Strange premonitions. Time jumps. Disappearing objects...or people. There's supposed to be rhyme and reason in life—logic guiding everything—but some experiences defy all explanation. Sometimes, they're so disturbing that they make us question the very fabric of reality.
1. Total Eclipse Of The Matrix
I have a childhood memory that still haunts me to this day. In my kindergarten class back in the USSR, I distinctly remember the sky going dark for some time and the teacher rushing us all inside. Then, after an unknown amount of time, it went back to bright again. My parents denied that there was a solar eclipse that day. I couldn't find any record of one either, though I should check again. Nevertheless, I distinctly remember that happening.
Wikimedia Commons, Thammarith Likittheerameth
2. Second Chance
One night, I got a phone call from my next-door neighbor late in the evening, asking if I can help him move a mattress into one of his upstairs bedrooms. His mom is ill and has a big heavy sleep number bed. I, of course, ran over to help, because they're great neighbors. I get over there and his friend, who is also a priest, was there to help.
I helped them figure out how to separate the mattress from the bed so we could fit it upstairs. We get it all moved up and back in place when my neighbor asks if I can help them move an armoire upstairs too. I think nothing of it and we pull it out of his travel trailer and start bringing it up the front stairs of his house. This is where I died.
The front stairs are 11 steps. I was on the lower end of the armoire about six steps up when my neighbor and his friend lose a handle on the armoire and it comes crashing down on me, and I fall backward towards the pavement. At that moment, I wake up in my dining room to my phone ringing and my wife asking me if I'm going to answer the phone. This is where it really gets freaky.
It's my neighbor asking me if I can help move a bed upstairs for his mom. I go over there and meet his priest friend again, as this is supposed to be the first time I met him. I say I can help with the bed, but I cannot help with the armoire. My neighbor was like "How'd you know about the armoire?" I then proceeded to tell them about what had just happened.
I spent the next hour talking with the priest. He was blown away, and he had so many questions. My neighbor didn't believe it until I described the upstairs bedroom in perfect detail down to the metal mattress frame on the floor and the intricate headboard leaning against the wall. I had never been upstairs in their house before.
The priest asked me what I saw after it happened. I told him I never actually passed, and that before it happened I woke up at my dining room table.
3. Program Family.exe Has Crashed
My boyfriend and I were taking a walk through a long park trail on the outskirts of Seattle, and we just happened to go down the "life is simulation" and "Mandela effect" rabbit hole. We had an ongoing joke about it since we have so many strange experiences. We'll casually be like, "Well, the simulation is messed up today." We do this semi-regularly.
We just happened to be talking about everything, and how life has been so strange ever since we started paying attention to it like that. The park wasn't very crowded at all that day, so we were walking behind a single family with two women and a few kids running around probably more than 50 yards ahead of us. My boyfriend jokingly pointed to the birds and said, "Yup, it's all fake."
So, I jokingly pointed to the family ahead and said, "That family is fake too, someone is probably watching us watch them." That was the exact moment it happened. The two women completely freeze in their tracks and stop talking. They then turn around and stare in our direction, completely in sync. I thought maybe they heard me, but I repeated to him that even with strong, that's it’s impossible because I pretty much whispered and they were so far ahead.
They continued to stare, without moving a muscle. We both looked behind us like, "Are they looking at us?" but no one was in sight. They just froze, no movement. The kids were just standing around silently too. It lasted for such a long time that even though we were far away, we ended up having to walk right by where they were standing.
As we passed by, they continued to stare into nothing. It was so uncomfortable, but it didn't feel right to say anything. We truly just didn't understand. It took us the rest of the walk to try to digest what happened, and we weren't even in a joking mood anymore, just weirded out. They didn't talk, no emotion, they weren't looking for anyone, they just froze.
As soon as we were about 20 feet past them, they just resumed walking and talking like nothing had happened and the kids were playing again. It still gives me chills.
4. Swan Song
I was 12 and my brother was eight. We were living with our dad after he and mom separated. Dad ruled with an iron fist when it came to school attendance; he wouldn't let us stay home unless we were bleeding or hospitalized. Nevertheless, I still tried to stay home from school at times. One day, I tried faking a headache so I could stay home. His reaction was bizarre.
He immediately said yes, but that I would have to stay with him all day. I asked why, and he said: "Because I need you here." Fast forward to lunchtime and we're sitting at the table eating. I look at him and see he's looking at me with a look I had never seen before. Then before I could process it, he collapses onto the floor.
He had a massive heart attack that took his life almost instantly. If my dad didn't let me stay home, my little brother would have found his body after school, and he would have been there for hours. I don't think my brother would have recovered from that. It took me over 10 years to recover from it myself, quite honestly.
But then, another thing happened that I can't explain. I used to go to sleep with the radio on, and for the three nights before my dad had the heart attack, I would wake up during the night to a particular song playing. Same song, every night for three nights…until he passed. Later, they played that song at his funeral. I hadn't told anyone what happened.
5. Location, Location, Location
I once had an Android phone that had a Google "Cards" feature option. This feature would notify you of how far you were from home at various times, like "15 minutes to home" if you went out somewhere. I thought this feature was annoying and useless, so I kept it turned off. After several months of no Cards notifications, the feature randomly appeared to turn back on by itself.
I’m just sitting at home alone one night when a Card pops up saying "35 minutes to home." I thought that was weird, since I was home. So I looked at the map to see where it thought I was. It was pinning me at a random intersection on the other side of town. For the time being, let's call that intersection “1st St. & Story.”
I think to myself, “That's weird, I'm not even close to where it thinks I am. I don't even know where that is, I've never been to that area.” I go to my Cards settings to turn the feature back off, but it says it's already turned off. "That's weird." The next night, the exact same thing happens again. "35 minutes to home from 1st St. & Story." What the?
I was still definitely not over there. I check the Cards settings and the notifications are still turned off, so I have no idea why I'm getting a notification. Then, a few days later, a friend and I are out running errands. While driving, he misses his intended exit, so he takes the next one. Once on the streets, I ask "Where are we? I've never been here before."
Suddenly, a car to our right tries to turn left and crashes right into us. He messed up the wheel to the point where it was unable to turn, so he pulled forward to the curb to call a tow truck. We had our kids in the car, so I called my sister to come and pick us all up. When my sister asked me for the location, I looked up at the street signs. The intersection was 1st St. & Story...
6. I Dreamed A Dream
Not sure if anyone will believe me or not, but screw it. Here goes. When I was in high school, my friend Phil took his own life. I never really knew the specifics. All I know is that he shot himself at one of the local parks. Fast forward to six years or so later. I'm asleep in bed next to my wife one night. I'm having a fairly normal dream.
In my dream, I was at a store doing something or another, I can't really remember the specifics of the beginning of the dream. What I do remember is bumping into Phil in the store. When I saw him, everything suddenly got super weird. He actually looked like himself, not like in most dreams where people will be certain people but not look like them. This guy actually looked like the real Phil.
He looked at me and smiled and said "Hey, man." At that moment, the dream got crystal clear. I asked him if it was really him and he said it was. He told me we were gonna hang out for a bit and, after that, the dream got super lucid. He showed me how to make stuff and generally we just messed around doing weird dream things.
Suddenly, I realized that my dream was coming to an end. I turned to him and asked him if I was about to wake up. He said yes, but said that he’d had fun coming to hang out with me for a bit. I don't know why, but I asked "So why'd you do it man? Why'd you take your own life?" The way he answered chilled me to my core. Not necessarily what he said, just how he said it.
He replied, "My girlfriend cheated on me, man." He said it like it was a question he'd answered before. Like when someone asks you what your first job was, and you've responded with the exact same sentence so many times that it just falls off of your tongue effortlessly. Except I had known his girlfriend, and they were the kind of couple that everyone admired.
I said "Sophie? Sophie cheated on you?" His eyes lit up like he realized he was talking to someone that actually knew him in real life. He said, "Yeah man, Sophie cheated on me." We gave each other a hug and he wished me well. I woke up and felt super strange. It was somewhere around 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I closed my eyes and thought: "Phil, if that was really you, I need you to give me a sign." It was at that moment that things got even eerier.
Right after I finished that thought, my phone started ringing. It came across as an unknown number and only rang twice. I knew I wasn't dreaming anymore because my ex-wife woke up and sleepily asked me who was trying to call me so late. To this day, whenever I think about that story, I get chills. Hope you’re okay, Phil, wherever you are!
7. A Bad Trip
Back in early July, my family was going on a road trip to Montana to visit our grandparents. Prior to the trip, I had a horrible, horrible feeling about going. I kept having flashes of car accidents in my head, and I was sure that we were going to get in one if we left. It was so strange, because I have a pretty severe anxiety disorder, but this didn’t feel like my anxiety at all.
I actually never have anxiety about road trips. I love them! Anyway, we left Saturday of that week. I had told my parents I had a bad feeling about driving up there, but they dismissed me as being anxious. I had honestly never felt so certain about something in my life. Getting into that car felt like signing my death sentence.
So, we get about six hours in, and at this point, I start to think I was being ridiculous, and a wave of calmness just washes over me. This is where stuff gets strange. My dad passes an underpass and everything just shifts. I feel like I saw everything in slow motion for a whole four or five minutes. My parents were joking beforehand, but their faces moved so slowly, and then the light in the car started to shift.
This was the scary part, because I thought I must have been going insane. For a few seconds, there was a huge illumination of light into our car, and I looked at my family, and could not tell who they were or what they meant to me. And then, it’s like everything just came back. The light shifted back, and I knew who everyone was.
Still, it felt like something imperceptible had completely changed. I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of the past few minutes. When I reached back to remember, I saw blood, our car, and another minivan in total shambles on the side of the highway right beyond the underpass, and mangled bodies—and that wasn’t all.
I remembered sensations I should not have known: what spattered brain matter looks like, the smell of something burning, the way I couldn’t breathe. None of it had ever happened, yet I remember that the car in front of us had switched lanes even though there was a truck in front of us, realized it at the last second, and hit us with a lateral impact.
I have no history of psychosis, and I have never been in any sort of car accident. This wasn’t PTSD, and I have never had anxiety over being in the car in any sort of way prior to this. And maybe I could have just brushed it off, but I still think about it when I’m driving in my own car. It’s made me a more cautious driver. I don’t know what happened, it was just a weird situation.
I remember having the distinct feeling in that moment that I had died in some sense. I am not a spiritually sensitive person by any means, I am a scientist at heart, but this truly was something I cannot explain.
8. Playing A Supporting Role In Someone Else’s Glitch
This technically happened last night, but I was just starting a graveyard shift and am only now getting it all down. I work at a gas station chain. We're just outside of a large chunk of suburbs—definitely not "middle of nowhere." We aren't exactly near any other businesses, but we are rarely completely empty for hours at a time.
It was just past midnight, and with everything going on right now, not a lot of things other than gas stations and bars are open at night anymore, so it was a slower evening. I was the only one in the store and a car pulled up to one of the two double-sided pumps out front. The car was a pretty standard white four-door.
I'm not great with car brands, but it was a little nicer, like upper-middle class and probably only a few years old. A woman gets out and starts walking towards our door like she's in a daze. Legit, this woman looked like she saw a ghost. She wanders up, sort of freezes at the door for a second with a thousand-yard stare, before opening it and coming in.
She didn't go looking for anything, didn't start shopping, just sort of stood inside for what felt like ages. Again, bars are still open so I think maybe she's had a rough night or something, so I give the usual "Welcome, let me know if you need any help finding anything." She finally notices me and immediately asks me a question that makes my blood run cold.
She looks at me and says: "You can see me right?" I reply, "Yeah." Like what else do you say? She breaks down crying in the middle of my store, so I'm already headed around the counter to see what's up. I have my cellphone out in case I need to call law enforcement or something for her. I get her to sit down on a nearby pallet of soda and I grab her a bottle of water.
After she catches her breath a little, she tells me "I thought I had died." Again, I'm thinking maybe she is on something, but she's a middle-aged woman who looks like a standard local suburban housewife. So, she asks if she can call her husband to pick her up and wait with me. She has her own phone and does so, not really telling him anything either, just where she is at and if he can come get her.
He says he'll call an Uber and be there as soon as possible. We're waiting, so far nobody else has showed up, so I'm keeping most of my attention on her, and eventually, she starts to tell her utterly unforgettable story. She says, "I was driving home from dinner with my coworkers and as I'm driving through this nearby intersection, a truck ran a red light and hit me."
Now, her car is still at the pump without a scratch on it. She goes on to say she remembers her car being pushed into a pole, going airborne, and then nothing. I tried to calm her down, letting her know that her car is out front and it looks fine, but she insisted that she completely blacked out, woke up in an ambulance for a split second, passed out again, and then woke up again in the driver seat of her car—at the intersection waiting for the light to change, perfectly fine.
This whole thing freaked her out so badly that she drove to the nearest place that was open just so she could get out of the car. Her husband eventually showed up to get her. He asked if I had any idea what happened, and even though she had sort of explained it to me, I just shrugged because no, I had no idea what was happening anymore.
She reluctantly got into the passenger seat of the car and he drove them back home. That was hours ago, after which I worked an entire shift at the station trying to wrap my head around what in heaven’s name I had just witnessed.
9. The Pen Is Mightier
A few years ago, I made a pen pal from another state through a website for that sort of thing. We talked a lot, with very extensive and specific letters, for about a year and some months. She told me about her childhood, her high school experiences, and what she was going through at the time. Her family, her house, her city; everything.
One day, she tells me that she was going on a vacation and couldn't send letters, so she sent me her Instagram handle in case of an emergency, or if I wanted to talk to her. Honestly, I had tried to find her before on social media, but her name and surname were too common. We were very close, and I didn't like talking to my pen pals on social media, but one day I wanted to tell her about an accomplishment I made.
So, I go to the username she sent me, but it didn't seem very active. She had no bio, no profile pic, and only one photo. I recognized her face, because we sent pictures of each other. I open the photo and see it was from 2016. It had so many comments. Weird, as she had almost no followers. I thought maybe this isn't her main account anymore.
But then I open the comments. All the comments were from family members and friends she had talked to me about. They were all giving their condolences and saying how much they missed her. I didn't know what to think, so I tried to look up what happened to her. Apparently, she’d been murdered in early 2017…the year we started writing to each other.
I was thinking it was a bad joke, so I kept on writing letters as if nothing happened. I asked her specifically about 2017 though, if it had been a good year or not. She told me a lot of things that happened that year, and that she went out with a creepy guy for a while. After that, I got too freaked out and I stopped writing to her.
She stopped writing to me too. But it still haunts me, and I still don't understand what the heck happened there.
10. Back To The Future
I live in a very small town. We have a small grocery store, hardware store, you know the drill. I was done getting groceries and hopped in my car to head home. As I pulled up to the end of the driveway of the store, blinker on to get onto the main road, I see a big, white, lifted Chevy pickup driving toward me that I need to wait for.
I watch it as drives closer to me, remarking to myself that it looks so similar to my husband's, just older and rusted around the edges. It even has the same black emblem and large iron cross bumper. As the truck goes past me, my jaw nearly fell open. Staring at me intently was a man almost identical to my husband...but with a longer, greying beard, and grey hair around the ears.
I quickly gathered myself together and pulled out behind the truck and up to the stop sign that followed. He was staring at me still in his side mirror. Glancing away and then staring at me again. He took off like a shot the first chance he got, and I tried to follow to see which direction he took, but a car was coming and I couldn't get out behind him in time.
The truck sped off toward my road, but I don't know if he turned in that direction or not. I know that it's a little crazy, but I couldn't help feeling the total connection I feel with my husband when I saw his reflection in that side mirror staring at me. It gives me goosebumps to think about it because it was like he knew that I was me, and I was the wrong age, and that he needed to get out of there before I could follow him.
I got home and my husband was there, working in his woodshop. I told him about it and he chuckled and asked if he looked hot when he was old. I mean...he did if it was really him!
11. Pressed The Reset Button Twice
I'd like to preface this by saying my husband is an electrical engineer and I'm a teacher. Also, we're not crazy people. So, back when my husband and I were dating, my husband was in a terrible car crash. His truck hit black ice and he slid into oncoming traffic. His truck was completely totaled. So was the other truck he hit.
The weird thing is, both he and the other guy were completely fine. Not a scratch on them. All my husband had was a bruise on his knee. The first responders were baffled, as were the towing company and insurance when they realized no one had lost their lives or been severely injured. Fast forward to a few days after the crash, my husband comes over to my apartment.
We're having a conversation about a university class we're both in and he casually asks when I got the flatscreen TV sitting on my dresser. At this point, I've very confused because I've had the little flat screen since I was 13 and I’d had it the entire year and a bit we'd been dating. I asked him what he's talking about, as I've always had that TV.
He told me to quit pulling his leg and asked me what I did with the old tube TV? I had no idea what he was talking about and told him so. He's convinced I had a tube TV. I proceed to get on Facebook and showed him a picture we had taken two weeks prior with the TV in the background. It's a flatscreen in the picture. His reaction was terrifying.
My husband goes white like he's seen a ghost and just stares into space for a minute. His eyes started to water. I asked him what's wrong and he said: "I swear to god, I'm not crazy. You've had a tube TV since we started dating. It was a tube TV when we took that picture." I brushed it off as his head being rattled from the accident and he didn't bring it up again.
However, anytime we hung out in my room, he'd always look at the TV just a little weird. Fast forward seven years, my husband and I have been married for a few years and decide that we're ready to be parents. I'm not on birth control and we decide whatever happens, happens. We're not actively trying, but not preventing it either.
So we're on vacation in Italy, wandering around Rome and I feel like garbage. I’d had my period the week before and it was the worst one I had had in my whole life. As we're walking around, I am suffering from back pain, chills, and horrific cramping. I go to the bathroom in a cafe and hurl my guts out, have diarrhea, and realize I'm menstruating, heavily.
Obviously I'm weirded out, since I had just had my period the week before. I clean myself up go back to my husband and tell him I think I need a doctor. I have a pretty high pain tolerance but this is insane. It's getting to the point where I'm having trouble walking and I'm starting to feel pain in my shoulders. I don't want to ruin our vacation, but I'm starting to really worry.
My husband is smarter than me, sees the state I'm in, and says I'm visibly paler than when I went into the bathroom, so he gets me help. 20 minutes later I'm on a stretcher and being taken to the hospital. An hour after that, I get the diagnosis, and it’s terrifying. I'm being prepped for emergency surgery as the doctor tells me I have a ruptured ectopic pregnancy.
I have heavy internal bleeding and if he doesn't perform surgery I am not going to make it. Six hours later, I wake up very sore and tired. The doctor tells me I've very lucky, and if I had waited any longer to seek medical attention I'd be a goner. My husband stays with me in the hospital the first night, then gets a hotel for the rest of my stay.
A week later we're cleared to fly home and I go through a grueling month of healing from the surgery. Two months after our return, somehow my husband and I get on the topic of fires. He goes on about the dangers of kitchen fires and I say, "No need to worry, we're all set with the extinguisher in the closet." His reaction freaks me out agan.
He looks at me like I have three heads and asks me what I'm talking about. I remind him about the extinguisher in the front closet where we keep the coats. We've had it for three years. He insisted we buy one when we bought our house. My husband shakes his head and tells me he has no idea what I'm talking about and we don't have a fire extinguisher.
I remind him about my memories of fighting about if we really needed one, where to put it, buying it from Home Depot, and also installing it to the wall in the closet. He looks at me with confusion and tells me none of that happened. I get up, go to front closet to show it to him, all the while cursing him for being an jerk for forgetting our two-week fight about it and lo and behold: no extinguisher.
Not only is there no extinguisher, there are no holes in the wall where I know we installed it. No fresh paint, this wall has never been touched...I insist he's moved it and fixed the wall and ask why in heaven’s name he would play such a stupid prank. He continues to insist we've never had one, let alone talked about getting one.
This goes on for several minutes. I'm approaching hysterics, telling him to quit playing with me when finally he says: "Now you know how I feel about that TV." We didn't speak about it for a long time. Later, he brought up his theory that perhaps in another timeline or dimension, or whatever you want to call it, we both actually passed after our related near-misses.
He thinks we reset like a video game and the TV and extinguisher are glitches. I don't know if I agree with him, all I know is that I have never been so rattled in my whole life and every time I get something out of the closet I'm overwhelmed with this feeling of wrongness. I know it should be there but somehow it's just not. I can't explain it. He says he will go to his grave swearing I had a tube TV.
12. Great Minds Think Alike
This story happened when I was only about 11 or 12 years old. It was the early 70s. Dad came home one Friday and announced that we were going to King's Island, a fairly new amusement park. We were supposed to be going the following day. I begged him to let me invite my friend Chris to come along. He said okay, as long as Chris could pay for his own ticket.
Great! Off to the phone I went. I pick it up, and there’s no dial tone. I say: "Hello?" Suddenly, I hear Chris’ voice say: "Hey, is that you?" I go: "Chris? I was just calling you, what's up?" What Chris said next was so bizarre, it’s unforgettable. He told me: "I was calling to ask if you'd like to come to King's Island tomorrow, but you have to pay your own way."
No phone ever rang, yet we both called each other at the exact same time, to ask the exact same thing.
13. Time Is On Your Side
I moved away from my hometown a few years ago for school and I now live three hours away from my friend’s house. I usually drive down once a month or so to visit him, and it has pretty much always taken me three hours to drive down. On rare occasions, if traffic is really good, it may take a little less time. More in the range of two hours and 45 minutes.
Now, I've done this drive dozens of times, so I know the route very well. The distance between my house and my friend's house is 178 miles. A few months ago, my brother and I started driving down to our friend's house at exactly noon. As soon as I got into my car, I texted my mom and friends to let them know that we were coming down for the weekend.
The drive itself was nothing noteworthy. Traffic was lighter than normal, but as I said nothing else happened that was out of the ordinary. I tend to go a little over the speed limit of 70 miles per hour, but never faster than 100 miles per hour. Going anywhere near that speed is way too dangerous for public roads with other people around.
Once we arrived at my friend's house, they were confused as to why we were so early. When I checked my phone, I made a disturbing discovery. It was only 1:30. We made it to their house in an hour and a half. We drove 178 miles in 1.5 hours. That equates to an average speed of 118 miles per hour throughout the entire trip. Granted, I drive a sports car.
My car’s speed is limited to 124 miles per hour for top speed, and there is no way I could keep it pinned at that speed for the entire way there. Between fear of getting a ticket and the engine definitely not allowing it, this just wasn’t a possibility. To say we were surprised would be a major understatement. I never use my phone while I'm driving and I rarely look at the clock in my car, since my attention is always on the road and on other drivers.
There is no logical explanation that we could come up with for what happened. I knew for a fact that I never went above 100 miles per hour the whole drive, and I knew exactly what time we had left, since we have text messages showing the exact time we said goodbye. And our friends have confirmed that we did indeed show up at 1:30.
The only illogical explanation I can think of is that we experienced some sort of time dilation, but I say illogical since that theory is only applicable to particles traveling near the speed of light. Not a car going less than 100 miles per hour. I guess I will never know how or why I experienced this apparent glitch in the matrix.
14. Baby’s Day Out
So, this happened about seven or eight years ago. My husband and I were laying in the bed one night, watching television. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a child in the doorway of our bedroom. Thinking it was our only child at the time, I tapped my hubby and said “Hey, shhhh, don’t look, but I think Connor is going to try to scare us!”
He turns and looks, and this child walked into our room. I can’t explain it, because it was one of those moments that seemed...somehow different. We watched in silence, soon realizing that this child was NOT our son. He toddles in, head slightly tilted back, curls bouncing and diaper squishing as he goes to the end of our bed.
We see his head go down, like he was crouching, and when we got up to look, he was gone. I looked at my husband and said, “Did we just see a ghost?!” Then, almost as an afterthought, I said, “Well, we know if we have another baby, and he has curls, that he was here before he was born.” We both laugh, because we were not trying for another baby at the time.
Fascinated, we go to check on our son, and he was fast asleep. We forget the whole thing, and a few months later, we find out that I’m pregnant. Fast forward to when our new baby, Liam, is two. He toddles in the room, head titled slightly back and curls bouncing, and it hit me like a bucket of ice water. This is the baby that came to visit us!
I mean, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind—but the story doesn’t stop there. Now, on top of that, whenever Liam is staying the night elsewhere, like with my parents, he comes to visit me in my sleep. For example, one time he came and just smiled at me while I was taking a nap. He was in a little red shirt, and his hair was cut short, even though he left with it long.
The next day, I go to pick the kiddos up from mom, and lo and behold—his hair is freshly shorn and he is wearing a little red shirt. I asked my mom, “Did he wear this yesterday?” And she replies “Oh, yeah he did, but he insisted on wearing it today, so here he is.” So, I look at him and say, “Did you go see momma yesterday in momma’s dreams?” He just looked at me, all big blue eyes and serious, and nodded his head.
15. The Metamorphosis
Me and my girlfriend have been living together in an apartment for two and a half years. Everything has been normal until recently, when things took a bizarre turn. For instance, for the last three weeks or so, my girlfriend has been putting sugar in her morning coffee, while throughout our entire relationship she's always been very much against it.
It may seem like a small detail, but she's always been complaining about how I don't know what real coffee is since I put quite a lot of sugar. On the first day that I saw her drinking coffee with sugar, I asked her why would she do that, and she looked at me weirded out and said something like "What are you talking about? I've always been putting sugar in my coffee."
I felt a bit confused for a moment, but then we started talking about some other things, so I didn't think any more about it. Until, that is, the morning after, when she did the exactly same thing, and had once again the same reaction. Fast forward a few days and another odd thing happened. We were doing the deed and she suddenly suggested a position that we had already tried once, but it had gone wrong and it hurt her a lot, so we had simply decided not to try it anymore.
Naturally, I was very surprised with her suggestion, and reminded her about the time when it went wrong, and she just completely dismissed it, saying that I probably mixed her up with some ex-girlfriend or that I was just tripping. Today, the weirdest thing happened, which is the reason I'm writing this. In the afternoon, I was working at home.
I'm employed as a PhD student at the computer science department of a university. My girlfriend asked me what's up with a guy who I've never heard of before. I asked her who is she referring to and she said "Well, it's that colleague of yours who you always talk about, the one from the company where you are employed at."
I froze. I asked her to repeat herself, and she said the exact same thing all over again. Then I told her that I don't work at any company nor have I ever worked at any company, since I started a PhD straight after my Master degree. At this point, she also completely froze and we were just staring at each other completely confused and shocked for a few moments.
She then asked me what the heck is going on and I reminded her about the coffee thing and about the position and that I don't know what is going on either. At this point, she started crying too, and asked what is wrong with us. Neither she, nor me nor anyone in both families have ever had any mental problems in the past. We don't know what to do about this.
16. The Invisible Man
This happened in 2009, when I was 16 years old. It was the first weekend of summer, and nobody was home when I woke up at around 11 am. I grabbed a snack and went down to the basement to watch TV. I had plans to hang out with a friend at 3 pm that day. Like I said before, I started watching TV at around 11, knowing I had four hours before I was supposed to head over to my friend’s house.
I had only been watching TV for about 30 minutes when my mom came down the stairs asking me where I'd been all day. I said what are you talking about, I've been awake for less than an hour? I look at my watch and see that it's well past 5 in the afternoon. I run upstairs and check my phone to see that I have several missed calls from my friend and my mom.
My mom's side of the story is what makes me nauseous when I think about this, even to this day. She was with my little brother at his baseball game from 1-3 that day. She and my brother WERE home when I "supposedly" woke up and went down to the basement, but neither of them have any memory of even seeing me that morning.
When my mom got home at around 3, she checked the entire house for me, including the basement where I had been sitting on the couch watching TV. It's been 10 years and I still have no idea what happened on that day. It is by far the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me, and although I talk about it with my family like it's a funny little thing that happened, it genuinely chills me to my bones thinking about it.
17. Ahead Of His Time
I had a dream that I was back in high school, at the beginning of first year. Everything was exactly the same, except I had the memories of my life after high school. In the dream I told all of my class that I was from the future but no one would believe me. Only one friend who was very, very smart said that time travel is theoretically possible. This is where it gets weird.
The next day, when I told my friends about it, their jaws dropped. They said that back in junior year, I was acting weird one day, asking time travel questions. They told me I said I come from the future. They also said that I was somehow out of it, that I was there—but at the same time, I kinda wasn’t. I saw the shock in their eyes when I told them what I dreamed.
They even recounted some of the details in the dream that I didn’t tell them. The weirdest thing is that I barely remember that day. I remember some of the stuff that also happened in the dream, but that day is kinda foggy to me. Maybe my friends are joking with me, but I have known them for 15 years and I know a genuine reaction when I see one.
18. Snap Out Of It
In early December 2015, my now ex-boyfriend’s mother passed in her home following surgery and other health problems related to her heart. She was born with a rare condition. Unfortunately, she went into cardiac arrest and we were unable to save her, so the event in and of itself was extremely traumatic and unexpected.
A couple of nights later, we decided to go see some friends who wanted to offer their condolences to my ex. Everyone loved his mom. We were all sitting in our friends’ living room watching TV and, to be honest, they were really trying to distract us from everything. One friend, Amy, was just being her goofy self, and I was taking Snapchat videos.
I distinctly remember taking a video of Amy. I saved the video, but when I looked at my screen to watch it, it wasn’t Amy. It was a grainy video with a background that appeared to be outside, and 100% not in a living room, but on the screen was my ex’s mom. She said the words, “I’m okay baby. I’m okay” and multiple other friends saw it on my phone before it disappeared.
She looked young and vibrant and had a huge smile on her face. Someone had tossed my phone to another friend across the couch to see, and the video then disappeared. When we watched the original video back immediately after, my ex’s mom was gone. It was Amy in the video again just like I had seen while recording it in the first place.
My ex and his mom had a very close relationship, best friends really, so when we saw her on my screen letting him know she was okay...it was astounding. I saw it first and everyone noticed I was visibly upset. I cannot imagine what went through my ex’s mind and heart when he saw that, but to this day, it’s something we talk about and something he shares with new friends.
It’s something we simply cannot explain other than her coming through in a glitch to let us know she was okay.
19. A Short Shelf Life
This occurred when I was about 13 or so. My family was moving into a new home, and we were having trouble with a bookshelf that was a little too big, tall, and wide for the doorway. We eventually had to take it apart and bring it in piece by piece. The shelf went into my sister's room, and she helped put it together. Here is where it gets creepy.
She used the shelf for her books and stuffed animal collection. I left her as she was putting things onto the higher shelves, using a kitchen chair to reach that high. As soon as I stepped through the door, there was a huge, loud crash. I'm thinking the bookshelf fell on her, or she lost her balance and fell, so I check.
She is standing with her back against the wall, and she looks terrified. I peek further in...and there is no shelf. It was completely gone. Her things were heaped on the floor in that spot. The chair somehow teleported back into the kitchen. My sister and I are the only ones that heard the crash. And worst of all? Not one person in our family remembers ever having that bookshelf.
20. McMore Than You Bargained For
If I told you what I saw last night you would not believe me. Like, I can't even wrap my head around it. It was the scariest thing I've ever experienced. I can't even talk about it without sounding crazy. So here it goes. I went to do laundry around 2 am with my oldest son. After we put the laundry in, we went to a McDonald's drive-thru to get something to drink.
The drive-thru was packed with about five or six cars ahead of us. I noticed none of the cars were moving forward, and it had been like five minutes already. So, I decided to go around the car in front of me to the next drive-thru lane—this McDonald's has two lanes. As I'm pulling around the car in front of me, I look into their car, only to be greeted by a truly horrifying sight.
I kid you not, both the driver and the passenger looked like corpses. Their heads were tilted all the way back, eyes shut, and they were not moving. I freaked out and tried to pull out of the drive-thru entirely, going around the other cars just to get out of there—but things didn’t end there. In the next car I passed, all the passengers looked the same! Heads tilted back, eyes shut.
I panicked, thinking maybe they were all shot, so I hit the gas and got the heck out of there. I couldn't fathom what happened and I could barely speak. I was hyperventilating, so my son called 9-1-1 and told them what happened. They sent an officer to check. A few minutes later, the officer called us back said everything was fine at McDonald's.
Mind you, my son saw it too. We both saw the car in front of us where the people looked dead. This was terrifying. It literally looked like one of those rapture movies, or end of the world type stuff. Needless to say, I can't wrap my head around what we saw or why. I'm still scared. I know I'm not crazy, because my son saw it too—but it feels crazy to even say it.
21. Missing In Action
Just a few days ago, I woke up in the morning and opened my door, only to find my mother there with a shocked and worried expression, and tears in her eyes. She asked me where the heck I had been and I said that I’d been sleeping right here in my bed. She didn't believe me, and said she’d checked and I hadn’t been there.
So apparently, my family woke up in the morning and I didn't come for breakfast. My dad went into my room and just saw the blanket and pillow—I do sleep with my blanket on my face. Then, my mom came to wake me up. When she took the blanket off, no one was there . Then she panicked and told my dad. They searched the entire house and tried calling me, nothing worked.
Then they asked the neighbors if they had seen me leaving, but the neighbors couldn't help. My mom was very afraid at that point, and they called law enforcement. My dad had gone to the station to file the report in person, and that was around the time that I woke up. We called my dad and told him I was back. He wanted an explanation, and I couldn't give him one.
I said I had just been sleeping, then I woke up, and this whole thing has happened. While I do sleep with the blanket covering my whole body and head, my mom insisted that she took the blanket off the bed and I hadn’t been there. We are all very shaken up still.
22. Wild Goose Chase
When I was attending college, a friend and I were walking back to our dorm rooms late one night. I attended a school with a primarily white population of students. As we were getting within about a half-mile of our dorm building, we were laughing about some joke when we suddenly noticed a man in torn clothing, running at us full speed.
We both slowed our pace to a crawl as he kept coming at us, unaware of what was going to happen. The man got closer and closer, and when he passed under a street light, we noticed a few things that were odd. He was A) sprinting away from something, and B) holding a rather large bowl of fruit in his hands. He sprinted right past us without even regarding our existence.
When we looked back to where he had come from, we were greeted by a truly bizarre sight. There was what appeared to be a bear cub sprinting in our direction. Both my friend and I began taking steps away slowly, and just as we were about to start following the man in the same panicked manner, the animal took a B-line for a curb toward what appeared to be a sewer drain.
The closer it got to the drain, the smaller this animal appeared until it was the size of a small mouse, and it went straight into the drain and completely out of sight. Then it got even weirder. The closer we got to the drain, the more it seemed to fade from our view. When we moved over a bit and were standing right next to the curb, it quickly became clear that there was actually no drain there whatsoever.
We proceeded to walk back in silence to the dorms. We still have no clue what happened that night, but I remember several other things during my time at that school that were also unexplainable.
23. Unstable Connections
One time, I was playing Minecraft with friends over Skype on my desktop PC, when I disconnected from Minecraft. I was still chatting with everyone on Skype when I checked my browser. That also wasn't functioning. So, I got up and decided to check the router, announcing to everyone that I was doing so. I checked it and it was fine.
So, still unable to connect, I asked the group, "What should I do?" And someone jokingly replied: "Check if it's actually plugged in!" I stood up while saying: "Well, how would I still be talking to you if it wasn’t?" I was assuming it was either a bug or a partial disconnect. At this point, I saw my Ethernet cable unplugged and sitting about two centimeters away from the back of my machine.
I announced this over Skype to everyone. And as soon as I did, the call dropped. This freaked me out for years until I saw a demo of someone scanning a VGA cable from across the room and managing to get an approximation of the picture. I guess I believe that part of the connection was able to make the jump across the centimeter or so gap or something like that.
But I didn't move anything at any point and my partner at the time witnessed it as well. Luckily, or I'd have thought I was mad! It wasn’t Wifi either—my computer didn’t have the card for it at the time. I had even theorized at the time that it was some kind of surveillance installed covertly on my computer that routed my internet via a different medium.
But either way, it freaked me out. I guess I will never know for sure.
24. The Rain Check To End All Rain Checks
I have a weird one. Back in October of 2005, I met my now-wife. We had first hooked up on a Saturday night at a gig in the city, and we arranged to meet again the following Wednesday night for a drink or a coffee. I remember feeling like absolute garbage on the Wednesday morning after being out the night before at a bar for my birthday with my buddies, drinking and whatnot.
I really did want to call her and see her again, but I felt so lousy that I just knew I wouldn’t make a good impression. I had no energy, looked and felt like something the cat had dragged in, and I just wanted to sleep. I was really dreading calling her to postpone, in case she would take it the wrong way and think that I was trying to ditch her.
When my cell phone rang that afternoon, I answered it automatically without really registering the number, as it was on an old crummy Nokia with a green two-inch screen. It was a girl’s voice on the line, asking me if I would mind if she took a rain check on our date that evening. She said she was hoping that we could meet up again the following weekend instead, as she was really tired from work.
Totally relieved, I said it would be no problem at all. When we met up again on the following Friday, we got to talking and I confessed that I was glad she had postponed our date, as I felt terrible the previous Wednesday. Her reaction was mind-blowing. She replied that she hadn’t called me on Wednesday afternoon and that she hadn’t rain-checked our initial date.
She had, however, been expecting my call, and she told me that she had just assumed I didn’t call her because I was being a jerk. She said when I actually did call her on the following Thursday to arrange the date, she changed her opinion and thought I was okay. My phone record showed that I had accepted a call on Wednesday afternoon that lasted three minutes, but the number came up blocked.
I guess in hindsight, I could have investigated further by asking the cell phone company to obtain the details of the blocked number, but I didn’t really think too much about it back at the time. Now, as time goes by, I sometimes wonder if whoever I spoke to on my cell phone on that Wednesday afternoon intervened in our lives in some way for some reason.
We are married with children today, and from time to time when I contemplate the event, some Marty McFly and Back to the Future type ideas come into my mind. Who the heck knows? I just know it was something odd as a cod.
25. Pub Pals
A few years ago, I was at my lowest point in life. Several people close to me had died unexpectedly and my co-workers bullied me every day at my job. Basically, my life was falling apart. I was past being depressed—I just couldn't imagine waking up another day. So, I'd planned to end my life. I bought a one-way plane ticket, got sleeping pills, and wrote a series of notes.
On the day I was to fly out to fulfill my “plan”, there was a terrible accident on the freeway to the airport. It was shut down in both directions. So, I drove into a nearby pub to wait out the traffic. The second I sat down on the patio with my drink, a gentleman asked if he could sit with me. Whatever, I thought, sure, who cares.
He began to talk—and I felt my blood run cold. He told me that whatever I was doing next was a terrible idea and I would regret it. I didn’t know what to think. Who was this guy? Why was he talking to me like this? But I listened anyway. He said that he sensed I was in pain, but that I had an incredible life ahead of me, and that this was not the way my story was supposed to end.
Again, I'd never met this guy in my life, and hadn't mentioned a word to him about my “plan.” He asked me to hand him my keys and my wallet, and he'd give them back to me after I talked and he listened. I poured my heart out to this random guy. Told him all my traumas and pains in life. I told him my whole terrible plan.
I told him why I had gotten that one-way ticket to the cemetery across the country where I had buried my family. He just listened. And then he pulled out a lighter, asked me to pull out my letters, and helped me burn them. He told me I was worth so much to the world and that after I finished my drink, I needed to head home and get some sleep.
He told me I was going to be okay tomorrow, and, for some reason, I believed him. He then gave me my keys and wallet back. I left that afternoon and went home, hugged my family, and got some sleep. The next day, I started working on myself. I found a therapist and a new job. Years passed, and I found myself in a fantastic place in life, so, so far from where I had been that day.
To this day, no one in my life knows how close I came to taking my own life. But this random stranger just somehow understood me. And saved my life. I never saw him again. I don't even know his name. It's the most unexplained thing that has ever happened to me. And I think about that guy every day, whoever he is and wherever he may be.
So, thank you, kind stranger, for saving my life that random September day on a pub patio.
26. The Uncanny Disappearance Of My Imaginary Friend
There was this kid in my kindergarten class that I distinctly remember playing with. We were pretty much inseparable. Then, about a month after the Christmas break one year, he just disappeared. That’s not even the creepy part. Or the part that I can’t explain. I mean, he could have just moved or something, right? But then how does that explain what happened after?
When we got back from Christmas break, no one remembered him. Not the teachers, or the other kids in my class. No one. I even asked the school counselor if he was okay, and she humored me by going through the records to see if he’d transferred. She couldn’t find a thing. To this day, no one remembers him. I think about it at least once a month.
27. Ghost Driver
I was delivering newspapers on my paper route when a long-time customer pulled up next to me. He asked me to give him his daily newspaper right there because he was going on a long trip. I handed him his newspaper then skipped his house as I continued my route. It seemed like a pretty harmless encounter—and then things got weird.
The next day I was collecting the weekly fees. We used to have to go collect the money back then because there were no internet payments yet. I went to his house to collect the fee. His wife answered and promptly complained that I missed her house on my deliveries the day before. Even that seemed like a normal reaction. Her husband just hadn’t told her that he had collected the paper.
I explained to her that her husband had pulled up next to me the day before and that I had given him the paper. She started crying. The next thing I know, she told me that her husband had passed on a couple of weeks ago and it was obviously not possible that I spoke with him the day before. That made my face turn white as a sheet.
Despite what she told me; I know what I saw that day. Nearly 30 years later and I still think about that situation. I have no way to logically explain what happened and it still gives me the creeps.
28. Visions Of The Future
I had this neighbor who was around 30 years old. He was such a sweet guy. Let’s just say his name was Adam. I felt like he was the kind of older brother I’ve always wished for but never actually had. He was a really talented guy; gym freak, good at singing and playing every possible instrument, dance, sports, cooking, etc.
He used to take me and my younger brother to the beach wherever possible. So, this incident took place three days before my 14th birthday. I was on my way to school in the morning when this scene flashed in front of my eyes. It was like I had a premonition or something. In this scene, I saw Adam lose his life in a terrible accident.
It felt so real that I almost wanted to cry. I just passed it off as a crazy daydream because I had watched a movie in which the same thing had happened to a character the previous night. I continued with my day normally and it was normal until almost eight at night. That’s when I heard the news that would change my life.
My parents got a call from someone that night. I could see their faces change expression almost immediately. Once the call ended, they said they needed to go somewhere and would be back in a while. I wasn’t sure what was happening yet but I felt that something wasn’t right. The next morning, I woke up to the worst news of my life.
Adam had been in a major accident the previous night and hadn't made it. I didn’t know how to react because a few hours before the accident had happened, I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t explain. For days I couldn’t even sleep and I blamed myself because I felt like maybe I could have warned him about it and maybe he would still be alive.
It’s been almost seven years since that incident took place but every time, I think about it, my heart aches and I still wish he was alive. I still can’t explain that premonition that I had or why I had that sort of sinking feeling hours before it actually happened.
29. Gone Before His Time
I remember my mom telling me that my cousin died from an overdose. The next year, nearly to the day, she calls to say my cousin—the same one—died. I replied “Yeah, from an overdose, right?,” she was shocked that I already knew. I thought she was somehow messing with me until she showed me the date of his passing. I still can’t really explain that one.
A lot of people have theorized that he could have overdosed before and survived, making it that I incorrectly assumed that he passed the first time. But the weird thing is that I barely knew anything about this cousin. My mom’s extended side of the family is very big, with 22 first cousins, more than 40 second cousins, etc.
So there’s a lot of cousins that I’ve never met personally, including this one, and I specifically only remember being told about his existence in the context of his substance use and how it contributed to his passing, since my other relatives speculated that it was intentional and not accidental. Basically, I never really knew much about him while he was alive and didn’t even really know his name.
So, while it’s very plausible that I could have heard about him overdosing beforehand, the way I remember it is very different. Memory is a fickle thing though, so who knows.
30. Phantom Pain
My mom and I were on the highway driving home, and there was a semi truck in the lane next to us. Suddenly, the semi swerved into our lane. Luckily, my mom was able to get out of the way before it hit us—but soon after, I began feeling strange. The entire right side of my face felt hot and sticky, I tasted blood, and smelled the very pungent scent of gasoline.
Then my head and right arm started to ache really badly, and I couldn’t feel my legs. Just as soon as the pain started to worsen, it went away. It was replaced with a cold, eerie chill. I told my mom about this, and she couldn’t come up with an explanation. I think I was feeling the pain from another timeline where my mom wasn’t able to avoid that semi.
31. Three Days’ Chase
This happened in January 2015, when I was three months pregnant with our first son. My husband woke me extremely excited—manic, you could say. He yelled, "Where were you?" It was no later than 4 AM, so I was very disoriented, and immediately started an argument, which ended with me really not remembering going to bed the night before.
When we talked more about it, I realized two days had passed, and I had a complete blackout. The last thing I remembered was throwing out leftovers from the food we ordered for dinner. It was about 7 pm, and my husband went to get his car back from the mechanic. He said I okayed him calling Uber from my phone, but I can't recall that.
He told me that when he came back, I was nowhere to be found. My keys, wallet and phone were there, but I was gone. He immediately went to the only neighbor we used to hang out with at a time, but I wasn't there either. He waited a few more hours, and called law enforcement. From what he said, the next two days were the worst experience of his life.
The hospital kept calling (I'm a nurse), friends I made plans with called, yet no one had any idea where I was. On the third day, I just appeared in our bed in jammies. The door was locked, and my husband didn't even sleep. He was pacing around the house all night. I didn't lose my job, and we had no problems with the authorities, but to this day, I can't figure out what could've happened.
32. Double Trouble
My husband recently took an overnight job to help us out. He's only been there about two weeks and works evenings/overnights, 9 pm-6 am. Last night was no different, and he left home around 8:15pm. Our 11-year-old daughter and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11 pm, I heard keys in my backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home.
I creep out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve, walks down the hall, says hi to our daughter as he passes the living room, and goes upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss and left again. We finished our movie and went to bed. In the morning when he got home, I made a joking comment about him forgetting his knee sleeve.
He was genuinely confused as I recalled the previous night. Our daughter confirmed everything I said and he still was acting confused. I pulled up our security motion camera on my phone to show him when he popped in quick. That’s when I made a disturbing discovery. There was no footage from the night before, or any other night, of him coming home after he’d already left for work.
My daughter and I both heard him, saw him, and I touched him. But he was never home during that time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened that night. We seriously have no idea what happened.
33. Dog-Gone
Not long ago, I was sitting on the couch as my dog walked by to go sit on her bed, which we have behind the “L” part of the sectional. She had something small caught in her throat last night, I think a popcorn shell, so I was paying attention to her breathing just to make sure she got it out. For a few minutes she was breathing fine, and then what sounded like a light snore started happening.
This is semi-normal for her depending on what position she’s laying in, so I didn’t bother to go over and check on her. That went on for about five minutes, until the most disgusting—and to my now realization, terrifying—snore/cough/wheezing sound started happening. I go over to her to make sure she’s okay, and the exact moment I looked at her bed the sound stopped “mid-breath,” and she wasn’t there.
She was outside with my parents, and had been for around 30 minutes. There’s no way to get out of the room without walking right past me. I don’t know who’s freaking dog I saw, and what was making that creepy sound five feet away from me, but I’m going to be staying outside for the rest of the day, and hiring an exorcist.
34. Two Steps Forward, One Jump Back
So this evening, my partner and I were upstairs sorting laundry, when his daughter called us downstairs, as dinner was ready. I was heading down the stairs, my partner right behind me, literally two steps behind me. He did his usual thing of tickling the back of my neck as we walked. The bottom of our stairs is wooden so you can hear when somebody steps onto it from the carpeted stairs.
When we got to the bottom, my feet hit the floor as usual. I turned to ask him something...and he wasn't there. He wasn't freaking there. I totally froze for a second and looked up the stairs, and there he was. On the top step, pale and shaking. I asked him what the heck just happened and he kept saying: "I don't know, I don't know, I was behind you and before I hit the bottom, the next step took me back upstairs!"
We are very freaked out. I just can’t explain it.
35. Is This What They Mean By “Hindsight Is 20/20?”
For a bit of context, my eyesight is horrible. Even half a foot in front of my face is nothing but blurry color. Yesterday, my mom and brother picked me up to go to an appointment. I was running a little late, so didn’t have time to put my contacts in/do my makeup and was getting ready on the drive. So, while mom was driving I was in the passenger seat with the mirror down.
I took off my glasses to apply my eyeshadow. My brother, who was sitting behind me, asked me a question and I turned to look back at him. When I turned my head back around, I quickly finished my eyeshadow and shut the mirror. I was looking out my window at the farmland just off the road and thinking how beautiful it was.
That’s when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t put my glasses back on, they were sitting on the dashboard. As soon as I had the realization, my perfect vision went back to being just blurred colors. It was instant, like flipping a switch on my sight. It was so shocking that I actually screamed. My outburst startled my mom and brother, so I told them what had just happened.
They said they believed me, but couldn’t think of a rational reason for it. We tried to figure it out for the rest of the drive but honestly couldn’t. To be honest, if there’s some secret to magically fixing my eyesight that I accidentally stumbled upon, then I wish I could find it again!
36. Repeat After Me
I was on my way to run some errands, riding in my car while on the phone with this friend. I remember the weather being super weird, cloudy but hot—I don’t really know how to describe it, but it felt like the air had some kind of heaviness to it. While I was talking to her, she said a few sentences to which I replied in agreement.
Suddenly, she starts saying the same exact sentences she just said 30 seconds earlier, only in a different tone and pace. It really sounded like she was repeating herself and not like the actual voice glitched and repeated, which is what made it even creepier. So at this point, everything became fuzzy and weird, almost as if I lost sense of time.
In the meantime, I heard my ringtone for text messages going off a few times through the earpiece, but I decided to check them out later on. So, I go on and tell her I’m pretty sure that she already said all of those things to me. The most unsettling thing is that her voice would stop whenever I tried telling her this, as if she was actually listening.
Then, she would continue on repeating herself as soon as I’d go silent, without saying anything about the fact she was repeating herself over and over. It was like talking to someone who was purposely trying not to answer. It felt incredibly odd, especially considering each sentence was slightly different than the previous one, but the meaning kept on being the same.
That’s when I lost her completely. The line gets cut off, so I go check the messages I received earlier. It turns out they were actually from her. Two of them were missed calls, and the last one said I should call her back as soon as I could. I was still actively talking to her at the same time that she was asking me to call her back. It’s definitely one of the most bizarre things that’s ever happened to me.
37. The Missing Link
I have four kids. I know I have four kids, but recently I just feel like there should be another one—but it’s missing. When we go out, I headcount and get flustered because I can’t find the extra one. I have to consciously remind myself there are only four, but my heart just doesn’t believe it. Well, I just put it down as one of those weird feelings and pushed it aside.
But then, weird things start happening. My parents sent some money to my kids. They sent $500. I called them and asked them why they sent so much. They were confused and said that they told me they were sending $100 per kid. I reminded them that I only have four kids. They were silent for a moment then just kind of laughed.
They said they must be getting old because they were thinking there was five—and that’s not all. Tonight, my daughter walked into the lounge room. She looked around said, “I know we’re all here but our family feels small.” My son agreed. I hadn’t said anything to anyone about my feelings lately, because they already think I’m ancient and forgetful at 40, but I can’t shake it.
38. The Gift Of Gab
I've decided I should share my stories about my little sister. We'll call her Diana here, for safety reasons. My little sister has Down's Syndrome. From my understanding about DS, many people with it are on the Autistic spectrum. My sister is considered high-functioning Autistic as well as having DS. Our mom had tons of difficulties with her pregnancy with Diana. On top of that, there were multiple strange occurrences while she was pregnant with her.
The main one being that, at around six months along in the pregnancy, our mom walked into her bathroom to find the box holding her wedding dress on the floor. That box had been in the attic since we had moved into that house. No one in the house knew how it got there. Mom started having contractions just after that incident, and started bleeding.
Dad took her to the ER, and after a day of her being in intensive care and having multiple tests done, my parents discovered that Diana has DS. After mom gets out of the hospital, she sits me and my older sisters down to talk to us about this, telling us that Diana will have an "abnormality" (her words), and explains to us that she will be different than "other" kids.
I remember very clearly that everyone but me was crying. I remember saying something along the lines of "but none of us are normal." Mind you, I was 12 and for sure my family is not very normal. Fast forward: Diana is born premature. I believe she was born at seven months, but could be off a bit. She has a ton of medical issues and has to have surgery immediately after being born.
She was in NICU for the first two months of her life. We finally get to bring her home after she recovers. She was the tiniest little thing. By the time Diana was about six months old, my parents started doing physical and speech therapy with her, because she wasn't developing the way a "normal" baby would have been by that age, I guess.
I remember we were learning sign language with her until she was about two years old because my mom was afraid she wouldn't be verbal. Mom couldn't have been more wrong! Diana started babbling by about eight months, and she'd always just lay flat on her back and "talk" to the ceiling, and just giggle like someone was playing with her.
Mom always joked that Diana was "talking to angels.” Fast forward again to when Diana is about three or four years old. My mom, Diana, and myself are at a little Christmas party at a place for disabled people, where Diana took classes and the rest of us volunteered. The three of us are sitting in these pews waiting for Santa Claus to come on stage, so all the kids can go have their photo taken with him.
Out of nowhere, Diana stands up and runs away from my mom and me, into the crowd. We chase her, and she runs straight toward this older woman we had never met. Diana grabs the woman's leg and starts bawling. My mom and I are apologizing to the woman, saying we don't know what got into her. The woman looks down at Diana and asks her what's wrong.
This is where it gets weird. Diana tells her, word for word, in the clearest way I had heard her speak: "I'm so sorry that your mommy left you." The woman starts tearing up, and tells us that her mother had passed a couple of nights prior after a long battle with cancer. Well, that’s not the only time she freaked us out.
I was visiting with my mom and Diana when she was about 10. Diana starts telling me how she talks to grandpa all the time, even though he passed when she was about five. She starts telling me that she met grandpa’s wife. Grandpa's wife, our step-grandmother, was still alive at this point, and that's the only grandma Diana ever knew.
So, I tell her, "Of course, you've met grandma." She corrects me and says, "No, mommy's mommy." My mom and I both froze. That grandmother had passed when our mom was pregnant with my older sister, meaning none of us had ever met her. So our mom starts asking Diana questions about grandma. She asks, "What color was my mommy's hair?”
Diana responds "Yellow, but not real.” My mom goes on to explain to me that grandma wore wigs, because she had been balding after years of battling anorexia, and she always wore big blonde wigs. So, mom asks Diana, "Do you know grandma's name?" She says "Jeannie," which was in fact our grandmother's name.
Diana had never heard about Jeannie before. It's a very sore subject to bring up around our mom, so none of us really know much about her. There have been so many other instances of her just knowing things. When I was in a very toxic relationship—that none of my family knew about—she once called me in the middle of the night.
She was crying hysterically that I needed to leave my house and "come home." Sadly, she was right. After that phone call, my fiancé came home and beat the tar out of me. I left him after that, and honestly can't say I would have had the strength to leave had it not been for that call from my little sister. Even to this day, she says she talks to grandma, grandpa, and other people who have passed.
39. Losing The Plot
This Wednesday, on the way to work, I went to my usual gas station. I go there every day, five days a week. Well, when I went in, everything was different. All new drink stations have been installed and the food area is completely redone. None of this was different on Tuesday morning and I couldn't believe that they'd redone a whole gas station in one night.
I then go outside and see that two gas pumps are completely gone and there are mulch bags stacked, taking up all the space. None of this was there the day before. I then leave and head to work. Somehow, I turn on the wrong street and get lost. I've been driving these neighborhoods for months, and suddenly I'm lost trying to find my workplace.
I get to work a few minutes later, and I'm starting to panic. I know it sounds silly, but I've always feared changing timelines. My fiancé and I have a timeline safe word, so we know we are together. I call and ask him, and his answer makes me sure that my worst nightmare is coming true. He has no idea what I'm talking about.
We just talked about it at the end of last month, and we've had it established for a while. I've even woken him up at night and asked him after having a nightmare and he's known. But now, he has no idea what I'm talking about. Then the girls start coming downstairs—I work in a group home—and one girl keeps saying how confused she is and how nothing makes sense today.
Later in the day another resident kept saying all she wanted to do was cry and she had no idea why. Then, while running errands, I go down the same street I always do and suddenly there are four houses gone and a grove of trees planted. I've never seen them before and really started freaking. They are next to a building my family owned for the last 20 years.
I know the whole neighborhood—but I hadn’t even hit my final straw yet. I called my mom. She said my sister was going out tonight with her friend Jenna. I have known Jenna since 2003. I asked how much longer until Jenna gives birth. My mom goes silent and asks what the heck I'm talking about. She says she's never been pregnant.
I look her up online, nothing. I ask my sister just a half hour ago and she laughs in my face and says Jenna is infertile and will never have kids. I literally remember the day my sister told me Jenna was pregnant. My sister had told me to guess who, and Jenna had been my third guess. What the heck is happening to my life???
40. Gotcha!
For a few weeks before this while out driving, I’ve observed pedestrians standing at the traffic lights who will reach into their pocket and look at their phone as they’re walking across the road when the light goes green. Nothing significant or strange about this, just one of those mundane things you notice while going about your day.
Today I was driving with my daughter and we stopped at a red light at a crossing and there was a man standing there. Nothing out of the ordinary, denim jacket, black cap, glasses, around 6’2” tall. I thought I’d try to weird out my young daughter, so I came up with a plan. She’s five, so I knew I was going to blow her mind.
I said “See that man? When the walking man goes green and he starts to walk across, he’ll reach into his pocket and pull out his phone and start looking at it. Watch and see.” I still can’t explain what happened next. As he walks across, he reaches into his pocket but then immediately takes his hand out.
He looks and points right at me with his mouth open smiling, like a “gotcha!” stance. Of course, my daughter found this absolutely hilarious and I sat there completely mind blown. I must’ve sat there in silence looking at him walk across for the next 10 seconds. I drove on and had a look at him as I drove past and he was smirking and laughing.
I’ve been playing it through my head all day. The windows were up. The radio was on. I wasn’t shouting. My voice was not even remotely raised. He must’ve been about 15-20 feet away from me. I can’t figure out at all how he could’ve heard me. It’s literally impossible. How did he know I was trying to predict he’d reach into his pocket for his phone?
41. In Search Of Lost Time
I’ve stopped telling people about the story I’m about to share because everyone assumes I’m making it up or had a stroke or something, but I sincerely feel like it must have just been a glitch in the matrix. This thing happened to me when I was a senior in high school. Let me preface this by saying I was basically a great student and well-behaved teenager.
I never used any kind of substances, was extremely responsible, no mental health issues, wasn’t overtired or under stress, no history of seizures or any other medical problems. So here it goes...Classes at my high school went from 9-4 each day and we had four classes per day. I took a calculus course that was only offered outside of normal school hours from 7:00-8:30.
Then I had an off period where I was permitted to leave campus from 9:00-10:30, and then needed to be back on campus for second period by 10:37. I usually woke up around 6:15, got ready, left around 6:45 and was able to make it to class on time. We had assigned parking so I knew I would have a spot right by my math class.
Some of my friends were in my class so I always got dressed, put on makeup, etc. before class even though it was early. After class, I would always drive back home around 8:30 and study after making myself breakfast, then leave again by 10:15 to be back on time. Well this one day...I sort of just “woke up” in the hallway of my school right before second period.
I ran into my friends and someone asked where my backpack/books were. I literally never used my locker and instead just carried my school work with me at all times. I realized at that point that I didn’t have any of my school stuff, and wasn’t even really dressed for school. I was wearing a t-shirt and basketball shorts, which isn’t something I would typically wear and was usually what I slept in.
I didn’t have my car keys or cell phone. I didn’t have anything with me at all, and I didn’t know where any of these things might be. Even weirder—I didn’t have any memory of driving back to school. I did remember getting dressed and going to my early math class that morning, then returning home afterwards, but had no idea what happened after that.
I instantly felt very anxious and confused about what was happening. I told my friends I had to go and went out to my car to see if it would jog my memory or I could find...anything. When I got to my car, it was locked but was in the right spot. My car was an older model that could only be locked in one of two ways—you could manually press down the lever on each door, or you could turn the key on the driver side door to the right and it would lock all of the doors.
No key fob or anything. Because the door was locked and I always used the keys to lock it, I assumed my keys were somewhere at the school. I had no idea how to trace my steps without any memory before waking up in the hallway, but I went to my math class, looked around and couldn’t find them, and used my teacher’s phone to call my dad, who had the spare.
I told my dad I didn’t really know what was going on but I was locked out of my car at school and had forgotten my school work at home so I needed him to bring me the spare. He was annoyed and asked where my keys where, and sounded really surprised when I said I didn’t know. He eventually made it up to the school and let me into my car.
He looked around the car after letting me in, and suddenly pointed to my back seat where he saw...my car keys. Just sitting there on the seat. At this point he became concerned and asked if everything was okay, and if I was trying to avoid school for some reason. I tried to explain that nothing was wrong, I wasn’t sick or anything, but was near tears.
I was trying to explain that I would never be able to leave my keys in the back seat because I ALWAYS used the key to lock the doors when I got out. But then it got even more weird. When I went to start the car, the battery was dead. We couldn’t find anything that was left on to drain the battery, but it wouldn’t even start when my dad tried to jump it with his car.
So we had to go buy a new battery. My dad was a little spooked and said maybe the doors lock as a safety feature when the battery goes...but that makes no sense, because how could they? So how had all the doors to my car been locked with the keys in the back? Why was my battery drained when I didn’t leave anything on in my car?
Why was I basically back in my pajamas even though I had gone to class that morning in jeans? And worst of all...why did I have no memory of any of this? It was as though all the details of my morning got scrambled and rearranged out of order, or there was some kind of electrical short in the universe. We never did figure out what happened that day, and when I brought it up a few years later, my dad just said “that was a really weird day.”
42. Glimpse Into The Future
My partner and I were getting in bed the other night. He was getting in on his side, and he stopped and sat on the edge for a second. He looked over at me and simply smiled, very lovingly. For whatever reason, there was a very quick shift, and as I was looking at him, like a flash, he morphed into an older version of himself/
His face had matured, but it was still absolutely him. His hair was a little longer and graying. Even his corrective lenses had changed, but were a similar style. It was only a millisecond. But it was SO REAL. He was smiling at me. And it was as if I saw him 20 years from now, in a similar moment. My heart almost skipped a beat. He could tell I was suddenly shaken up, but I waved it off.
43. Take A Picture, It’ll Last Longer
Five years ago, my best friend passed unexpectedly. We had a wake for him following the service, at a friend’s house in the country. I'm sitting in a lawn chair, just before dusk, my first drink in my hand. There was a guy taking photos of everyone, and I happened to look over at a group with five guys in back, four in front, getting their photo taken.
They were by the corner of the house, about 15 to 20 yards away. I looked over to see who I might know, and in the back row, on far left, was my deceased best friend, wearing a red shirt, with his arms crossed, with a big smile on his face. I looked down to put my drink down, looked back up, and he was gone. I said nothing that night to anyone, but it had rattled me.
The next day, I called one of our friends, Keith, who had known him for many years, and I told him something was bothering me—that I had seen my friend last night. His answer chilled me to the bone. He said, “You mean over by the corner of the house, back row, on the left? One of the guys getting their picture taken?" I said yes.
He continued: “In the red shirt, smiling at you, with his arms crossed? And when you looked back, he was gone? I saw him too." To this day I have no explanation, but I don't doubt that there is another plane of existence after this one, and that image has brought me peace over the years.
44. Back To The Future
This is a story that haunts me daily. This happened in 1992. I had just graduated high school and was working in a warehouse. I kinda enjoyed it and settled, thinking I will probably retire here. Yup...I had zero ambition. I was a sad, lazy, cringe-inducing idiot. Then, a new guy started. It’s a warehouse with high turnover, so nothing unusual about new guys.
Everyone asked if we were related, because we looked alike. He was probably late 30s/early 40s. I was 18 at the time, and he was larger. He seemed to carry himself like me, and the way he walked and spoke was similar. On his second day, we worked together on a wrapping station. The first thing he said to me was: "You still have that Penthouse magazine under your mattress."
I DID. Weird, but totally normal for teen boys I suppose. He then said: "I know everything about you." "You’re worried about never getting a girlfriend." I was floored, but I again thought it was a usual teenage thing. I mean I wasn't the best-looking guy, so it wasn't a stretch to guess. I asked him why he was saying all this stuff and he looked at me.
His expression is seared into my mind and it left an image I see daily. He said "I am you." He then went on to tell me EVERYTHING about myself. I mean my deepest, darkest secrets. That no one knows. Then he kept telling me more about myself. I asked him to be serious and how he knew all this stuff. He said, "I already told you," and used this nickname only one person ever called me.
A busted Jetta pulled into the parking lot and he said, “That's our girl. She is a demon who is horrible to us.” I asked him why he is with her and he said: "She is the best we could do." When she got out, I was super grossed out. She said: "Let’s go." Before he left, he stared right into my soul and said: "We deserve better. Please go to college and stop being lazy and make something out of yourself."
The girl just kinda laughed, like yeah right. He left with her and I never saw him again. I think I ran into a younger version of her at a friend’s house years later. He introduced me and said we should hook up. I said NO. I went to college and stopped being a pathetic, lazy cringefest. I accomplished everything I set out to do, as I always felt the need to not let him down.
I know none of this makes sense. How can I explain something that I can barely understand myself? None of it makes sense whatsoever. Why would a future me get a job with me? He had to fill out a job application and have his references checked, right? Yes, I asked my manager who was a jerk. He just told me to mind my own business and focus on my job and to try to be less of a screw up. Well…
45. Kitty Power
I was (stupidly) talking on my phone while walking home one night. I saw a man who was talking to himself near a park and I deliberately chose to walk down another street to avoid him. He seemed really off. In the middle of my phone conversation, this orange cat came up beside me and started walking next to me. We walked in tandem for about three blocks.
I was telling the person I was talking to on the phone how funny it was that I had this new cat-friend. Suddenly, the cat turned around and headed back the other way. I was going to say goodbye to my new friend when I saw that same man I'd seen earlier. He had changed his original direction and had been following me for a few blocks—but then, things got even more bizarre.
The cat got in between us and howled at him until he turned around and went the other way. Then the cat and I walked another block together at which point he peeled off into a yard. I double-checked and the man had disappeared. I can't be sure that the man wished me harm, but I know I wouldn't have noticed him if it weren't for that cat.
I never believed in guardian angels or anything of that sort until I had that experience.
Piqsels
46. Am I Sleeping, Or…?
When I was 13, I moved into my brother's old bedroom. It was an extension to the original house with an en suite. Originally, it was a tiny box room with the entrance to the attic but my parents had extended it outwards. The attic entrance was always open, with a permanent set of metal ladders angled up into it. It was far larger than my old room and I was pretty excited.
Within a few weeks of moving in, I was ready to move right back to my small old room. I'd wake up in the middle of the night to see a ghostly figure staring down at me. It had a white head like a skull and a formless black body. It would slowly move down to the foot of my bed and stare at me until I moved, at which point it would sink into the floor.
I thought to myself, it’s just sleep paralysis, right? Furthermore, I couldn’t ask my parents to move back into my old room. I'd begged to move into my brother’s room and had just gotten it all set up. So, ghost or no ghost, I wasn't going to leave. I didn't really talk about it to anyone and it gradually became less frequent over time.
Eight years after I moved into my brother’s old room, I got chills down my spine. At a family get-together, my brother mentioned that he used to see a sleep paralysis demon when he lived in his old room. When he went on to give the details, he described the exact same thing that I saw in that room! I nearly swallowed my stomach.
Neither of us had mentioned it to anybody else at the time it was happening so we have no explanation for us both experiencing the same thing.
47. More Things In Heaven And Earth
I used to work in this really old Shakespearean Theater. It was 1985. I had worked there all summer when I was 17. I had landed a cool job as a stage operations crew member the summer after high school. I worked the "upper theater" high above the stage on the catwalks. I was working in a far corner of a theater's rafters through my lunch break so I could leave early that day.
I had to walk off the catwalk, cross a wooden plank, and drop a rope down then pull up a larger rope to tie off on the rafters. We were getting ready for the season, and slowly stringing lights and scenery to the "drops" that were bars on pulleys and counterweights. It was a safe enough job if you knew what you were doing.
As I left the catwalk—which was very sturdy—I stepped onto a plank. It was so dark up there that couldn't see into the middle of the building but I could see a plank rising upward on the other side of the darkness. “Ok, it must hit a platform there at the bottom and go up again,” I thought. Boy, was I wrong about that.
I walked four or five steps down into a very dimly lit part of the rafters on the plank when a man stopped me. "Turn around slowly,” he said. “The plank is missing. No light. Get light.” I grumbled like any other teen would at someone telling them what to do. “Fine,” I said. I had no idea that that guy had just saved my life.
I turned around and got back on the catwalk, walked to the ladder, and climbed down to the stage to get a flashlight. My boss asked, "Why are you down here?" I told him that I needed a flashlight and that his guy up there told me that a plank was missing. "What guy?” he said. “You were the only one up there.” I wasn’t buying it.
"The old guy with the beard and wool cap,” I said. My boss, who headed the technical/carpenter/electrical part of the theater was in his late 60s and had worked in that theater for nearly 40 years. He looked amused at first. Laughing, at me. He asked, "How'd you know about that?” I was a little confused at first but then asked, “Know about what?”
"You're serious?” he said. “You saw him?” I was like, “Say who? What are you talking about?” That’s when my boss told me a story that filled me with sheer terror. “It must have been 1954,” he said, “and a rigger fell from the rafters and hit the floor. He fell all the way to the stage. I think his name was John. In '74 my assistant made up a story about talking to him.”
I told my boss that I know what I had seen and invited him to go back up to the catwalk with me. Sure enough, when we got up there, the plank was missing. There was the plank I was on, a platform then nothing. In the dust along the plank were my footprints leading right to the edge. One more step and I would have fallen to the stage.
Below us was a thick fabric curtain that separated the stage from the rafters, blocking light from below. In the horizontal folds of the curtain, we found a wool cap. To this day, I've not stepped back into that theater. Not even to say thank you to the ghost who saved my life.
48. Time To Fold
I once fell asleep wearing a certain pajama shirt. Yes, I am sure, I remember putting it on. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night, freezing cold, only to soon realize that I had no shirt on. I turned the light on and there it was, folded neatly on top of my bed table. I still don’t know what happened that night, but it has never happened again.
My first thought was really terrifying. I suspected that someone must have undressed me. I guess it’s possible if I would have slept very heavily or something. But that means some unknown person must have been inside my house, and that creeps me out just to think about. Some people have suggested that I might have been sleepwalking, but I’ve never done that before or since.
Nevertheless, it seems like the only reasonable answer that is actually plausible! But if that’s the case, I’m darn good at folding clothes in my sleep, so maybe I should do it more often!
49. The Cat With More Than Nine Lives
When I was little, I used to have a Thomas the Tank Engine book with fold-out parts and flaps. There was this one part which was like a shed, and you could lift a flap to see inside it. Inside was all the usual gardening and shed paraphernalia, but there was also a black cat seated in there. Here’s the glitch, though. I swear the cat wasn’t always there!
I used to love that book, but every time I read it I would get to that page and guess whether the cat would be there or not. Not a clue what that was all about really, but it creeped a young me out to no end.
50. A Dogged Search
A couple of weeks ago, my dog Koda came into my room and started to try and jump on my bed, which she was successful at doing after a couple of tries. Eventually, I gave her a little nudge to, you know, get off my bed. She jumped down and left. Then, I heard my phone ring downstairs, so I walked down and answered it.
It was a call from my grandma, who said she had made some food. So I said okay, I will stop by and come eat. I get my jacket on and get ready to leave. I get my keys and grab my dog's leash to take her. We get in the car and drive for about ten minutes until we arrive. I was eating and talking to my grandma about things. But when I was getting ready to leave, I couldn't find Koda.
I searched everywhere. In the backyard, in the front, outside. She was nowhere to be found. After a good hour of searching my grandma's neighborhood, it started to get dark. It was about 9:30-ish, so I decided to come back home and search again the next day. I left and went to sleep. The next morning, I woke up because I heard something downstairs.
When I went down, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was my dog. At that point, I just thought “Wait, what?” Later, I came back to my grandma’s house to tell her that I had found my dog. As soon as I arrived, I told her about how Koda was at home, and I thought to myself “Did I even bring her here in the first place?” I asked my grandma and she said yes I did, because I had left the leash in her living room.
I then asked my grandma to watch the footage on her security cameras from last night. And there was no footage of the Koda in the street or leaving the front door. But there was footage of her entering the house with me. I went home later and Koda was still there. And to this day, I still don't know what the heck happened.
51. Frankly My Dear, I Don’t See A Dam
Long ago, when I was a kid, my younger brother and I were riding our bikes on the embankment alongside the river and we saw a huge dam-thingy along the river. I grew up in this town and I never knew we had a dam. When we got home, I told my mother that it was the first time I had seen the dam, and she did not know what I was talking about.
Later, I returned to the spot, and there was nothing there. My brother does not remember the incident, but I know that I had seen a dam as clear as day. I guess it must have been my imagination, but it's still very strange. I did not dream it, since my brother remembered that we were there. He just doesn't remember the dam.
52. Say Cheese!
In college, I delivered pizzas for a local pizzeria to make money. I once had a delivery that should have taken about 20 minutes. When I returned to the store, the manager asked me what had taken so long. I asked him what he meant and he pointed to the computer, which was showing that I had been gone for an hour and seven minutes.
I don't remember delivering the pizza, only returning to the store when I was finished. I have no idea where I was during that entire time. I don't drink or use any mind-altering substances. 20 years later, I still have no idea what happened.
53. Hello, Stranger
This was the creepiest thing that has ever happened to me. I was chilling in a cafe several years ago when someone I had never seen before walked in. I’ve racked my brain trying to place this person’s face. I’m totally positive that I didn’t know this person. Anyway, he came up to me and asked, “Are you [my full name]?”
I said, “Yeah?” kind of unsure what he wanted. Then the guy just nodded and then walked out of the store and I never saw him again.
Unsplash
54. The Un-Twinning
When I was a freshman—or sometime in high school—we had a pair of new students start who were twins. I remember both of them because while they were twins, they had slight differences so I could tell them apart. Anyways, a few years after high school I got a friend request from one of them. It was nice to reconnect so I accepted.
I was looking at her Facebook page randomly one day. When I was going through her pictures, I didn’t see any of her sister which I thought was odd. I mentioned it to my friend and she looked at me strangely and said, “She doesn’t have a twin.” I asked another couple of people we went to high school with and they all said the same thing.
I have no idea what happened and it still baffles me because I distinctly remember two of them, but apparently, there was only one.
55. The Uncanny Hitchhikers
I was driving down the freeway in a big city after work and my car stalled in the left lane. Some guy immediately came up and offered to tow me to the next off-ramp. He dropped me off, and I tried giving him some money. He declined, telling me to instead do something nice for someone else. I got my chance a week later.
There was a rare downpour as I got in my car after work. Two scruffy-looking guys came running up to me and one said, “Hey brother, we missed our bus.” He wanted to know if I could give the two of them a ride. This was not the best part of town, and I would have declined but I remembered what that Good Samaritan had told me. Pay it forward. “OK,” I said, “hop in.”
We drove onto the freeway and I made all my usual turns heading home. It was the same way my two passengers wanted to go. After a while we got to an exit where they asked me to stop. It was the same exact spot, in a city of millions of people, where that other guy had unhitched my car from his truck and told me to do something nice for someone else.
56. Where Do Babies Come From?
I was at my best friend’s 18th birthday party at her big brother's house. There were like ten of us there. The party started at around eleven at night and at three in the morning, one of my friends ask to go to sleep because he started feeling tired. He went upstairs to an empty bedroom but came back right back downstairs.
He said that he couldn’t sleep in that room because there was already a baby sleeping in the bed. We were all confused because no one of us had kids and neither did my friend's brother. So, we decided to check and, in fact, there was a baby. We tried to wake the baby up by touching him but he didn’t stir. We were all afraid but decide to let him sleep.
30 minutes later, the baby suddenly started crying. All together, we went to the bedroom and tried to calm him. We fed him and he fell asleep again. We went back to the living room. We started cleaning the house around five in the morning when a friend screamed “Where’s the baby?” Sure enough, the baby had disappeared just as it had appeared.
57. Repressed Memories
I have this weird memory, almost like a dream. In it, I'm a boy in a suit and tie. I'm at a party in a huge ceremonial church and there are lots of men and women wearing fancy black clothes. They all gathered in a circle. It was the middle of the day and light was brightly coming in through the windows. There are older couples dancing in the middle of the circle.
There was classical music and I was trying to look at the dancing couples through people's legs. Suddenly, without cause, a man fell. Then a second man fell. Everyone started screaming. People were running away but the men were running towards the men who had fallen. I think the crowd trampled me because I was lying on the floor and then everything went black.
I'm really creeped out because I know that memory isn't mine. I've never gone to a fancy party in a church when I was little.
58. Next Time, Take The Stairs
So, this was when I was about eight. My mom, brother, aunt and grandma had all traveled to Chicago. We had been staying in a hotel for about five days. It was very upscale, new, and overall very nice. Those entire five days, my mom would let me run ahead to the elevator when returning to our room from swimming, getting ice, etc.
She would let me ride up alone, since our room was right to the left of the elevator when you got off, and my grandma would always have the door cracked. So, one day, on the way back from the pool, with a wet hair, suit, and towel, I did the same. I ran ahead and entered the elevator. Pressed the button for the seventh floor.
There is only one elevator in this hotel. Once I got to the seventh floor, which I knew by the signs outside the elevator, I went to the second door to the left, like I had maybe 20 times before that week. I knocked and knocked. Nothing. I remember becoming weirdly "alarmed" at this point. That’s the best way I can describe it.
So, while wondering why my grandma wasn't answering the door, I returned the few feet to the elevator and waited for my mom and brother. I saw on the display that the elevator was arriving on floor 7, the floor I was on. It was clearly written on the sign. I see the light and hear the elevator ding. The doors open, empty.
At this point, I just FEEL something is VERY off, and return to the room door, knocking and crying now, getting cold because I am still very wet from the pool. Finally, after no more than one minute, a very old woman answers the door and says, "Dear, I told you already yesterday, this is not your room." I had NOT been there yesterday.
She then said, "It will be fine. I am very sorry, but I am on the phone with my son. Give it a few more minutes, your mother is coming." And then she freaking closed the door! I was shocked. How could anyone close the door on a crying kid who lost their mother, especially a woman who seemed like the caring grandmother type?
Almost immediately after she closed the door, the elevator opened, and my mom ran out crying and grabbed me. She was saying, "Oh honey, where were you!? I have never been so worried." She then went to open the door. This is where it gets really creepy. It wasn’t our room. She was stunned. The whole time I'm trying to explain what had just happened, and my timeline of events had only been about five minutes.
She was still hugging and holding me, and she kinda just went into auto pilot and went back into the elevator with me. She pressed 7 again. The doors closed super briefly and then reopened. The elevator didn't move at all. Once the door opened, we both saw my grandmother standing in the second doorway to the left, crying.
When she was us, she was very happy, running to hug us. Apparently, I had been missing for 45 minutes. Law enforcement had been called, every floor had been checked, they were still in the process of knocking on all doors, and opening even locked, vacant rooms. Apparently, my mother had decided to go and look at the pool to see if I had returned there one more time.
Then, after seeing it was empty, she took the same elevator back up to 7. The only elevator in the hotel. Only THIS time, out of the multiple other times that day, she found me. And, not only that, we were clearly not in the elevator hiding out. As it was the only one. And the officers and staff had gone up and down in the elevator multiple times looking for me.
We still talk about it to this day and can't explain it. Even though it had apparently been 45 minutes, my hair was still wet. The officers were kinda angry until the hotel staff pulled up the camera. The footage was terrifying. It showed me getting on the elevator, but then never getting off. Then, when my mother got on from the lobby, you see her get on.
TEN minutes pass, and then she gets off on the seventh floor with me in her arms. They went through all the cameras, on ALL the floors, which had very clear angles of the elevator on each floor. NOTHING. I swear, the staff was freaked out, as were the officers. They were almost convinced someone had taken me, and then became freaked out and left me shortly after.
They were stumped as to why my hair was still wet. But they couldn't refute the cameras, as they were high resolution, working correctly and everything. I have always wanted to call back and see if they still talk about it years later. I have no clue who the woman was, nor was I ever able to identify her. For the investigation, even after they found me, they locked down the hotel and all possible exits, and had a perimeter.
Every guest in the hotel was more than happy to help. Women from ages 50 on, all willingly let the law enforcement officers take photos. Not one of them was the woman. This woman had VERY blue eyes, like very. The only possible connection I can think of is that the woman and I had almost identical eyes. It’s kind of rare considering how dark my hair is. I really don’t know!
59. Double Trouble
This happened a year ago. I was shopping at a mall and took a bus there. As I was waiting to take the bus home, I was looking around and saw a woman approaching the bus station from around the corner. She was like 50 meters away from me when I noticed her, and as I was looking at her, she really reminded me of a girl I knew in middle school that I haven’t seen in more than four years. Let’s call her Lucy.
In my mind I went “Holy smokes, is that Lucy? I haven’t seen her in ages.” As she came closer to me I realized, that’s not Lucy, it’s a random woman. Keep in mind, at this point there was absolutely no one else I saw at this location for the last 15 minutes and I haven’t seen or even thought about Lucy ever before this moment.
I simply continued waiting and after two minutes, THE ACTUAL REAL LUCY comes around the same corner and starts walking towards the bus station. I couldn’t believe it, what are the possibilities of that happening?
60. Call The Dogs Off
This happened to my sister yesterday, and she’s still freaking out. She's working at home, and every midday she goes to our parent’s place to take the family dog Jazz out for a walk. Yesterday, she went to take Jazz out and he was nowhere to be found. Our dad was grocery shopping and our mom was in the kitchen. When she asked her if Jazz was with our father, our mother asked her who Jazz was.
Long story short, there was no dog. According to them, after our first dog passed, we didn't get another. Thinking it was a strange prank, she searched the house, and she couldn't find anything suggesting the presence of a dog. No dog food, no dog bed, no dog toys, of which he has plenty and they are always everywhere.
Then our dad came home, and still no dog. When she interrogated him, he started to think that she was the one who was joking. After that, she returned to her home because she didn't want our parents to see her while she was freaking out, and she tried to call me. I was nowhere to be found, my cell phone wasn't active, and she couldn't even reach the shop where I work.
They simply didn't answer the phone, which is quite improbable, because it’s mandatory for us to answer the phone. She tried calling some of my friends too, with no success. After that, she went to bed and cried until she fell asleep. This morning I had 16 missed calls from her, with today's date. I called her back worried that something had happened, and she was crying.
She is still very agitated. When she went to our parents', Jazz was there, so she took him home because she wanted him to spend the night with her. She also confessed to me that the day before, she couldn't muster the courage to call our parents or relatives and ask about me, because she was too scared they would tell her she was an only child.
My parents told me that they didn't see her at all yesterday. They tried to call her at midday for the dog, but her phone was on mute, and they concluded that maybe she was busy. I'm so curious but she's still too freaked out to talk about it again.
61. History Repeating Itself
Something weird is happening in our town and only my family seems to notice. The first thing we started noticing were small things like duplicates. We would see someone somewhere, only for them to inexplicably end up somewhere else. For example, my mother and I saw and chatted with an old friend at the grocery store and when we arrived home later we saw on Facebook that this person was out of the country on vacation, and had been for a few days.
They have no memory of speaking to us either. Another time, my mother and brother were leaving a doctor’s office when they saw an old woman in smelly, tattered clothes enter the office and start speaking with the receptionist. While she was talking, my mother and brother got in the elevator and went down to the lobby from the third floor.
Upon exiting the elevator, they saw that the same woman was in the lobby, waiting for the elevator to go up. Sometimes, it would be an event aired live on Facebook that we had already seen days prior, or a child celebrating their birthday twice with the same exact party and photos. I've taken phone calls that were duplicates of calls I had already taken with the other person swearing we hadn't spoken yet.
The scariest thing has been the deaths. There have been four times where very well-known and influential people from the community have passed—and every one of them has passed twice. We hear about it and see all the RIP posts on Facebook. We see the community fundraisers put on to raise money for the funerals, and even see the cars at the church or funeral home…only for these same people to pass a week or two later.
Then all the RIP posts and fundraisers happen again. Only our family seems to notice these things happening. My mother and siblings, and my two kids. We don't know what's happening, and it is starting to scare us.
62. Walking Over Your Own Grave
This has to be the strangest thing to ever happen to me. I discovered it a few months ago and it keeps playing in my mind, because I have a lot of health problems. Last year my dad passed. We visit the graveyard quite often and go to various family members' graves. It's a Muslim graveyard, so they usually have the father’s name and other details on the gravestones.
Near my uncle’s grave, the one just in front of it has my name on it. My name is spelled a little differently than the common spelling, and it was spelled exactly like mine on the gravestone. Both first and last names. It's also got the same birth date as me. But there’s more. My dad, who also has an uncommon spelling to his name, was from a small village in Kashmir.
On “my” grave it has the name of the person’s father. It’s my dad’s name with the uncommon spelling. On the gravestone, it’s stated that the father is from a village. Guess where the person's father was from? Yep, the same village. It's really weirded me out. I know people from that village and contacted them to see if anyone heard of this person. No one seems to have heard of him.
63. Wishful Thinking
My mom was sitting on the couch tonight and I was standing next to her to the right, with my phone on the armrest. I clicked open my phone to show her something and quickly typed in my passcode, with the phone still on the armrest. She very casually said: “That’s your wedding picture,” and pointed to the screen. I asked her what she meant.
She said, “Your lock screen, that’s your wedding picture.” My lock screen picture is just a picture of some palm trees from my trip to California. My home screen is also just a different picture of trees. I’m 18 and I’ve never been married. I flipped through all of my tabs and there were no photos open that could’ve even remotely resembled a wedding picture.
When I showed her my lock screen again—the picture of the palm trees—she seemed a bit shocked and said it was weird. She just said, “I saw someone in a wedding dress,” after I questioned her another 10 times about it, and eventually dropped it. When she initially said it, I felt like I saw it too—it was the weirdest thing.
I feel like I saw it but it instantly left my memory and I couldn’t remember what the picture looked like. I believe her that she saw it. Could this be a glitch that showed me my future?
64. Break Up To Make Up
My girlfriend and I had been together about a year at the time, never had big problems, we are both pretty relaxed people. Never have had a big fight, never had trust issues, the whole shebang. So one day, I was out in front of my apartment building. This was before we lived together. I had seen her the night before, had a nice dinner, gone out to a bar, then gone to my place, after which she took a taxi home.
So, as I'm standing out in front of my apartment building, she pulls up in a taxi. I wasn't expecting her, and was pleasantly surprised to see her. I put out my smoke, smile, and walk up saying something like "Hey, what are you doing here?" Her reaction was devastating. She scowls at me, and slaps me square across the jaw.
Obviously I'm dumbfounded, and at a loss for words so I just kind of looked at her. She never said anything, just barged past me into the building. I followed her up to my apartment, asking her what was happening the whole way. She goes into my apartment, grabs her bag and some of her stuff she left there, throws a few things at me, breaking a glass or two and knocking down a bunch of stuff on a shelf.
She calls me a pig, says she knows everything, and that I've broken her heart. I'm trying to figure out what's going on obviously, and she stops on her way out when I touch her sleeve, glares at me again, and slaps me. She tells me something like, "I hope I never see you again," and walks out. I followed her to the street and she got in her cab and drove off.
The street was pretty empty and I watch her drive off. At this point, I'm just lost for words, scared, and sad. Then, as I'm watching the cab drive away, someone hugs me around my waist from behind. I turn around, and it’s her, in running clothes. She’d been wearing heels and a leather jacket before. I went completely pale.
She said "Hi" in her usual happy-go-lucky tone, then noticed my look and asked, "What's wrong?" I spun around, no taxi. It had literally driven away five seconds earlier, no way it could've turned in that time, and all the lights were red. I didn't say anything to her, just ran upstairs. Her bag was gone, things were still broken, my door still wide open.
So then I told her. We were both monumentally confused, there's no way I could have mixed her up with someone else, and she's an only child. We had security check the cameras, and sure enough, me following a girl to my apartment. The angles weren't great, and the film wasn't great quality, but it was pretty easy to see me and my face.
Hers was always hard to make out. It looked a heck of a lot like her, but never a clear shot.
65. Water Under The Bridge
So, I was at my friend’s house the other day and we got some drinks from the kitchen and then went up to his room to play some video games. He put his glass of water on his bookshelf then turned around to shut his door. In doing so, he knocked over the full glass of water and it went all over the floor. My friend was pretty angry, as it got over quite a few of his books as well.
So we went downstairs to get some kitchen towels and came back up like 30 seconds later. When we opened his door, we noticed that the wet patch on the floor was gone, so we felt it and it was bone dry. His books that got wet were dry too, and we couldn’t find the glass that we’d left on the floor either. It was then that we looked up and saw a full glass of water sitting on his bookshelf.
66. Sole Survivor
This happened years ago, but I still remember it like it happened yesterday. I was with my boyfriend at the time waiting for a bus on a really long main road. As we were waiting, I happened to see an old lady walking in our direction from ages away, and something about her really caught my attention. She was small and old but was hobbling towards us so quickly and with what seemed such purpose.
I don't know why, but I just felt like she was looking straight at me even though she was kind of far away. As she got closer, I noticed she was indeed looking at me with a warm smile on her face, slightly out of breath. Just full-on staring at me. She crossed the road and walked straight up to me as if she had known me for a lifetime.
She put her arms on my shoulders and told me "You are the sole proprietor of your own body." She just stood there smiling at me. She seemed relieved, as if she made it just in time to give me this message. It wasn't creepy at all, just a bit confusing, and so I asked her to explain what she meant. She simply said: “Nobody can touch you if you don't let them my dear. It is your body. Nobody can put their hands on you if you don’t allow it.” And just like that she left.
Later that same day, my ex was physically violent with me for the first time. This always stuck with me. Not saying she was an angel or something, maybe just a really batty lady with good timing, but it’s just something I never forgot.
67. Two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood
This happened a few years ago. I was driving through east Pennsylvania, and I'm giving this girl I had just met at a friend's house that night a ride back to her place. Now, getting to her house involves going down a one lane road that I had driven on at least 100 times prior to this. At one section, the road meanders around a ridge by making a big right turn, then it does a sharp turn left after a couple hundred yards, and then right again where these two logs laying on the side of the road make a kind of "X" shape on the ground.
It's a very distinctive landmark, at least for me. This is the way this road has always been. So there we are, trying to find topics to talk about to keep the car ride from becoming awkward since we hardly know each other. We take a right turn, round the bend, then a sharp left turn and then...there's a left turn up ahead where there should be a right turn.
Immediately my body goes into fight or flight mode. I remember thinking: "This isn't right, I know there's a right turn here. This is not what is supposed to be here." She knew it too. We both fell silent and just looked ahead in confusion. The road about 100 yards in front of me just turned left and disappeared off into the woods.
To the right there was nothing, just the side of a hill and some trees. It looked completely natural, not like a mirage or anything, yet it felt so strange and almost...intentionally deceptive. None of this made sense. I knew these roads. As we approached the turn, I decided that I'm not going down that road, something "bad" was down that road.
I just made the irrational decision to turn right instead and hope for the best. The girl in the car put her hands on the dash board to brace for impact. My eyes were still fixated down the left-turning road as I started steering to my right, and then as my gaze shifted towards the direction I was now driving in, suddenly I could see the "correct" road in front of me again.
Everything was back to normal. I looked in the rear view mirror and sure enough, the left turning road was non-existent. My hands felt icy cold and I was physically shaking. I pulled over to my right and we just sat there in silence. We contemplated going back to investigate, but just looking at the road behind me gave me a sick feeling in my stomach; she felt it too.
We decided to get the heck out of there and that was that. I was very hesitant to go down that road again and avoided it the best I could after that, but a few weeks or months later, I decided to go back in the day time and check it out. I pulled over at the right turn spot, got out of my car and walked around the area.
This is the part that really freaks me out. I quickly found out that on the left side of the road, obscured by some thick underbrush, was a very steep, rocky cliff that dropped off maybe 200 or 250 feet into a ravine. The phantom road would have taken me directly through a clearing in between two trees that lead straight over the cliff.
If I had chosen not to follow my gut and drove down that road, there's a very, very good chance that we would have been seriously injured or worse. Apparently, several people have crashed in that area by driving down into the ravine—it might just be coincidence, who knows. I don’t know what to make of this event. If I were alone I'd be more willing to write it off as a hallucination or trick of the eye, but I wasn't alone. She saw the same thing I did.
68. A Bad Lot
Yesterday I decided to drive to the mall. The one I go to is massive. It’s circular, you can drive around it. It has a massive car park on one side. So, all seems normal on my way to the mall with my girlfriend. As we get there, it looks really quiet. There's about 10 cars there, so I'm questioning whether or not the mall is open, which is really weird.
We drive around to the other side just to see what’s going on, and there's a few people about and a few cars but not much else. So, we decided to go round back to the first side where we normally park, and our plan is to walk to the entrance and see what's up...this is where it gets weird. As we pull up around to the other side again, the whole car park is full.
Literally people walking about everywhere. People sitting outside having coffee. There was even two ambulances. So very weird. Me and my girlfriend were unbelievably shocked. We were speechless and we literally sat in the car for ten minutes just trying to get our heads around it. I haven't felt right since. The time difference for driving round was about two minutes.
It would have been physically impossible for all those cars and people to get there, park, enter the mall, etc. What happened?
69. One Pill Makes You Larger
This happened a few days ago. My husband and I were at home, just a normal evening. For reference, I'm 5'8" tall and my husband is 5'7" tall. We've been together for years and know very well what the other looks like head on. I had gone to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and something felt off. I wasn't sure what, until my husband asked if I was taller than usual.
I was flat-footed and barefoot, but realized my viewpoint was as if I was on my tiptoes. I could see the top of the fridge, and my hips were above the kitchen counter. I turned to face my husband and he seemed much shorter to me than usual; our eyes are usually pretty close to even but they seemed much lower than mine.
He says he felt like his height didn't change at all, just mine. Understandably, we were both freaked out and were wandering around our apartment trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, everything felt right again and I returned to the kitchen; I could no longer see the top of the fridge and the counter was back even with my hips.
My husband returned, and both of us looked "right" again to the other. It was like once we couldn't see each other anymore, it fixed itself.
70. Unfriended
Two years ago, I went on vacation to Spain. It was a package tour for teens. I befriended a guy and a girl there who were a few rooms away from me in the hotel. Since we were over 18, we were allowed to hang out alone outside of the hotel, and so we practically spent the whole trip just walking around town together. I clearly remember adding the girl, let's name her X, on Facebook and talking to her on Messenger.
That's how the three of us were planning our days. I even started a group conversation with X and that boy, let's name him Y. Fast forward to today, It was her birthday, so I wanted to wish her happy birthday on Messenger, and she just wasn't in my contacts. I thought maybe she unfriended me, but looking her up on Facebook didn't bring up anything.
I decided to ask Y whether he'd heard from her recently and he told me he didn’t know any girl with that name. I looked through all the people me and X both added on Facebook during our trip, and even asked some of them about her. Nobody seems to recall meeting her. Y claims we were hanging out with another girl, who I do know and spoke to on the trip, but never hung out with.
I don't know what to make of it and I'm kinda freaking out. I'm thinking maybe my mental health is much worse than I thought, but honestly, there's a huge difference between mild seasonal depression and hallucinating a person for two weeks straight...
71. Dad Part Deux
So, my husband gets out of work at 5:30 pm, and gets home between 5:36 pm and 6:00 pm. Sometimes my kids are still eating dinner. Last week I'm getting a head start on dishes, and my kids are still eating dinner. I hear the dogs go off, hear his truck door. A few seconds later he does his distinct throat clear and tells the dogs to quiet down.
He comes in the door and says hi to the kids. They say hi back. I turn and smile and he goes upstairs to go to the bathroom. I look at the clock and it says 5:40 pm. He never comes back through. I go outside and notice his stuff isn't at the table where he throws it after work. Whatever. So, I go upstairs and go to look at the bathroom door.
The light is off and the door open, it's empty. I go check the bedroom, nothing. Ask the kids, they said he was probably in the bathroom, I said that I had checked and he wasn't there. The kids can see every door leading outside from the dinner table. I go back upstairs and check the rooms. He's not there. I look out a window to the driveway, and his truck isn't out front.
So I ask the kids if they saw him leave, but they didn't. I said he's not here anymore and all the kids looked confused, and start exchanging weird looks. At 5:50 pm, the dogs start barking and I hear his door. I hear his keys hit the table outside and he walks in and says, "Hi!" Then he goes to the bathroom. My kids and I look at each other weird but don't say anything.
When he gets out of the bathroom I asked where he went. He had a confused face and asked what I meant. I tell him and he looks at the kids and said he was just getting home. The kids said they saw him and talked to him and so did I. He made a face and all the kids just looked disturbed. It was so weird, because we all witnessed it together.
72. Two Days’ Notice
This has been playing in my mind for years now. I had a very realistic dream about a friend of mine when we were both 19. In that dream, he passed, and we were sitting against a brick wall talking. He was telling me that sometimes our time is up and to make the most of it. I woke up the next morning and was freaked out.
I called him and told him about it. He laughed and said, "That would suck," but reassured me that he was fine and not going anywhere. Two days later, I had a call from his parents to say he had suddenly passed in his sleep. The last time I spoke to him was when I called him after my dream.
73. Put Your Hand In Mine
You know how, on cold days, you can breathe on the window inside your car and draw on the glass? Well, yeah. I got in my car one morning and as I looked at the windshield, I saw a few small baby hands. I thought it was strange that someone would let a baby play on my car’s windshield. I went to touch the prints out of curiosity.
As I touched them, I wiped them away. That’s when I realized that the handprints were on the inside of my locked car. This is probably the strangest and creepiest unexplained phenomenon that’s ever happened to me. I don’t have kids.
74. A Picture Is Worth A Million Screams
My best friend and his mom were moving out of their house and he went to take one last selfie in his room. When he showed the picture to his mom, she asked, "Who is that?" Upon further inspection, he noticed there was a white face almost like a mask looking over his shoulder from the attic hatch above his room. He had always heard things from the attic but never saw anything.
A few weeks later we went on a wrestling trip and stayed in a hotel. He showed the picture to everyone in our room and then some spooky things started happening. We began hearing knocks on our door when nobody was there. We saw flashes or glimpses of a figure in the mirror in our room. Everyone was pretty freaked out about it.
We thought it could be the demon from the picture. My friend who took it became so paranoid that he played Bible verses to ward off any demons at night. He said ever since he took that picture, he has had weird things happen to him.
75. The Parasite In My Dreams
I had a recurring nightmare of a terrible parasite sucking the life out of me. Sometimes it waited for me in dark corners to go to bed. My cats always slept on my bed during that time. For me, it was a very stressful time. I got an itch at the place of my chest where I dreamed the parasite had latched onto me. I ended up making myself sick with worry.
I went to my doctor. As it turned out I had male breast cancer at the age of 28. My doctor ordered a biopsy of the lump that I thought had been this parasite. After I got well again the dream never came back and my cats slept in their places again and not on my bed. The dream was creepy enough that it made my cats protect me.
76. Silent Night
I had a schnauzer that could hear a cat stalk across a Persian rug. The slightest noise could wake her from a slumber and set off her constant barking. She made a great tent companion while on solo backpacking trips. One morning, we woke up from a night without interruptions in the backcountry of southwest Colorado and I found my tent’s central line had been replaced.
The aluminum stake that I had used was gone and instead, there was a piece of aspen branch that had been carved into what looked like a tiki statue. Someone, or something, had carved a snarling face with teeth into the branch and had heated it in a fire to give it a brown color. My dog—with the most sensitive ears--hadn’t made a sound all night.
I scrambled out of the tent and looked around the small alpine lake and saw no other campers nor any sign that people had been around. I cut my trip short and hiked the eight miles back to my car.
77. Take Two
Not long after the attacks on 9/11, on a Friday, I got up to go to class and had one of those mornings. I broke a glass while getting something to drink, then I tripped over something while going to my car. I was then late to class due to a wreck on the way there, though thankfully not one that involved my car. While at school, we heard about a plane crashing.
Something about the wings blowing off. I went to work, then went home. The next morning, my roommate wakes me up, asking if I'm skipping class today. After he convinces me that it is still Friday, I get up and go to class. I then noticed that the glass I had broken was no longer broken. On the way to work, I passed the same wreck in the exact same spot.
All day long, I waited to hear about the plane crash, but it never happened. It ended up kind of a normal day. Then, the next day, the news broke about how authorities had just apprehended the attempted “shoe bomber” and prevented his attack. I have wondered many times if someone somehow ‘rewound’ that day to stop the attack and if I somehow didn't reset with everyone else.
78. Accidental Prophet
A few months before my first car accident, I dreamed about it happening. Everything from the sounds to the placement and the smell was all the same. The thing is that the girl driving tried to get me to find a different ride, because she didn't want to do any extra driving that day. And after the crash, I told her about my dream. Her reply made my blood run cold.
She said she’d had the same one the night before and that's why she didn't want to drive. Freaky stuff, dude!
79. The Bells Are Ringing
My partner and I both have the same vivid memory of something happening that never actually happened. We are both convinced that our friend was with us at another friend's wedding, and that he fixed the sound system during the reception. Except that the friend that we remember fixing the sound system was not at the wedding, and does not even know the person who was getting married.
But we both distinctly remember our friend not only being there, but actually saving the day. We sometimes catch ourselves talking about it and once praised our friend for saving that wedding. And he was like: "What? Who's X? I wasn't even there."
80. Cat Got Your Tongue?
Once when I went with my grandmother to her friend's house, I was on the porch by myself with the grandmother's friend's cat. All of a sudden, the cat looked me right in the eyes and said the word "Meow." It didn't sound like a cat meowing at all. It sounded very convincingly like a human carefully enunciating the word "Meow."
Two syllables, in their most thoroughly unconvincing cat voice. Like someone intentionally doing a very poor impression of a cat, as a joke. But it was perfectly in time with the movement of the cat's mouth and there was no one else around, so it had to have been the cat saying it. So yeah, I met a cat that could talk, but the only word it knew was "meow."
81. Lost In Translation
About a year ago I was at work, helping two customers fill out some paperwork. They were both Chinese, but one spoke zero English, and the other was translating for him. I sat the paper in front of them and looked down to grab a pen. As I was looking down, I heard one of them say, clear as day, "Where do I sign my name?"
So, I looked up with the pen and said, "You sign your name right here, sir." The translator looked shocked and said, "You speak Mandarin?" I had no idea what to say. I was just as confused and shocked as he was. I made up an excuse and said, "I assumed that's what he said," to hide how mind blown I was, but no, I completely heard and understood him.
I don't think he believed me either because he was giving me that look still. It still freaks me out to this day.
82. Naming And Shaming
My dad works for animal control, and is often called to jobs suddenly. He was called to his female friend’s house one night unknowingly. He showed up to the house and a ton of law enforcement officers were there. That’s when he made a devastating realization. When someone is suspected to be deceased, animal control is often sent in first to get the animals out, just in case they attack, etc.
Anyway, he went in and made a disturbing discovery. Someone had come in and taken his friend's life—but the story didn’t end there. Later, in the middle of the night, my parents got a call on the house phone and my dad answered it. What he heard made his blood run cold. It was his friend’s voice, and she was screaming, yelling, and begging for her life.
He thought she said her boyfriend’s name at one point. My dad was very upset by the phone call. The officers he’d met that night later contacted him to say that her boyfriend had been the one to do it. He still can’t explain it.
83. Then Who Was On The Phone
Three days ago, I was having conversation with my father and he was telling me about his university life. Basically my dad came from nothing, he had a very difficult upbringing and went to the worst school and high school in our city. When it was time for him to go to university, disaster struck. My grandfather passed, leaving my dad to take care of the rest of the family as he was the oldest son.
He ended up in the wrong major because of some bad advice, and he regrets it to this day. The courses were taught in English, which is his second language. My dad told me that it was the darkest time in his life, and he just wanted to run away. He was even thinking of taking his own life. Now, very recently he got his masters in English literature.
He was telling me that he didn't think that would be ever possible. My dad just recently finished this degree at the age of 55. The next morning, my dad had to drive to this town because his distant relatives live there. They are struggling financially, and my dad is very a kind soul so he wanted to help them. The town is a three hour drive away.
He usually takes public transport, but didn't this time. He drove there and my mom was worried, so we decided we will keep calling him every hour to check. Well, I decided to call him. Where we live, the network signals are very weak on the highway. He told me to wait and parked at a nearby restaurant. It was like a check point for trucks.
I don't know what came over me, but I started crying and went on to tell him how proud I was of him, I just babbled and kept saying that he shouldn't think he is lacking, because he is not. He is an amazing father and a great person to look up to. My dad started crying, and he told me that he will talk to me when he returns. Well, he returned and he just hugged me.
He told me that 30 years ago he was visiting the same town and it was the time when he was at his lowest. He was visiting the same relatives and he had taken a bus that stopped at a petrol station. He went to call his mother and when he picked up the phone, without even dialing, he heard a voice. It told him the exact same thing that I had just said to him, about being proud of him and whatnot.
It was my voice—years before I was born. After that, he didn't even call my grandmother, he just stood there and cried. It gave him strength to keep fighting. He said he just now realized it was me whose voice he heard. My parents are now taking this as sign from God, who helped my dad when he thought no one was there for him.
84. If You Could Read My Mind
One time, I was going to lunch with two coworkers. We were discussing another coworker. One coworker made an assessment of the coworker we were discussing, and I agreed with him. He immediately looked at me and said he didn't say that. But he acknowledged that he was thinking it. Coworker Two agreed that he didn't say it.
85. A Miraculous Vanishing Act
I was traveling from Texas up to Washington state with my family. We were almost out of money, almost out of gas, had no food, and were stuck in California. I sat in the car while my mom took my younger sisters to the restroom at a gas station. I was really anxious about our situation. Suddenly, the car door opened and I looked up.
This lady that I had never seen before sat in the seat and faced me. She said, “It seems like you’re down on your luck. Take this and give it to your mom. Tell her to pay it forward someday to someone who needs it.” I looked down into my hand and there was a $100 bill. I looked up to thank her but she had already disappeared.
She was nowhere in the parking lot. Just vanished. When my mom came back, I told her what happened and she cried. We got gas. There was a guy selling oranges on the side of the road and we bought a bag and went to a local park. We got back on the road a few hours later. I never saw the lady again. She saved us and we made it up to Washington to start our new life thanks to her.
86. Why I Never Do Laundry
My grandma and I both saw something really creepy in our laundry room once. One afternoon, my grandma needed a hamper. So, I followed her to the laundry room. When we opened the door, we got the fright of our lives. There was this ghostly figure in there. It looked to be about my height—I was six or seven at the time—and totally black.
It was slumped near the washing machine. We only saw it for a split second, enough time to register that it was there, and then it was gone. I remember my grandma saying, "Did you see that?" and then laughing it off. She got the hamper and did her thing as if nothing happened. I avoided the kitchen for a while after that.
87. A Night In The Woods
I was camping alone in a small one-person tent. I went to bed one night, all snug and secure in my tent. I made sure to close the inner and outer zippers — I was sleeping alone in the woods, after all, and you can never be too safe. At around three in the morning, a loud thunderclap woke me up. When I looked around the tent, I discovered both the inner and outer tent “doors” were wide open.
I don’t know if it was the wind or something else, but it totally creeped me out.
88. A Long Distance Call
I was reading on my laptop in my bedroom, when suddenly I heard my best friend calling my name, and it sounded like she was talking through the phone. I look around for my phone, thinking she has called and somehow one of my siblings has answered and has hidden the phone somewhere in the room to prank me. But things got very weird, very fast.
No phone around, nor siblings, and meanwhile my bestie is still talking: "Answer meeee. Why aren't you talkiiiingg???" She then goes silent. I get really nervous, start crying, and ask my siblings if they have something to do with this. I then start to wonder if I am going crazy and hearing voices. They all try to console me. Later, I find my phone downstairs. Not anywhere near where I had heard the voice coming from.
The next day, I tell my friends about the experience, and my bestie says that she did in fact call me last night. She claimed that I did answer, and then she kept calling my name for a couple of minutes thinking I was playing with her, until she eventually hung up. To this day, I don’t understand how the phone just answered the call on its own, or how I was able to hear my friend’s voice from all the way upstairs.
89. Crash Landing
When I was little, I had a wooden doll crib that rocked. It was maybe about a foot and a half long. I kept it on the other side of my room from where my bed was. One night, I had one of those dreams where you feel like you're falling and it wakes you up. When I woke up, I made a disturbing discovery. The crib was sitting on top of me, on my chest and abdomen.
Now, I feel like this is an important detail to add. I sat straight up when I woke up from the dream, and the crib fell off of me onto the floor and made a really loud noise. Some people have proposed that it might have been sleep paralysis, but I've never experienced sleep paralysis before or after. And if it had been, I don't think I would remember the crib falling onto the floor.
90. When Charles Is Not In Charge
One time, in the middle of the night, I heard somebody scream my name. They just suddenly screamed: “CHARLES!” at the top of their lungs. Nobody was there, and my parents were both asleep. Later that same month, my dad was making coffee, and he heard me whisper in his ear: “Dad!” But when he turned around, nobody was there.
I have zero recollection of doing this. I have sleep paralysis a lot, which may explain the first one, but I have no idea how my dad heard me talk to him while he was working in the kitchen. I don’t believe in ghosts, but this does creep me out...
91. A Hair-Raising Sight To Behold
Just today at the mall, I saw at least ten men with the exact same bleached haircut in the food court. I think the universe’s character generator is broken…
92. In The Hole
When I was a kid, there was this house right before the entrance to my subdivision that was in this super deep valley. I remember calling it "the house in the hole" and thinking about how much it must have sucked when it rained, and how great of a sledding hill the sides would make in the winter. Then, one day, we were passing it, and there was no valley. It was at the same level as the road.
I asked my mom what happened to the hole and she had no idea what I was talking about. To this day, even though I no longer live in that area, I always stop and take a look at that house whenever I drive past it. Just to check if there’s anything that could explain what I had been seeing.
93. A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
I was going through my grandma's pictures after she passed. We found a picture of what appeared to be my husband's mom posing with my grandma. This couldn't possibly have been his mom as they didn’t know each other at the time, but it looked just like her. And that’s not all. According to the note on the photo, this person also shared the same first name as his mom. No, we aren't related. Yes, we've had our DNA analyzed.
94. Stairway To Heaven
One time, many years ago, I was going down the stairs in my house and went past my brother along the way, who was coming up the stairs at the same time. I said hi to him and he sort of mumbled back at me. I then arrived downstairs and walked through to the kitchen, only to find him standing there. How the heck can you possibly explain that one??
95. Special Guest
As a kid, I remember lying in bed at night waiting to sleep. I must have been about six or seven years old at the time. My brother was in the other single bed fast asleep, and a babysitter was looking after us. The babysitter was our older cousin. As I was laying there, I distinctly remember feeling someone or something tickling my feet.
I know it wasn't my brother. But the bedroom door was fully locked and it never opened, so it couldn’t have been my older cousin messing around either. A decade later or so, I was talking to my mum. We were just generally chatting about weird things that had happened to us over the years. She mentioned that she once heard me as a five-year-old, chatting away in my bedroom and giggling.
As my brother was out with my dad at the time, she went in to see what I was doing. What she saw made her freeze in her tracks. She said I pointed to the chair in the corner and said I was "talking to the old lady with the glasses." There was no one sitting in the chair at all, according to her. She said the worst part was that there really was an old lady in the family that used to live in this house.
She passed in that very bedroom, and that was her chair that the family had left behind from when we recently moved in. I don't remember my alleged chatting with the old lady, but I 100% remember the tickling of feet. The chair was in the corner of the room at the base of my bed. Part of me wants it to just be my cousin messing around with me. But I just know he wasn't in the room.
96. Penny For Your Thoughts
I was once showering and, after about 10 minutes in the shower, I hear something ping and hit the floor. I looked down and saw a penny. I was pretty perplexed as you can imagine, but I figured whatever. I thought I’d just keep it, as I imagined it could be good luck. I kept the penny in my wallet for a few years in a zipped-up side pouch.
I never really told anyone about it, because it was kind of pointless to talk about a random penny that I was superstitious about. So, a few years later while at a music festival, a girl in our tent woke up to find a penny in her butt crack. We all laughed it off as having had a wild night. However, I remembered the lucky penny that I had in my pouch.
And when I looked for it in the zipped pouch, I was shocked to find that it was gone. I told my friends about this, and they didn't believe me. I think they threw the penny away, too, so I no longer have it. I still to this day have no idea where this penny came from, how it ended up where it did, or where it is today.
97. Snack Time
My daughter and I were on the couch one day when she was younger, and we heard the sound of popcorn. Like, as if it was popping in a microwave. It wasn't a constant popping, but more like one or two pops every ten seconds or so. Then, the entire living room filled up with the smell of buttered popcorn. We both smelled it.
Yet no one was making popcorn. The microwave itself did not smell like popcorn, and the smell was only observable in the living room. I went as far as to open the heating vents to see if there was a rogue bag of popcorn in there. If it was just the smell and not the sound or vice versa, I would easily explain it away. But since it was both, this was one of the strangest events that I’ve ever experienced.
98. Let’s Lock The Door And Throw Away The Key
So, before my husband and I were married, we lived separately. He would come over and spend time with me, then leave later at night like around 11:00 or 12:00. He left one night out my front door, which has three locks. There’s a lock on the knob, a deadbolt, and what I call a hotel lock. It's a lock where you flip the long piece over onto a short peg and then the door can only be opened a few inches.
Well, on this particular night, he left and used his key to lock the knob and deadbolt. But I thought to myself that I should go lock the hotel lock too. I come downstairs and find that it’s locked already. Needless to say, there was absolutely no way that he could have locked it from outside. I have no clue how that could have happened.
99. I Can See It in Your Eyes
My boyfriend’s younger brother and I were taking a bike ride down the street to the shops late one afternoon. As we get onto the main road, we notice a dude across the street heading in the opposite direction. He is walking with a limp, his head is bowed, and he’s got a plastic bag in his hand. We're only a few meters away from him when he crosses the street onto our side.
As the bro rides past him, this stranger lifts his head up and smiles in his direction as they pass each other. I'm a little while behind, so I don't pay too much attention to this—that is, until the bro stops, turns around, and gives me a funny look, just as this guy is passing him by. I still don't think too much of it at this point, assuming that he had just stopped to let me catch up.
As soon as I myself passed the stranger and made eye contact with him, I realized that this was not the case. When the stranger looked over and nodded at me, I saw nothing in his eyes. When I say nothing, I mean like black pits where his eyes should have been, or just an eyeball that looked entirely black. I don’t know how else to describe it.
When I finally catch up to the bro, we stop around the corner and he says to me "Did you see that???" "You mean his eyes?!" I asked. "Yeah, it looked like they weren't even there!" he replied. We then kind of sat there for a while processing what we had both just seen. Had the bro not related the same feeling and experience to me as I had felt when the stranger looked at me, I doubt I would have ever thought anything of it.
I probably would have just assumed it was the light angles playing tricks on me or some such thing. It was a sunny afternoon, so glare certainly could have played a part. He could've been wearing contacts, I don't know. But none of those explanations feel like they fit. We got home later on and told everybody what had happened, but no one believed us. They still don't to this day.
100. Gut Feeling
I was 17 at the time. Me and my dad had just finished our fishing trip and it was almost midnight, mid-autumn. When I was about to get in the car, he told me that he did not want me to sit in the front seat on the ride home. We argued about it for about five minutes. He did not give any good reason as to why he did not want me to.
I gave up and got in the back seat. It was pitch black outside, and we had been driving on the main road for about two minutes when we saw a car driving in our lane. Right as we were about to collide, my dad swerved into the other lane—and so did the car in front of us. That’s when I heard my dad say something that still haunts me.
He muttered, “I knew it” at the very last second, and then I blacked out. I woke up when the ambulance showed up at the scene, and the EMTs helped me out of the car. I was barely conscious and don’t remember much after that—but there’s one thing that’s still crystal clear. I saw my dad, sitting in the car waving at me with tears in his eyes.
Later, when I asked where my dad was, they told me that he had flown out of the car window and landed a few feet from the car. They had put him in an ambulance, but he didn't make it. They also told me that the man we crashed into lost his life—but that’s not all. He was driving with his 17-year-old daughter, and she only survived because she’d been sitting in the backseat like me.
I still can’t believe that this really happened. This was six years ago.
101. Childish Game
I used to work in a nursing home where I cared for dementia patients. Every patient on the hall I worked on would steal spoons from dinner. It got to the point where once a week I’d have to go through everyone’s room to take back the spoons. It was the strangest behavior so one day, I just to ask why they were taking the silverware.
Apparently, the patients, all of them, took the spoons to give to “the kids” because “they like shiny things.” I asked the patients about the kids many times but never got a good answer. I’d hear things like “they just live here” or “they stand outside in the snow and look in the windows” or “they’re my friends who visit.”
It wouldn’t be so weird if they all didn’t do it but it was everyone—the ones who were still capable of speaking anyways. One time at three in the morning one of my patients started screaming so I ran into her room and found her lying in bed, seemingly fine. I asked what was wrong and she said, “That boy is here again and won’t get out of my closet! I’m scared!”
I was like, “Yeah, me too, Dolores.”
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