Sometimes horror films don't even come close to the bone-chilling terrors that reality can offer up. These Redditors faced down some of the creepiest phenomena imaginable and lived to tell the tale. From countryside monsters to haunted houses, these twisted stories might just keep you up at night.
1. Going Up?
I was in Taiwan one year when I was younger and had traveled to a busy night market. Nearby I spotted a sign for a net café in a 5-6 story building. Thinking I’d fire off some quick emails, I walked in the dark, small entrance of the building. The building was older and hadn’t been well maintained, but that’s not out of the ordinary in Taiwan.
The entrance just had a dark hallway that led to a small elevator. I pressed the elevator call button and entered. The elevator was uncharacteristically new compared to the building, but I didn’t think much of it. Like some Chinese/Taiwanese buildings, there wasn’t a fourth floor (it’s considered bad luck), so it just read 1-2-3-5-6, which was usual.
I looked for the floor the net café was on—the 6th floor—and pressed the button. It lurched into action quietly and began the ascent. When it stopped, I figured it was my floor, so I instinctively began to step out. Right before stepping out, however, the sight outside the elevator stopped me. It was pitch dark, only lit by the light in the elevator, and it looked like it hadn’t been occupied for decades, with some random pieces of furniture covered with a white cloth.
It was a small building, so each floor was single occupancy, and I could see pretty much the entire floor from the elevator. Thinking I must have gotten the wrong floor, I checked the light that indicates which floor you’re on. Strangely, there was nothing. None of the indicators were on, but the floor button to the net café was still lit so I knew I hadn’t gotten there yet.
All this happened within a couple of seconds. That’s when I noticed a figure moving in the distance on the floor. It was not very visible, but I could make out what looked like a person dressed in some kind of gown, moving slowly towards the elevator where I was. I was thoroughly creeped out, so I started pressing the close door button frantically.
As soon as I pressed it, the elevator light flickered off, and I was in pitch dark. I am this close to peeing my pants, and it’s actually kind of freaking me out thinking back to it now. The lights flickered back on under a second and the door closed, and the elevator jolted back to life. A few moments later, it opened again to the net café.
I am beyond relieved at this point. I walked out immediately and sat down at a computer. After gathering my wits a bit, I walked over to the cashier’s desk and told them what I saw. The girl working there listened and her face turned a bit ashen. I asked her if she'd heard of a similar story. She told me that she’s never experienced it, but some co-workers and occasional customers have brought it up.
Basically, the building has six floors, and the fourth floor had a history. Apparently, the floor used to be a hair salon of sorts, until one of the employees completed suicide there for some reason. The store continued operations despite stories of weird appearances—when customers got their hair rinsed the water would look a little red, like the customer was bleeding.
A couple of people reported seeing someone’s figure walking away in the mirror, but wouldn't see anyone when they turned to check. Naturally, the business closed down a few months after that. The building owner tried to re-rent the place out, but never had any luck. Most businesses are quite superstitious, and no one wanted to rent the fourth floor after someone had perished in it, even at a very cheap price.
Finally, after dropping the price to nearly nothing, a stationary supplies store wanted to rent. During the renovations of the floor, however, several accidents would happen. Tools would end up in strange places, a mirror from the previous business shattered when no one was near it, and finally, a worker had his hand jammed between the elevator doors when it closed on him unexpectedly.
The workers refused to continue working and finally, the business left and the building owner finally gave up and shut down that floor. He then had the elevator company come in to replace the panel so that the elevator could not go to the fourth floor. Let me repeat that—the elevator was programmed to never go to the fourth floor. It doesn’t even have a button.
But for some reason, sometimes when people take the elevator, it would go to the fourth floor and the doors would open, and some, like myself, would see a figure walking around in the dark.
2. Dressed To The Nines
When I was a child, two of my friends and I decided to explore an abandoned house that was down the road from us. It had the typical abandoned house look—there was paint peeling off with exposed wood in some spots, overgrown vines scaling its sides, broken windows, roof tiles missing here and there, etc. Well, we walked inside and it matched the outside.
The cupboards were broken, the walls were rotting, and floorboards throughout the space were splintered and cracked. Other than the place being extremely empty, we didn't really get any scary vibes from it. Nothing really stood out to us as "paranormal" as we'd expect. We left the house mildly disappointed...but the nightmare was actually beginning.
Then, as we were walking alongside one of the windows, this very well-dressed, well-groomed man, maybe in his 60s wearing a black dress coat, white shirt, and black tie came into view from inside the house. We didn't see him inside or hear him approaching, yet there he was, just staring at us blankly through the window.
My friends and I booked it as fast as we could and rushed back home. It was probably one of the property owners who just happened to be inside the house on the same day that we were there (there were a few rooms we didn't go in), but man, that scared the heck out of us. A few years later, the local Fire Department burnt the place down in a controlled burn, so if it was paranormal...Welp, it's gone now.
3. It’s Coming From Inside The House
I was once in a hot tub with some friends late at night, and we were all telling some stories. One of the guys told us this one, a story of a girl he knows—the people he was with verified it was true. So one day, this girl was called over to babysit. She did it a lot for these people, so it was routine for her. Anyways, she was told to put the kids to bed at 9, and she did.
After she put them to bed, she started watching TV and doing homework, waiting for the parents to come home. But then, she started hearing some noises coming out of the basement, like pans falling and stuff. She just ignored it, and thought it was the washing machine or something. Anyways, a little later, she starts hearing the noises again.
She decides to call the authorities. The lady at the station told her there's a patroller in her area, and that he'll be at the house in about 20 minutes. Anyways, in about five minutes, she hears a knock on the door. She answers, and it's a full SWAT team. She asked, "I thought they were just sending a patroller..." One of the guys told her, "After you hung up the phone, we heard a second phone on the line hang up."
Apparently, there was a man in the basement listening to the conversation. The lady in the station waited and heard him hang up, then immediately sent the SWAT team to help. They went downstairs and caught him; he was wanted for multiple cases of assault.
4. Two-Faced
One day 16 years ago, when I worked at a gas station, I was watching a teenage couple get slushies at the back of the store. I was taken aback when the young man looked toward the till, because I noticed that he had a very severe facial deformity. But then, when I kept watching, I noticed something bizarre. When he looked to the girl, he looked perfectly normal in profile. Confused, I assumed I imagined it the first time.
Well, they eventually came to the front of the store. Then his face was distorted again, like a terrifying gargoyle. I kept looking at the girl to see if she could see what I was seeing but she didn’t seem to. And every time he turned to her, his face was normal. Trust me—this was like a Halloween mask. It was not an expression anyone could possibly make.
It was SO DIFFERENT and terrible. Anyway. As he looked at me and finished paying, I felt like a massive black cloud of hate inside me, like an actual thing. It was like I had drunk a glass of liquid hate. Then they left. I’ve never been able to explain it.
5. Of The Shadows
My uncle used to live way out in the country on a plot of land. He said it was a little less than eight acres. His closest neighbors weren't terribly far away, but they were still far enough that walking wasn't a very viable method of getting to them. Anyway, I spent my eighth-grade summer there, and he had one story that scared the heck out of me back then.
He had an array of animals on the farm—three hunting dogs, some pigeons, dozens of chickens, a few goats, and a lone horse—and every night, he would make his rounds through his farm just to make sure they were where they were supposed to be. One night, as he was walking back to his house, strange things began happening. First, his dogs started going wild.
He initially didn't care and continued on his way, but his dogs just kept relentlessly barking. He waved his flashlight around and didn't see anything. He got to the back door of his house and his dogs were still barking, so he turned around one last time to do a quick survey. Way out in his fields, he saw what looked like a moving shadow. He automatically assumed it was a coyote or some other wild animal and just went back inside.
The next night, as he went out to make his rounds, he said he spotted the shadowy figure again, just a little distance away from his barn. Again, his initial thought was that it was a coyote trying to get his chickens. However, as he took a few steps toward it, he nearly screamed. The figure suddenly stood up, almost human-like, and ran into the field, covered in darkness.
He said he was so startled that he just froze for a moment before yelling out, "Hey!" He didn't chase after it, but for about a week after, his dogs would go ballistic at night. When he was telling me the story, he said that it could have just been a transient but I don't know about that. The dude lived in the middle of nowhere, so it seemed incredibly bizarre for some random homeless person to even be in that area.
6. Is Anybody There?
I worked with a lady once who was pretty old—I'd say about 70 years old. Since our job was pretty boring, we talked a lot and she had all kinds of crazy stories. But this one creeps me out still. She said when her grandma passed, they had her buried in a wood box in the backyard, as was pretty customary in those days. Well, years later they have a family plot in a cemetery and decide to dig her grandma up to move her to the family plot.
She paused at this point. Then she said when they took the lid off the coffin, their eyes went wide. It had claw marks all over the inside. The grandma had apparently been buried alive.
7. A Dark Upbringing
When I was young, my family lived in the woods up in Northern California. We were hippies, sort of, and at the time, there were no cell phones or Internet. We didn't have a TV, cable, or electricity for that matter, so my friends and I would often just hang out in the woods, mostly unsupervised. One of the kids in the group I hung out with was Dennis.
He was a year older than me, and I had a crush on him. He was goofy, fun, and interesting. He was the one who taught me to ride a dirtbike, and we used to go around on his, exploring the paths in the surrounding area. One day, we were riding around, and Dennis said he had to swing by his place to get something. I'd never been to his house, but my brother had, and he came back with stories about Dennis' dad being really creepy.
He liked when Dennis brought his male friends over, but hated when girls came along. He'd give the boys all sorts of freedom, and that freaked my brother out. He didn't go there again. But on that particular day, Dennis made me wait outside. He said his dad, Ken, would be really angry if I came in. At the time, they lived in a trailer in the middle of nowhere up a dirt road, with a tall wire fence surrounding it and a dog in the yard outside that barked at me nonstop.
Ken stood at the window and stared at me with an angry, pouty look on his face. It was weird as heck. After some time, Dennis eventually came back out, and we left. I tried talking to Dennis about his dad, but he shut me down and would not discuss it at all. When I turned 12, we moved, and I lost touch with Dennis. Then, when I was 14 or 15, my mom sat my brother and me down, saying she had something to tell us. That's when I learned the chilling truth.
She said that the kid we knew as Dennis was actually named Steven, and the man we thought was his father, Ken, had kidnapped him when he was only seven years old. He'd told Steven that his parents didn't want him anymore and that he was forced to take care of him. Steven believed it after a while because...what else could he do? He was only seven.
Ken took advantage of Steven for SEVEN YEARS. I can't even think about it; it makes me so angry that my friend lived with that monster. When Dennis was about 14 or so, he was getting too old for Ken's liking, so Ken went out and kidnapped another little boy. The kid's name was Timmy White. Well, one night, Ken left Timmy with Steven as he had to work.
Steven wanted to spare Timmy from the terror he knew was coming, so he took Timmy and managed to hitchhike about 35 miles to the nearest Sheriff station in Ukiah. He walked Timmy in and then tried to leave, but an officer saw him, brought him in, and talked to him. He said: "I know my first name is Steven." Ken was later taken in by the authorities, and Steven was hailed as a hero for saving Timmy.
Ken spent less time behind bars than he'd held Steven for because the prosecutor didn't bring charges to spare Steven from having to testify about it. That always ticked me off, but at least now, after wasting away in prison, he's since passed. I still can't get my head around the fact that these things happened in one family. None of us had a clue what was happening to Steven back when we all hung out.
8. The Gentleman Caller
About five years ago, I lived downtown in a major city in the US. I've always been a night person, so I would often find myself bored after my roommate, who was decidedly not a night person, went to sleep. To pass the time, I used to go for long walks and spend the time thinking. I spent four years like that, walking alone at night, and never once had a reason to feel afraid.
I always used to joke with my roommate that even the dealers in the city were polite. But all of that changed in just a few minutes of one evening. It was a Wednesday, somewhere between one and two in the morning, and I was walking near a patrolled park quite a ways from my apartment. It was a quiet night, even for a weeknight, with very little traffic and almost no one on foot.
The park, as it was most nights, was completely empty. I turned down a short side street in order to loop back to my apartment when I first noticed him. At the far end of the street, on my side, was the silhouette of a man, dancing. It was a strange dance, similar to a waltz, but he finished each "box" with an odd forward stride. I guess you could say he was dance-walking, and headed straight for me.
Deciding he was probably tipsy, I stepped as close as I could to the road to give him the majority of the sidewalk to pass me by. The closer he got, the more I realized how gracefully he was moving. He was very tall and lanky, and wearing an old suit. He danced closer still, until I could make out his face. His eyes were open wide and wild, head tilted back slightly, looking off at the sky.
His mouth was formed in a painfully wide cartoon of a smile. Between the eyes and the smile, I decided to cross the street before he danced any closer. I took my eyes off of him to cross the empty street. As I reached the other side, I glanced back...and then stopped in my tracks. He had stopped dancing and was standing with one foot in the street, perfectly parallel to me.
He was facing me but still looking skyward. Smile still wide on his lips. I was completely and utterly unnerved by this. I started walking again, but kept my eyes on the man. He didn't move. Once I had put about half a block between us, I turned away from him for a moment to watch the sidewalk in front of me. The street and sidewalk ahead of me were completely empty.
Still unnerved, I looked back to where he had been standing…to find him gone. For the briefest of moments I felt relieved, until I noticed him. He had crossed the street, and was now slightly crouched down. I couldn't tell for sure due to the distance and the shadows, but I was certain he was facing me. I had looked away from him for no more than 10 seconds, so it was clear that he had moved fast.
I was so shocked that I stood there for some time, staring at him. And then he started moving toward me again. He took giant, exaggerated tip-toed steps, as if he were a cartoon character sneaking up on someone. Except he was moving very, very quickly. I'd like to say at this point that I ran away or pulled out my pepper spray or my cell phone or anything at all, but I didn't.
I just stood there, completely frozen as the smiling man crept toward me. And then he stopped again, about a car length away from me. Still smiling his smile, still looking to the sky. When I finally found my voice, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. What I meant to ask was, "What do you want?!" in an angry, commanding tone. What came out was a whimper, "What the…?" Regardless of whether or not humans can smell fear, they can certainly hear it. I heard it in my own voice, and that only made me more afraid. But he didn't react to it at all. He just stood there, smiling.
And then, after what felt like forever, he turned around, very slowly, and started dance-walking away. Just like that. Not wanting to turn my back to him again, I just watched him go, until he was far enough away to almost be out of sight. And then I realized something. He wasn't moving away anymore, nor was he dancing. I watched in horror as the distant shape of him grew larger and larger.
He was coming back my way. And this time he was running. I ran too. I ran until I was off of the side road and back onto a better lit road with sparse traffic. Looking behind me then, he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the way home, I kept glancing over my shoulder, always expecting to see his stupid smile, but he was never there. I lived in that city for six months after that night, and I never went out for another walk.
There was something about his face that always haunted me. He looked completely and utterly insane. And that's a very, very scary thing to see.
9. Cabin In The Woods
A group of friends was staying at this remote cabin that one of my friend's cousins owned. There were no roads leading to the cabin, and it was a good three-quarter day hike from where you parked the cars. I couldn't go at the same time as everyone else due to work obligations, so I decided to head up the same day but later. It would mean I would have to camp for a night by myself though—the latter part of the trail is too dangerous to be taken at night, especially by someone who doesn't know it. I didn't care, I was kind of looking forward to it as I've never camped alone before.
I was in the middle of these woods when the sun went down. I got my camp set up in this small clearing. Probably 12 m (40 ft) across. I get my campfire going and pitch my small, one-person tent. I did all that camping stuff like cooking hot dogs on a stick over the fire and making smores. I probably stayed up for a good two or three hours after dark.
The entire time I thought I heard something moving in the woods on the edge of the clearing. I didn't think anything of it at first because the woods are full of animals, but as the night went on, I realized that it was just circling the clearing over and over. Once I started paying attention, it made four or five laps around before I decided to get up and investigate. The noise stopped as soon as I stood up and I thought I heard what sounded like it was moving away through the woods.
I just shrugged it off, thinking it was some fox that was curious but got scared when I stood up. I decided it was time to sleep, doused the fire, and climbed into my tent. I started to doze off and stayed in that half-asleep half-awake state for a while. I normally hear weird noises when I'm in this state, so I don't think much of it when I hear a voice.
Something woke me all the way up though, and I realized the voice was real and right outside my tent. It was just above a whisper and I was not sure if it was another language or if they were just speaking English in such a way that I couldn't understand. I laid there for some time, I don't know how long, listening and waiting for something to happen.
There was just enough moonlight to light up the walls of the tent. What I saw still gives me nightmares: A hand pressed into the wall of my tent down near my foot. This freaked me out and I sat up quickly. Whoever was outside of the tent tore out of there as fast as they could. They must have been running full sprint through the woods.
I got out of the tent and shone my flashlight around and didn’t see anything. I was expecting there to be a bloody handprint on the tent, but nope. I didn't sleep that night, packed up camp at first light that morning, and booked it to the cabin.
10. Imaginary Friend
When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend named Jessie. A couple of years ago while visiting relatives in Ireland we were all exchanging ghost stories, when my mum brought up Jessie. When I was a kid, Jessie was my imaginary friend. Or, I thought so. My mom's story made me rethink everything. She said that one time, when my dad was on his way to work, I asked him to bring back coal for Jessie's gran.
I'd ask for weirdly specific, old timey stuff like that for Jessie a lot. It never bothered anyone until we went on a little trip to a field we visited a lot when I was young. When I arrived, I suddenly ran off and went straight into a graveyard. I ran straight to a small grave and stopped and just stared at it. The headstone said "Jessie." So yeah...my 'imaginary friend' was a ghost.
11. Fast Forward To The Future
16 years ago, I got pregnant at about the same time as my sister-in-law. In my country, the first ultrasound scan you have is at about 12 to 14 weeks in to check for physical abnormalities and the possibility of Down Syndrome. It's not uncommon to find out whether the baby is female or male then too. My sister-in-law was about three months further along than I was and she had found out they were having a boy. I wanted a girl.
Three weeks before my scan was due, my partner and I were looking at a house to buy. It was an old villa with a front door and hallway that led straight down to a lounge, kitchen, and dining room that went across the top; kind of a T shape. The bedrooms were off the hallway. My partner and the real estate agent were in one of the bedrooms.
I was standing in the lounge to one side and I could see the doorway, but I couldn't see up the hallway. I could hear them talking. It was midday on a Saturday, I was well-rested and slightly hungry. I felt totally normal. There were only the three of us in the house. Then, all of a sudden, two floppy-haired brunette toddlers were running and giggling towards me.
They were wearing 'messy play' kind of clothes and I got the impression they were going to run past me and through the kitchen behind me into the backyard. As I stared at them, I had a strange thought: "Am I seeing my future child and niece or nephew?" I was trying to figure out which was the boy, so I could see what the other kid was. It was surreal, but I wasn't frightened.
It only lasted a few seconds and then I suddenly snapped back to reality. There were no toddlers and my partner and real estate agent started walking down the hallway. So, long story short, we ended up buying that house. And at my scan, I found out we were having twins...who grew into two floppy-haired brunette toddlers.
12. Too Close For Comfort
When my mom was young, she and her mother lived in a trailer in the backyard of a family member’s house. My mom was about 12 at the time, and the man in the neighboring house started to stare at her from time to time. She got a creepy vibe from him but figured her was just a harmless lonely guy. She soon found out how wrong she was.
One night when my mom was alone, she heard something on the roof of their trailer, then she heard what sounded like footsteps slowly walking along the metal rooftop. Given they were dirt poor at the time, they did not have a phone so she eventually ran out of the trailer and into the house without looking on the roof. When her uncle went outside to investigate, nothing was on the roof.
A few weeks went by with no incidents and my mom figured she must have been overly scared of nothing. More weird stuff would randomly happen, but only when she was alone, and it was always spaced out by a week or two. If I remember correctly, this occurred over maybe a couple of months…before it stopped completely.
Months go by without any weird instances at all—until one fateful night happens. My mom wakes up to find the trailer is unbelievably hot, like she could feel the heater on full blast. She got out of bed and was about to go to the control for the trailer's heater but she was overcome with a bad feeling and decided to just go into her uncle’s nearby house.
The uncle went out to the trailer again and this time noticed that the lock on the door was broken or messed with. He looked inside quickly but didn't see anything. His wife made him call the authorities and when they came out, they searched the trailer and made a horrific discovery. They found one of the kitchen knives behind a chair next to the heating controller.
They suspected that the neighbor went into the trailer, turned the heat up, and crouched behind the chair waiting for my mom to come by and then…who knows. It's been a long time since I heard the story but from what I remember, the officers questioned the neighbor but really couldn't do anything about it. Luckily, my mom and grandmother were able to move out of that town right after that.
My mom told me that about five or something years later she was visiting her other family who lived in a nearby town and she saw the neighbor at the grocery store. She bolted out before he saw her.
13. The Second Opinion
My mom always tells us her deceased twin sister follows her. Her sister passed at a young age. I always called nonsense and asked her questions like what is she wearing, or how did she follow you from the Caribbean where she passed? Then, one day at work, my mom came to drop off my lunch that I forgot. After she dropped it off, she went to say hello to the guy playing music at the back.
A customer she walked past stopped, turned, and went to his knees while doing the holy cross. I asked him if he was OK and he stared at my mom, saying a woman was following her. My stomach crunched because it was all too coincidental.
14. Jeepers Creepers
I live in the countryside in the UK, so I am as far away from any city or town as you can get. It's all very flat farmland where I live. I go for a lot of walks through all the fields. Last summer, I went three miles out of my house. It was super hot that day, around 33 degrees Celsius. I was walking past this one field that was full of crops ready to harvest.
I had no idea what kind of crop it was, but it was about waist high, bright yellow, and it looked amazing, so I stopped and got out my phone to take some pictures. I stood there for about five minutes messing around, trying to get some cool pics and videos for Instagram. Then I carried on walking. I had no idea at the time that something was very wrong.
About 30 seconds later, I looked back across the field and saw what looked like a person dressed in black, standing in the middle of this field of yellow. At first, I thought it was a scarecrow that I just didn't notice when taking those pictures. I thought maybe it had blended in with the trees in the distance behind this field.
I got my phone out and was looking through the pictures, zooming in and trying to see if I could see this scarecrow in the photos. And of course, I couldn't. I kept walking adjacent to the field and when I glanced over, the figure I thought was a scarecrow also started walking. At that point, I realized it was a real, live person...
...A person dressed in all black on this really hot summer's day. The person started walking towards the spot I had originally stopped at to take pictures, then he or she just stood there. I kept walking until I was far away enough that I couldn't see the creep anymore. It just freaked me out, as there was no reason for someone to be walking through that field.
Only the farmers ever did this, as it was full of crops. Part of me thinks this person had to have been laying down in this field while I was taking the pictures, as there was no way they got to the middle of the field in the 30 seconds that I looked away. I don't know, it was just a weird thing to see. I've never seen a single person just randomly walking through a farmer's field before or since then. It just felt like a scene from Jeepers Creepers.
15. A Soul Left Behind
I did some work emptying an old house. The house was infested with cockroaches and it all just felt depressing. When we emptied the basement, it always felt like someone was right behind us. There was a cut rope hanging from the ceiling. Turned out, the woman that lived there had hung herself. We didn't find out until the last week of work. We never went down to the basement alone after that.
16. Late-Night Ride
I was about 15 minutes from finishing the night shift at work when there was a massive crash on one of the windows in the office, so I got up to check it out. Someone has thrown quite a sizeable rock through one of the windows on the front of the building. This was especially weird because I was working in the industrial district at 11:30 at night with none of the other businesses open. I went back to my desk, put a quick call through to security to let them know, and decided to head home.
As I left the building, I freaked myself out about it more and more and ended up running to my car, got in, and took off. I was almost home and I started to calm down a bit when I realized that I didn't unlock my car when I got in. It had been unlocked the whole time. I did a quick check with my hand in the backseat for any possible intruders that might have been hanging around there but there was nothing there.
Fast forward 30 minutes: I called a friend of mine who said he was out drinking so I decided I was going to join him. I jumped on my bicycle and started riding over. I was doodling along the road on my bike, it was a nice night and I wasn’t in a big rush, just enjoying the moonlight when I heard someone riding behind me.
I straightened up and stuck to one side of the road. He passed me really slowly and, when he was right beside me, he shot me a smile I can only describe as purely insane. I kind of flinched and was taken aback as he rode on. That's when I realized something that made my blood run cold: He was riding my mom's bike. Needless to say, I sprinted home. When I got there, sure enough, her bike was missing and one of my car's doors was open. The back left one. I was driving and had no need to open that door.
Shutterstock
17. Bad Went To Worst
A couple of decades ago, when I was still in elementary school in my home country, I went to my mom's clinic after school with my brother. We ate an early dinner there. My mom was a dentist at the time, and I usually went home with both of them after my mom closed her shop every evening. However, on this particular day, I asked my mom if I could go home ahead of them.
I got home, darkness fell, and they hadn’t arrived home yet. After another hour, I was starting to get worried, wondering if something bad happened. All three of us normally came home before nightfall, and it was just very odd they hadn’t come home yet. I was scared and worried, having endless thoughts of what could have gone wrong.
As a kid in elementary school, I couldn't handle the stress and I started crying like crazy. Midnight struck and they were still missing. Finally, at two in the morning, I heard a knock on the front door and I quickly rushed to open it. I was scared of opening the door that late, but I couldn't care less. I just wanted my brother and my mother to be the two humans knocking.
I opened the door and I saw a peculiar sight—my mom and my brother were pale white, soaking wet, barefoot, and shaking like crazy. We just stared at each other for a good few minutes until I finally broke the silence with, "What happened?!" My mother told me the most messed up story. They rode a passenger bus around evening time after closing the shop, and everything was going well, until near the end of the trip.
While on the bus, they heard a couple of loud 'thuds' just underneath the bus, making the whole vehicle shake a bit. They heard metal scratching through concrete and all. The bus had to stop, and in my country, the roads are very dark with no lighting so they had to resort to flashlights given by the bus driver and conductor.
The driver was the first one out of the bus with his flashlight to check the underside of the bus. He went back inside the bus with a face that looked like he was about to puke and asked everybody to get off the bus and find another form of transportation. My brother and mother got off and they peeked under the bus, only to realize a truly disturbing sight—there was a mangled body of someone riding a motorcycle underneath the bus they were on.
It was dark, but with the help of some flashlights, they could see flesh, brains, and blood on the concrete, all that meshed with the twisted metal underneath the bus. The bus hit a motorcyclist and he went under the bus, crushing him. I could not sleep that night. The next morning, just as we were trying to heal from what had happened and all the trauma, my aunt broke the news to us later that following day that her husband never came home last night.
The mangled body underneath the bus was my uncle's body.
18. Shattered Fragments
My wife and I met in a small, rural town on Lake Superior. When we were ready to move in together, we purchased a remote cabin about 40 minutes out of town. It was incredibly idyllic and peaceful for the two years that we lived there. Eventually, though, we decided it was time to move closer to family. We had packed all of our items except for two mason jars that we had used for celebratory glasses on our last night.
When we woke up the next morning, both glasses were destroyed. It did not look like the glasses just fell off the table, either—there were pieces of glass everywhere, even in other rooms and on the window sills. Some pieces of glass were also ground into a fine powder. I cannot think of a logical explanation for what happened. Whatever caused the mess should have woken us up. I still think about that incident years later.
Wikimedia.Commons
19. Gut Feeling
I was 17 at the time. Me and my dad had just finished our fishing trip and it was almost midnight, mid-autumn. When I was about to get in the car, he told me that he did not want me to sit in the front seat on the ride home. We argued about it for about five minutes. He did not give any good reason as to why he did not want me to.
I gave up and got in the back seat. It was pitch black outside, and we had been driving on the main road for about two minutes when we saw a car driving in our lane. Right as we were about to collide, my dad swerved into the other lane—and so did the car in front of us. That’s when I heard my dad say something that still haunts me.
He muttered, “I knew it” at the very last second, and then I blacked out. I woke up when the ambulance showed up at the scene, and the EMTs helped me out of the car. I was barely conscious and don’t remember much after that—but there’s one thing that’s still crystal clear. I saw my dad, sitting in the car waving at me with tears in his eyes.
Later, when I asked where my dad was, they told me that he had flown out of the car window and landed a few feet from the car. They had put him in an ambulance, but he didn't make it. They also told me that the man we crashed into lost his life—but that’s not all. He was driving with his 17-year-old daughter, and she only survived because she’d been sitting in the backseat like me.
I still can’t believe that this really happened. This was six years ago.
20. The Familiar Becomes Unfamiliar
I was sleeping at my girlfriend's apartment and while we were falling asleep, my girlfriend turned to my side and said, “Who are you? I don't know you...You have some strange eyes...You aren't the person I know…” My heart was racing like crazy and I couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. It was terrifying. I was scared she would start screaming for help in the middle of the night or harm me.
21. You Think You Know Someone
Once, my father went camping at a non-commercial campground, which is usually more secluded, with no camp manager or outhouses. It was during early spring so it was still pretty cold out, and there wouldn't be many people out there camping. There was only my dad, a few of his buddies, and a rough-looking old Chevy with a makeshift, Frankenstein-esque camper mounted on it just a few sites down.
Being sociable and considerate campers, my dad and a couple of other guys went to say hi to their neighbor and let them know to holler if they were being too loud while they were there for the weekend. The guy they met was a seemingly nice man who was minding his own business and politely thanked them for introducing themselves.
He looked like he'd been out there for a few weeks, with a clothesline up and everything. During my father's three-night stay, the group would wave at their neighbor occasionally and invited him over for coffee in the morning once. After they didn't hear or see him for a couple of days, they didn't think much and ended up finishing their stay.
On the way out of the campground, they passed his camp, which was still set up the way it was when they went to say hello. My dad was driving his truck toward the exit with a friend in it, who shouted at him to stop because he thought he saw something. My dad saw it as well from the corner of his eye while driving, but assumed his mind was playing tricks on him. What they had just seen was haunting.
He really did see the guy hanging from the tree and not just a plastic bag. They got out and dialed 9-1-1 their spotty reception. The scene was pretty horrific. My dad recalls a note stuck to the tree with a buck knife. He was too sickened to read it, but he felt bad for the guy and always says how badly he wanted to cut him down from the tree, although he obviously couldn't save him because he had been long gone.
Officer and the ambulance showed up. The group got a "thank you" and were sent on their way after getting some information about the situation. The creepiest part of this story, though, was the fact that it occurred at my dad's favorite campsite, which we were staying at when he told us. He waited until we weren't kids anymore to say anything about it, but it still gets to me.
22. The Worst Form Of Scarecrow
This was like 40 years ago. My mom, dad, and I were driving in a very rural part of Indiana. I was about 10 years old and sitting in the back seat. As we crossed a short bridge over a stream, I looked out my window and saw a naked woman tied to a tree. I told my dad what I saw, and he reversed the car back over the bridge. To this day, I’m very grateful to him for believing in me even though I was just a little kid.
Anyway, as we drove back over the stream, we could see that the property owner had tied a mannequin to a tree with a KEEP OUT sign over her head. He was a really sick guy. That haunted me for years.
23. Creep In The Night
I live out in the country. One night, I realized that I never got the mail that day, so I walked out to the road to get it. No moon was out that night so it was pitch black; it was just the sound of crickets and tree frogs. As I was walking back up the driveway, I heard my husband whistling, and it sounded like he walked out the back door and was coming around the side of the house towards me.
I didn't know why and I didn't bother to ask. Instead, I just went up on the porch and back in through the front door. That's when my husband CAME OUT OF THE BATHROOM. I still get freaked out a little when I think about it. It was 100% a human whistling a tune outside our property.
24. The Unwelcome Bedfellow
Five or six years ago, my husband would wake up way earlier than me, come to my side of the bed, and give me a kiss before he left. He never missed a day. Then, I would go back to sleep for another hour before getting up for work. He always did this in the dark so as not to wake me with the lights. This is so hard to explain, but one day he did this—He said goodbye, and I went back to sleep.
I heard the door close and I closed my eyes. Maybe 10 to 15 minutes passed and I felt a weird presence; like someone was walking towards the bed. I thought, “Maybe he forgot something…or maybe he never left and I dreamed that.” It felt like a dark shadow sat on the bed like he normally did, but something didn’t feel right...I felt like the shadow wanted me to acknowledge it…but I didn’t!
It didn’t say anything, so I rolled to the other side of the bed and ran into the living room! I turned all the lights on…the doors were locked. My husband had definitely left! It was so early in the morning, and still dark! I don’t know why it freaked me out and I knew I was awake! After that, I told him to turn on my lamp when he kissed me goodbye!
I told him to never ever leave me in the dark again...to this day. It really freaked me out.
25. A Message From Beyond
One night, there was an altercation in the middle of our street at 2 in the morning that woke our whole house up. My stepfather and my uncle were still up drinking and went outside to see what was going on. There was a young man kicking the heck out of one of our older neighbors. We found out afterward the young man was dating the older man's daughter.
My stepfather and uncle went out to break it up and in the commotion, the guy plunged the weapon right into my stepfather. He stumbled back on to the porch and fell, and I tried to catch him. His blood smeared down the front of my shirt, and the younger guy took off and we called 9-1-1. This is where it got truly chilling.
We were in the hospital until the early morning. When my mom and I got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was a friend of mine from school, crying and apologizing for calling in the middle of the night, but she had just had a dream that there was screaming and a fight, and I was covered in blood. She begged me to call her back.
The time stamp on the message was the same time as the fight. This is in the late 80s, before computers and even cell phones really. I lived on the other side of town from her. There was no way she could have known what had happened.
26. A Father's Intuition
I live in rural Wisconsin. I'm surrounded by corn, marsh; the works. I remember one time, when I was in my teens, I was outside at dusk with my parents and we were all just doing our own thing. Suddenly, a woman yelled "HELP ME" from the woods beside our house. It was just loud enough to hear, but quiet enough for me to second guess what I had heard.
My mom and dad both looked at me and asked, "You heard that too, right?" My mom then screamed back, "DO YOU NEED HELP? WHERE ARE YOU?" At that point, it was already pitch black now out and the hair stood up on my neck because it got quiet...too quiet. My mom wanted to keep yelling, but my dad just got up from his chair and said, "Inside. Now." I think that's one of the only times I've seen her listen to him.
27. Watching...Always Watching
We lived three houses from the corner when I was growing up. There were really tall privacy fences backing on the house behind ours. We didn’t close our breakfast room blinds because that window was facing the backyard. I was eating breakfast before school, reading the cereal box as one did in the '90s. It was dark outside, but that’s because it was super early.
I saw my reflection in the window. As the sun started to rise, I could see the outline of the swing set right outside the window. Then it got lighter and lighter out and…huh, the swing set looked weird. Then, it hit me…there’s someone on the swing set watching me eat my breakfast. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “DAAAAAAAAD!!!!!!”
He came barreling in, but by that time, the peeping Tom had taken off. A couple of years later, we learned that the cop’s son who lived around the corner had been watching people all over the neighborhood for years.
28. The Place Under The Stairs
Just a few months ago, while I was still in school, I rented an old house with two of my friends. I lived in the basement and they each had a room upstairs. Several strange things happened to me while I was living in that basement. The first was that I had just gotten a dog and he was about four months old at the time. Now and then, right when I turned the TV off to go to sleep, my dog would start whining and growling at one corner of my room.
He would usually not get on my bed because he wasn't allowed, but during these times, he would jump on my bed and get as close to me as he could, all without his eyes ever leaving that corner. This happened about five times over the course of four months. Then, toward the end of the school year, when I was about to move out, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my life occurred.
Under our stairs was a little door that led to a small space that had a dirt floor. There was also a really weird, old wooden piece of what looks like a map nailed to the inside of the door, so it's a pretty spooky place. Up until the day before this incident, we had kept a small chair in front of this door that I laid my coats and things on, but we had some friends over the night before, so we brought that chair upstairs.
It was dark (probably 8 pm) and I had just been upstairs in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the stairs and was about to open the door to my room, when the door to the little closet under the stairs opened so slowly and with THE loudest creak I've ever heard in my life. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen in fear, staring at the closet, waiting for whatever was about to come out of it to show itself.
I literally stood there for about five minutes, absolutely terrified. Eventually, I opened the door to my room and locked it as fast as I could. I wasn't sure either of my roommates was home, so I called my female roommate and she was there. I spent the rest of that night upstairs with her, still too scared to go back downstairs. I do not scare easily.
Now I know many of you will probably say it was the wind or the fact that I had just come down the stairs or something just as my roommates did, but I've had those things happen to me before and been kind of creeped out, but this was different. The second I heard that closet open and looked over to see it opening so slowly, I felt this sheer terror.
It honestly felt like there was someone or something else in the room with me that wanted me to see that door open.
29. Backyard Lurker
I showed up at a friend's house once, as I did almost every day after school, when I was 13 years old. I rode my bike everywhere. I usually left it by the side of her pool in her backyard, but as I was pulling up, she started waving at me from her front porch. Her parents had gotten upset with us for leaving our bikes up there before, but neither of their cars was in the driveway, so I cruised up to her and we headed inside.
She immediately locked the door and called 9-1-1. She had been up in her room looking for me to arrive, as she usually did apparently, and she had spotted a man lurking behind their pool, very near where I usually dropped my bike. I was almost kidnapped. The guy booked it when the local authorities arrived and they didn't find him.
30. The Shadows
When I was 14, my family and I fell on hard times. We got kicked out of our house and ended up in emergency housing; basically, we went to a charity that found us a house that we were able to rent for 100 dollars a month, but only for three months. That summer, my mom and stepdad separated temporarily, and my three younger siblings would go to my stepdad’s for a week or so then come back to my mom and me. This house was creepy.
It started off with just that feeling, you know? Like, something isn't quite right, that you might not be the only person in the room. In the daytime, that's all it was, the feeling that something was up. Your instincts are pricking at you. I tried to ignore it, but as soon as dusk arrived, spooky things would start happening.
More than once I could hear this static-filled music playing, but I couldn't find the source, it just filled the halls. I heard whispering and went to my two sisters’ room where, in the open closet, a pair of eyes looked at me and disappeared. My brother spent one night in the house and didn't come back. In my room, I could never win.
On one wall there was a mirror, when I flipped away to face the window, the reflection showed tall shadow figures pace in front of it. In my mother’s room, the same shadow figures paced in circles around her bed. One night, she and I sat up for two hours in her bed watching these shadows. She was strongly religious and didn't know what to make of it.
During the time we lived there, there was a lunar eclipse. I had never seen one before and was very excited for it. When I went out to look, this terror took over me and I couldn't stay outside, I couldn't explain it. When the moon was fully cloaked, I went outside and looked up, but my head suddenly snapped down and to my left.
I could see three tall shadows walking in between the tall pine trees in the yard. Panicked, I ran back inside and into my room, flinging myself under the covers with my eyes shut tightly, but listened to the pacing outside my bedroom window. We went through three months of this. We moved out at the end of summer into a new house, my mom and stepdad got back together, and I was with my younger siblings again. We all agreed the house on Acorn Street was messed up, and still get chills when we drive by it.
Unspalsh
31. Dobby, Is That You?
People from ex-USSR countries believe that a house goblin lives in every house. There is even a cartoon about it. It can either like you or hate you depending on how you treat it. Obviously, a lot of people do not believe in them, but others, like my mom, leave some treats for them—milk, cookies, that sort of thing. Now, my mom is a strong believer because of some weird experiences she's had in the past.
When I was a toddler (in the late 80s), she put me to bed and came into the living room. There were fruits scattered all across the apartment—grapes on the TV, peaches on the sofa, an apple on the floor, etc. It was only me and her in the apartment, so she thinks a house goblin took the fruits from their original spot in the kitchen and put them out in different spots.
Another time, she came into the kitchen to find the stove glass in pieces. But it wasn't all over the place—it was shattered into tiny pieces and swept into a very neat pile. Again, there was no one but myself and my mom in the apartment, and I was only two years old. There were other stories since then, but in any case, she now tries to befriend the house goblin every time we move.
32. Something In Common
So, I see people. My parents said since I was old enough to speak, I would tell them about people I saw. When I was a teenager, I went to multiple psychiatrists and psychologists to rule out schizophrenia, etc. I started to reach out to people when I started receiving messages from others, and I joined a paranormal team for a while to help out.
I could describe people the people I see to a T. With that said, a couple of them have followed me around for years. I was at a convention once and they had a psychic medium in a class. A friend wanted me to go with her to it. I'm very skeptical about other people who claim to do the same thing, so I didn't think it would be anything special. I was pleasantly surprised.
The host made a speech and started doing her thing. Then, all of a sudden, she singled me out and made me stand up. She says there was a person with me, and she described her in full detail. Another time, I was walking to cosmetology class and one of my classmates' boyfriends went to drop her off. He saw me walking in the parking lot and he grabbed her arm.
Later on, when I asked what that was all about, she told me that her boyfriend also sees people and that he saw a group of them following me. I replied, "I know; don't worry. They don't bother me most of the time."
33. Shower Time
I woke up one night around 1 am and heard the shower was on. I first thought it was my brother who worked night shifts; so, I thought he had come home late and was in the shower. It went on for about half an hour until I got up and went to see what he was doing. No one was in the shower, my brother wasn't home yet, and I was the only one in the house. Still to this day, I have no idea how it turned on or who did it. Almost five years later, I still think about it and scare myself. Even writing this now I feel like turning every light on in the house.
34. Don’t Talk About It
I’m from northern Alberta in Canada. When I was five or six years old, my uncle was babysitting me and called me inside to have lunch. I was sitting in front of french glass doors when I heard our dogs barking like crazy. I just happened to glance to my left and noticed this tall thing. I thought it was the Grinch. No one told me the Grinch wasn't a real animal, so I didn't get scared when I saw that thing. Anywho, my uncle saw it too and we never spoke about it until about 17 years later.
35. Plain Evidence
I grew up in the hills out in the country. We own a ton of land including a ridge and a large hill. One day, my cousins and I were deep in the woods and we walked upon an old, bloody white shirt hanging off a tree. We thought it might have been someone's hunting shirt because it almost looked like a rag, but we looked around some more and found a pair of shoes.
Then we found a pair of socks, shorts, and underwear in an old freezer bag covered in mold and dirt. It looked like petite women's clothing. We got our uncles out there and they blew it off until they saw it. They left all of it untouched and told us to stay out of the woods for a while. No one really talked about it after. Looking back, that was extremely suspicious.
36. Home Sweet Home
So when I was about seven, maybe younger, I went to my mom's best friend's house with my mom in another city. It was just me, my mom, and her friend. Nobody else in the house. Except, when I was there, I saw a family which consisted of a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls who looked really burnt just walking around the house together without taking their eyes off me.
At one point, they even told me to go with them. I didn't think anything of it at that point because I assumed they were house guests. But many years later when I told my mom, she mentioned it to her best friend. Her best friend told her they actually had to move out of that house because they had had many haunting experiences, such as finding all her new baby's toys out in the middle of the night after she tidied it, things moved around, and blankets and pillows on the floor as if people slept there.
She asked her husband thinking maybe he did it, but he was just as scared as her.
37. Shadows and Silhouettes
I moved into my current home three years ago. We originally planned to not have a TV in the bedroom and have a cool hangout spot in the main living room, then give the kids a separate den. This worked out well for maybe the first six months to a year. I started to not like watching TV at night in the living room. There was something wrong with the lighting there, and it just bothered me.
It felt like the normal shadows in there were constantly moving. After a few weeks of just being quiet about that and the weird bumps and noises, I finally said something to my significant other. He seemed relieved that I could see it too. It always looked like someone was walking back and forth behind us when we were on the couch, and sometimes we'd see the silhouette of something reflected on the TV.
Now, we avoid the living room at night but have noticed a weird dark shadow in the shape of a tall person in our bedroom doorway. It never fully comes into the room, but it really creeps us out. Our pets react to it too.
38. Blink And You’ll Miss It
Eight years ago, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment by myself with two cats. I had a girlfriend, who I’ll name Elsa for this story, who lived 45 minutes away, on her college campus. Most weekends, she would drive into town and stay at my place until she had class again on Monday. We did regular things, as we didn't get to see much of each other.
So, here's the scene. It's Saturday night, 11 pm. Elsa and I are sitting on the couch, watching a movie—I can't remember which. We are dressed, sober, and alert, as we slept in that morning and had plenty of sleep. We are chatting, laughing, talking. The TV is illuminating our immediate area, and I kept the light on in the kitchen to provide some ambient light for the living room as well.
My cats are asleep in their favorite chair, all is well. Everybody is safe and comfortable. Suddenly, without any kind of warning or inkling, the “Jump” happened. You know when you're watching dialogue in a movie, and they're using two cameras to film? When they switch from camera to camera to capture the one speaking, it is seamless? With no clipping, interruption, fading, or transition effects? It was that sudden.
We were having a good time together in the living room when in an instant, I found myself sitting on the foot of my bed, clothes removed, in the dark. For about one half of a second, a million thoughts entered my mind. Had something fallen off the wall and hit my head? Did I have a seizure? Was I dreaming the whole time? Where is Elsa? Then the scary part.
I turn to my right, and Elsa is also sitting on the foot of the bed next to me, clothes removed. Her eyes are the size of golf balls and she's trembling. I realize I am as well. I try to speak and ask her if something happened, but I'm so frightened. I only stutter. After looking around the room and realizing we are alive, she managed to ask me what happened.
I didn't want to answer, in case it was just me, and I didn't want to come off as nuts. I just looked at her. After a pause, she started asking me again if I had turned off the lights, or removed our clothes, or if I knew what was going on. I didn’t. Neither of us had experienced grogginess or confusion before the event.
Furthermore, we didn't experience any sensations other than fear and confusion after it. No aches or pains, no bumps, bruises, or cuts. I reach for my phone to call my mom and see if a doctor would be appropriate. I notice that it is not 11 pm anymore. Now it's 3 am. In that sudden instant, that instantaneous change of scene, four hours had passed.
Everything in the house had been turned off, and we had been stripped. We went to the ER, as my mom's fear was a gas leak. No signs of toxins or injury were found on either of us. Elsa made an appointment for a CAT scan, which also came back as expected. I explored possibilities like a gas leak, poisoned consumer goods like our soda or fast food, neurological malfunctions, and more.
But the one thing that always bothered me was the fact that Elsa and I lost and acquired the time at the exact same instant, four hours apart. Neither of us witnessed anything that the other didn’t. And there were no lingering effects. For weeks I kept bringing it up with her, just hoping one of us would remember something. I browsed forums from all types of sites searching for answers.
Every time I brought it up, Elsa would get scared at the memory, and beg me to just let it go. I couldn’t. I'm no writer, so I'm sure I left some things out that would have been helpful in understanding the magnitude and surrealism of this event and how it affected Elsa and I. Somebody, tell me what happened to me.
Pexels
39. Let Me In
This happened to me when I was about eight and still scares me to this day. One evening, I went to let my dogs in from the back garden at around 9 p.m. It was pitch black, so I quickly opened the door and my dogs came bounding in. As soon as they came in, I locked the door and at that very moment a person on the other side pulled the handle down, trying to get into my house.
We had a glass door so even in the dark, I could see the outline of a man standing there. I ran to my dad and he ran into the back garden after this man and saw him running down the road. Since then, I have closed and locked doors at the speed of light.
40. The Break-In
About 10 years ago, in another town in another state, it was the middle of the night and I was sitting on a sofa with my then-boyfriend and our two lesbian friends, talking and eating donuts. It was almost 4 am. Now we were in the back room of his house, sort of an extra room, that really only had this sofa in it. The room is behind the kitchen and connects to the backyard and the basement.
The kitchen had a new mattress standing in it that was headed for the bedroom the following day. It was big so it took up most of that room. You couldn't really get to the sink or the microwave, but you could see the glow of the blue nightlight, and all the other lights in the house were off. I just happened to look over into the kitchen as one of the cats jumped off the counter and hightailed it out of the room.
That's when a shadow on the blue-lit wall caught my eyes. I immediately froze in fear. The shadow was the upper half of a man; a short bald man, and he was sketchy. He crouched and ducked, looked left and right, and then ran into the front living room. My immediate thought was "holy someone is breaking in." I thought I was seeing someone run by the outside of the house through the window.
I told everyone about this and as I was telling them it was slowly dawning on me that it is impossible that I would have seen someone who was outside cast a shadow from a nightlight inside the kitchen, from behind a mattress. Plus, the person would have to be extremely tall for me to see the entire upper half of their body crouched down if they were outside the kitchen window. My heart almost lurched out of my throat.
41. A Lonely Departure
One time, I was riding my four-wheeler with a friend high up in the Vermont mountains. My gas light came on, so we decided to drive straight down and not take the trail. We happened to stop a little ways down. There was a couple of inches of snow on the ground. Somehow, we noticed a pair of boot toes sticking up through the snow, and then we noticed...the body.
Frantically, we drove the rest of the way down the mountain and called the local authorities. We had to drive them up to where the body was. They uncovered a man who had shot himself. Then they had to strap the frozen body in and travel back down.
Shutterstock
42. Horsing Around
A friend of mine lived in a semi-rural area growing up. One night, the local authorities knocked on her door and warned her that they were looking for a possibly violent fugitive. They told her they'd check her property and that she should lock up and be wary. It wasn't until some time later that she found out the full story. The fugitive had been caught mauling a horse in a local stable. In the ensuing panic, the horse's leg was broken and the man got away. He was found two days later hiding in a stormwater drain.
43. The Ranch
When I was around six, my family lived out in the rural desert in Southern California near a Cahuilla reservation. We had a few acres of ranch that was beside a small mountain. My room had large windows that faced towards the mountainside and as such, it was always extremely dark at night so there was a motion sensor porch light that was attached over the back door which you could see from my window. The back door led to a room we never used but anyone coming to the property thought it was the front door.
One night while trying to sleep, I heard a tapping on the window, like a subtle scratching. I woke up and saw two very striking yellow eyes and the silhouette of something very canine. We had coyotes here but this was the size of a small man, far larger than any coyote and there were no wolves in the region. We had a dog, but our border collie was nowhere near the size of this.
We stared at each other for a few moments, just completely still—I was completely frozen on what to do while it just stared back. It began to scratch again at the window then turned and walked, upright, to the back door and tried the handle. The light went on, I saw this furry dog-man thing trying to get in. This is when panic started to set in.
I remember running out of my room to grab the Winchester we had in a case in the living room and then running back to my room. There it was, on the other side of the glass looking at me. It saw the rifle then bolted into the dark. I never knew what it was, and I only learned about “Skinwalkers” much later. I never told my parents, but I slept with that Winchester beside my bed for a few years after.
Shutterstock
44. The Great Escape
Coming back from a New York Giants football game as a 12-year-old, we were driving past a bunch of old abandoned factories when I saw a teenager in rags and what looked like chains around his body, limping away from one of the factories like he just escaped from a horror movie chamber. By the time I told my friend's dad, we were already past where I saw the kid.
It was very strange. I know what I saw that day and it was something serious.
45. A Bloodcurdling Scream
My little brother and I were tossing a baseball around near dusk at the bottom of our property, 30 wooded mountain acres WAY in the middle of nowhere. It had gotten dark enough that we were just about to call it quits...but then we heard the single most horrifying scream we've ever heard. It came from the trees, just beyond the edge of the clearing.
Imagine a woman screaming in mortal agony, writhing in the most wretched torment imaginable. Every tortured scream from horror movies, true detective movies; anything you've ever heard could not compare to this. Even now, decades removed from hearing it, the hair on my arms and neck stands up just thinking of it, and it's made even worse by the realization of what it actually was.
It was a mountain lion. Full-grown female mountain lions scream loudly when they're in heat, and it sounds like a human woman being torn to pieces by Lucifer himself. To hear that, as two kids alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere, was about as terrifying as it gets.
46. Wafting Through The Window
I lived way out in the country in the woods several years ago. It was a nice summer night, so I had all the windows open. I was a single female, and men's cologne came wafting through the windows so strong I could taste it. It completely scared the living heck out of me. I couldn't shut or lock the windows fast enough.
47. Sick Or Seeing
There was a day I was really sick and I was sleeping almost all day. I woke up almost every three hours to take some painkillers and to eat some food and then fell asleep afterward. I woke up around 2 or 3 am to see a shadowy figure sitting at the end of my bed. It looked like it was facing me, but I could only make out its outline as everything was too dark to see.
I talked to my cousin once about seeing this shadowy figure and said she saw it walking to the garage and followed only for it to disappear.
48. The "Get Out" Run
I stopped at a crossroad in the middle of nowhere to check my phone. When I looked up, I saw someone running towards my car at full speed. I slammed on the gas pedal and saw him still running after me, waving in the rearview mirror. Keep in mind that this happened miles away from the nearest town or farm, in the middle of some backwoods forest, at 3 am in the morning.
49. An About Face
A really bizarre thing happened today that left me a bit shaken. Earlier today, I went to an otolaryngologist appointment with a sore throat. At the end of my 30-minute slot, I was sitting at the table across from the doctor, with her writing out the prescriptions. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and, without waiting for a response, a man stepped in.
He was tall and slightly stooping, in his 30s or maybe 40s, with balding blond hair, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt. I guessed he was the next patient in line eager to start his appointment, and only paid him a quick glance before turning back to the table. The doctor called out something to the effect of, “Sir, could you please wait outside? I’ll call you back in a few minutes” and resumed writing.
The man, however, didn’t leave right away, but continued silently standing in the doorway for several more seconds. Then, out of my side vision, I noticed something truly disturbing. There was something strange going on with his face that wasn’t there a moment ago. I couldn’t make out the details, so I cautiously gave him another look.
What I saw is difficult to put into words. The best I can describe it is, well, a glitch effect, like a corrupt image in a video file. The man’s face was now a blob of different shades of pink, misshapen and somehow almost pixilated. I was only able to catch a flash of it, though, as the man quickly turned back to the door and stepped out.
As he was turning around, I noticed that in profile his face looked flat and featureless, like that of a Lego figure. This encounter was so unexpected and so unusual that at first, it didn’t even register with me as something noteworthy. After a moment’s consideration, I figured it must’ve been a simple brain hiccup on my part due to a lack of sleep, or maybe some weird visual illusion.
But then I met eyes with the doctor. She paused, pen in hand, and asked me hesitantly: “Did you see it? His face…” “Yeah,” I said. And that was that, we didn’t discuss it further. She finished filling out my paperwork and I went home, feeling a bit lightheaded. As I left the office, the man was sitting in the corridor outside occupied with his phone. As far as I could see, his face was once again perfectly normal.
50. Should They Stay Or Should They Go
I was in my early 20s, looking for some substances when my buddy’s girlfriend said she knew a guy. I was visiting from out of town, so I drove the three of us to some random house in the middle of nowhere. This guy answered the door and invited us in. All seemed well. I bought what I came for and was ready to go...but he didn’t want us to leave yet.
He asked us to stay and hang out a bit. He offered us some candy from his country of origin, and I obliged. It was disgusting—it ended up being some guava sweet candy chew wrapped in banana leaves. I hate guava. This guy got so highly offended when I told him politely that it wasn’t my thing. He had us sit down on his couch and he put on the movie Goodfellas.
About 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, he disappeared for a bit and reappeared with a machete. He was talking some nonsense about how he could, “cut a man in half, it’s so sharp.” He was swinging it in the air dangerously close to me. I was frozen in fear and just looking at my buddy’s girlfriend to diffuse the situation since she brought us there.
I swear I had never been so scared in my life. I couldn’t feel my body, my adrenaline was pumping so hard. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she told the madman with a machete that we had to leave. I remember the look on his face—it was that of someone making a choice of “Should I let them go? Or…” He finally gave a fake smile and said sure.
51. A Lingering Noise
My mom and I were in our backyard, and this may sound weird, but it was 3 am when we heard some whispering in the woods. We freaked out and started speed-walking to the door. But it got even creepier. Once we got inside, we walked all the way around the house, and the whispering noise followed us the entire time. We never saw anything, we just heard the whispering.
52. The Giving Ghost
I was lying in bed in the middle of the night trying to get some sleep when, out of the blue, I heard a creepy voice in my head say, “I’ll do it for you.” Keep in mind, I was not thinking those words; I have no mental illnesses to my knowledge, and I wasn’t thinking of anything other than “I need sleep.” I was obviously incredibly scared, so I made sure I was awake by flicking myself and asking, “Say that again.”
After what felt like the 20th time, I got the same response, “I’ll do it for you.” After a minute or two, I relaxed and went to sleep.
53. Flowers Of Evil
My grandmother told me a story that creeps her out still. Back when my grandfather was alive, my grandmother woke up one night to hear something smash downstairs. She woke my grandfather up and made him go check it out with a baseball bat, and when he got downstairs there was a broken flower pot in the middle of their family room floor, about 20 feet from where it usually was.
There was no dirt trail; it was just smashed on the floor in the middle of the room, as if someone dropped it straight down.
54. Halloween Story
When I was 14, I went to a Halloween bonfire at my buddy’s place in a rural area. He had a large backyard that was surrounded by some woods. I took a break from the bonfire and headed to a nearby bush to take a leak. When I was going to the bathroom, I saw something out of the corner of my eye in the woods, which was about 50 yards away.
I looked directly at it and saw nothing. I went back to my business but then, out of the corner of my eye I saw the large shadowy figure once again. I looked over and saw nothing. At this point, I remember in science class that your peripheral vision is better in locations with very little light. So, I look towards the area where the figure was without looking directly at it. That moment, I witnessed a chilling sight: It appeared as if someone was pacing the edge of the woods looking over towards the bonfire. I rush back to the group and tell them.
The kid who lived there ran into his house and told his dad. The dad comes out with a pistol and heads to the edge of the woods. He comes back and reports nothing. It's possible my eyes could have been playing a trick on me, but I'm almost 100% sure I saw a person stalking us kids. The nearest neighbor was a mile down the road. It's just creepy that someone in the middle of nowhere would be watching a bunch of kids…
Unsplash
55. The Ghosts Of Christmas’ Pasts
11 years ago, my ex and I were living in a shoddy apartment just outside of city limits. The apartment itself was used as barracks for the navy during WWI. So needless to say, it was a super old building. That Christmas eve, all of the surrounding neighbors in the complex had left to stay with family overnight for Christmas.
While laying in bed, and after we had just turned off the lights, we heard a door open up at the front of the apartment upstairs. This was a fourplex, with stairs going up the center to the second floor. After the door upstairs closed, we heard two sets of footprints coming down the stairs, and then the hallway door opened.
Out of nowhere, I heard a voice whisper, "Aww, let's come back later. They're already asleep." Both my ex and I just laid there, scared to our bones. I told her she was closer to the front door, so she should go take a look. She informed me, "Screw that, you're the protector here." So I grabbed my aluminum bat, and walked out to the entryway, with her attached to my back, peeking over my shoulder. Sure enough, both the deadbolt and doorknob were locked.
56. Mystery Music
A music store seemed to just show up in my town. I'd lived here for three years and never saw it once. When I went in, a guy was there and he had one bass guitar in the store. Me, being a bassist, played it and fell in love. I bought it, and then the next week when I was in town, the store was totally empty. It looked like it hadn't been open in a long time.
I got a new bass out of it though, so I'm cool with it being a spooky ghost store.
57. Mr. Sandman
A few months ago, I downloaded a program to my phone—Sleep as Android. I bought the premium version of the app for the extra features, to record sound throughout the night when volumes reached a certain threshold. It would activate when I would snore or move around. I would usually spend the next evening going over some of the recorded sounds. Everything was pretty normal...until I heard something I'll never forget.
It was near the beginning of April, and I had the apartment to myself. It started out picking up my snoring, and then the hairs on my neck stood up as I heard my doorknob moving. Following this, you could hear my door open slowly. I was confused and a little worried. Everything was still locked up, nobody came home, and my landlord certainly didn't come in. I don't use the app anymore.
58. Down The Rabbit Hole
My mother did all her GYN appointments with a doctor in downtown Austin. He was on the 5th floor of this hospital building and had a long time nurse/receptionist named Alison. I remember attending her appointments when I was little and my mother would make a game out of finding the office and being in the waiting room, which was colorfully decorated with a forest scene.
Alison was a super sweet woman who was half babysitter for us kids, too. She would read us books and give us coloring books and occasionally even listen to our dreadful knock-knock jokes. We all referred to her as Alison Wonderland. Anyway, years down the road, I got married and pregnant and started searching for an OB since I had moved back to Austin relatively recently before that.
My mother suggested I go see if that doctor, who had been super young when I was born, was still in business. Well, I could not find his name in the hospital directory, so I figured I would just swing by the office and check. My mother happened to be in town—she had moved years ago—and came with me. We both joked about it being so familiar but reversed situations now.
As we reach the stairs, we ran into a problem. There was no fifth floor of this hospital office building. Odd. We both must have misremembered it. We knew it was on the top floor, so it must have been the fourth. Nope, not there. We thought maybe we were in the wrong building. Except we parked in the same parking garage thing from 20 years ago and walked the same route.
That doctor does not exist. Never did, apparently. My mother and my brother and I are the only ones who remember him and Allison Wonderland. We have asked around, including among the hospital staff. We even looked up our birth certificates which are new copies and just list "Attending physician." One of my childhood memories is fake, but shared with my brother and my mother.
59. My House
When I was seven, I woke up in the middle of the night with an earache. I decided to tell my mom and stepdad and walked out of my room. Someone was sitting on the chair in the living room, the person looked strange, but it was dark and I couldn't see well. "Mom?" I asked. The person shook their head and I started getting scared. "Mike?" The person shook their head again.
I decided the best course of action was to go back to bed so I wouldn't have to walk past this person. I climbed in bed and closed my eyes for a second, before opening them to see the person standing in my doorway, smiling madly and nodding furiously. I screamed at the top of my lungs and closed my eyes. My stepdad came running out of his room with a baseball bat. There was nothing there, but the clothes my mom had folded and put on the chair were strewn about the living room.
Shutterstock
60. Get Out Of The Way
I was a USS Ranger somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the winter of 1991, in transit to Japan from San Diego. I encountered the ghost of the deck nine ladder well, on my way to mid rats. I did not even realize it until I emerged from the ladder well at the forward mess decks to a group of terrified sailors who asked me if I had seen it.
I just thought he was a visiting sailor from a foreign navy because of his strange uniform and appearance, but it turns out, the truth was way creepier. Apparently, the ghost was wearing the US Navy working uniform he passed in, from 40 years before. He just stood there at the edge of the hatch looking straight forward; with a full white beard holding a dark blue dixie cup cover in his hand wearing a dungaree shirt with three chevrons.
When I saw him, I stood next to the hatch waiting for him to descend down to the next deck, but he didn't move and I was hungry, so I just said excuse me and went on my way.
61. Straight Out Of A Horror Film
I worked at our college's info desk for AV stuff, and there was always another info desk person there with us. Around 9:50 pm, a girl came up and said that as she was leaving the planetarium, she heard a weird noise down the hallway, around a corner from our desk. As she went partway down the hallway, the lights started to flicker, and then she noticed what looked like blood drops on the floor leading down the hallway and peaced out.
We figured it was just a spilled drink, but we checked it out anyway. When we got there, we were fully spooked—and the entire wing was dimly lit and the hallway lights were about 15% as bright as they should be, flickering like when someone is about to get hurt in a horror film. The door at the end was partially opened and we heard what sounded like metal hitting against something coming from it.
We saw drops and it was more like a small trail of it. It was definitely red but didn't have the color of blood...it was more orange-colored than a deep red. After a louder noise banged out of nowhere, we peaced the heck out of there and radioed campus officers. They took a brief statement and we locked up the info desk for the night. We never did find out what it was.
62. Sleepover
I shared a room with my sister around the age of 7, but she was off at a sleepover party the night it happened. As a little kid, I was terrified of lots of things - I'd never seen anything close to a horror film (not even The Nightmare Before Christmas) because of how jumpy I was. So naturally, the dark freaked me out.
I was really nightmare-prone, which caused everyone to say this was a dream later. But this was different. It was more vivid. Too realistic to be a dream. I was hiding under my sheets like the cowardly kid I was when I decided to poke my head out to get some cool air, and I saw something in my room. Something clearly not human.
I called it an alien at the time because that's the closest thing my horror-ignorant mind could liken it to. Now, I see it as more similar to the Rake or the Mothman. Its head was big and egg-shaped, like those stereotypical gray aliens. Far too big for its tiny, slender body. It was totally naked. Pale gray or ashen white skin, the lack of light made it hard to tell.
All the bones were visible. Its tiny shriveled sack and schlong just hung there between its legs. Its hands were way too big for the toothpick-like arms. It was standing at a really unnatural angle. Its eyes were totally black and shiny, seemed to be the only feature on its weird head, and were sunken in little red holes. Most unsettling of all, it was just staring at me.
After a few seconds of being completely paralyzed in fear, I pulled the covers back up over my head - what else could I do? I stayed there for the rest of the night until I fell asleep. I know this thing wasn't human. I told my parents the next day and they said I was dreaming. I made up a lot of stories back then. I remember a lot of them vividly, and the rest of my childhood is really, really hazy.
But seeing that thing in my room is one of the childhood memories that stuck with me the most. I have no idea what it was, and despite my fascination with horror stories, I don't think I want to know.
63. Keeping An Eye Out
I used to live in this horrible little apartment in a horrible neighborhood. Just three streets over there was a place that boasted the first murder of the year just after midnight on New Year’s Day! Anyway, the place was above a restaurant and the dumpster was right up against the wall of the building. From there, you could absolutely hop right on top and gain access to the first-floor roof which happened to be right outside my bedroom window.
One day, I noticed there was an EYE traced into the grime on the outside of the window. I started sleeping in the living room after that with a hammer.
Public Domain Pictures
64. Zombie Town
One time, I was driving with a friend from St. Louis to Nashville, and both our phones ran out of battery. We got a little lost and ended up driving through Cairo, Illinois. That whole town should not exist. It was surreal; like driving through a Scooby-Doo ghost town. The buildings were faded and falling apart, and people were just haplessly milling about the streets like zombies. Freaky.
65. Ring, Ring, It’s Me?
I was sitting at home alone one evening when my phone started buzzing because of an incoming call. I reached out for it and when I looked at the screen, I was very confused. The caller ID was that of my own number. In that split second, I had just assumed it was a glitch and canceled the call. Seconds later, the same thing happened. I canceled the call once more.
When the same thing happened the third time, I felt kind of freaked out. But, I plucked up my courage to answer the call. After I said, “Hello”, there was nothing but silence. Then, I heard some labored breathing noises...almost like a whisper...on the other end. That did it for me. I was so freaked out, then, I just hung up.
66. The Thin Man
My parents' house is landlocked, which means it does not have direct access to the road. You have to go through someone else's property to access theirs. Currently, that property is a parking lot that belongs to a park. My parents have kept their property "natural," so they basically have a house in the middle of the woods next to a park.
I was coming home one night between 10 and 11 pm. I came around the corner and immediately slammed on the brakes as I was pulling into the driveway. There was this tall thing coming out of the darkness and it was moving. It was taller than my car and super skinny. I really thought Slenderman was coming for me. As I sat there in shock, my eyes adjusted.
It was a blue heron. A big giant bird. It had come up from the creek at the park looking for food, I guess. It scared the heck out of me.
67. Who’s At The Door?
One night, I was waiting for my boyfriend to get home from work. He was due any minute. I was sitting on the couch in the living room and had a clear view of the front door. I saw the front doorknob start to rattle and our new puppy started losing her mind. I just took a couple of minutes to calm her down, figuring my boyfriend would make it inside before I managed to get her out of my way.
But oddly, the door didn't open. I figured maybe my boyfriend was struggling with his tool bag and other work stuff, so after I got the puppy calmed down, I opened the front door. No one was there. I thought maybe he went back to his truck, so I shut the door and waited for him. Several minutes passed. I called him and asked, "Hey, where'd you go?" He asked me what I meant.
"Weren't you just here? You tried to open the door?" He said he'd gotten caught up talking to his mom as he'd swung by his parent's house, and he was still about 15 minutes out. I was creeped out but chalked it up to my intoxicated neighbor trying to get into the wrong apartment again. The next day, I found out a shocking development—another neighbor down the street had opened their door to someone and got tied up and robbed at gunpoint.
I don't know if it was the same person at my door. I don't know if that would have happened to me, as I had a habit of just opening the door without checking the peephole. I was really naive. But, I was really grateful that my puppy kept me from opening the door immediately and really grateful that my boyfriend had gotten me in the habit of locking the front door when I'm home.
68. Wigged Out
My dad lost his life to cancer the day I turned 16, after about two weeks in a coma. A lot of weird things happened after he passed, but the one that still freaks me out when I think about it happened about 12 hours before he went to bed for the last time. He was in our living room napping on the couch while my mom was in the kitchen cooking. No one else was home.
Suddenly, he jerked awake and was shouting for my mom in a very loud, agitated voice. Clearly angry with her, "Beverly! Don't do that! Don't EVER do that again!" She ran into the room, alarmed and asked what he was talking about, and he said, "Don't do that. Don't walk past me like that in that long, black wig." Sometimes I think he saw the Grim Reaper.
69. The Undiscovered Photographer
A few years ago, I was home alone with my sister and my parents and siblings went out for about six hours. we were sitting at the TV watching Dr. Phil when we heard a lock being fiddled with. All our doors were locked, so I was confused. I checked the house and found nothing. The next night, I was in my room walking around in booty shorts and a sports bra.
I heard a click sound. I thought nothing of it and laid on my bed facing the window. Then, I heard another click. I put on a t-shirt and I went to my window to slam it shut. When I glanced outside anxiously, I froze with horror at what I saw. A guy with a camera was hiding and he bolted. I screamed for my dad and he went after the guy. Eventually, the dude was caught.
It turns out he had multiple pictures of me over the course of two months of me sleeping, showering, and changing along with multiple pictures of other underage girls. So of course, he was incarcerated. That was by far the creepiest experience. I'm 17 now and I still get a pit in my stomach when I tell the story and I always feel watched
70. Bunk Mate
When I was about 13 or 14, I woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom. I had one of those bunk beds, but where instead of a bottom bunk there's a desk. For whatever reason, I started psyching myself out REALLY badly. I sat up in my bed staring into the pitch blackness, imagining a man with a knife standing under my bed ready to get me as soon as I put a foot down the ladder.
Or a torn-face ghost girl in the hallway. Or someone smiling and bloody at the turn into my bathroom. Basically, the usual freaky images. I tormented myself for a solid 20 minutes, then spent another 10 trying to convince myself to go to the bathroom. When I finally felt ready, I carefully stepped down the ladder, holding my breath, ready to feel my foot get harshly grabbed.
I continued to the bathroom, slow and completely on edge. I guess my mom was going to the bathroom at the time too, because she was RIGHT there in the hallway and she bumped into me. Getting bumped into just set me over the edge. I collapsed in the hallway in shock, started crying, and peed all over myself. My mom was stunned and apologetic, but not without a great deal of laughter and mockery first.
71. Midnight Visitors
This happened to my friend's dad. This guy isn't the type to make stuff up, so I believe him 100%. My friend's dad, Jack, and his brother Tom lived with each other in the 80s. It was just the two of them living in the house, no one else. So, this one night Jack is coming home at night and walks into his living room to see a bunch of old people sitting around talking.
As he walks in, they all just quiet down and awkwardly look at him as he walks by. He doesn't see Tom anywhere, so he just assumes Tom will be back to tend to his strange guests. Jack has work the next morning, so he goes in his room to get some sleep, but is kept up from all the people talking. He walks out from his room and is promptly met with Tom, who is coming out of his room to tell Jack to keep his friends quiet.
However, Jack was coming out to tell Tom to keep HIS friends quiet. They walk out from the hallway into the living room…only to see that it's empty with the leftover smell of musk.
72. Ghastly Creatures
Ever since I was really little my family has always encountered a really weird ghostly phenomenon. one night I was asleep and I heard a knocking on my door and a girls voice saying "Open the door!!! Let me in, I want to play!! Open the door!!" At first I thought it was my sister, but as I woke up I realized it was a much younger girl's voice.
73. Apocalypse Preparedness
I grew up spending a ton of time in the Colorado Rockies. In college, a friend and I were on a weekend backpacking trip up in the national forest, about three hundred yards off-trail, when we stumbled across a mostly-buried bunker someone had made. Think a 20-foot-long Tuff Shed, buried up to its roof. We only noticed it because the sun glinted off one of two small windows in the roof, which had been deliberately covered with brush and tree litter.
Looking through the windows, we could make out a cot, buckets and tubs of food, and other supplies. We later found the door that was partially buried, but it had a heavy padlock securing it. We noped out of there soon after as we didn’t want to run into whoever had built the place.
74. Weekend Warriors
This happened when I was 19, I'm 27 now. At the time I was still dating my high school boyfriend, he lived two towns away from me but we spent every weekend together. My best friend Jill had also been friends with Alan, my boyfriend, since middle school, so we were all very close. Jill and I worked together at a medical supply factory, and we would occasionally come up with some great adventures to go on on the weekends.
This week was no exception. We had made plans to all drive out to Alan's after work on Friday, spend the night, then get up and go on our adventure Saturday morning. Friday rolls around, Jill and I get off work and swing by our apartment to pick up our guitars and backpacks for our sleepover. We drive out to Alan's, start cooking up our frozen pizzas, and bust out the guitars and Xbox.
We play and talk and eat till around midnight, then decide we should get some sleep for our trip in the AM. Alan had a futon in the living room that Jill slept on, while Alan and I went to his room on the other side of the living room. We all said goodnight to each other and went to sleep. Saturday morning, I wake up and walk through the living room to go to the bathroom.
Jill grumbles a good morning at me as I walk past. I tell her to get up, it's almost 7 and we gotta get on the road. We all get ourselves ready and into Alan's '92 baby blue Ford Taurus. Then it got weird. We backed down the driveway, Alan driving, me up front, Jill sitting behind Alan. Then the next thing any of us remember, Jill and I are backing down Alan's driveway, in her car, having just returned from our day. It was 6:30 pm.
We were both smiling…but when Jill looked at me and her face fell. She looked me dead in the eyes and asked me what had just happened. It took a second for my feeling of euphoria to clear, like I'd just had a REALLY good dream, but then I realized that I couldn't remember where we'd all went after backing down Alan's driveway that morning. So, being reasonable, level-headed people, we pulled back into Alan's and went to see what he had to say.
We knocked and when Alan opened the door we knew he'd had the same reaction as us. He was pale and wide-eyed and just mumbled out a "doyouguysrememberwhatjusthappened?" And none of us did. We sat down and went over the details of the night and early morning over and over. We kept crying and having to stop to console each other, but we could not come up with any details past backing down the driveway.
Alan remembered going into his house, but not driving up to it or parking his car. Jill and I don't remember getting into her car or seeing Alan go inside. Oh, and none of us can recall what the plan for our Saturday adventure was. We know we had a destination and activities planned, but not one of us can recall a single detail about what the plan was other than: 1. Drive to Alan's 2. Spend the night 3. Get up early Saturday.
Eventually, we were able to calm ourselves down and just reasoned it must've been an abduction but it was no big deal, we were all fine. No weird side effects or physical evidence of anything. Stuff like this must happen all the time. Through the years we've brought it up to each other now and then, just a passing thought of how freaking bizarre it is that we still can't recall any other details of that day.
Part of what bothers me about it is how it's become such a nonchalant topic to bring up now, even though it was very traumatizing at the time. We just so willingly fell into calling it our abduction, even though none of us have a clue...
Pexels
75. Night Vision
One night, I grabbed my son’s toy night vision goggles to see if they even worked. If they did, maybe we could see what was making all the weird howling noises in the woods behind our house. I looked across the yard into the woods and there were so many eyes. So. Many. Eyes. They were everywhere. In one case, there was a grouping of three eyes.
I had myself convinced it was just a possum with its baby and I just couldn’t see one of the eyes, but then they all blinked at the same time. I have never ever used night vision to look into the woods again. Whatever deformity was there can have its space.
Unsplash
76. What A Way To Ruin A Night
Oh man, this happened in my junior year of college. Not my proudest moment. Me and maybe half a dozen friends are hanging out on Saturday night and we are just crispy baked. Then there was a knock at the door. Serious knocking. Panicked knocking. What do we do? Gotta be officers, and we are so screwed. Like, I'm getting kicked out of housing this time.
So one of the girls goes to answer the door. A guy with insane Ted Kaczynski hair and no pants is SCREAMING at the door to let him in. The girl screams and tries to shut the door, but the guy is forcing his way in. He is bleeding pretty bad, and is suddenly basically draped over my friend in a heap. He is totally incoherent, just keeps yelling PLEASE and making no sense otherwise.
My friend runs down to help the girl. I could muster precisely zero courage. I was terrified. I stood at the top of the stairs like a housewife who had seen a mouse in an old cartoon. WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO!? OH GOD WHAT DO WE DO!? We have to call the authorities! Right? I CANT DO IT I'M FREAKING OUT MAN. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY HANDS! Someone finally calls and tells the authorities an old, possibly homeless man is trying to force his way into the apartment.
I remain totally panicking at the top of the steps, helping in no way whatsoever. My friend has now wrestled the guy out of the apartment and is trying to calm him down. Eventually, officers come and they take the disheveled, pantsless homeless man away in an ambulance. We close the door and sit back down in the living room. "Is anyone else not baked at all anymore?" someone asked.
We were not. We'd go over the series of events a hundred times over the next few weeks. I tried to downplay my role as the guardian of the stairwell. Like a week later, though, we'd find out it was neither an old guy nor a homeless guy, but rather a friend of a friend on a really bad acid trip who had lost his pants and ran through a field in a panic.
77. Dirty
I just moved into this house a year ago. There are child-sized handprints on one of my bathroom walls. Permanent handprints you can only see from a certain angle, like what water exposure does to paint. The previous owners have no idea what I'm talking about, and I don't know how they got there.
78. Peeping Tom
I have to preface this by stating that I am a guy. I used to run quite a bit—five miles every day without fail. One day after finishing my run, I got a knock at the door and it was a young man about my age, like 27, asking about the duplex next door, as it was for rent. Typical questions about the neighborhood and the street and whatnot.
I was cordial and informative, but I had some food cooking and needed to get back inside. I told him to call the number on the sign, but before I could excuse myself inside he interjected. The conversation went something like this: Him: Wait...do I smell pot? Dude, do you have weed in there? Me: No, I'm cooking salmon. Him: Oh, cause if you were, I'd be totally down with that. By the way, you've got really nice pecs. Do you work out a lot?
Me: Yeah, I guess...look, I really gotta go. If you have questions about the duplex, call the number on the sign. Him: Cool, thanks. I go back inside the house and he drives off. I instantly call my landlord and tell her to under no circumstances let that guy rent the property, because he gave me the creeps. Well, fast forward two days.
It's a Sunday night around midnight. I'd just finished watching a movie on the couch and I had played a lot of soccer that weekend. Generally, I've found that if I can soak in a hot bath for about 20 minutes, my knees feel better in the morning. So I get up from the couch, walk by my bedroom, and notice that, since I'm kind of a restless sleeper, I must have knocked the blinds and curtains adjacent to my bed askew.
No biggie, I'll fix it tonight before I go to bed. Then I get into the bathroom and notice that someone must have opened the window to the bathroom when I had friends over several days ago. I don't have a bathroom exhaust fan, so it only makes sense to raise the window and blinds a bit. I close the window and shut the blinds.
I've got one of those nifty kitchen timers that I set to 20 minutes and I just sit in the bath, waiting for the time to expire. During this quiet time, my mind starts replaying the weekend's events, and I start to get an uneasy feeling. Subconsciously, I felt something was wrong, but maybe I was just being paranoid. Then I thought about the bedroom window and the bathroom window both having blinds askew.
And come to think of it, I believe the blinds behind the TV had one little slat that was sort of peeled up, too. But, no, now I'm really just being paranoid. And I hadn't even thought about the weird encounter from two days ago. But now, I'm sitting in a bathtub and the darn timer seems frozen at this point. I tell myself that I'll get up when the timer is done, put on some clothes and take a look around the house. Well, I snapped.
Five minutes left and I couldn't take it any longer. I don't know how to rationalize what I did next. It just seemed purely instinctual. I hopped up and got a towel around me. I turned off the bathroom light, made my way quickly through the bedroom door and then the living room area. I then cut the kitchen and living room lights. In the darkness, I pulled a pair of pants up so that I was at least wearing something.
I wasn't going to go back into the bedroom for a shirt. The only light on in the house was my bedroom light. I went over to the front door and flung it open quickly to peer out. Nothing. Crickets. This was the middle of the summer, and the crickets were overwhelmingly loud. Louder than the sound of my squeaky storm door opening.
I decided I was definitely being paranoid, and turned to go back in. I turned, but at the last second I had that thought: I won't be content to sleep tonight unless I properly dismiss the paranoia with a walk around the house. So I barefootedly and cautiously make my way down the front porch stairs, and down the sidewalk to the side of my house where the bedroom windows glow.
The front of the house is definitely clear. I then tiptoe to the corner of the house to get a view of the side of the house. As I peer around the corner, not 20 feet away from me, I see the stranger from two days ago, his face glued to the bedroom window. His hand is in his shorts. I'm instantly enraged. Apparently, he is completely unaware that I have exited the house, much less flanked him.
I decided in that instant to surprise him. The following conversation was a mix between my anger, his fear, and most strangely of all, the feeling of amusement that this is actually happening to me. Keep in mind, the conversation doesn't really make a lot of sense because the guy didn't really have time to think. It really couldn't have been more than about 15-20 seconds before the ordeal was played out.
Me: YOU SICKO! Him: (Surprised and mortified) AHHH!! Me: I'm going to catch you and beat the heck out of you. Him: You don't know me!?!? (backing away) Me: (Aggressively approaching) I know exactly who you are, and I'm going to catch you. Him: (Transitioning from backing away to turning away and starting to run) Please don't hurt me. I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! Please don't hurt me!
At this point, it's an all-out chase across a neighbor's yard. I'm wearing nothing but a pair of warm-up pants, but I'm gaining on him. I was playing soccer daily at the time, so I was definitely going to catch him. But he made it easy. I chased him across one gravel driveway, which wasn't fun, but I was on his heels by the time he reached the second one, and he took a nasty fall right into the middle of the gravel.
I very nearly kicked him across the face with my shin, but I suppressed the urge. I tell him to get up. At this point he knows he is caught, so he is completely compliant...well, kind of. I ask him where he parked, and he lied and said a few blocks down. I ask his name, and he gives me one. I take his keys from him and tell him we're going to his car. We walk about 30 feet and he stops and says, "Actually, this is my car."
Wow, ok, so you parked basically right next to my house. So, I open his car and he's like, "What are you doing?" I explain to him that there's no way for me to know who he is, since he has no wallet with him. I open his glove box hoping to find some real ID. Bingo. I found a receipt for tire rotation or something. The car shown on the receipt matches the car he's driving. But the name doesn't.
I call him by the name on the receipt and he starts crying again and apologizing about lying about his name. I'm convinced I have him scared, and now I just want to go to bed. I know the authorities will take hours and it's already like 1:00 and I've gotta be up early. So, I take the little folder thing the receipt came in and I told him to write down a confession of what he did.
It was only just becoming apparent to me that not only was he a peeping tom, he had come into my house when I wasn't there to adjust the blinds in order to see in. Now I've got a written and signed confession. I write his license plate down and then I decide to make sure I never have to see this guy again. I take his phone and write down numbers of obvious relatives: Mom, Dad, etc.
Just a few. And then I tell him "I never want to see you again." I made it clear for him that if he saw me somewhere, he'd better make sure I don't see him. Anyway, at this point he's sitting in his car. I toss the keys and his cell phone into his car and tell him to get lost. He sits in the car sobbing for a while as I'm walking away, but he's got the engine started and leaving by the time I'm back in my house.
At this point, I sit down and pour a drink. And then I decide I wished I had called the authorities because I'm not getting any sleep, so I call the officer to show them the confession and all the information. The officer who shows up writes a few things down and tells me I should have detained him. Two days later, I call them and ask them about a report.
No news, and no news would come. No report. Oh well, he's never coming back. Wrong! He knocks on my door about a year later. I open the door, and he must have seen the anger. He backs away from the door with his hands up and says he came to apologize. He said he was very sorry. I told him I accepted his apology and to not screw up like that again. And then he said thanks and walked away. Very strange.
79. Conserve Energy
To really get my story you have to understand my third-floor landing. There's a single set of stairs that lead up to it, once on the landing it’s a T-shape, with an office to the left, my bedroom to the right, and straight ahead is a bathroom with a shower. One night around 10 p.m., I was taking a shower before I went to sleep.
The glass panels on my shower are that glass that blurs everything, so everything was blurred and unclear. I glanced at the door and I saw some kind of hand-like figure. The hand was pitch black, so right there it freaked me out because I come from a family of pale white Welsh people. What freaked me out more was how the hand seemed to come through the door, or at least an angle where whomever the hand belonged to would be visible.
All it did was hit the lights. That's it. No noise, no attack or anything, it just turned off the lights. So, there I am, I just witnessed a phantom hand, and now I'm in my shower and the room pitch black. I had never been so chilled to the bone before; something about being in the darkness of the night, with the only noise being the water hitting the floor beneath me, just reduced me to the most primal state of pure fear I've ever been in.
I eventually got myself to leave the shower and hit the lights. The relief that came over me was immense. I've never been able to explain it. The stairs up to the landing are old and creek, so I would've heard someone come up and go down. No one was in my room or the office. Weirder still, nothing like it has happened since.
80. Underground Prisoner
When my brother and I were kids, there was an abandoned house we’d go in from time to time. One day, we were brave enough to knock on the root cellar door. I will never forget the immediate sharp bangs on the door back at us. I don’t think either of us has run that fast since.
81. The New House
When I was 3, my family had just moved into a new house, and I mean brand-spankin’ new. We were the first people on our street to move in, and they didn't finish building all the houses until a few weeks after we moved in. Anyway, here's my story. One night when I was about 4 1/2, for some reason I woke up in the middle of the night.
This was around the age where I was sure if I thought long and hard enough, that I could get x-ray vision like superman, and whenever I'd wake up in the middle of the night that's what I'd try to do. I'd sit there in bed for 10-15 minutes, trying really hard to see through walls, or my dresser, or even just the back of my hand before eventually giving up and just going back to sleep.
This particular night wasn't any different from any other, I woke up, saw the Toronto Blue Jays clock on my wall, saw it was around 1 am, and went to work trying to see through the back of my hand. About 5 minutes into my routine (I never did get x-ray vision in case you're wondering), I heard what sounded like a whisper.
I thought maybe it was my sister, who was just a year older and in the next room so I kept on trying my best to just see through something until I heard a man call my name, and I just about peed myself. I sat there frozen in fear, I didn't know who it was, my father at the time worked the night shift and didn't get home until 4 am most days.
I don't know how to rightly express just how terrified I was at what happened next, or to really express what was running through my mind, but the voice laughed at me, and said it was going to get me, and then silence for the next 5 seconds until I screamed out loud. I woke everyone in the house up, my mother ran into my room and asked me what was wrong, but I was crying a lot.
She sat with me for what must have been close to half an hour until I calmed down and was able to tell her what happened. I asked if it was dad and why would he be playing such a mean joke on me, but she said he was still at work and that I must have been dreaming. The thing about that whole ordeal, about how terrified I was, is that I never again felt comfortable in that house.
I never again slept with my door closed, and at least once a week, for many YEARS, I would wake up and just yell for my mother because something didn't feel right. It turned me from a self-assured child into a child that was afraid of everything. To this day I'm not sure if it was my father or not, my mother said it wasn't, but the house was brand new, the land it was built on used to be farmland, and there was nothing else on the land but massive fields of crops.
My parents still live in that house, and nothing like that voice ever happened again, but the room that was mine still creeps me out if I'm over there at night. I don't know what it was.
82. Hungry
I house sit for a family friend when she goes out of town. The woman who lives there is really into a bunch of spiritual stuff—new age stuff, reiki, etc. The very first time I was housesitting, I was outside watering the plants. I was the only one there and had closed the door after me. From the driveway where I was watering, I had a completely unobstructed view of the front door, the only door that was unlocked at the time.
When I went back inside, there on the little table next to the front door was a half-eaten cookie. The table had been completely clear when I went outside and I hadn't seen cookies that looked like that anywhere in the house. Nothing too creepy, but very puzzling and unsettling. When the woman returned, I mentioned it to her and she laughed and said she "gets ghosts all the time." I'm a fairly skeptical person, but honestly, ghosts were the best explanation.
The next time I was over, I was in the bathroom around 10:30 p.m. The house itself is fairly old and creaks from time to time, but nothing too loud or disruptive. While I was doing my business, there came a single loud knock from the other side of the bathroom door. This wasn't a little creak or pop from the house, it was a loud, determined rap on the door. It was enough to scare me for the rest of the night.
Unsplash
83. Scary Night Experience
I'm a kid who likes his sleep very much so my dad often had to wake me up as I slept through my alarm. One night I fell asleep and then woke up to a hand on my shoulder and then I feel the covers yanked off me all the way off the bed. I shot up out of bed because it was a habit at this point because this is when I knew my dad was serious. I opened my eyes only to realize that nobody was there.
84. Taken
One morning at about 1:00 a.m., I got a phone call from my little sister's cell. She lived in a time zone to the east, so it was 2:00 a.m. there. It woke me up, and I immediately sensed that something was wrong. I picked up the phone and groggily said, "Hello?" I heard a muffled woman's voice—possibly my sister's—say, "Please, help me." She sounded terrified and desperate.
I immediately thought I was having a Taken moment—my sister is being kidnapped and it was all she could do to call me for help! Should I hang up and call for help? Should I yell into the phone? Should I keep listening and try to pick up some kind of relevant information? I really wished I had one of those fancy phone recording devices that the Taken guy had right then.
I opted to keep listening, and as I did, I occasionally heard muffled yelling and screaming, much to my horror. Her phone must have been hidden away pretty well. Then something strange happened: I heard what was clearly my sister's voice, also muffled, but completely calm. I didn't hear what she said, but it was a very casual, conversational tone. Then I noticed for the first time that there was also scary music along with the yelling and stuff in the background. My sister butt-dialed me in the middle of a horror flick at two in the morning.
Unsplash
85. Gone In The Night
I lived in the Hollywood Hills, and this happened in the early 80s. One night, I heard crazy knocking at my door at 9 pm. I go to answer the door and there's a lady there just beside herself, talking about "There's so much blood..." She looks normal and is dressed in clean clothing, so we let her in. She tells a story about seeing someone get hurt.
I call the authorities and two uniformed LAPD officers arrive in 10 minutes. They take the lady away, and tell us that she was reported missing, has a mental condition, and lives up the street. All good. 30 minutes later, another knock at the door. Two different officers this time, responding to the call. They have no idea who the other two officers were!
They take our information and statements, our description of the officers, and the lady as well. Radio conversations back and forth ensue, and they really don't have any idea how any other officers could have picked her up, because they were given the call 40 minutes ago. Still no idea what happened to this day.
86. Zombies Galore
About a year ago, I was lying in bed after having just finished reading an excellent zombie novel. It was the middle of winter, and slightly after midnight. I couldn't sleep, as my mind was still crawling with zombies, so I lay awake staring at the ceiling with the dog snoring away next to me. Suddenly I heard three loud thumps from the glass of the window across the room.
Very hard and very steady. Like someone pounding on the glass with the flat of their hand. The sound scared the daylight out of me and woke the dog, who started barking. I sat there trying to reassure him (and myself) that it was OK and there was some sensible reason for it. After a few minutes we both calmed down, he went to back sleep and I followed about half an hour later.
I was woken up in the middle of the night by the same sound. THUMP THUMP THUMP. The sound came from the same window, with the same steady interval between thumps, and just as loud as before. The dog woke and started barking again. Both of us were freaking out, and I couldn't bring myself to turn on the light and go look out the window.
The only thing I could think to do was run out into the living room curl up on the couch with the dog, a blanket over both our heads. The next morning, I woke on the couch feeling exhausted, having slept only intermittently. The dog was sitting at the door to my room looking alert and looking back to me and whining. I went back into my bedroom and looked out the window.
There was nothing unusual looking. No marks on the glass or anything. My apartment is on the top floor of our 6-story building. The fire escape was on the window nearest to the bed, not the one near the window where the sound came from. Whatever had hit the window had had a six-story drop beneath it. At a loss for any other explanation, I figured it must have been a bird running into the window.
I had no explanation for the fact that it seemed to do so three times in a row, at very steady intervals, on two separate occasions, and with a sound much louder than could be made by a lightweight creature bouncing off the glass. The fact that it had happened late at night, a time when birds aren't typically flying around, I also carefully ignored in my hope for some sane explanation
Somewhat satisfied with my rationalization, I went to work and felt much better for the rest of the day... that is until one last fact filtered into my mind. It dwelt there for the rest of the workday nagging at me and I rushed home to confirm my suspicions. Reaching the window again, just as the sun was setting, I felt a chill run down my spine: my troublesome suspicion was accurate.
There was a screen on the outside of the window. The noise had very clearly be the sound of the glass being struck. Whatever had hit the window had to have done so from inside the room.
87. Window Watcher
This happened to my friend. She told me that when she was little, she was playing with her little brother and sister one night. Her little brother looked out the window and said, "Who is that man?" They all went to the window to see what he was talking about. She said there was a white figure sitting on top of the telephone pole, and it looked like a man.
He was staring at them with a huge creepy smile. Then he just stood up and jumped off the pole and simply vanished before they saw him hit the ground. She said it scared them so much, her sister won't even talk about it.
88. The Older Woman
When I was really little my parents would let me stay up late on the weekends and watch TV until I fell asleep. Well, one night I was almost asleep on the couch when I heard a noise on our front porch. Sitting on my front porch swing was an older woman, probably in her 50's wearing nothing but a nightgown, covered in blood and holding a huge kitchen knife. I still have nightmares about her.
89. Deja Vu
This whole thing still freaks me out. I was waiting at the bus stop around two years ago, and just start chatting with this lady who was waiting for a different bus. It was just a normal conversation, but there was an odd undertone that I could just barely make out, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I don't know what it was. but I know it was there.
Finally my bus comes, I get on, and I am the only one there. All of a sudden I hear "Hey!" I glance up and there's a little girl who says "Remember me?" She reminded me strangely of the woman I was speaking with at the bus stop, but younger. You could cut the tension with a knife, and when I got off I swear she watched me as the bus left.
I'm certain that I was the only one on the bus when I got on.
90. The Ghost Of Subways Past
Eight years ago we fitted out a brand new Subway restaurant with a CCTV system—it fully covered the front of house and back of house, 16 cameras in total. A couple of weeks after they open, the owner calls us in to download some footage for him. One night, while he's at home, he gets a screaming phone call from his staff who are closing up at the restaurant.
They have all bailed from the shop and are refusing to go back—ever. The shop is unlocked and he has to go down and close up. The staff claim that they were closing up at the end of the day as normal when a "ghost" came through the back wall. It floated through the kitchen, passing right through the chairs and tables. They all see it, freak out, and book it, leaving everything wide open and unlocked.
I go in the next day and review the footage—it's all there. I can't believe it. It's exactly as the employees described: A white, smoky figure comes out of the wall and takes a tour of the store. Footage shows the staff freaking out and bailing. "It" continues wandering around for a good two minutes before leaping onto a wall, and then rushing one of the cameras.
It runs/crawls directly into the camera and even makes the camera shake from the impact. Then it disappears. Three of us sat in the office reviewing that footage and were completely speechless. We just stared at each other for a few minutes; it was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. We downloaded the footage onto CDs and left them with the owner.
I still can't explain what we saw. Before you ask, I'm a firm atheist and skeptic; I don't believe in ghosts, the supernatural, or whatever, but I cannot explain what I saw. It was some kind of entity; it was witnessed first-hand by three people and it had enough physical presence to make the camera move when it hit it.
I have long since left that CCTV crew and have no idea what came of the footage. I have checked Youtube and it's not there. That one still boggles me.
91. Home (Almost) Alone
Once, my brother and I were sleeping, and my dad had just left for work. A little while after, someone entered the house and told the dog to be quiet. I didn't recognize the voice. I was 100% sure it was a burglar who thought the house was empty as my dad had just left. I sneaked into my brother's room, shaking with fear, woke him up, and told him that a stranger had just entered the house. He called the authorities on the spot.
Two tiny minutes later (we were impressed!) two official cars and four law officials were at the door of our house. Oh, how uneasy was my dad when they called him and he had to tell them he had come back because he had forgotten something and pretended to have a "funny voice" or something for no reason whatsoever. It was about 15 years ago and my brother and I still (jokingly) blame each other for it.
92. A Nasty Surprise
When I was about five years old, I woke up to the snow outside our house finally starting to melt. That’s when I noticed a girl "asleep" in the garden. I went and told my dad. He took one look and his face went white. He told me to go play in my room. Turns out, the girl had been "asleep" in our front garden for about two weeks, buried and frozen under the snow.
I didn't know she was actually a corpse until I was about 16, when I mentioned to my dad, "Remember that girl asleep in the garden?" Dad was like, “You idiot, that was a body." As far as I know, she was in her late teens or early 20s. We lived in a pretty rough area at the time, and she had probably been out partying, sat on our garden wall, and passed out.
93. The Cabin In The Woods
My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin. I used to spend time there in the summer tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One extremely early morning, when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and told us it was time to go fishing. It was still super early and we were all confused because it was pitch dark.
He hustled us down to the dock where he kept his little fishing boat and quickly launched us into the water and away from the house. At this point we were all getting a little freaked out—but this was just the beginning. My uncle wasn’t talking. We just sat, shivering under a blanket at the bow of the boat, while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline and waved a flashlight furtively ahead of us.
We eventually arrived at my uncle’s friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled into his house. Our uncle sent us to the loft to sleep. He and his buddy locked the doors and left, not returning until well after sunrise. Eventually, our uncle showed up with the truck and trailer already packed with all of our gear, and he told us it was time to go home.
Many years later, my uncle confided to me that the reason he’d hustled us home was because he’d woken up around 3 AM to a strange “Thok! Thok! Thok!” sound from outside the cabin. He’d gone out to investigate, when a massive jack pine fell directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line.
Just in time, my uncle saw a man, holding an axe. The man slinked away into the dark of the trees and woods. He and his buddy returned to his cabin later, and had to take turns chainsawing the tree that fell across our narrow driveway apart, while the other stood watch with a rifle. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
94. Crocodile Tears
When I was 14, I went for a walk by myself on a dirt path. I passed some guy who was just sitting on a rock in the middle of the forest. I didn’t make eye contact with him, but I could see that he was crying. I wanted to help, but my gut told me not to. Three days later, I turned on the news and saw his picture. That's when I learned a shocking truth about that man—he had savagely slaughtered his wife and five-year-old daughter.
95. The Others
My mom and older sister describe how I used to randomly start crying and asking where my mom was, even when she was right in front of me. When my mother would try to comfort me by saying she was right there, I would shout for my other mom. I would then describe this person, who apparently always held a bloody hammer. They said it scared them out of their wits, but one day when I was two years old, they tried to ask me about it and I couldn't remember anything.
Pxfuel
96. Calling All Angels
After I totaled my car, a man with burn scars all over his face and hands came up to my window. He asked if I was ok and then came and sat in the passenger seat. He said, “I need you to know that everything happens for a reason.” I said, “I know.” The next thing I know, I’m talking to the other driver and the authorities, and the guy is just gone. No one else saw him.
97. The Conversation
When I was a kid, I lived with just my mom. Every few nights after she went to bed and turned off all of the TVs, I’d hear a man and woman casually having a quiet conversation in our kitchen area. I always had to concentrate really hard to make sure I was actually hearing something, because it was so faint I couldn’t make out the words.
This continued for years, and I thought my mom wouldn’t believe me if I told her. After we moved out, I finally told her—she said she’d always experienced the same thing.
98. I Can See It in Your Eyes
My boyfriend’s younger brother and I were taking a bike ride down the street to the shops late one afternoon. As we get onto the main road, we notice a dude across the street heading in the opposite direction. He is walking with a limp, his head is bowed, and he’s got a plastic bag in his hand. We're only a few metres away from him when he crosses the street onto our side.
As the bro rides past him, this stranger lifts his head up and smiles in his direction as they pass each other. I'm a little while behind, so I don't pay too much attention to this—that is, until the bro stops, turns around, and gives me a funny look, just as this guy is passing him by. I still don't think too much of it at this point, assuming that he had just stopped to let me catch up.
As soon as I myself passed the stranger and made eye contact with him, I realized that this was not the case. When the stranger looked over and nodded at me, I saw nothing in his eyes. When I say nothing, I mean like black pits where his eyes should have been, or just an eyeball that looked entirely black. I don’t know how else to describe it.
When I finally catch up to the bro, we stop around the corner and he says to me "Did you see that???" "You mean his eyes?!" I asked. "Yeah, it looked like they weren't even there!" he replied. We then kind of sat there for a while processing what we had both just seen. Had the bro not related the same feeling and experience to me as I had felt when the stranger looked at me, I doubt I would have ever thought anything of it.
I probably would have just assumed it was the light angles playing tricks on me or some such thing. It was a sunny afternoon, so glare certainly could have played a part. He could've been wearing contacts, I don't know. But none of those explanations feel like they fit. We got home later on and told everybody what had happened, but no one believed us. They still don't to this day.
99. I'd Rather You Didn't
My six-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat a few days ago and looked at me and said, "Dad, when I'm seven I'm going to kill you. No wait, when I'm eight." I asked, "How are you going to do that?" She smiled and said, "I'm gonna drive over your head with this car."
Shutterstock/Getty images
100. Something Much Worse Than A Ghost
I was about seven years old. My brother was about 10. It was well past our bedtime when our mom woke up off the couch to put us to bed. Our dad worked construction out of town back then, so it was often just us three at the house for weeks at a time. Up the stairs and to the immediate right was our parents' bedroom. Going left put you in the middle of a hallway.
Taking another left down that hallway led to my brother's room. The opposite end was my room, which was also across the hall from our upstairs bathroom. At either end of the hallway are windowed doors that we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on my end led to a balcony overlooking our front yard, and the door on my brother's end opened to our back porch.
My brother and mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I only knew this because I was always a light sleeper and they just couldn't help flushing with the door wide open. This night, however, my brother stopped on his way to his room and came back towards the bathroom. That’s when he made a comment that chilled me to the bone.
He told me: "I'm gonna try to pee before I go to bed tonight. The past few nights, I've been too afraid to walk to the bathroom. I keep seeing a man wearing stripes at the end of the hallway." I don't know if my mom wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories to try to scare me, or if she was already half asleep and didn't catch it, but she didn't react at all to my brother's confession.
I, on the other hand, was terrified by it. The fear of seeing a ghost-like that at the end of the hallway or through the windows is the reason I started running from the stairs to my bedroom at night. Years later, when I was about 18, my mom and I were having a conversation in her car about a dog named Max that we’d had for a very short time when I was little.
We were sharing stories about Max's tendency towards destroying my shoes and other unruly behaviors, when my mom blurted out, "Do you remember that time I opened the front door for the cops and Max ran inside to the kitchen and started tearing open that big bag of dog food we had?" This really caught me by surprise.
In all the years I lived in that house, we never once called law enforcement as far as I was aware. I asked her what she was talking about and she looked equally surprised, as if she had just revealed something by accident. Then, she said: "Oh, that's right! I never told you about this because you were too young at the time…”
She continued: "One night, I woke up hearing noises outside my window and, when I looked outside, I saw a man staring into my bedroom." She went on to describe how turning on the lights caused him to take off running, and how she had grabbed my dad's pistol before calling the authorities. I started to ask some more questions about the experience until something clicked in my head.
My mom said she couldn’t remember all the details she gave them when they showed up, but she remembered describing the man as a tall white male, wearing a striped shirt and jeans, with short dark hair, or something like that. They said it matched the description of a man they were looking for in the area. It turns out he had just escaped from behind bars, where he’d been charged with murder.
Now, I know it sounds so obvious hearing those two stories back to back, but it wasn't until a few years ago, in my mid-20s, that I pieced together that my brother had unknowingly warned us about a murderer who had spent multiple nights staking out our home. Who knows what he had been planning to do…
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16,
