The paranormal is a topic a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their head around. It’s hard for us to believe in something we can’t see. Without proof, skeptics will always have an unshakeable belief in their disbelief. They live to disprove any half-baked theory or circumstance and are quick to reason away any possible explanations for anomalies. But what happens when a skeptic is confronted with something they can’t quite quantify?
What happens when the logical must throw rationality out the window, forcing them to confront their belief in a reality that is no longer accurate? Imagine the situations that would call for such extreme measures. Suffice to say they have a good reason for it. Imagine the fear and panic that must have been triggered. It must have felt like something out of a horror movie; ice cold fear spreading throughout the body, that feeling of someone watching you...
Here are some of the spookiest stories of Redditors who are trying to come to terms with their own unexplainable experiences.
31. Haunted House
I had a lot of weird things happen at my parent’s house growing up, but I still consider myself skeptical of anything paranormal.
The master bedroom has a walk-in closet where the light would constantly come on by itself, especially when I was home alone. The dogs were also weirdly obsessed with the closet. One would sit in there for hours, and the other would always stand and growl and bark. Even years after I moved out, my mom still has this happen on the regular.
The freakiest time was when I was 15 and my parents were out for the evening at a work party. I was in my room playing a computer game and listening to music. Suddenly I got a really uncomfortable feeling like someone was behind me. I turned around, and there was a black shadowy figure in the middle of the room. As soon as I saw it, it moved towards me and I could literally feel it move through me. I noped the f*** out of the house and sat outside until my parents came home.
The most recent time was after I moved out and was at my parents to do some laundry. As I was loading the dryer, I clearly saw somebody walk by the laundry room door and into the furnace room. I assumed it was my dad, but it turned out they were both upstairs at the time.
My mom is also a complete skeptic, but she almost wanted to come stay with me one time because she swears she saw a dark figure crawl across the kitchen floor. She also says she’s seen the chandelier swinging one time during the night.
I’ve never had anything weird happen to me anywhere else but that house, so it’s kind of freaky. I’m really not sure what to think.
30. I Would Have Immediately Moved to a Hotel
Stayed with a friend for a couple of months post-divorce. He had an old farmhouse and I bunked in the top floor room. One night as I had just gone to bed I heard creaking on the floor just in front of my bed. After a couple seconds, I rolled over and just ignored it.
After a few minutes, I hear it again. I roll over and sit up. I see what looks like a blur—mist perhaps, who knows—pass by the end of the bed. At this point, I'm more confused than anything.
Suddenly, I hear what sounds like light footsteps on the stairs—about 7 in total. A small creak, possibly the door opening to the downstairs and then the dogs go ballistic. I run downstairs and now we are all awake. The dogs are focused on the stairway and bark like mad for about 3 minutes.
No real explanation, but after telling my buddy and his wife what I heard we were all creeped out for a few days. I stayed there for a few weeks and nothing else ever happened.
29. Imagine if Ghosts Could Read Minds
Much like some other comments here, my parent's house has always had an eerie feeling to it. While I consider myself a skeptic, I still don't feel at ease being alone in some rooms to this day.
When I was in sixth grade I was on my computer late at night in my room when all of a sudden I got this overwhelming feeling that someone else was in my room. I had been playing Bubble Trouble and thought maybe it's one of my brothers trying to scare me so I looked over to the door and it was completely shut. There would have been no way for someone to open it without me hearing because it was an old door. I glanced around my room and no one was there so I continued playing but I couldn't shake the feeling.
I was sitting in a chair with a high back that went over my head and all of a sudden I felt like someone was standing right behind me. I reluctantly turned around and saw nothing, looked under my chair, under my bed and, again, saw nothing.
I sat back down at my computer with a little bit of relief but then the feeling came back significantly stronger than before and I was instantly petrified. All of a sudden I felt a presence in my left ear and I heard and felt it say "go to bed." I ran right to my bed and hid under the covers and didn't tell anyone for a long time because I was afraid that ghosts could read minds and if I told then it would only upset the spirits even more.
What the "thing" said wasn't the scary thing, it was clearly hearing a voice that felt like it was right next to my ear. I have had a large number of experiences before and after that one, but none that were so clear and unexplainable/irrefutable in my mind.
28. Hospitals Are So Haunted
On my first nursing job, I would work in a unit that served as an overflow, and that unit would close if the census was low (less patients in the hospital). The hospital was only a few years old, but there were strange things happening like the TV turning on its own in a room where one patient died and patient’s doors closing. I always joked that sun-downing in a hospital might as well be someone being possessed.
Two of our coworkers had the bright idea of going upstairs to that unit, turning on phone video, and asking aloud for the spirits to show themselves. I didn't join them since I was busy. But to their disappointment, nothing came of it and even the possessed TV did not turn on. But later, when they reviewed the video, they turned up the volume on their phone. They started to hear audible whispers and that freaked them out.
Not my story, but from a veteran coworker. She got consent from the family for a patient for a surgery who was paranoid "I'm going to die...I'm going to die...I know I am; you bring me there, I die." The patient didn't have any significant medical problems, no red flags with anesthesia history, and the surgery was a simple ex-laprascopic gallbladder removal.
The dude died on the table.
27. Grandma’s Spirit Has Your Back
Repost—not really scary, just a portion of it I can't explain.
So, this was about 13 years ago. My wife and I moved into our brand new condo in July of ‘05. We were new to the area and knew no one besides my dad. Fast forward to April ‘07. We had some "weird" things, such as the TV turning on in the middle of the night and a few glasses shattered on their own when no one was in the room. Strange... but we just explained it as new construction/wiring and perhaps the glasses were weakened by the move/age.
We joke about it, and eventually, I'm due to drive back to Chicago to do my oral defense for my Master’s Degree. I take showers daily, as does my wife. Don't remember the actual dates, but let’s say Monday my wife and I take our showers, no worries. Tuesday, I take a shower and get out. Our bathroom has a full wall mirror over the dual sinks. In the steam, at the VERY VERY top is written, "Chicago". I'm like, "Uh... that's odd."
Call to my wife and ask her, "Why did you write that?" She is just waking up and comes in, is confused as heck and starts to get mad at me ‘cause SHE didn't write it. I quickly write in the steam below it without thinking... as does she. The writing doesn't match either of us. Plus, it is written at the TOP of the mirror. We have ten-foot ceilings. Both of us would have had to have gotten on the counter and stood to reach it.
I run through the condo—it’s not very big—and everything is locked. We had no people over in between the daily showers, and hadn't had anyone over in weeks—still didn't know many people here. My wife is not a prankster; she has never pranked me in the two decades I've known her. I sure as heck didn't write it.
The kicker: the next night I had an incredibly realistic dream of my grandma who passed in ‘05. She was on my bed, rested her hand on my leg and said, "Don't worry Hyperion, that b****** is gone." Nothing weird happened after that. I can explain away everything except the writing. Who the heck knows!
26. Nighttime Visitor
I was laying in my bed sleeping one night and I woke up feeling uncomfortable. My daughter has health issues and years of worrying about her condition caused us to be light sleepers. When I woke up this night I watched a white figure come down the hall from my daughter’s room and go by my door. At the same time my dog slid off of the bed—he didn’t get up, just slid—and followed the white figure.
I was freaked out so I got up and followed the dog to our front door. The dog was facing the door looking out the glass in the door down the street. The moon was lighting up his face and I noticed his eyes were completely shut. I put my hand on his neck and he jumped...He was 100% asleep.
I checked my daughter’s room and she was happily sleeping and in good health. I’ve often wondered what visited and how often its visited our home. I’ve also wondered if I’ve ever been the one staring out the front door instead of the dog completely asleep…
25. Jimmy’s Such a Prankster
Me and my grandma both believe in ghosts. It helps that she's worked at a hospital for 15 years. She does not take crap from them. She'll tell stories of patients who've died that she knew fairly well—she works in a cancer ward and they don't always win the fight—and the traits they had.
For example: Jimmy loved to move things on her cart when she wasn't looking. One day, in particular, a few days after he passed, she kept losing her key card, only to find it on the second shelf of her cart, or behind a planter or somewhere else she didn’t put it. Finally, she said "Jimmy, you know I don't have time for this. You best stop." It stopped happening.
24. I Guess the Ghost Really Had to Go
When I was about nine or 10 years old, I was with my friend and we went to my house to get something to drink. We got the drink and we heard something weird coming from upstairs even though there was nobody in the house but us—I had just opened the front door with the key myself and the door was locked.
So we went upstairs and directly on the left there is a door to the bathroom which is about where the noise seemed to be coming from. I looked at the door and realized the little marker that says if it’s closed or opened was about 3/4 red and 1/4 white, so it was almost fully locked from inside. When we approached the door to knock on it since nobody was answering our calls to ask who was inside—it’s about 3 meters from the end of the stairs—all of a sudden with some noise of force—it was not an easy lock to unlock, but required some power—the thing just popped to fully white like someone turned the lock fully open again from inside the bathroom.
The quickness and force of the movement caused me and my friend to both run out of the house to his house and when we told his mom about this experience she went with us to see what was up.
When we got back, there was nobody in the house nor was there anything missing in the house and there were no windows opened for someone to get away that was in there before. The strangest thing about it all to me was that there was just no way someone could have gotten in and out without a key, and the only people with keys were all away at work.
I still don’t understand what happened to this day, but I’m convinced there was someone in that bathroom that day.
23. Mysterious Photos Falling Out of Nowhere: Totally Normal
I’m an Atheist, but I will say that I have an aunt and uncle who bought a really nice older house that she was convinced was definitely haunted. Lots and lots of really creepy, unexplainable stuff was constantly happening.
One day my aunt was finally fed up with it and she asks the ‘ghost’ to show itself. Nothing happens for a while, but as she’s at the bathroom sink brushing her teeth before bed, an old photo of a young woman from the ‘60s or ‘70s fall out from behind the mirror and into the sink. The next morning, she gets a Catholic priest to bless the house and say a few Hail Marys. Nothing ever happened again. Her husband also shared with me a couple of other even more terrifying accounts.
22. Spirit’s Final Dirge
I'm a police officer and I was working a fresh homicide—had occurred within the last hour. We'd checked the house, and it's me, two other patrol officers and a homicide detective standing there talking and waiting for the medical examiner.
All of a sudden the stereo kicks on, playing a song I don't know the name of, but sounded like something you'd hear at a funeral. None of us were near the stereo or had the remote. It took us like five minutes to figure out how to turn it off. Was very eerie to me.
21. OK, This Shook Me Up a Bit
The first one happened when I was about seven years old. I had my own bedroom and always slept with the door open. One night as I was laying in bed, on my side, facing the door, I saw my little brother, who would have been two at the time, run by my bedroom door wearing those old ‘90s LA Gear light up sandals. If you grew up in the ‘90s you know the ones, with the red lights that blink on the back heel area when you take a step.
I sat up a bit when I heard/saw this as I could hear the distinctive crumple sound of a diaper being run in and saw the lights clearly. I whispered his name and asked what he was doing. I saw him come back to my doorway, sandals lighting up, and then stop at my doorway looking at me. At that point I could tell something was off, I could not make out any features on him but I chalked it up to it being dark and he ran back down the hall and I went to sleep.
The next morning, I went to my Mom and asked why my brother was up running around last night. She told me that he wasn't, I said that I saw him and he even had on those sandals that light up. She looked at me funny and said, "Your brother slept in our bed all night last night, and I threw away those sandals over a month ago...
The second one, I was about 9 years old.
Our front room was a wide open space with a couch on the left wall, a couch towards the back of the room and a bay window you are able to sit in at the front. A family friend named Tom came over to stay with us. He was going to sleep on the couch in the front room, and me, wanting to hang out with my older cool "uncle" Tom, who was about 20 years older than me, asked if I could sleep on the other couch as a kind of slumber party. He, of course, said yes and my parents could care less.
We go to sleep and in the front room through the blinds on the bay window you could see some light filtering in from the street light outside. I woke up at some point and was by default staring at the bay window and I saw Tom casually sitting on the bay window looking out towards the street. I whispered his name, he slowly turned his head to look at me, and then slowly moved back to looking out the window.
I looked at the couch and did not see him there, so I got up and walked towards him asking what he was doing. As I got closer and closer, he became more and more translucent until I got right up to him and reached out to touch him and my hand went through thin air... he was gone. I looked at the couch and he was there sound asleep.
It wasn't sleep paralysis because I was wide awake in both situations but I have no explanation for what it might have been.
20. A Father’s Warmth From Beyond
My dad died when I was five. Was raised by my mom and I have a twin brother who I'm really close to, but we aren't inseparable. I was in my second year of college bombing all my classes, had not seen family or friends in months and one of my best friends died a month earlier. Not trying to complain, but it was a hard time in my life.
Anyway, I'm alone in my dorm on my bed trying to do homework while I'm panicking about my future. All of a sudden, my blanket moves up my bed and around me while I was all alone and I hear a man’s voice say "You’re going to be okay."
Sketched me out for months.
19. This Isn’t Close Encounters...
I was in bed one night and for no reason at all I woke up... heard scratching going on above my head and then every single electronic in my room turned on at once... I'm talking TV, computer, monitors, Xbox, laptop...I summed the scratching up to mice...but I still can’t explain the second part...
18. Super Eerie Country Creature
I lived in the countryside as a child, literally middle-of-nowhere territory, and my bus ride was an hour long so I had to wake up very early to catch it as it went by my house. I had no neighbors for a few miles around, and the stretch of road I lived on is flat and you could see a good mile in either direction before it curved off again into the forest which is cut back about 10 feet on either side of the road because of the electric poles.
It was winter and the plow had banked it three feet on either side, and I was waiting atop my driveway at 7 am before the sun has even come up, but there is enough light to see, especially since there is all the snow. To my left, I see something running on the opposite side of the road. I can't tell what it is because it is so far away, but I can see the silhouette against the snow, and I remember thinking to myself that I'm lucky to see a deer, because I enjoy wildlife. They often run along the road when the snow is deep, I've seen it before, albeit when the sun is higher.
I realize that its gait isn't right for a deer. It's now halfway to me, and I come to the absurd conclusion it's a man, running. As the figure jogs closer and closer, I can see he's not exactly wearing winter gear, like I am, all bundled up for the -10F, in fact he's barely covered at all. I feel uncomfortable and disturbed.
At 20 feet, he veers from his course and comes/directly at me/diagonally across the road. He's running and to me it feels too fast for a man.
It stops in front of me, just this grey naked silhouette at 7 am that I can’t see anything in or about, and I'm just petrified, standing there, looking at this thing, that's just standing there looking at me. It doesn't say anything, do anything, just stands there.
This happens in the course of maybe three seconds.
Then it turns and runs back the way it came.
I wanted to leave and go hide in my house, but my bus would be there any second and I didn't want to be yelled at by my mum. So I stood there terrified, watching that thing just run away until it had cleared the bend of the road. 10 minutes later the bus arrived and I was on my way to school.
I tried telling myself it was just a jogger, or someone playing a prank, but no one lives near me. When I got off the bus that evening, I couldn't find one footprint in the snow on either side of the road and there should have been, there should have been at least one footprint from this thing because it hadn't snowed while I was at school.
I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
17. Maybe the Spirits Just Wanted to Play
As a teenager, I would babysit for my cousin, let's call her A. I was about 16 at the time. She and her husband had just moved into this large house and had a newborn daughter. I never liked the vibe of that house but just thought I was being irrational. One morning I'm alone with the baby and I hear someone going down the stairs, a bang, and some murmuring, I tell myself the house is new and it's just settling and maybe the TV is on. I pick up the infant and make my way downstairs.
Once you get to the bottom of the stairs it opens up to a large living room to the left with a TV on the floor, to the right is the kitchen area. I go to the kitchen to make a bottle and it feels like someone is watching me, I shake it off but start packing up a diaper bag just in case. Not 2 minutes later I hear the TV turn on, volume all the way up, to static white noise...and I flip!
I run to the living room and turn it off. I call one of my cousins who lives nearby to come get me—let's call her S—and as I'm talking to S on the phone the TV turns on again. I waited for her outside after that. Later that night me, my cousin S, and another cousin who is A’s sister go back to A's house to drop off the baby and get the stuff I left there. We ring the doorbell, no answer. We hear them running up and down the stairs, we saw someone look at us through the window, and we can hear them talking and laughing.
We have no clue what game they're playing so we ring the doorbell again and start yelling at them, they're laughing at us now. All 3 of us are getting irritated and start to leave, as we get in the car, here comes A and her husband coming up the street in their car...We have no clue what the hell happened that night, I don't believe in the paranormal but I have no explanation for that.
16. I’m Sorry, What?
Posted this recently, was definitely creepy and scary at the time, maybe paranormal. I’m a former paramedic, responded with police and fire to a report of a man down on the side of the railroad tracks in a wooded area approx. 500 yards from the nearest access road. A railroad employee riding the tracks doing a safety check of the tracks noticed the man down the embankment of the tracks.
We all parked and walked with all the equipment the 500 or so yards to where the patient was. He had no signs of life, flat line on the EKG, along with fixed and dilated pupils. Do a little more checking and he has no visible signs of any type of trauma, the body is not cold yet and there isn't rigor mortis yet so he hasn't been dead too long. We don't see any track marks where he would have shot up and overdosed and feel no broken bones. The guy with the railroad said a train hadn't passed in the last 8 hours. We search the area and find a makeshift tent/campsite where the guy apparently was living and find no medications or anything out the ordinary.
We are not too far from an area that everyone believes is haunted and is a site for satanic worship. Even though all of us on the scene knew about the rumors none of us had actually seen it or had proof. It's dark and we were all waiting around for the funeral home to show up and bring the body to the morgue for an autopsy.
Then the weird/spooky stuff started. A few of us heard what sounded like people whispering but it wasn't from any specific direction, a couple of the guys didn't hear it and thought we were trying to mess with them. Then the whispering noises stopped and the people on scene that hadn't heard the whispering started hearing what they all described as children laughing wickedly, but it was all over, not from any specific direction. Those of us that had heard the whispering never heard the new noise. This went on for about 10-15 minutes while we're standing next to the corpse. Police officers on the scene told their dispatcher to tell the funeral home to step it up and get out there ASAP.
We helped them load the body—more like throw it in the damn stretcher. We didn't even bother strapping it down and got the heck outta there. We didn't take time to strap him down because he was already dead—it ain't gonna make him more dead if he fell off.
The next afternoon, we went to the morgue to speak with the coroner and find out the cause of death. The first thing the coroner asked us was why did we clean the body? Me and my partner looked at him kinda strange and asked what he was talking about. He said it must have been a very bloody scene, so we told him there was no blood anywhere around the scene.
He turned pale and said that just added to the confusion, because the body had absolutely no blood in it whatsoever. And there were no marks anywhere on him where blood could have been drained out. He also said he had a weird experience while doing the autopsy but refused to tell us what happened. To this day we have still never learned the actual cause of death, or been able to explain the whispering and evil laughing. Yeah, one of those calls I'll never forget!
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15. The Woman in White
Saw a woman in a white nightgown walk out of the forest one night while I was house sitting in the middle of nowhere. She walked out of the woods toward the house. She scared the hell out of me. There were no neighbors for miles. I ran upstairs to my GF. We both went downstairs and I saw her walk past one of the windows. I spent the rest of the night under the covers.
The next day I told the homeowners that “I saw something strange.” They replied, “Was it the woman in white?” They told me they have seen that woman for decades, sometimes INSIDE the house. I’m still trying to figure this one out. There has to be some sort of explanation. And why do so many ghost stories involve a woman in white? Must be something in the water. IDK!
14. Yep Just Grandpa’s Ghost Having Fun
A few years ago, my grandma and I traveled a state over to stay with my grandma's sister on their farm for a couple of days to attend a family wedding.
The first night sleeping, I constantly felt a freezing breeze blowing across my right ear. You'd think that it would've stopped when I pulled the blanket over my head. Nope. Maybe when I rolled over and smashed my ear into the pillow? Nope again. I figured it would have to stop if I laid flat on my back, but still the breeze persisted—only that time vertical instead of horizontal.
After a night of very little sleep, I told my great-aunt about it at breakfast. Very casually, she told me that it was her father-in-law, who'd been dead for a good 60 years at that point. He meant no harm, and I could ask my cousin about it at the reception, as I had spent the night in his childhood room. Went on to tell me about how this cousin always had stories of playing with an old man in his bedroom as a kid—one that there weren't any surviving photos of, but when he described him to the family they all agreed on who it was.
Went to the wedding, and then at the reception I got a chance to ask my cousin about it. With the same casualness, he told me "Yeah, that'd be Grandpa K., he's harmless and will probably leave you alone tonight."
Sure enough, no breeze on the second night.
I still want to know where the breeze came from. I want to know how my conservative, religious relatives are just like "oh yeah, that's just grandpa's ghost having some fun" and leave it at that. I want to know why that room in particular—I've stayed in that house probably a dozen times without incident, but that was my first time in that room. I want to know why I couldn't recreate it during the day, even with my head in the same place, or again on the second night. I want to know why no one thought it relevant to mention that I'd be sleeping in the apparently haunted room.
13. Aww, Puppy Heaven Called
Something unexplainable actually just happened to my wife and me.
We lost our beloved dog last year. He was our world. His urn, bed, and toys are in our living room next to our TV. We never called him by his actual name. Instead, we always used a nickname, which for the sake of this story I will call "Sunshine."
We recently got a new cable provider and wireless router. As a result, our Wi-Fi has a new name. Our old wireless network was named something like "[last name]1" and we changed it to "[last name]2." My wife and I went around the house and made sure that all our devices are connected to the new wireless router.
As we were trying to configure our Chromecast, the TV screen gave a message along the lines of: "Do you want to connect to SUNSHINE?" My wife and I just stared in disbelief. We didn't think that any wireless networks in our area had the same name as our late dog's nickname.
I immediately said, "Uh...I've never seen that Wi-Fi network before, have you?" My wife responded, "No. Definitely not." We opened our phones and checked the nearby Wi-Fi networks. There was none named "SUNSHINE." Then we checked on my laptop; no wireless networks named "SUNSHINE." We checked periodically throughout the day and still there was no sign of a "SUNSHINE" network in the area.
I can't explain why our TV tried to connect to the network with the same nickname as our late dog. We've never seen that network in our area. In fact, we live in a remote part of our state and nearby networks—which are few—have generic names given by the cable provider such as "Home [numbers]." Given that our dog's urn, bed, and toys are all next to the TV, we like to think that our pup was saying a quick hello.
12. Skinwalker or Desiccated Coyote?
Just to preface this: I am an agnostic/atheist with a STEM degree and no interest or belief in religion, the supernatural, the occult, new age stuff, or anything like that. Nevertheless, this is a true story.
So this incident, in stereotypical horror movie fashion, happened on prom night about 25 years ago. I attended high school in the American Southwest, on the edge of the Navajo reservation. After my junior prom, my date and I decided to drive out into the desert wearing our fancy clothes. I can't remember exactly why now—probably we wanted to go find a place to make out or something.
Anyway, we had been driving down this empty desert highway for about half an hour when I saw something in the headlights walking down the side of the road ahead of us. As we got closer, I realized that it was a dog. Or at least something that sort of resembled a dog. It was fairly large, maybe the size of a golden retriever, but strangely skinny and malevolent-looking. And it had this bad, unexplainable white-ish/blue-ish/green-ish aura or glow. If you've ever played Destiny, it looked exactly like a dog-shaped Cursed Thrall in the dark.
It stopped and stared at the car as we drove past. And something about it frightened me out of my wits like almost nothing else ever has in my life—the muscles in my hands actually contracted involuntarily and I instantly broke out in a literal cold sweat. At first, I thought I had just let my imagination run away with me, but after a couple of minutes of total silence, my date said, "Holy s***, did you see that? What the hell was that thing?" and we had a whole conversation about how strange and evil and scary the bad dog-thing was. It freaked both of us out pretty badly and we couldn't stop talking about it for the rest of the night.
A Navajo friend told me later that she thought we had an encounter with a Skinwalker.
I'm no expert on Native American lore, and maybe it was just a hungry coyote. But to this day I don't feel like it was a coyote. I spent most of my life in the Southwest, I've seen coyotes on a few occasions, and this didn't seem like a coyote to me. And coyotes don't glow in the dark or cause two otherwise normal, rational people to break out into a terrified sweat. I don't know. I still can't explain it all these years later. I would prefer not to have any more life experiences like that one, though.
11. Dogs Always Know
So this happened to me a while ago. I was probably 16 or 17—I'm 26 now—and I was walking my dog Boxer in our neighborhood. Just a little background on Boxer right quick, he wasn't the friendliest dog at first but he wasn't aggressive towards people either. He was just always... alert. He made us feel extremely safe but we never had to worry about him hurting other people. As long as they didn't have any ill intent, he was pretty chill. He wasn't much of a barker either. Unless he saw an animal or something.
So it's dark outside at this point, maybe 9ish. I wasn't really paying attention to where I was going. Boxer was basically leading the way and we were only a few houses down from my own. We were across the street from a house that to this day remains vacant. All of a sudden I feel Boxer pull with all his might and he starts barking like a mad dog. I look up to see what was making him react this way and immediately I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand. It appeared to be this woman. She had dirty blonde matted hair and it was slightly covering her face. She looked to be wearing a hospital gown.
I know that sounds crazy but I swear this is what I saw. She had a yellow blanket in her hand and she was walking down the vacant home's driveway. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. And it was almost like she wasn't even aware of me or my loud ass dog. I took one look at her and started pulling Boxer back to the house. He was a medium sized dog (Shar-Pei and pit bull mix) and I'm a plus size girl so when I tell you it felt like I was trying to pull back 10 dogs, I'm not kidding.
After much pulling, I manage to haul ass back to the house. my brother was playing video games in his room and I tell him what happened. My eyes watered up with tears which is weird because I'm not much of a crier.
The bad feeling I got out there when my eyes landed on her did. Not. Go. Away. And I swear it felt like if I peeked through the blinds in my bedroom I would see her standing there. My brother let me stay in the room with him, which was a rarity. But he definitely saw how freaked out I was so he was chill with me. I've never experienced anything like that before and there's probably a logical explanation to what I saw but I did not care at the time. It was like all rational thought went out the window. Creepy as hell.
10. Stephen King, Is That You?
When I was 18, I came home in winter from college to stay with my second family. I had moved out at 17 and a woman I worked with took me in to be part of her family, so this takes place at her family’s villa-style farmhouse. On this night, since all of their other children were gone for a while and I loathed staying in my room due to the creepy vibes I'd gotten in there from day one, I was staying in the bedroom that belonged to their youngest son (~19 at the time).
Now, I should've known better to stay out of that room anyway, but I hated my own room even more, purely because of the creepy vibes. My papillon (RIP that sweet boy) went everywhere with me when I was home, so he was with me in the bedroom on this night. I was also on my cell phone with a friend from college for hours, and every time something weird happened in my room, the call would drop. A heavy sense of dread weighed on my shoulders most nights I spent in that house, and this was no different.
The first weird thing to happen was around 10-10:30pm, when the TV turned itself on and played white noise. The remote was on the nightstand beside the bed, so it wasn't an accident on my part. When I stood up to turn off the TV, my phone call dropped and the TV turned itself off. I jumped back in bed with my dog and called my friend to relay the event.
Between 15 and 45 minutes later, while I was still on the phone, suddenly the top blanket was yanked to the end of the bed. My papillon was up by my chest and would be too small to yank a heavy blanket like that. Nobody was under the bed to yank from that angle. Of course, my cell phone call dropped when the blanket got yanked, so I quickly yanked the blanket back up to my chest and called my buddy back. I had the strong sense that I was being watched, but living out in the middle of nowhere, it couldn't have been by another living person.
The final unexplainable occurrence from that night happened about two hours after the others. I heard a loud scratching that sounded like it came from the roof. There were no trees within 60 or 75 yards of the house, so it definitely wasn't a tree and it likely wasn't a squirrel or other wildlife. Within 30 seconds, the scratching moved to the top of the gun cabinet in the bedroom with me. The gun cabinet was at least eight feet tall with 12-foot ceilings, and there were no cats in the house or on the property, except for random ferals out in the woods yards and yards away.
Of course, my phone call dropped as the scratching moved into the bedroom. The scratching continued for maybe 15 to 30 seconds in the bedroom and then abruptly ended. I called my buddy back in tears, convinced something was playing with me before finally eating me or something wicked. Nothing else happened that night, but we stayed awake on the phone until probably 4 am.
I can't explain any of it, and to this day it's one of the scariest nights of my life. The house had been built new for them about five or six years earlier on her family's homesteaded land, and to the family's knowledge, the land had not been used for a cemetery, slaughter, or anything else that would lead one to expect paranormal activity there. We had had a house fire the previous May, resulting in the deaths of five dogs and my sweet little black cat via smoke inhalation, but very little damage to the house itself. I had always felt barely welcome in the house anyway, and shutting the door to our (kids') wing of the house felt like shutting the door to a jail cell.
9. No Thank You
My mother and I are book collectors, and avid readers, so when I was growing up, we converted the outside cottage my dad had built for his mother into a library, as she had moved on. We had more than 2,000 books, all neatly arranged on the bookshelves alphabetically by author name.
One hardcover book in our collection was an encyclopedia that described in detail various haunted places in the world. The author had taken his own pictures and compared them to historical "paranormal" photos. This book was the bane of my childhood. It never stayed alphabetical, it would always move to the bookshelf facing the front door. At the time, I just ascribed it to family pranks—my sister had used my love of books to terrify me in the past, namely with Cujo.
The pictures had a floating dot of light, that would not be in the same picture, I would have to read through the book to find it each time. Either I misremembered its location constantly, or I imagined it completely. After three months of not knowing, it ate at me until I committed the greatest sin in my eyes, I circled the floating light in the photo and checked it the next day. The page was blemish free. At this point, I was terrified, so I took the book to school and left it under the floodlights on the cricket field after practice. I found it at home the next day. In its spot. Facing the front door.
That Friday, I took it to school again and gave it to a girl I hated. She left the school the next week and moved away, I don't know why.
I have only seen it once after that, it was in an SPCA second-hand book sale 6 years later. I picked it up, my mother's name in the front, no circle in any of the pictures, and the floating light in the second to last picture. I put it down and left the shop.
8. Play the Song
Repost from an answer to another thread.
Before I go on, just a caveat; I'm an atheist, also, I'm very skeptical of all things supernatural and I'd probably be the first to scream bull had someone else told me this, so yeah, I totally understand if you don't believe me. I still get jittery even though a lot of time has passed since, even as I'm typing this I'm getting really nervous by just thinking about it.
I've come to accept the fact that even though it might have been a hallucination, it was freaking real for me and that it's something that will probably remain unexplained forever but will stay with me as long as I'm alive. I remember every single detail of that day, every speck of light, sound, smell; like a trauma survivor.
I was 18 at the time and it happened on a high school trip in Spain. After a whole day of sightseeing, going around Barcelona, just doing the usual stuff, we were driving back to our hotel. I was listening to music, didn't feel like socializing much with others, especially since my class got mixed with some other people I didn't care much about and my friends were all on the lower deck of the bus while I was stuck with some obnoxious loud kid seated beside me, fidgeting all the time and screaming to his buddies across the bus. The fact that he stank didn't help much. Anyway.
I'm sitting there, listening to music, trying to tune out the noise that was super irritating and just watching the scenery through the window. We were driving through what I would describe as semi-industrial part of some town, lots of uninteresting, plain buildings, warehouses and such.
At some point the kid elbows me accidentally and I instinctively turn towards him, telling him to chill it, and at the moment when my face was in the opposite direction of the window, I see something move in my peripheral vision. In the same moment, the feeling of utter and total cold envelopes around me and a deep, panicky feeling develops and I look straight in front of me, not wanting to look to the window, unsure of what I might see there, feeling scared and silly at the same time. It really took a lot of strength to muster enough courage and look outside the window and to find that, of course, nothing is outside, just the usual warehouses, empty streets, nothing interesting.
At that moment, the bus stops on the red light and once again, I see something lingering in the back of my vision. This time, confidence boosted a bit by my previous victory over my own fear and superstition, I turn around. And actually see something.
At that point, I think my mouth was literally agape as I stared. It wasn't a now you see it-now you don't type of situation. I was staring at it for what seemed like hours but was probably 30 seconds, or whatever it took for the light to turn green and the bus to resume driving.
It was, because yeah, it was an it, no doubt in my mind about that, a different kind of dark, a deep subtle, moving darkness, the closest I can come to describe it is by asking you to imagine fire and the way it moves, fumes and all, but only black, utterly black.
Outside was getting dark but I was still able to differentiate all it's body parts and movements. It was walking on the left wall of the building, on all fours, back legs backward, went across the face side of the building, at which point it turned its horned doglike head straight towards me and stared straight into my eyes for what seemed like forever. Then it climbed on the roof and the bus started driving away.
I literally had to rip myself from looking at it and stared in front of me. I was a complete mess, shaking, thought I was going to have a heart attack, felt cold all over. The feeling of dread was something completely alien, unimaginable, it was like my mind was screaming and tearing itself apart because it has witnessed something it knows it should not, something that is not supposed to be possible, and I felt like I was in a totally different plane of existence compared to the other people on the bus.
I only half consciously realized that they were all screaming and laughing the whole time, not one of them had sensed anything wrong. The stinking kid besides me asked me kind of frighteningly if anything was wrong and if I'd like him to call our teacher to which I only muttered that no, it was okay and just let me be, trying to explain to myself what had actually happen.
Couldn't sleep that night and had developed a head-splitting headache for the rest of the trip. I was a constant mess and couldn't wait to go home.
I've made a point with myself never, ever, not in a thousand years, to check my peripheral vision to check whether something's there. Nope. Just freaking nope.
So yeah, there it is. I understand if it seems like I'm lying and it's totally fine and understandable; as I've said, had someone else told me this, I'd be yeah bro, drop the dope a bit next time, but I swear, it really did happen.
Regarding the thing I saw, and the whole moving darkness thing, I've seen the creature from the game Prey and the way they animated it looks really similar for those who want to take a look.
Also, this is the first time I'm writing about it, told my friends, they shrugged me off, whatever. Doesn't matter if it was a hallucination per se, had a deep unsettling effect on me and in that way was real to me.
YouTube
7. Guardian Angel
I was eight months pregnant with my second child. I had to take my mom to a doctor’s appointment, she was getting a procedure and could not drive home after. I had my not quite two-year-old with me. He was in the backseat behind my mom in his car seat. I was driving a Jeep Wrangler. I pulled up to the intersection to make a left turn. I was in the crosswalk and the light turned red.
I heard a loud man's voice tell me to "BACK UP NOW!" I put the car in reverse and backed out of the crosswalk. I did not have time to look up or put the car back in drive when I heard a loud crash. Two cars collided in front of me and a SUV was where my car just was. On my hood was the headlight cover for the SUV.
As the police, fire dept. and EMS showed up they wanted to treat me since I was really pregnant and I had to keep telling them we were not involved in the accident. One EMS guy picked up the plastic on my hood and said "How?" I told him what I heard. He said "I guess you have an angel." My mom did not hear anything. I still don't know what that was.
6. The Creepiest Ones Are Always in Hospitals
For a few years I worked at an inpatient acute critical care psychiatric/behavioral hospital for children and adolescents. I grew up not believing in ghosts or anything like that.
So one morning I’m working the child unit and part of my responsibilities is to interview each child. We had a scale—basically a worksheet with questions we asked the kids twice a day as a unit of measurement pertaining to their psychiatric health—to go over once in the morning and once at night. I was dayshift so I did it in the morning.
For obvious reasons boys and girls were kept very separate at night and only after morning routines, the interview and hygiene, were they moved together into the common area.
So on this morning I start with the boys and interview them and one of the questions is “Are you currently or did you recently see or hear things that aren’t really there?” Normally if this is true the patients are very hesitant and scared to admit it, I’m talking to this five- or six-year-old boy who starts getting really nervous and fidgety when I asked this question, which is a significant indicator of a positive answer. If they answer yes the follow up question is “Can you describe what you saw or heard?”
This little boy goes into vivid and exquisite detail about a small girl in pink pajamas who was crying in his bathroom very early in the morning before it was time to get up, he talked about how she was scared and didn’t want to be here anymore and he comforted her, he went back to his bed to retrieve a blanket for her and when he returned to the bathroom—each room had its own—she was gone and he went back to bed.
I finish the interview and while I’m intrigued at the intense detail he remembered which is unusual, I record it and move on. Unfortunately, visual and auditory hallucinations aren’t new to me at this point.
I move to the girls’ ward and start the process of interviewing over there. Second or third out of approximately five or six girls gets nervous and fidgety at the same question, finally admits she did see something. Cue me asking “Can you describe it?” She starts by saying that it was early this morning. Before it was time to be awake she hears crying from her bathroom, investigates and finds a little girl in pink pajamas crying in the corner of her bathroom, she goes into the exact same vivid detail as the boy did and explains the little girl is scared and doesn’t want to be here anymore she comforts her and goes back to her bed to retrieve her teddy bear to help comfort the little girl, when she returns to the bathroom with her teddy bear the girl is gone, she then explains she doesn’t know how she left because her door never opened. I record it and then request an immediate transfer to the adolescent unit.
I recorded everything and took both scales (interview worksheets) to the therapist on duty, I explain the entire thing and I am adamant that these two kids never had a chance to talk to each other to come up with this story. He says I believe them and you completely. I say “Wow I never would have thought you would accept this so easily,” he says “Well it helps that this happened about 20 other times in the past.” Same vivid details, same little girl, same pink pajamas.
The clinical reaction? Shoulder shrug, and a “we don’t count those stories as diagnostic material anymore”—like basically we believe they really are seeing ghosts and it’s not a hallucination. I was there for approximately five years and the girl in the pink pajamas came up approximately four times in my time there. I can’t explain it away. *Shrugs shoulders.*
5. It’s the Missing Money That Bothers Me Most
I’ve posted many stories about my time growing up in England and the houses I lived in where I experienced strange occurrences so as a summary here are the things that have happened that I have zero explanation about:
House 1: Later found out a policewoman hung herself in the room that ended up being the bedroom for my sister and me.
- The room was always colder than the other rooms in the house.
- My sister woke one night to see a man in a black suit, bowler cap and cane sitting on her bed staring at us.
- Heard two male voices having a conversation in the room when the house was empty.
- Unexplained noises every morning downstairs that sounded like a paper guillotine slicing paper. We didn’t own one.
- Every morning could hear people downstairs getting ready for the day—bowls and cutlery clattering, voices chatting—but no one was there.
House 2: Dad woke up one night after hearing hooves. His bedroom was on the ground floor and we were nowhere near horses or farms. He sat up in bed, mystified, and saw rows and rows of heads, with silver helmets and red plumage passing through the room in the direction of the city. The house was built on a Roman road so over the years the land would have built up so that in this era all you’d be able to see would be heads had they been Roman soldiers.
Mum left an envelope with 1,000 pounds on the staircase one day. Just the family home, no one else came over. Two hours later the envelope was gone and we never found it. Would wake up frequently in the night and my room would be filled with mist. TV and lights would always turn themselves on and off.
House 3:
- The door in me and my sister’s bedroom would always, always be open every morning. Even though we closed it each night. I remember half waking up one night to hear it slowly opening.
- Mum and Nan having a chat at the kitchen table one day about Nan’s parents who had passed. Mum said “what would your mum and dad think about it?” I can’t remember exact wording but she specifically mentioned Nan’s parents. Next thing, a picture above the table that had been up for 20+ years suddenly came off the wall and crashed down in the middle of the table my mum and nan were at.
4. Oh Cool, So That Terrified Me
I was in my apartment and just playing some video games with my roommate. Our place is set up where our rooms are on opposite sides of the apartment.
We are both in the same chat talking with a friend. Everything is normal until I hear a knock on my door. I said “come in” thinking it was my roommate. My roommate says on the chat “who are you talking too” I freak out and say “did you hear that knock,” he says he did. We are both freaking out.
Then maybe two seconds later a white figure comes literally right next to my face. It has no facial features and I flip out. I almost fell out of my chair and run to my roommate’s room. We are both freaking out now. He clearly heard the knock too. And it didn’t sound like someone dropped something above or below us. It sounded like a knock you hear when someone is trying to come in. I’m not sure what happened or what it was but by far the most scared I’ve ever been.
3. Nothing Good Ever Happened to Someone Playing With a Ouija Board
I once played a Ouija board at a friend's house. I don't believe in the paranormal so it didn't bother me that she lived on an Indian burial ground next to a lake where someone had previously drowned, or that her Ouija board was supposedly from Salem.
Everyone who was in the house at the time was playing the board, and although she had a small dog, which I don't even remember if it was in the house at the time, it could not have been responsible for the things that happened.
While we were playing, the planchette moved incredibly slowly, supposedly due to the "low energy" of the "spirit" we were talking to, which was that of the drowned man from the lake. Right away I speculated that someone had been pushing the planchette. There is always one person in a group who likes to mess with the others, and the fact that it moved slowly and almost always to the same answer since we only asked yes or no questions, contributed to this theory. That way, moving the planchette would be easily concealable.
I was very sure of this theory. Of course, they would use the drowned man's identity, the one story that everyone knew in order to make the experience more interesting. I noticed that one person in particular was having all sorts of fun provoking the "spirit," and knowing her personality I was almost certain it was her. At least, until the more unexplainable stuff started happening.
Suddenly, three clear foot stomps sounded out from across the house. Now, my friend lived in a somewhat old house, but these noises sounded like a person wearing heavy boots stomping by the back door. Without even saying anything, we just gave each other a look that said "did you hear it too?" that confirmed our thoughts.
We were all visibly shaken and didn't really know what to do, but then, from inside the cabinet under the television we were playing next to, three clear knocks rang out. Since I'm easily spooked, I was on the verge of tears and begged everyone to stop the game. At that point, though, it didn't take any convincing.
After the game, everyone showed visible signs of paranoia that are hard to dismiss and makes me question if anyone really set up the whole thing. I believe that everything has a rational explanation, no matter how crazy it seems at the time of happening. My personal theory is either that somebody messed with the planchette or that somebody subconsciously moved it.
The boot stomping is more difficult to explain, but perhaps somebody momentarily stopped by and needed to shake the mud off their boots upon entry. Maybe it was the washing machine making a weird noise from the basement. Either way, the timing was very coincidental. As for the cabinet, a person couldn't fit in there. It was filled with cable boxes and DVD players, and what I heard were clear knocking noises against the cabinet wall. I know because I sat right next to it. The cabinet is the only thing that I have absolutely no explanation for.
TL;DR played a Ouija board and contacted the ghost of a drowned man. Heard stomping noises from across the house when nobody else was home and knocking from inside the cabinet I sat next to.
2. Oh Jeez
When I was still a kid I stayed with my cousin at my grandma's house, it's a very old ryad in Morocco—like 400+ years old. My grandma left us alone and went to visit a friend of hers and she was the only one with the keys.
As I was playing with my cousin we heard heavy banging on the door, we went running to the door and checked who it was but there was no one outside, so we went back playing in a room ‘till we heard a very loud bang on the window overlooking the interior patio, and there was a huge man's hand on it, we got out of the room running to the patio but no one was there. We went hiding in another room for like two hours, super scared, ‘till my grandma came back. We told everyone the story and no one ever believed us.
1. Sounds Like the Scene From the Mummy With the Face in the Sand
I have a few all of which I’ve mentioned here. First was when I was about 11. I was the only one home in my grandparents’ house. I left some toys down in the basement so I went to get them. There was an area where my grandparents kept lawn furniture, and they’d hung sheets from the ceiling to create a makeshift “wall.” As I was leaving the basement, an impression pressed out of the sheets. In my mind, I remember it as looking like a person’s face with their hands raised similar to a “ don’t shoot” pose. I just took the dogs and sat outside until someone else came home.
Another time I was in another house, sitting downstairs. Again I was the only one home. I heard the very distinct sound of someone going up the stairs. I figured my mom had come home and had gone upstairs—there was a front staircase and a back staircase that met at the top. A few moments later I heard my mom come home, and greet me from the kitchen. The same thing had happened to her two days prior. I get that houses make noise but Jesus, this was so eerily similar to someone walking upstairs.
The last was when I was alone in the house I’d recently bought. It was just my dog and me, both of us were downstairs. I heard something heavy fall, like a shelf falling or bookcase knocking over. I went upstairs thinking maybe something was precariously balanced and finally gave out. It was so heavy it shook the house. Nothing had fallen upstairs, there were only two bedrooms and a bathroom and I made certain to check attic space and closets. Nothing.
I figured it was a fluke but it happened at least two more times while I lived there. One of the last times it happened a witness was there, and oddly we’d just been talking about my mysterious crashing sound. We both went upstairs and investigated and couldn’t find anything.
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