When you grow up, you might look back on experiences you thought were totally normal—and finally realize just how messed up your childhood really was. These people know that feeling all too well, and their stories are absolutely wild.
1. For Emergency Use Only
I slept over at a kid’s house who had a "pee jar" in his closet. It was a gallon pickle jar, and if he had to pee in the middle of the night, he had to use the jar—and it gets worse. Once his mom put him—and us—in his room for the night, we weren't allowed to leave his room until she came to get us the next morning.
How did they make sure of that? The doorknob was turned around backward so they could lock us in. Thank goodness I didn’t have to pee in the middle of the night.
2. The Night Woman
Walking with my grandmother at night along a gravel road close to where she lives out in the country. We were heading home to my grandparents’ house. Six-year-old me turns to my grandmother and ask who the lady who ran across the road behind us was. She turns around, sees nobody, and asks me to describe her. What I said made her turn white as a ghost.
Down to a T, I described a cruel woman who used to live not far away who was now 10 years deceased. I didn't live there, so I didn't think much about it but according to my grandfather, my description of the lady I had seen was so on point that my grandmother never walked alone there after dark. That was 29 years ago, and she still refuses to walk that road alone at night.
3. A True Nightmare
I was playing hide and seek at a friend's house when I was seven or eight. I was running to get behind the house and took the corner and stepped on top of the metal grate above the basement escape window. Suddenly, my life flashed before my eyes. The grate somehow gave way and I fell to the bottom, managing to scrape my legs arms and head as I fell. Then I saw where I was and just started screaming.
The bottom was dirty gravel strewn with the skeletal and still decomposing remains of countless frogs. To make matters worse, years of undisturbed spider webs crisscrossing was also triggered and I swear I could see the spider's eyes looking at me as dozens of thick booty spiders crawled frantically towards me to enjoy their feast.
I am laying at the bottom, blood seemingly gushing from my elbows, knees, and forehead as I started climbing the infinitely long ladder to the surface while screaming and crying. Each rung of the ladder was also covered in webs and spiders, who started crawling up my arms. I made it to the surface and my friend's mom tried to comfort me to little avail.
This series of events took maybe 15 seconds but felt like slow motion the entire time. To this day I have trust issues with any metal grate (storm drain, city sidewalk vent) and what I consider a reasonable fear of spiders.
4. Maybe It Was The Hamburglar
When I was like four or five, my mom, brother, and I went along with my dad on a business trip to Seattle. I have a distinct memory of being in a Taco Bell or a McDonald’s (I can’t remember which), but I remember waiting in line, getting to the front, and then my mom just taking us and leaving.
I remember being so disappointed, and my brother and I whining and complaining until we got to the next place. Well, a couple of years ago (I’m 28 now), it somehow came up in conversation, and my mom told us the whole horrifyuing story.
We got to the front of the line, and the cashier said, “Those men over there are robbing us; they have weapons. Take your children and leave now,” so my mom did exactly that and never told us what happened.
5. Parents Can Have Sleepovers Too
I went to a giant sleepover when I was 8 or 9 for a friend's birthday. He had all his friends over and his parents had also invited some friends over as well. As the night winded down, we all went into my buddy’s room to jam some Super Smash Bros. Fast forward to about 2 AM. Most of the boys had fallen asleep, save for a few of us.
I had to go to the bathroom horribly. I was holding everything in as I was terrified of using other people's bathrooms and making a mess or smelling up the place. Eventually, I asked my friend where the bathroom was. I still don't know if I misheard him or was just stupid and forgot the minute I walked out of the room, but I somehow ended up at his parents' door.
I opened it up full force—I will never, ever forget what I saw next. I found myself staring at his mother in bed with this dude who’d been at the party, while his dad was sitting in the corner with the dude’s wife. I opened the door so quick, they didn't even have time to semi-hide what they were doing.
So there I was, nine years old, frozen in place staring at his parents mid-swap with another couple. I still see their faces to this day. The only reason I know they were swinging was I could see every single one of their faces. They all just looked at me trying to process what just happened.
After a good five seconds of silence, the father finally yelled at me to get out and I just shut the door. I stood there for what seemed like hours. I finally made my way back to my friend’s room, completely forgetting about my full bowels, and just laid down. I laid there all night, wide awake, till 7 AM when my mom picked me up.
I never told anyone and NEVER went to another sleepover at my friend’s house or even went inside his house again, in fear of having to see his parents and having that talk with them.
6. The Pits
When I was about seven we were playing flashlight tag (essentially hide and seek in the dark) around the neighborhood and the spot I picked was in someone's backyard area by a trampoline. I'm sitting there and I started hearing some rustling behind me, but didn't want to move because I thought it was the kid looking for me. If I'd known what it was, I'd have run for my life.
Next, I hear a chain sound—and suddenly a pit bull latches onto the back of my leg and wouldn't let go. I lay there screaming until my brother finally found me. He gets the dog to let go and run away, but he took a chunk of the back of my leg with him. Doctors had to take some fat from my butt to patch it up and now I have a pretty sweet-looking wound on the back of my leg
7. I Dreamed A Dream
I woke up one night when I was 12 years old, because I dreamed that my older brother got into a car accident. I got out of bed and wandered downstairs to the kitchen to get something to drink. My mother was sitting there and asking me why I was awake. I told her: "I had a bad dream and needed something to drink".
I got a glass of water when the bell suddenly rang at our door. My mother went to look and see who was there in the middle of the night. Two officers were standing there. They asked if they could come inside for a moment. I couldn't hear what they were talking about because I was still in the kitchen and they were in the hallway.
After the two officers left, my mother came back to the kitchen completely pale and told me that I should go to bed now. I asked her what was wrong.
She informed me that my brother had been in a car accident and that she needed to wake up my dad and go to the hospital right now. When I pointed out that this was the bad dream I had before waking up, she only looked at me for a couple of seconds. That’s when she told me something I’ll never forget.
I prepared myself for a comment like, "Don't be silly and go to bed now," but instead she said, "Me too". So basically, we both had the same exact dream of my brother having a car accident. And we both woke up minutes before the officers came over to tell us that it really happened. Thankfully, my brother survived with just some minor injuries.
We saw the photos of the accident in the newspaper the next day. It looked 100% like it did in my dream. Even down to the smallest details. The way he lost control over the car, the spot where it flipped the first time, and the tree it came to a stop at. Even today, my mother and I still talk about this weird experience. Nobody else ever believes us when we tell the story.
8. Flesh Tunnel
I went to a girls' sleepover when I was in elementary school for a friend's birthday. We had a great time laughing and telling scary stories before bed. I woke up the next morning with a fever and terrible nausea. I went home and I was only getting worse. I had a huge spot on my leg right in the middle between my ankle and knee. It was hot, puffy, and red.
I went to the hospital. The doctor initially thought I was bitten by a spider, but it turned out I was suffering from a really bad staph infection. The night before, we were playing on the stairs, when I slipped and scraped my leg. The infection was spreading fast and was eating away at my flesh. I had a tunnel up to my knee cap that had to be packed with fresh gauze every day. I almost lost my leg.
9. Predators
When I was eight or nine, I won Kings tickets in a school raffle. My dad couldn’t go for reasons I don’t remember, and my mom is about as anti-sports as you can get. So I took my uncle with me instead. He mostly wanted to be in a private suite and suck down stadium food, so that's what we did.
He took me to the box, and there was this couple with us. They were probably in their 20s. Initially, they were kind of quiet and made very little small talk with my uncle. Then, he headed out to get some snacks, and the couple kind of slid over to me. Remember, I was at that “blushy-shy-kid age,” and the woman WAS rather attractive.
Then, the creepiest thing happened. Somehow—I swear that I don’t remember how—she asked what I would do if she kissed me, then bet me to let her. She kissed me, and I turned that kind of red you only see on stop signs. They had a HUGE laugh about that, which, of course, only made me blush harder and get a lot more self-conscious.
She started talking about doing it again, and I kind of did that thing little kids often do where they shake their heads and hide. She kept calling me cute, and then they said something about me going somewhere else with them. But my uncle came back with the stadium food, and they went back to their side of the box.
I was too dang embarrassed to say anything, and hey, stadium food is good, so I never gave it a second thought. When that memory resurfaced in my twenties, I went, “WAIT, WHAT THE HECK”!
10. Nightmare on Elm Street
I used to babysit for a family with three very young kids after school three days a week. On the parents’ anniversary, they asked me to babysit at night for the first time. When I got there at 7:00, the kids were already in bed and sound asleep. A few hours later, the oldest, a four-year-old girl, started screaming. Literally, horror movie screams.
I grabbed my phone, dialed 9-1-1, and carried my phone upstairs, expecting her to be chopped in pieces or something, me being next. I walked upstairs barely able to hold the phone, my hands were shaking so bad.
I turned the corner, and she was sound asleep, no one was around. The parents failed to warn me of their daughter's horrible night terrors, and were laughing about it when I explained the situation when they got home. NOT FUNNY.
11. A Fork In The Road
I was very young when this happened, so what I remember versus what I was told is the main scariness of this story. So my family was driving around the backwoods in the New Hampshire and Maine area. It was autumn and we wanted to watch the leaves fall. We were staying at some cottage, and my family came to this area pretty frequently.
We were coming back from somewhere when my mother started screaming at my father for stopping abruptly. In front of us, on an unkept back road in the deep woods of New England, at a pretty late hour, was a traffic jam of quite a few cars stopped in all directions. I remember a lot of bright headlights. I also remember seeing the terrified look on my dad's face as he turned around.
I then remember that he started reversing the car. My mom went completely silent through this whole thing. I just remember my dad saying eerily calmly, "Ughh, I hate traffic". He turned around and started driving back up the road we came down, and we started seeing cars going past us flashing their headlights. My dad just kept driving, saying absolutely nothing.
The whole atmosphere quickly went from "Wasn't that a fun day"! to "Let's leave". Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong. I went from annoying to quiet. Just a thickness in the air. Cars started coming up from behind, honking and flashing lights. Eventually, they just turned off the road and we drove back to the cottage. Decades later, the truth came out.
My dad and I were having a drink together. He says: "Remember up in the woods up north? We were driving around and we came to a weird traffic jam"? I was like, "Yeah. Why"? I honestly hadn't thought of it since that night. My dad goes, "Well, your mother and I were pretty sure that was one of those ambushes where they block the road and try to rob you and leave you in the woods or worse".
He continued: “You don't remember the cars coming up the road after us, trying to block us in? Or the cars chasing us and beeping at us until we hit the other route"? I said, "Well kinda, but I just figured it was traffic or people being weird". He just kinda stopped talking about it after that, and went on about how we should plant more trees in the backyard. So weird.
12. A Terrible Birthday Present
I am the first and only grandchild in my family, so my grandma was always very fond of me. She was always planning birthday parties for me, and every year she said she couldn't wait for me to turn 15 because it's a very celebrated birthday in my country. When I turned nine, I made a terrifying prediction to her.
I ominously told her that she wouldn't make it till then, and that in fact, she would only be there for my tenth birthday. I have no idea what made me say that. But the prediction came true. She passed exactly two weeks after I turned ten. My whole family still remembers this to this day.
13. The Man In The Big Blue House
When I was a kid, my family lived in a blue house that was oddly shaped. One year, the house got completely gutted and nearly destroyed by a flood. They had to knock down a wall between the living room and the kitchen. So after the flood, you could see all the way down the hall to my parents’ bedroom door. This house was and still is very strange, for lack of a better term.
I was a terrible sleeper as a kid and would routinely wake up and just go into the living room and watch cartoons on low volume if I couldn’t go back to sleep. One morning, I’m out in the living room sitting across the chair with my feet up on a window sill. Don’t ask me why, I was just a stupid eight- or nine-year-old at the time.
From where the chair was, I could see just over the kitchen counter down that hallway to my parents’ room. A movement caught my eye. I looked up and saw the shadowy outline of a man walking towards me, kind of near to my parents’ door. Thinking it was my dad, I said something like, “Hey Dad, sorry if the TV was too loud".
My dad is a notoriously light sleeper and would wake up from anything, so I assumed that this was the explanation for what I was seeing. Except there was no response. Within seconds, the weight of my foot breaks the window I was leaning it on, and my foot ends up going through the glass.
Again, I’m not sure if this is related or if I was just a dumb kid. Likely the latter, honestly. But either way, I screamed as loud as I could. My parents quickly woke up to figure out what was going on at 4:30 in the morning. At this point, I’m preoccupied, but I realized much later that I definitely saw the outline of a man.
But there was no way it was my dad because: A) He came bounding out of their bedroom after my scream, and B) I realized that the shoulders of that outline were much higher than what my dad’s would have been. Fast forward to a few years ago.
We’ve moved far away from the blue house, and my mom and I are hanging out and catching up. For some reason, the blue house comes up and I tell mom that the place still gave me creeps and that weird stuff happened there when I was a kid. My mom’s response floored me. She said, “Oh, you must have seen the shadow man too"!
14. A Deep Sleep
I remember waking up on our couch and being very bothered that I got taken from my nice warm bed, but I was too sleepy to say anything. My mom and dad were in the next room, screaming at each other, and then my mom came to me, crying and telling me not to fall asleep. I passed out. Then, when I woke up, I realized I was lying across my papaw’s truck’s back seat in the dark. Something was very wrong.
My mom was crying in the front seat, and my aunt was holding me crying. Papaw just stared straight ahead like he was mad. Later, I woke up again in a bright room, being jostled around and pinched. The next time I woke up, I was back in bed, and I thought it was all a dream. Twenty years later, I learned that my fever spiked at age three, and both my mom and dad unknowingly gave me medicine.
Those meds reacted to each other and I had a seizure, but my dad had to go to work and couldn’t be bothered, so my aunt and papaw took me to the hospital because an ambulance would have taken longer. In the truck, I was turning blue. The bright room was the ER, and the pinches were multiple IVs and tubes and such being placed.
I was there, out like a light, for three days.
15. When You're Too Good At Hiding
When I was about seven or eight, my younger sister and I were playing hide and seek in my parents' house. It was my turn to hide. My mother was taking a shower so I picked the lock on the bathroom door to hide in the bathroom cupboard under the sink. I was thinking I was a genius because my sister would never find me in there.
I sat for a while waiting for her to find me, then my mother finished her shower (she didn't know I was in there either). My father came into the bathroom as well. Long story short, they started going at it while I was in there and I was too scared, embarrassed, and utterly mortified. to move or say anything. So I did the worst thing ever.
I sat just frozen in position, petrified. After they finished and left, I stayed in the cupboard for at least 5-10 minutes disgusted by what I had just witnessed but unable to stop thinking about it. I made sure the coast was clear and made a run for it, just to find my younger sister sitting in front of the TV, completely forgetting that she was supposed to find me.
16. Hiding Behind A Costume
Many years ago, I was looking for a Halloween costume with my mom to wear to elementary school. This occasion was a big deal to me because I was homeschooled before that. We spent a couple of hours going to several stores, and couldn't find anything that I liked. It was getting dark outside, so we were going to have to find something and go home soon.
There was an old Halloween costume store, one of those really weird places that somehow is open year-round. We decided to go in and check it out, as a last-ditch effort to find something. We got out of the car and walked through the front doors. We then get up the steps to go into this place and something comes over me that I still can’t explain.
I felt huge, unbearable pressure all over my whole body, like the physical feeling of being hated by something. Imagine that feeling, combined with a sense of something wanting to hurt me and wanting me to leave. My little third-grade self turned to look at my mom, and in the same instant, she turned to look at me. It was extremely freaky.
We didn't say a thing to each other. We just turned around and went back to the car, after only walking three steps into the store. I remember getting inside the car and asking my mom if she had felt the same thing that I did. She said that she had essentially had the same exact experience as me. We prayed together in the car and left.
As an adult, I can still remember how bad it was. And I am getting tensed up just writing about it. On the bright side, I did end up with a costume that year though. We went home and my mom stayed up late with me working to cobble together a cowboy costume from the things we had at home.
17. That Pencil Really Came in Handy
A quiet kid in summer school was being constantly bullied by the loud and obnoxious kid who sat behind him. The obnoxious guy once called the quiet kid a very uncool name. Without missing a beat and in the flash of a second, the quiet kid spins around, sticks a pencil directly and completely through the kid's hand, and turns back around to sit front ways again.
It all went down so quickly that we were not even sure if it had even happened. If not for the pencil being physically stuck in the other guy’s hand, the loud screaming, and the pool of blood on the floor, we still might not have been sure!
18. Unsolved Mysteries: Sleepover Edition
When I was in elementary school, my sister and I got invited to a birthday party. Everything was going fine for most of the night, and then the catastrophe happened. The host's mom came down to the basement and was clearly very upset, but didn’t explain why. She then had each of us line up on the stairs from the basement to the ground level of the house and brought us in one by one.
I wasn’t the first in line but no one was telling us what happened once it was their turn. Finally, I was up, and her mom took me into the bathroom and showed me a trash can with a piece of poop in it. She was basically on the verge of tears, pointing to the trash can and asking me, “Is this your poop!? Is this your poop"!? It wasn’t.
We never found out whose it was, or at least I wasn’t told. We have joked that someone will finally come forward in their final moments on Earth, but my sister and I have since lost contact with those girls, so we may never know.
19. The Long And Winding Stairs
My grandmother was a real estate agent in Rhode Island. I was staying with her one summer and she had to take me along to see a potential listing. It was a very strange house because it was circular. All the rooms went along the outside and connected to each other, and there was a center part with a little garden that was open to the sky.
She went up to the second story, and I stayed downstairs because I wanted to walk around the loop one time. The problem started when I had walked a full loop but didn’t see the staircase that I had started from. I thought I must be confused, so I kept going to the next room. And I still couldn’t find them. At this point, I started to panic.
So I began running around the house as fast as possible, checking every room for stairs. And there weren’t any. Finally, I sat down by the front door and started crying. A little while later, my grandmother ran into the entryway room looking just as panicked as I had been. She started asking where I was hiding and why I was hiding and why I had not answered her calling out to me.
I never heard her calling out to me at all. Actually, the house seemed so still and quiet while I was sitting there that I was sure she had forgotten and left me there. We went home and didn’t talk about it really. Then, like 15 years later, I brought it up to my mom and asked if she knew anything or whether this was all just a crazy childhood nightmare that I’m remembering?
She told me she remembered it clearly, because my grandmother had called her and was absolutely spooked because she couldn’t explain what had happened and she thought she had lost me or that I had been taken by someone while she was distracted. She had apparently been looking for me for a while. I still don’t understand what happened really, because the house wasn’t even large or confusing to navigate.
I still get chills when I think about it.
20. A Miscarriage of Privacy
When I was about 16, I was snooping in my parents' wardrobe. Found a diary written by my mother when she was 14, from the year 1970. Read some beautiful and brilliantly written entries about meeting and dating my dad, who was 16 at the time. I had to read a little between the lines in some slightly later entries as they were written with such flowery language.
In one such entry, all of a sudden, she discloses that she's had an abortion. It was performed by my grandfather, who was an anesthesiologist. She never told anyone.
21. Glitch In The Matrix
While sleeping over at my friend’s house, I woke up in the middle of the night because I felt sick. When I opened my eyes, I saw something that made my blood run cold. My friend’s bed was empty and both clocks were stuck at some random time like 1:38 AM or something. I was convinced that time had frozen and everyone had disappeared.
I remember crying and being too scared to go downstairs to check another clock. Eventually, I went into his parents’ room and woke up his parents. That’s where I found my friend, who’d ditched me. Oh and it turned out the clocks were just broken.
22. Playing With Fire
A friend had a bunch of us over for a sleepover for his birthday. There was a group of us all around 10 years old, "camping" in a large tent in the backyard. Someone came up with the idea of putting gasoline in a two-liter bottle and seeing how quick it'd burn, but we didn't want to set it off in the yard, so we snuck out and walked down the block.
We planted not one but three two-liter bottles filled with gasoline and fitted with cloth rags for "fuses," lit them, and ran. Now being young and stupid, we didn't think there would be anyone driving that late at night, but of course, some poor soul drove by right as one of them went off. Luckily, the driver was a lane away, so there wasn't any damage that we could see.
So with that, we booked it back to my friend’s house and started goofing off until we heard the siren's from the fire truck. And yeah, we made sure not to tell anyone outside of that group what we did.
23. Look, Up In The Sky!
One time, my brother, his friend, and I all saw some lights up in the sky that darted around like UFOs. We went to get my mom and she was totally nonchalant about it. "Yep, those are UFOs," she said, and went back into the house. Her response was so subdued that we figured she was humoring us and that they weren't actually UFOs.
Years later, I asked her about it. That’s when she told me that she had to force herself to act calmly that day because of how terrified she was.
24. On The Ball
When I was young, I apparently had a few odd interactions with animals. For example, I would always know that a person had animals before we went into the house. They also tended to come over to me before my parents. These events were mostly just little things that were probably explainable by me being a fairly observant little kid.
The one that sticks out to my parents, though, is the time we went to a new car garage to have them work on our car. As we pull up, the owner has a big old black lab dog laying in the middle of the lobby. The guy informs us that the dog is comfortable with people, and that we can pet him if we want. I shake my head and say "He’s sad, though".
My dad looks at me and asks why I think that. I reply, "He lost his ball, so he’s sad now". My dad said that the owner immediately went pale, stared at me for a minute, and then looked at my dad and said, "He's had a favorite ball for ten years that just went down the sewage drain yesterday, and I couldn't get it back out". I have no idea how I could possibly have known that!
25. What Lies Beyond the Wall
I could lucid dream when I was a kid. I would actually get really excited to go to bed because I could decide what to dream, and then dream it. I had a recurring character in my lucid dreams, he was a boy my age with blonde hair. We would always play in this backyard/playground-type setting, that had a big brick wall on the edge.
One night, I dreamt that we really wanted to find out what was on the other side of that wall. We climbed a tree and the boy climbed onto the wall, looked back at me and waved, and went over it. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but the effects were chilling: I never lucid dreamed again after that. It actually caused me a lot of distress as a kid.
I legitimately missed him terribly and tried so hard to lucid dream again but just couldn't do it anymore after that.
26. Apocalypse Can Wait
My mother walked into my room one morning, waking me up to tell me that most of the world's population was gone. I spent the rest of the day as normal, eating breakfast, going shopping with her, going to a playground, then eating dinner—albeit, acting quite nervous throughout. The next day, she tried to make it clear that what happened the previous morning wasn't true.
I asked her if she remembered, but she told me she didn't. I'm certain it wasn't a dream because I recalled the rest of what happened the previous day to her—only to be met by her confirmation that everything I remembered was correct, right down to how shaky I was, and how upset I seemed. All except for the part that humanity was on the brink of extinction.
27. This One Will Leave You Breathless
My mum told me that she was once calling my dad, and was alone in the house. Suddenly, she gets a bizarre chill down her spine. My dad immediately says, in as calm a tone as possible, "Darling, start recording". Nothing else. So she starts taking a video and, although there's clearly no one in the room and you can hear both my dad and my mum, there is definitely some loud breathing audible.
You can clearly tell on the recording that neither person was making the sound, yet it was clearly being picked up. And it was LOUD. Not at all tiny. So I don’t think it was coming from the phone or a TV or anything like that. And it continued in the same rhythm while my dad was speaking. When I got home from school that day, I found a magazine on my bed.
It was the August 1952 edition of Autocar magazine. So I take it to my mum. Here's the weird part. It was my grandfather's. He had been deceased for more than 12 years at this point, and my grandmother kept it as it was the last magazine he had bought before he went on his tour of duty, and the only one he hadn't thrown away before his passing.
No one had seen it in almost five years. I just asked my mum for confirmation, and she did confirm that this event really happened. And now I am even more creeped out than I was five minutes ago.
28. Get Your Hands Off Me, You Dirty Apes!
Fifth-grade field trip to a zoo. During a tour of the primate exhibits, a notoriously ill-behaved student hurls a stick down into the gorilla habitat and it lands near an adult gorilla. Without hesitation, the now angry gorilla arms himself with the same stick and sends it back like a tomahawk to the boy with terrifying velocity and wildly impressive precision. The stick shatters around the boy’s face and he goes down. Commotion ensues.
More gorillas make an appearance and begin to scream at the group of horrified children. Zoo staff start piling in out of the woodwork to see what’s going on. The orangutans on the other side of the trail have now got wind of the situation and have begun mobilizing to assist their gorilla comrades. It's a battle on two fronts now.
Gorilla and orangutans launch volleys of poop and students scatter. Throughout the entire exhibit, all manner of primates begins their intimidating chatter and howling. An army of zoo staff has swarmed the primate exhibits and manages to stop The Planet Of The Apes.
29. Failed Experiment
In a physics class in Community College, a professor was explaining conservation of angular momentum and had a kid sit on a tall chair that spins. He then had the kid hold two books out with extended arms and then spin as fast as he could before telling the kid to pull the books in close to his chest. Think of a figure skater and how they spin really fast.
The kid immediately turns into a blur and the stool/chair starts to tip slightly until it rockets from under him like it was shot from a slingshot. The kid slams into the floor as if he got choke slammed and his head hit the floor in a way that sounded like someone dropped an overly ripe melon. The look on the professor's face said, "Well that was a good run. I guess I have to find a new career now".
Kid turned out OK and everyone got a laugh but it genuinely looked like I had just witnessed a death.
30. An Eary Story
About five years ago, my parents were sitting out on the back porch on a summer night. Out of the corner of her eye, my mom saw a person-sized white translucent figure float by a tree. She asked my dad if he saw it too, and he said yes. He is a tough guy, but he was really freaked out and so was she. So they both went inside.
The next morning, my mom was walking by the tree where they had seen the figure, and she noticed a very old-looking earring sitting on top of the dirt. She doesn’t wear earrings and it wasn’t the kind of earring I would ever wear. It looked like it belonged to an old lady and it was just dropped there somehow. My mom brought it inside and put it in her jewelry box.
The next day, it was sitting in the middle of the basement floor. From then on, I started hearing footsteps and whispering in my room at least once a week until I moved out.
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31. A Parting Gift
When I was three years old, my grandmother passed. She lived in our house with us and we were very close. She had told my mom many times that she would do her best to make her passing easy on me, since I was so young. The night that her life came to an end, my mom was lying in bed with her and heard her take her last breath.
My mom lay there and cried for about 30 minutes before coming into my room to check on me. It was about 5:00 in the morning, and there was no reason for me to be awake. But I was sitting up in my crib and playing when my mom came into the room. She asked me why I was awake, and I said: "Grandma Flo just came in to give me a kiss goodbye"!
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32. Sick As A Dog
It was a sleepover party for a friend's birthday. We were maybe 7 or 8. I was going to sleep on the floor with a sleeping bag. I wake up to her dog—yes, dog—walking over me like he’s blackout, smelling like pee, not responding to anything, but still walking around and bumping into everything. The parents refused to bring the dog to the vet, and the birthday girl acted like it was nothing new.
Basically, long story short, I watched a dog slowly succumb to a brain tumor at my friend's birthday sleepover.
33. That Wasn’t a Chicken...
My family and I were driving out of Bellows, a campsite/beach for military families in Hawai'i. I lazily gaze out the window and something catches my eye. About 30 feet away in a clearing before a metal gate leading into the forest, was a massive bird. Like eight-feet tall massive. It had a long neck, brown feathers, and very thick long legs.
My jaw dropped. I was still processing what I had seen when my dad said, "What the heck was that"? Turns out he had seen it too, and we both described it identically. No one else saw it, and by the time our brains had caught up with our eyes, it was too late to turn around. I will always regret not turning around. When we returned later in the day there was nothing there.
When we asked a security guard about it, he laughed at us. I scoured the internet afterward, and it looked like nothing I could find. At least, nothing that isn't extinct—it looked amazingly similar to one of the larger species of moa...but those lived in New Zealand thousands of miles away and went extinct hundreds of years ago.
This happened back in 2009, and to this day I wonder whether I saw a Lazarus species.
34. The Real Annabelle
My sister had this creepy porcelain doll with a black tear on its face in our room. It was a gift from an old aunt, and our mom put it away on the top shelf of a bookcase where neither of us could reach it. We constantly told each other ghost stories about how the doll was haunted, was hiding knives, and would shank us in our sleep one day.
Kind of weird, I know but we laughed about how freaky it was. One morning we woke up and my sister was covered in blood. We pulled off the blankets and she had gashes all over her legs and big sharp pieces of the doll all over the bed. We never figured out how it got off the bookshelf and into the bed, let alone how it smashed into pieces and cut her.
35. Some Excuses Are Valid
This was the one and only detention I ever received. I was in third grade, and had a math teacher that had this stupid policy that every math test, after she had graded it, needed to be brought home and signed by our parents and returned to her within two days. During that school year, my mom got in a terrible car accident, in which she got hit head-on by a semi-truck. She almost didn't make it, was permanently crippled, and spent several months in the hospital.
We had a math test a couple of days after her accident. My step-dad spent the whole week in the hospital by my mom’s side, no doubt stressed out of his mind and not knowing if she would pull through. He didn’t want to bring my brother or me to the hospital, as he didn’t know if we could handle seeing my mom in that condition.
My brother and I were left home alone all week, with neighbors occasionally checking in on us to drop off meals. Anyway, I hadn’t seen either of my parents in days, and obviously couldn’t get either of them to sign my test. When I tried to explain the situation to my teacher, she cut me off and said that she “didn’t allow excuses” or some similar stupidity.
Then she gave me detention the following day. Since I didn’t have anybody at home who could pick me up, I had to walk the two miles or so home from school after the detention was finished. A week or so later, when my brother told my step-dad about everything that had happened, he showed up to pick me up from school, which he’d never done before, as we took the bus to/from school, and absolutely tore the teacher a new one, almost bringing her to tears. The teacher never apologized to me, or looked me in the eyes again, for that matter, and I forged signatures on every other test that year.
Also, FWIW, I had gotten 100% on the test that led to my detention.
36. I Just Came to Say Hello
This was a while ago in high school, so I don’t know if I can really fault this guy for being an idiot—but he told everyone we knew that I was his dream girl and that we were going to get married someday. He actively sought out rumors about who I was crushing on, or who was crushing on me, or just about pretty much any guy who would talk to me.
He would then approach them and ask them to please, please, please let him have a chance and to not ask me out. The weirdest part was that I barely even knew this guy, and didn't even really talk to him much to begin with. I didn't even know his last name! Our whole relationship was literally just saying hi to each other during calculus class every morning.
37. Honey, I’m Not Home!
I was in seventh grade when my parents bought their first computer, so not super young. We had a small ranch, so my dad built a corner desk in the basement in one of the finished off rooms since there was no room anywhere else for it. The house had been built by my dad in the mid-1980s. No one else had ever lived there before us.
When my mom would get home from work, we’d hear her set down her keys on the counter and walk across the kitchen floor in her heels. It was a frequent occurrence for my mom to not be home, but for my brother or me to be on the computer and still hear sounds of her putting her keys down on the counter or walking across the kitchen floor.
This had happened to each of us quite a bit. It sounded the same as when she would get home from work. But when we went upstairs to check and see if my mom was home, she wouldn’t be home. We would tell my mom when it happened, and it happened enough where we tried to figure it out by checking the time we’d hear it.
A few times, she said she’d been thinking about work at that time and happened to look at the clock. We tried to figure it out and have no idea to this day why it would continuously happen. A few times, my mom mentioned she’d be on the computer and hear someone upstairs, and no one would be home. My dad didn’t allow pets in the house either, so it wasn’t just a cat being a jerk.
38. The Devil You Know…
When I was a little kid in the '80s, I got swept up by the Satanic Panic. I went to a Catholic school in a medium-sized city, and they really took it seriously. Everyone did. They convinced me that a cabal of devil worshiping fiends was secretly controlling the entire world, and I was determined to grow up and do everything I could to stop them.
My school had a lecturer who was a priest who was a supposed expert on Satanism, and he showed us a movie where some people slaughtered and ate an actual cat. They told us that it was 100% real. Little did I know, I was being brainwashed.
Sometime in high school, the whole thing just went away. It was as if one day, the Satanic Illuminati were out to molest every little kid they could find, and then the next day, they were gone. Eventually, I forgot all about the whole thing.
Flash forward to my mid-20s. I was in college, sitting in my apartment when all of a sudden I remembered the whole Satanic Panic. I remember thinking, “Whatever happened with that? Were they all caught? Did I dream that"? At the time, the internet was in its extreme infancy, but since my roommate was a longtime computer geek, we had it in my apartment. So I went online and looked it up.
I’ll admit I felt mixed emotions when I found out that 99.99% of it was total bunk. I was both relieved and angry; I was relieved for obvious reasons, but I was still angry because it generated a lot of fear in me when I was little. Little kids shouldn’t hear stories of ritual carnal cruelties and violent sacrifices.
Anyway, it was all very horrible, but I’m glad I got closure. Now it’s one of those things that people are comfortable talking about. Being an adult, I find the whole thing very fascinating.
39. Paws For Thought
When I was four, I vividly remember getting into my mom’s car. She kept telling me that our cat had passed. She told me how she rushed him to the vet because something was seriously wrong. Despite her best efforts, he apparently passed. I never knew why he passed and why it happened so suddenly, but I accepted that it happened.
Fast forward about 15 years—I was home from college for the holidays, and on Christmas Eve I drove to the store with my dad and uncle. They talked about the cat my parents got for Christmas one year. When I heard the truth, my jaw dropped.
My dad said, “Yeah, that thing was too aggressive. I took it to a farm and gave it away". Normally, when the family pet dies, the parents lie to the kid and say it “went to a farm upstate somewhere” to ease the burden. My parents told the opposite lie: they told me the cat passed to cover up the fact that they just sent it away to some farm.
40. What A Sweet Idea
Growing up, my family was poor. Yet, when I was 10 and all of my friends were having these crazy birthday parties with petting zoos, bounce houses, clowns, etc., my mother decided to throw me a birthday party as well. I would end up having a sleepover for my birthday when I turned 11. It was great—we were going to make ice cream cones! We got all the stuff out with my mom, but when she opened up the box of cones, they were all smashed up.
She explained that we weren’t having regular ice cream; we were having “magic castle sundaes” because the broken ice cream cones resembled the sections of a castle. We all thought this was great, and we enjoyed them. When my friends went home, they even asked their parents to make magic castle sundaes.
Two days ago, I found out that my mother was getting past sell-by foods behind the grocery store (the food was not expired, just past the sell-by date). She had no idea she got broken cones until she opened them with us. She thought of the magic castle idea quickly, and we all loved it. It just goes to show how stupid kids are.
41. Who Invited That Guy?
When I was about 14, some friends and I had a campout in one of our backyards. This was in a regular, older neighborhood in the city. Certainly not rich, but not a scary place either; just a working-class neighborhood. Anyway, I have no idea what time it was, but I woke up and made a truly horrifying discovery. There was this guy standing in amongst us as we lay there on the ground in our sleeping bags.
He was just looking at us. I freaking froze, but I was ready to scream my lungs out as I watched him through the slits of my eyes. After what seemed like a year, he stepped out from between us all, went over and hopped the chain-link fence and walked off down the alley. I immediately woke everyone and we went inside to tell my friend's mom.
Obviously, we finished our sleepover inside. That was also the last outside sleepover...ever.
42. Ouija Boards Are For Amateurs
I grew up in a very rural area of the Southern US. A middle school girlfriend was having a sleepover and later in the evening her mom came in the room. That’s when the weirdest night of my life began. My friend’s mom told us that she could talk to spirits through her daughter. She made her daughter drink wine and then hypnotized her.
I don’t know how long we sat in that room, but a lot of time went by with her mom demanding that the spirits speak through her daughter. Over time, her daughter admitted to all sorts of terrible things—supposedly all these spirits speaking through her. This was over 30 years ago and I still remember it with complete clarity.
I remember the daughter slumped over in a chair, slurring confessions of super dark stuff like hurting people, being hurt, etc. She told us sometimes spirits would manifest in such a way that her daughter would attack her and tear the house up. It was really strange. Her daughter was a very quiet girl, the things that spoke through her were not like her at all. It was beyond messed up.
43. Stone Cold Stunned
When I was in the ninth grade, I was at a new friend's house for my very first sleepover with her. The whole house was asleep, and I was still awake (insomniac), and I suddenly heard the LOUDEST crashing sound of glass I've ever heard in my life! My friend slept right through it. My only assumption was that her elderly and partially blind dog had knocked over an antique cabinet or something, so I left the room to check on the dog as well as investigate what had happened.
When I stood at the top of the stairs and looked down, I could see a man standing downstairs in her living room, and shattered glass was absolutely everywhere, and there was a BOULDER in the middle of the mess. Once I got a better look, I realized it was her dad standing down there, and when he noticed me, he shouted up at me and said: "Go call 9-1-1"!, which her mom was already in the process of.
The mom then collected all the girls, and she locked us in the master bedroom for safety. Once law enforcement arrived and investigated, they said that the boulder had been intentionally THROWN through the front living room window, and that two of their vehicles outside also had massive rocks shattered through the windshields. Later, I learned the bizarre reason behind it all.
It turns out that the older sister had thrown a big party the weekend before, and far too many people showed up. She had to start turning some teenagers away, saying she couldn't have any more people at the party. This group of guys from our high school were apparently so enraged about being turned away, that they came back the following weekend to mess with the family and destroy their property.
Once the windshields got fixed, the guys came back two weeks later and smashed the windshields again. The older sister ended up figuring out exactly who had done it, and not only did the family press charges, but all five of the guys involved got expelled from our school. The older sister also transferred to a different school afterward because of the embarrassment of the whole ordeal.
I never had a sleepover with that friend again…
44. A Morning Visitor
When I was 10 or 11, I woke up very early in the morning to someone driving down our long driveway. It was dark outside, but I just barely peeped out my window to watch a man look into all of our car windows, survey our flower beds, and finally peer into my bedroom window. I pretended I was asleep, and when I looked out the window again, he was driving backward out of our driveway.
In the morning I mentioned what I saw to everyone, but no one acknowledged hearing or seeing anything, despite the man’s headlights being very bright (maybe even switched to high-beams), and he slammed his car doors very loudly. But I can remember how scary it was having his face pressed against the window above my head, and praying he didn’t try the lock. No one believes me to this day. I swear it was not a dream.
45. Roses are Red...
When I was six, I had a girlfriend named Molly. I moved away the next year and never saw her again. For the next 40 years, one of my earliest and most vivid memories was me watching a six-year-old redhead girl running away from me and up towards her house, yelling, “Mommy, mommy, Jonathan kissed me"!, and her mother’s voice coming back, “Well, that must mean he really likes you".
A few years ago, I’d had a little sangria and decided to see if Molly was on Facebook—I know, I know. There she was! Right name, right age, right hometown, lovely red hair. I messaged her asking if she was the right redheaded girl. She wrote back that she was definitely the right Molly—and was happy to hear from me—but I’d got one crucial detail wrong: she’d only started dyeing her hair red after college.
Memory’s a trip, man.
46. The Talking Pumpkin
When I was somewhere in the four to six-year-old age range, I allegedly peed on my mother on Halloween. I was in my Batman costume and felt invincible. She did something that I didn't like, and I peed on her. Allegedly. I don’t remember this. What I do remember, is the jack-o-lantern that night threatening my life if I ever did it again.
Like it straight up spoke at me. It scared the crap out of me, and it terrified me for a long time. When I was a teenager, I said something about it to my mom and she started crying with laughter and told me the story. My dad had a small tape recorder, and recorded the speech and put it in the jack-o-lantern. So not unexplainable, but for years I truly believed I had met a sentient carved pumpkin.
47. It was Only a Dream...
My family was staying in this villa where my sister and I had to share a room, and we both woke up suddenly. The window was open, when it hadn't been before. I realized she was awake as well, and told her I'd had a bad dream, and as I started to describe it, she started talking along with me, describing the same dream.
In it, there was this black creature that looked like a bull; only it had shiny, scaly, plastic-looking skin, and was standing in the open window with this weird mechanical device. It somehow fired a projectile at the lamp in the room, which started rocking back and forth. Neither of us wanted to get up and close the window in case the thing was actually out there, so we called for our mum and she closed it and reassured us in typical mum fashion.
For months we would talk about that incident, and we could never figure out how we both managed to have the same exact dream at the same time.
48. The Remains of The Day
I swear this story is 100% true. So, in ninth-grade English class, our teacher assigned us to group work for the day so she could chill out and grade papers. She had a “teaching assistant” who was another student at our high school. We will call him "Tim". He was either a junior or senior at this time? So we're all working (see: messing around) at our tables, and Tim comes over and starts talking with me.
So, we’re on his phone looking at some fire 2013 memes, when a kid walks up and asks Tim a question about whatever dumb worksheet we were assigned. For whatever reason, Tim goes to help this student and leaves his phone with me. So of course, ninth grade me goes straight to his picture folder to see what’s up. So, what do I find? Nudes? Embarrassing pictures from last year’s Christmas party?
No…Tim's phone was harboring much darker secrets. Inside an album with an all-too-appropriate name were over 300 pictures of various poops in toilets. Thick poops, small poops, chunky poops, diarrhea... it was all there. I just kept scrolling down and down and it was just all poop. I was honestly just in shock, and as soon as Tim came back I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t see.
I had to know. "Dude. Why do you have so many pictures of poops on your phone"??? "Oh, I, uhh, those are all mine...I send them to my friends as a joke sometimes. Nobody’s ever seen that before". And that was it about that. Long story short, I found the poop folder.
49. That Was an Overreaction
The girls in our elementary school were given proto-sex ed before the boys. The basic puberty stuff—your body is starting to change, you might develop a chest, sweating, all that stuff. They made a huge stupid deal about keeping it quiet. It's the girls' little secret. Don't go spreading it around school. It only occurs to me now that that is kind of dangerous, in the wider scope of things.
Anyway, my best friend was a boy and naturally, I skipped right off to tell him why suddenly half the class had an assembly all by themselves. My teacher heard about it, got me alone, grabbed me by both arms AND SHOOK ME. “Keep your mouth. Shut". She was my favorite teacher up until then. Totally a great thing to teach a kid.
50. No Laughing Matter
So I don't actually remember this, but my mom has told me about it many times. My grandfather passed when I was only a year old. Prior to his passing, he loved to play with me and would make me laugh in this very specific way. The night he passed, my mom heard me making noise. So she goes in assuming I'm crying, but I'm not.
I'm staring at the ceiling, laughing hysterically just like my grandfather used to make me laugh. She's still convinced he came to say goodbye to me.
51. A Screwy Screwdriver
When I was a kid, my mom used to work at a small grocery store, and she always went there before breakfast to get fresh bakery goods when she had the afternoon shift. Then, she used to wake me up for school and ask how I slept, and I used to tell her what dream I had that night, if any. One morning, I told her about a dream that I’d had.
I dreamed that two guys broke into the store and then left a red screwdriver on the floor. My mom was shocked, because there really was a break-in that night. That was why she couldn't buy stuff for breakfast that morning. But since she had to come home and wake me up, she hadn’t yet talked with authorities or with her colleagues to get all the details.
I then went to school, my mom did the afternoon shift, and, in the evening, when she came home, she told me that the officers really did find a screwdriver on the scene, which had apparently belonged to the burglar. This all happened in Europe, in a small town around the early ‘90s, so there was no CCTV or anything like that at the time.
The burglar never got caught, but this was still a very strange experience. My mom made me fill out a lottery ticket the next day, but never won with it and never had such dreams since then.
52. A Very Stylish Ghost
When I was growing up, I lived in a small bungalow with my parents. My room was directly beside my parents’ room. I had a fish tank with a light and used it as a sleep aid. The dim light of the tank and the bubbling sound of the filter never failed to put me at ease. One night, I woke up, and what I saw made my blood run cold. There was an outline of a man wearing a trench coat and a top hat standing beside my bed looking at me.
Naturally, I screamed as loud as I could and my parents came running into the room. They turned the light on and the man was gone. They comforted me back to sleep and that's all I remember about that night. But fast forward about three or four years. I move my room to the basement and my parents knock down the wall to make their room bigger.
Their bed was now in the same spot that mine had been in before. Over the next year or so, I would constantly wake up to screams from upstairs and hear my mom crying. She would always see the outlines of a man standing in the exact place where I had witnessed it before. They even moved their bed to attempt to put it where the figure would appear, hoping to stop it from appearing.
It still scares me to this day thinking about that house, and I'm glad I'm nowhere near there anymore.
53. Down The Rabbit Hole
When I was little, I used to have this experience where all of a sudden, my perception of size and distance would get all wonky. I would look at everything around me, and things would all look small and far away. I always felt like a giant, yet when I looked at my hands, they’d be so small. This only ever happened at night.
To deal with the sensation, I would get up, go downstairs, and walk around a bit in the kitchen. Then, after some time, it would fade away. I told my mom about what I was going through but she just brushed it off. Fast forward many years later—it turned out that I had what’s called "Alice in Wonderland syndrome". Kids get it sometimes, and then the symptoms disappear as they get older.
Apparently, it’s harmless?
54. Beet The Odds
When I was in grade school, I walked from my house to school every day for about a mile. On my walk, I would always stop and give my vegetables to a homeless dude, so my mom would think I ate them. One day, while I was on my walk, a friend from my class pulled over with her mother. Her mother offered to drive me to the school with my friend.
I told her no. I had to give that dude my veggies, or else I'd have to come home with uneaten veggies and get in trouble. Also, I know now I could have just tossed them, but I was a dumb kid. Anyway, her mother got really pushy and insisted I get in the car, but I just continued on my way. That was the last time I saw that friend.
I was little, and we weren’t super crazy close or anything, so I didn’t think anything of it. Later in life, I thought about her and asked my mom if she remembered the girl. It turned out her estranged drug addict mom kidnapped her, and no one could find either of them. We lived close to the Mexico border, so they think she left the US.
My mom freaked out when I told her the story and was also kind of mad that I used to give my veggies to a homeless dude.
55. Hospital Heartbreak
I had meningitis when I was two years old. My baby brother also had it, but he passed. I had the viral for while he had the bacterial form. I grew up thinking I had it first, and I always felt like I gave it to him and that I was the reason he passed. I know I shouldn't have thought that way, but oftentimes, you can’t help what you think; especially when you’re a kid.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that he actually got it before me. I don’t know why no one had ever told me that before. Maybe they didn’t tell me because they weren’t aware that I always harbored this guilt about it since I kept everything inside. Not one person had ever mentioned to me that he had passed before I got it.
I was in the hospital for about three weeks, so it could have been before or during my hospital stay.
56. Fall From Grace
It was a sleepover in friend’s basement with four of us there. I think this was fourth grade. Sometime around midnight the host friend’s dad opened the door at the top of the basement stairs to ask if we wanted snacks, but right as the words started out of his mouth, he comes tumbling down the stairs and hit his head pretty hard.
He didn’t move for what felt like forever, and we heard from the top of the stairs some delirious yelling. Because I was so young, I thought that it was the host’s mom who was freaking out because her husband just tripped and fell. Later, I learned the disturbing truth. My other friend explained to me that the host mom was extremely intoxicated and had pushed the dad down the stairs.
57. Broken Telephone
I was at a friend’s birthday party in the second grade. His epileptic cousin woke me up in the middle of the night saying he wanted Little Caesar’s. I told him to go back to bed, because we could have Little Caesar's tomorrow. Nope, huge mistake. My friend, thank God, woke up and leapt into action. It turns out the poor kid was saying he was having a seizure...
58. An Earworm For The Eyes
All of my siblings and my cousins were having a big sleepover at my grandparents' house when my young cousin woke up me and my sister, and told us his bum was itchy. We were half-asleep and just told him to go back to bed, but he kept insisting it was really itchy and something was wrong. He pulled down his pajama bottoms. It was the most gruesome thing I’ve ever seen.
There were little white worms crawling from his bum and falling all over the place. My sister and I were horrified, and ran and got our mum, who then woke his mum. Needless to say, we all had to be treated for pinworms after that. Apparently it's highly contagious, and we likely all would have wound up like him from being in close quarters, playing all day, etc.
The image of his wormy bum is burned into my mind for all eternity.
59. A Glitch in the Matrix
When I was about four or five, I was in the foyer by my front door when I saw my father come in the house, put down his briefcase, and then walk to my mother to give her a kiss on the cheek. Then the front door opened again; it was my father—again. I looked next to me where I had seen him put his briefcase; it was gone.
I looked back at him, scared, and said, "You just did that". I have never hallucinated in the more than 25 years since this happened, and nothing like it has ever happened since.
60. A Transient Guest
My sister is 10 years younger than me. When I was in middle school, both my parents worked long hours and swing shifts, so I would take care of her after school on any given day. One of those particular days, my sis was napping in her bedroom, which was on the far end of the house, and I was watching TV in the living room.
I even remember very specifically that I was watching Clarissa Explains It All. The show was on commercial break when the weird thing happened. Aside from the sounds coming from the TV, the house was quiet as could be, when all of a sudden, from the other side of the house I hear a very decisive slam coming from within the house somewhere.
I remember sitting bolt upright and freezing in that position. I don't remember having any way to verify it, but I swear it was my parents' bedroom door that had slammed. Well, a full minute or so goes by before my sister—she couldn't have been a day older than three at the time—saunters into the living room with the sleepiest, dazed look on her face.
At that point, I was so jostled that I couldn't really speak. My sister was the one to break the silence to ask, "Where did she go"? As I regained the wits enough to be able to piece words together again, I asked: "Where did who go"? To which my sis replied, "The lady that was just talking to me". I have no way of really knowing for sure, but I'm certain that at that point I must have gone pale.
I distinctly remember the intermingled feelings of vertigo, nausea, and paranoia. No more than half a minute passed by before my sister shrugged it off and with humor in her voice said, "never mind" and went back to her room as if all was business as usual. I don't remember what eventually broke my paralysis or how long I was in that state, but I eventually got the nerve—after getting the largest kitchen knife I could find, of course—and did a perfunctory sweep of the house.
To this day, the part about the whole thing that sticks with me the most—and still sends shivers down my spine—is how nonchalant my sister shrugged it off. Almost laughed it off, one could say. It just didn't sit right with me. Something about her mannerisms that felt far beyond her years. Like a two-year-old adult.
Of course, through the years I've brought it up and she has always maintained not having any recollection of it whatsoever.
61. A Whisk Not Taken
I was solely responsible for washing the dishes in my teens. The only thing was, I was really bad about getting them done with any consistency, so I was always catching flak for that. When I was around 14, my mom noticed that she was missing some pots and pans and that the drawer felt light on silverware. So, she searched for them.
After turning the kitchen upside down, she concluded that I just did not want to do the dishes. She theorized that, in order to avoid getting in trouble for not doing them, I simply threw them out in the trash. The accusation stuck despite everything I said to defend myself. I caught backhanded comments and scolding about that for years.
Then, when I was 19, we visited a trailer my grandfather put on some rural property he owned. My mother then found a bunch of her dishwares. She realized she had left it there and that I never actually threw any of it away. My stepdad apologized to me immediately, but I never got any such thing from my mom herself. I resented her for that for a long time afterward.
62. They Didn’t Know ’Squatch
When we were kids, my buddy and I would ride our bikes up the road to this horse ranch that sat upon a hill. I have so many memories of that hill. Anyway, in the distance was another huge hill that was eventually bought and turned into a winery. Trees covered the entire hill except for the bare area that faced toward us.
Well, on one autumn afternoon, my best buddy and I spotted something very furry walking on two feet from one tree to another on that hill. This hill was hundreds of yards away from us, and whatever we saw was clearly bigger than us. As the sun was setting, it started to approach us. We. Freaked. OUT. Obviously scared the heck out of us, and we took off screaming down the road on our dirt bikes, away from whatever that thing was.
Many years later, I discovered that what my buddy and I saw was likely a bear walking on two feet. For nearly a decade, my buddy and I would’ve sworn we saw Bigfoot.
63. Falling For You
I’m not 100% sure this fits, because my mom confirmed it years ago and then denied it when I asked her again a couple of months later. Either way, here it is! When I was little, my dresser was long but pretty short. It sat against the wall with one of the ends pointed towards my door. That dresser was heavy, an old wood one with all sorts of kid stuff neatly arranged on top.
Since it was in my bedroom, the floor was carpet. And I always slept with the door closed. One night, with no explanation, the dresser tipped over. But instead of falling forward, it fell 180 degrees to the side, falling in front of my door. All of the kid stuff spilled to the side. My mom ran to get me, but couldn’t open the door as it was being blocked by the dresser.
Eventually, with her pushing and me pulling on the dresser, she was able to slip in and move the dresser out of the way. Nothing was damaged, not even the glass figurines I had on top of it. My dad helped put it back upright the next day and we all moved on with our lives. Years later, I remembered the incident and asked my mom about it.
I was fully expecting to learn that I had blown it out of proportion in my memory, and that it only fell forward or something like that. Nope, she remembered that night as well. However, she added one detail that I could never figure out. She thought she heard me jumping on the bed that night, and that was why she thought the dresser tipped over.
I had been sound asleep, so I have no idea where she heard that noise coming from.
64. The Not-So-Silent Treatment
At my parents’ house, I used to hear my mom calling out to me when she didn't. And she confirmed she'd hear me call out to her when I didn't. That was a common occurrence. Also, whenever I'd be alone for a little while, if my mom was late from work or at the grocery store, I'd usually be in the main living room playing video games.
I would often hear loud banging sounds from upstairs, as if a heavy piece of furniture tipped over. I'd go check and nothing was out of place. Both my mother and grandmother have confirmed similar experiences when they were alone in the house. There was also the time I was downstairs on my laptop and everyone else was in bed.
It was after midnight and I didn't realize just how dark everything had gotten without the lights on. I'm zoned out when I begin to hear it. What sounds like a murmuring coming from behind me. Like the low rumble you'd hear at a gathering when people are talking and you can't make out the conversation. The hairs on my neck immediately stood up and my body locked up from fear.
Tears ran down my face from the physical reaction my body was having. I refused to acknowledge it and kept staring at my laptop screen in silence. It took forever for my body to go back to normal. Some time later, I told my mother what happened and it freaked her out because she said she's heard the murmuring as well. I've always hated that house.
65. Lights, Please
Me and my friends used to visit a "haunted" mansion regularly when we were younger, hoping to see something weird. One day we did. It was a really large building, and it was always beyond me why someone would just abandon it and let it rot away. It was always apparent nobody lived there, so we got extremely spooked when lights went on in every single room.
My friends to this day swear they saw a figure running through the building at an incredible pace, not trying to look out the windows but just running really fast. I didn't, nonetheless, the moment they started running I also went full-on “Usain Bolt” mode. Since they still say it's what happened, I don't have any reason to doubt it.
So, either we saw something paranormal - or just a hobo that really liked installing light bulbs in an abandoned mansion, so that he can run from room to room just to scare people that are watching the building from the outside. Either way, for the rest of my life I for sure won't even remotely go close that building anymore.
66. Black Sheep
There I was, a seven-year-old kid in rural Utah. I was staying the night at my grandparents' house on Main Street. I didn't want to sleep, so around midnight, I went down into the basement. I took my Matchbox cars and played with my glowing "Better Blocks". I had this little metropolis going on when my uncle came down to play with me.
Should I mention that my great uncle passed when I was two? Well, he did. Anyway, my great uncle and I played for a good hour. I remember it like it was just yesterday. He drove Lincoln, because that was his favorite car. Anyway, it got late, and he had to leave so he wouldn't miss his train. He left, and I went to sleep.
The next morning, I asked when my uncle was coming back to play again. My grandparents were slightly offended that I bought it up. They hadn't seen him since before I was born and wanted nothing to do with him. He was the black sheep of the family. I said him and I played cars, and showed them the car that he drove in our city.
They were uncomfortable with this and chalked it up to my imagination. I had never met my uncle. Again, he passed when I was two. Over the years since then, I have learned that he drove both a train (for Union Pacific) and a Lincoln MKVII. As I said, I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't know how seven-year-old me knew things about an estranged relative who I never met and was never spoken of due to certain family issues.
To this day I don't know what happened that night, but I remember playing with some guy who said he was my "uncle" like it was yesterday. He was super nice, and at the end of the game simply left out the back door.
67. A Grandma You Don’t Want to Be Messing With
As a kid, every single time I made a mistake of any kind, whether big or small, my mom would immediately go and tell my feisty grandma. My grandma would then proceed to tell the ENTIRE family all about it. As a result, whenever we had family meetups, I would never hear the end of it. On top of that, this same feisty grandma would always tell me that I didn't know anything, and would then proceed to tell others that I didn't know anything as well if I didn't have an immediate and correct answer to whatever question she decided to throw at me on a given day.
This even included things that I could have no way of knowing at the time of her asking—such as what my work schedule, that someone else made and over which I had absolutely no control, would be like, even though I hadn’t been able to see it yet. I am still very insecure about things like that to this very day as a result of that environment, and I always start to panic and feel uncomfortable when someone asks me a question that I don’t immediately know the answer to even years later. I guess the lesson of this and other people’s similar stories is that, unfortunately, even one’s own family can be super messed up at times.
68. Cry “I Quit”
I started babysitting my neighbors a little before I should have. I was 9 years old, I think, and I had just put the two girls to bed. I went downstairs and turned on the TV. Almost immediately, I heard one of the girls cry, run to the bathroom, and slam the door. But this wasn't like them. I went back upstairs and tried to enter the bathroom, but the door was locked, and the little girl wouldn't respond, just cry.
I decided to check on the second sister. They share a room with a bunk bed. Both of them were sound asleep...But I could still hear the hysterical crying. I ran back downstairs, still hearing the crying. Their parents returned half an hour later, and we all went to check the bathroom, still audible crying. But something was different.
This time the door wasn't locked, and the crying quietly faded as we approached. I retired my babysitting career that night.
69. She’s a Poet and We Didn’t Even Know It
A little short blond girl in my class with a really cute high pitched voice was always very quiet, and usually kind of kept to herself. We would often see her sitting alone and writing stuff down while the rest of us were hanging out with our friends during lunch period. One time, someone decided to try and be nice to her. So, he went over and asked the girl what she was writing about.
She proceeded to read us a poem she had just written about how death is inescapable and how everyone will die. I think it’s pretty safe to say that this was not what even a single one of us was expecting to hear her read…
70. Talk Of The Town
This is sort of embarrassing. My mom got an IUD after my sister and I were born. Four years after my sister, a random priest stopped her in the streets and told her "Why are you stopping goddess Durga's will? She wants to gift you a son"! My mom was understandably freaked out. It's not like my family didn't want a son. Because, trust me, my family’s obsession with sons is real.
It's just that they didn't want another daughter, so they weren't trying. Anyways, a few days later, we had a kirtan, which is sort of like a musical prayer meeting. During the event, one of the ladies there claimed to have been possessed by the goddess. She started spewing out all sorts of crazy things that kinda make sense, but don't.
Super creepy, scary stuff. Anyway, while this is going on, that woman, mind you a complete stranger, straight up looked at mom and handed her an apple. She said, "Eat it and get that foreign thing out. I want to give you a son. How dare you deny me of my wish". Word spread like fire about this incident. Suddenly, half the town was interested in my parents' marital life.
My mom didn't budge though. My parents eventually met another priest who they considered their teacher. He said that they should try and let what's meant to be happen. Well, I had a brother within a year. That sparked the most exciting nine months our town had ever seen, since we didn't know the gender ahead of time.
71. Shut Down
I think about this pretty often. My mom and I were driving back from my grandmother's house in Chicago around dusk. While we were on one of the side streets in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, the lights in the car suddenly turned on and harmoniously got incredibly loud. I didn't know lights could make a sound like this.
They reached a boiling point and the whole car turned off. We looked outside and all the streetlights surrounding the car had blown out as well. The stoplights in front of us and a little ways away were all blinking as if the power had gone out. We were the only car in the area at the time. My mom turned the car back on and we drove away with no explanation—but it didn’t stop there.
After about 15 minutes on the highway, the whole car just turned off. We were able to pull over to the side of the road safely, and we turned it back on with no issues after that. I googled events similar to this around the time, but never came up with any answers or any other reports of this type of thing. I still don't know what caused it to this day.
72. The Last Visit
My mom said that I used to have “premonitions” when I was little, under the age of ten. My great aunt and great uncle were like grandparents to me and used to come visit in the summer from Mexico. I would miss them terribly then they would go. One year when they were leaving, I cried and cried. My mom said “Don’t worry! They’ll be back next year".
I remember sobbing and throwing a small child fit. Apparently, I said to my mom, “No, you don’t understand! Great Uncle Tío is NEVER coming back"! And she kept trying to reassure me that they’d be back next year. I kept repeating “He’s never coming back”! I didn’t say anything about my great aunt. Sure enough, he passed within a few weeks of going back home, and he never came back.
My mom said it was really creepy, and I also later predicted my great aunt passing as well.
73. You OK?
My Granny passed when I was little. I don't even remember her. My Aunt and Mom always told me this story. I was at my house when I was little, I think about four years old. The phone rang and I answered it. They got on to me for answering the phone. I told them it was my Granny calling to see if I was okay. I told her yes and hung up.
She had recently passed. They said they were a little creeped out by it, but insisted it really happened.
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74. The Night Is Dark And Full Of Terrors
I grew up in the deep South. As a child, we would take a winter trip up to Stowe, Vermont, to see my grandparents. While there, I would hear scary ghosts wailing outside the windows at night. It was terrifying! But once my grandparents moved south, we stopped going.
When I was in my 30s, I took another trip up to Vermont. During my first night’s stay, I heard the ghosts again! I freaked out until one of my siblings calmed me down and explained what was going on. It turned out, I was getting scared for absolutely nothing—the winter winds up north are just way different than the southern night winds. Suddenly, my general fear of the dark disappeared as I fully realized the source of the sound.
75. The Copycat
When we were young, my brother and I got a pair of kittens: a black one (mine) and a grey one (my brother’s). They got some vaccines, and sometime later, we woke up one morning to find that the grey kitten had grown. I thought, “Wow, cool! But why didn’t my black kitten grow too”? It was strange, but whatever. I stopped questioning it.
It turned out that the grey kitten randomly passed one night. My mom sent my dad out to get a new grey kitten so we wouldn’t be sad. All he could find was a slightly older and bigger grey kitten. So they told us one of his shots helped him grow. I believed that until late high school. My mom finally came clean to us one random evening.
76. Possessed
My first sleep over at my friend’s in middle school. His mom came in and put the “religious” channel on, which I guess helped him sleep all his life. I was on the floor in a sleeping bag and he was in a bed. I was so intrigued by the pastor I couldn’t go to sleep. But then, in the middle of the night, I got the scare of my life.
He sits up out of bed all a sudden and he screams: “I didn’t do it! It was him and it is over there"!! Multiple times. His mom runs in and basically soothes him back to sleep as he is repeating that phrase. I am on the floor stone frozen as she puts him down and leaves. He had a lot of weird sleepwalking moments, but that was my first experience with them.
77. Signs
I remember being seven or eight-years-old, standing in a smallish crowd of maybe 50 people alongside my parents, staring at the front porch of a white farmhouse at night, while a vibrant green light (almost like a green-gelled theater stage light it was so saturated and bright) shone back in my face. Someone was speaking intensely, maybe like an angry preacher, or the way someone whips up an angry group of people?
Everyone was staring and super focused on him. I remember all the adults being mad and feeling like something was coming. I can see this so clearly in my mind, and to this day I associate feelings of fear with this memory. But I have no real idea what it was and my parents swear it never happened. I still think about it sometimes and it sends shivers up my spine—like I’m forgetting the rest of what happened and it was bad.
78. Fast Forward
One day, I was punished by my foster parents for fooling around in church. The old woman got so angry that when we got home, she had me kneel in the corner as punishment all day long. I remember looking out of the window when I was taking a peek behind me, and time sped up as I watched the sun move across the sky in seconds.
It was early (after church Sunday morning) right up until the sun left my view from the window, and the sky was the color of sunset. It was so weird. It was a common form of punishment, but it’s a clear and distinct memory that I’ll never be able to explain.
79. Nature Can Be Cruel
I had a guinea pig in kindergarten that turned into many guinea pigs after I babysat the class guinea pig for Christmas break. My parents were thrilled... (not). Anyway, my teacher took the entire guinea pig family back to her house—she was supposed to sell them, and then give back my guinea pig. They never returned, and my parents told me they all got sold together as one big happy family... But it was all a big, fat lie.
I didn’t find out until I was maybe 25 that a coyote actually got into the cage and they all got eaten together as one big happy family. This is the way.
80. Nine Lives Weren’t Enough
I once had a sleepover birthday party with around eight girls. We're camped out in the living room gossiping, as tweens do. Slowly falling asleep. Around 3 AM, the worst howling you could imagine came from the center of our group. We wake up to find my cat, Helen, seizing on the floor and in the final throes of her life.
She's spraying pee as she contorts her body into horrifying positions. Immediately, the gaggle of girls start screaming at the top of their lungs. My parents come running downstairs, but the damage is done. They wrapped the cat up and took her away. Promised to take her to the vet in a few hours. Told us whatever we needed to hear to get us to calm down.
Helen didn't need a vet. She needed a hole in the ground. So, yeah. I literally lost my cat in the middle of my birthday sleepover.
81. Worm Theory
I clearly remember my mother explaining a concept to me when I was around six or seven, something she called "Worm box theory". Basically, she explained it to me like this: Suppose you have a wardrobe full of boxes with worms. Each box represents a specific time period, and each worm a human being. If you remove a box, you remove a certain time period, and the humans that lived during that time.
In the same fashion, if you take a worm from one box and put in another, you remove or add a person to a different time than the one in which they lived. I clearly remember with graphic details how she explained how the boxes and the wardrobe works, and how the removing and adding worked. She seemed like she genuinely believed what she said.
She claimed that there was a man (god?) that controls the boxes, and that one day he’ll say, “stop” and all the worms will stop moving, and the frail or sickly ones will die. Only when he says, “begin” will they restart their lives. My mother claims nowadays that she has no idea what I'm talking about, and that such a thing never happened.
82. Your Lot in the Gene Pool
When I was a kid, my mom was a pretty messed up person, so I have an endless list of stories that I could offer on this subject. The one that comes to mind right now is the time she sent me to go pick up my younger brother from the pool. I, being an active 13-year-old kid, decide to join him and start playing with his friends instead.
I guess she got tired of waiting around for me and decided to come to the pool to check up on us. She showed up and found me in the pool (yes, wearing my regular street clothes, shame on me!) playing Marco Polo with the guys. She yelled my name, took her slipper off, and threw it at my head in front of everyone there.
Then she started calling me names like promiscuous for daring to swim with boys. Every guy there went quiet. I think the silence was one of the most unbearable things about this situation. It still prickles my skin when I think about it. I was so utterly embarrassed that I didn’t know what to do. I vividly remember that walk home, my head down in shame the entire time.
In hindsight, I can't believe that I actually thought I had done something horribly wrong. I cried myself to sleep. What's funny is that she didn't even ask my brother to come back with us. Screw you, Mom! I'm very glad that our relationship is much better now than it was back then, but you still made my childhood a living nightmare, so screw you!
83. I Don’t Know Where It’s Been
So, I really overheard this conversation, but I did look during a long silent pause to see my dad actually on his knees, begging my mom to engage in intimate acts with him. I couldn’t hear what he said to her, but I did hear my mom stand her ground with, “It’s my body and it’s my choice. I don’t want to and you can’t force me to".
Obviously, at the time, I wasn’t supposed to hear any of that conversation, and even now I’m not supposed to know that my mom was concerned because my dad was cheating on her, hooking up with tons of other women in multiple states, and she was worried about her safety. But I do. I don't think I could ever bring myself to tell her.
84. Something to Be Thankful For
For some inexplicable reason, my mom decided that it would be a good idea to casually tell everybody at Thanksgiving dinner at her boyfriend's house about my tween bouts with anorexia. I didn't want to be there in the first place, and she just kept going on and on about how I used to just eat carrots for dinner for a year. It got so bad that I eventually had to shout at her to get her to stop.
85. Poetic License
A classmate of mine who I barely talked to came up to me on Valentine's Day and handed me a box of chocolates and a huge teddy bear with my name sewn into it. A bit weird and unexpected, yes, but I was appreciative of the gift nonetheless. It started to really get uncomfortable, though, when they handed me a drawing of myself.
In the drawing, I was leaning on a motorcycle in VERY revealing clothes (which I would never have worn in real life). He then proudly proceeded to recite a 2-page love poem that he had written about me, loudly in public, while I was with my friends. The poem referred to me as his princess, the love of his life, all that kind of thing.
I rejected him and never spoke to him again.
86. It Seems Like You Didn’t Get Much Sleep That Night...
When I was ten years old, I had invited two of my best friends (one boy and one girl) to sleep over at my place for the night. My dad, being the oversharing chatterbox kind of guy that he has always been, proceeds to tell my two friends the story of how I was conceived in the back of a car on a cold night somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
I was beyond mortified and my friends were just as uncomfortable as I was as the story was going on. When he finally left the room, we all collectively agreed to just ignore that whole ordeal and pretend that the conversation had never happened for the rest of the evening. A few minutes later, dad was back! This time it was to bring us some cake to eat out in the lounge.
He was wearing nothing but his tighty whitey undies and a bow tie as he made this special delivery. It was a rough night to say the least…
87. Too Young for That Kind of Candy
I haven't babysat in a while, but when I was a teenager, I watched two kids up the street. The mother was single and had another single friend with two kids, so I usually watched them all. I knew they went out to party—which was fine because they'd come home drunk and pay me more than I expected. What I didn't know is how much they partied.
One evening, I went upstairs to get money for pizza. I found both moms in the bathroom snorting white stuff. The worst thing was when they offered me some despite the fact that A) I was about to spend the night watching their young children and B) I was only 14 or 15 at the time.
88. Not Very Lutheran of You
I was in Lutheran elementary school despite not being Lutheran. In third grade, we were talking about baptism, and the teacher asked for everyone to raise their hands if they had been baptized. I was the only kid who didn't raise my hand, and I was already kind of a weird, picked-on kid. A boy in the class said that not being baptized meant I was going to burn forever.
When I started crying and asked the teacher if that was true, he said that it was. I felt awful for the rest of that day and my classmates definitely did not let up picking on me.
89. I Believe It Can Fly
Okay, I’m not even joking when I tell this story. So I was around five years old at the time, and my parents were driving on the highway with me in the back seat. Out of nowhere, in the broad daylight, my mom screamed. I looked out the window and saw one large wing followed by a claw-like foot. Whatever animal it was, it was huge and reptilian.
This might be my five-year-old brain exaggerating memories, but my parents saw it too. My mom was the only one that saw the full thing, and she swears to this day that it was a pterodactyl. And if my memory is at all correct, she was right.
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90. Lace To The Finish
The shoelace. I woke up one morning and the shoelace from one of my sneakers had completely vanished. Just on one shoe. The lace on the other shoe was still there. I do not ever remove the laces of my shoes. The shoes were right beside me by my bed all night. I have always, always been a ridiculously light sleeper. The slightest sounds wake me up.
Nothing woke me that night. Moreover, the door was closed to my room, the floorboards creaked whenever anyone stepped on them, and the room was small. I 100% would have noticed someone coming in. Nothing else was disturbed in the entire house. Nothing had been moved or taken. No signs of forced entry.
My mum noticed nothing all night. She also has no sense of humor. There was nobody in the house aside from me and her, and nobody but us had the keys. We didn't have mice, and there were no traces of the missing lace anyway. There is absolutely no way that the shoelace could have gone missing. It was the weirdest thing I had ever experienced.
My mum remembers the incident well. But as soon as I mention it, she immediately doesn't want to talk about it because it freaks her out. I guess I can’t blame her for that. I am convinced that either somebody broke into the house and did NOTHING except take a single shoelace, or the house was haunted and a ghost took it.
91. Knowledge That Will Come in Handy
I distinctly remember sitting in the front seat of a van with one of my mother’s acquaintances whilst she went to collect something. The guy told me in detail about cutting up, cooking, and eating human beings. He said that palms were a delicacy you could fry up like bacon. It only occurred to me as an adult that either I imagined it, he was lying, or he was a crazy person.
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92. Window Shopping
According to my parents, when I was a young kid, I would frequently cry at night because the "man in the window" was scaring me. My room was on the second floor. Also, my mom once saw him too. I wish I could remember what I saw more clearly so I could form an opinion on what it might have been, but I was too young at the time. Either way, it’s some pretty spooky stuff!
93. The Moor The Merrier
My older sister just told me about this. When I was about two years old, we were driving through the Yorkshire Moors. I pointed out of the window and said “There are deceased children buried up there". Those who know their history know that this is true, but I have no idea how I could have known that as a toddler. My dad confirmed this story a few years ago.
Apparently, he almost pooped himself when it happened, because it was late at night and the car was on its way out after a 200-mile journey from Scotland.
94. A Quiet Storm
One day, me, my parents, and my sister all went to bed early, at around 7- or 8-ish. We were all incredibly light sleepers, and we typically woke up at the tiniest noise. Also, the floorboards downstairs were extremely creaky. Anyway, we woke up the next morning to make a disturbing discovery. The house was extremely messy. Like, nothing was the way we had left it the night before.
The foot stool was tipped over, all the contents inside of it had come out, the kitchen was a mess, the toys in my bedroom were all out, my parents’ clothes and washing were just splayed everywhere. There was nothing in the house that had remained untouched, not even our air hockey table.
95. An Old Friend
When I was a small kid, I once had a bad night where it sounded like someone was in my room. The grunting sound was later identified as my mom snoring, but there was one noise in particular that stood out and never got cleared up. It sounded like my neighbor was talking, only I knew for fact that he was away in another country at the time.
I also saw apparitions of a man walking around in my room. When I was a bit older, I asked my mom about it one time and she was like “Oh, that must have been your great-great uncle. He still walks around the house sometimes to check on the family". Surprisingly, I wasn’t creeped out when I heard her say this. It’s kind of cool to think that a deceased relative is looking out for us.
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96. Just Passing Through
When my parents got divorced and I was in middle school, they bounced around houses a lot. My dad was renting this house that was pretty nice and in a normal upper middle class neighborhood. One day, I’m playing Kingdom Hearts 2 and, out of the corner of my eye, I see my dad walk into the living room, pass to the right of me, go into the kitchen, then walk back into his bedroom.
A few minutes later, I don’t know why I even asked this as I wasn’t scared or even consciously paying attention to what my dad did when he walked into the living room, but I walked into my dad's room and was like, “Hey, you just walk into the kitchen for something"? He looked at me with wide eyes and I immediately got goosebumps.
He responded, “No. Why"? And I was like, “I thought I saw you walk into the kitchen". He told me he’d seen THE SAME EXACT THING out of the corners of his eyes ever since he moved in. He was completely shaken up. Like I’m not kidding. We moved out pretty shortly after, and nothing weird has happened to us ever since. That house was suspect.
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97. Keeping Your Head Above Water
When she was still a baby, my mom once found my little sister completely submerged and drowning in the backyard kiddie pool while I just casually played in the water next to her, either not noticing or not caring. I was either four or five years old at the time, and my mom said she was creeped out by me for a while after that. Years later, as an adult, I saved my brother from drowning and redeemed myself.
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98. Field Of Nightmares
When I was 10 years old, I often visited a friend who lived around four miles away from me. To get there, I had to walk next to a huge cornfield with only a couple of houses on the side of it. After spending some time at his house, I had to walk back home. The street I walked on was mostly empty and there was rarely anyone walking their dog or jogging there.
So I was alone on it with no one around most of the time. The houses were always empty and looked like people simply left them behind and nobody new moved in, with windows barricaded and doors always shut. One day, I walked back home and my shoelace came loose. I bent over to tie it. All of a sudden, it happened. I saw a shadow reaching over me.
I quickly looked behind me and saw an old lady with short black hair. She was standing right behind me and had the scariest smile. She then started reaching for my shoulder, only a few inches away from me. I immediately started to run for my life, only turning around one more time to see her still standing there and still staring at me with her evil smile.
I ran all the way to my house and broke down crying when I got home. My parents told me that nobody lives in those houses. I walked by the house a few more times over the last 11 years, but I have never seen anyone near that house ever again and it is still empty. I have no explanation for what happened that day. But I get shivers just writing this story.
99. Not As Imaginary As You Thought
As a young child, I used to have an imaginary friend. My parents found that cute and, one day, they decided to ask me what this imaginary friend looked like. I said he was a grown up man who always looked very sad. They asked around and a neighbor informed them that the renter before us had fit that description. They also informed them that this man had taken his own life.
100. Possessed
I had a real jerk as a cousin. He used to feed me all sorts of lies. One day, when I was around five years old, he told me that our neighbor, a man of around 35, had slain someone with a knife in the street. So, as usual, I went to my parents to confirm. And guess what! It was true! This seemingly nice neighbor had just lost his mind one day, threw a public meltdown, and took someone’s life out in the open.
101. A Tragic Course Of Events
When I was a kid, I once dreamt of our family car accident the night before it happened in real life. My parents confirmed that I spoke about it as soon as I woke up, and it actually ended up happening the next day. We lost my brother just like how I saw it in my dreams, something that I have not been able to explain. Maybe it was just a one in a million coincidence.
102. Floating On Air
I used to have night terrors when I was around the age of eight. Apparently, it's fairly common in prepubescent boys. For those who don't know, a night terror is basically a very vivid nightmare, filled with screaming, flailing, extreme fear, and, in my case, appearing to be fully awake with my eyes open and talking. I don't remember any of these episodes, but my parents and older sister do quite well.
There was one in particular. It included the usual screaming and what not. But when my mum came in to calm me down, I was seated on the bed completely silent and in fear. I was pointing at the corner of the room. She asked what was wrong and I basically described a corpse floating there, as if suspended in water, and I was adamant that it was there.
103. How Rude-Olf Her
When I was 10, my godfather gave me 20 dollars as a Christmas gift. However, the money had disappeared by the end of the dinner. For years, my parents blamed me for being irresponsible with my money. Years later, we figured out that my cousin’s fiancée at the time was a kleptomaniac—after she got caught stealing stuff from my aunt’s house. It turned out she was the one who took the money.
104. Stay Together For The Kids
I was at my friend’s house when his dad's mistress came over. Apparently, this lady wasn't a secret. His mother knew of her existence and it had justifiably been putting a strain on their marriage. My buddy and I hid in the basement while the wife and mistress were screaming at each other upstairs. Shockingly, this did not end in divorce.
105. He Stood Corrected
When I was six or seven years old, I visited my dad at the place where he worked... or so I was told. I remember remarking about it at the time, and people laughed at me because I said it looked just like a prison. The people laughing were the guards, and I was indeed visiting my dad at the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, where he was a federal inmate.
106. Yesterday’s Disgusting Discovery Is Tomorrow’s Hot Food Trend
When I was a kid, I slept over at a buddy’s house for the first time. The next morning we woke up and his mom made us a couple of bowls of cereal. The milk tasted really sweet, even for my child taste buds. Something about it all just seemed off. That’s when I witnessed it—something so gross, I still remember it to this day.
Just as my buddy finished his bowl of cereal, his mom came over and turned the bowl on its side to pour the leftover milk from the cereal bowl into a milk carton. The mom then did the same with hers. I felt my face turn red with shame and embarrassment and my stomach turn. Horrified and confused, I asked: “What is that? What are y’all doing"?
He turned to me and said, completely seriously: “That’s our cereal milk". It turned out this sadistic freak and his ENTIRE family poured all of the leftover milk from each bowl of cereal back into a separate milk carton, specifically for cereal. I drank this entire family’s backwash. CEREAL MILK. Used. Cereal. Milk.
107. How Awful
When I was little (around six or eight years old, maybe), my mom, brother, and I were on the train traveling home from visiting family. Suddenly, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, and we just sat there confused for a minute until my mom saw something outside and gasped, “Don’t look out the window”.
Naturally, this piqued our curiosity, and we clambered all over our mother to get a look out the window while she tried and failed to hold us back. There was nothing there—just some sticks and maybe some paint. We were like, “What gives”? My mother laughed and said, “Gotcha! Were you scared”? We both slumped back into our seats, disappointed, and waited for the train to start moving again.
She told us years later what she really saw that day... The truth sent chills up our spines. Someone had jumped in front of the train. There was just no way we could have recognized what we were seeing as a human being, and my mom managed to just play it off like it was nothing, even though it must have been a truly horrifying sight to somebody who knew what they were looking at.
Wikimedia Commons, Vince pahkala
108. A Nasty Surprise
When I was about five years old, I woke up to the snow outside our house finally starting to melt. That’s when I noticed a girl "asleep" in the garden. I went and told my dad. He took one look and his face went white. He told me to go play in my room. Turns out, the girl had been "asleep" in our front garden for about two weeks, buried and frozen under the snow.
I didn't know she was actually a corpse until I was about 16, when I mentioned to my dad, "Remember that girl asleep in the garden"? Dad was like, “You idiot, that was a body". As far as I know, she was in her late teens or early 20s. We lived in a pretty rough area at the time, and she had probably been out partying, sat on our garden wall, and passed out.
109. Off The Playground
My cousin disappeared. This happened seven or nine years ago. I think he was 14 or 15 when it happened. He was kidnapped from the playground he was playing in. They put him in a van and drove off to the nearby city. However, his kidnappers made one huge mistake: They left him in the van to get some food, and that's when my cousin made his great escape.
He said a kind auto-rickshaw driver helped him call his dad who was living in the same city at the time. But that's not the most terrifying part. Turns out, the perpetrators were organ traffickers who were planning on harvesting his kidneys. Even typing this out is terrifying.
110. The Great Deceiver
When I was six years old, my aunt, who was my guardian, faked my grandmother’s passing. She lied to all of us—local churches, her friends, and strangers—for sympathy and money. She wrote to multiple people asking for support. She needed money for a headstone and the funeral, etc. People bought into it hook, line, and sinker.
So you can imagine our surprise a year later when we received a letter from our grandma saying she was coming to see us.
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