There are a good many horror fans in the world. However, when the spooky phenomena show up beyond the screen or page and enters into our mundane lives, we would rather be somewhere else. No one likes feeling like they are in an actual horror story. Read on to find out some of the strangest, creepiest, and scariest encounters that real-life people have shared. Beware, you may end up needing to sleep with the lights on.
1. They Walk Here
I do deep forest, as far from civilization as possible, camping and one experience creeped me out. It's the middle of the night, 2 am roughly, and I was traveling through a forest a couple of miles from civilization because I got a call on my sat phone saying I needed to get home immediately. I stumble upon an old graveyard.
The most recent tombstone I could read by my flashlight was 1831. That’s when I heard a sound behind me. I whip around and there's nothing but the still unending blackness of the night. Then I hear another sound from my left. I look over there and again nothing. I think to myself I'm probably imagining it since I'm alone in a forest, miles from civilization.
I turn around and head back to civilization. Just as I'm about to pass the last tombstone that I can see, I hear a little girl giggle right in my ear. Now I think I'm going crazy because things like this don't happen in the real world, only in horror movies. But it gets worse. Suddenly a rock hits my back. Not a pebble but an avocado-sized rock. I know I'm not crazy and I just book it out of there as fast as possible. I refuse to re-enter that forest to this day.
2. Want To Play Ball?
I was house-sitting for my parents at my childhood home, no big deal. They have a couple of little whiny dogs that refused to settle down and sleep without my dad since they sleep with him every night. By about night 3, I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to sleep in my dad’s room on the bed with them. About 2 or 3 in the morning I woke up to that low guttural growl dogs have that instantly makes your hair stand up.
Keep in mind these are little yappy dogs that bark constantly, but this was something entirely different. The room was cold as ice even though it was a tropical mid-July at the time. I just knew that something was wrong. Really, really wrong. Both dogs were growling nonstop so I rolled over and opened my eyes partially.
I saw these two little kids in what looked like vintage turn-of-the-century Victorian-age baseball uniforms. There was nothing inherently scary about how they appeared but the feeling of dread was almost indescribable. They are just looking at me but, somehow, I knew that whatever these were, they were evil for lack of a better word.
I honestly don’t even know how to explain it, but I just knew that something was very, very wrong with whatever I was seeing. The absolutely primal terror feeling told me this was not the harmless dream variety. I couldn’t stop looking though, I swear I blinked 100 times trying to convince myself it was just a night terror—until one of them smiled at me.
It was just a smile, but at the same time, it was malicious and somehow just off. I just got this overwhelming urge that told me to stop looking, close my eyes, pray, pray hard, and do it NOW. I just squeezed my eyes shut and prayed out loud like I never had in my life for what felt like forever. It finally passed, and about an hour later, the dogs calmed down.
As soon as I felt like it was “safe” to get out of that room, I called my parents and made them cut their vacation short and come home that day. My brother still sleeps in there every night with no problem, but something is wrong with that room. I’m not a big fan of the whole “evil” tropes, but I honestly don’t have a better word for it. Whatever was there that night was evil.
3. Lending A Hand
I used to live in a mobile home trailer park growing up. There was a hallway that went from one end of the trailer to the other, with the bedrooms coming off it on one side. My bed was on the wall opposite the hallway, so I could see into the hallway but not down either side. This happened when I was about 6-8 years old.
If I stayed awake after my dad went to sleep and stared at the doorway, I would see something that absolutely terrified me. I would start to be able to make out a hand stretching from beyond the doorway in the hall, from the right side of the door to the left. The longer I looked the more of the hand would appear until eventually, over the course of a few minutes, I could see a red and white striped shirt/sweater sleeve.
If I continued to stare, after a longer period, the body of a boy would appear in the doorway. I specifically remember hiding under the covers most nights when this would happen, mostly at the first sight of him. I was never antagonized further than him slowly moving—facing my bed—from the right side of the door to the left.
If I continued to stare, he would eventually disappear beyond the left threshold. We moved out of that trailer into a home when I had just turned nine, and that was the end of it. I never really thought about it. About 15-20 years later, my dad and I were talking about his best friend that had lived next door but sadly was no more.
We started talking about our trailer and the older lady that had moved in after us. My dad said something that made me blood run cold. He told me, “Funny enough. My friend told me a few years ago that that woman used to see a little boy in a red and white shirt, like a ghost or something.” I was obviously taken aback and told him about what I had seen almost every night for a few years and we were both just a bit shocked at what that might mean.
4. For Whom The Bell Tolls
When I was nine, my parents took me to some kind of Renaissance-historical reenactment event in a pretty remote area of the country. About an hour before the event is over, at around 5 pm, the people in charge gather all the kids up, and are telling stories and historical facts, etc. One of the guys mentions that the bell tower is haunted by a ghost who is either very nice or not depending on “whether or not you’re a good person.”
I immediately snuck away to the bell tower to see for myself. I went over the little chain they had put up to keep people out, and climbed the tower. After getting to the top, I just waited for a while, and eventually, I heard someone coming up the stairs. A woman opened the trap door in the top floor. The best way I can describe her is brown.
She had brown eyes, brown hair, dress, shoes, and even a tinged brown veil. I must have assumed she was one of the staff, and I said hello. She asked me who I was, and I told her my name. She asked, “What made you come to the tower?” I said I wanted to see the ghost. She laughed and said that I should probably go back down before my parents got mad.
I did and rejoined the group. The next day, my parents took me back. Soon I run up to the guy who said the tower was haunted, and tell him it’s all made up, and that I didn’t see any ghosts. He’s angry that I went in an off-limits area and says that I was lucky that I didn’t get hurt; because the tower is so unstable and old.
He told me that not even the staff are allowed in. I say that’s not true, because the woman was there and told me to go down. He’s confused and asks me to describe her. I do, and he freaks out, telling me that the bell tower is supposedly haunted by a woman of the same description. He then ran off to talk to someone else about it.
5. A New Haunting
My high school girlfriend said she saw an old man in her house in the study. I laughed it off because her house was no older than 20 years old, so how could it be haunted? I jokingly said that must have seen the wooden carving her parents had that resembled Jesus. This was plausible, because she described the man as having a big white beard.
A few weeks later, I was walking from the stairs and into the kitchen where she was sitting. Out of the corner of my eye I saw an older man sitting at the head of the table in the dining room. I told her but have to rule out my prior claim, as the seed of belief had been planted in my head. Months later her friend from Brazil was visiting.
During this visit, one day, my girlfriend and I were fooling around upstairs and her friend burst through the door crying. My girlfriend asks what’s wrong and her friend says she was listening to music with her headphones on and was walking around on the main floor when she ran into an old man with a white beard in the study.
There was absolutely no way my girlfriend told her friend as she wasn’t a believer in the paranormal, and didn’t make a big deal about it when she told me. To this day it is the one case in my life where I have to truly believe we all saw something in that house.
6. A Shadowy Business
It was August, and I went over to a friend's house to stay the night. The only people there were me, my friend, his girlfriend, and my friend at the time. It was 2:30 at night, my friend was laying down for a bit, and the girls were chilling in the living room, and I went outside on my own to have a quick smoke. After I spark it up, I'm looking across the street from their house, and right behind a small concrete brick wall I notice a head that looked like a straight shadow slightly poking above the wall, looking at me.
I thought it was just someone being really weird—until I put two and two together. There's a streetlight shining directly on where this thing is and it STILL looks like it's complete shadow. I am watching this thing, making sure that I didn't take my eyes off it, and it's just kind of watching me and bouncing back and forth, slowly getting faster as I smoke. By the time I'm done, this thing looks like it's doing a ritual dance or something with how fast it was going.
I slowly start backing up to the front door. When I know I'm there, I fumble for the doorknob for a few seconds and as soon as I get a firm grip on it, that thing stops completely in its tracks. For what feels like an eternity I'm standing there in a staring contest with it, and slowly it starts creeping towards the side of the wall. Only then do I decide to nope out of there, burst the door open, and slam it shut behind me making sure to lock it.
I scared my friends when for like a solid 10 minutes, I'm just constantly peeking through the windows looking like I just had a run-in with death itself. Eventually, I explain what happened to them and confirmed they were all still inside the house when I was outside. We all collectively decided that we didn't need sleep that night anyway.
It never showed up again throughout the night. The next morning, I didn't even bother looking in the area that I saw it. I just wanted nothing to do with it. I still don’t know or want to know what exactly I saw that night. I'm no stranger to the paranormal, have had experiences with it all my life, so not a lot of it scares me, but whatever I saw that night, I could tell just from a glance that it was purely malevolent, and it absolutely terrified me.
7. That’s My Chair!
It was 2009, late evening after my grandmother's funeral. My aunt and I are at my grandmother's house going through her paperwork in preparation for the coming disbursement of her estate to the rest of the family. I had my dog, Jack, with me as he went everywhere with me in those days. He was the most chill dachshund anyone ever met.
My aunt and I are discussing some random memories of my grandmother when Jack jumps out of a dead sleep on the couch, runs to just a few feet away from the empty chair my grandmother always sat in, and starts going absolutely insane, barking toward her chair—not the chair itself, though. The angle of his gaze suggested he was looking at someone in the chair.
Now, Jack never barked at anyone in his life, but here he is going absolutely bonkers over...nothing. It was the singular moment in his life that he seemed upset. He wasn't angry, he wasn't excited, he just clearly had a big problem with something in the chair. This went on for a solid 60 seconds as my aunt and I could only stare in shock and disbelief, occasionally exchanging baffled glances.
Then, as quickly as it began, Jack stopped barking, stared at the chair for maybe another three seconds, then went back to the couch. My aunt and I exchanged one more puzzled look before she said, "Very funny, mom!" I had never seen my dog act that way before and never saw it again. I'm on the fence about believing in ghosts or anything, but that experience was very difficult to rationalize.
8. Santa Claus In The House?
So, growing up I went to a Catholic school, and we celebrated St. Nicholas Day in the beginning of December. The tradition goes that you leave your shoes out, and “St. Nicholas” will leave presents in them. When I was in elementary school, one year the day after St. Nicholas Day, my friend came into school all excited.
He said that the night before, he saw St. Nicholas in his room putting presents in his shoe! He described him as having a big white beard and putting something in his shoe that he had left out, before leaving. At the time, we were excited because it proved to us that Santa was real. Twenty years later, I’m having some beers with this friend.
We had not seen each other in a long time as he had moved away shortly after elementary school. We’re buzzed and telling old stories, and I bring up the St. Nicholas Day story, and ask him if that really happened. That’s how I found out the bizarre truth about what really happened. Very nonchalantly he goes, “Yeah, dude. It did, but it wasn’t St. Nicholas, that was a ghost.” He then basically tells me that his old house was built in the 1700s, and was definitely haunted by one of the original owners.
He said that on the said night he woke up to see an old man with a long white beard, tugging at his foot. When my friend saw him, the old man waved, and then floated up through the ceiling. He didn’t actually leave anything in my friend’s shoe. It took my friend several years for the experience to sink in, and it scares him now.
9. We’ve Got Company
We had a two-story house as a kid, with me, my mom, stepdad, and stepsister living there. Every once in a while, you would hear plates in the cabinets rattle a little bit, almost like something tried to pick up the top one and put it back down. But then, there was a disturbing escalation. One night, my mom's hairdryer randomly turned on; a few months later, all of our windup Christmas music boxes go off in the middle of the night.
Another night, me and my stepdad are at home alone watching a movie on the couch. Our kitchen is also behind the couch. From our couch, you can see someone coming down the last stair out of the corner of your eye. My stepdad thought he saw someone like three times within an hour. THEN right after, our dog perks up and follows something around into the kitchen. He doesn't bark.
Sometime after that night, on another night, he groggily opens his eyes to find a woman standing over him. Once he does a double-take the woman is gone. One day my parents are talking to our neighbors and all this comes up. They ask what the lady staring over my stepdad looked like. He says that she had brown hair and she had older-style clothes on. Their reaction was chilling.
My neighbor and his wife immediately stare at each other and say that before we moved in they kept thinking they saw someone with that description in the front window of the house every once in a while. Then our other neighbors on the other side said the same exact thing. Whatever that thing was, it wasn't trying to go all Paranormal Activity on us, but man it is freaky when you're 10 years old.
10. Shaking It Off
We were visiting my in-laws around Christmas and we were chatting in their den, having some drinks, and catching up. They had a Christmas tree in the corner of the den. Nobody was sitting near it. My husband and father-in-law were sitting in lounge chairs and I was sitting with my mother-in-law on the couch on the opposite side of the tree.
The two dogs were napping between us. We were all at least six feet away from the tree. All of a sudden, their Christmas tree begins to shake violently. It was as though someone had grabbed the trunk and was shaking the dust off of it. A few Christmas ornaments fell to the ground and then it stopped. It shook for a good 10 seconds.
The thing is, we were the only four in the house, the dogs were sleeping on the couch with us, the tree had been up for at least a week so no woodland creatures were hiding in it and nothing else in the house shook. No glass clinking, no other rumbling sounds, just the tree. We still checked the news to see if there was an earthquake.
We checked both websites and newspapers and there were no reports of an earthquake. We also live in an area where earthquakes are rare. So, I have no clue what shook the tree. We all saw it, and the dogs slept through it. They did not care a bit.
11. Come A Little Closer
When I was about 19, I was coming back from seeing my grandparent from the hospital and had to take the last underground train back home. I arrived at the station which was completely quiet, but I assumed it was something normal, as it was very, very late. I don’t remember seeing anyone at all. So, I pay for the ticket, arrive at the departure platform, which was also silent, and wait.
And then I feel something off in the ambiance. Something just felt wrong, and even if it was summer, the ambiance was weirdly cold. So, I take a seat and start looking around because my phone was almost dead and didn’t have anything better to do. And then I see this girl. You know, the typical cliché lady, in a ragged white dress, with long and black hair, looking at me from the tunnel entrance.
I look around and think that maybe she is a worker, and I just need to change my glasses because a girl so young can’t possibly be alone at that hour. Still no one on the platform with me. I look at the girl again. She smiles and waves her hand as if she is calling me. Something clicks inside me. I blink several times, with a really bad gut feeling.
At the same time, I was mesmerized and unable to look away from her. I didn’t feel horror, just the feeling that I was seeing something I shouldn’t. I blink again, and then the image gets more vivid, and I start seeing more details of her face—and I’m suddenly struck with terror. Her eyes are empty. Not just black, pure empty. Her smile was off, her teeth were like white needles attached to the skull.
And worst of all, she kept waving to me. 15 minutes have passed since I came. By now the train has come but I haven’t heard anything. The worst part is yet to come, though. The train enters the station as though it was breaking the black mist that was floating behind the girl, and I didn’t even see the front lights until it had gone through her. I am still a bit confused.
Apparently already standing, I enter the train and leave her sight. Of course, after a few seconds, the doors close, and suddenly all the chill and the cold disappear. The train starts moving again and then I look one last time to the girl’s position, and that is when I make a horrifying realization. She was just an empty shell—a decoy.
A huge figure—black and horrific solid mist, or some kind of semisolid black liquid like oil—pulls the girl in the air. The ‘girl’ moves in front of my window like a rug, horrifying and amazing me in equal parts. The creature, or whatever that was, was angry. I was absolutely sure of that. And I was absolutely sure It was afraid of the light, as it crawled to the side as soon as the illuminated windows touched its figure.
I have spoken with many people about this, and I’m 200% sure I wasn’t asleep. There was something in there, something that expected me to come closer and actually made me do it with that ‘human decoy’ in front of him, waiting in the shadows. I still marvel at it, and it hasn’t been my first paranormal phenomenon but it’s probably the one I have felt least safe, by far.
What would have happened if the train had just arrived a bit late...? It still gives me chills.
12. Running Joke
I had a tickle-me Big Bird toy. It was possessed. At first, I just thought it was a normal toy like Elmo. Nope. Big Bird would go off saying "Ha ha ha, that's funny" or "Ha ha, that tickles" or he would just laugh. He would also do things like, appear in a different room than I had put him in, and blink his eyes even though his eyelids were not movable.
But one experience with him in particular really freaked me out. Big Bird laughs in the dining room of my dad's house. Dad was outside doing something and mom was in the bathroom. So, naturally, I decided that it was high time I buried that stupid Big Bird under all of my heaviest toys in my toybox. I do so and put the heaviest of all my toys on top.
The rest of the night goes fine so far. Until sometime after midnight. Somehow this thing made it to my room and under my bed after midnight. What does it do? He laughs. Just as I was getting close to sleeping. I look under my bed to see those soulless eyes blink and that yellow beak twitch. I then put that toy in the basement.
Fast forward to age 18. I was at my dad's house for the final time. I go through my old bedroom and what do I hear in the old heating vent? "Ha ha ha, that's funny!" Needless to say, I hope my dad has fun with the thing and I am so glad I don't have to deal with either of them.
13. A Family Ghost
I've known for a while that my dad, my younger sister, and I have all heard the same voice. My dad told me he used to hear a voice loudly whisper his name from behind his left shoulder to get his attention, when he was in his mid-20s living in an old house with my mom. At first, he'd think it was my mom, since the tone of voice was similar.
But then he'd realize what it was and say, "Oh, you again," and get back to what he was doing. His explanation for it is that the human brain does amazing things and hallucinations are common. I also started hearing a voice occasionally loudly whisper my name from behind my left shoulder when I was in my early 20s—and it sounded like either my mom or even my own voice.
But I knew my dad's story, so it wasn't scary; it seemed to be obviously the same voice. One time, when I was on an airplane getting ready to take off on a solo adventure, the voice said, "It's my birthday today." I figured I may have just been overtired. My sister, who is both very sensitive and very tough, has had a more intense experience.
After I stopped hearing the voice around my mid-20s, she started hearing it, over a much longer span of time. Sometimes, instead of saying her name, the voice whispers. "Hey!" or she even gets tapped on her left shoulder. I was pretty sure we were all experiencing a hereditary issue—hearing voices isn't that uncommon—until one fateful day.
I was upstairs last year and my adopted daughter, who was 16, suddenly started screaming for me and saying that there was someone in the house. I came running down the stairs and she was sitting in an armchair up against a wall. Nobody else was around. There was a window nearby, but the coast was clear. Once she calmed down, she explained to me that someone had whispered, "Hey!" right in her ear.
Honestly, I just smiled and asked her, "Did it come from behind you, like over there?" "YES!" "Did it sound kind of maybe like my voice when I whisper?" "YES!" So, I told her that it was nothing to worry about—just a family voice that we all hear. I told her all about it. It was actually really cool. I have always suspected that if the voice is paranormal, she is an ancestor, so it felt like my daughter was being accepted as spiritual family even if we aren't related by blood.
14. Introductions
Me and some friends were counselors at a music camp in Northern California, and we always stayed in this old dorm that had been a hospital at one point. My friend Nate was into those ghost hunting shows and we used to do these EVP sessions for fun after a few drinks. One night we start doing the session and we start hearing some bumps and sounds in relation to the questions we asked.
We are still not being really serious but are getting quieter. Then one of us asks, “What is your name?” A few moments go by and we hear Nate ask, “That was a joke, right?” He had his headphones hooked into his recorder, and we sat watching him puzzled ourselves, because he had this look on his face. He had heard something we didn’t.
After some discussion, we play back the audio through the speakers on the recorder so everyone can hear. “What is your name?” we hear our friend ask. What we heard in response will haunt me forever. It was a whisper, but still just as clear as a bell: “I’m Timothy.”
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15. A Noisy Neighbor
My mother lived in an adjoined flat in a nice old wooden place when I was in my 20s. We both worked odd shifts and often it was easier to go to her place after finishing at 3 am than heading all the way home. A number of times I was there on my own overnight because she was at work. Every so often I would wake up hearing shuffling in the hallway, on the carpet.
It sounded like slippers or socks. I just attributed it to my neighbor moving around and assumed I could hear them through the shared wall. When I eventually mentioned this to my mother she said “Yes, I hear that too. I seem to wake up paralyzed later in the night when I hear it. It feels like there’s something on the bed with me.”
Thinking back, she obviously was experiencing sleep paralysis and didn’t know what it was. The kicker is there was no neighbor, he’d passed about two years before I first heard it. So, all this time I was alone lying in the dark listening to someone walking along the hallway without the good sense to be scared!
16. A Glitch
It’s not my story but a pastor I know and his wife, plus another couple on vacation. The men were in a large RV and their wives were following in a sedan. They were taking a "scenic route" winding road through a hilly forest area in late afternoon. The pastor’s wife said they were driving at 45-50. Two large trucks were driving toward them and one tried to pass the other immediately in front of the RV.
She screamed, expecting a head-on collision. All of a sudden, the truck wasn't there anymore. The RV driver was badly shaken up and pulled over, the women behind them. A third vehicle stopped behind them. A man got out and came to her window. He said: "Where did you go?! You and that RV were in front of me and then you weren't. I had to swerve to miss that fool truck driver, then he passed behind me."
They all talked for several minutes until everyone calmed down. There was no explanation and they continued on their way. They thought it was, "A glitch in the matrix."
17. Looking For A Playmate
The house I grew up in, which my parents still own, was always very creepy. One night I was standing in my room. When I looked next to me, I got the fright of my life. There was a little girl wearing a white nightgown and she had blonde hair. My mom had a daycare so I always used to the daycare kids. However, it was 11:00 pm and she was not a daycare kid.
For some reason or another, I said that she should go back to the playroom. Then I realized what was happening and looked back. She was gone, with the door slowly shutting itself. There were more sleep paralysis instances where I could just open my eyes and see the floor next to my bed and see her legs and shoes while she was standing there.
I told this story to a girl who lived next to me at a campfire one night and before I explained the girl, she came out and asked, “Was she a blonde in a white nightgown?” She told me that she had also seen her at her house one night.
18. Horsing Around
I grew up on a horse farm with a large indoor riding arena. If there was an accident, like a horse breaking its leg, we would lay a tarp in the arena, bring the horse in if ambulatory, and wait for the vet to give their shot. “Off to the glue factory,” my dad would say. Roughly 500 meters past multiple walls are where the rest of the horses stay indoors.
Anytime there’s a horse who’s sick or dying they often whine and kick stalls. One time a boarder’s horse got the shot, and out of nowhere the entire barn just started screaming. It was multiple horses bellowing and scraping the stall doors with their hooves. It sounded like an equine carnage. Some were so upset they broke into sweats and were just huffing away.
It was cold so when I opened the barn door to go back to the house, all the steam and condensation from the horse breath and sweat left the barn at once. Again, these horses had zero chance to see and could likely barely hear what was happening, and the neighing went off like an explosion. Super creepy.
19. Movie Night
I was working at a movie theater in a mall that had been built in the mid-80s. It was rumored to be haunted and we all enjoyed swapping scary stories. There was one specific theatre that I personally hated going into because it gave off a horrible feeling. Especially at the end of the night when we shut off all of the lights.
One night me and another manager were finishing up closing duties and waiting for the last few people to leave the theatre. We had a stereo up on a shelf on the far end of the office and a stack of CDs. I stood up to change out the CD and moved back from the shelf about five feet after I was done to return to my seat at the computer.
As I was about to sit down, it happened. I watched the entire stack of CDs fling itself off of the shelf. One of the CDs flew across the room and hit my co-worker in the back of the head. She swung around thinking I had thrown them and saw me standing five feet away from the shelf looking dumbstruck. We quickly finished up everything and waited in the lobby until the last person left.
20. The Scent Of You
Several years ago, when my mother passed away, I didn’t talk to my grandfather for several months. Then, finally, after getting my head on straight, I helped him in taking care of himself. When he passed, he left his house to my niece who sold it. I revisited the property to ask for permission to get cuttings from two of the fruit trees—a fig tree and a mango tree—that my grandfather loved.
The owners invited me in for coffee and as we sat in the den, I was enveloped by my grandmother's perfume, which I hadn't smelled in over 10 years. The owners said that that had never happened before the owners said they never had that happen before. Then, in the living room, I was enveloped by the smell of cherry smoke.
My grandfather used to smoke it, but none of the current residents did. No one could explain it.
21. A Final Goodbye
I had a dream that I was at this cottage party, and though I didn't recognize anyone there but I felt like I knew them. All of a sudden, someone is knocking on the door and about 20 people crowd around it. I'm walking up and then everyone turns to look at me saying, "They're here for you.” I don’t want to go, but I still walk up.
It's this old lady kind of lying on the ground, as if she crawled up there. She's got stringy long hair and white eyes. I’m creeped out but also somehow feel comforted. I leave her at the door and walk to my room at the cottage and there's this old man sitting in my bed. The man says something like, “Someone passed recently in your life and you didn't get to say goodbye. Now is your chance."
I look out the window and he's also there. I again feel comforted. Then my friend’s dog woke me up! I definitely know this was about my friend who had passed a month before. She had stage 4 stomach cancer and passed within a month of knowing. It’s crazy what our subconscious can do!
22. Manifesting Power
One day I was in the blackest mood I've ever been in. I wasn't just sad or angry, I had been betrayed by some friends and a lover and I was just bitterness personified. I was lying in bed and I didn't want to move and I didn't want to think and I didn't want to do anything. I was finally tired enough to sleep, but there was a lamp on across the room and the light was shining directly in my face.
I glared at it and for a fleeting moment it represented all that I hated in the world and I just wanted it off without me having to actually move... and in that instant, the bulb blew. It actually shocked me out of my funk a little bit. I casually mumbled, "I'm a witch, burn me." And then went to sleep.
23. Picking Up After You
You know when you’re sleeping and someone is staring at you, you can feel it and wake up? I got that feeling and opened my eyes and saw a man staring at me as he was leaning over my bed. That scared everything out of me. He’s come to visit a few times since then, but he never got as close as he did that particular time.
I dropped a small skin serum bottle in the bathroom and heard it bounce on the tile and couldn’t find it. Two days later it was placed back in the cabinet. I live alone and had no visitors during that time, so no one placed it back in the cabinet.
24. Glitz And Glamour
I was at my town's summer party—Festa Major—with about 10 friends and other 100 people, drinking and dancing at 2:00 am. Then, suddenly, I look to the sky and there is it, a cloud/swarm of something shiny, and made of small parts, like big confetti, passing by, at a 4-5 story height. Everyone saw it, no one knows what it was, but it was there.
You could say that we were under influence, yes. But then I saw this thing from my house's balcony a couple of years after, more or less the same hour, not under influence.
25. Living It Up
I lived with a friend for a while who swore his living room was haunted. His neighbors told him when he moved in that they thought there were squatters in the house, as they'd see someone in the window every now and then when it was empty. There was no evidence whatsoever of squatters when he moved in. Whenever I was in the house by myself, I'd get that "you're not alone" feeling.
When we'd have friends visit, they'd often ask if someone just left, that they swore there was another person sitting with us. I hated that house. His dog refused to go in the living room even if there were people hanging out in there.
26. Take A Deep Breath
My old house was a pretty large run-down looking house, the floorboards creaked and everything and it kind of looked somewhat like a haunted house. Once, late at night, I went downstairs to grab water. I heard some sort of breathing so I turned around and saw nothing. I followed the sound and it was coming from inside a cupboard. It scared the life out of me.
I opened the cupboard, and I saw this thing crouching there. So, I closed the cupboard and ran like anybody else would. The next morning there was nothing there.
27. Knock, Knock
I was taking a shower while my family was out. I had talked to my sister a few minutes before and she'd said she was on her way home so we could go pick up food. I was notorious in my house for taking long showers, so when I heard someone knocking on the bathroom door halfway through my shower, I assumed my sister had gotten home and was telling me to hurry up.
I finished my shower, got dressed, and walked into the living room while calling out to her, but she wasn't there. I called her to see where she'd gone and she said she was almost home. No one was home but someone had definitely knocked on the bathroom door.
28. Watching Over You
It was morning and I was lying in bed. My eyes were closed but I was very much awake, just didn't want to get up yet. I then heard a female voice say, "Oh, there she is!" There was a brief pause, then a quiet gasp. That made my eyes open quite quickly and I looked to my door to see if my mom had come into my room or something, but no one was in the basement.
It was a very clear voice coming from across my room. I'm not sure what happened but it was either an angel or something, or I was imagining things. The voice also gasped immediately after I had focused on it and was about to open my eyes. So, I suppose they hadn't meant for me to hear them.
29. Mommy Dearest (Not)
One of my friends’ girlfriends growing up had a really cool house. She lived basically in a mother-in-law’s suite with her parents. So, it was really cool to hang out there because we could be as loud as we wanted. One night I went upstairs pretty late to go grab a snack and saw her mom at the top of the stairs to their room.
I apologized and felt really bad because I didn’t mean to wake her mom up. I went back downstairs and told my friend that I hope her mom doesn’t yell at her. Her reply was bone-chilling. She frankly said that her parents were out of town and that I must have seen the ghost. I guess there’s a ghost at the house who looks exactly like her mother, and they even have old records and photos of the families who lived there forever ago and the resemblance is uncanny.
30. My Deja Vu
A couple of months ago, I was exiting a Home Depot parking lot and saw a big truck coming in. Something came over me. I immediately knew what was going to happen and said out loud, “Driver has a blue hat and will honk the truck’s horn twice while turning,” as a way to actually believe myself if it did happen. Well, guess what? It certainly did.
I couldn’t see the driver until the truck cleared the entrance but when he did, I saw that he had a blue hat, and he also honked the horn twice as he was turning right beside me. I felt like an idiot for the whole day for saying out loud what I thought was going to happen, but felt weirder when it did really happen.
31. Hush, Little Baby
I stayed at a friend's house one night and had a really weird dream about someone wanting to hurt me, chasing me around my workplace. I started to wake up and felt someone stroking my hair and whispering in a gravelly voice in my ear. I sometimes have hypnogogic hallucinations, but usually, they're quick sounds and voices.
They also usually only when I am half-asleep. I was fully awake at this point. I even felt something cold, like the barrel of a gun being pressed in the back of my head, and had this overwhelming sensation that I was about to die. I flipped over and wildly swung my arms behind me but there was nothing there. The door was closed, so it would have been impossible for them to have left without slamming the door behind them.
32. Tickle Monster
When I was about seven years old, I was sleeping in the same bed next to my five-year-old sister after a long day playing on a hot summer day. I always slept with my arms above my head. That night I awoke to someone tickling my ribcage. I immediately looked at my sister to blame, but she was in a deep sleep. I was so terrified I pulled the sheet over my head—but my scare wasn’t over yet.
Then a small, child-sized hand pressed against the sheet and pulled away. I've never slept with my arms above my head since, and to this day, I'm terrified of someone tickling me. I'm now 40 years old.
33. Jazzing It Up
My husband and I had the "hang-out house" of the cul-de-sac. Everyone hung out in our garage. We had a friend named "Tony" who would stop by after work, take a nap on my couch, and then hang out every night playing pool or just being there. Sadly, we lost him in a vehicle accident. For nearly a year after that, we would wake up to the stereo in the garage turning on and playing the jazz radio station.
Tony was the only one who liked jazz—and our garage radio was never tuned to that station. Even if it was turning on due to some strange power surge, it would have turned on to the station we kept it set to, not the jazz station!
34. Vanishing Singer
As a child, I ended up going through several different copies of the Island Princess Barbie doll as they always ended up disappearing to God knows where. I would be so distraught that my parents always caved and bought me another. My experience was with the singing version of the doll. It had a button disguised as a gem on a necklace it wore and if it was pressed, it would sing.
I listened to it sing, drawn in to its voice, when I was startled to hear the voice abruptly distort and cut out for a moment and then sing a different song that I didn’t recognize. I don’t even know if the song existed. And yeah, the doll vanished about a year later.
35. A Screeching Success
About 10 years ago when I was in high school, myself and a few of my friends decided to go on Ghost Adventures and check out some of the haunted sites near my hometown. One of them was an old graveyard a few miles from where we lived. I drove, parked outside it and we walked through it to find a grave of a former captain that was said to have haunted the graveyard.
We read his gravestone and lingered for a few moments to see if we felt a presence or if we would hear anything. Nothing happened, so we proceeded back to the car. While sitting in the car trying to find our next destination, we all looked up as a loud screech that sounded like nails across the hood of my car startled all of us. I still remember the frightened look on my friends’ faces as I proceeded to fly out of that graveyard as fast as humanly possible.
36. Deux Ex Machina
Last summer, I once prayed off-hand for a bottle of vodka while walking my uncle’s dog one day. At the time, I was preparing for the emotional response to the then-incoming passing of my grandmother. One bottle of vodka literally fell from the sky into a bush on my right-hand side a few seconds later, intact and unopened.
I walked around the block once again to make sure what had just happened had actually happened, then picked it up, opened it, drank it, and did seven more laps while thinking of rational explanations as to where it had come from. There was nowhere obvious it could have come from.
37. Communicative Success
I got a Ouija board when I was a teen. One evening, my brother, step-sister, and I were asking it questions and that thing was actually moving. My step-sister asked it who I would marry. It moved to S, then T, then E. I let go and almost threw up. I never touched one again. At the time, I had a crush on a boy—named Steffan—from another city where we had just moved from.
And I was talking to a boy in my current school named Stephen. I hadn't told anyone about either of them.
38. Party In The House
I think I was around 8 or 9 when it happened. My mom owned a restaurant that my sisters and I had to go to after school so that we weren't home alone. Well, on one of these nights, some drama happened and my sister drove us all home earlier than usual. When we arrived in our driveway, we saw that all the lights were on and there were silhouettes of people walking around upstairs.
It looked like a party. We didn't think much of it because we did have a roommate and he was in a band and sometimes he brought his friends home. We walked into the house and nobody was home. Not a single person, but all three of us saw the silhouettes from outside of the house.
39. Playing Possum
I saw the ghost of a possum, or a phantom possum. Years ago, I lived out in the country, in a rented house. I went to the shed to get my fishing poles one day. I opened the door, and BAM...there was a possum right there. I was startled and took a step back, staring directly at him. The possum never moved, or even flinched.
For a second, I thought it was playing dead. Then IT DISAPPEARED RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY EYES. Just faded out of sight. I could still see it for a second or two after it faded away, like it was a vapor, then gone.
40. Speeding Spirit
There is a haunted road near where I live. Numerous people have seen the ghost car. The first time that I saw it I was driving and my mom was dozing off in the passenger seat. I see a cloud of dust and a large, old, black car speeding out of a road on my right. I just know that he is going to exit that road at the same time I am passing by that road.
We are for sure going to collide. So, I slam on the breaks. I don’t even look in the rearview mirror first, I just lock it up. We come to an abrupt halt; mom wakes up. The car is gone. No dust cloud coming from the road on my right, no black car. I am shaking, asking repeatedly where the car went. She just laughs and says, “You saw the ghost car.”
41. A Pre-Natal Experience
I was asleep one night, and I heard a voice whisper in my ear. It sounded like my friend Jennifer, and it said, “Sarah had her baby.” Sarah was a good friend of Jennifer's but just an acquaintance of mine. I was aware she was pregnant but had no idea how far along. We didn't follow each other on any social media either.
As soon as I woke up, I texted Jennifer and told her that I heard her voice whisper in my mind that night that Sarah had the baby. Later, Jennifer ends up texting back that she reached out to Sarah. Sarah then confirmed with her that she did have the baby. Jennifer said that when she read my text, she had no idea that Sarah had the baby, and I was the first to tell her.
42. A Smooth Slide
On a road trip, I drove through Savannah, Georgia on my way to a wedding. We stopped to go to the bathroom and walk around the historic district for a bit. While in the historic district, I found a single-stall bathroom I could use and decided to go there. As I'm going, the room got noticeably colder and I watched a toilet paper roll, standing on its end on a flat surface—so it couldn't roll or move on its own—slide about 3 inches to the left. I no longer had to use the restroom and left as soon as I could.
43. Mary’s Lost Lamb
There was a small kids’ playground at a local park. On this playground was a kiddie xylophone. When I went over there with my younger siblings, I often heard “Mary Had A Little Lamb” played on the keys. I thought I was imagining it, but they didn't hear it, and it happened too frequently. I was scared, but eventually, I just became sad. Why would an adult ghost stay on a children's playground and play one of the beginner songs?
44. Wheeling Around
The first night that I spent in my current home, I heard the sound of a PC mouse’s scroll wheel. I looked at the monitor, and the mouse was scrolling through a Google tab I had left open, and I could see how that little wheel was moving on the mouse! It’s not very scary but the most unexplainable and clear paranormal experience I’ve had.
45. A Floaty Feeling
A buddy and I saw, as clear as possibly could be, a white orb appear out of the air, slowly float up through the trees, and disappear. I'm not a superstitious or religious person, but I've never heard a good scientific explanation. Ball lighting might be the best possible explanation, but I am not entirely sure to this day.
46. Face-Off
When I was like five years old, I was laying in the corridor of my house when I saw a man appear. I didn’t recognize him, and he wasn’t my dad. It looked like he had a face, and when he appeared, the corridor went dark. He started walking towards me so I closed my eyes, and when I reopened my eyes, he was gone. I still don’t know who he was.
47. Passing Through
I was in my 20s and hadn't been back to my nana’s for ages since I had moved away. But me and my mam stayed over one night visiting. I slept upstairs in the front bedroom. Mam slept in the smaller "box room" that was a narrower room to the left of it. Nana and grandad were in the back bedroom. I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.
Then I tried to lie down and go back to sleep, and I suddenly felt really awful. I can't describe it. I felt sick, sad, and terrified all at the same time for no reason. As if you were hiding somewhere from somebody and your heart is going crazy as they walk past looking for you. I tried to close my eyes and to nod off.
To the left of me, the bed started dipping as if someone was trying to stand on the mattress and walk across it. There were two more dips one after the other to where my legs were. The mattress was actually making noise under the weight. But there was nothing there. It stopped as it got to the end of the bed. Then, something touched the hand that I had out over my blanket. I thought I was going to cry or retch.
When the terror subsided enough for me to move, I burst out crying and ran to my mam, trying to tell her what happened through the gasps. She was already awake, woken by a spider, and had heard me come back from the bathroom. She left me in her bed and got up to check the front bedroom. She told me that when she went in she felt sick and angry.
The hairs on her arms were sticking up but she couldn't see anything. She came back and told me not to go in there. Of course, then nana and grandad woke up to me crying and grandad dismissed the experience as a dream. My nana wasn't too bothered and said something like, "Ah yeah, I've felt and heard strange stuff for years but nothing dangerous.”
Mam and nana didn't tell grandad, and called a priest to come to the house. He was told everything and checked the house. He took some photos in that front room. He took a few photos of the wall over the beds and made a disturbing discovery. There was this blurry area in the middle over the headboards. He said that apparently from what he's seen before it was a sort of gate where things can get in and out.
So, they were obviously coming out, landing on the bed, and continuing through the house. The housing estate itself is next to the biggest children's hospital in the country and he thought that maybe there were a lot of confused "entities" passing through that didn't know where to go. So that explains what my nana says.
But also older, meaner things were coming in and out and that could've only been happening recently. My uncle told me afterward that he stopped house sitting for them years ago because he could hear running across the house’s upstairs and couldn't take it anymore. Mam had to stay there a few more times for work and she said the night disturbances were getting more and more aggressive.
My nana told me she locked up the house but when she came back and unlocked the front room the iron was plugged in and red hot. The house could've burnt down. Grandad still denies everything, but won't sleep without TV or radio on.
48. High-Speed Chase
When I was 20 years old, I was taking my girlfriend home late one night on small country roads. I went to take a left turn then suddenly there were bright headlights coming through the passenger window. She screamed, I screamed, we were about to be killed....and nothing happened. We didn't get hit; the car just vanished. She was hyperventilating and crying.
I was scared, confused, and my adrenaline was racing. We sat there five minutes before I could drive again. But our nightmare wasn’t over yet. I started up the road and suddenly there were intense headlights behind us. They flew up behind us, easily going 50 mph faster than us. We braced to get rear-ended...and nothing. My girl was screaming so loud that she was hoarse.
All I heard was, “GO, GO, GO.” We drove the next 10 miles on little country roads at 110 mph, making curves that should have sent us into ditches, with the headlights either mere feet behind us or pulling alongside but we could never see anything but lights. Then my girlfriend suddenly screamed something that made my hairs stand on end. She yelled, "What did you do with the stars?!"
I glanced up, not daring to look away from the road very long, and the sky was black. Not moonless night black, I mean GONE black. I know how crazy it sounds but I am driving with the gas pedal on the floor at three times the safe speed, scared to death, with a screaming girl beside me and I distinctly remember watching the trees in the headlights.
This was to figure out if everything literally vanished, ceased to exist once my car’s headlights were past it, because looking out the passenger window things seemed to just pop and vanish. She curled up in her seat and passed out. There was a sharp 90 degree turn ahead with a huge, deep gully just past it and there was no way we could make it at our speed.
I don't know why, but when I saw the lights beside me, I slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. The lights zipped past us and vanished, the stars were back, and somehow sitting there I just knew it was over. I woke her up, and she just kind of oozed into her seat and quietly asked me to take her home. We didn't talk about it at all, she just got out and ran inside.
I sat in her driveway and trembled for 10 minutes. I was terrified of going home the way we had come, so I numbly drove 20 minutes in the wrong direction and slept in the parking lot of a truck stop because there were people around 24 hours a day. We NEVER discussed it and three troubled months later broke up. I have never heard of anyone else seeing odd lights and I've never seen them again but SOMETHING was out there with us that night.
49. Barking Dogs
I was home alone with my old roommate’s pit bull, Hamburger. She was very sweet but would bark at strange noises or if she heard something outside the house. That night it was around 11:30 pm and I was chilling in my room when she started barking. Normally a quick “Hey, cut it out!” would hush her up, but not this time.
So, I figured something had riled her up for real. I went out into the hall and she was looking from the living room down the hall in my direction but past me. So, I looked to where she was looking and couldn’t see anything. The hall was mostly dark except for the light from my room. I looked back at her, and she whimpered for a second.
Then, out of nowhere, she started growling and barking like I’d never heard before and ran towards me and a couple feet past me. She continued barking aggressively at the end of the hall. She was not an aggressive dog at all, so this freaked me out. And it was definitely not a mouse, because she was looking around human head height.
I went to the living room, turned on all the lights, and sat on the couch because it was nice and far from the end of the hall where Hamburger was barking. I called her back to me and she sat by my side doing a low growl for the next five minutes. When I calmed down and wasn’t feeling so alarmed anymore, she refused to come with me to my room. But all that was nothing compared to what happened next.
Later that night woke up to what I swear looked like an adolescent girl in a white dress at the foot of my bed. Here’s the catch though. My room at night in that house could get really dark. I shouldn’t have been able to see anything as distinctly as that. It might have been night terrors but I doubt it. Also, I was completely conscious when all that with Hammy went down.
I never told any of my roommates, and I’ve only told one other person before. Even writing it out I’m doubting myself. All I know is that I loved that dog, and if there was something there, she put herself between me and it.
50. Booked
I was getting ready for work one day and was in the bathroom when I had a distinct feeling that someone was watching me. The bathroom door was partially cracked but no one else was home at the time. The feeling became a little overwhelming, so I pulled open the door quickly and a large, textbook flew off the bookshelf.
I was so shocked that I actually instinctively apologized out loud and left for work early. It was one of those history textbooks that was so big it didn’t fit on the shelf standing up, so it was lying flat on its face. It was about two feet from the bookshelf when it landed, like it was propelled and didn’t just fall off.
I left it there and didn’t pick it up until I got home from work. A lot of weird things like that happened at that house. For instance, the faucets would turn on by themselves, full blast. Completely locked and shut doors would be found open. There were more. The book incident was the most intense though.
Sources: Reddit,
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