These creepy tales are straight of a nightmare. From unsettling sightings in the middle of nowhere to supernatural phenomena, these Redditors have some horrifying true stories to tell. Real life is often more harrowing than any horror film—and that's the scariest part of all...
1. Bon Appetit
My mom just recently told me the story of her friend's creepy dad. One night when she was younger, she stayed over at this friend's house. The friend's creepy dad offered them "fresh venison" for dinner. My mom had never had venison, but of course, she ate it so as not to be rude. Well, the friend later tells my mom that her dad is not a hunter. The truth was so much more gruesome than she was prepared for.
Years later, we learned that creepy dad had cannibalized several women over the course of his life. Mom is pretty sure she ate human meat.
2. The Unseen
I was babysitting a three-year-old one night who I usually take care of when his parents are out on the town. We were playing and suddenly he pointed at a painting on the wall of a woman with her head turned away so you couldn't see her face. His next words made me want to scream. He said, "I don't like her, she's scary." I asked why and he said, "I don't like her eyes. She has bad eyes."
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3. A Call For Help
I live alone in the woods fifteen minutes from my town. My neighbors are near, but not right next door. One summer morning, I woke around 4:30 in the morning to a strange “pounding” sound. It was still kind of dusky dawn lighting and I was in a daze from just waking up. Then, I started to hear a man’s voice yelling, “Somebody help me.”
I began to look out my windows to see if I could see anyone, but couldn’t from upstairs. My home has no window coverings on any windows. I went downstairs and caught a glimpse of him, wearing only a thin t-shirt on, running around my house trying to jiggle windows and doors. He was very erratic, kept screaming for someone to help him, and kept running from door to window all around trying to find a way in.
In any normal situation, I would gladly help someone in need. But, this situation felt too unpredictable and dangerous for me to allow this person into my home. I was able to contact my neighbors who got my message and quickly made their way over to help me, faster than any officer could get here. The guy ran away straight into the trees before they arrived. He was picked up by RCMP shortly after. I have no idea what happened there.
4. The Ghost Of Subways Past
Eight years ago we fitted out a brand new Subway restaurant with a CCTV system—it fully covered the front of house and back of house, 16 cameras in total. A couple of weeks after they open, the owner calls us in to download some footage for him. One night, while he's at home, he gets a screaming phone call from his staff who are closing up at the restaurant.
They have all bailed from the shop and are refusing to go back—ever. The shop is unlocked and he has to go down and close up. The staff claim that they were closing up at the end of the day as normal when a "ghost" came through the back wall. It floated through the kitchen, passing right through the chairs and tables. They all see it, freak out, and book it, leaving everything wide open and unlocked.
I go in the next day and review the footage—it's all there. I can't believe it. It's exactly as the employees described: A white, smoky figure comes out of the wall and takes a tour of the store. Footage shows the staff freaking out and bailing. "It" continues wandering around for a good two minutes before leaping onto a wall, and then rushing one of the cameras.
It runs/crawls directly into the camera and even makes the camera shake from the impact. Then it disappears. Three of us sat in the office reviewing that footage and were completely speechless. We just stared at each other for a few minutes; it was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. We downloaded the footage onto CDs and left them with the owner.
I still can't explain what we saw. Before you ask, I'm a firm atheist and skeptic; I don't believe in ghosts, the supernatural, or whatever, but I cannot explain what I saw. It was some kind of entity; it was witnessed first-hand by three people and it had enough physical presence to make the camera move when it hit it.
I have long since left that CCTV crew and have no idea what came of the footage. I have checked Youtube and it's not there. That one still boggles me.
5. Mommy Dearest
When my son was first learning to talk, he would tell us about something called “Purple Mommy.” It could’ve been an imaginary friend, but whatever it was, it creeped the heck out of me. Here are a few of the details. Purple Mommy is all purple with long hair and bright all-white eyes (at the time, he mixed up purple with black, so he could have meant she was all black).
Purple Mommy picked him up at night and turned off the lights. We would often find my son out of his crib in the morning, which would have meant him crawling over the railing and to the ground at a time when he was barely walking. I definitely found the lights off in his room a few times, too, even though he’s terrified of the dark.
Purple Mommy needed a bandage because she had blood everywhere. Purple mommy had no smile, meaning she had no mouth. Purple Mommy could take her head off. Purple Mommy really didn't like Daddy. He told us all of this stuff for maybe a year or a little more. If we ever asked where she was, he'd always point to the same spot—a corner of the room behind his open closet door.
He would also wake up crying almost every night during that time. Once, during a really rough night, my wife went to ask him what was wrong, and his answer was, “Purple Mommy won’t let me sleep.”
6. Right Across The Concrete
I was showering home alone and thought I heard someone walking through the house. The hardwood creaked something fierce and it was a distinct sound, so I know that's what I heard. I called out to see if my mom or brother had come home but nobody answered. I heard it again, this time in the hall, so I cut the water off, threw my robe on, and went to see who it was.
There was nobody in the hallway, but I did notice something creepy. There was a massive puddle of dirty water with small bits of grass in the middle of the floor directly under the attic door. I went out to the living room and there was nobody. I checked the rest of the house and it was normal except when I got to the Florida room. The sliding glass door which had been closed and locked was now wide open.
There were also wet muddy splotches like someone walked from the lake up the lawn, across the concrete, and into the house. But, there was no water anywhere else but in the hallway under the attic door. We were renting the place and it had a garage, but the door leading into it from inside the house was kept locked and we weren't given the key.
We were told by the landlord that we can't use it because he keeps stuff stored in there but I have a vague memory of my mom saying she felt like someone was in the garage, like living in it. I can't remember if she heard noises in there or why she said that, but it was definitely an extremely creepy old house.
7. Release The Dogs
We live in the middle of nowhere. Part of the back garden is woodland. Only farms are around us. One day, a man was standing watching us at the gates whilst we played outside. We didn’t think anything of it as kids. Later that night, the same man came back up the driveway and knocked on the door. We watched from the cameras—and what we saw next was unforgettably disturbing.
He then turned around and signaled and three other men appeared on camera…two at the front door and one at the back door. My dad let the guard dogs loose from the basement entrance. It's fair to say that it scared the men and they ran off.
8. The Gentleman Caller
About five years ago, I lived downtown in a major city in the US. I've always been a night person, so I would often find myself bored after my roommate, who was decidedly not a night person, went to sleep. To pass the time, I used to go for long walks and spend the time thinking. I spent four years like that, walking alone at night, and never once had a reason to feel afraid.
I always used to joke with my roommate that even the dealers in the city were polite. But all of that changed in just a few minutes of one evening. It was a Wednesday, somewhere between one and two in the morning, and I was walking near a patrolled park quite a ways from my apartment. It was a quiet night, even for a weeknight, with very little traffic and almost no one on foot.
The park, as it was most nights, was completely empty. I turned down a short side street in order to loop back to my apartment when I first noticed him. At the far end of the street, on my side, was the silhouette of a man, dancing. It was a strange dance, similar to a waltz, but he finished each "box" with an odd forward stride. I guess you could say he was dance-walking, and headed straight for me.
Deciding he was probably tipsy, I stepped as close as I could to the road to give him the majority of the sidewalk to pass me by. The closer he got, the more I realized how gracefully he was moving. He was very tall and lanky, and wearing an old suit. He danced closer still, until I could make out his face. His eyes were open wide and wild, head tilted back slightly, looking off at the sky.
His mouth was formed in a painfully wide cartoon of a smile. Between the eyes and the smile, I decided to cross the street before he danced any closer. I took my eyes off of him to cross the empty street. As I reached the other side, I glanced back...and then stopped in my tracks. He had stopped dancing and was standing with one foot in the street, perfectly parallel to me.
He was facing me but still looking skyward. Smile still wide on his lips. I was completely and utterly unnerved by this. I started walking again, but kept my eyes on the man. He didn't move. Once I had put about half a block between us, I turned away from him for a moment to watch the sidewalk in front of me. The street and sidewalk ahead of me were completely empty.
Still unnerved, I looked back to where he had been standing…to find him gone. For the briefest of moments I felt relieved, until I noticed him. He had crossed the street, and was now slightly crouched down. I couldn't tell for sure due to the distance and the shadows, but I was certain he was facing me. I had looked away from him for no more than 10 seconds, so it was clear that he had moved fast.
I was so shocked that I stood there for some time, staring at him. And then he started moving toward me again. He took giant, exaggerated tip-toed steps, as if he were a cartoon character sneaking up on someone. Except he was moving very, very quickly. I'd like to say at this point that I ran away or pulled out my pepper spray or my cell phone or anything at all, but I didn't.
I just stood there, completely frozen as the smiling man crept toward me. And then he stopped again, about a car length away from me. Still smiling his smile, still looking to the sky. When I finally found my voice, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. What I meant to ask was, "What do you want?!" in an angry, commanding tone. What came out was a whimper, "What the…?" Regardless of whether or not humans can smell fear, they can certainly hear it. I heard it in my own voice, and that only made me more afraid. But he didn't react to it at all. He just stood there, smiling.
And then, after what felt like forever, he turned around, very slowly, and started dance-walking away. Just like that. Not wanting to turn my back to him again, I just watched him go, until he was far enough away to almost be out of sight. And then I realized something. He wasn't moving away anymore, nor was he dancing. I watched in horror as the distant shape of him grew larger and larger.
He was coming back my way. And this time he was running. I ran too. I ran until I was off of the side road and back onto a better lit road with sparse traffic. Looking behind me then, he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the way home, I kept glancing over my shoulder, always expecting to see his stupid smile, but he was never there. I lived in that city for six months after that night, and I never went out for another walk.
There was something about his face that always haunted me. He looked completely and utterly insane. And that's a very, very scary thing to see.
9. The Shadow Man Cometh
When my daughter was three, she had a disturbing imaginary friend. She called him “shadow man” and he mostly would stay in the corner of the room. Sometimes he would walk around and her little eyes followed the entire time. At first she would just casually mention him and she didn't seem bothered by him, but as time went on she would express how mean he was becoming.
One night, being desperate to fix this situation for her, I was going to beat the heck out of shadow man. So I go into the corner swinging and my daughter gets more upset and says shadow man is laughing and now showing his sharp teeth. She was terrified. I was terrified.
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10. Not The Only One
There was this trail where it was cool if people skinny dipped at the end of a hike. I was hiking alone and wanted to hang out by the stream as it was a hot summer day. I decided it’d be nice to take a quick dip before I continued hiking. I looked for a spot where there were no people and I saw some sunbathing down the trail.
So I purposefully went upstream a bit to be alone. When I was downstream, there was a lone man on the trail, so I stepped off to let him pass and I thought he had gone on. I found a private alcove and stripped, got in the water—and got a terrible surprise. To my horror, the guy reappeared about a foot behind me, completely unclothed, and tried to start a conversation.
I said something and quickly got out and got dressed. I have never hiked so fast in my life out there. I had no cell service either, but everything in my body told me I was in danger. I was a few miles from my car.
11. A Message From Beyond
One night, there was an altercation in the middle of our street at 2 in the morning that woke our whole house up. My stepfather and my uncle were still up drinking and went outside to see what was going on. There was a young man kicking the heck out of one of our older neighbors. We found out afterward the young man was dating the older man's daughter.
My stepfather and uncle went out to break it up and in the commotion, the guy plunged the weapon right into my stepfather. He stumbled back on to the porch and fell, and I tried to catch him. His blood smeared down the front of my shirt, and the younger guy took off and we called 9-1-1. This is where it got truly chilling.
We were in the hospital until the early morning. When my mom and I got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was a friend of mine from school, crying and apologizing for calling in the middle of the night, but she had just had a dream that there was screaming and a fight, and I was covered in blood. She begged me to call her back.
The time stamp on the message was the same time as the fight. This is in the late 80s, before computers and even cell phones really. I lived on the other side of town from her. There was no way she could have known what had happened.
12. Just A Typical Evening
I live in a city now, but when I was a kid I lived with my grandma in a very rural area of Florida that was known for being a dumping ground for murder victims. I never actually found a body whilst playing in the woods, but I did find a woman leaning over a creek in a dirty white dress at around six in the evening, right as the sun was setting. I heard her faint sobbing in the distance and went to investigate.
When I climbed over the embankment at the edge of the creek and finally saw her, she almost immediately started screaming at the top of her lungs, just staring into the water. Obviously, I wasn't a scaredy-cat, I was a brave 12-year-old. So naturally, I instantly pooped my pants and ran away. I still have no idea what that woman was doing, but that area was also known for having weird labs hidden in the woods, so that probably explains some of the strange people I met playing in that area.
13. Is Anybody There?
I worked with a lady once who was pretty old—I'd say about 70 years old. Since our job was pretty boring, we talked a lot and she had all kinds of crazy stories. But this one creeps me out still. She said when her grandma passed, they had her buried in a wood box in the backyard, as was pretty customary in those days. Well, years later they have a family plot in a cemetery and decide to dig her grandma up to move her to the family plot.
She paused at this point. Then she said when they took the lid off the coffin, their eyes went wide. It had claw marks all over the inside. The grandma had apparently been buried alive.
14. Well That’s Unpheasant
My dad used to rent this house way out in the middle of nowhere. It was a good 45 minutes from any town and the closest neighbor was another 15 minutes away. On this property were several enclosures for raising pheasants. These belonged to the property owner, so my dad had no responsibility towards them, other than to notify the owner if he saw anything wrong.
He was high school buddies with the owner so they were on good terms. Well, one morning, he made a seriously disturbing discovery. In the pheasant enclosure furthest from the house, with a good 50 or so birds, every single one of them had been slaughtered overnight. What was even weirder was that it didn't seem to be an act of predation. None of the birds seemed to have been consumed.
Luckily, the owner had cameras and they got to see what really happened. Sometime in the middle of the night, a man neither of them recognized had wandered onto the property. He made no attempt to approach the house, but instead crawled under the enclosure's fence and proceeded to catch and stab each pheasant while wearing a headlamp.
They caught the entire event on camera, from him entering the property till he left early in the morning. Officers were called, but nothing ever came of it. My dad was so freaked out from the whole event that he made us stay with our mom for several weeks while he slept in bed with a knife. The property owner tightened up security with new fences and alarms.
He even bought some guard dogs. They were very well trained and super friendly to anyone who'd approach them during the day. Nothing ever happened again on that farm, and the bird-slaughtering psycho was never found.
15. For The Love Of Ice Cream
My niece is currently four years old. I'm convinced she's going to be either the next Stephen King or the next Zodiac Killer. Latest incident: We found her with her dolls seated all around the table, she's at the head of it, holding forth. She's got a bit of a lisp, so it's not easy to make out what she's saying when she's talking fast. I go over to ask her what they are playing.
She was getting a battle plan ready on how to kill everyone in the house and take all the ice cream from the freezer. I was to be done in by her teddy bear stuffing itself down my throat. Sorry sis, I'm not staying the night, got plans. See you later (hopefully).
16. What Did He See?
When I was a teenager, I went to visit my aunt and cousins who lived in the boonies in a town named Eager, AZ, close to the border of New Mexico and half a mile away from the town where Fire In the Sky took place. I was really into alien abductions lore. I suffered from sleep paralysis where I'd wake up but couldn't open my eyes or move my body.
Anyway, late at night after everyone went to bed, I put on a movie…I can't remember the name of it… but it was like the Blair Witch version of an alien abduction movie. I was really into it, and totally geeked out. All the lights in the house were off, just the TV screen. I heard something behind me and slowly turned around in my reclining chair only to see an ALIEN staring at me.
I FREAKED OUT and jumped straight into the air screaming. Guys…it was a half-inflated balloon left over from my cousin's birthday party.
17. On The Run
I was staying with my grandparents who lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and a dude knocked on their door. He asked for directions to town, but they lived on a dead-end road where the only way to get up there is to come from town, so he obviously knew where it was. They then pointed in the direction he needed to go, and then he said thanks. His next move was bone-chilling.
Instead of getting back into his car, he just ran off into the woods as fast as he could. They called for officers, but they never found him so we have no clue what happened. He left his car in their driveway and never came back for it.
18. No Laughing Matter
So he didn't say anything exactly, but during this time my brother was around eight or so. My mom and I were sitting on the couch in the living room, and his room was right behind the living room walls. All of a sudden, I hear laughing. Not just any laughing, either. It was a high-pitched little girl laugh. I'm not joking. I go to check on my brother, and he's finishing a laugh, then goes silent. He never laughed in his sleep again.
19. The Place Under The Stairs
Just a few months ago, while I was still in school, I rented an old house with two of my friends. I lived in the basement and they each had a room upstairs. Several strange things happened to me while I was living in that basement. The first was that I had just gotten a dog and he was about four months old at the time. Now and then, right when I turned the TV off to go to sleep, my dog would start whining and growling at one corner of my room.
He would usually not get on my bed because he wasn't allowed, but during these times, he would jump on my bed and get as close to me as he could, all without his eyes ever leaving that corner. This happened about five times over the course of four months. Then, toward the end of the school year, when I was about to move out, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my life occurred.
Under our stairs was a little door that led to a small space that had a dirt floor. There was also a really weird, old wooden piece of what looks like a map nailed to the inside of the door, so it's a pretty spooky place. Up until the day before this incident, we had kept a small chair in front of this door that I laid my coats and things on, but we had some friends over the night before, so we brought that chair upstairs.
It was dark (probably 8 pm) and I had just been upstairs in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the stairs and was about to open the door to my room, when the door to the little closet under the stairs opened so slowly and with THE loudest creak I've ever heard in my life. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen in fear, staring at the closet, waiting for whatever was about to come out of it to show itself.
I literally stood there for about five minutes, absolutely terrified. Eventually, I opened the door to my room and locked it as fast as I could. I wasn't sure either of my roommates was home, so I called my female roommate and she was there. I spent the rest of that night upstairs with her, still too scared to go back downstairs. I do not scare easily.
Now I know many of you will probably say it was the wind or the fact that I had just come down the stairs or something just as my roommates did, but I've had those things happen to me before and been kind of creeped out, but this was different. The second I heard that closet open and looked over to see it opening so slowly, I felt this sheer terror.
It honestly felt like there was someone or something else in the room with me that wanted me to see that door open.
20. Not A Common Enemy
When I was camping as a kid behind my buddy’s house, I heard the most god-awful terrifying screech. It was like two pieces of metal being rubbed together. Our hands were absolutely trembling while unzipping the tent and we hauled our behinds back to the house. Honestly, I was still scared in the house too, thinking something was going to come through the window and get me.
It was probably a cougar/mountain lion I suppose, but they aren’t common here at all.
21. Home Sweet Home
So when I was about seven, maybe younger, I went to my mom's best friend's house with my mom in another city. It was just me, my mom, and her friend. Nobody else in the house. Except, when I was there, I saw a family which consisted of a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls who looked really burnt just walking around the house together without taking their eyes off me.
At one point, they even told me to go with them. I didn't think anything of it at that point because I assumed they were house guests. But many years later when I told my mom, she mentioned it to her best friend. Her best friend told her they actually had to move out of that house because they had had many haunting experiences, such as finding all her new baby's toys out in the middle of the night after she tidied it, things moved around, and blankets and pillows on the floor as if people slept there.
She asked her husband thinking maybe he did it, but he was just as scared as her.
22. Get Out Of There
I was hiking down a trail with my dog in remote Northern Wisconsin, when I just got a weird feeling. At the exact same time, the heckles on my dog went straight up and he began acting really anxious. About the same time, I came into a clearing in the woods, and got hit with what I can only describe as a sound wave. It was like someone was blasting a subwoofer right next to me but there was nothing around.
The nearest road was maybe a mile away. Something told me to get the heck out of there. So I quickly turned around and hiked as quickly as possible the rest of the way back. I didn't hear that bass sound after I left the clearing, but I still felt like something was following me.
20. The Other Side
When I lived in South Africa, I traveled a lot with a Christian missionary and humanitarian aid worker named Piet. He handled the spiritual stuff, while I tended to work more with the local (mostly Xhosa) people, helping them with non-spiritual issues. In July 2010, we went to a village in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we stepped out of the truck, we knew something was wrong.
We hadn't been able to contact our guy in the village all day, and there was no one around at all. Piet and I went from house to house, looking for, well, anyone, but everywhere was completely empty. Eventually, we saw a figure run around the corner of a building on the far side of the village. It was a young woman, wearing no clothes, running straight for us.
Her arms were flailing, and she was running like an animal, occasionally dropping to all fours, then back on her feet. As she got closer, Piet told me to get back in the truck, then he screamed at me to get in the truck. I'd seen this guy watch a Xhosa witchdoctor burn a dozen chickens alive and not bat an eyelid, so when he lost his cool, I knew it was serious.
I closed the truck door as she reached us. She was covered in blood; there were cuts and slices all over her face, arms, and breasts. One of her ears was missing—I think, there was a lot of blood—her teeth were bloody, and she had a look in her eye of absolute, untamed rage. The screeching sound she made is unlike anything I've heard before or since.
I can still hear it so vividly in my mind. Looking into her face, seeing her wide psychotic eyes and gaping mouth as she made that unholy sound froze me in my seat. Piet had started the truck, and already started reversing up the dirt track, but she followed. He turned the car, and all the while she was scratching at the windows and metalwork.
Then he sped off up the track. She followed us still. She didn't keep up, obviously, but for a while I thought she was going to. I've never seen someone run that fast in bare feet. The journey back to our base town was almost silent. I spent most of it concentrating on the sound of my own breathing, and the rumble of the road. I asked Piet what that was, and what we should do.
He said the girl was no doubt insane, had a psychotic break or something, but the locals would have immediately thought her possessed. If she didn't kill herself, the other villagers would within days. He suggested that they had gathered in one house for safety. This happened in the Eastern Cape, which I would argue is the darkest, wildest, and most bizarre part of the country.
Strange things happen there a lot, and often just get buried or only picked up by one of the crazy tabloids like the Mercury, and subsequently ignored or written off. There are vast swathes of grassland punctuated by the odd settlement, without any adequate law enforcement. A lot of people live in these isolated settlements, and will only leave to work or to get food.
Many spend their whole lives in the village of their ancestors, as do their children, and so on. We did call the authorities, and the officer said “we will look into it.” We never heard about it again. South Africa has some very developed areas (the major towns and cities, for example) but there are enormous parts of this country that have remained almost untouched for decades.
The further you go from Johannesburg or Cape Town, the more rural and strange things can become. I'm not saying that all of rural South Africa is like this. A lot of the villages we went to were nice, simple settlements where the people welcomed us, gave us food, gaped at us for being white, and so on. Some were more sinister.
We eventually got in touch with the guy we were originally trying to see a day later. Piet asked him if everything was all right, and he said “We had a bad presence in the village. It is now gone.” I don't know for sure what happened, but I can guess, based on what Piet said. Piet's been back once since to that place, without me, and they seemed fine.
He told me he didn't ask about the girl, as he didn't know what had happened, and he didn't want them to react. I don't think he wanted to know.
23. The Blonde Beast
Little blonde girls still freak me out to this day because of this story. I had the window seat on a quick one-hour flight, sat next to a little blonde girl with her mom on the aisle seat. As we're taking off, the girl points out the window and exclaims, "We go up and die!" Her mom quickly corrects her, "Yes, we go up in the sky!" A few minutes later, she's points again and says, "I see pain!"
Quick on her feet, her mom corrects her again, "You see plane, very good." No, Sheryl, that's not what she said and you know it!
24. What Are You Talking About?
My wife and I were staying at a cabin in a rural town in the mountains. Around eight in the evening, an air raid siren for a fire, maybe, rang out for quite a while. We joked that it might be a zombie apocalypse, and after a while, we actually got a little nervous that we didn’t know what it was for. So, I put on my coat and pots and walked down the road to a small grocery store nearby.
I went in and asked if they knew what the siren was for. They said, “What siren?” When I went back outside, the siren was gone.
25. What A Way To Ruin A Night
Oh man, this happened in my junior year of college. Not my proudest moment. Me and maybe half a dozen friends are hanging out on Saturday night and we are just crispy baked. Then there was a knock at the door. Serious knocking. Panicked knocking. What do we do? Gotta be officers, and we are so screwed. Like, I'm getting kicked out of housing this time.
So one of the girls goes to answer the door. A guy with insane Ted Kaczynski hair and no pants is SCREAMING at the door to let him in. The girl screams and tries to shut the door, but the guy is forcing his way in. He is bleeding pretty bad, and is suddenly basically draped over my friend in a heap. He is totally incoherent, just keeps yelling PLEASE and making no sense otherwise.
My friend runs down to help the girl. I could muster precisely zero courage. I was terrified. I stood at the top of the stairs like a housewife who had seen a mouse in an old cartoon. WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO!? OH GOD WHAT DO WE DO!? We have to call the authorities! Right? I CANT DO IT I'M FREAKING OUT MAN. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY HANDS! Someone finally calls and tells the authorities an old, possibly homeless man is trying to force his way into the apartment.
I remain totally panicking at the top of the steps, helping in no way whatsoever. My friend has now wrestled the guy out of the apartment and is trying to calm him down. Eventually, officers come and they take the disheveled, pantsless homeless man away in an ambulance. We close the door and sit back down in the living room. "Is anyone else not baked at all anymore?" someone asked.
We were not. We'd go over the series of events a hundred times over the next few weeks. I tried to downplay my role as the guardian of the stairwell. Like a week later, though, we'd find out it was neither an old guy nor a homeless guy, but rather a friend of a friend on a really bad acid trip who had lost his pants and ran through a field in a panic.
26. Making A Big Fuss
Our two normally placid black Labradors woke me up in my bedroom, on the ground floor, making an awful growly barking sound I've never heard them make with real aggression and fear in it. We lived in the countryside with a huge common and woods out the back of the house. I went into the kitchen, and they were glaring at the back door and making a big fuss.
This made my hair stand on ends and their obvious terror communicated itself to me. I grabbed a torch and steeled myself thinking maybe it was an intruder, armed myself with a fire poker, and opened the back door. It was pitch dark and, as I opened the door, both dogs shied away and ran to the other room. I poked my head and the torch out the back door. What I saw made my blood run cold. Just for a split second, I saw reflective eyes of a really large creature somewhere up the garden.
They blinked as they turned away, and then they were gone. There is literally nothing in England that can account for this. I slammed the door shut and me and the dogs slept in my bedroom half terrified. The local paper shortly after that featured an article about some unexplained sheep casualties in a farm a mile away from ours. They had been ripped to shreds as if by a large predator.
27. Peek-A-Boo
While changing my daughter in front of the open closet door, she kept looking around me and laughing. I asked her what was so funny. She said, "the man." To which I replied, "what man?" She then pointed at the closet and said, "the man with the snake neck." I turn around and nothing was there. I'm afraid to look into the history of my house to see if anyone hung themselves in the closet. At least she wasn't scared.
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28. Where Did They Come From?
One Friday this summer, one of my neighbors who has no kids cleaned her storm door. She had no visitors that day. When she woke up the next morning, there were what looked like ten or fifteen children-sized handprints on her storm door. She called for officers just in case there was a missing child or something, and they came out to take a look.
Said it could have been raccoons which it probably was, but for a while there I was genuinely freaked out—and the story doesn’t end there. In the summer of 2020, I made the mistake of going out onto the porch at around 11 at night. I was about to take the trash out to the dumpster across my back yard but I felt something in the yard and froze. A few seconds later, I heard footsteps, and something moved around out there.
It was definitely not a person. I left the trash on the screened-in porch and locked the door behind me so fast. I don’t go outside after dark now if I can help it. We’ve recently had reports of black bears in the area, so that might have been it but there’s no way to be sure. I’ve never seen one here in person.
29. The Uninvited
My creepiest thing will forever be the man who watched me at my window. It's nothing paranormal, but honestly. I was texting my girlfriend, playing a game, and I heard rustling outside my window—keep in mind I live in the basement as an "apartment" at my mom's house. I don't have any curtains, and I turned off my iPod.
I could see someone actually staring at me. This went on for about 10 minutes. I texted my little sister to get the bat and turn on the lights upstairs. After he saw the lights, he ran off. I have never been more creeped out…except for the recent occurrence. I thought I imagined the "FWOOSH" and "PLOP" sound in the middle of the night, but I brushed it off. The next morning, my stepdad was cleaning the yard and found the A/C cover in the other window well.
I went upstairs to get ready to wash my mom's car when they told me. They asked me if I heard anything, and I told them about the strange sounds I heard. I now keep a blade and an aluminum bat with me. We called the authorities the first time it happened, and they said they couldn't do anything. Short of breaking into the house, we're stuck dealing with this person (or people) until they do break in.
30. The Dog Knows Best
I live in a semi-rural village with houses and shops, but surrounded by fields. There are loads of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, like 1000 within a handful of miles. Anyway, there is this one prehistoric grave which is open, the contents having been moved to the museum. I jumped in one time to get a photo taken and my dog, a placid old black lab, suddenly started barking with full alert mode, hackles, danger, right at me, in the burial cist.
I still shudder to remember the moment. Maybe it was a snake, I don’t know.
31. Mischief Maker
Apparently, when I was a kid, I used to say "When I was an adult..." I did this and that. I don't remember why I was saying that, but I definitely remember I said I used to own a store when I was an adult. Another thing my dad says often was that he had an out-of-body experience where he saw me as a two-year-old looking and giggling at him.
He was trying to grab me but his hand just passed through me, where he realized he's asleep. So he woke up and went to check on me. I was still giggling and running away from him just like my dad saw. He believes I could actually see him while he was asleep.
32. The Symbolic Passageway
I lived in Japan and went on a trip in the mountains with a friend of mine. On a night ramble with him in an unfamiliar area, we both happened upon a torii (a traditional Japanese gate) that was immediately met with an impassable rock face. This seemed strange to me as torii were symbolically passageways. He and I both instinctively looked up to the sky while standing before the torii and somewhere that felt close to earth a great multicolored light appeared hovering above us, letting off light almost like a gas in the full spectrum of colors, before disappearing.
He and I both felt something incredibly significant had happened, but had no idea what. It was a very odd feeling.
33. Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before
Before I could talk, for months and months I would be humming in my sleep, the same tune, over and over. I would hum it when I played with toys, was waiting for something, but the creepiest was when I was asleep and humming it. A few months later my aunt and uncle were watching TV and they recognized the tune: it was the commercial jingle.
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34. Let Us In!
I lived 30 miles (48km) from the main road. There was private land all the way to the house and big panel windows all around the living room that looked over the property. We had no one near us, so privacy was constant. I was up late watching a monster truck rally with the living room lights on and no lights on outside. That’s when it happened. Two men come up to the window and slap their hands on the glass and look right at me.
I can hear them say to let them in and casually and slowly walk towards the front door connected to the living room. The door and connected frame was large and wide. When they walked behind the frame of the front door where I couldn’t see them, I heard nothing. I walked to an angle where I would be able to see them and saw nothing. They weren’t there or anywhere. It was like nothing happened and I started to think that I imagined the whole thing. The slow walk and dead eyes were just so weird.
35. Deja Vu
This whole thing still freaks me out. I was waiting at the bus stop around two years ago, and just start chatting with this lady who was waiting for a different bus. It was just a normal conversation, but there was an odd undertone that I could just barely make out, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I don't know what it was. but I know it was there.
Finally my bus comes, I get on, and I am the only one there. All of a sudden I hear "Hey!" I glance up and there's a little girl who says "Remember me?" She reminded me strangely of the woman I was speaking with at the bus stop, but younger. You could cut the tension with a knife, and when I got off I swear she watched me as the bus left.
I'm certain that I was the only one on the bus when I got on.
36. The Known Nursery Rhyme
I used to own five acres of land with a cow field as my only neighbors on all sides. I’ve always sung these really silly songs to my dogs. One is the nursery rhyme, “Daisy, daisy.” I sing the songs inside my house mostly, because my dogs are indoor dogs. Anyway, one crisp fall evening, I was inside my house alone with my windows open. I heard a faint, low whistle.
It was the “Daisy, daisy” tune, whistled slowly and deliberately. At the end of the verse, the whistling stopped. I was too scared to look outside. I’ll never know what caused that noise.
37. Something Was Looming
I live rather rurally, like an hour from even a supermarket. A few months ago, I was in my recliner, trying to sleep. My eyes popped open—and what I saw made my heart stop in my chest. I could see a solid black figure standing just off the corner of the chair. It bent over at the waist and turned its neck funny. It was like it was trying to get a good look at me at eye level. I panicked a bit.
All I could do was yell, "What what WHAT!" and it disappeared. A part of me thought I must have been dreaming. But then, I realized that my German Shepherd dog was hiding underneath the foot of the recliner, something he had never done in his six years of life. He did that for the next few weeks.
38. Alone And Vulnerable
My boyfriend works the night shift, and I was asleep alone in the house. Suddenly, I got woken up in the middle of the night by my puppy whining in the living room. I assumed it's because he wants outside. I'm just about to open the back door when I hear this weird scratching or clicking sound at the front door, like someone was sticking something in the lock.
I go to check, and I can see the silhouette of somebody standing there through the window in the door. I then notice there is a second figure in the living room window, although it's too dark to make out any features. I know they can see me because I didn't have any blinds at this point, and they just stood there. I totally freaked and called the authorities, then my dad.
I huddled in the kitchen out of sight of any windows and waited for someone to come. My parents live across town and showed up before the officers. The strange figures were gone at this point, but the neighbors across the street were up and saw the car they had come in. I ended up staying at my parents’ place that night, and when I came home the next morning, I noticed the basement window was partially kicked in.
I got a security system installed the next day. I still have no idea who it was.
39. A Buck Or Two
My mom lives in the woods with my young nephew. It’s totally dark at night, in a tiny house. She woke up in the middle of the night to a banging on the house. Eventually, she worked up the courage to look out her bedroom window. She saw a buck, banging its head against the siding. Just backing up and rearing toward the house over and over.
40. Hide And Seek
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my 18-month-old running around her room. I walked to her room, opened the door, and saw nothing. It was almost completely dark, and there was no toddler running around. I called out to her playfully. "Erika? Where did Erika go?" Silence. And then, from behind me, "SSHHHHHHH!!"
I almost screamed. She was standing, completely still and quiet, in a dark corner of the room the whole time. And decided that shushing me as loudly as possible was a good idea. I lost 10 years of my life. She's three now and continues to be the child out of a horror movie. I'm hoping I can raise her to be a productive demon member of society.
She also yells "Fix the cat’s tail! Fix it mom!" whenever I am using scissors for anything.
41. We’ll Just Do It Tomorrow
Was staying with my dad who lived in rural Kansas, 15 minutes from the nearest small town, an hour from a bigger city. He lived on an acre of property with the house being towards the front of it. One night, I had to return a shovel or something we had been using to the shed that was in the back of the property, right along a wooded area with a creek running through it.
I should mention the home was previously owned by puppy breeders, although the conditions looked like it could’ve been a puppy mill. Either way, wildlife was constantly being spotted in this area and we figured plenty of predators realized this was at one time a food source for them. So one night, I was taking the shovel back to the shed when it was dark out.
I had a floodlight on so I could see my way. When I got to the shed, I started to hear a low growl very, very close to me. Considering the forested and brush-filled area was only feet away from me, something could have easily been in there watching me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I was almost frozen until I realized I just needed to get out.
I kept the shovel with me and walked backward all the way to the house. I told my dad what had happened and why I still had the shovel, and he basically just said, “That’s ok, we’ll get it tomorrow,” which seemed odd because he was a very “no excuses” kind of guy. It makes me wonder if he saw something there previously.
42. Seeing Double
This is just good old human creepy. In the late 90s, I went to a yard sale that was about six blocks from my house; I live in a fairly small town. I found this silver case that I thought would make me look stylish and uber-sophisticated at the bar. I bought it for $2 from a guy who was at least 85 years old. I took it home and then immediately dropped it on the sidewalk.
It got dented in one corner, but it was still good-looking so I used it for a while. After a couple of bar trips, it became a pain in the butt, as it only held eight smokes, so I tossed it in a nightstand drawer and forgot about it. A few months, later I saw another yard sale at the same place and stopped to look. I found a case just like the one I bought and picked it up. But here's the weird part...
It not only had the same dented corner, but I opened it up and there was a smoke that was my brand inside. For some reason, I felt the need to buy it again for $2 from the same old geezer. When I got home the “original” case was not in my nightstand. I will never forget the smile that old guy gave me when I bought it the second time. I have no idea how he got it again, though.
43. Couldn’t Make It Through The Door
I grew up in the countryside in Italy. One night, I was going to my room when I stopped at the threshold of my door and couldn’t get myself to go in. I was frozen and had this feeling of terror. My heart was racing, I felt like hyperventilating, but I knew I had to keep my breath quiet. I just had this feeling of pure terror. I ran downstairs and drank some water or something and watched some TV with my parents.
After a while, I tried to go back to my room and the feeling was gone. I don’t know what could have caused it, I never had that problem before.
44. Girl Gone Wild
When my daughter was a year and a half old, she got out of her bed in the middle of the night, came up to me while I was sitting at my desk, and goes "The fire. It's coming. Shhh..." with a finger to her lips. And then goes back to bed. Then when she was two, she and I were playing with her baby dolls on her bed, and I ask her "Sweetie, do you want mommy to have another baby?"
And she looks me right in the face, takes a pillow, holds it over one of her dolls, and whispers "Nooo..." At three she comes up to me, strokes my ear softly, and whispers "Take your ear off, Mommy. I do it." Finally, on her third birthday, she was in her room popping balloons from her party and I hear her go "Pop all the balloons. Pop all of the joy." She's harmless, that I know of, but she's a little creepy somebody sometimes.
45. What You Least Expect
The mother of one of my friends retired to a cottage in the woods. A week or two in, she dropped her pants to have a pee in the toilet. In the process, she feels something “touching “ her in a very private place! She looked between her legs—and what she saw was so horrifying, it’s unforgettable. There was a black snake, several feet long, that was “chilling “ in the toilet bowl.
She got up and ran. It was only when she was a few yards down the road running away did she think to pull up her pants. She had movers remove everything from the place and apparently she never went inside the building again.
46. Nighty Night
This happened to my cousin, and my other cousin and aunt witnessed it. My younger cousin's name is Jenny, my older cousin’s name is Jane, and my aunt's name is Myra. So Jenny and her mom Myra are in New York to visit Jane while she's in her master's program. They tour around NYC and stay at a hotel in Manhattan somewhere.
Anyways, in the middle of the night Jenny is having nightmares. After talking with her after the fact, she describes sleep paralysis to the tee. Apparently Jenny was being drawn in and suffocated by a massive TV that drove her through the bed and into the ground. She woke up screaming and crying, and vomited and peed her pants in the bathroom.
My aunt Myra goes to help her and wash her off, and they both head back to bed sometime later. A while later, my aunt checks on Jenny again, who is now staring directly at her with a blank expression. She's sleeping with her eyes fully open. My aunt is creeped out, but then a new terror came to visit. She and my other cousin Jane are starting to hear whispers and children's voices.
They leave first thing in the morning…but one more creepy thing happened. There's a photo of my family from this time where Jenny has fully blackened lips. Not Photoshop blackened, but they're perfectly black. Almost as if she had put on some makeup or lipstick. But of course she didn't. To this day, we have no idea why her lips showed up like that.
47. Spirit Medium
My mom told me how when I was a baby in nappies and could talk quite well for my age (not sure how old I was). One day while she was changing my nappy she said I looked her in the eye and said, “I used to do this to you when you were a little girl.” She said the hairs on her neck went up and was creeped the heck out, but just replied “Oh did you?”
Then I went on as a baby again like I never said a thing. She thinks maybe it was my deceased great nanna appearing through me for a second.
48. In A Bad Neighborhood
My girlfriend lived out in the desert boonies and I'd frequently spend the night out there. She lived near a state penitentiary that fairly consistently had escapees. This was a time before cell phones and alerts were a thing, so whenever someone would escape, officers’ helicopters flew over the area shouting over a megaphone.
In the quiet of the open desert, it was quite jarring to be abruptly awoken by someone screaming at you from the sky. We'd all bolt out of bed to check all the locks and windows. Good times.
49. A Mind Of Its Own
I used to live in an old house way out in the woods in Georgia, United States. My mom loves Christmas and even though almost no one drove by our house, we would do up the lights like nobody's business. Anyways, one year I went to unplug the lights when I woke up and no one was home. I unplugged them and walked a few feet away and heard a noise like something sliding.
I turned around and I kid you not, I watched the extension cord lift off the ground and plug itself back in. I stared at it for a few moments and unplugged it. It never happened again.
50. Paint By Numbers
My parents were on their honeymoon in Key West. When they arrived at the hotel to check in, they were told that the room would be non-smoking. With my dad being a smoker, they requested a different room. They got the room switch and went to their room. As they got off the elevator, the smell of fresh paint was overwhelming.
Down the hall there was a painter with all necessary supplies laid out around him, and he was painting the wall. As my parents walked passed him, they casually greeted him and the painter gave absolutely no acknowledgement of their presence. Whatever. When they got to their room, the smell of paint was even worse in there, so bad it wasn't even bearable so they decide to go to the front desk to change rooms again.
When they explained the situation, the attendant looked very confused and informed them that there wasn't a scheduled paint job on that floor for that day but agreed to change their room. My parents go back to their floor to grab their luggage…and the painter is completely gone. All the supplies are cleaned up and gone within 10 minutes, and the smell of paint was completely gone.
At this point, my parents were freaked out but didn't think much of it and go to their new room. The next morning on their way to breakfast, they overhear a tour guide talking to a group. My parents tuned in when the guide mentioned the floor that they were originally supposed to stay on. Apparently a long time ago there was a painter on that floor painting and he fell down the elevator shaft.
Now, my parents don't normally believe in the paranormal but after an event like this that they had no explanation for, it freaked them out a good bit.
51. Furry Friend
My four-year-old daughter was going through a Cinderella phase and had a very active imagination. One night after reading a bedtime story, she sits up and looks towards the foot of her bed, and starts calling in a soft sweet voice "Lucifer? Luuuciferrrrr?" I was in that instant, very aware of my pulse. Took me a while to realize that the cat in Cinderella is named Lucifer.
52. Repeat Offender
I was hitchhiking home from high school (I know, I know) and got picked up by a really weird guy with stereotypical creepy thick glasses. For the record, I am a guy. It was really hot in his truck—he probably had the heat on in retrospect—as we drove along a main road. At one point he mentions the heat and said that it was OK if I wanted to take off my shirt. I had the perfect response.
I said, “No thanks” then opened the door and rolled out into traffic when the truck was coming to a light. Thank God the door handle hadn't been removed or anything. Bonus: I hitchhiked around a year later and the exact same guy pulled up and asked me if I wanted a ride. He didn't recognize me and I said no, then realized at that point that he must do this kind of thing often. I never hitchhiked again after that last day.
53. Dearly Departed Friends
I was a little kid when I said something creepy. I heard this from four family members (my mother, father, and grandparents). They were having breakfast and I came into the kitchen and said how "Uncle Sal" and I were talking last night. There was one thing horribly wrong with this. This was my grandmother’s deceased brother who passed 10 years before I was born.
My grandfather turned white and almost fell out of his chair.
54. Out For Blood
This old man would get intoxicated, grab a hatchet, and look for people to punish. The entire village would hide. We usually hid in the bushes behind an old creepy house and would stand there for hours. We’d get bitten by mosquitos and it would be dark and cold. My granny would pray the whole time. I was maybe eight and I lived with my grannies in a rural Russian village.
55. In The Shadows
One time, my husband and I went to his friend’s house for a bonfire. His son Lane was sitting on my lap. I went to get up, and he screamed then told me to sit back down. I asked him what was wrong and he said that "it" was watching me from the dark corner of the house and if I got up "it" was going to hurt me. He pointed to it and even described what it looked like.
I stayed there for two hours until he fell asleep. Told his dad to take him, and ran to the house. Scared of the dark ever since.
56. Whistle While You Work
This one hits me every now and then when I wake up in the middle of the night. So I was around 17 and had gotten home from work rather late. I went straight to my room to change and found myself hungry. It was probably around 1 am by this time and I didn’t want to cook anything and make too much noise as I was afraid I’d wake the parents.
So when I ventured to my kitchen, I started shuffling through the cupboards looking for a quick fix of snack food to tide me over until the morning. Now, our kitchen was positioned so that the kitchen door led to our back yard. The door itself was an old wooden door, but my dad had added one of those metal security gates on the outside for good measure. It was one of the security gates where the holes on the door were small enough so that insects could not get through, and therefore we could leave the wooden door open in the summer to allow for a breeze to go through the house.
In addition to the security door, my dad had also installed one of those auto security lights, you know the ones that go on automatically whenever their motion sensor is triggered. Usually the light would only go on when I would let my dog outside to pee at night. However, on this night my dog was already lounging in my room waiting for me to come back with some snacks for him as well.
Anyways, getting ahead of myself. So, I was busy creeping through the cupboards and finally hit the jackpot with some pop tarts. Knowing my dog, I didn’t want to chance him snagging the tart from my hand as I ate it, so I busted those things open then and there and ate them raw. As I am standing there eating the first pop tart, I hear a faint whistling sound from outside.
The wooden door was open. At first I thought it was the wind, but then I noticed that the whistling was a distinct tune and not random whistling. I didn’t know the tune but I could tell that it was from a song…it sounded like a happy and sad song all rolled into one. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s the best way I can describe it. It was odd.
After standing there for around 20 seconds, I decided that it must be one of my friends who lives down the block screwing with me. Maybe they were on the other side of the fence and whistling there to scare me. Right when I am thinking this thought, I see the security light suddenly turn on. I quickly looked around the surrounding area but don’t see anyone or anything that could have set the light off.
The whistling is still going on……Now I am in panic mode. Is it one my friends? If so, where are they hiding? If it’s not one of them, then who is it? I am stuck standing there now and can’t move as I stare outside waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. A minute or so goes by, with the whistling continuing and the light remaining on.
Suddenly the whistling gets louder and I see the doorknob to my metal door start to move up and down. I can see through the metal door to see that there is no one there. The whistling sounds like it’s right outside now and the door knob keeps moving like someone is trying to get in. The security light is still on so I have a clear view of the front of the door and know for sure there is no one there.
Screw the pop tarts. I dropped the box and jetted back to my room, slammed and locked the door, and hid under my blankets with my bat and dog. I never went out to the kitchen at night after that.
57. The Mysterious Myth
Last year, we bought our home in a mostly rural county about an hour from our hometown. We are surrounded by woods. It is a super safe small town with very few problems here. I grew up in the city but have done lots of camping, and in the mountains, I am not easily spooked by sounds in the woods at night. One autumn evening last year, I was sitting out on my deck alone, looking at the stars, surrounded by the pitch-black darkness that comes with living out here.
My husband was already fast asleep. As I’m sitting there, I hear this sound in the woods. It sounded like a very large animal, I mean huge, not like a large raccoon, but more like person-sized. I could hear it lumbering very slowly through the leaves in the woods right beside the house. The sound made me think it was someone walking on two feet, not an animal on four legs.
The slow lumbering made me think that if it was a person, it would have to be a zombie. I shined my flashlight in the direction of the lumbering, which sounded very close given how loud it was. I couldn’t see anything in the pitch-black darkness, but the lumbering didn’t stop. It seemed to turn and again, slowly lumber off toward the rear of our property, which touches our neighbors 70 acres.
I’m thinking, our neighbors are big-game hunters, so if that was a bear and it wanders onto their property, goodbye and good luck, bear. But, I got right out of there and back inside, just to be safe. I tell my husband the next morning and he immediately says, “Sasquatch,” sarcastically. We think that sort of thing is ridiculous, but I’d been updating our friends on our new adventure via Facebook, so I jokingly posted that I’d heard of a potential Sasquatch in the woods the night before.
One of my long-time friends who lives in this county, texts me and says he needs to talk to me right away. I call him back and his voice is pretty excited, and he starts going in about how there have been numerous Sasquatch/Bigfoot/whatever you want to call it sightings in our county and hits me with a link to a local news article from a day or two prior reporting a sighting not far from where I live.
People in these parts legitimately believe these things are living in our area. Apparently, my friend used to be a skeptic too, but after moving out here, he delved deep into the whole thing, and now fully believes there is a Sasquatch family in our area, and that they have been to my home. Needless to say, I was slightly freaked out.
I do not believe in Sasquatch, but ever since, I always take my dog when I go out at night alone. There have been times when he just won’t leave the porch at night to use the bathroom when I know he has to. It seems like he senses a predator. He seems to be on high alert and clearly anxious about something. Before, I’d have told him to “git” and given him a little shove toward the grass. Now, that’s enough for me to go back inside.
58. Did She See It Too?
My grandparents used to live in a semi-rural place. One night, when I was walking from a shop to my grandparent's house, I noticed something bright green and wobbly floating in the sky. I asked my grandma what it was but she said she couldn't see it. Up until this day, I don't know what it was, or whether she saw it and was lying, or whether only I could see it.
59. Hunter And Hunted
If someone here lives in the Philippines, then you know about a “duwende,” which is a sort of garden gnome that attracts and abducts small children, and they never return. So I was babysitting my three-year-old niece at that time and it was in the middle of the night, around 1-3 am, and she woke up for whatever reason. She suddenly looks at the window and goes “Hey, why is there a small garden gnome in front of the tree?
I instantly froze and told her to ignore it and just go to sleep. I closed all the windows and told her to never go near that tree during nighttime.
60. Lady In Red
I had a woman in red knock at the door. She was dressed like a church lady wearing a red dress with a matching blazer, a matching red hat with netting, and red heels. It was a trailer in the middle of nowhere. I felt a sense of dread, so I decided to call out what she wanted instead of opening the door. Her reaction was truly disturbing. When I yelled to her, she didn't answer but tried to open the doorknob.
My brother came through the back door to get a pack of ale for his friends who were outside having a bonfire. He saw her, and went back out the back around to the side of the trailer and came back in. That’s when I really got scared. His face was ghost white and he told me in a serious tone to not open the front door, he also locked the back door and we went to his room.
After a while, his friends came looking for him and knocked on the back…He told them we were done and staying in for the night. After some prying about it, my brother told me when he went out back and around the side, nobody was there, but could clearly see her through the window when he went back inside. We have a lot of superstitions about lost spirits as travelers, but this one just scared the living heck out of both of us.
61. Silent Partner
Our daughter was premature and dysmature, and had a problem with fluid in her ears that we unfortunately discovered a bit late. This lead to her having delayed speech development. When she was about two years old, she started smiling and waving and saying hello to a certain point on the wall above one of our windows. This happened from time to time, over the space of about half a year.
Because of her speech impediment, we could never get her to tell us who or what she was talking to, and after those problems were fixed she couldn't remember.
62. Into The Jungle
In Cozumel, Mexico, I was in a truck driving through a totally uninhabited area driving to a beach, and saw some creepy thing that looked like a stick figure drawing with a giant head cross the road in front of me and run into the jungle. I’ve looked up probably every animal that inhabits that island and I still have no clue what it was.
I don’t live there anymore, but none of my friends who still do have any clue what the heck it was based on my drawings of what I saw. It ran on its hind legs, looked like a stick figure with a huge head, and was all black and darted off into the jungle when it saw our truck.
63. An Unwelcome Visitor
When I was about six years old, I was playing with the kid next door one afternoon. Then the lights went out all of a sudden. We were by ourselves since all of her family members were at the hospital with her mom, who was suffering from leukemia then. When the blackout happened, my friend went out of the house to the porch. I was by the door looking outside when something made me look back into the house.
There, in the living room, was a shadow figure walking around—tall, dark, no recognizable features whatsoever. It was as if someone was wearing a black whole body suit, but not as definite as a real person would be in a room. It wasn't too blurry either, but I noticed it moved around the room as if it were looking for something.
I actually wasn't scared at this point, since I've never seen anything like it and I was a curious child. The next thing I knew, it went up to the second floor, so I followed it and continued to watch the shadow figure walk around the bedroom. Again, it seemed like it was looking for something. Then it started moving towards the wall on my right.
I remember thinking “Oh my god, is it gonna disappear!? Is it gonna disappear!?" And sure it enough, it vanished through the wall. I forgot about all this until I was around 17 and was watching one of those "Real Ghost Stories" on TV. One guy talked about his own experience of seeing shadow figures in a hospital where he was confined for a few months.
He mentioned that he sometimes saw them beside people who were about to pass. Chills ran up and down my spine when I heard this. I remember my friend's mom passed just a week after I saw that shadow thing. But at least I now have my own understanding of what that dark figure I saw might have been: some kind of grim reaper.
64. Very Dapper And Very Strange
If you want to experience the countryside, then come to Ireland. I had a job putting up road signs. At a junction in the middle of nowhere, a man walked up dressed in a full suit looking very dapper and professional and carrying an old doctor's bag. He introduced himself as a doctor...and then jumped in a hedgerow full of briars, crashed through it and ran off through a field.
My workmate and I had to peel our collective jaws off the floor with the shock!
65. They All Fall Down
One night in the fall, we heard what sounded like huge trees falling in the woods. It was very dark out and there was no moon. It also wasn't cold enough to cause freezing, so that wasn't the reason. It lasted for about an hour and a half and then just stopped. We went out to look the next day and couldn't find a single downed tree that wasn't like that the day before. It was strange and definitely spooky.
66. The Never-Smiles Kid
When my son was in kindergarten, there was one kid (who he'd also gone to preschool for two years with) who just...never smiled. Like, he constantly looked angry about something. I was helping at their Winter Holiday party, helping my son, the never-smiles kid, and a few others with an ornament they were supposed to make and take home. It took a creepy turn I’ll never forget.
Never-smiles kid pointed his blunt-tipped kiddie scissors at me and says "I'm gonna cut your eyes out" in the creepiest way possible. I was totally freaked out, but managed to at least LOOK calm. "Uh…no. We're not going to cut anybody's eyes out. Not today, ok?" Never-smiles kid was constantly bugging my kid and I asked for them to be in different classes the next school year, which the school agreed to.
I lost track of never-smiles after the end of first grade, because our district redrew the attendance zones and my son ended up at a different elementary school after that. I heard the next school year (so second grade), never-smiles had been caught shoving damp paper towels into one of the hand dryers and holding the button down, to see if it would catch on fire.
I also heard his mom had to pay for the school to have an anti-bullying assembly because of him. Another rumor, a couple of years after that (so like 4th or 5th grade) said that he'd gotten kicked out and that not even the local "alternative education" charter school had even kicked him out.
67. Shared Illusion
This was something I said as a kid. Years ago, the theme of ghosts came up, and my mom told the story about how my brother (he's built different and sees ghosts/is haunted often) several times saw a girl with pale skin and black hair. He said that he thought it was me for a minute until she ran upstairs and started making him run around the house.
What did little me say? "My imaginary friend used to look exactly like me, it was probably her."
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68. The Room Where It Happened
My mom told me one that's creepy. When I was a baby, maybe about six months old, she put me into my cot to sleep one afternoon. It was a high sided wooden thing with a drop side for access that required you to press in two little nubs, one in each corner, to release the side. Well, she came upstairs one day and found me outside the cot, asleep in the middle of the floor about two metres from the cot.
The sides were up and there is no way I could have opened it; I couldn't stand and the sides were far too high to jump over. Apparently she never felt comfortable leaving me in the room after that. Also, when my younger brother was born he was put into that room as his bedroom. One evening my mom and I were on her bed playing with my baby brother and we heard this noise coming from his room.
Panicked, my mom went to look and one of his musical toys was in the cot playing to itself despite not being activated.
69. Eating Some Crops
I lived in this quite huge house that was surrounded by a big fence with two metal doors that didn't have a lock. From time to time, small animals would come through and try to eat our crops. One time, around nine in the evening or so, I saw something coming through the doors. It was terrifying. It wasn't an animal but a person.
They looked very thin and malnourished. They were looking in my direction, so I believe they saw me. They stood there for a few minutes, took some potatoes, and ran away. I'm honestly thankful they never came back.
70. Just Couldn’t Say No
My mother is from a rural village in Mexico. She told me about an event that took place there. An elderly woman once got lost, and her family was really worried so they asked the neighbors for help to look for her. A bunch of people then started to do so. After hours, they found her all injured in the deep fields of the village and when asked why she was all the way there, she said that a big black dog asked her to follow it and she just couldn't say no.
71. The Call Is Coming From Inside The Tent
I was camping alone in the middle of the plains in North Dakota. A storm blew in and I was stuck in my tent under some trees and got a super strange feeling. I had two phones on me at the time, one had Internet access and was for navigating and the other was just for cell reception. This was in 2013. All of a sudden, one of the phones started ringing and I looked at the caller ID.
The call was coming from my other phone which was closed and in my hand.
72. Footsteps In The Dark
15 years ago or so, I had a seasonal job with the US Forest Service in western Colorado for the summer. I was living in an old ranger station all by myself. One night, I had a creepy dream that someone was walking around the cabin while I was in bed. When I woke up that morning, the front door was wide open. For the rest of the summer, I slept with a large blad close by.
73. All Good Questions
When I was like five, I was watching the History Channel at like 4:00 am and their intro at the time was a bunch of things from around the world and questions like "Who were they?" And "Where did they come from?" And "Where did they go?" I was hanging out with my mom the next night, playing with some Legos, and repeated those questions.
My mom asked me what the heck I was on about and had this really concerned look on her face.
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74. What Happens At Sleepovers…
I was at a friend’s house spending the night when I was in middle school. As expected, we'd stay up to all hours, which didn't matter most of the time except the bathroom was right near his parents’ room. About the only time we'd get in trouble was when someone would wake them up when nature called. To avoid this, we'd go out the basement door and just pee in the woods.
The door stayed unlocked most of the time because we'd managed to lock ourselves out more than once. This was also compounded by the fact that we'd all wander out and find something to do in the woods on a regular basis. This night, his older brother was home and kept barging in the basement door and raining chaos from above, so we decided to lock the door just to deter him.
Not that it really would have kept him out, but at least he'd have to use the key and that took the “barging in” fun out of it. About midnight, we heard the handle jiggling and didn't think much of it, figuring it was his brother. After about five minutes of off and on handle fondling, we finally hit the door and yelled for him to stop. Quiet.
No response, and no more clattering of the handle. Great, we can move on right? Wrong. About 10 minutes later it started again, and the process repeated. This went on for about two hours, until finally after telling him to stop we just said, “screw it” and ignored it. He continued for about 30 minutes after our last attempt for him to stop and then just gave up.
Well, fast forward to about 9 am. We were just stirring and one of my friends had to go to the bathroom. If you've ever had a sleepover like that, there are bodies strewn wherever there is space, and once the first person starts walking around it kind of stirs the nest. We all started stretching and making our way to relieve ourselves of all the soda we'd binged on the night before.
As I go walk outside, I grab the door handle to close it behind me and noticed it felt rough. After looking at it, I saw that the space around the keyhole was all but destroyed. There were giant scratch marks on every surface and the metal guides were bent and skewed. I asked my friend that lived there what had happened, and he said it was the first he'd noticed it.
Not really wanting to get blamed for something his brother did, we went upstairs and told his parents about the night before. After his dad went down to see what we were talking about, he went completely white and ran upstairs to call the authorities. Evidently someone had been trying to force the lock open while we were all inside.
That's actually happened to me more than once on different occasions, but what completely freaks me out about this time was that this person knew we were in there and that we knew someone was trying to get in. Even so, he REPEATEDLY tried to force his way inside, heedless of our complaints. God knows what sort of person that was.
75. What’s On Top?
This happened in rural Pennsylvania. We went camper camping in the middle of nowhere with some family friends. I woke up around three in the morning, cold sweating, with the hair standing up on my body. All of a sudden, the entire camper lurched as if something was trying to climb on top of it or shake it open. I was too terrified to look out the window to see what it was.
76. No Clue What It Was
I was once driving on a road in the woods at around two or three in the morning, going home. I usually encounter a lot of wild animals on this road. That night, I saw on the left side of the road a group of dogs. But, there was something almost twice the size of the dogs. I immediately braked to see what that was. That thing was black had a donkey-like head, no ears, red eyes and short hair.
As soon as I saw that it was not a dog I just drove away full speed. I wish someone could give me a rational explanation. I just want to drive alone in the night again, without being paranoid!
77. The Ghost Knows
I was sat on a bench in a cemetery. I had just had an argument with my then-girlfriend, and I was looking at the ground when I was aware of someone in front of me. I looked up and there was a little girl, about seven or eight years old maybe. She looked at me and said “Where is your beautiful wife?” I think I said “I don’t have one” then put my head back down.
I looked up a second later as I thought perhaps I didn’t want to look like some weirdo talking to kids in a cemetery, but she was gone, like vanished. I looked around and there was no one in sight and it was a bit away from the exits. Very odd and I never forgot it—but there was one final twist. I split up with that girlfriend, but we met again 15 years later and got married.
78. The Crying Baby
This is from my grandparents' place. We live on a reservation way out in the bush. My aunty and her husband were outside having a smoke and they heard a baby crying in the bush just out of the edge of their yard—but that’ not the creepiest part. They came inside and told my grandparents, and they came out and said that the crying would change its location and suddenly at that.
It would be crying at the edge of their yard which is huge, and then it would all of a sudden be on top of the house and then right beside them. They said there was no running noise or flying noise. It was just here and there. They got scared and my grandparents and aunty prayed around their yard while my uncle got out a blade.
They said the more they prayed, the further that crying would go into the bush. They thought it was some kind of spirit or something. I was just little at that time and I remember the next day I went there, and I wasn't allowed to play outside. I also saw a ghost in that house too.
79. A Tall Dark Stranger
I was walking to the store late at night, probably around 11-1 am. I don't fully remember, but the streets were isolated. I live in the Bronx in a not-so-nice area, but I've grown up around the "not-so-nice" people in this neighborhood all my life, so I’m not afraid that anything will happen to me because a lot of them actually look out for their neighbors.
Anyway, while I was walking, the streets were completely empty—until I heard footsteps behind me. Being the cautious person that I am, I turn around to take a good look at the man for a long minute just in case I had to identify him later. I'm a short girl (5'1) and this man was twice my height. I was a bit creeped out now but kept walking like normal.
After a while, he caught up to me and asked if I was Dominican. I sternly said yes and kept walking. He then asked if I was 18 (I was 17) and I replied no. I was ready to cross the street because he was freaking me out. As soon as I said “no,” he looked at me, disappointed, and said, “Oh never mind,” and ran away from me. It was such a small thing, but it really creeped me out thinking about what may have happened if I had told him I was 18 and what exactly this guy was planning.
80. Stuck In A Time Loop
A friend and I were driving home from a movie one night and we passed by the large hospital outside of town. This is a bit of a landmark because it’s huge, all lit up, and tells us that in a couple of minutes we’ll be in town and then our houses are only about 10 mins away. We keep on listening to music while driving and suddenly we pass by the hospital AGAIN.
This freaks us out because we realized that it had felt like 20 minutes since we first passed the hospital and never hit town. There’s no way to pass that hospital, loop around, and pass it again without going through town. We’d been traveling in a straight line the entire time. It was very weird.
81. Didn’t See You There
I used to do short-term foster care. I had a couple of brothers at one point and was sitting alone with one of them who was eight years old. He stared into the distance and very casually and with no sense of emotion detailed how he was going to stab his brother and suffocate my partner in her sleep. He spoke about it for about 10 minutes before looking at me and asking how long I had been sitting with him.
82. Taller Than Generally Expected
I used to live in rural Eugene, Oregon. By rural, I mean behind my house was the forest, type of rural. Anyway, I was used to seeing the glow of deer, raccoons, and other animals' eyes reflecting in my back porch light. One day, I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to go watch TV and whip myself up something as a late-night snack in the kitchen.
When I was washing the dishes, I heard something from just outside my window in the tree line, and assumed it was a deer. So, I flipped the light expecting to see a beautiful buck or the eyes at least. Instead, what I saw made me completely freeze in my tracks. It was a set of eyes that was EASILY a handful of feet off the ground.
The shadow looked to be hunched over, so it was probably taller. As soon as the light came on, the figure went down and ran back in the forest with HEAVY footsteps. The next day, I got two dogs.
83. A Family Affair
My three-year-old niece would often tell us about conversations she had with deceased relatives, two of which she never met and the third passed before she turned one. She was able to recognize them in pictures (unprompted), tell us the nicknames my sister and I gave them when we were little, and told us details that were accurate and that she couldn't have possibly known.
Hanka: Passed in 2015. she referred to him as Mr. ****** (his last name, but not hers). She told us he wears a suit and walks around with his hands behind his back. He wore a suit every day even after he retired, and he would frequently walk with his hands behind his back. He did get to meet her a few times when she was an infant, but he was bed-bound at that point and was never able to walk and didn't wear anything but pajamas in the few times they were able to meet.
Gran: Passed in 2012. Didn't name her but pointed her out in pictures. She told us that Gran wanted to make sure she grew up "proper and courteous." My grandmother was a big stickler for etiquette and made sure all of her grandkids studied an etiquette book as children. Poppy: Passed in 1991. She named him and knew who he was in pictures.
She said he was funny (he was known for his pranks) and had one finger that was shorter than the others...he lost half his right index finger while working on a lawnmower in the 70s.
84. No Laughing Matter
About two years ago, I was in my room reading a book when I hear it. Soft as ever, two little girls giggling. Not just any giggle. It was the kind of giggling you hear in horror movies. I immediately put down my book and listened. After about a minute of holding my breath, I decided it must have come from outside. Then that night, just as I'm about to drift off to sleep, I hear it again.
Two little girls giggling. Now it was 2 am and I was pretty darn sure there weren't two little girls outside my window at that time of night, so I began to freak out. I sat up in my bed and waited for what felt like forever just listening. Then I hear it again. I jumped out of my bed and go spend the rest of the night in the guest room. By the next morning, I was convinced my room was haunted.
For the next week, I avoided my room and spent my nights in the guest room unbeknownst to my family. I was afraid to tell anyone for fear I was going crazy or they wouldn't believe me. But every time I spent more than an hour in my room, I would hear those two little girls giggle. By the end of the week, I was a mess. I could barely sleep and was terrified of my room.
Then one morning my brother walks up to me and says, "You deaf or something?" Obviously, I was confused, and after further questioning, he tells me about this small device he had placed in my room. Apparently, its like some sort of prank device that's easily hidden and can make a variety of different noises, my brother, however, choose the creepy as heck little girls giggling sound.
He wondered why I hadn't heard it or said something about all week and I just wanted to punch him in the face. So my room wasn't haunted after all! Moral of the story, sometimes your brother is just a jerk.
85. Screaming And Crying
I lived pretty deep in the woods and the nearest town was a 20-minute drive away. I woke up around six in the morning one winter morning hearing a woman screaming and crying. I looked out my bedroom window and I saw a woman walking down the street holding her face while sobbing and screaming. I thought maybe there was a car wreck.
So, I ran through the house and out the front door to see if she needed help. The screaming had stopped and she had disappeared when I got outside. There were about eight seconds between me and the front door, and nowhere for her to disappear anyways, as the house sat near a road that was pretty straight in both directions. To this day I'm convinced it was a ghost.
86. Innocence Lost
When I was six, my mom and dad took my younger sister and me to a baseball game, leaving my grandmother to babysit my youngest sister. When we got back, my grandmother told my folks that two guys had come by the house with photography equipment and asked whether a young girl with red curly hair lived there, a description that sounded just like my sister who was at the game with me.
They said they had spotted her and that she would be a great child model for some advertising work they were doing. When my grandmother said she wasn't home they said they would come back another time. My grandmother and mom didn't think much about it, but my dad got an awful feeling in his stomach. He said "Something's not right here" and called the authorities.
15 minutes later, several FBI agents showed up and began conducting interviews with my grandmother and my parents while I ran around and showed the agents my helicopter. The truth was bone-chilling. Turns out we had been targeted by a child theft ring; the photographers would take a bunch of photos and wait until the toddler threw a tantrum and then they would ask the mother to go grab a toy to keep the child entertained.
While the mother was out of the room, they would grab the child and bolt, leaving everything else behind. The FBI told my folks that my sister had likely already been sold and would have been out of the country within 24 hours if they got her. We were advised to change preschools and other aspects of our daily routine. It still gives me the chills to think about what could have happened to her.
Needless to say, my mom became pretty overprotective; it was a few years before she even trusted us with a babysitter. We are just fortunate that everything worked out.
87. The Only One To See
I once saw a UFO. I live in a rural part of Australia. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was about 10 at night and I went into the garden. There were no neighbors for kilometers and this big black craft appeared. It made no noise and came from the direction of the bush basically. It was shaped a bit like the Millennium Falcon, which is my best description, but very black.
It had some lights around it and was very low. There was no noise at all and moved slow enough that I had time to call my husband to come and see. We just stood there, mouths open as it coasted over us and towards town. I googled it like crazy, but found no recorded sightings locally. I felt too embarrassed to ask people in case they thought I was nuts.
88. The Burden Of Dreams
I used to sometimes babysit a teacher’s kid in my teen years (they were friends with my family). The kid was highly anxious and talked about having disturbing dreams which weren’t necessarily violent as such, but just had smaller disturbing details, such as mold growing out of people’s faces. She used to talk about a “rat man” she saw in the corner of her room.
I would often get very off gut feelings when she talked about this stuff.
89. That’ll Drive The Property Value Down
We were visiting a family friend’s house. My oldest son was about three at the time and all the kids were playing in the kids' room. They started getting loud so I went to check on them. They were laughing at the closet, running up to it, and then running away. I figured playing hide and seek or just being silly, so I left to talk to the adults. It got way too disturbing way too fast.
A few minutes later, another boy runs to me and says my son is climbing in the crawl space in the closet. I ran and found him with just his feet sticking out. Pulled him out and he told me he was going to find “her” and she told him to come get her. Apparently, they had been playing with something/someone in the crawl space.
“She” was making them laugh through the crawl space, they all see her, and then she told my son to follow her. I told the homeowner what happened and she told me her kids know not to open the crawl space door and the kids swear they didn't open it. But that’s not all. The owners of the house laughed it off, but in so doing revealed that it used to be a daycare/orphan home in the 1900s.
Something bad happened back then where a lot of kids went missing and they had to shut it down. It was an old house right off the train tracks in East Texas. All the rooms connected with a door together and they all had crawl space openings in each room down a long hallway. It was so weird. They don't believe in paranormal stuff at all but would tell me about hearing crying, feet running up and down the hallway, and books falling off shelves.
9o. I'd Rather You Didn't
My six-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat a few days ago and looked at me and said, "Dad, when I'm seven I'm going to end you. No wait, when I'm eight." I asked, "How are you going to do that?" She smiled and said, "I'm gonna drive over your head with this car."
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91. 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.
92. Horsing Around
A friend of mine lived in a semi-rural area growing up. One night, the local authorities knocked on her door and warned her that they were looking for a possibly violent fugitive. They told her they'd check her property and that she should lock up and be wary. It wasn't until some time later that she found out the full story. The fugitive had been caught mauling a horse in a local stable. In the ensuing panic, the horse's leg was broken and the man got away. He was found two days later hiding in a stormwater drain.
93. Voices From The Past
I was out in the backyard in my parents’ suburban home many years ago. Their yard is nice: lots of leafy ferns, shrubs, and even a few palm trees. The backyard’s not that big though, probably 20 m x 10 m. Anyway, so I’m on the phone and sitting out the back near the back boundary fence. It’s probably about 10 pm.
Then, from one of the shrubby areas, I hear a “little girl’s” voice. Yet, it wasn’t a little girl’s voice either. It’s hard to explain. It sounded like the voice of a little girl but I had a strong sense it wasn’t a small child. It was speaking in a language I couldn’t recognize, a language I don’t think even exists now.
I’ve thought about this quite a bit over the years and I think it was probably an ancient language now extinct. Well, it freaked me out. I got up and ran inside. I told my parents and family members and each had a theory such as "Could have been the neighbor playing a joke," etc. Neighbors all around us are elderly, and the backyards’ dark, and I don’t think it was human.
94. This Is The Stuff Of Horror Movies
Okay, so this is kinda creepy. I'm an adult who doesn’t believe in ghosts and such, but then I think of this experience and wonder what the heck is wrong with me for being so stupid. I'd hardly call it an imaginary “friend,” but when I was around 12, I lived with my brother and his family. We moved to a new home, and one of my nieces, who was about four or five, would always avoid certain corners of the house because she was scared of “the green lady.”
The green lady was pretty much always located in the same corner in the family room, but on a couple of occasions, she'd move. So, my older niece, who was about nine at the time, would pick on her little sister and throw her toys in that corner. My little niece would avoid it like the plague. Then one day, her big sister PUSHED her in that corner.
I swear, NEVER in my life had I ever heard such a blood-curdling scream. Never again have I yet, and I hope never to hear that kind of scream again. She didn't even run away from the corner. She was backed into it, looking upwards in terror. Her fear had us all scared, I think. My older niece never messed with her little sister about that corner again.
Actually, none of us really screwed around with that corner again. Friends thought we were joking when they'd come over, and we'd casually say, “Oh, annnd stay away from that corner because we're pretty sure an evil ghost lives there.”
So, when did the green lady finally move from the corner? Here's the messed-up part: according to my niece, when my brother and his wife discussed moving out of the house, the green lady did not like that, so at bedtime, she followed them into their room. The other time, the green lady got mad again after my sister-in-law got pregnant, so she moved to the nursery and stayed in there.
During the time we lived there, which was for about two and a half years, all sorts of things went really wrong. My sister-in-law lost one of the twins she was carrying. The surviving twin was born with spinal meningitis and all kinds of problems; it was at least a month before the baby got to come home. Then my sister-in-law developed cervical cancer.
Later, my sister-in-law’s mom, who uses a walker, fell in the freaking pool and injured herself. Plus, we couldn't keep pets alive anymore. We had a golden retriever, a cocker spaniel, a cat, a couple of pet rats, and a guinea pig. The dogs got sick with pancreatic cancer, and tumors grew on their sides. Our cat got ran over, and the guinea got sick.
The rats were fine until my sister-in-law’s mom forgot to take the towel cover off the cage on a hot day, and the heat cooked my niece's rat. Eventually, we finally moved the heck out. But even after all this time, we all agree that something was wrong with that place and that whatever that green witch was, she was freaking evil and the probable cause of what made so many horrible things go wrong while we lived there.
95. The Cabin In The Woods
My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin. I used to spend time there in the summer tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One extremely early morning, when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and told us it was time to go fishing. It was still super early and we were all confused because it was pitch dark.
He hustled us down to the dock where he kept his little fishing boat and quickly launched us into the water and away from the house. At this point we were all getting a little freaked out—but this was just the beginning. My uncle wasn’t talking. We just sat, shivering under a blanket at the bow of the boat, while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline and waved a flashlight furtively ahead of us.
We eventually arrived at my uncle’s friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled into his house. Our uncle sent us to the loft to sleep. He and his buddy locked the doors and left, not returning until well after sunrise. Eventually, our uncle showed up with the truck and trailer already packed with all of our gear, and he told us it was time to go home.
Many years later, my uncle confided to me that the reason he’d hustled us home was because he’d woken up around 3 AM to a strange “Thok! Thok! Thok!” sound from outside the cabin. He’d gone out to investigate, when a massive jack pine fell directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line.
Just in time, my uncle saw a man, holding an axe. The man slinked away into the dark of the trees and woods. He and his buddy returned to his cabin later, and had to take turns chainsawing the tree that fell across our narrow driveway apart, while the other stood watch with a rifle. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
96. 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.
97. Playing Hooky
In high school, I remember going to English and the teacher did roll call. She called my name and I raised my hand and said, "I'm here," then she stopped. The eeriest thing happened next. The teacher looked around and said, "So he's not here then?" My friend and I laughed because I was obviously here. I thought she might be messing with me.
That night, though, my mom got a call telling her I wasn't at classes today. I was actually marked absent. I go back to school the next day and tell my friend, "Mrs. English Teacher actually counted me absent" and he just said, "Why wouldn't she?" Though to myself "Ha ha, you're not funny" but I just let it slide because I thought again I was being messed with.
Then one of my other friends sits down and asks, "You feeling better today? Or were you just playing hooky?" I was so confused. Then I go to my first hour and that teacher hands me the work I supposedly missed from that day. I looked in my bag and had the same stuff, the guide and assignments, already there. To. This. Day. I don't know if I missed that day of school or not
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98. 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.
99. One In A Million
A neighbor just regaled me with this heartbreaker. His sister, her husband, and two kids went up to Washington to camp every year. So, they were up there in May, early June, sometime during 2002-2003, and the son went to use a rope swing to jump into the lake. The whole family was watching, fun times. But then everything took an incredibly dark turn.
The boy botched the jump and ended up with the rope around his ankle, fell badly, broke a bone, and was just dragging underwater, flailing. The dad immediately springs into action to save his son and dove in—into shallow water. He smashed his skull open, was instantly paralyzed, and drowned. The mother obviously tried to save them both, dove into the water, and suffered a fatal heart attack.
The son stopped flailing and was just hanging there, head underwater. The daughter, 10 years old, had no idea two minutes prior that she would be sitting safely on shore, watching her whole family die. So incredibly heartbreaking. She was raised by my neighbor as a daughter. I just can’t even imagine what that would be like. Just normal, mundane risks proving lethal in less than 200 heartbeats.
100. Doom From Above
When I was seven years old, my mom gave birth to my little sister. My dad and I went to visit her in the hospital to check out the new family member. As seven-year-olds often do, I got bored, so my parents sent me to the kiosk right outside the main building to get an ice cream. As I was walking towards the kiosk, I cut over the lawn as it was a shorter walk.
Suddenly I feel and hear a really heavy thud right behind me. I turn around to see an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the warped, mangled body of a man in a hospital gown maybe 40-50 cm from where I was standing. The man had jumped off the hospital roof after receiving the news he had terminal cancer.
My mom and a lot of the others in the birth ward even saw the guy flying past the windows. The guy basically just fell short of taking me with him. A group of doctors and psychiatrists asked me to get emergency therapy, but I insisted on getting my ice cream and going home. To this day, I can still recall the thud of the body hitting the ground and his body lying next to me, clear as crystal.
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