Most creepy stories are experienced in the dead of night, but not these. That's the terrifying part. Even while basking in the warm sunshine, nobody's safe from the supernatural or the horrors of real life. Buckle up, because these brightly-lit scares are enough to keep you up at night.
1. A Race To The Finish
I was at a mountain bike race in the midwest. It was 100 degrees that day, with almost no oxygen in the woods. There were three of us who were well ahead of the pack. We were about to lap another racer when he rode off the trail and down a steep ravine. All three of us stopped. The ravine was steep and very deep. We found his bike halfway down—but then it got creepy.
We never found the racer. They sent a search party and found nothing. To this day, he has never been found.
2. A Total Flop
I was walking along the greenway in Boston when I saw a man some distance away, walking in the opposite direction with a completely floppy right arm. Everything below his elbow was just boneless, and his forearm was flapping around all loose. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, so it didn’t seem to be a prosthetic or some kind of gag. I was baffled. No one else around him was reacting to it.
3. Field Of Screams
When I was a kid, we lived in a newish development outside of Philadelphia. On the edge of our housing development was a wooded area, and on the other side of those woods were some farmers' fields. As a boy, I would go exploring in those woods, and one day I saw a car sitting on the edge of one of the farmer's fields. That car had not been there before.
I carefully walked up to it and peered inside. Next thing I knew, I was stifling a scream. In the backseat was an older man who looked like he was asleep, and he had a shotgun lying across his lap. I knew enough to keep quiet as this car was definitely out of place, and the man had a rifle. I crept back into the woods and ran home to tell my dad, who was a former officer.
My dad didn’t care. He didn’t want to go investigate it with me, and he told me just to forget I saw anything. I went back the next day to see it again, and the car was gone. Years later, it occurred to me that this must have been somebody on the run—perhaps a bank robber or something—and he must have pulled into this hidden farm field to get some rest.
4. An Old Soul
When I was young, we had moved to the mountains. I was helping my dad clear some big weeds when a young boy in denim overalls, red shirt, and ballcap walked down the road. He walked down our front drive, right past my dad and me, towards a big field our house was on the edge of. He hung a right along the treeline, and we lost sight of him.
My dad said, "Well, the house has been empty for years. Local kids just have to get used to not cutting across our property now.” We never saw the kid again. About 25 years later, my mom was catching up with an old neighbor who had moved out of the area. She told a story that still gives me chills. She asked if we had ever seen the ghost of a boy that had been beaten by his father.
I relayed the time from when I was little, and she said it all matched.
5. Double Vision
When I was about eight years old, I was visiting my dad at his house. My stepmother was in the kitchen, and I was in the family room. We both saw my father, wearing a red flannel shirt and blue jeans, walk around the corner from the living room and start walking up the stairs. I followed him and called his name as he went up the stairs.
He turned back and looked at me, got to the top of the stairs, and went around the corner. I called his name again. Then, the strangest thing happened: From the living room, my dad popped his head up over the couch and asked what I wanted. He had been asleep on the couch the entire time, yet both my stepmother and I clearly saw him go from the living room up the stairs. It was so freaky.
Both my stepmother and I still remember it and talk about it to this day.
6. Turn Back The Clock
When I was younger, I was at a friend's birthday party. She always talked about how her room was haunted, but I never believed her. One day, we were all watching The Exorcist in her room, and I was sitting on her bed, which was far back in the room. If anyone had moved, I would have seen it. Behind me, on her nightstand, was an alarm clock.
My mom was coming to pick me up, so, in anticipation, I was checking the clock often. I kept turning my head to view the time, and after about the fifth time checking, I looked over, and the CLOCK WAS TURNED AROUND FACING THE WALL. Now NO ONE had moved cause I would have seen them, so it wasn't just a friend messing with me. It was creepy and freaked me out so bad I went outside to wait for my mom.
6. A Grand Illusion
When I was 15, my family went on a cross-country trip, and one night we camped in the Grand Canyon. We went to a ranger lecture around 6 PM. It was summer, so it was still pretty light out when we were walking back. For a shortcut, we went off the trail and, after walking some distance, noticed a light up ahead. As we drew closer, we saw something so strange—it's unforgettable.
A man was sitting at a desk in the woods with a lantern. It was a full office-sized wood desk in the middle of the woods. I distinctly remember he had long sideburns and was dressed like a man from the 1800s. My dad backed us down towards the trail, and we went on our way. The man never made a peep or looked up or acknowledged us.
There were two adults and three teenagers, and we all remember the event clearly. I don't believe in ghosts or spirits but have no explanation for what I saw.
7. Total Blackout
When I was 12, I was in the wave pool at a huge water park. My friend and I were on a double tube just splashing around when we ended up in the middle of the giant pool, bumping into other tubers. I looked up, and a few feet away, I saw this guy, who was about 25, staring at me. It was a creepy, intense stare. I noticed he had black eyes.
But they weren’t just dark eyes—they were the kind of pitch-black you see in horror movies where the entire eye is black. This occurred before colored contacts were widely available, so that didn’t seem to be a possibility. I couldn’t look away for what felt like a long time. It was one of the creepiest things I had ever experienced.
8. Swamp Thing
I grew up in a pretty rural area on a decent-sized corn/soybeans farm that was about half farmland and half forest. My friends and I enjoyed goofing off in the woods and had thoroughly explored most of the land in every direction. There really weren’t many nooks or crannies left. I was out in the woods alone on a bright hot sunny August day.
The forest behind the farm had an almost bowl-shaped topography to it. In the middle was a depression that, for most of the year, was a swamp, which was very difficult to get through. There was this cool old blue car from the 1940s parked by the edge of the swamp. The swamp borders often shifted, and on that day, the car was sitting in swamp water almost up to its windows.
This wasn’t anything new, but what was new was the person sitting in the driver's seat. When I saw them—I freaked the heck out. Whoever they were, they had long dirty blond hair with colorful but dirty streaks painted in. I was facing the driver's side of the car and scrambled to put some distance between me and the car, but I didn’t outright bolt.
I peeked around the corner from a tree, and with my new vantage point, it was immediately apparent that it was just some old mannequin with a wig on. It was still creepy because it hadn’t been there before. Then it turned its head, and those pupil-less cold eyes looked right at me. I bolted all the way back to my house and locked everything down like Fort Knox.
A few weeks later, after my friends wouldn’t believe me, we went back to the car, and it was still there. We went right up to the car and looked inside. It was definitely just a dummy, and it had some kind of fishing line contraption with which one could crudely control the dummy head. The line ran out the other side of the car and around the back of a tree, a little ways into the swamp.
Someone was there that day, and they knew I was looking at the vehicle.
9. Where Did He Go?
In college, I lived in an apartment on the 11th floor with no balcony. It was about 4:30 PM. I had watched a man walk into my apartment about 10 seconds before I did. I was living with three roommates at the time, so I just figured they were having guests over. No biggie. Out of habit, I bolted the door behind me, which also locked automatically on the outside.
I put my stuff on the couch and went towards the back bedroom to say hi to whoever came over. My roommates had no idea what I was talking about. It wasn’t a big apartment, but I searched everywhere. My roommates stayed in the back bedroom sufficiently freaked out. There was no one else in the apartment, and the door was still bolted from the inside.
11. Who Shifted The Sofa?
My wife and I were living in a house that had this big couch in the living room. This thing was a huge, L-shaped thing that could easily fit seven people. One morning, we woke up, and the couch had moved. It was in the middle of the living room, about three feet away from the walls on either side and perfectly straight.
I asked my wife if she had moved it, but she said she didn’t leave the room all night and our dog slept in the bed with us, and our bedroom door was closed. Not only that but there was no way my wife or the dog could have moved the couch that much. I have no explanation for it. There wasn’t an earthquake, and I don’t sleepwalk. I have no idea how that couch moved.
12. Total Exposure
One afternoon, I spotted a man with a severely injured arm: the bone was exposed and he was missing a substantial amount of skin and muscle. He walked up to me in a parking lot and calmly asked me for a smoke. I was inwardly screaming. I told him I was calling an ambulance for him, and he immediately ran off. I gave his description to emergency services.
There wasn't much blood, but the guy clearly needed immediate medical attention. That image still gives me nightmares to this day.
13. They Were In Maximum Overdrive
My dad was a paramedic. He had a call that took him to an SUV that had driven into the river and was being towed out. The car was obviously not working, and the two guys inside were already deceased. As they were pulling the guys out of the vehicle, suddenly all the lights flashed on, the windshield wipers started going on full speed, and the car started blaring the radio at max volume. It freaked everyone right out.
14. I Wasn’t Monkeying Around
When I was ten, I had a dream about being in a barren playground with brown dirt and monkey bars placed next to each other. It looked nothing like the playgrounds I saw in my neighborhood. In that dream, I turned my head, and in front of me, a girl was sitting on a bench, telling another girl beside her, "You can't tell anyone, okay?" before whispering in her ear.
I woke up and was utterly confused because there was no plot to the entire dream, and the background was meaningless to me. Two months later, I moved to a different country—Japan. I was at a friend's birthday party. I was just standing in the middle of the schoolyard, staring at the monkey bars, and I couldn’t help but think they looked familiar. I turned around—and my stomach dropped.
I watched, completely stricken, as the birthday girl whispered to a friend beside her in Japanese, "Don't tell anyone, okay?"
15. It Was Like Something From Down Under
Shortly after I started a new job, I accidentally jumped on the wrong bus home. It was the same line as my usual bus, but it ran an adjunct route that dropped me a mile or two from where I needed to be. I began my trek to the park-n-ride and took my liberties cutting through various vacant and business lots. One such lot was a construction supply yard full of cement forms and heavy equipment.
I definitely didn't belong there, so I was feeling a bit on edge as I crept through the area. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something that startled me so badly that I yelped. It was an animal roughly the size of a small dog with long ears like a rabbit, and it was standing on its hind legs. When it saw me, it took off. It was jumping away like a kangaroo would, bounding large distances with just its hind legs while its front legs were tucked in.
It was fast, and it disappeared so quickly that it made the moment all the more surreal. I wrote it off as being some kind of very large jackrabbit at the time, but when I got home, I did a little research. Turns out, jackrabbits don't move that way, nor were there any species that even remotely resembled that thing in my area. It creeped me out, and I made it back to my car that much faster.
16. I Was Left Tied Up In Knots
One morning, when I was 15 years old, I was alone at my older sister's house. I had just gotten out of the shower, still wrapped in a towel when I heard a noise outside. I looked out the window. I saw a complete stranger tie the doorknob of the house’s main entrance to the deck railing with the rope I used to walk the dog with.
He then leaned a mop that was on the deck against the door. I called my sister, told her what happened, got dressed, and got out of the house through a different door. I hid in the bushes until the authorities arrived. The house was in a somewhat remote area, without any close neighbors. Later, I found out the door he tied up was unlocked!
I had no clue how long he had been lurking around before I discovered his presence. To this day, we have no idea who that was or what his motives were.
17. This Was Not An Awesome Possum
My father had never seen an opossum before in his life. He never even knew an animal like that existed. To him, small to medium rodents, even though opossums are marsupials, were limited to squirrels, rats, chipmunks, mice, hamsters, etc. One day, he started backing up his car, which was parked in an apartment’s basement garage. Suddenly, he heard this terrible shrieking sound.
He got out and went around to the passenger rear tire, and there stood an opossum. Its mouth was open, and it was angry. He started freaking out and ended up calling the authorities for help. He stood there trying to explain that he was trapped in his parking garage with a "monster.”
18. Look What The Cat Dragged In
One day, when I was in primary school, I was waiting to go into the school building when many of the students were gathered around a poster taped to the library on the opposite side of our school. I went over to see what they were looking at. There was a poster with different pictures of dismembered cats. There were about six or so different pictures on there.
In the middle was a warning to keep our cats inside. A few kids were crying after seeing that. The teachers had the poster taken down immediately. I remember our parents telling us not to play in the woods because there was a person actively hurting cats. We already knew about that; we didn't need the pictures. It was so disturbing.
19. I Got Tied Up
When I was a teenager, I was at a friend's house when his parents and family were not home. I was on his back porch tying my shoes, and then I went back into his house. I walked inside, and his entire family was back home, sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner. They asked me what I was doing there and stared at me like I was crazy.
They kept asking why I had just walked into their house, so I asked for the time. They told me it was 6:30 PM. Somehow, I had lost an entire hour doing a 20-second action. To this day, I still have no clue what happened or where the time went.
20. Silent Theater
One day, my dad, brother, and I went to a movie theater. It was around 4 PM, so it was getting dark, but it was still light out. We went up to the front where you buy tickets, and when we looked around, there was absolutely no one in the movie theater at all. There were no employees and no other guests. We walked in and looked all around.
We were hoping to find someone, so we could purchase a movie ticket, but found no one. We checked in each of the theaters, and all the movies were running but with no one else inside. We just sat down and watched the film, then left without seeing anyone else the entire time. It was all very surreal.
21. Never Leave A Man Behind
When I was about nine years old, my mother was driving us four kids home past a school. Suddenly, I heard a screech in the opposite lane. A school kid my age went flying into the air and then landed in the middle of the road. My mother stopped to see if she could help. The injured child was facing our direction about ten feet away from me.
I leaned out the car window to see him. His shocked grey eyes opened wider as he looked straight at me. His mouth opened slowly as if trying to speak. He didn’t show any sign of pain, and there was no blood—but I knew it wasn't looking good. The kid kept staring at me, and I could not stop looking back at him. None of the adults touched him or got too close.
My mother realized she had four kids watching this horror. We heard an ambulance on its way, so she drove off. She wouldn’t listen to my pleas to stay. I was devastated to leave a fellow school kid lying in the middle of the road with no one. Decades later, I can still see his shocked eyes looking straight at me, trying to tell me something.
22. She Wasn’t Kidding
My high school girlfriend and her family all talked about the ghost in their house. They always said that it sounded like a man wearing boots walking down the hallway. We were all very close, and one day, when they weren't home, I just walked in and went into my girlfriend’s room. I lay on her bed while I waited for them to get back.
A man in boots strolled right down the hall and right past the door to where I was lying. I did the next logical thing and climbed out of her bedroom window. They showed up a few minutes later and asked why I was just standing around in the front yard and why I hadn't just gone in. I told them that I heard the ghost and climbed out of the window to escape.
They laughed their heads off. It was broad daylight, totally creepy, and very unexplained.
23. It Was Not The Blue Man Group
My dad was in the Peace Corps and lived in Sierra Leone for three years. He had a motorcycle and would ride around the roads when he had free time. One day he was riding on a dirt road that snaked around a small hillside past some construction. About half a mile after the roadwork, he saw a man on the side of this dirt road just laughing his head off.
The man was blue—not painted blue—just blue. At first, my dad rode on, thinking nothing of it. Then it sunk in—he had just seen a bright blue dude sitting on the side of a dirt road laughing wildly. He turned around and rode back to where he saw the blue man, and there was nothing there. There was nowhere for him to go. He kept retracing his path beyond the roadwork but never saw the blue guy again.
Later that day, he went back to the village and told the locals about what he had seen. They laughed and said, "No, you didn't. White men can't see devils."
24. I Had A Glitch In The Matrix
It was the middle of the day. I was having a smoke in front of my apartment on the front steps at around noon or so. I got up to head back, and for a few fleeting seconds, while looking at the building, it looked totally unfamiliar. I knew I lived there. I knew it was my home. I knew I had just stepped outside only five minutes previously.
However, my brain was giving me some kind of indication that I had never seen this place before and that there was inherent danger. I tried to snap out of it by violently wagging my head back and forth in an aggressive “no” gesture. After, I was immediately back to normal. I’ll never forget that moment. It was like my concept of reality had very momentarily just cracked.
25. We Found A Forever Home
When we were looking to buy a house, we had to shop in the more rural areas to afford anything. One day, we were driving around on this small country highway and saw a sign that said, “For Sale,” on this teeny little one-lane road. So we decided to check it out. We drove for almost ten minutes but never saw a house. Without warning, the road just abruptly ended at a graveyard.
It was a very old graveyard filled with wild turkeys who just calmly sat there and stared at us. We decided to turn around and leave. On the way there, we had not seen a single soul. The only building we saw was an old one that was so dilapidated it looked abandoned. But as we were turning around to go, we started to notice people slowly shuffling down the road toward us.
They weren’t looking at us or talking. They were just slowly walking down the road in our direction. We drove toward them, thinking they wondered why we were on their street, but they never even acknowledged that we were there. They all had a vacant look on their faces as they stumbled down to the graveyard. There were around ten of them, all walking down or just standing on the side of the road staring blankly in front of them.
26. Ghost Rider
One day, when I was about 15, I was walking past a church. Standing in front of one of the graves was a cowboy dressed head to toe in pure white. He looked like he was straight out of a movie. His hat, shirt, waistcoat, trousers, and boots were all white—an incredibly clean white as if he’d only just put them on. He had short brown hair stubble and was an average-looking guy.
I kept staring at him. I blinked, and he was gone. I lived in the UK, so it was weird to see anyone resembling a cowboy, to begin with.
27. A Bad Case Of Déjà Vu
I once had a dream I was walking solo down a familiar dirt path towards a wooded area. The path had felt familiar to me in the dream, although I had never been down this path before. As I walked toward the wooded area, the feeling of familiarity changed, and the trail ended at an old abandoned cemetery under a tree canopy.
The familiarity suggested the path continued, and the cemetery should not be there. I was drawn into the cemetery toward a specific grave. The detail was vivid. There was an old stone bench next to a sunken grave. The headstone had an angel on top. The remaining wing had a pine needle dangling off, hanging from a cobweb, drifting in the breeze.
It was peaceful and quiet. I immediately woke up and felt like the dream was calling me back. I felt oddly connected. The jolt from waking up was so startling I decided to write the dream down. A couple of years later, I was thinking of buying a house with my girlfriend. After we reached a place we were considering, the realtor called and said she was running late.
While waiting, we walked outside of the house. Behind the house, we noticed a path past the overgrown grass going into some woods. To pass the time, we decided to walk the path to the trees. While walking along and enjoying the sun on my face, I was hit with an intense feeling of deja vu. I knew this place. As we reached the woods, there it was—the abandoned cemetery.
It was the same cemetery in my dream. I told my girlfriend I had visited that place in a dream and described specific details down to the pine needle. She thought I was trying to pull a stupid prank until she saw the sunken grave, the missing wing, the stone bench, and even the pine needle hanging off the angel's wing. She immediately walked back toward our car.
The entire experience was a copy/paste of my dream, except for my girlfriend being present. Later that day, we were back at my house. She asked me how I knew all that detail. I let her read the dream I had written down. I described the path, trees, cemetery, and weather perfectly. She refused to ever talk about the experience again. The experience still haunts me to this day.
28. Let The Music Play
My father and I were window cleaners. We were doing a vacant home from the "roaring 20s" era. There was a giant chandelier with the wrap-around spiral staircase, checkerboard flooring with the fancy carved golden trim—the works. The home was big, bold, and beautiful. My father was upstairs doing the master bedroom windows, and I was listening to some 70s music streaming through a speaker in the house.
I was coming upstairs when the sun came through a window and hit the chandelier, momentarily blinding me. I was stunned for just a second, and when I recovered, there was no more music playing, and the whole house felt different. I asked my dad if he was listening to music, and he told me, "No, but that's a great idea," and started playing some music from his phone.
It was the same song I was hearing when I was coming up the stairs but from the beginning.
29. Real Life Ghost Town
My parents booked an Airbnb house in Florida for a month and invited my wife and me to stay with them for a week. We were going to drive from Kansas City to Ft. Myers. My best friend lived in Jackson, Mississippi, and offered to let us stay the night on the way there and back. We left late on a Friday night. Around 10 AM Saturday, we crossed the border between Arkansas and Mississippi.
The first thing we saw was a burnt-out, late 90s Cadillac in a ditch right before town. As we got closer, a coyote ran from near the Caddy across the road in front of us. We got into town, and there wasn't a soul around—nobody. The houses were boarded up, the gas station and grocery store were empty. The closest we saw to life was a single cruiser at the station.
We turned a corner following the GPS and came across a small hospital or retirement home. All the doors and windows were open, bedding and mattresses were littering the front lawn, and a single gurney on its side was leaning against an overturned wheelchair. It was a ghost town. Like the ones you hear about in the "Wild West." I had never seen a modern one in real life.
The whole time I felt like we were being watched.
30. Straight From The Horse’s Mouth
I grew up in the former Panama Canal Zone, and my elementary school was located in one of the oldest towns. It sat at the base of a huge hill that was partly used as a quarry during the construction days. There was a ridge behind the school that once housed a cemetery that got moved, but not all the bodies were accounted for. Hence, there were many hauntings around that area because of the cemetery and deaths in and around the quarry.
The school was three stories, with a courtyard in the middle. One bright, sunny day when I was in second grade, I got excused to use the restroom. When I stepped outside, I glanced across the courtyard and saw something impossible: a horse just chilling in the hallway. It walked a few feet then vanished. Needless to say, I was freaked out and later told everyone.
Apparently, others had seen the horse on different floors, and some even saw its probable owner with it. I never saw it again, but, to this day, there are still stories of weird happenings in that building.
31. Midnight Stroller
When I was about 14–15 years old, I frequently slept on the couch in our living room. We lived in a typical suburban colonial where the couch faced the front door. For as long as I could remember, we NEVER locked our doors since we lived in a pretty decent city. BAD IDEA. One night, I was still awake at about 3 AM, listening to music, when I saw a car quickly pull up our driveway.
I then saw a very skinny, tall man open our front door, stand in the hallway for 20–30 seconds facing my direction, then leave the house and drive away quickly. In the morning, I told my parents and entire family, and they did not believe me. My dad insisted it was him, as he’d leave for work in the early hours. I knew that it had not been my dad, as my dad was stockier and shorter than this man.
It freaks me out to this day to think what this man was going to do.
32. I Was Bucking Scared
There was a trail on state land behind a park near my house when I was growing up. One day, I wandered off and got lost. I was in there for what seemed like forever. I started to get nervous because I couldn’t find the trail again. Right before I began to panic, I noticed a man in flannel not far away kneeled down. I started to approach him.
His back was turned, but he looked like he was rummaging around on the ground. I was about 25 yards away when he suddenly stood up. I almost screamed right there. He was holding a decapitated deer head by the antlers. The deer’s body was on the ground beside him. I freaked out and ducked behind a tree. I heard him moving around a little longer. Then silence.
I forgot about the trail and ran straight north in the direction of the park after that. I fought my way through the woods and found the park again. My dad said I was gone for less than an hour. I told him what I saw, and he explained that the guy in flannel probably just wanted the rack off of a deceased buck—no big deal. It still freaked me out, though.
33. We Passed On This Park
When I was a kid, two of my friends and I went to the Poconos with our families. The house we rented was in a community that was one big circle, and in the middle were a ton of trees and a playground. We were passing a soccer ball back and forth on the woodchips, and my buddy yeeted it way too hard. It flew past me and went far.
As it was rolling away, it moved about 20-feet away from this big guy. He was wearing an oversized trenchcoat, and the shade from all the trees covered his face so that we couldn’t make out any identifying features. We tried to get his attention by calling out. We knew he was looking at us, so we asked him to pass the ball back to us.
He took a few steps and stopped moving. So we're like, "Dude? The ball," and he didn’t move. So my buddy told me to grab it. I was a pretty big kid, so I was like, "Yeah, whatever. What's the worst that can happen?" I jogged up a little, and he started moving slowly. I bent down and grabbed the ball. I looked up, and he was like five feet away. That's when I got scared.
All I could see was his skin color, but I couldn't place any features. I was so terrified, I turned around and booked it. My friends were already running away without me. I never looked back, so I don't know what that dude was doing. We didn’t go back to that park again for the rest of the weekend.
34. I Thought My Eyes Were Playing Tricks On Me
Years ago, every now and then, I would see little light rainbowy-white squiggles in the air. They were fast and never lasted more than a second. I always figured it was a trick from the light, so it never bothered me, and I just brushed it off. Then, one night, I came home late with my dad. It was around midnight or 1 o’clock. I was ahead of him, walking towards the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it.
One of those squiggles darted through the front lawn. The street was mostly illuminated by the street lights, so once again, I thought it was just something with the light. A few seconds passed. Then my dad asked, “Hey, did you just see that light go across the lawn?” All that time, I thought it was just in my head. I asked him if it was like a squiggle of light. He said yes.
After we moved, I never saw anything like it ever again.
35. There Was No Explanation For This
A car had gone off of the road. It was on its roof on the other side of a farm fence. When I got down to it, all the windows were smashed, and there was blood everywhere. Five minutes later, this guy dressed in a suit and tie came walking out of the trees that the car was in front of, claiming it was his car. There was not a scratch on him or anything.
36. What Happened In The Break Room Broke Me
I worked as the visitor services manager at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. My office was on the main floor of a c.1872 carriage house. I mostly sat at the front desk. There was the gift shop’s space around me and a mini gallery behind me. On one particular day in March, it was miserable out—raining and sleeting. We didn’t have any guests come through the visitor center or tour the house.
Just before 5 PM, I sent the two guides to close the Stowe house. Window shades needed to be closed, some doors opened, some doors closed, etc. I was now alone in the carriage house, which was not unusual. I was always alone when the museum was closed to the public. What wasn’t normal was the sudden stomping feet I heard just above me in the guide break room.
Someone big was stomping around and moving things—heavy things! We had been broken into a month earlier. Someone had come in and taken the cash from the donation box and register while I had been across the lawn at a meeting. So, I immediately thought the same was happening again. However, that didn’t make sense. I could see the main staircase from my desk, and the door to the other one was always locked.
Finally, I called up to the guide break room where the noise was coming from. The room should have been empty. I was on a two-way phone that I put on speaker. I could suddenly hear the stomping and movement more clearly. There was someone up there. They sounded angry or upset. Then I could hear it panting, moving frantically.
I radioed security. Our security guard wasn’t far away and marched up to the break room by the front stairs while I watched the back stairs. There was no one was up there, and no one came down, except for our security guard. We had motion detectors. Had someone hidden up there, they would have been caught—but I know what I heard.
My two guides returned shortly after that. A big crumbled pile of plain white printer paper was on the break room table. The guides swore up and down that the table had been clear when they had left to close the Stowe House. I was certain they had nothing to do with this. This scared me more than anything else had. I went home completely shaken.
37. We Were Not Jivin’ With This
My mother was driving my brother to the dentist, and I was tagging along to get groceries with her while he was at the appointment. A car drove past us. It was one of those huge old 70s cars, but it had no driver. We all saw it. It began to turn, so we followed it. After a while, it stopped. We got out, and it had nobody in it. The keys were in it, and it was turned on.
It was a winding road, and it navigated perfectly. We followed it for a WHILE before it stopped. It was a clear day. There was no way someone had gotten out or was hiding. We looked over every inch of that car before giving up and leaving. When we left the dentist, the car was gone. We saw it again many times—same deal—same road. I have never explained that one.
38. I Couldn’t Bear To Find Out What That Was
I was playing at the edge of a forest that was at the back of a construction yard, immediately adjacent to a small subdivision. A tall wooden fence marked the boundary of the yard and subdivision. The fence stopped about 15 meters (16 yards) from a road so you could just walk around it. My friend and I were right near the end of the fence when we heard something big moving through the bush on the other side.
We heard it taking steps, and we could see a giant black silhouette through the gaps. As it was moving, it was throwing rocks over the top of the fence. The sound of this thing’s steps made it seem massive. We froze. We tried to make out what it was through the small gaps, but we just saw black. At first, I thought it was a person, but it sounded too big, and the steps were too far apart.
I screamed, "BEAR!!" and we just took off. I didn't want to wait for whatever it was to peek at us around the last fence post. I ran home in about 20 seconds. To this day, I have no idea what it was. The realist in me says it was probably just a bear, but I've seen a lot of bears in the woods and have heard the way they move. Something tells me that wasn't a bear.
Not only that, but it was throwing rocks over the fence as it moved. Maybe it was a person, but I was too scared to find out.
39. Delayed Reaction
When I was about seven years old, my mom had left my favorite cartoon on for me while she went to take a quick shower. My family home at the time was relatively small, and she had left the bathroom door open so she could hear me in case I called. I was sitting on the couch happily watching TV when I noticed two strange men at the door.
They caught my eye and started signaling for me to open the door. I thought it was so funny of them because my mom had explicitly told me never to open the door for strangers. I remember them smiling welcomingly as they tried to convince me to let them in. I was jumping around playfully laughing while shaking my head. After less than a minute, I got frustrated with their boring “game” and began calling for my mom.
The two guys left before my mom had a chance to answer the door. I probably casually told her that two people tried to knock on the door because she never questioned it further. She was a very overprotective mom, so I imagine if I had told her what really happened at the time, everything would have been taken much more seriously.
The chilling part is that at the time, I never thought what happened was creepy. When I grew up, I realized how truly disturbing the situation was. I think that is what makes it even more harrowing. One minute you are utterly naive to the atrocities of the world. The next moment you are not. It’s a weird feeling not realizing that you were in complete danger until YEARS later.
40. Head Games
When I was about three or four, my parents had separated. My mom and I were at our house with a family friend. The friend went to leave, and we noticed that my mom's interior car light was on. My mom grabbed her keys, and we walked out with the friend. My mom stopped by her car but kept watching her friend get to her car. I looked through our car window and saw a severed-head-shaped thing, covered by a large white sheet on the center counsel.
Severed heads did not belong in my mom’s car. Alarm bells began blaring in my little brain. I looked in the back seat, and there was nobody that I could see and no blood anywhere—just what looks like a head covered by a morgue-type sheet. My mom turned, popped the car door open, saw it, then calmly closed the door and walked inside.
She called the authorities. Officers showed up and did a once around the house to be sure, then went to the car with us. Nobody had touched the car between my mom and the officer, as far as I remember. There was no head. There was nothing anywhere that would corroborate what I had just seen. Both of them chalked it up to teens messing around, which is probably what it was, but I had nightmares about it for years.
41. Holy Night! What Is That?
One year, right before Christmas, I was driving back to work from my lunch break down our main street. I was stopped at a light and was just sitting there staring at all the Christmas lights. On one corner, there was a giant Christmas tree with lights that caught my eyes. As I was staring at it spaced out, waiting for the light, I realized that I was actually staring at something on the bench in front of it.
It caught me off guard and took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. It was a woman sitting there in the cold. Her head was shaking all around, contorting her neck like something out of the movies. I instantly asked my husband what was happening. The light turned, and we pulled up behind her and asked if she was okay and needed help.
We thought that maybe she was having a seizure. It even sounded like she was wailing as we rolled the window down. However, as soon as she realized we were behind her, she just instantly stood up, said "no thank you" in a clear, normal voice, and walked away. It freaked us out, and we never saw that woman again.
42. He Wasn’t Clowning Around
I was in high school around the time that all of those creepy clown sightings were going on. I ran cross country, and one day, the team and I were out at a local park, running around on the trails in the woods. I was with three of my teammates, and we stopped at this little pavilion in the forest that had a restroom. I stood there with two other guys, waiting for the fourth to finish up.
We started hearing some leaves rustling about 15 meters (16 yards) away from the pavilion. We thought it was just a deer at first because there were a lot of them out here, and they would often come up to people. The fourth guy came out of the pavilion. As he was walking towards us, we heard the rustling getting closer. Through the trees, I saw the face of a person coming towards us.
I told the other guys to look in that direction. The person started coming into view, and we all gasped as we realized this person was dressed like a clown. We all simultaneously noticed a huge blade strapped to his hip. We all booked out of there. The clown tried chasing us for a bit, but fortunately, we were much faster and got away. We told our coach when we got back, and he reported it to the authorities.
43. I Was In Deep Water
When I was in middle school, I would get home at around 1:30 PM. No one was home at that time, so when I would get there, I would lock everything up as my parents told me to and play video games on the family computer facing the back of the house. Behind me was a big window that showed the sidewalk. One day, I went home and decided to go through the front of the house instead of the garage door entrance.
I forgot to lock the front door because I never went that way and was in a rush to get on the computer. As I was playing, I needed to get some water, so I got up and went to the faucet. As I was coming back, I looked through the window and saw a bald guy walking down the sidewalk. He was looking around and had a creepy look on his face. He seemed keen to get to the door.
The hair on my back went up because I realized the door was unlocked. I put the water down and slowly tip-toed to the door just as the guy was approaching. I heard his steps creek through the wood deck just as I was getting to the door. I was so scared that I didn’t lock it quickly. I just slowly turned the padlock so that he wouldn’t hear me.
The second the door was fully locked, I heard him take his hand and start trying to open the door. He didn’t even try to knock. I sat there in pure shock. I could see him trying to look through the side windows of the door, but I was so little, I just stayed right behind the door so he couldn’t see me. Then he started knocking very loud, and I just didn’t move.
I sat there for 30 minutes, then realized he had left. I called my parents, and they rushed home. It was the most scared I had ever been as a kid. If I hadn’t gotten that glass of water, I wouldn’t have seen him and could possibly have been abducted.
44. Leaping Lizards
When I was in 8th grade, we all took a field trip at the end of the year. For some reason, even though it was a regular public school, we took a field trip to a campground owned by a church. We were free to explore the land, and there was a small river with a wide pebble beach. Lizards were running over the pebbles to different areas of brush growing on the beach.
I liked trying to catch lizards, so I chased them. I was totally focused on the lizard that was a foot or two in front of me and didn’t see much else. With my hands extended, almost touching the lizard, I followed one until it crawled across something that wasn’t pebbles or branches—it was short fur. I recoiled instantly and got a broader view of what was in front of me.
I saw that the lizard had crawled onto a goat carcass that was half-buried in the sand. It had a pentagram carved into its forehead, its eyes were milky white, and there were a lot of partially burned sticks nearby. Oddly enough, the goat carcass hadn’t started to stink yet. It was probably just some teenagers messing around and trying to summon Satan or whatever, but, for me, it was an incredible moment of shock.
45. There Was No Peace In This Resting Place
I used to live next to a country park that would close up and lock its gates just before sunset. There was a graveyard next to it with a big hole in the fence, so I used to take my dog and run around the park when no one else was around. It was great. One day, I finished running and was just sitting with my dog, listening to music and watching the lake.
Suddenly, I got the feeling that I was being watched. I turned around and saw a very tall ghostly figure standing about six feet behind me. It was like The Ring. I ran so fast, Usain Bolt wouldn't have been able to catch me. Looking back, it was probably a tall goth also enjoying the park to herself, but just in case it wasn’t, I bravely never went running there again.
46. Say Cheese
When my grandpa was a Mountie, he came across a car that had just crashed and was almost completely submerged in a lake. He rushed over and reached into the open window to see if somebody was inside. His hand pressed into a mass of what felt like warm squishy “guts.” It turned out the person was carrying giant containers of cottage cheese that had spilled.
The driver had left the vehicle a few minutes prior. My grandfather couldn’t eat cottage cheese for the next 60 years of his life.
47. Stop Thief!
I was at a Walmart to pick up some groceries. I noticed a ridiculously tall dude who was over six-and-a-half feet tall. He was holding a baby carrier with a blanket over the baby at the end of the aisle, talking on the phone. He knelt down to look for something from the bottom shelf and put down the baby carrier to his left.
A woman with bright blue lipstick walked past me and stopped next to him. She looked down and grabbed the baby carrier while the dad was juggling the phone, the baby, and whatever he was looking for. I thought to myself, "Wow, that's kinda weird. I wonder if she's his wife or something." The guy got whatever he was looking for and reached over to pick up his baby, only to realize the baby wasn’t there anymore.
He froze for a second and calmly said, "Honey, I'll call you back in a second. I need to locate our child." I looked at him, and he looked me straight in the eyes and asked if I had seen a woman with black hair and blue lipstick nearby. I was weirded out and mentioned that she was right behind him less than ten seconds ago. He thanked me and bolted to the front doors.
This woman had tried to leave through the front doors but was stopped when the man yelled out that she was taking his child. She was a serial stalker from a previous failed relationship. The fact that she was so brazen to go as far as stealing an infant child in public was insane. It was creepy how calm she looked while he was yelling at her for her actions.
48. We Were Not Alone
When I was a little girl, I was playing in my room with my sister. I looked out my window and saw a man staring in at us. I told my sister to leave my room and ran to get my father. He didn't believe me and thought I was crazy. Needless to say, I had a tough time sleeping that night. Throughout my childhood, I would hear what sounded like footsteps outside at night or my parent's car doors opening long after they had gone to sleep.
Several years later, I looked at our house on Google maps—and my jaw DROPPED. I always assumed we lived by ourselves in the woods, far from anyone else. It turned out there was a small house that looked like it was being lived in only a few hundred yards in the woods from us. My family was less skeptical of my "crazy stories" after I showed them that.
49. This Left Us Totally Rattled
When I was four, and my brother was 10, he stayed home from school, and my mom left him to babysit me. She left numbers on the fridge and went off to work. Soon after she left, we heard our dog viciously barking, which was entirely out of character for her. While my brother and I were in the kitchen waiting for our biscuits to come out of the oven, the barking got louder.
The dog was on the front lawn around the side of the kitchen entrance. The gate that led to the back was a little further down the side of the house and whoever was outside was in the gap in between, out of the dog’s reach. My brother opened the kitchen curtains to see if he could view what was going on. Right as he opened the curtains, a terrible face appeared.
There was a man looking right down at us. The doorknob began to rattle, and my brother ran to the living room and grabbed the phone, taking me with him. As soon as he got on the phone, the rattling stopped. My mom came home, and at the same time, the authorities showed up for a statement. They never found the guy. It was the creepiest thing I ever lived through.
50. I Zipped On Out Of There
On a trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama, we stopped to fill up at some run-down gas station that was also a truck stop in Mississippi. I went to the bathroom, and as I was standing at the urinal, I had the strangest feeling that something was off. The feeling overwhelmed the entire left side of my body. I don't claim to be supernatural or have any weird premonitions, and I had never experienced that feeling before that day or since.
I got up on my tippy toes to look to my left, where the stalls were located. There was this deranged-looking guy with nasty, greasy hair and a scary scowl on his face staring directly at me. He was the most typical-looking psycho you could imagine. He had to have been standing on the toilet because I could see his whole face and the upper part of his shoulders.
I immediately zipped up and got out of dodge so fast I didn't even wash my hands.
Sources: Reddit,
