Scary stories are all fun and games...until you experience one for yourself. Here are all the very REAL horrors that go bump in the night. From unexplainable apparitions to glitches in the matrix, these creepy moments might just keep you up at night.
1. Inhale, Exhale
About 15 years ago, my boyfriend got out of bed to get ready for work. He would sometimes do a workout before taking a shower, but for some reason, he decided to do his workout in the bedroom. I was really tired and I tried to keep sleeping. I hadn't even opened my eyes yet...but his breathing was getting really heavy and raspy, and I was unable to get back to sleep.
He was making so much noise and I was getting so mad. Little did I know something dark was at play. I turned over and opened my eyes to tell him to shut up—only to find nobody in the room. The breathing suddenly stopped and I got a chilly feeling.
2. The Calling Card
My grandparents lived in a farmhouse in rural Canada. It wasn’t an old farmhouse at all, probably built in like the 1940s or 50s. It was a split level with an unfinished basement with a large cast iron wood furnace. To allow heat to rise, there was a large cut-out in the living room floor that was covered with a grate that you could see through into the basement.
One day, my grandpa is sitting in the living room alone when he hears a loud crash from the basement. He heads down and finds that the heavy cast-iron tools for the furnace had tipped over and were scattered all over the ground. These things probably weighed like 50lbs total for the complete set and would’ve been hard to knock over without some force.
When he was kneeling down to pick them up and put them back on their stand, he spots something under the furnace that makes his blood run cold. It’s a single white rose. We all had weird experiences in that house that ranged from cold spots to large floating green masses. There was a bedroom that none of the children wanted to sleep in because of just the “vibe” of the room and the closet being specifically very unnerving.
3. Grandfather’s Ghost
After my father passed, I went to live with my friend and his mom for a little while. Things with my mom were very strained and I didn’t want to stay at my friend’s house initially. But they didn’t want me alone during that time. Staying at anyone’s house always made me feel uneasy for some reason. On my first night there, early in the morning, I woke up to the sound of my bedroom door opening.
A gentleman wearing a red flannel and bib denim overalls came into my room holding a bag of tools. He turned the light on, looked at me, and walked through another doorway to the utility room. Soon after, I fell asleep again. But when I woke up this time, the room was dark. Everything was the same when I went to sleep the night previously.
Figuring I imagined the whole thing, I went upstairs for coffee and asked my friend's mom if the guy with the overalls is still here. With a weird look, she informed me that it’s been her and I in the house all night. At this point, I’m VERY confused. So, I explain detail in detail about what the man looked like. Height, weight, clothes, facial hair. Everything.
She turns pale white, bolts to her room, and retrieves a photo. When she shows me the photo, It was the man I saw in the basement that morning. Even wearing the same clothes. She tells me that he died 30 years ago. It was her grandpa who owned the property previously. He had taken his own life to save the farm when he invested his money into horses instead of machines and his investment flopped.
It was all to keep the bank from taking the farm. On a stormy night, he took a lightning rod into the middle of a pond and nature took his life when lightning struck the rod. Because of this, life insurance paid out and kept the house from being foreclosed on.
4. A Grab In The Woods
I was in the woods, on vacation in Sweden, it was about 3 am, and I had to go to the washroom. Suddenly, I hear footsteps. I start asking "Who's there"? and I hear nothing, except for the footsteps coming toward me. I'm either a dumb idiot or the bravest dude ever, but I don't run away. Suddenly, when the footsteps seem to be right next to me, they stop. That’s when it happened.
Suddenly, I feel something tugging on my leg, and I actually fall down. By the way, this whole time, I'm still peeing. I feel something, some hair, some skin. On instinct, I aim toward it. I hear a human scream, and just as quickly as it came, I hear footsteps running away. I'm 90% sure it was a man. I was just 15 at the time. It was either a ghost or a guy who tried to kidnap me.
5. A Dark Presence
This happened many years ago when my daughter was still an infant. We were living in an apartment at the time and my wife was at work. I was sitting on the couch watching TV, while my daughter was asleep on a blanket pallet on the floor. Our dog, a German shepherd and wolf hybrid, was about 10 feet away from us, laying in the doorway between our kitchen and the living room.
All of a sudden, the dog started growling, so I figured that he had heard someone walking by through the parking lot. I honestly didn't think much of it. But a few seconds later, I noticed the sound was getting LOUDER, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that he had lifted his head up off his paws. His ears were perked, and he was looking up at the ceiling over the area where my daughter was laying.
I looked up, didn't see anything, and told him to knock it off. Right at that moment, he began exhibiting the weirdest behavior—he jumped up and started circling my sleeping daughter while growling more and more intensely, even stopping at one point and snapping his teeth. After about two minutes of this, he laid down next to my daughter, rested his head on her back, and stayed there for almost an hour; still staring at the ceiling.
To this day, I have no idea what the heck was going on or what he saw...but it was creepy, to say the least.
6. The Multiversal Variant
My husband recently took an overnight job to help us out during the pandemic. He's only been there about two weeks and he works evenings and overnights, from 9 pm to 6 am. Last night was no different—he left home around 8:15 pm, leaving me home alone with our 11-year-old daughter. She and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11 pm, I heard keys in my backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home.
I creeped out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve. He walked down the hall, said hi to our daughter as he passed the living room, and went upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss, and left again. It all seemed so normal, but I would later find out the bizarre truth...
We finished our movie and went to bed. In the morning, when he got home, I made a joking comment about him forgetting his knee sleeve. He was genuinely confused as I recalled the previous night. Our daughter confirmed everything I said, but he was still confused. I pulled up our security motion camera on my phone to show him when he popped in quickly.
But there was no footage from the night before, or any other night, of him coming home after he had left for work. My daughter and I both heard him, saw him, and I touched him, but he was never home during that time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened that night. We seriously have no idea what happened.
7. A Bathroom Break!
This happened a couple of years ago in my old house. We had friend friends over for a little BBQ and some drinks. For context, it was a two-story house with a full room in the basement and two upstairs. It was a Friday, and I happened to be more tired than usual, so I went to bed before everyone had left. I lived with two roommates at the time, and we had four friends over.
I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom right outside my room, but I noticed the light was on inside. However, my half-asleep self just opened the door anyways and someone was there sitting on the toilet looking at me, I didn’t stare as I was still half asleep, so I mumbled an apology and went to bed again.
Here's the funny thing though, the next morning I went to apologize to whoever it was. My roommate’s reaction was chilling. He said no one was home for the night, they had gone out and only came back around 5, and that incident happened around 3am or so. To this day, I don’t know who or what I saw but it was very weird, and it still haunts me sometimes when I think about it.
8. My Best Friend’s Scarf
My neighbor's daughter is four and has an invisible friend. Her parents are told it's normal and to play along. The little girl sometimes brings her mom her friend's scarf to wash with the white laundry. Her hands are empty, but she's holding up the pretend "scarf". Mom plays along, and it happens every other month for a few months. The girl can be found in her room talking to her "friend". She calls him Charlie.
Then the mom's father passes. They have tons of family and friends in town, decide to have a reception at their house. Mom goes into the attic to get all the old pictures of her dad. Sets them up all around the house. During the party, the little girl comes out of her room. As she's walking past a table she stops and says, mommy...Why do you have a picture of Charlie?
Mom says those pictures aren't Charlie, that's my Dad. This particular table was full of pictures of her father during his time in the service. The little girl says no, that's Charlie, pointing to one specific photo at the back of the table. Mom picks up the picture and looks at the back. It's not her father. It's her grandfather. His middle name is Charles.
And it's one of those pics where he's standing on the ladder of his fighter plane. Wearing a white scarf. Mom swears the box was buried in the attic, undisturbed, and that the little girl was never up there alone. There's no way she could have seen that pic.
9. The Girl On The Top Bunk
My dad had stuff going on in his house, so much that almost every kid who would come in, myself, my sisters, my brother, and my dad have all had multiple experiences in there. I remember one time I was going upstairs to have a shower. The bathroom was the end of the hallway and on the way to it, I had to pass by the room I shared with my sisters when I was over for the weekends.
As I passed by, I saw something sit up on the bottom bunk from the corner of my eye. This thing looked like a little girl. She had pale skin, short black hair that was cut in a bob style with straight bangs covering her forehead, and her eyes were these massive circles with large black dots in the center for pupils. She was facing sideways, so her right shoulder was facing me when she turned her head, and the other half of her body looked like it was under the blankets.
I remember getting such an intense feeling of fear that I went back downstairs and refused to go upstairs at all or even sleep in the house. My dad had to set up the camping tent in the backyard for the rest of the weekend. If this occurrence had been nothing, just seeing things that weren't there, I feel like I shouldn't still remember it in perfect detail at the age I am now
10. Hunted Like Prey
I was a pizza driver for a while back in college. One time, I made a delivery out to a rural area late at night. This was before smartphones, Waze, and all of that GPS stuff. Of course, the road had no streetlights, so the only light came from people's porch lights, my car's headlights, and the full moon. I finally found the right house and delivered the pizza to a sweet little old lady.
But when I turned around to walk back to my car, something felt off and I instantly stopped. There was a strange sensation that I wasn't alone; I was being watched. But I looked around and didn't see anything. I slowly moved toward my car and the feeling didn't go away...it only intensified. It was like I was being watched before, but now I was being hunted or something.
I looked around and still couldn't see anything. After a few minutes, I shrugged and figured I was imagining things. I opened my car door when suddenly I heard a clicking sound; as if something was tapping the pavement in the road really fast. I hopped into my car and barely got the door shut when this giant dog jumped at the driver's side window.
He was growling and you could just tell that he wanted a piece of me in a big way. He had drool coming off his mouth, his breath fogged the window, and it was like I could FEEL the reverb of his growling in my chest through the window. It was only after the fact that I realized how close I came to getting the life mauled out of me by some crazy, bloodthirsty dog.
When I got back to the store, half the drivers had heard where I went for the delivery and they asked me about the dog. Turns out, they'd seen him before but nobody thought to warn me about it.
11. The Exploding Glasses
In Snohomish, WA, there’s a bar called the Oxford. It has a violent history as there have been at least two or three deadly incidents there. My parents have gone a few times to listen to live bands and heard of women being locked in the bathroom and plates shattering in the kitchen when no one was around. One night my dad had a glass of red wine and headed downstairs to the basement, where there were pool tables and another bar.
He says that the cup part of his glass exploded in his hand, there was a pop sound—but that’s not the weirdest part. He looked down and he only had the glass stem in his hand and there was no red liquid or glass on or around him. In a bit of a daze, he went to the bartender, handed her the stem, and explained what happened and she replied, “No problem, that kind of stuff happens all the time”. And handed him a new glass.
12. A Guardian Angel
One night, I wasn’t feeling very well. Our upstairs bathroom is larger than our downstairs one, so I figured I might as well sleep in the guest room since I was dealing with a pretty bad case of food poisoning. My wife did not have a problem with that as she had to work early the next day anyway. At some point in the night, I awoke to the door slowly creaking open and a female voice asking if I was feeling alright.
I assumed it was my wife and I replied, “Yes honey I’m fine, see you in the morning”. But here's the creepy part—the door never closed and there were no footsteps that I could hear going down the stairs. I would’ve heard them since we lived in an old 1800s home with original wood floors and stairs. We were alone in the house that night.
I asked my wife about it the next morning and she said never came up to check on me, let alone wake up during the night. I was facing away from the door when it happened and the unexpected silence following the "interaction" made me turn over to check. The door was wide open and there were no lights on.
13. Slipping Between The Servers
At one of my previous SysAdmin jobs, we were closing down one of our smaller data centers as it was being consolidated into one of our larger ones, but we still had to have at least one person there in case of server issues that had to be dealt with on site. We rotated each week on which one of us would do the overnights there.
The place was reportedly haunted, by what I have no idea, just heard rumors from other coworkers when I hired in. So, imagine a relatively large open office space that is completely void of all the cubicles, desks, etc. that are normally there, with just one desk and a few random cables hanging from the ceiling. Also, just the lights over my desk were working and bleeding out into my surroundings by about three feet.
That was where I was for the week. I remember sitting there and just hearing ambient noise from the far-off server room working on a server for a customer of ours and seeing something dart across the room in my peripheral vision. I looked up and didn’t see anything, so figured my eyes were tired from the screen light and making me see like those floaties when your eyes close too tightly.
I went back to work and then about five minutes later, I saw it again, although this time I heard the bathroom door open and shut. I thought maybe one of my coworkers was here for a server fix, so I got up and went to greet them and wait for them. About 10 minutes pass and no one comes outta the bathroom. I go in to make sure they’re not passed out or hurt, but lo and behold, empty bathroom.
Now I’m creeped out. I leave the bathroom and this time, see the shadow person thing on the other side of the room dart across again, but looking at it straight on and not from my peripheral vision. Quickly went over and threw the rest of the lights on and started searching the whole office and server room for a co-worker as I was 100% sure was messing with me.
I never found anyone. The rest of the night was uneventful, as well as the rest of the week, minus me sitting terrified at my desk waiting for something else to happen.
14. The Shadow Crawler
Back in high school, I'd usually be up all hours of the night playing games. I had a large dog at the time that would sleep in my room at night. It was 2 am and I was finally headed to bed, but my dog wasn't with me, so I ventured out to find him. I made my way across the house to the kitchen where we had an island with a stool that the junk mail was usually kept on.
I walked up, called for my dog, and after a few seconds, he walked from behind the island to behind the dining room table, knocking all the junk mail down as he did so. I huffed, flipped on the light...then froze in complete fear. There was no dog. I freaked out, scramble back across the house, and ended up finding him in my parent's room.
The next day, I told the story to my parents and younger sister (who often claimed to see weird things happen in the house). My sister piped up and said, "Oh, that's the tall black thing. Yeah, sometimes it likes to crawl around on all fours”. Big nope.
15. I'm Watching You
In Grade 9, my best friend and I were having a sleepover at my house. My parents and younger brother were out of town, so we were home alone. After it was dark outside, we started watching a movie. We were laying on separate couches, watching the TV that was situated next to a door frame that leads to the kitchen, bedrooms, and basement.
Out of nowhere, I got chills up my spine—I saw a feminine figure standing in the doorway, facing me. For some reason, I instinctively yelled out, "Don’t leave me”! My friend also saw the figure, and he said to me, “Don’t worry, he’ll go away in a second,” thinking it was my younger brother. The figure just faded away, kind of like mist, into the other room.
We looked at each other and realized what had just happened, then quickly turned on all the lights and sat on the same couch. We’re 28 now. We still have absolutely no idea who that was or why I said what I did, but I still think about it often.
16. Uncle’s Return
On the weekend before leaving for Navy boot camp, my friend left my family's house in the middle of the night to crash at home, forgetting his keys in the process. After knocking a few minutes in an attempt to wake his dad, he tried the basement window with no luck. Eventually, he walked back to my house, but we were all asleep.
After another trek back to his family’s, and a few minutes of pounding on the door, he still had no luck. Frustrated, he sat on the porch and had a smoke. Then, heard the faint sound of the lock click. He opened the door to see what he thought was his dad walk down the hall and turn left into the kitchen. He walked into the kitchen seconds later to apologize for waking him up...
It was empty. This is a small townhouse that ends in the kitchen. There is nowhere to go. He sprinted up the stairs and pounded on his dad's locked bedroom door. Dad eventually woke up clearly confused, half asleep, in his underwear... After the shock started to wear off, they made a disturbing realization. It was the exact year anniversary of his Uncle's passing.
The person he saw looked like his dad and was fully clothed in jeans and a white polo with a blue collar. Apparently, his uncle wore this type of outfit everyday.
17. The Secrets Of The Art
I have extremely vivid memories of me and my ex doing a bunch of art classes for fun as a couples thing. My ex continued to do landscapes, and she was really good at it. I even remember going to multiple local arts and crafts stores to buy painting supplies. We broke up, and I remember keeping six of the paintings wrapped up.
I even remember multiple times seeing the paintings when going through my storage locker and kept debating to throw them out. We briefly got back together a few years later. I off-handedly mentioned I still had her art, and she was extremely confused. She claimed we never ever took an art class together, and she has never painted in her life beyond middle school.
She also said I never painted anything outside of my wargaming stuff. This caused a huge rift between us. I thought I was right, and she thought she was right. I got so frustrated that we ended up driving out to the storage locker. All of the canvases were blank, and I could not find any of the shared painting supplies that I swear was in a big red plastic container right by the paintings.
She honestly thought I was crazy, and I doubted my memory. The relationship ended up falling apart pretty quickly not long after that and went no contact. Then a few months later, when I went to grab camping supplies from my storage locker, all six paintings were there, no blank canvases to be found along with the red plastic storage container full of our art supplies, including some printouts with both our names from the art class.
I ended up tossing it mostly because I was done with the idea of having a relationship with her and how spooked I was at that point. I am still not really sure what happened there.
18. My Mother's Imposter
I was upstairs in my house. I saw a doppelgänger of my mom a few years back, and I think she saw mine. I was sitting in my bed and I looked up when I heard her coming up the stairs. She walked by my door, looking straight at me with no expression, then walked into her room and closed the door. I said hi as she walked, but figured she didn’t hear me or that maybe she was getting something from her room.
Then, about five seconds later, she yelled from downstairs, asking, “Did you call me”? That's when I freaked out. She came upstairs, looked down the hall, and asked, "Did you close my door”? I didn’t, and neither did she...In fact, she never closed that door because one of our cats primarily lived in her bedroom, and she always kept the door open so the cat could come and go as she pleased.
My mom said she had very clearly heard me yell, “Hey mom, come here” from upstairs. I had done no such thing. I’m never entirely sure what I believe and what I don’t, but I was totally sober, not tired, and it wasn’t some “movement-out-of-the-corner-of-my-eye” thing.
19. Signs From Charly
Years ago, when I was 16, my dog died. He developed stomach cancer and we had to put him down. I had him since I was eight years old—for literally half of my life—so it was a huge loss for me. He was a beagle and basset hound mix, and he was probably the most chill dog you could ever meet. Anyway, when we had to put him down, I was really sad about it and I missed him a lot in the following months.
My kitchen had a tiled floor and our hallway had hardwood floors, so when he was alive, his nails made a very distinct sound on the floors. We also had a small bell tied to his collar for a time so that we could hear him if he was getting into stuff. Well, after he passed, I started getting a weird feeling. When I was home alone, I continued to hear the very distinct sound of his nails on the floor and his bell jingling every now and then.
At first, it really freaked me out, but after the first few times, I found it sweet that my little guy was still hanging around. It stopped after a few months and I took that as a sign that my little man had moved on. Not really scary or unsettling, but it’s something I can’t explain. We have no other animals and, as I said, these noises are very unique. I miss you, Charly.
20. The Haunted Hotel
I worked in a hotel that was about 100 years old at the time. I never saw anything that crazy myself, but I'd go into the basement every hour or so and doors would be shut with the lights out one hour and open with the lights on the next. I was the only person in the building with keys to any of those doors. My brother was working there with me.
He was coming out of the walk-in and reaching for the lock when he heard a voice from inside say "No! Don't”! He freaked out, threw the lock, and immediately heard something pounding on the door from the inside. It scared the heck out of him and shook his entire belief system. He quit within the week and refuses to talk about it almost ten years later.
There were a lot of stories from that place, corroborated by lots of people. Like I said, I never saw anything that crazy myself, but I suspect that it's because I wanted to see it.
21. Missing In The Woods
When I was about 11 at summer camp, we went on an overnight camping trip in the woods. In the middle of the night, nature called, and I went outside. There, I saw an older teen in a varsity jacket standing outside taking a smoke. I asked him where was a "good place to go" and he smiled at me. I turned away for a second and when I looked back, he was gone.
The next morning, I asked my counsel who the guy was and when I described him, he turned white. He said that in the 50s, a bunch of local kids had gone into the woods and were murdered. I laughed it off, thinking he was just trying to scare me. Several years later, when the internet was a thing, I ended up remembering the incident one day and searching it out.
Turns out my counselor was 100% correct, and the hairs on my body stood on end. Ever since then, I've been convinced there are such things as ghosts.
22. Twister Terror
I managed to lock myself out of my house on my birthday during a tornado while trying to bring my cats to the basement for safety. I later found out a shocking truth—the tornado was approximately a couple of miles or less from me at that exact time. The sky was green and it got weirdly calm before I could hear what sounded like a train coming.
Thankfully, I found an unlocked window to climb through. Wild times.
23. The Black Void
I was in my college apartment and my roommate had just moved out. Her room was right across from mine. I cleaned out her room and then closed the door. One night, I left my bedroom door open when I went to take a shower. My bathroom was connected to my bedroom, and I had left the bathroom door open. While I was in the shower, I thought I heard a strange sound.
It sounded like a woman talking. I had never been able to hear my neighbors talking before, but I figured they were probably just talking loudly on the other side of the wall or something. When I got out of the shower, I was met with a bone-chilling surprise—I saw this black void when there should have been the closed door of my old roommate's room. I figured I just forgot to close the door, so I walked over and closed it.
The next night, I went to take a shower and I left both my bedroom door and the bathroom door open. This time, I checked to make sure my old roommate's door was latched and the front door was double locked. When I came back out, I once again saw the black void with the door wide open. I slammed my door closed and locked it so fast...
I convinced myself there must be a logical explanation, so the next night, I once again checked all of the doors and then closed my bedroom door. This time, I came out of the shower and MY bedroom door was open along with the other door. I showered with my bedroom door locked from that point on.
24. The Woman In The Basement
When I was 17, I started to see a woman out of the corner of my eye, and it started happening more frequently. I should note that I had lived in that house since I was five and in particular, I always felt something in the basement and would absolutely bolt up the stairs every time I was leaving it. I started seeing her more and more frequently but any time I turned to get a good look she was gone.
Then, one random night I was sitting on the couch long after everyone had gone to bed and I saw her again—but this time was different. She started chasing me and I bolted up to the second floor where my bedroom was. I had to sleep with every light in my room on that night and slept completely underneath the covers because I just knew that whatever was in the basement was now under my bed.
I slept with the lights on every night for a week because I was convinced if I didn’t it would hurt me. The paranoia and lights on for days happened a few more times over the years but only ever in that house and nowhere else. It’s been probably two years since I’ve had any visions like that though. But I’ve never seen a figure as clearly as I did then.
25. I’ll Always Be With You
My wife and I had a miscarriage about 7 years ago. We now have a son and daughter now. One night this past winter, I’m sleeping and wake up with the feeling I’m being watched. I lift my head, look toward our bedroom door, and see who I think is my daughter standing in our doorway. I call her name and ask if she’s ok, but no response.
I get up and walk over to check on her and make sure she’s not sleepwalking or something, and the shape of her disappears. Thoroughly confused, I go to her room, pop the door open a crack and see she’s sleeping. I close her door, and head back to bed, only to see the shadow girl on the other side of the bed, where I sleep.
I walk over to that side, and she disappears again. At this point, I go into the bathroom, verify that I am in fact awake, and go back to my bed. Nothing else happened that night. On several other occasions since then, I’ll see this shadow figure slightly bigger than my daughter in our bedroom at night. Sometimes I’ll think it’s our daughter crawling into bed with us, only to ask my wife in the morning and she’d say “no, she wasn’t in here last night”.
Sometimes I’ll see her in the doorway, or standing by our bed, or hanging out in bed with us. I don’t believe in ghosts and the usual paranormal stuff, but I have no explanation for our occasional shadow visitor other than perhaps it’s the spirit of our daughter that we miscarried. At first, I found these visits unnerving, but now I’ve just come to accept them.
26. A Dapper Ghost
When I was a kid, I used to sleep with my door closed. I have no idea what time it was, but one night, I heard my door creak open. When I opened my eyes, I freaked out—I could only make out a figure of a strange, tall man with a hat and a coat. He just sat on my bed and stared at my door. This went on for a few minutes before he got up and left.
I don’t have many memories of my childhood, but this one I can recall very well.
27. Chill In The Air
My sister and I were home alone when we heard someone big running up the stairs. The stairs in our house make lots of noise with slight pressure, so when there’s someone big on them, you can tell. When I went out of my room to check, I immediately got scared—I saw no one anywhere, but I could feel a chill in the air. My sister also came out of her room and she asked if that was me...I said no.
We both looked around to see if there was anyone, but after checking the whole house, we confirmed that no one was there. We were so confused. We called our parents and just waited until they got back.
28. Breaking My Routine
When I was in high school, I used to get home earlier than everyone, and I would stay alone for at least an hour. I don't remember exactly why, maybe because we didn't want our dog sleeping on the beds, but in the morning before we all left the house, we closed all the bedroom doors. So, my daily routine was: get home, greet my dog, leave my stuff in the living room and open all the doors.
I wasn’t afraid of being home alone, we lived in that house for 10 years and I never heard or saw spooky things. This day was the same. I go and open all the doors, and when I'm about to grab the doorknob of my parents’ bedroom, I hear a woman screaming NOOOOOO followed by a BANG, like if someone just punched the door from the other side.
Of course, I got really scared, but I kept telling myself that it might've been the wind, even though the punch on the door felt physical. When we moved out of the house many years later, my mom told me that on the first nights in that house, when everyone was asleep, she would feel someone sitting on the edge of the bed.
29. The Campground Ghoul
I was working at a summer camp in the PNW one year. On the second or third night there, I was jogging alone back from the staff campfire to the cabin, where the campers and my co-counselor slept. I'm walking in this big grassy throughway that has some taller reeds separating it from a shore of the Puget Sound.
It's probably around 2 am, with a full moon. As I'm jogging, I see this figure in the reeds—and my heart stops in my chest. It's wearing a white gown, and it has no face, just hair. I only notice it because, as I approached it, it stood up from a crouched position, backed up a few steps, then crouched down again, but I could still see it there, like it was waiting.
Its movements told me that it was not human. My knees gave out, and I felt flooded with fear as I collapsed. And then it got worse. I tried to run back to my cabin, but my legs would. not. work. I crawled and scrambled there on all fours. I tried to scream but no sound came out. Just gasping. I finally got to my cabin and fumbled with the doorknob for what felt like a minute before I could open it.
I closed the door and stood there waiting for a while inside. I didn't hear anything, but I barely slept. At some point later that night I remember laughing, thinking "Oh, it was just one of the campers peeing”! I was hysterically laughing at myself for like twenty minutes, then fell asleep. The next morning though, I realize that no campers returned to the cabin that could have potentially been out there peeing that night.
I asked all of them, and all of them said they hadn't gone out to pee the previous night. I'll add that this was a camp that was overtly for nonreligious, skeptically minded staff and campers, of which I was and still largely am, but I have no explanation for what I saw that night. It still scares the heck out of me just typing this.
30. Moonlight Mirage
I grew up in a very rural area. Our house was on the end of a road in the middle of farm country. In high school, I was in cross country and track, so I found it easiest to run in the late evenings on nights when there wasn’t practice. One night, which was fairly well lit by the moon, I was running the last quarter mile to my house when I saw someone else running toward me on the road from the direction of my house.
There is nothing but farm fields behind our house and it definitely wasn’t my mom running. It surprised me so much that I stopped for a second to consider what I was seeing. Something was really, really off. I remember exactly what the runner was wearing and I watched her run another couple of strides toward me before she disappeared into the night like the Predator or something.
Now, it could have been exhaustion or dehydration I guess, but I’ve run a lot farther and a lot longer than I did that night without seeing anyone materialize and evaporate. It was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I anime-ran home, crying panic tears. I couldn’t bring myself to run at night again for a month.
31. Yellow Vision
I got up in the middle of the night to pee and I happened to glance out the window to my backyard. That's when I saw it—the glowing yellow figure that spooked the life out of me. It looked like it was collecting soil samples from my backyard. I was so shaken by the sight of it that I bumped into the sink. The figure stopped what it was doing and looked at me.
I bolted back to my room and woke up my wife, but when we went back, it was gone. The funny thing is, I've told this story to a friend of mine and when his wife overheard, she burst into tears. She said she had seen the same thing when she was a child but nobody believed her. We both described her in the same way—it looked to be about seven feet tall since when it stood up, it was well taller than my fence.
It was glowing so strongly and seeing it made my adrenaline pump like crazy.
32. Remembering The Chapel
When my youngest son was about three years old, we were eating out in town, and he got a bit restless. I decided to take him for a walk and as I held a door open, he got away from me and made a break for it. He bolted into an adjacent site that had a ruined chapel and almshouses with info boards for tourists. I found him staring up at the chapel ruins.
I asked him: “What are you doing, mate”? I ask. His reply: “A long time ago I got married here”. “What”? “A long time ago…” Then a switch flicked, and he was a three-year-old with energy to burn and was off running again. That shook me to my core.
33. Shining Headlights
Several years ago, some friends and I were driving through one of the millions of small towns around the North and South Carolina border in the mountains. It was well after midnight. My friend looks behind us and sees a pair of headlights coming up on us. Quickly. They were easily going 60-70 MPH when the limit was only 25 or so.
They showed no signs of stopping so my friend pulls over to let the car pass. And what passes us is two lights. Just lights. Far too bright to be a firefly or any luminescent creature. As bright as headlights, if not brighter. Not attached to anything. No car, nothing. Just two lights booking it down the road.
34. What A Mess
Once when I was 17 years old, I was home alone for a week with our family's dog, who was pretty small. He was starting to have trouble climbing stairs in his old age. I worked every morning that week while my parents were out of town. I came home from my shift on Friday and I was met with a totally unexpected surprise. The kitchen table was a mess.
The napkins were taken out of the holder, all of the mail was thrown on the floor, the salt and pepper shakers were not stored away together, and one of the chairs was pulled far away from the table. Our dog had never done anything like that before, and he was barely even capable of climbing on top of the table at the time. Still, he was the only one who could have made that mess.
I shrugged and reset it all before going to bed. Then, on Saturday, I came back from work to find the exact same items in the exact same configuration. Everything was just as I found it the day before. At that point, I began to believe something dark was at play. I was convinced there was a ghost coming to get me. I slept horribly that night and was barely alive for work the next day.
Before I left for my shift in the morning, I made sure the place was orderly when I left because I knew my parents would be back before I came home. When I went on my lunch break, I called my mom and told her about what had happened over the past two days. She just replied, "Yeah, why did you leave such a mess”? To this day, I have no idea who or what was behind that mess on the kitchen table.
35. Oh, Those Eyes
When I was younger, I used to live in this really old house in the middle of the woods. It had a small clearing with an average-sized yard and the rest of it was the forest. One night, I was walking up to our gate to go inside and I suddenly froze in fear—I saw a very tall figure looking into my bedroom window. My light was on, which was weird since I hadn't been in there, or so I could see the figure with its face and hands pressed up against my window.
Whoever it was must have heard me because they looked in my direction before booking it to the back of the yard. He presumably ran into the woods since there was nowhere else to go and the backyard area wasn't fenced in. I never slept in that room again.
36. The Haunted Book
I was reading a library book before bed one night when I was a teenager. It was something really boring I had checked out for a history project for school, and I couldn't keep my eyes open. I fell asleep with it on my bed. I had like a sleep paralysis event happen—and it was utterly terrifying. I watched this shadowy figure of a man walk into my room, look around, pick up a few knick-knacks and put them back down.
It was so terrifying; my entire body was screaming to move but I couldn't—not even my fingers. I just wanted to scream for help, but nothing happened, no matter how desperately I tried. I finally got enough courage to look at the man, but he wouldn't come into focus for some reason. He was just a shadow, like he wasn't fully there.
He came up to the side of my bed and stood over me, looking down at me for what felt like forever. I was so terrified, but I couldn't move a muscle. Then he reached down, grabbed my library book, and turned, walking out of my room. I never found that library book, ever, after tearing apart my room and my house. My mom said it was a coping dream for losing the book.
However, I distinctly remember falling asleep reading it that night and I even sent a text to my boyfriend that night saying that I wished I had chosen a different book because this one was putting me to sleep. I had to pay a fine and everything!
37. A Radio Signal
My father died from cancer when I was a kid. The night he went, at roughly the same time around 4 am, the radio in my room turned itself on waking me up. It was tuned to static, but I was sure I had been listening to it the previous day. Granted this happened like 20 years ago. I would think it’s just a scrambled memory, but my mother remembers this too. She thinks that’s how he said goodbye. By scaring the heck out of me one last time.
38. I'll See You Again
When my dog passed, I had the strangest experience. I think he visited me in a dream to let me know he loved me and that he was at peace. It was just as vivid as my waking life, to the point that I remember seeing his individual whiskers. As soon as he sat on my lap, there was this INSANE feeling of euphoria and peace that vibrated through my whole body...I used to be an addict and I never felt happiness like that while I was under the influence.
I was almost a decade sober at the time it happened, by the way. I just hope other people get to experience the same thing sometime when they lose a loved one. I'm an atheist, but that dream was just so crazy that it convinced me there is some sort of afterlife. I know I'll see him again.
39. Scaredy Cat
Many years ago, When I was 14 or so, I had my first night alone in the house when my parents were out. I was lying down on the living room floor reading a book, and my cat sleeping next to me. Suddenly, my cat woke up, stared intently into the dark corner of the room behind me, and then bolted out of the room. I looked behind me and I saw nothing, but I followed the cat upstairs and hid under the covers.
It freaked me out.
40. The Thing In The Attic
I was babysitting two younger cousins at their home, which was about a hundred years old and situated next to a graveyard. There wasn't necessarily a bad feeling in the house whenever we were there, but it was a bit creepy at night looking out at the headstones. I was helping the girls brush their teeth and whatnot before bed, and I headed downstairs after I had said goodnight.
I sat down and almost immediately I heard a commotion of doors, not slamming, but shutting hard, and the girls talking loudly. When I got upstairs, they were at the end of the hallway, around a corner, and they were pushing their hands against the door to the attic, as if trying to keep someone or something from coming through.
"We gotta shut it! Help us shut it”!, they half-shouted, and half-whispered. I'm already on edge because of the house and the stories my aunt and uncle had shared with us regarding paranormal activity. Then, when I put my hand up against the old, heavy attic door, what I felt was seriously disturbing. I felt something pushing back from the other side!
I paused for a moment in shock, then quickly and forcefully slammed it shut. Thank goodness. The girls thanked me, as if this were like a normal bedtime thing for them and went back to their rooms to go to sleep. I noped the heck out back downstairs. My aunt and uncle returned later that evening and I mentioned it to my uncle as he drove me home.
He just kinda chuckled and said something to the effect of "Yeah, sounds about right”.
41. The Dream Terrors
I had once had a dream I had forgotten to wear my uniform to school. It was normal at first, with it ending with me realizing that I had forgotten it. I only remember one of my friends saying, “You silly goose you must be dreaming”. I then woke up and thought I was awake. I saw my mother with something seriously wrong with her face, like she was a Demogorgon.
I kept waking up, but still being in a dream, and every time I would go into another dream and have a Demogorgon-like head on one member of my family’s faces, and they would all say, “You silly goose, you must be dreaming”. I then wake up and pinch myself to see if I wasn’t dreaming. I then get ready for school…and forget to wear my uniform.
I then get sent to the office, and there one of my friends is sitting there with a Demogorgon shirt and he says to me: ”You silly goose you must be dreaming”. I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking maybe I was still in the dream.
42. A Warning Call
It was just me and my small dog at home. I had started getting ready to go to bed and my dog was already in my bedroom. When I was turning off the lights in the hallway, I heard something in the living room. It was this low growl coming from the dark. I turned off the lights and booked it to my room.
43. The Thin Man
I woke up in the middle of the night to someone standing next to my bed. I thought it was a friend of mine, but then I remembered that he didn't drive and I had never given him my address. I talked to my parents in the morning, but they slept through the night. All I remember is that the person was rail-thin—definitely neither my mom nor dad. I still don't know 100% of all that happened.
The night was a blur. I remember only bits and pieces.
44. The Man In The Night
I must have been like nine or ten. I was in my village, with just two houses: my grandfather's and his brother's. All our families were there. So basically, we kids decided that we wanted to have a sleepover. There were two separate places to stay, one was like a fairly open two-story hut, and one traditional Nepali house.
We being stubborn kids, wanted the hut because it was more open. I woke up around 2 AM because I had to pee. I was too scared to get down and go to the toilet, so I decided to pee from above the hut. While up there, I see an old man with a large build wearing a black coat, waving his hand, and walking towards me. He had a big hat, so I couldn't see his face.
It was so scary that I ran back to bed without peeing. I couldn't even speak or scream. I just got to my bed curled up, facing towards the wall, not being able to speak, scared out of my mind. I somehow fell asleep and didn't dare to go the same place. The day after that, I mustered up the courage to go up there with my friends.
Turns out, the figure was a banana leaf, which was shaped and would move like a walking person would when the wind hits it. I still refused to go there at night, even after knowing it was not a person, because it was so scary to me.
45. A Voice From Afar
I once was sleeping at an airport, and I was really scared and paranoid about someone attacking me in my sleep so I would wake up every so often in a panic. In the midst of one of those violent awakenings, I shout, "Daddy”! and then immediately go back to sleep. In the middle of sleeping, I saw a text from my dad but didn't think much of it.
I instead went back for round 20 of sleep. When I was situated the next day, I called him back and what he told me still sends shivers down my spine. He said that he heard me yell his name like I was in his living room, and he went to check for me. When he said that, I remembered how calm I felt after calling for him. There is a reason this guy is my emergency contact on every form.
46. Time To Panic
I was living in this house a few years back that was notoriously weird. One night, I was sleeping when I felt something touch me. Thought it was my brother because we shared a room. It was not. He was at his girlfriend's mom's place. I felt a hand on my back, then a sharp pain. The next morning, I looked in the mirror and found a scratch on my back.
There was nothing on my bed, and it was a memory foam mattress with no springs. Even if there were springs, I sleep on my stomach. The next night, I woke up in the middle of the night again, but this time, I caught a glimpse of this dark figure. It ran from my bedside and out the door into the living room where I never saw it again.
Having already been mentally messed up by recent bouts of depression, that encounter triggered the worst panic attack I have ever had yet.
47. Intruder Alert
I was home alone for a bit when someone knocked on my front door. I went to go check who it was, but I was confused because I wasn’t expecting anyone. Nobody was there, so I shut the door and locked it. But a few minutes later, I looked out the window and I saw these two people with a ladder attempting to go through the door to my porch. Thank God I was able to see them through the glass sliding door in my living room or else they might have actually entered my house.
I was so scared...but the strangers ended up seeing me looking at them and they left. 10 minutes later, a patrol car showed up outside of my house on the street...but he seemed to know the two people. To this day, I have no idea what that was about—the officer didn’t talk to me, but they never did come around again.
48. What Comes Out At Night?
So back in the early 2000s right up near McCall, my buddy Tyler and I were up in the mountains pretty far from any sort of actual civilization. We were up camping with my family, and I brought him along. After about two or three days, we had the bright idea to go out on a night exploration. Bad idea. We didn’t tell my parents and just left at about 2:00 in the morning.
We were probably about 20-30 minutes into our so-called “night exploration” and we were decently far from camp. Around this time, I started to get an uneasy feeling. I told Tyler that we should probably head back because it was pretty cold, and I didn’t want to admit I was freaking out. He insisted that we go on and that I should stop being a baby. I agreed.
After about 10 more minutes into our night exploration, I shined my light into a little clearing of the trees. I thought I saw a tall dark figure with exceedingly long lanky legs, a strangely shaped body, and no arms. I wasn’t too sure what it was and told Tyler we should go a little closer. We did and found this large 12-ish-foot-tall thing staring right at us both from about 20 feet away.
When I tell you I have never run faster in my life I mean it. And after the run back to camp my legs were torn apart and bloodied by all the branches and whatnot. We had to sleep in my parents' tent the rest of the trip.
49. Eyes… Watching…
I was sleeping in my own room and woke up in the middle of the night for no reason—until I realized someone was standing next to my bed. It was dark, so I only saw a figure, but once my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw it was a human figure wearing a white dress. Its head was bending down towards me a little, as if it was watching me sleep.
I couldn't see its face. I thought it was my little sister, so I asked, "What are you doing in my room”? There was no answer. I realized it couldn't be my sister as it looked to be a lot taller than her, so I carefully raised my leg to kind of get the feeling If it was a real person. My foot didn't hit anything and then the figure slowly disappeared.
After that, I panicked and hit the lights on and couldn't sleep at all that night. It was so weird, and I have no idea what that was. This happened over eight years ago, and I still think about it from time to time.
50. Crossing Over
When my dad passed on, I was at home by myself. I kept hearing a small bell ringing, which was weird because I lived there for years and I'd never heard that sound before. I searched around the house and it was coming from my mom's bedroom. On the window, there was a small porcelain bell, but it didn't have the ringer inside. I shrugged and went back downstairs... but the ringing started again.
I called my mom and asked her if she knew where it could be coming from. That’s when she revealed the devastating truth. She broke down crying and explained that years before I was born, she and my dad had agreed to ring the bell if they ever passed to let the other person know they were okay.
51. Ring, Ring
My husband used to leave for work at 4 am. Most days, I was asleep when he left the house, but one morning, I woke up early and made a nest on the living room floor, right in front of the TV. After an hour or so of playing video games, I heard the eeriest music. It was behind me and the sound was getting louder and louder.
After thinking the worst, I suddenly remembered that my baby sister had left her broken phone at our house. It was her ring tone...playing The Walking Dead theme song (which I don't watch).
52. Singing Of The Songbirds
When I was in college, I had a dream something was wrong with my great-grandmother. I called my mother the next day to see if she was okay. She said everything was fine. Two weeks later, we found out she had stage four lung cancer. A few months later she was placed in hospice and went to the hospital. She was out of it and unable to talk, but when I said goodbye and I loved her, she said “I love you too”.
The following morning, I got a phone call from my mother saying she passed. After we got off the phone, I heard a cardinal singing. Cardinals were my great-grandmother’s favorite bird. She had statues of them all over her house. I looked out my dorm room window, and the cardinal was right on my windowsill. I had to go to class and was trying not to cry when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
I immediately felt a sense of relief. I looked behind me to see who it was. There was no one. I said in my mind “Grandma, if that’s you, please do that again”. This time instead of one hand on my shoulder, I felt both hands on both of my shoulders. I miss her a lot. This year, two cardinals made a nest in my rose bush. It made me so happy.
53. The Woman’s Sadness
This happened to me when I was six. I was in my bed sound asleep when I felt the mattress beside me slowly shift as if someone was laying beside me. I opened my eyes and there was a full-grown adult woman beside me. She wasn't particularly scary, only normal looking, but she was a strange person in my bed. Of course, I opened my mouth to scream but before I did, she put her finger to her lips as if to tell me to be quiet.
Her eyes looked very frightened, and she seemed to be silently pleading for me to keep quiet. I screamed my guts out anyway, and I heard my parents getting up out of their bed. The strange woman just looked incredibly sad; her eyes were full of tears. Dad turned my bedroom light on and as soon as he did, she just wasn't there anymore.
No sign of her at all. I slept in my parents’ room that night. I was very scared but even more than that, I had a deep feeling of sadness. That was decades ago, and I still remember it clearly. I've had a few run-ins like that with different people, but never that same woman.
54. The Clock Strikes
One night, when my parents were out and I was home alone, a chain broke in the grandfather clock in the living room, causing the pendulum to crash to the bottom of the case. It "resounded" through the house, as if a break-in were underway. I hid in my room with the door locked until my parents got home. But here's the thing—when I went to check on the grandfather clock later, the pendulum still intact and swinging.
55. It's Moving Time
When I was a child, I had “life-size” Power Ranger dolls. I usually kept them in my room stationed around my canopy bed to guard me at night. One day, I was planning to take them all to pre-school for show-and-tell. As I was preparing them to bring them downstairs with me, the Red Power Ranger “came to life” and pushed me down the stairs.
I only vaguely remember this incident, but when I brought it up recently at a family gathering, my mom said that it wasn’t the first time I had mentioned the Red Power Ranger being lifelike. Apparently, she had frequently heard me talking to "people" in that particular apartment. The incident of me being pushed down the stairs frightened my parents so much that they went to drastic lengths to protect me.
They took me away and we stayed with my grandmother until my parents could find a new apartment to live in. Needless to say, the Power Rangers did not move with us.
56. The Winged Menace
My wife and I were driving along the highway in remote northwest Australia. we come around a corner from behind a hill and there's this massive bird in the middle of the highway ripping into a kangaroo. We slam on the brakes to avoid hitting it and it spreads its wings and flies away. This thing's wingspan was easily longer than our Corolla and the top of the bonnet was probably 2/3 the height of it standing on the road.
It looked like a type of eagle. Now, a wedge tail eagle is supposed to be the biggest flighted bird in the world. and I’ve seen wedgetails, right up close and trained to do tricks. this thing was easily at least four times the size as that. it could easily lift off with a dog or small child.
57. The Cat Whisperer
My one-year-old cat Salem passed suddenly, and I was so sad that I couldn't save his life. On that day I called my workplace and told them it was my grandpa so I could cry at home. I cried for days because of him. One day I went to work and there was a guy who is doing witchcraft and he claimed he could see auras. So, I passed him with my powered pallet truck, and he looked at me and said, 'Oh my god, who left you, my darling?'
I told him my grandpa did, as I didn't want to ruin my excuse. The guy’s reply left me stunned. He said, “Are you sure it was your grandpa? Because a black cat is sitting on your truck and meowing very loudly”. I was in shock. I didn't tell anyone that I had a cat and didn't post anything on Facebook. Then, he described to me how that cat looks, with a white spot on the chest. He described my black cat exactly.
58. A Bear's Revenge
When I got home one evening, I had to shoo some cats away from my trash cans. 30 minutes later, I heard rustling at the trash cans again. I ran out the front door annoyed, and when I turned the corner, I ended up face to face with an enormous black bear. I yelled, “YAAAAAAAAA”! at the top of my lungs, and the bear bolted up a tree in a blink, faster than I would’ve thought possible for something that big.
So I was marveling at the speed, just staring at the bear (which I’m now aware was a terrible move), and the bear was staring back at me like, “Huh…you’re not as big as I thought. I’m pretty sure I can end you”. He shuffled back down the tree, and at that moment, I think he resized me again and reaffirmed, “Yeah, I can definitely end you”. So I started backing up while making myself as big as possible.
I slowly scooted back inside to get my rifle. Then, I remembered I don't have one. So I grabbed a handful of silverware instead, headed to the second floor, and start chucking knives and forks at the bear who was back at the trash cans. A fork connected with his head, pointy end, and he motioned a swipe with his paw, knocking over both of the trash cans. He then lumbered off into the woods.
The only slightly strange part is that a week later, 60 miles away from my house, a Rutgers University student was killed by a black bear. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same bear, still upset about getting hit with that fork.
59. Secret Life Of Legos
I grew up in a haunted house. One time, my family and I had come home from being out. They stayed outside to clean up a bunch of toys and bikes that we had left out in the front yard, while I went into the house to pee. While I was inside alone, I could hear someone sloshing their hands back and forth in the big box of Legos that my little brother had in his room.
I finished up and went to check it out. As I turn into his room, I saw the box of Legos in the corner with the lid on. No one was there, but I could still hear the sloshing sound. I ran out of there as fast as I could.
60. Haunted House Stories
My dad used to work at a haunted house and wanted to add a ghost story to the website to get more people to come. He hired a medium to look around the place to see if she sensed anything. My dad didn’t really believe in the stuff though. Halfway through the tour, she asks if my father was missing a hammer. He said he was missing a lot of his tools.
The medium said an old woman died on the floor above and had the hammer. My dad asked the spirit to give it back and the next day it was laying on the table. After that, he left flowers for the spirit, and it never took anything again.
61. In The Airing Cupboard
When I was a child, my niece who my parents adopted after her parents passed, would tell us about nightmares she had about a clown living in our airing cupboard. We always just thought it was bad dreams obviously. My partner, one of the times she slept at my mother’s house, told me she was having dreams of a clown living in the airing cupboard. I have no idea how to explain that one.
62. Tipsy Magic
This happened when I was still living at my mom's place. One night, we were both at home when we heard the sound of keys entering our front door. That was scary enough...until the door actually opened! We were the only two people who had keys to the front door, so we were absolutely terrified. Luckily, it was only our neighbor's tipsy daughter who'd gotten the houses confused, but we had no idea how she had used her own key to her house to get into ours.
We checked the keys, and they were completely different. We even tried it several times to see if it was just tipsy magic. No amount of force or twisting and wiggling could open that door with her key. It was definitely tipsy magic.
63. The Ominous Voice
When I was younger, I lived with my mother and sister in a three-bedroom house. My parents had recently divorced. One night, I heard a muffled, foreign-sounding voice booming from the hallway. It sounded like it was giving a speech. I froze, scared to death, and went back to sleep. In the morning at the breakfast table, I told my mom what had happened. She froze and said, “You heard him too”?
Apparently, two weeks prior, she was vacuuming and heard a voice speaking in a foreign voice coming from upstairs. Stressed from the divorce, she chalked it up to stress and just ignored it, continuing to vacuum. Shortly after, my sister flew down the stairs screaming and crying. I found out the next morning that the voice woke her up and was coming from the corner of her room. She assumed it was her computer but her computer was shut off.
Neither my mother nor I had told my sister what we had heard, so this turned out to be the third, isolated instance. To this day, we have absolutely no idea who or where the voice was coming from.
64. The Secrets Of The House
My dad owned rental houses. Back in the 90s, my girlfriend and I’d go in after a renter left and rehab the house. One particular house, he’d purchased years ago with the renter already in the house. When they passed, we went in and started in the bedrooms, first painting and then cutting out the carpets. We noticed we kept losing our carpet cutters but thought we’d accidentally rolled them up in the carpets.
So, we got fluorescent orange cutters. Nope, we still can’t find them. Then we pull the living room carpet. Several large stains that look exactly like dried blood are soaked into the cork underfloor. OK, might be a stain, or someone butchered a chicken in the living room. No telling. But as I’m painting a living room wall, I see a human-shaped shadow coast across the wall.
I think someone is walking around the house, maybe a meter reader. I run outside and no one is there, up or down the street. I run around the house. NO ONE is there. We finish in a big hurry and get paid. My dad calls later and asks what we used to clean with because the house is full of flies. I go back and wash every flat surface with bleach and water.
The next day—full of flies again. It’s a house built on a concrete slab, so there’s no crawl space. He decides they must be getting in through a crack in the slab and fills the cracks with silica. Nope, there are still flies the next day. I vacuumed up hundreds of flies. He had lived through the depression and fought in WWII. He raised 10 kids and lived to tell the tale. But he sold that cursed house in a second. He didn’t believe in paranormal stuff, but he wasn’t a fool.
65. Spirits Of The Dogs
I’m a super chill person, an art teacher and rock garden enthusiast. I love paranormal stuff but don’t go looking for it or anything. I work with kids, so I’m pretty substance-free and of sound mind. The man and his two dogs who used to live in my house are still there. A German Shepherd and a Malamute. I got the house cheap because of its history of the disturbing passing of the previous owner.
I thought it was horrible, but I needed a place to live ASAP. So, I braced myself against superstition or the creeps. The weirdness started immediately. Pounding and moaning like the house was being hit by a bulldozer. Neighbors can hear it from outside sometimes. Huge dogs howling from somewhere inside the house. Bedroom doors opening and closing.
Footsteps went through the kitchen hallway every night at 4 am. It was nerve-racking but also sad. More than once I’ve awakened at night thinking my house is being broken into. Then I started seeing the dogs. Walking across my bedroom carpet and standing at the foot of my bed staring at me. It scared the heck out of me because I don’t have a German Shepherd or Malamute…
I have a Sheltie with an overbite that can only make ‘ffffff’ noises. My own dog went crazy making noises at the ghost dogs, and I ran all over the house making sure it was really spirits. We see their fluffy tails and watch them disappear into the closet. I don’t think he’s an evil spirit, and the dogs are certainly innocent.
Often things go missing and I’ll ask him and the dogs to help, and the missing things reappear in totally odd locations. Like my lipstick showing up in the freezer, or my headphones under my dresser. Places I’d never leave ANYTHING.
66. My "Gotcha" Moment
On one of my first nights in my new house, I thought I heard a door opening while I was reading in bed. So I very loudly got up, turned on the main light, smacked the wall a few times, to make sure I was heard, grabbed my handy dandy intruder-repelling stick (which I have literally never used), and headed out into the living room. My cat was staring at the front door, and I discovered it was unlocked, which was NOT normal.
When I looked out the peephole, what I saw made my blood run cold. I saw two dudes staring at the house. I stuck my head into the window near the door and waved at them. They immediately got into their separate cars and drove off. I was a lone female living with my cat. My friends stayed over the next few nights and we added some more locks.
67. Animate Objects
I live alone with my cat. Every night when he leaves my room, I shut my door and make sure it latches because he will often push against it. I always stuff a shirt under the door so my cat doesn't bounce it in the morning. I got to sleep around midnight one night, and I woke up around 3 am needing to turn over. That's when I noticed that, not only was my bedroom door open, but the shirt wedging it closed from the bottom was tossed aside.
If it had been my cat just figuring out how to open the door, that wedged shirt would have definitely prevented the door from opening. I have no explanation for this and I get the super goosebumps thinking about it.
68. London Bridge Whispers
My first year of university, a girl I lived with had her friend over one night. He’d been shooting footage on London Bridge at 3 AM to get some shots of it abandoned at night. He was really riled up about something and insisted we watch it with the audio up all the way and listen closely. Around the one-minute mark, I heard a low, deeply menacing voice whisper slowly “as you walk the devil’s path…” then something unintelligible… then “…death”.
It felt so final and evil. He turned to us and said, “Did you hear it”? I said I’d heard a voice. “What did it say”? I told him what I’d heard. His face went white. “You heard the exact same thing as me. You’re not the first”. My housemate said she’d heard the same thing as well. He hadn’t heard the voice when he was on the bridge, only when he was working on the audio.
But when he’d shown it to other people, they all heard the same thing. I don’t really have any other paranormal encounters, but I’m generally wary of paranormal events and this still scared me. There was some sort of presence on that bridge at night. It wanted to make itself known. I don’t think I ever want to know what it was.
69. It’s On The Baby Monitor!
My cousin, around 30 years old, had a baby and had one of those baby monitors with a video feed. She was in the living room with her sister, watching TV. Her sister gets up to go to the kitchen, swings by the baby monitor to take a look at the baby, and goes white. She slowly walks up to the mother and says there is a grown-up woman with a white dress holding the baby.
They were both alone in the house. The two of them both go running into the bedroom, only to find the baby in the crib and everything closed. To this day, the sister never forgot what she saw in the monitor.
70. A Warm Welcome
I just moved in and I was being followed by some small padding sounds. I am blind, so it’s not uncommon for me to get startled. Anyway, I just went about my business, but I kept being followed around by this sound. Eventually, after I was royally freaked out, the stalker decided to announce himself. Turns out, it was my new neighbor's dog trying to welcome me to the neighborhood. He’s my best friend now.
71. In The Arms Of An Angel
I was playing outside my townhouse alone. The parking lot was close to a tiny grass patch and sidewalk, with a big garage in the middle, so cars had to come around to the other side of it to be able to see where I was playing. I was using chalk to draw on the blacktop in my neighbor's parking spot (she was gone and let me do this) and one of my chalk sticks rolled into the part where people drove by. I walked over to get my chalk and was bent over when I heard a man call my name.
He crouched to give me a hug. I felt like I knew him, but I didn't know from where. I ran over and gave him a hug just as a car came flying around the blind corner of the garage. I looked at the car because I would've been hit if I hadn't gone over to give this man a hug, and when I looked back, he had completely disappeared. Years later, my mom and I were going through old family photos and I saw a picture of him. I picked it up and asked my mom who he was.
Her answer made me burst into tears. She told me he was my great-grandfather, her papouli. It's not necessarily scary, but it is strange and unexplainable. I never got the chance to meet him when he was alive, but I did get to see him that one time.
72. Aliens In The Sky?
I saw a UFO when I was 11 years old. I will swear on this my entire life. It was around 9:00-9:30 at night, and it was springtime. I was wide awake, completely sober, not on any meds. I looked out the window, and in between my house and my neighbor’s house was a grove of trees. It was a wooded area. Well, on the ground in this wooded area was a UFO.
Except, the physical surroundings were unaffected. None of the trees were crushed. This UFO sat there for about 5-10 minutes, then slowly took off in the air. It just went around in circles as it got higher, and as it got higher, the circles got wider. This lasted another five minutes or so until it vanished.
73. The Disappearing Market
My best friend and I found a store that didn't exist. It was full of pagan items and things like it, such as zodiac sign necklaces, candles, and books. It was downtown in our small city, and we were both familiar with the area and had never seen this store before. We ended up not buying anything because we were a couple of broke teenagers.
However, we did agree that we were going to return when we had more money. Except that when we did have more money, maybe two weeks later, that store was gone. It wasn't that the owner had closed up and left an empty space behind. The doorway straight-up no longer existed. It hadn't been freshly bricked over or anything, it just wasn't there.
74. Great Balls Of Fire
I was sitting in an armchair when I heard a faint buzzing noise coming from the fireplace directly behind me. I whipped my head around because I thought it was a wasp and I'm terrified of them, and I saw what looked like a little glowing blue ball of electricity hovering a foot off of the ground in front of the fireplace. It startled me and I jumped out of the chair; then, when I looked back, it was gone. It all happened within a couple of seconds.
I still can't figure out if I hallucinated or had some kind of medical episode. There was a thunderstorm at the time so I wonder if it was a weird static reaction or something...
75. Man's Best Friend
I’ve seen figures moving and they look like my deceased dog. Sometimes, people go through denial and make things up to comfort themselves, but I know I wasn't in denial. I know that I see my old friend walking around and sleeping under beds or pawing at the door. I can see her hop off the couch from the corner of my eye. I mentioned it to my mom once and she was like, “I miss her too bud”.
76. The Sleep Demon
Ever since I was 10, I’ve always encountered a sleep paralysis episode once a month. This experience I will never forget. I went to sleep earlier than I usually do, probably at around seven or so. I woke up at two in the morning and found out I couldn’t move. I tried calling my mom and dad, but nothing. In one corner there was a long dark black figure.
It had no facial features from what I remember. But the legs and that huge, long body is what terrified me the most. It crept closer and closer. Every movement felt like hours. Then it got to the side of my bed and their long finger was pointed at me. I closed my eyes and I think that’s when I passed out. I woke up a few hours later at 4 and it was still dark.
The figure was gone though. I didn’t get out of my bed or anything. I just cried and cried and cried. I stayed up the rest of the night looking at the corners every second. The trauma from that was so bad that I had to see a therapist, and my mom pulled me out of school for a few days so I could relax and be to myself. Every now and then I think about that day. And it makes me cry. The thought of me thinking I would get hurt or being taken still scares me.
77. The Animal Conference
I once saw a cat, a hare, a rat, a fox, a seagull, and a weasel all standing stock still on a road near Appleby in late summer a couple of years ago. The weird thing was, they were totally still in a perfect circle in the road facing each other, and as I approached in my car, I had to stop. I waited a few seconds, then they all seemed to snap out of it and legged it in different directions into the surrounding fields. I was so odd; I've never been able to work out what they were doing.
78. Message From Beyond
One night, I was falling asleep on the side of the bed that was nearest the sliding door to the balcony. Suddenly, I felt a VERY cold wind hit my back. I cursed myself for leaving the door open but also wondered why there would be so cold a breeze at that time of year; the end of April. I got up to close the door but it was already closed. Weird—but the story didn’t end there. My wife got a call a few hours later from a relative of hers informing her that her grandfather had just passed away a little while ago.
79. Musical Hands
My piano started playing unexpectedly in the middle of the night. It was maybe 60 feet away from me and I was completely terrified. I grabbed the safety bat and shouted out warnings, but the piano just kept playing. Not a song, just kind of plinking. As I inched down the hallway, I was thinking to myself, "This house is haunted, I've got to spend the night in a hotel and sell the house immediately".
I should add that I had my girlfriend over for the night. Scared as heck, I made my way to the piano with every hair on my body standing straight up. The lights were not on and the piano was still steadily plinking. When I threw on the lights, there was a big possum standing on the keyboard. I can't say I was relieved at that point, but the supernatural fears had evaporated. It came in through the dog door and it was probably after some dog food.
I had a big fishing net in the basement, so I grabbed it and threw it at him. He did his very best to get out, but I ultimately got him outside.
80. Emptying The Cabinet
My roommate enjoys making candles and keeps all his wax, scent oils, and supplies in the cabinet above the stove’s vent hood. We were hanging out in the living room one day and heard glass break in the kitchen. We found the cabinet open, and one of his oil vials shattered on the floor. We’re discussing how weird that is, and as I’m cleaning it up, another flew out of the cabinet and broke on the floor as well much further away.
It was like someone flicked it like a paper football. We both witnessed it and we still talk about it.
81. Spooky, Spooky Shadows
When I was eight, I saw a shadow following my moves during my prayers. What was troubling for me is that the movement of the shadow was delayed by a few seconds just like any people following a prayer would normally do. The shadow itself was not as clearly defined as my shadow and was half the size. I was terrorized but I pursued my prayer as if there was nothing happening.
It lasted for three days and even now I do not have a scientific explanation for this event. There was only one source of light, and the room in which I did my prayers was too small to allow another shadow with that delay. I had a few members of my family watch me as I pray in the same spot, but it did not happen when they were here, unfortunately.
82. Treehouse Trespasser
I grew up in a remote mountain area. When I was around 16, I was left alone at home one night as my parents had gone to some kind of work party. It was mid-summer, so I had my window open to keep my room cool. My window overlooked our backyard and we have a tree house built between two huge pine trees. It was the only time I had ever heard such a sound.
I thought it was a screaming baby or something, but it was creepy and raspy. Our dogs went insane at the back door. When I went to check the door, it became clear to me that something was in our tree house. I went to grab my dad's spotlight and I could see a pair of eyes looking back. I think it was a mountain lion—the sound they make is just bone-chilling.
83. Real-Life Toy Story
I was not allowed to own toys that made noise growing up. So no toy pianos, no toy drums, no electronic toys that talked, etc. I always wrote that off as my parents not liking loud toys. I was giving my mother heck about it one day because my kids have all the annoying loud toys nowadays. Turns out, when I was five, right after we got stationed in Germany, we moved into an old German apartment building.
For about a week, when my mom would get home from dropping me off at school, my little completely mechanical xylophone would just start randomly playing in my empty room. I guess she talked to a couple of the other moms in the building who said, "Yeah, that's a thing that happens. Stuffed animals also end up on the floor”. She was invited to a seance to talk to the spirits that lived in the building.
She said big nope to that. All my loud toys got donated, and all my stuffed animals got put in boxes in a closet in the guest room.
84. Monsters Of The Deep
My wife and I both saw massive crab-beings at the beach. I'm talking the size of a human. We saw a light coming through the lagoon and thought it was a boat. I kept watching as it floated up to a little island. I saw a massive crab leg reach out into the grass. While this was happening, my wife was looking at something right below us in the water.
It was also a giant crab leg but was reaching for her. I looked at her, said let's get out of here and looked back to check the light but it had disappeared. We were completely sober. It was the craziest thing I've ever seen.
85. The Abandoned School…
About two years ago, I went exploring in this abandoned school with a few of my mates. One of them thought it would be a good idea to fly his drone around in the main hall since it was a large open space. After about 15 seconds of flight, he flies his drone back to us. What he tells us is terrifying. He nervously says to us, “Guys? Don’t get alarmed, but I don’t think we’re alone in here”.
Curious and unnerved, the rest of us take a look at the footage that he recorded on the drone. There was a child staring at the camera through one of the windows of a corridor on our side of the building; blacked out eyes and smiling. We looked down the corridor and saw nothing, yet we heard no footsteps that could indicate to us that there was someone there.
86. When A Stranger Calls
I got a random phone call asking how my TV was holding up. I thought it was just the company we bought it from doing their normal customer support stuff until I was told exactly what channel I was watching. I asked who it was on the phone and their answer made my blood run cold. They said, “Don’t worry, I can see you but you can’t see me”.
I was nine at the time and my parents were out of town for work, so my older sister who was 17 got us all to hide in my parent's closet and we called 9-1-1. When they arrived, they called us to let us know they were knocking on the door. They found footprints but no person. We installed security cameras not soon after and never had a problem again, but it still creeps me out to this day.
87. A Close Encounter
This happened to my mom. She grew up in Wichita, Kansas during the time when BTK was active. The house of one of his first victims was down her block. One day, she was home with her brother—she was upstairs in her room and he was downstairs. Apparently, he heard a noise in the backyard moments before the power cut out (this was one of the key things that BTK did before entering a home). She then heard her brother scream and yell for her to run away.
She hopped out her window and sprinted barefoot to a Pizza Hut a couple of blocks away. She called the authorities who went to the house, but they didn’t find anything and everything turned out fine.
88. A Crowded Empty House
My family had just moved to a new house. This was our first time living in a house. My room was upstairs, but I was too scared to be there alone since I was 12. I stayed downstairs while my mom went to the store. I was lying on the floor next to the couch, and this couch was facing away from the door. I thought I heard the door open, so I sat up to get my mom.
As soon as I did, I saw a curly-headed white little boy. My family is black. Apparently, my siblings had been seeing people in the house too. An old Asian lady, a crying baby, I even saw a white middle-aged man that looked to be living in the 1930’s staring down at me from the balcony of the upstairs area one night. Never stayed home alone ever again after that.
89. Satanic Panic
A buddy of mine who was a former marine found a pretty large, abandoned building in a public park in upstate New York. We weren't expecting it and it was off the beaten path in the middle of the day. It was stable but missing large parts of the wall and we could see no one was around. It wasn't anything too exciting. Just rubble and lots of graffiti.
We went to the upper floor, and I noticed some satanic graffiti on a wall. Pointed it out to him and we chuckled, we're both metalheads and into the occult. I then opened a door that led to a small office and on the wall directly in front of me is a wall-to-ceiling pentagram in what looked like thick oil paint. There's no furniture or anything in this room.
We both stood there for a second, and as I went to take a step toward it, I heard "Get Out" in an even but stern voice like it came from in my head. Before I knew it, my friend started running in the opposite direction. I took off behind him and when we got outside, he looks at me wide-eyed, and asked "Did you hear it"?
He heard the voice too and he said it sounded like it came behind us. I've never felt anything like that and still causes goosebumps. I want to explain it away, but I can't accept it in my head.
90. You've Got Company
I was staying at my parent's place, sleeping in their bed while they were away when suddenly I woke up paralyzed. I saw someone sneaking around, and the bedroom door was open. The person—wearing dark clothes, face obscured—eventually came into the room, sat on the bed, and leaned closer, and closer, and closer. When I was finally able to break out of the sleep paralysis, I first made sure the front door was locked. It was not.
91. Switching Hooks
The towel hanger on my bathroom door has four hooks, but I only use two. So, I keep my towels (completely different in terms of size and color) on the first hook and another one on the third hook. I live alone and I kept them like that for more than a year. The only times I move the towels is when I put them in the washing machine. No more than two weeks ago, during the day, I opened my bathroom door and the face towel was on the fourth hook instead of the first.
I had nobody visiting or anything like that and I've never switched hooks on purpose before.
92. The Gathering Of Bullies
I was in a village in the Adirondacks, helping house-sit for family members while they dealt with some medical emergencies. Now, I'd heard a few weird stories about this house from said family members, but always wrote it off as a mixture of superstition and it being an old house. Until this one winter night. I'm fairly sure I was watching South Park or something on Comedy Central, when I noticed that I was having trouble hearing the TV.
I start looking for the remote, when I hear what sounds like a young child bawling his eyes out while walking down the street outside the house. Now remember, it's the middle of winter at close to midnight, in a small village in the Adirondack mountains. What the heck could a kid possibly be doing out there in the cold, crying like that?
So, I pause my search for the remote control and start going to the window to see what the heck is up. My hand is on the curtain, about to peek out, when a new sound joins the crying kid. It sounds like a pack of kids following the crying kid and they are laughing just maliciously. It was like if every bully you ever had got together and followed jeering at you.
This one kid is still just sobbing his poor guts out and the rest think it's the funniest thing ever. I froze. As in every part of my lizard brain was screaming at me, "DON'T DO IT, YOU WILL GET HURT". I basically stood there for a minute, so afraid to move a muscle until the sound finally faded into the distance. I didn't sleep that night.
I've tried to reason to myself later on that it must've been some wild animals or something, but the weird thing with the TV and the fact that I'm not superstitious but my body entered into "DANGER DANGER" mode, always makes me wonder.
93. The Attic Door
I had no idea our house had an attic door because it was in my parents’ closet. One weekend, I was home alone. I ALWAYS heard strange noises in the house. Like steps coming from upstairs, or random bangs, creaks. The usual house noises you try to forget about. My Mom gets home, goes to her room, and comes walking back downstairs like immediately.
She looks at me and she says, "Why were you in my closet”? I wasn't, so I told her that. She told me that the attic door was missing so she knew I was lying... to which I replied, "There's a door to the attic"? It had been pushed up into the attic and flipped over to the side. Attic doors are not light either, so it was WEIRD.
Strange noises still happened all the time. Other stuff would start to happen—like things going missing—that made us think it may have been squatters. But we moved, so...not my problem either way anymore.
94. Knock Three Times
I was home alone once when I was about 12 years old. I was watching a movie on my laptop when suddenly the back door slammed shut. I had locked it, so I knew something wasn't right. I got up with a metal baseball bat. Then, the front door, which I had locked, slammed shut as well. I locked the back door and went to check out the front door.
That's when I heard a knocking at the back door. I ran into my room, called the authorities, and hid until they arrived. The knocking was continuous for about three minutes, nonstop until I heard sirens. They had a look at our surveillance video. It showed the doors opening on their own and no one at the back door when I heard knocking.
Now there are two deadbolts on both doors.
95. A True Haunting
The first house I moved into was a very old, very small house in a town that dated back to the Civil War. I lived there during my college years with three other guys since rents were high, but we made it work. The house was built on a hill and it had a small driveway in the front, as well as a U-shaped driveway in the back. It had a full basement and was owned by someone with multiple rental properties in the area. They told us we had full access to the upstairs, but that they used the downstairs for storage.
We never questioned it because the rent for this particular location was low and we didn't want to ruin our rapport with the landlord. We were still technically on campus, but our house was surrounded by other college students, so we could have parties whenever we wanted to. Everything was great—until we started having unwanted visitors. At first, things were pretty easy to ignore or completely write off.
We'd often find rooms with the lights on despite none of us having flipped any switches, or we would hear the bathroom faucet turn on and off by itself. We tried to do what research we could at the time and found that water pressure can cause faucets to do some crazy things on their own and that power surges can do similar things with flickering lights. Unfortunately, things kept getting stranger.
At one point, one of our roommates, who was home alone, got out of the shower, looked into the mirror to start shaving, and noticed that someone else stepped out of the shower behind him and left the room. He searched the house, but he couldn't find anyone else home at the time. Later on, our other roommate had several items go missing out of his room, including his keys and pocket knife. He later found them in our microwave. Again, no one else was home at the time.
Me, personally: I got home on a day when nobody else was at the house for the next couple of hours in between classes. There was a folding chair on the front porch next to the door, and I had an armload of books. I set the books down in the chair, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. I turned around to pick up my books again and just as I was about to enter the house, the door slammed in my face. I thought the wind had caught the door, but when I tried to open it again, the door had locked itself again...both the handle and the deadbolt.
On another occasion, the three of us were sitting together on a couch watching TV when we heard a loud, heavy thud, as though something had been dragged off of a bed in a back bedroom. All three of us later confirmed that we could distinctly hear footsteps walking through the house as well as the sound of something heavy being dragged behind. The back door also opened and slammed shut, even though we were all in the living room, and there was supposed to be no one else in the house.
But then it got more disturbing. A week later, we started to smell gas in the house. We called the authorities in the middle of the night and they searched the house while we waited on the front lawn. They told us that they couldn't find a gas leak and they asked us to open the basement. We had never been in there, at our landlord' request, but since the fire department was asking, we opened the garage door. Right in front of us was a Honda motorcycle with a large pool of gasoline underneath it where the gas tank had apparently leaked underneath.
The firefighters saw this and decided to leave, while we were left to look around the rest of the basement. Most of what we found was shelves and shelves of canned vegetables, but in the very middle of the floor, under everyone's bedrooms, was a mortuary table and a device. I'm still not sure what the device was; it was cylindrical with a small viewport in the front door. It seemed to have some places on the back for hoses or pipes to connect to it, but nothing was attached when we found it.
Soon after, we found out that our land owner worked night shifts at a local hospital. Whatever it might have been, we decided that enough was enough and we all decided to move out as soon as our leases were up. I was the last one there, and I promise that the last seven days I spent there alone are the longest days I've spent anywhere since.
I am a self-described cynic who doesn't believe in the supernatural, but I can also admit when I have absolutely no explanation for a set of events. I just accept that being in old houses alone is not a good idea, and I do my best to avoid them altogether.
96. A False Call
I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I had forgotten to lock the front door. For reference, my bedroom door was about two feet from my front door. Out of nowhere, two shadowy figures passed by. One of them low to the ground and the other one much taller. My heart was beating out of my chest. Nervously, I screeched, “Who is it”?!
A man said, “It’s Doug”! As I was thinking to myself, who the heck is Doug, he muttered, “Oh, shoot”. He had the wrong house. He turned around to go back out the front door and said, “Sorry”. I asked, “ Didn’t you have a dog with you”? He replied, “Oh, yeah. Hey, c’mon”! He left, his dog ran out after him and I locked my front door.
97. Good Looking Out
The first time I saw her, I was six. We were playing the opposite of hide-and-seek. One person hides while everyone else looks, and once you find the person, you hide with them until there’s only one person looking. It was my turn to hide and I chose to hide under the stairs where my dad kept all the camping gear. There was only one person left. With all of us cramped in the room under the stairs, the last person left was sitting on the stairs above us.
It was my brother, and we could hear him yelling in his defeat to get us to surrender. In my hiding spot, I could see the door that led out and it was cracked open a little bit. A girl about my age poked her head into the room and waved at me. I asked her, "What’s your name”? What happened next made my blood run cold. With no reply, she vanished, which prompted me to follow after her. I yelled at her to come back, ultimately giving up our hiding spot.
Everyone under the stairs, my brothers and cousins, started yelling at me, asking what the heck I was doing and who I was talking to. Nobody else had seen her and we couldn’t find her upon searching. The next time I saw her, I had gone over to the neighbors' house to play with a boy my age because they had just gotten a new puppy. The boy had eight siblings—all boys—and his oldest brother had come home to visit. He came into the basement where we were playing.
Shortly after, I heard my name being called from upstairs by a girl. It was the same girl I had seen before, standing at the top of the stairs. She told me to call my older brother and get him to walk me home right away. We lived right next door. I didn’t feel scared, but I did exactly what she told me to do right then and there. My older brother was furious and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just do the 15-second walk home by myself.
I later noticed that I would see her often in the presence of the neighbor's oldest brother. I’m not sure why I had never questioned her or feared her. I was one stubborn child and I hated being told what to do, but for some reason, I trusted her. One day, I woke up in the middle of the night and I saw her again. She told me I needed to be really quiet and that I should wake my dad up because someone was outside my window.
I did what I was told and went to wake up my dad. He got his gun out of the safe by his bed and instructed me to stay with my mom. A few seconds later, he started screaming at my mom to call 9-1-1. Sure enough, there was someone outside my window. When the officers were questioning me, I mentioned the girl, which freaked my parents out. They later took me to see the bishop, and he started me on all types of church therapy nonsense.
They thought that would stop me from seeing her, but it didn't work. A few years later, I saw her on the way home from my boyfriend's house one night. I was driving at around midnight through a backroad that had trees on all sides. I was coming up to an intersection. She walked out from the tree line in front of me causing me to slow to a stop just before the intersection. As soon as I stopped, a car blew through the stop signs, just in front of me.
I turned back to where she was and she just smiled before walking back into the tree line. Had I not stopped, I would have been hit on my side of the car by the person who blew through the stop signs. I’ve seen her on many other occasions. Call it hallucinations, call it “divine” intervention, call it whatever you want—but I'm grateful for her. I’ve never been scared to see her. Actually, I'm more at peace whenever she's around; it's kind of like seeing an old friend.
98. Lost And Found
I was at home by myself on a call with some friends when all of a sudden my dog started barking like crazy, It was odd since it was the middle of the night and he was usually asleep. I went downstairs to check on him and I found him barking at our hall closet. Terrified, I grabbed the bat that I kept in my room just in case and I opened the door.
There was nothing out of usual at first, but then I looked down and I noticed something strange—it was a familiar-looking object at the bottom of the closet. It was my mom's necklace that she had lost six years prior. I showed it to my mom at breakfast and she was just as shocked as I was. I still have no clue how it got there or how my dog knew it was in there, definitely one of the oddest occurrences of my life.
99. A True Nightmare
I was playing hide and seek at a friend's house when I was seven or eight. I was running to get behind the house and took the corner and stepped on top of the metal grate above the basement escape window. Suddenly, my life flashed before my eyes. The grate somehow gave way and I fell to the bottom, managing to scrape my legs arms and head as I fell. Then I saw where I was and just started screaming.
The bottom was dirty gravel strewn with the skeletal and still decomposing remains of countless frogs. To make matters worse, years of undisturbed spider webs crisscrossing was also triggered and I swear I could see the spider's eyes looking at me as dozens of thicc booty spiders crawled frantically towards me to enjoy their feast.
I am laying at the bottom, blood seemingly gushing from my elbows, knees, and forehead as I started climbing the infinitely long ladder to the surface while screaming and crying. Each rung of the ladder was also covered in webs and spiders, who started crawling up my arms. I made it to the surface and my friend's mom tried to comfort me to little avail.
This series of events took maybe 15 seconds but felt like slow motion the entire time. To this day I have trust issues with any metal grate (storm drain, city sidewalk vent) and what I consider a reasonable fear of spiders.
100. Nothing Is The Same Anymore
A long time ago I had a conversation with an old workmate who described his "glitch in the matrix" moment. The detail is hazy, but he said one day he in his house when he felt a sudden NEED to go outside and 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 a 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.
101. Ruining Everything
This happened to my friend. It’s Halloween night and there’s a knock on her parents’ door. However, when her dad opens the door, he comes face to face with the most horrifying sight: There's a man with a bag on his head standing on their porch...completely silent. The man makes a move to step into their house and the dad pushes him backward.
Everyone watches as the man falls backward off of the step and smashes his head on the ground. But then the heartwrenching truth was revealed. The fallen figure was actually their grandfather, who was trying to prank the family. He was rushed to the hospital with permanent damage. He’s no longer able to care for himself or his wife who had health issues as well.
They both ended up in convalescent care. Additionally, my friend’s mother never forgave her husband, placing the blame for the accident entirely on his shoulders. They divorced shortly after.
102. Howdy, Stranger
I was driving away from a gas station. Out of nowhere, a guy in a suit comes running up to my minivan and starts yanking the door. As if he knew me, he began pleading, "C’mon, LET ME IN". Luckily my doors were locked, and I asked him who the heck he was through my window. He looked genuinely surprised that I wouldn't let him in.
After I refused again, his facial expression inverted; as if he just realized something horrible. He let go of my car, said something to the effect of "You're one of them, aren't you"? Then he ran away behind the gas station and into the woods. Full suit and tie, nice shoes, extremely frantic in nature, zero explanation. The look in that man's eyes was pure terror when I didn't let him in.
103. Ronald McSecrets
This one time when I was little, my dad woke me up at like 2 am said "Get ready, we're going to McDonald's". I was so confused and kept asking why, but he wouldn't answer anything besides, "because" or "to have fun". The rest of my family—my two brothers, my sister, and my mom—didn't come with us and they were still asleep when we left.
The play place was closed, and we just kind of sat there for an hour or so eating, then went back home. To this day, I still have NO idea why he frantically needed me out of the house, and he swears he doesn't remember that happening, but the whole thing was SO weird that I kept the toy that I got from the Happy Meal to remember it by, and I still have it to this day…
It's my only proof of this weird freaking night that my dad (almost scarily) hurried me to McDonald’s at 2 am. I have two guesses why. First, my sister pooped the bed and they were worried I'd make fun of her. Or maybe they somehow noticed something like rats in my room? Were they worried I wouldn't be able to sleep if I knew that there were rats and they needed an hour or so to get them out???
Either way, a very strange night that my dad refuses to tell me the truth about, which only makes me think it's something much worse. Like. I'm 23 now. If he said "Yeah, your sister pooped the bed and we didn't want you to know," I'd have been like cool, nice, good thinking. But he REFUSES to believe that it happened at all. WHAT HAPPENED.
104. Doom From Above
When I was seven years old, my mom gave birth to my little sister. My dad and I went to visit her in the hospital to check out the new family member. As seven-year-olds often do, I got bored, so my parents sent me to the kiosk right outside the main building to get an ice cream. As I was walking towards the kiosk, I cut over the lawn as it was a shorter walk.
Suddenly I feel and hear a really heavy thud right behind me. I turn around to see an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the warped, mangled body of a man in a hospital gown maybe 40-50 cm from where I was standing. The man had jumped off the hospital roof after receiving the news he had terminal cancer.
My mom and a lot of the others in the birth ward even saw the guy flying past the windows. The guy basically just fell short of taking me with him. A group of doctors and psychiatrists asked me to get emergency therapy, but I insisted on getting my ice cream and going home. To this day, I can still recall the thud of the body hitting the ground and his body lying next to me, clear as crystal.
105. The Cabin In The Woods
My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin. I used to spend time there in the summer tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One extremely early morning, when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and told us it was time to go fishing. It was still super early and we were all confused because it was pitch dark.
He hustled us down to the dock where he kept his little fishing boat and quickly launched us into the water and away from the house. At this point we were all getting a little freaked out—but this was just the beginning. My uncle wasn’t talking. We just sat, shivering under a blanket at the bow of the boat, while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline and waved a flashlight furtively ahead of us.
We eventually arrived at my uncle’s friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled into his house. Our uncle sent us to the loft to sleep. He and his buddy locked the doors and left, not returning until well after sunrise. Eventually, our uncle showed up with the truck and trailer already packed with all of our gear, and he told us it was time to go home.
Many years later, my uncle confided to me that the reason he’d hustled us home was because he’d woken up around 3 AM to a strange “Thok! Thok! Thok"! sound from outside the cabin. He’d gone out to investigate, when a massive jack pine fell directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line.
Just in time, my uncle saw a man, holding an axe. The man slinked away into the dark of the trees and woods. He and his buddy returned to his cabin later, and had to take turns chainsawing the tree that fell across our narrow driveway apart, while the other stood watch with a rifle. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
