On the surface of our lives, everything might seem normal. We go to work, see our friends, and go home to our pets on an average day. But sometimes, we get a glimpse of something far beyond “normal”; the strange mysteries that lie just underneath our day-to-day routines, and the things we can’t explain. These Redditors have first-hand experience with that eerie feeling.
1. A Better Place
When I worked in the medical field, I had a dream one night about a patient of mine, a very kind elderly woman, whom I visited once or twice a week. In the dream, she came to me, dancing, and called out to me that she wasn't hurting anymore. I was so happy watching her dance after seeing her decline for years. I didn’t know how eerie it would get.
When I got to work the next morning, I told my co-workers about the dream, and later that morning we got the call from her daughter that she had passed the night before. I cannot explain that, but I am glad I had told my co-workers about it before the call and not after, otherwise they'd never have believed me. Such a bizarre experience, but so wonderful to feel she was at peace.
2. Luck Of The Irish
I was sick a few years ago—very, very sick. It was a few weeks before my amputation and I was battling a severe bone infection. I was hopped on all kinds of antibiotics and pain medication. I'm a huge Yankee fan, so my best friend got us tickets for the game at Yankee stadium. She pushed me around the stadium in a wheelchair with a ton of blankets on me (it was freezing) just to put a smile on my face.
My friend leaves our seats to go get some hotdogs and stuff. This is where it gets weird. As soon as she leaves, an older Irish gentleman sits by me. He offers me some of his spiked hot chocolate, but I said no thanks and explained that I was on a lot of medication. We begin talking, and I told to him what was going on with my life.
He asked if I was scared to have my leg amputated, and I told him that I was. I was really frightened of the unknown. He gave me some pretty valuable life advice and comforted me. He assured me that it would be fine, and he told me that, "If you have to be an amputee, try to be the best darn amputee that there is in the world!"
My friend comes back with food…and asks who I was talking to. There's no one next to me. I guess I must've hallucinated this, but I don’t know. It felt more like some kind of angel or being that came to me to let me know it would be okay. I guess my guardian angel is an Irishman with spiked hot chocolate! Not sure if this makes it more creepy or not, but the Yankees were playing the Angels in that series.
3. Car Trouble
I was driving home from work on the back roads and was driving behind a car that was the same make, model, and year of my car, just a different color. Further down the road, we both get into the turn lane to turn left onto a long, straight road with open fields on either side. The car in front of me turns onto this road and I wait for a car to pass, and then turn as well.
It took less than five seconds. However, when I turn onto the road, my blood ran cold. The car that had been driving in front of me was nowhere to be seen. This road has no turn offs and it’s long and straight, so you can see pretty far ahead of you. The car had just vanished, and I still think about it today. I have a dashcam now, but I wish I had had one back then because I question what actually happened that day.
4. Stairway To Heaven?
I was sitting in my lounge room alone one night watching TV. Suddenly, I heard clear as day someone coming up the stairs barefoot. I thought it was just a family member coming up the stairs, but I then had the “Oh God” realization that I was home alone. For some reason, I just sat there looking at the door, waiting for whatever was coming up the stairs to walk through the door.
I heard the staircase creaking and everything, and heard the bare feet get to the top of the stairs, step onto the tiles, and take the three-four steps it would take to be in sight of the doorway to the lounge room I was sitting in. But nothing came through the door. I sat there for about five seconds, waiting. Said to myself, out loud, “screw dealing with that right now,” and kept watching TV.
I’ve heard other things like glass moving and footsteps and all that, but the second-most notable thing I can’t explain was me and my mom hearing something talk to our dog downstairs in a like mumbled male voice we couldn’t understand. If I heard that on my own, I’d have just thought it was my brain playing tricks, but my mom also heard it.
5. In The Dog House
I was having a sleepover at home with a friend from school. We were watching a film, and suddenly the weirdest thought comes to me: Her dog has just passed. Obviously, I can't just blurt that out. So I ask in the middle of the film, hey, by the way, how is your dog? She was quite surprised, since I had never met her dog and she doesn’t talk much about it, she just mentioned she had one.
She answered that he is ageing, but well. We moved on but I couldn’t shake that odd feeling. Anyway, she goes home the next day and calls me after a while. She asked, “Why did you ask about my dog yesterday? How did you know? He passed last night, around the same time you asked about him." I was both shocked and unsurprised at the same time.
I don’t have an explanation, it seems like a weird coincidence since her dog was not something usually on my mind. It never happened to me again.
6. Just The Two Of Us
I pulled into a fast food drive-thru in Odessa, Texas; it was my first time there. When it was my turn at the speaker, I placed my order—it’s been a long drive, so I’m treating myself and being a little picky, asking nicely, and building a customized meal. The cashier listens, then she says the strangest thing. “Again? You ate all that already?”
Me: “Um...huh?” Cashier: “Oh, I’m sorry. Someone who sounds just like you was just through here, and placed the exact same order.” Me: “Hey, cool! Weird, but cool.” I get to the window and the girl looks at me with this exasperated expression, opens the window, and says, “It is you!” Me: “?” The cashier calls her manager over and points at me, shows him the order, and says nothing.
Manager: “Welcome back. Was there a problem with your order?” Me: “No...I haven’t gotten it yet.” Manager (clearly confused): “I made your order myself.” The cashier points at the time on receipt. The manager blinks, and says, “That’s the same order,” to her, looks at me, back at her, and says “and that’s him.” Cashier: “I said the same thing.”
Both of them looked genuinely upset and confused. But it got so much worse. At first, as the manager was handing me my food, he laughed and visibly relaxed. “The other guy had long hair,” he explained, pointing to my cap. “Like, halfway down his back. You just have a twin, I guess...with the same kind of car.” His face when I took off my hat and showed him my long hair...
They might have been messing with me for fun; shifts get long and people are creative. But if it was a game, they deserved careers in theater, because they looked terrified.
7. The Lady In The Hall
When my son was not even three years old yet, he came to my room and kept telling me "the lady" was in his and his sister's room. I was half asleep and dismissed it, and told him to snuggle up in my bed with me. So he got in my bed, but every few minutes he kept waking me up to tell me about "the lady." Then he says she is at my bedroom door.
In an effort to show him there is no lady and we should just go back to sleep, I pick him up and walk him in the dark out of my room. We stand in the hall and I say, "See, there is no lady." His reaction terrified me. He points his finger down the hall where there is nothing to see at all and says, "Mama she’s right there. That's the lady! And this is HER house."
Nothing, not even a shadow where he was pointing. I kind of just tried not to show he was freaking me out and said, "Okay, she must be a nice lady" and took him back to my bed where he promptly fell asleep and I stayed awake for hours thinking this "lady" in my 100-plus-year-old apartment must be hanging out and watching me sleep.
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8. Put Your Back Into It
I sneezed my back into place after being couch-bound for nearly a year and half. Within 15 minutes, it felt like that year and a half was a distant memory.
9. Talk The Talk
Last night as usual, my partner fell asleep before I did and seemed to be sleeping away quite happily. After a while, I rolled over and was about to fall asleep myself when out of the blue, she rolled toward me and kind of whispered, "It all goes white you know... white static and noise..." Something about it just gave me goose bumps. It felt so nonsensical…and so true.
10. The Phantom Of The Highway
I was driving one night in a really foul mood and speeding. Like when I say “speeding,” I mean at least 25 over the limit. Anyway, this car gets behind me and for some reason I can just tell it wasn’t an officer. It was a full-tinted Chevy truck with weird lights on it. Once it got behind me, I got a really eerie feeling I can’t explain. My body just knew something was wrong.
I figured if it was an officer, they would light me up for speeding, but for some reason they just kept pace with me, also speeding themselves. At this point I’m getting a little weirded out, so I turn off the freeway…and they follow me. I turn into a gas station and get out. If I’m going to get attacked, at least the cameras will pick it up and give my family some closure.
Something just didn’t sit right with me. I knew something was up. As I’m getting out of my car, the truck rolls its windows down. And what I saw still haunts me to this day. It was a heavily disfigured guy who just has this soulless stare. He starts to motion me with his finger, like telling me to come closer. I don’t care if he was going to give me the winning Powerball numbers, there was no way in heck I was going to approach his car.
I bolt inside the gas station, and at this point my whole body is shaking. I try to tell the clerk what’s going on as they stare at me, as my story doesn’t make any sense. Then, when I go to look outside, the truck is gone. I still have nightmares to this day.
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11. A Midnight Visitor
When I was young, my parents and I relocated across the country to Maine. We lived in a very small town and our house was old, beat up, and on many acres deep in the forest. It had two stories, with the top storey being the main level and the bottom story being the bedroom level. My bedroom had several large windows that looked out into the forest.
I don’t remember having curtains or blinds but I’m sure I must have, because my mother never forgot details like that when decorating my bedrooms as a child, but I must have left them open one night. I remember waking up in darkness, with a faint glowing orb of light hovering just outside my window. I watched it in utter terror as it went slowly across one window, and then the next.
Then it paused, flashing briefly into my bedroom, before shifting into the third and final window and disappearing altogether. I was so upset by the ordeal that I went and woke my parents up, and my stepfather stormed the backyard. There was nothing and no sign of the strange orb. My eyes are watering as I write this. Deep down, as an adult looking back, I realize that orb was anything but magic. It was something much worse.
It was someone’s flashlight. It never happened again, but I’m still afraid of having window blinds open at night.
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12. Squared Up
I was driving home from work one afternoon with my brother and cousin in the car. As we were sitting in traffic, I noticed a small, motionless black square high up in the sky and way out in the distance. I pointed it out and both my brother and my cousin spotted it quickly, so I know it wasn't all in my head. It just remained still for about 45 minutes, and then the sun had set and it was too dark to spot it any longer.
It just stayed in the exact same spot the whole time, and while it was really far away, you could still tell it was a perfect square shape. Once I got home, I went online to see if there were any mentions of it anywhere—and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. To this day, I still think about it and wonder what the heck I was looking at.
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13. By Any Other Name
I was once standing in line at Target. A mother and her toddler were in front of me in the checkout lane. I had never met them before in my life. The child was riding in the shopping cart and the mother went forward to better unload it. The child then looked straight at me, smiled, laughed and said my first name, very clearly, twice.
I have an uncommon first name, which made it even stranger.
14. God’s Plan
When I was in my 20s, I had a car accident that kept me in the hospital for about a year. It was a Catholic hospital and most of the nursing staff were nuns, and besides the normal checks they regularly just stopped in to chat and see how I was doing. Early one morning, there was a knock and this nun came in who I hadn’t seen before.
She introduced herself as Sister Greta, a member of the nursing staff. She sat on the side of the bed and we spoke for a few minutes, then she asked if she could say a prayer for me. She held my hand and said a prayer then wished me well and left. About five minutes later, there was another knock and one of the regular sisters came in to say hi.
I remarked it was going to be a good day because I’d already had one visit from Sister Greta and now I was getting another one. Her face went oddly blank. She said there wasn’t a “Sister Greta” on the staff and there were only two sisters around right now, it being so early. I pointed to the bed, which clearly showed where she had been sitting.
I described her and the habit she had been wearing, now getting a bit unnerved. The sister basically shrugged and bustled off. She came back about half an hour later with a book about the hospital’s history and showed me a picture of some nuns from the 50s. Their habits were exactly the same as Sister Greta’s that I’d described.
Turns out that patients regularly mentioned talking to nuns in old garb that definitely weren’t part of the current staff. I never saw her again or anything similar while I was there...I’m not religious by any stretch. Could the nuns have been pranking me? Absolutely. Despite perceptions they are a funny bunch, enjoy a good laugh, read comics and watch Star Wars. Only, there was never a “Ha, we got you!”
15. I’m An Open Book
I was living in a dorm with no roommate. The night before a two-hour open book final, I put my book in the middle of the floor so I'd stumble over it on the way out. The floor has nothing else on it. In the morning, it’s gone. I look all over the room, can't find it. I think I'm strangely blind, so I feel over every inch of the floor with my hands. Nothing.
I go get a cup of coffee and come back, still nothing. By now, there's only one hour for the test. I go anyway and do the best I can. Naturally, when I get back the book is in the middle of the floor exactly where I put it. Probably a prank, but how? I'm not that heavy a sleeper. Nobody took credit for it. Truly, it’s something I think of often.
16. A Bowl Lotta Trouble
As a kid, I went to the kitchen downstairs late at night to get some snacks for midnight gaming. There was this bowl of candy on top of a shelf that my parents didn’t think I knew about, so I grab a chair and had to stand on my toes to reach it. The bowl slipped from on top of the shelf onto the floor, and I held my ears, knowing there would be a sound of shattering glass in the middle of the night.
I thought my parents would wake up and be mad at me. Then the strangest thing happened. There was no sound…and no trace of the glass bowl or any candy at all on the floor. I was so floundered, so I just sat on the chair staring at the floor for a while before going back to my room and wondering what the heck just happened.
A few days later, my mom was looking for the bowl, but it was nowhere to be found. I never told anyone, as they would just think I was crazy.
17. The Man Who Wasn’t Thursday
I was around six years old, and on a Wednesday evening I went to bed. I woke up and it was Friday. I remember asking my mom why is it Friday when yesterday it was Wednesday. She said yesterday was Thursday, obviously. So I asked her what I did on Thursday, because the last thing I remember is going to sleep on Wednesday.
She named some activities, and I remembered none of that. I never found out why I don't remember the Thursday.
18. The Gatekeeper
A long time ago, when I was in preschool, school had just ended and I was the first one, adult or child, at the exit, which was a tall gate with one of those c-shaped latches that slips over a pole to keep the gate shut. I walked up to it and reached for the latch, but alas, I was very small and the latch was at least three feet above me.
I stepped back and decided to just wait for the adults to come set me free, but then the latch just lifted and the gate opened. I saw it clearly; there was nobody around and no one touched it. Still have no idea what that could've been. Childhood telekinesis? Who knows.
19. Catch A Falling Star
So in 2013, I was talking outside with my buddy and his schizophrenic neighbor in Denton, Texas. This neighbor was the nice kind of off, never acting mean or violent. So we were actually pretty good friends. Anyway, during the middle of the conversation, the neighbor acts like he just got hit with an energy wave, and runs out into the yard.
He begins to start rhythmically dancing and chanting about "The Meteor." What I could understand was that he felt the meteor, and he said that he felt it falling, and then with a final jerk, he said the meteor had exploded. Soon after, we found out the chilling truth. At that same time, on the other side of the world, an enormous meteor exploded over Russia.
If you are wondering, no there was no advanced warning. And yes, part of me does suspect that he somehow knew.
20. Watch Your Step
I was around the age of 10 and my younger sister was seven. Usually, whenever my sister was scared during the night, she would wake me up and I would comfort her and tuck her back into bed. However, this night was different in the worst way. She was shaking me furiously and crying, couldn’t speak, etc. so I rushed to her room and after a few minutes she could finally tell me what happened.
She said that she could hear faint footsteps up and down the small hallway outside our rooms—our rooms are opposite from each other in the hallway. So we tried to be quiet and listen for the footsteps, but couldn’t hear anything. I thought she must be hearing things. Except after we calmed down, we both started hearing the footsteps.
They were actually so clear it sounded like there was someone right outside the room. We both were terrified that someone broke into the house and was wandering around our house. I grabbed a pillow to protect myself and my sister in case the “intruder” came inside. At this stage, myself and my sister are both bawling, but nothing is happening after two minutes of hearing footsteps.
I gain the courage to scream “Help!” and I run down to my parents’ room at the other end of the house. I wake them up and let them know what happened. My dad checks the entire house plus backyard, nothing. He then goes to sleep. Relieved, I decide to lay in my sister’s bed with her so she is less shaken up from the situation. It got worse, not better.
Around 15 minutes later, wide awake, a very, very loud screech happened in the kitchen for around two seconds, like something dragging on our floor tiles. Immediately, we both jump up and scream and cry, and it was so loud that my parents even woke up to see what it was. We left our room before my parents and saw our wooden kitchen chair somehow dragged on the tiles around five metres away from the kitchen table.
At this point, we were all shocked and could not explain what happened. We thought it might have something to do with the footsteps. This is hands down the scariest thing I have ever gone through.
21. Animal Instinct
My dad, sister and I all saw something that wasn't an animal and wasn't human. This was in winter 2015 in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. We were driving, and it ran out in front of us on the road. It was so fast that it was a dark blur, but we all agree we saw long gangly limbs like a deer but it had human looking "arms" and "legs." We still talk about it.
22. Something’s Fishy
A tiny humanoid creature underwater. To this day, I still search the Internet in hopes that what I saw was an actual type of fish, but I still haven’t found anything. I was snorkelling at the age of 16 off the coast of Australia with my dad. Seeing all the fish was so beautiful. My dad drifted a little far from me, but there was a reef protecting us from any large sharks, so I wasn’t scared of snorkelling on my own.
I swam down toward the coral to get a closer look at a small octopus—when something terrifying caught my eye. A human face. A human face with an eerie smile and big eyes. It was sort of “standing” casually, leaning against the coral with a body about four inches tall and a head no bigger than a grape. It resembled a naked human male, but had gills by its neck and webbed feet.
Smooth all over like a ken doll. I stared at him. He stared at me. I stared back and tried to rationalize what I was seeing. I reached out to touch him, and he casually evaded me by stepping to the side, all while his creepy smile remained. By that point, I could see my dad had turned around and was swimming closer to me, so I called him over to see this crazy creature.
The creature turned toward where my dad was swimming over, seemed to notice him, then looked back at me coyly. Then it walked away. Like walked on its little webbed feet on the coral and disappeared down through a little hole on the rocks. I tried explaining to my dad when he came over but he couldn’t explain anything like that either.
He just said something about aboriginal spirits and I shouldn’t mess with it. I swear I think about that little fish man every day.
23. This Old House
As a full-grown adult, I was telling my mother about this house I was in during a dream I had. It was brown, had two bedrooms, two floors, L-shaped stairs. I went into full detail about this house from my dream. Her face went white as a sheet. Apparently, the house I described was the house I was born in. Not like, born, born, though.
I was born in a hospital…but the house my family lived in for two years prior to my birth, that we all moved out of when I was seven or eight months old. At first I thought maybe my brain got it from pictures I had seen, but honestly the level of detail wasn't shown in any pictures we had ever had of me at such a young age.
My best guess to this day is that my brain was picking up really old and obscure memories. Other than that, I'm not sure how the heck I knew anything about this house, let alone the layout, furniture set-up, etc.
24. An Open And Shut Case
Not so much something I saw, but rather something I heard that I can’t explain. I was staying at my dad’s place for the weekend when I was about 16 and he lived out of town in rural Australia, the kind of place you don’t lock doors in, etc. The house was pretty long, with my dad’s room being right at the front of the house in a loft-style second floor, and my room was literally down the other end of the house.
I would stay about 20 meters away down the end of a hallway with a few other rooms and a bathroom on the way. It was just he and I there that weekend. I stayed up late on the computer and went to bed at about 2 am. I got into bed and started listening to music to go to sleep to. About two minutes in, I hear the door at the end of the hall SLAM shut, and I had not closed it.
I immediately take my earphones out and went to call out, thinking it was my dad, when an empty bedroom door right next to it opened. I got that shaky shiver feeling all through my body. I knew something wasn’t right and was assuming someone had broken in. After about 30 seconds or so of silence, I hear a loud thud on the wooden hallway floor, like a stomp.
After about five seconds, it happens again, and again, again, it was in a rhythm. About halfway down the hall to my bedroom, there was a little bit off the side where the bathroom was, which had an old wooden sliding door that was extremely loud to open and close. After about 30 seconds after the stomping in the hall stopped, the bathroom door was reefed open with all the strength you could imagine.
It was like how you would imagine someone to do it in a complete and utter rage. At this point, I was nearly throwing up from fear. I sat there completely paralyzed, thinking “my room is the next stop.” I sat, waited...and nothing. I literally sat up in my bed until the sun came up, at which point I ran up to my dad’s room to explain what had happened.
We go through the house and nothing, nothing out of place, all the doors shut—which he had actually locked all but one. My dad said he did not come down and he has never been known to sleep walk or anything in his life. I have never been able to come up with a rational explanation of what happened that night. I’m not someone who is much of a believer in ghosts or anything, but that night I just had a feeling that whatever was out there wasn’t exactly human.
I still don’t know who or what that could have been and why I didn’t hear anything after the bathroom door being ripped open. Still get chills telling people that story and even writing it out now, I feel so uneasy.
25. The Omen
I’ll preface this by saying I don’t really believe in the paranormal or superstitions, although I find these topics super interesting, but something really weird happened one night after leaving a movie theater with a friend that I’ve never been able to rationalize. We had just watched a horror movie as well, so we were definitely in that spooky mood.
During our drive home out of the city (I lived in the country), we counted three cars pulled over in different areas on the road. As we get onto the highway, we count about eight more, in various locations, all a decent distance apart, so it’s not like they’re yielding to an ambulance or something like that. We get about halfway to my house, and we ended up counting a total of 12 cars before my friend freaks out and begs me to take a back road.
He was convinced it was a sign that we may get in a collision or a road accident of some kind. We were silent the rest of the ride home. I’ve brought it up to him once or twice since then, and he gets really defensive and shuts it down immediately. It really bothered him. It’s definitely weird and I can’t explain it, but it makes for an interesting story.
26. Hands Off
It wasn’t what I saw so much as felt. I was on my way to fly to Petersburg, a small island in Alaska, but the runway was too foggy so I had to stay in Juneau at a hotel for the night. The next morning, I was sleeping and had my hand dangling in between the bed and the wall. Then, I swear on everything, I felt something grab my hand.
It had a grip like a very firm handshake and it literally woke me up out of a deep sleep. I actually got up and checked under the bed, and nothing was there. It was very weird.
27. The Night Shift
I used to work nights. It was a fairly simple job and I was pretty much alone in an abandoned building. I was basically security to prevent people from coming in, and I was supposed to clear people out if there were any. Occasionally, you'd get some teens hanging about, the odd homeless person, or some Youtubers filming, but nothing out of the ordinary.
I understand that the night and your brain can play tricks on you in the dark and when you're tired, but I don't know how to explain what I saw. I just went into a room, and it was pretty much empty. Except I saw three shadows on the wall even though there was nothing to explain how the three "human" shadows were there.
It was just really creepy and I got really bad vibes. Then, when I went out of the room, I saw a very tall, slim, not-of-this world figure on the other end of the hallway, so that was me done.
28. A Bridge To Another World
I was taking a trip with my then-girlfriend and we had to cross the Hudson River to get to where we were going. There are only a handful of bridges across, and I know them all from having grown up in the area. On that particular trip, we were supposed to take The Bear Mountain Bridge, but I got off on the wrong exit and passed it.
We decided it wasn't a big deal. The next bridge, The Newburgh-Beacon, was actually closer to where we were going. It would just bring us over a little bit past our destination, but not enough to really matter. So we kept on driving, not really paying specific attention to where we were since it was probably 20-30 minutes until we got there.
Well, we never crossed the Newburgh-Beacon that day. We also never crossed The Bear Mountain. And we certainly didn't drive an extra half an hour to the Mid Hudson or turn around and go back to the Tap. When we did take a minute to check where we were, my jaw dropped open with surprise. We found we were already on the other side of the river. No bridge, we were just already there.
So either there's a secret tunnel somewhere under the river, we had our memories erased, or we found some kind of spatial rift somewhere in the Hudson Valley.
29. Mind Games
I was an RA when I was in college. All the RAs would come back a week before the winter semester started for training, which meant no students were back in the dorms—we were the only ones in the building. One night, I heard the door to my shared bathroom open. The sound of the doorknob turning woke me up, so I kind of groggily said my suitemate's name.
She would sometimes come through the bathroom to talk or ask me for advice. Then I realized—my suitemate was on an extended holiday in Italy, so no one should have been in our suite at all. I immediately shot up and looked toward the bathroom door. It was almost pitch black in my room, but next to the bathroom door, I could see the perfect outline of a human face wearing a flat-brimmed hat.
I couldn't see the details of the face, but I could see shadows where the eyes, mouth, and nose would have been. It was as if someone was standing next to the door, staring at me. I had no idea what to do. Because no one was back in the dorms, I knew that the nearest RA was two floors away and wouldn't hear me scream for help.
I stared at the face for a few seconds—and it stared back—then I shifted slightly on the bed and it completely disappeared. I got up to check the door, and it had been closed the whole time. It's been almost seven years and it still freaks me out when I think about it.
30. Little Girl Lost
I was half asleep and something grabbed my feet. When I jumped up, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I saw a little girl run out of the room. My two dogs both looked at the little girl and watched her leave the room, then looked at me as if to say, “Did you see that?” then chased her down the stairs into the living room.
I followed behind the dogs, but when we got to the living room, there was no one there. The only explanation I have is I was still dreaming while awake.
31. A Message From Beyond
Years ago, when my wife was pregnant with our second child and about to give birth, my mom came to stay with us for a few days to help take care of our oldest child. One early evening, mom asked for a pen, paper, and an envelope. When I gave them to her, she wrote on the paper, sealed it in the envelope and gave it to me, saying, “Put this in your pocket and don’t open it.”
The she added, “You’ll know when.” 30 minutes later, my wife announced it was time to go to the hospital, as she was in labor. So we did and about nine hours later, our second daughter was born at 3:45AM. She weighed 8 pounds, 11 ounces and was 20 inches long. This being pre-cell phone days, I called my mom from the hospital to tell her the news.
She answered the phone and immediately said, “Before you say anything, open the envelope.” I did. Its contents shocked me. It said: "Girl 3:45AM 8 lbs, 11 oz 20 inches." I kept that paper for years. When my mom passed, I went to the safe where we kept it, but it was gone.
32. Mirror, Mirror
I once saw someone who looked and dressed exactly like me, with my mannerisms and posture, standing outside a pub I had visited only a week earlier around the same time in the evening. He was finishing a smoke and went back inside a few seconds after I’d been able to notice and get a good look at him. Not sure if I saw a glimpse of my own past from a third person perspective or what, or if I just have a twin somewhere in Dublin.
33. On Command
I can summon—I don’t know a better word for it—a boy to message me. It’s one specific boy who was a close friend when we were 12-13. Once we left to go to high school, we kind of lost touch. I think about messaging him sometimes, and usually within 10 minutes I’ll get a message from him. It’s really bizarre and it only happens with this one dude.
Once, we didn’t talk for a year, and then he messaged me randomly after I thought about reaching out. I asked him why he messaged and he said that he felt a weird feeling wash over him and it’s like it pushed him to message me.
34. Do You Want To Play A Game?
My youngest daughter would always beg to buy the seasonal decorations when we'd go shopping. She passed from a brain tumor when she was five, and as a way to cope, I started buying those seasonal decorations and now decorate my house with them as the seasons and holidays change. Her favorite were these colorful birds from Target.
A couple of years ago just before Easter, I was deep-cleaning the house, and noticed one of the Easter birds went missing. I assumed one of my older kids had knocked it off the shelf with their backpack as they had left for school that morning. I looked around where it should have a fallen, but couldn't find it. We also had a younger dog that loved to chew up everything he could find, so I worried about that, too.
I checked all his usual hiding spots, but couldn't find it. I continued to clean the house: vacuum, dust, full top-to-bottom cleaning of the common areas of the house since I was home alone for the day. Finally I'm done and still haven't found that bird. I've found a lot of missing socks, legos, and other stuff, but no bird.
I grab my cleaning stuff and say out loud, "[Daughter], it's ok if you're playing with it, but will you let me know somehow so that I know the dog didn't destroy it?" I walk out of the living room and put the cleaning stuff away under the kitchen sink. I come back into the living room to a heart-pounding sight. The bird is there.
It’s standing on its feet in the center of the living room floor. These birds have pipe cleaner-like feet, so they were difficult to get to stand right, and it is standing on its feet. I got a chill. I picked it up and looked it over. There weren't anything like teeth marks or slobber, so it hadn't been in the dog's mouth. I just said, "Thanks [daughter]. You're welcome to play with it whenever you want," and put it back on the shelf.
I have no way to explain it other than the paranormal, and I’m honestly just fine with that.
35. A Game Of Telephone
For about 10 years, a man would call my home, ask for me, and then ask me if my feet were ticklish. This was 30 or so years ago—no caller ID or anything like that. I would engage him if my family was home. If I said my feet were ticklish, he’d ask me to ask the person sitting closest to me to tickle them. He always hung up before we could ask questions to figure him out.
Sometimes, he’d get me on a pay phone. Like, I’d be walking home from school and a pay phone would ring. It was always him. Still don’t know who it was.
36. Home Evil Home
In my first apartment, I experienced sleep paralysis nearly every night. It was terrifying and I remember that everything would suddenly get really dark around me and I couldn’t move or speak. It felt like I was suffocating and I would fight it until it would abruptly ease up. I started sleeping with a light on, as it seemed less likely to happen when I did.
I moved out and tried not to think too much about it as it gave me an icky feeling. I never told my family about this, either, as I felt they would think I was crazy; there’s some mental problems in my family. Years later, that horrible place came back to me in an eerie way. As I was talking to an older relative, she casually mentioned that my sister-in-law used to live in the exact same apartment shortly before marrying my brother.
Still, she added that she’d moved out pretty quickly. I remembered that it was a fairly nice apartment and asked about why. Apparently, my sister-in-law had felt like she was being awakened by something and kept finding her stuff moved. About eight years later, the relative that owned the apartment asked me to retrieve something from it.
It had been vacant for years and was being used for storage. I took my daughter with me, and my normally extremely talkative child was very quiet the whole time. We got in and out of there fairly quickly. That night as we were talking, I mentioned to her that it had been my first apartment. She asked if I’d been scared—and then she blurted out something horrific.
She said that she’d seen something large and black on the ceiling that seemed to be sucking all the light out of the surrounding area.
37. Make A Wish
Me and a friend were at his house watching TV and someone on the screen was eating a strawberry. I don't really care for them, but it looked good and I asked if, by chance, he had any strawberries in the house. He almost laughed at me; we were two 20-year olds with a higher chance of mac & cheese or Fruit Loops than strawberries.
About 20 minutes later, there's a knock at the door and he goes to answer it. He yells out to me to come see something. His mom is standing at the door with one of those low-cut boxes with a bunch of strawberries. He said, "Tell my friend what you said!" She looks a little strange and says, "I was driving home and there was a guy selling strawberries out of the back of his truck and I thought, "I bet David and his friends would like some strawberries..."
My buddy said to me later, "Well, you blew it. We all have one wish and you wasted yours on strawberries.”
38. Face Off
I went kayaking with my family this one time, and while nearing the end of our route, I saw this other family about 50 feet away. They were relatively normal looking, except for this one kid. His face looked weirdly deformed, like he had large black eyes, two slits for a nose, and a large downward pointing snout with a black hole on the end.
I kept looking back at him and rubbing my eyes to see if I was just going crazy or something, but he just looked like this creepy monster. I didn’t dare get closer. I sort of just left and tried to not think about it, but to this day I have no idea what it was to cause that person to look like that in my eyes. I don’t think it was reality, though.
39. The Fortune Teller
I am really not spiritual, nor do I have any belief in psychics, ghosts, mind reading, fortune telling...any of that. But, only a couple weeks ago, there was an exchange that shook me to the core. I'd taken the train out to do a hiking trail and camp for a few days, finishing up in a town I'd only ever briefly visited once a couple years prior on bonfire night.
As I made my way toward the station, a perfectly ordinary looking middle-aged woman stopped me. "You don't believe in souls," she said. "What?" "You don't believe in souls. But you also know you lost yours." "What do you mean?" "You have absolutely no aura." At this point, I started to walk away, but she just raised her voice to shout after me.
"You had a procedure, a medical procedure, on your brain and your soul left." Of course it sounded like madwoman stuff to anyone who could hear, but they didn’t know the truth. 15 years ago when I was 18, I had 16 sessions of electro-shock therapy. Being a large number of sessions in a short space of time at a young age, it left many difficult and long-lasting negative effects on me that I still struggle with.
But one of the most pervasive feelings is what I have only ever been able to describe is a loss of whatever it was that made me “me.” Like, the essence of me, my spark, had disappeared. I never really knew how to put this feeling into any accurate words, so despite my lack of belief, I'd always described it as feeling like I'd had my soul removed.
40. A Grand Old Time
My grandfather sat on the edge of my bed when I was in the 4th grade and told me a bedtime story. Except…he’d passed before I was born, and the only photo of him was in a chest in my grandmother's attic. I hadn't even heard his name before, let alone seen his face, and his life and passing was a sore spot in my family.
41. Thoughts And Prayers
I was suffering with depression a few years back, and it was a really hard time in my life. My family was getting ready to go to a barbecue. I was brushing my teeth and randomly out of my peripheral vision, I saw the torso and arm of a man in blue and green flannel. I didn't see a face or anything, but I'm fairly certain he put his hand on my left forearm.
I looked up and there was nothing there. This really creeped me out, and my mother, who is an extremely devout Catholic, gave me a rosary to see if it would help. I brought the rosary with me when we left, and in the car I started to have an unnatural tiredness where I went into a weird daydream-like state, followed by dark thoughts that really bothered me.
Then suddenly afterwards, I had this bizarre feeling of sheer peace, and clear mindedness. I felt as if I could pass that second and I was happy and content with my life ending at that point. I wasn't suicidal, but I felt as if even if something did happen in that moment, that things would be ok. After this event, my mental health got better, and I feel more put together as a person.
I don't know what happened. I'm not sure if what I saw was supernatural or just a figment of my imagination. Or even if I really saw anything at all. Nothing like that has happened since, and I've been in a way better mental state.
42. Every Dog Has His Day
A very confident and calm Great Dane I knew was so afraid of a month-old kitten that he ran into the deepest room of his home and didn’t stop quivering and whimpering for several hours. For context, he wasn’t a timid dog; a little over a month before the mentioned incident, a man attempted to break into their home at night and the dog bit half of his left foot off.
43. The Old Switcharoo
I was standing outside of a convenience store one day minding my own business. I saw two different cars park about a minute or so apart and go in the store. It was obvious the two people didn't know each other. Yet after shopping, they each left in the other's car….still can't explain it today without going down the CIA conspiracy route.
44. Cat People
I'm 90% sure I saw some large predatory cat in my backyard at 3 am one night in New England. I'm not very far from a couple of cities. It was the size of a Labrador retriever, but walked like a cat. Scared the heck out of me, and it just made no sense that it was there.
45. Shared Experiences
My brother and I were watching a soccer game on the floor one summer when I saw something in my peripheral vision under our couch. Imagine a beautiful translucent sea slug the color of an opal, roughly an inch long, and undulating in midair in one spot. Then it just vanished like it was never there. My brother saw it too, and we searched around to see if it was hiding or something.
Never found a thing. Honestly, if it weren't for my brother I'd just assume it was a hallucination or something.
46. The Little People
About 15 years ago, I went with my parents to check out a piece of land they wanted to buy to build a home. It was in a heavily wooded area. We pulled into the property, which was quite large, and as we got closer to where the house would be built, we encountered the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. There were about seven people decked out in fairy clothes.
Like FULLY DECKED OUT with wings and everything. It was actually scary. We quickly turned around and when we looked, they had all disappeared. To this day we are still shocked.
47. Talk About A Windfall
This happened to my mom. She was going through a rough patch not making a lot of money, and she was a single mom with two kids. Obviously, she was stressed over bills but had just enough to cover them. Unfortunately, it left us with no money. She was a hard worker and would do multiple shifts at the hospital. Still, it was hard this particular month.
She was sweeping and prayed for help. Then, as she turned around to empty the dustbin into the trash, there was a crisp $100 bill perfectly laying on top of the filled trash can. No one lived at our house with us. She was never able to explain it.
48. A Fruitful Dream
I had a dream one night that a former co-worker who I rarely interact with was pregnant. In the dream, I was back at my old office and they were explaining to me that I was going to fill in for her. I was very alarmed and like “Oh heck no, I left y’all last year and went to a new place.” She came up and was very pregnant and was like, “Oh come on, it’s just while I’m on leave.”
I told my husband about it because it was weird and we joked about how awful it would be for me to have gotten out of that workplace just to have to go back. Maybe a week later, though, I dreamed about a different friend who I also rarely speak with being pregnant as well. The next week, I run into my old co-worker somewhere and joke about the funny dream I had where she was pregnant. Her face changed completely.
Suddenly, she was like “Oh my god!” and tells me she is and that they haven’t told ANYONE yet, that she’s waiting. I laugh it off and later tell my husband about it. He jokes and is like, “Didn’t you dream that other friend was pregnant too? You should give her a call.” It’s even funnier because this friend is my age and like me has older children; we’re waaaay too old to be starting over.
I laugh it off again. The next day, as an afterthought, I’m bored and driving a long distance, so I call this older friend about the funny dream and my husband’s joke that I should call her. Turns out she IS ALSO PREGNANT and they haven’t told anyone because they’re having ultrasounds first due to her age and all. Completely crazy!
49. Howdy, Stranger
I was driving away from a gas station. Out of nowhere, a guy in a suit comes running up to my minivan and starts yanking the door. As if he knew me, he began pleading, "C’mon, LET ME IN." Luckily my doors were locked, and I asked him who the heck he was through my window. He looked genuinely surprised that I wouldn't let him in.
After I refused again, his facial expression inverted; as if he just realized something horrible. He let go of my car, said something to the effect of "You're one of them, aren't you?" Then he ran away behind the gas station and into the woods. Full suit and tie, nice shoes, extremely frantic in nature, zero explanation. The look in that man's eyes was pure terror when I didn't let him in.
50. The Road Not Taken
I once met this young homeless guy, probably about 10 years ago, and he acted like he knew me. When I said I had no idea who he was, his response chilled me to the bone. He said, "Isn't your name [my name] and you work in radio broadcasting?" I got right freaked out, because I had been applying to colleges for radio and there was no reason for him to know my name.
I said “No, but I've wanted to work in radio. Who are you?” He responded saying it wasn't important and to ignore him, as sometimes he gets confused between the present and the future, and just left. I never saw him again. It threw me off completely. I abandoned the idea to go into radio almost out of fear from that point.
Sources: Reddit,
