Sure, it’s easy to say ghosts aren’t real, and that all the supernatural moments we might experience have perfectly reasonable explanations. But…do they? Some of the things these Redditors saw, heard, or went through were so bizarre that they defy any simple solutions. They’re also straight-up terrifying. Warning: Don’t read these with the lights off.
1. Sound The Alarm
I used to work the night shift in group homes for the mentally disabled or severely mentally ill. At one house I worked at, there was constant scratching coming from the walls. I figured it was just squirrels, but now I’m not too sure. We had set a lot of traps and never caught anything. But this isn’t what made me a believer.
What happened was one night I was watching TV in the living room after all the residents had fallen asleep. Around 3 am, the doorbell starts ringing like someone is frantically pushing it. I got up and went to the door, but when I got there and opened it nobody was there. Now, there are three things you need to know about this entry way.
First, the entry goes into the living room and I can see it from the couch. Second, the front door has a very large window on it that is two thirds of the door. Lastly, the walkway to the front doorknob is a 20-30 foot corridor that has brick wall on either side. So in order to ding-dong ditch, you’d have to run back that entire length to be able to duck around a corner.
So basically, I didn’t understand how anyone could have rang the bell, but they did. I figured I was being pranked by one of our more mischievous residents, so I went and checked on them all. They were all fast asleep. Then as soon as I finished shutting the last resident’s door, the doorbell started frantically ringing again.
I rushed to the door again, only to find nobody there. This time I was determined to catch them, so I turned all the lights off except the TV and hid right beside the door so I’d be able to immediately open it when they came back. After 20 minutes, the doorbell started going insane again, I jumped out and quickly turned on the walkway lights and looked out the window—but nobody was there.
I then opened the door, thinking maybe they were hiding to the side of the door like I had. After seeing nobody there again, my stomach dropped and I got a feeling of dread. I slowly started closing the door, and as soon as the door was almost closed all the way the doorbell started going nuts again and stayed that way for at least 15 minutes before stopping again.
It was almost as if whatever it was took great pleasure in mocking and taunting me. I locked the door and ran my butt to the couch after turning on all the lights I could. Another disturbing thing about this is it seemed to read my mind. Whenever I got the urge to go outside and smoke, it would start with the doorbell again.
It’s like it didn’t want me to forget it’s there and a threat. Looking back, I’m pretty sure it was a poltergeist. That place was rife with bad energy, as most group homes are. A lot of suffering and raw emotions happen at those places. It also didn’t help that we had a resident there who had literally gone insane after watching his parents get murdered in front of him and a medium-low functioning schizophrenic with what I’ve confirmed as at least eight distinct “people” talking to him in his head.
Both of these residents are constantly having stuff knocked off their shelves and walls in the middle of the night and it’s super common for them to be yelling at people who aren’t there to shut up in the middle of the night. I used to think it was just mental illness but now I’m not too sure.
2. Circling The Drain
The house I grew up in was haunted. The way it was laid out, I could see from my bedroom down the hall and into the living room. My parents’ bedroom door was on the other side of the living room directly across from my door. Late at night, I would hear someone pacing circles in the living room, but I was the only one awake in the house and we didn’t have pets.
I never said anything because I didn’t want the family to think I was nuts. Eventually, I moved out and went to college. After I graduated, I was in a rough spot financially. My parents had bought a new house, the old one was still empty (they were considering getting renters) and they offered it to me to stay in for a while.
Even though it was a sweet deal, I said no I didn’t want to move in. My mom asked why, and I finally gave in and told her I thought there was a ghost. My mom FROZE and turned to look at me. Her face was like you hear her too. Turns out, she had also heard it for years and didn’t say anything for the exact same reason. So spooky.
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3. Private, Keep Out
This is my mother’s story. I’ve no reason to doubt her and she’s never told another or been concerned with the supernatural. She does have a vaguely spiritual streak, but that’s all. Mostly, she’s pretty no-nonsense. When she retired, she got heavily into family history. At some point, she obtained the diary of my dad’s mother, who’d passed perhaps 20 years previously, who we all called Nan.
Nan had been a very stiff and proper English type, called everyone dear, used words like “terribly” and “perfectly dreadful” and was always relentlessly formal and seemed to be slightly offended at all times. She was also an intensely private person and never wanted anyone knowing her business. So one night my dad was away and my mother, home alone, sits down with the diary and starts going through it.
It starts raining, nothing unusual since they live on the coast. She gets up and closes a few windows. Goes back to the diary. The rain turns into a storm. It gets windy. She goes to the other room and shuts the windows there. Comes back to the diary. A few more minutes go by; she’s been looking at the diary for maybe 15 minutes at this point.
Suddenly, the intercom to her right bursts to life at full volume with just static coming from the speaker. They live in a three-storey house on the side of a hill that was originally built by an electrician, so there are a million lights, power points on every wall and every room has an intercom. After recovering from the fright, she turns off the intercom.
The one in the next room is still going full blast. She gets up and shuts that off, and can hear the rest of the house downstairs still going. Every intercom. She heads down to the middle level where the master unit is and turns the intercom off. She’s heading upstairs when she notices the creepiest part yet. All the pictures on the walls are all askew.
All at similar angles, not random. Meanwhile, the storm has increased. The floor she is on is lined the length of the house on one side with timber-framed windows. Even the tops of the windows are wet with rain, which rarely happens and takes a proper storm to do. As she’s stood there taking this all in, what she can only describe as “an intense gust of wind” rattles the windows from one end of the house to the other, as if a speeding train went past on the balcony outside.
Instead of fleeing into the night in search of a hotel room and real estate agent as I would have done, she walks calmly upstairs, shuts the diary, puts it in a cupboard, shuts the cupboard, says “Sorry, Nan” to the empty room, and goes to make a cup of tea. The storm calms down. She rights all the pictures. That’s that. But here’s the kicker.
Someone from her work lives in the same street. Like, 10 houses away. When my mom sees him the next day, she mentions the storm. “What storm?” comes the reply. She’s like, “What do you mean ‘what storm?’ I’m talking about the gale-force storm we had last night.” The guy looks at her funny and says he would’ve known if there was a storm since they had dinner on the balcony that night and there wasn’t a storm at any point.
Reading this back it sounds completely made up. I can only swear it isn’t. I lack the imagination to make up something like this. Shout out to Nan if she’s somehow reading this. I promise I won’t be reading your diary.
4. The Scent Of A Woman
In 2012, my grandmother suffered a major stroke resulting in at-home palliative care. Friends and family were able to come by freely and spend time with her. I was very close to my grandma and was lucky to be able to share much of this time with her. For anyone that has ever been through hospice with a loved one, you will understand how hard this type of thing can be.
One night, I was sitting at home in my office catching up on some work, when all of a sudden the room filled with the scent of perfume. I'm not talking about a faint smell, I'm saying it was very distinctive and strong throughout the entire room. I stopped everything I was doing and said out loud, to myself, "Something is wrong with Gram."
I had not spoken to my family that day but felt an urgent need to send a text message to my uncle, who was staying with her. I asked, "You guys okay?" This was at 11:20 PM. I got a response right away saying, "You might want to come and say goodbye. Not okay." I quickly rushed over. Upon arrival, the living room where my family was congregated was very silent and filled with blank faces.
Without saying anything, I walked straight to my grandmother, kissed her on the forehead, and told her I loved her. She was still warm...but no longer breathing. I told my uncle that I was there because grandma had brought me there. I asked when she passed, and he replied saying just five minutes before I sent my text. This puts the perfume in my office at nearly the exact same moment.
Now, I'm going to say that I was born into an Irish Catholic family, but I am in no way a religious person. I would have been the first person to discount this type of story if you told it to me. But, I must say, this experience had me thinking that there really is something more out there. I felt it. It was just that one night, but I felt it.
5. The Last To Know
This was a true experience. Many years ago, I was working in a shop and an old lady had purchased several bags of groceries. It was a little icy outside and I knew the lady lived fewer than 100 yards away from the shop, so I offered to take her groceries home for her. She was shocked that I would offer and ever so grateful.
On the way to her house, she kept saying thank you to me. I told her it was no problem and I was happy to help. She said she wished more people like me were helpful etc., etc. As we reached her door, she opened it and stepped away so I could enter. I told her that I was OK holding the bags and she should go in the house and get out of the cold.
She thanked me again and stepped in the doorway and took a few steps down the hall. I walked in behind her and put the shopping bags on the floor. I asked her if she wanted me to help her put things away, and she insisted I had done enough and thanked me again and again. I stepped outside and turned around to say bye to her.
As she was closing the door, she said, "Thank you young man, I will watch over your soul from heaven." A few days later, her body was found in her home, in the hallway, next to a few bags of slowly rotting groceries.
6. Bridge Of Souls
When I was a kid, my favorite uncle was the youngest in the family. He was my hero. He had just finished high school and I was like 10 or 11. We would go and visit on spring break and over the course of the summer, and I always looked forward to seeing the guy. We’d listen to records and tapes, and he introduced me to tons of bands.
As I entered my teenage years, my life started and my friends became the center of my universe. Meanwhile, those spring break and summer visits eventually stopped happening. Eventually, I graduated high school, and around the same time my uncle started a family. A few years out of high school, my mom called me up and let me know my uncle had passed.
I hadn’t seen him in a few years, and when I asked what happened the only reply I could get was “he was sick.” It wasn’t until years later I found out the whole truth. He had taken his own life. He didn’t leave a note or anything, but the general consensus was he learned he didn’t have long to live and took the easy way out. But here’s where things get interesting for me.
Shortly after the funeral, I start having dreams. I’m a pretty lucid dreamer, not in the sense that I can decide what I want to happen in a dream, but I can recall my dreams in vivid detail. Maybe there’s another word for that? I don’t know. Anyways, I started having dreams about my uncle. Sometimes we were just sitting in his room from when I was a kid.
But another dream was much darker. I had this recurring nightmare where I would find him sitting at a rope bridge. He would stare at this bridge and get up and try to walk across it, but there were snakes that would strike at him when he tried to cross. A snake would snip at him and he’d go back to where he was sitting and just look at me, then look at the bridge.
So I’d walk on to this bridge and look across, and every few feet is a very angry snake. All the way across. I grabbed my uncle’s hand and took him out on the bridge. And he would be apprehensive because of the snakes. So I stood in front of him and kinda of hopped up and down on the bridge. The momentum or whatever you call it from me bouncing on this rickety old bridge made the snakes angry, but if you bounced enough on it, the snakes would eventually teeter over the side.
It was a very strange “eureka!” kind of dream. So my uncle would step out on to the bridge walk a few feet. Bounce the bridge so the snakes would fall off. The dream would always end with my uncle making it across the bridge and me getting this feeling of reluctance to follow him across. Then I would wake up, with this overwhelming feeling of sadness.
These dreams happened for almost 20 years. Always the same. Me and my uncle talking, or me helping him solve a puzzle of some sort. The snake and rope bridge was the most common. I never told a soul in my family about what my uncle and I were up to, since I always thought it would be upsetting. Like he wasn’t at rest. Like he was in purgatory or something. Maybe he was? I eventually just came to accept that my uncle was haunting me. And for the most part, I didn’t mind.
Then my grandmother passed a few years ago. Nothing tragic; she caught pneumonia and never really recovered from it. One night she went to sleep and never woke up. We celebrated her life. Hugged and healed the way families do. Since my grandmother’s funeral, though, I haven’t had a single dream about my uncle. Not one.
I think that was the confirmation I needed that there’s something out there for us after we go. Or maybe my grandmother passing was the catharsis I needed to let my uncle go. I look back on it now, and I like to think that my uncle was just lost. He was lost in life, and that carried on in the afterlife. I also think my grandmother, on her way to the sweet hereafter, found her baby boy, picked him up, dusted him off, and brought him home.
7. Never Walk Alone
I was camping at a friend's family property with a group of friends. They had a huge, dingy shop full of old tools and old furniture that was super creepy. Dirt floor, clown paintings in the loft (not even kidding), stuff like that. We stayed up late drinking by the fire and I was the last one awake. I went to go pee on the side of the shop and stood about five feet away, looking inside through the window.
There was a fluorescent light on and I noticed what looked like a piece of paper or dollar bill kind of floating around. I thought it was a moth at first, but it was moving in a very flowing figure 8 pattern that was very rhythmic. It reminded me of dangling a carrot. I watched it for maybe 20 seconds, which felt like forever.
Then it quickly floated back to the corner of the shop where it was dark. There was also a wood chair near the corner that added to the creepiness. I sat back down by the fire. No one else was awake, so I played on my phone for a while. I noticed my friend Mark pop out of his tent to pee, then go back in to go to sleep. I decided sleep sounded good, so I went to my tent and feel asleep.
The next morning, we were having breakfast, and Mark said something that made my blood run cold. “I saw you guys sitting by the fire super late, how late did you stay up?" I told him I was probably 2 or 3 am. Then he said," Who was up with you?" I told him I was the last man standing. He said," I got up and saw you on your phone and two people over your shoulder watching you play."
He said one person looked bigger so he thought it was one of our friends, who was a bigger dude. He said the other person was taller and skinny, but none of us are noticeably tall, or skinny. It freaked me OUT!! We still camp at that property once a year, but I don't go in the shop, and I go to sleep whenever my wife decides she's tired.
8. Angels On Earth
Back in 2001, there was a show called The Amazing Race, and my wife and I were watching the first-ever episode while my son played on the floor. As the episode ended, I thought to myself that my mom would have loved this. My mom had passed about a year earlier. As soon as I had that thought, a cold chill ran up through my body, starting at my feet and up through my head.
At the exact same time, my wife said, "This is something you and your mom would have done, and probably won." We both laughed, partly because we both had similar thoughts and partly because it was a bittersweet reminder that she was gone. Right then my son, who was about a year and a half, started waving at the ceiling saying “bye” and “bye-bye.”
He often talked to the ceiling and would stop playing and sit and look up at it, so we started asking who was there and what were they saying, just kind of playing along with his game. He wasn't saying real words yet, but we wanted to encourage talking so we'd listen and ask questions that he'd "answer." This time when he started saying “bye-bye,” we asked who was there and where were they going.
Just kind of normal play-along stuff. He was saying something that the closest I can spell of what it sounded like was “annel” or “anyul.” So we said, "Ok, tell anyul to be safe." A few months later, I had out an old photo album and was laying on the floor looking through it. My son came "walking" over saying “hi hi” and laughing. I said hi back…but he wasn’t talking to me.
He started chatting with a picture in the album and was waving and "talking" to it. The picture was my mom’s official graduation picture from nursing school. He had first met my mom when he was six months old and only a couple of times between then and when she passed, but he was carrying on a conversation with the picture.
I asked him, "Do you know who that is? Who is that?" He put his finger right in the middle of the picture and said "Anyul... ANYUL!" and started laughing and talking to her again. He knew what angels were...is that what he was saying? I don’t know.
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9. The Disappearing Student
I once worked as a live-in staff member in a college dormitory. During the summer, we housed the few summer school students who remained on campus (nearly 30 of them). It may be significant to point out that these students tended towards the highly academically-motivated, and were oftentimes high-stress students, if quiet.
One warm day in late June, my office received a call from a concerned sibling saying that she and her family were unable to reach her brother, who lived by himself in a room on the summer school floor. This wasn't unusual as our office frequently dealt with students avoiding their kith and kin due to frayed nerves or general social awkwardness.
Our normal protocol to check on a student is to try to reach them by our emergency contact information. Failing that, we go check their room to verify they're living in the building and perhaps available then and there, then have them call their family to verify we followed up on the original request. Also, we are to only enter a room with another staff member present to ensure personal safety of staff and students.
I failed to reach this student on his room and mobile phone, and was working short-staffed, so since I was on my own I decided to pop up to his room and check on him. This was an enormous mistake. I arrived on his floor around 2:00 in the afternoon and the floor seemed deserted, as I had expected. I found his room number and immediately noticed the sound of a movie playing on a TV or computer from behind the door.
I knocked three times and announced that I was a staff member checking on his health and safety. No answer. I didn't think this was that remarkable, since college students are notorious for leaving electronics running while not in the room. I checked the floor showers and bathrooms and found them deserted too. I returned to his door and knocked three more times, waiting about 20 seconds between each knock.
No answer. This is when my instincts started to buzz. I worked in residence halls a number of years as a professional, and something about all the pieces of this puzzle weren't adding up; family concerned about his health and safety, electronics running (someone must have started them recently, within the time frame of a movie run-time), summer school students and their idiosyncratic behavior.
Something wasn't right. I was by myself, so I probably let myself get more worked up than if I was with someone else. A deserted dorm floor, even at 2:00 in the afternoon, oftentimes evokes Kubrickian memories of the Overlook Hotel…I decided that for some sense of closure or sanity, I needed the immediate resolution of keying into this student's room, even though I was by myself and not technically supposed to do so.
I knocked on the door one more time for good measure and again announced myself as the hall director. I keyed into the room and my spider sense went off even stronger. The room appeared relatively vacant; the student appeared to be living out of a suitcase, which is unusual for someone staying no fewer than eight weeks for a summer school session.
The bedding was tussled like someone had been sleeping in it and all the lights in the room were on. And as I had suspected, there was an open laptop on a desk running on battery power and playing The Matrix. But no student. I began to start rationalizing to keep from feeling unsettled; surely this student and I had crossed paths on my way to his room (I'd never met him before so I wouldn't recognize him otherwise) and perhaps he was just down in the lobby picking up delivery food for a late lunch.
Sure, that's it. Then I turned to leave, planning on trying to reach the student later in the afternoon or that night. As I turned to leave, I noticed another odd piece of evidence. The accordion closet doors, which are removed in most rooms due to disuse, particularly single rooms like his, were still in this room. And they were closed.
Odd. I couldn't remember the last time I actually saw someone use those cranky, dysfunctional doors. Then my intuition spiked higher than ever. I realized I was alone in a room with a potentially suicidal student who may, in fact, have completed just that. And I am about to be "that guy" who discovers the body and then has a storm of paperwork and undesirable tasks, not the least of which would be calling the family back to break the news.
I felt like I was talking to myself when my voice cracked as I spoke to the closed doors and announced my name and title and that I would be opening those accordion doors in three seconds. I fumbled with the latch on the doors, and finally managed to get them disengaged. As I slid the doors apart, I was unprepared. I don't know what I really expected, a hanging? A wound?
I'll tell you what I didn't expect: a 7-foot dark-skinned Indian man staring at me embarrassingly as though I had found his secret hangout. We stared at each other for a good 15 seconds without blinking, breathing or speaking. I finally realized what was going on and my natural emotion was disbelief. All I could think to say was, "Um . . . are you in here hiding from me?"
He looked at me and said, "Yeah." My heart was still racing, I turned to leave and before I shut his door, I turned back to him and said, "Call your sister, she's worried about you, and, frankly, I am too."
10. Things That Go Bump In The Night
One night, I stayed at a pub until 11 pm then I began journeying home. On the way back, a man’s shoulder struck mine. I wished him a "good night" but he did not answer. Cursing him under my breath, I continued on. I began humming a song. A little further and I was struck again. "Can you not mind where you are going"? I asked, real angry.
I got no answer. It happened again in the dark, and this time I did not speak. A cold sweat broke on me. I knew something was wrong so I began my journey again. A little further on, I was bumped again. I began a sprint onwards to my residence. Eventually, I reached home and I hammered on the door. My neighbor opened the door, I saw his jaw drop and his eyes stare.
I looked behind for the first time and there stood a man fully dressed—with, I swear, no head. We rushed into the cottage and barred the door.
11. Into The Dark
My wife and I went to Maine for a wedding. We flew into Boston and rented a car to drive up the coast to one of those small seaside towns you see in postcards with the lighthouse in the background. If you've ever made this drive before, you know that the city of Boston fades away, and crossing into Maine requires no signage because it's like leaping out of the city directly into miles and miles of never-ending forests and wilderness.
The bride's father had arranged for a series of rental cabins along a hill facing an ocean inlet just outside of town. Each cabin varied in size and was separated along the hill by anywhere from 30-60 yards, and each was partially hidden among more of those thick ominous trees. What struck me about the property was how isolated it felt and how difficult it was to get from the long dirt road drive down.
There was also approximately three or four flights worth of treacherous rocky steps just to get to the front door to our cabin. With no neighbors in sight and a rocky treacherous hike to get down there, it felt pretty isolated and unlikely anybody would come into our little campsite. We caught up with friends and slowly everyone made their way back to their respective cabin and bed for the evening.
I, however, had just spent the week working in California (hello PST in the EST) and decided I'd get some work done on my laptop before heading off to bed. I also took the opportunity to post up on a rocking chair on the porch. At this point, the porch was pitch black and the only light came from the moon on the water and the soft glow from my laptop.
About 25 minutes had passed and all was pretty normal—until I heard something moving through the brush and trees just down the small footpath to the next cabin. At first, I didn't think much of it; woods, nighttime, small critters, maybe my compatriot in the next cabin. Who cares? So I shook it off and glanced at my watch, noting the time being about 2 am.
Then I heard it again, only this time it was much louder and much closer. It felt like something massive was coming down the hill in the trees and it was knocking large branches down that then tumbled down the hill in a cascade of rocks and summer leaves. Instantly I was filled with an intense sense of dread. The kind of dread you may only feel a few times in your life where your body freezes in place, but your adrenaline explodes underneath, making your senses go wild and the tips of your fingers go numb.
Something told me to get out of there. Immediately, I closed my laptop and quietly went inside and locked our cabin door. It took a bit to fall asleep that night. The next day, we jumped on a ferry and went to an awesome island off the coast to go on a hike with the group and to take some photos together. We were sitting around the small island brewery and were discussing our weekend living arrangements when I commented about my experience with the creature in the woods the previous evening.
The bride's cousin across from me, who I had just met the day before, went white and his eyes were big as saucers. He asked me if this happened around 2 am. This shocked me. I confirmed the time. He was embarrassed to tell us his story because he'd just met us and at the time he was in a bit of shock and thought he'd imagined the entire thing.
He was laying alone in his small solo cabin down the way from us reading his kindle in the dark. At around 2 AM, he heard the same noises I heard only they were closer, much closer. The thing, whatever it was, approached his cabin and walked across the porch, loud enough that the boards creaked under its weight as it moved from one side to the next.
It was dark, so he never got a clear view of it through the window, but he confirmed with me that it was massive in scale, maybe 7 feet tall. He was in such shock he turned his kindle off and hid in his bed in the dark until the thing moved on. With no cell signal and no desire to make the attempt to get to the other cabins in the dark, he eventually fell asleep.
After telling us that story, he slept the next night on the couch in a cabin he shared with other members of the family. The solo cabin was left empty. The funny thing is, I made Bigfoot jokes on the way in and we even stopped near a museum to the creature. Never thought I'd actually have a close encounter with what could have actually been described as one.
12. Exit Stage Left
This isn't my story directly, more my mother's story. When she was seven or eight months pregnant with me, she would accompany my biological father to the local stage theater where he acted in various productions for rehearsals. One job she had taken on her own, even months or years before she became pregnant, was to sit in various places in the house and take notes, making sure the sets and actors looked good from every seat in the house.
One particular night as rehearsal was starting to wrap up, my mom, being muy enciente with me, got up from her seat. As her belly now hid her feet, it was difficult to see where she was walking; even more so since the lights in the house hadn't come up yet. Heading down a flight of stairs, she took a misstep and almost fell over. Then she suddenly felt somebody take a strong, firm grip on her upper arm and pull her back.
She felt that same grip then pull her forward but very gently, and it never released until she got to the landing near the exit. She turned to thank the person who helped her down, but there was nobody there.
13. Reach Out And Touch Me
I woke up and saw a shadow standing above me, reaching out to me. My mom told me it was an angel, but I didn’t think so. It was not a good feeling, it was very negative, and it was like it was forced to be there. I very much didn't like the experience, but who would? My house is notorious for housing spirits and shenanigans, so this wasn't a shock to anyone, but at the same time, it was one of the creepier experiences we've had.
14. Nice And Quiet
I was at a friend’s house when his mom decided it was time for me to head home as it was getting dark. She told my friend to walk me towards the stairs, which was a shortcut that leads to the main street. As we said our goodbye and I headed down the stairs towards the main street, things got a little weird. I noticed that there was a lot less traffic than usual.
I was walking and listening to music when my phone ran out of battery randomly, even though I had it charged fully when I left. I didn't pay any attention to it and kept walking, thinking that it would be nice to walk alone and in the quiet. I live near a supermarket, which is always packed, and I thought surely there would be people there.
Nope. It was empty too. Completely empty; not anyone in sight. By now I was panicking on the inside. As I turned the corner before heading on to my street, I saw a white light on the ground. It got closer to me but I kept walking, thinking it's my imagination. I stopped as the light reached my feet, then looked up at the sky and was blinded by nothing but white with a screeching white noise kind of sound.
I closed my eyes and ran with my head down, afraid to open my eyes for direction but eventually doing so. I turned another corner and ended up at the front of my apartment complex. I ran up the stairs and entered the front door. Inside, my sisters were watching TV, with the time displaying 8:05 pm. Minutes later, my mother decides to go to the supermarket.
I accompany her and notice cars and people were outside. When we get to the supermarket, it was packed, completely full with long lines at the checkout. I told my family and friends about this story and they all write it off, believing it's impossible as we live in New York and it's usually alive at night. I don’t know what happened to me then. It was like I was stuck in some kind of wormhole.
15. Girls Allowed
One Sunday morning I was in my kitchen having a cup of tea with my wife. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I thought was my three-year-old daughter walk out of the front room and into the entrance hall. I went to see what she was doing, and when I got there, there was no one there. I walked back into the kitchen and said to my wife something along the lines of “I'm bloody seeing things, I could have sworn I saw Amelia walking to the front door, but when I got there she was nowhere to be seen.”
My wife was all like, “You're joking. The same thing happened to me and my mom just the other day.” She explained how the same thing happened to them in the exact same spot, with the mysterious girl taking the exact same route. In fact, they were so convinced they had seen our daughter that they crept into the entrance hall after her, to make her jump, but there was no one there. It didn't end there, though.
A few months later, we saw a post on a local Facebook page saying, “I had a lovely childhood growing up in (our address), and I’d be really keen to speak to whoever lives there now, particularly to see if they have ever experienced any paranormal goings-on.” I direct messaged the poster and asked if she had ever seen anything untoward, without giving any indication of what we had experienced.
Lo and behold, her and her sister used to see a little blonde Victorian girl in a white nightie standing outside their bedroom doors or walking through the house. She related how initially they would think it was the other sister and would go to investigate and find no one there. I am a very cynical person by nature and did not previously believe in the paranormal, but I have no explanation for the above.
16. Child’s Play
This is my brother's story, but it's a good one. He was working as a night porter at an old hotel from the 18th century in the Northern English countryside. One night, a woman came down to reception as white as a sheet with her suitcase, saying she could not sleep and did not want to stay there. My brother enquired as to why, but he wished he never heard the answer.
She said she could hear children laughing all night and a child had entered her room with a candle and was standing at the foot of the bed and wouldn't leave. My brother mentioned it to his manager the following morning, and he was told that this is a regular occurrence—before the hotel was a hotel, it used to be a school over 100 years ago.
17. The Fire Inside
Several years ago, I had a recurring dream about burned alive in a hotel. It was so realistic that I could feel the pain and hear screams. Each dream would be more and more detailed. In the last dream, I could make out the exact details of the building. When we went on vacation once, we stopped in a small city and looked for a hotel.
Well, we stopped at the exact hotel in my dream. I just froze and repeatedly asked if we could go to a different hotel. After pestering my parents about it, we went somewhere else. But that’s not even the most terrifying part. It burned down the night we were supposed to stay there, and 14 people perished in the blaze. Did my head in.
18. A Stopped Clock
My grandfather got into the hospital on a Friday night. Nothing too unusual. He wasn't doing well, but he had been there before. The next day, I go to work. I'm somewhat worried but again, he'd been there before. I go on with my day, there are customers, a friend stops by and we talk, and I fill the rest of the time with homework.
My grandfather is in the back of my mind, but I have other stuff going on too, you know? Right around 4 o'clock, I was chatting with a co-worker. Then I glanced at the clock and my stomach dropped. I randomly got filled with dread and profound sadness. I continue chatting but the feeling persists. I check out at 5:00, the feeling of gloom persisting, and of course my brain goes to my grandfather.
I just knew. I get home and my mother tells me my grandfather passed. I ask around what time. 4 o'clock.
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19. A Premonition
My mom was in a fatal accident on March 24, 2019. In the weeks leading up to it, I dreamed that my teeth were falling out. Also, I had this very persistent feeling that something bad was going to happen. It wasn't fear, just a conscious awareness that my life would change in a bad way, and that I should prepare myself mentally.
This thought kept coming up where I realized that for 26 years, nothing traumatic had ever happened to me, and that this easy-going life would end. So I started meditating to find emotional stability, and then on Sunday, March 24 I got the call from my sister that my mom was in critical condition, and later that day she passed in the hospital.
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20. Spirited Away
I rented a room in a New England farmhouse during grad school. The first night I was there, at about two in the morning, I had a very, very clear feeling I was being checked out by some sort of house spirits, but they approved. I went back to sleep. The first time my girlfriend came over, she sat up in bed. I asked what's up, and it was almost word for word, something was checking her out but there was no threat.
A few weeks later, my brother came over. The next morning, unprompted as he came downstairs, he said he felt like something was checking him out at night but it was OK. A new housemate, later, said the same thing his first morning. None of them knew each other, it was completely bizarre and I’ve never been able to explain it.
21. The Room At The End Of The Hall
I used to do regular volunteer work at a religious shrine, and since I had to travel halfway across the country to get there, I was provided with accommodation. Said accommodation dated back centuries, and every time I stayed in it something would happen that could not be explained in any logical way, but this story is my favorite.
I had traveled all day, arriving at the shrine just as they were about to stop serving the evening meal. I grabbed some food and a shower before falling into bed, since I was exhausted. I woke up around three in the morning to a woman's voice saying in a broad Yorkshire accent, right next to my ear, "Are y'all right, luv?" I replied that I was fine, the way you do when you're still half asleep and not really focusing.
The next minute, I was sitting up in bed with all the lights on, asking myself what the heck just happened. I managed to get back to sleep eventually, and then the following morning I ran into a member of staff who had known me for many years. He asked how my journey had been, and I said that it had been fine but that something really weird had happened during the night.
He asked what room I'd been put in, and when I told him his response shook me to the core. He said, "Oh, what did she say to you?" Come to find out that this was always the last room they would put anyone in because so many people had complained of hearing things in there—and when that wing of the building was being renovated, the builders used this room to store their equipment and always found things moved around.
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22. Feeling Blue
When my middle child was about three years old, we lived in an old house with a lot of poorly built renovations done on it. There was an under house storage area/workshop area accessible from one of the bedrooms. This workshop had a hatch door to the dirt under the house. Anyway, my daughter used to complain about the blue lady that lives under the house. We moved and I never heard about it again.
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23. Nighty Night
Years ago in college, we were sharing ghost stories when a friend told a story that terrified me. So the full story is that when his family—the parents and their two boys—moved into their new house, everything was basically hunky-dory except for my friend’s little brother, who was having trouble sleeping and insisted that his room was haunted.
The parents figured it was just a symptom of the move and that he'd get over it, but as time went on the youngest boy got more paranoid and anxious about the room and not less. Eventually, bedtime became such a hassle with this kid that the father relented and said that this time, he'd sleep in the kids’ room to prove it wasn't haunted while the boy would sleep in his parents’ bed with his mother.
So the morning after the swap comes and everyone's milling about getting breakfast when the dad comes downstairs, and people of course want to know how he slept. His reply was chilling. To everyone's surprise, he says to the youngest, "Yeah, you're not sleeping in that room anymore." Everyone was slack-jawed and demanded an explanation.
Apparently, as my friend recounted, when his dad slept in the room he reportedly had to sleep facing the wall, because anytime he slept facing out towards the room, he couldn't escape this really awful feeling that someone (or something) was knelt by his bedside, staring him in the face, and that, as you can imagine, did not lend itself well to a restful sleep.
Once the youngest was out of that room and settled into another, the drama over bedtime stopped.
24. A Message From Beyond
My family member went on a bit of a bender pre-diagnosis and ended up in the hospital. Her husband, who was a bit older, passed suddenly while she was in a coma. When she awoke, the very first thing she said to my mom was, "I know [husband's name] is gone. He came to tell me." It was very freaky, but she seemed perfectly fine with it.
25. A Gold Mine
When I was like 14, I was with a friend riding mountain bikes way out in the woods. We decided to turn back and go home for the day. We must have been two miles from any houses. Walking up the hill we just rode down from, this old guy with miner clothes from the 1800s was carrying a bucket in front of us. He was walking up the hill with his back towards us.
He was only there for a few seconds and then he disappeared. We were both silent when I said, "I thought I saw something." My friend goes, "Yeah me too" and he perfectly described the guy I had seen. We got out of there very quickly. This was in northern Arizona where they used to mine gold, and there was even this old miner’s cabin about a mile from us.
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26. The Sound Of Silence
I had just started a new job, and the building I worked in was really old. I had to stay a bit later than I normally would to get something done, and by the time I was packing up to leave, my floor was pretty empty. I needed to use the restroom before I left, so I walked over there, and as I approached the door I saw someone else open the door and go in.
I remember vividly that they were wearing a pink shirt and khakis, because that's what I was wearing, too. I was also mildly annoyed, because I don't like being in the bathroom when someone else is in there. After deciding I still definitely needed to pee before the commute home, I entered the bathroom. When I got in, I turned pale.
It was completely empty. I don't know how to describe the energy in the room, but it was very tense. Completely silent. I remember being able to hear my heartbeat. After standing completely frozen for what felt like 10 minutes (it was probably like 15 seconds), I turned right around and left. I had nightmares about that bathroom for weeks. It seems so simple, but it really shook me.
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27. The Woman In The Water
Once I was on holiday in Bangladesh with my family, and we were in a tuk-tuk at night time. We were staying in a village, so there was only one way to get there, a one-way road as it happened. It had no lights, so if it was night, the only light you could rely on were the headlights of the tuk-tuk, which aren’t very good. So we were just driving on this dark path.
It was a gravelly muddy path, and the whole chunk of land was a massive pool of water where they grow rice. The path was the only elevated piece of land there was for miles. Suddenly, I start feeling weird. It was like this unsettling feeling that someone was there. It was really strong and disturbing, but I was able to ignore it…at first.
Then we—me, my dad, my brother, and the driver—see this woman. She was wearing a red sari and was staring out at the water. But when we looked down, her feet are twisted backwards, facing towards us. Meanwhile, her whole body is facing away from us. She's holding a water pot and just watering the ground, no plants, just the ground. Then we rode away.
28. Into The Woods
A few years back, some friends and I were driving on some back roads in a patch of woods believed to be haunted. One of my friends was getting bored so he rolled down his window and shouted, "Make something happen" or something along those lines. About five seconds after he rolls up the window, there is a strong knock on the window closest to me.
We've seen some weird stuff in those woods, but nothing that couldn't be explained by shadows or animals. There is no explanation for that knock. Nothing was thrown at the car, we weren't moving, it sounded the way a knock made by a human hand sounds, etc. Actually later on, we heard a very feminine shriek in those woods with no explanation either. So there’s that.
29. Midnight Visitor
My family and I went on a holiday to Indonesia in 2019, and I shared a hotel room with my sister. The first morning, she mentioned that in the night she’d seen someone walk across our room and stare out the window. She’d even heard the floorboards creak as they moved. She gets sleep paralysis pretty regularly, so we shrugged it off. God, looking back, I wish I had listened to her.
Two days later, I woke up in the middle of the night to see someone sitting at the end of my bed, their hands cupping their face as they cried. I thought it was my sister and sat up. “You okay?” I asked—and froze as I realized I could see my sister tucked up in her bed out of the corner of my eye. The figure, which was like a living silhouette, was clearly female with her long hair tied back in a ponytail.
I just kind of slowly lay back down, took out my phone, and started watching YouTube videos. I know that sounds stupid, but I figured there wasn’t much else I could do! Every now and then I’d look up and see the figure still there, and then go back to watching my videos. This lasted about half an hour until I looked up and the woman was just gone.
30. Just Dropping In
When I was younger, like three or four years old, my mom said I used to talk to something or someone in the corner of my room. I would sit down and hold a conversation for hours. Mom would ask me who I was talking to, then one day I said "Grandpa." I then said something about him—I think it was his mustache and something about a joke he used to tell.
I couldn’t have known any of this since he had passed three years earlier and I had never been told about him, nor seen his picture since I was so little. But apparently, my description was bang on.
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31. The Long Goodbye
I was about eight years old when this happened. I was lying in bed with lights on when I felt someone sitting on the edge of my bed and petting me. I thought it was one of my parents, but when I opened my eyes a middle-aged man I had never seen before was there. He was kind of "shining" (?) in a yellow color and he smiled at me.
I was a shy girl who was afraid of pretty much everything, but for some reason I felt safe and comfortable with him and I fell asleep again. About one or two years, later my mom was talking about her dad who passed when she was a teenager. She showed me the only picture of him, and yep it was the yellow figure I saw. I didn't said anything for years thinking no one would believe me.
But then at a family gathering, several relatives were talking about their paranormal encounters with my grandfather. So either me and my whole family are just nuts, or grandpa just couldn't let go before saying goodbye to all of us.
32. The Conversation
When I was a kid, I lived with just my mom. Every few nights after she went to bed and turned off all of the TVs, I’d hear a man and woman casually having a quiet conversation in our kitchen area. I always had to concentrate really hard to make sure I was actually hearing something, because it was so faint I couldn’t make out the words.
This continued for years, and I thought my mom wouldn’t believe me if I told her. After we moved out, I finally told her—she said she’d always experienced the same thing.
33. The Room That Wasn’t There
When I was a young adult, I went to Job Corps. During the first week of being there, we had a hall meeting, and we all had different things to add or question at the meeting. When it was my turn, I asked about all of the talking that the room next to mine did, since I thought we all had lights out at the same time. I also mentioned the stomping from the hall above.
I wasn't trying to get anyone in trouble, I was still just trying to figure the place out. Well, I never saw a group of different aged girls from different backgrounds from all over the place all stop smiling. The blood drained out of each of them. Apparently, my room didn't have another next to it. The room next to it currently was the storage room.
Same with the stomping from the hall above; there was no hall above, that was the roof.
34. Who Ya Gonna Call?
My mom has tons, but I'll just tell one that makes me laugh. We lived in a pretty haunted house, and many people heard or felt stuff. Anyway, one day my brother and I were gone to our father’s for the weekend and my mom was watching some Jerry Springer in the living room. She hears the tap in the upstairs bathroom turn on.
After dealing with this stuff for years at this point, she just yells, "You can turn the water off, 'cause you're not scaring me!" The water shuts off. I don't know how she stayed alone in that house, but I laugh at the thought of my mom telling the ghost to knock it off.
35. Window Waif
Back in 2015 when I was younger, I was at my cousin's place and we were hanging out in her grandpa's backyard. As we are messing around, we hear screaming and banging coming from the living room window of the house. We look up and see a woman crying frantically and hitting the windows. We shout and ask her if she's okay, but she tells us to leave her alone and shuts the window completely.
Later on, we learned the blood-chilling truth. The thing is, her grandpa and grandma weren't at home at the time that happened. When we went into the house, the woman was gone.
36. The Devil’s Backbone
I’ve got a few from my grandparents’ ranch. The original house was built in the early 1800s, and the graveyard from the original family is still there. When my family first bought the property, the previous owners were still living there for a few weeks until they moved. My grandpa was out riding around and saw a guy from a distance dressed in slacks and a white shirt and suspenders.
My grandpa assumed it was the previous owner, so he drove up to say hi. As he got closer, the guy walked behind a bush and seemingly disappeared into thin air. My grandpa told the previous owner about it and he asked, “Was he wearing a white shirt and suspenders?” Apparently, they’ve seen him a lot wandering around in the evening, almost always where my grandpa saw him, too.
A few months later when I first visited, my cousin and I were playing PS2 in the living room around midnight. There is a huge sliding glass door facing the backyard and barn. I notice two people walking around outside with what looks like civil war caps. It looked like they were marching almost. I was terrified. Eventually, they kept going into the darkness while me and my cousin were freaking out in silence.
Fast forward to when I lived there during college. I had my own little cabin down the road and it was really creepy, but cool. One night I had a friend over and we were up pretty late. We heard some footsteps on the gravel outside and then louder footsteps on the front porch. Then I saw a silhouette of someone through the window walking around.
I jumped up to go make sure it wasn’t a threat, but when I walked out front there was nobody there. And it’s an open area, so there would be no place for anyone to run or hide. Safe to say we didn’t get any sleep that night. This was on the Devil’s Backbone in Texas by the way. If you know the stories of that area, you know it’s a creepy place.
37. Backseat Driver
When I was in my early 20s, I owned a hearse. It wasn't much to look at, but it was a lot of fun to own. Anyway, all funeral cars have a partition that separates the driving compartment from the coach area where the casket or gurney was kept. I would park the car in the morning when I got home from work, and that night when I would return to the car the glass partition was always open several inches.
Every night I would close the glass and every morning the glass would again be open. Some thought that someone was screwing with me, and I considered that, but to faithfully keep up that gag for well over a year is a bit much. It happened every single day. Not most days, but EVERY day. I suspect that a spirit in the car did not like the partition closed for some reason.
In the summer it would get really hot back there and in the winter, cold. The A/C didn't work and the heater core for the rear was bad. Maybe they wanted a better temperature? It didn't bother me and I actually thought it was kind of cool.
38. Little Boy Blue
There was a ghost in my house when I was little that my parents both saw. My parents were exhausted, since they had three young children and they both had full-time jobs. This meant that they put a lot of their strange experiences on stress and being tired. Still, they said that they often would see a child running by them when my siblings and me were accounted for somewhere else.
My mom also described a hand tapping her shoulder and hearing a child saying “mom,” but when she would turn over, there would be nothing there. This went on for months, and although my parents had both experienced this they never mentioned it to each other. Then one night, my dad asked if my brother had a new set of PJs.
My mom said no, and this was when they realized they had both been seeing this extra child. They talked to our neighbors at the time about this, and they revealed a chilling detail that made me rethink everything. They said that a young boy had perished from scarlet fever in the house in the 1950s. The last time I heard about this ghost’s appearance was when my brother had gone into his room and yelled at what he thought was me to get out his room.
I was in the bath, and he was seeing the ghost. I never usually believe in ghosts, but it was the fact that so many people had seen this ghost on different occasions. I was too young to remember any of this, and so I only know what has been told to me about this. I never realized until a last year that that was one of the reasons we moved.
39. Creepy Things Come In Twos
My youngest sisters are twins. Back before they were born, I remember this old lady I didn't know was hanging outside my neighbor's house and said to me, "There’s two. There's definitely two in there.” She came to our house like three or four times and would always repeat that to me. So I always believed that we were going to have twins.
I even remember walking up at night once to pee, and I saw my dad sitting on the sofa. He asked me what should we name my sister, and I would recommend names in pairs. Well, couple of years before my mom passed from cancer, we started going down memory lane. My mom talked about having to come up for the second name for my one sister since they only prepared for one. And I was like, why only one?
My mom said it was because they didn't know my sister is a twin. So I said, but we did know, that lady told us. Apparently, both my dad and mom only found out about the twin during the childbirth. Creepy thing is, my dad did remember me suggesting two names and thought that I was just joking. I told them about the lady, but none of them remember her.
40. Clear As Crystal
This was in the late 80s, and I was around eight or nine at the time. I was sleeping in the master bedroom with my grandma, and I was woken up in the middle of the night by a female voice chanting my name. I roll over and right up in my face is a hovering, glowing green disembodied head of a woman. Pitch black hair and eyes.
The most distinguishing feature, besides her face being green, was that her neck was made out of crystal. I was frozen in fear, unsurprisingly, but managed to roll back over and call out for my grandma. My grandma woke up and I told her what I saw. She told me to go back to sleep and stayed up reading her Bible. Here's where it gets really weird.
The next morning, I went to tell my two brothers what I saw. I started describing what she looked like; green face, black hair, black eyes...I'll never forget this. My younger brother, with a petrified look on his face, asked if her neck was made of crystal. He had seen the same woman, in the same room, a couple weeks prior when he got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
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41. Haunted House
When I was young, I lived in a broken town called Uniondale, in the outbacks of the Karoo in South Africa. The house I lived in had several long corridors. One day, I went to my room to play with my toys, and when I walked in, this random guy was just sitting on a chair in my room. He told me to get out, and he told me that this was his room.
So I ran to my mother and told her about it, but when she stormed into my room, the man was gone. Fast forward a few months, and I was in the kitchen baking a cake with my mom, when several potatoes literally rolled into the kitchen from the corridor. No joke, they rolled into the room as if they had their very own momentum, but my mother and I were the only ones in the house at the time.
Fast forward a few more months, my grandma came to visit. After a few days of staying, she ran into the living room telling us she saw a guy walking down our corridor. She described him, and I noted that her description fit the guy that was in my room. We moved out not long after.
42. The Lost Boy
When I was around 10 or 11, I used to see this small blonde-haired boy in what looked like an early 1900s brown suit. I thought nothing of it until I was 15 and my mom and I started talking about the paranormal and I told her about the boy. She freaked out and asked me to describe him. I did. Then my mom told me the most terrifying story.
Apparently, when she was pregnant with me, she dreamt of a little boy in a brown suit coming up to her and asking her to be his mommy. She then told my granny, who said my grandfather once had several younger brothers, one of whom passed at six years old of a cancer in his neck. They searched through old photos and found a picture of him. Lo and behold, a small blonde-haired boy in a early 1900s suit.
43. The Family Oracles
Premonitions seem to run in my family. They happen rarely but in significant ways. In 2013, my mom was coming back to the US from the Philippines and was supposed to board Asiana Airlines Flight 214 once she arrived in Seoul for her layover. My dad messaged her while she was still in the airport and distracted her with incessant questions and concerns about random important things like their house, the security system, documents, etc. until she missed her flight.
She was angry at the time because she had to wait until the next day to catch the next international flight home, but my dad had a general feeling that he needed to keep her talking. As it turned out, that flight that my mom missed crashed in San Francisco. A lot of passengers were injured and a few perished. But that wasn’t the last one.
In 2016, a group including myself, my sister, and our friends were on a month-long, all-girl vacation in Orlando for MegaCon 2016, the theme parks, and the nightlife. We had fun at the con, and then we tried to decide on our schedule for the rest of the trip. One of the clubs our friends wanted to go to was the Pulse nightclub.
They proposed we do the theme parks on the first week of June and then the clubs on the second week. My sister strongly insisted that we reverse the order: clubbing on the first week and theme parks on the second week. We all eventually agreed since she cared so much about the sequence. But because of this, we were at Pulse eight days before the Pulse nightclub shooting instead of possibly being there on that night.
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44. Sing Us A Song
I was 11 I think. At the time, it had been about a month or two after my great aunt had passed. I was just chilling in my bed trying to go to sleep when my guitar hanging on the wall starts making noise, as if someone was there stroking the strings. I look up to see if it’s my dad messing with me, but there was no one there.
That kept going for about 10 minutes before I called my parents in and slept in my brother’s room the rest of the night. I didn't hear any more guitar. I think either the next night or a few after...similar thing happens. I'm laying in bed, when all of a sudden my alarm clock starts making fuzzy radio noises and music comes on.
I've never even heard this song. The next day when I tried looking up the lyrics, nothing came up. Nothing. It went on for like 10 minutes or something crazy. It mentioned things that were related to my aunt, and it was saying it’s my time and all that. As I'm writing this right now...I’m scared even remembering it.
45. Watch Your Back
I was house/pet sitting for my biological mom and stepdad back in June, and was on a video call with my best friend. I was the only living person in that house, but my best friend said that there was a woman standing behind me in the kitchen, while I was sitting on the couch with my laptop on my lap. I couldn’t see anyone, but she SWORE.
46. Gone Too Soon
It was just a normal day at work, and then I get this overwhelming feeling of dread and anxiety out of nowhere. An hour later I get a call from my mom letting me know that my aunt had been in a car crash an hour earlier and had passed at the scene.
47. Time Flies
When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was at my grandmother’s house for Christmas and was playing hide and seek with some of my cousins. For context, the house was a big, worn-down Victorian house that had been moved from its original location to the plot of land my grandmother owned. It was very cold and drafty, especially in certain rooms.
The upstairs where we were playing consisted of four bedrooms, three of which opened to a large landing, one of which was down a long-ish hall. Most of us, along with our immediate families, were staying the night, but for some reason, no one ever stayed in that fourth room. As a child, I always thought it was my grandfather’s room (he’d passed about 10 years prior to my birth), but in hindsight, I’m not sure why.
As far as I know, that wasn’t true and certainly, no one ever told me it was. Anyway, it was around 8 pm and my turn to count, and of course, the person counting went into the separate room to do so. I sat on the bed, closed my eyes, and counted to 20. When I opened my eyes, I nearly screamed. It was light out. Morning.
I’d closed my eyes at night, counted to 20, and somehow 12 hours had passed. Of course, the immediate thought is that maybe I just fell asleep. I’ll refute that with three points. First, why didn’t my cousins come to get me when I failed to seek them? Second, it was cold in that house. We would sleep multiple people to a bed under several blankets, at least one of which was usually electric.
I can’t imagine sleeping through the night in that kind of cold without some kind of covering. And third, there’s no way my parents wouldn’t have bothered to come to find me before they went to sleep, and when they did find me, they wouldn’t have left me there, especially without a blanket. I can’t tell you what happened. Maybe I had some sort of strange memory lapse that just happened to begin and end in the same location.
Maybe the simulation lagged. Maybe I really did skip 12 hours. All I can say for sure is that something happened that night, and I’ve never been able to explain it.
48. A Child’s Intuition
I've had a bunch, but one that stands out was probably the time my then-youngest son had gotten me up crying about a bad dream he was having at 3:00 am. He was four at the time. I calmed him down, then he told me he's hungry so we go to the kitchen for a snack. He's sitting there eating cereal when he just kind of looks up and then he casually drops horrific detail. The boy who woke him up is sitting in the corner crying.
He nods to an empty corner of the room by the table where we're seated. I asked him why the kid is crying, just kind of humoring him, when he tells me, "His mommy crashed the car up the road and now he's trying to figure out what's going on. He woke me up, please tell him to go." So me thinking it's my kid still shook from the bad dream, I look at the corner and say, "Hey kid, go back to your mom."
We keep sitting there and my son finishes his cereal and hands me the bowl. Just kind of joking around, I ask him if it worked and if the kid left. He looks at me really seriously and says, "Yes, he told me the ambulance is coming so it's okay. They're all dead anyways." Not even a minute later, a string of cars and an ambulance go past our house, sirens blazing.
I got this feeling of the most intense dread while the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I shook it off, told myself it was just a kid's imagination and coincidence, and we went back to bed. A few days later, my neighbor tells me all about the big wreck a mile up the street from us, where some lady was going too fast and flipped the car coming around a curve and no one survived.
At 3:00 in the morning on the night my kid had woken me up. I didn't dare ask her if a little boy was in the car.
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49. Stay In Your Lane
This is the only good story in my whole life. Growing up, I always wanted to go on a bike ride at night, since something about it seemed really cool to me. It wasn't until I was 13 that my mom finally let me. She told me to wear my helmet, have my phone, take a flashlight, and she set the parameters for where I was allowed to go.
She gave me about four miles, which was a lot to me. So right after the sun set, I was off. I loved it. There were no people out walking their dogs, no kids running around, the temperature was perfect, etc. It was really fun; so fun that I ignored the limits my mom set. You see, where I was biking was all walking paths. It was one of those grassy areas between two neighborhoods.
There's this long path that went at least 600 feet at a 25-degree angle. I was flying down this hill, having an absolute blast, and I darted right through the parameters. My mom set these limits for a reason. Everything on the inside was close to houses and people. The outside, more specifically the place where the path I was on lead to, was barren.
I rode along this path for 10 minutes before I could only see some of the lights of the houses on the inside of the limits. After 15 minutes of riding along this dirt path, I hear the strangest sound: someone was singing. It sounded about 30-40 feet in front of me. I stop riding to hear it better. It was a woman's voice. She was singing “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles.
But she wasn't singing the words, just the melody of the vocals. Her voice was strange. You know how when you have phlegm in your throat, your voice gets scratchy? That's what her voice sounded like. I inch forward to try and see her. I get close enough to see the silhouette of hair bouncing up and down, like she was head banging.
I decide to get my flashlight out. I'm thinking that maybe this person is in need of help or something. Or maybe this is an insane person and the light will scare them away. So I take the flashlight out of my pocket, point it at her, and turn it on. The moment the light hit her, she stopped moving completely. She was facing away from me. And that wasn't all.
She had disgusting hair that seemed to be sticking together in clumps. Some of her hair was ripped off, too. She was wearing a very over-sized, bright red hoodie. I was almost too scared to move. I think she was, too. I conjured up as much bravery as I could and said "Sorry" in a very, oops-this-is-the-wrong-room, kind of way.
She didn't respond. I turned off the flashlight and put it back in my pocket. Just as I was turning my bike around, she screams. She screams in an awful, awful, high-pitched voice. I throw myself back onto my bike. I hear her voice getting closer to me. I book it as fast as I can. I don't look behind me, and I don't stop pedalling. Her screaming grew quieter and quieter until it dissolved into the howling of the wind.
50. No Laughing Matter
My brother's bedroom was next door to mine growing up. One afternoon, he asked me what I was doing the previous night that made me laugh so much. Confused, I pressed him for details. "About 3am last night,” he told me, “your laughter woke me up. It sounded like you were pacing your room, too. Pacing and laughing."
At this point, I told him that I wasn't home last night. I'd been at a friend's house. His face turned bone white. To this day, he swears blind that it was my laugh. I have a very distinct laugh, apparently.
Sources: Reddit,
