No horror movie can compete with the real-life moments that send a chill down our spines. The close-calls and unexplainable events that stick with us for years after the fact. These people relived the most terrifying moments of their entire lives, and their stories are going to have us sleeping with the lights on for a week.
1. Going In A Different Direction
Back in the 70s, friends and I planned a camping trip for a long weekend. We picked up a hitchhiker headed to Kernville and dropped him off on the way. We thought it was no big deal, but when we got to our campsite, my girlfriend made a chilling discovery. She found a note from the hitchhiker on her bag. It said, “I could have made all of you disappear forever.” We didn’t sleep that night.
2. Distant Relative
I met a guy who had been traveling through Australia with a couple friends, hitchhiking around as many people have done. He told me a story that I'll never forget. One day, one of his friends told him they were near his distant uncle’s house. He'd never met him before, but he got his uncle's phone number from a family member. He called him and, as the hitchhikers had hoped, the uncle offered them a place to stay for the night.
He picked them up and drove them to his rural property way out in the bush. They said he seemed like a pretty friendly, cheery, and normal guy, so they had no worries about staying with him. When it was time to set up a place to sleep, the uncle opened a closet that was totally full of sleeping bags and bed rolls. They didn’t think too much about it at the time, but looking back, that was a sign that something wasn't right.
They set up on the floor and stayed for a few days. Then the uncle drove them to the bus station, and they went on their way. A year later, the authorities took the uncle into custody. It turned out that he had been picking up young hitch-hiking backpackers, then killing them. The guy telling this story was 100% certain he had slept in the sleeping bag of one of his victims.
3. Lost Backpack
I was exploring the forests near my house with my cousin. We were on a steep hill and as we looked down, we saw that there were a bunch of craters at the very bottom. As we looked inside one of the craters, we saw something strange. There was a backpack in there. We tried to climb down, but the hill was too steep and slippery to do it safely, so we planned on returning later with a rope.
The next day, there was a news story about how there was a backpack with the remains of a girl in that forest. A guy walking his dog found it after the dog would not stop barking at the edge of the crater and staring at the backpack. My cousin and I decided not to go exploring in the forests anymore after we saw that news clip.
4. Forest Fiends
In high school, my buddy and I were riding our dirt bikes on the trails that ran around the logging roads in Washington. Thousands and thousands of acres of undeveloped land with just gravel roads and trails. We were on our way back to the truck when we stopped at an intersection to figure out which way to turn. That's when we saw an eerie sight.
Three dudes in overalls, no shirts, and full-face helmets rode out of the woods on quads. They rode a few slow circles around us, then took off back into the woods. We booked it the heck out of there. Whatever they were guarding, they didn't want us to see.
5. Stranger in the Woods
I was camping with a friend in a backwoods camping area. There weren't many sites and they were all super spaced out. We had already been there one night, had the site fully set up, had been hiking all day—the works. We drove into town to get some food, and when we were driving back to our secluded campsite, we passed a man walking out of the only road to our site.
We both locked eyes with him and I got a super creeped-out feeling. He stared at us like he knew us and hated us, but we had never seen him in our lives. When we got to our tent, we went inside and everything we had in there was tossed. Our bags were dumped out and our clothes were thrown everywhere. We quickly realized both our hunting knives were gone, along with a bunch of our clothes.
We also realized it had to be that guy we saw. There were no other sites or hiking paths he could've been walking from besides ours. We jumped in the car and drove back towards where we had seen him, but he was gone. So we drove a bit further and found a common area where other campers were gathered. We sprinted down and asked "have any of you seen this guy..." and described him. Their response chilled me to the bone.
The people at the gathering just stared at us and didn't speak, giving us an even more creeped-out feeling. It was at that point that I told my friend, "We need to leave this place right now." Walking back to our car, we looked over the edge of a guardrail and saw all our clothes in the woods. We gathered them up but didn't find either of our knives.
Knowing this guy was still out there with those knives and that no one around us cared freaked us out so much, we packed the car up and ended our camping trip early. No way were we staying out in those woods one more night!
6. More Than a Feeling
My mom and I were walking our dog on a semi-secluded, dried-up river bed when I was probably 7 or 8 years old. A couple approached us, and instantly something in my gut told me that they weren't safe. The man asked some weird question like, "Is it just you and your daughter here?"' and then proceeded to say that he took pictures of kids for a living and that he would love to have me model for him.
I didn't wait to hear the rest of the conversation because after that I took off. I'm ashamed to admit, I left my mom and dog behind with the creepy guy. My mom was livid, saying how rude I was and how worried she was because she didn't know where I went, but the intense "leave now!" feeling that came over me totally clouded any sort of reasoning.
7. Truck on Truck Violence
I was driving to work one morning at about 2 am. As I was behind this slow 18-wheeler, I was getting a feeling I needed to move. When we came up to a red light, I switched over a lane so that I wouldn’t be behind him anymore. Just about a second later I heard something that sounded like an explosion. It was a tow truck slamming into the back of the 18-wheeler at about 70 mph.
It tore off the two rear axles on the trailer, and most certainly would have smashed my car to pieces.
8. Dog vs. Bear
I was staying at a friend's house out in the country. He was asleep in another room, I was dozing off with his gigantic pit bull Izzy Bell, a sweet girl. In the middle of the night, I was awoken by sounds outside, like scrambling. Izzy leaps up too, looks at me, then the back door, then growls. My friend at the time had a young daughter, about four or five, so I immediately began to worry about her.
I grab the nearest weapon, a fire poker, and go to open the door as Izzy is beside me seemingly ready for a fight. But it didn't feel right. I instead bar the door the best I could and creep to look out of a window. As I look, I feel myself nearly scream. Right outside is a gigantic bear. So big it could easily rip my head off, and it has a few cubs in tow. I watch as it ambles off.
I am pretty sure that if I had charged out of that door as I originally intended, me and Izzy would not be here today.
9. Anybody There?
I once interviewed a woman who told me a horror story about something that happened to her as a girl. When she was ten, she had trouble sleeping. She thought that the Boogeyman was standing in her closet and staring at her whenever she tried to sleep. Every night, she would go downstairs and tell her parents about how scared she felt. And every night, her father would tell her the Boogeyman didn't exist and then send her back to bed.
This happened over several nights, and the father got tired of it. That night, he walked her back up to her bedroom, turned on the light, and said, "I'll show you there's no Boogeyman." As he went to open the closet door, something on the other side held it shut. The dad immediately sent his daughter out of the room and forced the door open to find that a man was in there.
He'd been sneaking into their house every night to stand in the girl's closet and watch her.
10. Sound Travels
I was maybe 12 or 13 at the time. A childhood friend of mine came to the house to ask if I could play. Mom said she had a bad feeling and told me not to go. My friend leaves the house and goes down the hill, doesn't stop at the stop sign, and gets hit by a car. I still remember hearing the car and hearing his scream.
Thankfully, he survived, and is both alive and healthy today. But if momma bear didn't have her instinct, I'd have probably been hit or been in a bad spot.
11. Unanswered Questions
I was driving Uber one night. It was pretty tame until I picked up two guys who wanted to go to a gentleman's club forty miles away. As they requested an UberSelect fare, I was happy to drive that far. It took them fifteen minutes to get ready and into the car, but they seemed cool so I wasn't worried. As soon as we got onto the freeway, things took a very strange turn…
The guy in the passenger seat started asking about Uber driving, and things got dark. After a few minutes, he started saying things like, "What would you do if someone just grabbed the steering wheel and ran the car into the median?" and "Have you ever thought about what would happen if someone in the back seat tried to strangle you while you were driving?"
I got a little freaked out and tried to lighten the mood by asking what they were celebrating, but the one guy just kept at it. I was happy to get to the club and get them the heck out of the car. The surprise bonus was that the bouncer at the club gave me $40 for dropping them off there. I never drove Uber again, though. Screw that.
12. Let Us In
I lived with three other girls in college. All three took off early for spring break, leaving me alone in the house. During my first night on my own, I heard someone bang on my front door at 2 AM. Then I heard more knocks at my back door. A man yelled, “I’m an officer. Open the door!” I didn’t believe him. I stayed in my room and started to panic.
As I heard bodies slam against both doors, and a man saying, “Little girl, open the door. We know you’re alone,” I frantically dialed 9-1-1. Thank God I did. As the sirens approached, I saw officers chase four boys from our school hockey team and pin them face down on the grass. I had to file restraining orders against all of them.
13. All In Your Head
When I worked in healthcare, I had a patient who got a sinus infection. He stopped taking his antibiotics after a few days because he felt better. Then, overnight, everything fell apart. He got to the Emergency Department, where the doctors realized he was experiencing stroke symptoms. It turned out that the sinus infection had spread to his cranial cavity.
There was so much pus in there that it was twisting his brain. No one thought he would survive the surgery. The family was advised to expect the worst, but amazingly, he somehow made it through. It wasn’t an easy recovery though. He ended up needing three more surgeries to wash all the pus out and then spent almost two months in the hospital. Take your full dose of antibiotics, people!
14. Geriatrick Grandparents
My sister and I were playing outside when an elderly couple walked by our yard. Our yard had this cemetery in the back that was a common local attraction for tourists as the house was built in the 1800s. Most of the graves were of children lost to illnesses. The old couple were pestering my sister. They were asking her to tell them her name.
We got scared and ran inside to tell our mom what had happened. The following week, I heard a story on the news about an elderly couple approaching a teenage girl and attacking her. It was the same couple who came over to us that day. It still scares me.
15. Pause For Effect
When I was younger, my mother managed the apartment where we lived. Right before Halloween, she told a scary story about a tragic accident involving the two little boys and their mom above us in the vacant apartment. She said if you listened closely, you could still hear their footsteps running up and down the hallway.
At that very moment, we heard the sound of running upstairs. The look on my mother’s face was pure terror. She called the neighborhood patrol man and one of the on-duty maintenance guys to go and check the apartment. They found a homeless mother living there who had slipped through an open window with her two children.
My mom never told ghost stories again.
16. Man’s Best Friend
My family has a Bernese mountain dog called Ava, who is very big. She’s a quiet and lazy dog, but she also seems to be alert at all times. One night, my parents went out for dinner and left me at home with Ava. I was downstairs watching TV and my lounge is right next to the front door. At around 8:00 PM, the doorbell rang.
I opened the door to see a guy in fairly plain clothes standing there. He told me that he had a delivery for me. I was confused because he didn’t look like a delivery driver, and he had no parcel. Suddenly, I turn my head and see another guy around the side of my driveway which goes to our back door. This other man is clearly walking towards my back door.
I freak out and the guy at the door notices this. He barges through, shouting for the other guy. This is when Ava wakes up and begins to let out the loudest bark I’ve ever heard, making the guy stumble back. She rushed towards him and jumped up, grabbing his shoulder and literally throwing him out the door. His buddy came along, but saw Ava and started to run.
The other guy managed to slip out of Ava’s grip and run down the road. I somehow managed to get Ava to stay so I didn’t lose her, and they got away. I was so shaken up. I called my parents and then the authorities, and I gave them a statement. It’s safe to say that Ava got plenty of treats from then on, and I always keep her nearby when I am on my own.
17. A Taste Of His Own Medicine
I was standing in line at the local pharmacy to get my prescriptions. This is a small town and I am a regular there, so they know me on sight. I was behind a couple of other people in line, and there were a couple of people behind me. I kept feeling a tickle in my hair in the back of my head, but every time I looked behind me, the guy there was a few steps back and looking at the floor.
This happened several times by the time I reached the front of the line. The pharmacist told me she wanted to talk to me about my medication in the consultation room. I thought this was weird, because we both knew I had been on this medication for years and would be for life. Nothing new. I get back to the room and close the door, and she comes in from the pharmacy.
She told me that the man behind me had been stepping forward, sticking his nose in my hair, and smelling it before stepping back and looking at the floor. This shook me pretty badly as this is such weird behavior, especially in my little town. The pharmacy staff insisted on having me wait there until the guy was distracted by another pharmacy employee.
They then had a security guard walk me to my car and watch me drive off, to make sure I was gone before Hair Sniffer came out and saw what car I was driving or what direction I was going in. I still use this pharmacy and some of the same people still work there. I will always be grateful that they took the initiative to make sure I was safe that day.
18. Bad Fingers
One time on the train, this old dude slipped his little finger in the mini pockets of my jeans. When I pointed this out, he turned away, whispered, “bad finger,” and slapped his own hand.
19. Looking for a Mommy
I was 18 years old and working retail. An older man in his mid-40s came in with a young girl who looked around 3. He came up to me and started chatting. I was polite at first, but then the conversation shifted. I don’t remember exactly what was said that led to this, but the guy was trying to get my number and being overly flirtatious.
He then looked at the girl in his arms. What he said next was so disturbing it’s unforgettable. He told me, I kid you not, “She needs a mommy.” I got away from him so fast. I still think about how gross that made me feel, and I actually worry about that little girl.
20. Security Guardian Angel
When I was in college, I lived in a sketchy part of Chicago. I liked to take late-night strolls, even when I was living in that neighborhood as a 20-year-old woman. Yeah, I know. Pretty dumb of me. One night, I was feeling stressed out so I embarked on one of my late-night strolls. I was walking along a somewhat busy road. Cars were zooming past me. Pretty normal.
I wasn't paying much attention because I was too wrapped up in whatever was stressing me out that night. Suddenly, a chill shot up my spine. Hypervigilance washed over me and I became more alert than I had ever been. Something was wrong. Someone was watching me. I quickly spotted a car. It was driving in the opposite direction, a little slower than usual. It was too dark for me to see anyone inside the car, and the car was pretty unassuming. But I still knew something was off.
They were watching me. I just knew. The car drove past me and then made a U-turn. Now it was right behind me, creeping along the curb. Luckily, there was a convenience store a few blocks ahead. I started walking faster, and the car eventually sped past me and disappeared into a corner. I somehow knew I wasn't safe yet, so I still sprinted to the store.
I told the security guard what happened, and we both went outside. The car was parked up the street, about 50-100 feet away. The security guard was a big guy who looked intimidating. He marched toward the car, and the car immediately backed up, made a U-turn, and then booked it out of there. The security guard called the cops, and they drove me home.
I never took a late-night stroll again. My gut made me more alert, but it was really the security guard who saved my life. I'm positive that if he wasn't there that night, something bad would've happened to me. I wish I could find that security guard to thank him.
21. Not Alone
A couple years ago, I snuck into an abandoned orphanage with a couple of buddies. Dumb I know, but college kids seek dumbness. I step down through a basement window onto a barrel, easy. We get down and walk through a hallway when we notice a drop of blood by our feet. After close examination of ourselves, we notice none of us are bleeding. But then it got creepier.
We shined our flashlight further ahead and notice the blood continues into the darkness. Got the heck out as fast as possible. Trespassing with someone or something else injured in the basement of this building? No thanks.
22. Knock Knock
My car was taken the very night I moved into my new house in a very good neighborhood. The neighbors had warned us that the neighborhood was being targeted at the time. They mentioned a woman around the corner who opened the door for knockers in the middle of the night and they attacked her, robbed her, and almost ended her.
We had reported the car stolen, and did the reports when it happened. Well, two nights later in the middle of the night, I hear a knock on the door. They said open up, it's the authorities. Well, since I had heard the story about the other lady, I was suspicious and did not answer. I grabbed my kids and put them in my daughter's room because it had access to the roof from the window.
I called the real authorities to say that two men claiming to be them were pounding on my door. They said there were no officers in the area and they're sending a car. Turns out, these same guys took the car and came back for seconds. The best part of the whole story was that I did get my car back...because they brought it with them.
23. In the Dark
I used to drive for Lyft. Last year, I picked up a young couple from a bar at about 1:30 am. They were fairly chill and I figured it would be my last ride of the night. The dude asked me to stop at a corner store on the way to their destination. I didn’t see any harm in waiting, so I stopped, and had a nice chat with the young woman while he was in the store.
He ended up being about five minutes. When he came out, he asked me to take him to a location that was in the opposite direction of their destination, but was only about a mile away. He said he wanted to meet some friends really quick and grab some drinks. Since I figured it would be my last ride of the night, I said "screw it, why not" and drove him over there.
Now, I know the town we live in fairly well, but the direction that we were coming from was not a way I was used to going when I would go to this location. So, when I turned onto the destination street, I missed the turn into the complex parking lot. I just came to a complete stop, since the roads were empty, and asked them if they just wanted me to park on the street or pull into the complex.
This is when the two of them started arguing, as he suddenly wanted to go in and hang out for a few minutes while she didn’t want to go in at all; she just wanted him to do his thing and get out of there so they could go home. And then something terrifying happened. Something hit my car. The sound is unmistakable to me, so I immediately started to look around to figure out what it was.
But there were no other cars on the road, so that couldn’t have been it. Then I moved to the next thing on my mental checklist: If something didn’t hit me, then what did I hit? But that didn’t make any sense either as I’d been in park and couldn’t have hit anything. It’s at this point that the young lady’s attitude completely changed.
She just kind of looked around, and then said, "Can we just get out of here? It hurts and I want to go home." This was odd to me, as she’d been sitting in my car for about 10 minutes at this point and hadn’t said a word about any kind of pain. She followed this up with, “It hurts and I can’t move.” She put her hand to her back, and pulled it out covered in blood.
What. The. Heck. The guy starts freaking out, thinking that something in my trunk had exploded, but it was empty. As he reached over to tend to her, I noticed something white sticking out of the seat. This hadn’t been there at the beginning of the night, so I asked him what it was. He pulled on it; it was a piece of the filler fuzz from my seat.
It came out of the hole that had been made in the seat. Because she’d been shot. As soon as he grabbed that fuzz, we both had the same realization. He slammed shut his door and I drove them straight to the hospital, which was only a couple of miles away. That realization was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever experienced.
Wikimedia Commons, Tony Webster
24. Good Samaritan
When I was 14, I was walking home from school when a creepy older guy pulled over his work van, got out, and started asking me for directions to a well-known local place. He was feigning like he didn't understand what I was saying, in an obvious attempt to draw out the conversation. So that alone set off alarm bells in my head, but then he kept looking around the whole time.
I knew he was about to try something. Some lady happened to be walking from her house to her car so I yelled out, "Hey Mom! Can you come here and help give this guy directions?" Surprisingly, the lady actually came over and as she did, she yelled something like, "Your father and your big brothers will be out in a minute, are you ready to go?"
He looked panicked, quickly got back into his car, and took off. Once he left, that lady told me she knew what was up and made sure I was okay, before letting me use her phone to call the authorities. Turns out, I wasn't the only girl he tried to lure and abduct. My faith in humanity was both damaged and restored that day.
25. Office Stalker
This was by far the creepiest thing to ever happen to me. For context, I live only a few streets away from my workplace. This guy came to my floor one day for a team meeting. Ever since then, he made a point to pass my desk when walking to the kitchen, which doesn't make sense logically as the elevator basically opens right onto the kitchen.
Keep in mind, this guy is a complete stranger, nobody had ever seen him on our floor, so my work friends KNEW he purposely came to our floor just to see me. He would make excuses to be near me whenever I was in the kitchen, for example to get a glass of water while I am washing my dishes. He was always alone, never spoke to anyone, and only watched me. This happened for about three months.
One day, he happened to be downstairs at the time I finished work. He then knew EXACTLY what time I finish and waited downstairs for me every day. He just sat there watching, waited for us to leave, then went back up. One day, I walked out with a friend. We saw him sitting downstairs, quickly walked out of the building, and parted ways, assuming he would go back up now that we’d left. Boy, was I wrong.
My friend walked off in the opposite direction, leaving me alone. I had crossed the road and was just about to turn in the direction of my apartment, when some higher power compelled me to turn around. The feeling that rushed over me just then, I had never felt it before. It was like a mix of all the most negative emotions in the world all swirling into one massive super-cloud of fear.
When people talk about the flight or fight response, THIS was literally the epitome of that. To this day, I still cannot understand what made me turn around when I generally never do that. I was smart enough to go in a completely different direction so he wouldn’t know where I live. He walked a short distance behind, crossed the road, and checked to see where I was walking home to!
Another male colleague who happened to finish work at the same time as this went down followed him and waited to see what he was doing. He confirmed that the guy absolutely followed to see which direction I was going, and then went back into the building once I had walked too far ahead. He would've only needed to follow me a short distance to see where I lived.
This happened a few more times before I finally reported him and got him banned from entering all buildings associated with my company. Turns out, he didn't even actually work for my company and shouldn't have even been in my building in the first place. After they caught him via his access pass records and on CCTV, he was escorted out of the building by scary-looking guys and his contract with my company terminated immediately.
It was awesome to watch the head of security in action. I'm so impressed with how well it was handled and how seriously my accusation was taken. After I reported him to my boss, within two hours they found him and confirmed what I was saying was true. The firm he worked for asked him not to come to work for a few weeks. After that, nobody ever saw him again. But, I'm still super vigilant and am always hyper-aware of my surroundings now.
26. Wet And Wild
When my mother was young, she went swimming with her friends. While there, she had to watch helplessly as her friend was sucked into a whirlpool at the bottom of a drainage lake. They didn’t find his body for days. That’s why I never learned to swim.
Shutterstock
27. Unnamed Savior
One night when I was very young, I was at a bar. Some guy proposed going back to his place, and I was up for it. I left my car, because he told me that he could give me a ride since I had been drinking a lot. We went winding down the road. He drove for quite a while, and I started to question where we were going. He said it was just up the road on the river.
He pulls over to the side of the highway and points to a two-story house on the river. It was very dark and the only light was from the moon. We walked down the dock to get to the front door. He gets in front of me and is playing with the doorknob. As he pushes it open, he turns to me and says, please don't make me turn the light on and let you see how dirty my place looks.
So of course, young and stupid, I said no problem. And probably giggled. He guides me by the hand up a set of stairs. We get to the top and he says, “I just have a mattress on the floor, I hope you don't mind.” And again, young and stupid me just sits down on the mattress, not thinking about anything. As I sit there in the dark, though, my vision starts becoming clearer.
Everything looks off. The mattress has no sheet on it and I hear a whisper in my ear, “Get out!” I jumped up. I ran down the stairs. I ran out of the door and down the dock. I ran across the highway, and up to a house that was across the street. I ran up to the door and started beating on it and screaming for help. Then I hear a sound. When I look, my blood runs cold.
The guy is running across the highway, chasing me. I start screaming more and more, as now I'm afraid this house is abandoned. Right as the guy gets up about ten feet away, the porch light turns on. The guy stops, turns around, and goes back to his truck. The poor guy whose door I was beating on came out and saw me crumbled, crying on his porch.
The sweet man got in his car and drove me back to the bar 20 miles away so that I could get my car. I never saw him again. I never even knew his name. But he saved my life. I know he did.
28. Compelled to Leave
I was a 13-year-old girl, camping with my best friend and her mom by a lake. My friend’s mom was not the world’s best mother, and allowed my friend to drink a lot. I had one drink, so I was a little tipsy, but still had my wits about me. It was about 11 at night, and my very not-sober friend randomly decided to go swimming, so I chased after her to keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t hurt herself. And god, I’m so glad I did.
Two men followed us out to the lake. We didn’t notice until my friend and I had swum a few dozen yards into the water. The men had also been drinking, and were stumbling with their bottles in hand. They were catcalling us as they waded into the water, getting closer and closer. My friend was so gone, and wanting so badly to seem cool to these grown-up men.
13-year-olds aren’t the most rational thinkers at the best of times. At first, she tried to respond to their questions. But I knew something very bad would happen if we didn’t get away, so I repeatedly whispered to her, “They’re going to attack us. They’re going to attack us. We need to leave. Now!” I think that finally knocked some sense in her brain, and she agreed to swim towards the shore with me.
They called after us, asking where we were going, and my friend yelled, “AWAY FROM YOU!!” Back then, I second-guessed myself and wondered if maybe I had been a little dramatic after the fact. But now, as an adult, I realize just how much danger we were in, and I’m so thankful that 13-year-old me knew to trust her gut.
29. Hors D’Oeuvres
The time I felt a small, curious shark delicately scrape my foot with its teeth in its effort to figure out what I was. It literally felt like it gently took my heel into its mouth and I felt the barest brush of teeth all around my heel. It didn't break the skin. I didn't realize it was a shark until I reflexively kicked and felt its shark-y skin against the bottom of my foot.
It felt like a small shark, so a juvenile of some species, not sure. My mom told me my eyes got huge and I looked at her like I wanted to nope right out of the ocean that second. I didn't go back in the water.
30. Predator Radar
I used to climb up to the Hollywood Sign all the time. I took a bunch of friends there one night who had never been. Usually it's just an uneventful climb other than some fairly steep parts. This time was different in all the wrong ways. About half way up, I get a really weird feeling. Wasn't sure what it was. Two steps later, I hear this quickly repeating whistle-y sound. Unmistakable.
I knew what it was immediately; I'd heard it once before in Northern California when I was in elementary school. I couldn't see it right then in the Hollywood Hills, but I'd seen the source of the sound clearly when I was younger. It was a freaking mountain lion. I put my hand out sharply, straight behind me with my palm open towards everyone else.
They told me later that they could tell by how much my body language changed that it was really serious. I leaned backwards while not breaking line of sight with where I thought the sound was coming from. My friend leaned his chin up on my shoulder, and I told him in the calmest voice I could to make everyone start climbing down very slowly.
I think because there were so many of us, we got away without incident. But the absolute stone-making fear I felt that night was intense. Going from laughing and having a good time to immediate silence and maximum sensory perception. It was wild. Never climbed to the sign again after that. It just didn't seem worth running into that guy again.
31. Warning Signs
My ex and I were out driving on a big Canadian road trip a year ago. One night, it was getting dark, so we decided to grab a hotel room and settle in for the night. On the way, we came across a car and a girl standing on the road and trying to flag us down. Keep in mind, this was in a rural area and we hadn't seen any cars in a while, so we were already confused and weirded out.
Just to be safe, we stopped, mostly to see if the girl needed help. As my boyfriend rolled down his window to talk to the girl, I slammed my foot on the gas and took off. I happened to look at the opposite side of the road and saw three guys coming out of the bushes with baseball bats. I don't know what that girl was doing, but I'm pretty sure she was going to lure us into something horrific.
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32. Shed Some Light
I lived in a house with four housemates for a year. We had a pretty big backyard with motion detector lights, a garage, and a tool shed that we never really used. Two of my housemates were very superstitious—they believed in ghosts, spirits, and other stuff like that. So, when the lights in our backyard kept turning on randomly, I assumed it was animals, while my housemates were sure it was a ghost.
One even said that she had caught a man-ghost looking through our window one night. She thought it was scary; I thought she was just being ridiculous. A few nights later, though, I became a believer. I looked outside and swore that I saw a man standing behind the mesh-door that led into our back patio. I screamed, got my roomies down, and made us all investigate.
But by the time we got out there, whoever was there (if anyone had been there at all) was gone. Anyway, flash forward a few months. I moved back to my home country and FaceTimed with one of the housemates. Well, it turns out that man hadn’t been a ghost. A homeless man had been living in our toolshed for God knows how long. It gave me the creeps for sure.
33. What’s Out There
When I was eight, we all had to take swimming lessons at school. My mom worked late, so I went to after-school care and didn’t get home until after it was dark. One day, when we came home, my mom told me to get my swimsuit and towel, and hang them on the clothesline to dry. That way, I would be able to wear them the next day.
I was so confident going outside to do this. I had this real feeling of finally being a big kid, you know? But as I walked into our backyard, everything changed. Suddenly, a man leapt over our gate and started sprinting towards me. I screamed, jumped inside, and instinctively locked the back door. Thankfully, he ran off and didn't try anything like that again, but it really messed me up. I slept with the light on until I was 16, and I get my husband to go outside for me while it’s dark.
34. No Time for This
I was sitting in a park by my house at night with some friends when I got the sudden feeling to turn around. I saw a guy about 15-20 ft behind us with his hood on and his hands in his pockets, walking quietly and with purpose towards us. My adrenaline instantly shot through the roof. I stood up quickly and started moving away from him.
I said, "Let's go, NOW." to my friends, who kind of protested, and the guy stopped and said he just wanted to know the time. I told him "Nah, screw that" and "let's GO" once again to my friends. We got the heck out of there with the guy just kind of standing there from what I recall. Things get a little hazy here because my adrenaline was really going, and I knew I needed to get out of there.
Could've been something, could've been nothing. Point is, I'm still here. ALWAYS go with your gut feeling. People don't just go creeping about like that when they just want to know the time.
35. Getaway Car
I was at a rest stop in upstate New York near Troy around midnight. This was before cell phones and GPS, and we stopped to use the pay phone to find a hotel for the night. On the way back to the car, a couple of random guys approached us from behind asking for direction. I told my wife to get in the car when I noticed two other guys coming towards the car from the opposite direction.
I hopped in the car and drove away before anything else happened. Might've just been me being overly-cautious, but I swear I avoided a mugging or worse by the skin of my teeth.
36. Hang Up
My mom once stopped to help an overturned car on the side of a highway. As we got out of our vehicle, my mom immediately called emergency as I wandered over to see if anyone needed help. Near the wreck, I saw the driver treating a woman (I think it was his wife) roughly. I was only a teenager and the guy was almost three times my size, so I tried to get my mom to come over.
She was busy on the phone, leaving me with these two people. I quickly realized that the man was intoxicated and looking for a fight. I figured that the only way we were going to get out of this was by playing it cool and then driving away as fast as we could. Once I could get my mom's attention, I'd find a way to tell her, but in the meantime, it was me and the two passengers.
The man asked me to help him move the car. I just stared at him and told him that was a ten-man job and there was no way he and I could do it. Then his wife started to scream at him. She was shouting that she got him hurting her and crashing the car on camera and that she sent the video to his sister. This caused the man to lose his mind.
He picked me up and literally threw me. Then he shoved my mom, took her phone, and pushed her down the bank. Panicking, I told him I had a knife, and I wasn’t afraid to use it if he touched my mother again. With that, he took his focus off my mom and stared right at me. As I tried to calm him, my mom snuck back into the car. When she was ready, I made a run for our vehicle.
On my way, a car that was speeding on the road almost hit me, but I made it to my mom. I heard her start the engine as I jumped in, and we tore off to the local station. The man was apprehended a couple hours later for two charges: one for hurting his wife and the second for assaulting an officer. We call emergency when we see crashes now.
37. How Kind
Once, my friend went out and met this girl who seemed really nice. After drinking with her, she passed out and woke up in an Uber. She told the driver that she didn’t know where she was. He told her that a girl brought her to his car because she wanted to make sure her "friend got home safe.” My friend insisted that something very wrong had happened and told the Uber driver to pull over. He was a good man; he immediately believed her, stopped the car, and called for officers to come and figure out what was going on.
When the officers heard what happened, they said they recognized the address that the Uber driver had been given by this mystery girl. It turns out that there was some kind of human trafficking operation. A girl would slip something into a pretty girl's drink, then pour her into a cab, and send her to the same house. Until my friend called in, none of the girls had been seen again.
38. The Van
I was walking by a long stretch of road with no houses, and there was a cemetery nearby. A van with two guys in it stopped to ask me if I needed a ride. I say, "No thanks, I'm nearly home." Yet they wouldn't budge. They kept following me with the windows down, and kept saying, "C'mon, just get in..." I didn't know how long I could fend them off.
At some point they just stop, and they start getting out. I was just a teen, and they were clearly twenty-something. I just took off running. I must have sprinted half a mile to get to an alley, and hid by the nearest building near the road. I waited about 15 minutes before moving on to make sure they had given up, so they wouldn't follow me home.
39. A Mother to All
I think I was in 8th grade when an old guy drove up at my bus stop. He asked me which way I lived. I pointed in the opposite direction. Luckily, another kid’s mom drove up at that time. He must’ve thought she was my mom, because he high-tailed it out of there. She asked me if I knew him. I told her I didn’t. After that day, she was always waiting at the bus stop when we got there. I never knew the kid or his mom, but I’m thankful for her.
40. Freak Incident
When my friend came home after work, his wife was gone. He thought she had taken the dogs for a walk and so checked the normal walk route. Then he saw all of these flashing blue lights. An officer stopped him and said he wasn't allowed to come any closer. But my friend had this sinking feeling. He looked over the officer's shoulder and realized that there was a woman bleeding on the sidewalk. That's when his stomach dropped: the woman was his wife.
It turned out that she had been on a walk in her neighborhood when a man randomly attacked her. He had just been released from a mental institution and randomly happened to cross paths with her. Sadly, her injuries were too extensive and she passed in the hospital. It's the scariest story I've ever heard because it's so meaningless. This man ended her life for no reason.
41. Baked Even
There's a big bread factory in my town. One day, years ago, maintenance men had to go into the bread oven to fix some issue. The oven had been off for 24 hours before they arrived, but it was still hot. The maintenance men didn't want to go in, but the company insisted, saying that anymore time wasted would lose them even more money.
So the maintenance guys took out baskets that held the raw bread on the conveyor belt, climbed onto the conveyor, and started up the machinery. Almost immediately upon entering the oven on the conveyor, the maintenance guys realize that something is terribly wrong. It's way, way too hot to be safe. They tried to run out, but there were too many baskets on the belt for them to get out. The path was blocked. They were trapped.
The only thing they could do was stay on the conveyor and go through the oven, a slow and horrifically painful process that essentially baked them alive. Those outside assisting with maintenance had to listen to their screams. Then the oven went completely silent. They saw one burnt body emerge on the other side of the oven. The second man somehow lived, but only for a few moments.
42. A Comfy Seat
My cousin and I were once sitting at the waterline of a sandbar. There was crystal-clear salt water, our legs were dangling in very shallow water, and we were absent-mindedly pulling up handfuls of wet sand and letting it pour through our fingers as we chatted. We’d been doing this for about 10 minutes when we suddenly both felt our butts shift.
The sand plumed under the water...and a freaking massive stingray literally swam out from under us. I’ve got to say, it’s probably a much crazier story from the stingray’s perspective. What a chill dude to just let us sit there on him for so long.
43. Corn Field Fun
For no good reason whatsoever, me and a friend were running around some farmer’s corn field one night. We both clearly heard the "CLICK, CLICK" of a shotgun—AKA the renowned sound of, "You’re in a whole heap of trouble." We both ran until we got home and never looked back. I suspect he was just scaring us. Well, I gotta hand it to him. It worked.
44. Going Somewhere?
When I was nine, I was playing at the school down the street from my house. It was the middle of summer, and my friend and I were watching some local boys play street hockey. One of the boys called my name and said a man in the parking lot was looking for me.
The parking lot was mostly obscured by a nearby building, but I could see an old 70s style van that hadn't been there earlier. I was walking over to the van when the mother of one of the other kids showed up looking for her son. When she saw me, she said hi and asked me where I was going. When I told her, she took my hand and started to quickly walk away with me. At that exact moment, the van pulled out and sped off.
My friend's mom walked me all the way home, and I wasn't allowed out of my yard without my parents for the rest of the summer. I was so upset and didn't understand why I was being punished. It was only years later that I had understood that I was likely being targeted by some opportunistic loser for I don’t even want to know what.
45. A Slippery Slope
At a summer camp, a buddy of mine and I climbed out onto a tin roof of a big hall that was built on the side of a steep hill. On one side you could climb out, right onto the roof, while on the other side it was a three-story fall onto concrete. Being teenage idiots, we climbed from the low side over the peak of the sloped metal roof and were inching down towards the edge of the high side.
We had sneakers on, and had pretty solid footing, so it wasn't outrageously dangerous. Then, out of absolute nowhere, raindrops started falling. We both look at each other and realize this is really bad and try to start backing up, but wherever there is even the slightest dampness, the metal is now completely slick. There is nothing to hold onto; the grip of the rubber shoes on dry metal was all we had.
I look at him and see the panic in his eyes that I'm feeling, too. We are trying to move up this roof as fast as we can, and the raindrops are falling harder every second. I see him break completely free and start sliding down with his eyes frozen in terror. Somehow, miraculously, he stops sliding. But I still have to think very fast.
I made it to the top, scrambled down, grabbed a branch, and leaned back over the top, trying to give him something to grab. He eventually makes it high enough to grab the branch and I pull him up and over. I have never felt panic like that. We were so lucky to make it out of there.
46. A Big Part Of Life
Back in the late seventies during her first semester at college, my mom met this guy named Bob. They were lab partners, and she’d thought he seemed cute and nice. She was too shy then to ask him out, but she definitely liked him. If Bob had asked her, she would have happily gone on a date. But he never did, so they just stayed friends.
But then things got...weird. Even though they studied different major, my mom kept noticing that Bob was often waiting for her. He'd be outside of her other classes, the library, the student union, and out in front where her dad picked her up and dropped her off. This continued into the spring semester.
Puzzled, but not yet alarmed, she asked him how he always knew where she would be. Bob loudly said, “oh, I asked the registrar’s office for a copy of your schedule!” My mom went to complain to the secretary who gave it to him. She blew it off because, “you guys are dating.” It was creepy, but since my mom was doing an exchange program the next year, she just left it at that. She figured that when she came back for her final year of university, he would have moved on.
Flash forward to her final year. She returns to university and...Bob is nowhere in sight. She figured she was free, but the whole situation was far from over. While my mom was at one of her grad school classes, my grandma heard a knock on the door. It was a man wearing a naval uniform. Since my grandmother had been a Navy nurse, she let him in.
The man started off by saying how sorry he was for my mother’s loss, which completely mystified my grandma. Before she could ask him what he meant, he continued, saying: “Well, ma’am, I just came back from overseas, and I found out my old friend Bob had passed. He had spoken so highly of his fiancée, your daughter, and I wanted to meet her.”
My grandmother told him her daughter didn’t even have a boyfriend, let alone a fiancé. It didn’t take long for the friend and my grandma to realize that Bob had made up his entire engagement. The whole thing was so creepy.
47. Barely Making It
I was living in a big city a few years ago and didn't know anyone. A guy I was seeing came to visit me. At the end of his trip, I accompanied him to his train home. After that, I slowly walked back to the streetcar to go back to my apartment. It was about 2 PM and very bright and sunny outside, and I was feeling friendly. As I sat down on the bench at the streetcar stop, the man sitting next to me said hi.
I said hello back, but I felt something was off. I tried to ignore it and keep enjoying my day. Shortly, the streetcar came, and we both got on. It was crowded so we ended up sitting pretty close to each other. Once I saw my stop approaching, I got up. The man stood up too. I could feel him breathing right behind me. Even worse, I could see his reflection in the metro car window. He was very slowly looking my legs up and down. I started to feel very uneasy. The doors opened; we got off.
I made my way quickly to the end of the platform but realized he could be following me. There were several exits around, so I suddenly changed direction to go to another exit. He changed his course as well. Then I turned around again; he followed. I did this a few times, and he changed his path to match mine every single time.
Eventually, he caught up to me and approached me. He got closer and closer until I was up against a wall. He smiled brightly at me, he said, "Hello, how are you?" I was terrified. No one stopped to even glance at us, so I knew that unless I did something, I would not get away from him. I glanced to the right and saw a staircase. Without warning, I sprinted away.
Since I’d caught him off guard. It took him a few seconds to start following me. Somehow, the stars aligned and I managed to get on a train right as the doors closed in his face. That incident and several others of men following me home or in the street make me paranoid when I walk outside alone.
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48. Vile Smile
A couple years ago, I sat waiting at a bus station for my brother so that we could travel together. The seats were set up similar to airport seats. I noticed this man, who sat across from me, staring at me. Every time I looked up, he would advert his eyes. Each row had three seats and there were already two ladies sitting next to me.
I brushed off the weird feeling and was praying so hard that either my brother showed up soon, or the bus that the ladies were waiting on took longer. Well, their bus came and they got up and left. Not even 10 seconds after the bus left, the guy ripped up whatever paper he had in his hand and came to sit next to me, turning his body so that he was facing me. He looked at me with this creepy smile and I was so scared for my life, I just got up and speed walked to the nearest coffee shop about 20 minutes away.
49. A Close Call
Years ago, my boyfriend owned a truck tire repair company. He stopped by a customer’s house unannounced one day to try to get a check, as they owed a lot of money. When he came out of the house, he was pretty shaken up. He explained that the man's numerous other brothers were there, and everyone was very jittery but they cut him a check and then rushed him out. He had a scary feeling that day. Two days later, that customer and his brothers were detained for a murder that they had committed the night before we stopped by.
50. You’re Coming With Me
My friend came back home with her first date. They were both a little tipsy and high. She went in to change, and when she came back to her bedroom, her date bent down to remove his shoes. As he got up, he immediately grabbed her and dragged her out against her will. She struggled, but he just covered her mouth and brought her outside.
He took her out of her apartment complex with a strong hold the whole time. Then finally, he let her go, and she asked him what exactly was wrong with him. He told her that he had seen a man who was hiding under her bed.
51. Like Riding A Bike
I was a toddler and lived with my mom in a cheap single wide trailer in a really bad trailer park. I slept at my aunt’s overnight a lot because my mom would work graveyard shifts. She picked me up from my aunt’s house around 7 AM one day, and we went back to our trailer. I remember immediately not wanting to go inside. I just had this terrible feeling.
I begged to ride my bike, but my exhausted mother just wanted to go to sleep, so we went inside, and she laid in bed. I sat up watching the TV for a while. And being the toddler that I was, I kept waking my mom up asking to go ride my bike. She said no and told me to go play in my room. I didn't want to, so I asked to lay with her. I told my mom that I felt like there was someone in my closet, and he wanted to hurt me.
My mom, who was exhausted and just wanted to go to bed, got up to show me no one was there. We went in my room, and then we saw the folding closet door open, but then it got stuck. Inside was a man who had skipped out on his bail, been watching my mom’s comings and goings for a few days, and came into our house when she was at work.
We bolted out of the house, ran to the car and then drove to the station. Unfortunately, the guy escaped before the officers showed up.
52. Little Help Here
One time when I was about 16, I went to a laundromat with a friend. I wasn’t as familiar with the neighborhood, since it was near my friend's house instead of mine; I was just there to hang out with her. As we walked inside the laundromat, we saw an older man standing near his car looking. My friend walked right passed him. She didn’t give him a single glance, but he caught me looking at him and asked, “will you come help me find my phone. I dropped it down here somewhere and I can’t find it.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I looked into the car and noticed a second man in the car staring at me. I’ll never forget how he looked at me. I just snapped my head away and followed my friend inside. When we got inside, she told me that those men were known in the area. They would use ploys to get young women into their car. After that, you don't want to know what they did.
I was shaken up because if I had been a little younger and a little dumber, I don’t know if I would have seen the other man in the car. I might’ve helped him.
53. Seen Some Stuff
My friends and I were drinking one time and going around asking, "hey, whatever happened to…?" In this case, it was a guy who had a free period with a few of us in high school. He was a nice kid. We Googled him, and there were a couple appellate court decisions visible in first few results. We kept looking into him and discovered his chilling story.
He had gone to Afghanistan. It had really messed him up. The court notes said he saw things there that completely undid him. He came home with PTSD and delusional schizophrenia. He had been on a mission to hurt his mother to save her from demons and send her to heaven. He'd tried and failed numerous times. We looked for his social media accounts.
It was just threads and threads of manic rambling about demons. It was sad to find this but also terrifying to think you could be "normal" then through one set of circumstances or another, become completely insane within a few years.
54. Just Close Your Eyes
When I was about five, I woke up to my house surrounded by loud voices and bright white lights. It turned out that a group of dangerous people had broken into our house after a heist and were using my parents as hostages.
55. How’d You Get Here?
I was in the drunk tank with a guy who’d been in a brutal fist fight. The other man was in intensive care in the hospital. While we were together, the guy spent the entire time telling me all of the very specific details of the fight. After three days, the CO’s came and brought him to isolation. His victim didn’t make it. I was 17 at the time. I’ll never forget being scared to fall asleep right next to this guy.
56. The Basement
When my mother convinced me that it was a good idea to go see a house for sale in the middle of nowhere. A guy showed us the house and then led us to the door of the basement, insisting we absolutely had to see it. From the top of the stairs, I could see a bed and what looked like a semi-furnished room. He insisted we go down first—and in that moment, I got this strong feeling of unease.
So I excused myself, turned on my heels, and headed for the road. My mom said the guy got really upset, started to swear and sweat, and cut the visit short, so maybe my instincts were on point. I wanted to add that I did not abandon my mom. I just figured out that my best chance was getting the heck out of the house and to ask for help. I didn't think he'd hurt my mother, considering I was a potential witness.
57. Party Pooper
While in college, I was at a house party. I had been drinking and was passed out on the couch. Suddenly, my buddies ran in to wake me and get me out of the house in a hurry. One of the other guys at the party got into a fight with someone, then ran to his car and got a shotgun from the trunk. He started running after the guy who had fought him. That was the fastest we ever left anywhere.
58. Firestorm
My town got hit with a firestorm. At the time, we knew there was a fire somewhere. Maybe another town? We weren't too worried. Yet the power was beginning to go spotty, and the winds were howling outside. Then my roommate gets a call from a friend on the other side of town, "My house is on fire! You guys need to pack a bag!" After the call was over, the power went out and stayed out.
So, we packed our bags, and I start to hear little plinks against the roof, almost like rain. But it isn't rain. It's just ash. Not 15 minutes had gone by, and I look outside. We lived by a large hill only two blocks away, and it was burning. The fire got there so fast. I got back inside and told my roommates we had to leave right away.
This is when our neighbors started wigging out, too. We had to then capture our three very scared and confused cats. It was so crazy to drive away and see only blackness ahead of you, but in your rearview mirror only flames. Our neighborhoo and home ended up being spared, however many of my friends who lived closer to the mountains were not so lucky.
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59. Listen To Your Elders
My mother-in-law was a very funny and cool woman. She and my wife were really close, and sadly, she passed when our son was about four months old. A few years later, we moved into an old 1930s era craftsman house. Our son was three by then. I was giving him a bath one night, and he was looking over my shoulder at something.
He asked why Grandma called Mommy a funny name. I paused and asked him what he meant, thinking he was talking about my mom. He then said, “why does Grandma call Mommy [very specific nickname]?” I was shocked. My wife and I had never used that nickname. It was something her mom had called her since she was a baby.
I asked him where he’d learned that. He said, "the farmer told me." I asked him who the farmer was. He said he was his friend. I told my wife about it later, and she was reduced to tears over the whole nickname thing. We both knew there was no way for him to know it, and we just marveled at it, not knowing what else we could do.
The next weekend, my son was playing alone in his room. My wife was at work, and I was at home in the office next to my son's bedroom. Through the shared wall, I heard him talking like he was having a conversation. He was saying things like, “yes,” “no,” and, “I don’t know that,” and then laughing. I started to get a little creeped out, so I went into his room and asked him what he was doing.
He told me that he was playing. I asked him who he was playing with. He told me he was playing with the farmer. I asked him where the farmer was. He told me that he’d left when I came in. What?! My wife came back, and I told her what happened. She was just as weirded out as I was. We had no idea what to do and figured if it happened again, we would do something.
A few days later in the middle of the night, we both heard our son saying, "Grandma says you and I can't be friends anymore." We went to check on him while freaking out. He was sitting up in his bed. We asked him if he was okay, and he said, “yeah, Grandma says I can’t play with the Farmer anymore.” He never once mentioned the farmer again. Not ever. He's 13 now and remembers none of it. But we do.
60. Bad Company
I was walking in my old local park with my sister. We entered the park at about 3 pm, and were hanging around until about 9-9:30, when we saw three people all wearing somewhat similar outfits, all the way on the other side of the park. I immediately noticed but didn’t think much of it. We walked for about two more minutes and I noticed one of them stopped and was staring at us.
I immediately had a bad feeling, and told my sister we should leave. She noticed and obliged. Later that night, there was word of a stabbing in the park, and the suspects were all the people we saw in the group of three.
61. American Psycho
I was on a second date with a guy who wanted to stop at his house to grab something, and he invited me in. He was really hot, but I wasn't feeling comfortable with him for a reason I couldn't put my finger on. We get to his house, and it was just...creepy. He was well-off, and the house itself was gorgeous. Spotless, and totally sterile. Nothing on the walls, every surface empty.
No books. No CDs. Nothing. I ask how long he'd lived there, and he said, "five years." While he was in the kitchen, he then asked me to go into his room and grab something from the top drawer in his dresser. I got the coldest chill up my spine, and immediately stepped closer to the front door. There was NO way I was letting him come between me and the exit.
He asked me again to go to his room, and I "laughed" and said, "No dude, I'm hungry, let's go!" He asked one more time, visibly annoyed at this point, and I proceeded to pretend that I was a "stupid" girl, and made a fuss about being hungry and what the heck was taking him so long. He was so mad. So, I walked out of his house down the sidewalk and made him follow me.
We got to the car, and I kept pretending to be a clueless chick, and demanded he take me home. He did. In cold, furious silence. Then, when he stopped the car in front of my place, he grabbed my face to kiss me goodbye. He bit my lip so hard I was bleeding, and he reached under my shirt and pinched me. I luckily got him off me, falling out of my door, and ran inside to the sound of him laughing. I ended up with a bruised face, cut lip, and was scared that he knew where I lived, but I still feel like I survived a legit psychopath.
62. Unfriendly Stranger
I was walking out into a parking lot one night when a guy got my attention and asked for a ride. I did not know this person and don't give random strangers rides so I already knew I would say no. But before I could turn him down, he launched into this story about how he was a truck driver who needed to go to the to the gas station across the highway, since it was within walking distance to his big rig.
I didn’t buy it, so I made up some excuse and told him that there were apps he could use for help. He started yelling at me, saying that it was just a ride and that he needed help. At that point, I just said, "I gotta go," and quickly turned around and headed to my car. I heard him say, "okay fine, you jerk" as I got into my car and just sped away.
Initially, I felt really bad for not giving him a ride, but the way he’d yelled at me made it seem justified that I said no. A year later, I was at a restaurant eating lunch and decided to open Facebook on my phone. What I saw next just spooked me to the core. The article had a mugshot of that same guy from that night.
He was a fugitive wanted on several major charges across the state where I was living. One of the ways he would trick his victims was by asking for a ride and then when they were out of sight, he'd off them and take their stuff. He then would take their vehicle and travel to the next area to find his next victim. I almost choked on my drink.
63. Ruining It For Everyone
A kid in my class was absolutely cruel to another student, even doing stuff like burning his poor victim's face. One day, the kid went to the class he shared with his tormentor, ran to his desk, and blew his own brains out in front of the cruel kid, the teacher, and the rest of the class. The poor kid’s body slumped forward, and his head fell right on the mean kid’s desk.
Almost everyone in the class switched schools after that. My brother, who was there too, barely spoke for a year after that day. It took me until I was 25 and he was 35 for us to talk about what happened.
64. Locked And Loaded
I was a bouncer, and on one slow night, a guy tried to get into the club after last call. After arguing with me, he just tried to push his way through to the door. I grabbed him by his dreads and threw him back to the street, which made him very angry at me. He told me that he was watching me and that I had better watch my back.
I had heard that threat before, but this guy meant it. He turned around and hit the button on his keychain, popping the trunk of his car. He went in his trunk and armed himself. He was right in my face. This was the first time I'd ever had this happen to me. I had often thought about a situation like this and joked about it with coworkers, saying that I'd take a guy down if it came to that.
Nope. I was so wrong. I only felt crippling fear. I luckily had nothing in my bowels to vacate because I certainly would have if there had been. While trying to keep my voice from cracking, I used one arm to point up and say, "you're on camera, get out of here." Then I backed up into the club, locked the door, and puked in the washroom.
65. Raging Bull
I was taking pictures of a family who wanted a fall photoshoot in a field. I hear something, look behind me, and a HUGE bull is pawing the ground. When I make eye contact, it starts running towards us. I see that there is a fence between us, so I'm not as fast as I could be shooing the family to the car...Until the bull gets to the fence and immediately turns away from us to run along it. I then notice that the fence ENDS halfway up the field, and that bull is MAD and running pretty fast. That adrenaline rush was for real.
66. Right Place, Wrong Time
I live in Dallas, Texas. Almost a month ago, it was Sunday night and I was doing my typical UberEATS drives around 9pm-ish. I notice there’s a thunderstorm warning right when I thought about stopping for the night, but it cleared so I decided to try to stay out until 10pm. I needed to get cheese, so I walk into a Kroger and park there.
As I’m walking in the door, I hear the tornado sirens go off. Then my phone sounds off with the same watch alert. I run, get the cheese (silly I know) and hurry to head home so I can get safe. It clicked in my head that if the siren went off it was a big deal, and I was terrified. I was speeding home and it seemed that every time I passed a stop light they were turning off behind me.
I get closer to my apartment complex—and see a horrific sight. It’s all torn up. Shattered windows, trees down everywhere. But it was so ironic because had I been home, I would have been worse off than when I was sitting in the Kroger parking lot.
67. Tailgater
I was driving my friend and myself (both girls) back from a bar on the way to our Airbnb, out in the middle of nowhere in a small town. At some point early on, a car turns onto the road behind us. It's dark and like 2 am, so I don't think anything of it. They're also driving super close to me, but I'm not about to speed due to road rage pressure.
Eventually, they chill out on tailgating. Yet the longer we’re on the road, the farther we get from civilization. It is very unusual for another car to be going out the way we are. So, about half a mile from our Airbnb, I pull off to a side street and let the car pass. Then we wait five minutes, turn around to get back on our road...and lo and behold, the car is just sitting there waiting for us.
So, we nope the heck out, and now I'm FLOORING it back to town to the bar so we can get to safety. I do a rolling stop through a stop sign, and the car finally turns its cop lights on and pulls me over. Dude has the audacity to ask me why I ran a stop sign and I just go off on him about how terrifying it is to be stalking two college girls all the way back on the 25-minute drive home from the bar.
I was literally on the phone with 9-1-1 when he pulled us over. The officer looks real apologetic and lets us off with a warning (for what I don't know), saying that he thought we saw he was an officer and that people usually turn off onto side streets like we did when they're trying to avoid the authorities. Yeah, they also do it when they're trying to avoid STALKERS.
68. No, You Stop
My wife’s friend was driving home from work one evening. She was in a quiet area when an unmarked car sped up behind her and started flashing his lights to get her to pull over. She still doesn’t know why, but she remembered feeling like something wasn't right. She kept driving, even though the flashing car was behind her, and called the local station.
She asked the operator about an unmarked car wanting to pull her over. The person on the phone did a quick check. What they said was, "Ma'am, I'm going to need you to keep driving and stay calm." Within a few minutes, four marked cars came speeding up behind and, before she knew what was happening, boxed the unmarked car in between them and forced it to stop.
The dispatcher told her to drive around the corner and stop. After they put him in the backseat, the officers told her the full story. It turns out they had been hunting this guy down for pretending to be an officer. He'd flash his lights, get young women to pull over, and then attack them.
69. Almost The End
A van of six people was on their way to an engagement party when the driver, who'd worked too many shifts in a row, dozed off. He woke up to realize that the van was out of his control and, in the seconds that he had, decided to save himself and jumped out his door. This van, out of control, went down and rolled over multiple times, ending four lives on the spot.
There was one lucky person who survived with minor fractures and another who had barely survived. Her skull cracked. The bone under her eyes broke and caved in. Glass from the van’s window stuck in her eyes. She broke her nasal bone, jaw, hip bone and fractured her toes. She also dislocated and broke her shoulder bone.
If that wasn’t bad enough, she lost her teeth as well as a huge chunk of skin from her feet. She was wheeled into the hospital and had multiple surgeries. She said the only thing that got her through was thinking about her kids growing up motherless. When I saw her after surgery, she was completely wrapped in bandages.
She couldn't speak for months and couldn't walk for a year. This was my mom in the year 2006. I was 9 or 10 then, and the memory of her mummified form still haunts me in my dreams.
70. Free Range
A friend of mine went backpacking in Australia and wanted to work on a farm. So, she placed an ad about herself on a website and got a response. A man picked her up to take her to the farm. At the farm, the guy instantly became horrifically violent. He dragged her out the car, chained her up, and tormented her. I don't want to write about what he did to her, but I'll put it this way. At the end, she genuinely thought she wouldn't live to see another day.
He left her, assuming she wouldn't last much longer. Luckily, though, she had her backpack nearby, and he hadn’t chained her well. She slipped out and sent messages to people she had met, alerting them about what had happened. She then pretended to get back in the chains while one of her friends called to send officers to rescue her. She’s safe but traumatized.
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71. Did You See That?
About seven of us were driving two cars in tandem along the interstate on our way to see a concert. Most of the interstate goes along the river that borders two states. There’s one section that jets out into the river essentially making a small lake between the east and west parts of the road with guardrails on both sides.
I was in the left lane going 65. It was dark out, and suddenly, I saw a Texas Chainsaw looking person in a long trench coat. His face was bright red and he was standing in the middle of my lane. He raised his arms and started coming towards the car. I was able to swerve just enough to avoid him. Then, of course, I was worried for our friends.
They were about eight car lengths behind us. They swerved hard almost losing control but somehow didn’t hit the scary, bloody faced horror show in the middle of the highway. There was no wreck or evidence of damage to the guard rail. We stopped to report it but never heard another thing about it. It scared us all to our cores.
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72. Freeze Fall
I went ice fishing with my dad when I was ten, but it had just snowed the night before, so you couldn't see any of the ice. On my way out to the ice house, I fell straight through an unmarked hole that had a very thin layer of ice covering it. The scariest part was instantly shutting down and sinking because of the icy cold.
I could look up and see where I had fallen through but couldn't swim back up to it. After a few seconds, I finally willed myself up and to the edge where my dad pulled me the rest of the way out.
73. Midnight Run
My girlfriend and I were car camping in the woods, and had a nice spot by a rushing river. The evening had gone well and we turned in for the night. Sometime later, I wake up needing to pee. I do my business and head back to the tent. I'm sitting on the edge of the tent taking my shoes off when I see it....A vaguely human shape suddenly jumps out in my mind and I freeze.
I stare through the dark at this shape, just silhouetted by the dim starlight, wondering if I'm seeing things or if someone is creeping on us. Then the shape moves. It rises up, becoming a larger outline partially blotted by the trees. BEAR my mind screams at me. I whip into action, reaching for my knife with one hand, while zipping the tent closed for some paltry barrier between me and it...
It's then that I hear a noise over the rush of the river... "Hey, wait for me." Apparently, my girlfriend had come out after I did and I just didn't realize it.
74. Don't Stall
One time, it was about midnight, and I went into a 24-hour supermarket with my boyfriend. He went into the bathroom, and I decided I’d go too. So, I walk down this corridor and turn right into the ladies. We had been drinking and I wasn't completely clear-headed, so I spent a second looking at myself in the mirror before picking a cubicle.
All the doors were weighted, so they stayed shut. But as I was looking, I noticed something strange. Under the reflection of one of the doors was a pair of feet. Male shoes, crossed at the ankle, as though sitting in a very relaxed position. They didn’t move at all. I was overcome by fear, feeling that someone had been sitting there waiting for an unsuspecting woman to come in, and I said, “Oh heck no!” out loud and literally ran out the door.
75. Straight To Your Door
I live on a street with no exit. One day, I was cleaning and heard my younger daughter talking. There was just one problem: My older daughter was at school, so who was my daughter talking to? I checked on her and saw there was a man on the street talking to her through the window. I quickly ran outside to catch him, but he ran away before I got there.
A few weeks later, my older daughter was riding her bike when she quickly came inside, crying and panicking. She said an old man was trying to talk to her while she was outside. She described the exact same guy that I saw talking to my younger daughter. I reported it and haven't heard anything back. I better not see him ever again.
76. When Twigs Snap
In my early 20s, I'd go urban exploring with a group of friends from college. One cold night in October, seven of us went to an abandoned, formerly state-run asylum. It was on a big campus with several large buildings. The roads were disused but not closed, so we were able to get pretty close by car, and luckily found a good spot in some brush to hide the vehicles in.
We were pretty bad at sneaking—people were talking, one dude was messing with a laser pointer, etc. Luckily, there really wasn't any security patrolling, but I knew there could be other people to hide from. We went to explore one of the main buildings, 10+ storeys tall, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Eventually, we found a hole and climbed in.
Searching between the fence and the outer wall, I swore I heard twigs breaking in the wood behind the building. We were basically trapped between the fence and the building, and the only way out was the way we came, which was also the direction the sound was coming from. Two of the girls with us were joking around, and the kid with the laser was still playing with it.
I started to get nervous and told them to knock it off, but they were having fun and didn't care. All of a sudden, there was this loud yelling like an old man in pain. Everyone shut up, and after a moment we heard tons, TONS of twigs snapping. Now I was panicking, and I yelled for us all to run. We scrambled out of the fence and back to our cars, sure that danger was right behind us.
Looking back at it now, it was probably just a few raccoons going at it, or a squatter who was more scared of us. But at the time, I never felt the need to run more in my life. Needless to say, we cooled off on the exploring for a while.
77. Is Someone There?
A few years ago, I was an intern in a medical department and happened to be on call one night. The nurses informed me around 1 am that there was a new admission to the isolation room. She was a female inmate had pneumonia and likely tuberculosis. The isolation room was right at the end of the ward, and you have to go through double doors just to enter it.
So, in addition to being a room for isolation of infectious diseases, it was also really isolated from the nearest human contact. I went in to do a clinical assessment, which involves a thorough history. One of the questions I wanted to ask was if she shared her cell with anyone who could have passed on the infection to her.
It being late at night and me being not very proficient in her native language, what I actually asked her sounded something like, "Was there anyone else in the room with you?" Right after that question escaped my lips, she smiled really widely, put her finger to her lips as though saying “shhhh,” and then flicked her eyes to a spot near the window behind and above me.
This horrible chill went through me and I decided then and there that I’d done enough history-taking for the night, and fled to the safety of the nursing station.
78. Hot And Cold
A work friend had introduced me to a guy, and we briefly dated. We enjoyed each other's company and ended up in bed together. A couple days later, he called my work and left a creepy message with the secretary. It just said, "I want nothing to do with you, leave me alone, and never call me again." It was weird since I never did call him, but I figured, oh well, his loss.
A couple weeks later, officers discovered a body that was shoved in a well the next town over. Not long after, they caught the guy. It was the same creepy guy I had dated oh so briefly. He pleaded guilty. What was his motive? She wouldn't sleep with him.
79. Skin Of Your Teeth
My friend was in a really awful traffic accident. He was riding his bike in the bike lane next to a big truck. He was in the blind spot of the truck, fell under the truck, and was dragged 600 meters. His face scraped on the asphalt. He lost his eye and a lot of his arm skin. It was so bad that he had one arm amputated.
What makes it extra scary is that he was fully conscious the whole time.
80. Hall The Way Out
I was around four years old, and my parents had just separated. My mom and I had to move into an apartment that was so small that we had to share a bed. We set it up just under the window, so that the light would shine in behind us every morning. Well, that's what we wanted. What we got instead was a complete nightmare.
One hot summer night, I woke up and saw our cat sitting in the door frame. It was strange because our cat was typically always in bed with us. As I was watching him, he walked into the bedroom and meowed. I turned to face my mom and wake her up. In the few seconds that it took for her to wake and ask me what was wrong, we both looked back up and saw a man standing by the living room door.
I still don't know how she managed to do it so quickly, but my mother somehow picked me up and threw me out of the open window. She quickly followed, and we were able to start screaming for help. Someone heard and called for emergency. Officers arrived but couldn't find any signs of forced entry. They only found that our front door was unlocked which led them to believe the man must have exited that way.
The strange thing was that my mom swore up and down that she had locked, bolted, and chain locked the door that night. A couple days later, she was cleaning up in the kitchen and opened the water heater closet. She found a notebook with names and drawings as well as a pair of gloves and some gum wrappers. She called officers over again, but all they could do was speculate that the man had been in our house and hid until we were asleep.
81. Just Mom’s Friend
I moved to my dad’s when I was 10 and didn't know anyone in the area. Being an outgoing kid, I quickly made friends with some of my neighbors. One was a girl who was 12, and we ended up having the same circle of friends. One day, I'm at her house when we hear a knock on the door. My friend thought it was her mom since she knocked a certain way, so she answered the door without thinking.
Meanwhile, since I wasn't supposed to be there, I took off through the window and went back to my house. Later on, I learned about the danger I'd escaped. The woman at the door was not my friend's mother. Her mother worked at a mental institution, where one of the inmates had recently been released. She was the one at the door.
Thankfully, my friend's little brother was able to run away to find help. But my friend wasn't so lucky. The lady must have had a breakdown because she attacked that 12-year-old girl, removed her head, hid it, and left her body in the tub. The officers eventually found the head in the worst place: the family's Christmas presents.
82. Leave It As It Was
There's an abandoned house next door. The previous owner moved 25 years ago and never sold it. I got a flashlight and gloves, pushed the window open, and got inside to the basement. There was a grand piano there that still played but was very much out of tune, old WW2 stuff, and what looked to be a signed Elvis poster.
There was other really cool stuff that no one should ever had left. There's basically a whole story in that basement including a broken wedding picture frame and instruments everywhere. The main floor had an unmade bed, molded food in the fridge and on the stovetop, half-empty bottles turned solid, and lights still on.
Then I started walking upstairs and heard crying from one of the side rooms. That's when I freaked out and haven't been there since.
83. Itsy Bitsy
I got home from work late one night and walked right into this huge spider web on my front stoop. At first, I didn't think too much of it until I looked down and saw about 20-30 baby spiders all over me. I started freaking out and then noticed the parents sitting on my front door. They were huge–bigger than a quarter each.
I did not want to use the front door. I had no choice but to run to my back door. I threw all of my clothes off and jumped in the shower. I then watched in horror as baby spiders began falling out of my hair.
84. Come And Play
I worked in a nursing home. One time, I had a resident refuse to get on the elevator with me because she was, “scared of the little boy.” I shrugged it off until I had a resident come out of his room and ask me for "candy for the little boy." I decided to ask my mom who was the charge nurse and an employee of 13 years.
She told me that residents would periodically report seeing a little boy who was always wanting to play. He appeared to all kinds of residents from those of sound mental status to those with severe dementia. They all reported seeing the exact same thing. When they moved to a new facility, the little boy came with them.
The little boy was particularly fond of those with limited sight. The residents described him as having dark black hair and that he lived in a "tent,” where a tree had fallen on him. Then once, I was feeding a resident who had recently suffered a stroke. She couldn’t use her right hand and required complete assistance.
As I was feeding her, I felt a cold hand on my arm. Right then, the resident said, "is that your boyfriend? He looks a little young for you!" I nearly peed myself. That resident who saw him had passed by the morning.
85. The Suspect
I went to a movie on Halloween night when I was in high school with my boyfriend at the time. It was a huge theater where there was a staircase all the way to the top row that opened in the middle of a row, so you could sit on either side of the opening. My boyfriend and I sat in the back row on one side of the opening.
We were watching the movie, and around 30-40 minutes after it started, a guy walked in by himself wearing a big sweater and sat on the other side of the opening. He didn't really do anything at first, though he gave me a bad feeling and I felt uncomfortable. Still, I continued watching the movie. I then noticed the guy seemed really nervous and wasn't paying ANY attention to the movie.
I really couldn't figure out why, but he was stressing me out big time and I just felt like we had to get the heck out of there. I told my boyfriend that I was probably being silly but I wanted to leave. As we were leaving, we informed the staff about the guy just in case. Turns out, they had been looking for him as people had reported seeing a guy of that description behaving strangely in the parking lot earlier. The authorities came, and he apparently had quite a few large hunting knives hidden under his sweatshirt.
86. Don’t Look Down
I was in class, and the teacher was asking us how our weekends were. The quietest girl in the class started to speak, only to break down in tears. She said she was on a trip in the mountains with her mom. They stopped to stretch their legs during the drive, then looked over the cliff, only to see an overturned vehicle with an entire, deceased family scattered around it.
87. Something’s Down There
During university, I was living in a sorority house with 20 other women. The house was super old and in terrible condition. The basement had items from residents who had lived there years ago, but never took their stuff when they moved out. With so many of us, we wouldn’t notice stuff moving around because we assumed someone else just moved it, took it, or ate it.
One day, a girl was doing her laundry in the basement and noticed a bed set up behind the giant piles of junk people had left behind over the years. Then she nearly screamed when she noticed a man. He tried to calm her down by saying her that he was dating someone at the sorority and she knew he was down there. But the girl wasn't buying it.
She called the campus officers immediately and they investigated the man. They told us that he had been living in the basement for who knows how long. They guessed that he had used the basement door to get in and out of the house. He never came back to our sorority, thank God, but I don't think campus officers caught him either. Who knows where he's living now?
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88. 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.
89. Something Much Worse Than A Ghost
I was about seven years old. My brother was about 10. It was well past our bedtime when our mom woke up off the couch to put us to bed. Our dad worked construction out of town back then, so it was often just us three at the house for weeks at a time. Up the stairs and to the immediate right was our parents' bedroom. Going left put you in the middle of a hallway.
Taking another left down that hallway led to my brother's room. The opposite end was my room, which was also across the hall from our upstairs bathroom. At either end of the hallway are windowed doors that we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on my end led to a balcony overlooking our front yard, and the door on my brother's end opened to our back porch.
My brother and mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I only knew this because I was always a light sleeper and they just couldn't help flushing with the door wide open. This night, however, my brother stopped on his way to his room and came back towards the bathroom. That’s when he made a comment that chilled me to the bone.
He told me: "I'm gonna try to pee before I go to bed tonight. The past few nights, I've been too afraid to walk to the bathroom. I keep seeing a man wearing stripes at the end of the hallway." I don't know if my mom wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories to try to scare me, or if she was already half asleep and didn't catch it, but she didn't react at all to my brother's confession.
I, on the other hand, was terrified by it. The fear of seeing a ghost-like that at the end of the hallway or through the windows is the reason I started running from the stairs to my bedroom at night. Years later, when I was about 18, my mom and I were having a conversation in her car about a dog named Max that we’d had for a very short time when I was little.
We were sharing stories about Max's tendency towards destroying my shoes and other unruly behaviors, when my mom blurted out, "Do you remember that time I opened the front door for the cops and Max ran inside to the kitchen and started tearing open that big bag of dog food we had?" This really caught me by surprise.
In all the years I lived in that house, we never once called law enforcement as far as I was aware. I asked her what she was talking about and she looked equally surprised, as if she had just revealed something by accident. Then, she said: "Oh, that's right! I never told you about this because you were too young at the time…”
She continued: "One night, I woke up hearing noises outside my window and, when I looked outside, I saw a man staring into my bedroom." She went on to describe how turning on the lights caused him to take off running, and how she had grabbed my dad's pistol before calling the authorities. I started to ask some more questions about the experience until something clicked in my head.
My mom said she couldn’t remember all the details she gave them when they showed up, but she remembered describing the man as a tall white male, wearing a striped shirt and jeans, with short dark hair, or something like that. They said it matched the description of a man they were looking for in the area. It turns out he had just escaped from behind bars, where he’d been charged with murder.
Now, I know it sounds so obvious hearing those two stories back to back, but it wasn't until a few years ago, in my mid-20s, that I pieced together that my brother had unknowingly warned us about a murderer who had spent multiple nights staking out our home. Who knows what he had been planning to do…
90. Face Off
I saw a dude with no face driving a car. No features at all, it was just blank. I did more than just glance at him, I was staring. Just smooth skin and a men's haircut. I've never told anyone because it's so ridiculous sounding and I don't think people would believe me. Probably a rational explanation for it I suppose, but man, what the heck?
91. A Sob Story
I drove Uber in Denver for a couple months, but the singular event that forced my retirement happened on a classically Coloradoan night in late December of last year. It was cold and snowy, and everyone in town was very much under the influence of substances. I initially wasn't planning on driving in such miserable conditions. I'm a lousy enough driver as is.
I have no confidence in my abilities, nor should anyone else. I find the need to mention that the only reason I became an Uber driver to begin with was that I lost my job at Chick-Fil-A because of some "Can I speak to your manager?" type who wanted fat-free ranch, despite my insistence that we didn't have any fat-free ranch.
Anyway, I met her rudeness with rudeness of my own and got fired for it, which finally showed me that customer service probably isn't a good job choice for an angry jerk like myself. But I'm chilling at my apartment and the heating was broken, because Shawn the indifferent landlord was too busy catching up on Game of Thrones to fix it.
So I decide to get out of the house and pick up a fare. I picked this girl up to drive her to the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Turns out this girl lives directly underneath me, but I've never met her before. She's also very attractive: curvy, blonde, about 5'2, and with the goofiest smile you'd ever see. As I'm driving her there, she starts telling me the story of why she's all alone on this chilly pre-Christmas night.
Turns out her ex-boyfriend, Scott, was supposed to go to this play with her that night, but he was a major jerk. The stories about him started off small enough. He slept with her best friend and lied about it. Basic stuff, right? Not even close! Turns out, he was dealing substances from the basement of her old house. And we’re talking very dangerous ones, not just the common stuff.
Believe it or not, she is the one who got thrown behind bars when he got caught! Thankfully, she was proven not guilty in court since the evidence was entirely circumstantial. But, in the meantime, her boyfriend had skipped town, so she was left to suffer on her own. She tells me he mistreated her, hit her nightly, and tried to do terrible things to her before she broke up with him.
My sympathy senses are going off the charts for her. She even sheds a few tears. Apologizing for spilling her history, she asks if I want to see this show with her. She says she still has the extra ticket. I, of course, jump at the chance to go on a date with this hot bombshell who's probably definitely out of my league, so I agree.
We park about a block away from the theater and have to walk the rest of the way. The snow is sprinkling around us like this magical fairytale scene, and I'm getting serious vibes from her, like, "I'm totally gonna sleep with you tonight if you ask." We get to our seats in the show, when she asks me if I want to go backstage to meet the actresses before it starts.
That's against the rules, right? Well, the girl insists that she knows the performers and it's fine. So she takes me on this shady little path backstage and pulls out a set of keys to unlock the doors. Red flags are going off, yeah, but I'm wanting to get some action, so the last thing I wanna do is upset her by questioning what she is doing. I ended up ignoring my gut instincts—and I instantly regretted it.
She takes me to the green room and introduces me to this dude called Scott, who is one of the lead actors. Yes, you read that right. Scott, as in the same name as her crazy boyfriend. He looks at her and starts freaking the heck out, which is when she pulls out a knife and stabs him in the gut. Yeah, that Scott was the same Scott that broke up with her.
I got the heck out of there, called the authorities and an ambulance, and when everything calmed down, I had a little drink to calm myself down before Googling the guy’s name. Turns out, she was the substance dealer and the crazy one who had skipped town. He was her innocent boyfriend who found out and ratted her out to the authorities, and she wanted her revenge.
She tried to pin the stabbing on me, but when the officers interrogated me, they found out all about who she was and they understood that she had planned this whole thing from the beginning. So the whole time that I was feeling sorry for her, she was actually just a monster in disguise. Who knew? Anyway, the experience was the end of my Uber career.
92. Early Learner
When I was in middle school, I got into a local college’s summer program where kids study advanced subjects. The day was over before my mom's work day, so I would take the light rail to the library or sometimes the local community center. Anyway, it was my first time ever really being on my own in a city or in public in general.
My parents got me my first cell phone because of all this. They didn't make me scared but I was prepared about how to stay safe. I sort of did the same thing everyday; get off my stop, go get a burger, and then go to one place or the other, making sure not to talk to strangers and all that. A couple of times, I noticed a man walking behind me. He'd also go the same burger place that I went to.
He never tried to talk to me or do anything like that, but after the fourth time I noticed, I called my mom and she told me people are just going about their day, on a schedule like I am, so it could just be a coincidence. Well, one day I decided to eat inside the burger place instead of take it to go, and I saw him walking outside and straight toward the way I would normally go.
Before he got out of the parking lot, he started looking around, like he was looking for someone or something. I went to the restroom, called my mom, and told her to get me. I didn't go that way ever again after that, took a new route. About a week or so later, a chilling story came on the news about a girl who had gone missing. The video footage was from the same strip center as the burger place.
The suspect was the man who had been following me.
93. Ditching Danger
I was driving a friend home late at night when I was around 21. She lived in a pretty rural area outside of St. Louis, MO and about a quarter mile from her house was an old abandoned farm and farm house. I always thought of this place as non-threatening as she told me she and her two sisters would go there as kids and they found an attic full of cool things, including a trunk of vintage woman’s clothing and old love letters. It was like something out of a movie.
Anyway, I’m driving her home and it’s a hot, humid Missouri summer so we have the windows open. We are also singing at the top of our lungs. We pass the abandoned farm and I drop her off at her house. I wait long enough to see she makes it inside and I head back out the way I came. I’m driving along and I get to where the farm is. I see two things in the middle of the road, but I can’t tell what they are.
My danger meter goes off. I had just driven this road and there was nothing there. That’s when I put the windows up and made sure the doors were locked. I got closer and realized the items are two car batteries, spaced out in the road in such a way that I would have to get out and move them to drive on the road. I immediately knew I wasn’t getting out of the car.
I picked the side of the road that had the more shallow ditch and I gunned it. I was driving a little SUV and remember feeling the car run over branches and things in the ditch, but I just gunned it and got out of there. All the way home, I felt creeped out and kept checking my rear view mirror. I called my friend the next morning and told her what had happened and we both agreed it was weird.
Shortly after that, I moved to another state and didn’t think much of it after that. Fast forward to a couple of years later when I was back visiting my hometown. I randomly ran into my old friend and she ran up to me with wide eyes and grabbed my arms. She asked me if I remembered what I told her that night. I said yes and she proceeded to tell me a story that made my blood run cold.
Not too long after the night with the car batteries in the road had happened, her family was awakened in the middle of the night to someone pounding on their sliding glass door. Her dad went to check and saw two naked, injured women. He let them in and immediately called 9-1-1. They had been abducted from St. Louis City, about 40 minutes away, by two men and brought to the old abandoned farmhouse where the men had attacked them.
The women somehow managed to get free and ran like heck to the only light they could see—the light over my friend’s garage. They both survived, but the men who grabbed them were never caught. There was evidence the men had been going there for a while. My friend was convinced they had put the batteries in the road to get me to stop.
I’m just really glad my gut told me not to get out of my car.
94. Trust Your Gut
A few years ago, I was at a bar with a couple of friends. All was good, we were drinking and having fun. All of sudden, we heard this discussion taking place just a couple of tables away from us. Two guys decided to have a shouting/threat match. I stopped everything to pay attention to them. My friends were making fun of me, saying I was gossipy. One of the guys in the discussion got up and left.
Immediately after he left, I told my friends we had to go. Right away. I was adamant. They didn't get why I was being weird, but we’d been friends forever, so they reluctantly agreed. We went to a different bar in a different neighborhood, but I couldn't take my mind off of those two guys. The next day, I turned on the news and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
There was a report about a bar fight. Apparently, the guy who got up went home, grabbed a gun and came back for a drive by. He mowed down four people in the process. My grandpa taught me to never ignore my gut, and I couldn't be happier to have listened.
95. The Nose Knows
I was like eight when my parents took me and my younger brother to stay the night at my paternal grandparents' house because they were in the middle of divorcing. They lived in a farmhouse that was connected to a barn with machinery, gasoline tanks, and hay on the ground floor and furnished rooms on the floor above that. The room we were supposed to stay in was in that barn.
As soon as we went into the guest room, I was overwhelmed by panic and felt really dizzy. I turned around and just said that we will not sleep in that room, and we spent the night on the couch in the living room instead. Later that night, a gas leak in the barn ignited. The entire barn exploded, including the guest rooms on its top floor.
Maybe I had that weird feeling because the gas had leaked into the room already, but no one else felt anything. I'm sure I would be dead if I hadn't noticed it
96. Early Learner
When I was in middle school, I got into a local college’s summer program where kids study advanced subjects. The day was over before my mom's work day, so I would take the light rail to the library or sometimes the local community center. Anyway, it was my first time ever really being on my own in a city or in public in general.
My parents got me my first cell phone because of all this. They didn't make me scared but I was prepared about how to stay safe. I sort of did the same thing everyday; get off my stop, go get a burger, and then go to one place or the other, making sure not to talk to strangers and all that. A couple of times, I noticed a man walking behind me. He'd also go the same burger place that I went to.
He never tried to talk to me or do anything like that, but after the fourth time I noticed, I called my mom and she told me people are just going about their day, on a schedule like I am, so it could just be a coincidence. Well, one day I decided to eat inside the burger place instead of take it to go, and I saw him walking outside and straight toward the way I would normally go.
Before he got out of the parking lot, he started looking around, like he was looking for someone or something. I went to the restroom, called my mom, and told her to get me. I didn't go that way ever again after that, took a new route. About a week or so later, a chilling story came on the news about a girl who had gone missing. The video footage was from the same strip center as the burger place.
The suspect was the man who had been following me.
97. Speed Demon
When I was 18, I was on a back road with some friends. A girl I didn't know was driving really fast. Now, I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and I have always enjoyed a calculated risk in the name of a good time, but I just had a terrible feeling this time. I told her to either slow the heck down or let me out. I literally had to start screaming at her before she listened and slowed down.
A week later, a friend told me a story that made my blood run cold. She had crashed on that same stretch of road at 90mph, killing herself and the three passengers of her car.
98. Stranger Danger
I was maybe six years old and playing with a friend at the playground. An older man came and asked us if we would like to play at his private playground. I remembered my mum telling me to not interact with strangers, so I declined. I was sure as a kid that he had a private playground and was actually kind of mad at myself for not saying yes.
Years later, I was 25 and walked home alone from a club, being tipsy. That’s when it struck me. Suddenly, I remember this man from my childhood and it occurred to me what that really was. I see in the corner of my eye two guys behind me, one leaning on the wall, the other one just nodding and walking out of my perspective. Got chills like crazy.
All of the sudden, this dude locks me in his arms, trying to touch me. I said no, he didn’t stop. No one was around. So I said let’s just walk, because I was convinced that the other guy was just waiting as well. We walked, he held me super close to him. I asked him for his jacket because I thought I could run if he has to mess with his zipper.
He just grinned at me, held me even tighter and didn’t say a word. So I felt that I was running out of time, and there was still no other pedestrian in sight. So I relaxed my body on purpose while walking. He sensed it, stopped holding me so tight. I focused for 30 seconds and right at the moment when he looked back, I punched him as hard as I could on the side of his jaw.
He fell to the ground and I ran.
99. 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.
100. Calling All Angels
After I totaled my car, a man with burn scars all over his face and hands came up to my window. He asked if I was ok and then came and sat in the passenger seat. He said, “I need you to know that everything happens for a reason.” I said, “I know.” The next thing I know, I’m talking to the other driver and the authorities, and the guy is just gone. No one else saw him.
101. Coming In Handy
This happened when I was around five years old, but I remember everything like it happened yesterday. We had gone to a funeral for my mom's cousin in another town a couple of hours out. We got to the house and my mom went to see her aunt. She gave her condolences and I followed, holding her hand. I guess during the hugging and crying, my mom let go of my hand.
I started looking for her hand but not really looking up, just keeping my hand out for her to grab it while calling her name. There were a lot of people and the house was small, so I could only see the people standing around me. A couple of minutes later, I found her. Or so I thought, because she took my hand and started walking towards the door to leave.
I thought to myself as I was putting on my shoes that it seemed weird to come such a long way just to be here for five minutes. That thought led me to look up at the lady holding my hand. I instantly realized it wasn’t my mom. I have no idea where the woman was planning on taking me. I jolted my hand away from her and ran towards the room I had lost my mom at.
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