As great as a good urban legend can be, there is a whole other level of eeriness when one hears a creepy true story. There is no limit to the level of depravity, sketchiness, and just plain bizarreness that human beings can stoop to at times. And if there’s any doubt in your mind about that, reading these stories will do away with it pretty promptly. Here are 42 of the creepiest true stories that people have ever had the chance—or should I say misfortune—of hearing about.
1. Another Member of the Household
A 58-year-old man living alone in Japan started hearing noises at night and noticing things out of place in his house. He installed video cameras. Turns out a homeless woman had been living in his attic and cupboards for almost a YEAR in his house, undetected. This is why I get freaked out when I hear things at night.
2. It’s Just a Prank, Bro
There's a public park near my house, which gets pretty dark at night. I was driving home tired and exhausted after midnight when I realized that someone had dragged all the garbage cans and other large items out into the middle of the road to form a barricade of sorts. I'm not sure if it was just a lame prank or if someone was waiting for a car to stop so that they could rob the person.
I didn't bother to find out. There was just enough room for my small car to slip through. It's happened twice in the past few weeks, so I'm going to assume it's just some teenagers being jerks.
3. Who Can You Trust These Days?
Just gonna jump in on this topic to share a story that happened to a girl that I dated. I'll leave out specific details because I don't know how much she'd want it out there. She used to work at a home improvement store and there was this middle-aged guy who used to come in regularly and hang around the store and talk to her. He seemed a little slow and clingy, but harmless.
He would always address her by name and say that she was pretty. Then one day he was in the store as they were closing and he saw a male coworker give her a hug before he left. The next day that male coworker woke up to find his tires slashed in his driveway. No one made any connection to the nice middle-aged guy who came in to buy batteries five times a week.
Meanwhile, this girl had been noticing that she was always losing underwear at home. She just assumed that she had been losing them in the wash or simply misplacing them and thought nothing of it. She even joked about it with her mom. Then it happened. She was sleeping one night and woke up to find this guy standing silently over her bed, staring down at her with her panties pressed against his face.
She flipped the heck out and he ran out the sliding glass door on the back of the house. The same unlocked door that, as they found out once he was caught, he had been coming into night after night for months to watch her sleep.
4. Family Troubles
Found out that a girl who lives three hours away from me in Medicine Hat, Alberta, together with her boyfriend, killed her mother, father, and three-year-old brother. She was released from juvi a couple years ago and now goes to the same university as me. She was 12 years old when she did it.
5. A Mid-Life Change of Career Paths
There is a guy who became famous after being convicted of murder and cannibalism, and lives as a free man in Japan to this day.
6. How Creepy People Changed the Course of History
During WWII, an American airplane crashed near the Japanese island of Chichijima. There were nine servicemen on board. One was rescued by an American submarine. The other eight were taken in by the Japanese. Don't wanna go into all the details, but through some time and events, the Japanese ended up EATING those servicemen. But that's not the weird part.
The one serviceman who was rescued? That was George H. W. Bush. Google "Chichijima incident" for more details if you'd like.
7. To Hear Disturbing Oral Persuasion in Action
There is a recording of Jim Jones' speech during the night at Jonestown where the hundreds of people drank cyanide-laden juice and committed suicide. You can hear them dying in the background and his sheer delirium is absolutely chilling. Also, the entire Jonestown incident is horrifying. There is a really good documentary about it on Netflix called Witness to Jonestown. I highly recommend.
8. Earning His Title
When Vlad the Impaler was about to be invaded, he (true to his title) impaled hundreds of peasants on his country’s border so that his attackers would see how ruthless he was. It worked, and the invaders turned back and went home. Historians believe Vlad’s penchant for impaling stemmed from abuse from men while he was a boy.
Also, he experimented with different methods of impaling. Through various orifices, and in his off time would eat his meals while watching people slowly dying upon their spikes.
9. An Infamous Tale
Edgar Allan Poe’s "The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1838) was about four shipwrecked survivors stranded in a boat before they killed and ate a cabin boy—Richard Parker. In 1884, a boat was stranded with only four survivors. Three of the men killed and ate the cabin boy, also named Richard Parker.
10. You Can Take the Guard Out of the Circus, But You Can’t Take the Circus Out of the Guard
Once upon a time, on Staten Island in New York City, there was an institute for the mentally disabled known as Willowbrook. Long story short, most of the patients there were left completely unattended. In other words, it was a total nightmare. Needless to say, that circus show was shut down, but that's only the beginning.
Years later, a man by the name of Andre Rand (who was an old attendant of the facility) kidnapped two young girls, Holly Anne Hughes, and Jennifer Schweiger. Rand was given the nickname "Cropsey" after an old urban myth of a forest-dwelling ax-murderer. The body of Holly Anne Hughes was discovered in the surrounding woods, while Jennifer's body has yet to be found.
There's actually a decent documentary about the whole thing on Netflix, just search for Cropsey.
11. A Fire I Can’t Put Out
Centralia, Pennsylvania. It was a pretty decent sized coal mining town and in the 60s, a fire (which I believe was started at a landfill, but was not put out completely) caught an exposed coal vein on fire and the fire burns underground to this day. In the 80s, the government started paying people to leave, buying up all of the land and destroying the houses so no one could live there.
Since they didn't exactly force all the people there to leave, the town still has a population of about ten. There is enough coal underground to keep the fire burning for a very long time. I have been there before and in person, it is really eerie. It's a bunch of empty streets with one or two houses, a church, and some cemeteries.
One part of the highway, which was closed off and rerouted because of the fire, is all cracked and misshapen so the road is really uneven. One of the weirdest things is the steam that comes out through the ground. It almost looks like little hot springs everywhere, but it's really all coming from the fire below.
12. How is This Even Physically Possible?
So I guess I'd say this one I heard about this really really old lady, thought to be about 101 who lived in a small stone hovel in South America, (Chile I think). She always wore a hood over her head and talked in a shrill rasping voice. By day, she worked at a meat stall, and by night she would hobble back to her house in her full-length gown.
Her skin was greyed and incredibly wrinkled and dry, she looked by most accounts like a witch and many children in the village feared her. It was only after aid workers came to the village after an earthquake which left it without supply routes that they actually examined this old woman and found that the woman's granddaughter was actually wearing her grandmother’s skin, and that the grandmother had died from natural causes years ago.
The girl, who if I remember correctly was about 14-15, gutted, bled and cured the grandmother's corpse and left an opening in the back of the skin that she could climb into. Worse still, she had left the skin of the face, cured and intact and could put her head up inside and fill out the skin on the head and peer out of the eye holes which she enlarged.
After being removed from the grotesque suit and asked about the ordeal she said she did it so she could carry on working because her grandmother had died, and so she could maintain her status in the community, she also said she enjoyed playing make-believe with the corpse and that the whole process gave her much enjoyment. The girl was thought to have run away years back.
However, after the ordeal (which by all accounts was oddly legal), the young girl vanished from the community once more, and was never seen again.
13. That’s Some Tragic Irony
The story of Felix Batista, an anti-kidnapping expert. Felix Batista was successful in negotiating the resolution to nearly 100 kidnapping cases, many of them in Mexico. So it made for an amusing headline when he himself was kidnapped in Mexico in 2008 while he was there to give a seminar on how to avoid being kidnapped.
Since then, no one has had any communication with him and no one has ever claimed responsibility for his kidnapping.
14. Scary Stuff
I woke up at seven years old, totally naked, with the sole window in my room open; screen placed outside propped up against the house. I have no memory of what may have happened or how I came to be naked in the middle of the night. I went to my mother, in my predicament, who rolled over and told me I was fine. I took her word for it, put some clothes on, and went back to bed.
I still have no idea what happened. I do remember her putting the window screen back into its proper place the next day, and nothing else was ever said.
15. A Grizzly Discovery
This was when I was around 12 or 13, back when my four cousins and me were little hellions. They lived out on a ranch and we would ride four-wheelers to a bunch of abandoned buildings in the country all the time. This one time we came across a bridge and decided to stop and enjoy the view. The sun was shining, birds were singing, and the water in the river looked amazing rushing under the bridge. Then we noticed something strange.
There was a metal wire tied to the rail of the bridge and hanging down into the water. Of course, curiosity got the best of us, so we decide to pull it up and see what it was all about. We pull up a deer skull. A huge one too, with large antlers and everything. Mind you, this is not within the timeline of hunting season at all. Then my cousin says, “Look over there! “ We see what looks like an axe stuck in the middle of a tree stump down by the river.
We walk to the end of the bridge and hike our way down to the river and low and behold, this is not an axe, it was a deer’s leg that had been chopped off and stuck in the dead center of the tree stump, pointing straight up at the sky. We rushed back to the top of the bridge and decided there was no way a deer died by itself and put its leg in a tree stump and tied its skull to a metal wire. We come to the realization that someone is hunting out of season.
Suddenly, as two of my cousins are discussing whether to take the head with them or not (they thought it was super cool but it smelled absolutely horrible), we see some hillbilly looking men step out onto the porch of a house up on the hill. They are holding rifles. They see that we’ve pulled up the wire with the deer skull and start running down the hill at us. We never rode our four-wheelers so fast! We booked it out of there! We made it back to the ranch and told our parents about it.
16. All Out in the Open
Karin Catherine Waldegrave, a well-educated English woman who moved to Canada and made a bunch of lengthy Facebook wall posts addressed to nobody replying only to her previous comments and reaching up to 4,000 posts a week. The posts went into as much detail to suggest it being the result of some covert secret service brainwashing scandal or a sudden snap into schizophrenic delirium.
As suddenly as it started though, she disappeared and there has been no report of her since.
17. So Close, Yet So Far Away
My roommate's sister lives in a suburban part of Delaware, right outside of Wilmington. Her neighborhood had been experiencing all these weird break-ins for a bit, break-ins where nobody could figure out what had been taken. Finally, one day she comes home and finds a pair of men's boxers on her pillow (to the skeptics, she lives alone).
She immediately calls the police and gets the heck out of dodge, locking her doors before she leaves. The police come with her back to her house, and find the door unlocked, meaning the man was almost certainly inside her house when she made the discovery.
18. No Respect
Gilbert Newton-Lewis, the scientist who made the Lewis-dot structure we all learn in chemistry, was nominated for the Nobel Prize 41 times, and won it zero times. After having lunch with a rival who built off of his work, who won a Nobel Prize over him, Gilbert Newton-Lewis went into his lab and killed himself with the chemicals he was experimenting with.
19. The Odd Things You Come Across in the Woods
Okay, so one time back when I was like 11 years old, my friend and I were walking through the woods because he said he had something he wanted to show me. We walked down the path for a good twenty minutes until he suddenly started walking through some closely planted thin trees. Despite my confusion, I followed him until he suddenly stopped in a clearing.
There was a round mud hut in front of us, he told me he was too scared to go inside so I did instead. The floor was lower down then the floor itself and there was a little fire put in the center, it was surrounded by a DIY wooden bench. Although that was odd in itself, the real showstopper was the walls: every inch or the mud walls were covered in animal skulls held up by wire.
These skulls would range in size from a small sparrow skull to a deer skull. To be fair, it was a pretty neat sight. Outside of the hut was another small bench, which had the phrase “Where heaven and earth meet” carved into it. Cut to January of this year, and me and my mom tried to find the weird voodoo hut again in the woods.
While we did come across the hut it had sadly been demolished and all but a few of the skulls had been taken. It just kind of looked like someone had jumped on top of it after stealing all of the skulls for what I can only imagine to be some vulture culture collection. It’s kind of sad it had to go but I still remember like it was yesterday.
20. Demons in the Basement
My extremely Catholic grandmother owned a house in rural New York. We'd often go there when we went to camp or for family holidays. The place always had a weird vibe to it, as it was over 150 years old. I had several paranormal experiences like seeing what I believed to be a spirit of a man in a brown coat and top hat in the kitchen.
I would also hear children's voices in the bunkbed room when nobody was home, as well as light fixtures acting strangely, like bulbs going out on holiday lights one by one in sequence instead of all at once. Anyways, these experiences were never particularly emotion-inducing or threatening, just weird things I was convinced I saw...
...until one day when I was about ten. I was there alone while my grandmother went shopping and was just watching Avatar the Last Airbender and playing with Legos, pretty standard. I went to the bathroom at one point and noticed the door to the basement. I never thought anything of the basement because it was always closed and off-limits, but being unsupervised and the bold kid I was, I opened the door to get a peek.
It was pitch black down the stairs, but within about three seconds I felt an intense chill and an absolutely terrifying feeling of pure evil wash over me, like a primal fear. Every instinct in my being and soul went into full panic mode as I felt the presence rapidly approaching up the stairs. I shut that door and locked it as fast as I could and ran to the common room and grabbed a cross, convinced it was some sort of demon.
Upon telling my grandmother this, her face went white, as if she wasn't as shocked as afraid, and as if she knew something about it. She called a priest into the house and had him bless the place. When he opened the door to the basement he stopped abruptly and slowly descended. He performed his blessing down there and confided in us that he had felt the same feeling of dread, but that the house was protected by the lord now and we had nothing to fear.
I was always wary after that, but never experienced it again, and certainly never went near the basement. As I grew up, it weighed less on me, and I thought that maybe I was just a kid who spooked himself, maybe I had a grandmother who was so religious that she thought a non-existent demon was present, and maybe the priest felt what we were telling him we had felt, and it wasn't real.
Unfortunately for that theory, and the reason I share this, is because I learned a few years ago that the family that had moved into the house after my grandparents moved to Florida had abruptly moved out. They had forfeited their down payment and left immediately because, and I quote from the realtor's report, “The demons in the basement were terrorizing their children to an unbearable degree.”
So I don't know what was down there, but it wasn't human, it wasn't benevolent, and it wasn't make believe.
21. The Man in Black
When out exploring an old abandoned quarry with some friends we found this dude stood staring at this rock, occasionally twitching, but he never turned around. We were pretty creeped out, so we didn't investigate, and left pretty soon after. Later on that night we found out that another friend was driving down the lane that runs parallel to the quarry found a guy in a black coat stood in the middle of the road, and wouldn't move.
She was pretty freaked out and had to reverse all the way back up the lane in the dark because he was still there. Pretty sure it was the same guy, otherwise it was just a big coincidence.
22. Shrines to Murder
Bushwalking in New South Wales (Australia), me and my friend came across this weird platform looking thing made out of rocks. Later that year the cops arrested some bloke on suspicion of the murders of a series of backpackers who had gone missing over the course of a few years, and at the sites of several of the murders slightly off in the bush were these “altars.”
A current affairs show runs footage of one (the trial and run up to it were all over the news) and yeah, it's that thing we found. The altars were typically no more than 300 yards from the victim's shallow graves. The guy who was arrested and subsequently convicted for the murders is Ivan Milat, Australia's worst serial killer.
Now the cops are pretty sure that at least one other person was involved in the murders other than the one now in jail for the crime, they just couldn't prove it.
23. Haunted by a Boy in His PJs
Not long after I met my current boyfriend I would spend the night at his house. Normally I fall asleep as soon as I hit the pillow, but at his house I would be awake super late feeling creeped out. I blamed it on being in a strange house. After a while, I used to fall asleep at a decent time, but I would wake up around 2 or 3 AM and try to let my eyes adjust to the darkness (small town = very little light pollution).
When my eyes adjusted, I felt like I could see a little boy on top of the grandfather clock. This would happen every night for a while. I never felt scared just confused. It looked like a boy wearing older style pajamas kicking his legs on top of the clock. Still, I would blame it on sleep paralysis/dreaming or my imagination.
When I would go back to my parents’ house for school nights I would start waking up in the middle of the night seeing the same apparition sitting on the dresser or ledge in my room. I slept alone in the basement of the house, and after months of seeing the “little boy,” I wanted to sleep upstairs again, as I figured my mind was just getting to me.
One evening, I was home alone as my brother and parents were gone to some appointment. I happened to fall asleep on the couch in the living room, only to dream that the little boy was knocking down my mom’s ornaments that were on the coffee table. I woke up in a cold sweat and looked at the table: sure enough, the ornaments were broken.
Of course, they could have been broken beforehand and I never noticed. It started to get chilly in the living room so I moved to my mother’s bedroom to watch television before they came home. In her bedroom, I kept seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye that looked like the “little boy,” but I never really had a full-on view.
At this point, I was sure it wasn’t sleep paralysis/dreaming because I could move when I woke up and sometimes I would be wide awake. I fell asleep in my mom’s bed and woke up to the little boy laughing and running in the closet. Friday of that week, I went to my boyfriend’s house and he knew something was up but I wouldn’t tell him out of fear that he would think I was crazy.
That night, I was helping his mom bake and I happened to mention that I was having really weird dreams about a little boy and she asked me if he “was a young one with his jammies on?” She knew what I was talking about. She told me that their house was pretty old and all throughout the time they lived there strange stuff would happen such as stuff being moved or hearing voices or laughter, but the past six to eight months, things had stopped happening.
It’s been three years and I’ve moved out with my boyfriend to start post-secondary. I’m still seeing, sensing, and dealing with whatever it is. Things are still being moved and voices are still being heard.
24. Oh Deer
Over the years when I have told this story, many people haven't believed me, but it's true as the sky is blue. Me and my brother were hiking out in our new backwoods (we had just moved in to a new house) and we stumbled upon a small, open, grassy field. In the center of it, there was a person with a blue jacket crouched over.
We thought it was a friend of ours that we had recently met, so I ran out to greet them. I did not have my glasses on, but I got pretty close enough to see that it was a grown man leaned over the carcass of a deer, stabbing it with an unsharpened stick. He looked up and saw me. I was pretty freaked out, so I turned around and yelled at my brother to run, and so we started to sprint as fast as we could back home.
25. Need a Hand?
I went camping in southeast Ohio once with my dad and sister miles from civilization. As it started to get dark, my dad and I started to prep food for the fire while my sister went to change in her tent. A couple minutes later she walks over to me and asks “Were you outside my tent?” I asked her why, and she tells me that someone walked out from the direction of the trees to her tent and placed their hand on the wall of the tent.
She smacked the hand away thinking it was me messing with her but when she came out no one was there. We tell my dad and he says he did it and left it at that. The problem was, I knew it wasn’t him, because I was with him the whole time. Later that night I asked him why he lied and he told me it was too late to go home so there’s no sense in scaring my sister when there’s nothing to do about it.
I stayed in my sister’s tent that night with a knife in hand. I didn’t sleep. We stayed for another night without incident, but I couldn’t get my mind off of the fact that we weren’t alone.
26. It Was a Warning
I was camping alone in a bit of secluded bushland, with lots of sticks and leaf litter. I heard a strange plopping noise during the night, but no other noises really. Well, I wake up to see a decapitated kangaroo’s head next to the tent that obviously wasn't there when I put the tent up. No explanation. Got the heck out of there.
27. This Is a Horror Movie
When I was younger, around 14 or 15 years old, my family used to camp at a state park. Every night, my friend and I would walk through the woods. We called this "the ritual." This particular night, we decided to walk further into the woods than usual. We had flashlights, but we liked to try and navigate through the woods with them turned off. This was a horrible mistake.
We were about half a mile from the nearest campsite when we heard soft whispering behind us. Obviously, we hit the flashlights and spun around. Didn't see anything. So we kept walking and we hear it again. This time, we stop and look around a bit before we decided to head back to our campsite. Then we see what's whispering.
It's a lady crawling on the ground whispering just random words. She was wearing dark clothes and was covered in dirt. When she sees that we notice her, she stands up and declares that she is looking for her campsite. We ended up walking her back to the campground and tried helping her find her group. Turns out, she was just got lost trying to find a bathroom.
Her friends didn't even notice she was missing and if we didn't go that far into the woods, she would have been lost all night. It was pretty creepy.
28. Don't Cage Me
I went camping by myself way out in the middle of nowhere in north central PA. Drove on dirt forest service roads for over an hour and then hiked about 6 miles in on a barely recognizable trail. There were no signs anyone had been in the area recently. The trail was almost completely overgrown, no footprints, spiderwebs everywhere, etc.
I didn't really have a planned stopping point, I was just looking for a nice place to camp, but the trail followed a creek in a valley and was very rocky and not flat. As the sun was starting to set, I came upon a fork in the creek, with a nice flat spot just on the other side. As I got closer, I saw all sorts of stuff laying about. I crossed the creek and started looking around.
There was a tarp on the ground by a stone fire ring, a log about a foot in diameter that had been chopped with an axe. A little bit away I found the entire contents of what you would imagine to find in a hikers backpack: food, cooking set, camping pad, first aid kit, etc., all strewn about on the ground, but no backpack in sight.
There was a pile of clothes down by the creek that looked like it had sat through the last rain, which was the day prior, and a towel hanging from a tree. There was an area that had clearly been used as a toilet, for maybe 10-14 days based on the amount of toilet paper piles. But that was far from the strangest thing I saw that day.
The strangest thing was this "cage" about four-foot square, made out of saplings tied together. It was framed where the edges of a cube would be, and then had cross bars diagonally on each face. But it wouldn't have kept anything inside because of how much open space there was, and obviously wouldn't have been very sturdy since it was only made from saplings.
I ended up deciding to set up camp there because it was nearly dark and I didn't really have much choice unless I wanted to hike out in the dark on an unrecognizable trail. I had a 12" knife on me and I kept that thing in one hand the whole time I was there, thinking some crazy guy was gonna jump out and try to eat me.
All night I barely slept and kept thinking I was hearing things, and then as soon as the sun came up I packed up and got the heck out of there. Everything turned out fine, no crazy cannibals or anything, but it still really bugs me because I don't know what that stupid wooden cube frame cage thing was. I did try to find out.
I called the forest service for the area and told them about it, even sent them pictures. They said they'd send a ranger in to check it out and clean it up, but I never followed up to see if they figured out what it was. The ranger on the phone told me it was probably either someone with a still nearby, someone growing pot, or just some loner living out in the woods.
I roamed up the sides of the valley before I set up camp and didn't see anything, a still seems unlikely because of how far you would have to carry equipment in, and the area isn't really great for growing pot. So maybe it was just some guy living out in the woods. But why the cage??? It's going to drive me crazy, I know it is.
29. Seriously Disturbing
I was on a camping trip with some friends of mine and we found like seven or eight chipmunks and squirrels all in a pile. They were all dead, without arms or legs.
30. A Creepy Story Has a Twist Ending
This was quite a few years ago now. My friend and I had this really cool spot to hang out, in the woods. You had to walk in the middle of a creek for a kilometer and duck through sharp bushes and thistles. The hike was well rewarding though. The spot was about half an acre big, it was pure green grass on an incline with beautiful clear water ponds everywhere.
There was tons of wildlife and butterflies lived there. My friend Levi and I were walking along the river on the way to the spot. It was in the middle of a valley and nobody else ever went down there. Suddenly, Levi stopped moving and ducked into a bush, I did the same because I thought there must have been a large animal somewhere.
I saw him staring up the hill and so I looked up to. There were two people standing at the top of the hill heaving back and forth a lifeless body. We watched as they threw the lifeless corpse down the hill as it bounced off the trees and eventually got stuck on a tree at the bottom. Then they took off. Levi and I were terrified and I was shaking so badly I couldn't speak.
So we decided to verify that it was a real body. Levi got about four feet away before screaming, “IT HAS NOSTRILS!! IT’S REAL!! RUN!!!” So, of course, we take off running, and I glance back to see the two people run back to the top of the hill. Levi and I ran two kilometers through thick brush and trees to get away from them.
The next day we were with his parents driving to town. And we saw like 10 fire trucks at the school closest to the forest. Terrified, we told his parents, balling our eyes out worried that we were going to get murdered. His mom started laughing at us and said, “They are training for search and rescue, that was a dummy that the firemen had to find.”
I never slept as well as I did that night.
31. Basement of Horrors
I used to work in low-income home weatherization, basically giving free stuff away to help lower electricity and gas bills and make the home more comfortable to people who really needed it. One step in qualifying a home is testing combustion appliances to make sure they’re not emitting carbon monoxide into the living space, because if they are and we seal up the house we could kill the whole family.
During a pre-inspection of a home on the outskirts of the city, I ask to see the owner’s water heater. He tells me that it’s in the basement, which is fairly normal, and I tell him I have to inspect it before work can start. So, he goes into the kitchen and starts moving the refrigerator. Turns out the entry into the basement is underneath carpeting beneath the fridge.
I should note that I went and did thousands of homes over the years, and had never seen such a thing. But, whatever, needs to be done regardless and so I pull out my flashlight and shine it down the stairs, to check out the layout but really to look for black widow spiders. At this point, I notice a dead cat, mostly down to a skeleton.
Not my favorite sight, but really common in crawlspaces and basements. I take a few steps down the stairs and continue my spider check, and notice another couple of small animal skeletons. At this point, I start to worry about gas, or poisons, or something equally dangerous having been responsible for the skeletons. I start looking closer.
There are animal skeletons everywhere, at least ten on a cursory look. Some of them are so degraded I can’t determine what they used to be. I also happen to notice that this guy is waiting at the entrance a little too quietly, with his hand on the door. Something clicks in my brain and I get this immense sense of danger.
I’m about four steps from the door being clear to close, I have no partner on the job with me, there’s death all around me, and I realize just how hidden the entrance to the basement really was. I noped the hell outta there, told the guy I needed extra tools and would be back, and marked the job as non-feasible for health and safety as I was driving away.
I have no idea if I was actually in any danger, it could have been completely innocent; but I still remember the adrenaline rush and sense of doom, and sometimes you just don’t take chances.
32. A Gruesome Discovery
I'd been at soccer practice with a few of my cousins when I was about 10 years old. We decided to take a walk before our parents picked us up, so we went along the canal towpath. My cousin looked down in the canal and saw a really nice jacket floating along, and being a weird scavenger person, he decided to reach in to fish it out.
Well, the jacket turned over. And so did the man wearing it. He also had no face left. Not going to lie, that was rough sight.
33. Everything Was Going Swimmingly… and Then Came the Scream
We were exploring some woods on the outskirts of my city when we were around 12 years old. These woods had old barracks in them that were used during WWII but are completely abandoned, overgrown, and run down now. To actually get to any explorable barracks you had to go quite deep into the forest and up some very steep hills in which you use the trees roots that grow down them to climb up. This was the first time me and my friends had ventured this deep before, so we were all pretty excited at seeing how far we could go and how big the place actually was.
Eventually, we had to squeeze through some tight stinging nettle bushes but luckily we all had long clothes on to protect us. We stumbled out into this huge clearing area where right in front of us was the building. We were all astounded. But being young, we were all pretty nervous to actually set foot any further. We hung around the entrance for a bit messing around when my friend says, “Guys I swear I just saw a face or something in the dark over there.” My friend and I are thinking he's trying to spook us. That’s when it happened...
The loud scream of an adult male fills the entire building amplified by the echo. With that my friends and I look at each other absolutely terrified and let out shrieks ourselves. We bolt it towards the bushes in which we came and start making a break straight back the way we came without looking back. We must have run for a solid ten minutes straight without even stopping. Those huge steep hills I spoke about earlier we literally jumped down and just slid down them getting covered in dirt.
We finally reached the edge of the forest and stopped running. We never did find out who was in there or why but considering how young I was it was definitely one of my most terrifying experiences.
34. Sounds Like Someone Is Getting Chirped
I was doing a home cable installation at this one particular customer’s house, and he had a creepy basement that I needed to go into to complete the job. I absolutely had to go down there, or I would have had to rewire the entire house on the outside, which would look really trashy, and the customer definitely didn’t want it.
Anyway, it didn’t take me long to realize that this basement was completely infested with literally thousands and thousands of crickets, but they were like cave crickets or spider crickets or something else. Each one was extremely terrifying and I had never—and still haven’t ever again since—seen anything like them again.
I didn’t even know they were crickets at first. They were jumping and flying everywhere. They lined the walls and the ceilings and the floor; and I had to get through three entire rooms of them, as well as make three separate trips and then spend about five minutes trying to work on the wiring next to a noisy hive of some kind.
The basement also had no lights whatsoever, so all I had to see with was whatever little flashlight I had been carrying with me. The first moment that I opened the door down there and saw them all, I instantly said “Screw this!” and ran back upstairs. Unfortunately, though, I still had to finish the job. So, I came back a few minutes later with about four entire cans of hornet spray.
I emptied them. It barely phased the crickets. I hated that place.
35. That’s Just Ghost Rider
Hopefully this doesn't get buried, but once when I was around 20—36 now—I was driving to meet up with some friends. It was a Saturday morning, around one, so there weren’t too many cars out. As I make a left at the end of my street, a car had made a left from the main road onto the road I was on, so we are on a straight path to pass each other.
As the car was coming up, I noticed the driver had an unusually white head, as in white, not white person. As we passed each other, we were both driving slower, and as I got up next to the car, it was a skull. At first, I thought it was a mask, but the skull turned and looked at me. When he did, his eyes were wide open and then he opened his mouth at me.
At the time, it scared the living hell out of me, but looking back at it now, it had to be some top of the line mask the driver was wearing. It would probably still scare me though if I wasn’t expecting it.
36. A Terrible Sight, An Honorable Deed
I was driving home after an extremely late night at work, I lived in the middle of nowhere, about a mile before I got there a woman covered in blood jumped out of the woods into the middle of the road screaming. I panicked and went around her, then slammed on the brakes to help. Her boyfriend had beaten her and was currently chasing after her in the woods.
I got her in my car and called the police, they met us at the hospital because I told them there was no way I was waiting on the side of the road when he was coming.
37. Abandoned Buildings: A Haven for Wild Animals
There used to be this abandoned asylum in the woods by the park near my hometown. The main building above ground was torn down but the basement was still there and you could enter it by crawling through a small window. The furniture and some medical stuff was all still down there. I was too afraid to go through the window but my friend wasn’t.
He was down there for about five minutes before he screamed and jumped out of the window. He said something was chasing him. We could hear it down there scurrying around but none of us wanted to get close enough to the window to look with the flashlight. A few years later a woman got attacked near there by a bunch of super-aggressive raccoons.
38. When Leaving Was a Piece of Cake
When I was a senior in high school, I became friends with a classmate who later invited me over to her house for her birthday party. I knew that she lived in one of the "rougher" parts of town, which I didn’t see as an issue. So I showed up at her house and met her mom, who I’m guessing was about 450 lbs. and maybe five feet tall.
The house was totally trashed and smelled dirty. My friend didn't say anything about the state of the house or anything, so I just rolled with it. Anyway, there were probably about 10 of us at the party, and eventually, the time came for the cake to be cut. We all crowded into the dining room and waited for her mom to bring the cake out.
All of a sudden, we heard her mom yelling in the kitchen. The birthday girl and a couple of us ran into the kitchen, where the mom proceeded to tell us that a rat—or possibly a group of rats—had gotten onto the cake that was on the table. What she said next was what scared me off—“Oh well, I guess we can just cut around that part.”
Hell no. I got the hell out of there. Well, me and a few others to be precise.
39. Searching for Sully
Not sure if this counts or not but I was driving home from work late last night and I swore I saw a monster that looked like Mike Wazowski but with really long arms. I figured I was hallucinating because I needed sleep, but it still freaked me out.
40. A Personal Account
I almost was abducted by a man in a van (twice on separate accounts) when I was 15. This one time the cops came to my apartment complex and found footsteps in the snow leading up to the back window where my room was. When the guy tried to snatch me (in front of the complex, he didn't because I was kicking and screaming) he had said my name several times.
Gives me chills thinking about it.
41. Gone Fishing
This is about my Uncle. I think it was the late 70s or 80s; I can’t remember which, but my uncle is old—he’s like 50 now. Anyway, he took a trip to the Grand Canyon with his friends. They were driving along and stopped near this area with hedges/brush on the side of the canyon and decided to take one of your standard funny Grand Canyon pictures.
They had a really funny idea; my uncle was to stand on the side of the canyon with a fishing rod and pretend to fish off the side of the canyon. So they ended up taking the picture, and shortly after packed up and drove off. So they took the roll to be developed and when they saw the picture they noticed something very strange.
In the picture, not far behind my Uncle, was a man dressed in all black with pale white skin standing there in the brush just staring at the camera with a knowing smirk on his face. He said he and his two friends were in that spot for about 15 minutes. My Uncle and his friends claimed that they did not know this man, that they were the only ones in the spot, and the Grand Canyon was vacant of tourists at this time of year.
They still know nothing about the man and the picture still exists to this day.
42. One Step Ahead
My old man was an avid outdoorsman in the Colorado Rockies in the late 80s. He'd go on week-long treks with his buds. One summer, they'd been out for a few days in Pikes National Forest. They set up camp in a ravine they thought was safe. That night my dad unzipped the tent to take a leak in the dark and outside stood a pair of pale bare feet.
My dad screamed and zipped up the tent. Everyone else woke up and asked what was wrong. My dad said someone was barefoot out there. They went out and flashed their lights for a bit, hollering. My dad swore he saw what he saw and described the feet in detail: they were old blotchy feet, one even had a lump on the ankle. Tony, his bud, asked which foot, left or right.
My dad said it was the right. Then Tony said they needed to move their camp immediately. Dad asked why. Tony said they didn't have time. They went along with it and packed up and moved on top of the hill. The next morning they woke up to find a flash flood had torn through the ravine during the night. It would have surely killed them.
Tony's grandfather had just died a month prior and one of the last things he said to him was that he would always watch over him. The feet my dad described reminded Tony of his grandfather's feet.
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