There are some things out there in the universe that are just beyond our understanding. From moments with an eerie tinge like deja vu or the feeling of being watched when you know you're alone, to full-blown paranormal experiences like ghostly presences and sightings that seem undeniably like UFOs. Even if you're a full-blown skeptic, these real-life accounts of terrifying experiences might make you think there's something more out there, below the surface...
1. A Father’s Warmth From Beyond
My dad died when I was five. Was raised by my mom and I have a twin brother who I'm really close to, but we aren't inseparable. I was in my second year of college bombing all my classes, had not seen family or friends in months and one of my best friends died a month earlier. Not trying to complain, but it was a hard time in my life.
Anyway, I'm alone in my dorm on my bed trying to do homework while I'm panicking about my future. All of a sudden, my blanket moves up my bed and around me while I was all alone and I hear a man’s voice say "You’re going to be okay." Sketched me out for months.
2. Thrown-Out Baby Shoes, Never Worn
My dad was renovating the kitchen in his house before they moved out. We were putting new cabinets in, when we took out the old cabinets (60-ish years old) behind the cabinet (inside the wall) we found...A pair of white old-timey children's shoes.
What did we do? We threw them right in the trash... I guess this pissed off the baby ghost or spirit or whatever it was cause ever since then we would hear knocks and children running throughout the house at odd hours of the night. And occasionally my baby sisters crib would be moved from my dad's room out into the hallway. We moved out a couple years ago and haven't been back.
A Slice of My Trash, Travels and Tots
3. Umm, What??
Just me and my 2-year-old son at home. Was changing his clothes when he looks at me and says: "Why don't you say hi to that man?"
4. The Woman in White
Saw a woman in a white nightgown walk out of the forest one night while I was house sitting in the middle of nowhere. She walked out of the woods toward the house. She scared the hell out of me. There were no neighbors for miles. I ran upstairs to my girlfriend. We both went downstairs and I saw her walk past one of the windows.
I spent the rest of the night under the covers. The next day I told the homeowners that “I saw something strange.” They replied, “Was it the woman in white?” They told me they have seen that woman for decades, sometimes INSIDE the house. I’m still trying to figure this one out. There has to be some sort of explanation.
And why do so many ghost stories involve a woman in white? Must be something in the water. IDK!
5. As Creepy as it Gets
I stayed home from school one day because I was sick. I went to the kitchen to make a sandwich and I heard a sound coming from the living room. Go to see what it was, and it's a little toy car rolling from the "fancy living room" to the room I was previously sitting in, then it rolled around the coffee table, and crashed into the spot I was sitting at.
Also, my brother had passed away three months prior to this and after it happened I told my mom. She said the same thing happened to her too. So I'm sure it was related to him dying. Still very bizarre.
6. I Saw You Drop My Gameboy
During a spinal tap procedure, I was put under. While under the anesthetics I had what I can only explain as an out of body experience seeing as how my viewpoint was from above my body looking down on the procedure. I watched the whole thing and saw that the doctor knocked my Game Boy off the tabletop while walking by, batteries ejecting from the fall.
One fell in sight and he picked it up but the other was next to the front left wheel under the bed out of his view…but not mine. I woke up groggy and told him where my other battery was and he was shocked when he found it there. To this day it still weirds me out.
7. No Thank You
My mother and I are book collectors, and avid readers, so when I was growing up, we converted the outside cottage my dad had built for his mother into a library, as she had moved on. We had more than 2,000 books, all neatly arranged on the bookshelves alphabetically by author name. One hardcover book in our collection was an encyclopedia that described in detail various haunted places in the world.
The author had taken his own pictures and compared them to historical "paranormal" photos. This book was the bane of my childhood. It never stayed alphabetical, it would always move to the bookshelf facing the front door. At the time, I just ascribed it to family pranks—my sister had used my love of books to terrify me in the past, namely with Cujo.
The pictures had a floating dot of light, that would not be in the same picture, I would have to read through the book to find it each time. Either I misremembered its location constantly, or I imagined it completely. After three months of not knowing, it ate at me until I committed the greatest sin in my eyes, I circled the floating light in the photo and checked it the next day.
The page was blemish free. At this point, I was terrified, so I took the book to school and left it under the floodlights on the cricket field after practice. I found it at home the next day. In its spot. Facing the front door. That Friday, I took it to school again and gave it to a girl I hated. She left the school the next week and moved away, I don't know why.
I have only seen it once after that, it was in an SPCA second-hand book sale 6 years later. I picked it up, my mother's name in the front, no circle in any of the pictures, and the floating light in the second to last picture. I put it down and left the shop.
8. Play the Song
I was 18 at the time and it happened on a high school trip in Spain. After a whole day of sightseeing, going around Barcelona, just doing the usual stuff, we were driving back to our hotel. I was listening to music, didn't feel like socializing much with others, especially since my class got mixed with some other people I didn't care much about and my friends were all on the lower deck of the bus while I was stuck with some obnoxious loud kid seated beside me, fidgeting all the time and screaming to his buddies across the bus.
The fact that he stank didn't help much. Anyway. I'm sitting there, listening to music, trying to tune out the noise that was super irritating and just watching the scenery through the window. We were driving through what I would describe as semi-industrial part of some town, lots of uninteresting, plain buildings, warehouses and such.
At some point the kid elbows me accidentally and I instinctively turn towards him, telling him to chill it, and at the moment when my face was in the opposite direction of the window, I see something move in my peripheral vision. In the same moment, the feeling of utter and total cold envelopes around me and a deep, panicky feeling develops and I look straight in front of me, not wanting to look to the window, unsure of what I might see there, feeling scared and silly at the same time.
It really took a lot of strength to muster enough courage and look outside the window and to find that, of course, nothing is outside, just the usual warehouses, empty streets, nothing interesting. At that moment, the bus stops on the red light and once again, I see something lingering in the back of my vision.
This time, confidence boosted a bit by my previous victory over my own fear and superstition, I turn around. And actually see something. At that point, I think my mouth was literally agape as I stared. It wasn't a now you see it-now you don't type of situation. I was staring at it for what seemed like hours but was probably 30 seconds, or whatever it took for the light to turn green and the bus to resume driving.
It was, because yeah, it was an it, no doubt in my mind about that, a different kind of dark, a deep subtle, moving darkness, the closest I can come to describe it is by asking you to imagine fire and the way it moves, fumes and all, but only black, utterly black. Outside was getting dark but I was still able to differentiate all it's body parts and movements.
It was walking on the left wall of the building, on all fours, back legs backward, went across the face side of the building, at which point it turned its horned doglike head straight towards me and stared straight into my eyes for what seemed like forever. Then it climbed on the roof and the bus started driving away.
I literally had to rip myself from looking at it and stared in front of me. I was a complete mess, shaking, thought I was going to have a heart attack, felt cold all over. The feeling of dread was something completely alien, unimaginable, it was like my mind was screaming and tearing itself apart because it has witnessed something it knows it should not, something that is not supposed to be possible, and I felt like I was in a totally different plane of existence compared to the other people on the bus.
I only half-consciously realized that they were all screaming and laughing the whole time, not one of them had sensed anything wrong. The stinking kid beside me asked me kind of frighteningly if anything was wrong and if I'd like him to call our teacher to which I only muttered that no, it was okay and just let me be, trying to explain to myself what had actually happened.
Couldn't sleep that night and had developed a head-splitting headache for the rest of the trip. I was a constant mess and couldn't wait to go home. I've made a point with myself never, ever, not in a thousand years, to check my peripheral vision to check whether something's there.
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9. Calling From Beyond the Grave
My sister died in an auto accident years ago. Shortly after, I was at home for lunch on a work day, and the house phone rang. It was someone asking for my sis. I asked who was calling, since everyone we knew was aware of her passing, and he identifies himself as "Tom" (or whatever). I explained the situation, and the call ended.
A couple of days later, talking to sis's best friend and I mention the call. She tells me that "Tom" had also been killed in an auto accident weeks ago, so he couldn't have called. Was really creepy.
10. The Family Witnesses a UFO
The most bizarre thing that has happened to me happened when I was about 10 or 11 years old. Me, my mother, grandmother, her sister, and my three brothers were out in the mountains berry picking one summer. In one pickup truck is me, my mother, grandmother, and my little brother. My older brothers and my grandmother's sister were in the other, smaller pickup.
Well, we must have ran over a nail or sharp rock on our way home, because my mom's truck got a flat. We tried changing the tire, but the donut also happened to be flat, so we piled into the other truck. The three women were up in the cab of the pick-up and my brothers and I were in the bed of the pickup, all laying down watching the stars.
We had about an hour drive ahead of us. While driving down the road, we noticed that a star wasn't rotating with the other stars whenever we made a turn. It was as if the star was directly above us. It left us all perplexed. It wasn't blinking and it was pretty high up, so it couldn't be a helicopter or a plane. It wasn't a satellite. We were so confused.
After about 20 minutes, the "star' began to move across the sky, gradually getting faster until it ZOOMS into the sky really fast until we can't see it anymore. I should also say here that it didn't fade away into the horizon. It literally zoomed into the sky. Like one minute it was there and the next, it wasn't. After about a minute of stunned silence, my oldest brother sits up, looks at us wide-eyed, and says, "Did you all just see that thing?" To this day, we don't have any explanation.
11. This Guy Probably Didn’t Get Back to Sleep Any Time Soon...
Heard my dog walking around at midnight, you know, nails hitting the floor. I got annoyed that he was waltzing all over the place, and I couldn't sleep, so I shouted "Freaking stop with your stuff already" from my bed. Sounds stopped. Realized a moment later that he's been dead for a year and there's no one else supposed to be in the house.
I ran around with my baseball bat in my hand for 10 minutes but couldn't find anything... or anyone...
12. Old Habits Die Hard
I had a cat who would come and lie down next to my back when I was sleeping on my side. He did this every morning after he ate breakfast. My girlfriend told him it was his job after I had been through a bout of depression. After he died I could feel the pressure of his body for about a week.
13. An Uninvited Guest
Woke up one night to see my mom looking into my room watching me sleep. Asked her what she wanted and she just shut my door. I took a few minutes for my sleep-addled brain to realize I was 25 years old and living on my own at the time. What followed was a thorough search by a naked sleepy man holding a chopping knife looking for whoever was in his apartment.
All the doors were locked, all the windows were locked, and no one else was there.
14. The Girl With the Quilt
I used to live in a duplex. I was/am good friends with my neighbors. We used to hang out in his side of the garage all the time, smoking joints and what not. Our side of the garage had a spotlight in it. So, if I was in my room and it was late at night and the light turned on, that meant someone was headed out to the garage to smoke one.
I always got up to see who it was (it was a popular spot). Well, on this day I see the light and get up to check, and there's a little girl holding a quill in her hand, walking along the fence that separates our two yards, until she hits the house, and disappears. I lost my mind and thought "Darn, I'm just messed up. that never happened."
The next day I'm talking to my neighbor about what I saw. he said that he saw the exact same thing, because when the light went off he got up and looked out his window to see who it was, and all he saw was a little girl with a quill, walk along the fence and into my house. That was bizarre.
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15. Guardian Angel
I was eight months pregnant with my second child. I had to take my mom to a doctor’s appointment, she was getting a procedure and could not drive home after. I had my not quite two-year-old with me. He was in the backseat behind my mom in his car seat. I was driving a Jeep Wrangler. I pulled up to the intersection to make a left turn.
I was in the crosswalk and the light turned red. I heard a loud man's voice tell me to "BACK UP NOW!" I put the car in reverse and backed out of the crosswalk. I did not have time to look up or put the car back in drive when I heard a loud crash. Two cars collided in front of me and a SUV was where my car just was.
On my hood was the headlight cover for the SUV. As the police, fire dept. and EMS showed up they wanted to treat me since I was really pregnant and I had to keep telling them we were not involved in the accident. One EMS guy picked up the plastic on my hood and said "How?" I told him what I heard. He said, "I guess you have an angel."
My mom did not hear anything. I still don't know what that was.
16. Drama Already in Progress
One morning my girlfriend and I went to 7/11 to buy bus tickets and right when we were about to pay the cashier, a ratchet looking man barges out of the bathroom covered in blood from head to toe with bloodshot eyes.
He swiftly walks to my side and yells at the cashier shouting, "You can keep this!" As he violently threw a pack of Skittles at the counter. The cashier then calls out saying, "Wait-!" But the man ran out of the store. The cashier then shook his head and casually said, "Sorry about that." And everything went back to normal, like nothing had happened.
17. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Window
During my freshman year of college I lived on the fourth floor of my dorms. It was winter time and there was snow on the ground. It was probably around three or four in the morning. My roommate and I had both randomly woken up but we weren’t talking, as we each thought the other was asleep. Then we suddenly both heard very clear, loud knocking on our window.
We both said “did you hear that?” and were kind of spooked. 15 minutes went by and nothing happened. I was starting to fall back asleep when there it was again—four loud knocks. At this point I was shaking because, in my mind, someone had somehow climbed up to our window and was trying to scare us. So I got up and pulled the blinds back to look for someone.
No one was there. No footprints in the snow either—nothing. So I got back in bed. Another five minutes or so went by and we heard the knocking again. This time, it was coming from what sounded like the neighbor’s window. Sure enough, we heard our neighbors say “dude, what the hell” and shuffle around a little. Two minutes later, it sounded like every single window on our floor was being knocked on for about seven seconds straight.
Just absolutely insane. People started screaming and we could hear people opening their doors and running across the halls into their friends’ rooms because they were terrified. It kept happening for probably two more hours, but only at specific intervals every 15-30 minutes. Every time I was about to fall asleep it happened again. It was a very long night. No one ever found out what it really was, as far as I know.
18. Secret Admirer
I have very vivid memories of seeing a black, shadowy figure moving around in an apartment I lived in when I was little. I always screamed for my mom and she tried telling me that it was just a shadow of someone in the apartment, but it wasn't. I watched it, from my bedroom, walk across the wall from the living room to my parents room.
It even stopped and turned to look at me once.
19. Eerie Phone Call
My uncle works for emergency dispatch in my town and he recently told my family of the weirdest call he's ever gotten. He says that he had received a call from a landline one night and when he answered it there was only static on the other end. This happened two more times. Finally, he calls a squad to go check out the address from the caller ID.
When the cops got there and walked into the house they immediately saw that there was a dead body. The person had been dead for five months. The craziest part about it was that there was no electricity or any other utility working. So there is no way they should have been able to get those calls into dispatch. But if they hadn't, who knows how long that person’s body would have stayed there.
20. This Legit Sounds Like a B-Movie
My grandmother was a cop in Santa Maria in the late 70s till early 90s. A man calls in saying there is a 7-foot gray man at his door. She goes to check it out, the door is jammed. The man is screaming and she hears a loud buzz. She slams the door open and the buzz is gone and so is the man. There's blood everywhere.
She calls for backup and runs around and calls his name. She hears what sounds like someone yelling, but someone is covering their mouth. She finds him tied up, piss everywhere. Investigators say that he was in that room for at least four hours. Man lives alone in the middle of nowhere. Says he called the police five hours ago. They said that a cop was on their way.
He reported seeing a 7-foot tall gray man with big eyes who did that to him. No footprints, no trace of any kind of invasion. My grandmother lost four hours somehow...The guy ended up killing himself a few years later, leaving a note behind. In the note, he warned my grandmother that "they" are after him...and thanked her for rescuing him.
21. Turning Point
Ok, so this happened to be a New Year’s back and to this day is the weirdest thing that I've ever experienced. I was in the airport, getting ready for my flight home - was traveling for work reasons. Since I was with a couple of other coworkers, I got there a couple of hours earlier—my flight was the later one. Checked in, got my boarding pass.
Since I am terrified of missing a flight, I usually just find my gate and wait there until boarding. I did the same this time. Sitting at the gate (I double-triple check info on ticket and gate, I'm just that paranoid), playing candy crush. It's quiet around me - only a couple of folks sitting not too far. But it's still over an hour away. I continue playing, casually eavesdropping on the conversation of a couple of people a row away from me—they work in the airport fast food place.
There was some drama, someone was talking smack about someone, it was kind of entertaining. I heard the various boarding announcements, watching people come and go through the nearby gates. All is well—I'd be home soon. Glancing at my watch—soon, almost there. It's about 45 min before the flight, the boarding should be starting any minute.
But it's quiet. No people come by the gate. I look around. The flight attendants are standing quietly at the terminal post (by the gate), just shuffling stuff on their desk. Confused, I ask them—"When is the boarding for the flight XXX?" They look back at me equally confused—"It's over, we did the last call 15 minutes ago. The plane is leaving the gate right now.”
"Was there a gate change to (hometown, flight#)?"—my confusion, as well as anxiety starts to slowly rise. They tell me, no, no gate changes. Boarding was announced and completed as normal. "Are you sure? I was sitting right there! There were no people around me, no one boarded!" I point to my seat a couple of rows away from their desk. They just shake their heads, looking at me with suspicious looks.
I stand there dumbfounded. How can this be—I wasn't asleep, I didn't leave. I was wide awake and aware of my surroundings through all this time. But the clock is correct. It's way past the time—the plane is leaving. I start crying. The attendants take pity on me and give me the number for the airline service to change my flight. At that point, I walk through the airport bawling—mostly because I feel like I'm in one of those movies where someone time travels and no one believes them.
That somehow reality's been altered, and no one realizes it. I'm an adult, sober, no drugs—but I feel like I am losing my mind. I don't think I've ever been so terrified in my life. I realized what people who lose their mind must be feeling. How utterly terrifying it is. How can this small, by comparison, incident make me question the reality I am in.
I was afraid to ask the people that were talking (fast food workers) : "Hey, did you see me sitting here—was I awake?! Because I heard you talking!"—Yeah, not weird at all. I got a seat on the flight about 5-6 hours from then. The odd thing, during that time I called my sister because I was just terrified and alone at that airport, and we spent a long time talking about things that I've avoided talking about.
Things like losing my faith, terrible depression, and a thankfully failed suicide attempt. I came clean about how badly I needed help. And we just talked. It was already dark when I got on that flight. I felt stronger and more grounded than I had for the longest time. I was ready to go back home, fight for myself, and find professional help. The seat that I got was the crappiest one—at the very tail of the plane, next to the lavatories.
It smelled there. It was cramped and hot and the turbulence was bad. But for once, none of it mattered - whatever the reason was that made me miss my own flight - it saved my life. After that, I got counseling, was put on anti-depressant medication. I started going back to social activities, and eventually back to the church.
I also started to be more open about my depression and anxiety, especially to my family.
22. Super Speed?
I was marching in my town's Memorial Day parade. I was with my church for the VBS promotion float. About halfway through the parade, I realized that I had kept on seeing the same guy taking pictures of our float. We would walk 100 feet down the road and I would look to the right and see the same guy taking more pictures of our float.
After 3 or 4 times of noticing this I pointed it out to someone else. For the rest of the parade every hundred feet or so we would look over to the right and see this guy standing there taking pictures of our float among the crowd. We would watch him to see if he was making a mad dash to get ahead of us after we passed him but we never saw him move from where he was standing, yet he somehow magically appeared to our right every so often.
By the end of the parade we had like 5 people watching for this guy and every single person swears that they never saw him move but kept on seeing him taking pictures of our float. From the time that I noticed him to the time that the parade was over I must have seen him probably 15 times. No clue why this guy was so interested in our float because it was nothing special but yet he was eagerly bent over looking through the viewfinder snapping picture after picture after picture of us.
He was not a member of the church; the church was small enough that I knew everyone in it at the time and I never seen him before. I definitely still wonder about it to this day.
23. Silhouettes on the Shade
Just me and my daughter alone in the house one night. She pointed at the top corner of a room and asked: "What is that man's name?" She got very upset at me when I told her there is no one there after she repeatedly asked me that question. Needless to say, all the lights stayed on that night...
Another time, before my daughter could speak. She was looking over my shoulder at the doorway. And then she got really excited and was waving at someone. I thought it was my husband coming home from work. Turned around, no one was there.
24. When Dreams That You Dare to Dream Come True
At my grandfather's funeral, the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was played at the beginning and end of the service. My mother and aunts had picked that song because they all grew up in Hawaii. At the reception afterwards, one of my aunts tearfully said that she wished that he would send us a sign that he was at peace like my grandma had done (A single white lily grew at the foot of her grave, exactly like the one on her headstone... in an otherwise flowerless cemetery).
Within about two minutes of her saying that, the song began to play again and, in an otherwise cloudless sky, a rainbow appeared directly across from the house over the lake. Every single one of my aunts and my mother all have photos with them pointing at the rainbow—but none of our neighbors or other people in the area recall seeing a rainbow that day.
25. Snail Mail to the Extreme
There was this abandoned school turned World War I military hospital near my house that my friend and I liked to break into. One day, we were rooting around the third floor and we found an empty envelope on the floor of a closet. It was old, and the address was written in script. It only had a name on it. That name on it was the exact same as my friend’s name, whose name is rather uncommon. We booked it out of there real fast.
26. Leave!
I was stationed in Seoul, South Korea several years ago. I was taking a shower in my room and when I got out, the word "leave" was written in small letters in the fog on the bathroom mirror. I didn't have a roommate because NCOs got their own private rooms. A little freaked out, I decided to do exactly that—leave. I went off post for some Korean BBQ and wandered the city a bit.
I came back a couple hours later to find the barracks evacuated and half burned to the ground. The fire was pinpointed to faulty electrical wiring that caught some insulation on fire inside the walls. Something knew it was going to happen and to this day, whatever that something was, it didn't want me in the middle of it. I'd gladly thank who or whatever it is if they'd give me the chance but it's been years and I still have no idea.
27. Ahead of Your Time
When I was nine years old, I woke up in the middle of the night positive that my Aunt Hope had died. The feeling was so real that it scared the daylights out of me and I ran to my parents’ room crying. I told them what had happened, and they kept saying "it’s just a bad dream, everything's okay, Aunt Hope is fine." But for some reason, I just couldn't calm down.
About 15 minutes later, the phone rang. My dad got up and went to answer it. It was my uncle calling to tell us Hope had just died.
28. Whistling in the Dark
I took my dog out to the backyard one night and, while out there, had to pee so I went over by a tree to relieve myself. While I was peeing, I heard someone whistle. I thought it was just my imagination, but then they whistled AGAIN and I realized they were standing right there hiding in some bushes. I froze in fear for about ten seconds until I yelled for my dog and ran inside.
I told my dad, who was the only other person home. He quickly went outside with a gun and a flashlight, but they were already gone. The next day, I went out there and noticed the limbs of the bushes were pushed back and broken off in some places right where they were standing. I still have no idea who it was or why they were there.
29. Private Tutor
When my son was about two or three, he wouldn't go to sleep so I let him into my bed. My husband was asleep, so I told my boy he had to look at his books quietly while I read mine. He was good for a bit, but then he suddenly started reading the book. Actually reading the words out loud. Slowly. He couldn't read and it was a newer book we hadn't read to him yet.
It wasn't memorization. I asked him how he knew what it said and he replied: "my friend John is telling me." Scared the hell out of me.
30. Don’t Miss the Forest for the Trees
I get insomnia. It was one of those nights and I was sitting out on my back porch at about 4:00 AM, smoking a cigarette. It was one of those eerie nights where there is absolutely no breeze and it's just completely quiet out. We have woods behind our house and, as I was sitting there, I see this person making his way through the trees. I don’t mean just walking around. It looked like he was jumping from tree to tree, at least 30 or 40 feet up in the air.
I was absolutely stunned and just sat there dumbly, too afraid and confused to even get up and run inside the house. This person or thing then stops directly behind my house and looks at me. At this point, it's about 50 feet away and maybe 40 feet up in the air. It pauses for about five seconds staring in my direction.
I'm absolutely certain that it wasn't an animal. Its body was human-shaped and it did not resemble any type of animal I know of. But the way it was moving through the trees definitely was not human. No human could move like that.
Within a few more seconds it was out of sight.
31. Two Places at Once
My brother Chris and I have a much younger brother named James, who was five at the time this story happened. We had just moved into an older house and were deciding who would get which bedroom. James's new room was directly above the living room with the staircase. James went up to discover his new room, and Chris and I took a short walk around the neighborhood.
When we get back, my mom says she's going to get pizza for dinner, and leaves. She took a fairly long time, which is normal for her. I think she really enjoys the small breaks she gets when she can leave the house without James, and I never object to babysitting. Besides, James is plenty occupied with his new room. Chris and I are just talking in the living room.
James is super excited about his new bedroom. We hear him running and stomping around upstairs, opening and closing doors. Sometimes he slams the doors pretty hard, but whatever—he's a kid. I assumed he fell asleep since the noise stopped eventually. I hear my mom's car pull up. I get up to meet her in the kitchen. My mom comes in, carrying soda.
James follows directly behind her, carrying the food, yelling "PIZZA TIME!" She had taken him with her to get dinner. Chris and I just looked at each other, taking too long to comprehend what was happening. I lived in that house for four years, and that was the only time something really freaked me out about it.
32. Haunted House
I had a lot of weird things happen at my parent’s house growing up, but I still consider myself skeptical of anything paranormal. The master bedroom has a walk-in closet where the light would constantly come on by itself, especially when I was home alone. The dogs were also weirdly obsessed with the closet. One would sit in there for hours, and the other would always stand and growl and bark.
Even years after I moved out, my mom still has this happen on the regular. The freakiest time was when I was 15 and my parents were out for the evening at a work party. I was in my room playing a computer game and listening to music. Suddenly I got a really uncomfortable feeling like someone was behind me. I turned around, and there was a black shadowy figure in the middle of the room.
As soon as I saw it, it moved towards me and I could literally feel it move through me. I noped the f*** out of the house and sat outside until my parents came home. The most recent time was after I moved out and was at my parents to do some laundry. As I was loading the dryer, I clearly saw somebody walk by the laundry room door and into the furnace room.
I assumed it was my dad, but it turned out they were both upstairs at the time. My mom is also a complete skeptic, but she almost wanted to come stay with me one time because she swears she saw a dark figure crawl across the kitchen floor. She also says she’s seen the chandelier swinging one time during the night. I’ve never had anything weird happen to me anywhere else but that house, so it’s kind of freaky. I’m really not sure what to think.
33. I Would Have Immediately Moved to a Hotel
Stayed with a friend for a couple of months post-divorce. He had an old farmhouse and I bunked in the top floor room. One night as I had just gone to bed I heard creaking on the floor just in front of my bed. After a couple seconds, I rolled over and just ignored it. After a few minutes, I hear it again. I roll over and sit up. I see what looks like a blur—mist perhaps, who knows—pass by the end of the bed.
At this point, I'm more confused than anything. Suddenly, I hear what sounds like light footsteps on the stairs—about 7 in total. A small creak, possibly the door opening to the downstairs and then the dogs go ballistic. I run downstairs and now we are all awake. The dogs are focused on the stairway and bark like mad for about 3 minutes.
No real explanation, but after telling my buddy and his wife what I heard we were all creeped out for a few days. I stayed there for a few weeks and nothing else ever happened.
34. Imagine if Ghosts Could Read Minds
When I was in sixth grade I was on my computer late at night in my room when all of a sudden I got this overwhelming feeling that someone else was in my room. I had been playing Bubble Trouble and thought maybe it's one of my brothers trying to scare me so I looked over to the door and it was completely shut. There would have been no way for someone to open it without me hearing because it was an old door.
I glanced around my room and no one was there so I continued playing but I couldn't shake the feeling. I was sitting in a chair with a high back that went over my head and all of a sudden I felt like someone was standing right behind me. I reluctantly turned around and saw nothing, looked under my chair, under my bed and, again, saw nothing.
I sat back down at my computer with a little bit of relief but then the feeling came back significantly stronger than before and I was instantly petrified. All of a sudden I felt a presence in my left ear and I heard and felt it say "go to bed." I ran right to my bed and hid under the covers and didn't tell anyone for a long time because I was afraid that ghosts could read minds and if I told then it would only upset the spirits even more.
What the "thing" said wasn't the scary thing, it was clearly hearing a voice that felt like it was right next to my ear. I have had a large number of experiences before and after that one, but none that were so clear and unexplainable/irrefutable in my mind.
35. Hospitals Are So Haunted
On my first nursing job, I would work in a unit that served as an overflow, and that unit would close if the census was low (less patients in the hospital). The hospital was only a few years old, but there were strange things happening like the TV turning on its own in a room where one patient died and patient’s doors closing.
I always joked that sun-downing in a hospital might as well be someone being possessed. Two of our coworkers had the bright idea of going upstairs to that unit, turning on phone video, and asking aloud for the spirits to show themselves. I didn't join them since I was busy. But to their disappointment, nothing came of it and even the possessed TV did not turn on.
But later, when they reviewed the video, they turned up the volume on their phone. They started to hear audible whispers and that freaked them out. Not my story, but from a veteran coworker. She got consent from the family for a patient for a surgery who was paranoid "I'm going to die...I'm going to die...I know I am; you bring me there, I die."
The patient didn't have any significant medical problems, no red flags with anesthesia history, and the surgery was a simple ex-laprascopic gallbladder removal. The dude died on the table.
36. Grandma’s Spirit Has Your Back
This was about 13 years ago. My wife and I moved into our brand new condo in July of ‘05. We were new to the area and knew no one besides my dad. Fast forward to April ‘07. We had some "weird" things, such as the TV turning on in the middle of the night and a few glasses shattered on their own when no one was in the room.
Strange... but we just explained it as new construction/wiring and perhaps the glasses were weakened by the move/age. We joke about it, and eventually, I'm due to drive back to Chicago to do my oral defense for my Master’s Degree. I take showers daily, as does my wife. Don't remember the actual dates, but let’s say Monday my wife and I take our showers, no worries.
Tuesday, I take a shower and get out. Our bathroom has a full wall mirror over the dual sinks. In the steam, at the VERY VERY top is written, "Chicago". I'm like, "Uh... that's odd." Call to my wife and ask her, "Why did you write that?" She is just waking up and comes in, is confused as heck and starts to get mad at me ‘cause SHE didn't write it.
I quickly write in the steam below it without thinking... as does she. The writing doesn't match either of us. Plus, it is written at the TOP of the mirror. We have ten-foot ceilings. Both of us would have had to have gotten on the counter and stood to reach it. I run through the condo—it’s not very big—and everything is locked. We had no people over in between the daily showers, and hadn't had anyone over in weeks—still didn't know many people here.
My wife is not a prankster; she has never pranked me in the two decades I've known her. I sure as heck didn't write it. The kicker: the next night I had an incredibly realistic dream of my grandma who passed in ‘05. She was on my bed, rested her hand on my leg and said, "Don't worry Hyperion, that b****** is gone." Nothing weird happened after that. I can explain away everything except the writing. Who the heck knows!
37. Yep Just Grandpa’s Ghost Having Fun
A few years ago, my grandma and I traveled a state over to stay with my grandma's sister on their farm for a couple of days to attend a family wedding. The first night sleeping, I constantly felt a freezing breeze blowing across my right ear. You'd think that it would've stopped when I pulled the blanket over my head. Nope.
Maybe when I rolled over and smashed my ear into the pillow? Nope again. I figured it would have to stop if I laid flat on my back, but still the breeze persisted—only that time vertical instead of horizontal. After a night of very little sleep, I told my great-aunt about it at breakfast. Very casually, she told me that it was her father-in-law, who'd been dead for a good 60 years at that point.
He meant no harm, and I could ask my cousin about it at the reception, as I had spent the night in his childhood room. Went on to tell me about how this cousin always had stories of playing with an old man in his bedroom as a kid—one that there weren't any surviving photos of, but when he described him to the family they all agreed on who it was.
Went to the wedding, and then at the reception I got a chance to ask my cousin about it. With the same casualness, he told me "Yeah, that'd be Grandpa K., he's harmless and will probably leave you alone tonight." Sure enough, no breeze on the second night. I still want to know where the breeze came from.
I want to know how my conservative, religious relatives are just like "oh yeah, that's just grandpa's ghost having some fun" and leave it at that. I want to know why that room in particular—I've stayed in that house probably a dozen times without incident, but that was my first time in that room. I want to know why I couldn't recreate it during the day, even with my head in the same place, or again on the second night.
I want to know why no one thought it relevant to mention that I'd be sleeping in the apparently haunted room.
38. Dogs Always Know
So this happened to me a while ago. I was probably 16 or 17—I'm 26 now—and I was walking my dog Boxer in our neighborhood. Just a little background on Boxer right quick, he wasn't the friendliest dog at first but he wasn't aggressive towards people either. He was just always... alert. He made us feel extremely safe but we never had to worry about him hurting other people.
As long as they didn't have any ill intent, he was pretty chill. He wasn't much of a barker either. Unless he saw an animal or something. So it's dark outside at this point, maybe 9ish. I wasn't really paying attention to where I was going. Boxer was basically leading the way and we were only a few houses down from my own. We were across the street from a house that to this day remains vacant.
All of a sudden I feel Boxer pull with all his might and he starts barking like a mad dog. I look up to see what was making him react this way and immediately I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand. It appeared to be this woman. She had dirty blonde matted hair and it was slightly covering her face. She looked to be wearing a hospital gown.
I know that sounds crazy but I swear this is what I saw. She had a yellow blanket in her hand and she was walking down the vacant home's driveway. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. And it was almost like she wasn't even aware of me or my loud ass dog. I took one look at her and started pulling Boxer back to the house.
He was a medium sized dog (Shar-Pei and pit bull mix) and I'm a plus size girl so when I tell you it felt like I was trying to pull back 10 dogs, I'm not kidding. After much pulling, I manage to haul ass back to the house. my brother was playing video games in his room and I tell him what happened. My eyes watered up with tears which is weird because I'm not much of a crier.
The bad feeling I got out there when my eyes landed on her did. Not. Go. Away. And I swear it felt like if I peeked through the blinds in my bedroom I would see her standing there. My brother let me stay in the room with him, which was a rarity. But he definitely saw how freaked out I was so he was chill with me. I've never experienced anything like that before and there's probably a logical explanation to what I saw but I did not care at the time. It was like all rational thought went out the window. Creepy as hell.
39. Stephen King, Is That You?
When I was 18, I came home in winter from college to stay with my second family. I had moved out at 17 and a woman I worked with took me in to be part of her family, so this takes place at her family’s villa-style farmhouse. On this night, since all of their other children were gone for a while and I loathed staying in my room due to the creepy vibes I'd gotten in there from day one, I was staying in the bedroom that belonged to their youngest son (~19 at the time).
Now, I should've known better to stay out of that room anyway, but I hated my own room even more, purely because of the creepy vibes. My papillon (RIP that sweet boy) went everywhere with me when I was home, so he was with me in the bedroom on this night. I was also on my cell phone with a friend from college for hours, and every time something weird happened in my room, the call would drop.
A heavy sense of dread weighed on my shoulders most nights I spent in that house, and this was no different. The first weird thing to happen was around 10-10:30pm, when the TV turned itself on and played white noise. The remote was on the nightstand beside the bed, so it wasn't an accident on my part. When I stood up to turn off the TV, my phone call dropped and the TV turned itself off.
I jumped back in bed with my dog and called my friend to relay the event. Between 15 and 45 minutes later, while I was still on the phone, suddenly the top blanket was yanked to the end of the bed. My papillon was up by my chest and would be too small to yank a heavy blanket like that. Nobody was under the bed to yank from that angle.
Of course, my cell phone call dropped when the blanket got yanked, so I quickly yanked the blanket back up to my chest and called my buddy back. I had the strong sense that I was being watched, but living out in the middle of nowhere, it couldn't have been by another living person. The final unexplainable occurrence from that night happened about two hours after the others.
I heard a loud scratching that sounded like it came from the roof. There were no trees within 60 or 75 yards of the house, so it definitely wasn't a tree and it likely wasn't a squirrel or other wildlife. Within 30 seconds, the scratching moved to the top of the gun cabinet in the bedroom with me. The gun cabinet was at least eight feet tall with 12-foot ceilings, and there were no cats in the house or on the property, except for random ferals out in the woods yards and yards away.
Of course, my phone call dropped as the scratching moved into the bedroom. The scratching continued for maybe 15 to 30 seconds in the bedroom and then abruptly ended. I called my buddy back in tears, convinced something was playing with me before finally eating me or something wicked. Nothing else happened that night, but we stayed awake on the phone until probably 4 am.
I can't explain any of it, and to this day it's one of the scariest nights of my life. The house had been built new for them about five or six years earlier on her family's homesteaded land, and to the family's knowledge, the land had not been used for a cemetery, slaughter, or anything else that would lead one to expect paranormal activity there.
We had had a house fire the previous May, resulting in the deaths of five dogs and my sweet little black cat via smoke inhalation, but very little damage to the house itself. I had always felt barely welcome in the house anyway, and shutting the door to our (kids') wing of the house felt like shutting the door to a jail cell.
40. So Many Questions
A few years ago my wife and I were driving east on Washington Highway 20. This is a narrow twisting mountain road that crosses the North Cascades and is closed in winter because of snow with no towns for many miles. About 20 miles east of Newhalem (the last permanent thing for the next 70 miles, not even a town really) we pass a homeless person pushing a shopping cart up the pass going east.
We came back on that same road a few days later and there was shopping cart person a few miles more east, pushing that cart. A few weeks later, the same person had managed to cross Washington Pass and was now going down hill, but still a good 20 miles from anything at all. Now the nearest town that might conceivably even have a store with shopping carts was 70 miles to the west of where we first saw this person.
This left so many unanswered questions. Where did this person come from? Where did the cart come from? How long were they traveling? Where were they going? How did they eat? How the heck did a shopping cart survive being pushed for weeks and possibly months on a mountain highway? So many questions.
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41. Kids Know More Than They Let on
My mom told me this story the other day and it freaked me out. When my oldest sister was little, like 3 years old, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up to hold her. My mom said she was like "She can't pick you up, honey, she has a baby in her tummy." And then my little sister was like "That baby is dead!" My mom freaked out, but my aunt and grandma were fine and were telling my mom it was all good, she was just a toddler and didn't know what she was saying.
Well, lo and behold my aunt goes to the doctor the next day for a routine pregnancy checkup, and the baby was dead. Give me the willies just thinking about it.
42. Without a Trace
A while back I was in NYC with some friends and we noticed this weird story on a newspaper (maybe the Times?) about a girl who had fallen from on high in Union Square, possibly off a building. The girl got up, apparently unharmed, and ran off into the crowd of onlookers. The police looked into this, but didn't have much luck until an anonymous envelope containing the picture of this girl was delivered to them.
The picture was included in the newspaper story. We thought this was pretty interesting, so the minute we got home we googled the story and...got nothing. We've never seen any articles on this girl, anywhere. Everybody we've asked about the story, including people who live or work around Union Square, claims that they've never heard anything about it. This was about three or four years ago and we've found NOTHING.
43. Is There an Exorcist in the House?
Actually experienced this. I was 3 or 4 years old at our family's summer cabin when I got extremely sick out of nowhere. My temperature started spiking and no one knew what was wrong. Apparently I was sweating out puddles and my family was getting ready to take me to the hospital when my uncle said he wanted to try something.
I was laying on the couch crying when he started to pray over me for a couple minutes. The second he put his hands on me after the prayer, my family says I shot up to a sitting position, flat as a board, and puked everywhere. Temperature started to go down and they never took me to the hospital. Still just weirds me the heck out, 20-something years later.
44. Aww, Puppy Heaven Called
Something unexplainable actually just happened to my wife and me. We lost our beloved dog last year. He was our world. His urn, bed, and toys are in our living room next to our TV. We never called him by his actual name. Instead, we always used a nickname, which for the sake of this story I will call "Sunshine." We recently got a new cable provider and wireless router.
As a result, our Wi-Fi has a new name. Our old wireless network was named something like "[last name]1" and we changed it to "[last name]2." My wife and I went around the house and made sure that all our devices are connected to the new wireless router. As we were trying to configure our Chromecast, the TV screen gave a message along the lines of: "Do you want to connect to SUNSHINE?"
My wife and I just stared in disbelief. We didn't think that any wireless networks in our area had the same name as our late dog's nickname. I immediately said, "Uh...I've never seen that Wi-Fi network before, have you?" My wife responded, "No. Definitely not." We opened our phones and checked the nearby Wi-Fi networks. There was none named "SUNSHINE."
Then we checked on my laptop; no wireless networks named "SUNSHINE." We checked periodically throughout the day and still there was no sign of a "SUNSHINE" network in the area. I can't explain why our TV tried to connect to the network with the same nickname as our late dog. We've never seen that network in our area. In fact, we live in a remote part of our state and nearby networks—which are few—have generic names given by the cable provider such as "Home [numbers]."
Given that our dog's urn, bed, and toys are all next to the TV, we like to think that our pup was saying a quick hello.
45. Sounds Like Something I Would Remember
My mom told me that when I was a toddler she was tucking me in bed and I said, "Mommy remember when I died in that fire."
46. Right Time, Right Place
I was 17 and struggling with depression, so I went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and was going to attempt suicide. As I was contemplating, there was a power surge (which rarely happened at my house). The microwave and stove clocks were blinking, so I definitely didn't imagine it. I texted my mom who was in her bedroom and I asked if there was a power surge and she said that she had been watching TV and the power never went out in her room.
So I put the knife down and watched TV instead.
47. Skinwalker or Desiccated Coyote?
Just to preface this: I am an agnostic/atheist with a STEM degree and no interest or belief in religion, the supernatural, the occult, new age stuff, or anything like that. Nevertheless, this is a true story. So this incident, in stereotypical horror movie fashion, happened on prom night about 25 years ago. I attended high school in the American Southwest, on the edge of the Navajo reservation.
After my junior prom, my date and I decided to drive out into the desert wearing our fancy clothes. I can't remember exactly why now—probably we wanted to go find a place to make out or something. Anyway, we had been driving down this empty desert highway for about half an hour when I saw something in the headlights walking down the side of the road ahead of us.
As we got closer, I realized that it was a dog. Or at least something that sort of resembled a dog. It was fairly large, maybe the size of a golden retriever, but strangely skinny and malevolent-looking. And it had this bad, unexplainable white-ish/blue-ish/green-ish aura or glow. If you've ever played Destiny, it looked exactly like a dog-shaped Cursed Thrall in the dark.
It stopped and stared at the car as we drove past. And something about it frightened me out of my wits like almost nothing else ever has in my life—the muscles in my hands actually contracted involuntarily and I instantly broke out in a literal cold sweat. At first, I thought I had just let my imagination run away with me, but after a couple of minutes of total silence, my date said, "Holy s***, did you see that? What the hell was that thing?" and we had a whole conversation about how strange and evil and scary the bad dog-thing was.
It freaked both of us out pretty badly and we couldn't stop talking about it for the rest of the night. A Navajo friend told me later that she thought we had an encounter with a Skinwalker. I'm no expert on Native American lore, and maybe it was just a hungry coyote. But to this day I don't feel like it was a coyote. I spent most of my life in the Southwest, I've seen coyotes on a few occasions, and this didn't seem like a coyote to me.
And coyotes don't glow in the dark or cause two otherwise normal, rational people to break out into a terrified sweat. I don't know. I still can't explain it all these years later. I would prefer not to have any more life experiences like that one, though.
48. Nighttime Visitor
I was laying in my bed sleeping one night and I woke up feeling uncomfortable. My daughter has health issues and years of worrying about her condition caused us to be light sleepers. When I woke up this night I watched a white figure come down the hall from my daughter’s room and go by my door. At the same time my dog slid off of the bed—he didn’t get up, just slid—and followed the white figure.
I was freaked out so I got up and followed the dog to our front door. The dog was facing the door looking out the glass in the door down the street. The moon was lighting up his face and I noticed his eyes were completely shut. I put my hand on his neck and he jumped...He was 100% asleep. I checked my daughter’s room and she was happily sleeping and in good health.
I’ve often wondered what visited and how often its visited our home. I’ve also wondered if I’ve ever been the one staring out the front door instead of the dog completely asleep…
49. Waxing Poetic
I could have sworn I heard the back door open. After a couple seconds of no one coming in, I call out to see if it’s my brother. Then I hear movement and the door close. I go outside via the back door and don’t see anyone. My brother’s car isn’t there. I do a quick walk around the house and see nothing. So I go back inside, lock everything, and walk into the bathroom—where I suddenly discover an old unlit white candle sitting upright in the hole of the sink.
I have yet to come up with a theory as to why some guy broke into my house just to put a candle in the sink.
50. Knock Knock!
I was sitting in the living room with my family watching TV. My sister got up to use the bathroom. We heard her yell "Stop!", "You guys are annoying!", "What the heck!" When she got out of the bathroom, she said "why’d you guys keep banging on the door? You’re so annoying!" But none of us were banging on the door—we were all seated together on the couch the entire time.
We could see the door from the living room and it didn't seem like anything was happening. She said it was really, really loud and the door was shaking. We were thoroughly spooked.
51. Belief Shattering
I was at a friend's dinner party once when he revealed that one of the guests was a respected psychic. I am a huge skeptic but the psychic agreed to do a reading for us. We were all in the living room—maybe 20 or so people. She began with the expected stuff we think of when we think of a psychic doing a cold reading.
I had had a few drinks and was feeling pretty loose so I was just observing and waiting for her to do anything interesting that an observant person or someone trained in cold reading couldn't do. About 20 minutes into it, she stopped and said "OK, there is a stronger power than mine here and it needs to be acknowledged."
I perked up, thinking things were about to get interesting. She said anyone who had anything to say should speak up. She asked us to look around the room and allow ourselves to see one another clearly and look into each other’s eyes. If we felt impressed to tell someone something, we should. I will admit that I felt a little drawn toward a woman I had never met.
Her name was Tammy. I didn't say anything. The room was silent and the silence got awkward, like when a teacher waits overly long for a student to respond to a question s/he clearly doesn't know. So she probed again. "Someone here has a strong gift and needs to tap into it. There are messages waiting to be heard. If you feel drawn to someone, say so."
There was another silence. Then, she looked right at me and said, "Oh my God. It's you. You are a gifted empath. You must speak." I blushed and kind of laughed it off, but several of the guests insisted that I must speak my mind. So, I said I was feeling drawn toward Tammy. The psychic asked me to let my guard down, "reach out with your mind" she said.
So I tried to let my mind go blank. Suddenly, I could hear the Journey song “Don't Stop Believin'” in my head. Not my usual stuff. Then I started to feel sad. I'm normally a pretty happy guy, and this odd wave of sadness just came over me. At the same time, the name "Mark" came into my mind followed by an urge to tell Tammy thank you.
I didn't know what to do. The "psychic" told me to just start talking—describe what I was experiencing. So, I did. I closed my eyes and started to talk. As I got to the "thank you" part, I started to choke up and cry a little like I was actually feeling extreme gratitude. I opened my eyes and Tammy was white as a ghost.
Her friend Mark had died in the early 90s from complications with AIDS. She had been the only person in his friend group to visit him, and she did so regularly. The song had been their "pep" song, and she said Mark had died unexpectedly after seeming to have rallied a bit. Tammy was trembling. I was shaken.
The psychic was smiling and the guests were all staring at me. A bevy of questions followed—almost none of which I could answer. I've always relied on my gut, but had never had that specific of an experience before. I do not believe in an afterlife, and as I said earlier, I've always been a huge skeptic. I couldn't explain what had just happened.
Others asked me to "read" for them. I didn't know what to do, and was frankly a bit weirded out. The psychic told me to hold people's hands and look deep into their eyes. That night, I told a man I'd never met that Sharon, the woman that allowed her friends to pay her for the "right" to molest him as a boy, was sorry and in torment.
This huge, burly man crumpled into a pile and said he had never told anyone about that ever in his life and that I had even nailed her physical description. I told a young woman I'd never met that the relationship she was in was not working because she was too focused on wanting a child and that the stress was causing her to not become pregnant and making her act out in anger toward her husband.
She left in anger because "People had been talking about her behind her back and told (me) her secrets." That was not the case. All total, there were about five instances out of six attempts that night that were dead on. The one that did not work was my partner. Nothing I said was right. I was left very, very perplexed by the whole night.
So, being a student/researcher, I decided to explore it. I worked that summer with the psychic (whom I have befriended) on exploring things I do not understand. She determined that I am, she believes, indeed an "empath" and that I can feel/read/interpret emotions from people that allow my intuition to put together stories.
She also believes that the world is full of emotional impressions/scars and that empaths can feel their echoes. Since then, I have determined that I AM indeed able to do something unusual. I don't do it as a hobby. I don't make money off of it. To be honest...I do it as a "I've had one too many drinks" party trick because that's about how seriously I take it.
However, I do it one on one now because I've discovered one too many uncomfortably personal things people don't want everyone in earshot to know. Here's what works best for me to "read" someone: The expectation is that I will tell them something they need to hear and that they do not tell me anything about themselves or what they HOPE to hear.
It works best when the person is an absolute stranger. I ask for an item that they usually have on their person often. So, a favorite ring, someone's glasses, etc. It has to be something they have touched often. I've found the absolute best results come from pillows people sleep on often. I will spend five to ten minutes holding the object in silence, allow my mind to wander, and then I will ask for the person's hand.
Then I just talk. I let my mind wander, and I talk. About 90 percent of the time, when I open my eyes again, they're staring at me in disbelief, crying, or smiling an incredulous smile. I don't understand it. I don't get it. I do like doing it, but it challenges my beliefs to the core.
52. Glitching Your Life Away
As I type this I am already feeling deja vu. I've always wanted to share this part of my life with someone but have never been able to. So... I'll just tell a bunch of people on the internet. One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever.
I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about 15 feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension. All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me.
It was a bunch of strange looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits. They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black. When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work.
I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed. I've never done any hard drugs, never experienced any hallucinations, never have had anything like this happen to me. The weird thing is, when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled. It still bothers me very much to this day.
53. Photo Comes to Life
This is from a friend who used to work as a security guard. My friend is a night person so he's used to night shifts. Well, anyways, one night he's working to guard a mansion and at 2:22 a door access alarm goes off from the gym room. By usual protocol, he calls 911 and has cops deal with it. The cops, two of them, meet with my friend and head to the gym room.
A short while later, the cops started yelling at my friend how prank calls are a serious offense and he shouldn't waste their time. My friend flabbergasted by the cops' reaction, asks what's wrong and one of the cops says that an old lady told them that she was in the house for a long time. My friend doesn't understand what lady they're talking about since there's no one in that mansion.
The owners left on a cruise for a month or so. They stop to stare at each other in silence and head inside the mansion. My friend swears to me it's true. They go inside and right at the entry hall, you can see the painting of the old lady. The cops turn white and leave. My friend confused by what happened just nopes out of there the moment he finished his shift. Apparently, that was the painting of the current owner's great-grandmother.
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54. Where Did My Time Go?
Ten years ago I was returning home from a road trip with two friends. I received a phone call from my parents asking when we would be arriving, and I explained that we were about 25 minutes away. About a minute later we came around a bend; it was a full moon and we could see the reflection from a lake below us and other than that the road was completely empty.
Suddenly everything went completely dark in the car, no lights from the dash or gauges or headlights on the road. The music also stopped and re-started at the beginning of the CD we were listening to. There was now a vehicle pulled over by the police about 1/4 mile in front of us that hadn't been there a split second before.
I assumed I had dozed off for just a second as it was late. I thought it was still quite peculiar, though. After about a minute, the driver of the car turned the music all the way down and said: "did that just happen to anyone else?" The other passenger in the back seat sat forward abruptly and exclaimed: "I thought I just fell asleep..."
We then realized that the clock in the car was reading an hour later than it just had a minute before. To keep ourselves from freaking out we decided that the car had possibly had a momentary electrical failure and reset the clock to an odd time, turned off the dash lights, headlights, and gauges, and restarted the CD player.
But when we arrived home 25 minutes later, we were one hour late. I am missing an hour of my life, and to this day have no idea how it happened.
55. Listen to Your Gut
A couple years ago a buddy and I got turned around on a side road in rural north Missouri. I had no service for GPS and it was pouring rain so I headed south toward my destination hoping to run into a main highway. We ended up coming into the town of Skidmore, MO. It’s a tiny town in the middle of nothing but there’s something dark about that place.
Infamously, in the ‘80s, a man known as the town bully was killed in broad daylight in the middle of town there. Not one person spoke up about who killed him and it’s never been solved despite there being many witnesses. There have also been disappearances, and a brutal crime a few years ago involving a baby being cut out of a woman’s womb.
Keep in mind, this is a town of only 270 people. As we drove down the main drag, several people gave us a blank but intimidating stare, completely unnerving. Once we got out of the town my buddy mentioned he’d had a sense of impending doom or danger as we drove through, and weirdly enough, I’d been feeling the same way.
I’d never had a such a persistent gut feeling of danger like that before. We agreed to never ever go through Skidmore again. There’s something seriously evil about that town, it shouldn’t exist.
56. Get Away From the Car
I was heading home with my dad, we stopped at a drive through. I start feeling more and more anxious for no reason, to the point where it makes me lightheaded and sick to my stomach. We have to wait a little bit ahead because they gave us the order wrong. So I sit there, feeling like crap, and it suddenly comes to me an urge to call my brother.
He was trying to call us, he was in a car accident. No one died, some got seriously bruised, he was only shaken. I told him to shut up and get as far away from the car as possible. He didn't understand but followed through, trying to call some of his buddies, and I could hear them calling him a wuss, him giving up and getting far and then a loud noise, people shouting.
After the whole thing was over he told me what happened. His drunk friend tried to impress some girls in the car, hit the gas, drifted and hit the bottom of the car on some rocks, completely messing with the engine. They stood near the car, the driver still inside trying to turn the engine back on. The hood burst in flames and the car started to burn fast, the driver managed to get away but got severely hurt.
Some of the guys and girls who stood around were hurt and burned too, but not as bad as the driver. My brother was the only one with light bruises from the whole thing. He told me that when I ordered him to get away from the car he was in front of it, inches from the hood. I never experienced anything like this before and after, just this once.
It's just a weird memory, I don't remember what I was thinking, I remember it like watching a movie and seeing myself and everything from an outside angle.
57. Dark Energy
Many years ago, my family and I moved from California to Nebraska. I was still a young kid, probably five or six years old. We were driving through Nevada and shortly after Las Vegas and we needed to stop and fuel up. We stopped at your typical old-school gas station that rings when you pull up to the pump. I don't remember it that well but my dad told me it looked normal.
He got out to stretch while my mom went inside to pay for gas. My mom said that when she walked in, the gas station had quite a few people inside, despite us being the only car there. When she walked up to the counter to pay for gas, everyone turned to her and the lights went out. She ran outside where my dad witnessed everything and helped her into the car and we sped off down the interstate, not caring whether we ran out of gas or not.
To this day, my mom says that's one of her scariest encounters because she can't explain nor figure out exactly what was going on. And yes, we found a better gas station down the road and made it to Nebraska.
58. Clench Worthy
In my late teenage years, I came into some money after my father died by suicide and I received an inheritance from him. At the time of my dad’s passing, he and my mom owned a cabin up in Oregon by Mount Bachelor. My mom had put it up for sale but it was going to be vacant for a month. I saw this as a chance to get away for a while and clear my head in light of all the things going on.
I quit work, packed up my snowboarding gear, grabbed my dog and headed up in my dad’s car (that he had willed to me) to the cabin. My first two days at the cabin were normal and nothing out of the unusual happened. Spent my days playing with my dog in the snow, snowboarding, and the evenings playing PlayStation or listening to music, drinking and smoking out on the balcony.
Had already stocked up on food, cigarettes, and liquor so I was pretty much a shut-in aside from the occasional out to hit the slopes. With my dog Midnight as company and DVDs/PlayStation as entertainment, I was quite content and started to feel relaxed after all the drama that had preceded my outing. The cabin itself was two floors, the bottom story had the living room and a side guest bedroom along with a small kitchen.
Upstairs had another two rooms along with a walkout balcony attached to the master bedroom. Most my time there was spent either in the living room, kitchen, or master bedroom. I never ventured into the other rooms and always kept the doors leading into them shut (open doors to dark rooms always creeped me out). Anyhow, the third day came around and I was going through my usual routine of playing with my dog, playing games and watching DVDs.
That day it was pretty heavy snowfall so I did not feel like trekking down the hill to the main road in my car and decided to stay in. That’s when things started getting a bit weird. In our area, there were only two other cabins adjacent to ours (maybe a block away from each other). All other cabins aside from these two were around a mile away from ours.
Surrounding us was mostly forest and very tall pine trees. Both these cabins were empty and from the past couple of days, I knew that no one was currently staying there. Around midday, while outside with my dog I noticed what looked like footprints in the snow around the area surrounding our cabin. It was still snowing so the footprints looked semi-fresh like someone had been there in the last 20 or 30 minutes before me.
I thought that maybe someone was staying in the cabin near me that I may not have noticed…maybe they were shut-ins like me…alright…whatever, the prints lead away from my cabin and they disappeared in the snow towards the denser part of the trees…disregarded the footprints and went back inside. Nighttime came around and decided to head to bed.
My dog was laying on the bed with me when I noticed his ears perk up to a standstill/listening position. This was followed by him quickly jumping off the bed and running downstairs to the living room. I lay in bed and stayed silent (I was kinda freaked out) and could hear him moving around downstairs back and forth.
After around five minutes he ran back upstairs to me and started to do his doggy dance for the sign that he had to pee or that he wanted to go outside. Shoot…well fine. I can’t say no to him so we both went downstairs to the outside driveway for him to do his thing. Only, he didn't want to pee. As soon as we were outside he started to pull on his leash trying to drag me to where he wanted to go.
He kept looking into the dense part of the trees where the prints had been earlier. But he also kept sniffing the side of the house and looking up towards the roof. After he figured out that I was not going to go to where he wanted he sat himself down and just stared into the darkness…a bit unusual for him but alright, maybe there are forest animals out there that he wants to chase down.
I did not want to chance anything so I pulled him back inside and we both headed back upstairs. Around half an hour later, I was lying in bed when I heard what sounded like hooves walking on my roof. It was only a series of around six steps and I rationalized that it could be a pine cone falling from a tree onto the roof or maybe a kind-hearted forest animal running around.
But here’s the thing, the steps seemed to be spaced apart like a man length stride. So it was really freaking me out. Midnight also heard the noise and was quick to run to the balcony screen door expecting for me to let him out. Alright, you know what, I’m a tough guy and at the time considered myself to be fairly well built and strong enough to handle myself.
So, I grabbed my coat and shoes along with my cigarettes and flashlight and went out onto the balcony. Screw it right? As soon as I was outside I lit up my cigarette and started canvassing the roof with my light…nothing there and the snow on top was undisturbed. Weird, must have been all in my head? What about the dog hearing the noise?
Maybe he was feeding off my fear or paranoia. I started to calm down and relax again. My eyes started to adjust to the darkness and I kept smoking and just staring at the stars and trees next to our cabin. That’s when I saw it. In a tree that was a little taller than our cabin and around 20 feet from the balcony, I saw what looked like a man crouched in a squatting position between two branches.
It was squatted on one branch and its arms were extended above its head holding onto the branch above it. Screw me…what the heck is that? I wasn’t sure if I was really seeing this thing and stood just staring and sat there motionless. I noticed the dog stand up and start pacing behind me and lightly barking at the same time.
The thing still did not move. I put my cigarette out and was debating on shining the light in the thing's direction, but something in my head kept screaming not to. So I walked backward to the inside of the room and pulled the dog with me. Once inside I locked the door and shined the light in the thing's direction but there was nothing there.
I shut the curtains to the screen door and retreated back to bed. But later on in the night, I heard light tapping at the screen door, like someone was tapping on the glass with their fingers. It was consistent and did not stop for nearly an hour. Midnight seemed to stare at the door but he wouldn’t go near it anymore. The weirdest part was that I had a feeling like someone was inviting me to open the door.
But at the same time, I kept hearing my dad’s voice in my head telling me to stay in bed and not do it. I listened to my dad’s voice and just stayed where I was. Passed out eventually and woke up in the morning and everything was normal. The rest of the week I spent there was non-eventful and nothing else out of the ordinary happened.
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59. You Can Never Unread This One
About 2 years ago, I was around 24, I used to go into this gas station every morning before work to get coffee and cigarettes. I went in one morning, it was around 4 AM and I was the only customer there. The cashier was a young white male that I had seen several times before, but this gas station seemed to have a high turnover rate because it seemed like there would be a new employee I had never seen before working there at least once a week.
Anyway, I walked into the store and went straight to the left and fixed my coffee. After that, I walked around to the next aisle and grabbed a pack of gum and then went up to the cash register. I sat the coffee and the gum on the counter and the guy just stood there staring at me for like 10 seconds. It was really awkward and at first, I couldn't think of anything to say.
After like those 10 seconds I told him that I also needed a pack of cigarettes. Right after I finished speaking, he backed up a few feet and he had his private part in his hand and it was pouring blood. I freaked out and ran out of the store, I didn't know what to do to help him. I ran to my car and called the police and told them to send an ambulance.
Like I said, I was freaked out and didn't know what to do and was hoping with an ambulance on the way he would be alright. I realized if I didn't hurry I was going to be late for work so I decided there wasn't anything else I could do so I left. I went through the whole day hoping he was alright and wondering what else I could have done.
Later that day when I got off I figured I would stop at the gas station and ask whoever was working there at the time if they knew how he was doing, but believe it or not, that gas station this happened at that morning, and that I had been going into every day for over a year wasn't even there. Like there was nothing there on that side of the highway, just trees.
I felt like something snapped in my mind and I still 2 years later feel like something isn't right with me. I went home and called my family and friends of mine and none of them remember a gas station ever being there. After that, I never told anyone else or brought it up to anyone because I'm scared they will think I'm crazy.
Nothing else weird has happened to me since then but I know I must be insane, I feel like my whole life is a lie.
60. Late to Bed, Late to Rise
Many years ago myself and two of my best friends decided to go for a day of mountain biking at Snowshoe in southern West Virginia. Now this was way before the days of GPS, so we were kinda doing this by some half baked directions and an old map, but the point is we got very lost. Some time along the way we ended up in this very tiny little town and we figured we would ask for directions but it was absolutely deserted.
I'm talking not a single soul to be seen anywhere. We parked the truck and split up looking for anyone we could find. Now this was at around 9 or 10 AM so not exactly the butt crack of dawn, mind you. We went into the post office, nobody, we went into the only bar in town which was unlocked, unattended with music playing, but not a single soul present.
We went business to business to business and walked the streets and after about 25 minutes finally found one old guy who just seemed to appear out of nowhere in the middle of town walking alone. The first question we asked him wasn't even for directions. It was "Where the hell is everyone?" to which he replied: "Well I guess folks round here don't get up much till round noon."
We asked him for directions to Snowshoe and he pointed to the road we came in on and said to go that way about 10 miles and make a right and we will find the interstate. We left quickly. We all had a very bad sense of unease about the whole thing. As we left we were about 5 miles down the road and hit a lady dressed up in a state road uniform standing in the middle of a very long straightaway holding a stop sign.
When we approached her she turned the sign from "slow" to "stop". We asked what was going on. She stated that there was road construction ahead. We told her of what just happened and she just kinda laughed and said those people in that town are kinda strange, but let it slide. So we started talking to her waiting for a line of traffic to come by from the opposite direction.
We actually ended up talking to her for about 45 min to an hour, just horsing around about everything. Kinda got lost in the convo. Not one single vehicle EVER approached from the other direction or behind us. Eventually, she said: "Well I guess it's clear now and y'all can go ahead" and slowly turned the sign from stop to slow and motioned for us to go ahead.
We went straight ahead; the only direction you could possibly go for the next 30 some odd miles and didn't see any signs of construction, state road workers, or maintenance going on at all. She had no vehicle so we figured she was a flag woman dropped off by some crew up ahead. After the encounter with the town and this woman we had enough and called it quits.
We turned on the interstate as soon as we found it and headed north and home. Every single one of us still remembers this whole encounter in vivid detail to this day. I asked my friend about it actually about three months ago at this wedding and it still freaks him out to no end.
61. In Hindsight, the Dream Wasn’t so Stupid After All
My dream was simple: I was driving down from the mountains back home with friends in the car after (what I vaguely remember) was a snowboard skiing trip. The conversation was, I suppose, the usual for a long car ride, playing "I spy" and just stupid stuff. Then, the song “All Star” by Smash Mouth came on. I remembered it because everyone started singing along.
We were speeding down the mountain and after signaling into the passing lane, all of a sudden, a huge car wreck happens right in front of us, happening so fast that cars were smashing into each other. One of the cars rolled right off the mountain, over the divider. I was too close to avoid it and so I pulled to the right, which caused the car behind us to plow into the side of us, rolling our car to the opposite side of the road.
I remember just a fuzzy feeling, being upside down, and glancing around the car and just seeing my friends mutilated. It sends shivers down my spine to even think about it. I woke up in tears, I was just so frightened and scared... it was so surreal. This is where the glitch begins, Years after the night I had that dream, my friends and I decided to get together to plan a small trip to have a ski and snowboard day for the first snowfall.
We knew a storm was coming so we headed up the mountain. Good runs, fresh snow, it was overall a great success, we had gotten exactly what we had come for. We packed our things, headed down the mountain, and it clicked, the same stupid car banter, "I spy," and then Smash Mouth “All Star” came on... it had happened, I was in my nightmare.
The wreck happened just as I remembered, but I didn't pull right like I did in my dream, I pulled to the left, into the opposite lane, and somehow just avoided it. Everything slowed down, it was like I was in my own world, and everything happened the same, except for my actions. We pulled to the side of the road and called 911, I broke down, it was too much...I was scared and shaking, but somehow that stupid dream saved my life.
62. A Change of Scenery
I was driving in a rural area in New England, near the borders of Vermont and Mass., so I am not sure which state I was in. It was late—so late that it was actually early. And there was fog, dense dense fog. Like Silent Hill levels of fog. And like an idiot who dies in the opening scene of a horror movie, I am driving on back roads. First my headlight just up and goes out, cannot use high beams because of fog.
I am in the middle of nowhere, I haven't seen a house or town in a long time. Car starts making noise, check engine light comes on. So I pull over nothing much around field and fog and dark. Creepy as hell. I gamely look at the engine, I can fix electronics, not engines. I tighten all the things I know. The car now won't start. So I am in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the road.
Because of the natural rules of how things work, my cell phone has no service as well. It is like one big cliché. But I am not stupid enough to go wandering the roads right now. So I recline my seat and decide to take a nap for a couple hours until the sun comes up. I wake up, the sun is coming up, the fog is going away... and I am in on the main street of a tiny town, parked in front of what looks like the Bates Motel house.
Houses everywhere. It was the creepiest feeling. I was sure I was off in the woods. There was not a light on in any house all night? There was a service station 50 yards up the road, I walked up to it, talked to the guy (who looked perfectly normal), he walked over to look at the car, asked me to try to start it... and it did. The thing turned over right away.
And... BOTH headlights were working. I drove on, never got the name of the little village, and I couldn't find it on a map. I always felt like I was in this big set up for a horror movie that just didn't pan out.
63. What Happens in the Shed, Stays in the Shed
I had just turned 22 and my parents had sold their house and purchased a place out in the country. On the property, there was a big shed that wasn’t far from the house. I decided to turn it into my place. I felt kind of uncomfortable in the shed sometimes, but my dog kept me company so it wasn’t so bad. Anyway, I had been in there maybe two weeks and one night I'm on the computer, my dog asleep at my feet, and I need to pee so I get up and go outside to piss.
It's a beautiful clear night and the stars were incredible. Next thing, I hear the shed door slam behind me. I turn immediately and try to open it but it won't budge. Now from inside the shed, I can hear my dog start to growl, quietly at first then louder, now he's barking and I'm panicking trying to get the door open. I must mention that I'm 6’5” tall and well built, play sports, etc., but even ramming my full weight into the door won't open it.
I'm really panicking as my dog's barks turned into whines, then whimpering, then silence. With all my might I slam into the door and it flies open. The light is off inside now and it's pitch black, it won't turn back on and I'm in complete darkness. Can't see my dog anywhere and I stumble around trying to find a flashlight.
Finally, I find it, pick it up, and turn it on—I wasn't prepared for what I'd see next... My dog had literally squashed itself into the furthest, darkest corner of the room, his eyes closed, and he’s shaking violently. I immediately moved towards him and as soon as I got within reach of him, he leaped at me into my arms and wouldn't move.
I picked him up and I swear I've never run so fast in my goddamn life. I never stepped foot in that shed ever again and my dog wouldn't even go near that part of the property. I don't know what happened in that shed that night but I'll never forget it.
64. The Shadow People
I first starting seeing shadow people as a child, when I was around five or six years old, just prior to my great-grandmother's passing. I was getting ready for bed, got in my room, turned out the light, when I could hear our German shorthaired pointer start barking and growling. She never growled like that before.
I look out the window, and there were at least five of them out there. They were just dark shadows. Almost like they were absorbing light. They were either holding something or they had long arms, I couldn't make it out. They appeared to be teasing our dog. They would stand just at the edge of her reach (she was on a chain) and walk back and forth outside.
I ran to my parents. My parents were deeply religious people and told me to pray the next time I saw them. Sure enough, the next night they returned. I was scared stiff, so I prayed. A light seemed to turn on from the house, but this was different than the other lights. Instead of absorbing this light, the beings sort of burst away when the light hit them.
I asked my parents to turn on the light again, but they did not have a light back there at the time. After that, I never saw them again, but I did have the feeling I was being watched until we moved out of that area. I thankfully have not had these hallucinations since then.
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65. Not So Hill-arious
When my brother and I were 10 and 12 respectively our family went on a hike through the cemetery and into the woods not far from our house. My brothers and I would explore these woods every day. Even camped in them before. We knew it like the backs of our hands. Anyway, as the family hits our usual spot by the creek, halfway through my brother and I said we’d be back in a few, we wanted to wander off further up the creek. So we did.
We came across a very large hill we had never seen before. It was littered with what looked like someone's worldly possessions. As if they turned a house upside down, shook out the contents, took the house and left. There were tons of painted X's on the trees showing someone intended to cut them down at some point. We poked around for a few when we thought we heard our mom hollering at us.
So we turned tail and walked maybe 20 feet back down the hill to where our parents were. The entire encounter was maybe 45 minutes long…on our end. As soon as our mom saw us we got the beating of a lifetime. We had actually been gone almost four hours. She never saw us walk up any hill and remembered seeing us meandering down the strait path by the creek, not turning up a hill that was 20 feet away.
She and her husband and our other brother combed the woods for over four hours screaming our names and couldn't find hide nor tail of us. We pleaded our case and even tried showing her the hill. Surely she was messing with us. So we stomped up to the turnoff for the hill and...it was gone. Nowhere to be seen.
For YEARS we explored the woods determined to find that freaking hill. We covered miles and miles of off-path woods. As we got older we mapped it out. To this day that hill does not exist. We never found it again. Never found the weird furniture, toys, clothes, and other household items that were scattered across the hill. And never met anyone in the area that had a clue about the hill.
66. Old MacDonald Had a Farm
My grandparents had a big farm when I was growing up and all of the grandkids would help work it over the summer when we were out of school. Anytime we saw a rabbit we were supposed to get it with the hoe or grab the shotgun. I was around 12 or so when I saw a little rabbit in the beans and I didn't want my grandfather to see it so I tried to chase it off.
Followed it into the brush on the land and for whatever reason, I just kept following it because usually, I'd lose sight of them pretty quickly once they hit the brush. Kept following it until I found what was clearly an old barn ruin. These are pretty normal to happen upon where I'm from and they're fun to look around inside, so I went in.
It was weirdly kept up really well with antique tools in great shape and fresh hay. I worried I had crossed into our neighbors’ property so I high-tailed it out of there. I asked my grandfather about it and he said our land went way far past what I had described, and I couldn’t have left our land in the short amount of time I was gone, so he followed me out there and we couldn’t find it.
I checked every summer I worked there and never found it again.
67. There’s Someone Sitting at the Computer
One time my wife and I were coming back from a dinner night out. When I opened the door of the house, she was sitting at the computer working, as I usually find her when I get home, nothing unusual. Except she was entering the house with me...I shrugged it off and carried on, we went to bed and I told her that I saw her sitting at the computer, and she goes dead serious and told me that when I opened the door, she saw herself sitting at the computer working.
It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever experienced... The fact that our neighbor's 2-year-old daughter used to point to the TV when it was off and tell us that the person on the screen was making scary faces and that she wanted it to go away, didn't help us getting much sleep that night...
68. I Guess the Ghost Really Had to Go
When I was about nine or 10 years old, I was with my friend and we went to my house to get something to drink. We got the drink and we heard something weird coming from upstairs even though there was nobody in the house but us—I had just opened the front door with the key myself and the door was locked. So we went upstairs and directly on the left there is a door to the bathroom which is about where the noise seemed to be coming from.
I looked at the door and realized the little marker that says if it’s closed or opened was about 3/4 red and 1/4 white, so it was almost fully locked from inside. When we approached the door to knock on it since nobody was answering our calls to ask who was inside—it’s about 3 meters from the end of the stairs—all of a sudden with some noise of force—it was not an easy lock to unlock, but required some power—the thing just popped to fully white like someone turned the lock fully open again from inside the bathroom.
The quickness and force of the movement caused me and my friend to both run out of the house to his house and when we told his mom about this experience she went with us to see what was up. When we got back, there was nobody in the house nor was there anything missing in the house and there were no windows opened for someone to get away that was in there before.
The strangest thing about it all to me was that there was just no way someone could have gotten in and out without a key, and the only people with keys were all away at work. I still don’t understand what happened to this day, but I’m convinced there was someone in that bathroom that day.
69. Mysterious Photos Falling Out of Nowhere: Totally Normal
I’m an Atheist, but I will say that I have an aunt and uncle who bought a really nice older house that she was convinced was definitely haunted. Lots and lots of really creepy, unexplainable stuff was constantly happening. One day my aunt was finally fed up with it and she asks the ‘ghost’ to show itself. Nothing happens for a while, but as she’s at the bathroom sink brushing her teeth before bed, an old photo of a young woman from the ‘60s or ‘70s fall out from behind the mirror and into the sink.
The next morning, she gets a Catholic priest to bless the house and say a few Hail Marys. Nothing ever happened again. Her husband also shared with me a couple of other even more terrifying accounts.
70. Spirit’s Final Dirge
I'm a police officer and I was working a fresh homicide—had occurred within the last hour. We'd checked the house, and it's me, two other patrol officers and a homicide detective standing there talking and waiting for the medical examiner. All of a sudden the stereo kicks on, playing a song I don't know the name of, but sounded like something you'd hear at a funeral.
None of us were near the stereo or had the remote. It took us like five minutes to figure out how to turn it off. Was very eerie to me.
71. OK, This Shook Me Up a Bit
The first one happened when I was about seven years old. I had my own bedroom and always slept with the door open. One night as I was laying in bed, on my side, facing the door, I saw my little brother, who would have been two at the time, run by my bedroom door wearing those old ‘90s LA Gear light up sandals.
If you grew up in the ‘90s you know the ones, with the red lights that blink on the back heel area when you take a step. I sat up a bit when I heard/saw this as I could hear the distinctive crumple sound of a diaper being run in and saw the lights clearly. I whispered his name and asked what he was doing. I saw him come back to my doorway, sandals lighting up, and then stop at my doorway looking at me.
At that point I could tell something was off, I could not make out any features on him but I chalked it up to it being dark and he ran back down the hall and I went to sleep. The next morning, I went to my Mom and asked why my brother was up running around last night. She told me that he wasn't, I said that I saw him and he even had on those sandals that light up.
She looked at me funny and said, "Your brother slept in our bed all night last night, and I threw away those sandals over a month ago.
The second one, I was about 9 years old. Our front room was a wide open space with a couch on the left wall, a couch towards the back of the room and a bay window you are able to sit in at the front. A family friend named Tom came over to stay with us. He was going to sleep on the couch in the front room, and me, wanting to hang out with my older cool "uncle" Tom, who was about 20 years older than me, asked if I could sleep on the other couch as a kind of slumber party.
He, of course, said yes and my parents could care less. We go to sleep and in the front room through the blinds on the bay window you could see some light filtering in from the street light outside. I woke up at some point and was by default staring at the bay window and I saw Tom casually sitting on the bay window looking out towards the street.
I whispered his name, he slowly turned his head to look at me, and then slowly moved back to looking out the window. I looked at the couch and did not see him there, so I got up and walked towards him asking what he was doing. As I got closer and closer, he became more and more translucent until I got right up to him and reached out to touch him and my hand went through thin air...
He was gone. I looked at the couch and he was there sound asleep. It wasn't sleep paralysis because I was wide awake in both situations but I have no explanation for what it might have been.
72. Silence Is Golden
20 some odd years ago, I took my kids and parents on a driving trip through the eastern coast of Canada. My dad (who was driving) decided to take this ‘shortcut’ off the main highway down a dirt road. About five minutes down this road, things go eerily quiet. We should be able to hear birds, the trees rustling, cicadas, yet nothing.
It was too quiet. Dad starts slowing down. I am busy looking at the map. I know where we turned off and there was no designated road on our map. I’m worried that I can’t find it. I look up from the map as I have realized, nobody is talking. Everyone is looking out their windows. There are little stick people and stick designs hanging from the trees.
Some are just shapes and others are more intricately made. Dangling, swaying slowly. Between this and the fact that it was dead quiet, I made an instant decision and told dad to turn around and leave as quickly as possible. I felt a huge pressure in my ears like they needed to be popped. Mom had goosebumps and my dad said we were just being silly.
He obliged and got us out of there.
Tenor
73. This Isn’t Close Encounters...
I was in bed one night and for no reason at all I woke up... heard scratching going on above my head and then every single electronic in my room turned on at once... I'm talking TV, computer, monitors, Xbox, laptop...I summed the scratching up to mice...but I still can’t explain the second part...
74. Super Eerie Country Creature
I lived in the countryside as a child, literally middle-of-nowhere territory, and my bus ride was an hour long so I had to wake up very early to catch it as it went by my house. I had no neighbors for a few miles around, and the stretch of road I lived on is flat and you could see a good mile in either direction before it curved off again into the forest which is cut back about 10 feet on either side of the road because of the electric poles.
It was winter and the plow had banked it three feet on either side, and I was waiting atop my driveway at 7 am before the sun has even come up, but there is enough light to see, especially since there is all the snow. To my left, I see something running on the opposite side of the road. I can't tell what it is because it is so far away, but I can see the silhouette against the snow, and I remember thinking to myself that I'm lucky to see a deer, because I enjoy wildlife.
They often run along the road when the snow is deep, I've seen it before, albeit when the sun is higher. I realize that its gait isn't right for a deer. It's now halfway to me, and I come to the absurd conclusion it's a man, running. As the figure jogs closer and closer, I can see he's not exactly wearing winter gear, like I am, all bundled up for the -10F, in fact he's barely covered at all.
I feel uncomfortable and disturbed. At 20 feet, he veers from his course and comes/directly at me/diagonally across the road. He's running and to me it feels too fast for a man. It stops in front of me, just this grey naked silhouette at 7 am that I can’t see anything in or about, and I'm just petrified, standing there, looking at this thing, that's just standing there looking at me.
It doesn't say anything, do anything, just stands there. This happens in the course of maybe three seconds. Then it turns and runs back the way it came. I wanted to leave and go hide in my house, but my bus would be there any second and I didn't want to be yelled at by my mum. So I stood there terrified, watching that thing just run away until it had cleared the bend of the road.
10 minutes later the bus arrived and I was on my way to school. I tried telling myself it was just a jogger, or someone playing a prank, but no one lives near me. When I got off the bus that evening, I couldn't find one footprint in the snow on either side of the road and there should have been, there should have been at least one footprint from this thing because it hadn't snowed while I was at school. I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
75. Did You Stumble Upon the Robot Takeover Preparations?
Was driving through Illinois to get to Chicago about a decade ago with a group of friends and we stopped at a Taco Bell. The first thing we noticed was that the workers were acting very odd. Everything they said was monotone and rehearsed. After sitting in this fairly busy restaurant for a bit, we kind of all just looked at each other at the same time as we realized that none of the conversations happening around us made any sense.
The people were speaking, and it was English, but the sentences weren't logical. They were just saying words at each other. We didn't say much about it until we got outside, at which point we all freaked out and confirmed each others' experiences at once, and got the heck out of there. We jokingly refer to that place as the "NPC Training Center" since the people didn't seem to be real, or they were learning how to be human or something. Still freaks me out.
The best I can remember about the weird conversations was that they were stringing several prepositions in a row with no real sentence structure, forced laughter and nodding, stuff like that. Like they were mimicking how humans talk. Think of those "what English sounds like to a non-speaker" videos on YouTube, but EVERYBODY was doing it all around us.
76. There's a Man in the Laundry Room
My mother runs a sort of child care out of her home for three friends of hers who work and have young children. The oldest of these kids is nearing three years old. He's a very smart kid, and he's never been one to make things up or lie just for the sake of it. It was a few weeks ago however that he shouted loudly from the kitchen for my mother to come help him because there was a man in the (adjacent) laundry room staring at him.
My mother came into the room and saw nothing, but the kid was terrified and shaking. She reassured him that no one was there after having checked around for herself. The day went on and the kid kept mentioning the man in the laundry room. The next day when he was dropped off, his mother said that the man was all he talked about at home that night.
A few hours passed and the boy was standing in the kitchen looking for his drink. My mom hears him shriek in terror again, entering the room to find his eyes fixated on the same location as before, this time crying and telling her that the man was going to get him. We're still not totally sure what he saw, but he certainly saw something.
The room he was looking into was totally empty, and only recently has he felt comfortable being anywhere near that room. No one else was in the house apart from my mother and the three children she was keeping. He was though and still is very adamant that the man in the laundry room wanted to take him.
77. “Not My Legs, Not My Legs!”
I was staying at my mates' a couple of weeks ago after a quiet night in. I was asleep in my friend's bed before she came home from work and I had this horrible night terror that some girl in a white dress was going to cut off my legs. My mate gets home and I apparently was just saying, “Not my legs, no, not my legs!” When she asked what I was on about, I sat up and said “No, that wasn't me, just go to sleep, don't worry.”
Which I don't recall doing and have never done before during a night terror. But the weirdest part was that as soon as I got back to sleep, her flatmate let out a bloodcurdling scream and said she felt like her bottom half was being cut off and couldn't move. She said she had the weirdest pain in her legs the whole next day.
Unbeknownst to us at the time, our friend had stayed alone in the flat for a week before everyone moved in and said she'd seen a little girl in white at the top of the stairs before she turned the light on. Which is great.
78. Unidentified Flying Object, Identified
When I was little, my parents were in the middle of a divorce, and my father would pick my sister and me up on Wednesday nights. We still lived in what passes for a rural town in Connecticut, and my father went to drop us off, but my mother wasn't home yet so we were waiting in the driveway in the middle of the woods pretty much.
The car had a sunroof, and I was seated in the back staring out at the stars when suddenly something I can't identify flew overhead. It was essentially a bunch of large circular lights grouped in a circle rotating. They seemed to be very large, traveling at a high rate of speed at a decent altitude. It went by quickly enough that I didn't even say anything to anyone in the car.
Nearly 20 years later I was reclined on the couch watching some UFO show and they showed the exact thing I saw briefly. When they showed it I actually screamed and leaped to my feet. It took me a couple hours to calm down, it freaked me out so bad.
79. I'll Remember It Forever
When I was about eight or nine my parents went to the grocery store. I chose to stay home. Mind you at the time I lived in a house the had woods behind it so it was already pretty scary. They left at around 11 in the morning so it was not even close to being night time. Well, I was in my room and decided to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
My house at the time was long so I had to walk to the kitchen at the opposite side. Halfway through I was in the living room when I heard a loud explosion of some kind. There were two windows in my living room so I could clearly see outside. What I saw still frightens me to this day. The outside was completely black.
I'm not talking night time, I mean the whole window looked as if someone had painted it black. But there was still light inside. I rushed back to my room where I waited for my parents to come back. When they arrived I told them if they had heard the explosion or seen the black outside since the store they went to was only a few blocks away from where we lived.
They didn't have the slightest clue as to what I was talking about. That evening I sat all night watching the local news if they would report it but nothing. I still wonder if it was just my imagination but I distinctly remember the darkness of the window, so I know it was real.
80. The Creepiest Ones Are Always in Hospitals
For a few years I worked at an inpatient acute critical care psychiatric/behavioral hospital for children and adolescents. I grew up not believing in ghosts or anything like that. So one morning I’m working the child unit and part of my responsibilities is to interview each child. We had a scale—basically a worksheet with questions we asked the kids twice a day as a unit of measurement pertaining to their psychiatric health—to go over once in the morning and once at night.
I was dayshift so I did it in the morning. For obvious reasons boys and girls were kept very separate at night and only after morning routines, the interview and hygiene, were they moved together into the common area. So on this morning I start with the boys and interview them and one of the questions is “Are you currently or did you recently see or hear things that aren’t really there?”
Normally if this is true the patients are very hesitant and scared to admit it, I’m talking to this five- or six-year-old boy who starts getting really nervous and fidgety when I asked this question, which is a significant indicator of a positive answer. If they answer yes the follow up question is “Can you describe what you saw or heard?”
This little boy goes into vivid and exquisite detail about a small girl in pink pajamas who was crying in his bathroom very early in the morning before it was time to get up, he talked about how she was scared and didn’t want to be here anymore and he comforted her, he went back to his bed to retrieve a blanket for her and when he returned to the bathroom—each room had its own—she was gone and he went back to bed.
I finish the interview and while I’m intrigued at the intense detail he remembered which is unusual, I record it and move on. Unfortunately, visual and auditory hallucinations aren’t new to me at this point. I move to the girls’ ward and start the process of interviewing over there. Second or third out of approximately five or six girls gets nervous and fidgety at the same question, finally admits she did see something.
Cue me asking “Can you describe it?” She starts by saying that it was early this morning. Before it was time to be awake she hears crying from her bathroom, investigates and finds a little girl in pink pajamas crying in the corner of her bathroom, she goes into the exact same vivid detail as the boy did and explains the little girl is scared and doesn’t want to be here anymore she comforts her and goes back to her bed to retrieve her teddy bear to help comfort the little girl, when she returns to the bathroom with her teddy bear the girl is gone, she then explains she doesn’t know how she left because her door never opened.
I record it and then request an immediate transfer to the adolescent unit. I recorded everything and took both scales (interview worksheets) to the therapist on duty, I explain the entire thing and I am adamant that these two kids never had a chance to talk to each other to come up with this story. He says I believe them and you completely.
I say “Wow I never would have thought you would accept this so easily,” he says “Well it helps that this happened about 20 other times in the past.” Same vivid details, same little girl, same pink pajamas. The clinical reaction? Shoulder shrug, and a “we don’t count those stories as diagnostic material anymore”—like basically we believe they really are seeing ghosts and it’s not a hallucination.
I was there for approximately five years and the girl in the pink pajamas came up approximately four times in my time there. I can’t explain it away.
81. It’s the Missing Money That Bothers Me Most
I’ve posted many stories about my time growing up in England and the houses I lived in where I experienced strange occurrences so as a summary here are the things that have happened that I have zero explanation about:
House 1: Later found out a policewoman hung herself in the room that ended up being the bedroom for my sister and me.
- The room was always colder than the other rooms in the house.
- My sister woke one night to see a man in a black suit, bowler cap and cane sitting on her bed staring at us.
- Heard two male voices having a conversation in the room when the house was empty.
- Unexplained noises every morning downstairs that sounded like a paper guillotine slicing paper. We didn’t own one.
- Every morning could hear people downstairs getting ready for the day—bowls and cutlery clattering, voices chatting—but no one was there.
House 2: Dad woke up one night after hearing hooves. His bedroom was on the ground floor and we were nowhere near horses or farms. He sat up in bed, mystified, and saw rows and rows of heads, with silver helmets and red plumage passing through the room in the direction of the city. The house was built on a Roman road so over the years the land would have built up so that in this era all you’d be able to see would be heads had they been Roman soldiers.
Mum left an envelope with 1,000 pounds on the staircase one day. Just the family home, no one else came over. Two hours later the envelope was gone and we never found it. Would wake up frequently in the night and my room would be filled with mist. TV and lights would always turn themselves on and off.
House 3:
- The door in me and my sister’s bedroom would always, always be open every morning. Even though we closed it each night. I remember half waking up one night to hear it slowly opening.
- Mum and Nan having a chat at the kitchen table one day about Nan’s parents who had passed. Mum said “what would your mum and dad think about it?” I can’t remember exact wording but she specifically mentioned Nan’s parents. Next thing, a picture above the table that had been up for 20+ years suddenly came off the wall and crashed down in the middle of the table my mum and nan were at.
82. Oh Cool, So That Terrified Me
I was in my apartment and just playing some video games with my roommate. Our place is set up where our rooms are on opposite sides of the apartment. We are both in the same chat talking with a friend. Everything is normal until I hear a knock on my door. I said “come in” thinking it was my roommate. My roommate says on the chat “who are you talking too” I freak out and say “did you hear that knock,” he says he did. We are both freaking out.
Then maybe two seconds later a white figure comes literally right next to my face. It has no facial features and I flip out. I almost fell out of my chair and run to my roommate’s room. We are both freaking out now. He clearly heard the knock too. And it didn’t sound like someone dropped something above or below us. It sounded like a knock you hear when someone is trying to come in. I’m not sure what happened or what it was but by far the most scared I’ve ever been.
83. Nothing Good Ever Happened to Someone Playing With a Ouija Board
I once played a Ouija board at a friend's house. I don't believe in the paranormal so it didn't bother me that she lived on an Indian burial ground next to a lake where someone had previously drowned, or that her Ouija board was supposedly from Salem. Everyone who was in the house at the time was playing the board, and although she had a small dog, which I don't even remember if it was in the house at the time, it could not have been responsible for the things that happened.
While we were playing, the planchette moved incredibly slowly, supposedly due to the "low energy" of the "spirit" we were talking to, which was that of the drowned man from the lake. Right away I speculated that someone had been pushing the planchette. There is always one person in a group who likes to mess with the others, and the fact that it moved slowly and almost always to the same answer since we only asked yes or no questions, contributed to this theory. That way, moving the planchette would be easily concealable.
I was very sure of this theory. Of course, they would use the drowned man's identity, the one story that everyone knew in order to make the experience more interesting. I noticed that one person in particular was having all sorts of fun provoking the "spirit," and knowing her personality I was almost certain it was her. At least, until the more unexplainable stuff started happening.
Suddenly, three clear foot stomps sounded out from across the house. Now, my friend lived in a somewhat old house, but these noises sounded like a person wearing heavy boots stomping by the back door. Without even saying anything, we just gave each other a look that said "did you hear it too?" that confirmed our thoughts.
We were all visibly shaken and didn't really know what to do, but then, from inside the cabinet under the television we were playing next to, three clear knocks rang out. Since I'm easily spooked, I was on the verge of tears and begged everyone to stop the game. At that point, though, it didn't take any convincing.
After the game, everyone showed visible signs of paranoia that are hard to dismiss and makes me question if anyone really set up the whole thing. I believe that everything has a rational explanation, no matter how crazy it seems at the time of happening. My personal theory is either that somebody messed with the planchette or that somebody subconsciously moved it.
The boot stomping is more difficult to explain, but perhaps somebody momentarily stopped by and needed to shake the mud off their boots upon entry. Maybe it was the washing machine making a weird noise from the basement. Either way, the timing was very coincidental. As for the cabinet, a person couldn't fit in there. It was filled with cable boxes and DVD players, and what I heard were clear knocking noises against the cabinet wall. I know because I sat right next to it. The cabinet is the only thing that I have absolutely no explanation for.
84. Oh Jeez
When I was still a kid I stayed with my cousin at my grandma's house, it's a very old ryad in Morocco—like 400+ years old. My grandma left us alone and went to visit a friend of hers and she was the only one with the keys. As I was playing with my cousin we heard heavy banging on the door, we went running to the door and checked who it was but there was no one outside, so we went back playing in a room ‘till we heard a very loud bang on the window overlooking the interior patio, and there was a huge man's hand on it, we got out of the room running to the patio but no one was there.
We went hiding in another room for like two hours, super scared, ‘till my grandma came back. We told everyone the story and no one ever believed us.
85. Sounds Like the Scene From the Mummy With the Face in the Sand
I have a few all of which I’ve mentioned here. First was when I was about 11. I was the only one home in my grandparents’ house. I left some toys down in the basement so I went to get them. There was an area where my grandparents kept lawn furniture, and they’d hung sheets from the ceiling to create a makeshift “wall.” As I was leaving the basement, an impression pressed out of the sheets.
In my mind, I remember it as looking like a person’s face with their hands raised similar to a “ don’t shoot” pose. I just took the dogs and sat outside until someone else came home. Another time I was in another house, sitting downstairs. Again I was the only one home. I heard the very distinct sound of someone going up the stairs. I figured my mom had come home and had gone upstairs—there was a front staircase and a back staircase that met at the top.
A few moments later I heard my mom come home, and greet me from the kitchen. The same thing had happened to her two days prior. I get that houses make noise but Jesus, this was so eerily similar to someone walking upstairs. The last was when I was alone in the house I’d recently bought. It was just my dog and me, both of us were downstairs.
I heard something heavy fall, like a shelf falling or bookcase knocking over. I went upstairs thinking maybe something was precariously balanced and finally gave out. It was so heavy it shook the house. Nothing had fallen upstairs, there were only two bedrooms and a bathroom and I made certain to check attic space and closets. Nothing.
I figured it was a fluke but it happened at least two more times while I lived there. One of the last times it happened a witness was there, and oddly we’d just been talking about my mysterious crashing sound. We both went upstairs and investigated and couldn’t find anything.
86. Maybe the Spirits Just Wanted to Play
As a teenager, I would babysit for my cousin, let's call her A. I was about 16 at the time. She and her husband had just moved into this large house and had a newborn daughter. I never liked the vibe of that house but just thought I was being irrational. One morning I'm alone with the baby and I hear someone going down the stairs, a bang, and some murmuring, I tell myself the house is new and it's just settling and maybe the TV is on.
I pick up the infant and make my way downstairs. Once you get to the bottom of the stairs it opens up to a large living room to the left with a TV on the floor, to the right is the kitchen area. I go to the kitchen to make a bottle and it feels like someone is watching me, I shake it off but start packing up a diaper bag just in case.
Not 2 minutes later I hear the TV turn on, volume all the way up, to static white noise...and I flip! I run to the living room and turn it off. I call one of my cousins who lives nearby to come get me—let's call her S—and as I'm talking to S on the phone the TV turns on again. I waited for her outside after that.
Later that night me, my cousin S, and another cousin who is A’s sister go back to A's house to drop off the baby and get the stuff I left there. We ring the doorbell, no answer. We hear them running up and down the stairs, we saw someone look at us through the window, and we can hear them talking and laughing.
We have no clue what game they're playing so we ring the doorbell again and start yelling at them, they're laughing at us now. All 3 of us are getting irritated and start to leave, as we get in the car, here comes A and her husband coming up the street in their car...We have no clue what the hell happened that night, I don't believe in the paranormal but I have no explanation for that.
87. I Would Survive in a Horror Movie
I used to work at a historic house as a “caretaker” which basically meant I cleaned it when no one else was there. A lot of the employees would talk about how the house was haunted, but I don't believe in that stuff at all, and I found the job really easy and really peaceful. Important fact: the house was in the woods, not connected to any main roads (visitors would walk down from the welcome center), and the electricity for the whole place was turned on and off by staff every day using a circuit box near the front door.
There was no other power, it was in the middle of the woods. One day I went in to clean and I was completely alone on the property and it was kind of a stormy day. I finished my work in a few hours, and I went through the whole house twice (as always), going down a checklist of turning things off and locking things up.
The last thing I did (and it had to be, because that's where I had to leave the checklist) was turn off the circuit—turn off the electricity for the whole house. So I turned it off, locked the door, and took one last walk around the perimeter of the house to make sure all the windows were shut. As I turned the corner, I thought I saw something move in the house, but I figured it was just the curtains.
And then one of the lights inside the house turned on. I freaked out, because it either meant that someone was in the house and had been there the whole time, or that the house was extremely haunted. I considered both things and ran like hell, because I'm a small lady and if the place was getting robbed, I sure wasn't going to defend it.
I went back to work a few days later (it hadn't been robbed and no disturbances had been picked up by the outside security cameras), I told one of the other staff about what happened, he said that it was a ghost... I still don't know what to think... I've tried to justify it by saying it was some freaky electrical thing because of the storm? But I'm glad I don't work there anymore, it was weird.
88. Try Turning the Mirror Off and On Again
When I was young (maybe five or six) I was watching a movie alone in my parents room because there was no VCR in the living room. On the wall adjacent to the bed was my mother's large, old vanity. I remember seeing movement in the mirror, and assumed it was the cat in the room at the time. Again, I saw movement, so I stood up, and looked directly into the mirror.
I remember seeing the strangest thing. My reflection, and the reflection of the room, was completely off. Like, if I waved my hands in the air, the reflection would also wave it's hands but would be completely out of sync and different from mine. Always freaked me out of mirrors from then on.
89. Cold as Ice
I was at my grandmother's house staying the night. It was summer; probably mid-July and there was a storm brewing outside. I was laying in bed, just listening to the TV as I tried to drift off to sleep when I suddenly felt like I was being watched. I laid there, trying to pull the covers up higher, the uncomfortable feeling growing stronger.
The room was starting to grow cold. I tried to focus on the TV, I was watching something on Cartoon Network so it definitely wasn't contributing to the creepy atmosphere welling up in the room. Then I felt something down by my foot. The bed depressed slightly and the covers fluttered. Then something icy cold grabbed my ankle. I immediately jumped out of bed and hit the light switch on the wall behind me, at the same time I ripped the covers off of the bed.
There was nothing there, but I still felt the cold fingers around my ankle.
90. More Like Lake Eerie
In the 7th grade, I had a friend that lived near a beach on a bay of Lake Michigan. One day in early May it reached 70 degrees, nearly unheard of for that time of year in northern Wisconsin. My two friends, including the beach friend, excitedly rode our bikes down to the beach to maybe dip our toes in, expecting still frigid waters, and then "tan" for the rest of the afternoon.
The water, though, was surprisingly warm. Like bathwater warm. In this particular area of the bay the water was shallow for about a half mile out, and we joyously splashed around, wading deeper and deeper until we were about chest deep. As we dunked each other and swam with abandon I started to feel sick. Bad headache, nausea, wobbly.
Just then, my other two friends mentioned that they also felt sick. We headed back to shore, nearly crawling by the time we got out. The three of us collapsed under a tree and fell asleep for 2 hours or so. When we woke up we talked about how weird it was. I dipped my toe back in the water and it was freezing cold. To this day I have no idea what was in there.
I do know that there is a chemical plant in town that used to manufacture things like Agent Orange, and that their practices were known to be less than environmentally conscious. I have never touched that water since.
Bay-Lake Region Planning Commission
91. Lost Time in the Arctic
I grew up in the Arctic. In the town I lived in, as long as it was a clear night, it was an extremely normal occurrence to see all sorts of strange lights move across the sky. Keep in mind the winter is long in the Arctic, which means longer amounts of time being spent under the stars. It's quite beautiful, as long as you don't mind the cold so much.
Sometimes I would drive a snowmobile a few kilometers out of town, shut it down, and just lay down on the snow looking up at the majesty of it all, the only thing disturbing the silence being the occasional breeze. The Northern Lights are also a common occurrence. Doesn't happen everyday, but often enough that they start getting ignored after a while, as long as they aren't too spectacular anyway.
On one particular night, without asking my parents (it was their snowmobile), I decided to go on one of my midnight drives out of town. I drove a few kilometers over the hills to find a spot devoid of light pollution from town, shut off the machine, and settled into a good spot to look up and be introspective. It wasn't all that interesting a scene.
A few satellites passing here and there, some relatively boring activity affecting the magnetic field, etc. And then I started noticing a clicking noise...At first, I thought it was the sound of the snow machine cooling down, as engines expand and contract a lot in the cold. But the source of the sound definitely wasn't coming from that direction.
My next thought was there must be an animal nearby in which case I need to get out of there fast (you don't really want to mess with a wild animal). But, the clicking is far too regular for an animal to produce it. It was fairly mechanical sounding. And again, the source of the sound isn't coming from anywhere around me laterally. It was coming from up.
So naturally, I look up determined to ascertain the origin of this strange noise. I see what I always see: stars, Northern Lights, a lazy satellite crossing the sky...all normal stuff. But before I dismiss it altogether and begin heading home, I notice something strange in the Aurora Borealis. There were three rather strong points of light.
I ignored them at first thinking they were oddly symmetrical stars, but this proved false. They were definitely getting brighter. I kept staring in morbid fascination as they grew stronger and stronger, yet still only remaining single points in the sky. All the while the clicking noise is getting louder and louder and more pronounced, almost like someone started with tapping a pen on a desk to clacking billiard balls together inside my head.
Then it stops. The lights are gone, the clicking is not heard, and aside from being a little stiff, cold, and rather petrified, I'm fine. So I jump back on the snowmobile thinking maybe I'm going crazy. The machine takes a little longer than usual to start up, and I'm beginning to worry, but soon it's running and I'm heading back to town.
As I'm driving back several plausible scenarios as to what occurred are running through my head. I'm thinking it could've been a helicopter from the mine, or some strange Northern Lights behavior, etc. Probably not that big a deal. I pull up to my house. Lights are all dark. Strange. It wasn't that late when I left. Open outer door as quietly as possible, remove winter gear, enter inner door.
House is quiet. Really quiet. My parents are teachers and are usually up late marking or watching TV. All I'm thinking is I have to get to bed without anyone noticing. Proves to be easy as I'm soon under my covers. I go to set my alarm for the next day. All of a sudden everything makes sense. Engine hard to start, stiff, rather chilly, nobody up when I was gone what felt like relatively short period of time...
It was almost 11:00 PM when I left, and now it was creeping up on 6:00 AM. I stood, staring at clicking lights for almost seven hours. I never ended up sleeping that night, and I don't go on late night rides anymore.
92. Good Luck Trying to Figure This One Out, Folks...
This took place when I was 13. No one in my family will acknowledge it happened, the only ones who would cave to my “but great grandpa...!!!” have unfortunately passed away. No one will give me the time of day about it. My family has a cabin in Cook Forest, Clarion, PA. Cabin was built by my great granddad, and has expanded a bit over the years but has a nice little nook at the bottom of a long dirt road off the main road and down a hill.
There are a few other properties around, but most are up and off on the dirt road, only one is down the hill and only halfway at that. It’s not modern by any means; no internet, no cell service, the TV still has dials you have to twist to get to watch a DVD. It’s very rustic and I love it. The property halfway down the hill is visible from any part at the front of our cabin, which is where the kitchen window, parking, porch, and fire pit are.
For as long as anyone can remember, it’s been this abandoned lot that had what was once a cabin with a concrete basement. The cabin was built on a hill so half the basement stuck out from the hill, but the remaining part was crumbling. It also was at the fork where we would ride our ATVs to get to the firebreak, so even though it could’ve been creepy it was a very common and familiar sight.
Until one Memorial Day, which is when we opened the cabin after the winter and a large part of our family would go to the cabin for the long weekend to spend time together. Everyone would usually get there though the early evening, and then all come together for my great granddad’s dinosaur pancakes for breakfast (The highlight of my single digit to preteen years).
So I wake up, expecting to smell pancakes and hear chatter from the older members of my family down in the kitchen, but nothing. I assume I’ve gotten up too early, and go downstairs to use the bathroom and then go back to sleep. Looking back, the whole upstairs was just mattresses with an aisle between them, I should have noticed that most beds were empty.
I get downstairs and see all the adults outside, and I go out to say good morning and demand my T-Rex pancakes. I walk out and see all my family adults in a kind of semicircle facing an older man and a woman I didn’t recognize. I assume this is some adult situation so I go back inside to wake up my cousins, but not before looking at the clock on the microwave and seeing that it’s about 3pm.
Now, I LOVED the cabin. I’d doodle the cabin itself, four wheelers, and the area around it for months leading up to Memorial Day weekend. I was usually up at the earliest crack of dawn because I was so damn excited to just be there. Sleeping until 3pm was not in any way normal. I wake my cousins up and by the time they all mosey downstairs the adults are all back inside.
Everyone is pretty silent but then great grandpa fires up the stove and gets us kids excited for dino-cakes, so all seems normal. I was there with my one of my aunts and my uncle, no parents, and my aunt is pretty close in age to me and was for sure the “cool aunt.” So when I saw her pale as a sheet I went to ask what’s wrong. She took me outside and pointed at the aforementioned abandoned and crumbling property.
In its place was a sprawling cabin-mansion, parking area full of SUVs and the coolest looking four wheelers my 13-year-old self had ever seen. Aunt tells me that the owners had come to say hi (the couple I saw earlier) and invited us over to hang out with their nieces and nephews, as they were having a Memorial Day get together just like us. Me, having zero thought besides AWESOME FOUR WHEELERS, almost ran to the house but my aunt caught me and rather forcefully reminded me of my dino-cakes.
I conceded and ran back inside, to an atmosphere so thick with tension that even my undeveloped brain could detect it. The oldest of the adults were acting normal and playing around with us kids, but something was very off. I finally asked what the heck was up, and my aunt bonked me in the head and asked if I had seen that massive cabin-mansion last night, last year, the year before?
We’d come to the cabin every few weeks until December, did I see any construction? Well, no, but they invited us over and they have cool four wheelers, Aunt Beth, come on!! A resounding NO from multiple family members made my emotional girl self almost flee and cry, until my grampie (a 6’7” hulk of a man) got down to my level and explained that he felt there was something weird going on.
He said the couple didn’t act right, I assumed that meant they were rude, and that we should just keep to ourselves this weekend. I agreed and we went about our day, all adults keeping us occupied with activities either inside or behind the cabin. We get ready for bed when I see my great granddad (WWII vet), who had the only bedroom on the first floor, loading 3 shotguns, handing one off to my grampie and the other to my uncle/cool aunt’s husband.
To my shock and awe, my grammie pulls out a (bedazzled) Glock from her purse. I go to bed with images of my little grammie taking down a bunch of bad guys with her shiny pistol. I wake up the next day to the smell of pancakes and the sound of adults chatting downstairs. I’m sad because today is when we have to pack and leave, but things seem back to normal so I’m very glad.
I run downstairs, note that the clock says 7:30, but ignore the weirdness and sit in front of a plate of dino-cakes that I dig in to, while asking my aunt what time we have to leave. “Leave? We don’t leave until tomorrow.” Wait, what day is it? “It’s Saturday, we just got here last night.” I notice just a bit of doubt in my aunt’s eyes that I know something is up, and I run outside.
The abandoned lot is back to its decrepit state. I resolve to brush it off and enjoy my ATV riding, and forget about everything pretty quickly. It wasn’t until I got back to school and was called to the main office where they asked why I wasn’t at school on Monday. I told them that today was Monday, what in the world are they talking about.
Nope, it’s Tuesday, and my absence was unexplained despite several calls to my parents (divorced), neither of whom were at the cabin. So either my family played the trick of all tricks on me, or I’m living in an alternate universe where I can sleep into the afternoon. Like I said, no one will even remotely entertain a conversation about this incident.
93. Speaking To Yourself
It happened in early 2000 when I was working at a juvenile detention center in a small town in Oklahoma as a corrections officer. I was working nights at the time and went to work at 9 pm. This one night when I arrived for work my supervisor looked confused and asked me what I was doing there. I said "I work tonight," and he said, "But they said you called in a few hours ago saying that you were sick."
I was a bit confused and said: "It must have been someone else and they got the message wrong." After everyone else showed up for work that night it was a bit weirder, but we carried on as usual and assigned everyone their places for the night; I went to work in the control room where I usually work. The control room is the center of the prison that has direct control over the cameras, doors, phones, and everything.
After I relieved the guard on duty and settled in for the night, I looked at the message that said I called in. It said that I had called at 6:50 and said that I had gotten sick while out cleaning up after the storm. There had been a storm the night before and it was a bit bad, but not anything that I had to go out to clean up. It was truly weird.
The supervisor came into the control about that time. He was also a friend of mine outside work and we started talking about it, and how odd it was. I decided to call my wife at home and tell her about it while he was still sitting there. I picked up the phone and dialed. After two rings a man picked up the phone and with a raspy voice said "Hello?" I did not know what to say for a few seconds.
I looked at the phone to make sure I dialed the right number, and I had. After a few seconds, the person said "Hello?" again in the same raspy voice. I said "Hello. who is this?" "This is Taylor, who is this?" the person said. My head started spinning, because my name is Taylor. I said, in almost a scream, "Where is Ann?" He said, "Ann's in bed. Who is this?"
I dropped the phone and told my supervisor to ring me out, I had to get home, and I took off towards the door. I could hear Dave pick up the phone behind me and say "Hello?" followed soon after by "What the heck!" rather loudly. I ran to my car and drove home faster then what was legal, my mind racing the entire time.
I busted through the door and my wife was sitting watching TV and was shocked at me being home. I asked her who was there and she said no one has been here. After a rather long talk with my wife, I went to call the prison to tell them what was going on, but the phone was dead. I went back to work and when I came in Dave was acting weird and asked me "How the hell are you doing this?"
He told me that when I left, he picked up the phone and the person on the other end sounded like me. He kinda freaked out and hung up the phone. A minute later as he could see my car leaving the parking lot, I had called back from home and asked what was going on. He said that I was a bit irate and said I was sick and did not feel like playing these games and was telling him to stop prank calling me and hung up.
After convincing him I had no idea what was going on we went back to work. Later, I find out that the phone line for my area had been knocked down the night before by the storm. This is absolutely the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.
94. Nothing Is The Same Anymore
A long time ago I had a conversation with an old workmate who described something terrifying. The detail is hazy, but he said one day he in his house when he felt a sudden NEED to go outside an stand on his lawn, he claimed it was the strongest clearest feeling ever, and on doing so he experienced a sort of "wobble" he just said everything was screwed up for moment, and he experienced a feeling of detachment/outside-ness.
When it passed he turned to go back inside. Now, while talking to me he got quite upset at this point and asked me not to think he’s crazy but he said the next thing he saw was his car parked in the street and it was the same model/registration but a different color. He was so thrown at this, and then more so because then his wife came out to ask what he was doing, and he said he realized "She was in all appearances his wife, but somehow not his wife.”
He said from that point on, she liked foods she had claimed to hate before, and sometimes brought up memories that he said had zero relation to things they had done in the past. He said things like his route to work, was still the same but somehow different, he said there were buildings on the way that either he had missed in the six years he'd driven past them five days a week or had just "appeared" overnight.
He even said some people he remembered from other departments in work had just vanished, and asking about them brought total incomprehension from other people. He was a totally regular healthy guy, but he said he measured his life in relation to that afternoon. There were things that happened before the change, and everything afterward.
He went to say he was now living his life with a feeling that about 15% of it had spontaneously changed that afternoon. We moved on and drifted apart since then (different jobs) but I've never really felt so sure about the permanence of "reality" ever since.
95. One Last Goodbye
I attended the same university for my bachelor and my PhD. There was a lovely woman by the name of Jennifer, who was my “Reading in the Content Area” instructor. The guys all swooned over her (she was gorgeous) and I loved her because she read us The Giver out loud. She was an awesome instructor, and was doing her PhD in literacy.
Fast forward a few years, and Jen has moved to South Carolina to teach literacy. I'm now in my PhD program, and in the same grad student office she used to work in, with other literacy people that were her colleagues. And then, we got the news that she’d been murdered by her boyfriend. Everyone was totally devastated. It was a huge blow to the department, as she was genuinely loved by everyone who knew her.
So a few days after her funeral (her body was brought home), I'm in the office suite at school very early in the morning, when nobody else was around. The grad students had a fishbowl office (10 of us, with group desks) within a larger office suite that was locked and had light motion sensors. I'm walking in and pass a locked door with windows, and I see a woman with short, dark hair walk the other way inside.
Which was weird, because the lights didn't flicker on when she moved. So I walked around the corner to the door with a key code and let myself in. I walk inside, and head to where I saw her. The lights flicker on when they sense me. Nobody is there. It's just me, and an entire suite of empty offices. I swear to god, it was her, saying goodbye to a place she spent so many years, and where she had so many friends.
It spooked the heck out of me, but made me sad, too.
96. Creeped-Out Critter
August 1998, I'm in the passenger seat of my uncle's truck as we are driving up the windy gravel road to his friend's cabin, which is in a very, very remote, forested part of Washington state. As we reach the top of the hill, I am about to get out of the truck when he says "Hey, don't move, but...look" in kind of a sharp whisper, pointing to the patch of trees surrounding the parking area.
I'm looking but not seeing anything, when this thing moves out across the edge of the gravel lot onto another group of trees. I kid you not, it's a freaking upright walking ape!! It must have been a young one because it was only about 5 1/2 feet tall, but it freezes, looks in our direction, kind of moves its head around in a circular motion like an owl, then stops and crouches down.
I'll never forget the expression on its face, the poor thing looked almost comically TERRIFIED. Like, it had a visible frown. My uncle tells me to slowly open the door so we can try to approach it, but as soon as he opens his door, the thing kind of grabs a small handful of gravel and sticks and chucks it in our direction, then books it through the treeline.
My heart was racing and it took a long time to calm down after that. I suspected that was the first time either of us had seen something like that, but surprisingly my uncle's response was "I haven't seen one of those since the 70s." I guess he had seen one hiking in the Olympic National Forest a long time ago.
We kind of combed the perimeter after the encounter looking for any evidence about an hour later, and even went into the woods to look around, but never saw it, or anything like it ever again. One thing I do remember is that it smelled like absolute doodoo near where we saw this thing for a few hours after. I will never, ever forget that day.
97. I’m Sorry, What?
Posted this recently, was definitely creepy and scary at the time, maybe paranormal. I’m a former paramedic, responded with police and fire to a report of a man down on the side of the railroad tracks in a wooded area approx. 500 yards from the nearest access road. A railroad employee riding the tracks doing a safety check of the tracks noticed the man down the embankment of the tracks.
We all parked and walked with all the equipment the 500 or so yards to where the patient was. He had no signs of life, flat line on the EKG, along with fixed and dilated pupils. Do a little more checking and he has no visible signs of any type of trauma, the body is not cold yet and there isn't rigor mortis yet so he hasn't been dead too long.
We don't see any track marks where he would have shot up and overdosed and feel no broken bones. The guy with the railroad said a train hadn't passed in the last 8 hours. We search the area and find a makeshift tent/campsite where the guy apparently was living and find no medications or anything out the ordinary.
We are not too far from an area that everyone believes is haunted and is a site for satanic worship. Even though all of us on the scene knew about the rumors none of us had actually seen it or had proof. It's dark and we were all waiting around for the funeral home to show up and bring the body to the morgue for an autopsy.
Then the weird/spooky stuff started. A few of us heard what sounded like people whispering but it wasn't from any specific direction, a couple of the guys didn't hear it and thought we were trying to mess with them. Then the whispering noises stopped and the people on scene that hadn't heard the whispering started hearing what they all described as children laughing wickedly, but it was all over, not from any specific direction.
Those of us that had heard the whispering never heard the new noise. This went on for about 10-15 minutes while we're standing next to the corpse. Police officers on the scene told their dispatcher to tell the funeral home to step it up and get out there ASAP. We helped them load the body—more like throw it in the damn stretcher.
We didn't even bother strapping it down and got the heck outta there. We didn't take time to strap him down because he was already dead—it ain't gonna make him more dead if he fell off. The next afternoon, we went to the morgue to speak with the coroner and find out the cause of death. The first thing the coroner asked us was why did we clean the body?
Me and my partner looked at him kinda strange and asked what he was talking about. He said it must have been a very bloody scene, so we told him there was no blood anywhere around the scene. He turned pale and said that just added to the confusion, because the body had absolutely no blood in it whatsoever.
And there were no marks anywhere on him where blood could have been drained out. He also said he had a weird experience while doing the autopsy but refused to tell us what happened. To this day we have still never learned the actual cause of death, or been able to explain the whispering and evil laughing. Yeah, one of those calls I'll never forget!
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98. Pinch Me, Please
I was about 7 years old living with my mother, we were deep in the country visiting my aunt who owned a drinking establishment. Since it was morning and her bar wasn't open, I was allowed inside. We left shortly before she opened and while driving home from this curvy back road there was a car stopped on the road.
It didn't look like anyone was inside the car, but we stopped anyways to see if someone needed a ride. I remember vividly the two people inside the car were looking away from us towards the mountain, we asked if they were okay and both individuals turned towards us and had eyeballs the size of fists, they looked like something straight out of a nightmare.
Huge eye sockets and eyeballs staring straight into my soul. She hit the gas and we took off, I don't think we went under 60 until we were almost home. I asked her about this recently thinking it was a bad dream / childish memory...She started to cry saying she remembered it all. I'll never forget those giant eyeballed monsters.
99. Seeing Double
About 10 years ago (I was 8 years old), I was visiting my dad at his house. My stepmother was in the kitchen and I was in the family room. We both saw my father, wearing a red flannel shirt and blue jeans, walk around the corner from the living room and start walking up the stairs. I followed him and called his name as he went up the stairs.
He turned back and looked at me, got to the top of the stairs and went around the corner. I called his name again, then from the living room my dad popped his head up over the couch and asked what I wanted. He had been asleep on the couch the entire time, yet both my stepmother and I CLEARLY saw him, wearing the clothes he had on the whole day and all, go from the living room up the stairs.
It was the strangest thing I've ever seen. Both my stepmother and I still remember it and talk about it to this day. Also, it was broad daylight, so it wasn't some uncanny illusion of the night.
100. That’s Just Freaky
Paramedic/volunteer firemen, here. Hope I'm allowed to contribute...
We covered a town in the middle of nowhere. Get a call from "Woodchuck City" as we call it, which is a trailer park with all of the chaos you'd associate with an alcoholic meth scene, but without the alcohol and meth (they were just lazy, crazy Seventh Day Adventists).
Call was FNRP (Found Non-Responsive, with/weak Pulse), so we rushed out there. These are usually overdoses or strokes, so time was important. I get there and when I come in there's four or five adults, all wearing their church clothes (black pants, white shirt, women in blue or grey gowns) which threw me off because it was about two in the morning on a weekday (their Sabbath is Saturday, I think).
I kneel down next to her and feel her wrist. Cold as ice. My guess is they're wearing their clothes because they knew she was dead, and the minister was on the way for last rites or something. Paramedic with me asks if we should defib, I shake my head and try to verify there aren't any vitals. Nothing.
Their dog starts growling at me, and I'm thinking he doesn't like me touching her. I ask them to get rid of the dog and he starts howling. Then the dog just stops. At the very moment the dog stops, a light blows out, and the "dead" person sits up, says "Make sure [victim's sister] gets the heck out of her place" and slowly lays down.
My partner and I are freaked out, as I was CERTAIN that woman was dead, but nobody else is. Partner starts going through, checking, to see if I screwed up. Nope, still dead, skin is getting a little change. We call in the coroner, who has to come out from the other part of the county, nearly 40 minutes away. Sheriff radios in and says they'll be a few minutes, as a tree has fallen on a cabin a few miles away.
Later find out they had called the sister and she hadn't taken two steps out of her place when a tree had fallen on her cabin, totally destroying the bedroom in which she slept. I don't know if it fell directly on the bed, but, at that point, I didn't want to know any more about anything that happened that night.
Not that I think anything "paranormal" was at work here, but it certainly wasn't normal what I saw.
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