We all have those memories that we can't quite explain, that keep us up at night. Whether you saw something you can't explain, or heard a sound that sent a chill down your spine, you know what I mean. Well, these Redditors' unsettling experiences are beyond creepy—they're downright disturbing.
1. 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. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
2. Stranger In The House
I was 13 at the time and it was late at night. My old bedroom faces the door at the top of our stairs, and into my parents' bedroom. One night, my mom was at work and dad was visiting my grandmother, so I was in my room, listening to music when I heard someone coming up the stairs. We don't lock our doors in our neighborhood.
When I looked, it was my dad, in his usual pajamas. I said goodnight, but he never faced me; he just went into the bedroom and that was it. I went back to whatever I was doing. Half an hour later, I heard someone else coming up the stairs, and when I looked, it was my dad, fully clothed, wearing his jacket. He asked me how my night went, and I just went pale.
To this day, we cannot figure out what happened. He checked the house, and no one was there. But, our house has been known for being haunted. We've had several people leave our house because "it just didn't feel right" and some out of ordinary things have happened. I never stayed in my house by myself after that.
3. Break And Enter
When I was 16, I went to a flea market. It was the last day the flea market was open before closing down for the season. I came across a man in a booth selling knives, throwing stars, and all sorts of bladed instruments. Behind him on a rack was a katana. He sold it to me for $20.
Now, what is a 16-year-old guy going to do with a katana? Nothing. I kept it for years. It stayed either in a closet or under my bed for years. When I went to college, it followed. Fast forward to August 18th, 2006. I was living by myself in Charleston on the ground floor of a one-bedroom apartment.
My katana was under my bed. I have a sliding glass door with vertical blinds, a screened in patio, and a hammock hung outside. That night, around 3:00 AM, I woke up and heard my blinds rattling. I thought to myself, "Wow, it's windy outside”. But I soon came to a horrific realization.
I remembered that I never sleep with the sliding glass door open, and that someone was in my apartment. I was laying in bed, thinking of things that I can use as a weapon to defend myself and my home with. Then, I realized that the sword was under my bed. Oh, yes. It was righteous.
With my sword gleaming in the dim light, I crept around the corner and looked into my living room to find two very large men stuffing my belongings into garbage bags. When you're amped up on adrenaline, you say some dumb things. So, I yelled, "YOU! STOP!" They both turned and ran out the sliding glass door. The only thought that going through my mind was that those jerks have my stuff...and I want it back!
I chased them out of the door, through the wooded area behind my apartment and into a marshy area behind that. All of this was in my underwear, no shoes, no contacts, and with a big sword. Sadly, I lost track of them and sanity seeped back into my brain. I realized that they might have a piece, I'm practically blind, carrying a very large blade, and the only people that know that I'm out here are me and them.
I went back inside and called the authorities. The burglars had cut away my screen on the patio and using the blade as a prying instrument, forced the lock on my sliding glass door open. How they managed to get past the hammock in the dark without getting wrapped up like a spider's prey is beyond me. For weeks, I made rounds to area pawn shops, but to no avail.
None of my stuff was ever recovered and I was uninsured. I lost my laptop, my DVDs, all of my video games, and my keys.
Christian Delbert, Shutterstock
4. Saw A Ghost
When I was about five, my family was visiting my grandparents, who lived in a duplex at that time. There were two doorbells and I ran up to the house and rang one of them. A creepy old lady answered the door downstairs (wrong apartment). I remember getting scared and running back to the car. Anyway, 20 years passed by.
At Thanksgiving dinner, I told my family how I was always scared to ring the doorbells in my grandparents’ old apartment because I couldn't remember which one was the right one. I also told them how I was always scared of the creepy old lady and described her looks a bit. Everybody went quiet and I wondered what was wrong.
Then, my mom explained that for the entire time I was alive, nobody had lived in that apartment. But, the last tenant, who had croaked IN the apartment, looked just like what I described. We were all creeped out and I still can't explain it.
5. Scream
I'm Irish, and was still living in Tyrone, Ireland when this happened. About four years ago, I was lying in my bed in my parents’ house (my bed was right at the window) when I was woken up by a horrible screaming, wailing noise in our garden at 3:00 AM. It was like the noise an injured cat would make, but crossed with the noise of a screaming baby.
I opened the window and looked out, and heard the noise again, but coming from the back garden of the house next door, then one more time from the third house. Something about it completely terrified me, and I knew something wasn't right about it. But, I tried to convince myself it was a cat that had been hit by a car.
I went downstairs to go outside and see if I could find it, and my own cat was lying fast asleep. If he had heard it too, he would have been at the window looking out. It was then I realized what was really happening. Only I had heard it. Freaked out, I went back to bed. The next morning, I was talking to my mom at breakfast and asked if she's heard the noise.
She said, “No, but did you heard the terrible news? The man who lives in the house two doors down passed at 3:00 AM. You must have heard the Banshee”. That was scary. I know a lot of people think the whole Banshee thing in Ireland is just made up for tourists, but actually quite a lot of people here have seen or heard something like this.
Most families have a story about hearing the Banshee before someone passes. It was the most horrible noise I ever heard, and I sincerely hope I never hear it again.
6. Toy Story
My mom worked in a pediatric ward here in our local hospital. Once, while working the night shift, she heard a truly terrifying sound: There were giggling noises coming from the playpen area of the ward. She was by herself and understandably, she was very freaked out. During the night, she figured that the noise she kept hearing must've been from one of the toys (dolls, robots, stuffed animals) in the playpen.
Anyway, she tried her best to ignore the noise. Hours later, she fell asleep despite being so freaked out. When she woke up the next morning she decided to figure out what the heck had happened. She played with all the toys in the ward trying to extract every noise she could from them. Not one matched the laughing noise she heard the night before.
7. Dear John
When I was around seven, my grandmother took care of a baby whose mother was mentally ill. This woman would bring her child, let's call him John, to my grandmother’s house and leave him there for months at a time. Needless to say, our family became very attached and thought of him as part of the family. His mother came to get him one night, but they got in a car crash on the way home.
John was in a coma for about three or four days. Then one night, a terrible shriek woke up my entire house. It was my older brother, screaming and crying saying that John was gone. Once my parents get him calmed down, he tells them that John came into his room crying, saying that he has to leave but he is scared and wants my brother to come with him.
While my parents are trying to convince my brother that it was just a dream, the phone rings. It’s my uncle calling from the hospital to inform us that John’s heart stopped beating. This happened over 30 years ago, but I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
8. Look Both Ways
I lived away from home after high school, in California. At the time, I didn't have a car, but I rode my bike everywhere. My grandfather had passed a month earlier, but sometimes I felt he was around. I was on my bike, booking it down a sidewalk one day going the opposite direction of traffic. I was getting to an intersection and had the green arrow when a minivan rolled up in the right turn lane and stopped.
She turned her head and saw me, looked me right in the eye, so I figured she was waiting. I didn't slow down—that was a terrible mistake. Just as I'm a few feet from the curb, going at least 20 mph, she floors it. I'm talking life flashing before my eyes. My friend who was on his bike about 50 feet behind me later said he thought the exact same thing. There was no way I was going to avoid a nasty accident.
I hit both brakes. Rookie mistake because now my wheels are locked as my front tire skids off the curb into the busy street. As it hits, it stops but the bike is still moving, pitching me forward. I'm literally flying through the air, time has slowed down, and I can see where I'm about to land, in the path of this lady's tires.
Suddenly, I felt two hands, one on each shoulder blade, shoving me down. I didn't fall in an arc as you would expect. I was literally slammed into the pavement, knocking the wind out of me. One second I was speeding towards the minivan, the next I had just stopped like I'd hit a wall and dropped prematurely. I can't prove it, but I'm still pretty sure my grandpa had intervened.
9. Two Golden Retrievers
I was hiking in Andorra with a friend. Long story short, we got lost off the trail and ended up in Spain. Found another trail and we’re following it, without a map. A while ahead of us we see a man with two golden retrievers walking in the same direction we are. He looks young and is carrying climbing gear over his shoulder.
We’re rushing down the trail to catch up with him and finally do. We ask him for help with directions, and he tells us exactly where we are and where we need to be. About 12km away, there’s a town with a hotel. He says there’s another, smaller, town about 6km away and that he parked his car there. He says he can give us a lift if we like, but he’s in a hurry. We are over the moon and so we hike together for a while.
The dogs are nice and friendly, running circles around us. We are chatting away to the guy and he is really nice, but my friend and I are getting tired and so we cannot keep pace with him for long. This is where the day took a dark turn. The trail bends away to the right and the man disappears behind the bend. We get there a couple of minutes later, and the trail is empty, even though the trail is a straight run for quite a while and we should’ve been able to see them.
The two of us continue on, alarmed, waiting to see or hear something, but there’s nothing. We get to the town eventually, and from there made it to the safety of the hotel in the next town over. We were completely freaked out by the man’s sudden disappearance and to this day we are both convinced he was a ghost with two dogs.
10. Just Shopping
I was camping in a campground on the West Coast. I have back problems, so when I camp I have to sleep in the car. I had the backseat converted to a bench seat and put my sleeping bag there. I cover the car windows for privacy. One day, early in the morning, I hear this rumbling sound. It's loud enough to wake me up.
I'm a child of the suburbs, and I think what it really sounds like is when you push a shopping cart across a really rough parking lot, one with a lot of gravel sticking out of the concrete. Then the car gets bumped—hard. The whole car moved. Panic set in immediately. I immediately start unzipping the sleeping bag with the inside zipper, but that's not the quickest process.
By the time I get free enough to sit up and look, there's nothing there. But some big animal had walked by and I loved to know what makes a rumbling noise like that.
11. New Roommate
I lived on the outskirts of a national park in a cabin. It was a four-mile drive from the main road just to get to the property, and we had no plumbing or power. This property was right next to where a national park started, so to call it the middle of nowhere is an understatement. My roommate at the time was interning with the park service, but he is a city kid.
Every night I had been hearing noises in the woods, what I thought was someone walking. But then they'd just stop in particularly overgrown areas of the jungle, so your mind starts to doubt itself. Is it a pig? A cat? Is it just the wind? The cabin didn't have a locking door, and the owners didn't want me to install one, so I began sleeping in my car.
Now, this is a huge property, and I'd park my car over an acre away from the cabin and where I was hearing something. I started hearing those footsteps again. I moved out, but my roommate (who thought I was bonkers) stayed and still slept there without a locking door. Someone broke in, not once, but twice after I moved out. So he finally put up motion-triggered cameras. The video revealed the chilling truth.
There was a man who'd hike up to the property, set up in the bushes, and just...watch us. We never figured out who he was, but I still find it unsettling. How long had he been watching us for?
12. Follow The Trail
I’m an avid mountain climber here in the Philippines. One time, my group went on a night hike to a mountain located in Central Luzon. I still can't explain what happened out there. Naturally, we took the easier trail since we were hiking with some newbies. At around 4 am, we broke camp and started our descent. Almost an hour in, we noticed that we kept passing the same fallen tree and the same boulder.
The trail was very straightforward, and many of us had climbed the mountain before, but for some reason, all of us were going around in circles. One of the more superstitious hikers decided to make us all stand in a circle, say a prayer together, and leave an offering of food. Only then were we able to complete our descent.
13. Great Minds Think Alike
My mom and dad have the same dream when something bad is about to happen. It's not exactly the same, but the general story of the dream is the same. It's only happened three times in the 20 years they've been together, but here's one of the stories. My mom and dad both dreamed that I was going to be hurt in some way. I was only three at the time.
Well, in my mom's dream, her mother came to her saying that she just wanted to hold me. I've never met my grandma, she passed before I was born. Well, she proceeded to tell my mother that she just wanted to meet me and told her, "Don't be mad”. In my dad's dream, he just felt like he lost something. Something very important and it ruined his life. He was helpless.
Well, they both woke up freaked out, but proceeded to go about their day as usual. My dad went to the grocery store, came back, and parked the truck. He had an F250. My older sister, (who was five at the time), was strapped in the front seat of the truck and couldn't get out so she was screaming and crying, just throwing a fit.
My dad went and took the groceries into the house. I went outside to the truck. I tried to get in it and I fell beneath the tire. I, being three and all, also threw a fit and just stayed there crying. It turned into a seriously chilling disaster. My sister proceeded to throw a tantrum and ended up kicking the thing into neutral somehow and the truck rolled over my head and stopped on my chest.
My dad came out, saw me, freaked out, and couldn't find the keys. (They were in a grocery bag). He screamed and yelled for any neighbors to help. They tried to lift it off me, but it was too heavy. So they had to push it over the rest of my body. I had to be flown to the hospital. In the helicopter, my heart stopped for about a minute.
That was the first dream my parents had like that. The others were when my little sister and brother were born. My little sister's lungs collapsed and my little brother was very sick. My mom had another dream years later with her mom explaining that she'd held us all now and everything is gonna be okay. Nothing really terrible has happened since.
14. Russian Twist
I live near a camp that I used to attend as a child. When I was seven, there was a counselor at the camp who was Russian (the camp has a very large staff exchange program with many different countries), and very weird at that. Counselors said he was incredibly fast, and during staff-only campfires, he would catch, skin, and eat live rabbits.
He could do this crazy, sleeper hold move. It essentially was a wrestling move that knocked you out for a few seconds, you came to, and were fine a minute later. I saw him do it on a counselor once. The guy was out for about 10 seconds. He was forbidden to do it after that. However, kids got curious and started asking him to do the move.
He would do it in secret, but he would increase the severity of his holds which would keep the kid knocked out for a longer period of time—until it culminated in an utterly horrific incident. One day, a camper went missing. He wasn't in his bunk, despite going to bed with his cabin that night. They did a camp-wide search, keeping us all on the soccer field for about two hours.
The counselors had to start searching the water. They found his body under the sailing dock, completely out cold. He was alive, but very unconscious. He had marks around his neck. Everyone knew who it was. They caught the Russian guy and sent him back to Russia. Turns out they never even sent an exchange counselor. Nobody knew who he was.
15. New Friends
My four-year-old daughter was supposedly asleep when I heard a noise coming from her upstairs bedroom. I tried to listen but could not make out what was being said. I approached the room, and she stopped talking. Thinking I alarmed her, I went into the room. At the time, she was sharing it with her three-year-old sister.
I walked in and saw the four-year-old sitting up in bed. I smiled and said, “Is everything okay”? She said fine, but her sister said they were keeping her up. I asked who. My four-year-old said sorry, but that she was talking. When I asked her who she was talking to, my three-year-old sat up and said, "The girl in the window, she said you were coming”.
After I started freaking out, I asked who the girl was, and they both said a girl comes and stands in front of the window at night and talks to them. Not knowing what to say, I said okay, tucked them in, and hung around outside their door. The next day I asked about the girl. They said she came back but was mad. I waited a few days and asked again.
My four-year-old said the girl in the window was still mad. I forgot about it for about a week, when my wife said, “Who are the girls talking to upstairs”? Freaked out, I ran upstairs, and both girls were sitting under the window looking up. They turned and looked at me and asked if I wanted to meet the girl. When they turned around, disappointed, they said the girl left. It has been about five years since and I have not heard about the girl in the window since then.
16. Sketchy Employee
My friend and I were downtown one day and decided to eat lunch at a food court in an old mall. Most of the places were closed down except a subway and an independent pizza place. We each ordered a slice of pepperoni and a fountain drink from the man behind the counter. The first thing that was weird was that he wasn't wearing a uniform, just plain clothes.
The second thing that was off was that he charged us both two completely different prices, despite the fact that we each ordered the same thing. What we each paid was less than the listed price for our items on the menu. My friend and I laughed about it, ate our food and went on with our day. Half an hour later, we both sat down in a hotel lobby.
We each ended up falling asleep at roughly the same time and waking up an hour later. We were both freaked out that we would each fall asleep for no reason and both noticed that we felt pretty drained. A few hours later, we decided to get dinner at the Subway in the food court. As we entered, we noticed that there are two new people working at the pizza place.
They were both wearing uniforms. At the other exit of the food court, on the opposite side, we saw paramedics taking a gurney to an ambulance. Strapped to the gurney is the man that served us our pizza. A janitor was mopping up some kind of mess in front of the pizza place.
We both have no clue what had happened and were too weirded out to even want to know or ask the people at the pizza place what had happened.
17. Intruder Alert
I live in an apartment with my mom. One day, I came home later than she did, so I did what I usually do: pulled in the door, threw my stuff on the floor and got something to eat. I didn’t even think about locking the door. The night went on and both my mom and I went to bed. I must have dozed off around midnight or a bit earlier, and I fell into a pretty deep sleep.
A little background worth mentioning: there are times when my mom leaves something of hers in my room and she has to try and get it in the morning before she leaves while I’m still asleep. She usually does so very quietly, but I can always kind of feel that she is there. So, I was having a good sleep, when all of a sudden, I felt light shuffling around my bed.
This didn’t really wake me up, but I guess it woke up my unconscious because I told myself that it was most likely my mom. I kept hearing this sound, when all of a sudden, there is a loud bang next to my bed. I happened to be laying face down, so I lifted my head up and looked down, expecting to see my mom on the floor because she tripped over the clutter around my room.
I prepared myself to get yelled at in Spanish since my family is Hispanic. What I did hear stunned me. All of a sudden, I started hearing Korean. I had no idea what was going on, so this really woke me up. As I woke up, I immediately realized a couple of things.
It was too early for this to be my mom, my door was wide open (which my mom never does), and there was a little shadowy figure on the floor. When I heard this language, I panicked and jumped off my bed and just started screaming at the top of my lungs. The shadowy figure started getting up in the creepiest way possible, like the girl from The Ring.
At this point, the figure was in between me and my door. Out of fear, I started yelling to turn on the light. I had no idea what I was doing, but the figure for some reason listened and slowly walked to my light switch. The dark figure turned on the light for a second, looked at me in the eyes and turned it back off.
I saw that it was an old Korean lady. She turned off the lights and started to reach for her dentures, which had fallen when she tripped over my mess. At this point, I was sure she’d hurt me. My heart was pounding and I was screaming at the top of my lungs at 4:00 AM. As she put her dentures back in, I managed to drive her out into the hallway with my screaming.
My mom came out of her room asking what I was doing. She assumed I had been drinking or that a friend of mine was drinking. She couldn’t see the lady, so I stepped aside to let her see, and my mom’s jaw dropped. We eventually got the lady outside. Then the whole story came out.
It turned out she was some lady with Alzheimer’s Disease who got locked out of her house and found our door open. I almost threw up later in the night because I kept thinking that at some point, she was watching me sleep. That was the creepiest thing I’ve ever had happen.
18. Uncomfortable Massage
It was my 16th birthday and my stepmom and I went to get massages. After filling out some paperwork, they told us that there were no available females to do our massages (I'm a female), so we both said we would be okay with males. Through the whole massage, the masseuse kept complimenting me and it was just generally awkward.
He also asked how old I was and he said he was 26. At the end of the massage, he asked me for my phone number. It was super creepy, but I didn't want to be rude so I just said I didn't live in the state. A few weeks later, I get a bunch of missed calls on my phone with messages from the same masseuse! He got my cell phone number off the paperwork I filled out.
I never returned any of his calls, but he continued to call me every so often for the next few months.
19. Close Encounter
When I was about nine, I was outside in front of my apartment with my brothers (aged three and six). We were sitting on a blanket pretending to have a picnic. We saw this guy in a baby blue van drive by. At first, we think nothing of it. But, then he proceeds to drive by three or four more times. And it got so much worse.
We noticed that he stops the van and he is staring at us. He waved us over to the van. I got freaked out and grabbed my brothers, went into the house, locked the door and told my mom what happened. Later on that night, when we were watching the news, the guy we saw earlier was on the news for kidnapping a kid in our neighborhood. Creepy that it could have been us.
20. The Ticklish Stranger
I'm always being approached by strangers. It's almost uncanny how often it happens. Usually it's just friendly chit-chat, and I end up going home with someone's life story. But, sometimes it gets really weird. There was this one guy who approached me when I was inside a bus shelter. He was a really thin guy with blonde hair and braces.
He walked into the bus shelter and sort of stared at me for a minute. That's when I knew that he was going to be a creeper. Then he said, "So, how are you on this fine evening?" I told him I was fine. He said it was good that I was fine. Then, he said, "I'm really ticklish". I tried to ignore him and stare off in the direction the bus would come from.
A minute later, he said, "I am so very, very ticklish". All I could think so say was, "So is a friend of mine". I made sure I said it in a quipped way that should signal I was done with the topic. But, that didn't work. The creepy guy asked me if I was ticklish. I said no, which was a lie, but I didn't want him coming anywhere near me.
So, he responded with, "That's too bad. But, I like being tickled more than I like tickling". I struggled for something to say, but said, "I don't really like tickling in general". He asked me what I meant, and I said that I didn't like to be tickled and that I didn't like tickling people. He said, “That’s too bad”. Too bad for him.
There was no one else at the bus stop, but it was a semi-busy area, and I knew if I screamed, someone would notice. Plus, I had a hot beverage, which was almost full. So, I resolved that if he moved so much as a foot closer to me, it was going in his face. He asked me where I was going. I said, “My boyfriend’s birthday party”.
He fell silent, and just stared at me. Then my bus came, and he took off running across the road.
21. 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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22. Not So Easy To Get Rid Of
I was helping my mom clean out her garage, and we ended up coming across this old teddy bear that belonged to my great-grandma. She told me to take it down to the dumpster and throw it away. So I did. Later that night, we were digging through the garage a little more, and there it was. The teddy bear that I had thrown away earlier that day. Neither me nor my mom knew how it got back there.
23. Careful What You Wish For
When I was about nine or ten, my dad took my brother, sister, mum, and me for a random drive on a quiet Sunday afternoon. We’d been out for a while when our parents said it was time to go home, but us kids didn’t want to. So we kept chanting, “Break down, break down,” so we didn’t have to go home. This evolved into us holding hands, closing our eyes, and continuing to chant.
All of a sudden, the car lost power. The car had a full tank of gas, and there was no reason why it should break down. We had to call for a company to come check the car, and they couldn’t identify why the car wasn’t working either. The car had to be towed to our house. Upon trying the car later that day, it worked as normal.
24. 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.
25. Divine Intervention
I was sleeping in my dorm room in college in 1988. Suddenly, I heard a voice clearly telling me to go to the roof, where we often went as kind of a macho tough guy thing. My friend Eddie was sobbing on the edge of the roof. I went swiftly over to him and caught him by the collar, just as he jumped. I pulled him back from thin air. It felt like he didn't weigh anything at all.
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26. A Helpful Ghost?
Ten years old, I was in Maine with some friends. We decided to get "lost" in the woods. This wasn’t actually possible, because the road went around in a circle. Somehow, we got into a swampy area, and couldn't find our way out of the woods. We started screaming for help, and finally we saw someone picking blackberries.
He gave us directions and told us the way out. As I turned around after we passed him, he was gone. It was super weird. My sister later told me that the cabin we were staying in was actually haunted.
27. 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.
28. Heed His Warning…
While visiting a theme park when I was younger, I ran into a dude that looked just like me. He warned me that I would lose my money today, and to watch my pockets. Later that day, I noticed my money had fallen out of my pocket, but luckily, it was on the ground nearby. I wouldn't have noticed if that dude’s comment hadn't been stuck in my mind.
29. More Than Just Imagination
I found out only a few months ago that my parent’s friend, who was deaf and always visiting us when I was very young, didn't exist. They apparently don't have a deaf friend. It might seem like I had an imaginary friend, and that would be the end of it. However, I remember learning how to speak a bit with my hands from him.
I really don't know how I learned what I did from this person that supposedly never existed. How did I imagine the knowledge and ability to sign from someone that existed only in my head? It really weirded me out when I found out my parents didn't have a deaf friend, because he was a big part of my memories from that time.
30. 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.
31. 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.”
32. A Glitch In The Matrix
I saw a guy accidentally drop a 16-inch concrete drill bit from shoulder height. It never hit the ground. It's like it stopped existing on its way to the floor. No sound of it hitting the floor, nowhere to be seen, just gone. Three witnesses all saw the same thing. This happened in a completely empty newly constructed building.
33. 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.
34. Never Truly Alone
I worked in a building with keypad locked doors. On video, at least five doors were violently thrown open in the same hallway, seconds apart. There were cameras on both sides, and neither showed anyone there. I 100% cannot explain what I saw, even today, but I ended up working nights in the building, alone. I did, on occasion, got the feeling I was being watched.
35. The Nightmares Are Real
My wife and I lived in a small apartment. I got up one night and just had a creepy feeling while I was standing in the bathroom. I shook it off, and got back to bed. The next morning, my wife told me she had a terrible dream about a demon that was watching her. I didn't tell her about my feelings because it would have scared her even more.
36. 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.
37. 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.
38. 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.
39. A Coincidence, Or Something More?
The guy I was dating in college started having terrible stomach issues. I went with him to the GI doctor, who decided to do some extensive and unusual testing for a fairly rare digestive cancer that was very uncommon in young people. It turned out he didn’t have it, but 6 weeks later, I was rushed to the ER with sudden gastric distress.
They took me into emergency surgery to remove my appendix, and when I woke up, they told me they had discovered the exact semi-rare, uncommon-in-young-people cancer that my boyfriend was just tested for. A part of me believes that the doctor has some sort of extrasensory perception, and he was just off on who had the tumor.
40. Back For Revenge
When I was maybe 10 or 12, I went to visit my grandparents' house to spend the night. I woke up in the middle of the night and needed to use the bathroom, so I went down a hallway that led to the bathroom, which had a screen door leading to the back porch. When I went down the hallway, I stopped to look out the screen door.
In the distance was a figure in the field behind the house. When I looked at the figure again, the figure turned, facing me. Our closest neighbor was at least two miles away. Later I learned that the farmhouse was built on a slave plantation.
41. 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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42. Lost In Time
I had a doctor's appointment and took my dad with me. It was in another town about an hour away, and since the appointment was for 11 AM, I left at 9:30 to give us plenty of time. We pulled into the parking lot at 10:30. I remembered checking the clock in the car when we arrived, and remarking to my dad that we made good time.
We went into the office, and the receptionist pointed out that we were a little late, but that it was okay because the doctor was running behind. I told her that we had an 11 o'clock appointment, and that we were actually a half-hour early. She pointed to the clock on the waiting room wall...which said 11:15.
My dad checked his watch. 11:15. I ran out and checked the clock in the car. 11:15. Somehow, in the few dozen steps from the car to the office, we lost 45 minutes.
Krakenimages.com, Shutterstock
43. The Ghost In The Closet
When I was about 12 years old, I spent a night with a shadow person in my room. Every time I looked at the gap between the foot of my bed and the dresser on the opposite wall, I could see an eight feet tall shadow in the shape of a man just standing there. I was too scared to move and too scared to fall asleep. I just huddled under my blankets.
Eventually, I must have just passed out from exhaustion, and woke up the next morning, fine but rattled. I slept with my closet light on for like two months after that.
44. 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 hurt or abduct 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.
45. 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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46. A Dream Come True?
I recently dreamt about the people who adopted me. I do not like those two, at all, and we hadn't spoken in literal years. I woke up in a pretty bad mood, and got a phone call from a social worker later that day about the people who adopted me. I simply told her that I couldn't care less about those two, and that unless one of them had passed, I really didn't need to know anything about their shenanigans. Turns out one of them HAD passed.
47. Found At Sea
I was at sea on a container ship. I was miserable. Things had been going badly with the crew, I was missing my family, and I was regretting my career for taking me away from home for so long. I had broken up with my girlfriend because I knew she was going to cheat on me. Anyway, I'm lying in my bed one morning, and I had this dream where I saw my grandfather, who'd been gone a few years, at his summer place.
He was walking with big strides and he looked radiantly happy. He didn't have the limp that he got when he broke his leg at age 70. He was smiling at me and he gave me the feeling that he was proud of me and that I should keep at it. And I was sitting on a beach chair next to his wife, my grandmother, who'd been in a nursing home when I left.
It was the most vivid image of him, and we'd been so close when he was alive. The dream meant a lot to me and really changed my outlook. I even got up to write down my thoughts. When I got home, my dad picked me up on the dock and he handed me the program from my grandmother's funeral. She'd passed right around the same moment that I'd had the dream. She and my grandfather were together again. That's why he was so happy.
48. Not Too Young
This story is from my dad. When my grandpa left us, he and my mom decided I was too young to attend the viewing or the funeral (I was two). My aunt and uncle decided the same for my three-year-old cousin. A few hours after returning from the funeral, my dad walked into the living room to find me talking to an empty chair. What I said left him beyond shocked.
I told him I was talking to Pappy and asked how he couldn't see him sitting there, and I then proceeded to describe the exact outfit he was buried in—down to the tie pattern and pin on his lapel—despite never seeing him in this outfit. Freaked out, my dad called my aunt and explained the incident. She told him that my cousin had just done the exact same thing an hour earlier.
49. Something In The Shadows
When I was about 11, some friends and I were having a slumber party. We all snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and went to a park about half a block away. We had been there for about an hour or so when I thought I saw a large shadowy figure about 100 feet away, lurking in the shadows under some trees. We all turned to look and stared in the shadow's direction trying to make it out.
Right about when we had decided we were seeing things, the figure started running at us at top speed. We jumped up and ran back to the house as fast as we could go and locked the door. We could hear someone moving around the outside of the house and then it began tapping on the windows. We spent the night huddled together in the middle of the living room.
50. Camera Shy
A friend of mine told me a story of her good friend, a very beautiful teenage girl. One night, she’s getting ready for bed when she glances out the window and sees a red flicker. She moves closer to the window trying to figure out what she is looking at. Finally, she turns off her light and looks out the window to see a man with a video camera in a tree a few feet away.
When they caught the guy, they noticed that at the spot on the tree where he had placed his ladder, there were thick grooves, as though he'd been putting his ladder there for months.
51. Take Me To Your Leader
My mother, grandparents, aunt, uncles and several of their neighbors all swear they saw a UFO hover over my grandparents’ house in the late 1960s. They said it just hung over the backyard, silently spinning in the air, except for a faint whizzing sound for a minute or two with all sorts of colors in a ring around it.
My mom and grandma said they remember the television and radio in the living room turning on full blast, getting transmissions and broadcasts from other countries in other languages, and appliances in the kitchen rattling. My uncle said it was hanging right outside his bedroom window on the top floor, and that he was too scared to move, just stood by his window, staring.
52. Thanks, Mom
Ten years ago, my dad was getting remarried after my mother passed. Before my stepmom was going to officially move in, we had to clean out a lot of the house because we were consolidating two families' worth of stuff. One morning while we were cleaning, my babysitter and I found a fancy mug of my mother's with the emblem of her college and accidentally left it in the upstairs office.
My dad came home from work, and suddenly the mug was downstairs in the kitchen on top of a sample of the wedding invitations. We joked about the "haunted mug" for a while, how it was my mom giving her approval of the wedding. A year later, my stepmom had misplaced her car keys and searched every corner of the kitchen for them, which involved many laps around the island counter.
However, on what must have been the 50th lap around, she saw that her keys had appeared on one of the corners—with the mug next to them. We put it on a high shelf and it hasn't moved since.
Flickr, Hagerstown Community College
53. Mr. President
About 10 years ago, I was sitting in a bar I frequented, drinking a pint. It was a Sunday and the bar was pretty much empty. An older white woman walked up to me wearing an Asian-style farmer hat and started chatting me up. I ignored her at first. Then she said, "You know, you have the spirit of Abraham Lincoln around you”. I laughed, she left, I didn't think anything about it.
Now mind you, I don't look anything like Abraham Lincoln. I have blonde hair, blue eyes, and no beard. I go home and I'm curious, so I look up Abraham Lincoln and realize that he was shot on my birthday. Not insanely creepy, but it kinda gave me a weird feeling.
54. What’s In A Name?
Back in junior high, a girl brought a Ouija board to school. Naturally, almost all of us thought it was silly, but a group of girls became obsessed with the thing throughout the day. Finally, I got tired of it and wanted to prove that it was nonsense, so I told them to guess my grandfather's first name—something I knew NONE of them would know because they weren't close friends and my grandfather lived hundreds of miles away.
They guessed correctly on the first try. It was a little unnerving.
55. Don’t Talk To Dinosaurs
I once had a friend who explained to me why she took sleeping pills. Apparently, when they lived in Georgia they bought an older house, (rich family, VERY nice home) that had some character. She claimed to find some old purple dinosaur in the crawl space while her dad was fixing some plumbing. She laid with the dino for a few weeks and always slept with it in her bed, among other toys.
One day, she woke up to a frightening sight. It was staring at her, standing on her chest in a different position than when she had found it, or it had been the past few weeks. She set it aside. For the next three weeks, the same thing happened. It didn't matter if she put it on the floor, in a drawer, or anything. One day she locked it up. She couldn't sleep and heard the drawer unlock, open, and slam shut.
The nightmare didn’t end there. Slight footsteps, and it was back on her chest. She was scared. So scared. She pretended to sleep while it shifted and sat on her chest. And watched her sleep. She told her mom the next day, her mom didn't believe her until she was allowed to lock the dinosaur in their room. Same thing. They moved to another house after other paranormal things started happening around the house.
The dino stayed at the original house, buried if I remember right, for a year and a half. One day it appeared at their new house just standing as they found it on the kitchen counter. They got rid of it for good. I think they burned it and ditched it in the river. Never to be seen again. But my friend has a recurring nightmare about it that goes away with sleeping pills.
56. Lock Your Windows
When my cousin was around seven years old, his room was in the basement. The basement level was half underground and half above ground. His room had a window and his bed was right next to the window. One night, out of the blue, he wakes up and opens his eyes and there's a man crouched right outside the window just staring at him.
He didn't know what to do so he just froze for a second and then turned over in bed. He turned his back to the guy and eventually fell asleep. Why he didn't run screaming to his parents’ room is something I'll never understand. This went on for a while. On random nights the stranger would come and stare at him through the window, sometimes he would actually tap on the glass with his finger.
On the opposite wall of the window was a mirror, right across from the bed. One night when my cousin noticed the stranger was there, he turned over in bed so he didn’t have to look at the guy. The stranger shined a flashlight and bounced the beam off the mirror to illuminate my cousin's face as if to say "I can still see you”.
But the worst part was this. One night the stranger finally got bold and began to push on the window to see if it would open, but luckily the window was locked. To this day my cousin has no idea who the guy was or what he wanted, or what he would have done had the window been unlocked that night. And to this day he still has not told his parents about it. He’s 31 now.
57. The Sunday Paper
This happened to my parents about 20 years ago now. Both of them were driving out to the desert to a hotel for a weekend in the winter, and they had left late in the day and were going to arrive at the hotel at night. The hotel was about 30 minutes outside of the actual town center, and when they finally found the place, it was completely abandoned.
My mom gets spooked easily and didn't want to go and look, but my dad's into that sort of thing and got out of the car. Right after he walks around the back of the building to look around, a man approaches my mother's side of the car. He claims his motorcycle broke down, and that he delivers newspapers to around the area. My mom looks around, and sees no motorcycle anywhere.
This hotel had nothing near it, not one building. This guy was begging, begging my mom to come to get the newspapers and take them to a hotel in town, otherwise, he'd lose his job. He had the stack in his hands and wanted her to open the door so that he could give them to her. My mom’s getting serious vibes from this guy now and refuses, locks all the doors, and tells him to go away.
Finally, my dad comes around the corner. The guy panics a bit and just hands them over to my dad quickly and leaves. They drive off, and they spot the guy starting to walk off into the desert. They finally get to the hotel to deliver the papers and end up booking a room there. When they hand over the newspapers, the lady at the desk tells them they don't get any newspapers delivered to the hotel.
My parents open up the stack and look at the front page. It's a newspaper from 1954.
58. The Journey Of Mr. Bear
This reminds me of a bear that I placed in my dad's coffin during his funeral. It was a stuffed bear I used to sleep with all the time. I was 12 years old, so giving it to him was a big deal. A week after his funeral, the bear reappeared on my bed. No explanation as to how it came back from being buried with my dad. I still have Mr. Bear to this day. I'm terrified if I try to get rid of him he'll just keep coming back.
59. House Of Horrors
I grew up in a house where I just can't explain the stuff that happened. It was an old house in New Zealand. My family lived there for about five years. There were many strange things that occurred during that time. We had the normal doors slamming when there was no breeze. Many times my sisters and I would hear footsteps from the hallway when there wasn't anyone there.
My mother often claimed to have woken up and felt someone breathing on her face. My biggest scare was when I woke up one night in my room. My bed was in the middle of the room. Now I could distinctly hear a man breathing heavily as if he was lying on the floor next to my bed. I was seven years old and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced.
I had had a few asthma episodes previously and was trying to tell myself it was me breathing weird, but after holding my breath for a long time I could still hear this guy breathing. I couldn't bring myself to look at the floor, but luckily it was not between me and the door. It took me about 10 minutes to build the courage to get out of bed and run to my parents' bedroom. I slept in my mom’s bed that night.
60. Thanks, Dad
When I was eight, I started sleeping in my basement on a couch. My dad slept on another couch perpendicular to mine. It was cooler in our basement and I was closer to my dad than my mom, who slept on the top story of our house. Well, the couch I slept on was right under some windows, so I would look out at night and freak myself out thinking someone was there.
My dad eventually put pillows in the window for me so I couldn't look out. My dad passed on a year or so later right before my 12th birthday in our basement, suddenly. I was too terrified to go back into our basement for a while, but eventually, I did, and I started sleeping on my couch again. One night, the pillow fell away from the window.
I woke up and looked out and started getting scared. Then I noticed I wasn't imagining someone standing there, there was really a person standing there. But I noticed they were pacing back and forth in front of the windows as if they were guarding them. The person looked just like my dad, I'm almost positive it was. I blinked and fell back asleep. I woke up, the figure was gone and I never saw it again.
61. Lights Out
My friend always said that weird things happened at her house, like hearing footsteps on the steps and no one being there or hearing the sound of music coming from the attic. I always thought she was just trying to freak me out. Then one night, I'm staying the night at her house. It is pretty late, so we close her bedroom door and turn on a small lamp she had that was next to the door.
We are both just chilling on her bed talking when the door to her room flies open and knocks the lamp off the table. We could see into the hall and there was no one there and no footsteps of someone running away. I bolt out the door because I'm convinced it is her brother, but he was in his room asleep with the door closed. We never heard anyone moving. We didn't sleep that night.
62. Stay In Bed
My friend's dad was checking up on his daughter late at night, seeing if she was asleep. When he poked his head through her door he saw that she was standing at the window looking out at the view. He said "Honey, are you okay? Why don't you go to bed”? He hears a reply from under the bed sheets saying, “Dad, I'm already in bed”.
He looks over at the bed and there's his daughter. He looks back over at the window, and no one's there.
63. Across The River
My mom told me a story about her cousin Bobby. Bobby and his girlfriend got in a severe car accident, and his girlfriend didn’t make it. After the accident, he had a reoccurring dream that he and his girlfriend were on opposite sides of a river. She would always scream and try to get him to swim across the river to her, but he refused.
One night, he woke up—and what he did next was so disturbing, it’s unforgettable. He said goodbye to everyone in his family and told them that he'd never see them again. Everyone was very confused, and he explained that he had dreamed that he had finally crossed the river. He passed on the next day. In a car crash. And no, the car crash was not his fault.
64. Party On
I live in a party house. Enough weird stuff happens on a normal day, but you really don't want to be here alone. I'm the only roommate that can stomach it, but then, I've seen some really terrible things in my time. I was home alone one night, and I was certain of this because all my roommates were in Minneapolis for Pride Week.
I was planning to have a party, but decided against it, checked the house, and locked up for the night. At about midnight, I heard the dog whimpering at my door and got up to let him out. As he did his business I thought I heard a door slam upstairs. I thought it was nothing but a stray breeze at first, but it was a pretty placid night.
As I let the dog in I heard a huge succession of slams and began to think it may be someone trying to mess with me. I headed up the stairs cautiously. When I got up there, all the doors were standing open, which was weird since roommates generally shut their doors when they were away. When I walked down the hallway to check the bathroom door I heard a loud crash from downstairs.
A moment later, the dog went streaking by and hid in the bathroom behind me. Now more than a little freaked out, I went downstairs to investigate. I didn't see anything strange so I stood still for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. I turned in time to catch my door slam itself shut and then fling itself open. I ran out of there.
65. Oh, Buster!
As a boy, I was super afraid of the dark. I'm still always "alert" when I'm traversing the darkness. One time I woke up in the middle of the night to see two eyes floating in the darkness in the corner of my room. Like a dog's eyes in the dark. Thinking it was my dog, I shout to him "Buster, come here boy”! It just sat there.
"Buster, come on”! Nothing. "Buster come here right now”! Nothing. Terrified, I lean forward for the light switch, turn on the light, and I'm alone in my room. I slept on my couch for about a year and a half afterward.
66. Kids Are Weird
The house that I grew up in was pretty old and always gave me a really weird feeling. A lot of strange things happened while we lived in that house. For one. my sister (who was about two or three at the time) would say really strange things. Once while sitting on the couch watching a movie with my mom, she pointed up to the ceiling and said "I want to go up there”!
My mother asked her where she wanted to go. Her reply was chilling. She said, "Up there, mom! With those people over there. They're nice to me”. No one else saw anything and we were too creeped out to ask further questions. Another strange thing my sister said in that house was around the same time. While my dad was giving her a bath she asked him: "Do you remember when I used to take care of you and mommy”?
He was really shocked and he asked her what she meant. She continued to reminisce. "I remember when you two were really little. I took care of you”! He basically noped right out of there.
67. Fred Follows
We used to live in an old place, and we'd always joke about it being haunted by a ghost. We nicknamed the ghost "Fred" and he was used to explain anything strange (electronics going off by themselves, items being moved). When we moved, my mom jokingly called out to Fred as we left stating he was welcome to join us at the new place.
A week later, I was up getting my usual middle-of-the-night drink of water when I thought it would be funny to do something strange for the house to wake up to the next morning. So I proceeded to open up all drawers and cupboards. I even lifted all the chairs up on the table. I went back to bed and didn't think much of it. Big mistake.
I woke up the next morning to my mum, who was 100% convinced that Fred has followed us to our new house and he wanted to let us know he was there. She seemed comforted by the thought of proof of the afterlife so I never told her otherwise. She'll still tell people occasionally about her ghost.
68. How Convenient
I was very young, so I don't remember this at all. My parents told me this story many times. They firmly believe it happened exactly as I am about to tell it. My parents, my older brother and I were going apple picking. My parents decided they wanted to go to a different orchard this year than the one they have been going to for years, so off we went.
We apparently stopped for gas at this old-time convenience store. While my dad was filling the tank, my mom said she went in and looked around for some snacks, but she said everything in the store looked "old" but "fresh”. Like, snacks from another era or whatever. So she didn't buy anything but chatted with an elderly clerk behind the counter while paying for the gas.
So, we leave that store and continue on to have an apparently amazing day picking lovely granny smiths and whatnot. On our way home, my dad stopped to get gas at the same convenience store that we had stopped at on our way to the orchard. But the convenience store was boarded up and looked like it had been abandoned for quite a long time.
So my dad drove to a rest stop a few miles down the road to get gas. My dad, being the ever-talkative guy, wound up in conversation with an older guy working there. Turns out, that convenience store had been abandoned for over 50 years when the owner, an elderly gentleman perfectly described as the gentleman my mom had chatted with, passed on.
I'm 22 now and certainly don't believe the story, but my parents swear by it. They told me they did not say a single word the entire drive home they were so freaked out.
69. Face The Music
It's not especially scary, but once, when I was younger (seven or eight), I woke up in the night to piano music downstairs. We had an old piano and I went to bed much earlier than my family, so I just presumed it was my dad playing the music. However, when I asked about it the next day, nobody admitted to playing, so I presumed I had dreamt it.
A few years later, we decided to clear out our attic, which was still littered with stuff from the previous owners. We found some dusty old sheet music in a corner, and I asked my dad to play it. What I heard made my blood run cold. I instantly recognized it as the music from that night, and subsequently didn't sleep for a week.
70. Careful What You Wish For
When I was young, I was intrigued by the paranormal, as I suppose everyone was. I outgrew it, of course. One summer, I was probably 17 years old, me and some friends were hanging out on the beach at night with some kids, 14 or maybe younger, who felt like sharing scary stories. I had outgrown the phase and I was bored so I just kept saying stupid stuff all night, provoking spirits and ghosts.
Anyways, there is this expression in Greece, something like “May Mother Mary be with you”. So late in the morning as we are standing up and about to part our ways, I said "Goodnight guys, may Satan be with you," and that's when something slapped me really hard. I turned around to hit my friend, thinking he was the one who did. Nope. He was a couple of meters away from me.
71. Don’t Pull Over
I live in a really, really rural place, so it's not uncommon to have really long stretches of road with absolutely no civilization at all. No lights, no other cars, no nothing for miles and miles. One night, my friend was driving back from a bonfire party in the desert when she said she saw what looked like a guy walking along the side of the road.
She could see him moving way up ahead of her, and as she got closer, she started to notice that the way he was moving was very unusual. His arms seemed too long and she described the way he was walking to me as nothing she'd ever seen a human being do. She said it was like he was constantly staggering, but never really falling over.
She told me that as she got close enough to pass him, she just KNEW that she didn't want to see this person/thing's face. She turned her rearview mirror away from her, drove by as fast as she could, and didn't look back. She called me later to tell me about this. She was actually really creeped out because the thing had been heading in the direction of our town.
72. Coming Up Roses
My friend told me this about a month or so after his mom passed on suddenly while she was taking a walk in their back garden. No suspicious circumstances or anything. Everything was normal around their house for about a month. Then, my friend swears that strange things started happening. The garden just seemed to stop being healthy.
All the plants just withered even though they were still being watered on a somewhat normal basis. And to add to that, strange noises could be heard throughout the house and sounds of things being knocked over. One night, he was woken up by one of these noises, so he walked from his room to the kitchen to get a drink of water to try and set his head straight.
When he came around the corner, he swears he saw his mother standing at the stove cooking something, and he said you could smell it. The ghost of his mom or her apparition or whatever turned around and looked at him, and smiled. He started to back away, and he wanted to scream and run but he just couldn't bring himself to do that.
The ghost walked out their back door onto their deck and beckoned for him to follow. He did. The ghost walked out to their back garden, back to where his mother was found. He stood there and just watched it for a few minutes. The ghost stood on the exact spot for about 10 minutes and this whole time my friend was being quiet and trying not to lose it.
Eventually, this apparition went away. My friend stuck around for a few minutes after just to be safe. Then he went back inside and tried to fall back asleep. The next morning, he just thought he had a bad nightmare. He went outside to the spot in the garden where the ghost had been. On the exact spot where the ghost had stood, there was a new group of about five new roses, one for each member of their family, he claims.
At first, I didn't believe him. That is, until he sent me a picture of the group of roses surrounded by all the wilted plants. I wish I still had the picture but this ordeal took place almost half a year ago. Still gives me chills when I think about it, I can't even begin to imagine what it's like for him.
73. The Next Step
My grandma told me that back in the 1970s, she was looking to buy this old Victorian house in Liverpool, England. On their way up to the second floor, when she stood on this one certain step on the staircase, she would feel completely overcome with emotions. She said that when she stepped on it she, felt nauseated but peaceful and a sad kind of happiness.
This happened every time that she went up that staircase on that exact step. Later on, when the realtor was telling her the history of the house, she told her that a nun lost her life on the staircase. Her body was found lying on that specific step.
74. Take A Hike
Me and my buddy went hiking pretty late one night, right before sunset. We decided to travel up a hill to explore, and as we were hanging out up on the hill it began to rain. I'm not talking about regular rain, it felt like we were in a hurricane. Anyways, we decide to start heading back because the sun was going down and it was already hidden by rain clouds.
As we travel down the hill, we thought we heard footsteps behind us but just assumed it was the storm. We realized we had been going down the hill the wrong way, and by the time we made it back down to the trail, it was totally dark and creepy. We continued to walk on the trail back to my car, but that's when we started to get a creepy feeling.
It felt like we were getting hunted. The rain had calmed down by now so we could hear things around us better. We could hear twigs snapping and footsteps. Multiple footsteps. Still not sure if it was people or mountain lions. That's when it got really creepy. As we dried off and sat in my car and started recounting our epic journey, we both notice a man just sitting in his car, which was down the street from us by about 20 feet.
We didn't see him in the car when we walked past it, and we didn't see anyone approach the car since we got in ours. From our view, he appeared to just be sitting there and staring straight at our car. His head wasn't down like he was reading or anything. After about 10 minutes of us just staring at my mirrors and watching this guy sit in his car, he turned on his headlights. Then he slowly drove off. We didn’t see him again.
75. Breakfast Is Ready!
My uncle is the pastor of a church in Oklahoma, and one of his closest buddies is a youth minister in a church in a neighboring town. He has a wife and one daughter. Every Saturday morning when his daughter was younger, she and his wife would get up really early and cook breakfast. One morning, the daughter saw the kitchen light turn on from her room and heard some of the pots and pans being moved around.
She thought, why is my mom making breakfast without me? So she got up and went to check. It was about 4 am and no one was in the kitchen and all the lights were off. She went to her parents’ room and asked, "Mommy why did you try to start breakfast without me”? Her mom thought it has been her in the kitchen making that noise.
So she woke up her husband thinking someone was in the house. He grabbed an old aluminum baseball bat and started walking through the dark house. He checked the kitchen, and besides some pots and pans being out, nothing seemed too greatly disturbed. Next to the kitchen is a reading room, with a couch and a rocking chair.
When he walked in there, he could barely make out the rocking chair, which was rapidly rocking with no one sitting in it. He jumped back frightened and grabbed a bible sitting on the shelf and screamed: "In the name of Jesus, leave my house”! And the chair instantly halted. Nothing like that ever happened again. I'm not a believer but nonetheless, it’s a creepy story.
76. Party Guest
When I was around 18, one of my friends lived in a house about three miles outside of the village my friends and I lived in. It was right next to a motorway and had a large amount of land attached to it. His parents had gone on vacation, and we were planning on having a small party at his house (about 20 or 30 people).
A few of us met up in the village and walked through the country roads up to his house, which took about 30 minutes. When we got there, we found two officers’ cars parked in the drive. We all thought that the party had started and for whatever reason, the authorities had been called. Turns out that the friend who lived there had been eating dinner waiting for people to turn up when he noticed someone standing at the bottom of the garden, watching him.
Thinking it was one of us messing with him, he slipped out the side door in an attempt to get behind whoever it was and surprise them instead. After sneaking around and not being able to find the person, he headed back, expecting us to be there waiting. What he saw in the window was horrifying. The unknown man was sitting in his kitchen finishing the dinner he had been eating.
Apparently, he looked dirty and unkempt. My friend decided to leave, ran a mile to his nearest neighbor, and called for help. When they turned up, they searched the house and property with dogs but couldn't find anyone. It seriously freaked him out, so several of us ended up staying at his for a week until his parents got back.
77. Put Your Toys Away
My sister teaches third grade at a school with a lot of lower-income kids. This is one of their stories. One of her students, normally a very good student, suddenly started having problems staying awake in class. Concerned, my sister approached her at recess and asked her what was wrong. She wouldn't say. My sister eventually brought it up with one of the other teachers.
This woman knew the family a little more personally. She told my sister what she'd heard. The little girl in question was pretty serious. Never made up weird stories for attention, never lied about stupid things like other kids her age. But this girl, one day, began to complain to her mother that, every night, a young girl with dirty hair and dirty fingernails would come out of her closet and play with her toys.
Her mother had been getting on her recently about not putting her toys away at night after she found them still out the next morning. But this young girl insisted that she had put them away, and that the dirty girl in her closet had taken them out again. Every night, the door would open slowly, and the dirty girl would emerge with her toys, and my sister's student would hide under her covers and listen.
One night, the family had come home from a movie past the girl's usual bedtime. Everyone had said goodnight and gone straight to bed. Shortly after, the girl knocked on her parent's door, sobbing and shaking, and asked to sleep with them. Apparently, when she had gone into her room and turned on the light, she'd found the dirty girl asleep in her bed.
78. Picture Perfect
A couple of years ago, a mix-up at a bank put my cousin and me back in touch (long story short, we have the same name but had accounts at the same bank that lead to a series of headaches). She was estranged from the rest of the family, and her father passed under mysterious circumstances years before. She was strange, but I had to put up with her due to paperwork related to the mix-up.
The week after everything was resolved, I moved. The last box went out of the old apartment, and I found a photograph face-down on the floor making my final walk-through. It was a picture of her father—my uncle—that I'd never seen. He was looking right at the camera, out of focus, but making a funny face. I barely knew the man, and I still don't know how the picture got there.
79. Disappearing Act
When my grandfather was a teenager, he dated a girl whose father had disappeared when she was a child. Her father was a bad man and didn’t treat her mother well, so most just assumed he had left town for greener pastures. Fast forward 40 years to when the girl's mother passed on. That’s when the dark truth came out.
She went to the authorities, as was her mother's wish, and confessed that her mother had shot her father.
80. Out Hunting
My great-grandpa purchased a farm in the early 1930s, and it was a big family project to keep it up and running. Relatives would come and help with the chores, and in exchange, they would be able to hunt the land for food. My great-grandpa had a cousin that came over one day and went out to do some hunting. The next morning, my great-grandpa noticed that his vehicle was still out in driveway, even though he should have left hours before.
It was still dark out, but my great-grandpa knew the area of the land he would be hunting and set off in that direction. He walked back towards the back pasture field, and as he came around a bend, he hollered my cousin's name. He heard a strange, yet familiar voice answer him back. He said that the voice chilled him to the bone, that something wasn't quite right about it.
So he called out again, and this time, the voice was for sure not his cousin, but almost like a growl imitating his voice. He said he high-tailed it out of there, never looking back. When the sun came up, he took a big group of relatives and farm hands to look for him. They made a disturbing discovery. They found his hat, which was covered in a brown liquid spattering, and that was all.
My great-grandpa looked for any signs of him for over 60 years. The only time he ever held out hope of finding him, my dad said, was when the swamp in the pasture fields by where he was supposed to be hunting dried up. Needless to say, there is more to this story, but it would take forever to tell.
81. The Woman In Black
My uncle always told the story of when he worked in the woods of Montana. He was a solid 10 miles away from town. He recalled pulling his ATV on top of a big hill that overlooked a valley. In between all the trees, there was this clearing he could see through his binoculars. Through them, he saw an older lady in black surrounded by six to eight wolves.
Now, my uncle is a lengthy distance from the woman, but he starts yelling and honking and all that and takes off down the hill as fast as he could. But when he reached the clearing, there was no one there. No wolves, no woman, only a silver ring with a black stone in the middle. He still has the ring to this day, and he never found out who it belonged to.
82. Secret Of The Woods
My cousin is with the forest service in the Montana/Wyoming area, and I decided to go up there with her to test the waters. She does hydrology and has to ride out to the middle of nowhere to test streams and snow runoff to ensure no contaminants, so I thought that sounded fun and wanted to do a bit of a tour with her.
We were going to have to camp out there for two nights, so we packed up all our gear in saddlebags and started out. The first day and night were amazing. Beautiful scenery and amazing air quality. It really is so peaceful out there. Anyway, we started out on the second day and my cousin said, "You want to see something weird”?
Of course, I said yes—I still can’t believe what she showed me. She led me on a bit of a side journey into this tiny little ravine. We ended up traveling about two hours away from the actual path we had laid out. At the very end of this fold in the land, she dismounts and tells me to get off my horse, too. We tie them up in this gorgeous little clearing and she tells me to follow this tiny wildlife path and bring our little rechargeable radio.
It is one of those you can plug in or wind up, and it also acts as a lantern if you really need it to, but that drains the batteries quickly. I do and, out in the middle of nowhere, there is a huge coil of wire sticking out of the ground. The wire itself was not weirdly large, like some buried transmission wire, but small, like wiring for a house. It trailed off into the brush and trees, so naturally, I decided to follow.
My cousin trails behind me as I do, and this wire, after coming straight up from the ground, is strung across limbs of trees and then back to the ground. Then it snakes around rocks and finally goes into an outlet. That outlet is mounted on the side of a desk. It looks like a schoolteacher's desk from when I was growing up. No chair, no building, no nothing, just this outlet, and this desk.
I am staring confused at this desk in the middle of a forest when my cousin takes the radio, pulls out the cord, and plugs it into the outlet. It lit up and started blaring static. The wire was being fed from somewhere. Now, the place where we were had no road access, no buildings for many miles, and no other people around. And yet, there was a live outlet. I wish I had taken a picture of it.
83. Dream Come True?
For my grandmother's entire life, she had a recurring nightmare. In this nightmare, she would be walking down a long dark hallway, turn to the left, open a door, and see something terrible. She'd always wake up before seeing what it was. In her 40s, she, her husband, my dad, and my aunt were on vacation. They booked the hotel at the last minute, so they ended up having to get two rooms.
My dad wakes up around three in the morning and can automatically tell something's not right. He calls out in the darkness, "Dad”? No response. He turns on the bedside light. "Dad”? he says, a little louder this time. There’s still no response. Getting worried, he slides out of bed and shakes his father. That’s when he makes a disturbing discovery. His dad won’t wake up.
My dad ran down the hotel hallway to my grandma's room and started banging on the door. My grandma worriedly opens the door, and my dad shouts, "Something's wrong with dad”! He leads her down the hallway. A long hallway. To the last door on the left. My grandmother reaches the door and sees her husband, who had just had a heart attack. She never had the dream again.
84. Kids These Days
In my hometown, there was a true story about a guy in my neighborhood that was going into people's homes, taking things, and harming pets. He made one strike a night, and he was super careful, so he never got caught. On like the ninth or tenth night, they caught this guy. When I found out who he was, I was stunned. It was my next-door neighbor! He was 17 years old and he did it "for the thrill.”
85. Job Well Done
One of my friends had a job in the hospital looking after patients. I heard he randomly quit his job and wouldn't talk to anyone about it. I go over to his house and try to see if I can get him talking—what I found shocked me. He was a total emotional wreck. I finally get him to talk and he says that he was working one night in the hospital when he heard a nurse shouting for help because someone was going into cardiac arrest.
So he runs down a hallway and some man runs towards him. They almost bump into each other and the man shouts, "Where's the exit”? My friend points to the exit, then runs into the room with the sick man, only to see it's the exact same person who ran past him in the hallway.
86. Not The Wind
I'm a fairly heavy sleeper. I grew up in South Florida, so if you didn't gain the ability to sleep through heavy thunderstorms and strong winds blowing against your window aided by the sweet sound of car alarms going off from thunderous booms, you were going to have a bad time. I'm serious when I say it wasn't a weird thing for your house to shake from how loud these things were.
I head to bed one night, no storm and the dogs are silent, so I fall asleep faster than usual. I was up in the middle of the night to a sound that makes my blood run ice cold. It’s a loud scream. Just one, single loud scream. Actually, now that I think of it, a better description would be a wail. It was the one, if not the most, disturbing thing I have ever heard. I couldn't understand it, but I just felt disturbed and unsettled, and I found it hard to go back to bed.
It was nowhere near as loud as thunder or wind, but it was just horrifying. From the sound of it, it came from one of the neighbors, and from someone inside their house. I seriously considered calling the authorities, because I thought someone got seriously injured. Later, I learned the disturbing truth. I find out that the sound I heard was a mother crying for her son.
He had passed on in a car accident that night, and the authorities had to go and tell the mother what happened. The guy was one of my brother's best friends growing up. There's a lot more to the story that I won't say, but the whole thing just makes me feel sad.
87. Behind The Book
I was in a bookstore reading a book when I happened to glance up and see a guy standing in a nearby aisle facing me, presumably reading a book of his own. I didn't pay much attention. Maybe 15 minutes later, I looked up again and he was still there. I also noticed he was watching me and his book was lower than where it would've been if he was actually reading it.
I ignored him and continued reading. I thought maybe it was just a coincidence and we had both looked up from our books at the same time. After a little while, he walked around the bookshelves to stand on the opposite side of where he had been. He turned around, still holding that same book, and resumed watching me.
He stayed there for a few minutes, then went back to his original position. His book was still lowered and he was definitely staring at me, but I didn't make eye contact. Then came the tipping point. I noticed that the hand not holding the book was in his front pocket. And he kept adjusting that hand.
He was moving it around a little in his pocket. I tried not to look at him and by now I was thinking, "No. He's not... is he? This is not normal. I'm out". I glanced at him as I stood up and I made eye contact for the first time. He gave me this big, toothy smile and a slow nod. I made a circuitous trip around the store, making sure he wasn't following me. Then, I went out of the store with a group of people.
88. Living Dolls
When I was a kid, I used to sleep with dolls. One night, I woke up and heard a sneeze and my face got all wet. I didn't sneeze, and the only thing next to me was my doll.
89. The Hills Have Eyes
Many years ago, I was in Boy Scouts and our troop was going on a camping trip to a summer camp that was closed in the winter. We'd gotten permission, and we'd planned to hike in. Myself and another scout went up there the day before, so we could set up the range. We had just finished setting up as it was getting dark.
That’s when we noticed what looked like a set of glowing eyes down the hill from us. No big deal, probably a coyote or something. Except that they never blinked and never left the area. After several minutes, we started to freak out. Keep in mind, we'd watched the Blair Witch Project the week prior, and were only 15 and 16.
Our rational brains were trying to come up with explanations for what we were seeing, but our reptilian hind brain was screaming so loud, we couldn't think. We ended up in the back of my friend's Explorer. Each of us were locked and loaded. We laid there for about an hour scared as ever.
And that's when someone else went over to the building on the other side of the lake. They turned off the light. The eyes immediately disappeared. Once we realized we were only looking at a reflection, we felt insanely stupid. We never told anyone, either.
90. Stalker Dude
One night, I was chilling in my basement during the summer at around midnight. My parents were asleep. I was on AIM talking to people when I got a message from someone named StalkerDude314. It said something like, “I’m outside your house”. I figured it was just one of my friends playing a really annoying trick and talked to the person for a little bit.
I went to bed after blocking the guy because things got too creepy for my sixth grade brain to handle. The next day, my dad woke up at 5:00 AM to go to work. He got ready and walked out to the car. He was met with an unsettling sight. He saw a gold truck sitting at bottom of our driveway. It turns on and goes away.
My dad hopped into his car and drove after them for a while and ends up losing them. I didn’t tell my parents about the AIM thing for a couple days. We also saw a ton of footprints in the grass leading up to our house. It was creepy to think that StalkerDude314 was actually stalking me.
91. Stalker In The Night
I work at a hotel and in the dining area. There are a lot of windows. It was a slow night, so I was sitting and watching television. I kept looking out the window at this old ‘89 hatchback mustang. I thought someone parked to run in quickly to see a guest or was a guest. I continued to chill out, but I kept getting this weird feeling someone was in the car watching me.
So, I went behind my desk and the car did not pull off until a few minutes before my relief arrived. I had my nightly smoke with my co-worker then headed out to get gas before I went home. Well surprise, surprise…mustang man showed up. He circled around the pump lane then parked by phones. I finished pumping my gas.
Then, I jumped in the car and pulled out. I kept an eye on him to see if he would follow. I drove down the service road and sighed with relief because my imagination was really acting up. That’s when I noticed that the headlights of a mustang are slowly catching up. I loved mustangs up until this point and an ex of mine drove the same year make, so I knew the headlights.
At this point, I called my co-worker back and told her I’m headed back and that someone is following me. I pulled up to work and ran inside. My co-worker made sure the doors were locked and she has her baseball bat. She is ready. The creepy car pulls in the parking lot and naturally parks. We called the emergency number and they sent out two patrol cars.
One of them questions him, while the other cop comes in to ask questions, but his radio went off and he quickly headed back out. 10 minutes or so later, one of the law enforcement officers came back in all sweaty looking. He says the stalker did not want to cooperate, so it got rough. So, the stalker was taken into custody and had a warrant out for him.
Anyway, his car was towed and a week later, he came back to the hotel for his car. He came up to the window, saw me and smiled. Then, he waved. It was a creepy smile and wave. I then informed him that his car was towed.
92. Clowning Around
I was driving home with a buddy from my high school summer job at the local amusement park. It's about 3:00 in the morning, and there is no traffic at all. We got stuck at a red light that never ends and while we are waiting, another car pulls up next to us. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a big, black hearse in immaculate condition, with a clown in the driver’s seat.
He had full makeup and costume on. He never moved, didn't look at us, nothing. He just stared straight ahead the whole time. It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.
93. Psychopath In The Making
About 10 years ago, I was at a small fair in a Midwest town. It was the middle of summer and I was sitting in a barn-like place that had some picnic tables set up. I noticed a young bird that couldn't fly, off in the corner. It had probably jumped out of its nest. No big deal, it was off in the corner by itself and nothing would bother it.
This little girl (maybe about four or five years old) walked over to it to get a closer look. I kept my eye on her to make sure she doesn't pick it up or anything, but she stayed her distance and just looked at it. And I heard her say a couple of things like, "Oh, such a pretty bird, you're a pretty bird".
I looked away for about a minute. When I looked back up, I wanted to puke. She was standing over the little bird, stomping on it. This went on for a few more seconds and then she quickly covered it up with dirt and ran off into the crowd. No one else saw this except for me and I was way too awestruck to even do anything about it.
Even to this day, I'm not sure what I really could have or should have done. I'm pretty sure I saw a future psychopath born that day. It really creeped me out.
94. Close Call
I worked at Blockbuster Video around 2001. I was working with my store manager the Wednesday before Star Wars Episode II was to be in theaters and saw that I was scheduled to work the night of the midnight screening. I asked if I could be off to go, since I wouldn't be able to go if I had to work until midnight. So, the manager changed my schedule.
The day of the screening around 4:00 PM, I got a phone call from my roommate telling me that there’s an emergency crew in front of the store. I tried to call to find out what was going on and did not get an answer. Me and another friend decide to drive down to see what was going on. Just before we arrived, I was able to reach one of my co-workers by phone.
They answered the phone crying and telling me that the store had been robbed and that two employees had been liquidated, along with two customers. Of course, I was devastated. It was also creepy to think that had I not taken the day off, that could have been me.
95. Home Alone
One night when I was 11 years old, I was watching television with my two older sisters (who were 13 and 15 at the time). Our parents were out late at a party, but being home alone was nothing new to us. Just before 1:00 AM, our dog got up and left the family room. He began to stare out the back door of the kitchen, just off the family room.
A minute later, he went absolutely crazy. It was not the typical barking sound, or the growling at a stranger, cat, etc. It was an insane mixture of incredibly loud barking and wild animal growling, the sound one would make in a truly fight-or-flight situation. This, of course, freaked us out. We went to our dog to comfort him.
After 20 seconds of discussion, we decided we had better secure the house as quickly as possible. It was a large house with many doors and windows to check. So, we all ran frantically to lock up everything as quickly as possible. The last door I got to was the garage door.
A split second after locking it, I put my hand around the handle to verify it was locked. That's when it happened. I felt someone from the other side viciously shaking the handle. They were pushing, trying to open the door. We of course made quite a few phone calls within the next few minutes. The memory of feeling that violent shaking and knowing that a person was one foot from me on the other side creeps me out even now.
96. Daughter In Danger
I worked at a call center as a customer service representative for a Medicare-based company. All patients were on Medicare, meaning probably 90% were elderly, and the other 10% were disabled. It wasn’t a great job, as you can imagine, trying to explain complicated concepts to elderly people when money is involved, or having to tell someone that a cold, emotionless corporation won't make their lives easier.
Well, one night, I was one of only a handful of people working. Since elderly people go to bed early, we never really got late calls. It was about 10:00 PM central time, when the customers were all on the west coast. I answered, and a woman was on the other end, sobbing. She sounded fairly young, early middle-aged or something,
She just kept saying, "I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it". I was thinking, "Holy, Holy, my first person that wants to take his own life call, what do I do? I'm not the one to talk to!" Then, I heard the kid. It was a little girl in the background, also crying, "Please mommy, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me, mommy". The mom was still crying over the phone.
She was saying, "I don't want to do it, please don't make me do it. I don't want to do it. Please don't make me do it". All I took from that was that she was about to hurt the kid or something. It was intense. The supervisor was basically my age, and we were pretty similar. I jumped up, hit mute on the mic, and started yelling, "SUPERVISOR, SUPERVISOR QUICK! 9-1-1 TRACE QUICK!"
As per the rules, the supervisor came and got on the phone. Crisis calls require a supervisor, usually. She ended up trying to talk to the woman, while the top manager on duty for my department came out of the office and got the emergency call going. It took the emergency crew about 11 minutes to show up to her house. I was only on the phone for about 30 seconds, maybe 60.
I was sitting right there the rest of the time, though. The supervisor was crying. everybody was, basically. It turned out the woman had some serious mental issues and had stopped taking her medication. She called us because she had no idea who else to call for help. If she didn't get committed to a mental ward somewhere, she was going to hurt her child.
Turns out, people calling the insurance company to try to have themselves committed isn't totally uncommon.
97. 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.
98. The Mysterious Radio
My husband was sleeping in the back of our truck, and I was starting to get super tired while driving. I heard another trucker on the radio, and started chatting with him. He helped me stay awake until I stopped off at a truck stop, where my husband could take over. The next morning, I told my husband what happened. He told her the radio was broken, and that what happened was impossible.
99. 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.
100. Glitching Your Life Away
As I type this I am already feeling deja vu. I've always wanted to share this part of my life with someone but have never been able to. So... I'll just tell a bunch of people on the internet.
One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever.
I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about 15 feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension.
All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me. It was a bunch of strange looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits. They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black.
When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work. I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed.
I've never done any hard substances, never experienced any hallucinations, never have had anything like this happen to me. The weird thing is, when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled. It still bothers me very much to this day.
101. Kids Know More Than They Let on
My mom told me this story the other day and it freaked me out. When my oldest sister was little, like 3 years old, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up to hold her. My mom said she was like "She can't pick you up, honey, she has a baby in her tummy." And then my little sister was like "That baby is gone!" My mom freaked out, but my aunt and grandma were fine and were telling my mom it was all good, she was just a toddler and didn't know what she was saying.
Well, lo and behold my aunt goes to the doctor the next day for a routine pregnancy checkup, and the baby didn't have a heartbeat. Give me the willies just thinking about it.
102. Warning Signs
I work at a psych hospital. I was in the cafe with an adult unit and the adolescent unit was also there. I had known one of the kids from when she was on the children’s and normally we had a good rapport. I went to say hi and told her I was proud she had been staying out of trouble, a few of the other girls reacted weirdly to me saying it and the girl looked guilty.
I told the staff on the unit and said they should keep an extra eye on the girls because I had bad vibes about it. The staff kinda brushed me off. A half hour later four girls—including the one I knew—literally almost ended the two staff, one got her head bashed in and suffered brain trauma and the other staff was blinded in one eye.
103. Don’t Look Down
I was in class, and the teacher was asking us how our weekends were. The quietest girl in the class started to speak, only to break down in tears. She said she was on a trip in the mountains with her mom. They stopped to stretch their legs during the drive, then looked over the cliff, only to see an overturned vehicle with an entire, deceased family scattered around it.
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