Things that go bump in the night, unsettling occurrences, and eerie strangers. These Redditors were asked to share the creepiest or scariest thing that happened to them or someone they know, and they did not disappoint. Keep the lights on for this one.
1. The Ranch
When I was around six, my family lived out in the rural desert in Southern California near a Cahuilla reservation. We had a few acres of ranch that was beside a small mountain. My room had large windows that faced towards the mountainside and as such, it was always extremely dark at night so there was a motion sensor porch light that was attached over the back door which you could see from my window. The back door led to a room we never used but anyone coming to the property thought it was the front door.
One night while trying to sleep, I heard a tapping on the window, like a subtle scratching. I woke up and saw two very striking yellow eyes and the silhouette of something very canine. We had coyotes here but this was the size of a small man, far larger than any coyote and there were no wolves in the region. We had a dog, but our border collie was nowhere near the size of this.
We stared at each other for a few moments, just completely still—I was completely frozen on what to do while it just stared back. It began to scratch again at the window then turned and walked, upright, to the back door and tried the handle. The light went on, I saw this furry dog-man thing trying to get in. This is when panic started to set in.
I remember running out of my room to grab the Winchester we had in a case in the living room and then running back to my room. There it was, on the other side of the glass looking at me. It saw the rifle then bolted into the dark. I never knew what it was, and I only learned about “Skinwalkers” much later. I never told my parents, but I slept with that Winchester beside my bed for a few years after.
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2. Cabin In The Woods
A group of friends was staying at this remote cabin that one of my friend's cousins owned. There were no roads leading to the cabin, and it was a good three-quarter day hike from where you parked the cars. I couldn't go at the same time as everyone else due to work obligations, so I decided to head up the same day but later. It would mean I would have to camp for a night by myself though—the latter part of the trail is too dangerous to be taken at night, especially by someone who doesn't know it. I didn't care, I was kind of looking forward to it as I've never camped alone before.
I was in the middle of these woods when the sun went down. I got my camp set up in this small clearing. Probably 12 m (40 ft) across. I get my campfire going and pitch my small, one-person tent. I did all that camping stuff like cooking hot dogs on a stick over the fire and making smores. I probably stayed up for a good two or three hours after dark.
The entire time I thought I heard something moving in the woods on the edge of the clearing. I didn't think anything of it at first because the woods are full of animals, but as the night went on, I realized that it was just circling the clearing over and over. Once I started paying attention, it made four or five laps around before I decided to get up and investigate. The noise stopped as soon as I stood up and I thought I heard what sounded like it was moving away through the woods.
I just shrugged it off, thinking it was some fox that was curious but got scared when I stood up. I decided it was time to sleep, doused the fire, and climbed into my tent. I started to doze off and stayed in that half-asleep half-awake state for a while. I normally hear weird noises when I'm in this state, so I don't think much of it when I hear a voice.
Something woke me all the way up though, and I realized the voice was real and right outside my tent. It was just above a whisper and I was not sure if it was another language or if they were just speaking English in such a way that I couldn't understand. I laid there for some time, I don't know how long, listening and waiting for something to happen.
There was just enough moonlight to light up the walls of the tent. What I saw still gives me nightmares: A hand pressed into the wall of my tent down near my foot. This freaked me out and I sat up quickly. Whoever was outside of the tent tore out of there as fast as they could. They must have been running full sprint through the woods.
I got out of the tent and shone my flashlight around and didn’t see anything. I was expecting there to be a bloody handprint on the tent, but nope. I didn't sleep that night, packed up camp at first light that morning, and booked it to the cabin.
3. Late-Night Ride
I was about 15 minutes from finishing the night shift at work when there was a massive crash on one of the windows in the office, so I got up to check it out. Someone has thrown quite a sizeable rock through one of the windows on the front of the building. This was especially weird because I was working in the industrial district at 11:30 at night with none of the other businesses open. I went back to my desk, put a quick call through to security to let them know, and decided to head home.
As I left the building, I freaked myself out about it more and more and ended up running to my car, got in, and took off. I was almost home and I started to calm down a bit when I realized that I didn't unlock my car when I got in. It had been unlocked the whole time. I did a quick check with my hand in the backseat for any possible intruders that might have been hanging around there but there was nothing there.
Fast forward 30 minutes: I called a friend of mine who said he was out drinking so I decided I was going to join him. I jumped on my bicycle and started riding over. I was doodling along the road on my bike, it was a nice night and I wasn’t in a big rush, just enjoying the moonlight when I heard someone riding behind me.
I straightened up and stuck to one side of the road. He passed me really slowly and, when he was right beside me, he shot me a smile I can only describe as purely insane. I kind of flinched and was taken aback as he rode on. That's when I realized something that made my blood run cold: He was riding my mom's bike. Needless to say, I sprinted home. When I got there, sure enough, her bike was missing and one of my car's doors was open. The back left one. I was driving and had no need to open that door.
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4. Snap, Crackle, Pop
I was playing around with a radio once when I was a kid, just slowly spanning through the static trying to find a station. I had found an old television antenna, attached it to the side of our house with an alligator clip, and ran a wire out my window to it, allowing me to get a much broader range of signals on the radio.
So, I was sitting there, early in the morning, slowly sweeping frequencies, and suddenly I got to this station that was playing this very weird crackling sound. It sounded sort of like cracking knuckles, or maybe Rice Krispies cereal, but with a fixed, rhythmic pattern instead of being random. I sat there listening to it for a second, then it suddenly stopped.
This faint voice says, "It doesn't work. We're already dead. We're already dead." It took a second for the weight of the words to hit me, but when they did, I freaked out and almost threw the radio across the room. I'm pretty sure it was just someone messing around with a radio transmitter, but man, if it didn't scare the life out of me at the time.
5. Tree-Rex
About a year ago, I was climbing a tree in my front yard at around 4:30 a.m. I had walked a lady friend to her car and was wasting time until I got the "I'm home" text. The weather was nice for tree climbing, so I just did it. This particular night, my neighbors didn't lock their gate like they normally do, leaving easy access to their tool shed, lawnmower, etc. I guess the guy forgot, it happens, but it was definitely noticeable.
As I observed the gate from my lofty perch and considered all of the reasons it would be open, I noticed a car coming down my street very slowly, eventually coming to a halt right in front of my neighbor's driveway. I looked into the car and saw two young men pointing and looking intently around his yard. Sketchy during daylight, much more so at night.
After a minute or so of being too nervous to do anything at all, I realized I was leaning pretty heavy on some branches, exposing myself more than when these two had just driven up. That was when it happened. The guy in the passenger seat noticed me first. He did a panicky sort of double-take when he first saw me, followed by what I generally assume to be the words, "OH NO!" and rapidly punched the driver in the arm.
Attempting to look menacing, I did the only thing I could think of which was hold my arms up in a claw-like pose. When the driver saw me, he did the same panicky double-take before slamming the gas and hauling out of dodge. I like to think I was the creepiest/scariest thing those two ever saw.
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6. It’s Not Delivery
My parents were out one night, and my brother and I were home alone. We were probably 12 and 10, respectively. Anyway, there was a knock at the door and I heard a voice say, "Pizza." Initially, thinking it was my father playing a joke, I instinctively went to open the door—then it hit me. That really didn’t sound like my dad's voice.
"We didn't order any pizza," I said. There was no reply and no audible movement. I went to my bathroom window, which allows some vision of the footpath leading from the front of our property to the front door, but you can't see the door itself. So, we waited for about 15 minutes, clutching a cricket bat and some ornamental fireplace poker, until finally the dude moved away from the door and walked away. It was some guy with dark hair in a long ponytail, a long dark coat, and no pizza.
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7. Night Dive
This happened a few years ago on a night scuba dive. There were eight of us in the group including our divemaster and his assistant. We had just finished our dive and were gathered up in a circle ready to ascend and get out of the water when my divemaster froze. He took his flashlight and pointed it outside our circle of divers, and he caught something circling us with the beam.
Turns out it was a 4 m (12 ft) long great white shark. At this point, half of the group were trying to keep the shark illuminated as it circled us and remarkably, everyone stayed calm. The only things going through my mind were iterations of these two thoughts, "Don't look like a yummy delicious fatty seal,” and, “I hope I taste terrible."
My divemaster got our attention and slowly put his thumb up and then made an upward motion to signal to go up. We all began to ascend and the shark kept with us until we were maybe 3 m (10 ft) from the surface. Then it turned off into the darkness and was gone. I did not go back into the ocean for about a week after that.
8. The Shadows
When I was 14, my family and I fell on hard times. We got kicked out of our house and ended up in emergency housing; basically, we went to a charity that found us a house that we were able to rent for 100 dollars a month, but only for three months. That summer, my mom and stepdad separated temporarily, and my three younger siblings would go to my stepdad’s for a week or so then come back to my mom and me. This house was creepy.
It started off with just that feeling, you know? Like, something isn't quite right, that you might not be the only person in the room. In the daytime, that's all it was, the feeling that something was up. Your instincts are pricking at you. I tried to ignore it, but as soon as dusk arrived, spooky things would start happening.
More than once I could hear this static-filled music playing, but I couldn't find the source, it just filled the halls. I heard whispering and went to my two sisters’ room where, in the open closet, a pair of eyes looked at me and disappeared. My brother spent one night in the house and didn't come back. In my room, I could never win.
On one wall there was a mirror, when I flipped away to face the window, the reflection showed tall shadow figures pace in front of it. In my mother’s room, the same shadow figures paced in circles around her bed. One night, she and I sat up for two hours in her bed watching these shadows. She was strongly religious and didn't know what to make of it.
During the time we lived there, there was a lunar eclipse. I had never seen one before and was very excited for it. When I went out to look, this terror took over me and I couldn't stay outside, I couldn't explain it. When the moon was fully cloaked, I went outside and looked up, but my head suddenly snapped down and to my left.
I could see three tall shadows walking in between the tall pine trees in the yard. Panicked, I ran back inside and into my room, flinging myself under the covers with my eyes shut tightly, but listened to the pacing outside my bedroom window. We went through three months of this. We moved out at the end of summer into a new house, my mom and stepdad got back together, and I was with my younger siblings again. We all agreed the house on Acorn Street was messed up, and still get chills when we drive by it.
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9. Shower Time
I woke up one night around 1 am and heard the shower was on. I first thought it was my brother who worked night shifts; so, I thought he had come home late and was in the shower. It went on for about half an hour until I got up and went to see what he was doing. No one was in the shower, my brother wasn't home yet, and I was the only one in the house. Still to this day, I have no idea how it turned on or who did it. Almost five years later, I still think about it and scare myself. Even writing this now I feel like turning every light on in the house.
10. Watch Your Step
I watched in horror as this guy who seemed intoxicated fell onto a commuter rail track just as the train was coming. The sound/sight of him getting run over has stayed with me for life as the scariest, brain-scarring thing ever.
11. Let Me In
This happened to me when I was about eight and still scares me to this day. One evening, I went to let my dogs in from the back garden at around 9 p.m. It was pitch black, so I quickly opened the door and my dogs came bounding in. As soon as they came in, I locked the door and at that very moment a person on the other side pulled the handle down, trying to get into my house. We had a glass door so even in the dark, I could see the outline of a man standing there. I ran to my dad and he ran into the back garden after this man and saw him running down the road. Since then, I have closed and locked doors at the speed of light.
12. Roadside Assistance
There was a story I read that described a guy taking a scenic route in the middle of the night to get to a certain town. He was driving up a hill and came upon a car accident with two cars on the side of the road and a person lying down on the ground. For some reason, he caught a bad vibe from it and slowly drove past the scene. He stopped about 30 m (100 ft) past it, looked behind him, and saw that the person on the ground was standing up and staring at him, with about 20 other people coming out of the woods.
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13. Mr. Sandman
A few months ago, I downloaded a program to my phone—Sleep as Android. I bought the premium version of the app for the extra features, to record sound throughout the night when volumes reached a certain threshold. It would activate when I would snore or move around. I would usually spend the next evening going over some of the recorded sounds. Everything was pretty normal...until I heard something I'll never forget.
It was near the beginning of April, and I had the apartment to myself. It started out picking up my snoring, and then the hairs on my neck stood up as I heard my doorknob moving. Following this, you could hear my door open slowly. I was confused and a little worried. Everything was still locked up, nobody came home, and my landlord certainly didn't come in. I don't use the app anymore.
14. My House
When I was seven, I woke up in the middle of the night with an earache. I decided to tell my mom and stepdad and walked out of my room. Someone was sitting on the chair in the living room, the person looked strange, but it was dark and I couldn't see well. "Mom?" I asked. The person shook their head and I started getting scared. "Mike?" The person shook their head again.
I decided the best course of action was to go back to bed so I wouldn't have to walk past this person. I climbed in bed and closed my eyes for a second, before opening them to see the person standing in my doorway, smiling madly and nodding furiously. I screamed at the top of my lungs and closed my eyes. My stepdad came running out of his room with a baseball bat. There was nothing there, but the clothes my mom had folded and put on the chair were strewn about the living room.
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15. Wigged Out
My dad lost his life to cancer the day I turned 16, after about two weeks in a coma. A lot of weird things happened after he passed, but the one that still freaks me out when I think about it happened about 12 hours before he went to bed for the last time. He was in our living room napping on the couch while my mom was in the kitchen cooking. No one else was home.
Suddenly, he jerked awake and was shouting for my mom in a very loud, agitated voice. Clearly angry with her, "Beverly! Don't do that! Don't EVER do that again!" She ran into the room, alarmed and asked what he was talking about, and he said, "Don't do that. Don't walk past me like that in that long, black wig." Sometimes I think he saw the Grim Reaper.
16. Hunter
My co-worker had a grandson named Hunter who was four or five. She said that Hunter would have bad dreams and that he would sleep with his dad when he got scared. One night his dad woke up because he heard Hunter calling him. But he was calling him by his name, not “dad.” He went to Hunter's room and he was asleep. He woke him up and said, "Hunter, you were calling me. Is everything okay?" And Hunter said, "Dad, when they call you, you're not supposed to answer," and fell back asleep.
He asked him about it in the morning, but he said he didn't remember saying it.
17. Bunk Mate
When I was about 13 or 14, I woke up in the middle of the night needing to go to the bathroom. I had one of those bunk beds, but where instead of a bottom bunk there's a desk. For whatever reason, I started psyching myself out REALLY badly. I sat up in my bed staring into the pitch blackness, imagining a man with a knife standing under my bed ready to get me as soon as I put a foot down the ladder. Or a torn-face ghost girl in the hallway. Or someone smiling and bloody at the turn into my bathroom. Basically, the usual freaky images. I tormented myself for a solid 20 minutes, then spent another 10 trying to convince myself to go to the bathroom.
When I finally felt ready, I carefully stepped down the ladder, holding my breath, ready to feel my foot get harshly grabbed. I continued to the bathroom, slow and completely on edge. I guess my mom was going to the bathroom at the time too, because she was RIGHT there in the hallway and she bumped into me. Getting bumped into just set me over the edge. I collapsed in the hallway in shock, started crying, and peed all over myself. My mom was stunned and apologetic, but not without a great deal of laughter and mockery first.
18. Twister
My parent's house got hit by a tornado when I was in high school. We live in rural North Carolina, not exactly Tornado Alley, but we do get some bad storms now and again. My dad had this habit of liking to sit out and watch thunderstorms come in. We were all inside when we heard him yelling for us to come out. We walked out and the sky looked surreal. There was a wall of black clouds sweeping towards our house at a disturbingly fast pace.
When I say black, I mean jet-black clouds. Like an ink cloud from a giant octopus was squirted into the sky. I've never seen it before in my life, not even on a video, and hope to never see it again. We were pretty freaked out by the clouds and the wind was picking up. Someone, I think my mom, said maybe we should get inside, just to be safe.
But things start going crazy even before we can turn around. The wind goes from a seven out of 10 on the windy scale to a 25 in like three seconds flat. We turned to get inside and I was the last to go in the door. I try to pull it closed behind me, but the wind is sucking the door open. I had to put both hands on the knob and jerk back with my full weight to get the door to shut.
We ran to the hallway and started throwing things out of the closet under the stairs and climbed in. The whole house was full of this absolutely indescribable roaring noise. It was like a jet was taking off on our roof. It wasn't so much a sound as a physical force. It made your head throb it was so loud. You could feel it constantly in the pit of your stomach. It felt like your eyeballs were quivering in your head. I kept getting that sense of vertigo you feel when standing at the top of a cliff looking down. It was an absolute sensory overload.
We all jumped under the stairs and shut the door, when we realized we had left the dog out in the house. My mom opens the door and yells for the dog, which comes barreling into the closet. At this point it's been maybe a minute and half since we were sitting in the kitchen chatting and my dad yelled at us to come outside and look at those crazy clouds. That's how long it took to go from normal to absolute terror.
We sat under the stairs for maybe two minutes, probably three at most. Everything was shaking. I was just waiting for the walls to tear apart around us, or debris to start smashing through the door. Then the sound passed and we came out. The house was still standing around us. We went back to the front porch and the door wouldn't open. I gave it a heave and pushed it open a few feet and squeezed out.
The porch was destroyed. We had a small barn sitting in front of our house and it had been obliterated. The tornado had picked up the barn, turned it into kindling, and threw it at our house. The posts on the front porch were all destroyed and it was just covered with broken glass, nails, shattered two-by-fours, and pieces of particleboard.
Looking out over our pasture in front of our house, there were just masses of trees down everywhere, probably about two or three acres of trees in total, were just gone. Our cars were pockmarked with hail damage. Our full-sized pontoon boat had been picked up from the front yard, rotated 90 degrees, and deposited in the back yard about 50 yards away.
Yet other things remained weirdly untouched. One of our barns was destroyed, but the other, standing maybe 27 m (90 ft) away, wasn't even missing a shingle. All in all, we were incredibly lucky. The house sustained major damage, despite its appearance. The roof had to be replaced because the suction from the tornado had made it unstable. In fact, to this day you can still see cracks in the walls on the top floor, where the tornado had nearly sucked the roof off the house.
19. Dirty
I just moved into this house a year ago. There are child-sized handprints on one of my bathroom walls. Permanent handprints you can only see from a certain angle, like what water exposure does to paint. The previous owners have no idea what I'm talking about, and I don't know how they got there.
20. Look Up
I lived in a house once that had child-sized footprints on the ceiling of one of the bedrooms. Extremely high ceilings. I could think of no way someone would get a child's feet up there. Not even climbing up a ladder and holding a kid upside down could've done it.
21. The Attic
My boyfriend lived in a house that made no sense—there was a light switch on a baseboard that worked a light two rooms away. Just an only-college-kids-can-stand-it house. They decided to see if there was room in the attic space for some boxes. So, my boyfriend opened the hatch, pulled down the ladder, and went up. He pulled the chain for the light to come on. The bare bulb hung over a dusty room, empty except for a rusty, metal highchair. My boyfriend clicked the light back off, came back down the ladder, and said, "No, we're never going up there."
22. Run
In the Northern part of Mexico, the drug cartels feud was very intense in the city where I live a couple of years ago. I was waiting to cross the street when I saw a big truck dumping a plastic bag that happened to contain a dismembered body. The worst part is that nobody did anything. I just waited for the light to change and ran as fast as I could.
23. Conserve Energy
To really get my story you have to understand my third-floor landing. There's a single set of stairs that lead up to it, once on the landing it’s a T-shape, with an office to the left, my bedroom to the right, and straight ahead is a bathroom with a shower. One night around 10 p.m., I was taking a shower before I went to sleep.
The glass panels on my shower are that glass that blurs everything, so everything was blurred and unclear. I glanced at the door and I saw some kind of hand-like figure. The hand was pitch black, so right there it freaked me out because I come from a family of pale white Welsh people. What freaked me out more was how the hand seemed to come through the door, or at least an angle where whomever the hand belonged to would be visible.
All it did was hit the lights. That's it. No noise, no attack or anything, it just turned off the lights. So, there I am, I just witnessed a phantom hand, and now I'm in my shower and the room pitch black. I had never been so chilled to the bone before; something about being in the darkness of the night, with the only noise being the water hitting the floor beneath me, just reduced me to the most primal state of pure fear I've ever been in.
I eventually got myself to leave the shower and hit the lights. The relief that came over me was immense. I've never been able to explain it. The stairs up to the landing are old and creek, so I would've heard someone come up and go down. No one was in my room or the office. Weirder still, nothing like it has happened since.
24. Hungry
I house sit for a family friend when she goes out of town. The woman who lives there is really into a bunch of spiritual stuff—new age stuff, reiki, etc. The very first time I was housesitting, I was outside watering the plants. I was the only one there and had closed the door after me. From the driveway where I was watering, I had a completely unobstructed view of the front door, the only door that was unlocked at the time.
When I went back inside, there on the little table next to the front door was a half-eaten cookie. The table had been completely clear when I went outside and I hadn't seen cookies that looked like that anywhere in the house. Nothing too creepy, but very puzzling and unsettling. When the woman returned, I mentioned it to her and she laughed and said she "gets ghosts all the time." I'm a fairly skeptical person, but honestly, ghosts were the best explanation.
The next time I was over, I was in the bathroom around 10:30 p.m. The house itself is fairly old and creaks from time to time, but nothing too loud or disruptive. While I was doing my business, there came a single loud knock from the other side of the bathroom door. This wasn't a little creak or pop from the house, it was a loud, determined rap on the door. It was enough to scare me for the rest of the night.
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25. Taken
One morning at about 1:00 a.m., I got a phone call from my little sister's cell. She lived in a time zone to the east, so it was 2:00 a.m. there. It woke me up, and I immediately sensed that something was wrong. I picked up the phone and groggily said, "Hello?" I heard a muffled woman's voice—possibly my sister's—say, "Please, help me." She sounded terrified and desperate.
I immediately thought I was having a Taken moment—my sister is being kidnapped and it was all she could do to call me for help! Should I hang up and call for help? Should I yell into the phone? Should I keep listening and try to pick up some kind of relevant information? I really wished I had one of those fancy phone recording devices that the Taken guy had right then.
I opted to keep listening, and as I did, I occasionally heard muffled yelling and screaming, much to my horror. Her phone must have been hidden away pretty well. Then something strange happened: I heard what was clearly my sister's voice, also muffled, but completely calm. I didn't hear what she said, but it was a very casual, conversational tone. Then I noticed for the first time that there was also scary music along with the yelling and stuff in the background. My sister butt-dialed me in the middle of a horror flick at two in the morning.
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26. Redemption
I do a tour at an old prison and some of the scariest stuff I've ever experienced has happened there. I'm not convinced of ghosts and whatnot but if they exist, they're definitely there. Every person who works there has their own creepy story. My scariest was when I had a group of about 30 people in the gallows one night.
I was there doing my bit when suddenly there was this huge bang on the roof. Everyone looked up and a few people screamed, but a lot laughed; we have a few actors that jump out on tours, so they probably thought it was that. The banging didn’t stop though, it was kind of irregular and people were getting creeped out, me included. So, I took the group outside.
Now the roof of the room is a slanted A-frame, so if you walk back a bit you can see the roof. We all watched as this one bit of tin looked like it was being stomped on from the outside, moving and everything, and it was still banging when I took the group to the next spot. We finished the tour and a few people thought it was a joke, but it genuinely terrified me.
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27. Homecoming
When I was in high school, these four girls went to a concert in a city that was a five-hour drive away. They tried to get a hotel room after, but they were too young and were denied, so they had to drive all the way home. About 20 minutes from making it home, the driver fell asleep at the wheel and the car rolled. One of the girls didn’t make it. A couple days later the girl's parents invited a bunch of us over to their house, where we were shocked to see they had her body laying in her bed.
28. Ready Player Two
I was playing Kinect one night. It detected a second player. I was alone.
29. The Colonel
Just last year, I was in New York City, riding a packed subway. Halfway through the ride, a man gets up with a strangely large backpack. He cleared his throat and said, "Alright everyone, the time has come-" and in that moment the people on the subway faces turned to fear, a mother nestled her son, and I tensed up, ready to pounce.
He continued to say, "-I am a poor man, in need of food, if anyone has anything on them or if they could take me out for food it would save my life." My girlfriend and I got him some KFC and asked him to approach a large group of people differently. All in all, he was a nice guy—he didn't even look homeless. My girlfriend still refers to it as "the day the KFC guy was going to hurt us".
30. Samara
Back in 2003, I was watching The Ring at 2 a.m. As soon as the main character finished watching the cursed tape, my phone rang. I picked it up, but there was no one on the line. I stopped watching the movie at that point.
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31. Fortune Cookie
I'd been living alone for less than a week. I got some Chinese take-out and was eating in front of the TV. I finished my meal and cracked open the fortune cookie. It read, "You will have a visitor tonight, lock your door." There were no visitors that night, but the memory still haunts me.
32. Don’t Stop
I was driving to pick up a friend who was at this cabin party about 65 km (40 mi) west of where I lived. It was close to 2 am. So I was driving down this back road to find this random cabin, and I came across this red four-door sedan with all the doors open and four limp figures in the seats with their heads slumped over. That alone kind of freaked me out.
Later that night, I was driving by again after a failed attempt at picking up my friend. Mind you, it's getting close to three in the morning. Only the front seat passenger door was open and every person in that car was staring with a blank dead stare directly at me as I drove past at 15 km/h (10 mph). It was very creepy to me.
33. Visitors
I lived on 5 hectares (13 acres), most of which was forest. I was eight, hardly ever home alone, but when I was the same kind of things would happen all the time. Only when I was alone. The doors would open while they were locked, my young dogs would run up to the door and stay 3 m (10 ft) away barking at something I couldn't see while I hid behind the bar clutching a knife.
34. Imaginary Friends
Growing up, my younger sister and I would play in the woods with just our dogs. At five and seven years old, we had an imaginary friend that we both would talk to and could hear what it was saying. Our dogs would follow it when it would walk away and run around it in circles as it moved around.
35. Not So Calm
One time when I was around 12, my friend and I had watched this scary movie, then played with a Ouija board. To calm our nerves I said, "Well if there was really a ghost in this house, then let it swing that door open!" I pointed to a door behind my friend. Within two seconds it did, very quickly and hardly banging into the cabinets behind it. Needless to say, we were not very calm that night.
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36. After You
After living in my house alone for eight years, I came to the realization that I had closed a lot more doors than I had opened.
37. Inside
I was staying at this country hotel, and I looked in one of the wardrobes in the room I was in. I saw two little handprints on the mirror, and I tried to wipe it off with my hand to see if I could smudge or remove any of the print. Nothing happened, they stayed there. I had a closer look and it seemed to be inside the mirror.
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38. Lightning Strikes
In the middle of the summer two years ago, I was sleeping in my bed peacefully when I heard the loudest thunder I've ever heard in my life. Normally I am not afraid of thunder but this time my entire house shook as if it was a huge earthquake. I shook it off and went back to sleep. No big deal. Next thing I knew, I was jolted awake by a flash of bright purple lightning and the loudest thunder that Zeus could possibly create.
Then I start to hear the screams. It had seemed as if outside my window was a choir of demons screeching in cries of agony. As I laid in bed, terrified, I thought to myself, "This is actually happening. I can hear them. This is how it ends." Later, I found out that the screams were just a pack of foxes that were scared by the intense lightning, but still that was some scary experience right there.
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39. Mating Season
Decades ago, on a road outside Midland, Michigan, thousands upon thousands of frogs went to die. Cars slid through this green and red mass like they had hit a patch of black ice. Cars were in the ditch with a 200 m (650 ft) trail of frog carcasses behind them. It was chaos. When I got home, my mud flaps were liberally caked with amphibians. Why were all those frogs in the middle of the road?
40. Wild Ride
I was about 16 years old and was heading back to Central Indiana from Kings Island, a theme park in Cincinnati. Somewhere along the highway, we saw a man walk out of the woods about a quarter-mile up. As we got closer, I noticed it was a middle-aged man in his birthday suit, other than a latex mask and a chain around his neck. There was nobody else visible from the road. Being that I was 16, I just looked at the strange naked man and kept driving. Thinking back, I always wished I had called someone, who knows what he was doing in the woods along the highway.
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41. Last Goodbye
When I was in middle school, class was letting out and my best friend and I were walking to our buses. He had to stop by the music room to pick up his instrument to take home with him, so I said goodbye. I kept walking, turned around the corner, and he popped out of another door with his instrument and startled me on purpose.
We walked and talked for another minute and as I was walking away from him to get on my bus, I said to him, "Goodbye for good this time." That weekend he was in a car crash in front of his house, where he was ejected, and his family's car rolled over him. Now I relive that last interaction I had with him every once in a while.
42. Helping Hand
When I was maybe 19 or 20, I nearly got run off the road on my way home from work one night. No actual accident, but it shook me up so I pulled off onto the shoulder to calm down before continuing to drive. A windowless van pulled up behind me and a man got out and approached my car. He asked if I was okay, and I told him I was fine, just gathering myself after a scare.
He offered for me to wait in the van with his "wife and kids." He insisted multiple times that I get in his van. Luckily my door was already locked and I had only cracked the window to speak with him. He parked his van right behind me and when I looked, I could see in my rearview there were no visible passengers in his van.
43. Line Safety
We were at the church next door which was on the second floor and had a big window, from the back you could see the wireman doing something, but then suddenly he grabbed a hold of a live wire. He tensed up, started shaking, and he couldn't let go. People tried getting him down using wooden sticks, but it only caused him to fall down, still clinging onto the live wire. I didn't see anything else after him falling down but our neighbors said his clothes were burnt off and he was literally charred and unrecognizable.
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44. Take Cover
This was right after the mass Las Vegas shooting. I was at my sister's keeping her company while her husband was out of town and we had her two young children. We were talking about the shooting and how probably a lot of people don't run away at the start of a mass shooting because gunfire in real life doesn't sound like it does on TV.
At that very moment, we heard this really loud banging noise and I thought it was someone trying to kick in her door. We took the kids to the bedroom and hit the panic button on her security system. Once it was over, we found out that it wasn't someone trying to kick in the door. Someone had shot through her front door.
45. Sharing Is Caring
When I was a kid, I was at a friend’s house and we were hanging out in her parents' bedroom when they weren’t home. She had some gum, so I asked if I could have a stick. She left the room and came back with a large kitchen knife, got on top of me, held it to my throat and threatened me. I don’t remember exactly what happened aside from these details, but I wasn’t harmed.
46. Run Away
I was out at a pretty secluded lookout near my town that you need to drive through some forest and dirt roads in the hills to get to it. So, I’m sitting there with a friend just taking in the view and this car comes flying down the road. It blocks us in with spotlights turned on, someone gets out, and starts coming towards us with a chainsaw. Noped out of there. I started my car and just hit the gas. We managed to get out of there, but they gave us a chase and stopped once I got to the main highway.
47. Damien
My parents bought their first house back in 1972. It was a fixer-upper, but they decided to move in right away and fix things as time/money permitted. Within a few days of moving in, the new neighbors came over to introduce themselves. They also let my parents know that the previous owners had moved out after a nasty divorce. They had lost their second baby to SIDS and their relationship went downhill from there.
My parents were horrified, more so because they were newly pregnant and couldn't imagine going through such a terrible thing. They eventually pretty much forgot all about it. Their lives went on. They were in love with their new life and their new house. In preparation for the baby, they decided to wallpaper the nursery.
Now, my dad told my mom there was no need to wallpaper the inside of the closet, but she insisted. She was kneeling down, scraping off old paint inside of the closet...then her eyes fell upon something that made her blood turn to ice. Written in crayon, at about eye level for a kindergartner, in childish scrawl was: “I KILLED THE BABY.”
48. The Boogeyman
I'm a journalist and was told this doozy by a woman I interviewed for a true crime story. When this woman was a young girl, say eight years old, she started to come downstairs at night to tell her father that there was a man in her closet. He told her there's no such thing as the Boogeyman and sent her back to bed. This happened on and off for like a week.
Finally, he got frustrated and walked her back to the room and said, "I'll show you there's nothing in your closet" and opened the door. It opened an inch and then he felt someone slam it shut. Turned out there really was a man in her closet. This guy was a perv who would come into the house every night and stare at the girl from the closet while she slept. The dad beat him up and the perv got locked up for many years.
49. I Hear Something
I went to see The Sixth Sense when it first came out with my wife. We had just moved into our new house and my wife was pretty shaky when we came home. We didn't have kids at this point. She insisted that I go through all of the rooms in the house to check for...who knows what. Being a dutiful husband, I rolled my eyes as I went through all of the bedrooms and was finishing up in the guest bathroom.
The door was ajar and I pushed it open...and heard, right next to my head, the loudest, most blood-curdling scream ever. Turns out that the cat was behind the door and somehow had its tail in the jamb—and when I opened it, it got pinched.
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50. The Fourth Floor
I was in Taiwan one year when I was younger and had traveled to a busy night market. Nearby I spotted a sign for a net café in a five- or six-story building. Thinking I’d fire off some quick emails, I walked in the dark, small entrance of the building. The building was older and hadn’t been well maintained, but it was not out of the ordinary in Taiwan. The entrance just had a dark hallway that led to a small elevator.
I pressed the elevator call button and entered. The elevator was uncharacteristically new compared to the building, but I didn’t think much of it. Like some Chinese/Taiwanese buildings, there wasn’t a fourth floor as it’s considered bad luck, so it just read 1-2-3-5-6, which was usual. I looked for the floor the net café was on and pressed the button for the sixth floor.
It lurched into action quietly and began the ascend. When it stopped, I figured it was my floor, so I instinctively began to step out. Right before stepping out, the sight outside the elevator stopped me. It was pitch dark, only lit by the light in the elevator, it looked like it hadn’t been occupied for decades, with some random pieces of furniture covered with white cloth.
It was a small building and each floor was single occupancy, so I could see pretty much the entire floor from the elevator. Thinking I must have gotten the wrong floor, I checked the light. Strangely, there was nothing; none of the indicators were on, but the floor button to the net café was still lit so I knew I hadn’t gotten there yet. All this happened within a couple of seconds.
That’s when I noticed a figure moving in the distance, it was not very visible but I could make out what looked like a person dressed in some kind of gown, moving slowly towards the elevator. I was thoroughly creeped out, so I started pressing the close door button. As soon as I pressed it, the elevator light flickered off, and I was in pitch dark. I was this close to peeing my pants. The lights flickered back on and the door closed, the elevator jolted back to life. A few moments later it opened again to the net café.
I was beyond relieved at this point. I walked out immediately and sat down at a computer. After gathering my wits, I walked over to the cashier’s desk and told them what I saw. The girl working heard my story, and her face went white. I asked her if she heard of anything like that happening to anyone else.
She told me that she never experienced it, but some coworkers and occasional customers had brought it up, Basically, the building has six floors and the fourth floor had a history. Apparently, the floor used to be a hair salon, until one of the employees took her own life there. The store continued operations despite stories of weird appearances and a couple people reported seeing someone’s figure walking away in the mirror but wouldn't see anyone when they turned to check. Naturally, the business closed a few months later.
The building owner tried to rent the place out, but never had any luck. Most businesses are quite superstitious, and no one wanted to rent the fourth floor after the incident, even at a very cheap price. Finally, after dropping the price to nearly nothing, a stationary supplies store wanted to rent. During the renovations of the floor, several accidents happened.
Tools would end up in strange places, a mirror from the previous business shattered when no one was near it, and a worker had his hand jammed between the elevator doors when it closed on him unexpectedly. The workers refused to continue working and finally, the business left and the building owner finally gave up and shut down the floor.
He then had the elevator company come in to replace the panel so that the elevator could not go to the fourth floor. Let me repeat that–the elevator was programmed to never go to the fourth floor. It didn’t even have a button. But for some reason, sometimes when people took the elevator, it would go to the fourth floor and the doors would open, and some, like myself, would see a figure walking around in the dark.
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