There was a screen on the outside of the window. The noise had very clearly be the sound of the glass being struck. Whatever had hit the window had to have done so from inside the room.
11. Open Season
We live in the country and occasionally get big packs of coyotes coming through. I remember one summer you'd hear them running and yelping almost every night. One night my friends are out and we're sitting on the road and we start to hear the coyotes in the field off across the road. Our dog is kind of paying attention but he hears it so often he doesn't really do much more than bark once or twice and stare.
Then it all goes quiet. It didn't fade away like they were traveling away from us. They just stopped dead, no noise. Then one coyote trots out under the yard light and it's just staring at my dog. My dog starts growling. The coyote walks away out of the light for maybe a minute or so and then trots back into the light and yelps a bit and stares at my dog. Now my dog starts barking and the coyote leaves the light again.
I crawl into the house and go down and out the door. By the time that I get out there, the coyote is right there, sitting under the light. It’s staring at my dog and my dog’s going absolute bonkers. I get a hold of her collar and I'm trying to calm her down. Finally, I just drag her back into the house and shut the door firmly.
I go back up and sit with my friends on the roof and the coyotes start howling again. They were there just off in the darkness and had sent one to try to bait my dog into coming out away from the house. Coyotes can be incredibly smart.
12. Don’t Chase Your Own Tail
About six years ago, when I was 14 years old, I was walking through the small trails throughout my parents’ property that we lived on at the time. This was a regular thing I used to do because I had just moved into the area and there was all sorts of old-fashioned farm equipment and old shacks in the woods on the property. My parents were pretty wealthy and they had purchased well over 100 acres of land.
There were even a few streams that ran through there as well. It was sometime in the afternoon that I was walking on this narrow path and I noticed a golden retriever run out into the path in front of me from out of the brush. I was curious, considering I didn’t have a dog and there were not any neighbors within around five miles of the property.
It began to bark, and stopped in its tracks, looking at me with a very agitated look. A few moments later, a man around 19-20 years old comes running out of the brush and stops in his tracks and looks really confused to see me and yells, "Hey, what are you doing here?" and starts to chase me. I instantly sprint as fast as I can back to my house.
I didn't have any intent of looking back at him but I heard him yelling "HEY WAIT" and the voice sounded eerily familiar. Eventually, halfway through the thickly wooded thicket, I couldn't hear his voice anymore and he didn't seem to be following me. However, that didn't stop me from getting back to my house as fast as possible.
I told my parents this and my stepfather actually went and retrieved the rifle from his safe and proceeded to go look for this guy for an hour or so before basically finding no evidence of this happening. I actually got grounded for this, because they thought I was lying, and my parents being very strict basically assumed it was just another tall tale from their rebellious child.
Now that you've made it through this part of the story, this is where it starts to get absolutely weird. Around five weeks ago I visited my parents’ house with my girlfriend and her golden retriever Bentley. The first few hours of the visit went just fine. I talked with family, had some drinks, enjoyed being at home for a change instead of working my daily 9-5 shifts. It was nice.
I stepped out to let the dog out and to smoke, and for no reason, Bentley decides to dash into the woods full speed. As fast as I could, I ran out after him into the thick woods and eventually actually lost track of him. It wasn't until about five minutes of walking into the woods that I heard him barking at something.
I quickly ran to the sound and found him no more than 15 feet away from a kid playing in the woods. I looked at him confused, and said, "Hey, what are you doing here!" I start to walk towards him, and the kid booked it as fast as he could and ran through a thicket of brush and literally completely vanished. I've never experienced something like this.
During the moment, I actually had no idea, but the kid was wearing the exact same clothes I used to wear as a 14-year-old. I've told my girlfriend about this and even she thinks I’m insane, but it actually happened and I can’t explain it. Anyway, that's the story about the day I chased my past self.
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13. Lights Out
Right around before Christmas, me and my SO were both home and just both doing our own things when I went to the kitchen to grab something to drink. It was already dark outside, so I flipped the switch to turn the lights on but accidentally hit it again as I was lowering my hand which turned the lights off. So naturally, I tried turning the light back on, but it didn't go back on, so I figured the light bulb fried and thought nothing of it.
I hollered to my SO that when she comes back from meeting a friend, she could drop by a store and get a new light bulb. She couldn't hear me properly since there's a hallway between the kitchen and the living room, so she came to me and after I told her to get a new bulb, she asked which light bulb I'm talking about. I was pretty confused about why she would ask me that, since we only have one light source in the kitchen if you exclude the fridge.
I told her I'm talking about the lamp of course, to which she replied, "Why do we need a new one, it's working fine?" For her, the light was perfectly fine and the kitchen was lit. To me, the light was off and everything was dark. I told her that the light's off and it's obviously dark in here, which was the point she started looking at me strangely, as if I'd gone a bit insane.
She then flipped the switch on and off repeatedly and for me nothing changed, but she told me it's working fine and asked me how I couldn't possibly see it turning on and off. At that point, I was confident she was just trying to mess with my head and told her to stop playing jokes and just get a new bulb but she kept arguing back the lamp works fine.
I was still sure she was trying to mess with me, just to a greater extent than I'd thought, so I said, "Alright, I'll take out my phone and take two pictures, one when the light is off and one when it's on for you, if I get one picture where the light is on when you say it's on, I'll agree to anything you want from me for the entire week."
By then, she started looking a bit more freaked out, but agreed to it anyway, so I took the first photo with the light off and when she flipped the switch, I took another and immediately noticed the thumbnail in the iPhone's camera app that shows the latest photo that it was bright. I opened the photo and the light was on, even though I was still seeing nothing at that very moment.
We tried it again a couple of times and each time produced the same result. For her, everything was the way it was supposed to be and for me the light was constantly off. She was now completely freaked out and insisted I call an ambulance or a psychiatric help line and kept asking me how I feel, if anything else seems off, etc., although I felt completely normal other than being completely stunned by what had just happened.
I did question my own sanity for a bit, but dismissed it once I realized this was just one thing that was wrong and everything else was completely normal and I felt completely normal. I have no idea what to think of this, we were both right there, talking to each other, but one detail was different for the two of us.
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14. A Road Trip Of Horrors
My family and I were on a trip from Mexico City to Acapulco. Suddenly, during the middle of the night, the car broke down, and a squad car quickly came to our help. There were three officers in the car, and the chief offered to take me to the nearest gas station, where I could find a mechanic and told the other two officers to stay with our car.
They seemed absolutely not pleased with the order, until the chief told them, "Don't worry, there's a woman and two children." That seemed to calm the two officers. While driving to the gas station in the squad car, I asked the chief what that was all that about—but I wasn't prepared for his answer. The chief told me that there had been many accidents in that part of the road. But it wasn’t just that.
All of the accidents involved young men traveling without a female or child. Those who had survived, said that they crashed because they could see a very beautiful woman next to the road, but once they came close to her, she turned out to be just a rotting corpse staring at them, and they crashed because they were paralyzed by fear.
15. The Parking Garage
My friend was once walking through a parking garage late at night when she noticed a man in a grey hoodie lying at awkward angles in the middle of the road. He croaked out for help and begged to be driven to the hospital. My friend saw that he had a grisly headwound and decided to be a good Samaritan. She helped him into her car and offered to put his bag into her trunk. He didn't respond so she just put it at his feet in the passenger seat.
Even though she was nervous, she got in the car and started driving. But after about five minutes, she noticed something very very wrong. The blood peeling, yes peeling, off of his face. He wasn't bleeding at all. It looked like he'd applied some kind of make-up. She immediately freaked out, but on the surface, she kept her cool. She slowed to a stop and asked the man to check her back tire because she thought the car was uneven.
The minute the man got out of the car, she screeched off. She drove to the authorities and they examined the car. The man's black bag contained a butcher's knife and a garbage bag. The man was never caught.
16. Blink And You’ll Miss It
Eight years ago, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment by myself with two cats. I had a girlfriend, who I’ll name Elsa for this story, who lived 45 minutes away, on her college campus. Most weekends, she would drive into town and stay at my place until she had class again on Monday. We did regular things, as we didn't get to see much of each other.
So, here's the scene. It's Saturday night, 11 pm. Elsa and I are sitting on the couch, watching a movie—I can't remember which. We are dressed, sober, and alert, as we slept in that morning and had plenty of sleep. We are chatting, laughing, talking. The TV is illuminating our immediate area, and I kept the light on in the kitchen to provide some ambient light for the living room as well.
My cats are asleep in their favorite chair, all is well. Everybody is safe and comfortable. Suddenly, without any kind of warning or inkling, the “Jump” happened. You know when you're watching dialogue in a movie, and they're using two cameras to film? When they switch from camera to camera to capture the one speaking, it is seamless? With no clipping, interruption, fading, or transition effects? It was that sudden.
We were having a good time together in the living room when in an instant, I found myself sitting on the foot of my bed, clothes removed, in the dark. For about one half of a second, a million thoughts entered my mind. Had something fallen off the wall and hit my head? Did I have a seizure? Was I dreaming the whole time? Where is Elsa? Then the scary part.
I turn to my right, and Elsa is also sitting on the foot of the bed next to me, clothes removed. Her eyes are the size of golf balls and she's trembling. I realize I am as well. I try to speak and ask her if something happened, but I'm so frightened. I only stutter. After looking around the room and realizing we are alive, she managed to ask me what happened.
I didn't want to answer, in case it was just me, and I didn't want to come off as nuts. I just looked at her. After a pause, she started asking me again if I had turned off the lights, or removed our clothes, or if I knew what was going on. I didn’t. Neither of us had experienced grogginess or confusion before the event.
Furthermore, we didn't experience any sensations other than fear and confusion after it. No aches or pains, no bumps, bruises, or cuts. I reach for my phone to call my mom and see if a doctor would be appropriate. I notice that it is not 11 pm anymore. Now it's 3 am. In that sudden instant, that instantaneous change of scene, four hours had passed.
Everything in the house had been turned off, and we had been stripped. We went to the ER, as my mom's fear was a gas leak. No signs of toxins or injury were found on either of us. Elsa made an appointment for a CAT scan, which also came back as expected. I explored possibilities like a gas leak, poisoned consumer goods like our soda or fast food, neurological malfunctions, and more.
But the one thing that always bothered me was the fact that Elsa and I lost and acquired the time at the exact same instants, four hours apart. Neither of us witnessed anything that the other didn’t. And there were no lingering effects. For weeks I kept bringing it up with her, just hoping one of us would remember something. I browsed forums from all types of sites searching for answers.
Every time I brought it up, Elsa would get scared at the memory, and beg me to just let it go. I couldn’t. I'm no writer, so I'm sure I left some things out that would have been helpful in understanding the magnitude and surrealism of this event and how it affected Elsa and I. Somebody, tell me what happened to me.
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17. Road To Nowhere
When I was 19, I owned a car. I haven't driven since, because I never want to go through that ordeal ever again. I was driving at night, trying to get home from a friend's place. My friend lived out in the country, so I had to take back country roads home. I was never a proficient night driver, so when I got lost, I wasn't surprised.
I tried bringing up Google Maps, but I didn't have my 3G coverage out there. I decided that I was probably going in the wrong direction—just a gut feeling—so I got out of the car to look around. At the time, it was May, but when I got out, it was freezing cold. The weather had been mild all that week, even at night it was brisk at the worst.
The second I stepped out of the car, though, I knew everything was wrong. Not only was it unimaginably cold for that time of year, but the forest that was below the hill my car was on was gone. It had been there just moments before I stepped out, but now, there were four large houses where the patch of trees had been.
The houses didn't look like houses I was used to seeing in the area. They had domed roofs with a skylight in the middle, and what looked like elongated entryways at the front, kind of like your classic igloo. I started to panic, and called my dad, but the call went nowhere. I had forgotten that I lost coverage. Then, I heard a voice below me.
I looked down at the houses, and a small floodlight had been turned on in one of the front lawns of the houses. This guy was standing outside with a dog. He was talking to the dog in this language I had never heard before. I'm no linguist, and I couldn't hear him very well, but I swear it sounded practically alien. Lots of elongated vowels and “chirping,” for lack of a better word.
I was dumbfounded. Freaking out. At that point, I was considering throwing myself off that hill hoping to hit my head and wake up back in my car. I was fully awake though, freezing, and panicked. I rushed back into my car, and drove for another few minutes before passing by another car. That car, though, was totally not the kind of car we see today.
There was a weird symbol on the windshield, and lights accenting the chassis. It had no outboard mirrors, and didn't make a normal sound as it passed by. I can't even describe the sound it made. Not a “whoosh” like normal cars, it was almost like a slithering. I think the driver noticed that my car was super different too, because as I instinctively slowed down to get a better look, so did the strange car. That was it for me.
I stopped at the side of the road a few seconds after it had passed, and took a lot of deep breaths. I turned off my car and sat for a long time, but eventually worked up the nerve to get out of the car again. This time, it was barely cool out, and I could recognize my surroundings. I was a 20 minutes’ drive away from home.
I walked down the road a ways, around a bend and up another small hill, and could see a familiar billboard out in the distance. The problem was that I was way too afraid that if I got back in my car, things would change again, so I was determined to stay outside. I thought, just to be safe, I'll open the car door, and grab the flashlight I keep in the driver's side door compartment.
I walked back down the hill, around the bend, and the car wasn’t there. It occurred to me that after I shut the car door, I hadn't looked back at all. So maybe I had just forgotten its position. I kept walking back, but nope. No car. I checked my phone, and it had been hours now since I left, and my parents were surely in bed asleep, so I called my friend, and he picked me up on the road.
I told him some made up story about how the car had crapped out on the roads going through the woods, on a different, longer route back to my house. I was getting scared in the woods, so I decided to hoof it home, gave up by the time my folks had gone to bed, so I had to call him. He laughed at my misfortune and apparent stupidity, and said he'd help me look for the car the next day.
I led my dad and him on a wild goose chase for that car for the majority of the next day, before my dad gave up and said it must have been stolen, and reported it. To this day, the car hasn't been found, because as far as I know, it's on the side of the road in what I firmly believe to be an alternate dimension, a parallel universe, or what have you.
18. Dine With The Devil
We used to own a racetrack in Ohio years ago, but we lived in southeast PA. You had to take the turnpike to get there in any reasonable amount of time, and one of the times my mother, my sister, and I were together to go meet my stepdad who was driving separately with a trailer to haul equipment. We got off at an exit after paying a toll and headed off into a strip mall with a bunch of rinky-dink looking buildings.
They had a diner, though, and we hadn't eaten since we left four hours before, so we stopped in. The food sucked and was completely tasteless. People stared at us the whole time. It wasn't dark like a cave, just not a ton of windows. There were some, enough for ambient light. Like a Denny's if the power went out, that sort of thing. And an unreasonable number of people, we noticed, had bandages on them.
The only person who said a word to us was the girl who took our order, who also rang us up at the end. We decided not eating was better than going back there, so we wrote down the exit in a little journal we'd been keeping in the glove compartment so we knew not to make that mistake again. A couple of hours later we get to the track and my stepdad asks how everything went.
We said it was uneventful but told him we'd recorded a real whopper for the journal and not to take the exit we'd marked because it was garbage. He gets really excited and we're all kind of wondering why. He tells us he thinks we ate ghost food and that the people in the diner were vampires. He wouldn't stop talking about it for like ten minutes and it was making my sister uncomfortable.
We have the race weekend, it's time to drive all the way back. He asks me if I want to come with him, since he had to drive alone the way there. I say sure. Two hours in, he pulls off. I think it's weird because we ate a gigantic breakfast before we left. I didn't recognize it at first coming from the other direction, but eventually it occurs to me he's going to the diner's exit.
He wants to see it for himself. He stops to pay the toll, doesn't mention our story, but he asks if there's a diner at the exit to make sure he has the right one. The guy’s answer was chilling. He says there was one, but it burned down. Okay, so there weren't vampires, but what a coincidence. We just eat there and then right after, in the span of two and a half days, they have a freak accident.
This almost intrigues him more than the supernatural bit, and I am one hundred percent on board for checking it out. We drive over, same humdrum strip mall, except where we went to eat it's just this charred mess. No vehicles, no tape, and they'd cleaned the area around it well. We go to get back on the turnpike, and these poor toll guys are stuck in a booth hardly bigger than they are, so it's the same dude we talked to before.
Anyway, my stepdad's like, I thought you said there was a diner there. Guy says, there was, like I told you, burned down. He asked if they'd figured out yet what caused it, was it a grease fire or what, that kind of thing. The guy says, "Yet?" "Yeah, it had to have been in the last two or three days, they didn't investigate it? It wasn't on the news?" Then the guy says, "Oh, we know what happened. It was on the news when it happened, eight years ago."
It sounds ridiculous, and cliché, and there are tons of stories like it. I know what I saw, it was the same exit, the same distance from the road, same buildings save for the one.
19. Weekend Warriors
This happened when I was 19, I'm 27 now. At the time I was still dating my high school boyfriend, he lived two towns away from me but we spent every weekend together. My best friend Jill had also been friends with Alan, my boyfriend, since middle school, so we were all very close. Jill and I worked together at a medical supply factory, and we would occasionally come up with some great adventures to go on on the weekends.
This week was no exception. We had made plans to all drive out to Alan's after work on Friday, spend the night, then get up and go on our adventure Saturday morning. Friday rolls around, Jill and I get off work and swing by our apartment to pick up our guitars and backpacks for our sleepover. We drive out to Alan's, start cooking up our frozen pizzas, and bust out the guitars and Xbox.
We play and talk and eat till around midnight, then decide we should get some sleep for our trip in the AM. Alan had a futon in the living room that Jill slept on, while Alan and I went to his room on the other side of the living room. We all said goodnight to each other and went to sleep. Saturday morning, I wake up and walk through the living room to go to the bathroom.
Jill grumbles a good morning at me as I walk past. I tell her to get up, it's almost 7 and we gotta get on the road. We all get ourselves ready and into Alan's '92 baby blue Ford Taurus. Then it got weird. We backed down the driveway, Alan driving, me up front, Jill sitting behind Alan. Then the next thing any of us remember, Jill and I are backing down Alan's driveway, in her car, having just returned from our day. It was 6:30 pm.
We were both smiling…but when Jill looked at me and her face fell. She looked me dead in the eyes and asked me what had just happened. It took a second for my feeling of euphoria to clear, like I'd just had a REALLY good dream, but then I realized that I couldn't remember where we'd all went after backing down Alan's driveway that morning. So, being reasonable, level-headed people, we pulled back into Alan's and went to see what he had to say.
We knocked and when Alan opened the door we knew he'd had the same reaction as us. He was pale and wide-eyed and just mumbled out a "doyouguysrememberwhatjusthappened?" And none of us did. We sat down and went over the details of the night and early morning over and over. We kept crying and having to stop to console each other, but we could not come up with any details past backing down the driveway.
Alan remembered going into his house, but not driving up to it or parking his car. Jill and I don't remember getting into her car or seeing Alan go inside. Oh, and none of us can recall what the plan for our Saturday adventure was. We know we had a destination and activities planned, but not one of us can recall a single detail about what the plan was other than: 1. Drive to Alan's 2. Spend the night 3. Get up early Saturday.
Eventually, we were able to calm ourselves down and just reasoned it must've been an abduction but it was no big deal, we were all fine. No weird side effects or physical evidence of anything. Stuff like this must happen all the time. Through the years we've brought it up to each other now and then, just a passing thought of how freaking bizarre it is that we still can't recall any other details of that day.
Part of what bothers me about it is how it's become such a nonchalant topic to bring up now, even though it was very traumatizing at the time. We just so willingly fell into calling it our abduction, even though none of us have a clue...
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20. In The Eye Of The Storm
When I was 13, my father and I experienced something that still makes me question reality. It happened on a summer afternoon when we made a quick stop home between games from the softball field not far from my house. My sister and I had both made all-star teams through our local league and she was in the middle of a game so my mother stayed with her while my dad brought me home to change and eat between a double header.
The softball field is less than a mile from where we lived, so it would take us a whole three minutes to get home. During those three minutes, the sky went from sunny with almost no clouds to a very sinister, dark gray. We live in Rhode Island, so this is not totally weird as New England weather changes more than most people change their underwear, but I do remember thinking I never saw us drive into a storm cloud or recognizing how it got so dark so fast, it just suddenly was.
My dad made a comment about how my second game would probably get postponed because it looked like a serious thunderstorm. Another thing I'll mention was that when we pulled onto my street coming home, it was unusually deserted. We live on a dead-end side street and most people had multiple cars; almost all of our neighbors parked a car on the street in front of their house.
We all had unspoken "designated" spots and I remember thinking I'd never seen the street so bare when we pulled onto it. I went into the house with my dad, went to the bathroom, changed, and grabbed a sandwich. My dad went downstairs to check his work email and I walked outside by the car to wait for him. It was so dark out at that point because of the cloud cover, it felt pointless to even go back to the field.
I was mulling this over while eating my sandwich when I got this insanely ominous feeling. I looked to my left and saw a giant tornado coming down the street towards me. I watched as my neighbors gutter three houses down came flying off of their house and their shingles started to rip off. Living in an area where tornadoes just don't exist, I'm pretty sure I went into pure shock from disbelief.
I was just standing there and the next thing I remember is my father grabbing me from behind and pulling me in the house while yelling. He rushed me down into the basement locking the door behind him. In the next few minutes there was just a ton of commotion with him swearing, trying to call my mom's cell phone to warn her and everyone at the ballfield, while I sat there like an idiot unable to comprehend what had just happened.
When my dad got through to my mom, she told him there were absolutely no storm clouds anywhere she could see but pulled my sister from the game nonetheless and told everyone on the two teams playing what he called to warn her about. There was confusion at the field and they stalled the game. My dad told me to wait while he investigated as we heard NOTHING after entering the basement.
After the longest five minutes of my life, my dad came back, color completely drained from his face, telling me it was gone and I could come upstairs. When I walked up, I noticed right away the sun was out. I walked outside, there were several cars on the street in their normal spots that weren't there 10 minutes ago, and my neighbor's house was completely fine.
No local news reports, my neighbors never saw a thing even though two of them claim they had been home the entire time. This was not a small tornado that we saw, there is no way this thing materialized that quickly and disappeared just as rapidly. My dad still doesn't like talking about it, and even when I get him to he has convinced himself it must have been a freak thing that began and ended on our road.
I know he noticed the same things I did, like the cars suddenly being there and our neighbor’s house magically being repaired. He’s not a very open-minded guy and I can tell the cognitive dissonance makes him really uncomfortable so I don't push him too much, but it's obvious he is just as disturbed by the entire thing. It still freaks me out to relive it. It makes me question reality in a serious way.
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21. International House Of Panic
My parents were on a small island in Florida on vacation and there were not many places to eat. They drove around and randomly found a restaurant. They said there weren't many cars in the parking lot, which made what they saw inside even more weird. They walk into the doors and see a very full restaurant of people. Everyone stops, stares, and smiles at them. Everyone.
Then they go back to what seemed like scripted conversations while still looking at my parents. The hostess comes up to them and smiled and simply said, "Sorry, everything is full. You should go now." The phrase my mom and dad kept using was "they were like actors..." My parents left as instructed. They couldn't stop talking about what happened the next day and decided to go back and see it again.
They drove all over the small island and never found the restaurant. My parents hate telling this story and hate when I ask about it. Visible goosebumps appear on their arms immediately at the mention of it.
22. Just Twist
I used to live in a renovated little section of a warehouse converted to a three-room apartment. Two large storage sections were still used for storage, but I had my cozy little spot. This was also directly located on a state highway with a large gravel patch in front that I got used to people thinking they could park on whenever they wanted.
This behavior was quite a bit weird at first but after the umpteenth time of telling people to get off private property one simply learns to let it go. This apartment was also outside the city limits by a couple of miles, and so I was somewhat isolated and surrounded only by the highway and trees in all directions.
Cut to one evening, around 2 am, I am sitting in my living room, lights off, watching a movie on my television. Along the wall to my right-hand side is my front door and three large windows that cover most of the wall. The doorknob starts moving. Slowly at first, like little test twists. Then it starts getting turned far more aggressively. Someone was not being subtle about trying to get in.
I am freaking out, not really sure what to do but still bolt up and grab something to potentially swing at someone, because if they REALLY wanted in, they could easily break one of the multiple huge windows. The knob turning, finally, subsides and I am left to deal with a borderline heart attack and an utterly sleepless night.
Never, ever forget to lock your doors, folks. Every little deterrent counts.
23. Don’t Wake The Baby
This morning I wrecked my car. It was such a silly way to wreck, but it happened. I started up a hill and there was a truck and trailer turning up a hill in front of me. I was a good few cars lengths behind him, but I still slowed down because he was moving slowly. He quickly made the turn, I sped up, then he stopped suddenly leaving the trailer sitting out in the road.
I slammed on my breaks and tried to stop, but still ended up sliding into him. The next couple of seconds were a bit blurry, but I remember seeing the front of my car slam into the Mansfield bar as the back of the trailer came through my windshield. The whole crash only lasted a few seconds, but I know my car had gone under the end of the trailer, jarring the bar loose.
I saw it swing into my windshield, hitting me in the face. The next thing I remember is feeling the metal slam into my face and tasting blood. My face hurt badly and my two-year-old was screaming in the back seat. My head was hurting worse than any pain I had ever felt, but I had to make sure he was okay. I laid my seat back enough to twist around to look at him.
He was safely buckled in his car seat and had no signs of injury. He was obviously just scared as he had been asleep a few minutes prior to this. When he saw my face, he screamed louder and started crying even more. He was screaming “Mommy!” “Mommy!” Through sobs. He was crying so hard he was going silent between breaths.
The last thing I remember is hearing the guy I hit calling an ambulance. As I drifted off, I could hear my baby screaming but I didn’t have the strength to get to him. The next thing I know I’m waking up in a panic and my eyes pop open and I’m hitting the trailer again. But this time it was different. The trailer twisted up and swung in the opposite direction, throwing a riding lawnmower off into a ditch.
When the car was still, I quickly turned around and my two-year-old was still asleep in the back seat. I was so confused and scared. My first thought was that I had died, and I was stuck in a loop of crashing into this trailer. I know how silly that sounds, but that was the first conclusion my mind gathered. I sat there dumbfounded for what seemed like forever until I heard the guy I hit telling me to please say something or he was calling 9-1-1.
I turned to him and told him I was fine. There wasn’t a scratch on me and my two-year-old was sleeping peacefully in the back seat. This time several things were different. Instead of hitting him directly with the front center of my car, I only hit him on the driver's side. And I wasn’t injured at all, not a single scratch. Previously my face had been hit and I felt pains in different parts of my body.
There were vehicles stopped behind me and things continued as they normally would after a wreck. Law enforcement was called and they started cleaning up the accident. The lady in the car behind me finally got out and came to ask if my little guy and I wanted to sit in her car until all was done. I declined and she asked if I was sure I was okay.
What she said next made my blood run cold. She said she just knew I’d be hurt because she saw the trailer come through my windshield. As in, she’d seen the crash the way it happened the first time. When she looked at the front of my car and saw my windshield still intact, she too was dumbfounded. I don’t know if this was a glitch, a divine intervention, or a coincidence.
Did my mind simply fill in the blanks and she perceived the accident differently than what actually happened? I don’t know, but I’m so very thankful my baby and I are both unharmed.
24. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner
Last night I was on phone with my mom, and she told me to come over for dinner. Everything was going great. Then suddenly she comes out with, "Janet is going to be there!" I was like, very funny mom, great one. But in my head, I was thinking that's really not funny, why would you say something like that? Then my mom keeps going on with this. "You haven't seen her in forever, it'll be nice, etc."
Here's the thing. Janet died last year! I have a vivid memory of it. I did not attend the funeral, but I remember everyone talking about it and making a scene of it because she passed on so young. She had cancer and I remember her husband coming to visit and being very depressed. I never saw her body or anything, but I'm 1000% certain this woman is gone and I remember many family members talking about it.
I never saw the body or visited her grave, and I wasn't that close with her so I never had much grief over it. But I have vivid memories of her passing on and my relatives being depressed over it. I was really weirded out by my mom on the phone, and finally, I came out and said, "Janet's dead, what are you talking about?" And my mom just kept talking like it was ridiculous or like I was kidding around.
She jokingly said, "She's back!" or something like that. I asked my dad later on and he looked at me like I was insane. I also couldn’t find the obituary online—but I never looked for it to begin with. Lo and behold, Janet comes to dinner. I remember getting a really creepy feeling when I walked in and saw her sitting there, but everyone was acting perfectly normal.
Nothing extraordinary happened, but we sat around talking for a long time. The eerie part is that I was sitting around having dinner with the same people I remember talking about Janet's passing with. Some of my aunts were there, and I distinctly remember last year one of them crying over it and being in the same spot. The memories didn't clear up once I saw her, and I still know what I saw/heard a year ago. It's just...very bizarre.
25. Kentucky Fried Creepy
This happened around eight years back, my two teenage male cousins were staying over at our house for the weekend during their summer break. So instead of going out for a drive, my mom suggested we walk to a KFC in our neighborhood. It was about an hour/hour and a half walk. Later, as we were walking home, we started going through alleyways between houses as a shortcut instead of the main street route.
As we were passing the last alleyway shortcut before continuing back on the main road, I felt a weird sensation, like a faint magnetic pulse waved through me. My mom and cousins later confirmed the same sensation at the same spot. We emerged on the main road and it was completely silent. It was like the world was put on mute and everything seemed very familiar but quite weird at the same time.
The roads/houses looked way older, they had cracks in them and the paint was almost completely faded away or chipped. To our left was a roundabout, which now was completely gone and there were freakishly tall trees in its place. To our right was the road that we had to take to get back to the house, we could see the small grocery store we passed on our way to KFC, yet the neon lights were much brighter and in different colors.
We stood there bewildered by it all. My mom lived in this area before I was born and we can basically navigate blindfolded through it. It's usually alive with people and stray cats 24/7. I thought we can go back and retrace our steps but when we looked back at the alleyway we came from it was PITCH BLACK DARKNESS and it was just emitting creepiness…
My mom just said to keep walking back to the house. We walked for what felt like 30 minutes. It was like we were walking on a treadmill while staring at a large image. We finally started to get closer and I glanced at my watch again and it was 9:32 pm! Two minutes only?!? Even on normal days that distance would take at least 5 minutes if you were walking REALLY fast.
We were joking around to lighten the mood but we were all obviously freaking out but trying to maintain our cool. We made it down two roads and finally reached the house. I had quite a few pet cats then and they usually run up to us when we get back to the house, this time only a few of them were around and they kept a huge distance away from us while standing still and staring at us like they had seen a ghost.
I remember going to my room and sitting on my bed looking out of my window trying to make sense of what happened but I couldn't shake the creepy feeling. The world felt terrible, not a single sound, not even a breeze. The trees were still like rocks and everything had an eerie feeling to it. I looked at my clock again and it was around 9:40/9:45pm…which again, is impossible for the distance we covered.
I forced myself to sleep that night and when I woke up in the morning everything was back to normal. We went out for a drive to backtrack our steps and it was back to normal, everything was clean and new. I can’t explain it.
26. Just A Coincidence, Right?
I was driving down the highway and happened to look to my right. I saw a woman with a bun, staring at me with a terrified expression from the car next to me. Before I really figured out how to react, the car pulled off at the next exit. About half an hour, later a different car with a different driver pulled alongside me, with the same woman in the passenger seat.
By then, I planned to pull into the next service station to report it. The car disappeared before I could get any details, and I thought there was no point calling the authorities with no details, so I carried on driving. Literally about four hours later, yet another car pulled alongside me, with the same woman, except this time I took one look at her and went white as a sheet. She appeared to be SCREAMING at me through the window.
I pulled over and called the authorities. Apparently, they had received three other calls about the same woman and car in the same area in the last few minutes. I never heard anything more about it, but I didn’t see her again, and although I kept an eye on the news, I didn’t see anything about it. Hopefully, it was just a giant coincidence. Who knows.
27. Aladdin’s Lamp
My last semester at college, I was nearly killed by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive. While unconscious on the ground, I lived a different life. I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red. I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over.
After two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter. I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house. When my daughter was two my wife gave birth to our second child, a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.
One day while sitting on the couch, I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but...just..wrong. I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp. I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking.
I stared at the lamp for three days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me. By this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany. The lamp is not real. The house is not real, my wife, my kids...none of that is real. The last 10 years of my life are not real!
The lamp started to grow wider and deeper. It was still inverted. It took up my entire perspective, and all I could see was red. I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain. A metric ton of pain. The first words I said were, "I'm missing teeth," and then I opened my eyes.
I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people who I didn't know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused. At some point, an officer scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass, and threw me face down in the back of his car. I was still confused. I was taken to the hospital by the officer—it seems he didn't want to wait for the ambulance to arrive—and given CT scans and whatnot.
I went through about three years of horrid depression. I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane, as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision. He is perpetually 5 years old, and I can never hear what he says.
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28. Grey’s Abnormality
I work at a hospital as an RRT (Registered Respiratory Therapist), and the following happened only a few hours ago. I was running three floors with 13 patients under my direct care, six of them I had treated for a few days, and I know them in terms of we have talked while I treat them. I am considered a kind person by most patients, so they talk to me and tell me about their lives and about the family, etc.
There is this one particular lady, 73 years old—sadly, a terminal patient. I have been treating her for four days now, so she knows me well enough to not confuse me with anyone else, as I stated, we have talked before and even joke around. Very nice lady. At around 1:30 am, I was headed to her room to provide treatment.
But, as I was walking through the hallway, a code came in, and I had to turn around and instead run all the way to the ER to deal with the code the ambulance was bringing in. I was with that coding patient for a good 25 minutes with all the nurses and the doctor trying to save his life. Unfortunately, we couldn't help him.
After that, I had to continue my normal rounds, and my next stop was obviously the lady I was going to treat prior to the code's arrival. So, I went to her room, and she saw me and asked: "What happened? Did you forget something?" I thought nothing of it, and told her it was time for her treatment, to which she replied, “Son, but you already gave me the treatment! Only a few minutes ago!”
I said, “Ma'am, I have not, did someone come in and give you treatment?” This should not have happened anyway, as I had with me her treatment chart. She said: “YOU gave me treatment only a few minutes ago, you came in like you always do, asked me how I felt, and we talked about adjusting my dose because it's making my heart ‘race like a horse’ and you said that you would look into it.”
Mind you, she was not alone, her granddaughter was there too and she also said that I had been there only a few minutes ago. After trying to process what she said to me for a few seconds, I asked, “Ma'am are you sure someone came in here and treated you?” To which she replied: “Not someone... YOU!! You are the only one who treats me at night...you and that crazy nurse out there.”
I was confused and told her to hang on a minute, so I went outside, and went to the nurse's desk where the patient records are kept, to see if anyone had written on it, looking for any treatment anyone else had given her, but there was none written. I went back into the room, and said that I still had to give her treatment—obviously I had to or I could have lost my job for that.
Anyway, as I am treating her I am asking her granddaughter about it, and she also is 100% certain it was me, and that I gave her treatment, and that we indeed talked about adjusting her dose. Now, I am here thinking and asking myself...WHAT THE HECK!? I was in the ER and there are several witnesses, I was there for a good 25 minutes.
But, the patient and her relative claim I was in the room with THEM during that time. There are no records of any treatment on the main patient records and we RTs carry around a little chart of our personal patients for the shift, and no one else but ME had it, so, what happened here? I asked the nurse outside at the desk if she saw anyone going in, to which she replied..."Other than you, no one.”
I asked again, “Are you sure? You didn’t see anyone going in?” "Well, no, just you, you went in, were in there a few minutes, came back out, walked right past me, and went down the stairs...and just came back!" So, the nurse is saying, that I indeed went into the room, then left, and now came back...but, it wasn't ME, I was in the ER!!!!
After this all happened, I talked to the security guard, and asked him to please check the security footage and let me know if someone went in. What he found was blood-chilling. About half an hour later, I came back and he said yes, someone went in, looked physically just like me, wearing the same uniform, but he couldn’t make out the face as I never actually faced the camera, so the footage never caught my face.
So, now, we have footage of "me" walking into the room, and... brace yourself...footage of "me" in the ER at the same time!!!!
29. This Takes The Cake
It happened about eight months ago. We lived in a small apartment with our two young children and our dog while we saved up for a down payment on a home. It was a typical Monday night around 7 pm. We had just cleaned up after dinner, my husband was surfing the web, and I was relaxing on the couch. I was reading the back of a cake mix trying to decide if I had time to bake it, let it cool, frost it, and eat it before I needed to be in bed.
My husband was watching a video on the internet, he said something funny about it, we both laughed...Then BAM! I woke up, face-down in bed. My clock read 8:00 exactly. My alarm hadn't been turned on. I was very confused and could smell the strong scent of coconut. I sat up and looked at my husband who was also just waking up.
He looked at me with a really confused look, and we both jumped out of bed and ran to our kids' room. They were in bed asleep. We went into the living room and the second our dog saw us, she started whimpering and sort of army-crawling toward us. It was such unusual behavior for her. I had never seen her act that way before, and have never since.
Nothing looked out of order in our apartment…aside from one small detail. The cake mix I had been looking at that night was gone. I searched everywhere for that cake mix and never found it. Another odd detail from that day is that we were all dressed in our pajamas when we woke up, except my youngest. He was in the jeans and t-shirt he had been wearing the night before.
Neither my husband nor I would have ever put him to bed like that. Neither of us have any memory of getting into our pajamas or anything else after laughing at the comment he made on the video. We were already late for work so we both called in sick that day. We spent the day talking about it and trying to make sense of it. At some point that day, he asked me a question that made my blood run cold.
He was wondering if I had smelled coconut when I woke up. We never found the source of the smell. To this day, I can't look at a cake mix or smell coconut without feeling a little anxious and sick.
30. Sleep Paralysis Meets Lucid Dreaming
When I was around 7 or 8, I had pretty bad sleep paralysis. One night I went to bed and in the middle of the night, I began having what I thought was an episode—however, it was absolutely evident that the shadow of an adult figure was sitting on the edge of my bed. I know this is a common misconception among the sleep paralysis crowd, because your mind is going into self-defense due to the nature of your current situation.
You begin to see and hear things. But what freaks me out about that night is what happened next. I then fell asleep and dreamt that I was in that exact situation again and I was able to move this time, I was able to project my voice. I completely lost it and started throwing everything about the room, kicking and screaming.
The shadow got up, opened the door, and left. When I woke up in the morning, my blood ran cold. My room was a mess, the covers were on the floor, and my bedroom door was open. Normally, I couldn't sleep with the door open because it freaked me out. There was something about that dream that always felt so real. 20+ years ago now and it's as fresh in my mind now as it was then.
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31. A Nightly Visitor
About ten years ago, I was sitting in my room when I heard my doorknob slowly turning. I thought it was my dad seeing if I was napping, and he was trying to be quiet. I watched the knob turn and heard the springs in the mechanism squeaking, and then the sound of the latch slide off the metal plate as it was pushed open a bit.
I sat up to greet my dad and ask what he needed, except I didn't see anyone. Then, the door moved like it was pushed again, and it opened a little more. Through the door, I clearly saw my dad in the living room, sitting on the couch. I just couldn't explain it. The door was shut all the way and latched properly.
To make things worse, I also frequently saw a shadow figure peer around my door frame. The figure was about six feet tall, solid black, and the side it peeked from was about three inches from door frame to wall. No one could fit in there, and it would just stare at me in my bed. The figure would also keep leaning in and out of view.
32. Between Two Fires
Way back when, Grandpa and Grandma were driving through Pennsylvania to an old family farm. Grandpa was a city kid, and had visited the farm every summer for years as he was growing up. It was around 25 years since he had been, but he loved that farm, and wanted to introduce Grandma to his cousins and show her around the farm.
As they drove closer to the farm, Grandpa began to tell Grandma about the little town that was on the road on the way to the farm. Soon, they reached the little town. Grandpa was amazed that it hadn't changed a bit. Towards the end of town, they saw that a hotel was on fire. The road was blocked by firemen using an old-fashioned fire wagon with a water tank pulled by horses.
They thought it was strange, but they chalked this up to being in rural Pennsylvania. Eventually, the water wagon moved, and they could drive on. They reached the farm, and after greeting Grandpa's uncle and cousins, they shared the news of the fire at the hotel. Grandpa suggested that they all go down to see if they could help. The relatives looked shaken.
That's when one of the cousins explained that there was no town—not anymore. About 20 years before, the hotel burned down, and the fire spread to most of the small town's main street. After their businesses were lost, people left the town. In fact, the uncle and cousins were the last people living in the area. Grandpa and Grandma couldn't believe it.
They had just seen the town, the fire—even smelled the smoke! Grandpa, Grandma, and some cousins got in the car and drove back to town, going back the same way they came. And the town was gone, just some burnt-out shells of a few buildings remained.
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33. Slinking Around
When I was a kid, someone's huge pet python escaped from their house in my neighborhood. Maybe it was some other type of snake but I remember it being a python. I live in Poland so large snakes are not a common occurrence. Anyways, one night I couldn't sleep, so I was just lying in my bed, trying to fall into the arms of Morpheus so to speak.
And, suddenly, I heard a loud hissing from behind the window. Very loud. I was about six or seven at the time, so I was too scared to even try to look out the window. However, I was sure that it was the escaped snake. I was terrified, thinking that it would climb into the house and get me while I was asleep and unaware.
34. The Godmother
My godmother's friend, who I'll refer to as Jim, had a son about ten years ago. Jim's father crossed over the rainbow bridge about a year before the son was born, and the family always kept a picture of him on top of their TV in the living room. Jim's son, Timmy, looked at the picture frequently but never asked who the man was.
One day, Jim was on the second floor of his house, while Timmy, who was 3 or 4 years old at the time, was in the backyard on the patio near the family's in-ground pool. Jim told Jimmy never to go in the pool when he was alone, so Tim wasn't worried. Unfortunately, Jim suddenly heard a splash. Panicked, he raced down the stairs, and just as he reaches the first floor, he hears the splashing stop.
Fearing the worst, Jim steps out onto the patio. Surprisingly, Timmy was standing there, soaked, but unharmed. Jim grabbed his son and dried him off and asked him what had happened. Timmy replied simply by saying, "I fell in the water, but then the man on top of the TV saved me."
35. Two For One
At the end of last year just before Christmas vacation, I left work around 3 pm instead of the usual 5 pm. I started to drive home, and the plan was I'd get home, mow the lawn (I live in Australia, and I'd promised to get that done for my housemates), clean up, and drive the three hours to Sydney to my parents' place to get there somewhere after dinner Friday night.
It should have gone like this: 3 pm, leave work. 3:50 pm, arrive home and start mowing. 4:30 pm, shower, clean up, dry off. 5 pm, leave for mum's in Sydney. 8:30 pm, arrive at mum's. What happened instead was I drove home, and rushed through to start mowing the lawn like I'd promised my flatmates. I got back inside, stripped off, got in the shower.
When I woke up, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was revived in my parents' shower three hours away. Apparently, I'd arrived at my mum's house before she'd come home, mowed the lawn THERE, got in the shower, and passed out from a touch of heat exhaustion. My mum came home and found my car in the driveway, the grass mown, and me in the shower a bit too long before she checked I was OK.
The thing is, she woke me in the shower at her house a little after 6 pm on Friday. Even if I'd driven breaking every speed limit for the 250km from work directly to her house, I couldn't have reached there much before 6:30 pm, let alone drive, arrive, mow the lawn there, and shower. The distance isn't quite three and a half hours’ worth, but it's a tight winding city/mountain drive with city speed limits for a good third of it.
The next morning I checked with my housemates and the lawn there had indeed been mown by the time one of them had arrived home after finishing work at 5, and my grass-covered work clothes were in the corner of the bathroom. I remember mowing the lawn there. I remember stripping off to get in the shower, but I don't remember showering, driving, or mowing the Sydney lawn.
I'd left my work clothes with grass clippings in the bathroom at my place, but in mum's shower it was a fresh change of clothes, and I don't remember getting into covered in grass clippings.
36. Rescue Me
I once had a weird dream where I was driving home and listening to some oldies. It was raining a bit and the wind was quite heavy. After a while, I saw a heavily damaged car on the left side of the road. The driver must have hit a tree. I stopped my car to call the ambulance and to look for the driver. It was a woman in her mid-20s with short curled blonde hair.
She was unconscious and there was some blood. She wasn't breathing, so I dragged her out of the car to give her first aid. After a while, I heard the sirens of the ambulance. I shortly looked in the direction of where the ambulance was coming and then back to the woman. She suddenly had her eyes wide open and a look of total terror on her face. The dream then ended there.
Some weeks ago, we celebrated my 25th birthday. I got some awesome presents but one was very special. My uncle made a photo collage of my family. He found them in an old box as he mentioned. I already had some shots so I decided to put it in the corner of my room with the other presents. When I was about to leave the room, the collage fell over so I turned back to arrange it properly.
While doing it I glanced over the photos. I've never seen old pictures of my parents before, so I was quite curious after all. There was a wedding photo of my parents. I recognized my dad, he looked really sharp in his suit. Next to him was a lady—she was gorgeous and pregnant. It looked like she had some wounds and/or scars at her arm and at her neck. Then it all kicked in.
She was the woman I dragged out of the car to give first aid. My whole body trembled. I immediately ran to my dad to ask what happened back then. He told me she had a car accident 25 years ago. When the ambulance and law enforcement arrived, she was laying on the street and a man was running away from her body. The doctor told my dad if my mother hadn’t received first aid in that situation, she may have lost her unborn child because of lack of oxygen.
I was still trembling at this moment and could not get a single word out of my mouth. After some time I just went back to my party guests. But I didn’t feel like celebrating anymore. It was all so weird.
37. Mixed Messages
I'm a newlywed. We'd been married less than a month when I woke up at 5:30 am next to my husband's sleeping form and saw a notification on my phone. It was a text from him, he’s in my phone under “Sam <3.” It was sent at midnight. It said, “Who is this?” Now, I was pretty sure that Sam had been stretched out next to me, snoring away at midnight.
I'm a light sleeper and it's likely I would've awoken if he had gotten out of bed or turned on his phone. Still, stranger things have happened. I figured he was playing a weird joke on me or something. I decided to play along so I wrote back: “Who is this?” Seconds later I got a reply that sent chills down my spine. It said: “I asked you first.”
I could feel Sam pressed against my right side, warm and breathing regularly. I looked at his nightstand and confirmed that his phone was still there, dark and silent. Me: "Seriously who is this? Why are you coming up on my phone under one of my contact names?" Sam <3: "What name am I under?" Me: "Obviously there's some crossed wires somewhere. We don't know each other."
Sam <3: "Are you in (town I live in)?” Me: “Yes....are you?" Sam <3: "Yes." Me: "Ok there ya go. Wires are crossed. It's weird but I'm sure it happens." Sam <3: "We must live near each other. What street are you on?" I’m trying to change the subject because I definitely do not want to tell this person the street I'm on. So I ask, "Do I come up on your phone under someone else's name?"
Sam <3: "I was looking through my contacts and I saw one I didn't remember creating under the name Wi-Fi, with a heart built like this <3 next to it. Lol I was just curious who this is. I live on Violet St., btw." I went cold. My husband's nickname for me is Wi-Fi but pronounced "wife-y." It's a silly inside joke. No one knows about it but us...or so I had thought—and that’s not the worst part.
We live on Violet St. Also, we both make little "<3" next to each other's name. And something about this person's writing style was so familiar. I confirmed that my husband was still slumbering next to me. His phone was still on the nightstand. Someone was messing with me. I turned my phone off, got up and got ready for work.
Later that morning I showed the texts to Sam, who was completely baffled. His phone had no messages on it. He texted me to test things out and his message "hi" popped up right underneath the last message the other "Sam" had sent to me. I assumed it was someone playing a joke on me, or maybe it really was some technical glitch.
As the days have passed I keep thinking, what if that was Sam? A Sam in an alternative reality where we never met? My husband and I have texted each other since with no problems. I tried to put the incident out of my head, but yesterday I started scrolling up to find the messages. They're gone. I did not delete them. They're just gone.
If it is another Sam in a different reality, am I there too? If I ever hear from him again should I tell him to find me? I love him so much. I want all his versions to be happy.
38. I Hardly Know Her!
This morning, before work, I stopped by the supermarket close to my house to buy some pens and a clipboard. I walked in a rush because I was already late and quickly grabbed the items and made my way to the front. I sat my items on the conveyor belt and looked up and there was no cashier behind the counter. You know that strange feeling you get when you know someone is staring at you? Or standing too close?
I started to feel that way. I turned to my right and this beautiful woman was standing right beside me. Probably late 20s with long brown hair and blue eyes. She wasn't a comfortable arm's length apart, she was less than a meter away. I looked up at her as she smiled at me. You know the way people look at you when you know them very well? Like, know them deeply?
That is the look this woman was giving me. "Did you call for help yet? Do they know we are standing here?" she said like we were more than acquainted. I just stared at her. The way she said that combined with the way she looked at me made me feel so uneasy, like we had come here together though I had never seen her in my life. "No, not yet," I replied to her.
She walked around the side of the counter and looked into the manager's office that was behind the end of the registers. The cashier came out of the back room and apologized for the wait. I only half heard what she said because I watched the woman come around the counter, smiling a beautiful toothy grin and looking at me the whole time.
"I got herrrr," the smiling woman said in a playful tone before bouncing right back next to me, close enough that I crossed my arms to keep our hands from touching. Close enough that I could smell her hair. I looked up at the clerk and realized that this wasn't strange to her but that she definitely thought we were together. "Yall doing okay today?" said the cashier.
The woman beside me bounced back to one of those candy racks they have by the register and said, "Oh yeah! I needed gum, remember?" I just stared as she put the gum on my clipboard and came to rest again close to me. I backed away and looked at her, my face had to be as confused as it ever has been. She looked at me, smiling still, and then stopped. "What?" she said.
I looked down at the gum on my clipboard and back up to her again. "What?" she said again, this time with worry in her voice. I looked at the cashier who was confused and then back to the woman who was now looking down at the gum with no expression on her face. She looked back up at me and this time, she looked at me like you would expect from someone you had never met in a grocery store.
The smile, gone from her voice, she said, "Sorry." She took a few steps back. I quickly ran my card through and grabbed my bag from the corral. I turned back to the woman who looked lost and confused. I walked back to my car, the experience still fresh in my mind and instead of leaving, I waited, hoping there would be an answer walk out of those doors.
Maybe she had a husband, boyfriend, significant other who has a long beard and blue eyes as I do. Maybe she embarrassingly mistook me for that man. I waited for a lot longer than it should have taken for her to ring up the gum that she had grabbed. Finally, she emerged with the gum in hand and an expressionless look on her face all alone. She got in her orange Kia Soul with a Hello Kitty plushy hanging from the mirror and drove away.
I took off to work and that quickly consumed my thought processes. On the way home a few minutes ago, I remembered my dog was out of food. I pulled into the same supermarket and grabbed a bag. I got to the register and the same cashier came to the till. "You’re back again, I see," she said, "and without the girl this time." "Yeah, did you notice that woman? I didn't know her at all! She was acting so weird."
The woman kind of half smirks as she gives me my receipt, "To be honest," she said, "I thought you were being a jerk." I looked confused at her again, "What do you mean?" "I was watching the camera earlier when you guys came in together. There was a man in the same aisle you two walked to who I thought was putting printer cartridges in his backpack."
"I watched you two look at the pens for a second then walk to the register but I didn't come out because I was sure that guy was stealing ink. Never found out because that girl came and got me." "What do you mean came in together?" I said. "She walked in with you, stood behind you while you grabbed your pens and walked with you to the register, then you acted as if you had never met her."
Goosebumps my friends. That chill took over me like a freaking breeze from a deep freezer. "Ma'am," I said, "I had never met that woman in my life." At 31 years old, I can say definitively that this is the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.
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39. Between A Rock And A Hard Place
I think I was around 12 or 14 at the time, and I went on a camping trip with my parents. They were in one tent, and I was in another. One morning, I woke up and exited the tent. My parents were up at this point and told me something along the lines of, "You're not sly." I was confused and asked what they meant. They motioned toward the small pile of rocks sitting in front of their tent.
They had assumed that I stacked the rocks during the night to try to scare them, like what happened in The Blair Witch Project. I had no idea where the rocks came and swore up and down even to this day that I didn't do it, but they don't believe me at all. It was kind of my own fault since I am always doing something to mess with them, but this time I really didn’t.
40. All The Lonely People
Growing up, I always wanted to go on a bike ride at night. Something about it just seemed really cool to me. It wasn't until I was 13 that my mom finally let me. She told me to wear my helmet, take my phone and flashlight, and follow the parameters she had set for where I was allowed to go. She gave me about four miles, which was a lot to me.
So, right after the sun had set, I was off. I loved it. I rode along this path for 10 minutes before the only thing I could see was some of the lights from the houses on the inside of the limits. After 15 minutes of riding along this dirt path, I suddenly hear singing. It sounded like it was just a few feet in front of me. I stop riding to hear it better. It was a woman's voice.
She was singing “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles. But she wasn't singing the words, just the melody. Her voice was strange. You know how when you have phlegm in your throat, your voice gets kind of scratchy? That's what her voice sounded like. I inch forward to try and see her. I get close enough to see the silhouette of her hair bouncing up and down, like she was headbanging.
I decided to get my flashlight out. I'm thinking that maybe this person is in need of help or something. Or maybe this is an insane person and the light will scare them away. So I take the flashlight out of my pocket, point it at her, and turn it on. The moment the light hit her, she stopped moving completely. She was facing away from me.
She had disgusting hair that seemed to be sticking together in clumps. Some of her hair was ripped off, too. She was wearing a very oversized, bright red hoodie. I was almost too scared to move. I think she was, too. I conjured up as much bravery as I could and said "Sorry" in a very, oops-this-is-the-wrong-room kind of way. She didn't respond.
I turned off the flashlight and put it back in my pocket. Just as I was turning my bike around, she screamed. She screamed in an awful, horrifying high-pitched voice. I nearly pooped myself as I threw myself back onto my bike. I heard her voice getting closer to me. I booked it as fast as I could. I didn't once look back behind me, and I didn't stop pedaling.
Her screaming eventually grew quieter and quieter until it dissolved into the howling of the wind.
41. Wake-Up Call
I was about 6 or 7 when this happened to me. I used to sleep in my parent's room often. I would kick my dad out to sleep in my bed so I could sleep with my mom. I woke up in the middle of the night and something compelled me to walk back to my room. I looked at my dad and saw him sound asleep. Then I had this urge to look out the window.
Now my room faces the street and there's a street lamp that provides some light. I can also see the front porch from my window as well. Anyways, I saw a shadow of this boy, just standing there on the front porch. It seemed like he was wearing 1930's attire with a newsboy cap. I'm staring at this shadow for a few minutes, confused.
So, I go back to my parent's room thinking I've gone crazy. There was a nightlight in the room that faintly illuminated the room, just like the streetlamp outside of the house. I was already under the covers when I saw the same shadow of the boy next to my side of the bed. I couldn't see any facial features or anything. It was just a black shadow of this boy.
I called out 'Hello?' several times to this shadow but it didn't respond. I eventually gave up and put the blanket over my head and snuggled closer to my mom and fell asleep. That's probably the creepiest thing that has happened to me.
42. The Black Menace
It was the first Christmas I spent visiting my husband's parents, as well as the first time I met either of them. I was pretty nervous because of that fact and being shy by nature, and I mostly kept to myself the entire evening we were there. We had a nice dinner and afterward my husband, his dad, and myself retired to the living room where my husband and his dad played guitar together.
The way their house was situated was that it was very small with a kitchen connecting to the living room (where we were) through one doorway, and in the back of the kitchen, there was another doorway leading out to the hall, which also fed into the living room. Where I was sitting on the couch I could look down the hall and see straight into the bathroom.
To the right of the bathroom was another room, his parents' room. I remembered getting up and walking through the first doorway (living room doorway) and asking my husband's mom if she needed help doing the dishes that she was doing. She shooed me away and told me to return to the living room and she'd take care of it all. So I did.
After a few minutes, I needed to go and use the bathroom. Just as I was about to get up to do so, as I looked forward down the hall to the bathroom, I saw a very tall, very dark, human-like figure dart through the first doorway from the kitchen and rush into the parents' bedroom. It was not a hallucination. It was as real as seeing any person in front of me.
Panic set in and I could not take my eyes off of that location. I waited for it to re-emerge, convincing myself it must have been my husband's mom. The figure was so darn tall, though, and tracing my mind back, could she have been that tall? Was she wearing a large black sweater? It had to be her and a trick of my eyes. Except...Then my husband's mom walked through the other doorway to the living room, asking us if we wanted any dessert.
It was not her. And no one else was in the house. Eventually, I did get up to use the bathroom, but when I looked around the area and into their bedroom, nothing was there. It took me months to say anything to my husband about that. We were dating at the time and I thought he'd think I was crazy. His reply stunned me. He had had similar experiences, only his were even worse.
He believed me and even told me about how his father had seen things in that hallway as well. Their thoughts were that when they bought the house, a family friend of theirs was working on some trimming in the hall at the time and had ended up having a heart attack and passing. They assume he felt he left a job unfinished and sometimes comes back. The feelings from that sighting made me feel almost ill, however, and I believe it was something pretty menacing.
The whole house has a really bad vibe to it and a not-so-great history, so who knows what it was.
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43. Well, I’ll Be A Monkey’s Father
I have a 10-month-old son. He’s a great kid and is just starting to crawl and move around on his own. Tonight, before I put him to bed, he passed out on this big pillow in our living room after he had a bottle. I picked him up and put him in his crib in his room down the hall, then let the dog out and sat down to watch some TV before I brushed my teeth and went to bed.
My dog walked down the hall to my bedroom to go to bed and about an hour later I get up to turn the TV off. I notice my son asleep, facing away from me on the same pillow I picked him up from an hour before. Now, thinking that given his skill level at walking and crawling there is no way he was getting out of his crib, down the hall and back there, I chalked it up to me not paying attention.
So, I walked over, picked him up, slung him over my left shoulder, went over to the front window, shut it, and went back down the hall to go to put him in bed. I opened the door to his room, turned the corner, and with the dim light from the nightlight, I notice that he is in his crib asleep. It took about a second to put together what was happening.
How did I have him on my shoulder while he was in the bed at the same time? What felt like a millisecond later, I hear my dog kind of bark/whimper in a confused tone right behind me, then I looked to my left bringing my arm down, and I see that his stuffed animal monkey is in my arm. Now, I am as sure as anything in my life that I picked up my son and that I would have known the difference between a 25 lb. kid and a 1lb. stuffed animal.
I've checked the carbon monoxide detector, the windows were open, and I've only had a single drink tonight. The weirdest thing though is that my big ol’ black lab will not leave my son's room. I'm really, really baffled.
44. An About Face
A really bizarre thing happened today that left me a bit shaken. Earlier today, I went to an otolaryngologist appointment with a sore throat. At the end of my 30-minute slot, I was sitting at the table across from the doctor, with her writing out the prescriptions. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and, without waiting for a response, a man stepped in.
He was tall and slightly stooping, in his 30s or maybe 40s, with balding blond hair, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt. I guessed he was the next patient in line eager to start his appointment, and only paid him a quick glance before turning back to the table. The doctor called out something to the effect of, “Sir, could you please wait outside? I’ll call you back in a few minutes” and resumed writing.
The man, however, didn’t leave right away, but continued silently standing in the doorway for several more seconds. Then, out of my side vision, I noticed something truly disturbing. There was something strange going on with his face that wasn’t there a moment ago. I couldn’t make out the details, so I cautiously gave him another look.
What I saw is difficult to put into words. The best I can describe it is, well, a glitch effect, like a corrupt image in a video file. The man’s face was now a blob of different shades of pink, misshapen and somehow almost pixilated. I was only able to catch a flash of it, though, as the man quickly turned back to the door and stepped out.
As he was turning around, I noticed that in profile his face looked flat and featureless, like that of a Lego figure. This encounter was so unexpected and so unusual that at first, it didn’t even register with me as something noteworthy. After a moment’s consideration, I figured it must’ve been a simple brain hiccup on my part due to a lack of sleep, or maybe some weird visual illusion.
But then I met eyes with the doctor. She paused, pen in hand, and asked me hesitantly: “Did you see it? His face…” “Yeah,” I said. And that was that, we didn’t discuss it further. She finished filling out my paperwork and I went home, feeling a bit lightheaded. As I left the office, the man was sitting in the corridor outside occupied with his phone. As far as I could see, his face was once again perfectly normal.
45. Like Father, Like Son
I’m a law enforcement officer. In November 2012, I was on regular patrol when a Dodge Challenger SRT 8 blew past me on the highway going 99 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. I whipped my car around, and the chase was on. The Challenger was outgunning me, with speeds reaching about 131—as fast as my Vic would go. On one particular road the Challenger turned down, there is about a four mile stretch of straight, hilly road that has a T intersection at the end.
I had almost lost sight of the car, but happened to catch his tail lights just in time to see him turn East at the intersection. Now, this is where it gets weird. I remember coming up to the T intersection, trying to slow down. Within I'd say, maybe 200 yards from it, I looked down at my speed and noticed I was going way too fast to make it—approximately 95-100 MPH.
I remember hitting the brakes as hard as I could and seeing the dirt berm coming up quick. I remember closing my eyes and asking God to watch over my kids, because I knew I had made a fatal mistake, and was a goner. But nothing happened. No loud crash, no tires squealing, no glass, no airbags, or anything of that nature.
I opened my eyes and I was traveling eastbound from the northbound road at 50 MPH. It still drives me crazy to this day wondering what happened. Did I die and this is all a dream? Did the universe reach out and save me? I wish I knew the answers. I even caught the guy as a highway patrolman had put out stop sticks a few miles down the eastbound road. From the video on the dashcam, I was 35 seconds behind the Challenger.
Later, I got home from work, and I was telling my dad the entire story. What he tells me next absolutely floored me. Apparently, he had pretty much the same experience when he was a truck driver. He was overloaded, driving on slick, wet roads and was traveling down a hill when his brakes became too hot and quit working, which is weird because the exact same thing was going on with my car.
In fact, I literally had to blow through two stop signs on the Northbound straight away without slowing because my brakes were smoked. They were done. I remember seeing them glowing orange after the pursuit was over. Anyway, he remembers the truck skidding and the trailer turning sideways, and then all of a sudden he is on the adjacent street, traveling normally.
He doesn't remember the directions the roads were going (I asked, I got pretty freaked out), so I can't make that particular connection, but he told me how creepy it made him feel. I don't know. I'm kind of in a weird spot right now. I don't know how I'm supposed to be feeling at this moment. I need to see if any other family members have had a similar experience.
46. The Creepy High School
I've had a few strange and creepy experiences growing up. The creepiest by far though was when I was in high school. It was summer and my mother had left her laptop home for me to use to pass the time during the day since she had left me no chores that day. Our house an old two-story building that was built in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
It has hardwood floors throughout the first floor and carpet on the second. Because of the age of the building, and the fact that the second story was a later addition, no matter where you are upstairs you can hear, and often feel when someone is walking around downstairs. If you have ever lived in an old house with hardwood floors, you understand what I'm talking about.
So, one evening I was laying out on the floor in my room whilst I used the computer. AIM was a must given the fact that it was the turn of the millennium and MSN hadn't figured out that whole Mac/Microsoft bridge yet. I remember hearing my stepdad drive into the driveway at the back of the house. Hopping to my feet, I looked through the navy-blue curtains and could see the red hue of his burgundy Chevy Denali in the driveway.
I immediately laid back down and told my friend that I had to log off because the stepfather was home and was going to be mad that I was using my mother's computer (even if it was with permission). Around this point I heard him set the alarm on his car, walk up the porch stairs, fumble with his keys, and lumber into the den where he heavily dropped his stuff. I cursed under my breath and hastily logged off.
Gathering up the computer, I slinked my way to the stairwell ready to take my licks. However, when I got to the stairwell, I noticed all the lights were off downstairs still. I thought that's fine, sometimes he doesn't turn on lights. It's his house, he knows where stuff is. So, I force a nervous chuckle and head down the rest of the stairs; into the darkness of the first floor.
"Sorry about using her laptop... She said I could..." Silence greeted my words. Odd, I thought, usually he chides me or otherwise takes me down a notch. Thinking he is in the bathroom, I set the laptop on the couch in the den and began to leave. It was then, as my eyes finished adjusting to the light, that I noticed it. His things were not where I had thought they would be.
My heart skips a beat and my eyes fly to the window that looks into our backyard and driveway. The light is on, but there is no Denali. Fearing a burglar, I rushed to the back door only to find it locked securely. Too afraid to do anything else, I grabbed the cordless phone and hightailed it to my room; locking myself in.
This is where the experience went to a new level. Sitting in my room, panting and shaking as I held the phone, I could both hear and feel as multiple people were walking around on the hardwood floor. Some people even felt like they were stomping. Realizing that I may not be alone, I thought of the only thing a crazed teenage girl could think of, I called my friends across the street.
The first friend was a talking robot. I figured she would never answer, I was used to her busy signal, but I had to try. Punching in the number quickly, I brought the phone to my ear and waited; dial tone, three-ring, voice-mail. Darn it. I dialled up the second friend. I felt I had a chance, she was never on the phone; busy signal.
Sure, the third friend, the one I was talking to online would answer; busy signal (dial-up fml). So, I'm sitting there, listening to the footsteps and the dial tone as I'm trying to figure out if I should try the first friend again. Static crackled through the dial tone and broke my thoughts as I stared at it. Almost immediately the static shift from a crackle to laughter and I straight up opened my door and chucked the phone down the hall.
The footsteps got louder and I tried to think out a resolution to the problem. I needed the third friend off the internet. I needed someone to validate that I wasn't going crazy and hearing things. But the only way to get her offline would be to go get the computer from the first floor. Swallowing hard, I threw open the bedroom door and made a mad dash for the computer.
I grabbed the computer and rushed back upstairs. While I was down there, I could hear the footsteps in other rooms other than the ones I was in. Rushing back into my room, I hopped back online and forced my friend to get off the internet so I could call her. Retrieving the phone from the hallway I re-locked myself in and dialled her up.
When she answered I recounted what had happened and asked her if she could hear it. For listening purposes, I made my way towards the stairwell. Eventually, it stopped and then seemed to start back up again only lights were turning on. Inching down I realized it was my mother and told the friend I would talk to her later.
After a little talk with my mother, I found out that she had been home for about 5 minutes. This had all started at about 7 pm. Even if my mother had been way off, and arrive 15 minutes before, that would still leave me with 15 minutes of unexplained phenomena.
47. A Hair-Raising Tale
I was lying on my bed, watching telly and I could hear a weird scraping sound. I turned the telly’s sound off and listened. There was nothing so I shrugged it off and went back to watching the telly. Five minutes or so passed by and I could hear this scraping again. So, I turned the sound off, got up, turned my bedroom light on to look, and what do I see?
The biggest spider I've ever seen in my life. It turns out that this spider was big enough that I could hear its leg scraping the coving between my wall and my ceiling. It was loud enough to be heard even over my telly. I was, thankfully, able to trap it in a jug and then took it and threw it out into a neighbor’s yard.
48. Dog’s Best Friend
My first semester at university, I got stuck taking all night classes and didn't get out until about 10:00 PM most evenings. I then would walk from the campus to the New Jersey transit station. Not too far a walk, but it starts to feel spooky in that area at night and I wasn't 100% sure where I was going since I was still new to the school.
So here I am, already a little on edge, when all of the sudden I hear a sound that will haunt me until the day I die. There was someone barking at me. That's right, barking. I look up and discover a man sitting up in the tree barking and growling down at me as I walk by. I was freaked out, but afraid that if I ran it might provoke him to follow me. So, I speedwalked to the corner, then ran across the street and didn't stop till I was at the train platform.
49. 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.
50. Monsters Under The Bed
When I was 12, I woke up in the middle of the night to loud breathing under my bed. I was convinced there was a demon or cryptid or something that was going to eat me. I finally decided to risk it and run up to my mom’s room to sleep in her bed. I made it safely without being dragged under the bed. My mom was convinced I just had a nightmare, but the next night, I heard it again.
Since it was only around 9 at night, I called my mom so she could hear it. She was about 10 feet away and could hear the breathing clear as day. There was nothing under my bed. Over the next couple of months I kept hearing it, although not nightly. It slowly started to sound more like purring than breathing. My brother came home from college, and checked under my bed and made me lift my hands to double-check that I wasn't playing a prank. We never found out what was breathing under my bed.
51. 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.
52. The Fear Factor
So, a little background: I'm a Navy kid and I moved all around the east coast until my dad retired when I was 14. When I was about 8 or 9, we lived in Newport, Rhode Island in your standard Navy housing development. The units on our street were recently remodeled, but my best friend at the time lived in the only unit on the street that wasn't.
His name was Michael, and we'd hang out all the time after school and on the weekends. He'd always sleepover at my house, but never let me stay over at his house. I'd only ever been in his house twice, and I'm about to tell you why. The second time I was at Michael's house, we were sitting in his living room watching Power Rangers.
It's early afternoon and his mom is making us lunch. Michael's mom yells out "Gosh darn it! Why didn't anyone tell me we're out of cheese?" or something along those lines. She comes into the living room to tell us she's running to the NEX convenience store down the road to pick up some cheese. She leaves and we continue watching TV.
We never left the chairs we were in while Michael's mom was gone. About 10 minutes later she gets back to the house and heads to the kitchen and SCREAMS out loud. It made both Michael and I literally jump out of our chairs in fright, then we both start laughing because we thought she was playing a joke on us. I turned around expecting her to be standing there, but she was still in the kitchen.
She yells "Michael?! Michael?!" and we go running into the kitchen. "Michael, did you do this?" We both shake our heads. Every cabinet was open. The refrigerator was open. All the drawers were pulled out to the point just before they'd fall out of the counter. Michael's mom tells us to go to my house to finish watching our shows and as we're leaving, she calls Michael's dad, crying.
We get to my house and finish watching Power Rangers and then whatever show was on after that. Michael says he better go home and find out what's going on and leaves. I tell my mom what happened and she explains that Michael's mom has been experiencing lots of weird things over at their place and tells me I'm not allowed back in his house. I was unaware of any of this and my mom says it's because they don't like to talk about it.
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53. Ignorance Is Bliss
When I was about 17 or 18 years old, my friend Wendy and I worked at the Elks bingo hall every Thursday night. As my grandma lived close to the hall and to our high school, we would spend every Thursday night at my grandma's house after work. We would be at the Elks pretty late, not getting back to my grandma's until around 10-11pm. So, one Thursday night, Wendy and I were chilling. I opened the fridge in the kitchen to see what's good, with Wendy standing directly behind me.
As I opened the fridge, I heard a very stern female voice coming from the living room say, "Can I ask you a question?" Wendy and I went about getting our snacks without mentioning it. We sat down at the kitchen table, and Wendy said: "So, when you opened the fridge a minute ago, did you hear a voice coming from the living room?"
The TV was not on, nor was the radio or anything else. Wendy said that she had heard an older female voice, but she could not make out what it had said. I said what I thought I heard, and we agreed that it was too scary to think about. We just agreed that it happened, and then pretended it didn't. We had to spend the night in the house, after all.
54. Night Of The Doppelganger
I had just graduated from university, and a friend and I took an all-inclusive trip to Cuba. We shared a room, and had beds that were spaced about two feet apart. We'll call my friend “Anna.” On the first night, around 1 AM, she woke me up by saying, "What are you doing?" I sat up and looked over at her. She was sitting up and staring at the foot of her bed, looking stunned.
She looked over at me, and then back at the foot of her bed. She paused and said "I... thought I saw you at the foot of my bed." I convinced her she had been dreaming, and eventually we fell back asleep. The next day was normal. The following night was not. I woke up in the middle of the night, and I knew something was wrong right away.
It wasn't fear, just...something was wrong, different. I looked up and Anna was standing at the foot of my bed. She was in her pjs, and her hair was down, just like she had been when we tucked in. When I looked at Anna's bed, she was there, fast asleep. I sat up and stared at the “Anna” at the foot of my bed, then quickly glanced over to the “Anna” asleep in her bed. I did this several times, to confirm I was really awake. "Anna?" I whispered.
The version of her in her bed stirred and groggily said, "What?" "Are you in bed right now?" I asked. At this point, the Anna that was at the foot of my bed turned around and started walking across the room away from me. "Yeah," the version of Anna in her bed said. "I see you at the foot of my bed," I said. There was a silence from the “Anna” in her bed.
The other Anna continued walking away. "I'm going to turn on the lights," I said. I reached out for the switch beside my bed. At that moment, the Anna walking away turned back and looked at me. She faded away about two seconds before I turned on the lights. For the rest of our trip we slept with the lights on.
55. They Watch You Sleep
One night, while me and my partner were spending some time at his parent’s home, I was trying to sleep and couldn't get comfy. I woke up at one point feeling like something was standing by the door and walking across the room towards the bed. I turned my phone light on and shone it around the room, but nobody was there.
I rolled over quickly and cuddled up to my partner. I hid almost under the covers. After what felt like an eternity, I felt like I was overreacting, so I pulled the covers lower and stopped holding my partner as tight. Suddenly, a chill hit me. It was this wave of unease and terror. I felt a pressure on the bed, as if somebody was sitting on the edge of the bed.
The covers began reacting like they were being sat on and pulled. I felt the bed move, and my body tip like it would when somebody sits next to you on the bed. It was like whatever it was had sat close to my lower back, and was facing the wall away from us. I was about to freak out when I felt the pressure on the bed go and the presence leave the room.
The next morning, I told my partner and we joked a bit about it being one of the relatives from the two urns downstairs. We went down for some breakfast, and my partner told his mom how I got a bit of fright last night. After hearing about what happened, she actually went pale. My partner, who was expecting her to joke about it, asked what was up.
She said she was feeling uneasy because the same thing happened to her last night. She said she had woken up and felt like someone was by the door. She had tried to forget it by putting it down to a trick of the mind, but then felt somebody standing over her. She turned the light on by her bedside, and nothing was there.
She turned the light off, but then felt something sit next to her, the same way as I had felt. She said it sat facing away, and then got up a few minutes later before leaving the room. My partner's mom might joke about stuff, but she wasn't joking that day. She’s not the type to make jokes at your expense or to further freak you out.
56. The Creepy Drive-by
So I was driving by myself in the afternoon. I stopped in Amboy and snapped a picture of the city sign, just to prove I was there to friends who dared me to take that route to I-40. I got back in my car and proceeded to drive up into the mountain range between Amboy and I-40. Once I reach the top I am driving north through a canyon with high grass on both sides of the road.
Up ahead I see some stuff in the middle of the road. As I approach, I slow down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, a suitcase open with clothes scattered everywhere and two bodies laying face down in the road, a man and a woman. I stop a hundred feet or so away and the hair on the back of my neck is standing up.
Being a Marine, I reach under the seat and pull out a 9mm pistol and chamber a round. Something seemed very wrong, it looked too perfect as if it were staged. An ambush? Was I being paranoid? Something was just wrong. Getting out of the car seemed unthinkable, I felt like I was in a horror movie. As I scanned the road, I saw a line I could drive.
Pass the guy in the road on his left, swerve to the right side of the woman, behind the Fiero and I'd be on the other side. I dropped it into first gear, punched it, and drove the line I planned. I passed the back of the Fierro without hitting it or either of the bodies in the road. I continued forward a couple of hundred feet and slowed down so I could breathe and let my heart slow down.
As I looked up into the rear-view mirror, I saw that the two bodies had gotten up to their knees and twenty or so people emerged from the tall grass on either side of the road by the car and bodies. At that moment my right foot smashed the gas pedal to the floor and did not let up until I had to slow down for the I-40 east onramp.
I will never know what would have happened to me had I gotten out of the car to check on the bodies or stopped my car closer to them. Somehow, I do not think it would have been good. Sometimes real life can be scarier than a movie.
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57. Night Of Dread
I've always been a night owl. I have never been able to fall asleep easily, so I have a tendency to read, surf around, or occasionally just pace the house. I also grew up on a farm, so on nights when the moon was light enough, I would go walk in the pasture if I was feeling especially restless. This was definitely one of those nights.
I pulled on a pair of jeans and some shoes figuring a walk would help me relax. Stepping out onto the porch, some movement near the barn caught my eye. In the light, I could make out the figure of a man carrying something. The sound of the door opening must have alerted him because he started coming towards me.
The distance from our porch to the stock barn is about 25 yards, so it wasn't a terribly large distance and even in the dim light I was able to realize the man had a pistol. My heart racing, I backed into the house and deadbolted the door. Living in a small town in rural East Texas, the door had been unlocked before. Terrified, I stumbled into my parent's room and woke my father.
I told him I'd seen a man with a pistol in our backyard, and he quickly grabbed his pistol and told my mom to call the authorities. Since we lived far out, it would be 20 or so minutes before we would see any officers, so my dad and I went out to check on the animals. When we stepped outside it was silent. There was no sign of anyone in our yard, so we walked briskly towards the barn where I'd seen the man.
We had (at the time) a few cattle, goats, a bad-tempered donkey, about a half-dozen chickens, and my mangy old cat, Velcro. None of them were to be seen, the barn was completely empty. They slept close by, and the goats weren't penned at night, but they always slept inside the barn. Something had clearly spooked them out of their sleep.
We did a quick sweep of the area and found that someone had tried to force the door to the attached tool shed open and failed, but otherwise, nothing else. So we called the authorities, but they didn't find much either. I wondered if I'd imagined the whole thing. The next morning though, I awoke to a sight that will haunt me forever.
In the morning when we went out to collect the eggs we had a pretty horrible surprise. Of all the places we'd looked, we never thought to check inside the chicken coop (which was a pretty large area). Apparently, whoever this guy was had decided to hide out in there when we came outside. Every one of our chickens was dead (we assume to keep them quiet).
While we were leaning against the coop relaxing and drinking our beers, this guy had been inside of it, tormenting our chickens the entire time.
58. Tripping Up
When I was a kid I used to go and visit my uncle’s lodge in the school holidays. It was on this huge property and backed onto the edge of bushland, so my brother and I always had a whole bunch of stuff to do to keep us occupied. I remember I was with my dog one day playing near an empty creek when he suddenly just took off into the trees.
Everyone else had gone into town and my dad was asleep inside so I was pretty much alone and decided to go after him. He was much quicker than I was and I got lost pretty quickly. I was starting to get a bit upset because I couldn't find my dog and I had no idea where I was so I turned around from where I thought I came from and tried to run back and get my dad so he could help me find him.
From what I remember I tripped over a tree root or something and fell down this embankment. I must have hit my head on something because I woke up in the bottom of this small gully not knowing how I got there, everything was still a bit fuzzy. What actually woke me up was my dog licking my face. He was lying down right next to me.
How he found me I don't know, but I was really happy to see him. But then he started barking but it was a bark I hadn't really heard him do before and he was still lying flat on his stomach, that's the strange thing I remember about that part. A really strange lying down, grumble sort of bark. It scared me a little bit.
I turned to see what he was looking at and there was a guy standing there. I remember he had this really faded cowboy hat thing on that had a big chunk missing on the side. “Hey kid, you had a pretty bad fall, but you should be alright. Let me get you back to your home” he said in this really, really deep voice. Then he walked over to me, picked me up, grabbed my hand and we started walking back through the bush.
The two things I remember from that walk were holding his gloves which I thought was weird because it was the middle of summer and really hot at the time. The other one was my dog was walking too close to me, I was pretty much tripping the whole way back because he kept smacking into the side of my leg on the way back.
The guy didn't say anything though, in fact, I don't actually remember him saying anything at all apart from the first time he spoke. I don't think we walked for that long because we reached the creek bed really quickly and I could hear my name being called out by my dad for dinner. I started to run straight up to the house and remembered I forget to thank the guy for getting me here so I turned to yell “Thanks mister” but he was already gone.
I just figured he was in a hurry or something. A few days later I was in the supermarket with my Mum, it was one of those small country town ones that kind of sell everything and everyone knows everyone else there. So, I'm kind of just wandering around and there's this photo up on the wall of this guy in a cowboy hat with a big chunk in the side missing.
It was the guy who helped me in the woods! I wanted to thank him or something for helping me before so I ask the person working there who he is. His answer chilled me to the bone. Turns out he was the original owner of the store around thirty years ago but keeled over in a freak accident in the woods where my dog and I were.
Apparently back in the day he used to grow vegetables for the store himself in the middle of these woods (I don't know why, I guess the soil was more fertile or something). He went one day to see how they were growing when a really bad storm started up. Apparently, he was trying to get back but his dog (who always went with him) fell down a really steep embankment into a small gully so this guy went after it.
While he was down there a branch broke off a tree and hit him, breaking his back. They didn't find him till weeks later. His dog was also found with him, by his side. That's how I found out that the man who saved me was a ghost.
59. Hanging On The Telephone
This story took place about five years ago and every single word of it is 100% true. To this day, my family and I still can't explain what happened. My mum, dad and two sisters went on a family trip across Europe. I stayed at home with my husband and 12-month-old baby. It's 3 AM and my phone's ringing. It's my dad.
I'm thinking that's weird, dad's usually well aware of what time it is here when he calls…maybe he doesn't realize? So, I ignore it. My phone rings again. I'm now thinking it's somewhat urgent and I should answer, but it rings out before I can pick it up. I then notice I have a dozen missed calls from both mum and dad and my sisters. I also have a heap of messages.
So, now I'm wide awake and thinking the absolute worst—if only it were that simple. I open up the text messages and they're all along the lines of, "Everything will be okay, we are going to get the next flight home to be with you, stay strong we love you." I'm thinking what the heck are they on about? My phone rings again and I answer straight away.
"What the heck is going on dad?! What do all those text messages mean??" Now, it takes a lot to make my dad concerned. On the phone he's really concerned and trying to keep it together. Through gritted teeth and his voice shaking he says, "I've just been on the phone to you for an hour...what do you mean 'what's going on?'" I'm completely dumbfounded.
I went to bed at 10 pm and have been fast asleep until now. The last time I spoke with my parents was three days ago. How could I have possibly been on the phone with my dad for the last hour? I tell him he must be confused, I've been asleep and definitely didn't make any phone calls. "Don't play games with me!" My dad almost shouts. This is where it gets scary.
He tells me: "I've been on the phone with you for the last hour, consoling you because you've just found out your pregnant and [husband] has left you!" "WHAT?!!!" At this point my husband has woken up to all the commotion and is asking what's going on. "Dad, what are you talking about?! He’s right here, asleep next to me. He hasn't walked out on me and I'm definitely not pregnant!"
Dad's angry now. He's telling me to stop lying to him and that this isn't funny. He's demanding I tell him the truth, asking if both me and my son are okay and do I know where my husband has gone? At this point, I'm thinking I've been sleep talking. I've somehow called my dad in my sleep and told him this ridiculous story. My husband doesn't believe it, saying he would've woken up to me crying on the phone to my dad if I had in fact done that in my sleep.
I tell my dad to hang on a minute while I check if I made any calls to him. I look though my phone log, and apart from multiple missed calls, I haven't made any calls to my dad or my family for that matter. The last phone call received was three days ago. I check my husband’s phone, in case I somehow clambered over him and used his phone to make the ridiculous phone call. Nope. Nothing.
"Dad, I've just checked my phone. I haven't made any calls to you..." I ask dad if my caller ID showed up when I ‘called him.' He says he can't remember, so he checks. A minute or so later he says, "It says unknown...I haven't received any calls from your phone number." My dad is suspicious now, thinking who the heck did he just speak to.
My bewilderment turns to anger. Has someone pranked my dad? Who would make up such a story and upset my whole family? My dad denies it, saying he knows my voice and says it was definitely me. Even my sister got on the phone and said she was there the whole time, talking with me while I was in complete hysterics on the phone.
She said that I had told them my husband got angry and walked out on me when I told him I was pregnant. I didn't know where he went and he wasn't answering my calls. I said I was scared to be home by myself with my son so I went to stay with a friend. My sister said she could hear my friend in the background, but I wouldn't tell them which friend I was staying with when they asked.
Dad asked me why I didn't go to his house as I still have a key and I said I didn’t want to because of their family friend who was staying there. The creepy part? That’s completely true. If it as a stranger or a scammer, how would they know that? My mum and dad had a family friend staying with them for a few months, and they were looking after the house while they were traveling.
My sister said eventually I calmed down and said I had to go as I didn't want to keep my friend awake any longer. I said I have to go to work the next day and need to cancel my dentist appointment. Another true piece of information. I was, in fact, called into work the following day and had told my husband the night before I'll need to cancel my dentist appointment.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And at the same time, my family couldn't believe that I was telling them otherwise. I had to take a photo of me and my husband to prove to them everything was fine and none of that happened. We stayed on the phone with each other till six in the morning, me convincing them that they definitely do not have to get on the next flight home.
No one could make sense of what happened. My dad and family still didn't 100% believe me until they got home from Europe and saw me in the flesh. We speak about it every now and again. I always ask my dad and sister to tell me again and again exactly what I said to them over the phone. I find it fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
My dad doesn't like talking about it. He just shakes his head and says, "I don't know what to believe." And I don't blame him either. What he and my family heard was real. They really were on the phone with “me” and were all devastated at what I was telling them. Ready to jump on the next flight home and telling “me” to stay strong! Imagine then being told a few minutes later by the real me that I had no idea what they were talking about??
60. We’re Ready To Believe You
12 years ago my boyfriend and I went to the video store to rent Ghostbusters because I had just found out he’d never seen it before. After we rented the movie, we went for a late lunch. He had two beers and I had one. We were definitely not wasted. We got back to my place, made popcorn, poured soft drinks over ice, and sat down on my couch.
We put the movie in the DVD player and pressed play. We were not sleepy. We were still in that hyper awake flirtatious stage of dating, if that makes sense. It was 6 pm. It was summertime, so the sun was shining brightly through the shades. Cut to—I suddenly come to consciousness by taking the hugest breath I’ve ever taken. I hear my boyfriend take a huge breath at the same time next to me.
It was the kind of breath you would take after coming out of the water when you’ve stayed under as long as possible. We were both sitting on the couch in the exact same positions but it was dark and the movie was long over. The glowing clock showed it was 4 am! We both remember the same thing. We lost consciousness at the exact same time and came back into consciousness at the exact same moment.
We don’t know what happened. We still talk about it sometimes. It’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me. The poor guy has still never seen Ghostbusters to this day, which is too bad, because I think it’s a really good movie.
61. 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.
62. Now You See Me…
About six years ago, I was driving one night around 10 pm down a dark road. It was in a valley, so the only light was coming from my car and the car in front of me, no streetlights. This car in front of me is probably 75 feet ahead. We go around a bend in the road, which leads into a straight shot of road for about a quarter of a mile. When I go around the bend in the road a few seconds after them, the car is gone.
I’ve driven on that road hundreds of times, and I know for a fact there was absolutely nowhere the car could have turned. It was just gone. I even turned around to make sure they didn’t go off the road and needed help. There were only trees around the road, and there was no damage to any of the trees. I have no idea what happened.
63. Sleepover
I shared a room with my sister around the age of 7, but she was off at a sleepover party the night it happened. As a little kid, I was terrified of lots of things - I'd never seen anything close to a horror film (not even The Nightmare Before Christmas) because of how jumpy I was. So naturally, the dark freaked me out.
I was really nightmare-prone, which caused everyone to say this was a dream later. But this was different. It was more vivid. Too realistic to be a dream. I was hiding under my sheets like the cowardly kid I was when I decided to poke my head out to get some cool air, and I saw something in my room. Something clearly not human.
I called it an alien at the time because that's the closest thing my horror-ignorant mind could liken it to. Now, I see it as more similar to the Rake or the Mothman. Its head was big and egg-shaped, like those stereotypical gray aliens. Far too big for its tiny, slender body. It was totally naked. Pale gray or ashen white skin, the lack of light made it hard to tell.
All the bones were visible. Its tiny shriveled sack and schlong just hung there between its legs. Its hands were way too big for the toothpick-like arms. It was standing at a really unnatural angle. Its eyes were totally black and shiny, seemed to be the only feature on its weird head, and were sunken in little red holes. Most unsettling of all, it was just staring at me.
After a few seconds of being completely paralyzed in fear, I pulled the covers back up over my head - what else could I do? I stayed there for the rest of the night until I fell asleep. I know this thing wasn't human. I told my parents the next day and they said I was dreaming. I made up a lot of stories back then. I remember a lot of them vividly, and the rest of my childhood is really, really hazy.
But seeing that thing in my room is one of the childhood memories that stuck with me the most. I have no idea what it was, and despite my fascination with horror stories, I don't think I want to know.
64. Imaginary Friend
When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend named Jessie. A couple of years ago while visiting relatives in Ireland we were all exchanging ghost stories, when my mum brought up Jessie. When I was a kid, Jessie was my imaginary friend. Or, I thought so. My mom's story made me rethink everything. She said that one time, when my dad was on his way to work, I asked him to bring back coal for Jessie's gran.
I'd ask for weirdly specific, old timey stuff like that for Jessie a lot. It never bothered anyone until we went on a little trip to a field we visited a lot when I was young. When I arrived, I suddenly ran off and went straight into a graveyard. I ran straight to a small grave and stopped and just stared at it. The headstone said "Jessie." So yeah...my 'imaginary friend' was a ghost.
65. 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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66. 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.
67. 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.
68. 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.
69. 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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70. Without A Trace
My aunt and uncle supposedly perished in a car accident back in 2011. They had a head-on collision with a pickup truck. But there was something even more terrifying about that day. The two cars and all the damage was there…but their bodies weren’t. The car didn’t catch on fire, the windshield wasn’t broken enough to show that they had been ejected. Just gone.
My uncle’s wallet was found by a guy mowing someone’s yard 23 miles away about a month later.
71. 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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72. Grandparents
When my mom was about 3 years old, my grandma and grandpa moved into an apartment on the 9th floor in downtown Columbus. After they moved in, she didn't have many friends so she developed an imaginary friend named Cathy. When he gets back my mother is playing in the corner by a window with Cathy. As soon as he walks in the dog stares straight at my mom and starts barking and snarling.
All of the hairs on his back stands straight up and he is ready to attack and my mom starts screaming and all of a sudden, the dog stops and my mom just starts crying. My grandparents are freaked out at this point and ask my mom what happened and she says that Cathy fell out of the window. After that, she never played with or mentioned Cathy again.
73. 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.
74. 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.
75. 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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76. 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.
77. 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.”
78. Invisible Hand
My eerie story involves a nightstand. My nightstand has three drawers and the handles are floppy in a way that you have to use your whole hand to open a drawer. Mind you, they are made of heavy metal. One day when I was around nine years old, I woke up around 7 am, long before my parents. I decided to read to get some homework out of the way, and all of a sudden the middle handle of my nightstand when from down to up, to the point where the whole underside was showing.
Since it's kind of old furniture, I heard the creak of it and it sounded as if someone grabbed it with force and just flipped it and left it there. My two hands were holding my book so I was completely freaked out. I might add that I only have a ceiling fan, but the air it gives out is DEFINITELY not strong enough to flip a handle from down to up; for that you require an actual human being.
I left it like that for the next few days and it hasn't happened again since almost 10 years later.
79. A Visitor In The Dark
I live with my parents, and my room is on the other side of the house. One night, around 3 AM, I randomly woke up. Then, I heard somebody knock on my door. I thought it was my parents, so I just said, "Come in," loudly. Nobody came in. I assumed they felt bad because they woke me. Then, I heard another door open and assumed it was just my dad.
About 15 or 20 minutes later, both my parents came down the hall talking, opened my door, and asked me what was wrong. I said, "Nothing. What are you talking about?" They then told me, "We just saw you in the hallway. We called out, but you turned and walked away." Creeped out, I said, "I've been in bed this whole time. Is this why you knocked on my door 20 minutes ago?"
Then they told me, "We didn't knock on your door." We combed the house, thinking we had a burglar or something, but there was no one. Also, we have an alarm and it was still armed, so it seemed unlikely that somebody broke in. My dad stayed up for an hour or two and went back to bed. The dogs started barking at something around 6 AM, but again, there was nothing.
Dogs barking at nothing is not usual, but it was spooky considering what just happened. We had lived in the house over 15 years without any weird happenings or ghost stories. My mom, after the fact, decided it was her brother Chuck, who passed a few years back. I look a bit like him apparently, so she thinks his ghost pranked us or something.
80. Sleeping In Fear
This sounds really crazy and I don't care if you don't believe me, but here are the facts: For years, I'd go through periods where when I was trying to fall asleep, I'd see a bunch of faces when I closed my eyes. They were all angry faces, very angry and menacing. They'd come towards me then kind of fade off to the sides, two rows, one on each side.
Sometimes it was just angry eyes. Human, animal, cartoon - all very angry. It took a long time to realize that when I saw these faces, it meant I was about to dream about a place I actually really liked. The place only existed in my dreams but it was like an alternate universe for me. I had memories of that place like anyone does about their childhood, but it didn't exist.
I don't want to expand on the dream place because I'm trying to get back there again and I don't want to ruin my chances. I told a few people once about this place, specific things I remember. Then a few nights later the angry faces were back and I was all excited about "going" to my favorite place again. When I got there, various people who lived there, people I "knew" and liked, suddenly had angry faces, like the ones that usually come before I "go" to this place.
They shot me. Three times. In three different rooms. Twice I woke up after getting shot. I didn't wake up in real life, but I woke up in my dream. I thought, "Wow, I'm glad I made it through that," looked over, saw another old "friend" with a now-angry face, and get shot again. I didn't wake up the third time. This "shooting" happened about 7-8 years ago.
I've really missed the place. I keep trying to force myself to remember the angry faces, thinking if I can fall asleep visualizing them, they might show up. Nothing ever worked, until two years ago when I had an experience I'll never forget. I was dreaming I was in some kind of street market, either an old-timey one or one located in a country that wasn't at all modern.
A woman was leaning over a well in the middle of the town square, she was wearing a large-brimmed, purple hat. She looked right at me. An angry face, like the old days. I was both freaked out and kind of relieved. Like somehow, I wasn't forgotten by that place and those people I used to "visit." That was two years ago. I now work in a hotel in the heart of downtown Chicago.
I see a lot of people on the street. I sold my car last winter and take public transportation, so I see more people now than I used to when I'd just drive by in my car. I'm in crowds fairly often. And six months ago, I saw that woman. I wasn't dreaming. I checked. That woman from the well was there, and she had her angry face on.
In the last six months or so, I've seen 10-12 more people who were glaring at me, the way those faces used to. Then the people disappear into the crowd when I try to follow them. I'm kind of scared but I'm also kind of thrilled. I know I sound crazy, but these people might be following me around in real life now. I still can't get back to that place I used to go to, though.
81. 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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82. The Haunted House
I grew up in a haunted house... So, I have many of these stories. This house was three stories tall and 5,000 square ft. It was moderately new. It was built in the ‘60s, located in the middle of the woods. Creepy enough, without the haunted part. One time we were all watching tv downstairs in the "basement" (basically just the ground level floor at the bottom of the house.)
The kitchen is right above the tv room. It's nearly 10 pm. All of a sudden, we hear what sounds like a man with work boots on, stomping through the kitchen. We pause the movie and all look at each other, like, "Oh no, not this again." My grandpa tells us to stay downstairs. He goes upstairs and returns about 5 minutes later.
"All the doors are locked. All the lights are off. There is no one in the house." We all just stare at each other completely freaked out.. and resume watching the movie. When I was little, I used to see black figures walking around the upstairs section of the house. We had this balcony, thing, that overlooked the library/conversation room.
That balcony connected to my grandparent's room-- their room connected to a bathroom-- the bathroom connected to the sewing room-- the sewing room connected to the staircase landing, that connected to the other side of the balcony. So, it was all a big loop. That floor, in itself, was extremely haunted. When my sister and I used the bathroom, we went together, in case something bad happened.
One time we were in my grandparent’s bathroom and she was peeing. I was standing next to the sink and saw something move out of the corner of my eye, in my grandparent's bedroom doorway. I looked and saw a huge black figure walking around the room. I started screaming "black thing! Black thing!" and my sister and I jumped up and ran through the sewing room, towards the stairs..
As were running, we heard the "black thing" running through the bedroom and across the balcony. We could hear it running behind us as we went down the stairs, then it stopped once we reached the kitchen. Crazy.
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83. Ghostly Connection
When my mom was 9 years old, her mother kicked her out of the house for the day and told her to go play. My mom did so, and pretty soon her father joined her and played with her for a few hours, which was unheard of him to do since he was a stern, unemotional man. When she got home, she made a chilling discovery. She found out she had been locked out of the house for the day because her father had succumbed to stomach cancer the night before, and her mother wanted to be alone for the day to make arrangements.
84. We Saw It Plane As Day
A few years ago, my wife and I were driving through the national forest about an hour outside our town headed to a neighboring town. We were on a two-lane main highway coming over a hill when we both saw a large passenger plane billowing smoke and fire as it descended towards the forest. It was so close to us we could see the people's faces in the windows.
We both watched, stunned, as the plane disappeared over the hill next to us. There were no roads in that direction so we hurried as quick as we could to the town that was about 20 minutes away. When we got there, we asked some people we knew if there were any reports about the plane crash or if anyone had heard anything.
They looked at us like we were crazy. There was no plane crash, no reported emergencies, nothing. My wife and I spent many hours discussing what we each saw in detail. There is no question we both saw the people in the windows. We both saw the flames and smoke. The plane was about the size of a 737. We have had a few strange experiences around the national forests, but this was by far the strangest.
85. Guardian Angel
Let me begin by saying I was born in 1998. This is by far the weirdest experience I've had. Anyway, I'm not much of a dreamer, but when I do dream it's usually very lucid and memorable. I had a dream that my mother was alone in an old, really poor-looking house with my newborn sister and was waiting for my dad to get home.
It was dark out and my mother was anxious waiting at the door hoping my father would show up. The house was a one-room structure with only four or five candles illuminating it. I was casually talking to my mother saying it's all okay and just reassuring her that everything is okay. Suddenly my mother looked at me and was thanking me for being with her while she was alone and for protecting her.
The next thing I know I wake up. I thought it was an odd dream but didn't think much of it after I showered and went to work. Fast forward three days. It's a Friday night and my parents and I are outside in my front yard sitting around a fire talking. And my parents began to joke about how my mother used to pop my father's bike tires when they lived in Mexico. My parents are Mexican and came to the US in '95.
I ask what's the story behind that, and they begin to explain to me that back when my sister was born in 1991, they lived in an old shack in a poor part of a small town in Mexico for a year. My father had the habit of going out on his bike with friends to drink and not coming home until the next morning, so my mother would pop the tires on his bike so he wouldn't leave. I laughed and didn't think much else until they continued on about it.
My mother said she'd be terrified of being home alone in the tiny home because they lived in an alley known as "El callejon de la Llorona," which translates to “Alley of the weeping woman.” For those unfamiliar, the weeping woman is an urban legend in Mexico about a ghost woman who roams areas of Mexico and even parts of the US, weeping for her missing kids. Naturally, an alley named after the ghost is going to be terrifying as all get out.
My mother continued on by saying how terrified she was in that house all alone and how she would wait praying for my father to come home. My father then made a joke saying something along the lines of, "Why did you want me there, you claimed your guardian angel was protecting you." At this point I thought, "Wow, weird."
So I asked my mom more and she told me that she one night was visited by a man who seemingly came out of the wall, but she felt comfort and familiarity around him. He sat and spoke to her reassuring her it's okay before the man seemingly walked back into the wall. My mother said that after this, she felt a strong calmness around and was no longer afraid of being there.
This tripped me out, considering I was born in '98 and I had never heard a thing about my mother's story until after I had that dream. I'm not sure if it's just a coincidence or if it's something more complex.
86. Wheel Of Fortune
On July 15, 2013, at about 7:45 AM, I was on my way to work, approaching the intersection and getting ready to take a left-hand turn. This is a notoriously dangerous intersection on any day, and there have been many accidents there. It is hard to see if the intersection is clear from the right and the left turn is particularly hazardous.
I was running late and in a flustered state of mind. I looked to the right and believed that I had correctly viewed that nothing was approaching from the right, so I made the left turn. As I crossed the intersection, I glanced right once more and saw a vehicle heading straight for me at what could only have been in excess of 90 miles per hour. We saw each other.
I saw the look of terror in the other guy’s eyes. We were that close. A collision was absolutely inevitable. There is no way on this earth that it could have been avoided. What happens next is EXTREMELY difficult to describe, but I will do my best. Across from the front of the car on the left, in almost the opposite direction to the oncoming vehicle, was a field.
I suddenly became aware of a very large “object” approaching slowly on a diagonal across this field. It was coming directly towards my car. Time was not functioning normally while this was happening, if it was functioning at all. I had the space to notice this happening, but I can’t explain how I was able to do that. The object when I first saw it, appeared to be about the size of a ten-floor tower block.
It subjectively seemed to be about two or three hundred yards across the field. The object resembled a giant waterwheel lying on its side and rotating as it approached me and my vehicle. It got closer. I saw that my first observation about its size was wildly inaccurate. It was more like the size of a small city. As it got closer still, I understood that all scale and distance estimates were meaningless. It was larger than what we think of as the world.
As the object drew near to me, a kind of sensation came over my person and I knew exactly what this thing was. I had seen the object before I was born and I will see it again when I die. We all knew it before we were born. We will all see it when we die. But this information is eclipsed from us while we are alive. And that was why I was seeing it now in the experience, because I was in the process of dying in a fatal car crash.
The wheel WAS reality, itself. It represented EVERY CONCEIVABLE POSSIBILITY for a life or for a world that could ever be envisioned or imagined. As it approached, I became aware that what we call our world was contained within it. It was simply one of the numberless slots or paddles in the “water wheel.” At that moment, the truly terrifying dimension of this experience began.
Words cannot even begin to describe the level of fear I experienced. The water wheel sort of rolled across me and then across the place where my car was in the road. As it did so, I began to be hit by each of the paddles in the wheel. Imagine a film of water being thrown outward from the wheel in each slot, as if by centrifugal force.
Imagine being slapped or splashed by each of these films as you collide with it and pass through it to the next one. This is what was happening. Except these weren’t just films of water. They were (for lack of a better term) possible realities or what we might think of as universes or worlds. Again, our world, our entire universe as we normally think of it, was simply one among an infinite number of these.
The event, or perhaps the imminent event, on the highway had caused me to slip out of or fall between the paddles on the wheel. This structure had some kind of cosmic purpose of sorting things into their correct natural place. I was afraid and resisted being “sorted” so the wheel stepped up its aggressive attempts to “sort” me correctly.
With this came another understanding that frightened me even more. I knew that unless I soon selected one of these realities to slide back into, that the wheel would coerce the situation by deciding for me. I seemed to file or flip through numerous conceivable (quantum?) possibilities for the outcome of the accident. I began to grow extremely panicked.
Each time I thought I was just beginning to get a handle on things, I would be slapped over violently and ruthlessly into a new slot in the wheel. Then, it happened. I found myself back on the highway in what seemed to be a very short distance back up the road, still approaching the intersection.
This is just one of the many mysteries associated with the event that I cannot explain. Did I choose a world that was a version of our universe in which the accident hadn’t quite happened yet, but was just seconds away from happening? I can’t say, because I have no memory of making that decision. I remember the look on that driver’s face as clearly as if it were yesterday. I remember him bracing back on the wheel. But I braked as I reached the intersection and that driver, or his car, were simply nowhere to be seen.
87. The Break-In
About 10 years ago, in another town in another state, it was the middle of the night and I was sitting on a sofa with my then-boyfriend and our two lesbian friends, talking and eating donuts. It was almost 4 am. Now we were in the back room of his house, sort of an extra room, that really only had this sofa in it. The room is behind the kitchen and connects to the backyard and the basement.
The kitchen had a new mattress standing in it that was headed for the bedroom the following day. It was big so it took up most of that room. You couldn't really get to the sink or the microwave, but you could see the glow of the blue nightlight, and all the other lights in the house were off. I just happened to look over into the kitchen as one of the cats jumped off the counter and hightailed it out of the room.
That's when a shadow on the blue-lit wall caught my eyes. I immediately froze in fear. The shadow was the upper half of a man; a short bald man, and he was sketchy. He crouched and ducked, looked left and right, and then ran into the front living room. My immediate thought was "holy someone is breaking in." I thought I was seeing someone run by the outside of the house through the window.
I told everyone about this and as I was telling them it was slowly dawning on me that it is impossible that I would have seen someone who was outside cast a shadow from a nightlight inside the kitchen, from behind a mattress. Plus, the person would have to be extremely tall for me to see the entire upper half of their body crouched down if they were outside the kitchen window. My heart almost lurched out of my throat.
88. 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.
89. 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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90. A Driver’s Nightmare
I live in a small mountain town. It takes three hours to get to the nearest city. I make that drive two to three times a month, and have done it for ten years. I have the trip committed to memory. One night, I was making the drive at 2 AM to catch an early flight. I went through a big sweeping curve to the left… and all of a sudden, I was driving on a straight road. I KNEW there wasn’t a straight section on that highway for another 30 miles. I looked around, trying to figure out where I am.
There wasn’t a single highway sign on the side of the road. My phone had no service, so I couldn’t check my location. I looked out the window and realized the high desert scrub trees have been replaced with a thick forest. That’s something that we don’t have here. I kept looking at the clock for the next 15 minutes I was driving.
For some reason, I was on a straight road through this ominous dark forest, when I should’ve been on a curvy mountain pass in the desert. Right about the time I started to have a full-on panic attack, a sweeping left curve appeared, and I was finally out of the forest, back in the scrub. I chalked it up to drowsy driving and an overactive imagination, until IT HAPPENED AGAIN!
It happened two years later, at the same spot, except this time I wasn’t alone. I had my brother riding beside me on a similar airport run, when all of a sudden I was on that straight, forested road. This time, we were on that road for about five minutes. After about five minutes of driving down that dark, heavily forested road, my brother looked around, and finally asked, “Where are we?” As soon as he asked that, cue the sweeping left curve appearing, and after taking it, we were suddenly back in the desert. Even though I can’t explain it, I’m at least grateful I had a witness.
91. Just Another Manic Monday
About 4 or 5 years ago I worked at a Little Caesars Pizza. Usually I would work inside on the pizzas but we had just started up this Monday Madness deal where pizzas were only $4 on Monday so we needed someone to advertise. I was a wild and weird metalhead so I took up the position on Mondays of just going out there, throwing around a sign to get attention and bring people in for pizza. Not exactly glamorous but I had fun.
One day while I was out there doing my thing, I see a van coming straight at me. It jumps the curb and slams into me. I feel it crush me against the electrical box controlling the street lights. I see a quick flash as the traffic lights flick off…then I black out. I open my eyes with a gasp and I'm still on the corner and nothing has happened. No van or anything—but the story doesn’t end there.
Well, I was a little shaken up so I decide to pack it up and walk back to the store for a break. I walk no more than 15 feet away from the corner when I hear a crash. I look back and a van just hopped the curb into the electrical box and I watch the traffic lights flick off. Needless to say, I took the day off. Still think about that from time to time.
92. Nine Lives, Two Stories
When I was in high school my little sister, mom, and I would eat dinner together every evening and tell each other about our days. At the time my sister was young, only in elementary school. On a Monday during summer break we were all having dinner and my sister told us about how she and our next-door neighbors were playing with their new cat when it got loose outside. They had to spend the whole day looking for it.
Fast forward two days at dinnertime, my sister tells the exact same story from two days prior. My mom and I looked at each other funny because we both clearly remembered the cat story. When we asked my sister if she had mistaken the day since she told us the story on Monday, she just gave us this blank look and had no memory of it.
The creepy part is, when we called our neighbors to ask them about the cat incident they told us all of it happened that day, Wednesday, and they weren't even in town on Monday.
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93. Down The Rabbit Hole
My mother did all her GYN appointments with a doctor in downtown Austin. He was on the 5th floor of this hospital building and had a long time nurse/receptionist named Alison. I remember attending her appointments when I was little and my mother would make a game out of finding the office and being in the waiting room, which was colorfully decorated with a forest scene.
Alison was a super sweet woman who was half babysitter for us kids, too. She would read us books and give us coloring books and occasionally even listen to our dreadful knock-knock jokes. We all referred to her as Alison Wonderland. Anyway, years down the road, I got married and pregnant and started searching for an OB since I had moved back to Austin relatively recently before that.
My mother suggested I go see if that doctor, who had been super young when I was born, was still in business. Well, I could not find his name in the hospital directory, so I figured I would just swing by the office and check. My mother happened to be in town—she had moved years ago—and came with me. We both joked about it being so familiar but reversed situations now.
As we reach the stairs, we ran into a problem. There was no fifth floor of this hospital office building. Odd. We both must have misremembered it. We knew it was on the top floor, so it must have been the fourth. Nope, not there. We thought maybe we were in the wrong building. Except we parked in the same parking garage thing from 20 years ago and walked the same route.
That doctor does not exist. Never did, apparently. My mother and my brother and I are the only ones who remember him and Allison Wonderland. We have asked around, including among the hospital staff. We even looked up our birth certificates which are new copies and just list "Attending physician." One of my childhood memories is fake, but shared with my brother and my mother.
94. Dark Double
This not only happened to me but to almost everyone in my class in my junior year of high school. So basically, one of our teachers was checking attendance for his class, and he noticed that one girl in our class was marked "absent" for the previous day. He asked her why, and she said that she was sick, or something like that. This sent a chill through the entire class.
It left me (and probably 80-90%) of the people in our class bewildered because we could have sworn that we SAW her in class and in school the day before. I really thought I saw her walking right outside our classroom, too. The next 10-15 minutes was pretty much almost everyone saying that they could have sworn that they saw that girl in question the day before, and giving their accounts of where they saw her.
It turns out, that the girl really wasn't in school. This still creeps me out to this day.
95. Nighty Night
A few years back, I was talking to my parents late at night. Their room leads to a corridor, which has a door to the bathroom and a door for my room. I said goodnight to both of them, and they responded each with "good night." Then I closed the door to their room and walked down the corridor to mine. When I was by the bathroom door, a voice whispered in my ear "good night" with deepest, raspiest, and spookiest voice I have ever heard.
I froze for a second, opened the door to my parents again, and asked if they had spoken to me. They both denied it, so I calmly closed the door and then bolted to my room. I cried myself to sleep that night.
96. Sometimes, One Guy Can Ruin It For Everyone Else
I went to my wife's last reunion a few months ago. The day of the reunion she got a call saying that it was canceled. Apparently, five years earlier a classmate got creepy and stalkery with another classmate. The people organizing the reunion invited him, expecting him not to show up. Then the guy posted some vague threats on his social media accounts.
They did actually change the venue and have the reunion, but there were many people that couldn't be contacted with the updated info.
97. The Widowed
So, my mom remarried about two years ago. My dad died when I was twelve so she had been widowed for over ten years. This new relationship was very whirlwind with her meeting the guy, dating him, and getting married within three months. I didn't know much about the guy, but my mom was happy, so I just tried to be supportive. She moved into his house in upstate Virginia and invited me and my fiancé to spend a weekend in her new home getting to know her new husband.
My mom's new home was pretty isolated. It sat on a few hundred acres of lovely rolling hills, and was very picturesque. I was nervous about getting to know this guy, but really trying to make the most of it. Over the course of our first day there though, I started to feel more and more uneasy. We were being made to feel very at home, yet I still couldn't shake this oppressive feeling. I finally chalked it up to me being more upset about my mom getting remarried than I was willing to admit to myself.
That night, my fiancé and I showered together. When I turned my back to him he stopped talking mid-sentence and asked, "What did you do to your back?" Well, nothing. Why? "You have a large bruise." I hopped out to try and see it in the mirror. He was right. It was so strange; I had no idea how it got there, and the whole thing made me feel even more creeped out.
The next morning I had a complete meltdown. I woke up and just couldn't stop crying. I told my fiancé we had to leave. He tried to calm me down by telling me all the things I had been telling myself. My feelings of anxiety were just a result of seeing my mom with someone. The longer I spent with them the easier it would become. But I just had to leave, I felt completely hysterical. I knew I was on the verge of a panic attack, so in the end, my fiancé drove me away.
As soon as we were on the road I felt like a weight had been lifted. I was even feeling embarrassed for my behavior, hoping I hadn't insulted my mom's husband by leaving early. Then my fiancé broke the silence, "That bruise on your back....did you get a good look at it?" I had. It looked like some had touched the middle of my back, with fingers spread wide, with their hand at a tilt. I want to make completely clear, no one had touched my back the previous day, especially hard enough to bruise me.
Cut to three weeks later. My mom comes to visit me. The entire time she's hounding me to come stay with her again. After finally trying to change the subject for the fifth time, I level with her. Before I've even finished telling the story her face is white as a sheet. She tells me she has been feeling the same way in the house. She hates it. She wants them to move as soon as possible. And the real kicker...her new husband's previous wife shot and killed herself in the house.
98. 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.
99. The Doppelganger
It happened in early 2000, when I was working at a juvenile detention center in a small town in Oklahoma as a corrections officer. I was working nights at the time and went to work at 9 PM. This one night when I arrived for work my supervisor looked confused and asked me what I was doing there. I said, "I work tonight." And he said, "But they said you called in a few hours ago saying that you were sick."
I was a bit confused and said, "It must have been someone else and they got the message wrong." After everyone else showed up for work that night it was a bit weirder, but we carried on as usual and assigned everyone their places for the night; I went to work in the control room where I usually work. The control room is the center of the place, and it has direct control over the cameras, doors, phones, pretty much everything.
After I relieved the guard on duty and settled in for the night, I looked at the message that said I called in. It said that I had called at 6:50 and said that I had gotten sick while out cleaning up after the storm. There had been a storm the night before and it was a bit bad, but not anything that I had to go out to clean up. It was truly weird—and it was about to get weirder.
The supervisor came into the control about that time. He was also a friend of mine outside work and we started talking about it, and how odd it was. I decided to call my wife at home and tell her about it while he was still sitting there. I picked up the phone and dialed. After two rings a man picked up the phone and with a raspy voice said, "Hello?"
I didn't know what to say for a few seconds. I looked at the phone to make sure I dialed the right number, and I had. After a few seconds, the person said, "Hello?" again in the same raspy voice. I said, "Hello. Who is this?" They replied, "This is Taylor, who is this?" My head started spinning. My name is Taylor. In almost a scream I said: "Where’s Ann?"
He said, "Ann's in bed. Who is this?" I dropped the phone and told my supervisor to ring me out, I had to get home, and I took off towards the door. I could hear Dave pick up the phone behind me and say, "Hello?" followed soon after by "What the heck!" rather loudly. I ran to my car and drove home faster than I should have, my mind racing the entire time.
I busted through the door and my wife was sitting watching TV and was shocked at me being home. I asked her who was there and she said no one has been over. After a rather long talk with my wife, I went to call the center to tell them what was going on, but the phone was dead. I went back to work and when I came in, Dave was acting weird and asked me, "How are you doing this?"
He told me that when I left, he picked up the phone and the person on the other end sounded like me. He kind of freaked out and hung up the phone. A minute later, as he could see my car leaving the parking lot, the phone rang. What he heard made his blood run cold. He said that I had called back from home and asked what the heck was going on.
He said that I was a bit irate and said I was sick and did not feel like playing these games and was telling him to stop prank calling me and hung up. After convincing him I had no idea what was going on, we went back to work. Later, I find out that the phone line for my area had been knocked down the night before by the storm.
This is absolutely the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.
100. 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."
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