Haunted houses aren’t just for Halloween. Sometimes, people find themselves living with unsettled spirits of all kinds. Here Redditors share their spine-tingling tales of the real-life haunted houses they lived in. It will make one wonder who—or what—else is lurking about when they hear that creaking sound while sitting on the couch.
1. Haunting Husbands
My dad decided to buy a house from a lady who had two husbands live and die in it. The first husband had hung himself from the rafters in the garage, and the second one fell ill and passed in his bed that was in the basement. This turned out to be a big mistake. I lived in the basement room and often felt like I was being watched all the time.
The bedroom in the basement had a secret storage room behind a bookshelf with a locking latch. I would always wake up to find the door wide open. It happened so often that I would wake up cold and routinely go shut and lock the latch of the door in the middle of the night. For the longest time, I thought my dad or stepbrothers were messing with me, but they weren’t.
My stepbrother later occupied that room and said the same thing would happen to him. In fact, it got worse. He even saw it open on its own! There were no air vents, so I had ruled out any wind. Also, in the garage, I would always see a light coming from under the door through the crack, only to open the door and find the area pitch black.
I heard sounds coming from the garage and would find saw blades clanging together and slightly rotating in their place on the hole storage wall. At first, I didn't think anything of it, but when you find stuff moving on more than one occasion, it makes you look over your shoulder at the rafters and wonder just what the heck is going on.
2. Shadow Man
I lived with my dad when I was around 9–10 years old. He had a very large terraced house that was built in the 1800s. Every so often, an unexplainable event would happen, such as footsteps or voices when there was no one there. One night, it was just my dad and me in the house—my sister was staying with my mom. That night, all hell broke loose.
I woke up and noticed the door to my room was wide open—I usually slept with it closed. I then became aware of a large 7-foot tall shadow-like figure watching me from the end of the bed. When the figure noticed me, it seemed to “melt” into the floor. Then, the door to my room slammed shut. The next day, I asked my dad if he was in my room, and he denied any knowledge of such an event.
The whole experience left me slightly traumatized.
3. Fright Night Freddy
My grandmother lived in a house that was haunted for a few years. We called him Fred. You could hear Fred walking around in the attic, pictures would regularly fall off of the walls, and sometimes the silverware drawer would be open and its contents all over the floor. One night, my great grandparents were sleeping in the guest bedroom.
My great-grandmother woke up to use the restroom but heard someone taking a shower in there. She assumed it was my aunt and waited outside the door until she was done. Whoever was in the shower got out and used the hair dryer, then the door opened, and no one came out. My great-grandmother couldn't take it anymore. She woke up my great-grandpa, packed her bags, and had him drive her home.
She didn’t visit again as long as she lived there. My grandma hired a water witch, and all of those experiences stopped.
4. Apartment Apparition
I used to live in an apartment where my family and I had several experiences. My mom was on a video call with my grandma in the middle of the night. I was asleep, my brother was out somewhere, and my dad was working. They were having a normal chat when my grandma suddenly asked, "Hey, how are you"? My mom was confused.
They were in the middle of a run-of-the-mill conversation, so she asked why she said that. Her answer was terrifying. My grandma answered her, saying, “Isn't that your son behind you”? My mom was in bed. It scared my mom because there was nobody else awake and it still freaks her out to this day. But it wasn't the last creepy incident.
Then, when my brother was in his room chilling at about 9 or 10 at night, he heard my dad's voice talking. At first, he said he thought he was talking with my mom, but then he heard nobody reply, so he thought he was talking on the phone. The next morning, he asked mom if my dad had come home, and she said that he was still out of town.
That freaked my brother out because he had heard my dad talking. He told my mom what he heard, and with my mom's experiences, she believed him, and they were both freaked out. I was always a believer and got scared easily. If I felt scared at night, I would sleep with my parents. However, this one night, I was sleeping in my room.
I was scared to fall asleep, so most of the night I was on my phone, occasionally looking around my room. I kept on reassuring myself that if anything happened, it would be easy for my parents to hear me yell out for them since our rooms were so close. It didn't stop my worst nightmare from occurring. I was dozing off to sleep when I heard scratching on the walls.
That had never happened before. I was completely frozen in fear. I called out for my parents. They came to my room, and I told them what had happened. They told me it just could have been squirrels in the walls since there was a tree right next to my room. I knew that wasn't squirrels. We had never heard scratching before from anything.
Before we moved out, we got a dog—a little Yorkie. He was never afraid to bark at anything he didn't like. So sometimes when he barked, we brushed it off. One day in the afternoon, my mom, grandma, cousin, and I were watching TV in the living room with my dog, who was just lying on the floor. Then, out of nowhere, my dog got up, looked at the dark hallway that led to the bedrooms, and started barking.
We were all freaked out because he had never done that before. He then came running to me and curled up into a ball in between my legs. We ignored it and went back to watching TV, but everybody was scared. Closed kitchen cabinets would slam shut, and some nights you could smell an awful stench. The smell would only be in my room and my parents’ room.
My sister’s room, the living room, or even the kitchen didn't have the smell. Thank goodness we moved out!
5. Nothing Relaxing About This Vacation
I was on vacation, staying at my uncle’s house. At that time, I used to stay up late at night just using my phone and passing the time. Midnight came, and I heard the front door closing though it was very faint. I didn't think anything was wrong because we had three dogs out there. I figured the dogs should've started barking, but there was no sound.
After about 30 minutes, I heard someone or something body-slamming the door. We were all sleeping in the same room. It was so loud that I almost started hyperventilating from fear. I found it odd, though, that none of my uncle's family woke up. After that, I heard the screen door from the other room opening. Minutes passed, and nothing was going on.
There was just complete silence. I contemplated waking my uncle up and asking him what was going on. Then pots and metal stuff in the kitchen started dropping to the ground. Still, no one was waking up. After that, I fell asleep. I told my cousin what had happened, and the next night, he said he heard the sound of cutlery scraping on the wall.
6. A Phantasmical Perk
I used to live in a big six-bedroom house by myself. I was there as a hiring perk and to look after the place for my boss, who lived out of state but owned the home. It was a win-win situation. The first couple of months were fine, but when winter came, I started hearing things coming from the second floor—I almost exclusively lived on the first floor.
It started with little bumps and bangs coming from above, where I had my computer set up, and progressed to distinct footsteps coming and going across the second floor. From time to time, I would go up to the second floor to check things out, and I knew there were unfinished areas up there. One terrifying place always stuck out.
It was an unfinished room similar to a walk-in closet for one of the upstairs bedrooms. The room was completely unlit and attached to the garage attic. When I went up to investigate the noises, I found it open, so I shut the door and locked it. Two nights later, there were more noises—footsteps leading from the unfinished room to the bathroom—then nothing.
The worst part was that the door that led to the unfinished room would not stay closed or locked. I tried everything. Eventually, I pushed the bed up against the door to keep it from opening. That seemed to work. A few months went by without the door coming open, but I would find it unlocked all the time at the strangest hours.
As time passed, it got so much worse. I would hear noises all over the house. Mostly footsteps, but the occasional THUMP with no explanation. I cannot explain how horrifying it is to hear little taps up and down the hall from the other side of a bathroom door during your morning shower. I eventually moved out, but another employee moved in to take my place.
His stay there only lasted about a month. One morning before work, he was shaving. Then, he heard a SLAM—like someone dropped a heavy stack of books—right outside his bedroom door, followed by the heavy footsteps of someone running down the hall. He wouldn’t stay there after that, and no one from the company would live in the house either.
7. The Stinky Old Lady
When I was in college, I lived in an old haunted house. Things got so weird that everyone moved out except for one roommate and me. One day, I woke up at 3 AM because my roommate’s door kept opening and slamming shut. From my bed, I yelled for him to stop, only to realize I was the only one home that weekend. As soon as I yelled, the slamming stopped.
However, the hippy beads I had hanging outside my closed door began to sway perfectly, yet aggressively, against the door frame, for a half-hour. While I debated if I should pop out my air condition unit and jump out of the window, I laid in the fetal position in bed until it stopped. But it wasn't over yet. Another night, while alone again, I woke up once more at 3 AM.
I heard the Nintendo on the back porch playing loudly. I figured some tipsy kid had come in and started playing. I grabbed a bat and walked towards the back of the house as the music got louder and louder. As soon as I opened the door, it was completely quiet—meanwhile, it had been loud enough to wake me up from my bed.
When I had friends over and told them the house was haunted, no one believed me. So, I asked the ghost to do anything to prove it was there. As soon as I asked, it happened. All the lights in the house began flickering for about a minute straight. This was the middle of the day, and everyone witnessed it and knew what I was talking about.
Every time something spooky happened, the house would smell like old lady, flowery perfume. The house had a door built into the flooring that led to the basement. We always had a rug covering it, so no one knew it was there. Things would constantly go missing in the house and later turn up in the basement. The place had a coal chute from when it was heated by coal back in the day.
Missing stuff would always be placed on the chute for us to come and get. Late one night, while playing video games, my roommate saw a mist hovering from the kitchen and then moved to the bathroom. The bathroom had a trap door that led to the attic. We figured that was where the old-lady ghost liked to hang out during the night.
Another night when my roommate was up late, he went to lock the doors and turn off the lights. When he turned his back on the room and walked to the door, someone breathed into his ear, "Haaa". He thought it was me, but I was sleeping. He turned around and ran to his room. He was too afraid to come out and turn off the lights and TV.
There were loud thumps in the attic at all hours. For peace of mind, we told ourselves squirrels must've gotten in there, but we soon found out how wrong we were. Voices would wake us up in the middle of the night. I spent many mornings on the front porch waiting for the sun to come up before I would go back into the house.
Years later, I had a friend who rented a different place in the same town and from the same landlord. He and his roommates moved out because that house was also haunted, as it turned out. I didn't think it was too weird until he told me that when all the weird stuff happened, it was accompanied by old-lady, flowery, stinky perfume.
8. Who Would’ve Thunk It?
I grew up with a cat named Boots. Boots was motivated only by food and spent his later years sleeping on my parents' bed until someone came home. Then he would jump off the bed, with a “thunk-thunk” of his front and back paws hitting the ground, and run to his food bowl to beg. Sadly, he had to be put down when I was 18 years old.
My parents moved out of my childhood home during my first year of college. I went back a few times before it sold. Every time, I was certain I felt a cat’s presence. Sometimes I would hesitate my step because I was sure a cat had just walked under my legs. Not only that, but upon walking in, I would always hear a “thunk-thunk”, like Boots jumping down to beg for food.
When my mom and I returned for the last day we would ever be in that home, I told her what I had experienced. Her reply gave me shivers. To my surprise, she had the exact same feeling. When we walked into the house, there was a “thunk-thunk”. We exchanged shocked glances and confirmed we both heard it, that tell-tale sound.
I went and sat in my empty room while my mom got the final things together. While my eyes were closed, I had to force myself not to pet a cat that I felt walk up to me because I knew logically he wasn’t there. Before leaving, we stood in the hallway outside of my parents’ bedroom, hugged each other, and said goodbye to my first home.
I said I thought Boots was still around and suggested we take his spirit to the new house. She agreed, so she called out, “Bootsy”, and from my parents’ room, we both heard “thunk-thunk” one final time.
9. Grandpa’s Little Playmate
My father-in-law passed before my son was born, so he never met him. When we moved into our new home, my son would often be laughing in the middle of the night by himself. No biggie, kids will play with anything. One day, we were finally putting pictures up in the house. Once I put up the picture of my father-in-law, he said, "Oh mommy, why do you have a picture of the man that comes and play with me at night"?
He had never seen a picture of my father-in-law before that.
10. The Feeling Was Straight Up Spooky
When I was a teen, I lived in a haunted house along with my parents. The place was an old farmhouse that we were remodeling. We were there for a couple of months before witnessing anything. One day I was underneath my truck, which was supported by only a jack. I was in the middle of working on it, with no good reason to get out at that moment.
Suddenly, an overwhelming urge to get out from underneath overcame me. I still can't believe the next events. No sooner than I got out, the truck fell to the ground—the jack had slipped. It freaked my dad out because he thought I was still underneath. When my mom got home, we mentioned it, and she started just crying.
She was sobbing pretty hard. It turned out the previous owner lost his life in the driveway—under a vehicle—in that very spot. I would often see moving shadows and strangely hear music from the upstairs area. One of the more disturbing things happened when my mother was cooking breakfast. She turned away to get something out of the cabinet, and when she turned back around, all the forks set out were bent straight up.
11. Centuries Of Incarnations Haunted My House
I grew up in a huge 17th-century house. While we lived there, it hadn’t been remodeled—it was still in the beautiful old style with art, ballroom, marble floor halls, statues, etc. During my nine years living there, I discovered that it had been a house of ill repute, a plague hospital, a regular hospital, and a morgue. Just the whole nine yards of spookiness.
During WWII, it had also been a German SS post before half of it got blasted up, destroying about 20 Germans. There were also three families who lived there that were each victims of manslaughter. As a kid, I saw a lot of shadows and heard a lot of weird noises—the usual. My sister, who lived on the third floor, came down to my room often to stare at me while sleepwalking.
The doors creaked and opened and closed by themselves a lot, and the alarm would often go off during the night on its own. But everything paled in comparison to this one event. One time, my parents were away for business. My brother and sisters and I were sleeping elsewhere because my parents were going to be away for some time.
I had to go to hockey practice but forgot some gear, so my friend and I went to get it. The house was engulfed in darkness and very silent. As we walked out of my room, we heard footsteps in the attic. Two of my siblings had their bedrooms there, so I thought one of them was at home. I shouted at them, which made the footsteps stop.
After five seconds or so, we heard the footsteps coming closer to the stairs and actually setting foot on the very old wooden creaky steps—one step at a time. I then felt a "weight" setting foot in front of me. It was very strange. I saw nothing. We noped out of there fast. Outside, my friend had a total nervous breakdown because he saw some scary face or form that looked like an alien to him. He never set foot in my house again.
12. We Couldn’t Kick This Ghost Out
My husband and I owned a martial arts school. The building that it was in—which we also owned—was about 130 years old and was located next to a church. I never believed in the paranormal, but the things that happened in it didn't just happen to me. The building was decrepit, and we did all the work ourselves. It was old, creaky, and drafty.
When we worked on it with drills and electric saws, I heard the tinkling of a music box. I would stop everyone to ask if they heard it too. No one else did, so I assumed it must have been some music from the church coming through. But there was more in store for us. Then, my husband often heard a woman's voice calling his name from the bottom of the stairs.
He would think that it was me back from work, but it wasn’t. The building would be empty. It happened four or five times. There was a small apartment on the second floor that was connected to a large hall. One night, we woke up hearing what sounded like a broom sweeping across the wooden floors in that hall. My husband got up to check.
Once he walked in, the sweeping sound stopped. It happened three more times that night. In another instance, we had a barbecue in the backyard, and I needed to go get more utensils. There was a metal stairwell from the backyard up to the second floor; the main entrance staircase was opposite that. I came up the main entrance and heard footsteps pacing back and forth across the far end of the hall.
I thought my husband came up from the metal stairwell to get utensils with me. It was dark, and I couldn't see anything. I called out for him, and the pacing stopped. There was no response, and then the pacing footsteps continued. Annoyed, I thought he was messing with me. So, I flipped on the lights. I immediately regretted my actions.
All of the utensils from the shelf where I heard the pacing crashed down to the floor. There wasn't anything around, not even a rat like I thought there might be. One Saturday morning, my husband was on his computer in another room. I was in the apartment playing on my iPad when I heard the stereo in front of me click on, and a girl's voice started talking from it.
I thought my husband was controlling the stereo from his computer, so I ignored it. I wasn’t paying much attention to the voice on the stereo until it suddenly went, “Something's hurting me". When I caught that, I looked up and squinted at the stereo, confused. Then the terror continued. The voice just kept repeating, "Something's hurting me. Something hurt me".
At that point, the hair was standing on the back of my neck. I got up to take a closer look. It said, "Please, someone tell my parents, tell the teachers, tell the corrections officer". At the word "corrections officer", I bolted into the other room and started yelling at my husband because I was certain he was playing a trick on me.
I told him, "We don't play jokes about ghosts". He looked at me, completely baffled. When he finally calmed me down long enough to get what I had heard out of me and what I was accusing him of, he told me it was impossible and led me to the stereo. It wasn’t plugged in. I thought maybe the stereo picked up the signals from an eBook or something.
After that fiasco, I went to ask our live-in student—who lived with his girlfriend in the basement apartment—if anything weird's been happening. They gave each other an alarmed look and confessed the dark truth. He told me his girlfriend was sleeping one night recently when he was working overnights and not around the house.
She heard footsteps come down the stairs, and their door open and then close. Suddenly, a bright flashlight shined on her face, and she could just make out the silhouette of who she thought was her boyfriend. She was annoyed, thinking he was messing with her, so she swatted at him and told him to stop. Finally, she got so mad that she turned on their lamp.
There was no one there. They also mentioned that they sometimes would hear footsteps on the first floor when no one was in the building. They had a pet mouse at the time, and whenever that happened, it would start doing backflips in its tank. However, when class was going on, and people were in the building, the mouse didn't care and just went about its mousy business.
They were play-wrestling one day when suddenly, their parrot ruffled its feathers and, in a really alarming voice, asked, "Who's there? Who's there"? They thought it was funny at first, so our student looked at the bird, pointed to the door, and said, "You mean over here"? and ran towards the door to open it. Just as a kind of joke.
As he did that, though all the books lining the shelf on the way to the door fell over in front of him, and the lights started flickering. The bird and the mouse both got spooked and were throwing themselves against their cages. Once the couple got married and moved out, our second live-in student said that there were several times that he could not find his phone when he woke up in the morning.
Yet, he had placed it next to his bed the night before. He would search his room high and low and then find it perfectly placed right outside his locked bedroom door on the floor. There was no way anyone could have done it. I thought he might have been sleepwalking, but his girlfriend said it wasn’t likely because she would have realized if he did.
13. Kevin, The Friendly Ghost
Two weeks before we moved, my dad and I toured our new house. I noticed this guy was painting the water heater, which I thought was weird, but I was about ten, so I didn’t know much. We moved in on a Wednesday, and my parents let me stay home from school until the following Monday. I was preoccupied with coloring books and a new doll house.
In my brand new crayon pack, there wasn’t a blue crayon. It was a 64 pack, but there were only 63 crayons in it. One day, I went downstairs into the basement, and my blue crayon was next to the hot water heater. Scribbled on there, it said, “Hi—Kevin”. I was so confused. I started school, and that's when the whole creepy story came out.
My new classmates were like, “OMG, do you live in Kevin’s house?! Your house is gonna be haunted”! It turned out that Kevin was a little eight-year-old boy who lived in our house before us. He got hit by a car in the front yard. If you left out a pen and paper, he would write notes. He would open and close doors, adjust the thermostat, and always turn on Christmas music when it was that time of year.
We had a swing set in the backyard, and even on the hottest, calmest days of summer, only the left swing would be moving back and forth. We had a cat that I would lock in my bedroom at night, and every morning, my parents would open the door, let him out, then close it back up. One night, I woke up, and the cat was meowing at the door.
It woke me up, but the door opened, and the cat hissed and ran out really fast. The next morning, I asked my mom why they didn’t close my door, and they said they didn’t open it. But then there was the time I'll never forget. One year, during Christmas break, I was very upset and thought about taking my life. The authorities randomly showed up at my house.
The officer said that he was patrolling our neighborhood and felt like something was wrong at our house. I'm absolutely certain Kevin had something to do with that.
14. Monster In The Attic
When I was younger, I used to take naps in the upstairs area of our house, but by the time I was eight years old, I REFUSED to go upstairs. The upstairs had two large closets/attics that ran from one side of the upstairs all the way to the other side on both sides. It was essentially a crawl space that was about thirty feet long, and I hated it.
One day, a friend and I crawled from one side to the other with flashlights. I witnessed a horrific sight. I saw a girl sitting in the corner, acting like she wanted to play with us. I was beyond terrified. This girl looked normal, had blonde hair, a nice dress, and seemed friendly. I stayed silent, kept crawling behind my friend, and got out of there.
I told him what I saw in there, and he said he didn't see it but felt like he didn't want to go back in. My parents would occasionally send me upstairs to get something. When I would get up there, I would see the doors swing open, as if they were beckoning me to come inside. I would lose toys and wouldn't be able to find them anywhere.
Suddenly, my parents would be fishing out Christmas presents from the attic, and we would find some of my toys in there. One day, my parents were still asleep in the morning, and I came up with a plan. I leashed up my dog to go take on the monster in the attic. My dog—usually up for anything—REFUSED to go off the top step into the space.
My parents never believed me. They would also blame me for things that happened all over the house—leaving lights on, toys all over, things I knew I didn't do. When I was ten, we moved out. Not even a week passed by before the new owners called us up and asked if the house was haunted. Their daughter slept upstairs, in that creepy room
She said that she had been playing with a blonde-haired girl at night. Then it got ten times worse. The girl started appearing in other parts of the house for them. They would look over while watching TV and see the girl sitting on their daughter's lap. They looked up the past house owners and found out that an old dressmaker had lived there.
Sure enough, there was a picture of the little girl, that same little girl, wearing one of the lady’s dresses. The family that moved in there was absolutely torn apart by the events; it seemed to hit them a lot worse than us because they engaged with her. They got divorced, and the dad stayed living in the house. He ended up taking his own life in that house.
15. Tea For Two
It was 3 AM, and I was just getting up to turn the heat off and putter around after falling asleep on the sofa. I was yawning and rubbing my eyes and was just about to get up to go to bed when I realized there was a noise that was getting louder and louder. I suddenly turned my head and saw the kettle boiling by all by itself in the corner.
I freaked out, thinking I had lost time and it was me, but before I could stop myself, the words “But I don't want tea or coffee”, came out of my mouth. The kettle then clicked off by itself. It wasn't at the end of the boil, either. Also, as soon as I said that, I felt guilty and thought I shouldn't have been scared. It was apparently just a friendly offer.
Two days later, I was at the dining room table with a friend. We were both around the corner from the kettle, and nobody else was in the house when it started boiling again. My friend rushed over and pointed out that the button for the kettle had been pushed. So much relief came over me that I wasn't insane and that this really had happened.
Another time, I was lying in bed and could hear a conversation. It was 4 AM, and there was no one else around. Any neighbors were 20 feet away on either side. Then the kettle started boiling. I was angry, so I yelled out, “Please stop boiling the kettle. We have people asleep upstairs”, and it clicked off again. It was very, very strange.
16. The Calling
Growing up, my brother and I lived with our single mother. The house was a little 500-square-foot home, but we were young, so it wasn’t a huge deal. My mom remarried, and the newlyweds decided to tear down the old house and build a ranch on the land. Strange things started happening almost instantly after we moved back into it.
One of the weirdest things occurred when my brother and I were in the house alone. We were hanging out at an island in the kitchen, talking about what teenage boys talk about, when I heard something that made my blood run cold. It was the faintest whisper of someone saying my brother’s name. At first, I thought I was probably just hearing things.
Then, about 30 seconds later, I heard my brother’s name again, a little louder. He was talking when I heard the second whisper. He seemed to hear it, too, because he stopped what he was saying briefly. Finally, about 15 seconds after the second interruption, clearly and angrily, a raspy voice says his name. We looked at each other, terrified.
My brother asked, “Did someone just say my name”? I told him I had heard it more than once. He said, “Three times, right”? We grabbed our coats and left.
17. Out Of Time
I lived in a house for about five years that was haunted. I would come home to the windows on the second floor being open when it was raining, to food containers being open in the fridge that I hadn't touched yet. The worst was that the “ghost” hated clocks. She absolutely hated them. I had an antique cuckoo clock that had worked for 50 years that would just stop.
Brand new wall clocks ate through batteries like candy. My watch ended up on the floor one morning, the crystal shattered, even though I knew I slept with it on. The one that aggravated me the most was that I got a brand new kitty clock for Christmas. That nasty presence threw it off the wall. I was cooking, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cat clock FLY.
I turned around, and it was across the kitchen, broken.
18. Homeward Bound
On a Friday the 13th, my stepfather passed in the hallway of his condo apartment. My mom had to move out shortly after since they were already behind on mortgage bills. A few months later, my lease was up. I was barely making ends meet and couldn't find a new roommate, so my mom offered me the key to the condo apartment to stay in for a few months until I saved up enough for my own place.
I took her up on the offer and moved into the condo. After a month or so, I was asleep in the living room, and I dreamt of my stepdad standing in the hallway facing the living room. He was looking at me and smiling/laughing. He even made a stupid joke and everything. It wasn't disturbing at all, just bittersweet. Then, I suddenly woke up. I felt some pressure stroking down my head and back. There was nothing around me, and it tripped me right out.
19. An Alarming Situation
My wife and I were living in an apartment when my great aunt was looking to sell her home. The house was built in the 50s and needed some work. My aunt didn’t feel like taking care of it, so she suggested she take the apartment, and we buy the house. It was a good deal that worked out for everyone. The house was always full of people.
We had friends live with us for a while, then my brother, then we had kids. After moving in, though, things went slowly downhill. First, I started sleep-walking. Once, I actually opened up the basement door and fell down a flight of stairs. Every once in a while, we would get creeped out or hear a strange sound, but it was nothing really noteworthy.
It could usually be explained as someone else making noise. My great aunt passed a few years later, and then things started getting really strange. My wife would hear voices. My son, who was two or three at the time, started waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning, crying. The cat would go into his room and stare at the top corner of his wall.
The dogs would growl outside the door. However, it was all pretty explainable so far. My wife was getting nervous, but I just laughed it off. I figured it was due to the fact that we lived close to the neighbors, my son was hitting a developmental milestone, or maybe squirrels were getting into the attic. Then, things got VERY creepy.
One day, we were watching my nephew. I heard giggling in my son’s room—it was my nephew. I walked in, and he pointed at the corner the cat used to stare at. The cat had passed before my nephew was even born. My nephew was just creepy giggling. My son started saying things like, “I don’t want to go to bed. He gets mad” or “The shadow went over there”.
I still laughed it off out loud but was getting truly creeped out. That uneasy feeling that “someone’s here” kept hitting, harder and harder. Soon things started happening at 3 AM—“the witching hour”. I’d wake up in a cold sweat, which was no big deal, except falling back to sleep was tough because I felt like someone was watching me from a corner.
Then, for absolutely no reason, at 3:01 AM, my smoke detector started going off. “FIRE. FIRE. FIRE”. It went off three times, then stopped. I checked the house, and there was nothing. I changed the batteries and went back to bed. The next morning at 3:01 AM, it went off again three times—“FIRE. FIRE. FIRE” then stopped. I got up again—nothing.
After the fourth night, I was totally spooked. Then, inexplicably, it stopped. We ended up moving shortly after. We moved into an 1850s farmhouse. I never felt safer. There were no creepy feelings, the kids were sleeping better, and I even stopped sleepwalking. The people that bought our house never even moved in. They put it back on the market, where it sat for almost a year.
20. Locked In
From the age of five to 17, I lived in a house with activity. It was all pretty basic run-of-the-mill stuff—footsteps, voices, lights turning on and off, doors opening and shutting, batteries draining, etc. If we started renovating—which we almost always were—they would get more active and start throwing stuff. I got used to it. They didn’t hurt us, so we just let it go.
The worst thing they ever did was while we were moving in. I was five years old at the time, and my friend and I were playing in the only room that was finished in the basement while my parents were moving the stuff in. My friend’s parents were helping. Suddenly, the door to the room we were in slammed shut. There was no wind, no draft, and no explanation.
Then the lock engaged with a click, and someone started laughing. We were stuck in the room for two hours.
21. When Darkness Calls
The house I grew up in had a slightly strange design in that all the bedrooms were clumped together at one end of the house and the kitchen and living room were at the other end. The two areas were connected by a long, narrow hallway that had a bathroom in the middle and a bunch of closets on either side. My bedroom door was at the end of the hall.
There were two other bedroom doors facing each other, across the hall, on either side. This meant that if you were sitting in our living room, you could look straight down the hallway at my bedroom door. Many strange and frightening things happened in that house. Things would disappear, stuff flew off the shelves, there were strange voices or breezes, etc.
There was one thing, though, that we could never rationalize away or lie to ourselves about. It was the most terrifying thing I've ever experienced. The darkness at the end of the hall. The hallway was not just very long and narrow, it was also paneled in a dark wood, so it was pretty dark down there naturally if no lights were on.
However, with the living room lights on, there was always enough light to see down the hall and make out my bedroom door. Sometimes we would be sitting in the living room and get the feeling that we were being watched or that something was about to happen. When that feeling would come over us, the end of the hallway would be completely blacked out.
It was as if someone dropped a curtain over the end of the hall. You could see part of the way down, and then there was just blackness. When this would happen, our three little dogs would go to the mouth of the hallway and sit in a line across it, staring down into the darkness. Sometimes they'd bark a little or growl, but mostly they just sat and stared.
Once in a while, one of them would get brave enough to walk down the hall, but they never got more than halfway to the darkness before they would stop and back up. They would walk backward up the hall, never turning their back on whatever they were looking at. After a little while, the oppressive feeling would lift, the darkness would disappear, and the dogs would wander off.
This didn't happen often but compared to all the "normal" spookiness in that house, that was the one thing we could never convince ourselves was just in our heads.
22. The Man In The Hat
I lived in a haunted house for 10 years. I had five kids while living there. Every one of my kids saw the man in the hat on the wall. They all saw him when they were between the ages of two to five. Then another spooky development occurred. When they turned six, they stopped seeing him, just never talked about him again.
Once, I heard my son screaming for me in the middle of the night when he was five. When I went to him, he begged me to make his drawers stop. I asked him, “Stop what”? He said they kept opening and slamming shut, and he couldn’t sleep because it was too noisy. Things got moved and lost all of the time, it was just constant.
The spirit did not like babysitters and would torment every one. The most violent episode was when I let my 15-year-old brother watch my kids. When we got home around 2 AM, we found my brother sitting on the steps in the hallway between the front door and the kids' bedrooms. When I saw him, I just knew the worst had happened. He was shaking and crying.
He said that when he got the kids in bed, the pounding started—everywhere and all over the house. At one point, it was so bad that he went outside to see if people were outside hitting the house, but there was no one there. He had gone out the back door to check, and when he walked back inside, he saw the reflection of someone in the mirror walking up the steps to the kids’ rooms.
He went running, thinking that someone had snuck in when he was outside. He checked everywhere, and there was no one in the house. Then when he was upstairs, he saw a shadowy figure streak around the corner of the steps. He heard the front door open and shut. He went running down the steps, but the door was closed and locked.
He spent the next three hours chasing this shadow and hearing the doors open and close. He never babysat for us again. No one would. I had lights shatter above our heads, and my children would laugh and talk to people in their rooms. We had neighbors call us at all hours of the night asking if we were OK because they saw gangs of people in our yard and sneaking around our windows.
The authorities got so used to getting the same emergency call that they stationed an officer in the back of our house to watch our house between 2 and 3 AM. We finally moved, and the people that moved in after us only stayed for a month. They said it was too scary, and the house remained vacant for a very long time afterward.
23. Peeling Poltergeist
We lived in a haunted pub on the site of a former Catholic abbey that Henry VIII had destroyed. We saw some weird stuff. The strangest was the bug zapper in the kitchen. Something peeled it apart in the night. There was no sign of a break-in, all the doors were locked, and the alarms were set. It wasn't smashed. There was no explosion; the metal was just peeled outwards.
A couple of months later, we had an incident in the cellar. The entire pump system blew out, ruining $1,000 of brew. The engineers could not find the cause of the fault and just replaced the system. There were also people captured on the CCTV that weren't there, the underfloor cellar doors would slam, the pub Furby would be talking in the middle of the night, and many more things that would be slightly odd out of context.
24. In Motion
I lived in a house that was built in the 1800s. It survived countless disasters and had seen some stuff. One of the previous owners had two sons who took their lives. A lot of strange things would happen. Our animals—a dog and parrots—would wake up from their naps and follow something with their heads just as they would follow me if I walked around.
Before I switched rooms in the house, my brother had a room that he refused to sleep in, as he would hear voices. He slept with my parents until the day he got my old room. There was also a whole floor we wouldn’t use. I slept in the attic and would pass through the unused floor to get to my room. I had a motion-activated light that would go on as I would walk the stairs to that unused floor.
It would switch on in the middle of the night while nobody was walking under it.
25. Here Kitty, Kitty
My cat was walking through the dining area of our home when she suddenly started sliding backward—for about five feet—as if someone was pulling her by her tail. Only there was no one there. She freaked out and tried to run but couldn't immediately as something held on for a brief second before letting her go. I tend to think that was the handy work of a four or five-year-old girl ghost who hangs out in our house and just wanted to play with the kitty.
26. The Previous Tenant
My sister and then four-year-old niece moved into a townhouse apartment complex. Not long after they moved in, my niece ran into my sister’s room screaming about the man in her room who was yelling at her. My sister jumped out of bed and searched around for anyone or anything out of place. She found nothing. The doors and windows were still locked.
Over the next few nights, it happened a couple more times. My niece didn’t want to sleep there and wouldn’t go into her room. One day, my sister was chatting with one of the other moms at the complex playground. She made a bone-chilling discovery. The other lady mentioned how creepy the events were, considering there was a guy who overdosed in that apartment a few years back.
Apparently, his son’s room was now my niece's room. So, my mom did some digging and found the guy’s name, which led to his obituary. We pulled up the picture from the obituary and called my niece into the computer room. She got half a step into the room when she saw the photo on the monitor. She recognized the guy’s picture and ran out screaming about the man.
27. The Babadook Came For My Baby
My husband and I rented a really old house. We had to fix it up a bit before my son came home from the NICU. We took down the wallpaper and painted, took down the popcorn ceiling—the whole nine yards. The basement was unfinished and had been vandalized by the teenagers who had lived there before. There was angry graffiti everywhere.
We didn't bother finishing it because we didn't really need the room. I went down there once out of the year we lived there. When I did, I had a creepy feeling as if someone was watching me—angry. Sometimes that creepy feeling would come upstairs. I would give it a week or so, thinking it was in my head; then, I would sit in the car with the baby while my husband burned sage to clear it out.
He said the feeling while he did that was heavy. He would see very angry figures coming at him through the smoke. We had countless experiences there, but two stuck out the most. One day, I was showering and the baby was in a little bouncer seat in the doorway. I opened the curtain. Just as I did, the can of air freshener that was sitting on the back of my toilet went flying toward my baby.
If the door weren't just slightly shut, it would have nailed him. I went full-on crazy. I started yelling, telling them if they were going to mess with anyone to mess with me because he was just a baby, and so on. As I was doing so, the detachable shower head went flying off at me, hit the end of its rope, and swung down. It shut me right up.
On another occasion, my husband and I were in bed. My son was in his room right down the small hallway, fast asleep. We had the baby monitor on. My husband and I were lying in bed together. We would usually talk for a while, then say our good nights and fall asleep. As soon as we said our good nights, we both heard—clear as day—a little girl laughing on the baby monitor.
My husband jumped up out of bed, but I already knew no one was there. I couldn't move until finally, I fell asleep.
28. We Had To Face The Music
The house we lived in was photographed in the 1860s in a book in the local library. It was shown to be one of the first houses to have a radio and some sort of headphone device on top of someone's head. One day, I went to school and my mom was home alone, cleaning up after I had left. She was doing her thing when she began to hear music upstairs.
She thought that I had left the radio on. She got to the top of the stairs, which had an open railing. She looked to the right, and nearly screamed. There was a pair of legs standing there tapping feet to the music. She didn't even stay to look up for a body. She noped out as soon as the music stopped and the legs began to turn toward her.
I was 15 at the time, and my mom made me sleep with her for a week. I had numerous other experiences in that house that made a skeptical, big, burly construction worker with sun-kissed skin turn pale as a ghost.
29. There’s No Place Like Home
My mom passed at the age of 56 due to cancer. She was in hospice and passed in her home. One of her favorite songs was "Somewhere over the Rainbow", which I added to her memorial video. Months later, I was cleaning the belongings out of her home. There was no one else there; I was by myself. At one point, I had an emotional breakdown.
I stepped outside to collect myself. When I returned, I heard music coming from the other side of the house, which immediately struck me as weird. Not only was I there alone, but the electricity in the home had been shut off. I followed the music to a bookshelf, where I found it emanating from a snow globe. The snow globe was motion activated.
As in, it only played music when picked up. The song it was playing was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
30. When Spirits Roam
My partner, daughters, and I moved into a new house that had been occupied by the same couple for 49 years. It happened to be right next door to our good friend, who helped us find it. The couple moved because they needed something that would better accommodate their aging and health challenges. Our oldest daughter—who had just turned three at the time—started having imaginary friends right before we moved.
Their names were Beans, Beedo, and Lala. Most of her dolls had similar names too. About a week after we moved in, she asked me a blood-curdling question. She asked me why a man was standing in the kitchen. There was no one there, and my husband was not home yet. I asked her what he looked like and she said a big man with no hair.
A few days later, we were walking by my bedroom, and she said, “Why is that man lying in the bed”? I asked her where he was lying, and she pointed to my husband’s side of the bed. Again, there was no one there. Soon after, she started talking about "Jordan". We did not know any Jordans. When I asked what he looked like, she said he was tall with no hair and old like dad.
She told me he was often around while we were eating. One morning, she was eating breakfast on our covered porch. Suddenly, it all got even creepier. She was disturbed because she saw a young boy walking on his hands and feet towards our neighbor’s house. That was the first time she was disturbed by seeing anyone around the house.
She would talk about Jordan here or there but was never bothered by him. Then eventually, she stopped talking about Jordan. Until one day, in the mail, we got an insurance letter from MetLife addressed to Jordan Jones at our address. The owners of the house before us were there 49 years and had no connection to a Jordan or the last name Jones.
Soon after that, we put a gate in the fence between our and our friend neighbor’s yards. After that, strange things started happening at HER house. The TV would turn on by itself at night while the remotes were on top of the TV stand, a flood light she disconnected would turn on randomly in her garage, and her dogs would growl and bark often.
During that time, my daughter started talking about a girl named Luna. She said, “She’s gone now but wants to be alive. She burnt her face in the fire, and someone took the flowers from her hair, and she wants them back”. When asked, my daughter said Luna and Jordan knew each other and liked us. They also liked my neighbor’s dogs.
She would often see people walking between our houses. Then, she saw someone standing behind my husband in the basement, waved, and said, “That’s not Katie”, and heard laughing and footsteps in the night. When my youngest was two, she would wave and point at nothing often and ask, “Who’s the girl” or “Why is that girl crying”? She didn’t seem scared, though.
31. Tiny Dancer
When I was about six, I moved from the US to the UK. My parents bought an old beat-up house. It was so old that it still had lead pipes for the water. We stayed in the house while it was being worked on. At night, we started seeing bright lights in the corners of rooms and heard footsteps on the floorboards even though the house had carpet.
Then, I started getting woken up in the night by a little girl who would dance on my chest of drawers for me. I was terrified. My mom just brushed it off as me dreaming. But it was much more serious than that. The workmen also complained of strange things happening. Tools were being moved, and they had an odd feeling as if they were being watched.
After about a year of this, my eldest sister’s friend stayed over one night. She woke the whole house up screaming, saying a little girl had been in her room and had apparently pulled her from the bed. The friend left the house and refused ever to come back. My mom decided she might need to do something about it and got some advice.
It was recommended that my mom and the whole family should treat the presence as part of the family. So when we got home, we shouted, “Hi, we’re home. Did you have a good day”? Over time, the house settled down finally, and we didn’t have any more trouble. We also found out a little girl had passed in the house due to asthma.
32. That Burning Feeling
When I was three, my family moved to an extremely small town. The house was built in the early 60s and was your typical ranch-style home. I was an extremely weird, morose kid who didn't have a lot of friends—except for the man in the attic. He was very sad, and his skin was burned. He didn't like many people, but we were friends.
I would talk to him, and sometimes we'd play. It creeped my mom out, but she assumed maybe I had seen Nightmare on Elm Street and was imagining the burnt man. Years went by, and we stopped playing, but I always felt SOMETHING. A few years later—as an adult—we were visiting with new neighbors who happened to have ties to the community.
Somehow the subject of imaginary friends came up, and my mom enthusiastically told the husband about the burnt man. He went deathly pale. He informed us that the land our house had been built on was the site of an old blacksmith’s shop. The blacksmith had accidentally caught on fire and later passed from his injuries. Needless to say, I felt this in my soul.
After a little research, I found out it actually did happen.
33. The Cabin In The Woods
We lost our first home during the housing collapse. Both my husband and I grew up in rentals, so home ownership was a big deal for us both. It took several years, but after a long search, we found our dream home—a beautiful affordable cabin in the woods. The previous owner of the house had lost his life in a motorcycle crash.
The house had been on the market for years. Prior to our closing, I dreamt that the previous owner had left me a fruit basket and a handwritten card that read, "Take care of it for me". When we moved in, I found vintage mason jars with fruit baskets etched on them. That first year it seemed whenever we needed something like a simple tool or screw to fix stuff in the house, it would just turn up in the shed or in a cabinet.
The previous owner had built the house with his own two hands. He converted it from an old hunting cabin into a four-bedroom house. It was a labor of love for him. In any case, one day, we decided to finally research about his accident. He passed three years before we moved in, on the exact day that we lost our first house.
34. She Finally Closed The Door
I rented and later bought a house in Denver. There were two stairways into the basement. The door to the front stairway was always closed, and we never used it. The stairs were steep, always super cold, and not terribly convenient. That door would swing open every day or so while I was sitting on the couch and then close. When I would get up to go check it, it would be latched shut.
As I was preparing to buy the house from the landlord, I got a note from an attorney that the authorities wanted to come over and do some crime scene stuff. That was how I found out the dark truth. The previous tenant had accidentally shot herself in the chest while cleaning a double barrel while her husband was in the basement.
He supposedly didn’t hear it and was acquitted. After I bought the house, I had it "smudged" and "cleansed" by a psychic who told her it was okay to go. The door never opened on its own again after that.
35. This Spirit Raised The Bar
My parents managed a pub in London, and we lived in a flat directly above said pub. We always used to think there was a ghost of some sort living there because the lights attached to the ceiling above the bar would swing, and we would hear creaking noises. However, there was one night when I was staying at home for a short while when something even spookier happened.
At about 1 AM, all the alarms had been put on, and the lights were turned off. The way the alarm system worked was that if there was a large amount of movement detected, it went off. I was still awake while the rest of my family had gone to bed for the night when the alarm went off. I had only ever heard it go off once before, and that was scary in itself.
I thought I needed to get a bat or massive flashlight or something. My mom and dad came barging out of their bedrooms, and we unlocked the door separating our flat from the pub. We turned on the lights, and each grabbed something big just in case someone had broken in. We walked about the bar area for a little while searching for someone.
We were going full-on special forces—checking corners, banging doors open with our feet. Then we noticed something weird. Some of the electronics and fuses for the pub were hidden behind a small wooden door/panel near the men’s toilets. It usually latched, so it doesn’t randomly come loose and smack a customer in the face. The panel was wide open.
It was something that had never happened before. There was no way a rat or something like that could’ve done it. The latch and panel itself were way too heavy to be moved by something that small, which also meant it couldn’t have been a draft. I suggested we check the CCTV the next day. The door had wildly swung open for no apparent reason. We all agreed it must have been a ghost.
36. The Man In White
In our house, several people—myself included—had seen or felt a presence that we affectionately dubbed “the man in white”. One day, my brother was cooking with his girlfriend in the kitchen. From the periphery, he saw a white figure pass in front of the kitchen door, as if walking through the hallway. I was in my room, and he asked me if I had passed through there.
I hadn't. A maid had been cleaning the bathroom, and she felt something was looking at her from the bathroom door. She told my mom about it because it really affected her. Then, a different maid was walking through the hallway on her way to clean the bathroom that was on the way to my room. When she got to the bathroom, the door was open, and she saw a figure standing in front of the toilet.
She assumed I was peeing with the door open and quickly turned away. She continued on to the bedrooms to tidy them up. I was in my room. So, when she got to it and saw me, she turned around to the bathroom to check if there was someone there. She screamed and sat on my bed pale and with goosebumps when she noticed the person wasn't there anymore.
While brushing my teeth in that same bathroom, I saw a shadow pass through the hallway. On another occasion, my mother's sneakers fell to the floor from on top of the washing machine when it wasn't turned on. My mother even brought an uncle of hers who was a priest to cleanse the house. That was before the second maid and I saw the figure.
Luckily, “the man in white” was pretty chill and became a recurring joke at our house. If the dogs were looking fixedly at the hall, I would lose my socks, or someone would feel a presence somehow, we all attributed it to “the man in white”.
37. Irma And Hiram
In the mid-1970s, my parents bought a 100-year-old Victorian house in NJ. The original owner, Hiram, was a captain in the Union Army and an engineer. After the Civil War, he developed parts of my hometown under the assumption the railroad would come through, and he would hit it rich. He didn't. The railroad went one town over.
However, that didn't deter him from developing a public park and building several houses, including mine and one for his daughter and son-in-law just 100 yards away. At the time my parents bought the house, the only living descendant was Hiram’s granddaughter, Irma, who by then was in her 80s and living in the house he had built for her parents/his daughter.
Irma was born in Hiram's house but raised in the second house by her parents. Irma took a liking to my parents because of their interest in the history of the houses. Irma passed not long after my parents moved in. My parents bought several pieces of furniture at Irma's estate sale, including a complete antique dining set that initially belonged to Hiram.
They set up the furniture in the dining room—which could be accessed by two doors—one of which was partially off the hinges and hence needed to be picked up for anyone to open and go through it. Doing so made a distinct and loud creaking sound, followed by a slam to shut the door and get it to latch. Both doors could be locked by a skeleton key.
As a precaution, they usually locked the broken door. Around the time my parents bought Irma’s furniture, they attended her wake. My mom placed a skeleton key from our/Hiram's house into Irma's casket. The night after the wake, my parents were lying awake in bed when they heard the broken dining-room door open, creak, and slam.
They went downstairs to inspect, but no one was there. It looks like Irma and perhaps Hiram got one last look at everything before moving on.
38. I Needed A Change Of Pace
I lived in an older home for about five years or so. My stepdad, who knew the man who had lived there before us, told me he had hung himself in the attic. I honestly didn't think much of it...until one day. I heard the footsteps. Like clockwork, every night at 3 AM, I would hear footsteps walking along the length of the attic, which would go over my room.
The steps were heavy, and you could clearly tell the pace was at a normal walking speed. It sounded like a man contemplating something, thinking about his next move. If it was truly the former owner, perhaps those were his final moments being played out every night before his fateful decision. No one can say, but those footsteps went on for years and still freak me out.
39. The Back Room Boogeyman
My parents divorced, and my mom always used to talk about my dad’s house, more specifically, "the back room". The house was located in a super small town in middle America. It was a super old house with an addition. The new addition was “the back room". My dad always kept it sealed off. It was full of boxes and had a bedroom attached.
The back room was fantastic as a kid because there was so much stuff back there. There were boxes full of old toys, papers, weird stuff, fishing lures, books, etc. All the things that had been "stored". But it had a dark side, too. My mom would always tell us that she put her guitar back there and would always hear it being strummed at random times, day or night.
It would sound as if someone was running their hand across all the strings. We always had really minor weird stuff happen at that house, but nothing that would make me say there was a severe issue. There were footsteps, the occasional bang, and stuff being moved. When I turned 11 or 12, I decided that since nobody was using the back room, it should be mine.
My dad agreed. It was later at night, so I moved a mattress in on the floor, determined to set up the room as my own the next day. This was a dreadful mistake. That night, I went to bed and woke up really late in the night. It sounded as if a thousand birds were in the room, all flying around and smacking into walls, or a thousand hands all over the walls, hitting them.
I could hear it a foot or so above my head. I put the blankets over my head, which lasted for at least another 30 minutes. I finally mumbled, "Let me sleep tonight, and I'll never sleep here again", and it stopped. The next day, I didn't say a word. I was terrified, but I was also scared of being laughed at by my dad for being a baby or something.
The day passed, and at night, I was freaked out at going back in there, but I still said nothing to my dad about what had happened. As I started to go back to bed, my dad opened the door and said, "If there's something back here bothering you, you don't have to sleep back here". I immediately got up and slept in another room.
40. College Creep-Out
When I first moved to college, I was assigned to one of the oldest dorms on campus. They were these massive towers that held a lot of students, and I got assigned to the 8th floor, all the way at the top. I had four roommates, and since the dorm was so old, it was relatively small. We had one bedroom for all of us, one living room, and one bathroom.
When I moved in, I remember thinking, "something is a little off about this room". I'm a skeptic that really believes there’s a rational explanation for everything, but that dorm had some really scary stuff going on. Around the spring semester, things started to get really out of hand. I had a moving trunk with a padlock on it that we used for a living room table.
It was primarily used to hide our drinks, but it served its purpose as a table well enough. One night, I woke up to a scraping sound in our living area. I went to check it out because I had to use the bathroom anyway, and the padlock was swinging back and forth on the truck, making the scraping noise. I thought it might have been one of my roommates at first.
Trouble was, they were all fast asleep in the room I had just left. I chalked it up to my imagination. Then, a couple of weeks passed, and the door started to lock itself behind us. The doors didn't have a mechanism to lock automatically as some doors did. Our RAs always stressed that we should always lock the door behind us when we leave.
There were days when I would be talking to our friends across the hall and turn around to go back into our dorm, and the door would be locked. It wasn’t a bolted locking, but rather like somebody was holding the handle. My roommates weren't there, or they would be with me on the other side of the door. Then even stranger stuff started happening.
We had a window on the other side of the room from our front door. It was the middle of winter, so we kept it shut tight and locked, and we kept the curtain shut. My roommate and I were talking by the front door, getting ready to go eat, when the curtain opened up by itself. It hung there for a second and got forcefully torn off the bar it was on.
It was as if somebody forcefully ripped it off, and neither of us was near it. We both looked at each other and left in a hurry because we couldn't explain it whatsoever. The scraping padlock—which happened all throughout the semester—somebody "holding" the handle of our front door, and the curtain all convinced me that something was up in that dorm.
I have many other stories from when I was a security guard watching over a haunted victorian style house, but the dorm took the cake.
Public Domain Pictures
41. Saved By The Specter
I lived in a loft apartment. Many strange things happened there, but only the first encounter was scary. The place had a weird wall furnace in it. When winter came, my new boyfriend lit up the furnace for me. Just as he did, everything went crazy. We heard—but didn't see—doors slamming and footsteps running up and down the stairs.
The lamp hanging above the table began to swing wildly. I was standing there in shock while all that was happening. My boyfriend then turned the furnace off and took the front off of it. It was filled with a mouse nest that was just starting to smolder. How he knew to remove the door was beyond me. When I asked him, he said he didn't know why he did that.
That ghost saved us that night.
42. Doorbusting Demon
I am skeptical about the paranormal and always try to find a rational explanation for things. That being said, my childhood home was undoubtedly haunted. The house used to have a couple of apartments. One of the tenants had slaughtered his wife in the house. He was taken into custody and thrown behind bars for many years for this.
My grandparents later moved in, remodeled, and passed it on to my mom when I was born. When my brother was eight and I was 12, we were about to go to sleep when my brother suddenly started crying uncontrollably. He said he was scared to go to sleep. He looked and sounded genuinely upset when he would typically be very calm.
I finally calmed him down, and we fell asleep. A few hours later, he woke up crying again, got out of bed, and woke me up. As soon as I opened my eyes and sat up, my guitar—that was hanging on the far wall about eight feet away—smashed against my headboard. It was as though someone had lifted it and threw it very, very HARD at my head.
We both screamed, but I chalked it up as my fault for hanging it wrong. However, I knew it could not have lifted and propelled itself forward on its own. I stayed awake the rest of the night, thinking of every possible explanation that could’ve made that happen. I also used to have constant vivid nightmares about a scary woman who seemed to always be in my mom's walk-in closet.
She would come out at night and hurt my mom. One time she was putting needles into her like a pincushion, and once, she was punching my mom in the face. Another time, she was trying to escape the room to get to my brother and sisters, but because my mom was there, she couldn’t get to us. It was odd, considering the closet door was just an accordion door.
One day, my mom, siblings, and I were downstairs eating lunch when my middle sister came downstairs crying frantically. Her words struck a terrifying chord in me. She said there was something scary in mom’s closet moving the door. So my mom and I went to check it out. I opened the bedroom door about to go in, watching to see if there was any movement, and nothing happened.
So, I started to walk towards the closet door, and it started to move the slightest bit. I paused, then, all of a sudden, it looked like there was a crowd of people behind that door punching with all their might to get out. The door came off of the tracks on both the top and bottom. The rattling noise was so loud and rapid that it was like a machine gun.
The unfathomable fear I felt made me physically ill. We ran as fast as we could out of that house to the neighbor’s. We had the neighbor go in to check if someone or something was in there. They checked it out and saw nothing but a beaten-up door off its tracks. We moved about a month later. We had orbs, lights turning on and off, and doors locking and unlocking themselves as well.
A few years later, my mom—a hospice nurse for years—received a patient whose name was eerily familiar to her. It was the man who offed his wife in our house. She cared for him until he passed. The odds were unreal.
43. I Was Rattled
I lived in a big 1840s colonial house with three of my friends. It was set back on more than 80 acres of state wildlife property and was a gorgeous house. The bedrooms were all upstairs and lined the hall. On our third night in the house, about 30 minutes after we had all called it a night, my doorknob rattled as if someone was fiddling with it.
Then, I heard the door next to mine rattle—and the next—and the next—all the way down the hall one at a time. Even so, I had no idea what I was in for. The following day one of my housemates asked why I was messing with the doors. She had asked the two guys in the house, and neither of them knew what she was talking about.
Another night, I woke up with an intense urge to get out of bed. It was as if my brain was screaming at me to get up. I laid still for a while, thinking maybe I had been woken up by a noise, but it was around 3 AM and utterly quiet. I went into the hallway. As soon as I walked out into the hall, all my roommates opened their doors and came out too.
We were all woken up, but no one heard anything, and they had the same urgent feeling to get up that I did. We just shrugged and went back to sleep. Strange objects would also show up in the basement or crawlspace. Things like old, old suitcases or a kid’s rocking chair, even a vase—just random stuff. You would occasionally hear footsteps running down the bedroom hall and down the stairs if you were in the living room below.
That house was really strange. We NEVER felt threatened; it was just weird.
44. This Ghost Got Touchy-Feely
We used to live in a house that was built in 1956. There were several things that happened. When my middle daughter was in preschool and kindergarten, she would be trying to go to sleep but would be crying that someone touched her hair, touched her feet, and even said her name in her ear. Finally, when all three of my girls were in school, I'd had enough.
I went into her bedroom and said, "Whoever is touching her and saying her name, please stop. I know you only want to get her attention, but you are scaring her". After that, it never happened again. Around the same time, we removed the carpet in our living room and hallway and put down a wood floor. My husband worked nights, and I would always hear a child running in the hallway.
I would get up and check my three girls, and they would be fast asleep. It happened so often that I stopped checking on the kids. Once my husband was off, and even he heard it. He was sleeping, woke up, and said one of the girls was up. I had not even mentioned to him that it had happened before because he is a huge skeptic, and I didn't want to deal with his attitude about it.
I said no, they weren't, and he said, "They are! I heard them running in the hallway".
45. He Raked My Fears Away
My first house growing up always gave me the creeps. I was very young, but I remember it well. I hated nap time and being in my room because it gave me the willies. I felt fine everywhere else in the house, but I didn’t even like playing by myself in my room and would often hear “breathing” in my ears, similar to when you can hear blood pumping in your ears.
I somehow convinced my parents to let me sleep with an inflatable alligator pool floaty because I thought it would “protect me from the ghosts”. One night, I was waiting to go to sleep with my gator when in the dark, I saw a figure of a man in the middle of my bedroom. He looked like my grandpa—who was alive at the time—had clothes that looked like they were from the 30s/40s.
He was just silently raking my bedroom carpet with one of those longish metal rakes. He did that for a few minutes, then vanished. I wasn’t scared when I saw him, and after that, I wasn’t scared of my house anymore. I also never saw him again.
46. Double Trouble
We had two ghosts at my house. One was our house ghost. The first experience I had with her was at about 9 AM one morning. My daughter was about four at the time and was either on school break or didn't have school that day. We had only been living in our house for a few months, and we didn't know anyone in town yet at that point.
We were asleep, and I woke up to a startling sound. I was hearing the "shave and a haircut" knock. I was confused and figured maybe I had dreamt it, so I stayed in bed, but I heard it again. I looked outside to see if maybe there was someone at the neighbor’s house or in our backyard, but nothing. I checked the front door and looked around outside.
Still nothing. I assumed I just heard the house settling and equated the noise to the “shave and a haircut” knock. I went back to bed. Then, I heard it AGAIN. I called my husband at work to tell him I was scared. I felt really stupid. Another time I was making tacos from leftovers. I got my kiddo’s all done, put everything away, and sat down.
Then, I decided I wanted some myself. I went back to the kitchen. I was shocked at what I saw. Everything was out. I was absent-minded, but not THAT absent-minded. I remembered putting it all away. To make light of the situation, I laughed out loud and said, "Oh, thanks" to nobody. I put the last of the cheese on my taco, popped it in the microwave, and walked to the trash can.
I threw the cheese bag away, turned around, and my taco was on the table, but my microwave was still going. I know I had put it in there. So, I said out loud, "OK, that's just not funny", and left it at that. Then, I saw her. I was cooking, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a woman in a long dress standing on the stairs. I froze, still using my peripheral vision to see her.
It wasn’t an old-fashioned dress, just a casual summer one. The figure and their clothing were just gray. When I turned to look full-on, nobody was there. Things would go missing and turn up in a place we had definitely already looked. One day, my niece's phone went missing for about 30 minutes. We had six people looking for it at the time.
It ended up on top of the bedding on the air mattress that four of us had torn apart looking for it. The house ghost was harmless and stayed primarily on the main level of our house and upstairs, where the bedrooms and bathrooms were. But there was another, darker presence. This was the second ghost, “Mr Creepy/Mr White”.
He would stay downstairs in the laundry room, office, and basement. The first time I saw him, we had been living in the house for about a year. I had just started a load of laundry and was cleaning out my car in the garage. The laundry room had a door to the garage, which I had open because it was summer, and it was nice outside.
I walked by the door and saw a tallish black figure standing in front of the washer. They were just standing there. At first, I thought it was my brother wearing his black winter coat. I did a double-take, and no one was there. I tried to recreate it, thinking maybe I had cast a shadow or seen my reflection in the mirror, but neither was possible.
I went upstairs to ask my brother if he had been downstairs, but he hadn't because he'd been cooking, and nobody else was home. I dubbed him “Mr Creepy” because he didn't seem as friendly as our house ghost. I saw him once again as I was upstairs, walking by the staircase. He was just a dark figure that quickly moved from the door to the basement, through the office into the laundry room.
My nieces shared the basement as a bedroom, and one would constantly complain about feeling watched, especially at night. Roughly a year after the first incident, I was talking to our neighbor across the street. We got to talking about the previous owner of the house, Mr White, since they'd been good friends and neighbors for years before he had gotten too old to care for the house.
The neighbor informed me that Mr White had passed roughly a year prior, which lined up with the timeframe I first saw him. I told my niece that if she got that feeling again, to address him as Mr White, tell him he's making her scared, and nicely ask him to please leave her alone. At some point, she did, and we didn’t have any Mr Creepy/Mr White incidences.
47. Never Fear Mrs. Frear
The house I grew up in was haunted by Mrs. Frear. It was built in the 70s, and it was her dream home when she built it. Mrs. Frear wound up passing in the house. When I was home by myself, I would hear walking upstairs. The previous owners had remodeled the kitchen on the cheap. Mrs. Frear hated it and would bang cabinet doors.
I remember walking downstairs when I was 11 or 12 after cabinet doors slammed, and my mom was standing there. She looked at me, then looked into the kitchen and said, “Mrs. Frear, I don’t like the kitchen either, and as soon as we have the money, we’re going to remodel this kitchen”. The cabinet slamming stopped from that point on.
When the kitchen was finally remodeled, things got even weirder. I would walk into it, and there would be the smell of fresh-baked foods, even though not a single person was awake to cook yet. I guess she liked the new kitchen. Another time, I was sitting in my room on my computer, and the door knob turned, and the door opened.
I would tell Mrs. Frear that she was welcome to stay as long as she liked. The door would shut and latch, usually about 15 minutes later. One time, my friend stayed the night. He said he woke up and saw an elderly woman in a dress staring out the window. Mrs. Frear looked at him, and her image faded away over time to just a ghostly imprint.
When my parents were out of town, I fell asleep on the couch watching a movie. I had ordered a pizza. I woke up to a quilt over top of me that was on the other side of the room when I fell asleep. The pizza box was closed, and my plate was on top of the box. But that wasn't all. My sister had a friend that was a little on the strange side.
She must have been some sort of medium because one day, she was over and we were all talking in the kitchen. She looked at us and said, “Mrs. Frear likes the new kitchen”. She also told us, “Mrs. Frear likes your brother the most”. No one had told her that our house was haunted. Every time I would go home to visit my parents, she always made her presence known.
I always told Mrs. Frear that I missed her, and I’m glad to know she was doing well. She was not a bad ghost at all. She was just making sure that her dream house was being looked after.
48. Knives Out
My house was abandoned for two years before we bought it. When we went for the viewing, we noticed something disturbing right away. There was a bedroom closet that was padlocked shut. The realtor said they had no key, and we couldn't open it unless we bought it, which we did. Our first priority was opening that door!
After a few minutes, we got in. It was a child's play area. There were brightly colored walls, glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars and planets covering the ceiling, and checkered tile on the floor. There were no lights, no air vents, and no windows. My little brother chimed in, "Well, this must be where they kept the kids before they died!"
After three months of renovating, we moved in. The loft area had a daylight sensing motion sensor light as there was no easy way to install a switch. The light would come on by itself at all hours of the day. It didn’t matter how we positioned the sensor, it would randomly trip, and we jokingly shout out, "Will you darn kids quit running in the house"!
That would usually be the last time it would come on that day. A year after living there, we turned the creepy closet bedroom into our computer room. My wife and I would leave for work at the same time each day but arrive home about two hours apart. That's when it escalated. One day, I got a call from my very confused wife asking why I had come back home after we had left together.
I did not go back home. Upon returning from work, she was greeted by our computer room chair—in our kitchen. The chair had to travel through two doorways, down a hallway, and a flight of stairs to reach the kitchen. It did so seemingly by itself. We thought it odd but blamed the deceased kids and tried to think nothing more of it.
About six months after that, we had our last big doozy of an event. We went to bed in a house in perfect order. Upon waking, we found that all of our kitchen cutlery had been removed from the butcher block. In their place were all of our butter knives. The sharp, dangerous ones had been placed behind the kitchen sink instead.
Neither one of us had moved them. We were both pretty freaked out and spent the whole day away from the house trying to sort it out. We decided we were being unreasonable and went home to forget the ordeal. We told ourselves that ghosts aren't real, and there weren't actually any kids who passed there. We talked to the neighbor about it.
He confirmed that there were indeed no kids who perished in the house. Instead, something worse had happened. A grown man had. The room with the creepy closet was the room where the previous owner’s brother took his life. When his wife left, and they failed to work it out, he couldn't handle life anymore, so he cut his wrists and bled out.
The previous owner kept living there afterward, but upon finding out he was foreclosed on, he attempted to take his life in the same room. His children found him, and he lived. Later that year, our family began to grow. The rooms all got shuffled to make room for the baby. That creepy closet room got emptied, and the weird things all stopped happening.
To this day, that room is only used for storage. My four-year-old son played in there occasionally, but even in the daytime, with all the light the window let into the bedroom, he turned every light on. When asked why, he said, "It makes it less weird to play there". Seems like he sensed something was very wrong with the house too.
49. Doppleganging Demon
I lived in a house that seemed to be haunted by “doppelgangers". It's even creepier than it sounds. Every event that happened never involved some mysterious figure, but a known person being in a place where they should not have been. One day, I was instant messaging my girlfriend with my webcam turned on. I had the viewer up so I could see myself on the webcam.
Behind me, there were stairs leading up to the left of the camera view and the entrance to the living room to the right. My younger sister would typically fall asleep every night on the couch in front of the TV and make her way up to bed in the middle of the night. At one point in my webcam view, I saw my sister leave the living room and go up the stairs.
What was odd was that I didn’t hear anything. It was an older Victorian house, and the wooden floors and stairs were extremely loud. Without saying anything to my girlfriend, I got up and looked into the living room. I couldn't believe my eyes. My sister was there, passed out on the couch. Even though I was certain about what I saw.
I sat back down and asked my girlfriend if she had seen anything on my camera. She said, "Yeah, I just saw your sister go upstairs". Another day, my family was all getting ready to go somewhere. I was sitting in the car with my mom, and we were waiting on my sister, who was still in the house. After a bit, she came out and got in the car.
She then just looked at me, completely confused. I asked her what was wrong, and she said that just before she walked out of the house, she thought I was still inside. She had yelled up the stairs, "We're leaving", and apparently "I" yelled back, "Okay, I'll be down in a minute"! Then, when I was 22, I was in the armed forces.
I had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. About a month after my diagnosis, I was home on leave for the holidays. I carried around a kit—a black zip-up pouch with a glucometer, insulin pen, needles, and isopropyl pads. Right after I left home to head back from leave, my mom texted me to ask if I was missing my diabetic kit.
I looked, and I wasn’t. She sent me a picture of a diabetic kit and asked if I knew it. I had never seen that kit before in my life. Apparently, my sister went into her bedroom and discovered it outside of her window, propped up like someone had set it there. Her bedroom was on the second floor, and nobody else we knew had diabetes.
50. Maid Service
My uncle's house—on a very eastern part of NY—was said to be haunted because the family that used to own it in the 1800s decided not to give it to the stableman and sold it instead. He and the maid haunted the place. We always used to joke that you would hear people or things moving at night, but since the house was so old, we used to just laugh it off. Until one night, everything changed.
My uncle's friend and her sister stayed at the house one night, and the friend noticed a maid bringing towels down the stairs when she woke up. She saw the maid again, bringing what looked like a percolator down the stairs. She was so impressed that my uncle hired staff that she went back to bed and woke up later downstairs to see my uncle and the friend just chatting.
She asked where the maid went and thought the housekeeper was cooking breakfast. My uncle had no idea what she was talking about and asked what she looked like. The sister explained, and he laughed. He walked her to the living room and pointed to an old picture. She said that was the woman. My uncle replied, "Yeah, she's been gone for about 100 years".
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