From getting a mysterious cut to misplacing our keys, from a bruise on our leg to missing an entire hour, from the masterpiece we created who knows when to that new pet our neighbor now seems to have acquired, we've all had a “...How??” moment. We try to rationalize most of these moments, and sometimes even solve these mysteries. However, some experiences remain shrouded in mystery—a real-life glitch in the matrix. Read on to find out about some such moments experienced by our readers.
1. The Lady in the Pink Dress
My two-year-old toddler went to a two-hour class three times a week at the local church. This was in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. I should mention that this church was on the main road through town, which often had logging trucks carrying tons of wood driving on it. I went to pick up my son one day, and I could see he had been crying.
He had puffy, red eyes, and he confirmed as much when he said, “Mommy, I cried!” His teacher looked equally distraught. She said, “I need you to stay after class.” A few of the other kids were still there, waiting for their moms. I sat there with my son, and my heart was pounding. Had he bitten another child or something?
That wasn’t like him, but with kids you never know. All the students finally left, and his teacher turned to me and said, “As you know, we had an outing today.” I had signed a release form for the outing, which was for them to leave the school and walk next door to look at the fountain. She continued, “We used the buddy system walking over and back, but once I got to the classroom and counted the kids, I realized one was missing.”
By now, the teacher was almost crying herself. As I said, this church was on a main road. My child had somehow gotten separated from the others, and was alone, unsupervised, for five to ten minutes just yards from a busy main road with fully loaded lumber diesel trucks whizzing by. The teacher continued, “I ran as fast as I could to go look for him. He was standing at the main door, pounding at it to get in and screaming. I’m so sorry.”
Apparently, he had somehow found his way back to the main building, standing outside until someone found him. At this point, my son piped up. “The pink lady helped me!” I gathered my son up and took him home, telling his teacher that it was okay, these things happened, thank God it turned out fine, etc. I felt bad that she was so upset, but I was rattled to the core.
It was terrifying just imagining my toddler running loose next to a busy street, and he was clearly traumatized by it. On the way home, I asked him, “Who is the pink lady?” At that time, if he didn’t know someone’s name, he’d identify them by what color they were wearing, so the pink lady must have been wearing pink clothing.
I wanted to know who this was, because if she “helped” him, as he said, then this person found a lost toddler, led my son up to the outside of a building, and just left him there without trying to find an adult or even opening the door to let him inside. What adult would do that? My son knew the names of all the people at the school, so this was a stranger to him.
When my husband got home, I told him the whole story, with my son again babbling about a “pink lady.” My husband got a very strange look on his face and said, “You know, my grandmother was buried in her favorite pink dress.”
2. Better A Baker Than A Butcher
When I was very young, less than four, I was afraid of going to the bathroom alone because I thought there was an old man in it with a baker's hat. I still remember his face. One night, I was forced by my mother to go alone and be brave and, I swear, there he was just standing there. I froze in fear and then I remember running back.
I ran into my mother who was just standing there with a weird look on her face. All she said was, "See, I told you it's nothing to be afraid of," in a shaky voice and she pulled me away from there. I think she saw him but couldn't process it herself.
3. Keeping It Quiet
My grandmother and my brother would sit under the Christmas tree playing with the train decoration running around it. She passed a few weeks before Christmas when I was very young. After her funeral, every night, at different times after midnight when we had all gone upstairs to bed, the train would turn itself on and my mom would go down and turn it off.
After a week, my mom exasperatedly yelled down the stairs "Enough, (grandma's name), we miss you but we need sleep!" The train stopped and never turned itself back on again. After that Christmas, my mom refused to put a train under the tree. We gave it to our uncle who was a train enthusiast. He never had it turn on by itself after all these years.
4. Open Up, It’s An Emergency!
15 years old, I was taking a shower at home. The rest of my family was out and it was around 9:30 at night. I heard someone knock on the bathroom door while I was showering, so I called out, "I'll be out in a sec!" thinking it's just my dad or one of my brothers getting home. There was silence for a few moments, and then knocking again.
Only this time it was pounding, like someone was banging on it with their fists, trying to break it down bare-handed. It was a little creepy, but my dad always loved to prank us so I didn't think too much of it. I decided to get a towel around me and see what his problem was anyway, but when I opened the door, no one was there.
The house was locked up, no open windows. There were no cars in the driveway. I checked every floor, every room. No one else was home. That was the first occurrence; the weird happenings continued in smaller ways until we moved out of that house, to the point that we imagined it to be some sort of Poltergeist and named it Edgar.
5. Light-Fingered
When I was in kindergarten or maybe the first grade, we had a blackout at my school, and this kid went, “Wait, I’ll light a match,” and proceeded to pretend to light an invisible match. The lights came back on instantly, and we cheered for him. Then he said, “Oh, it’s too hot,” and he pretended to to extinguish the match out, then the lights went back out immediately. Wizardry.
6. Space Doughnuts
Years ago, myself, my buddy, and a friend of his are out in the boonies, lighting off fireworks for the 4th of July. We go out to the cars to light the stick for igniting the fireworks. As my buddy's buddy is in the car doing so, I look up at all the stars, completely unused to seeing so many. As I'm looking, something just feels off.
I finally pinpoint it and start squinting my eyes, looking away and back, everything I can think of to make sure that I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing. It's one point of light absolutely identical to the stars around it, except for one weirdness: It's doing a steady, repeating figure eight. I turn to my buddy to ask him about it and I see him staring at the same area of sky.
So, I ask him, "Do you see what I see?" I hadn't said a word about what I saw, but he answered back, "A star doing a figure eight?" I've tried to explain it by any logical means over the years, but nothing quite matches up and I refuse to accept that a figure eight in space is the alien teenager version of doing doughnuts in a parking lot.
Model Republique, Shutterstock
7. Giggling Fit
When my daughter was about 18 months old, her grandmother lost her life. That evening, I put my daughter to bed as normal, but instead of going to sleep pretty quickly as she usually did, she spent over an hour giggling and squealing with laughter. When I went to check on her, she was staring at an empty chair in her room, laughing as if she was watching the funniest thing ever. This carried on every night until the day of her grandmother's funeral.
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8. Non-Musical Chairs
I am home alone with my sister who is about three at the time. She’s sleeping in my room and I walk out to go to the bathroom. No one else is in the house but, as I’m in there handling business, I start hearing the chairs moving in the kitchen. I come out of the restroom and look to my left where I find the dining table chair moved and placed perfectly staring down the hallway.
I go back to check on my sister and she’s still sleeping. I walk around the house to see if my parents are home and nothing. The doors and windows are shut so there’s no way wind could’ve pushed this chair five feet (1.5 meters) and turned it to face down the hall.
9. Bed-Sharing
It was four in the morning, I was lying on the bed and watching a video on YouTube. Suddenly, I felt like someone jump up on the edge of the bed. At first, I thought it was one of the cats, but turning my head towards the chairs on which they usually slept, I made sure that both of my cats are there. The worst thing was that they were looking exactly at the edge of the bed. Turning around, I saw an imprint there as if someone was sitting there or something small was lying. As soon as I looked at it, it disappeared.
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10. See That Guy?
In the place where my parents used to live, there was this old couch. My mom sometimes would walk by in the middle of the night and see a silhouette sitting there. She describes it as a man, sitting down, with a hat on, just sitting there. She saw it several times but thought nothing of it. She never told my dad, who one day said to her, "It's weird, but sometimes in the middle of the night I think I see a man sitting down on the couch doing nothing."
It turned out they both saw the same man sitting on this couch, and they realized this when they told each other after they'd both seen him.
11. The Side Of The Tiger
I had to have my pet dog put to sleep. That night I dreamed that he was at first protecting the house from a tiger, then became friends and began playing with the tiger. When we went to pick up his ashes after cremation, we were told, "He's been in good company; we've kept his ashes next to those of a tiger who was recently cremated."
12. Built-in Translator
I was once at McDonald’s with my best friend who was a girl from Holland. Both her parents were Dutch and she was born there but moved to America quite young. We had just sat down to start eating when the father asked, "Does anyone know where the straws are?" Knowing where the straws were, and knowing they were freely paying for my meal, I quickly shot up and grabbed a straw for the father.
“Here you are,” I added. I then realized that they were sat staring at me like I was an alien. Now, I only know how to speak English and bad English, but apparently, the father had made this request completely in Dutch. But I would swear on a painful end that I, 100% clearly, heard the request made in English. Not only that, the translation is completely different, so it was not as if I picked up the body language and my mind did the rest of the translating. This only further confused them, and does me to this day.
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13. Just Changing The Bulb
I was outside talking to my neighbor. Suddenly, it was like someone accidentally flicked the lights off and then back on. It was dark in the middle of the day as far as I could see for just a split second. I thought it was just my brain but then I saw my neighbor looked confused as well. Then her daughter said, "What just happened?"
We all were looking in opposite directions so it was just suddenly dark everywhere. We still talk about it sometimes. No idea what it was. I've spent hours on the internet trying to find answers with no success.
14. Said The Spider To The Fly
I came home after a miserable day during my teen years once, and because I didn't have my keys, I knocked to have my sister come down. When she opened the door, her eyes were wide with panic. She asked, "Did you just get home?" I said, "Yeah, just now. Why?" She started jumping up and down like she was shaking off spiders.
She then told me that she'd been hearing my voice from my room telling her to come in. I said, "No, I haven't been home all day. Did you go in my room?" She said, "No, it was your voice... but I guess... quietly malicious? It just felt off." She then called her boyfriend to pick her up and stayed overnight with him and left me in this creepy situation by myself. I, thankfully, didn't hear anything else that night though.
15. Sleeping Beauty
When I was around 15, my parents left me home alone for the weekend, and I thought, “This is awesome. I can chill, play games all weekend and eat what I want.” I went to sleep Friday night, and then woke up to my mum waking me up to what I thought was the next morning. So, I asked, “What happened? I thought you were going out the whole weekend?”
To this she replied, “What are you talking about? It's 4pm Sunday.” I have no idea what happened to those two days. I didn't leave the house. There was no food or washing up that had changed since they left. I hadn't looked at my phone, there were unread messages from Saturday morning. But I refuse to believe that I was asleep the whole time.
16. That Funny Feeling
I was staying late at work with some colleagues. Our office was located around the 40-50th floor of the building. I suddenly had a really strong thought that if an earthquake were to hit now, the dash downstairs would be chaotic. I tried to brush it off but couldn't, the feeling was so strong. And it's not like I'm not used to working in high-rise buildings.
I'd been working at the place for around two years at that point, and had never felt that way before or since. I decided to leave and work from home, which was only 15 minutes away on foot. Just as I arrived at home, an earthquake struck. It was pretty intense, and thankfully everyone at the office was all right, just freaked out. But it was so strange that something just told me to leave just minutes before it happened.
17. Saying Goodbye
Two days after we lost one of my closest, dearest friends, I fell asleep in the library at school. This was after a horrific couple of days trying to process everything and function normally at the same time—I was massively sleep-deprived. I placed my head in my arms on the library desk, and I woke up, and there he was beside me.
It was a scenario that had happened so many times—us revising and hanging out in the library together, whispering jokes and banter—it didn't feel strange at all. We stood up and wandered around, watched one librarian putting books away on shelves. There was a girl reading a book sitting on the floor with sickly bright yellow socks, and my friend made some silly Dad-joke about them being too "loud for the library."
We chatted in low voices, about nothing much—the usual chit-chat—and then went back to the desks. I woke up and he was gone, of course. I was startled but weirdly euphoric. I went over the same set of shelves and had déjà vu: saw the same librarian putting away the books and the same girl with the yellow socks still there sitting on the floor reading.
I swear to this day that I hadn't seen them before I went to sleep. I like to think it was his way of saying goodbye. It helped me immensely, even though I know it was probably just a dream. But the socks thing has always stuck with me, and anytime I see a pair of 'loud' yellow socks now, I think of him and our final chat.
18. A Rectangle In A Round World
I was walking to my friend's house one summer, maybe when I was 10 or 11 years old. It was a sunny day. There were a couple clouds but otherwise, it was bright out—perfect visibility—when a perfectly rectangular shadow came up from the direction behind me on the ground, maybe 15' x 30' in size, traveling just faster than a car probably would be and went over top of me.
I was looking at the shape on the ground as it went over, and when I did look up to the sky, I didn’t see anything that could have possibly cast it. Even the clouds were just trailing little wisps. I looked back down, and it was going over some houses. And then it was gone forever—a Mystery Rectangle Shadow.
19. A Shoe-In
My boyfriend and I were downstairs in the kitchen making dinner. We were the only two in the house. I went upstairs to get something and a shoe came flying at me from the top of the stairs. It went right over my shoulder. I had no pets. I had my boyfriend check it out and nothing was unusual or different. I had to dodge that shoe; it was undoubtedly launched at me.
20. By A Stairs' Breadth
One night, when I was about 16 years old, I'd finally decided to get off my computer and go to bed, around 2 am if memory serves me correctly. At that time my family and I lived in a decently-sized two-story house. The staircase to the second floor was pretty basic: head up a few steps, turn on a landing halfway up, traverse the remaining few steps, and at the top you're only a couple of footfalls from my bedroom door.
Someone please explain to me, then, how I got lost on this staircase. Sure, it was dark, but even then you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to not know how to walk up these stairs after you've already done it a thousand times before. Just keep one hand on the railing and you don't need to use your eyes. I swear that as soon as I reached the landing, I spent ten minutes just...continually walking upwards.
Realistically it only takes someone five to seven seconds to walk up these stairs, three if they're running or skipping steps. I realized I'd been walking for much longer than that and stopped. At that moment, my blood ran cold. I'd walked up those stairs in pitch-black darkness so many times before, but even with my hand on the railing I was getting nowhere, just endlessly walking upwards.
My skin crawled. If my brother hadn't turned on the upstairs hallway light, I'm not sure I would've made it to my bedroom. The guy blinked sleepily at me and asked me if I was okay, and all I could say was, "I legitimately have no idea." I told him the next day what had happened and he told me that the reason he'd come out of his room in the first place was that he'd heard footsteps on the stairs "for several minutes."
What in the world, man? What was that? I wasn't so tired that I just mindlessly walked up and down the stairs for a while. I was completely awake, and not once did it suddenly feel like I'd turned around to walk back downstairs at any time. I still get chills thinking about it.
21. A Last Cuddle
When I was about 11, we took in a dog—a big one—for somebody who was very old. He wasn't in great health anymore, but we were supposed to be his final happy home, since we lived out in the middle of nowhere. We had him for about a year when one night I just randomly decided to go outside to sit with him—since he refused to go indoors—and pet him.
I sat outside and laid down on him (he was a pretty big dog) for probably an hour even though it was a pretty chilly winter night, despite there being a space heater in the sheltered area where he would usually lay down. I don't know what possessed me to say it, but I gave him a big hug right before I went inside and told him that it was okay to go.
The next morning, my mom woke me up to tell me that he had perished during the night. I helped her move his body to somewhere not out in the middle of the open so the owner could come say their final goodbye, and that was it. Honestly, I still don't understand how I knew, but I think I just empathized with his pain and told him that it was okay to let go and not have to keep living for us.
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22. A Tiny Visitor
This happened probably five years ago. I was asleep in my room when my eyes suddenly opened at about 2:30 am. I was wide awake. My senses were heightened and it felt like someone or something was in my room. In the darkness, I saw an outline of something underneath my desk. It was almost like a really tiny man, maybe a foot tall give or take.
At this point, I'm totally perplexed but not really scared until I see it start to move out from under my desk and across my room. The light switch is right next to my bed, so I decided that in one motion I was going to turn on the light switch and jump on this thing the second it got near my bed. This thing gets near my bed, but I messed up and fumbled with the light switch.
I also missed when I dove at it. But I kid you not, I watched this thing move through my bedroom wall. I just sat on my bed trying to figure out what had happened. Little did I know, this nightmare was just beginning. Now, my brother had the room right next to mine, right behind the wall this thing went through. About ten minutes later my brother knocks on my door and comes in.
The first words out of his mouth were, "Did you happen to see like a little tiny human in here a little bit ago?" I was pretty shocked, and I told him that I indeed had. He replied with, "Well, I just watched something dart across my room and it looked like it came from the wall and then it disappeared through the wall and to outside."
To say I was stunned would be an understatement, but I was also thrilled that I didn't have psychosis. But, a little while later, perhaps a year passes and I am driving in my car and I'm listening to some late-night radio host, and he had a guest on. The guest proceeds to describe something that happened to him and it was almost exactly what my brother and I experienced.
23. Lost And Found
I was about 18 or 19, and at the time worked an hour away from home. It was a commute of two bus rides, a train ride, and then a 15-minute walk. As it was in a lawyer’s office, I used to take my sneakers to walk in rather than “work shoes.” One morning, I got up, took my watch off, had a shower—all as normal. I got out, and couldn’t find my watch for anything.
I was searching everywhere, pulling everything out of the bathroom cabinets, etc. Eventually, I gave it up as a bad job, and carried on with my day. I got to work, told my boss I’d lost my watch, and was paranoid the whole time I would be late. He looked up and said, “It’s in your right Adidas.” He followed me to my desk, and my watch was in my sneaker.
The sneaker I’d just taken off after two bus journeys, a train ride, and a 15-minute walk. I have no idea how it came to be in there or how my boss knew. He said he didn’t know why he said it, it came out his mouth before he could think about what he was saying!
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24. Remotely Controlled
My buddy and I were chilling watching TV in the living room. I was on the far-right, and he was on the far-left end of the sofa. The remote was in the middle, a good two feet away from either of us. Suddenly, it flung itself up in the air and toward the TV without either of us moving a muscle. We just looked at the spot it was in, then each other, then back to the TV and didn’t say anything about it until years later talking with friends.
25. Sweet Dreams
When I was a kid, I had a dream about visiting a city made of chocolate where I was walking, I tasted all the chocolate houses, flowers, etc. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling really sick, ran into the bathroom and the vomit was all chocolate. I swear I didn't eat any before I went to bed, we rarely kept sweets at home! It is still a mystery to me.
26. Into The Rainbow
I drive down the same road every day to get into town and on the horizon are the Chiltern Hills. I grew up on and around them so I know them well and the surrounding area. One day there was a rainbow as I drove down that road, and I went through it. Rather than seeing the familiar greens and chalk of the hills I was used to, I swear I saw a vast Industrial complex.
It was huge with multiple dark buildings and chimneys belching out smoke. It lasted as long as the rainbow was there and could only be seen through it. There are no buildings like that for many miles around or ever have been as far as I'm aware.
27. Give Me A Sign
I can vividly remember the day an ex of mine wanted to get back together. I was conflicted, I knew that I didn't want to be with him but I've also always been a loyal person. I asked for a sign from the universe while I was sitting in my company break room and, when I came out of my thoughts, I noticed an extremely attractive guy I'd never seen before.
He started talking to me and one thing led to another. Well, the mystery work guy and I are married now. I've never been a religious person but for the life of me I can't understand how he showed up in my life at that exact moment, especially considering that we worked together and that was the first time I'd ever seen him. Thanks, Universe!
28. A Juicy Bit
I was going through the airport metal detector when I found an orange juice in my bag. I had to drink it because it wouldn’t pass through the security being over the liquid limits allowed to enter a plane. Having finished it, I passed through the security. One hour later, as I was waiting to enter the plane. I found the same orange juice in my bag as though it had never been touched.
29. A Punch To The Arm
I woke up with a hole in my arm. Yes. a hole. Not a cut or something like that, but a 1/2 inch (3.8 centimeters) wide 1/2 inch (3.8 centimeters) deep hole. It was like it was punched out and the skin and tissue were missing. Adding to the weirdness, it didn't bleed that bad. A bit but not as bad as you would think. I went to urgent care to get it stitched up and everyone there kept asking me how it happened. Since I couldn't tell them, they got worried about infection and sent me to the ER.
30. Singing Along
My college roommate worked at the radio station and brought home albums right when they were released so that he could decide if he wanted to play anything from them and just for general enjoyment. One album he brought home was Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Toward Ecstasy. We listened together, enjoying it well enough, and when the fifth track, “Mary,” came on, I sang along, as I knew it by heart.
My roommate looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “Oh. I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve known this song my whole life.” The song was written for that album, just like all the other tracks. It wasn’t a cover and had never been released before. It isn’t particularly important to me, it’s just that I remembered it the same way that I could remember the Carole King and Sheena Easton songs my parents played in the seventies.
It was just something I had always known. I’m a skeptic and this is clearly impossible. I have spent real time trying to find some reference to this track having been written well before the rest of the album and maybe covered or performed elsewhere, but I’ve found no such evidence. It is really unimportant but just so inexplicable.
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31. Flight Of Fancy
I started bird watching this year and a couple of months ago I had a dream that I saw a violet-green swallow for the first time. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw a violet-green swallow in real life, and I felt like I had a mini spiritual experience seeing it. I even took a blurry picture.
32. Feeling It In The Bones
I had graduated high school and moved back to where I grew up as a young child. I moved in with my grandma. I had been visiting a chiropractor where I had lived previously due to injuries. Since coming here, I had been telling my grandma that I needed to find a chiropractor in that area as my back was giving me issues.
Too much powerlifting without proper instruction and wrestling had done a number on it. Then, the first weekend that I was there, we went to the grocery store to get some food. In one aisle a lady started talking to me like we already knew each other. I wondered for a little bit if it wasn't somebody from the church that I had attended as a child. Then she said something that made my stomach drop.
She told me never to go to the chiropractor. When I asked her about it, she told me that their adjustments can go wrong and there was a young man that she knew who lost his life after having a spinal adjustment. This freaked me out a little bit because I had a spinal adjustment that actually allowed me to continue to play.
But this lady continued to tell me about how people had lost their lives after chiropractic adjustments. There was no lead-up to this conversation other than her saying that I looked athletic and might consider it. The second that the conversation ended my grandma walked back up to me and asked what I was doing. I told her I had just been talking to the lady right there.
I also mentioned how funny it was that she walked up to me talking about chiropractors after I had just told her an hour ago that I needed to find one. My grandma asked what lady I was talking about because she never saw me talking to one as I was perusing the items on that aisle. I turned to point her out but she wasn't there. I don't know if the conversation with my grandmother had lasted longer than I had thought or there was another explanation.
33. Getting Warm
I stayed in a luxurious resort on a small island with three of my friends when we were in high school. My friend's dad was the manager. This was a tiny island. You could walk around in less than a day and there were only a few suites. Very exclusive and it was far from the nearest town. At night, it would get really dark and peaceful.
The staff there always talked about how they have had strange or ghostly encounters throughout the years. Full disclosure, this island was used as a camp/hiding place for serviceman back in the day. It still has the lighthouse that they used and that's over hundreds of years old. Anyway, our room had two king-sized beds. In the middle of the night, while everyone else was asleep, I woke up suddenly and felt extremely hot.
I was sweating like crazy even though the A/C was on full blast and it was blowing straight at me. I felt something weird, like a presence, next to my side of the bed. I've never felt so scared in my entire life. I was shaking and sweating profusely. But what was really crazy was that only one side of my body was hot, the one by the edge of the bed. The other was cold.
I hid under the blanket and closed my eyes as hard as I could because I was afraid that if I opened them, I would see something. I felt the energy of that presence get closer to me, like we were face to face. I kept inching towards my friend who was sleeping next to me. After a while, it suddenly disappeared and I wasn't hot anymore. The next morning, I didn't mention it to anyone until they talked about how it was so cold in the bedroom that they were freezing the whole night.
Then I told them what I had felt that night. My friend who slept beside me got really quiet. She told me not to freak out but she woke up last night too, and she saw a girl standing next to my side of the bed and just staring right at me. I've never not believed in ghosts, but I also don't necessarily believe in them. But I just can't explain that night. It was the first time I had experienced a feeling I just couldn't explain or shake off. It still bothers me to this day.
34. Snowy Sighting
A friend and I were up at his mountain house. It was snowing and we were setting up some ramps at the bottom of a hill to do some snowboarding the next day. I accidentally dropped my keys while we were out there and did not notice until it got dark. We went back out to the trail to see if we could spot them and when we got out of the woods to a clearing, we saw a silhouette of a child on a hill across from us.
The kid was standing under a tree laughing. It was late, snowing, and cold so we were sketched out by it and kind of hustled back to the house. The next day we went back out, and there was a single gravestone on the top of the hill under the tree for a 12-year-old child. I am not someone who believes in ghosts but I have no explanation for what we saw. I am actually getting chills remembering it now.
35. In A Tizzy
I was running a smallish cargo ship from Washington to Alaska one night, I was alone on watch, and it was around 2 am. Inexplicably, the ship lost autopilot, radar, and started spinning. It was relative chaos until I was able to wake the captain and get things under control. This was near a dangerous reef as well. Three years later I married a man from Alaska and we moved to his cottage by the sea, and, from my kitchen window, I can see the spot where I spun out.
36. Rewinding Up
I was driving from Northern California to Southern California through the middle of the night about a decade ago. I was tired, and the scenery along the freeway through the central valley isn't very interesting. I remember passing an old silo, looking at my car clock and it was 3:17 in the morning. I drove some more, passed a powerline, and it was 3:21.
I blinked, shuffled in my seat, and passed that same old silo, and it was back to 3:17. I was in disbelief. I just stared at my clock for a few moments. I drove a little bit more, passed the same powerline, and it was again 3:21. I don't know why or how, but I went backward by about four minutes. I have never experienced anything similar or since.
37. A Pressing Concern
You know how on cold days inside your car you can breathe on the window and draw on the glass? Well, I got in my car, and as I looked at the windshield, I saw a few small baby handprints. I thought that it was strange that someone would let a baby play on my car’s windshield. I had an urge to touch the baby prints and as I touched it, I wiped away the handprints. The handprints were made from inside of my locked car.
38. Best Laid Plans
Since I was a child, I’d had a nightmare about this haunted house and, specifically, the balcony and upstairs. The upstairs floor plan was such that there was a hallway running horizontally, with each door to the left facing the balcony. I would be extremely unnerved in my dream, walking down this hallway, the hair on my neck standing up, just feeling the presence of evil.
In 2019, my wife and I went to an architect to design a house for us to build in the Acadian/Creole style. The upstairs floor plan was exactly like the one in my nightmare. We scrapped the plans. And it’s a good thing—we all know how 2020 turned out. I feel like someone was warning me not to build that house ever since I was a child.
39. Berry Scary
Once, as a kid, I was at a friend's house after school. It was a sunny day so we, with his younger brother, went to the park near his house, then through the woods there. In these woods, beside the path, there were red berries on the ground. The berries had been arranged into three stick figures, which was weird as there were three of us.
We got back to the house, and my friend and I decided to go back to take another look while his brother stayed at the house. When we got back there were only two stick figures. My friend snapped a photo on his phone then kicked the berries and we ran back to the house. I have no idea what was going on; was it just some kind of prank being pulled on us?
40. Doppelgänger Houseguest
In college, I was roommates with my childhood best friend for about two years. We are very trusting of each other; we would go into each other’s room freely and grab whatever we needed. We would borrow clothes, hairbrushes, perfume, etc. There were no questions asked, just a knock if we were in the room to let each other know we were going in.
Our rooms are across the hall from each other, with the hall facing the kitchen. So, from the kitchen you could see down the hall where our rooms were. At the time my friend had very long black hair and she’s very fair-skinned. One day, I get home from work, with my headphones in my ears talking to my mom about my day.
I go in the kitchen and grab a snack. I see her walk out of her room and go into mine, leave my room and go back into hers. She looks like she has just gotten out of the shower, her hair is soaking wet and she is wrapped in a white towel. Her long black wet hair is what I distinctly remember. Also, she makes no eye contact with me but I don’t think it was weird.
I don’t say anything to her since borrowing each other’s stuff was normal. I’m still on the phone with my mom so I don’t think much of it. I grab my snack, hang up with my mom and go into my room to watch TV. I figure she’s getting ready to go somewhere and we’ll talk later. About an hour passes and I go to the kitchen to clean the plate I ate on.
I see her in the kitchen making something to eat and I tell her, “Hey, what did you grab from my room earlier? Did you find what you needed?” She looks at me like I was crazy and says, “What are you talking about?” So, I say, “Yeah, earlier when I got home, I saw you go into my room and grab something. Did you get what you needed? Sorry, I didn’t say hi. I was on the phone with my mom.”
She asks me if I’m sure I saw her. I said that I was a 100% certain. That's when all the blood drained from her face. She tells me to grab my phone and go to her car as soon as possible, that she needs to show me something. I had my phone on me, and she grabbed my keys from the kitchen counter along with her purse, and she dragged me out the front door and into her car.
She then tells me that she got home maybe five minutes before we started talking. She had spent the night at her boyfriend’s and hadn’t been home all day. So, she has no idea who I saw. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she told me this. Complete fear and panic. She called the authorities and they came along with the apartment manager.
They checked the whole apartment and found no one. There was nothing amiss. And they were in there a while checking every nook and cranny. The manager got maintenance to change our locks and gave us new keys that day. My friend then tells me that for a week she’d been hearing noises from her bathroom like bottles moving.
However, whenever she went to check she found nothing. I have no idea who I saw going in and out of our rooms, but it looked exactly like my friend. I don’t drink or use substances. I am not on medication. This was in 2014 and I still freak out when I think about it.
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41. Bee In The Bonnet
I had a dream about bees chasing me. The next day I had to climb out of my basement window to escape bees that broke into my parents’ house and were blocking the only way upstairs and to the only doors to the outside. That bee dream that I had the night before was way too premonition-like to be a mere, freaky coincidence.
42. Blink And Miss
One night, while driving home, my best friend and I had to exit off of the highway to use the restroom. We pulled up to a Denny's that was super busy—it was around 2am/last call—and it looked like the line to the restroom was about five guys long. We knew it was going to take forever to get through that line, so we decided to run around the back and just go behind the dumpster.
While back there, we talked about going back in and grabbing a bite to eat, since we really had no reason to rush. We agreed to go back in just to grab something small and see if we ran into anyone we knew. Then we walked back to the front...It was closed. Not just for the night, but like it had been out of business for months.
It was completely dark—no people, abandoned. We both paused and looked at each other with that look on our faces like, "Wasn't this place packed and running when we pulled up?" To this day some people don’t believe us. We worked in nightlife, so we had had a drink or two at the most, but we never drove while drinking.
We weren't on any substances or meds or sleep-deprived. It was literally like an alternate universe/reality had slipped into our timeline. We got pronto out of there. This was over 20 years ago, and we both still talk about it and remember it like it was yesterday.
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43. Wedding Bells
My mom, when I was nine years old, pointed to a six-year-old girl at a school function and said to me, “She’s going to play a big part in my family’s future.” Truer words were never said. Little did we know how true that prediction would turn out to be. Mom reminded me 16 years later, what she had foretold, when I married the said girl.
44. Out Of Body Experience
When I was three years old, we had multiple houses on the Commune with swimming pools. I remember standing on the side of the pool and watching a kid floating in the water, drowning—then I saw a man come running from the house, dive into the water and save the kid from drowning. Then, when I was 14 years old, we were living near Lake Tahoe and a guy came to the house one day.
I answered the door and he greeted me with, "Do you remember who I am? I am the one who pulled you out of the pool that day on the commune and saved you from drowning." The kid in the pool was me—I was standing outside my body and watched all this happen.
45. Just Delivering
One time I was in my apartment, really sick with a fever and vomiting. My husband was pulling a double shift and I was home alone. I went to go make a can of soup earlier that day but didn't turn off the gas burners completely. I fell asleep on the couch for hours, and woke up to a man in my living room. He told me that he had just dropped off my General Tsao chicken in my kitchen and that it was getting cold.
I'm looking at him thinking, “When did I let you in?” I was so out of it that I had no idea if I had ordered food or not but I know that I never paid him. He insisted that I get up right away. Completely out of it, I was not fazed by his pushiness. I walked into the kitchen, looking for my food, and realized my gas burners were on.
They had been on for almost ten hours straight. All my neighbors were smokers, and my lights in the house were on. I quickly opened the windows to let the gas dissipate into the air. When I came back to ask him where he had put the food, he was gone. He was solid as can be, real, and probably hung around for what felt like five to ten minutes so I'd get myself up off the couch.
46. Easter Dad
I woke up on Easter morning to see my dad walk into my room and into my closet with his work clothes on. I kept asking him what he was doing but he wouldn't respond to me. He went in and shut the door. I ran into my mom's bedroom to see if she knew what was happening but she wasn't there. So, I went down the steps and they were both sitting at the table in the kitchen. My dad has his plain white T-shirt on and a pair of shorts like normal, no work clothes in sight.
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47. Hello From The Other Side
When I was seven months pregnant with my first baby, when my granddad, the man who helped raise me, lost his life. So, my daughter never met him and I honestly never spoke of him much as it was too sad for me. As a baby she would often wave and smile at our hallway if she sat on my bed. I thought she was looking at flickering sunlight, but then she would wave and giggle at the same spot no matter where in the house she was.
When she was a toddler, she would say things like, “No, sorry, I can’t play now. I have to eat my brekkie,” or “Ha-ha! You’re making me laugh!” When I asked her who she was talking to you she would just say, “The nice man.” So, I assumed it was an imaginary friend. This only happened once a month or so. When my daughter was two, I had another baby and my mother came to stay with us for a while.
At this time, my oldest daughter started talking to this man every day at breakfast, always facing the hallway where the sunlight came in. I heard her telling him about her new sister. My mam was amused listening to her and asked her who it was. I expected her to just say, “The nice man,” like she always did, but she looked my mother straight in the eye, pointed at her, and said “It’s your daddy, Nana. Say hi!”
My mam dropped the cup of tea she was making and just stood speechless. I was the same. I don’t believe in ghosts but at the same time, my daughter had never met him and if I ever referred to him, I would have called him my grandad; my toddler would never know he was my mother’s father. My mam just welled up with tears and said, “Can you tell him I said hi back?”
My daughter just said, “Okay,” and continued eating her cereal. It was so freaky I will never forget it. She’s four now and still sometimes says “Hi,” to the nice man in the hallway when the sun shines through.
48. Passing Through
When I was nine years old, my best friend and I were crossing a busy street on the way home from school. Normally we were careful, but I was distracted by a black cat following us down the road. We stopped and she bent down to pat him while I turned around to cross the street, not thinking to look both ways. A silver car was directly to my right, about to hit me.
I froze up, like a deer in headlights. My friend was screaming. Then suddenly it happened. The car was now on my left. It didn't swerve and wasn't just in another lane—the car was just suddenly on my other side, speeding away. I ran across the rest of the road and my friend asked how I had passed through the car. Everything looked a bit strange; her shape too was fuzzy and doubled.
It was a clear day and the sun was shining, even though it had been overcast and windy on the other side of the road. When I glanced back, the black cat was staring at me from the other side. Then he just strolled away.
49. Listening In
My husband worked for a small old folks’ home. They only had three residents and his aunt ran the place. I had college classes nearby and would often come hang out for a few hours at the end of his shift and visit with the residents. One night my husband got the residents to bed and went downstairs to collect his paycheck while I turned off the lights.
As I reached the top of the stairs, I turned to look into the hallway leading to the residents’ rooms. Standing outside the room of one of the residents was a woman. She was wearing an old pale green Victorian style dress, and had her ear pressed to the door. I opened my mouth to say something, and she looked directly at me, put a finger to her lips, and shushed me.
I turned and practically fell down the stairs, sprinting to the owner's office. She took in the expression on my face and said the words that still haunt me: “You saw the woman in green.” It was not a question. I confirmed what she had said, and she asked whose room she had been interested in. When I told her, she nodded and sighed. I was confused, but it wasn't long until I understood.
The next morning, the owner called us to let us know that the target resident had been found comatose in her bed. She lost her life later that day.
50. A Shade Of Gray
My parents’ two-story house had a living room that connected to stairs leading to the second floor of the house. You could see completely down the hall on the second floor from the couch in the living room. One time my family went away on vacation, so I had my cousin come over while I house sat for them. I'd been alone in this house for a couple of days now and I just really wanted company.
So, we're sitting on this couch playing Xbox. The stairs leading to the second floor are almost out of my vision. At the very top of the stairs on the left is a doorway leading to a bathroom and nothing else. We were up pretty late gaming when out of the corner of my eye I saw a grey face lean out and stare at me for a split second.
I didn't budge, I just barely noticed it, but as soon as I did, it was gone. I hadn't snapped to look at it, nor did I say anything. I just continued gaming for about three seconds until my cousin said, "Did you just see that?" As soon as our eyes connected, we both knew that we had seen the same thing. The second my cousin said that, I felt my heart sink.
It scared me a lot to have him pretty much confirm what I had seen but brushed off. I had immediately assumed it was just one of those blurs, or darting shadows you get in the corner of your eyes at times. The creepiest part is that it slid out as if it were lying on the floor. Whatever it was, its head was at level with the top of the steps right at the bottom of the bathroom door frame.
It just sort of slid out, stared, then slid back. Again, I just saw it from the corner of my eyes, but it appeared to be grey-skinned with black hair. Our descriptions matched too. We went upstairs and checked the whole bathroom, including the insides of luggage bags in the closet. We never found anything. To this day I still can't have a door in my house open. I'm afraid I’ll be looking down the hall and some gray-skinned creature will just lean half its face out to silently stare at me, and then vanish.
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