Some childhood memories give us that warm, fuzzy feeling when we look back on them. These...don't. These Redditors shared their chilling tales of childhood's most traumatic moments—and they bring new meaning to the phrase "scarred for life".
1. Whirling Dervish?
I had a friend that I would sleepover with relatively often. One night after we had gone to sleep, he turned a lamp on, stood directly in front of the area where I was sleeping, and just spun in place while making weird noises. I asked him what he was doing and he talked about being possessed. I laughed because I thought it was funny. He kept going for about an hour, long after I had expressed that I was tired and asked him to stop.
He kept saying that he couldn’t since he was possessed. Eventually, I turned over and tried to fall asleep, despite it all. The following morning, he insisted that it had not happened. He had never walked in his sleep during a sleepover before, and to my knowledge, he didn't make a habit of it. No matter how much I pressed, he wouldn't admit to doing it. It was very disjointed and unsettling.
2. The Night Woman
Walking with my grandmother at night along a gravel road close to where she lives out in the country. We were heading home to my grandparents’ house. Six-year-old me turns to my grandmother and ask who the lady who ran across the road behind us was. She turns around, sees nobody, and asks me to describe her. What I said made her turn white as a ghost. Down to a T, I described a cruel woman who used to live not far away who was now 10 years deceased.
I didn't live there, so I didn't think much about it but according to my grandfather, my description of the lady I had seen was so on point that my grandmother never walked alone there after dark. That was 29 years ago, and she still refuses to walk that road alone at night.
3. Maybe It Was The Hamburglar
When I was like four or five, my mom, brother, and I went along with my dad on a business trip to Seattle. I have a distinct memory of being in like a Taco Bell or a McDonald’s (I can’t remember which), but I remember waiting in line, getting to the front, and then my mom just taking us and leaving. I remember being so disappointed, and my brother and I whining and complaining until we got to the next place.
Well, a couple of years ago (I’m 28 now), it somehow came up in conversation, and my mom told us the whole story. We got to the front of the line, and the cashier said, “Those men over there are robbing us; they have weapons. Take your children and leave now,” so my mom did exactly that and never told us what happened.
4. The Pits
When I was about seven we were playing flashlight tag (essentially hide and seek in the dark) around the neighborhood and the spot I picked was in someone's backyard area by a trampoline. I'm sitting there and I started hearing some rustling behind me, but didn't want to move because I thought it was the kid looking for me. If I'd known what it was, I'd have run for my life.
Next, I hear a chain sound—and suddenly a pit bull latches onto the back of my leg and wouldn't let go. I lay there screaming until my brother finally found me. He gets the dog to let go and run away, but he took a chunk of the back of my leg with him. Doctors had to take some fat from my butt to patch it up and now I have a pretty sweet-looking wound on the back of my leg
5. Flesh Tunnel
I went to a girls' sleepover when I was in elementary school for a friend's birthday. We had a great time laughing and telling scary stories before bed. I woke up the next morning with a fever and terrible nausea. I went home and I was only getting worse. I had a huge spot on my leg right in the middle between my ankle and knee. It was hot, puffy, and red.
I went to the hospital. The doctor initially thought I was bitten by a spider, but it turned out I was suffering from a really bad staph infection. The night before, we were playing on the stairs, when I slipped and scraped my leg. The infection was spreading fast and was eating away at my flesh. I had a tunnel up to my knee cap that had to be packed with fresh gauze every day. I almost lost my leg.
6. Disappeared
Back in 1988, I was committed to a psychiatric institution for a month. During that time, another guy who was there escaped. He was missing for a day or two. Eventually, the authorities discovered his body by some railroad tracks about 30 miles away. I've asked news anchors whom I remember reporting the story to look into their archives. I know the timeframe, and I know the kid's name, but...nothing. There’s no information to be found anywhere.
7. How Awful
When I was little (around six or eight years old, maybe), my mom, brother, and I were on the train traveling home from visiting family. Suddenly, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere, and we just sat there confused for a minute until my mom saw something outside and gasped, “Don’t look out the window”.
Naturally, this piqued our curiosity, and we clambered all over our mother to get a look out the window while she tried and failed to hold us back. There was nothing there—just some sticks and maybe some paint. We were like, “What gives”? My mother laughed and said, “Gotcha! Were you scared”? We both slumped back into our seats, disappointed, and waited for the train to start moving again.
She told us years later what she really saw that day... The truth sent chills up our spines. Someone had jumped in front of the train. There was just no way we could have recognized what we were seeing as a human being, and my mom managed to just play it off like it was nothing, even though it must have been a truly horrifying sight to somebody who knew what they were looking at.
Wikimedia Commons, Vince pahkala
8. Leap Of Faith
So to give some background, it was the morning after my brother's 10th birthday party and his friends were still over from the sleepover. My parents' house had a fully finished basement that was often used as the place for all the kids to hang out and play. I was only five at the time, which meant I could get into all the best hiding spots. Except that day, I made a terrible mistake.
I had the brilliant idea of hiding behind the TV and TV stand. It was a huge old tube TV, maybe 30 inches, so lots of space. There was a DVD rack to the left of the TV stand that stored the VHS tapes. I was small enough that I was able to hide on top of the sub-woofer for the sound and couldn't be seen from in front of the TV. Perfect, right? Wrong.
Well, this all turns bad when the three other hiding places were checked and behind the TV was checked. I was found out and tried to make a break for home base. The only safe way from behind the TV was where "Joe" was guarding. So with the logic of a five-year-old, I thought I could jump over the DVD rack to get past "Joe" to get to base.
I didn't make the jump, got my foot got hooked on the rack, and collapsed onto the glass coffee table and shattered it. I got rushed to the ER, happened to need stitches for all the glass that went into my chest. Had the glass gone a millimeter deeper, it would have punctured my heart. We were told many times by my parents to not to play hide and seek and run around in the basement.
Funny that you don't listen to rules until you find out why.
9. Sudden Loss
I had my first ever sleepover with my best friend in the first grade. Things at night were awesome. However, when I woke up the next morning, everyone at his house was super distant, and they called my mom to come and pick me up ASAP. I didn’t know what was going on. As it turned out, unfortunately, his father had an aneurysm that night and didn’t survive.
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10. The Hitchhiker
I’ve lived in a small mountain town in Colorado for 17 years. When my friends and I got our licenses, we’d drive around in the mountains when we got bored. This one area we went to frequently is beautiful, but it’s known to be pretty sketchy. We were driving around one night when we suddenly passed a man walking on the road.
It was weird because we hadn’t seen him in the headlights initially, it was more like he appeared out of nowhere as we were passing him. I thought he was walking a little weird as I looked back at him, so I asked my friend to stop, maybe he was hurt or something. He paused for like 10 seconds when we stopped, and then he started RUNNING at the vehicle.
It wasn’t a “let me catch up to them real quick” jog with a wave or anything like that, it was a full-blown sprint like he had a personal vendetta against us. It freaked us out and my friend hit the gas again. We did call it in just to make sure we didn’t leave him in danger but didn’t hear anything else about it.
11. Predators
When I was eight or nine, I won Kings tickets in a school raffle. My dad couldn’t go for reasons I don’t remember, and my mom is about as anti-sports as you can get. So I took my uncle with me instead. He mostly wanted to be in a private suite and suck down stadium food, so that's what we did.
He took me to the box, and there was this couple with us. They were probably in their 20s. Initially, they were kind of quiet and made very little small talk with my uncle. Then, he headed out to get some snacks, and the couple kind of slid over to me. Remember, I was at that “blushy-shy-kid age,” and the woman WAS rather attractive.
Then, the creepiest thing happened. Somehow—I swear that I don’t remember how—she asked what I would do if she kissed me, then bet me to let her. She kissed me, and I turned that kind of red you only see on stop signs. They had a HUGE laugh about that, which, of course, only made me blush harder and get a lot more self-conscious.
She started talking about doing it again, and I kind of did that thing little kids often do where they shake their heads and hide. She kept calling me cute, and then they said something about me going somewhere else with them. But my uncle came back with the stadium food, and they went back to their side of the box.
I was too dang embarrassed to say anything, and hey, stadium food is good, so I never gave it a second thought. When that memory resurfaced in my twenties, I went, “WAIT, WHAT THE HECK”!
12. A Deep Sleep
I remember waking up on our couch and being very bothered that I got taken from my nice warm bed, but I was too sleepy to say anything. My mom and dad were in the next room, screaming at each other, and then my mom came to me, crying and telling me not to fall asleep. I passed out. Then, when I woke up, I realized I was lying across my papaw’s truck’s back seat in the dark. Something was very wrong.
My mom was crying in the front seat, and my aunt was holding me crying. Papaw just stared straight ahead like he was mad. Later, I woke up again in a bright room, being jostled around and pinched. The next time I woke up, I was back in bed, and I thought it was all a dream. Twenty years later, I learned that my fever spiked at age three, and both my mom and dad unknowingly gave me medicine.
Those meds reacted to each other and I had a seizure, but my dad had to go to work and couldn’t be bothered, so my aunt and papaw took me to the hospital because an ambulance would have taken longer. In the truck, I was turning blue. The bright room was the ER, and the pinches were multiple IVs and tubes and such being placed.
I was there, out like a light, for three days.
13. When You're Too Good At Hiding
When I was about seven or eight, my younger sister and I were playing hide and seek in my parents' house. It was my turn to hide. My mother was taking a shower so I picked the lock on the bathroom door to hide in the bathroom cupboard under the sink. I was thinking I was a genius because my sister would never find me in there.
I sat for a while waiting for her to find me, then my mother finished her shower (she didn't know I was in there either). My father came into the bathroom as well. Long story short, they started going at it while I was in there and I was too scared, embarrassed, and utterly mortified. to move or say anything. So I did the worst thing ever.
I sat just frozen in position, petrified. After they finished and left, I stayed in the cupboard for at least 5-10 minutes disgusted by what I had just witnessed but unable to stop thinking about it. I made sure the coast was clear and made a run for it, just to find my younger sister sitting in front of the TV, completely forgetting that she was supposed to find me.
14. The Unwanted Invite
When I was in the 4th grade, one of my friends had a sleepover birthday party. It was pretty normal stuff. About 30 minutes after everyone had already gotten there, someone knocked on the door. A 6th grader whose parents were friends with my friend's parents. Apparently, he didn't have a lot of friends so he got invited. It only took a few minutes to realize why he didn’t have many friends.
He was mean, physical, and would try to one-up everyone. A little later in the night, we decide to wrestle each other. That's when the night took a dark turn. He punched one of the kids in the groin, so one of the other guys went up to him and gave him a swift punch to the sternum. He fell straight to the ground. For the rest of the night, the kid didn't say a word to anyone and hid in the basement for most of the night.
15. The New Neighbors
A new family had recently moved in and had set up a shrine with a face on a tree and candles in the backyard. We became friends with the girl in the family who began telling us that her house was haunted. We were intrigued, as any 10-year-old would be, but given their weirdness, we thought nothing of it. Well, it turns out that she was right. One day, playing in the yard with her, a disheveled-looking man comes running out the front door, followed by the family.
He proceeded to run, full speed, into the woods with the dad yelling at him. We go over and find out that the dude had been living in their attic and had been keeping it locked from the inside. The dad finally pried it open, and what we saw was the chase that ensued. TO THIS DAY, I check under, inside, above, behind, and outside of every house I have ever lived in and regularly clear corners when I get home.
16. The Driver Got BUSted
For a while, in about the second grade, we had a bus driver who drove strangely. One time, he even tried to get the bus down a really narrow lane where it got stuck between a building and a tree, and we all had to get out and push. But the time I'll never forget was when he didn't drop off my friends and me at our designated stop.
He just completely missed our neighborhood, the last area on his route, and he went on to pick up the kids at the high school. My two friends and I were too scared to speak up. We stayed sitting in the back seats until a high schooler yelled, “Hey, there’s a bunch of little kids back here”! The driver cursed a blue streak, peeled out of the high school parking lot (probably without half his next load of kids), and drove us home.
All of our moms were distraught since we were like an hour late, and this happened long before cell phones. I told my mom all about the adventures we had with this guy driving, and the next day we had a new driver. Of course, he had been driving around for weeks, intoxicated, with a school bus full of kids.
17. You're Lion
I was 8 or 9, and we had this huge church youth campout at one of the kids' family cabins in the mountains in Utah. We were playing hide and seek in the dark with nothing but flashlights and I was crouched down in my hiding spot. I turned my light off so no one would see it and looked up and saw two bright eyes low and staring in my direction.
I stood up, frozen in place, and started screaming in fear. I threw my flashlight towards it (I was not the brightest child) and by then a bunch of kids and adults came running over to my area yelling my name and shining their flashlights. I found out later a mountain lion had been stalking me.
18. Love Me Some Sweet Milk
It was the early 1990s when I was a kid. I slept over at a buddy’s house for the first time. The next morning we woke up and his mom made us cereal. The milk tasted sweet, even for my childhood taste buds. Something about it all seemed off. Just as my buddy finished his bowl of cereal, his mom came over and turned the bowl on its side to pour the leftover milk from the cereal bowl into a milk carton.
The mom then did the same with hers. I felt my face turn red with shame and embarrassment and my stomach turn. Horrified and confused, I asked, “What is that? What are y’all doing”? He turned to me and said, “That’s our cereal milk”. As it turned out, his ENTIRE family poured all of the leftover milk from each bowl of cereal back into a separate milk carton, specifically for cereal. I drank this entire family’s backwash.
19. Peacock Feathers
I was about five at the time, and I had a nightmare about this scary lady who was dressed in peacock colors and slightly resembled Mulan. She followed my family to a park and chased me around trying to grab me. it was pretty freaky to my five-year-old self, but I can’t really describe how scary the dream was to me.
I forgot about the incident, but around five years later, I was on the highway driving to my Nana’s for Easter. I looked at the car that we had been driving next to. What I saw made my blood run cold. In the driver’s seat was the same lady that was in my dream who is trying to grab me. she was wearing the same peacock colors and her hair was styled in the same high bun.
I was staring at her in shock, then she looked over while driving give me a slight smile, and then zoomed away.
20. Fit To Be Tied
One time, when I was a kid, I had a bad dream. I dreamt that my parents locked me in my room by tying a rope between the doorknobs of my door and the bathroom door directly across the hall. I thought it must have been a dream because my parents would never do that to me. But years later, I found out that was exactly what they did.
Apparently, I had horrible night terrors, and I would run screaming into their room. After so many sleepless nights, they couldn’t handle it anymore. My door didn’t have a lock, so they came up with the rope solution. Thank goodness I eventually grew out of the night terrors.
21. Goofing Gone Wrong
A friend and I went to another friend’s house to sleep at night. We were all goofing around, as most 10-year-old boys do, to the point our friend’s dad started yelling at his son. It was a little bit awkward and tense, and then my friend told his dad to “shut up”. That was the wrong thing to say. His dad decided his son needed some old school punishment and made his son pull his pants down, and made us watch as he whipped him a few times on the bare cheeks with his belt.
22. The Valley Beast
I used to holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Friends of my family had a cottage there in the middle of nowhere at the end of a valley. It was always creepy just because it was so isolated. Anyway, one day I went outside and heard the most unearthly sound I have ever experienced. It sounded like a robot demon cackling insanely while simultaneously crying in agony.
It just sounded... wrong. I went inside, white as a sheet, and told my dad. He grabbed a stick, said "come on"! and set off to find the source. We homed in on the sound and saw it was coming from the area close to the water tank which filled from the stream and supplied the cottage. There was clearly something not from this world stuck inside the tank.
We nervously approached and circled the tank. My dad suddenly said "Ahhhh" in realization and strides confidently to the tank. Now, I don't fully understand the setup of the water system, but there was some kind of small vent pipe on the tank. A large leaf had got stuck in the pipe, creating a reed, and the tank was acting like a giant amplifier and reverb chamber.
The sound was channeled down the valley the stream was in and straight to the cottage. I can still hear the sound in my head as I type this—it was absolutely demonic. I still want to know how my dad thought he was going to tackle a slobbering demon-beast with a stick!
23. Sometimes Parents Run Out Of Patients
I met my wife in college. When we were dating, she often mentioned that when she was a kid, she had a play doctor’s kit that someone swiped from her house. She had some surgeries really young, so her parents bought it for her to de-mystify the doctor’s office. She’d use it all the time on her dad, poking and prodding him.
One day, I asked her about the theft. Did they take everything? Jewelry? The TV? Other valuables? No, no, and no. Then, it hit me. I asked, “So, someone broke into your house and only took your doctor’s kit, leaving anything worth fencing there”? She replied, “Yeah, why”? I responded, “Did you ever consider your folks were tired of you using the kit on them all the time after you got better”? She finally realized. “Oh, dang”.
We confirmed it with her dad later, but for 15 years, she had believed some thief broke in and ONLY took her beloved doctor’s kit.
24. Into The Woods
When I was about eight years old, my six-year-old brother and three-year-old sister were playing some type of easy hide and seek in my grandparents' backyard. Well, there are woods behind their house. Our sister, being a defiant toddler, ran into the woods and my brother just saw her run in and ran in after her. That's when things went wrong.
They were in the woods for hours because she ran in so deep and they both got turned around. Our brother found a hunting post, climbed up it into the tree, and found a way out. They then knocked on doors, covered in dirt and scratched up, until someone answered. A woman gave them a ride back because our brother was able to point out landmarks to get back to our grandmother's house.
They got back while my mother was on the phone with an officer, and they were discussing a helicopter to find them. We were this close to a search party. They walked a collective two to three miles. They could have gone miles deeper into rural woods if they didn't keep going one way and find the post. So yeah, watch your darn kids!
Telling them "Don't go into the woods" does not guarantee they will listen. The authorities were called and still showed up to give the kids a "talking to".
25. Lonely Old Nana
I stayed over at my best friend's house almost every week when I was in elementary school. Their grandmother lived with them and everyone treated her like a burden. They told me she was crazy and mean but she was always very kind to me, and because I was raised to be nice to my elders, I was kind in return. One day, when my friend had to go talk to her mom about something, the grandma asked me into her room.
I had never been in there and it was decorated completely differently from the rest of the house. I could tell she had moved an entire house’s worth of stuff into one bedroom. I can’t remember our conversation, but she gave me a little metal bracelet and asked me to hide it from the family. I was scared to wear it, as I didn’t want my friend to get mad.
Unsplash
26. The Forgotten Figure
When I was around two years old, I remember going to the house we were building and walking through the construction. There was a little spot in the ground where it looked cool to place this toy Power Ranger. But every time I bring up walking through the construction site, my mom says the house was never under construction when we bought it.
We ripped out the cement in our garage, around the place where I had left my Power Ranger since it had started to crack to replace it. My Power Ranger was there. That is specifically the only thing I remember at that age. My parents still deny the fact that we had the house under construction.
27. Toby's Gone Missing
When I was eight, I was at a birthday party for my neighbor's daughter. We had mutual friends, and one of them, let's call him Toby, wasn't really the brightest. We all weren't, but he took the cake, like eating a wasp once and then wondering why his mouth was swollen. Anyway, the daughter challenged us to a game of hide and seek.
For context, they lived on a big farm, so there was plenty of space to hide. To keep the game from going too long, we all agreed to only hide in the barn and on the main plot, and not the meadow behind it. It only took the daughter about 15 minutes to find me and the other kids invited to the party, except for said Mr. Darkhead Toby. Soon, we started to panic.
By this time, it was about 5:30 PM and we were all getting ready to go home, but Toby was nowhere to be found. Our parents agreed to let us stay until 7 PM, hoping that he was found by then. After Toby wasn't found, Toby's parents called 9-1-1 and a search squad was sent out. Still no sign of him, the officers gave up.
The next morning, I woke up to my parents telling me, in a tone of relief, that Toby was found. When I heard what happened, I couldn't believe it. Apparently, Toby somewhat got lost in the meadow and was only found eight hours later standing on the side of a road that was four MILES away, with his shorts and t-shirt all ripped and damaged.
He was only found after a relative spotted him with his headlights. Oh, did I mention that Toby was new to the area and didn't know where what was? We are still friends to this day, 18 years later, and whenever we are really bored, we bring this story up and just laugh our guts out about it. About him not being very bright, yeah, he now has his masters degree in mechanical engineering.
So glad this story ended well, or else my life would be different now.
28. Messing With Mom
I solved a family mystery for my mom. I wasn’t allowed to play console video games during the week until I was 18, but some nights I’d really be craving it, so I would noiselessly creep through my house into my basement where I could play video games in peace. But once every 30 times or so, one of my parents would need something from the basement, so I’d quickly turn off the TV monitor, hide in the guest room, and pray they didn’t turn on a light or notice the Xbox was on.
One night, I ducked into the guest room and hid behind the bed. To my horror, my mom followed me into the room and turned on the lights. I was panicking, so when she started digging through the closet with her back to me, I made a run for it. I nearly brushed her shirt—if she’d seen me, I would have probably given her a heart attack. But I made it and kept going all the way to bed.
About five years later, my mother commented to me something along the lines of, “You’re such a quiet walker,” and I told her it was because of my basement trips, thinking that I had nothing to lose. My mom’s face immediately went kind of solemn, and when I explained, she said, “So there really was someone down there”.
She explained that she remembered that exact night and felt that a ghost was in the room. Over the next couple of days, she’d stare into space and just say, “I can’t believe you were really there”. She seemed to get over it, but she probably checks empty rooms closer now.
29. Playback Time
I went to a girl’s sleepover when I was about eight years old. There were three of us. The girl’s dad put an audio recorder under the teddies on top of her cupboard when he came in to hand them out. We were talking about crushes at school and such. The next day he played the recording out loud to wake us up, laughing, and listening closely to what we were talking about, in front of us.
30. What’s In The Kitchen?
So. I was kindergarten-aged, my family is at home in the evening, and I am in the hall. I probably hear something or want someone to pay attention to me, so I open the door leading to the kitchen and I see my dad and brother, who must have been around 16, holding my mom by her arms and legs, bending down and like…swinging her against the floor.
Mum has a weird expression on her face, and dad and bro are looking serious, concentrating, not violent or anything, but the process itself looked pretty weird to me. I look at them in terror and say: “Hey...Don't fight”. Dad tells me to go back to the hall, I get back, just sit there in the dark alone, listening, and...that’s it. Fifteen years later I still have no clue what the heck that could have been.
Physical violence never occurred in our family, and when I ask them now, they have no idea what I’m talking about.
31. The Greatest Hider Of All Time
Ok, first some backstory. I take hide and seek VERY seriously. And I’m very good at it. Like, savant good. When I was in high school, I went to a camp every holiday (four times a year) where one of our activities was a nightly game of spotlight. Spotlight is essentially hide and seek, but played outside on an oval in the dark, with weak flashlights.
Once you were found, you turned in your own flashlights and started looking for the remainder of the people hiding. It was a BIG deal to be the last one found. So, my first time going to this camp, I go all out. Full matte black clothing, a beanie, etc. And I pick the best possible spot—it was in long, wet grass on the side of the oval.
Weird thing was, three other guys picked the same spot a minute later as time was running out, only they bunkered down closer to the edge of the grass where it was dry. They had no idea I was there. Inevitably those casuals were caught. The guy that found them was peering into the grass, trying to find me. Then the craziest thing happened.
As he moves further in, he actually steps on me. And thinks I’m just a pile of garbage. Because matte black clothes under torchlight look a lot like a garbage bag. So that hurt. Well, I stayed in that wet ditch for two hours. When I finally made my way back to the dorm...it was not to triumph. It turns out everyone had forgotten I existed. Owch.
32. Taking The "Care" Out Of Daycare
One summer while in a horrible daycare, my younger twin brothers and I were forced to stay outside along with the older kids, who were 14-15ish, and were pretty entitled jerks if I'm being honest. I didn't like them. Anyway, we were allowed to go outside of the fence of the daycare and often went up a hill into a forest near the daycare.
So one day these buttheads decide to make us play hide and seek in said forest, lest they go back to the lady who owned the daycare, Susan, and come up with some excuse to get us in trouble. By the way, Susan hated our guts for some unknown reason, and favored the older kids over me and my brothers. After five minutes in the woods, things go south—HARD.
Both of my twin brothers are very allergic to bees—something that the forest was filled to the brim with, as it turned out. One managed to get stung right in the foot when he took his shoe off for just a moment. We had to carry him through the forest and down the hill because he couldn't walk at all. His screaming still haunts me.
When we got back to the daycare, Susan tried just fixing the sting on her own to avoid word spreading of how she didn't keep an eye on a kid with allergies. Well, she failed miserably. Sometime later, my brother was taken to the hospital and thankfully recovered. We didn't go back to that daycare the rest of the summer, and it was closed down less than a year later.
33. Practice Makes Perfect
When my father would take us camping, we'd often go on hikes and bike rides. He taught us about safety in the woods and on the water and how to navigate using maps. So it wasn’t all that strange when, on a random day, he said that we would be playing a game where we’d be blindfolded and taken on a drive. The object of the game was to call out what direction we were turning by feel, and then ultimately, after driving for about 30 minutes, give a rough guess of where we were and which direction home was in.
He was impressed with how well we did. We then took off the blindfolds and went for a hike. I never thought much about it. Years later, I suddenly realized why we played the game—my dad was into psychology, especially child offenders. He was kidnap-proofing us, but in a lighthearted way, so there was no fear or trauma.
34. All Tied Up
When I was 12, I slept over at my supposed best friend's house. Her then 17-year-old brother played his music very loudly and then shook his junk in my face. My friend and her brother then tied me to a chair and made me watch a movie that freaked me out. After that, they proceeded to laugh their butts off when I woke up in the middle of the night screaming from a nightmare. I’m not friends with her anymore.
35. The Water Drum
When I was around three years old, I fell into a 44-gallon drum filled with water that me and my little friend were looking into, I remember it being a beautiful sunny day and how clear the water looked. Apparently, my friend somehow pulled me out after I fell in but honestly, I don't know how another three-year-old could do it.
I don't remember anything else about it, and I'm not sure where mum was, and my dad was at work. For years I had nightmares about rust-colored clouds ballooning up, dark rusty clouds. It took me 30 years before it clicked. It was the rust being stirred up by me trying to get out of that drum.
36. How Rude-Olf Her
When I was 10, my godfather gave me 20 dollars as a Christmas gift. However, the money had disappeared by the end of the dinner. For years, my parents blamed me for being irresponsible with my money. Years later, we figured out that my cousin’s fiancée at the time was a kleptomaniac—after she got caught stealing stuff from my aunt’s house. It turned out she was the one who took the money.
37. A Man’s Garage Is His Castle
I had a best friend with a big house. His dad was a HUGE garage dad. He had his brand new fishing boat that he cleaned every day in there, all his trophies, life relics, everything was in the garage. The floor of the garage was nicely carpeted, and legit everything in there was spotless. Anytime I went over, his dad spent most of his waking hours in that garage.
My friend, his brother and I somehow got into a "water battle" with the garden hose and some super soakers. I can't remember how or why it started, but as you can guess, we moved our battle into the garage and left the garden hose running inside. We must've left it running from lunchtime, and his dad didn't come home until 5 or 6 pm.
I'll never forget the earth-shattering screams and wails I heard. My friend's mom just closed her eyes, sobbing, as my friend and his brother begged for her to do something while their dad dragged them into that garage. The screams and yelling from the dad inside the garage continued for the entire hour it took for my parents to come and pick me up.
38. The Past Or The Future?
When I was small, my parents say I used to tell stories from when I was an adult, and that the stories were kind of creepy and specific. They told stories about their day at work or anecdotes from the day, and I chimed in with some of my own from when I was older. I don't know anything specific except that I insisted that I used to be older. I have no memory of it.
39. Well...This Isn't Good
Before I was born, my brothers and sisters played a game at my aunt's house down by the river. My eldest brother decided to hang by his fingertips inside the water well. Meanwhile, and unknowing of that fact, my other brother thought about hiding up inside the little steeple cover of the well. But, to get to it, he needed to slam shut the well cover...
SLAM...Blood-curdling scream...Splash...Cries for help...Between fits of unadulterated anger interspersed with disbelief and worry, my aunt, grandmother, and mom managed to get him pulled up, which wasn't easy because with all of those smashed fingers of his he couldn't hold tight to a rope.
40. They Didn’t Know ’Squatch
When we were kids, my buddy and I would ride our bikes up the road to this horse ranch that sat upon a hill. I have so many memories of that hill. Anyway, in the distance was another huge hill that was eventually bought and turned into a winery. Trees covered the entire hill except for the bare area that faced toward us.
Well, on one autumn afternoon, my best buddy and I spotted something very furry walking on two feet from one tree to another on that hill. This hill was hundreds of yards away from us, and whatever we saw was clearly bigger than us. As the sun was setting, it started to approach us. We. Freaked. OUT. Obviously scared the heck out of us, and we took off screaming down the road on our dirt bikes, away from whatever that thing was.
Many years later, I discovered that what my buddy and I saw was likely a bear walking on two feet. For nearly a decade, my buddy and I would’ve sworn we saw Bigfoot.
41. Swim Date Scuffle
I was meant to stay the night with a kid just a few doors down from my grandparents’. He lived with his grandparents and his grandpa was a facilities manager at an upscale apartment complex and offered to take us swimming there for the day. His grandfather dropped us off at the main pool and said he’d be back in a while.
The pool was Olympic-sized and simply had too many people, so we decided to explore and ended up at a smaller pool on the property elsewhere. We were swimming, having a good time and everything was great—that is, until he started a splash fight. We were going back and forth and then he started screaming at me at the top of his lungs. Then he went too far, and I knew I had to act.
He ends up cornering me and tries to push me under the water, still screaming. I wrestle myself free and hit him square in the nose. His nose started bleeding like Niagara Falls and he started cursing at me repeatedly as loud as his lungs could muster. I got out of the pool and grabbed my things and headed back to the front of the complex. People were staring and trying to calm him down. He started walking after me, hands at his sides in fists, covered in blood from his nose.
I make it back to the front of the complex and am desperately trying to get someone to let me use a phone to call home. No one would listen. They’re enamored with the screaming kid who, by the way, is still lumbering after me. He’s a mess. Out of nowhere, his grandfather appears and snatches him up and disappears with him through a door. I was still trying to get someone to let me use a phone when his grandfather reappeared.
He asked me what happened then told me he has to take the kid home, and that I can’t go with them. They finally let me use the phone. My parents didn’t answer, so I ended up getting ahold of my aunt who was still working and couldn’t come to get me for another two hours. The office wouldn’t let me stay inside so I was outside in the parking lot standing around waiting, still having no idea what happened.
My aunt showed up and off we went. When I got home, I got yelled at for being so far from home. A few days later my mom went to talk to the kid’s grandfather. She came back and told me that we couldn’t hang out anymore. She told me that he needed medication to keep him calm and that he had missed his dose that day. The situation wasn’t my fault. I never saw him again.
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42. Garage Stories
My mom and I were the only ones home on this particular night, and around 2:00 AM, we are both woken up in separate rooms by a loud crash, as if a particularly heavy object had fallen on something. Both my mom and I were up and about looking for the source of the noise when we open the garage. Now, this is where my story begins to differ from hers.
She has the memory that the shelf fell on top of my car and spilled a bunch of cleaning fluids all over the garage. We supposedly wiped up all the fluid with a few towels and hung them to dry. I remember that my bike that was hanging on the wall fell down and crashed on top of the car leaving a sizable dent and mark in the car. I had to find a stud in the wall, screw in the hanger, and rehang my bike.
Neither of us remembers the other's story happening, but there is proof both situations happened. The towels in the morning were soaking wet and smelled of windshield wiper fluid while my car had clearly sustained a dent from the bike falling. How anything fell in the first place is another question. The shelf in question is on the opposite side of the garage as the bike and the door was down, no one was there. It was an odd, odd night.
43. Tramapoline! Trambopoline!
I was playing hide and seek with my sisters when I was like in 4th grade. It was dark outside and you couldn't see anything, so I thought it would have been a great idea to grab my blanket, which was black all around, and put it over me while I lay on my trampoline. So I'm under a big fluffy blanket, on a considerably comfy trampoline, and it's night time. I fall asleep.
My hiding spot was so good, none of my sisters could find me. They finally got my mom involved—and that's where things went sour. Mind you, I am still asleep during all this, and I only know this because they told me afterward. My mom and stepdad start freaking out, thinking I ran away. My mom gets in her car and my stepdad gets in his.
They drive around the neighborhood to see if I'm out there. Of course, they don't see me. They were driving around for like half an hour. Eventually, I wake up. The way my room is makes it so you can see the trampoline from out of my window and vice versa. I wake up and I see that my bedroom light is on and my mom is walking around talking on the phone.
My mom was on the phone with the authorities. I didn't know at the time, I thought she was just talking on the phone and wandering around the house. So I get off the trampoline with my blanket still wrapped around me. I walk through the back door and sit on my living room couch. My mom walks out of my room in tears and sees me on the couch.
My sisters are in my parents' room and my stepdad is still looking for me. She asks me where I was and I tell her. She doesn't straight-up believe me. Some officers come and she makes me talk to them—they weren't impressed, to say the least. I thought it ended there, but no. My mom had those officers come to my school the next day to talk to me.
The most embarrassing thing to ever happen is having the Dean walk into your 4th-grade class and tell you to come with him. I was terrified. They took me to the guidance counselor's office and just asked stuff like what I wanted to do when I grow up, family life, stuff like that. I think they were trying to make sure I hadn't actually tried to run away.
And silver lining: It actually wasn't too bad and I got to miss class time.
44. The Devil You Know…
When I was a little kid in the '80s, I got swept up by the Satanic Panic. I went to a Catholic school in a medium-sized city, and they really took it seriously. Everyone did. They convinced me that a cabal of devil-worshiping fiends was secretly controlling the entire world, and I was determined to grow up and do everything I could to stop them.
My school had a lecturer who was a priest who was a supposed expert on Satanism, and he showed us a movie where some people slaughtered and ate an actual cat. They told us that it was 100% real. Little did I know, I was being brainwashed. Sometime in high school, the whole thing just went away. It was as if one day, the Satanic Illuminati were out to hurt every little kid they could find, and then the next day, they were gone. Eventually, I forgot all about the whole thing.
Flash forward to my mid-20s. I was in college, sitting in my apartment when all of a sudden I remembered the whole Satanic Panic. I remember thinking, “Whatever happened with that? Were they all caught? Did I dream that”? At the time, the internet was in its extreme infancy, but since my roommate was a longtime computer geek, we had it in my apartment. So I went online and looked it up.
I’ll admit I felt mixed emotions when I found out that 99.99% of it was total bunk. I was both relieved and angry; I was relieved for obvious reasons, but I was still angry because it generated a lot of fear in me when I was little. Little kids shouldn’t hear stories of ritual carnal cruelties and violent sacrifices.
Anyway, it was all very horrible, but I’m glad I got closure. Now it’s one of those things that people are comfortable talking about. Being an adult, I find the whole thing very fascinating.
45. Sleepwalking Smasher
I was a sleepwalker. At about the age of seven, I slept over at a friend's house, sleepwalked, and woke up in an enclosed space. I panicked. I pushed my arms straight out in front of me against what I thought was a wall. Once I realized what was happening, it was too late. It turned out to be an enormous bureau that was placed diagonally in the corner of the dining room. I ended up pushing it over. It was full of plates, glasses, and fine china, etc. It was 4 am.
46. The Little Things…
I rented a terraced townhouse with my cousin for the summer so we could be close to our jobs. It was a college let most of the year and was three stories with a professional guy living in the basement year-round. He was sound, totally normal. But that’s when strange things started happening. We noticed weird unimportant things like bedroom doors being opened that weren’t in use, candles, and ornaments being moved around, oven door left open repeatedly…
It was all small and we both assumed it was the other person. Until…happy birthday balloons appeared scattered in the sitting room one day right around my cousin’s birthday. She thanked me for them, but it wasn’t me! I was alone one night and heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. I crept along to the bedroom door and saw shadows on the other side. I froze and they went away eventually.
After this, we asked the guy in the basement about the events who confirmed that the students always had strange things happening, but with 7-8 of them in the house normally, they all blamed each other. Turns out the attics of the entire terrace were linked and there was likely someone living up there. They had keys to the bedrooms and the front door of this house because the locks hadn’t been changed in years and years!
47. Locked In
So when I was a wee kid and a scout, we played hide and seek in the dark. We usually played something like this every time in the last 15 minutes of our meetings. It was a medium-sized cabin, essentially. There were a lot of places to hide, lots of stuff just lying around. For some reason, there was a coffin there and nobody, as far as I know, ever hid inside.
Because it's a coffin, and that's just creepy. But my genius butt hid inside it. Unluckily for me, another kid also looking for a hiding spot saw me. Then he did something truly horrific. He decided to lock the coffin I was inside of. Yeah, I had claustrophobia for quite a while afterwards. I have an intense hatred of the name Marcus since, because that was the guy's name.
48. Paws For Thought
When I was four, I vividly remember getting into my mom’s car. She kept telling me that our cat had passed. She told me how she rushed him to the vet because something was seriously wrong. Despite her best efforts, he apparently passed. I never knew why he passed and why it happened so suddenly, but I accepted that it happened.
Fast forward about 15 years—I was home from college for the holidays, and on Christmas Eve I drove to the store with my dad and uncle. They talked about the cat my parents got for Christmas one year. When I heard the truth, my jaw dropped. My dad said, “Yeah, that thing was too aggressive. I took it to a farm and gave it away”. Normally, when the family pet dies, the parents lie to the kid and say it “went to a farm upstate somewhere” to ease the burden. My parents told the opposite lie: they told me the cat passed on to cover up the fact that they just sent it away to some farm.
49. And Those Are The Rules….
I went to my friend's house for the first time, as she always wanted to come to my house, not the other way around. However, she had never told me why. I was about to learn the truth the hard way. So, I got there, and after the first hour, it all goes downhill. The parents had strict rules about eating at the table. They proceeded to insult me about my weight to the point I nearly cried. After that, they continued to ask me questions about my race and family.
By the time night came, I found out they had a lockdown rule in their house. We weren't allowed out of the bedroom until morning. I didn't know that and ended up getting lectured the next morning. I also didn't know that I would be forced to attend their church in the morning before I could go home. That's how I figured out why she always wanted to stay at my house and not the other way around.
50. Mind Flashes
When I was in elementary school, we were all playing on the playground. There were probably like a hundred kids throughout all the outdoor areas of the playground, teachers, basketball court, jungle gym, random field areas, etc. in the middle of the day at recess. It was bright and sunny and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
I was looking across the playground and all of the sudden there was a “flash” where everyone was running inside in unison, and then almost immediately, another flash where everybody was GONE, not a single other soul on the playground, and the sky was suddenly very dark and cloudy and stormy, and at the second “flash” there was an extremely loud crack of thunder that rumbled and echoed for what seemed like minutes.
It was clearly later in the day, and I was so confused. I made my way back to the classroom, and it was probably five minutes before the final dismissal bell rang. The teacher was asking me where I had been, and I got in trouble. I’m guessing I fell asleep or something but man. I’ve never experienced anything like that before or since.
51. My Sister's Screams
My younger sister and I (seven and eight years old at the time) were playing nighttime hide and seek at my cousins’ house, all while our parents enjoyed a few bottles of vino. We had stopped over for the night before catching a ferry to France the next morning. It was my turn to seek, so my sister and cousins went off to hide as usual.
I found my youngest cousin first, then shortly after found my sister hiding on a windowsill behind a closed curtain. I dramatically pulled the curtain to reveal her. She hopped down and ended up in a pile of tears on the floor, holding her right butt cheek. She just couldn't stop crying. I comforted her and our game ended as our other cousin came to see what was wrong.
Through tears, she explained that she had hit the radiator under the windowsill as she had jumped off. She kept crying so I took her down to our parents, where she sat on my mom’s lap for a while. Once she’d calmed down, she came back to resume the game. But instead of hiding again, it went wrong again. She burst back into tears.
I took her down once again to my mom, who was now inspecting a spot of blood on her white jeans. That's when we finally realized what had happened. It turned out my sister had ripped a 4 cm hole in her butt cheek as she’d hit the corner of the radiator on the way down. It was gruesome. My aunt, a GP who’d had a glass or two of cabernet, got my sober uncle to drive her, my sister, and my mom to a hospital.
She stitched my sister together and all was fine. The story doesn’t end there though. The following day my parents, sister, and I left my cousins to catch that ferry to France for our annual holiday. Halfway through the holiday, my sister’s stitches needed removing. Fearing that a French hospital may freak her out, my dad proceeded to remove the stitches himself.
I will never forget her screams—they were truly bloodcurdling. They sometimes feature in my nightmares. She was left with a gnarly, purple scar that has slowly faded over the last 20 years. It’s still very visible though. My butt tingles and I grimace whenever I think of this story.
52. Down The Rabbit Hole
When I was little, I used to have this experience where all of a sudden, my perception of size and distance would get all wonky. I would look at everything around me, and things would all look small and far away. I always felt like a giant, yet when I looked at my hands, they’d be so small. This only ever happened at night.
To deal with the sensation, I would get up, go downstairs, and walk around a bit in the kitchen. Then, after some time, it would fade away. I told my mom about what I was going through but she just brushed it off. Fast forward many years later—it turned out that I had what’s called "Alice in Wonderland syndrome". Kids get it sometimes, and then the symptoms disappear as they get older.
Apparently, it’s harmless?
53. He’s Naked and I’m Afraid
I was at a typical sleepover—movie, video games, popcorn. When it came time to go to bed, I went into the bathroom, changed into my pajama pants, and walked back in to find my friend already in his bed and smirking. I didn't think much of it, so I crawled into my sleeping bag and asked if he wanted to play some more video games. He threw open his blanket and I saw he was naked.
The kid flashed me. I was understandably stunned and I said something along the lines of, “Put some clothes on". He responded, "Nope, my house, my rules". I was really uncomfortable by now, and didn't want to sleep. He covered himself back up with his blankets and said he would put his clothes back on, which he did. I tried to shrug it off, and we played some more video games for a little bit, then turned off the lights and went to sleep.
Not too long after the lights went out, I heard him rustling around, then getting out of his bed. He says, "I'm naked again," laughs, and tries to lay on me. I shoved him off, and he kept trying to lay on me. A brief back and forth went on, and at this point, I'm pretty much yelling at him to leave me alone and go to sleep. I heard him stand up. I thought he was going to leave me alone now. I was wrong—what happened next was the worst by far.
I started to feel something splattering against my sleeping bag where my feet were. It didn't take long for me to figure out that he was relieving himself on me. I told him I was going home, and as I'm trying to get out of the sleeping bag, he body-slammed me. I was stunned. As he went to jump on me again, I kicked him in the stomach as hard as I could, and he went down crying.
I woke up his mom at around midnight and told her what happened. She went into the room to find her unclothed son on the floor crying and yelled at me to leave. I called my mom and waited for her on their front porch, as my friend's mom was going bananas when she saw the pee on the sleeping bag and ground.
54. Boxed In
My dad and I were driving home from something. I was about eight. It was a two-lanes-each-way divided highway and there were a lot of tractor-trailers. My dad went to pass one, but we ended up getting boxed in. And it wasn’t just a slow-truck-slowly-passing-another-truck thing, it went on long enough that it was clearly on purpose.
So here we are, one truck purposely going slow in front of us, one blocking the side of us, and our open side was against solid rock as they tried to push us off the road. I remember my dad being freaked out and trying to get the license plates of the trucks to give to the authorities, who he couldn’t call at the moment because we were in a no-reception zone.
I looked up from the book I was reading and made eye contact with one of the drivers. What I saw was terrifying. He had a big white beard and looked straight at me with a sinister smile that, had I not already stopped believing in Santa Claus, would’ve made me scared of Christmas. Eventually, we got to a town and were able to get into a parking lot, where my dad reported them.
We waited ten minutes or so to get distance from the trucks, then got back on the road and thankfully didn’t cross them again.
55. Never Hide In A Bathroom
I was probably 11 or 12 and I was very good friends with the next-door neighbor kids. They consisted of two brothers one a year younger than me and the other three years younger and a sister who was two years older. I went over to their house all the time to play games. One day we decide to play hide and seek inside their house.
I’m hiding first and I find a great spot in the shower with the curtain closed. Some time passes and everyone is found besides me. I hear the door to the bathroom open and one of the brothers and sister are talking about where I could be hiding. The door then closes and I think nothing of it and stay as quiet as possible. To my horror, I realize what is happening.
I hear the toilet seat go up. The sister is using the bathroom and dropping the kids off at the pool while I’m directly across from her, hiding behind the shower curtain. I was terrified the whole time hoping she wouldn’t look in the shower and find me. I stayed as silent as I could until I heard her leave. I immediately left because I didn’t want to be found in there and raise any suspicion.
Unfortunately, I left a little too soon and they all watched me walk out of the bathroom. The brother a year younger than me immediately starts yelling “[me] and [sister] were in the bathroom together”. I just kept denying it but the sister kept looking at me really confused and seemed to be wondering if I really was or not.
I went home as soon as possible and gave it a couple days before I went back over.
56. Beet The Odds
When I was in grade school, I walked from my house to school every day for about a mile. On my walk, I would always stop and give my vegetables to a homeless dude, so my mom would think I ate them. One day, while I was on my walk, a friend from my class pulled over with her mother. Her mother offered to drive me to the school with my friend.
I told her no. I had to give that dude my veggies, or else I'd have to come home with uneaten veggies and get in trouble. Also, I know now I could have just tossed them, but I was a dumb kid. Anyway, her mother got really pushy and insisted I get in the car, but I just continued on my way. That was the last time I saw that friend.
I was little, and we weren’t super crazy close or anything, so I didn’t think anything of it. Later in life, I thought about her and asked my mom if she remembered the girl. It turned out her estranged drug addict mom kidnapped her, and no one could find either of them. We lived close to the Mexico border, so they think she left the US.
My mom freaked out when I told her the story and was also kind of mad that I used to give my veggies to a homeless dude.
57. Bar Hopper
We were 13. Normally I would always stay at my friend's place but this time we stayed at mine. My parents took us to the bar which was something people did at the time. My father decided to drink too much, and my friend and I were stuck in the bar from 8 pm until 1 am. It was getting pretty uncomfortable, so when my father got up to use the bathroom, my mom grabbed us and we ran out to the van.
He came out screaming and banging on the van. When we got home, we got some dinner and my mom went to bed. My friend and I decided to watch a movie in the living room, which I was never allowed to use. An hour later my dad showed up, just sat on the couch, and fell asleep an hour later. So we snuck off to my room and my friend’s parents picked us up to stay at his place. That was the last time I ever had a friend sleepover.
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58. Spirits By The Bayou
In my old hometown, we weren't allowed to play out of the yard. The highway was at one end and the bayou at the other. Like alligators walking down the road was a normal occurrence, ya know? So anyway, there was a girl who would ride her bike up and down the road and we'd chit chat. She was maybe seven or eight. I know I was like five or six, we weren't too far apart.
Anyway, she would come and talk and then we would part. Sometimes she came with other kids, sometimes not. One day, she invites me to her birthday party. I have to ask my mom if I can go, and she said she lived a couple of houses down, and it was no big deal. Mom says no. You don't know her, she doesn't live on this street, etc.
I was upset. It was so unfair, and she was my friend! I never saw her again and thought she was mad at me. I went back to visit family and brought up this story with my mom and aunt about how weird it was I never saw her after that. They got really quiet, and my aunt tells me that there was a girl by that name whose body was found in this guy's house along with a bunch of other kids.
He did awful things to them, and they didn't make it. But here's where it's creepy: they would have passed by the time I was talking to them. I never felt so cold, and we all agreed to never talk about it again.
59. Bloody And Bloodier
I have two stories. One was with my brother. Another was with a childhood friend. Two separate occasions. First, when I was about 6 or so, we went to visit some family at my uncle's house. All us kids thought hide and seek would be a great idea, so off we went. My uncle at the time was kind of an amateur race car driver and built this racing simulation seat.
It had the pedals and everything nailed to these little 2x4 boards. Well, there were some sharp corners on it that had sheet metal nailed on the outside of it to reinforce it. We all decided to hide in the basement where this prototype gaming chair was and my brother went to go hide behind it. He slipped going around behind it and fell head first into one of the sheet metal wrappings.
He sliced his forehead WIDE open. It was like a horror movie. Blood everywhere. 13 stitches to close that bad boy up. It was the most horrific thing I saw as a child...other than my second story. We were playing hide and seek at the neighbor's farm and they were redoing the tin roof on the barn. There were some scrap pieces laying on the ground next to a couple of round hay bales.
Now, if any of you have seen those tin pieces, they are quite thin and can cut you pretty easily. Well, our friend thought it would be a good idea to climb the bales and get on top of the barn roof and hide on top. When he jumped from the top bale, his foot got caught up in the plastic and it pulled him to the ground on one of those pieces of tin.
It sliced his throat. We thought he was a goner. By the time his dad got over there, it was a mess. Blood all over the side of the barn, he's screaming, we were all crying (this was a few years after my brother's incident). They rushed him to the emergency room, only to find out he missed his carotid artery by .5mm... Luckiest kid I've ever met.
That was the last time I played hide and seek. We all kinda agreed that we wouldn't do again without really even saying it.
60. Hospital Heartbreak
I had meningitis when I was two years old. My baby brother also had it, but he died. I had the viral for while he had the bacterial form. I grew up thinking I had it first, and I always felt like I gave it to him and that I was the reason he passed. I know I shouldn't have thought that way, but oftentimes, you can’t help what you think; especially when you’re a kid.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that he actually got it before me. I don’t know why no one had ever told me that before. Maybe they didn’t tell me because they weren’t aware that I always harbored this guilt about it since I kept everything inside. Not one person had ever mentioned to me that he had passed before I got it.
I was in the hospital for about three weeks, so it could have been before or during my hospital stay.
61. Aunty Flo Crashed the Party
I was at my friend’s house when my period decided to show up. I bled through my underwear and pajamas ALL over my friend’s bed. I was mortified and too embarrassed to tell her. I cleaned up in the bathroom before anyone else was up. Then, I made the bed before anyone could see it. I still feel so terrible and embarrassed about it almost 15 years later.
62. Nighttime Guests
When I was about 14 years old, I was home alone while my parents were out visiting some friends. Around 9:30 at night, I suddenly hear some voices downstairs. I knew all the doors were locked and no one besides my parents could get in. I was afraid the house was broken into, so I start to listen. It sounds like at least a dozen people having some sort of dinner party, though I can't make out exactly what they're saying.
I make it halfway down the stairs, and I still hear the voices all talking. Finally, I yell out "hello" and all the voices instantly stop, and I didn't hear anything again. It was the craziest thing I've ever experienced.
63. The Reservoir Man
I grew up in apartments with a huge stormwater reservoir behind them. We would often hop the wall and play in there since it was always empty. The wall we would usually hop was lined with thick brush, so there were few spots to easily hop back over to the apartments. Anyway, one day after playing, it started getting dark and we are walking toward our spot to hop back over.
I’ll never forget what happened next. This man crept out about 20 feet in front of us on all fours wearing some tattered shorts. We froze, he growled and ran at us on all fours at incredible speed. I was around nine and the second fastest kid in school and the man was almost keeping up. We scattered and found some alternate routes. I remember running and yelling "I'm sorry I'm sorry" out of sheer terror.
We never told our parents because they probably wouldn't have believed us, and they would have whooped us for playing out there since it was kind of dangerous.
64. Coffin Camping
When I was about 12, I was playing hide and seek during a church lock-in. It was great! Huge, dark building, tons of great places to hide. I was carefully looking everywhere for the best place, and finally found it in a small chamber off of the main sanctuary. There was what looked like a large, sturdy marble-topped table in one corner, but with also a raised bottom platform instead of just legs and the floor.
It was partly covered by a thick and weird-smelling cloth, and had extra “legs” in the middle that were ornately carved. So, I climbed onto the bottom portion and pulled the cloth over the side so as not to be seen. Stayed there for maybe half an hour. Kind of creepy. I was found last and won, but everyone was freaking out about my hiding place.
I couldn’t figure out why until someone showed me a photo of the weird item in use. Then it finally hit me. It was a coffin stand.
65. The Copycat
When we were young, my brother and I got a pair of kittens: a black one (mine) and a grey one (my brother’s). They got some vaccines, and sometime later, we woke up one morning to find that the grey kitten had grown. I thought, “Wow, cool! But why didn’t my black kitten grow too”? It was strange, but whatever. I stopped questioning it.
It turned out that the grey kitten randomly passed one night. My mom sent my dad out to get a new grey kitten so we wouldn’t be sad. All he could find was a slightly older and bigger grey kitten. So they told us one of his shots helped him grow. I believed that until late high school. My mom finally came clean to us one random evening.
66. Like a Bat Outta...
There were about six or seven of us at a friend's house. It was a hot summer night, so we’re camping outside in sleeping bags. It’s pretty late and we’ve been messing around with each other all night, tossing little pebbles and running around dragging each other about in sleeping bags. Just as I was dozing off, I felt a nudge, but waved it off.
Then, I felt a nudge inside of my sleeping bag and immediately heard a squeaky screech. I screamed and everyone immediately panicked with me. I’m zipped up in a mummy-style sleeping bag so when I stand whatever is screeching is still wrapped in it with me. A quick-witted kid ran over and helped shake me out of the bag and a huge bat flew out. Thank goodness, it didn’t bite me.
67. Grandpa’s A Zombie!
When I was four or five years old, my parents would take me to my grandpa’s house every weekday so I wouldn’t be home alone. My grandma had work, but she would come pick me up around the time my sister got out of school so we could both go home. My sister wasn’t feeling well one day, so we both went to my grandparents’ house.
Everything was normal for a few hours, he made us breakfast and turned on cartoons for us. My sister wanted to watch something else, so she turned around to him and asked him to put on her favorite show. He didn’t respond. He had a weird look on his face, like he was spaced out but angry at us at the same time. He clearly wasn’t himself.
It was only a bit unsettling, so my sister asked him again. He started making groaning sounds, like he wasn’t fully aware of what was happening. My sister got up and dragged me down the hall. We had to pass by his chair and when we did, he grabbed my arm. It wasn’t like a playful grab; he was holding on tight. It hurt really bad, so I tried to get away.
I eventually did and we continued running down the hall. We got into the bathroom and my sister said he was playing a game. She said he was a zombie, and we need to find a cure for him while staying hidden. We stayed in the bathroom for ten minutes and then we tiptoed back. He was totally normal when we got back, and it seemed like he had no memory of what just happened.
This happened again when I was alone with him. I didn’t know how to use a phone because I was so little, so I just grabbed his flip phone and hid behind his chair. I tried to call someone, but I couldn’t. I had to sit behind his chair while listening to him make that scary groaning sound. My grandma eventually came home, and he was just suddenly normal again.
My family says he has a sickness. They call it a seizure, but I’ve tried looking for a seizure that has similar symptoms to the way he acts when he has them, but I’ve had no luck. Looking back, it probably isn’t that scary, but it has stuck with me for a long time.
68. Outside The Window
When I was 9 or 10, I was laying in my bed which was next to my open window. I was about to fall asleep when I heard inconsistent footsteps like someone had a limp. I thought it was my dad as he tended to get up at night, and he also had a limp from a football injury, so I brushed it off. When I heard it again, I started to wonder what it was.
It got closer to my window and stopped. I freaked out and slipped under my blankets. After maybe five or six minutes, the noise moved away from my window. It kept going on for an hour or two. The next morning, I asked my parents if they went for a walk last night, but neither of them did. When I told them what happened, they shot each other a terrified look and told me to keep my window locked from then on.
69. Hidey Hole
When I was younger, about 3 or so, my great-grandmother was watching my younger brother, some cousins, and I. She decided hide and seek was a great idea since we all weren't able to open any doors without her help. Turns out, it was a terrible idea. I found this perfect spot tucked between the wall and a couch with a small coffee table between the arm of the couch and that wall.
So I got under the coffee table. Well, I got too comfy and fell asleep (back then I was a hard sleeper). My great-grandma gets so worried that I somehow got out of the house when I wouldn't respond to her calling out for me, she called 9-1-1. The fire department shows up first and starts asking her questions about what happened and all the basics.
They decided to do a quick sweep of the house and make sure. Well, one of the firemen sees a little shadow move under the coffee table (me) and asked if my grams had a dog. She didn't. So the search was over, and my grams never wanted to play hide and seek again with me. And that kids, is how I earned the nickname Hidey for the rest of my life.
70. Nature Can Be Cruel
I had a guinea pig in kindergarten that turned into many guinea pigs after I babysat the class guinea pig for Christmas break. My parents were thrilled... (not). Anyway, my teacher took the entire guinea pig family back to her house—she was supposed to sell them, and then give back my guinea pig. They never returned, and my parents told me they all got sold together as one big happy family... But it was all a big, fat lie.
I didn’t find out until I was maybe 25 that a coyote actually got into the cage and they all got eaten together as one big happy family. This is the way.
71. Heavy-Handed Hijinks
I went to a sleepover for my mother's friend's daughter. I didn't know anyone else there and was pretty shy, but I was down for junk food and silly movies. In the middle of the night, one of the other kids started freaking out and having an anger or anxiety attack. She was screaming about how everyone hated her and was throwing stuff everywhere.
I stood up and immediately got hit in the nose by a heavy dinner plate that she had chucked like a frisbee. I fell backwards, hit my head on the window frame, and passed out. I underplayed how bad it had been to my parents because I didn't want them to freak out, so it was a week or so before my mom was concerned enough that my nose still hurt to take me to the doctor.
A month later it still hurt, so I fessed up to how bad the sleepover had been. My mom took me to a second doctor, who within minutes had referred me to get x-rays and see the plastics team. They found that the bridge of my nose had shattered into pieces and cracked vertically down the middle. The impact had spread pieces into places they shouldn't be, and because of the delay in treatment, it had started healing like that.
72. The Haunted Woods?
When I was around 13, my friends and I would constantly roam around our neighborhood late at night and just mess around. Right next to the entrance of our neighborhood, there was a cluster of trees that we called the forest. It wasn't really a forest, since it probably only stretched a hundred feet or so in each direction, but we called it that nonetheless.
We were riding our skateboards by the forest and my friend stopped right outside of the treeline. I thought it would be funny to mess with him by throwing his skateboard into the woods since it was pitch black inside of there and super creepy at night. He naturally got mad at me and made me go get it, but I told him it wasn't my board, so it wasn't my problem.
After bickering for a few minutes, we decided that the three of us would go in together to get it so that we could protect each other from forest demons. Now, even though this was a small cluster of trees, this place was creepy as heck in the nighttime. Just something about it threw you off. Even in the daylight, it was a little creepy. We slowly crept in and shined our flashlights around looking for the skateboard.
My friend saw it about 15 feet into the woods and made me go get it since I was the one who threw it in. I rushed over to go pick it up, and as I was bending over to pick it up, I heard my two friends start screaming and yelling. I looked up to see a homeless man about 10 feet in front of me. He had a really shocked look on his face. I too screamed, grabbed the board and bolted.
My friends had turned and fled with the flashlight before I could turn, so I stumbled through the dark and tripped over a bunch of roots and could barely see but I made it out in one piece. We took off and fled back to my friend's house all the while yelling about the ghost in the woods. Looking back at it, that poor homeless guy was probably equally as spooked as we were, just wanted to be in peace, and us kids came along and ruined his tranquility.
73. Frozen In Bed
Years ago, my bedroom was in the basement, and with the way my room was set up I could see the bottom of the stairs from my bed. I was napping one day and suddenly jerked awake, and a shadowy figure was sitting on the stairs, watching me. I could feel pure anger and hatred radiating from this figure as it watched me, and my instincts were screaming that this thing was dangerous.
My body was shaking and reacted on its own, moving my arms onto to a defensive position.
After a few seconds, the figure suddenly vanished, and I could move again. I was freaked out and went upstairs to watch TV. It happened again a few weeks later, and that time was the last time.
74. Hit And Seek
A professor of mine's dad was a big time lawyer in Detroit, often prosecuting members of the local mafia. One summer day, when he was about seven, he decided he was gonna go to work with his dad and hid in the backseat of the car that morning. Once they actually got to the firm, he didn't say anything and kept quietly hiding while his dad went in.
Cut to a couple hours later, his mom is freaking out cause she can't find him. Because of his dad's profession, it's a genuine worry that their son has been kidnapped by some gang with a grudge. Meanwhile, he's starting to get heat stroke from being locked in a car during the middle of summer. Luckily, his dad found him when he was headed back to the car after getting the call from mom.
75. The SisTerminator
I had nightmares for years. In literally every dream I had, my older sister was a robot trying to kill me. She would come in the form of a tank, things that looked like Transformers, or a metallic spider, and she had a lot of knives and stuff on her. My dreams would conjure every single metallic robot you could imagine with my sister’s face on it.
I had these dreams for all of elementary school, but it was solved when I brought it up at the age of 17. I was born super early—I mean SUPER early—at four months old. I was born with so many issues and complications that I spent five months in the NICU, where I received a lot of attention from doctors. I also had multiple surgeries and a feeding tube put in me.
My mom was sad that I couldn’t meet my sister and that my sister couldn’t meet me (she was four years old at the time). So my mom put a picture of my sister’s face above me in my incubator thing so I could see her. A cute idea, but this ended up causing my brain to put together the only two things I knew—surgical tools and scary hospital equipment with my sister’s face on it.
It took us so long to figure out what the heck those nightmares meant.
76. The House in the Woods
When I was eight, I had a sleepover at a friend's house who lived in the woods. They were living in a dilapidated house on the property, while their proper house was being built. Unfortunately, this house didn’t have an inside toilet, rather, a long drop out the back. Even worse was that there was a thunderstorm the night I was staying over.
The rule was that I had to use the toilet before bed, but after one look outside at the rain, thunder, and their horse standing between the door and the long drop, I decided to skip that step. I ended up wetting the bed that night and her dad wasn’t too pleased with me. I remember her brother coming home in the morning saying, “Ah you’re the one who wet the bed”. My friend also told all of our other friends at school.
77. Sky Nightlights
I have a memory of waking up at night time when I was really young, probably about 11. I looked outside, thought it was weird that it was still light outside, and my parents went outside with me. Everything was cloaked in a green light. The trees, the pavement, the sky, the houses, everything. The wind rustled the trees a little and we went back inside.
After about five minutes, it was pitch black outside like everything was all normal again. It wasn't a dream, because I asked my parents about it a week later and they said "Yeah, that was weird". Then I asked them a few years later and they said they didn't remember, not denying that it happened but just that they didn't remember.
78. Intruder Alert!
There was a loud crash in the middle of the night. I remember waking up and seeing my dad slowly walking past my room holding our wire-haired terrier over his head. I waited until he said everything was okay and went to go see what happened. Their memory is that the bottom shelf of dishes fell down and some of the dishes shattered on the countertop.
My memory is so much scarier. I saw that the sliding glass door was broken inwards and there were bloody footprints that went to the middle of the room and then stopped. The only part that we agree on was my dad holding the dog like a ball. She apparently stood up at the noise and then laid back down. My dad was like “Screw that, you're going to defend us".
My mom and I will bring it up sometimes and he says he was just going to throw that dog at any intruder.
79. Trust Me. We're Sure.
I was about 7 years old, and we were playing in the dark at Grandma's house. I don't remember the exact reason, but I popped into the game a little late, and was waiting on my brother or cousin to come rushing around the house, and I was set to beat them back to base. As they came running around the corner, I turned and started to run.
I didn't pay attention to where I was, and tripped on the wire supporting a newly planted tree. I fell to the ground, my wrist landing on a rock. I didn't know exactly what happened, but I do know it hurt. Badly. Run to Mom and Dad, bawling my eyes out. Dad took one look and his face went pale. So, off to the hospital we went.
In the emergency room, Dad tells the admissions nurse, "We need to see a doctor, my son broke his arm". She got a little huffy, and says back something along the lines of "What makes you so sure"? Then Dad lifted the damp towel that was covering my arm, and it was immediately apparent. She just started repeating "Oh my God"!
Dad had to calm her down so I wouldn't start freaking out again. I don't know how much more force it would have taken, but it was a radial fracture of the two bones in my forearm, nearly compounded. I still remember seeing a couple bumps on my arm, but not much else.
80. Paranormal Paralysis
When I was 12 or 13, I had a horrifying experience one random night. I woke up completely awake (not dreaming) and felt encased in transparent concrete. I could only move my eyes, and even though I was breathing, I couldn’t control it. Everything was bizarre... I could sense a malevolent presence in the corner of my room, but I couldn’t turn to look at it.
This went on for what felt like hours. I was drenched in sweat and felt like I was suffocating because my adrenaline had kicked in big-time, but I couldn’t increase my respiration. Finally, after trying to scream a thousand times, I was finally able to get a squeak out. I kept going and going until I was screaming at the top of my lungs, but my family didn’t come to check on me. At that point, I really thought I was going to die.
After another thousand tries, I was able to start barely moving. I finally broke out of the encasement and realized what I thought was my screaming was a barely audible whisper. I didn’t wake my family because I had nothing to tell them that they wouldn’t simply dismiss as a “bad dream”. I didn’t go back to sleep that night, and I had horrific insomnia for decades until my 40s when I saw a documentary about people who said UFOs had abducted them.
It was a dry, fact-based documentary, and they had experts on explaining that many such “abductees” were actually experiencing something called “sleep paralysis”. My jaw hung open. I called my wife in, as I had told her about my “supernatural” experience, and we listened as these scientists described my experience EXACTLY.
Here, after decades, was the clinical description that literally changed my life. My sleep began returning to normal, and my mental health improved.
81. The Day the Drain Field Collapsed
A friend of mine had a monster dump during a sleepover. It backed up the entire drain field, with poo-water coming through the sinks and the washing machine. We spent part of the night bailing water out of the bathroom window. The next morning, we woke up to the sounds of a backhoe and my dad shouting. It turned out that my buddy's poop was the one that finished off the drain field. The whole backyard had to be dug up and an all-new drain field put in.
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82. Just A Flash
This has happened to me two times in my life; once with my parents in a car and once by myself in my room. There was a very bright blue flash. It was for about a half of a second, but you could not see anything but bright blue, even a foot in front of you. There was absolutely no sound. It was like a camera flash of intense blue light from out of nowhere.
The first time it happened, I was maybe eight years old, and we were on the highway just talking and it happened (the sky was clear that night) and everyone just stopped talking. No one said anything for 5 or 10 minutes when I asked my parents if they saw this. No one has mentioned it since that day, and now my parents just say they don't remember/know what I am talking about. That was about 20 years ago.
It happened again when I was around 20. I was in my room with all the lights off, in bed about to go to sleep and there was just a bright blue flash. I don't know where it came from, but again, I couldn't see even a foot in front of me. It was the exact same thing I had experienced in the car with my parents a decade earlier. I have tried Googling this phenomenon, but I have not found anything that remotely can tell me what it was.
83. The Worst Concert
Every year in grade school all of the classes would sing a song as a concert for the parents. One year, we had a horrible music teacher who told us throughout the year that we would be lip-syncing the song and not to worry about the concert. Then at the concert, we went on stage, and he hands us a microphone and says "sing".
So, there are about 50 fifth graders in front of all the parents and other students at the school going mumble mumble "CHORUS" mumble mumble. The thing is, I only know that was how it went because of the speech a classmate gave at eighth-grade graduation. What I personally remember is the concert getting canceled due to snow.
I asked my parents and some friends, and they not only remember it happening but that I was there as well. Apparently, my fifth-grade mind said "NOPE"! and blocked out the memory.
84. That Ain't Water
I was playing outside a church at night after a service with some friends, and they had a whole new dirt pile next to the building. So when a buddy started counting, me and my other friend ran behind it. We slowly backed further and further then... Splash! I fell in a deep hole full of water. I warned my buddy I fell in some water, but then another splash...
A little after that my friend says "I don't think this is water". That's when the smell kicked in. I realized why there was a big hole full of liquid poop behind the dirt pile. It was an open septic tank being worked on. Me and my two friends rode with my mom to church that night. Let's just say she wasn't too happy to be stuck in a car for 20 minutes with two kids that had raw sewage all over them.
My friend who was counting thought it was hilarious, though.
85. The FUNcle
My uncle, who was single with no kids, lived a few houses away from my grandparents. My siblings and I would often go between the houses. We always loved my uncle’s house because he had a huge fish tank of tropical fish, and he let us play video games. He was the most fun uncle there was—he was always taking us to the movies, amusement parks, fishing, and golfing, and he was just fun to be around in general.
He always had us rolling with laughter. But over time, he became less okay with us popping over, and we resorted to sneaking into his house. We didn’t get very far along, and it made him angry when he caught us. From that point on, we always just saw him at my grandparents’ house. We used to joke with him about having a girlfriend over.
Fast forward 17 years later, he had a massive heart attack, and while he was in the hospital, his sisters went into his house to look for paperwork and get the house ready for his return. That's when we uncovered his dark secret. There they found ROOMS full of empty bottles of cheap booze. My uncle had a severe drinking addiction for years, and none of us knew it. And suddenly, so many little things started making sense. He ended up dying shortly thereafter of organ failure. He wasn’t even 60 yet.
86. Chocolate Chunkies
It was around Halloween time. We spent the night playing video games and having a good time. As we were playing, I was eating a ton of chocolate. I was in bed at around 2 am, and began having a nightmare. When I woke up, I needed to puke. I ran down a bunch of stairs to the toilet and started heaving away. As it turned out, I had also barfed all over the side of my friend’s spare bed and on the floor while I was sleeping.
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87. What’s In The Box?
I don't really remember exactly how old I was, but it was maybe around the third or fourth grade. I was at my middle school in Miami in line waking towards the field for recess. We had to pass the cafeteria hall and then cross a parking lot, so my teacher would take the lead and the stragglers would have to kind of go slower as we all crossed.
I remember being almost last in line when I was passing the refrigerated food delivery truck: It was an older, smaller truck. I remember it being white. Something felt really awful about it. As I walked past, the driver—a disheveled man with scruffy facial hair and horrible teeth—peeked around the corner and stopped me.
He asked me to help him with the last box in the back as his back was starting to hurt from the deliveries. I remember very clearly staring into the back of that truck with cool fog just hovering over the last box in the very back of the truck and feeling nauseous. I looked at him and said I couldn't help him because I had to catch up with my class. He then growled a "...but wait"!
I hurried away with my two friends who were waiting for me and had taken note that I wasn't with them.
88. A Special Lens
I had these cool night vision goggles when I was eight or nine years old that would only see stuff in black and white. It was late one night, and I was messing around with the camera function on it, taking photos and recording videos when I see this girl. I only have a brother, so it couldn't have been him, because this girl was wearing a dress and she was very thin, unlike my brother.
I take off the goggles and there's nothing in front of me, but I get this horrid feeling that I've seen something I shouldn't have, turn off the camera, and cry myself to sleep. The next day, I try to forget about it and start using the goggles again when I see this moving orange ball floating throughout my house. It was absolutely terrifying, and I get the same feeling.
Little me decides to not be as afraid and keep watching it and following it. I followed it to my garage where it disappeared, and the room got extremely hot extremely fast. I ran out of there and was terrified to go back for weeks. That was years ago, and I still have no explanation to what any of that was.
89. Follow My Finger…
I have stories from the same place we used to holiday every year: a tiny island half a mile wide and a mile across. There were no cars allowed and it used to be inhabited by monks, so there were many tales of hauntings. The first was when we used to stay on the campsite. I had been to the toilet, and I was walking back to our tent.
I passed through a small group of people sitting in chairs in the middle of the field. As I passed through, someone said something to get my attention. I can't remember what was said, but I was just chatting with them when suddenly this one man pointed his finger at me. All I could focus on was his finger. He kept on talking to me, but I don't know what he said.
All I know is I could not take my eyes away from that finger. I felt very afraid, but I could not move. It was like the entire world vanished and it was just me, him, and that finger that I could not stop looking at. I don't know what happened, but I'm sure that dude hypnotized me in an instant. I remember hearing a laugh from someone in the group and it was like the spell was broken.
I ran back to my tent with my heart pounding as they all laughed at me. Overall, it was the weirdest thing that has happened to me. I don't really believe in psychics and hypnotism, but that guy sure did something to my brain.
90. Sleeptalking
One time when I was around nine or so, we had guests over at our house for a few days, and since I had the largest room, which meant I had to sleep in my younger sister’s. Well on the second night of me sleeping in the room, at around two in the morning, I was woken up by the sound of muttering. I got up and looked over at my sister who was facing my direction, but her eyes were closed, so I just started back at her.
This is where it starts to get creepy. She then started to cry out of nowhere and said “Help me” over and over again, so I panicked and went over to her. She then started repeating in a kind of angry tone I had never heard her use saying to turn off the fan that was next to her. After I did that, she sat up again and turned it back on and start crying again.
I got into the bed and hugged her till she stopped. The next morning, I asked my mum if my sister ever talks in her sleep, and she said no. It was such a strange experience and I struggled to sleep the next few days.
91. The Greatest Spots Have The Greatest Risk
One of my friends was playing hide and seek in a big group at his place when he was like 13 or 14. Their garage was an absolute mess. Like, completely packed with all sorts of random stuff (enough so that you had to walk on top of/through things), so he decided that it'd be a fantastic place to hide. But, just to add another layer of difficulty to it, he decided to hide by laying down on some of the beams above the track for the garage door. When things went wrong, they went WRONG.
At some point, he lost his balance and fell about 10 feet down onto a pile of bikes, trash bags full of clothes, car parts, etc. While he was falling he desperately tried to grab hold of the beam he was on and instead managed to barely reach the track for the garage door. His first finger on his left hand made contact right on the last knuckle before his fingertip.
That portion of the garage door track had a v shape to it and severed it cleanly. He landed on the pile of junk, bleeding and screaming, and he was rushed to the hospital. Some of his family searched for a while to find his fingertip hoping the doctors would be able to reattach it. They found it still cradled in the v shaped portion of the track.
Unfortunately, they didn't know to put it on ice. We sometimes now refer to him as "nine and three-quarters" since that's how many fingers he has.
92. Tiger Mom Torment
It began on Friday afternoon after school when I was in middle school. My parents weren't available to take me, so my friend’s mom, who is a Tiger Mom, and who I had never met before, picked me up. We had to go pick up her younger daughter from school, and the mom told me she had to speak to the principal. The mom told me that I was not to speak, move, or even breathe too loudly.
She told me to be quiet, or that she was taking me home. She snapped at me again in the car on the way to the house because I didn't get the memo that I was supposed to be quiet the entire time. My friend and the other girl were at the house by the time the world's most awkwardly silent car ride finally ended. Tiger Mom glared daggers upon our very mild greeting to each other and I only saw her once the rest of the evening.
My friend was constantly looking over her shoulder and trying to maintain our teenage fun through whispers, as we were walking on eggshells. It was more stressful than fun, so I was relieved when it was time to lock ourselves in the room for the night, where we were a little freer to talk and relax—or so I thought.
My friend got a few sharp texts from her mom telling her to keep us quiet. How she even heard us, I don't know. She was across their large house and downstairs. We were ridiculously quiet for three teenagers having a sleepover. The next morning, my parents were ordered to pick me up as early as possible. I was so stressed out by Tiger Mom, I was happy to leave without breakfast.
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93. The Dog Whisperer
My dad was walking our dogs kind of late at night, and a homeless person was standing at the end of a street nearby talking to herself in Spanish. She noticed my dad walking our dogs and began to say in Spanish, “Those dogs are so pretty, let me touch them, those dogs are so pretty, let me touch them” over and over and over again.
He said she followed him for a few minutes and her voice kept getting deeper the more she would say it, as if she got possessed…or was already possessed. Luckily, she was on the opposite side of the street, and she stopped following him eventually! We don’t live in the best area, so sometimes you’re going to see some sketchy stuff that makes you feel really uncomfortable, but it’s something to keep in mind and makes you more aware of things.
94. Look Under Your Pillow…
When I was about five or six, I remember waking up in the middle of the night to my door aggressively going back and forth. This scared me, and I ended up hiding under my blanket for what seemed to be about a half-hour. I felt some sort of crinkling under my head when I brought my head back up to my pillow. That’s when I made a chilling discovery. There was this poorly drawn side profile of a man on this crinkled paper, and I forever remembered it.
I ran to my parents’ bedroom, but the paper was gone the next morning. It wasn’t until years later TikTok came out and the trend of “the man in everyone’s dreams” was everywhere. I had a panic attack when I saw him because it was the exact guy on this crinkled-up paper that arrived on my pillow 10 years before. I get chills every time I see him
95. Finding Family
An 11th grader was talking about how he moved back with his grandparents when his mom passed on. He mentioned that his mom had also attended this school and so had his dad, but he had never met him. He only knew his dad's first name. So, he said the name in my "get to know other students first-day icebreaker". This is where it gets crazy. A freshman girl asked a few pointed questions, pulled out her phone, and called her dad.
The dad was there within 15 minutes. It turned out that the late mom’s family moved mom out of the city to hide the pregnancy and the dad only knew the child's first name. The mom and dad had only been high school students at the time. Mom moved from a downtown major northern city to Alabama or Louisiana to be with her grandfather. The baby boy got the maternal grandfather’s name.
The dad did not have the money or the resources to track down the mom’s movement. This would be in the pager/cassette days and not during the years of cell phones and Facebook. The dad spent years trying unsuccessfully to track his kid and the kid’s mom down. He, later, settled down, became an EMT, got married, and had three daughters.
Among the three daughters, the oldest daughter was the previously mentioned freshman. There was a GD family reunion in my icebreaker on the first day of school.
96. One In A Million
A neighbor just regaled me with this heartbreaker. His sister, her husband, and two kids went up to Washington to camp every year. So, they were up there in May, early June, sometime during 2002-2003, and the son went to use a rope swing to jump into the lake. The whole family was watching, fun times. But then everything took an incredibly dark turn.
The boy botched the jump and ended up with the rope around his ankle, fell badly, broke a bone, and was just dragging underwater, flailing. The dad immediately springs into action to save his son and dove in—into shallow water. He smashed his skull open, was instantly paralyzed, and drowned. The mother obviously tried to save them both, dove into the water, and suffered a fatal heart attack.
The son stopped flailing and was just hanging there, head underwater. The daughter, 10 years old, had no idea two minutes prior that she would be sitting safely on shore, watching her whole family die. So incredibly heartbreaking. She was raised by my neighbor as a daughter. I just can’t even imagine what that would be like. Just normal, mundane risks proving lethal in less than 200 heartbeats.
97. A Nasty Surprise
When I was about five years old, I woke up to the snow outside our house finally starting to melt. That’s when I noticed a girl "asleep" in the garden. I went and told my dad. He took one look and his face went white. He told me to go play in my room. Turns out, the girl had been "asleep" in our front garden for about two weeks, buried and frozen under the snow.
I didn't know she was actually a corpse until I was about 16, when I mentioned to my dad, "Remember that girl asleep in the garden"? Dad was like, “You idiot, that was a body". As far as I know, she was in her late teens or early 20s. We lived in a pretty rough area at the time, and she had probably been out partying, sat on our garden wall, and passed out.
98. Parents Can Have Sleepovers Too
I went to a giant sleepover when I was 8 or 9 for a friend's birthday. He had all his friends over and his parents had also invited some friends over as well. As the night winded down, we all went into my buddy’s room to jam some Super Smash Bros. Fast forward to about 2 AM. Most of the boys had fallen asleep, save for a few of us.
I had to go to the bathroom horribly. I was holding everything in as I was terrified of using other people's bathrooms and making a mess or smelling up the place. Eventually, I asked my friend where the bathroom was. I still don't know if I misheard him or was just stupid and forgot the minute I walked out of the room, but I somehow ended up at his parents door.
I opened it up full force—I will never, ever forgot what I saw next. I found myself staring at his mother in bed with this dude who’d been at the party, while his dad was sitting in the corner with the dude’s wife. I opened the door so quick they didn't even have time to semi-hide what they were doing. So there I was, 9 years old, frozen in place staring at his parents mid-swap with another couple.
I still see their faces to this day. The only reason I know they were swinging as I could see every single one of their faces. They all just looked at me trying to process what just happened. After a good five seconds of silence, finally the father yelled to get out and I just shut the door. I stood there for what seemed like hours.
I finally made my way back to my friend’s room, completely forgetting about my full bowels, and just laid down. I laid there all night, wide awake, till 7 AM when my mom picked me up. I never told anyone and NEVER went to another sleepover at my friend’s house or even went inside his house again, in fear of having to see his parents and having that talk with them.
99. He Stood Corrected
When I was six or seven years old, I visited my dad at the place where he worked... or so I was told. I remember remarking about it at the time, and people laughed at me because I said it looked just like a prison. The people laughing were the guards, and I was indeed visiting my dad at the Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution, where he was a federal inmate.
100. Gone, Baby, Gone
On a day out with my dad when I was little, I was playing in the park with a girl the same age as me. I didn’t know her, but she was on her own. We left after an hour or so, leaving the girl on her own. Again, my dad asked her where her parents were. Later on that night, there was a big story on the news that gave me chills—it was about a girl who had been abducted, and all my family members kept asking me questions about this little girl.
It went right over my head at the time, being about five years old. 40 years later, I still think about her.
101. A True Nightmare
I was playing hide and seek at a friend's house when I was seven or eight. I was running to get behind the house and took the corner and stepped on top of the metal grate above the basement escape window. Suddenly, my life flashed before my eyes. The grate somehow gave way and I fell to the bottom, managing to scrape my legs arms and head as I fell. Then I saw where I was and just started screaming.
The bottom was dirty gravel strewn with the skeletal and still decomposing remains of countless frogs. To make matters worse, years of undisturbed spider webs crisscrossing was also triggered and I swear I could see the spider's eyes looking at me as dozens of thicc booty spiders crawled frantically towards me to enjoy their feast.
I am laying at the bottom, blood seemingly gushing from my elbows, knees, and forehead as I started climbing the infinitely long ladder to the surface while screaming and crying. Each rung of the ladder was also covered in webs and spiders, who started crawling up my arms. I made it to the surface and my friend's mom tried to comfort me to little avail.
This series of events took maybe 15 seconds but felt like slow motion the entire time. To this day I have trust issues with any metal grate (storm drain, city sidewalk vent) and what I consider a reasonable fear of spiders.
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