Going to see scary movies is fun and all—but it’s not quite so enjoyable when you find yourself in the middle of the horror story. Thankfully, since that already happened to these unfortunate posters, we can sit back and enjoy their scary stories…with the lights on, of course.
1. Creepy Camera
My girlfriend got a yearbook photography assignment to take pictures of a graveyard. She felt scared to go alone, so I went with her. I was walking through a graveyard with her and we were pointing the camera at a grave that had a Freemason's seal on it. It was extremely foggy and overcast. The camera flashed and I started moving on.
She said to me, "Um...I didn't do that". I asked her what she meant. Her reply chilled me to the bone. She says that she didn't press the button. I asked her if she was absolutely sure and she said, "Yes, I am absolutely sure...whoa…look at this picture". I looked at the camera screen and the scene was bright as day and not overcast at all.
I felt a stillness for a second. Then, I said, "Yep, we're going home, come on". But it wasn't even over. As I was walking out of the graveyard, I swear I saw a lady dressed in white sitting between some gravestones in the distance. I did a double take, but on the second look she wasn't there. We promptly exited the graveyard.
I talked to my friend the next day about it and he told me a story. He said he was biking along when suddenly a black blur went past him really quickly. Without warning, his tires locked up and he almost fell off his bike. He got off for a second and looked around, but there was no one to be found. He got back on his bike and, finding that it was back to normal, kept on going. He was right beside the same graveyard!
2. Stranger In The House
I was 13 at the time and it was late at night. My old bedroom faces the door at the top of our stairs, and into my parents' bedroom. One night, my mom was at work and dad was visiting my grandmother, so I was in my room, listening to music when I heard someone coming up the stairs. We don't lock our doors in our neighborhood.
When I looked, it was my dad, in his usual pajamas. I said goodnight, but he never faced me; he just went into the bedroom and that was it. I went back to whatever I was doing. Half an hour later, I heard someone else coming up the stairs, and when I looked, it was my dad, fully clothed, wearing his jacket. He asked me how my night went, and I just went pale.
To this day, we cannot figure out what happened. He checked the house, and no one was there. But, our house has been known for being haunted. We've had several people leave our house because "it just didn't feel right" and some out of ordinary things have happened. I never stayed in my house by myself after that.
3. Break And Enter
When I was 16, I went to a flea market. It was the last day the flea market was open before closing down for the season. I came across a man in a booth selling knives, throwing stars, and all sorts of bladed instruments. Behind him on a rack was a katana. He sold it to me for $20.
Now, what is a 16-year-old guy going to do with a katana? Nothing. I kept it for years. It stayed either in a closet or under my bed for years. When I went to college, it followed. Fast forward to August 18th, 2006. I was living by myself in Charleston on the ground floor of a one-bedroom apartment.
My katana was under my bed. I have a sliding glass door with vertical blinds, a screened in patio, and a hammock hung outside. That night, around 3:00 AM, I woke up and heard my blinds rattling. I thought to myself, "Wow, it's windy outside”. But I soon came to a horrific realization.
I remembered that I never sleep with the sliding glass door open, and that someone was in my apartment. I was laying in bed, thinking of things that I can use as a weapon to defend myself and my home with. Then, I realized that the sword was under my bed. Oh, yes. It was righteous.
With my sword gleaming in the dim light, I crept around the corner and looked into my living room to find two very large men stuffing my belongings into garbage bags. When you're amped up on adrenaline, you say some dumb things. So, I yelled, "YOU! STOP!" They both turned and ran out the sliding glass door. The only thought that going through my mind was that those jerks have my stuff...and I want it back!
I chased them out of the door, through the wooded area behind my apartment and into a marshy area behind that. All of this was in my underwear, no shoes, no contacts, and with a big sword. Sadly, I lost track of them and sanity seeped back into my brain. I realized that they might have a gun, I'm practically blind, carrying a very large blade, and the only people that know that I'm out here are me and them.
I went back inside and called the authorities. The burglars had cut away my screen on the patio and using the blade as a prying instrument, forced the lock on my sliding glass door open. How they managed to get past the hammock in the dark without getting wrapped up like a spider's prey is beyond me. For weeks, I made rounds to area pawn shops, but to no avail.
None of my stuff was ever recovered and I was uninsured. I lost my laptop, my DVDs, all of my video games, and my keys.
4. Saw A Ghost
When I was about five, my family was visiting my grandparents, who lived in a duplex at that time. There were two doorbells and I ran up to the house and rang one of them. A creepy old lady answered the door downstairs (wrong apartment). I remember getting scared and running back to the car. Anyway, 20 years passed by.
At Thanksgiving dinner, I told my family how I was always scared to ring the doorbells in my grandparents’ old apartment because I couldn't remember which one was the right one. I also told them how I was always scared of the creepy old lady and described her looks a bit. Everybody went quiet and I wondered what was wrong.
Then, my mom explained that for the entire time I was alive, nobody had lived in that apartment. But, the last tenant, who died there, looked just like what I described. We were all creeped out and I still can't explain it.
5. Scream
I'm Irish, and was still living in Tyrone, Ireland when this happened. About four years ago, I was lying in my bed in my parents’ house (my bed was right at the window) when I was woken up by a horrible screaming, wailing noise in our garden at 3:00 AM. It was like the noise an injured cat would make, but crossed with the noise of a screaming baby.
I opened the window and looked out, and heard the noise again, but coming from the back garden of the house next door, then one more time from the third house. Something about it completely terrified me, and I knew something wasn't right about it. But, I tried to convince myself it was a cat that had been hit by a car.
I went downstairs to go outside and see if I could find it, and my own cat was lying fast asleep. If he had heard it too, he would have been at the window looking out. It was then I realized what was really happening. Only I had heard it. Freaked out, I went back to bed. The next morning, I was talking to my mom at breakfast and asked if she's heard the noise.
She said, “No, but did you heard the terrible news? The man who lives in the house two doors down died at 3:00 AM. You must have heard the Banshee”. That was scary. I know a lot of people think the whole Banshee thing in Ireland is just made up for tourists, but actually quite a lot of people here have seen or heard something like this.
Most families have a story about hearing the Banshee before someone passes. It was the most horrible noise I ever heard, and I sincerely hope I never hear it again.
6. Sketchy Employee
My friend and I were downtown one day and decided to eat lunch at a food court in an old mall. Most of the places were closed down except a subway and an independent pizza place. We each ordered a slice of pepperoni and a fountain drink from the man behind the counter. The first thing that was weird was that he wasn't wearing a uniform, just plain clothes.
The second thing that was off was that he charged us both two completely different prices, despite the fact that we each ordered the same thing. What we each paid was less than the listed price for our items on the menu. My friend and I laughed about it, ate our food and went on with our day. Half an hour later, we both sat down in a hotel lobby.
We each ended up falling asleep at roughly the same time and waking up an hour later. We were both freaked out that we would each fall asleep for no reason and both noticed that we felt pretty drained. A few hours later, we decided to get dinner at the Subway in the food court. As we entered, we noticed that there are two new people working at the pizza place.
They were both wearing uniforms. At the other exit of the food court, on the opposite side, we saw paramedics taking a gurney to an ambulance. Strapped to the gurney is the man that served us our pizza. A janitor was mopping up some kind of mess in front of the pizza place.
We both have no clue what had happened and were too weirded out to even want to know or ask the people at the pizza place what had happened.
7. Intruder Alert
I live in an apartment with my mom. One day, I came home later than she did, so I did what I usually do: pulled in the door, threw my stuff on the floor and got something to eat. I didn’t even think about locking the door. The night went on and both my mom and I went to bed. I must have dozed off around midnight or a bit earlier, and I fell into a pretty deep sleep.
A little background worth mentioning: there are times when my mom leaves something of hers in my room and she has to try and get it in the morning before she leaves while I’m still asleep. She usually does so very quietly, but I can always kind of feel that she is there. So, I was having a good sleep, when all of a sudden, I felt light shuffling around my bed.
This didn’t really wake me up, but I guess it woke up my unconscious because I told myself that it was most likely my mom. I kept hearing this sound, when all of a sudden, there is a loud bang next to my bed. I happened to be laying face down, so I lifted my head up and looked down, expecting to see my mom on the floor because she tripped over the clutter around my room.
I prepared myself to get yelled at in Spanish since my family is Hispanic. What I did hear stunned me. All of a sudden, I started hearing Korean. I had no idea what was going on, so this really woke me up. As I woke up, I immediately realized a couple of things.
It was too early for this to be my mom, my door was wide open (which my mom never does), and there was a little shadowy figure on the floor. When I heard this language, I panicked and jumped off my bed and just started screaming at the top of my lungs. The shadowy figure started getting up in the creepiest way possible, like the girl from The Ring.
At this point, the figure was in between me and my door. Out of fear, I started yelling to turn on the light. I had no idea what I was doing, but the figure for some reason listened and slowly walked to my light switch. The dark figure turned on the light for a second, looked at me in the eyes and turned it back off.
I saw that it was an old Korean lady. She turned off the lights and started to reach for her dentures, which had fallen when she tripped over my mess. At this point, I was sure she’d hurt me. My heart was pounding and I was screaming at the top of my lungs at 4:00 AM. As she put her dentures back in, I managed to drive her out into the hallway with my screaming.
My mom came out of her room asking what I was doing. She assumed I had been drinking or that a friend of mine was drinking. She couldn’t see the lady, so I stepped aside to let her see, and my mom’s jaw dropped. We eventually got the lady outside. Then the whole story came out.
It turned out she was some lady with Alzheimer’s Disease who got locked out of her house and found our door open. I almost threw up later in the night because I kept thinking that at some point, she was watching me sleep. That was the creepiest thing I’ve ever had happen.
8. Uncomfortable Massage
It was my 16th birthday and my stepmom and I went to get massages. After filling out some paperwork, they told us that there were no available females to do our massages (I'm a female), so we both said we would be okay with males. Through the whole massage, the masseuse kept complimenting me and it was just generally awkward.
He also asked how old I was and he said he was 26. At the end of the massage, he asked me for my phone number. It was super creepy, but I didn't want to be rude so I just said I didn't live in the state. A few weeks later, I get a bunch of missed calls on my phone with messages from the same masseuse! He got my cell phone number off the paperwork I filled out.
I never returned any of his calls, but he continued to call me every so often for the next few months.
9. Close Encounter
When I was about nine, I was outside in front of my apartment with my brothers (aged three and six). We were sitting on a blanket pretending to have a picnic. We saw this guy in a baby blue van drive by. At first, we think nothing of it. But, then he proceeds to drive by three or four more times. And it got so much worse.
We noticed that he stops the van and he is staring at us. He waved us over to the van. I got freaked out and grabbed my brothers, went into the house, locked the door and told my mom what happened. Later on that night, when we were watching the news, the guy we saw earlier was on the news for kidnapping a kid in our neighborhood. Creepy that it could have been us.
10. The Ticklish Stranger
I'm always being approached by strangers. It's almost uncanny how often it happens. Usually it's just friendly chit-chat, and I end up going home with someone's life story. But, sometimes it gets really weird. There was this one guy who approached me when I was inside a bus shelter. He was a really thin guy with blonde hair and braces.
He walked into the bus shelter and sort of stared at me for a minute. That's when I knew that he was going to be a creeper. Then he said, "So, how are you on this fine evening?" I told him I was fine. He said it was good that I was fine. Then, he said, "I'm really ticklish". I tried to ignore him and stare off in the direction the bus would come from.
A minute later, he said, "I am so very, very ticklish". All I could think so say was, "So is a friend of mine". I made sure I said it in a quipped way that should signal I was done with the topic. But, that didn't work. The creepy guy asked me if I was ticklish. I said no, which was a lie, but I didn't want him coming anywhere near me.
So, he responded with, "That's too bad. But, I like being tickled more than I like tickling". I struggled for something to say, but said, "I don't really like tickling in general". He asked me what I meant, and I said that I didn't like to be tickled and that I didn't like tickling people. He said, “That’s too bad”. Too bad for him.
There was no one else at the bus stop, but it was a semi-busy area, and I knew if I screamed, someone would notice. Plus, I had a hot beverage, which was almost full. So, I resolved that if he moved so much as a foot closer to me, it was going in his face. He asked me where I was going. I said, “My boyfriend’s birthday party”.
He fell silent, and just stared at me. Then my bus came, and he took off running across the road.
11. Going In A Different Direction
Back in the 70s, friends and I planned a camping trip for a long weekend. We picked up a hitchhiker headed to Kernville and dropped him off on the way. We thought it was no big deal, but when we got to our campsite, my girlfriend made a chilling discovery. She found a note from the hitchhiker on her bag. It said, “I could have made all of you disappear forever.” We didn’t sleep that night.
12. Distant Relative
I met a guy who had been traveling through Australia with a couple friends, hitchhiking around as many people have done. He told me a story that I'll never forget. One day, one of his friends told him they were near his distant uncle’s house. He'd never met him before, but he got his uncle's phone number from a family member. He called him and, as the hitchhikers had hoped, the uncle offered them a place to stay for the night.
He picked them up and drove them to his rural property way out in the bush. They said he seemed like a pretty friendly, cheery, and normal guy, so they had no worries about staying with him. When it was time to set up a place to sleep, the uncle opened a closet that was totally full of sleeping bags and bed rolls. They didn’t think too much about it at the time, but looking back, that was a sign that something wasn't right.
They set up on the floor and stayed for a few days. Then the uncle drove them to the bus station, and they went on their way. A year later, the authorities took the uncle into custody. It turned out that he had been picking up young hitch-hiking backpackers, then killing them. The guy telling this story was 100% certain he had slept in the sleeping bag of one of his victims.
13. Lost Backpack
I was exploring the forests near my house with my cousin. We were on a steep hill and as we looked down, we saw that there were a bunch of craters at the very bottom. As we looked inside one of the craters, we saw something strange. There was a backpack in there. We tried to climb down, but the hill was too steep and slippery to do it safely, so we planned on returning later with a rope.
The next day, there was a news story about how there was a backpack with the remains of a girl in that forest. A guy walking his dog found it after the dog would not stop barking at the edge of the crater and staring at the backpack. My cousin and I decided not to go exploring in the forests anymore after we saw that news clip.
14. Let Us In
I lived with three other girls in college. All three took off early for spring break, leaving me alone in the house. During my first night on my own, I heard someone bang on my front door at 2 AM. Then I heard more knocks at my back door. A man yelled, “I’m an officer. Open the door!” I didn’t believe him. I stayed in my room and started to panic.
As I heard bodies slam against both doors, and a man saying, “Little girl, open the door. We know you’re alone,” I frantically dialed 9-1-1. Thank God I did. As the sirens approached, I saw officers chase four boys from our school hockey team and pin them face down on the grass. I had to file restraining orders against all of them.
15. All In Your Head
When I worked in healthcare, I had a patient who got a sinus infection. He stopped taking his antibiotics after a few days because he felt better. Then, overnight, everything fell apart. He got to the Emergency Department, where the doctors realized he was experiencing stroke symptoms. It turned out that the sinus infection had spread to his cranial cavity.
There was so much pus in there that it was twisting his brain. No one thought he would survive the surgery. The family was advised to expect the worst, but amazingly, he somehow made it through. It wasn’t an easy recovery though. He ended up needing three more surgeries to wash all the pus out and then spent almost two months in the hospital. Take your full dose of antibiotics, people!
16. Geriatrick Grandparents
My sister and I were playing outside when an elderly couple walked by our yard. Our yard had this cemetery in the back that was a common local attraction for tourists as the house was built in the 1800s. Most of the graves were of children lost to illnesses. The old couple were pestering my sister. They were asking her to tell them her name.
We got scared and ran inside to tell our mom what had happened. The following week, I heard a story on the news about an elderly couple approaching a teenage girl and attacking her. It was the same couple who came over to us that day. It still scares me.
17. Pause For Effect
When I was younger, my mother managed the apartment where we lived. Right before Halloween, she told a scary story about a tragic accident involving the two little boys and their mom above us in the vacant apartment. She said if you listened closely, you could still hear their footsteps running up and down the hallway.
At that very moment, we heard the sound of running upstairs. The look on my mother’s face was pure terror. She called the neighborhood patrol man and one of the on-duty maintenance guys to go and check the apartment. They found a homeless mother living there who had slipped through an open window with her two children.
My mom never told ghost stories again.
18. Warning Signs
My ex and I were out driving on a big Canadian road trip a year ago. One night, it was getting dark, so we decided to grab a hotel room and settle in for the night. On the way, we came across a car and a girl standing on the road and trying to flag us down. Keep in mind, this was in a rural area and we hadn't seen any cars in a while, so we were already confused and weirded out.
Just to be safe, we stopped, mostly to see if the girl needed help. As my boyfriend rolled down his window to talk to the girl, I slammed my foot on the gas and took off. I happened to look at the opposite side of the road and saw three guys coming out of the bushes with baseball bats. I don't know what that girl was doing, but I'm pretty sure she was going to lure us into something horrific.
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19. Shed Some Light
I lived in a house with four housemates for a year. We had a pretty big backyard with motion detector lights, a garage, and a tool shed that we never really used. Two of my housemates were very superstitious—they believed in ghosts, spirits, and other stuff like that. So, when the lights in our backyard kept turning on randomly, I assumed it was animals, while my housemates were sure it was a ghost.
One even said that she had caught a man-ghost looking through our window one night. She thought it was scary; I thought she was just being ridiculous. A few nights later, though, I became a believer. I looked outside and swore that I saw a man standing behind the mesh-door that led into our back patio. I screamed, got my roomies down, and made us all investigate.
But by the time we got out there, whoever was there (if anyone had been there at all) was gone. Anyway, flash forward a few months. I moved back to my home country and FaceTimed with one of the housemates. Well, it turns out that man hadn’t been a ghost. A homeless man had been living in our toolshed for God knows how long. It gave me the creeps for sure.
20. What’s Out There
When I was eight, we all had to take swimming lessons at school. My mom worked late, so I went to after-school care and didn’t get home until after it was dark. One day, when we came home, my mom told me to get my swimsuit and towel, and hang them on the clothesline to dry. That way, I would be able to wear them the next day.
I was so confident going outside to do this. I had this real feeling of finally being a big kid, you know? But as I walked into our backyard, everything changed. Suddenly, a man leapt over our gate and started sprinting towards me. I screamed, jumped inside, and instinctively locked the back door. Thankfully, he ran off and didn't try anything like that again, but it really messed me up. I slept with the light on until I was 16, and I get my husband to go outside for me while it’s dark.
21. Behind The Book
I was in a bookstore reading a book when I happened to glance up and see a guy standing in a nearby aisle facing me, presumably reading a book of his own. I didn't pay much attention. Maybe 15 minutes later, I looked up again and he was still there. I also noticed he was watching me and his book was lower than where it would've been if he was actually reading it.
I ignored him and continued reading. I thought maybe it was just a coincidence and we had both looked up from our books at the same time. After a little while, he walked around the bookshelves to stand on the opposite side of where he had been. He turned around, still holding that same book, and resumed watching me.
He stayed there for a few minutes, then went back to his original position. His book was still lowered and he was definitely staring at me, but I didn't make eye contact. Then came the tipping point. I noticed that the hand not holding the book was in his front pocket. And he kept adjusting that hand.
He was moving it around a little in his pocket. I tried not to look at him and by now I was thinking, "No. He's not... is he? This is not normal. I'm out". I glanced at him as I stood up and I made eye contact for the first time. He gave me this big, toothy smile and a slow nod. I made a circuitous trip around the store, making sure he wasn't following me. Then, I went out of the store with a group of people.
22. Living Dolls
When I was a kid, I used to sleep with dolls. One night, I woke up and heard a sneeze and my face got all wet. I didn't sneeze, and the only thing next to me was my doll.
23. The Hills Have Eyes
Many years ago, I was in Boy Scouts and our troop was going on a camping trip to a summer camp that was closed in the winter. We'd gotten permission, and we'd planned to hike in. Myself and another scout went up there the day before, so we could set up the rifle range. We had just finished setting up as it was getting dark.
That’s when we noticed what looked like a set of glowing eyes down the hill from us. No big deal, probably a coyote or something. Except that they never blinked and never left the area. After several minutes, we started to freak out. Keep in mind, we'd watched the Blair Witch Project the week prior, and were only 15 and 16.
Our rational brains were trying to come up with explanations for what we were seeing, but our reptilian hind brain was screaming so loud, we couldn't think. We ended up in the back of my friend's Explorer. Each of us had a loaded shotgun and a loaded rifle. We laid there for about an hour scared as ever.
And that's when someone else went over to the building on the other side of the lake. They turned off the light. The eyes immediately disappeared. Once we realized we were only looking at a reflection, we felt insanely stupid. We never told anyone, either.
24. Stalker Dude
One night, I was chilling in my basement during the summer at around midnight. My parents were asleep. I was on AIM talking to people when I got a message from someone named StalkerDude314. It said something like, “I’m outside your house”. I figured it was just one of my friends playing a really annoying trick and talked to the person for a little bit.
I went to bed after blocking the guy because things got too creepy for my sixth grade brain to handle. The next day, my dad woke up at 5:00 AM to go to work. He got ready and walked out to the car. He was met with an unsettling sight. He saw a gold truck sitting at bottom of our driveway. It turns on and goes away.
My dad hopped into his car and drove after them for a while and ends up losing them. I didn’t tell my parents about the AIM thing for a couple days. We also saw a ton of footprints in the grass leading up to our house. It was creepy to think that StalkerDude314 was actually stalking me.
25. Stalker In The Night
I work at a hotel and in the dining area. There are a lot of windows. It was a slow night, so I was sitting and watching television. I kept looking out the window at this old ‘89 hatchback mustang. I thought someone parked to run in quickly to see a guest or was a guest. I continued to chill out, but I kept getting this weird feeling someone was in the car watching me.
So, I went behind my desk and the car did not pull off until a few minutes before my relief arrived. I had my nightly smoke with my co-worker then headed out to get gas before I went home. Well surprise, surprise…mustang man showed up. He circled around the pump lane then parked by phones. I finished pumping my gas.
Then, I jumped in the car and pulled out. I kept an eye on him to see if he would follow. I drove down the service road and sighed with relief because my imagination was really acting up. That’s when I noticed that the headlights of a mustang are slowly catching up. I loved mustangs up until this point and an ex of mine drove the same year make, so I knew the headlights.
At this point, I called my co-worker back and told her I’m headed back and that someone is following me. I pulled up to work and ran inside. My co-worker made sure the doors were locked and she has her baseball bat. She is ready. The creepy car pulls in the parking lot and naturally parks. We called the emergency number and they sent out two patrol cars.
One of them questions him, while the other cop comes in to ask questions, but his radio went off and he quickly headed back out. 10 minutes or so later, one of the cops came back in all sweaty looking. He says the stalker did not want to cooperate, so it got rough. So, the stalker was arrested and had a warrant out for him.
Anyway, his car was towed and a week later, he came back to the hotel for his car. He came up to the window, saw me and smiled. Then, he waved. It was a creepy smile and wave. I then informed him that his car was towed.
26. Clowning Around
I was driving home with a buddy from my high school summer job at the local amusement park. It's about 3:00 in the morning, and there is no traffic at all. We got stuck at a red light that never ends and while we are waiting, another car pulls up next to us. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a big, black hearse in immaculate condition, with a clown in the driver’s seat.
He had full makeup and costume on. He never moved, didn't look at us, nothing. He just stared straight ahead the whole time. It was the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.
27. Psychopath In The Making
About 10 years ago, I was at a small fair in a Midwest town. It was the middle of summer and I was sitting in a barn-like place that had some picnic tables set up. I noticed a young bird that couldn't fly, off in the corner. It had probably jumped out of its nest. No big deal, it was off in the corner by itself and nothing would bother it.
This little girl (maybe about four or five years old) walked over to it to get a closer look. I kept my eye on her to make sure she doesn't pick it up or anything, but she stayed her distance and just looked at it. And I heard her say a couple of things like, "Oh, such a pretty bird, you're a pretty bird".
I looked away for about a minute. When I looked back up, I wanted to puke. She was standing over the little bird, stomping on it. This went on for a few more seconds and then she quickly covered it up with dirt and ran off into the crowd. No one else saw this except for me and I was way too awestruck to even do anything about it.
Even to this day, I'm not sure what I really could have or should have done. I'm pretty sure I saw a future psychopath born that day. It really creeped me out.
28. Close Call
I worked at Blockbuster Video around 2001. I was working with my store manager the Wednesday before Star Wars Episode II was to be in theaters and saw that I was scheduled to work the night of the midnight screening. I asked if I could be off to go, since I wouldn't be able to go if I had to work until midnight. So, the manager changed my schedule.
The day of the screening around 4:00 PM, I got a phone call from my roommate telling me that there’s an emergency crew in front of the store. I tried to call to find out what was going on and did not get an answer. Me and another friend decide to drive down to see what was going on. Just before we arrived, I was able to reach one of my co-workers by phone.
They answered the phone crying and telling me that the store had been robbed and that two employees had been murdered, along with two customers. Of course, I was devastated. It was also creepy to think that had I not taken the day off, that could have been me.
29. Home Alone
One night when I was 11 years old, I was watching television with my two older sisters (who were 13 and 15 at the time). Our parents were out late at a party, but being home alone was nothing new to us. Just before 1:00 AM, our dog got up and left the family room. He began to stare out the back door of the kitchen, just off the family room.
A minute later, he went absolutely crazy. It was not the typical barking sound, or the growling at a stranger, cat, etc. It was an insane mixture of incredibly loud barking and wild animal growling, the sound one would make in a truly life or death situation. This, of course, freaked us out. We went to our dog to comfort him.
After 20 seconds of discussion, we decided we had better secure the house as quickly as possible. It was a large house with many doors and windows to check. So, we all ran frantically to lock up everything as quickly as possible. The last door I got to was the garage door.
A split second after locking it, I put my hand around the handle to verify it was locked. That's when it happened. I felt someone from the other side viciously shaking the handle. They were pushing, trying to open the door. We of course made quite a few phone calls within the next few minutes. The memory of feeling that violent shaking and knowing that a person was one foot from me on the other side creeps me out even now.
30. Daughter In Danger
I worked at a call center as a customer service representative for a Medicare-based company. All patients were on Medicare, meaning probably 90% were elderly, and the other 10% were disabled. It wasn’t a great job, as you can imagine, trying to explain complicated concepts to elderly people when money is involved, or having to tell someone that a cold, emotionless corporation won't make their lives easier.
Well, one night, I was one of only a handful of people working. Since elderly people go to bed early, we never really got late calls. It was about 10:00 PM central time, when the customers were all on the west coast. I answered, and a woman was on the other end, sobbing. She sounded fairly young, early middle-aged or something,
She just kept saying, "I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it". I was thinking, "Holy, my first suicide call, what do I do? I'm not the one to talk to!" Then, I heard the kid. It was a little girl in the background, also crying, "Please mommy, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me, mommy". The mom was still crying over the phone.
She was saying, "I don't want to do it, please don't make me do it. I don't want to do it. Please don't make me do it". All I took from that was that she was about to hurt the kid or something. It was intense. The supervisor was basically my age, and we were pretty similar. I jumped up, hit mute on the mic, and started yelling, "SUPERVISOR, SUPERVISOR QUICK! 9-1-1 TRACE QUICK!"
As per the rules, the supervisor came and got on the phone. Crisis calls require a supervisor, usually. She ended up trying to talk to the woman, while the top manager on duty for my department came out of the office and got the emergency call going. It took the emergency crew about 11 minutes to show up to her house. I was only on the phone for about 30 seconds, maybe 60.
I was sitting right there the rest of the time, though. The supervisor was crying. everybody was, basically. It turned out the woman had some serious mental issues and had stopped taking her medication. She called us because she had no idea who else to call for help. If she didn't get committed to a mental ward somewhere, she was going to hurt her child.
Turns out, people calling the insurance company to try to have themselves committed isn't totally uncommon.
31. It’s Coming From Inside The House
I was once in a hot tub with some friends late at night, and we were all telling some stories. One of the guys told us this one, a story of a girl he knows—the people he was with verified it was true. So one day, this girl was called over to babysit. She did it a lot for these people, so it was routine for her. Anyways, she was told to put the kids to bed at 9, and she did.
After she put them to bed, she started watching TV and doing homework, waiting for the parents to come home. But then, she started hearing some noises coming out of the basement, like pans falling and stuff. She just ignored it, and thought it was the washing machine or something. Anyways, a little later, she starts hearing the noises again.
She decides to call the authorities. The lady at the station told her there's a patroller in her area, and that he'll be at the house in about 20 minutes. Anyways, in about five minutes, she hears a knock on the door. She answers, and it's a full SWAT team. She asked, "I thought they were just sending a patroller..." One of the guys told her, "After you hung up the phone, we heard a second phone on the line hang up."
Apparently, there was a man in the basement listening to the conversation. The lady in the station waited and heard him hang up, then immediately sent the SWAT team to help. They went downstairs and caught him; he was wanted for multiple cases of assault.
32. The Gentleman Caller
About five years ago, I lived downtown in a major city in the US. I've always been a night person, so I would often find myself bored after my roommate, who was decidedly not a night person, went to sleep. To pass the time, I used to go for long walks and spend the time thinking. I spent four years like that, walking alone at night, and never once had a reason to feel afraid.
I always used to joke with my roommate that even the dealers in the city were polite. But all of that changed in just a few minutes of one evening. It was a Wednesday, somewhere between one and two in the morning, and I was walking near a patrolled park quite a ways from my apartment. It was a quiet night, even for a weeknight, with very little traffic and almost no one on foot.
The park, as it was most nights, was completely empty. I turned down a short side street in order to loop back to my apartment when I first noticed him. At the far end of the street, on my side, was the silhouette of a man, dancing. It was a strange dance, similar to a waltz, but he finished each "box" with an odd forward stride. I guess you could say he was dance-walking, and headed straight for me.
Deciding he was probably tipsy, I stepped as close as I could to the road to give him the majority of the sidewalk to pass me by. The closer he got, the more I realized how gracefully he was moving. He was very tall and lanky, and wearing an old suit. He danced closer still, until I could make out his face. His eyes were open wide and wild, head tilted back slightly, looking off at the sky.
His mouth was formed in a painfully wide cartoon of a smile. Between the eyes and the smile, I decided to cross the street before he danced any closer. I took my eyes off of him to cross the empty street. As I reached the other side, I glanced back...and then stopped in my tracks. He had stopped dancing and was standing with one foot in the street, perfectly parallel to me.
He was facing me but still looking skyward. Smile still wide on his lips. I was completely and utterly unnerved by this. I started walking again, but kept my eyes on the man. He didn't move. Once I had put about half a block between us, I turned away from him for a moment to watch the sidewalk in front of me. The street and sidewalk ahead of me were completely empty.
Still unnerved, I looked back to where he had been standing…to find him gone. For the briefest of moments I felt relieved, until I noticed him. He had crossed the street, and was now slightly crouched down. I couldn't tell for sure due to the distance and the shadows, but I was certain he was facing me. I had looked away from him for no more than 10 seconds, so it was clear that he had moved fast.
I was so shocked that I stood there for some time, staring at him. And then he started moving toward me again. He took giant, exaggerated tip-toed steps, as if he were a cartoon character sneaking up on someone. Except he was moving very, very quickly. I'd like to say at this point that I ran away or pulled out my pepper spray or my cell phone or anything at all, but I didn't.
I just stood there, completely frozen as the smiling man crept toward me. And then he stopped again, about a car length away from me. Still smiling his smile, still looking to the sky. When I finally found my voice, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. What I meant to ask was, "What do you want?!" in an angry, commanding tone. What came out was a whimper, "What the…?" Regardless of whether or not humans can smell fear, they can certainly hear it. I heard it in my own voice, and that only made me more afraid. But he didn't react to it at all. He just stood there, smiling.
And then, after what felt like forever, he turned around, very slowly, and started dance-walking away. Just like that. Not wanting to turn my back to him again, I just watched him go, until he was far enough away to almost be out of sight. And then I realized something. He wasn't moving away anymore, nor was he dancing. I watched in horror as the distant shape of him grew larger and larger.
He was coming back my way. And this time he was running. I ran too. I ran until I was off of the side road and back onto a better lit road with sparse traffic. Looking behind me then, he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the way home, I kept glancing over my shoulder, always expecting to see his stupid smile, but he was never there. I lived in that city for six months after that night, and I never went out for another walk.
There was something about his face that always haunted me. He looked completely and utterly insane. And that's a very, very scary thing to see.
33. You Think You Know Someone
Once, my father went camping at a non-commercial campground, which is usually more secluded, with no camp manager or outhouses. It was during early spring so it was still pretty cold out, and there wouldn't be many people out there camping. There was only my dad, a few of his buddies, and a rough-looking old Chevy with a makeshift, Frankenstein-esque camper mounted on it just a few sites down.
Being sociable and considerate campers, my dad and a couple of other guys went to say hi to their neighbor and let them know to holler if they were being too loud while they were there for the weekend. The guy they met was a seemingly nice man who was minding his own business and politely thanked them for introducing themselves.
He looked like he'd been out there for a few weeks, with a clothesline up and everything. During my father's three-night stay, the group would wave at their neighbor occasionally and invited him over for coffee in the morning once. After they didn't hear or see him for a couple of days, they didn't think much and ended up finishing their stay.
On the way out of the campground, they passed his camp, which was still set up the way it was when they went to say hello. My dad was driving his truck toward the exit with a friend in it, who shouted at him to stop because he thought he saw something. My dad saw it as well from the corner of his eye while driving, but assumed his mind was playing tricks on him. What they had just seen was haunting.
He really did see the guy hanging from the tree and not just a plastic bag. They got out and dialed 9-1-1 their spotty reception. The scene was pretty horrific. My dad recalls a note stuck to the tree with a buck knife. He was too sickened to read it, but he felt bad for the guy and always says how badly he wanted to cut him down from the tree, although he obviously couldn't save him because he had been long gone.
Officer and the ambulance showed up. The group got a "thank you" and were sent on their way after getting some information about the situation. The creepiest part of this story, though, was the fact that it occurred at my dad's favorite campsite, which we were staying at when he told us. He waited until we weren't kids anymore to say anything about it, but it still gets to me.
34. Is Anybody There?
I worked with a lady once who was pretty old—I'd say about 70 years old. Since our job was pretty boring, we talked a lot and she had all kinds of crazy stories. But this one creeps me out still. She said when her grandma passed, they had her buried in a wood box in the backyard, as was pretty customary in those days. Well, years later they have a family plot in a cemetery and decide to dig her grandma up to move her to the family plot.
She paused at this point. Then she said when they took the lid off the coffin, their eyes went wide. It had claw marks all over the inside. The grandma had apparently been buried alive.
35. Too Close For Comfort
When my mom was young, she and her mother lived in a trailer in the backyard of a family member’s house. My mom was about 12 at the time, and the man in the neighboring house started to stare at her from time to time. She got a creepy vibe from him but figured her was just a harmless lonely guy. She soon found out how wrong she was.
One night when my mom was alone, she heard something on the roof of their trailer, then she heard what sounded like footsteps slowly walking along the metal rooftop. Given they were dirt poor at the time, they did not have a phone so she eventually ran out of the trailer and into the house without looking on the roof. When her uncle went outside to investigate, nothing was on the roof.
A few weeks went by with no incidents and my mom figured she must have been overly scared of nothing. More weird stuff would randomly happen, but only when she was alone, and it was always spaced out by a week or two. If I remember correctly, this occurred over maybe a couple of months…before it stopped completely.
Months go by without any weird instances at all—until one fateful night happens. My mom wakes up to find the trailer is unbelievably hot, like she could feel the heater on full blast. She got out of bed and was about to go to the control for the trailer's heater but she was overcome with a bad feeling and decided to just go into her uncle’s nearby house.
The uncle went out to the trailer again and this time noticed that the lock on the door was broken or messed with. He looked inside quickly but didn't see anything. His wife made him call the authorities and when they came out, they searched the trailer and made a horrific discovery. They found one of the kitchen knives behind a chair next to the heating controller.
They suspected that the neighbor went into the trailer, turned the heat up, and crouched behind the chair waiting for my mom to come by and then…who knows. It's been a long time since I heard the story but from what I remember, the officers questioned the neighbor but really couldn't do anything about it. Luckily, my mom and grandmother were able to move out of that town right after that.
My mom told me that about five or something years later she was visiting her other family who lived in a nearby town and she saw the neighbor at the grocery store. She bolted out before he saw her.
36. Going Up?
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 netcafe in a 5-6 storey 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 that’s 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 (it’s considered bad luck), so it just read 1-2-3-5-6, which was usual.
I looked for the floor the netcafe was at– 6th floor—and pressed the button. It lurched into action quietly and began the ascent. When it stopped, I figured it was my floor, so I instinctively began to step out. Right before stepping out, however, the sight outside the elevator stopped me. It was pitch dark, only lit by the light in the elevator, and 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, so each floor was single occupancy, and I could see pretty much the entire floor from the elevator. Thinking I must have gotten the wrong floor, I checked the light that indicates which floor you’re on. Strangely, there was nothing. None of the indicators were on, but the floor button to the netcafe 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 on the floor. 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 where I was. I was thoroughly creeped out, so I started pressing the close door button frantically.
As soon as I pressed it, the elevator light flickered off, and I was in pitch dark. I am this close to peeing my pants, and it’s actually kind of freaking me out thinking back to it now. The lights flickered back on under a second and the door closed, and the elevator jolted back to life. A few moments later, it opened again to the netcafe.
I am beyond relieved at this point. I walked out immediately and sat down at a computer. After gathering my wits a bit, I walked over to the cashier’s desk and told them what I saw. The girl working there listened and her face turned a bit ashen. I asked her if she'd heard of a similar story. She told me that she’s never experienced it, but some co-workers and occasional customers have 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 of sorts, until one of the employees completed suicide there for some reason. The store continued operations despite stories of weird appearances—when customers got their hair rinsed the water would look a little red, like the customer was bleeding.
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 down a few months after that. The building owner tried to re-rent the place out, but never had any luck. Most businesses are quite superstitious, and no one wanted to rent the fourth floor after someone had perished in it, 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, however, several accidents would happen. Tools would end up in strange places, a mirror from the previous business shattered when no one was near it, and finally 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 that 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 doesn’t even have a button.
But for some reason, sometimes when people take 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.
37. A Message From Beyond
One night, there was an altercation in the middle of our street at 2 in the morning that woke our whole house up. My stepfather and my uncle were still up drinking and went outside to see what was going on. There was a young man kicking the heck out of one of our older neighbors. We found out afterward the young man was dating the older man's daughter.
My stepfather and uncle went out to break it up and in the commotion, the guy plunged the weapon right into my stepfather. He stumbled back on to the porch and fell, and I tried to catch him. His blood smeared down the front of my shirt, and the younger guy took off and we called 9-1-1. This is where it got truly chilling.
We were in the hospital until the early morning. When my mom and I got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was a friend of mine from school, crying and apologizing for calling in the middle of the night, but she had just had a dream that there was screaming and a fight, and I was covered in blood. She begged me to call her back.
The time stamp on the message was the same time as the fight. This is in the late 80s, before computers and even cell phones really. I lived on the other side of town from her. There was no way she could have known what had happened.
38. The Place Under The Stairs
Just a few months ago, while I was still in school, I rented an old house with two of my friends. I lived in the basement and they each had a room upstairs. Several strange things happened to me while I was living in that basement. The first was that I had just gotten a dog and he was about four months old at the time. Now and then, right when I turned the TV off to go to sleep, my dog would start whining and growling at one corner of my room.
He would usually not get on my bed because he wasn't allowed, but during these times, he would jump on my bed and get as close to me as he could, all without his eyes ever leaving that corner. This happened about five times over the course of four months. Then, toward the end of the school year, when I was about to move out, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my life occurred.
Under our stairs was a little door that led to a small space that had a dirt floor. There was also a really weird, old wooden piece of what looks like a map nailed to the inside of the door, so it's a pretty spooky place. Up until the day before this incident, we had kept a small chair in front of this door that I laid my coats and things on, but we had some friends over the night before, so we brought that chair upstairs.
It was dark (probably 8 pm) and I had just been upstairs in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the stairs and was about to open the door to my room, when the door to the little closet under the stairs opened so slowly and with THE loudest creak I've ever heard in my life. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen in fear, staring at the closet, waiting for whatever was about to come out of it to show itself.
I literally stood there for about five minutes, absolutely terrified. Eventually, I opened the door to my room and locked it as fast as I could. I wasn't sure either of my roommates was home, so I called my female roommate and she was there. I spent the rest of that night upstairs with her, still too scared to go back downstairs. I do not scare easily.
Now I know many of you will probably say it was the wind or the fact that I had just come down the stairs or something just as my roommates did, but I've had those things happen to me before and been kind of creeped out, but this was different. The second I heard that closet open and looked over to see it opening so slowly, I felt this sheer terror.
It honestly felt like there was someone or something else in the room with me that wanted me to see that door open.
39. Home Sweet Home
So when I was about seven, maybe younger, I went to my mom's best friend's house with my mom in another city. It was just me, my mom, and her friend. Nobody else in the house. Except, when I was there, I saw a family which consisted of a mother, a teenage boy, and two younger girls who looked really burnt just walking around the house together without taking their eyes off me.
At one point, they even told me to go with them. I didn't think anything of it at that point because I assumed they were house guests. But many years later when I told my mom, she mentioned it to her best friend. Her best friend told her they actually had to move out of that house because they had had many haunting experiences, such as finding all her new baby's toys out in the middle of the night after she tidied it, things moved around, and blankets and pillows on the floor as if people slept there.
She asked her husband thinking maybe he did it, but he was just as scared as her.
40. Flowers Of Evil
My grandmother told me a story that creeps her out still. Back when my grandfather was alive, my grandmother woke up one night to hear something smash downstairs. She woke my grandfather up and made him go check it out with a baseball bat, and when he got downstairs there was a broken flower pot in the middle of their family room floor, about 20 feet from where it usually was.
There was no dirt trail; it was just smashed on the floor in the middle of the room, as if someone dropped it straight down.
41. Perverted Producer
Back in the summer of 2001, I was an aspiring actor and filmmaker in Baltimore. I was in line at a Rite-Aid and this guy dressed like Don Draper from Mad Men approached me. "Are you an actor?" I tell him I am. "I knew it. You have 'the look.' I'm a producer and represent modeling talent. Why don't you come by the studio? I'd like to see what you can do".
I was 21 years old and thought this was amazing, so I agreed. A few days later, I drove to the address he gave me. At first, I thought it was the wrong address because I pulled up in front of a row-house in the very slummy west side. But I knocked on the door and he answered, wearing a dirty white t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.
"Welcome to my house," he said and we walked in. The place is a mess. He starts breathing really loud. I turned around and asked, "This is your studio?" He stares at me with really cold, bleak eyes. "No, the studio is out back. I'll show you". He led me out his kitchen door to a garage. As we entered, he hands me a photo album, "Want to see some of my work?"
We're walking up stairs, to a room above the garage. I look through the album and see pictures…amateur pictures shot on a point-and-shoot, of underage boys, in their underwear, in various poses. One boy, looking about 10, was wearing a banana hammock and is laying in the backseat of a car. My adrenaline started racing.
I looked up and saw "the studio". It was a huge, white room. It was empty, except for a stained mattress in the middle of the room, surrounded by four large mirrors, propped up by chairs. The man was behind me. I had a sensation that I was about to get hit in the head. I spun around. And he's just staring at me, again with a cold, dark look. "Sir, I'm going to leave," I said.
Nothing. He was just standing in the doorway, blocking my way. "Please step aside, sir. I am going to leave". I dropped the photo album and it made a very loud slap on the floor. This startled him and he moved in to pick it up. I walked by him, down the stairs, and back out to my car. I looked back at the house to see him standing in the doorway, looking straight at me creepily.
I drove directly to the liquor store, bought a bottle of vodka and drank myself into oblivion. I told my Mormon fiancée at the time the whole ordeal. Her response? She screamed in my face about how I sinned for drinking and then went to her parents' house for a week. But, yeah, that's the creepiest thing that ever happened to me.
Public Domain Pictures
42. 3:20
A friend of mine had died. A few days later, I dreamt I was walking in an empty school hallway and saw someone emptying their locker. I got closer and saw it was my friend. I asked him what was going on. He said he had to spend some time in this place (purgatory?) for 40 days. I noticed a clock in his locker that had 3:20 as the time.
He said when I see the clock at that time again, I'll know that he'd moved on. A few weeks later, I got woken up by the crack of some loud thunder. I opened my eyes and my clock read 3:20. I remembered my old dream and got up and went to the kitchen to check the calendar. He had died 42 days previous. Maybe an odd coincidence, but I still think it was freaky.
43. Haunted Mobile
Our baby daughter had a wind-up mobile that played a lullaby. It hung over her crib. We'd wind it up at bedtime and she loved to stare up at it. One night, hours after we put her to bed, we heard the thing going off by itself. My wife and I ran in there to see what was going on. She could not have wound it up by herself.
She was lying there, smiling up at the mobile. We found out soon after that my mother, her grandmother, had died very close to that moment, a hundred miles away.
44. Man In The Mercedes
I lived in the middle east when I was in high school. One day, as I was walking home from school, an old Arab man in an old Mercedes pulled up like he was lost and rolled down his windows. He leaned out like he was about to ask for directions. So, I walked over and he asked me if know if there was a massage parlor nearby.
That immediately struck me as odd, so I said I didn't know and walked on. But, he kept up with me and said that since there wasn't a massage parlor around, maybe I could give him a massage. I ignored him and started walking faster. He then started offering me a lift home, but I told him to leave me alone and kept walking.
He just kept following me, so I had to duck into the nearest house pretending it was mine. I hid in their garden until I was sure the guy was gone and then continued on my way home. I am still suspicious of men in old Mercedes to this day.
45. Sleepwalking Girlfriend
My girlfriend is a sleepwalker. It only really comes on when she's incredibly exhausted or stressed out. We had just come back from Tokyo, and it was our first night back in our bed. I got up to take a leak and when I turned around, she was standing in the door, with her eyes semi-open but glazed over and face slack.
She surprised me, but I thought she just needed to use the bathroom. But it got creepier. She just stood there and wouldn't let me pass until I spoke to her. "Hey,” I said. "We have to get out of here...they're coming for us," she said. The hairs on my neck immediately stood up. The way she said it was so cold and mechanical, it was like it wasn't even her voice.
That's when I realized she was sleepwalking. "Go back to bed". She spun around and shuffled off to bed. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it was so creepy. It's like she was possessed. I didn't even get back in the bed with her. I went into the living room and slept on the couch.
46. Not So Secret Admirer
While going to college, I used to work at a drive-thru espresso stand in an industrial area near Tacoma. I was your usual bubbly, blonde barista who excelled in small talk and boosting egos (it helped the tip jar, of course). One day, a much older gentleman stopped by and ordered a can of Diet Coke for $1.
He gives me $1 and put $5 in my tip jar. That’s not the first time it’s ever happened, so I thought it was no big deal. He continued to come by two to three times per week, always when I'm in the stand. He continued to get the $1 coke and tip me $5. Nice man, always easy to talk to, never came on to me. But then he did something that made me get nervous.
Eventually, he bumped it up to a $20 tip. I always want to think the best of people, but something was definitely awry. Valentine’s day came up and I was working. The $1 coke man drove up and I went to the back to grab his drink. When I came up to the window, there laying for me was a box of chocolates, two dozen roses, and $100.
I was freaked out. I didn't even know how to react, I thanked him for the chocolates and the flowers, but refused the money. He stuck it into my tip jar before driving off. At this time, school was overwhelming anyways so I came to the decision to give my two weeks’ notice. For the following weeks, the $1 coke man continued to come by and tip me $100.
I kept asking my boss for advice on how to handle the situation, but she'd laugh it off and tell me just to take the money. On my very last day, he came by, ordered his coke, tipped me $100, and before he left he asked me what I was doing that weekend and if I'd like to go out with him. I was shy and avoided saying no in this situation!
I said I had to wait for the schedule to come out from work and work around my school schedule and I'd let him know next time. At the end of the day, I blacked out every bit of information about me, wrote notes to everyone who would come after me to never give out any of my information. Locked up and left.
47. Who’s Playing The Piano?
My parents didn't have a lot of money when we were growing up, so when my big sister started taking piano lessons they bought an old piano. It was an old player piano (but I think it had the guts of the player removed). Anyway, I was probably in sixth grade, got home from school, and I heard a noise coming from the basement.
So, I opened the door and called my sister's name out, but there was no answer. I was kind of nervous now. I yell my little brother's name...still nothing. I started walking downstairs and got about halfway down the steps and something was making that piano play. I ran upstairs and decided to sit outside until someone else got home.
I am 34 and sometimes I still get the chills when I am in that basement.
48. The Darkness Is Coming
My daughter is two and is generally laid back and not really afraid of anything. One night a few weeks ago, she walked up to the glass door leading out to the patio and stared motionless into the night for several minutes. Shortly after, she runs into my arms saying "Scary. Too scary". She wouldn't let me put her down.
She demanded that I hold her and rock her for the next half hour. Eventually, she started repeating over and over: "The dark coming inside now. The dark coming inside now". It was definitely the creepiest thing that has happened to me.
49. Peckish Guests
I was at work and there were only two of us in a small office, on Halloween. We were busy and then we heard some light tapping on the door. So, we said, "Come in". Nothing. A little bit later, we heard the light tapping again and said, "Come in". Nothing. So, I got up and went to the door, opened it, looked down and saw three ravens pecking at the bottom of the door.
I slammed it shut, walked back to my chair and just sat there staring at the wall for a moment.
50. Same Ghost, Different Day
In my grandparents’ incredibly old house in Long Island, my cousin once confessed to me that when staying there, he would wake up in the middle of the night and see a figure in the doorway. He said the man was very tall, looked grim, and had a beard. He said he looked a lot similar to Abraham Lincoln. But there's a twist.
His younger brother was shaking at this point. He said that he saw the same man several times. I'm glad I never had to stay in that house.
51. Terrified Of The Toilet
When I was about six or so, I lived with my grandma in a small apartment. I don't know how old it was. Every night that I would take a shower, I would hear the toilet seat slam shut. Naturally, I thought my grandma or someone else was messing with me. So, the next time I went to take a shower, I locked the door, and made sure the toilet seat was down.
I watched the door through the side of the shower curtain. That toilet seat slammed so hard that time that I thought it was gonna fly off. And lucky me, I had shampoo in my hair so I had to wait until I got it out before I could get out of the washroom.
52. Swallowed A Spider
My friend's daughter (who was two years old) had the bad habit of picking random things up off the floor and putting them in her mouth. One day, her mother heard a choking sound and came over to see what was in her mouth. Upon opening, there was a gigantic wolf spider (still alive) that scurried out of her mouth, up the little girl's face and into her hair. But it's grosser than that.
The spider had thousands of baby spiders on its back that all fell off in her mouth. Imagine thousands of spiders crawling down her throat, on her teeth, on her lips, up her nose, on her eyes, in her ears, etc. Her mom flipped out.
53. Bloody Woman
We bought a house from my aunt and uncle. When my aunt lived in our house, she was sitting at the kitchen table at night. The table sat next to a large sliding glass door that looked out across the clear backyard in the middle of farmland. In an instant, a young woman covered in blood was standing with her hands pressed against the glass, pawing and banging.
My aunt was scared. She called the cops and eventually got the frantic woman to calm and sit down. Apparently, she and her boyfriend were in a car wreck down the road, and she struggled from the wreck to the very visible kitchen where my aunt sat. The boyfriend didn’t make it out alive.
54. Whose Footsteps Are Those?
When we got married, my wife and I moved into a new house. Often at night I would hear what sounded like someone walking around the carpet in our bedroom. My wife never heard anything, so I just ignored it. She did start to pay attention when, twice, we had friends say they didn't want to housesit for us anymore because there was something weird about the house.
After a couple years, we got a cat who liked to sleep on the bed with us. One night, I was woken up by a noise and the sound of someone walking around was louder than ever, even though there was no one there. I was not the only one who heard it. The cat also woke up, tracked her head in exactly the same direction as the sounds I thought I was hearing,
After a few seconds, the cat meowed at it. The sounds immediately stopped. After a few seconds of watching the cat, I decided all was good and went back to sleep. I do not believe in ghosts or any of that sort of stuff, but that was enough for me. We moved several months later. We're on our fourth house now and I've never experienced the same thing in any of the others.
55. Man In The Mirror
I was sitting at my computer really late one night, and had a mirror sitting next to me because I'm paranoid. There was a door and a pillar right behind me. So, I glanced at the mirror, and saw a horror. There was a hand waving through the little window, next to the door. I blinked, turned around and saw the guy’s hand trying to reach the lock on the door.
I called the authorities as quietly as I could, while he tried for an entire 20 minutes. They showed up a few minutes later to open my door. I was standing to the side of the window, holding a baseball bat.
56. Guardian Angels
I was sitting at an intersection, waiting for the red light to change so I can turn left. As it changed, I heard the words “accident,” “stop,” and “no” whispered into my ear. It distracted me for about two seconds, which was just enough time to watch a GMC van blast through the red light. I would have been killed otherwise.
57. When I Was Big Before
This is not something that I remember, but my mom told me it was one of the weirdest things that has ever happened to her. I started speaking at a very early age, but I still didn't comprehend a lot of concepts because I was so young. My mom was trying to explain something I didn't understand to me and I said, "Oh, I remember that from when I was big before".
58. Footsteps In The Dark
I was in bed one night, drifting off in the darkness of my bedroom. I couldn't quite get to sleep, though. The weather was warm and my room was getting a little stuffy, so I went to open my window up and let some air in. I went back to bed, staring at the ceiling, hoping I would fall asleep out of sheer boredom. That was when I heard the sound downstairs.
Now, I wasn't yet asleep, so my heart started thumping. You know the feeling, when fight or flight kicks in. When I was younger, I went on work experience at my grandad's sheet metal work factory. One of my best memories of us bonding was when we both made an axe at the workshop, which he let me take home. So, I reached for this axe and creeped out of my room while undressed.
I heard that sound again, this time closer. It was dark and I didn't want to alert the burglar, so I stood at the top of the stairs, in the dark with this little hand axe raised shoulder height. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. Could I really hurt someone with it? I don't know. Anyway, I heard these quiet footsteps moving up the stairs.
It was only a few steps away from me now. I'm aware of them, but they’re not aware of me. Three, closer, two, closer still, one! I switched on the light and with my hand axe held high, screaming at the top of my lungs. I am met with another undressed man, with fear seared on his face, also screaming. It was my mother's friend, whom she had been seeing without me knowing for months.
59. My Dog Wasn’t There
One time, I was laying in bed about to go to sleep and my door opened. Figuring it was the dog, I called his name and did the double pat on the bed and told him to come up. The bed sunk and moved, much like a 100-pound Labrador had just jumped on the bed. After he jumped up and laid down, I went to pet him, but he wasn't there.
60. Not Coming In Today
This was when I was about four or five years old. My mom was self-employed as a housekeeper and was always willing to take along anyone who wanted to help out. She would split the day's pay with them. One of her favorite assistants was Ruth, an older woman that lived next door. She was the nicest person you could meet.
So, she and my mom worked together for a few months until the day that Ruth’s life was taken in a car accident. My mom heard about the incident from my grandmother and didn't tell me about it because, well, I was four years old and that wasn't something you usually want to talk about at that age.
On the same day that she learned about Ruth's passing, something odd happened. She went into the bathroom and the phone rang. I was pretty good with picking up the phone and asking the basic questions, so she asked me to answer it. When she came back out from the bathroom, she asked me, "Who was it?" My answer? "It was Ruth. She said she can't go to work today". That really creeped my mom out!
61. Growling Girl
I went on a date a few weeks back with this awesome circus performer girl. We had a very fun night, which did end up with me sleeping over. Anyway, it was like 4:00 AM and I woke up to this growling noise. I looked at her and she was staring at me, just doing this feral animal growl. It didn't even sound human. Freaked me out.
I tried to talk it off a little bit and then it sort of dawned on her. She apologized and said she talks in her sleep. The next morning, she didn't remember anything had happened. Makes my skin crawl just thinking about it.
62. Blood On The Bed
I’m a male and when I was about five or six years ago, I was going to bed one night. When I pulled the covers back, I noticed a large puddle of dried blood in the middle of the bottom sheet. I had no idea where it had come from. Anyway, it freaked me out a little and after dismissing the possibility of a practical joke, I could only assume that I was ill and bleeding.
Either way, I went to the doctor to get checked out. Everything was fine. No infection, no piles, no fissures, nothing. Still no idea where it came from. I've also had a similar instance where I've woken up with dried blood on the pillow. I have however put this down to an early night nosebleed, but oddly no dried blood on my face or hair.
63. Funky Peach
I used to really like peaches. I would always just munch them straight from the tree, but one day I grabbed a beauty (perfectly ripe, unbroken skin), took a big bite out of it, and a massive black spider crawled out of the center. Luckily the bite I took was all fruit, but after that, I refused to eat a peach that hasn't been sliced.
64. Mysterious Mass
I woke up to a swirling black mass in the corner of my room and my computer speakers were making this awful noise. I starred at the mass for several minutes as it swirled in the upper corner of my room. Then, it disappeared into the wall and made a distinct noise. The power surged and the noise coming out of the speakers stopped.
I've never experienced it again, but I wake up in the middle of the night a lot and look at that corner. It’s very unsettling.
65. Tugging Sheets
I was sleeping in the middle of the day when something grabbed my sheets and tugged them hard. I had the sheets tucked up and over my head to keep out the sunlight, so my head got yanked back. But, I was so tired, and still basically sleeping, that I just fought against it. It was only when I woke up later on that I got seriously freaked out because I live alone.
66. Alien Abduction
When I was 12, I was visiting my grandmother for her birthday. She lives in the middle of nowhere, in a typical farmhouse surrounded by woods. It's kind of creepy on its own, and definitely creepy at night. My family lived a good distance from her, so we decided to spend the night and drive back home in the morning.
As usual, I got stuck sleeping on the couch. In the middle of the night, I was awoken by the sound of something moving around the room. I didn't get up, but I opened my eyes to take a look. When I realized what I was seeing, I nearly screamed. Across the room, about 10-12 feet away, stood an alien.
It was a stereotypical alien: short, giant forehead and small chin. All I could see was the silhouette of his head in front of the window. He kept looking around, just standing there, surveying the room. Of course, I was scared and didn't do anything, but really, what could you do? It's an alien.
Awaiting my inevitable abduction I lay in bed, paralyzed. But, he just stayed still, looking around, for what seemed to be forever. I decided to get a better look, so I very slowly sat up. I was trying to get a look at what he was up to. As I sat up, more of his body came into view, but where his neck should've been there was only a knot.
Below that, string. It was a balloon, from my grandma's birthday party, swaying back and forth due to a vent somewhere. To this day, I've never felt a bigger sense of relief.
67. Possessed Doll
When I was a kid, my sister always loved playing with dolls, but I was terrified of them. There was this one that would sing a song when you pressed a button on its back. It only had like three to four songs it could sing, and it would cycle through them, so you knew what song it would sing next. Well, shortly after she got it, it got lost around the house.
A year later, she found it again and tried to make it sing, but when it started singing, it was in a really distorted voice. So, she figured it was running out of batteries. She found me and let me hear one of the songs, and I was slightly disturbed by it, but not legitimately scared. We then found my mom and my sister asked her for new batteries.
When demonstrating the distortion to my mom, the sound clip completely died out halfway through. We attributed this to the batteries losing the little juice they had left. The next moments are burned into my brain forever. When opening the battery case though, my mom accidentally hit the button, and it started singing in the same distorted voice as it had before, except this time it was a slow version of "Jimmy Crack Corn".
It had never sung that song before. It wouldn't stop until we took out the batteries. Afterward, we checked the instruction manual that came with it, and it confirmed that "Jimmy Crack Corn" was not one of the songs it sang. Being young and already scared by dolls, this was the scariest thing ever.
68. Reflections
One night, when I was about 12 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, bleary-eyed and half conscious. I saw the reflection of someone in the bathroom on the tile. I ran downstairs to my parents and they wouldn't believe me. My dad came up and looked in the bathroom, living room and kitchen, but saw nothing.
He let me sleep on the couch, but a few hours later (having come to the conclusion that I would never sleep again), I heard footsteps and the front door open and shut. The next morning, we noticed that some food from the cabinets and fridge was missing. I think the guy had hid in my sister's room, which was attached to the bathroom. Good thing she wasn't home that night.
69. The Good Liar
When I was 17, I had to do a work-study program for a charity that dealt with mentally delayed people in their 20s and 30s. I worked with a 34-year-old man named Ryan. I spent three weeks training him to do simple person-to-person interactions, so he could be a Wal-Mart greeter or something. I came home after a session to find an emergency crew at my house.
They told me my mother was fine, but she had been attacked and cut on her right arm. It turns out that Ryan had become obsessed with me to the point where he walked into my house with a knife, probably to attack me. Oh, but that's just the beginning. The most messed up part of the story is that he was only POSING as a mentally challenged person to meet high school boys.
70. The Sleeping Bag
I have a developmentally delayed nephew who was really young (about four years old) and one night, he started talking about a man in the sleeping bag with a beard. Completely out of the blue. Why it is creepy? There was something he didn't know. We had an uncle that was murdered in a sleeping bag years before my nephew was born. He had a big "mountain man" beard.
There aren't any pictures in the house and obviously nobody would tell my nephew the tragic story. My only guess is that he saw my uncle’s ghost.
71. Hang Up
My mom once stopped to help an overturned car on the side of a highway. As we got out of our vehicle, my mom immediately called emergency as I wandered over to see if anyone needed help. Near the wreck, I saw the driver treating a woman (I think it was his wife) roughly. I was only a teenager and the guy was almost three times my size, so I tried to get my mom to come over.
She was busy on the phone, leaving me with these two people. I quickly realized that the man was intoxicated and looking for a fight. I figured that the only way we were going to get out of this was by playing it cool and then driving away as fast as we could. Once I could get my mom's attention, I'd find a way to tell her, but in the meantime, it was me and the two passengers.
The man asked me to help him move the car. I just stared at him and told him that was a ten-man job and there was no way he and I could do it. Then his wife started to scream at him. She was shouting that she got him hurting her and crashing the car on camera and that she sent the video to his sister. This caused the man to lose his mind.
He picked me up and literally threw me. Then he shoved my mom, took her phone, and pushed her down the bank. Panicking, I told him I had a knife, and I wasn’t afraid to use it if he touched my mother again. With that, he took his focus off my mom and stared right at me. As I tried to calm him, my mom snuck back into the car. When she was ready, I made a run for our vehicle.
On my way, a car that was speeding on the road almost hit me, but I made it to my mom. I heard her start the engine as I jumped in, and we tore off to the local station. The man was apprehended a couple hours later for two charges: one for hurting his wife and the second for assaulting an officer. We call emergency when we see crashes now.
72. How Kind
Once, my friend went out and met this girl who seemed really nice. After drinking with her, she passed out and woke up in an Uber. She told the driver that she didn’t know where she was. He told her that a girl brought her to his car because she wanted to make sure her "friend got home safe.” My friend insisted that something very wrong had happened and told the Uber driver to pull over. He was a good man; he immediately believed her, stopped the car, and called for officers to come and figure out what was going on.
When the officers heard what happened, they said they recognized the address that the Uber driver had been given by this mystery girl. It turns out that there was some kind of human trafficking operation. A girl would slip something into a pretty girl's drink, then pour her into a cab, and send her to the same house. Until my friend called in, none of the girls had been seen again.
73. Freak Incident
When my friend came home after work, his wife was gone. He thought she had taken the dogs for a walk and so checked the normal walk route. Then he saw all of these flashing blue lights. An officer stopped him and said he wasn't allowed to come any closer. But my friend had this sinking feeling. He looked over the officer's shoulder and realized that there was a woman bleeding on the sidewalk. That's when his stomach dropped: the woman was his wife.
It turned out that she had been on a walk in her neighborhood when a man randomly attacked her. He had just been released from a mental institution and randomly happened to cross paths with her. Sadly, her injuries were too extensive and she passed in the hospital. It's the scariest story I've ever heard because it's so meaningless. This man ended her life for no reason.
74. Baked Even
There's a big bread factory in my town. One day, years ago, maintenance men had to go into the bread oven to fix some issue. The oven had been off for 24 hours before they arrived, but it was still hot. The maintenance men didn't want to go in, but the company insisted, saying that anymore time wasted would lose them even more money.
So the maintenance guys took out baskets that held the raw bread on the conveyor belt, climbed onto the conveyor, and started up the machinery. Almost immediately upon entering the oven on the conveyor, the maintenance guys realize that something is terribly wrong. It's way, way too hot to be safe. They tried to run out, but there were too many baskets on the belt for them to get out. The path was blocked. They were trapped.
The only thing they could do was stay on the conveyor and go through the oven, a slow and horrifically painful process that essentially baked them alive. Those outside assisting with maintenance had to listen to their screams. Then the oven went completely silent. They saw one burnt body emerge on the other side of the oven. The second man somehow lived, but only for a few moments.
75. Wet And Wild
When my mother was young, she went swimming with her friends. While there, she had to watch helplessly as her friend was sucked into a whirlpool at the bottom of a drainage lake. They didn’t find his body for days. That’s why I never learned to swim.
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76. Incognito Infiltration
I was a director of my college’s student government. There was this dude who was always willing to take on projects, so I assigned him a lot of work. I remember thinking he was pretty charismatic and well dressed, and he'd always done good work for me. So when he told me he owned a start-up clothing company, I bought some things from his website.
The next year I saw an article with his face on it. I found out that he was not what he seemed. He had been taking extracurricular classes as an excuse to stay on campus, even though he'd been kicked out of all his classes for a horrible reason. He'd been forcing himself on women at the university. His father was a wealthy professor and covered it up every time it happened. He seemed so normal.
77. No Strings Attached
A co-worker's dad went into the nursery to check on his newborn baby only to find a horrific sight. The baby had reached for the blinds strap, somehow tangled his neck up, and began choking. The baby was already blue, and all of the veins in his face were popping up. Grandpa frantically called for emergency. Thankfully, EMS arrived in minutes and had the baby breathing again, but as a mother, I can't imagine anything scarier.
78. Personal Emergency
There was a fatal car accident. The first officer on the scene had recognized that the victim was the daughter of an emergency dispatcher. The same emergency dispatcher who had been relaying all of the information about the crash to emergency services. This was before cell phones, meaning the officer had no easy way to tell her what had happened. He just had to keep that horrible information to himself.
79. Going Somewhere?
When I was nine, I was playing at the school down the street from my house. It was the middle of summer, and my friend and I were watching some local boys play street hockey. One of the boys called my name and said a man in the parking lot was looking for me.
The parking lot was mostly obscured by a nearby building, but I could see an old 70s style van that hadn't been there earlier. I was walking over to the van when the mother of one of the other kids showed up looking for her son. When she saw me, she said hi and asked me where I was going. When I told her, she took my hand and started to quickly walk away with me. At that exact moment, the van pulled out and sped off.
My friend's mom walked me all the way home, and I wasn't allowed out of my yard without my parents for the rest of the summer. I was so upset and didn't understand why I was being punished. It was only years later that I had understood that I was likely being targeted by some opportunistic loser for I don’t even want to know what.
80. Anybody There?
I once interviewed a woman who told me a horror story about something that happened to her as a girl. When she was ten, she had trouble sleeping. She thought that the Boogeyman was standing in her closet and staring at her whenever she tried to sleep.
Every night, she would go downstairs and tell her parents about how scared she felt. And every night, her father would tell her the Boogeyman didn't exist and then send her back to bed. This happened over several nights, and the father got tired of it. That night, he walked her back up to her bedroom, turned on the light, and said, "I'll show you there's no Boogeyman."
As he went to open the closet door, something on the other side held it shut. The dad immediately sent his daughter out of the room and forced the door open to find that a man was in there. He'd been sneaking into their house every night to stand in the girl's closet and watch her.
81. Midnight Visitors
This happened to my friend's dad. This guy isn't the type to make stuff up, so I believe him 100%. My friend's dad, Jack, and his brother Tom lived with each other in the 80s. It was just the two of them living in the house, no one else. So, this one night Jack is coming home at night and walks into his living room to see a bunch of old people sitting around talking.
As he walks in, they all just quiet down and awkwardly look at him as he walks by. He doesn't see Tom anywhere, so he just assumes Tom will be back to tend to his strange guests. Jack has work the next morning, so he goes in his room to get some sleep, but is kept up from all the people talking. He walks out from his room and is promptly met with Tom, who is coming out of his room to tell Jack to keep his friends quiet.
However, Jack was coming out to tell Tom to keep HIS friends quiet. They walk out from the hallway into the living room…only to see that it's empty with the leftover smell of musk.
82. What A Way To Ruin A Night
Oh man, this happened in my junior year of college. Not my proudest moment. Me and maybe half a dozen friends are hanging out on Saturday night and we are just crispy baked. Then there was a knock at the door. Serious knocking. Panicked knocking. What do we do? Gotta be officers, and we are so screwed. Like, I'm getting kicked out of housing this time.
So one of the girls goes to answer the door. A guy with insane Ted Kaczynski hair and no pants is SCREAMING at the door to let him in. The girl screams and tries to shut the door, but the guy is forcing his way in. He is bleeding pretty bad, and is suddenly basically draped over my friend in a heap. He is totally incoherent, just keeps yelling PLEASE and making no sense otherwise.
My friend runs down to help the girl. I could muster precisely zero courage. I was terrified. I stood at the top of the stairs like a housewife who had seen a mouse in an old cartoon. WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO!? OH GOD WHAT DO WE DO!? We have to call the authorities! Right? I CANT DO IT I'M FREAKING OUT MAN. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY HANDS! Someone finally calls and tells the authorities an old, possibly homeless man is trying to force his way into the apartment.
I remain totally panicking at the top of the steps, helping in no way whatsoever. My friend has now wrestled the guy out of the apartment and is trying to calm him down. Eventually, officers come and they take the disheveled, pantsless homeless man away in an ambulance. We close the door and sit back down in the living room. "Is anyone else not baked at all anymore?" someone asked.
We were not. We'd go over the series of events a hundred times over the next few weeks. I tried to downplay my role as the guardian of the stairwell. Like a week later, though, we'd find out it was neither an old guy nor a homeless guy, but rather a friend of a friend on a really bad acid trip who had lost his pants and ran through a field in a panic.
83. Peeping Tom
I have to preface this by stating that I am a guy. I used to run quite a bit—five miles every day without fail. One day after finishing my run, I got a knock at the door and it was a young man about my age, like 27, asking about the duplex next door, as it was for rent. Typical questions about the neighborhood and the street and whatnot.
I was cordial and informative, but I had some food cooking and needed to get back inside. I told him to call the number on the sign, but before I could excuse myself inside he interjected. The conversation went something like this: Him: Wait...do I smell pot? Dude, do you have weed in there? Me: No, I'm cooking salmon. Him: Oh, cause if you were, I'd be totally down with that. By the way, you've got really nice pecs. Do you work out a lot?
Me: Yeah, I guess...look, I really gotta go. If you have questions about the duplex, call the number on the sign. Him: Cool, thanks. I go back inside the house and he drives off. I instantly call my landlord and tell her to under no circumstances let that guy rent the property, because he gave me the creeps. Well, fast forward two days.
It's a Sunday night around midnight. I'd just finished watching a movie on the couch and I had played a lot of soccer that weekend. Generally, I've found that if I can soak in a hot bath for about 20 minutes, my knees feel better in the morning. So I get up from the couch, walk by my bedroom, and notice that, since I'm kind of a restless sleeper, I must have knocked the blinds and curtains adjacent to my bed askew.
No biggie, I'll fix it tonight before I go to bed. Then I get into the bathroom and notice that someone must have opened the window to the bathroom when I had friends over several days ago. I don't have a bathroom exhaust fan, so it only makes sense to raise the window and blinds a bit. I close the window and shut the blinds.
I've got one of those nifty kitchen timers that I set to 20 minutes and I just sit in the bath, waiting for the time to expire. During this quiet time, my mind starts replaying the weekend's events, and I start to get an uneasy feeling. Subconsciously, I felt something was wrong, but maybe I was just being paranoid. Then I thought about the bedroom window and the bathroom window both having blinds askew.
And come to think of it, I believe the blinds behind the TV had one little slat that was sort of peeled up, too. But, no, now I'm really just being paranoid. And I hadn't even thought about the weird encounter from two days ago. But now, I'm sitting in a bathtub and the darn timer seems frozen at this point. I tell myself that I'll get up when the timer is done, put on some clothes and take a look around the house. Well, I snapped.
Five minutes left and I couldn't take it any longer. I don't know how to rationalize what I did next. It just seemed purely instinctual. I hopped up and got a towel around me. I turned off the bathroom light, made my way quickly through the bedroom door and then the living room area. I then cut the kitchen and living room lights. In the darkness, I pulled a pair of pants up so that I was at least wearing something.
I wasn't going to go back into the bedroom for a shirt. The only light on in the house was my bedroom light. I went over to the front door and flung it open quickly to peer out. Nothing. Crickets. This was the middle of the summer, and the crickets were overwhelmingly loud. Louder than the sound of my squeaky storm door opening.
I decided I was definitely being paranoid, and turned to go back in. I turned, but at the last second I had that thought: I won't be content to sleep tonight unless I properly dismiss the paranoia with a walk around the house. So I barefootedly and cautiously make my way down the front porch stairs, and down the sidewalk to the side of my house where the bedroom windows glow.
The front of the house is definitely clear. I then tiptoe to the corner of the house to get a view of the side of the house. As I peer around the corner, not 20 feet away from me, I see the stranger from two days ago, his face glued to the bedroom window. His hand is in his shorts. I'm instantly enraged. Apparently, he is completely unaware that I have exited the house, much less flanked him.
I decided in that instant to surprise him. The following conversation was a mix between my anger, his fear, and most strangely of all, the feeling of amusement that this is actually happening to me. Keep in mind, the conversation doesn't really make a lot of sense because the guy didn't really have time to think. It really couldn't have been more than about 15-20 seconds before the ordeal was played out.
Me: YOU SICKO! Him: (Surprised and mortified) AHHH!! Me: I'm going to catch you and beat the heck out of you. Him: You don't know me!?!? (backing away) Me: (Aggressively approaching) I know exactly who you are, and I'm going to catch you. Him: (Transitioning from backing away to turning away and starting to run) Please don't hurt me. I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! Please don't hurt me!
At this point, it's an all-out chase across a neighbor's yard. I'm wearing nothing but a pair of warm-up pants, but I'm gaining on him. I was playing soccer daily at the time, so I was definitely going to catch him. But he made it easy. I chased him across one gravel driveway, which wasn't fun, but I was on his heels by the time he reached the second one, and he took a nasty fall right into the middle of the gravel.
I very nearly kicked him across the face with my shin, but I suppressed the urge. I tell him to get up. At this point he knows he is caught, so he is completely compliant...well, kind of. I ask him where he parked, and he lied and said a few blocks down. I ask his name, and he gives me one. I take his keys from him and tell him we're going to his car. We walk about 30 feet and he stops and says, "Actually, this is my car."
Wow, ok, so you parked basically right next to my house. So, I open his car and he's like, "What are you doing?" I explain to him that there's no way for me to know who he is, since he has no wallet with him. I open his glove box hoping to find some real ID. Bingo. I found a receipt for tire rotation or something. The car shown on the receipt matches the car he's driving. But the name doesn't.
I call him by the name on the receipt and he starts crying again and apologizing about lying about his name. I'm convinced I have him scared, and now I just want to go to bed. I know the authorities will take hours and it's already like 1:00 and I've gotta be up early. So, I take the little folder thing the receipt came in and I told him to write down a confession of what he did.
It was only just becoming apparent to me that not only was he a peeping tom, he had come into my house when I wasn't there to adjust the blinds in order to see in. Now I've got a written and signed confession. I write his license plate down and then I decide to make sure I never have to see this guy again. I take his phone and write down numbers of obvious relatives: Mom, Dad, etc.
Just a few. And then I tell him "I never want to see you again." I made it clear for him that if he saw me somewhere, he'd better make sure I don't see him. Anyway, at this point he's sitting in his car. I toss the keys and his cell phone into his car and tell him to get lost. He sits in the car sobbing for a while as I'm walking away, but he's got the engine started and leaving by the time I'm back in my house.
At this point, I sit down and pour a drink. And then I decide I wished I had called the authorities because I'm not getting any sleep, so I call the officer to show them the confession and all the information. The officer who shows up writes a few things down and tells me I should have detained him. Two days later, I call them and ask them about a report.
No news, and no news would come. No report. Oh well, he's never coming back. Wrong! He knocks on my door about a year later. I open the door, and he must have seen the anger. He backs away from the door with his hands up and says he came to apologize. He said he was very sorry. I told him I accepted his apology and to not screw up like that again. And then he said thanks and walked away. Very strange.
84. Gone In The Night
I lived in the Hollywood Hills, and this happened in the early 80s. One night, I heard crazy knocking at my door at 9 pm. I go to answer the door and there's a lady there just beside herself, talking about "There's so much blood..." She looks normal and is dressed in clean clothing, so we let her in. She tells a story about seeing someone get hurt.
I call the authorities and two uniformed LAPD officers arrive in 10 minutes. They take the lady away, and tell us that she was reported missing, has a mental condition, and lives up the street. All good. 30 minutes later, another knock at the door. Two different officers this time, responding to the call. They have no idea who the other two officers were!
They take our information and statements, our description of the officers, and the lady as well. Radio conversations back and forth ensue, and they really don't have any idea how any other officers could have picked her up, because they were given the call 40 minutes ago. Still no idea what happened to this day.
85. Ghost Busters
I supervise the night crew at a Subway. The day crew has never mentioned it, but the night crew always make jokes about our "SubGhost,” although I've stopped being sure that it's actually a joke. Now hear me out. I'm not saying the Subway I work at is haunted...but I'm not saying it's not haunted, either. It's open 24/7, so past midnight just one person stays by themselves until day crew rolls in around 6 am.
I always spend at least an hour a night alone, and quite a while with just one other person. Sometimes we hear voices. The music is off, there's only one or two of us, but we can hear people having a conversation, although it's too quiet to pick out words. The first time I heard voices I looked at my supervisor and asked if she heard them too, and she looks me in the eyes and casually says, "Yeah, it's the SubGhosts talking."
It sounds like a joke, but now I realize when I'm training a newbie on the late shift I've given the casual "It's just the SubGhost" response more times than I can remember. There are voices, there are weird crashing noises, and sometimes when no one is in the room things fall off the counters for no discernible reason. Once our owner bought new paper towel auto-dispensers to replace the old push dispensers.
I was alone right before the graveyard guy came in when I heard a towel dispense. I walked around the corner and everything was quiet. I was about to walk away when another towel came out. Then another. Then another. Finally it goes full SubGhost and dispenses the entire roll continuously without stopping, much like when a cat finds out how to unroll your toilet paper.
It only stopped when there was no paper left. No one else was around, but a few days later the owner switched them back, so we now have the manual paper towels back. If there is a SubGhost, I don't really mind. Stupid day crew is oblivious, but us night crew tend to become quite familiar with the sandwich spook, and its presence is so constant that the voices have almost become comforting.
Wikimedia Commons, Corey Coyle
86. Window Watcher
This happened to my friend. She told me that when she was little, she was playing with her little brother and sister one night. Her little brother looked out the window and said, "Who is that man?" They all went to the window to see what he was talking about. She said there was a white figure sitting on top of the telephone pole, and it looked like a man.
He was staring at them with a huge creepy smile. Then he just stood up and jumped off the pole and simply vanished before they saw him hit the ground. She said it scared them so much, her sister won't even talk about it.
87. The Uninvited
My creepiest thing will forever be the man who watched me at my window. It's nothing paranormal, but honestly. I was texting my girlfriend, playing a game, and I heard rustling outside my window—keep in mind I live in the basement as an "apartment" at my mom's house. I don't have any curtains, and I turned off my iPod.
I could see someone actually staring at me. This went on for about 10 minutes. I texted my little sister to get the bat and turn on the lights upstairs. After he saw the lights, he ran off. I have never been more creeped out…except for the recent occurrence. I thought I imagined the "FWOOSH" and "PLOP" sound in the middle of the night, but I brushed it off. The next morning, my stepdad was cleaning the yard and found the A/C cover in the other window well.
I went upstairs to get ready to wash my mom's car when they told me. They asked me if I heard anything, and I told them about the strange sounds I heard. I now keep a knife and an aluminum bat with me. We called the authorities the first time it happened, and they said they couldn't do anything. Short of breaking into the house, we're stuck dealing with this person (or people) until they do break in.
88. The Final Countdown
I delivered newspapers in a fairly rural area the summer after I graduated high school. One night, it's pouring rain and I'm driving down this dirt road that is a cul-de-sac to a farmer's house. I've been down this road a few dozen times and know the routine—drop the paper off in the box at the end of the drive, turn around, and go back up the road and off to my next stop.
This time, as I am getting out of my car to place the newspaper in the holder, I see this man in the ditch wearing a drenched white shirt and running at me as fast as he can. He got within 20 feet of me, and I could see what my mind pictured as a hatchet or axe in his hand. I had never ran so hard in my life to the front of my car, jumped in, and took off.
Everything happened so fast that I almost didn't realize where I was. It must have been about 5-10 miles later that I attempted to call 9-1-1, but there was no signal using my Motorola flip phone in the middle of nowhere in the year 2000. I had to stop at a farmer's house to call the authorities at 2:00 am. Turns out the guy took his own life within an hour of his run with me in that wooded ditch.
89. Deja Vu
This whole thing still freaks me out. I was waiting at the bus stop around two years ago, and just start chatting with this lady who was waiting for a different bus. It was just a normal conversation, but there was an odd undertone that I could just barely make out, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I don't know what it was. but I know it was there.
Finally my bus comes, I get on, and I am the only one there. All of a sudden I hear "Hey!" I glance up and there's a little girl who says "Remember me?" She reminded me strangely of the woman I was speaking with at the bus stop, but younger. You could cut the tension with a knife, and when I got off I swear she watched me as the bus left.
I'm certain that I was the only one on the bus when I got on.
90. The Other Side
When I lived in South Africa, I traveled a lot with a Christian missionary and humanitarian aid worker named Piet. He handled the spiritual stuff, while I tended to work more with the local (mostly Xhosa) people, helping them with non-spiritual issues. In July 2010, we went to a village in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we stepped out of the truck, we knew something was wrong.
We hadn't been able to contact our guy in the village all day, and there was no one around at all. Piet and I went from house to house, looking for, well, anyone, but everywhere was completely empty. Eventually, we saw a figure run around the corner of a building on the far side of the village. It was a young woman, stark naked, running straight for us.
Her arms were flailing, and she was running like an animal, occasionally dropping to all fours, then back on her feet. As she got closer, Piet told me to get back in the truck, then he screamed at me to get in the truck. I'd seen this guy watch a Xhosa witchdoctor burn a dozen chickens alive and not bat an eyelid, so when he lost his cool, I knew it was serious.
I closed the truck door as she reached us. She was covered in blood; there were cuts and slices all over her face, arms, and breasts. One of her ears was missing—I think, there was a lot of blood—her teeth were bloody, and she had a look in her eye of absolute, untamed rage. The screeching sound she made is unlike anything I've heard before or since.
I can still hear it so vividly in my mind. Looking into her face, seeing her wide psychotic eyes and gaping mouth as she made that unholy sound froze me in my seat. Piet had started the truck, and already started reversing up the dirt track, but she followed. He turned the car, and all the while she was scratching at the windows and metalwork.
Then he sped off up the track. She followed us still. She didn't keep up, obviously, but for a while I thought she was going to. I've never seen someone run that fast in bare feet. The journey back to our base town was almost silent. I spent most of it concentrating on the sound of my own breathing, and the rumble of the road. I asked Piet what that was, and what we should do.
He said the girl was no doubt insane, had a psychotic break or something, but the locals would have immediately thought her possessed. If she didn't kill herself, the other villagers would within days. He suggested that they had gathered in one house for safety. This happened in the Eastern Cape, which I would argue is the darkest, wildest, and most bizarre part of the country.
Strange things happen there a lot, and often just get buried or only picked up by one of the crazy tabloids like the Mercury, and subsequently ignored or written off. There are vast swathes of grassland punctuated by the odd settlement, without any adequate law enforcement. A lot of people live in these isolated settlements, and will only leave to work or to get food.
Many spend their whole lives in the village of their ancestors, as do their children, and so on. We did call the authorities, and the officer said “we will look into it.” We never heard about it again. South Africa has some very developed areas (the major towns and cities, for example) but there are enormous parts of this country that have remained almost untouched for decades.
The further you go from Johannesburg or Cape Town, the more rural and strange things can become. I'm not saying that all of rural South Africa is like this. A lot of the villages we went to were nice, simple settlements where the people welcomed us, gave us food, gaped at us for being white, and so on. Some were more sinister.
We eventually got in touch with the guy we were originally trying to see a day later. Piet asked him if everything was all right, and he said “We had a bad presence in the village. It is now gone.” I don't know for sure what happened, but I can guess, based on what Piet said. Piet's been back once since to that place, without me, and they seemed fine.
He told me he didn't ask about the girl, as he didn't know what had happened, and he didn't want them to react. I don't think he wanted to know.
91. Better Not Squashed
My mom passed an accident where two semis had completely crashed into each other. It looked like a normal accident, with both drivers seeming fine. They were walking around outside their cars, with emergency staff surrounding the scene. Because of this, my mom didn't think much of it--until she learned the truth. The news covered the crash. They said there weren't two semis, but three vehicles. There had been a car smashed in between the trucks. The driver was one of my brother's teachers.
Unsplash
92. A Big Part Of Life
Back in the late seventies during her first semester at college, my mom met this guy named Bob. They were lab partners, and she’d thought he seemed cute and nice. She was too shy then to ask him out, but she definitely liked him. If Bob had asked her, she would have happily gone on a date. But he never did, so they just stayed friends.
But then things got...weird. Even though they studied different major, my mom kept noticing that Bob was often waiting for her. He'd be outside of her other classes, the library, the student union, and out in front where her dad picked her up and dropped her off. This continued into the spring semester.
Puzzled, but not yet alarmed, she asked him how he always knew where she would be. Bob loudly said, “oh, I asked the registrar’s office for a copy of your schedule!” My mom went to complain to the secretary who gave it to him. She blew it off because, “you guys are dating.” It was creepy, but since my mom was doing an exchange program the next year, she just left it at that. She figured that when she came back for her final year of university, he would have moved on.
Flash forward to her final year. She returns to university and...Bob is nowhere in sight. She figured she was free, but the whole situation was far from over. While my mom was at one of her grad school classes, my grandma heard a knock on the door. It was a man wearing a naval uniform. Since my grandmother had been a Navy nurse, she let him in.
The man started off by saying how sorry he was for my mother’s loss, which completely mystified my grandma. Before she could ask him what he meant, he continued, saying: “Well, ma’am, I just came back from overseas, and I found out my old friend Bob had passed. He had spoken so highly of his fiancée, your daughter, and I wanted to meet her.”
My grandmother told him her daughter didn’t even have a boyfriend, let alone a fiancé. It didn’t take long for the friend and my grandma to realize that Bob had made up his entire engagement. The whole thing was so creepy.
93. Barely Making It
I was living in a big city a few years ago and didn't know anyone. A guy I was seeing came to visit me. At the end of his trip, I accompanied him to his train home. After that, I slowly walked back to the streetcar to go back to my apartment. It was about 2 PM and very bright and sunny outside, and I was feeling friendly. As I sat down on the bench at the streetcar stop, the man sitting next to me said hi.
I said hello back, but I felt something was off. I tried to ignore it and keep enjoying my day. Shortly, the streetcar came, and we both got on. It was crowded so we ended up sitting pretty close to each other. Once I saw my stop approaching, I got up. The man stood up too. I could feel him breathing right behind me. Even worse, I could see his reflection in the metro car window. He was very slowly looking my legs up and down. I started to feel very uneasy. The doors opened; we got off.
I made my way quickly to the end of the platform but realized he could be following me. There were several exits around, so I suddenly changed direction to go to another exit. He changed his course as well. Then I turned around again; he followed. I did this a few times, and he changed his path to match mine every single time.
Eventually, he caught up to me and approached me. He got closer and closer until I was up against a wall. A he smiled brightly at me, he said "Hello, how are you?" I was terrified. No one stopped to even glance at us, so I knew that unless I did something, I would not get away from him. I glanced to the right and saw a staircase. Without warning, I sprinted away.
Since I’d caught him off guard. It took him a few seconds to start following me. Somehow, the stars aligned and I managed to get on a train right as the doors closed in his face. That incident and several others of men following me home or in the street make me paranoid when I walk outside alone.
Pexels
94. Doom From Above
When I was seven years old, my mom gave birth to my little sister. My dad and I went to visit her in the hospital to check out the new family member. As seven-year-olds often do, I got bored, so my parents sent me to the kiosk right outside the main building to get an ice cream. As I was walking towards the kiosk, I cut over the lawn as it was a shorter walk.
Suddenly I feel and hear a really heavy thud right behind me. I turn around to see an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the warped, mangled body of a man in a hospital gown maybe 40-50 cm from where I was standing. The man had jumped off the hospital roof after receiving the news he had terminal cancer.
My mom and a lot of the others in the birth ward even saw the guy flying past the windows. The guy basically just fell short of taking me with him. A group of doctors and psychiatrists asked me to get emergency therapy, but I insisted on getting my ice cream and going home. To this day, I can still recall the thud of the body hitting the ground and his body lying next to me, clear as crystal.
95. Never The Right Time
While I was living in Denver, I had a friend fly into town to visit. The Denver National Airport was about 30 minutes away and her flight was scheduled to get in around 11:15 pm. At exactly 10:30 pm, I got a text message from her. She said: "I just landed. Are you here?" Assuming her flight arrived early, we immediately started rushing to the airport while I kept trying to call her, only to have her phone go to voicemail.
I thought maybe her phone had kicked the bucket or something, so I continued to refresh the flight information page on our way there. It just kept saying the plane was still in transit. We ended up getting to the airport before 11:15. With no word from my friend or new information about the flight, we circled the airport and waited...then I got a text that sent a shiver down my spine.
At 11:15 pm or so, I got the exact same text message she had sent me at 10:30 pm. I called her and I asked if she texted me while she was on the plane. She said there was no way she could have since she had her phone turned off the entire time. When I finally met up with her, I asked to compare our text conversations on our phones.
I had two of the same texts from her, one at 10:30 pm and one at 11:15 pm, while her conversation only read 11:15 pm. She confirmed that she hadn't typed it out prior either. Her phone was completely off. This glitch in the matrix made me waste 15 minutes circling an airport.
96. They Say He’s A Real Blockhead
We grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in my state. It was really rough. Anyway, 80s childhood being what it was, we used to ride our bikes everywhere, regardless of danger. Our home street was divided into three parts. The upper and middle parts were relatively okay in the daytime. The lower part was off limits no matter what, because that’s where the creeps and dealers lived.
We moved out finally and went somewhere a lot safer. Years pass. Our old neighborhood makes the news every so often for various outrages. One day, I saw in the newspaper that a woman had recently been found deceased in her house—she’d been sitting there for a month on her couch. It was already sad, but then things took a horrific turn.
When authorities showed up to deal with the situation, they discovered a big slab of cement in a strange place in the backyard. A neighbor told them that they’d frequently seen her at night sitting near and talking to the slab. If you knew how strange the people were in our neighborhood were, you’d have brushed this off as yet another weirdo.
Well, it turns out it was her husband. Only they weren’t officially married, so when he passed on—it was suspected to be natural causes, surprisingly—she couldn’t live without his Social Security check every month, so she buried him in the backyard and kept up the pretense that he was alive and living with his out-of-state relatives.
We used to ride by that house frequently when he was already buried in the yard. Oh, the 1980s.
97. Ronald McSecrets
This one time when I was little, my dad woke me up at like 2 am said "Get ready, we're going to McDonald's.” I was so confused and kept asking why, but he wouldn't answer anything besides, "because" or "to have fun.” The rest of my family—my two brothers, my sister, and my mom—didn't come with us and they were still asleep when we left.
The play place was closed, and we just kind of sat there for an hour or so eating, then went back home. To this day, I still have NO idea why he frantically needed me out of the house, and he swears he doesn't remember that happening, but the whole thing was SO weird that I kept the toy that I got from the Happy Meal to remember it by, and I still have it to this day…
It's my only proof of this weird freaking night that my dad (almost scarily) hurried me to McDonald’s at 2 am. I have two guesses why. First, my sister pooped the bed and they were worried I'd make fun of her. Or maybe they somehow noticed something like rats in my room? Were they worried I wouldn't be able to sleep if I knew that there were rats and they needed an hour or so to get them out???
Either way, a very strange night that my dad refuses to tell me the truth about, which only makes me think it's something much worse. Like. I'm 23 now. If he said "Yeah, your sister pooped the bed and we didn't want you to know," I'd have been like cool, nice, good thinking. But he REFUSES to believe that it happened at all. WHAT HAPPENED.
98. The Cabin In The Woods
My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin. I used to spend time there in the summer tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One extremely early morning, when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and told us it was time to go fishing. It was still super early and we were all confused because it was pitch dark.
He hustled us down to the dock where he kept his little fishing boat and quickly launched us into the water and away from the house. At this point we were all getting a little freaked out—but this was just the beginning. My uncle wasn’t talking. We just sat, shivering under a blanket at the bow of the boat, while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline and waved a flashlight furtively ahead of us.
We eventually arrived at my uncle’s friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled into his house. Our uncle sent us to the loft to sleep. He and his buddy locked the doors and left, not returning until well after sunrise. Eventually, our uncle showed up with the truck and trailer already packed with all of our gear, and he told us it was time to go home.
Many years later, my uncle confided to me that the reason he’d hustled us home was because he’d woken up around 3 AM to a strange “Thok! Thok! Thok!” sound from outside the cabin. He’d gone out to investigate, when a massive jack pine fell directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line.
Just in time, my uncle saw a man, holding an axe. The man slinked away into the dark of the trees and woods. He and his buddy returned to his cabin later, and had to take turns chainsawing the tree that fell across our narrow driveway apart, while the other stood watch with a rifle. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
99. Don’t Look Down
I was in class, and the teacher was asking us how our weekends were. The quietest girl in the class started to speak, only to break down in tears. She said she was on a trip in the mountains with her mom. They stopped to stretch their legs during the drive, then looked over the cliff, only to see an overturned vehicle with an entire, deceased family scattered around it.
100. Some Devastatingly Flawed Logic
I worked at a daycare. One of the mothers gave me the heebie jeebies. She would show up randomly and be like "my baaaaaaby, I neeeed my baaaaby." Like, moms love their kids and miss them, but her obsession with her daughter really made me feel weird. I should have trusted my gut when it came to this lady. It turns out that she was not at all okay.
Tragically, she ended up killing her daughter so that she could be an "angel." It really messed me up when I found out and I regret not doing anything to this day.
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