Friends and family are supposed to be supportive, right? Even when you tell stories that seem too unbelievable for real life? Well, these Redditors proved that to be false. From strange animal antics to unexplainable figures, these stories sound like they could be fictional movie plots. Do you believe them?
1. The Man In Black
One time after school, my friend and I were hanging out in her room on the computer, and we heard the front door open and the little "beep beep" alarm go off which goes off when a door or window is opened. We both looked at one another, confused, since both of her parents weren't supposed to be home for several hours, and we both got a weird vibe from the sound.
So we slowly crept to her door, she literally grabbed a bat, and we opened the door and peered down and over the banister to the living room below. What we saw was seriously chilling. I SWEAR TO GOD there was a man in a business suit, with a briefcase, just standing in her living room. The front door was wide open behind him. And my friend was like, "Who are you?! Get out of my house”!!
And he just slowly looked up at us, like he was totally stoned or confused, and was like, "Wha? ...oh...sorry..." and walked out and shut the door. That was almost 15 years ago, and we both STILL remember it and talk about it to this day. At least someone else was with me who saw it! But nobody else believes us when we tell them.
2. Great Balls Of Fire
I was at a New Year’s party at an apartment that was on a golf course. I hadn’t been drinking that night but nearly everyone else was and it was late, so most of them were getting very sloppy. My (inebriated) buddy and I left to go get some Taco Bell, and when we came back we decided to go take a leak in the nearby sand trap.
As I’m looking up I saw an orange ball that was slowly creeping sideways. Confused, I asked him, “Do you see that”? He was confused too and said, “Oh, I know what that is. It’s one of those lantern things you light and it flies up into the sky”. Since it was New Year’s, I totally believed him, but it still looked curious and didn’t have any flicker like a Chinese lantern would have.
As we’re still peeing and looking at the orange ball, out of nowhere another one comes and quickly surpasses it and then the first ball chases after the new one and then they disappear. My friend said, “What in the world was that!? Did you see that”!? I confirmed I had seen the same thing and we both went inside and started talking to people about it.
They either didn’t believe us or didn’t care, but it was absolutely wild. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. and a few points that make it more fascinating is: 1. They were both the same size and brightness which makes me believe they were at the same altitude. 2. The second orb suddenly appeared and it was a clear night from what I remember, so we should have been able to see it approach sooner than we did. 3. The first orb took a second to respond to the second orb.
The interaction I can best compare it to is a kid walking down the street and his friend sneakily running up behind him and saying, “I bet I can beat you home”! If it was a lantern and a sudden gust of wind, the first lantern would have at least started to accelerate before the second orb reached it, but it didn’t. 4. Just like my second point, they both disappeared just as suddenly as the second orb appeared and that shouldn’t have happened either.
The whole interaction was odd and I don’t tell it to really anyone because there’s nothing too fantastical about it besides the fact that it’s another person’s UFO story.
3. My Hero
When I was eight I lived in a trailer park in Florida. One whole row of trailers were unoccupied, with no power and no water. As any eight-year-old in the early 90s, I played around them, because it was fun. If you've been to Florida you know what fire ants are. If you've lived in Florida you know how they react to having their hills stepped on.
So eight-year-old me, not paying attention, wearing shorts, stepped calf deep into a fire ant mound. Yea, you know where this is going. Instantly my leg was covered in biting, stinging fire ants. A lot of them. Easily 100. Of course it hurts. I start screaming and stomping. That just angers them more. No more than what felt like instantly, this man comes running around the trailer with a water hose. He sprays my legs off and tells me to run home to my mom. I do. Never saw the man before or since.
4. Squirrely Situation
About ten years ago, I was looking out my grandmother's back door. Two squirrels were playing in the yard. A hawk swooped down and grabbed one. As it was batting its wings and gaining altitude, the other squirrel raced up a nearby tree, leapt off, rocketed down into God's Own Doom From Above, and rescued his friend by curb stomping the hawk out of the air. They both ran away and the hawk limped off in confusion.
5. A Lightbulb Moment
We had a shed in our garden with some couches and a TV. My dad always used to nap there after dinner. At one time he installed a light there with a movement sensor because in the winter it would be a bit too dark to find the keyhole and the light buttons inside of it. (And to scare off burglars). The light, however, broke after a while and stayed that way for nearly a year.
A few years ago my dad suddenly had a fatal cardiac arrest in his 50s. We kept his body in the same shed for a week until the funeral, so that people could say their goodbyes. The evening after the funeral, my family walked to the shed to clean it up a bit because there were tons of flowers and other things left behind.
While we were walking there I said, “Shame dad couldn't fix the motion lamp, now we have to walk in the dark”. What happened next is unforgettable. I kid you not, the lamp suddenly turned on after a year of not working. My mother and brothers all witnessed it, but no one else believes me. I'm normally not someone who believes in the afterlife or spirits, but at that moment it really felt like he was still somewhere out there.
6. Pond Monster
I once saw the Pend Oreille Paddler. He's a Nessie-like creature that plies the waters of Lake Pend Oreille in the United States' Pacific Northwest. Northern Idaho, to be exact. It's pronounced "Pond Oray", by the way. Lake Pend Oreille is tremendous, and gorgeous, with thick forest that grows right down to the water's edge. It's also very, very deep (1,150 ft./350.52m).
It has a lot of huge logs floating in it, too, which can be a hazard to watercraft. My first husband was part of the crew on a racing yacht, and I tagged along early one cold, foggy morning. As we were sailing along, a few of us saw, off to the left side of the boat (we were heading due south), what looked like an absolutely massive tree trunk in the water.
Only this trunk was moving all on its own, in the opposite direction to our sailboat. It was leaving a wide wake in the water, and as we watched, three bumps appeared above the surface. They were the blue-green color of dark water (think lake water in the shade) and they were covered in small scales. We could see an actual space between the humps and the water.
We kept watching in utter silence as it passed us by, until it suddenly just disappeared below the surface. I'm still convinced, thirty years or so later (this was in the 80s), that I saw The Paddler. For one thing, logs don't just rotate on their own. Second, they don't have visible humps like this object did. And third, they can be submerged, but they don't have the wherewithal to submerge that quickly, and that completely. Also, this thing was whisper-quiet. It was a pretty calm morning, too, with no choppy water, so it could not have been mistaken for rough waves. I feel so special and blessed to have seen it that morning, and I would have loved to have filmed it!
7. Babysitters Club
When I was younger, like a little girl, I swear I had a babysitter. She was pale, skinny, had beautiful long hair and was super sweet to me. But she didn't like my parents that much because she'd always leave when they interrupted our playtime. Her name was Stacy. But the weird thing?
Years later when I try to bring this up to my parents or grandmas they act like I'm crazy.
8. My Anaconda
I was on a houseboat with my family in the Thousand Islands (St. Lawrence River in Canada). We’d docked on one of the tiny islands for the night. A branch cracked loudly over the boat, and a snake that (to me at that age) looked to be the size of the snake in the film Anaconda fell from a tree and landed across the boat. It splashed down into the water and swam away. Everyone I told believed it was a snake but nobody believed how huge it was.
9. Duck, Duck, Goose
One time I was at home alone and heard something odd at the front door. This was about ten years ago. I opened the door and there were two ducks standing there quacking at me. One was male, the other a female. Anyway, they continued to quack and slowly waddled down the driveway and then down the street. I shook my head in disbelief and closed the door. In hindsight I wished that I followed them, as it seems they wanted me to follow them. That was the only time I have seen ducks in the neighborhood and have not seen any since.
10. Rainy Days
This is from Bangalore, India. One of the quirks of the city's climate is the occasional isolated spots of heavy rain. There's a running joke of “when you say it's raining in Bangalore, do mention which locality and street too”. So one summer in the late 90s, my friend and I were in the outskirts of the city, and we saw a small crowd blocking the highway.
There was a rain front slowly passing across the road, and the people were watching something. When I saw what it was, I couldn’t believe my eyes. One side of the road was dry while the other side had heavy rain. So we stopped the bike, coolly got down and took shelter beforehand. And from that comfortable vantage point, we saw a parked goods van whose one side was rainy while the other side was dry. It took five seconds for the van to be rained on fully, and another ten seconds for us to be completely surrounded by rain. To date, my memory of this is in a super clear slow motion while my friend doesn't even recall this incident.
11. Getting Old
I swear I'm not insane, but I was walking home from high school nine years ago and I saw something that I absolutely can't understand that freaked me out badly. I was coming to a crosswalk and across the two-lane street I saw a distinctive-looking girl maybe a little older than me wearing a white dress, and she had a cocker spaniel puppy on a leash that was just sitting on the sidewalk.
I looked away while I was watching for traffic and crossed over to her side, and when I looked up I kind of jumped because the girl in the white dress was now maybe in her late 60s and her dog was a very old, graying cocker spaniel. I don't have eyesight problems and I am seriously certain of what I saw. I still wouldn't tell anyone I know because there's no way they would believe me. The only explanation I can feel comfortable with is maybe hallucination, but that's never happened to me before or since.
12. Fairy Dust
This is going to sound so childish, so bear with me. When I was about 13, I was severely bullied, between the fact that my clothes were all second-hand, my mother was too caught up in sleeping her way down the alphabet to teach me how to groom or do makeup, and I hadn't yet grown into curves, so I was just a chunky weird girl with frizzy hair.
Because of this, I got OBSESSED with fantasy worlds. Lord Of The Rings was my initial escape, and then I began writing. This is when I saw the movie Fairy Tale, and I read up on it as much as I could. I vehemently believed in fairies. I lived in Germany at the time, only a couple miles from a castle. I made fairy houses in the trees outside and in the blackberry bushes on a trail to the library.
One day, my sister and I were walking home for dinner. This gold figure, about three inches high, flew in front of us, hovered for a moment, and flew off, leaving an honest-to-god golden trail of glitter behind it. We looked at each other for a couple minutes, and she goes, "Did you see that too"? Nobody will ever probably believe it, but I swear it HAPPENED. I have never seen anything like it since. There was no face or anything, it was just like this glowing golden roughly humanoid shaped golden thing with wings.
13. Alarm Bells
I was living in Texas. It was around Thanksgiving. I lived by myself and was lonely and missing my relatives (the deceased ones). I heard an alarm going off. It wasn’t my alarm clock. I followed the sound into my storage room and could hear it coming from a pile of boxes. I dug through and found the right box then tore it open.
What I found was devastating. In a bunch of stuff I had gotten when I lost a favorite uncle, there was a travel alarm I didn’t know I even had. It must have been his. It was going off about three years from the day when we lost him. It had been on a Thanksgiving morning. I had just been thinking of him earlier that day. It was so strange but oddly comforting.
14. Framed
This was in the 90s, pre-camera recording mobile phones. I was staying at my then-girlfriend's house, we were about 16, and at one point we both saw a photo frame that hung on a wall rocking back and forth slowly for about a minute or two. It was in a small room, with no open windows or drafts, no earthquake etc. To this day I have no idea how that could have happened, but we both saw it and were just staring at it. It was pretty freaky at the time.
15. New Set Of Wheels
This was in or around 2015 in Irvine, California. I was skateboarding outside of a Panera Bread late at night, goofing around being an idiot , usual teen stuff. I had left my skateboard on a parking block and was taking a leak in the bushes, when all of a sudden out of nowhere, WHOOOSHHHHH right beside me. I turned around. What I saw was terrifying.
A huge owl had swooped my skateboard off the parking block and flew with it about 50 feet into a big tree. I’d never been so confused. After about 25 minutes, he just flew away. I was able to get my skateboard back eventually. It blew my mind.
16. Crabby
When I was in middle school, my girlfriend’s family used to take me to this hole-in-the-wall, five dollar all-you-can-eat crab shack in Maryland (mid/late 90s). As a fat kid, I was "the ringer" to make sure we always got our money's worth, lol. One night, when I was about halfway through what I would have eaten, I saw a dude eat an entire crab, shell, claws, and all. Like this dude was HOUSING a whole crab, snappin' into it like a Slim Jim.
And it wasn't a soft shell crab, either. You (well, I) could hear the chomping and cracking from several tables over. I remember that I kept expecting to see blood dribbling out of his face, but it never did. I was so awestruck and horrified that I couldn't even move. I couldn't finish my food or anything. No one in our party saw it, because I asked about it on the ride home and everyone thought I was joking. There has not been a single instance in my life since then that I've eaten crab without flashing back to that.
17. Playing Frogger
My husband and I were driving late at night on a rural road in South Georgia about 20 years ago. I’ll never forget what happened that night. All of a sudden there were frogs covering about a half-to-one mile patch of road. You could hear them thumping up under the car. We are talking about a biblical amount of frogs. We still talk about how crazy it was and confirm that it really happened. I don’t think anyone could believe the amount of frogs if they didn’t see it. I wouldn’t.
18. We’re Not In Kansas
I saw a tornado empty a hotel swimming pool. This was in Nebraska, in the mid 90s. We were staying in a room that had a sliding patio door that opened to an outside pool. The building was sort of “U” shaped with the pool in the U part. The storms were bad and the hotel lost power in the middle of the night. I pulled back the curtains by the sliding door to look outside and see how bad it was.
Right then I heard a sound like a combination freight train and steam whistle, and saw the entire contents of the pool just lift straight up out of the ground like someone hit it with a giant shop vac. There was about a three or four second delay where I could only describe the sound as the combination of wind in a cave and water flowing through pipes.
Then the wind pitched REALLY high for a split second and suddenly, it all stopped. Like someone dumping a bucket of water into a solo cup, the water crashed back down into the sides of the hotel. About half of it flooded back into the pool and the rest flowed across the patio area and out to the parking lot and the tornado was gone. Like sucking up an entire swimming pool killed its energy or something and it just all crashed back down.
A bunch of cars were moved sideways and a huge tree fell right next to our car and pancaked them. We had nothing on our car but a few little twigs and leaves. You could see the path the tornado took as it crossed the road and came right into the hotel pool area. There was zero damage to the hotel at all that we could see the next morning.
19. Suited Up
I was probably between the ages of seven and 12. I always used to go out walking with the new phone I got. I’d go around “collecting” kilometers and I watched the steps go up. Simple brain of a child, I know. Anyway, the morning of a weekend I once again would get up early for a walk. It’s about a two minute walk up a farm road to reach a forest.
It might be important to point out that my village is surrounded by small mountains, meaning as you go up this “mountain” you need to look up to see the road ahead. So as I was walking I randomly stopped to look around me like I often do. No one would be up this early and so it would be completely silent and you could listen to the sounds of nature all around you.
As I was coming closer to a turn, my destination was a bench at the top of this little “mountain”, I could see something else. Or rather someone else? A man (or woman, I don’t know) was standing roughly 600 m up from where I stood, around where my bench was. That in itself wasn’t so unusual, farmers go up here all the time.
But what made me stop in my tracks was that this person was wearing completely white attire. And I mean completely: white pants, a white long suit and a white hat. He was also leaning on a cane. In that moment I could swear he looked at me, corrected his hat and turned, disappearing behind the curvature of the little “hill”. To this day I don’t know who that person was. I am quite certain I know most people in our little village and I sure don’t know who would walk up to a bench at the edge of a forest in full white attire this early in the morning just to look at passers-by and then disappear.
20. Wrestlemania
In November 2001, I took my first airplane ride after the fall of the Twin Towers. It was from North Carolina to Philly on American Airlines. I was nervous like you wouldn’t believe. Plus, my plane only had 30 seats and being on such a small plane scared me even more. I was 19 at the time and flying alone. It was Thanksgiving week, so the airport was crowded.
When boarding came, I seemed to be the only person trying to get in line. The rest of the passengers were seriously in no hurry, so I boarded first. I sat in a single seat all the way at the very back. The seats on the right were doubles, but the left side was single seats. As passengers started to board, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
They were all WWE/ECW wrestlers and a couple of crew. There was a merger going on with the two companies, so I only recognized the WWE faces, but you don't board a teeny plane with The Big Show on it and not notice he's there! Tajiri was there, a few Divas, Steven Richards, I was awestruck!
I was big into WWE at the time and I must have booked a spare ticket on their charter flight. Knowing wrestlers are never in plane crashes helped me relax some. But when I got off the plane LAST and tried to point them out to my mom, they had all scattered to the four winds and I have no evidence of them being on my plane.
21. The Case Of The Disappearing Woman
I swear I saw a woman disappear in front of my house. I told my partner and friends exactly what happened in detail and obviously no one believes me, but to this day I know what I saw and I can't think of any way she could have gone out of my line of sight without me watching her move. She had abruptly stopped outside of my front window and looked really sketchy, so I was cautiously watching her as I was home alone.
She looked like she answered a call and then VERY suddenly hunkered down to the ground, which obviously piqued my interest. There were no other people outside, no cars parked on the street where she was, and nothing to either side of where she hunkered down to that would've blocked me from seeing her. My partner insists that for whatever strange reason she must have crawled away out of sight, but I showed him the outside of my house and made it clear that it would be impossible to do that without me seeing. I will forever be confused.
22. Sixth Sense
I sometimes see a glimpse of what's going to happen in the next few seconds. I don't find it useful though because it happens so fast and most of the things I see are random and don't hold any significance to me or anyone I know. For example, a dog will pass by, or someone will call a person's name. Some might say this is nonsense but it happened to me many times since i was a kid.
23. Lost Dog
One time our family dog ran away. He was super shy and scared very easily (we got him from an animal testing lab). So we gathered all the friends and family we could get our hands on and shortly after he bailed there were numerous search parties (all together about two dozen people) looking for him. After a whole day of searching without any sign of the dog, the sun was setting slowly.
I was standing on the edge of the forest, where I searched and called for the whole day, and suddenly I saw a deer just 15 meters from me staring directly in my eyes. We stared at each other for at least a minute, no movement and no sound, then I asked with a soothing voice “Did you happen to come across a lost beagle”?
I swear to god, till this day, the deer nodded and looked down on the ground where it was standing. Then it jumped away into the woods. I was thinking to myself that I just imagined that nod and the dog could not possibly have been sitting next to the deer without making any noise.
But I had to check, and yes, there he was sitting in the exact spot, scared and shaking of fear. I gasped and cuddled the dog, took him in my arms, and looked into the woods where the deer disappeared. There it was again, staring at me, directly in the eyes! I had tears of joy and was so unbelievably grateful while at the same time confused. Since that day I never ate deer again.
24. If A Tree Falls
I live outside city limits. There are very few houses near my home and many tall bushes and trees around the house. There is a small mountain at some distance. The nights are very quiet and there are no street lights so after dark the only lights are the lights from my house and the moonlight. There are two trees a little far from my house that are standing close to one another.
One night while I was outside my house with a flashlight doing something, I realized there was only one of those trees. I looked around with my flashlight around that tree but there was no sign of the other tree, like it never existed. The next day I went there during daytime to see exactly what happened to the other tree and they both were there just like I remembered. I looked around them and even climbed on them to see anything strange but nothing was out of ordinary. My partner says I must have looked at a different tree at night but I didn't. I looked around the same tree that night and the second one was missing.
25. Pick Up Sticks
In grade eight I had a friend sleep over. After a multi-hour Dreamcast session, we decided to go into the kitchen for some snacks and drinks. As we left the kitchen, I flicked off the lights and we heard what sounded like something powering down. Sort of like when you get used to the whirring drone of your old refrigerator, AC, generator before it kicks into power saving mode or goes into standby or whatever. The kind of high-to-low powering down sound you might hear from Sci-Fi movies of a shield generator turning off, if any of that made sense.
It wasn't LOUD but enough that I got spooked and immediately turned the light back on. My friend got spooked because I was startled. But that wasn’t what really scared us. We then watched ALL of my household's chopsticks MID FALL dropping to the ground, covering most of the square footage of the kitchen and falling from what I can only assume was at least the ceiling,
We took our time grabbing chips from the counter and some sodas from the fridge, and we didn't notice anything out of the ordinary prior to that happening. We had a pull-out drawer that held a utensil divider/organizer and that's where we kept all of the chopsticks. A few were metal but the majority were wooden. My friend ended up calling his mom crying and he gave her an earful because he had told her that my parents were going to be home.
We didn't talk about it until the next start of the school year. His mom had apparently convinced him that I pulled a prank on him and taped the chopsticks to the ceiling, and he would 100% not listen to any answer other than that. He was also never allowed to sleep over at my house and he stopped being my friend for what I can only assume he thought was me pulling a very cruel prank on him.
I don't believe in ghosts and I'm not superstitious. My parents were in the medical or mathematical fields, my brother is double doctorate in biology, and I've always been the black sheep of the family. There was no way I'd tell any of them what happened and I never did. I know it sounds completely insane and too unbelievable to even be 1% true but I SWEAR I saw it and I have ZERO proof it happened. I had even thought, for many many years, of what could have possibly caused all of that to happen. Even to the point of thinking it was maybe my non-humorous, relatively strict parents and some extremely elaborate prank, but it just didn't make any sense given their personalities.
26. Flash Bang
In high school, I used to walk through a small field to get to the neighborhood bus stop. It was about the size and shape of a football field. One day it was raining hard, so I was running through the field to get to the little shelter we had at the bus stop when I swear lightning struck the ground no more than 30-35 feet from me. It was the loudest thing I think I've ever heard, and when I made it to the shelter I started to realize how insane what just happened was, and how dumb I was for running through the field!
27. Sky Snake
I had been working late, and came home to everyone asleep in the house. It was a beautiful fall night in upstate New York, with lots of stars out. I poured myself a drink and sat out on the back porch just stared at the stars. At some point I noticed a string of lights almost like a snake kind of writhing back and forth but without really moving position. After a few minutes, it faded away.
About 30 seconds later, it appeared in a different area in the sky, same thing slowly writhing without really moving position, sometimes changing color, more just fading in and out with different colors. I watched that go on for about 20 minutes, and then it faded away and never came back. I've told some people about this over the years, but I've absolutely no idea what I saw, if it was my imagination, and I've absolutely no way of proving what I saw in any way shape or form.
28. Never Feed After Midnight
I think I was like six, maybe seven? I was getting ready for bed in the bathroom of my old childhood home. As I’m brushing my teeth, I look over to the doorway. What I saw made my blood run cold. At the bottom was a small creepy devil gremlin-looking thing. It poked its head out, looked at me, and went right back behind the doorway. I threw my toothbrush down and ran to my parents absolutely freaked out.
They said it was nothing and just my imagination, but I had never ever imagined something like that. I remember it so vividly and I’ve thought about it occasionally since then and I’m 21 now. I have only ever had visual hallucinations on a medication I was taking in my teens. So creepy. I remember it so so so vividly. No idea what it was.
29. Man In The Shadows
I was like seven years old and it was late at night. My bed was turned so that as soon as I opened my eyes I saw straight towards the door. I woke up. A shadow of a human form, completely still, stood on the threshold of my bedroom door. I closed my eyes and started screaming. When I opened my eyes the shadow was gone and my worried mother came to me.
The next morning I asked my parents if they woke up that night, maybe to go to the bathroom. It turns out it was the only night my father (with sleep problems) had managed to stay asleep the whole night. But obviously no one believed a child's tale. Now that I am much older, I am still investigating what happened that night.
30. Bird Lady
Back in the 80s, I belonged to a dining club in Calgary that would organize trips to various restaurants around town. One night dinner was at a place near the river—I think it was called La Caille—that had a vacant lot in back of it. I came out of the restaurant at about 9:00 pm, just a little bit squiffy from the wine but not fully inebriated, and saw a strange woman in the moonlight at the edge of the vacant lot.
She wore a hat with white feathers around the headband, was carrying a wide oval shaped wicker basket, and was leaning forward towards a white duck that was waddling across the grass at her feet. I looked at her for a minute, then carried on to the LRT platform. I might have thought I imagined the whole thing, but there she was in broad daylight a few weeks later, riding the train with her pet duck sitting in the basket. Just one of those colorful characters that downtown Calgary seemed to have a lot of back then.
31. Sticker Shock
So last year my dog had puppies and she was in this box lent to us by a friend. The box had a sticker on it that had like a wooden picture frame with a dog peeking over the top with text inside saying something like, “Dog’s Puppy Boxes”. Something else to know is that the sticker was at a slight angle. When the puppies were four or so weeks old, I noticed something strange.
The sticker had changed! The text had changed to something like “Weaning Tray”, the font had changed, and also the text was level with the base of the box, not in line with the base of the sticker. I asked everyone in my family about it but as far as they are concerned it was always the current appearance. I had lots of photos and videos of the puppies in and around the box but I somehow never caught the sticker on camera! I am convinced that I have traveled to an alternate dimension or something.
32. Creepy Cat
When I was a kid, probably four or five years old, I lived with my grandparents in the Ozark mountains of Southern Missouri. My grandpa was a very outdoorsy kind of guy and would oftentimes be up late at night getting snacks or whatever. Well apparently one night he saw what he could only describe as a black panther. Large muscular cat, long tail, pointed ears, NOT a house cat or a bobcat.
It was much too large to be any of those. He watched it through a window in the house for what he said had to have been 10-15 minutes. It was walking around and flicking its tail checking things out. All of a sudden it let out a shriek that sounded like a woman screaming. The next day he was telling all of us and his buddies about it. No one believed him.
They all said it was a house cat, bobcat, or he was just making it all up. Keep in mind he was a former mayor and first circuit judge, he wasn’t known for making up stories. What he described sounded like a black panther (which is absolutely not native to that area) or some mountain lion that had a genetic mutation. Which we found out years later, apparently doesn’t happen with mountain lions.
A few nights after that happened he ran into my room and started shaking me awake. He had seen it again and came and got me to witness it. I think the only reason he woke me up was because I was one of the few people that believed him. We proceeded to watch that “panther” or whatever it was walk around the yard again much like it had before. Then it suddenly ran off. Few moments later we hear that scream call again. To this day, like almost 40 years later, no one can figure out what we saw, but we both definitely saw it. I still have memories of looking at it out the window with him. That was the last time we saw it.
33. Who’s That Kid
On the first day of high school, apparently I came really, really early to school and the only people who had come were some non-teaching staff like the office duty in-charge teachers, the janitor, a few class teachers, PE teachers, etc. I sat on the last bench and decided to go to the bathroom to take a leak. When I came back I saw a new kid sitting on the front bench staring at the window just like that.
The dude had dark brown hair and a sad face. Later when the teacher came in to take the attendance I got to know his name (Jason A…I don’t know the full surname). The next day apparently the kid didn’t turn up and even the teacher didn’t bring up his name in the attendance register. Honestly I didn’t care about it because I thought she must’ve just missed his name or something, but then the same thing went on for a week.
On day four I decided to ask my friends about it. Their reaction was chilling. None of them knew any person of that sort. Honestly I thought they were just joking at first, but then when I informed the teachers about it they gave the same reply: “There’s no kid like that. Are you mistaking it for someone else”? Usually I’d just confirm that it would’ve been a kid who accidentally sat in the wrong classroom and was just some junior, because there have been times when stuff like that happened in school.
But the thing was this happened in between the COVID situation when only the high schoolers were called in to attend classes in my country. There were only around 55-60 students that had come in during that time (in fact it’d been even lower cuz a bunch of kids just didn’t want to come to school due to all the quarantine break beefing up their freedom to stay at home). In fact, I decided to check the attendance register in my computer lab after school one day with one of my friends and there never was any student of the name “Jason A” or something like that. The whole situation is still a Mandela effect to me, even now.
34. Roasted Chicken
I was like ten in the backseat of my dad's new mustang with my siblings. We were driving to my godmother's house when a massive storm hit out of nowhere. We were crawling down a road, visibility was almost nothing, thunder was so loud it was like the world was literally ending to us kids, when my siblings and I swore we saw a chicken walking out of the trees and into the road.
It was almost to the car, literally right outside my window, and it got struck by lightning. My siblings and I start screaming and crying and insisting a chicken just got struck by lightning, and our parents are adamant that there was no chicken and it just struck the ground. Thirteen years later, I'm still certain that I witnessed a chicken receive the wrath of God on that trip.
35. In The Moonlight
One year in junior school, some time in the autumn/winter (it was dark) my mum was driving me and my mate back from swimming in the evening and the moon was out, but it wasn't an ordinary moon. It was easily more than five times the size of a regular moon, maybe bigger. Like "bigger than both hands at arms-length" size.
This wasn’t a "super moon" that's like 15% bigger, this was absolutely massive. It was just rising over the horizon. We went up on top of the local hill to see if it was something like stadium flood lights, or some fairground attraction or something, but it was definitely the moon. We watched it for about 15 minutes as it slowly rose. Later in the evening it was back to its normal size but I have never seen it like that in 30 years since. Every time I talk to anyone about it they just say "oh it's just a supermoon" but every time I see a supermoon it's tiny in comparison.
36. Keep Or Toss
I was at the park once and a crow went up to this garbage can, and started picking food out of it. Another crow comes up and sits just outside of it. Crow one starts tossing trash towards crow two, and crow two catches it and gently puts it down. Crow two was making two piles. One for trash and one for food. After a few moments crow one joins crow two near the food pile and starts eating together. They flew off together right after.
37. The Chase
When I was in high school my little brother and I were playing with his toys and he said he wanted a different action figure from upstairs. He started running towards the stairs so I went the other way around a different corner to catch him. I saw what I thought was him run up the stairs. So I ran after him and he ran into his room and into his closet. What happened next still freaks me out.
When I got to the closet he wasn't in there. I turned around and my brother was just coming up the stairs. I was terrified. Who/what did I follow?! (We had a lot of weird things happen in that house, I have lots of stories).
38. Swirling Cement
I saw a swirling vortex in solid cement tile. Me and my friend as children about ten years old were playing around in the garden of my grandparents’ house. I was balancing along a low wall and as my vision was focused down I noticed that one of the cement tiles that made up the path at the side of the house was moving.
The movement was circular, swirling like a vortex or whirlpool, like some photoshop effect. I stared at it for like a good minute, thought about jumping on it, then thought "it's probably just heat waves" and carried on down the wall. The strange part was I didn't say anything to my friend who was just behind me, knowing how it would sound, but then she got off the wall and brought it up herself, confirming to me I wasn't just seeing things. But when I looked again it had returned to a normal solid floor. In hindsight, it's also a bit weird how we were both so unconcerned and complacent about it.
39. Freaky Flight
About 16-17 years ago, when I was still in high school, I was walking in my neighborhood when I saw a plane flying just a couple hundred feet off the ground, looking like it was going to crash. It wasn't a commercial airliner. It looked like an older plane, with two propellers, and it was brown. I can still hear the gears on the propellers moving. But that’s not the weird part.
What I found the strangest was that there was no crash, no reports of a plane landing, and nobody ever said anything about it. I was the only one around, and therefore the only witness. But I've actually never mentioned this to anyone in real life because it was so bizarre.
40. Into The Light
About seven years ago, I was gaming late at night in my room (third floor) and all of a sudden a bright white light, like from an extremely bright flashlight, was shining through my windows into my room from an above position. There were no other high buildings in front of my window. I totally freaked out and jumped to the ground but it was gone as quick as it came. I hysterically recorded an audio message on my phone where I explained to myself in detail what I saw and how long the light was shining, what day it is, at what time it happened, etc. I still sometimes listen to that recording and it still freaks me out.
41. The Freezer Section
I was working at a bakery on the third shift (8:00 pm-4:00 am), at the local orchard. The store closed at eight, but it wasn't unheard of for the owners to come in after closing. I had been working there for about a week at this point. I was out stocking the shelves, so it was close to the end of our shift, so probably 3:00 am-ish.
I turned to take something off of the rack and there was a man standing by the cold case. He was late 40s/early 50s, bald, thin/average build, wearing a red flannel shirt tucked into jeans. He said, "Hello, how are you"? I said "Hi. I'm doing well, how are you"? He said "I'm fine, thank you". I put the bread on the shelf, and turned to ask who he was and introduce myself, and he was gone.
I was only turned for a few seconds so there's no way he could have left my line of sight without me seeing some part of him leaving, and I never heard any doors open or close to indicate that he left or went elsewhere in the store.
I told my mom when I got home because I was like, what if someone broke in? Do I want to work at a place where people can just easily waltz in undetected? She asked me about it. I told her it was weird because he was just standing there looking at a covered up cold case so he couldn't see what was actually in it, and he didn't seem like he was trying to steal anything. She told me it was probably just the owner.
I met the owner a few days later. He was not the man that I saw there a few nights prior. It wasn't anyone that worked there. But I later found out the chilling truth. I had heard from co-workers that the owner was still working there because his son that was supposed to take over the business had died after a battle with cancer. That night after work I went home and looked up the son's obituary online, and I kid you not, it was the guy I saw in the store.
42. Mind In Motion
When I was a kid, say between six and ten, I had a load of model aircraft in my room that were hung from the ceiling by fishing line. I'd often look up at them and imagine them flying around and fighting. One day as I was looking up at them I found I became hyper-focused in a way that felt new to me at that age. I then commanded one of the aircraft to move. What happened next was unforgettable. It did, twisting slightly on its string back and forth.
I'd never seen these models move before. There were no drafts in my room. I commanded the model to be still and it was. I worked my way down the line and moved each one in turn and stopped it. It felt like hard work to do this in my mind. I practiced this often and it became easier but I could never do it when I had someone with me as I felt I could not reach the state of focus required.
One day, when I was around ten I couldn't do it anymore. I hit puberty pretty early around then and it might have coincided, now thinking about it. I swear this happened. I could do it at all times of the day so not only when I was drifting in and out of sleep, say. I'm a very rational person, a trained scientist with a PhD. I know what I saw but I can't explain it.
43. Fest Fight
I saw Fred Durst punch a female fan in the face at End Fest 2000. They were not on the set list and did not perform but Fred was there with Korn (I think they were getting ready for another tour set together, perhaps family values?). I was hanging out at the tattoo booth with my friends who were daughters of the tattooist. We were about 150 feet away from the band trailers when we went to the back side of the tent where all our coolers and seats were.
A very short, very thick blonde girl came barreling through security squawking something, and just barged right into Fred, snatched his hat, and I think forced a sharpie into his face/hands. He was shocked at first and the next thing I knew, she was flat on the ground, security was dragging her away, and medics ran after them. No proof but he straight-up Danzig'ed her.
44. TV Texter
I was watching Degrassi with two friends at one of their houses. During a commercial, the screen cut to static with the black boxed, white font subtitles saying things like “help me” and “I’m trapped”. It was 2006 so I can’t remember exactly what was written but it freaked us out and we shut the tv off. No one believed us.
45. Spooky Stereo
When I was a teenager I used to keep the remote to my stereo on the lip of my bed frame. One night around midnight I woke up to my stereo playing static at me. Only it was getting louder. I could see the volume number moving higher and higher. So it's pitch black and this static is getting louder and louder and the remote wasn't in its usual place for some reason. I had no choice but to jump out of bed to turn it off. I turned on the light, and freaking out, I found it. Under my bed. Like, deep under my bed at that middle point that's super hard to reach. Did not like.
46. Steppin’ Out
When I was sixteen I skipped school to stay home and play video games. I set up my PlayStation and made some hot pockets and right when I get good and comfortable I hear footsteps walking to my room. I glanced outside and saw my parents weren't home yet but I was still afraid I was going to get caught. Seeing no place to hide, I froze.
Suddenly the door was flung open and I heard a blood-curdling scream echo through the house. I must have sat there petrified in that room for half an hour before going outside and waiting for my parents to come home. I tried to explain to my friends later what happened but they thought I was just pulling some prank from the internet.
47. Night Terror
A few years ago, my wife and I spent three months in Bermuda for work. Initially, we rented a large detached house whose owners were staying back in the States. There was one locked room on the top floor, presumably containing the owner’s personal possessions. After a few nights, we both began to hear footsteps from upstairs.
This was relatively easy to ignore as we put it down to rodents even though they sounded human…long footsteps and heavy. We had checked the locked door and there was never any sign of movement there. One night I was asleep when, in my dazed state, I “imagined” somebody right by my face shouting “WAKE UP”! This was from my right side. My wife was sleeping to my left.
Immediately after I felt myself pulled down the bed. I awoke to find my legs hanging off the end of the bed and my right cheek moist as if somebody had shouted at me from six inches and their saliva had sprayed my face. I panicked, woke up my wife and checked the room but there was nobody there. I checked the rest of the house and all was quiet. I washed my face quite vigorously after though... We left the house soon after that night and claimed the company flat as soon as it became available. Never had anything like that happen to me before or since.
48. The Watcher
Last November I was staying at the Excalibur in Las Vegas. I had a late check out because I had a midnight redeye flight. Anyway, I was taking an afternoon nap and it was around 6:00 pm. I suddenly awoke. An employee from Excalibur was just standing in my room looking at me. It wasn't housekeeping or room service either. He was just looking at me.
I was highly confused waking up and said, "What's going on” or something like that. He then just said "Nighty night" and walked out of the room. I filed a complaint with Excalibur and they comped one night. I also tried to contact a couple of lawyers with no luck, possibly basing it on privacy acts. It was just so weird. And this isn't “I swear I saw....”. This happened.
49. Hello Nurse
When I was very young I was sick and coughing all night. A pregnant woman in a white dress came to my room and took me to the kitchen to take some cough medicine. There was just one problem. The woman wasn’t a member of my family. I didn’t know her at all or why she was there.
The medicine was left out the next morning. I was way too young to appropriately dose myself and I couldn’t reach the medication. My family all saw the medicine left out. Even weirder than what I saw, my whole family believed me. They didn’t accuse me of dreaming or anything. It’s just a family tale now. I can’t prove it but I know for a fact that it happened.
50. Sasquatch Hunt
While hunting with my dad in the Pacific Northwest, we were crouched down outside of a thicket of trees. Suddenly I got the feeling I was being watched. I turned to my dad and tapped him on the shoulder. I pointed off to the side and we saw something in the brush moving. I stood up and whatever was there took off into the brush. We went to where it was and there were large footprints in the snow (Bigfoot). We looked at each other, acknowledged the weirdness, and went elsewhere to continue the hunt.
Sources: Reddit,