Forget that long-running TV show, the most compelling unsolved mysteries are the ones that happen to regular people just like you and me. There are some bizarre and disturbing experiences in life that simply don’t make sense, and these Redditors came together to share their stories and try to figure out exactly what happened. From glitches in the matrix to strange disappearances, these tales are so chilling that we had to sleep with the lights on.
1. Rebirth
I have memories that aren't mine. I described them to my mom one day, down to the house I was in, the view out the windows, what I was wearing, what I was doing. My mom looked at me with absolute terror in her eyes. It turns out the memories belonged to my cousin who drowned in a river before I was born. I hadn't seen any pictures of her, the house, or anything. It still keeps me up at night.
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2. The Call Is Coming From Inside The House
I was watching TV home alone one night. It was Mad TV I think. Or Nick at Nite. Something harmless and not at all frightening. Then I noticed the image on the screen flickered slightly. Curiosity killing the cat, as it often does, I rewound it and then hit pause right at the point where it flickered. What I saw made my blood run cold.
In a little box on the screen sort of embossed into the picture were the words "I WILL BE BACK," and the E in BE was backward. It was so creepy. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I had to just convince myself it was a glitch or something but I had the heebie-jeebies for the rest of the night. Luckily my sister came home a couple of hours later.
I've always wondered what that meant, who it was for, and how it even happened.
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3. An Explanation Is Overdue
I went to the library to check out a book. Couldn't find it, but I did find a book called The Alien Invasion Survival Handbook. Looked interesting, so I took it with me and checked it out. I used the self-checkout at the library, which scans some sort of metal strip inside the books. I took it out along with some other book I found that I needed for school.
My friend was there with me and witnessed me check both books out. Later on, I went home and started reading it. It was full of crazy conspiracies, so I laughed it off. A few days later, the book disappears. I knew where I had left it the night before, and the next morning it was gone. No one had taken it, no one hid it, it was just gone.
I didn't know what to do, so after it was past overdue, I confessed up to the librarian, told her I had lost a book, asked her how much it would cost us to have it replaced. Her reply made my blood run cold. She looked up the book and informed me that according to the library database thingy, it didn't exist and they had never had it in stock.
4. Unexplainably Juicy
Just recently, I was sleeping and I had this dream that I was talking to someone without a face. While we were talking, he randomly grabbed my hand and put a Starburst in it then made me close my hand. When I woke up, I looked down. What I saw sent a chill down my spine. There was a random Starburst wrapper in my hand.
I don’t even remember the last time I even bought Starburst. I still have the wrapper in my wallet.
5. You’re Thinking Too Loud
When I was roughly four years old, my parents and I were at a hotel. My dad was sitting next to me as I was getting my shoes on. He was thinking to himself, "I wonder if those people are walking to get coffee from the lobby." I turned to him and asked, "What's coffee?" My dad said he felt violated in a way he has never felt before.
Then, when I was nine, my dad was telling me about this teacher he had when he was very young. He paused telling his story to try to remember her name. I turned to him and asked, "Was is it Mrs. Cow?" He looked up at me with a shocked expression, and said, "Yes! How did you know?" All I did was say the first thing that popped into my head.
To top it all off, when I was 19, I had a horrible dream one night. It was very vivid. I remember dreaming that there was a big hairy scorpion climbing up the walls in my bedroom. It dropped down and fell next to me on my bed before I woke up. In the morning, I came out to the living room and saw my dad checking under the couch. I asked him what he was doing.
He said, "Just checking for scorpions." I told him about my dream, and he looked up at me with a slight smile. "Was it hairy?" He said. We had the exact same dream.
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6. The Shift
One night, about 10 years ago, during the summer, me and three friends were driving back from a concert that was in a town about an hour and a half from where we lived. About halfway back, a couple of the guys had to take a leak. It's dark out, and we were between towns, so we just pull off on a side road and park about a quarter-mile from the highway in an empty parking lot at the base of some trail or park or something.
There are no lights anywhere, but there were no clouds, and the moon was pretty bright, so it wasn't like it was pitch dark or anything. Me and the driver were waiting in the car, listening to the radio, when we hear, “What the heck?!" Right then, the car dies completely, like no power or anything, and I notice that it's pitch dark to the point that I can't even see my hand in front of my face.
The temperature drops from the mid-80s to being shivering cold. This goes on for maybe 30 seconds or so, and then just as quickly, the car gets power, the temperature warms back up, and we can see again…only now there’s dew all over everything. It was the creepiest that ever happened to me. Not a day goes by that I don't think about it at least once.
7. Tell ‘Em Large Marge Sent You
For my fifth birthday, my uncle got me a Pee-Wee Herman puppet. I was a big Pee-Wee fan and loved it at first. I had bunk beds in my room. I slept on the bottom bunk and on the top I kept all of my favorite toys and stuffed animals. I'd often leave them in really weird formations after having “battles” and the like, but I always remembered to leave certain ones in certain places because they were my favorites. Namely my Ninja Turtles and Pee Wee.
A few months after getting this toy though, I started to have some really terrible nightmares about it. Not the Are You Afraid of the Dark? kind of early 90s nightmares for kids, but truly graphic and horrible dreams where someone had broken into our house and made me watch him attack my sisters and my parents while the doll just laughed. Scarring stuff.
So, I told my parents and they immediately “got rid” of it. This apparently just meant they hid it in the garage, since I couldn't see the stuff stored up high anyways. A couple of weeks later, I woke up and all my Ninja Turtles were on the floor. Confusing, but maybe I shook the bed a bunch in my sleep. A few days after this, my older sister woke my parents up, screaming, about a dream she'd just had.
When she explained, I was utterly terrified. It was nearly identical to the dream I had told them about but I know she'd never heard about it. My parents knew as well and my mother looked genuinely horrified. I got screamed at for telling my sister about such horrible things, but once it became clear that I really hadn't told her, my mom looked even more worried.
I watched her go into the garage, grab Pee Wee, put him in a trash bag, and put him in the dumpster. But it didn’t end there. For years I'd wake up and my stuffed animals would be in really odd places; in places I know I hadn't left them. When I was 12, I found the Pee Wee toy in a box in the garage. My mom said my dad must have come home, seen it in the trash, and pulled it out…but he doesn't remember ever doing that.
8. Climbing The Walls
When I was with my family in South Africa we lived in two rooms. I had to live in the same room as my mother, and my brother with my dad, since we didn’t get along very well. Anyway, one night my mother wakes me in the middle of the night and says, "There’s someone in here." My heart rate goes through the roof, and we turn on the light. Maybe not the smartest idea, I mean, what would we have done? But either way, there is no one there.
I then remember that we live on the 10th floor, so there couldn´t be anyone in the room. So we go back to sleep after some time. However, in the morning our money, cellphones, and some other stuff like watches were gone.
9. Unidentified Driving Object
Once I was driving to El Paso from Dallas, TX. I was with my best friend and were going to celebrate my birthday. When Highway 20 turns to Highway 10, our surroundings turned a bit quiet. Even the music. As we drove, I noticed "someone" was following us. I drove pretty fast. I told my friend that we were being followed.
The "vehicle" that followed us only had the parking lights on. I got extremely scared and did not know if I needed to speed or stop. My friend told me to get the license plates, so I looked in the mirror and made a horrifying realization. It wasn’t a car. It was a silver flat-looking thing with no wheels, with lights on the sides like cars have. I told my friend it was not a car.
Then I remember being paralyzed out of fear. To this day, we don't remember how we kept driving. We were almost in El Paso when we were finally able to speak about what had happened. I’m still scared.
10. Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
When I was a kid I would get up in the night to get a glass of water and go pee. It was always like clockwork at around midnight. Well, as usual, one night I wake up and go into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. I am walking across the hall and pass the living room to get to the bathroom to take a leak, I hear a step behind me and turn around to see a man standing in the living room.
He is just standing there staring at me, and he is dressed like a sailor. We don't say anything, and I am pinching myself to see if I am dreaming, and even poured water over my hand. I was awake. He stood there and said nothing until hs started pointing at the table. After a few seconds I got out of there and went to my room, covering myself under the blankets.
The next morning I told my mom somebody was in the living room that night and she freaked out, thinking someone broke in. She checked all the doors and windows for signs of forced entry, nothing. She eventually just didn't believe me and thought I was dreaming or making it up. I told her that he was pointing at the table in the living room, so she humored me and checked out the table.
After closer inspection, I said, "That's him! That's the sailor!" There was a picture of him, in the full sailor uniform, on the table framed. The glass on the frame was cracked. My mother looked petrified. When I asked her who it was, she said it was her older brother who passed on in a helicopter crash while serving in the Navy.
I never knew him/knew about him. I still have no idea.
11. A Series Of Unfortunate Events
When I was six, I attended a summer camp that just watched us during the day. It was out in the country and it had a horse pasture and a barn and stuff like that. Quite a lot of kids went there. Anyway, one day I was sitting with a kid on this bar. The bar was cemented in and was like the barrier to the edge of the cement.
I was six and not thinking, I turned the bar and the kid did a 180, and his skull came right down on the edge of the concrete, he just kind of laid there and didn't move. I knew something was wrong and started crying and then messed all over myself. I have no clue what happened to the kid, but being out in the country, it took a while for help to get there.
I just sat there in the office all soiled. The unexplained part? I have absolutely no idea what happened to the kid. Did he live? Was the injury horrible? Did he pass on? I’ll never know.
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12. Impractical Joke
I was 19 and I was apartment sitting for my friend. He told us that his place was haunted by a friendly ghost and that when he took pictures, he’d see weird shadows. I was skeptical, but my mate who was sitting with me terrified. I used to mess with him, like set his iPod to play music by itself at 3 am, etc. One day we cleaned the kitchen, then chilled out in the living room.
When we went back to the kitchen five minutes later, we made a bizarre discovery. Everything was a mess. The cupboards were open, the sink was full of water, items from the fridge were on top of the fridge. No one could’ve been in there, the place was tiny. For anyone to get in the kitchen, they would have had to come through the living room.
I pretended it was me so my mate could sleep at night, but I was really freaked out.
13. A Rip In Time
I woke up from a nap in my room and I proceeded to walk into the kitchen. My mom was baking pies, asked me how I was doing, and then asked if I could run out to the garage, which was detached, to grab some frozen pie dough from the freezer out there. I agree, walk outside, play with the dogs for a few minutes, then start walking to the garage. I get halfway there and the bushes rustle. A lot.
I said, "Hello," got no response, and then walked nervously towards the garage. Next thing I know, I wake up in my bed. I walk out to the kitchen, where my mom is baking pies. I tell her I had a really strange dream and then she asked me if I got the pie dough. That’s when I freaked out. Apparently, I had left 15 or 20 minutes before I walked out of my room.
She started questioning how I got in my room, I say I don't remember, and then we both realize that I had been tracking grass all over the linoleum—I had gone outside barefoot. It was followed by a lot of awkward silence and confusion. I still have no idea what the heck happened.
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14. Spontaneous Combustion
I come home to my apartment late one night, I live alone and was exhausted from work so I strip in my bathroom before bed and leave my pants and shirt on the floor. The next morning I get up, throw sweats on, and am getting ready to take my dog to the park before work. In my bathroom, I distinctly remember smelling something burning, but I live in a high rise and I figured my neighbors were burning their breakfast.
When I get back from the park, I start getting ready for work and when I enter my bathroom, I find my pants completely charred. Burned to a crisp. My shirt and pants were the only things on the floor, the electric outlet is on the wall above my sink, nothing electrical near the floor or on. I don't know if my bathroom is haunted or what, but I've considered everything and still have no explanation.
15. An Old Soul
It was the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks, and there was a half-page picture of the USS Arizona on the front page of the local newspaper. We were having breakfast, and my little five-year-old cousin is doing typical kid stuff, but he happens to catch a glimpse of the paper. He suddenly stopped whatever it was he was doing, points to the paper, and goes "Hey I know that ship! I've been on it before!"
My aunt and I both just kinda shrugged it off as something the playful imagination of a five-year-old would say. Until he started describing things. That's when it got scary. He started rambling off what his uniform looked like, how many stripes it had and where they were on the uniform, etc. That's when my aunt and I got really scared.
He said a couple of other creepy things like what his favorite place on the ship was, and what his favorite food was. It was super scary.
16. Living Rent-Free
I had this closet in my old place that was absolutely terrifying. It was really, narrow, but pretty deep. Also, its entrance faced directly away from the nearest light source, and there were no light sources that actually faced it, so it was always really, really dark in there. Also, it was right next to my room, which is important.
Anyway, when I was really, really little, I would constantly hear whispering coming from the closet. A couple of voices, one louder and sharper, one quieter, would always be talking in there. It didn't freak me out for some reason, and I'd try to talk back to them, but every time I did they went silent for a few minutes.
When I told my parents about it, they didn't really think much about what I’d said, until one night when my dad came to tuck me in and he heard them as well. He got this terrified look on his face and opened the door to the closet, but he couldn’t find anything in there. The whispers stopped a couple of weeks after that.
When I was about nine, I was playing hide-and-seek with my sister and a friend, and I was "it." I had looked in all the usual places, and finally decided to check the closet. So I opened the door and waded into the darkness, feeling in front of me to keep from running into anything. Then, I felt someone. I grabbed their arm, stopped in my tracks, heard them breathing, and felt them move their arm away from me.
I said "Gotcha!" and laughed, and then walked out of the closet. Then my sister walked to me from the opposite direction, and we found our friend, "C," hiding elsewhere—she said she had tried to hide in the closet, but heard "B," my sister, moving around in there…but no one was in there...
17. The Drop Of A Hat
When I was maybe six years old, my family and I were on a speedboat ride at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago. As we were speeding through the water, the baseball cap I was wearing flew off my head and fell into the water. I was bummed out the whole day and when we finally got home later that night, I went to my room.
I opened my closet door…and there is my hat on the rack above me. Even my parents couldn’t believe what happened.
18. The Other Man
One night I heard my boyfriend come home from work while I was sleeping. He came in and said hi, then went out to the living room. I got up not long after to convince him to come to bed, and he's not home…I called him and he told me he had stayed late at work and repeatedly told me he had not come home that night at all.
I freaked out and made him come home right away. Creeped me out for a while.
19. A Paternal Pull
When I was in the hospital for surgery when I was 5 or so, I was having a really Bad Day. Everything that was happening to me suddenly became too much, and I started crying and sobbing uncontrollably. The staff were doing their best to calm me down, but weren't having a lot of success. Then, for some reason, I looked out the window, which happened to look down on the sidewalk leading to the hospital's main entrance and THERE WAS MY DAD, walking up to the revolving doors and entering the lobby!
Now this happened in a time when parents were not yet allowed to visit their kids 24/7 the way they are now, and it was way outside normal visiting hours. It was also a normal working day for my dad, and there were no special events planned for the day or anything. My parents were scheduled to visit me as usual later that day, and the staff hadn't called them to tell them I was distressed.
In short, there was absolutely no way my dad should be there. In fact, he formally wasn't even ALLOWED to be there at that time, and he knew it. The staff knew it too, and they hadn't seen him out the window, so they went into this "Oh, you poor thing" mode, and gently started to convince me that no, my dad really wasn't there, that I was mistaken, and that he would get there in the evening, etc.
So that's when my dad actually walked in. I flew into his arms, and refused to let go for a long time. When I asked him years later why he went to see me that day, at that time, he didn't really know. He just "felt the urge to go", even though it was not the right time, he really had other things to do, and he just plain did not have any real reason to go.
All I know is my dad showed up exactly when I needed him the most.
20. At The End Of His Rope
When I was an infant my parents lived onsite at a summer camp teaching. Fast forward a few years. I had always noticed some serious scars on my dad's shoulder, and he would always need two knee braces when we would do anything that would potentially be hard on your knees. When we went on vacation, I finally started to get a little more information about it.
He tells me that he fell while rappelling off a cliff, destroyed his shoulder, broke both legs, and punctured his lung. This never really was brought up because it was a bit of a sensitive issue. Apparently, my mother really didn't like thinking about the fact that she almost lost him. Fast forward another six years and my dad invites me to come with him to visit the campground.
I go back and meet many people. Everything was fun, I got to meet my dad's closest friend growing up, great guy. Then my dad asked if I wanted to go with him to visit the place of the accident. I said sure, and a loudmouth guy overhears and decides he is going to go as well. We hike through a path that has been overgrown.
We walk up to the cliff and my dad approached the bottom and kneels and just sits in thought for a minute straight. I leave him to his thoughts and start to wander, the loudmouth co-camper follows me and starts blathering, clearly not content with listening to nature. Generally annoying me, but then he says: "Did your dad tell you about how it happened?"
He explains that my dad was teaching a rappelling class and he was the person that was teaching with him. He explains that this day he rappelled first and my dad was rappelling last. After they coached a whole group of campers down from the top of the cliff it was my dad's turn. He got about a third of the way down before the rope failed. He fell the rest of the way and wrapped around a rock at the base, the same rock he was now kneeling next to.
None of this really surprised me, as it pretty close to the story I was told. But then the tone of the story changed. He drops his voice and says, "We all went on that rope, that rope was solid. I checked it myself before I went down, I always did. I saw him check the rope, check the anchor. There was no rub damage on the rope. After your dad fell I was the person that collected the rope. I saw that the failure was between the anchor and the ledge."
Dropping his voice even lower still, he looks me dead in the eyes and says, "There was no wear damage on the rope, it was cut clean." As if on cue, my dad walks up from the base of the cliff. Co-camper takes a step back and returns to normal talking level and says, "So I collected the rope and I locked it in the climbing shed, so that I could show law enforcement the evidence."
I ask the co-camper, “What did they say about it?” He replies, "Nothing..." lighting up a smoke and taking a deep draw, "After I put it in the climbing shed, a spark hit the shed, it burnt to the ground. Real-life is not like these TV shows, most of the time law enforcement will just stop investigating things and you will never hear back. I don't think they ever gave a second thought about a shed that had some old climbing gear in it."
I asked my dad why he never told me any of this. He said, "It doesn't change any of what happened. It was my way of figuring out I needed to move on. I think I am done now." That was the last time I ever asked about it.
21. Might As Well Go For A Soda
It happened when I was 10 years old. My brother and I were enjoying a fun evening of video games with a mutual friend, and as 1 AM rolled around we all agreed it was time for a soda. We had run dry at the house and brazenly decided to run to the local soda machine. It wasn't more than two blocks away, so the trip shouldn't have taken long...had things gone accordingly.
We were parched when we arrived and had brought enough change for multiple cans, so we decided to enjoy our first soda in front of the machine. As we drank and shared stories from school and whatnot, a car approached the neighboring apartment building. It pulled up, parked and a woman of about 40 got out of the driver’s seat and made her way to the building.
We were a tad nervous at first, breaking curfew and all, but she disappeared into the building and she quickly left our minds. Then...out of nowhere...we heard a chilling sound. It was the same car starting. No one had come out of the building. The car immediately peeled out and began driving straight at us. We all scattered. I ran behind the building the soda machine had been placed in front of and crouched behind a dumpster.
The mystery car whipped around and began slowly circling the building. I was frozen in fear. It took every ounce of strength for me to circle around the dumpster as the car passed so as to go undetected. After the car passed, I summoned an amazing burst of energy and ran home faster than I thought physically possible.
My brother and friend arrived home three minutes or so later. They claimed to have seen the driver's face and described it as "mangled." It was the most terrifying experience of my life.
22. Blink And You’ll Miss It
My father owns a lakefront summer cottage that he inherited from his mother. On the summer nights when no one was staying there, members of the family would sometimes drop by just to check on things. His house was 20 minutes away, so it was convenient and we'd do it to make sure no one broke in, that sort of thing. I drove over one night to do a check. It was 8 pm.
This is a rural cottage, there are no lights outside, you have to keep the headlights of a vehicle on to go and unlock the door and turn the lights on inside. I sat in the car listening to a song for a moment. One second later, I am standing 30 feet from the car at the side of the house in darkness near a ridge of bushes. I "come to" staring straight ahead into the black night with my left arm slightly raised, staring at my wrist.
My car's headlights are on, the car door is open. I see a trickle of blood coming from a small cut on my arm, two inches below the wrist, the size of an index fingernail's width. No illicit substances in me, no bramble that I could have scraped myself on. Nothing really around that would cause a small cut. I walked back to the car and the clock read 8:20.
I have NO memory of getting out, never mind walking to the side of the house—I would have walked to the front door.
23. I Remember You
I was traveling in Italy when two American girls came up to me and started talking excitedly about how they couldn't believe they'd run into me in Rome and wanted to know how my trip had been going, but I had no idea who either of them were. And if you're thinking, "It's a prank, bro" they knew specific things about my life and my travels that only someone who knew me would have known. I still have no idea who the heck they were.
24. Burn The Whole House Down
I was sitting in my dad's room shining his boots—don’t ask—when I feel something crawling up my back. Of course, I freak and reach back and feel nothing. I take the shirt off and search it and around my immediate area. Nothing. So I go back to shining the boots, a few minutes go by and then I feel it again. I reach and grab the biggest bug I have ever seen in my life.
It must've been 4-5 inches long with tons of legs. Imagine a brown roly-poly. I throw it on the ground and smash it with a boot. After I'm done smashing it, I lift up the boot and there's nothing there. Nothing on the ground, nothing on the boot. I have no idea what happened to it.
25. Candid Camera
So, I was home alone that night, watching some TV in the living room. I kept hearing footsteps every once in a while, no big deal so far. A little later, I turned on the Xbox to do stuff. I rarely use that thing, because it's my roommate’s. Every time you turn that thing on, the Kinect starts automatically. Yet again, no idea how that thing works.
All I know is that it shows a little window on the bottom right with the outlines of the people it tracks. I was going through the library of games when I realized that there was a purple me, waving around like a moron, and something green-shaped in the background, where the kitchen is. I just thought that my roomie must be home so I said: “Can you pass me a water?” No answer.
I turned around, nobody there. And the green figure had disappeared on the TV as well. Weird, not too weird, so I went back to business. Then I heard footsteps that sounded pretty close all of a sudden. There was no way that this was the neighbors this time. I went through the apartment and nobody was there.
I kept doing what I do best, and ignored the fact that I was creeped out. I sat down, saw purple-squiggly-line me sitting there…and green-squiggly-line something standing behind me, moving slowly towards me. At that moment I jumped up and turned everything off while running away, without ever turning around. Pretty silly I know, but I was never that scared in my whole life.
26. What You Don’t Know Can’t Kill You
My dad was a pilot, commercial until his substance misuse got him fired. He led a double life, one filled with glamour, celebrities, and parties, and another as a “family guy.” He made both look pretty believable for a while. I was told he even hung out with and used with Bill Murray at one point. Anyway, he moved us—my mom, brother and me—to Guatemala for a while.
He had a job as a freight pilot there, making deliveries from South American countries, including Panama, up to the US. At this point we were living nicely with our own maids, security guards(!), and had whatever we wanted. My mom knew he was trafficking from the beginning, but stayed with him because she didn't have a choice. It was the beginning of the end.
She was basically a slave in her own home and tried to keep us as safe as possible. This continued for some time. A few of their friends and his coworkers began "passing on" unexpectedly, in unusual ways, or looking like suicides or overdoses. My mother told me one friend of theirs who had never touched anything bad, though he helped deliver them, wound up being found with a needle in his arm.
Shortly after these incidents started, my father packed us all up for the Southwestern US. We lived there in shambles while my father was off taking random jobs. My mom never knew where he was half of the time, and he only sent us enough money to keep us off the streets, and never allowed her to contact anyone or let the extended family know where we were.
He was very paranoid. This continued for less than a few months until his passing. One day, while my dad was delivering a private plane to its owner after being newly repaired, there was a major engine failure and his plane went down, killing both him and his co-pilot. It was written off as accidental, but everyone knew better.
He had been receiving warnings and threats for weeks prior to this accident. My mom sued the plane repair company and got a small settlement. Accidents do happen, but we were on the run from somebody, and you don't just get out of a cartel freely. Years later, I received messages from older strangers wondering how my mom, my brother and I are, where we are, and asking for details of our lives.
They claim to be friends of my mom and my dad, and when I confront my mother she gets very upset and asks me to lie about everything or delete my accounts. There are things she will never tell me, and I've come to the conclusion that she is keeping us safer by not telling us. It will be forever a mystery to me.
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27. Voice Doppelganger
This happened about 15 years ago. I called my friend up and he wasn't home so I left a message on his answering machine. I said, "Hey, it's me. Sorry I missed you, call you later. Bye." And then I hung up and left the house. I made no other calls. Later that day he called back and he says, "Wow, that was quite a message you left. Who was that girl you were talking to?" I was like, "What are you talking about? I wasn't talking to any girl!"
Well, as it turns out the message didn't end after I said "Bye." I had to go over to his house and listen to this message a few times. After my initial message that I did leave, as quoted above, there was a slight pause and it continues on for another 30-40 seconds or so with me talking to some girl. It was my voice, but a conversation I never had with a girl whose voice I didn't recognize.
You could compare it to the message I know I did leave and the two voices were indistinguishable. Not just the voice but, you know, talking mannerisms. It was my voice. Also, references to my occupation and activities were the same. Basically, in this conversation, I was talking to this girl about going skiing but I had to go down to my shop and work on a car first, which totally correlated to me.
Then the message just stopped. It was recorded on one of those digital answering machines that recorded the message to a chip so there was no tape I could have taken and had analyzed, unfortunately. Also, neither I nor my friend had party lines so that's not an explanation. It was very freaky, I can't explain it.
28. Living A Nightmare
I grew up in Germany and when I was about 7 or 8 I had a very memorable dream. In the dream I was walking through an empty house that had bare white walls and different color carpet in every room. As I am walking through the house I go through a door that leads down some stairs into darkness. Above the stairs was a small cupboard.
I opened it and saw a revolver, I picked it up, descended into the darkness, and woke up in a cold sweat. About three years later, my family moves to America and we arrive at our new home at night. We slept on the floor, but the next morning I was awake before the rest of my family. As I start walking around I start feeling that this was the house from my dreams—the walls were white, the carpet was different in every room, and it was all empty.
Remembering my dream I searched for the door that went down and found it in the exact spot I remembered from my dream. I cautiously open the door and sure enough, it seems to descend straight into darkness. I look above the stairs, and there is that cupboard, but it has a rusty lock on it. I go to town on it with a hammer, eventually I break the thing and open it up as my family starts to see what I am up to.
I open the cupboard and inside is a rusted revolver...I mean really rusted, this was an old, old gun. I didn't take it down into the darkness though, I know it sounds silly now, but at the time I was terrified to go down there because of how scared I was to be down there in my dream. I've never been able to explain to my family how I knew that it would be there.
29. The Setting Says It All
I broke into a cemetery one night with some friends. I was in mid-conversation with my friend when she suddenly disappeared. I began shouting her name, but she was nowhere in sight. I headed back to the entrance to meet up with everyone else. She was there, crying and shaking, mad that I had abandoned her. But she wasn't gone for more than five seconds before she disappeared.
I’m still not sure if she was messing with me or if something supernatural was happening.
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30. Girl In The Tower
My grandmother lived in a castle in England in the 1930s because her mother worked as a cleaner for the rich family that owned the castle or something along those lines. Anyway, in my grandmother's bedroom, on the far wall from the door, there was a huge old wood dresser that weighed probably around 800 pounds and would take four grown men to move.
So my grandmother goes to sleep one night and the next morning, the dresser is right in front of her door locking her in her room. She had to yell for help and about and it took about five of the other workers in the house to move the dresser away from the door. After she got out, she asked and nobody could explain how it got there.
31. Twisted Sister
I was on the phone with a girl in the middle of the night and I had fallen asleep. I woke up the next morning and apologized to the girl that I was talking to. She proceeded to tell me it was okay, but she also said that she had hung up and called back to wake me. She then said that a little girl answered the phone and said "Hello."
Then she said that all she heard was me snoring. I don't have a little sister that could've done this.
32. Stealth Grooming
This happened about seven years ago, but I’ll try my best to explain it. When my dog was still alive, she would sleep OUTSIDE of my room all the time at night on an old white duvet. My door is always shut at night so it can't be pushed open. My dog was white with black patches on her, she was like a King Charles Spaniel, so has quite messy and tangled fur.
So I sleep through the night and go downstairs the morning after to which I find my mum, dad, sister, and rather clean dog. I asked what's up. My mum questions me to see what I did last night and I just said that I slept, why? She said that this morning, she couldn't find the dog or her duvet. She checked downstairs and then noticed something white in the bushes at the bottom of our 30-foot garden, which is separated from our kitchen by a big locked door.
It was the duvet—but that’s not the weirdest part. My mum then said that she found the dog in MY ROOM, clean as a whistle and no rangled fur anymore, literally like she has been washed, cut, and dried. I still don't know how all of that happened, how can a dog drag a duvet three times the size of her though a locked door to the bottom of the garden and put it on top of the bushes, and then let herself in my room and shut the door behind her all whist getting pampered.
33. The Red Room
So way back when, while my parents were dating, they decided to take a trip to the outer banks and stay at some little hotel there. When they got there, the hotel was deserted. It wasn't just understaffed or underpopulated, it was literally the bellhop, the receptionist, and my parents. Apparently, it was like something out of The Twilight Zone.
They thought it was strange, but they decided to stay anyway because my dad was on leave and wanted to get away. So the next day the hotel is still deserted. At this point, my parents were getting really creeped out so they decided to stay one more night and leave first thing in the morning. What happened next was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.
I haven't heard this story from my dad’s perspective, but I'd imagine it would be equally as horrifying. In the middle of the night, my dad woke my mom up by screaming, “They're here, get up, get up!" When my mom opened her eyes, the whole room was filled with red light like they were at a club or a rave or something. My mom was too scared to move at first, then she saw a weird figure lean over and look at her.
A split second later, my dad reached over and punched it in the face and dragged my mom out of bed screaming, "Get to the wall, follow it to the door, don't look back at me!" with his weapon out. They hauled out of the hotel and drove home. I've only heard that story once and I could tell my mom was a little reluctant to tell it.
34. A Bird In The Hand
My tenth grade English teacher was an interesting and unusual lady. She was in her early 30s, brilliant, and attractive. Not dark, not morose... just a little bit "deep." It seemed like there was more to her than you could see. She had a profound presence. I spent a fair bit of time hanging out in her classroom, talking. We talked about lots of things. One of them, no more prominent than anything else, was mysticism. Just as a general concept.
In the middle of the year, my family left me home alone for the weekend. My sister had a soccer tournament in another state. They all went, I stayed home to feed the cats, et cetera. It was the first time I was alone overnight. Saturday morning, I woke and went downstairs to find my cat with a little bird in her mouth. I shouted at her and she dropped the bird.
I picked it up; it was barely breathing. I held it and stroked its head while it passed on. It made me really, deeply sad. It was the first time I'd ever watched something take its final breath. On Monday at school, my English teacher saw me. We made small talk for a minute. Then she suddenly looked me deep in the eyes. What she said next made my blood run cold.
She said, "How's your little bird doing?" I stared at her blankly. I hadn't shared that story with anyone. That story was private. I wasn't ready to share it. I didn't know what to say. A moment of silence passed. She never broke eye contact. But the story gets more terrifying from there. Then she said, darkly, "Are you ready to cross over?"
And then someone came up beside us and started talking to us. I was terrified of her for the rest of the year. I never spoke to her again unless I couldn't avoid it. She left her job at the end of that year. Ten years later, I found her and sent her an email, asking her how she knew about the bird. She never responded.
35. Antisocial Studies
Grade 8. Going to social studies class. Lining up and my friends are like, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?” I'm like “What?” and they're like “your funeral.” Thoroughly confused, I walked to class. Once there, my teacher is like “What are you doing here? I told you to never come back!”
I got sent to the principal's office in tears. I have no idea what I did. I asked my friends and they all thought I was being weird or something and wouldn't tell me. To this day, I have no clue what I did that day to infuriate my grade 8 social studies teacher so completely.
36. Cry Wolf
I had a boyfriend who was 21 when I was 16 years old. His friends thought it would be funny to play a joke on me and tell me that he passed on. Seriously. They really dragged it out for a few days. I was super upset and bawling, and then finally, he called my phone. Well, we continued seeing each other and he went on a trip.
Two weeks later I get a call from the same friends, saying he had passed on for real this time. I didn't, and still don't know if it was really true, or if he went back to his hometown in another state, as he had talked about before he left, and maybe just didn't want to dump me.
37. The New Neighbor
When I was really young we lived in a house with a huge backyard and six neighbors we shared a property line with, since we lived at the very back of a cul-de-sac. One of those neighbors we only shared maybe a six-foot section of fence with. I didn't know the people who lived there, but one day there was a little girl about my age at the fence.
We talked for a long time across the fence and got along really well, and she told me she was the niece of the people who lived there. I must've talked to that girl for hours, until she told me she had to leave, but she'd be back next week so we could talk again. I never saw her again after that, but saw the homeowners in their backyard one day and asked when their niece was coming back, because I wanted to talk to her again. Their answer sent a chill down my spine.
They had no idea who I was talking about, they didn't have a niece who visited them. To this day, I don't know who that girl was or what happened.
38. Wrong Number
I remember, right around my sophomore year of high school, I was playing video games alone in my room. My family was downstairs, and everything was normal. Right around sundown, I get a call from a number in Los Angeles, California. I answer the phone and a woman is absolutely screaming at the top of her lungs. She is not yelling, but screaming for help.
Thinking it was my friends messing with me, I tell them to knock it off and leave me alone. The woman starts cussing and crying and screaming some more. At this point, my heart is racing, and my stomach cramps. I ran downstairs to my dad to ask to help the lady. By that time, the woman has stopped screaming, and the other line is silent.
I, by that time, was crying hysterically. We called 9-1-1 to help report the lady and whatnot. I never found out what happened to her.
39. Otherside
This is a weird one. My mother passed on about a dozen years ago. At the funeral home, we received a lovely bouquet of flowers with a card from the band The Red Hot Chili Peppers that said "We are saddened to hear of Renate's passing." We are a humble family from southern Indiana. There is zero chance she ever had any contact with those boys.
Is this something they just randomly do? They would have loved her, though. She was the warmest person you could ever hope to know.
40. Dead Ringers
My friend was born with one name that she used during her young life, we'll say Sarah Jane Smith. She always knew that her dad had wanted to call her something else, Donna Noble Smith. When she's in her teen years she's cleaning upstairs at her mom’s and makes a bizarre discovery. She finds a birth certificate for Donna Noble Smith, born two days before her birthday at the same hospital, to the same parents, with the same stats.
Okay, so maybe they got a new certificate and changed the name before it was filed? Well, Sarah Jane starts going by Donna Noble to her friends and it turns out her mom doesn't just dislike it, SHE HATES IT. In fact, she gets a little too upset about it for simply disliking the name. Also, she won’t speak about the weird extra birth certificate.
A few years later Sarah Jane/Donna Noble hears that a friend of hers met a woman who looked an obscene amount like her. She kept asking about Sarah Jane and how she was doing. She got very teary-eyed when she heard stories about her. All quite odd for a random stranger. Sarah Jane/Donna Noble still has no idea what's the deal.
I make fun by wishing her a happy birthday on both days, but it is a really weird thing. I keep begging her to do one of those mail away DNA tests...
41. Hand-Some Devil
Way back when I was around 16 years old, I was alone in my house during a thunderstorm. It was raining like crazy outside and I kept hearing this loud bang coming from inside the garage. I got up and walked to the kitchen and tried to open up the door to the garage. About halfway through opening the door, a small skinny hand reached out and grabbed the other side of the door and yanked it back.
The force was so much that it pulled me to the door and caused me to fall and smack my nose right on the doorknob itself. I was so angry that I quickly got back up, turned on the lights to the garage, and started screaming and kicking anything I could to get the culprit out. I assumed it was my buddy who had sneaked in the house trying to scare me. I heard absolutely nothing—which made what I saw even more chilling.
So I closed the door, locked it tight, even barricaded it with a desk and ran out to the front of the house. I saw a dark figure standing outside so I guessed it was my buddy, getting ready to admit defeat after sliding out underneath the garage door panel. My mother was there, dripping wet with a sad expression on her face.
She had been outside on the front porch with a sack of food the entire time and asked me why everything was locked and if I was alright, because I had blood all over my shirt from my nose. I ran out to the front yard and asked if she saw my good friend. She said no. I looked over at the garage door from outside, it was sealed tight.
I went back to the garage from inside the house and removed the desk that was blocking it—which I was questioned about—and stood in the doorway looking around. There was absolute silence. I'll never know who or what was in that garage.
42. The Terminal Kid
I have a strange habit where I live to make myself sneeze. I've made myself sneeze since I can remember. I normally do it by tickling the inside of my nose. When I was around 15, I sneezed a small green device out of my nose. It was the size of a small oval sweet. I felt it shoot out of my nostril and it landed on the floor in front of me. It was not natural.
I picked it up and straight away felt a dire need to make it go away, so I flushed it down the toilet. I have no idea what it was.
43. Garage Rocked
I never believed in ghosts, or anything paranormal for that matter, but one incident in my life changed all that. I was 16 years old, and it was a pretty normal night at my friend’s house. My friend's parents were quite rich, their house was enormous and quite creepy at night. I had spent many nights there before though, so nothing was really that creepy to me at that point.
After a long night of Halo 3, my friend passed out. After a while, I decided it was time to get some sleep. I leave his room and head downstairs to grab some water. I notice my shoes are just laying on the stairs, so I grab them and decide to put them in the garage. I open the garage door and set my shoes right on the floor, not even stepping into the garage.
As I look up, something catches my attention in the corner of the garage. The image is burned into my mind. It was a shadow of a man, a tall one. He had a long trench coat on that barely scuffed the ground, and a top hat. I couldn't look away for a good 10 seconds, I was totally frozen in fear. As soon as my brain was functioning again, I bolted from the doorway and up the stairs.
I am freaking out, so I wake my friend up and I tell him that I think I saw a ghost. Now, this is the part that is messed up. I haven't told my friend anything, except I saw a ghost. He calmly asked where I saw this ghost, and I told him the corner of the garage. He then says, “Yeah, I've seen him there before.” But I didn't say it was a guy...
He then precedes to describe this man in the long trench coat, exactly how I saw it. Needless to say at this point, I was freaked out and my opinions on paranormal things was forever changed. I still don't see how my friend could live in that house, I guess he just got used to seeing him. Also, the next morning I went to get my shoes and I investigated the garage.
There was no coat rack, and nothing that could even be remotely mistaken for a man in the corner of the garage.
44. The Almond Fairy
When I was about six or seven, I had this weird growth in the inside of my mouth. It was the size of an almond and it was hard. So one day I was on the bed and took a nap. I woke up and the lump was gone. On the bed next to my face? There was an almond. I showed my mom and she didn't believe me. I then thought maybe that was a dream or something.
But to this day, I still have uneven skin on the side of my mouth where the lump used to be.
45. Flash Forward
I was playing a game by myself when I was about 6 or 7. It was my first summer vacation out of school. I was running through the house, then outside and around to the back door. I then decided that it was a good idea to go to the kitchen and get a glass of water. The only thing that I remember was filling the glass and accidentally dropping it on the floor. I could see the glass breaking in slow-motion.
The next second later, I was in school about to take a spelling test. I tried to tell the teacher and my parents, but they didn't believe me. I cried and cried over it and was sent home. By my count, I lost a total of three months and 7 days. I was sent to multiple psychologists about it, but they were never able to figure out what happened to me or why.
46. Back To The Future
When I was around 13/14, I went camping with a bunch of friends at a park that had an old railroad running through it. On one part of the railroad, there were a couple of old train cars that sat abandoned, which I thought was pretty cool. I broke off from the group for a bit to check it out, but was hurrying to get back so I'd be around this girl I really liked.
I was approached by a kid around my age that was wearing what seemed to be older clothing...the typical attire you'd think of when you think of kids in the 1930s or such. He said: "Excuse me, what year is it?" I told him the year, and he said something similar to, "Oh, I guess I've gone too far." Being an idiot, I walked away, found the group, and never saw the kid again. What even was that?
47. That’s Not Santa Up There
When I was little my mom and dad got divorced and my dad got the house. Anyway, one night it was like 11 and we were watching TV. My dad seemed extremely nervous and he wouldn’t let us go too far away from him. He would walk us to the bathroom and wait outside the door until we were finished. So we were watching a movie in his room when we heard a terrifying noise. There was this very loud bang on the ceiling.
He instantly stood up and checked it out, then he had us come with him and we shined flashlights at the roof. We looked around the yard, nothing. After that, we went back inside and just thought it was an animal—well that’s what I thought—then we decided to go out for a late trip to McDonald’s. My dad didn’t like cooking, so he took us about every day.
We come back to a horrifying sight. The place is just trashed, the window in my dad’s room is broken, my room has been torn to bits and everything was on the floor. the weirdest part is my dad refusing to call law enforcement after it happened. He not just didn’t want to, he refused. He never talked about it again, and got mad when we did. I don’t talk to my dad anymore, but I wish I knew what happened.
48. Sleepyhead
I wake up in the middle of the night and notice my roommate is not in his bed. I find him sleeping on couch. I ruffle his hair and say, "Go to bed, you'll thank me in the morning." At 7 AM, I rise for my day and notice my roommate is nowhere to be found, but think nothing of it. Then, I receive a call from him around 9 AM.
He tells me about what he's been doing, and surprise surprise…he hasn't been in the apartment since the prior evening. Who exactly did I touch then, sleeping on my couch at 4 AM?
49. No One Likes A Surprise Hair
One night I had fallen asleep in bed, and knowing I had to wake up early for work, I set my alarm for 6 AM. The alarm goes off at 3:55 AM, and I reach over knowing it wasn't the right time. As I went to hit the snooze, I felt my fingers go through what felt to be hair. Frightened, I grabbed my phone and shined it around the room, only to find nothing.
Still terrified, I got up and ran to turn the lights on. I looked down at my hand to see long black strands of hair intertwined between my fingers. Still freaks me out to this day thinking about it!
50. Collect Call From…
I've got three children with pretty unique names. They’re not unheard of, but not common. My oldest son, Rylan, was nine at the time and sitting on the couch. My cell phone rang, which was weird. It was only used for emergencies as I used my house phone more often, being a stay-at-home mom. I answered it even though I didn't recognize the number.
I said hi, and a teen boy replied, “Hey mom!” I looked in the living room and all three of my kids were sitting on the couch, so I said, “Who is this?” The kid’s reply nearly knocked me off my feet. He said: “It’s me, Rylan!” I’m frantically looking at my son, who is very confused, as I yell, “Rylan WHO?!?” The kid on the phone replied, “Mom, stop playing!”
Then, the phone sounds like it's got a hand covering the mouthpiece and I can hear another voice say, "No it's not time yet.” The kid from the phone says, “Oh I'm sorry, wrong number” and hangs up. Whether it was a prank or my kid from the future, I'll never know. I do know I had to hold onto the wall so I didn't pass out—and it didn’t end there.
After, I tried to call back about two minutes later, it said the number was disconnected. Super freaky.
Sources: Reddit,
