It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about the world, but all it takes is one brush with the supernatural to make us question that. From the appearances of ghosts and apparitions to intense feelings or knowledge that we just don’t know how to explain, there are certain experiences that just leave us scratching our heads and wondering what is truly out there. And when these experiences happen to us as kids, they will usually stick with us for the rest of our lives. Here are 50 spooky stories about some very unexplainable childhood memories.
1. A Terrible Birthday Present
I am the first and only grandchild in my family, so my grandma was always very fond of me. She was always planning birthday parties for me, and every year she said she couldn't wait for me to turn 15 because it's a very celebrated birthday in my country. When I turned nine, I made a terrifying prediction to her. I ominously told her that she wouldn't make it till then, and that in fact, she would only be there for my tenth birthday.
I have no idea what made me say that. But the prediction came true. She passed exactly two weeks after I turned ten. My whole family still remembers this to this day.
2. Hiding Behind A Costume
Many years ago, I was looking for a Halloween costume with my mom to wear to elementary school. This occasion was a big deal to me, because I was homeschooled before that. We spent a couple of hours going to several stores, and couldn't find anything that I liked. It was getting dark outside, so we were going to have to find something and go home soon.
There was an old Halloween costume store, one of those really weird places that somehow is open year round. We decided to go in and check it out, as a last ditch effort to find something. We got out of the car and walked through the front doors. We then get up the steps to go into this place and something comes over me that I still can’t explain.
I felt huge, unbearable pressure all over my whole body, like the physical feeling of being hated by something. Imagine that feeling, combined with a sense of something wanting to hurt me and wanting me to leave. My little third grade self turned to look at my mom, and in the same instant she turned to look at me. It was extremely freaky.
We didn't say a thing to each other. We just turned around and went back to the car, after only walking three steps into the store. I remember getting inside the car and asking my mom if she had felt the same thing that I did. She said that she had essentially had the same exact experience as me. We prayed together in the car and left.
As an adult, I can still remember how bad it was. And I am getting tensed up just writing about it. On the bright side, I did end up with a costume that year though. We went home and my mom stayed up late with me working to cobble together a cowboy costume from the things we had at home.
3. On The Ball
When I was young, I apparently had a few odd interactions with animals. For example, I would always know that a person had animals before we went into the house. They also tended to come over to me before my parents. These events were mostly just little things that were probably explainable by me being a fairly observant little kid.
The one that sticks out to my parents, though, is the time we went to a new car garage to have them work on our car. As we pull up, the owner has a big old black lab dog laying in the middle of the lobby. The guy informs us that the dog is comfortable with people, and that we can pet him if we want. I shake my head and say "He’s sad, though."
My dad looks at me and asks why I think that. I reply, "He lost his ball, so he’s sad now." My dad said that the owner immediately went pale, stared at me for a minute, and then looked at my dad and said, "He's had a favorite ball for ten years that just went down the sewage drain yesterday, and I couldn't get it back out." I have no idea how I could possibly have known that!
4. The Friendly Ghost
When I was six or seven years old, I was out with my mom. When we returned home, as I was walking towards my room, I heard someone say hi to me. So, being six years old, I assumed it was my dad and said hi back. I then went to my parents’ room, only to find that it was empty. The weirdest thing is that my mom also heard someone say hi, so I wasn't hallucinating or anything like that. It never happened again, and I still don't know what happened that day.
5. Look, Up In The Sky!
One time, my brother, his friend, and I all saw some lights up in the sky that darted around like UFOs. We went to get my mom and she was totally nonchalant about it. "Yep, those are UFOs," she said, and went back into the house. Her response was so subdued that we figured she was humoring us and that they weren't actually UFOs.
Years later, I asked her about it. That’s when she told me that she had to force herself to act calmly that day because of how terrified she was.
6. This One Will Leave You Breathless
My mum told me that she was once calling my dad, and was alone in the house. Suddenly, she gets a bizarre chill down her spine. My dad immediately says, in as calm a tone as possible, "Darling, start recording." Nothing else. So she starts taking a video and, although there's clearly no one in the room and you can hear both my dad and my mum, there is definitely some loud breathing audible.
You can clearly tell on the recording that neither person was making the sound, yet it was clearly being picked up. And it was LOUD. Not at all tiny. So I don’t think it was coming from the phone or a TV or anything like that. And it continued in the same rhythm while my dad was speaking. When I got home from school that day, I found a magazine on my bed.
It was the August 1952 edition of Autocar magazine. So I take it to my mum. Here's the weird part. It was my grandfather's. He had been deceased for more than 12 years at this point, and my grandmother kept it as it was the last magazine he had bought before he went on his tour of duty, and the only one he hadn't thrown away before his passing.
No one had seen it in almost five years. I just asked my mum for confirmation, and she did confirm that this event really happened. And now I am even more creeped out than I was five minutes ago.
7. The Man In The Big Blue House
When I was a kid, my family lived in a blue house that was oddly shaped. One year, the house got completely gutted and nearly destroyed by a flood. They had to knock down a wall between the living room and the kitchen. So after the flood, you could see all the way down the hall to my parents’ bedroom door. This house was and still is very strange, for lack of a better term.
I was a terrible sleeper as a kid and would routinely wake up and just go into the living room and watch cartoons on low volume if I couldn’t go back to sleep. One morning, I’m out in the living room sitting across the chair with my feet up on a window sill. Don’t ask me why, I was just a stupid eight- or nine-year-old at the time.
From where the chair was, I could see just over the kitchen counter down that hallway to my parents’ room. A movement caught my eye. I looked up and saw the shadowy outline of a man walking towards me, kind of near to my parents’ door. Thinking it was my dad, I said something like, “Hey Dad, sorry if the TV was too loud.”
My dad is a notoriously light sleeper and would wake up from anything, so I assumed that this was the explanation for what I was seeing. Except there was no response. Within seconds, the weight of my foot breaks the window I was leaning it on, and my foot ends up going through the glass. Again, I’m not sure if this is related or if I was just a dumb kid. Likely the latter, honestly. But either way, I screamed as loud as I could.
My parents quickly woke up to figure out what was going on at 4:30 in the morning. At this point, I’m preoccupied, but I realized much later that I definitely saw the outline of a man. But there was no way it was my dad because: A) He came bounding out of their bedroom after my scream, and B) I realized that the shoulders of that outline were much higher than what my dad’s would have been.
Fast forward to a few years ago. We’ve moved far away from the blue house, and my mom and I are hanging out and catching up. For some reason, the blue house comes up and I tell mom that the place still gave me creeps and that weird stuff happened there when I was a kid. My mom’s response? “Oh, you must have seen the shadow man too!”
8. A Fork In The Road
I was very young when this happened, so what I remember versus what I was told is the main scariness of this story. So my family was driving around the backwoods in the New Hampshire and Maine area. It was autumn and we wanted to watch the leaves fall. We were staying at some cottage, and my family came to this area pretty frequently.
We were coming back from somewhere when my mother started screaming at my father for stopping abruptly. In front of us, on an unkept back road in the deep woods of New England, at a pretty late hour, was a traffic jam of quite a few cars stopped in all directions. I remember a lot of bright headlights. I also remember seeing my dad's face as he turned around.
I then remember that he started reversing the car. My mom went completely silent through this whole thing. I just remember my dad saying eerily calmly, "Ughh, I hate traffic." He turned around and started driving back up the road we came down, and we started seeing cars going past us flashing their headlights. My dad just kept driving, saying absolutely nothing.
The whole atmosphere quickly went from "Wasn't that a fun day!" to "Let's leave." Even as a kid, I went from annoying to quiet. Just a thickness in the air. Cars started coming up from behind, honking and flashing lights. Eventually, they just turned off the road and we drove back to the cottage. Years later, I mean decades later, my dad and I were having a drink together.
He says: "Remember up in the woods up north? We were driving around and we came to a weird traffic jam?" I was like, "Yeah. Why?" I honestly hadn't thought of it since that night. My dad goes "Well, your mother and I were pretty sure that was one of those ambushes where they block the road and try to rob you and leave you in the woods or worse.”
He continued: “You don't remember the cars coming up the road after us, trying to block us in? Or the cars chasing us and beeping at us until we hit the other route?" I said, "Well kinda, but I just figured it was traffic or people being weird." He just kinda stopped talking about it after that, and went on about how we should plant more trees in the backyard. So weird.
9. The Long And Winding Stairs
My grandmother was a real estate agent in Rhode Island. I was staying with her one summer and she had to take me along to see a potential listing. It was a very strange house because it was circular. All the rooms went along the outside and connected to each other, and there was a center part with a little garden that was open to the sky.
She went up to the second story, and I stayed downstairs because I wanted to walk around the loop one time. The problem started when I had walked a full loop but didn’t see the staircase that I had started from. I thought I must be confused, so I kept going to the next room. And I still couldn’t find them. At this point, I started to panic.
So I began running around the house as fast as possible, checking every room for stairs. And there weren’t any. Finally, I sat down by the front door and started crying. A little while later, my grandmother ran into the entryway room looking just as panicked as I had been. She started asking where I was hiding and why I was hiding and why I had not answered her calling out to me.
I never heard her calling out to me at all. Actually, the house seemed so still and quiet while I was sitting there that I was sure she had forgotten and left me there. We went home and didn’t talk about it really. Then, like 15 years later, I brought it up to my mom and asked if she knew anything or whether this was all just a crazy childhood nightmare that I’m remembering?
She told me she remembered it clearly, because my grandmother had called her and was absolutely spooked because she couldn’t explain what had happened and she thought she had lost me or that I had been taken by someone while she was distracted. She had apparently been looking for me for a while. I still don’t understand what happened really, because the house wasn’t even large or confusing to navigate.
I still get chills when I think about it.
10. An Eary Story
About five years ago, my parents were sitting out on the back porch on a summer night. Out of the corner of her eye, my mom saw a person-sized white translucent figure float by a tree. She asked my dad if he saw it too, and he said yes. He is a tough guy, but he was really freaked out and so was she. So they both went inside.
The next morning, my mom was walking by the tree where they had seen the figure, and she noticed a very old-looking earring sitting on top of the dirt. She doesn’t wear earrings and it wasn’t the kind of earring I would ever wear. It looked like it belonged to an old lady and it was just dropped there somehow. My mom brought it inside and put it in her jewelry box.
The next day, it was sitting in the middle of the basement floor. From then on, I started hearing footsteps and whispering in my room at least once a week until I moved out.
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11. A Parting Gift
When I was three years old, my grandmother passed. She lived in our house with us and we were very close. She had told my mom many times that she would do her best to make her passing easy on me, since I was so young. The night that her life came to an end, my mom was lying in bed with her and heard her take her last breath.
My mom laid there and cried for about 30 minutes before coming into my room to check on me. It was about 5:00 in the morning, and there was no reason for me to be awake. But I was sitting up in my crib and playing when my mom came into the room. She asked me why I was awake, and I said: "Grandma Flo just came in to give me a kiss goodbye!"
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12. I Dreamed A Dream
I woke up one night when I was 12 years old, because I dreamed that my older brother got into a car accident. I got out of bed and wandered downstairs to the kitchen to get something to drink. My mother was sitting there and asking me why I was awake. I told her: "I had a bad dream and needed something to drink."
I got a glass of water when the bell suddenly ringed at our door. My mother went to look and see who was there in the middle of the night. Two officers were standing there. They asked if they could come inside for a moment. I couldn't hear what they were talking about because I was still in the kitchen and they were in the hallway.
After the two officers left, my mother came back to the kitchen completely pale and told me that I should go to bed now. I asked her what was wrong, when she informed me that my brother had been in a car accident and that she needed to wake up my dad and go to the hospital right now. When I pointed out that this was the bad dream I had before waking up, she only looked at me for a couple of seconds. That’s when she told me something I’ll never forget.
I prepared myself for a comment like "Don't be silly and go to bed now," but instead she said "Me too." So basically, we both had the same exact dream of my brother having a car accident. And we both woke up minutes before the officers came over to tell us that it really happened. Thankfully, my brother survived with just some minor injuries.
We saw the photos of the accident in the newspaper the next day. It looked 100% like it did in my dream. Even down to the smallest details. The way he lost control over the car, the spot where it flipped the first time, and the tree it came to a stop at. Even today, my mother and I still talk about this weird experience. Nobody else ever believes us when we tell the story.
13. Honey, I’m Not Home!
I was in seventh grade when my parents bought their first computer, so not super young. We had a small ranch, so my dad built a corner desk in the basement in one of the finished off rooms since there was no room anywhere else for it. The house had been built by my dad in the mid-1980s. No one else had ever lived there before us.
When my mom would get home from work, we’d hear her set down her keys on the counter and walk across the kitchen floor in her heels. It was a frequent occurrence for my mom to not be home, but for my brother or me to be on the computer and still hear sounds of her putting her keys down on the counter or walking across the kitchen floor.
This had happened to each of us quite a bit. It sounded the same as when she would get home from work. But when we went upstairs to check and see if my mom was home, she wouldn’t be home. We would tell my mom when it happened, and it happened enough where we tried to figure it out by checking the time we’d hear it.
A few times, she said she’d been thinking about work at that time and happened to look at the clock. We tried to figure it out and have no idea to this day why it would continuously happen. A few times, my mom mentioned she’d be on the computer and hear someone upstairs, and no one would be home. My dad didn’t allow pets in the house either, so it wasn’t just a cat being a jerk.
14. A Light At The End Of The Tunnel
In my mom's seaside hometown, there was an offshore decommissioned lighthouse. Even though utilities to it had long been shut off and the lighthouse was locked, it would randomly light up at times. When it did, it was clearly visible in all directions. No one could explain it. It happened so infrequently and at such odd hours of the night that by the time officials examined the structure, there were no signs of activity.
To this day, as I’ve mentioned to people many times, the lighthouse remains mysterious and a bit creepy.
15. Falling For You
I’m not 100% sure this fits, because my mom confirmed it years ago and then denied it when I asked her again a couple of months later. Either way, here it is! When I was little, my dresser was long but pretty short. It sat against the wall with one of the ends pointed towards my door. That dresser was heavy, an old wood one with all sorts of kid stuff neatly arranged on top.
Since it was in my bedroom, the floor was carpet. And I always slept with the door closed. One night, with no explanation, the dresser tipped over. But instead of falling forward, it fell 180 degrees to the side, falling in front of my door. All of the kid stuff spilled to the side. My mom ran to get me, but couldn’t open the door as it was being blocked by the dresser.
Eventually, with her pushing and me pulling on the dresser, she was able to slip in and move the dresser out of the way. Nothing was damaged, not even the glass figurines I had on top of it. My dad helped put it back upright the next day and we all moved on with our lives. Years later, I remembered the incident and asked my mom about it.
I was fully expecting to learn that I had blown it out of proportion in my memory, and that it only fell forward or something like that. Nope, she remembered that night as well. However, she added one detail that I could never figure out. She thought she heard me jumping on the bed that night, and that was why she thought the dresser tipped over.
I had been sound asleep, so I have no idea where she heard that noise coming from.
16. The Not-So-Silent Treatment
At my parents’ house, I used to hear my mom calling out to me when she didn't. And she confirmed she'd hear me call out to her when I didn't. That was a common occurrence. Also, whenever I'd be alone for a little while, if my mom was late from work or at the grocery store, I'd usually be in the main living room playing video games.
I would often hear loud banging sounds from upstairs, as if a heavy piece of furniture tipped over. I'd go check and nothing was out of place. Both my mother and grandmother have confirmed similar experiences when they were alone in the house. There was also the time I was downstairs on my laptop and everyone else was in bed.
It was after midnight and I didn't realize just how dark everything had gotten without the lights on. I'm zoned out when I begin to hear it. What sounds like a murmuring coming from behind me. Like the low rumble you'd hear at a gathering when people are talking and you can't make out the conversation. The hairs on my neck immediately stood up and my body locked up from fear.
Tears ran down my face from the physical reaction my body was having. I refused to acknowledge it and kept staring at my laptop screen in silence. It took forever for my body to go back to normal. Some time later, I told my mother what happened and it freaked her out because she said she's heard the murmuring as well. I've always hated that house.
17. Drive My Car
Not necessarily creepy, but when I was around 11 years old or so, my mom and I were going about 40 miles outside of town for a typical orthodontist appointment. The trip typically took about 35 minutes, give or take a few for traffic. However, this one time, I kinda zoned out while being driven and, upon arriving, I remarked "Wow, that was fast!"
We were earlier for my appointment than usual, despite leaving at a consistent time to every previous appointment. Upon looking at our vehicle's clock, and confirming with a watch my mom had on, it had mysteriously taken us only 10 minutes to drive the usual 35-minute distance. We both have no recollection of anything happening during those ten minutes, and it never happened again.
But it left us with a very weird feeling. We still wonder what we drove through to this day.
18. No Laughing Matter
So I don't actually remember this, but my mom has told me about it many times. My grandfather passed when I was only a year old. Prior to his passing, he loved to play with me and would make me laugh in this very specific way. The night he passed, my mom heard me making noise. So she goes in assuming I'm crying, but I'm not.
I'm staring at the ceiling, laughing hysterically just like my grandfather used to make me laugh. She's still convinced he came to say goodbye to me.
19. Slippin’ and Slidin’
This one is not so much creepy as it is unexplainable. I have a memory of standing in my grandmother’s suburban backyard with my cousin. We were maybe about three or four years old, and we were watching a line of penguins in a neighboring yard climb up a pool slide and slide down into a pool, one by one. I kid you not, real live penguins.
They would swim to the stairs, waddle out of the pool and around the pool back to the slide stairs, and wait in line to go down the slide again. I never mentioned the memory to anyone and assumed, because it was so implausible, that I dreamt it up or remembered wrong. But that’s not the end of the story. A couple of decades later, I visited my grandmother and this same cousin was also visiting.
We were sitting at my grandma’s kitchen table which looked out at her backyard. There was a lull in the conversation, and we were all looking out the window. It made me think of the whole penguin memory, so I brought it up. My cousin’s eyes widened and she said she had the same memory, but, like me, thought it was a dream.
My grandma chuckled and said, “Well, the neighbor that used to live there did work for the zoo!” Not exactly a confirmation, but...I guess that means it could have really happened??!! Even if he did work for the zoo, though, I’m pretty sure that you can’t just bring a dozen penguins home, can you?? I guess we’ll never know the truth as far as this story is concerned!
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20. A Performance You’ll Never Forget
When I was little, probably about five years old, my great grandmother passed due to cancer. We were very close. She watched me nearly every day and would sing to me before my naps. “You Are My Sunshine” in particular. It was a few days after she passed, and I can instinctively remember waking up to someone stroking my hair and singing “You Are My Sunshine.”
At first, I thought it was my mom, but it was unlike her to do something like that. I opened my eyes, turned around, and found no one there. I even remember getting up and checking my parents’ room, only to find that they were both asleep. Both my parents kind of just nonchalantly dismiss it, but I swear it was her saying goodbye to me.
21. A Screwy Screwdriver
When I was a kid, my mom used to work at a small grocery store, and she always went there before breakfast to get fresh bakery goods when she had the afternoon shift. Then, she used to wake me up for school and ask how I slept, and I used to tell her what dream I had that night, if any. One morning, I told her about a dream that I’d had.
I dreamed that two guys broke into the store and then left a red screwdriver on the floor. My mom was shocked, because there really was a break-in that night. That was why she couldn't buy stuff for breakfast that morning. But since she had to come home and wake me up, she hadn’t yet talked with authorities or with her colleagues to get all the details.
I then went to school, my mom did the afternoon shift, and, in the evening, when she came home, she told me that the officers really did find a screwdriver on the scene, which had apparently belonged to the burglar. This all happened in Europe, in a small town around the early ‘90s, so there was no CCTV or anything like that at the time.
The burglar never got caught, but this was still a very strange experience. My mom made me fill out a lottery ticket the next day, but never won with it and never had such dreams since then.
22. A Very Stylish Ghost
When I was growing up, I lived in a small bungalow with my parents. My room was directly beside my parents’ room. I had a fish tank with a light and used it as a sleep aid. The dim light of the tank and the bubbling sound of the filter never failed to put me at ease. One night, I woke up, and what I saw made my blood run cold. There was an outline of a man wearing a trench coat and a top hat standing beside my bed looking at me.
Naturally, I screamed as loud as I could and my parents came running into the room. They turned the light on and the man was gone. They comforted me back to sleep and that's all I remember about that night. But fast forward about three or four years. I move my room to the basement and my parents knock down the wall to make their room bigger.
Their bed was now in the same spot that mine had been in before. Over the next year or so, I would constantly wake up to screams from upstairs and hear my mom crying. She would always see the outlines of a man standing in the exact place where I had witnessed it before. They even moved their bed to attempt to put it where the figure would appear, hoping to stop it from appearing.
It still scares me to this day thinking about that house, and I'm glad I'm nowhere near there anymore.
23. Talk Of The Town
This is sort of embarrassing. My mom got an IUD after my sister and I were born. Four years after my sister, a random priest stopped her in the streets and told her "Why are you stopping goddess Durga's will? She wants to gift you a son!" My mom was understandably freaked out. It's not like my family didn't want a son. Because, trust me, my family’s obsession with sons is real.
It's just that they didn't want another daughter, so they weren't trying. Anyways, a few days later, we had a kirtan, which is sort of like a musical prayer meeting. During the event, one of the ladies there claimed to have been possessed by the goddess. She started spewing out all sorts of crazy things that kinda make sense, but don't.
Super creepy, scary stuff. Anyway, while this is going on, that woman, mind you a complete stranger, straight up looked at mom and handed her an apple. She said, "Eat it and get that foreign thing out. I want to give you a son. How dare you deny me of my wish." Word spread like fire about this incident. Suddenly, half the town was interested in my parents' marital life.
My mom didn't budge though. My parents eventually met another priest who they considered their teacher. He said that they should try and let what's meant to be happen. Well, I had a brother within a year. That sparked the most exciting nine months our town had ever seen, since we didn't know the gender ahead of time.
24. Shut Down
I think about this pretty often. My mom and I were driving back from my grandmother's house in Chicago around dusk. While we were on one of the side streets in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, the lights in the car suddenly turned on and harmoniously got incredibly loud. I didn't know lights could make a sound like this.
They reached a boiling point and the whole car turned off. We looked outside and all the streetlights surrounding the car had blown out as well. The stoplights in front of us and a little ways away were all blinking as if the power had gone out. We were the only car in the area at the time. My mom turned the car back on and we drove away with no explanation—but it didn’t stop there.
After about 15 minutes on the highway, the whole car just turned off. We were able to pull over to the side of the road safely, and we turned it back on with no issues after that. I googled events similar to this around the time, but never came up with any answers or any other reports of this type of thing. I still don't know what caused it to this day.
25. The Last Visit
My mom said that I used to have “premonitions” when I was little, under the age of ten. My great aunt and great uncle were like grandparents to me and used to come visit in the summer from Mexico. I would miss them terribly then they would go. One year when they were leaving, I cried and cried. My mom said “Don’t worry! They’ll be back next year.”
I remember sobbing and throwing a small child fit. Apparently, I said to my mom, “No, you don’t understand! Great Uncle Tío is NEVER coming back!” And she kept trying to reassure me that they’d be back next year. I kept repeating “He’s never coming back!” I didn’t say anything about my great aunt. Sure enough, he passed within a few weeks of going back home, and he never came back.
My mom said it was really creepy, and I also later predicted my great aunt passing as well.
26. I Just Called To Say Hello
My Granny passed when I was little. I don't even remember her. My Aunt and Mom always told me this story. I was at my house when I was little, I think about four years old. The phone rang and I answered it. They got on to me for answering the phone. I told them it was my Granny calling to see if I was okay. I told her yes and hung up.
She had recently passed. They said they were a little creeped out by it, but insisted it really happened.
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27. I Believe It Can Fly
Okay, I’m not even joking when I tell this story. So I was around five years old at the time, and my parents were driving on the highway with me in the back seat. Out of nowhere, in the broad daylight, my mom screamed. I looked out the window and saw one large wing followed by a claw-like foot. Whatever animal it was, it was huge and reptilian.
This might be my five-year-old brain exaggerating memories, but my parents saw it too. My mom was the only one that saw the full thing, and she swears to this day that it was a pterodactyl. And if my memory is at all correct, she was right.
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28. Lace To The Finish
The shoelace. I woke up one morning and the shoelace from one of my sneakers had completely vanished. Just on one shoe. The lace on the other shoe was still there. I do not ever remove the laces of my shoes. The shoes were right beside me by my bed all night. I have always, always been a ridiculously light sleeper. The slightest sounds wake me up.
Nothing woke me that night. Moreover, the door was closed to my room, the floorboards creaked whenever anyone stepped on them, and the room was small. I 100% would have noticed someone coming in. Nothing else was disturbed in the entire house. Nothing had been moved or taken. No signs of forced entry.
My mum noticed nothing all night. She also has no sense of humor. There was nobody in the house aside from me and her, and nobody but us had the keys. We didn't have mice, and there were no traces of the missing lace anyway. There is absolutely no way that the shoelace could have gone missing. It was the weirdest thing I had ever experienced.
My mum remembers the incident well. But as soon as I mention it, she immediately doesn't want to talk about it because it freaks her out. I guess I can’t blame her for that. I am convinced that either somebody broke into the house and did NOTHING except take a single shoelace, or the house was haunted and a ghost took it.
29. Knowledge That Will Come in Handy
I distinctly remember sitting in the front seat of a van with one of my mother’s acquaintances whilst she went to collect something. The guy told me in detail about cutting up, cooking, and eating human beings. He said that palms were a delicacy you could fry up like bacon. It only occurred to me as an adult that either I imagined it, he was lying, or he was a crazy person.
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30. Haunting People Is A Nonno In My Book
My grandpa passed before I was born. Neither me or my sister ever got to meet him. The last cousin to have met him was my cousin, who I'll call Jay. Jay was apparently one or two years old at the time, and he was my grandpa's favorite. The week after his passing, my family was creeped out because Jay kept calling out "Nonno," what he called my grandpa, and appeared to be talking to him.
One time, while his babysitter was taking care of him, he started calling out “Nonno” again, and the dogs even started barking. These dogs were always incredibly quiet. They never even barked at passersby. The babysitter got scared apparently, and started shouting something along the lines of "Please don't haunt me sir, please!"
31. Window Shopping
According to my parents, when I was a young kid, I would frequently cry at night because the "man in the window" was scaring me. My room was on the second floor. Also, my mom once saw him too. I wish I could remember what I saw more clearly so I could form an opinion on what it might have been, but I was too young at the time. Either way, it’s some pretty spooky stuff!
32. The Moor The Merrier
My older sister just told me about this. When I was about two years old, we were driving through the Yorkshire Moors. I pointed out of the window and said “There are deceased children buried up there.” Those who know their history know that this is true, but I have no idea how I could have known that as a toddler. My dad confirmed this story a few years ago.
Apparently, he almost pooped himself when it happened, because it was late at night and the car was on its way out after a 200-mile journey from Scotland.
33. A Quiet Storm
One day, me, my parents, and my sister all went to bed early, at around 7- or 8-ish. We were all incredibly light sleepers, and we typically woke up at the tiniest noise. Also, the floorboards downstairs were extremely creaky. Anyway, we woke up the next morning to make a disturbing discovery. The house was extremely messy. Like, nothing was the way we had left it the night before.
The foot stool was tipped over, all the contents inside of it had come out, the kitchen was a mess, the toys in my bedroom were all out, my parents’ clothes and washing were just splayed everywhere. There was nothing in the house that had remained untouched, not even our air hockey table.
34. An Old Friend
When I was a small kid, I once had a bad night where it sounded like someone was in my room. The grunting sound was later identified as my mom snoring, but there was one noise in particular that stood out and never got cleared up. It sounded like my neighbor was talking, only I knew for fact that he was away in another country at the time.
I also saw apparitions of a man walking around in my room. When I was a bit older, I asked my mom about it one time and she was like “Oh, that must have been your great-great uncle. He still walks around the house sometimes to check on the family.” Surprisingly, I wasn’t creeped out when I heard her say this. It’s kind of cool to think that a deceased relative is looking out for us.
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35. Just Passing Through
When my parents got divorced and I was in middle school, they bounced around houses a lot. My dad was renting this house that was pretty nice and in a normal upper middle class neighborhood. One day, I’m playing Kingdom Hearts 2 and, out of the corner of my eye, I see my dad walk into the living room, pass to the right of me, go into the kitchen, then walk back into his bedroom.
A few minutes later, I don’t know why I even asked this as I wasn’t scared or even consciously paying attention to what my dad did when he walked into the living room, but I walked into my dad's room and was like, “Hey, you just walk into the kitchen for something?” He looked at me with wide eyes and I immediately got goosebumps.
He responded, “No. Why?” And I was like, “I thought I saw you walk into the kitchen.” He told me he’d seen THE SAME EXACT THING out of the corners of his eyes ever since he moved in. He was completely shaken up. Like I’m not kidding. We moved out pretty shortly after, and nothing weird has happened to us ever since. That house was suspect.
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36. Floating On Air
I used to have night terrors when I was around the age of eight. Apparently, it's fairly common in prepubescent boys. For those who don't know, a night terror is basically a very vivid nightmare, filled with screaming, flailing, extreme fear, and, in my case, appearing to be fully awake with my eyes open and talking. I don't remember any of these episodes, but my parents and older sister do quite well.
There was one in particular. It included the usual screaming and what not. But when my mum came in to calm me down, I was seated on the bed completely silent and in fear. I was pointing at the corner of the room. She asked what was wrong and I basically described a corpse floating there, as if suspended in water, and I was adamant that it was there.
37. A Rose By Any Other Name
I am the parent in this story. When we bought our current house, my daughter was five years old. In our previous house, if she'd wake up in the middle of the night, she'd build a pile of her blankets and pillows in our room and wake up in "her nest." In the new house, she started building the piles in her own room, but she'd wake up on her striped bed.
When asked, she insisted that the nest was "for her friend Rose." She had actually had an imaginary friend named DeeDee, so a new one didn't surprise us much. She would tell us about Rose waking her up at night and wanting to rest, so she'd build a nest for her on the floor and then go back to bed. Years later, we were speaking to a sweet old neighbor who was the niece of the cattle rancher that had built the house at the turn of the century.
She happened to tell us about his first wife, who suffered a rough illness and passed in the house. Her name was Rose...
38. Keeping Your Head Above Water
When she was still a baby, my mom once found my little sister completely submerged and drowning in the backyard kiddie pool while I just casually played in the water next to her, either not noticing or not caring. I was either four or five years old at the time, and my mom said she was creeped out by me for a while after that. Years later, as an adult, I saved my brother from drowning and redeemed myself.
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39. Possessed
I had a real jerk as a cousin. He used to feed me all sorts of lies. One day, when I was around five years old, he told me that our neighbor, a man of around 35, had offed someone with a knife in the street. So, as usual, I went to my parents to confirm. And guess what! It was true! This seemingly nice neighbor had just lost his mind one day, threw a public meltdown, and took someone’s life out in the open.
40. A Tragic Course Of Events
When I was a kid, I once dreamt of our family car accident the night before it happened in real life. My parents confirmed that I spoke about it as soon as I woke up, and it actually ended up happening the next day. We lost my brother just like how I saw it in my dreams, something that I have not been able to explain. Maybe it was just a one in a million coincidence.
41. Beware Of Darkness
My mom and I lived in Wilmington, North Carolina for a few years when I was in middle school. Once, in the middle of a bright summer day, we were in our well-lit condo when suddenly it went pitch black. It lasted maybe two or three seconds, but it was enough for both of us to notice and still remember it almost 20 years later. It was like someone flipped the switch off and on for the sun really quick.
42. Just A Closer Walk With Thee
In the house I grew up in, every night at around midnight, these big loud footsteps would go stomping up and down the hallway a few times. I’d often think it was my dad getting up in the night, so sometimes I would stick my head out in the hall to see him. But there was no one there. And I’d hear him snoring away in his room.
This isn’t a particularly creepy story compared to some others out there, but it’s just strange to me that everyone in my family confirms that they heard these same footsteps, and that no one was ever that bothered by it or found out what the cause of it was. It seems like it happened for as long as we could remember, so we all just casually accepted it.
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43. Cleanup On Aisle One
I don't believe in ghosts or the afterlife. But when I was a kid, the vacuum cleaner in our family closet would frequently turn on by itself. It would always happen right around 2:00 in the morning, even while it was unplugged and rolled up in our closet. I have no explanation for it whatsoever. It’s the kind of thing that even makes folks like me start to wonder…
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44. Shadow Of A Doubt
I've had regular encounters with shadow people and almost all the extras that go with them since I was a little child. They always seem to find me wherever I am. They don't bother me most of the time, they just let me know that they are there. My parents would not discuss such things. But my sister confirmed that it really happened.
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45. Reckless Abandon
I live in Puerto Rico. If you have ever visited here, you know that there are a lot of abandoned houses. Where I live, there’s one at the end of my street. I can sometimes see a man just staring through a window, and then he always disappears. And then, moments later, he appears at another window. It’s the creepiest thing.
Sometimes, I can see him on the roof of the house. The authorities came to check it out once because a lot of people saw the same thing. But when they came, they said they saw no signs of anybody entering or leaving the residence. One weird thing that they saw was a pair of running shoes being left at every window in the house.
I say it’s weird not just because it was an abandoned house, but also because the shoes were brand new with no signs of anyone ever wearing them. I can still see him at night.
46. These Boots Were Made For Walking
Between the ages of five and 10, I would randomly wake up at my grandparents’ house from time to time. We lived only six blocks away. When I was a teenager, it was confirmed that, as a child, I had an issue with sleepwalking. I knew where my grandparents’ house key was kept, of course. So I would go to bed normally in my home, and then in the middle of the night I would walk to their house without knowing.
I would then unconsciously unlock the door, go to the couch or to my old room, and lay on the floor until morning.
47. Wax Museum
When I was about nine or ten years old, my dad took me to visit with an older hunting buddy friend of his one time. My parents were divorced and my dad lived in a completely different part of the country. So while I had known this guy since I was a toddler, I didn't share any of the same common interests as either of them.
The older friend was an arms dealer and had lots of catalogs. This was before the internet was in wide use. The catalogs allowed people to order bullets, magazines, ammo, etc. People often spent hours going through listings to determine what they wanted to order. We got there fairly early and my dad said that after an hour or two we'd all go to Hardee’s for breakfast before going to shoot clay birds.
Now, I'm a kid. I don't care much about guns or hunting for sport, and am just incredibly bored throughout this whole experience. So I start wandering around the house, reading my video game magazines that I brought with me. Very quickly, that hour or two has passed and they're still down there. I ask if they're going to leave any time soon.
The friend suggests I check the refrigerator in the kitchen and see if there's anything I want to eat. I look through the fridge and find nothing. However, on the kitchen table, I see an apple and decide that it will be appetizing enough to hold me over until we can leave. As I pick up the apple and prepare to take a bite, his wife comes running into the room.
She screams, "Don't eat that! Everything in the bowl is wax!" I tell her thank you for warning me, and continue to wander around the house burning time until we can get going. Maybe another 30 minutes later, I go back to the basement where they're going through catalogs and ask when we are going to Hardee's. My dad’s friend asks if I'm still hungry after going through their fridge.
I tell him that I was going to eat an apple, but his wife told me it was wax before I made the mistake. Both of them give me a blank stare. After about 20 awkward seconds of shock my dad explains that his wife had recently passed. I then go back through the house to try to find her and show that they were just joking with me, but sure enough she was nowhere to be found.
Roughly 30 years later, before he himself passed, my dad still insisted that I must have imagined the whole thing. But I didn't. She told me not to eat the wax fruit.
48. The Big Sleep
I’m a parent of toddlers and kids now, and I have a creepy story from last year. We were driving with my then three-year-old son in the car, and we stopped at a red light next to a cemetery. Out of nowhere, my son looked over at the cemetery and said something so disturbing, it’s impossible to forget. He told us: “There are people laying down there, and they can’t get up!” We all kind of shuddered and didn’t know how to react.
My wife asked my son what he was talking about, and he again pointed to the cemetery and said, “All of the people laying down in the park are stuck.” My wife and I just looked at each other in silence. We were both completely freaked out. At this point in our son’s life, there had been no recent losses in the family and we had never discussed the concept of passing away with him.
I’m still creeped out when I think about it.
49. Field Of Nightmares
When I was 10 years old, I often visited a friend who lived around four miles away from me. To get there, I had to walk next to a huge cornfield with only a couple of houses on the side of it. After spending some time at his house, I had to walk back home. The street I walked on was mostly empty and there was rarely anyone walking their dog or jogging there.
So I was alone on it with no one around most of the time. The houses were always empty and looked like people simply left them behind and nobody new moved in, with windows barricaded and doors always shut. One day, I walked back home and my shoelace came loose. I bent over to tie it. All of a sudden, it happened. I saw a shadow reaching over me.
I quickly looked behind me and saw an old lady with short black hair. She was standing right behind me and had the scariest smile. She then started reaching for my shoulder, only a few inches away from me. I immediately started to run for my life, only turning around one more time to see her still standing there and still staring at me with her evil smile.
I ran all the way to my house and broke down crying when I got home. My parents told me that nobody lives in those houses. I walked by the house a few more times over the last 11 years, but I have never seen anyone near that house ever again and it is still empty. I have no explanation for what happened that day. But I get shivers just writing this story.
50. Not As Imaginary As You Thought
As a young child, I used to have an imaginary friend. My parents found that cute and, one day, they decided to ask me what this imaginary friend looked like. I said he was a grown up man who always looked very sad. They asked around and a neighbor informed them that the renter before us had fit that description. They also informed them that this man had taken his own life.
Sources: Reddit,
