Fear is a powerful emotion. We don’t experience genuine, gut-wrenching terror very often—but when we do, the experience can stick with us for the rest of our lives. But if fear is so horrible, then why do we like ghost stories so much? Why do we watch horror movies? Fear is a powerful emotion—and sometimes, it means we just can’t look away.
1. Going Up, Going Out
I cared for a woman with end-stage renal disease who was just minutes from dying and lying unresponsive in bed. My charting station was right outside her door, and while I waited for her only daughter to arrive, I was finishing paperwork with a clear view into the room. Then something deeply unsettling happened.
The daughter finally arrived, frantic, shouting that she needed my help getting her mother out of the elevator. We both ran to the elevator… and it was empty. We went back into the room just as her mother took her last breath. The daughter insisted, over and over, that she had ridden up in the elevator with her mother from the lobby to the 12th floor.
She said that when they reached the 12th floor, her mother told her to go get the nurse to help her back to the room, because she was too weak to walk and would wait in the elevator.
2. Not Feeling Secure At All
I used to work in a small office with about 60 people at full capacity. We had a security guard on duty around the clock. One night, I had to stay very late by myself because I needed to leave early the next day and still had work to finish. By around 10 p.m., all my coworkers had gone home, the cleaning crew had come and gone, and only the security guard and I were left.
The office was dark, but I wasn’t scared. I’m not easily frightened, the guard was a genuinely nice man, and the neighborhood was safe. I had no idea how unsettling the night was about to become. The guards were supposed to do rounds every couple of hours just to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes they’d stop and say something; most of the time they wouldn’t.
That night, the guard stopped by my cubicle and asked, “Everything alright?” He had the same big friendly smile he always wore. “All good here, thanks!” I said, and went back to work. Twenty minutes later, he was back. Same smile. “Everything alright?” “Yep, all good!” Twenty minutes later, he returned again. Same smile. By then, I was starting to feel uneasy.
There was no reason for him to come by that often. It was odd, and honestly a little disruptive. But that wasn’t the strangest part. I realized that every interaction was exactly the same, like it was repeating itself. Same grin, same tone, same rhythm, same words.
I also noticed he was whistling the same tune at nearly the same time each round, so if I paused my music, I could hear the whistling getting closer before he appeared and asked, “Everything alright?” By midnight, I was thoroughly unnerved. I kept trying to explain it away because I still needed to finish my work.
I rushed through what I could while hearing that whistling behind me again and again. Surely he wouldn’t come back this time. Then: “Everything alright?” By then, I was terrified. I no longer felt safe around this man I had always trusted. I was a woman in my mid-20s, alone in the office, and he was a man in his 50s.
I didn’t finish everything, but I sent my supervisor an email saying the guard was acting very strangely and that I didn’t feel safe. I shut down my computer and hurried for the exit. I didn’t see the guard on the way out… or so I thought. Just when I started to feel relieved, I heard, “Bye now,” behind me.
He was standing in the dark hallway, smiling, just watching me. I mumbled something and ran to my car. The next morning, I went straight to my supervisor to explain what had happened. In daylight, it almost felt like maybe I had overreacted, or maybe I’d imagined parts of it. Then I learned what made it even worse.
The guard had vanished. He was missing. As far as I know, they never found him. The security company brushed it off as if he were just someone unreliable who quit without warning, and no one seemed to investigate much further. Maybe he was dealing with a serious mental health issue or something else entirely, but until that night, he had always been kind, dependable, and well-liked by everyone.
Still, the whole thing felt disturbingly unreal, almost as if something inside him had changed.
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3. Time To Face The Music
I was sitting at the dinner table with some friends when someone offered me a glass of wine, even though I wasn’t 21 yet at the time. I accepted it and casually turned to look out the window while taking a sip. The second I looked outside, I felt a strange sensation, like someone was staring back at me. What I saw made me freeze.
There was a man standing on the sidewalk in the distance. He was tall and very thin, but he had no face. Where his face should have been, there was only a blur. I panicked and screamed. When all the adults turned to look at me, I tried to explain what I had just seen.
Of course, no one believed me. They said I was probably reacting to the few sips of wine I’d had, but I know what I saw. Even now, thinking about it gives me a sharp sense of dread.
4. Just The Two Of Us
I pulled into a fast-food drive-thru in Odessa, Texas. It was my first time there. When I got to the speaker, I placed my order. I’d been on the road a long time, so I was treating myself and being a little particular, politely customizing the meal. The cashier listened, then said something bizarre: “Again? You already ate all that?”
Me: “Um… what?” Cashier: “Oh, sorry. Someone who sounded just like you just came through here and placed the exact same order.” Me: “That’s weird… but kind of interesting.”
When I got to the window, the cashier looked at me with a tense, frustrated expression, opened it, and said, “It is you.” Me: “What?” She called over the manager, pointed at me, showed him the order, and didn’t say a word.
Manager: “Welcome back. Was there a problem with your order?” Me: “No… I haven’t gotten it yet.” Manager, clearly confused: “I made your order myself.”
The cashier pointed at the time on the receipt. The manager stared, then said to her, “That’s the same order,” looked back at me, and added, “And that’s him.” Cashier: “That’s what I said.”
They both looked genuinely disturbed and confused. Then it got even stranger. As the manager handed me my food, he let out a nervous laugh and seemed to relax a little. “The other guy had long hair,” he said, pointing at my cap. “Like halfway down his back. You probably just have a twin… with the same kind of car.”
Then I took off my hat and showed him my long hair.
Maybe they were playing a joke on me. Long shifts can make people creative. But if it was a joke, they were incredible actors, because both of them looked honestly shaken.
5. Is Someone There?
A few years ago, I was an intern in a hospital department and happened to be on call one night. Around 1 a.m., the nurses told me there was a new patient in the isolation room. She was a female inmate with pneumonia and likely tuberculosis. The isolation room was at the far end of the ward, and you had to go through double doors just to reach it.
So not only was it meant for infectious patients, it was also physically separated from everyone else. I went in to do a clinical assessment, which included taking a full history. One of the things I wanted to ask was whether she shared a cell with anyone who might have passed the infection to her.
It was late, and I wasn’t very fluent in her native language, so what I actually asked came out more like, “Was there anyone else in the room with you?” I still can’t forget what happened next.
As soon as I said it, she smiled very widely, raised a finger to her lips as if to say, “Shhh,” and then shifted her eyes to a spot near the window, behind and above me.
A wave of cold panic went through me. I decided I had taken enough history for one night and went straight back to the safety of the nursing station.
6. Big Brother Isn’t Watching You
When I was a young teenager, I joined a Big Brothers program. My Big Brother was a man named Chris who, like me, was a little unusual, so we clicked right away and spent a lot of time together. After we’d been matched for about a year, he told me he was taking a trip to Baltimore. He also told me the exact day he’d be back.
I waited a few days after that date before trying to call him, but when I did, the person who answered said, “There’s no Chris here.” I checked the phone book to make sure I had the right number, and I know I did because I had it circled and it matched what I dialed. But the man said again, “We’ve lived here a long time, and there’s never been a Chris here.”
Chris never came back from Baltimore, and neither I nor the Big Brothers program ever heard from him again.
7. Sound The Alarm
I used to work the night shift in group homes for people with serious mental illness or developmental disabilities. At one house, there was always scratching coming from inside the walls. I assumed it was squirrels, but now I’m not so sure. We set a lot of traps and never caught anything. But that’s not what convinced me something strange was going on.
One night I was watching TV in the living room after all the residents had gone to sleep. Around 3 a.m., the doorbell started ringing like someone was pressing it over and over in a panic. I got up and went to the door, but when I opened it, no one was there. There are three important things to know about this front entrance.
First, the doorway opens right into the living room, and I can see it from the couch. Second, the front door has a huge window that covers about two-thirds of it. Third, the walkway to the front door is a 20- to 30-foot corridor with brick walls on both sides. So if someone wanted to ring the bell and run, they’d have to sprint the full length before they could turn a corner and hide.
So I couldn’t figure out how anyone could have rung it and vanished that fast. I thought maybe one of our more playful residents was messing with me, so I checked on all of them. Every one of them was fast asleep. Then, just as I finished closing the last resident’s door, the bell started ringing wildly again.
I ran back to the front door and found no one there. This time I was determined to catch whoever it was, so I turned off all the lights except the TV and stood hidden beside the door so I could pull it open the second they came back. After about 20 minutes, the bell started going crazy again. I jumped out, switched on the walkway lights, and looked through the window, but again, no one was there.
I opened the door, thinking maybe someone was hiding beside it like I had been. But when I still saw no one, my stomach dropped and I felt this deep sense of dread. I slowly started closing the door, and just as it was almost shut, the bell started ringing furiously again and kept going for at least 15 minutes before finally stopping.
It honestly felt like whatever it was enjoyed mocking me. I locked the door and hurried back to the couch after turning on every light I could. Another unsettling part was that it seemed to know what I was thinking. Any time I started to feel like stepping outside for a smoke, the doorbell would start up again.
It was like it wanted to remind me it was there—and that it meant trouble. Looking back, I’m pretty sure it was a poltergeist. That place had a heavy feeling to it, like a lot of pain had built up there, which can happen in group homes. There was a lot of suffering and intense emotion in that house. It also didn’t help that one resident had developed severe trauma after seeing his parents killed in front of him, and another had schizophrenia and described at least eight distinct voices speaking to him in his head.
Both of those residents often had things knocked off shelves and walls in the middle of the night, and it was common to hear them yelling at people no one else could see, telling them to be quiet. I used to think it was only mental illness, but now I’m not so sure.
8. Knocking On Heaven’s Door
One night, my wife was staying at my parents’ house while I was still away at college finishing my last day of work. I woke up to a very loud knock on my dorm room door. When I opened it, no one was there. I looked at the clock and saw it was exactly 3:00. I’m not superstitious, but it scared me enough that I barely slept the rest of the night.
I came home later that day and saw my girlfriend. We started talking, and I mentioned the knocking, trying to laugh it off. She immediately went still, then told me that she had also woken up during the night and found herself standing in front of my bedroom door at my parents’ house after sleepwalking there—at exactly 3 a.m. Even now, we still have trouble believing it.
9. Private, Keep Out
This is my mother’s story. I have no reason to doubt her, and she’s never been someone who tells ghost stories or obsesses over the supernatural. She does have a slightly spiritual side, but that’s about it. Most of the time, she’s very practical. After she retired, she got deeply interested in family history. At some point, she came into possession of the diary of my dad’s mother, who had died about 20 years earlier and whom we all called Nan.
Nan had been a very formal English woman. She called everyone dear, used phrases like “terribly” and “perfectly dreadful,” and always seemed polite, private, and just a little offended by everything. She was also intensely guarded and hated people knowing her personal business. So one night, while my dad was away, my mother was home alone and decided to sit down and read the diary.
It started raining, which wasn’t unusual since they live on the coast. She got up and shut a few windows, then came back to the diary. The rain turned into a storm. The wind picked up. She went into the next room and closed those windows too, then returned to reading. At that point, she’d only been looking at the diary for about 15 minutes.
Suddenly, the intercom beside her burst on at full volume, blasting static. They live in a three-story house built by an electrician, so there are lights and outlets everywhere, and every room has an intercom. Once she got over the shock, she turned that intercom off.
Then the one in the next room started blaring too. She got up and turned it off, but she could still hear the others downstairs. Every intercom in the house was going. She went down to the middle floor, where the main control unit was, and shut the whole system off. As she headed back upstairs, she noticed the strangest part yet: all the framed pictures on the walls were crooked.
Not randomly crooked, either. They were all tilted at almost the same angle. Meanwhile, the storm had grown stronger. One side of that floor is lined with wooden-framed windows running the length of the house. Even the tops of the windows were wet with rain, which almost never happens unless there’s a serious storm. While she was standing there taking it all in, what she described as “an intense gust of wind” shook the windows from one end of the house to the other, like a train had just rushed past outside.
Instead of panicking and running to a hotel, which is probably what I would have done, she calmly went upstairs, closed the diary, put it in a cupboard, shut the cupboard door, said “Sorry, Nan” into the room, and went to make herself a cup of tea. The storm settled down. She straightened the pictures. End of story. But here’s the strangest part.
Someone she worked with lived on the same street, about 10 houses away. The next day, my mom mentioned the storm to him. He said, “What storm?” She said, “The huge windstorm we had last night.” He looked confused and told her he would have noticed if there had been a storm because they ate dinner out on their balcony that evening, and the weather had been calm the whole time.
Reading it back, it sounds made up. I can only say that it isn’t. I’m not imaginative enough to invent something like that. And to Nan, if you’re somehow aware of this: I promise I won’t read your diary.
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10. Ahead Of Your Time
When I was nine years old, I woke up in the middle of the night absolutely sure that my Aunt Hope had died. The feeling was so strong that it terrified me, and I ran to my parents’ room crying. I told them what was wrong, and they kept saying, “It was just a bad dream. Everything’s okay. Aunt Hope is fine.” But for some reason, I couldn’t calm down.
About 15 minutes later, the phone rang. My dad got up to answer it. The news was chilling. It was my uncle calling to tell us that Hope had just died.
11. Angels On Earth
Back in 2001, there was a show called *The Amazing Race*, and my wife and I were watching the very first episode while my son played on the floor. As it ended, I remember thinking that my mom would have loved it. She had passed away about a year before. The moment that thought crossed my mind, a cold chill moved through my body from my feet all the way up to my head.
At that exact moment, my wife said, “This is something you and your mom would have done—and probably won.” We both laughed, partly because we’d had such similar thoughts and partly because it was a bittersweet reminder that she was gone. Then my son, who was around a year and a half old, started waving at the ceiling and saying “bye” and “bye-bye.”
He used to do that a lot—he’d stop playing, sit still, and stare up at the ceiling—so we would ask who was there and what they were saying, mostly just playing along. He wasn’t really using full words yet, but we wanted to encourage him, so we’d listen and ask questions that he would “answer.” This time, when he started saying “bye-bye,” we asked who was there and where they were going.
Just the usual playful kind of thing. He kept saying something that sounded like “annel” or “anyul,” at least the closest I could spell it. So we said, “Okay, tell Anyul to be safe.” A few months later, I was lying on the floor flipping through an old photo album. My son came walking over saying “hi hi” and laughing. I said hi back—but he wasn’t talking to me.
He was chatting with one of the pictures in the album, waving and “talking” to it. The photo was my mom’s official nursing school graduation picture. He had met my mom when he was six months old and only seen her a couple more times before she passed, but there he was, carrying on a whole conversation with her picture.
I asked him, “Do you know who that is? Who is that?” He pointed right to the middle of the photo and said, “Anyul… ANYUL!” then laughed and kept talking to her. He knew what angels were... was that what he was trying to say? I don’t know.
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12. Leave!
I was stationed in Seoul, South Korea several years ago. One day, I was taking a shower in my room, and when I got out, the word “leave” was written in small letters in the fog on the bathroom mirror. I didn’t have a roommate, since NCOs had private rooms. A little shaken, I decided to do exactly that—leave. I went off post for some Korean BBQ and spent some time wandering around the city.
A couple of hours later, I came back and found the barracks evacuated, with half the building burned down. The fire was traced back to faulty electrical wiring that had ignited insulation inside the walls. Something seemed to know it was going to happen, and whatever it was, it didn’t want me there when it did.
I’d still gladly thank whoever—or whatever—it was, if I ever got the chance. But it’s been years, and I still have no idea.
13. Girls Allowed
One Sunday morning, I was in the kitchen having a cup of tea with my wife. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw my three-year-old daughter walk out of the front room and into the entrance hall. I went to see what she was doing, but when I got there, no one was there. I walked back into the kitchen and said to my wife something like, “I must be imagining things—I could have sworn I saw Amelia heading to the front door, but when I looked, she’d vanished.”
My wife said, “You’re kidding. The exact same thing happened to me and my mom the other day.” She explained that they had seen what they were sure was our daughter in the very same spot, taking the exact same path. They were so convinced it was her that they even sneaked into the hall to surprise her—but there was no one there. And that wasn’t the end of it.
A few months later, we saw a post on a local Facebook page that said, “I had a lovely childhood growing up at (our address), and I’d really like to talk to whoever lives there now—especially to find out whether they’ve ever experienced anything paranormal.” I messaged the person and asked whether she had ever seen anything unusual, without telling her what we had experienced.
Sure enough, she said that she and her sister used to see a little blonde Victorian girl in a white nightgown standing outside their bedroom doors or walking through the house. At first, they would think it was the other sister and go to investigate, only to find no one there. I’m naturally a very skeptical person and never used to believe in anything paranormal, but I honestly have no explanation for any of that.
14. Circling The Drain
The house I grew up in felt haunted. From my bedroom, I could see down the hall into the living room. My parents’ bedroom door was on the far side of the living room, directly across from mine. Late at night, I would hear someone pacing in circles around the living room, but I’d be the only one awake, and we didn’t have any pets.
I never said anything because I didn’t want my family to think I was losing it. Eventually, I moved out and went to college. After I graduated, money was tight. My parents had bought a new house, and the old one was still empty—they were thinking about renting it out—so they offered to let me stay there for a while.
Even though it was a great deal, I said no. I didn’t want to move in. My mom asked why, and I finally admitted that I thought the house had a ghost. Her reaction was immediate and unsettling. She froze and turned to stare at me. Her face said, *You hear it too.* It turned out she’d been hearing it for years and had kept quiet for exactly the same reason. Very creepy.
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15. Treasure Island
This happened around 2006, when I was 10 years old. It was after midnight. I was sleeping in one aunt’s bed, and my brother was asleep in another bed next to mine. Across from us was my grandparents’ bedroom, and downstairs, near the laundry room, was my parents’ room. I woke up groggy, confused, and desperately needing to use the bathroom when I suddenly heard a voice.
With eight people in the house, hearing someone up in the middle of the night wasn’t unusual. I figured someone had gotten up to use the bathroom and started talking to someone, or maybe answering the phone. I was still half-asleep, so a late-night phone call didn’t seem that strange. But then I realized something was wrong. I didn’t recognize the voice.
That snapped me fully awake. I froze, clutching my blanket and sitting straight up in bed. It was a man’s voice—not deep like my dad’s or my grandfather’s—and he kept rambling about some kind of “treasure.” He was right outside the door, but he never touched the doorknob or tried to come into any of the rooms.
He just kept walking back and forth, like he was pacing, talking to himself the whole time about this treasure. I was terrified and looked over at my aunt, who was still sound asleep. I still don’t know how I managed not to wet the bed. Eventually the voice stopped, and somehow I fell back asleep. The next morning, everyone was busy getting ready for work or school or doing things in the kitchen, so I convinced myself it must have been a dream.
I really wish I’d stayed quiet. While eating breakfast, I casually told my mom and grandmother about the voice and laughed about how strange dreams can be. They froze. Everyone froze. The voice had been real. I hadn’t even mentioned the part about the “treasure,” but my grandfather did. Then my mother. Then my brother. They had all heard him talking about treasure too.
Apparently, he had moved through the whole house, but he never actually went into any of the rooms. Nothing had been stolen, all the doors were locked, and all the windows still had their screens in place. Two weeks later, while I was helping my grandparents clean out the garage, my grandmother found several empty Coke cans behind an old sofa that had been pushed up against the wall for a long time.
There were also empty chip bags, candy wrappers, fruit cores, and peels—all food taken from the garage. The sofa was tall enough for someone to hide under. So that man had definitely been inside our house. Inside our garage. We’ve moved since then, and so have my aunts, but my grandparents still live there, only about a three-minute drive away.
We still don’t know who he was, how he got in, or—most unsettling of all—how long he had been living inside our home.
16. House Hunters: Haunted House Edition
When I was younger, around sixth grade, my mom and I moved to a new city and started looking at houses. After a long day of touring one place after another, we found one we both instantly loved. Then it was time to check one of the last rooms. I remember walking into a small, pale blue room. At first, it seemed completely normal.
But the moment I stepped inside, I got a strange feeling all through my body. I had to run outside and throw up. My mom and the realtor came after me, and that’s when the realtor asked how we somehow knew what had happened. My mom, confused, said, “Knew what?” The realtor told her that someone had recently died in that room. I still dream about it sometimes.
17. The Last To Know
This really happened to me. Years ago, I was working in a shop when an elderly woman bought several bags of groceries. It was icy outside, and I knew she lived less than 100 yards from the store, so I offered to carry her groceries home. She seemed surprised that I would even ask and was incredibly grateful.
As we walked to her house, she kept thanking me. I told her it was no trouble at all and that I was happy to help. She said she wished more people were willing to do things like that. When we reached her door, she opened it and stepped aside so I could come in. I told her she should go inside and get warm while I brought in the bags.
She thanked me again, stepped through the doorway, and walked a few steps down the hall. I followed behind her and set the grocery bags on the floor. I asked if she wanted help putting everything away, but she insisted I had already done more than enough and thanked me over and over. I stepped back outside and turned to say goodbye.
As she was closing the door, she said, “Thank you, young man. I will watch over your soul from heaven.” A few days later, they found her body in the hallway of her home, next to a few bags of groceries slowly going bad.
18. A Terrible Birthday Present
I’m the first and only grandchild in my family, so my grandma always had a special bond with me. She loved planning my birthday parties, and every year she would say she couldn’t wait for me to turn 15 because that birthday is a major celebration in my country. But when I was nine, I said something that terrified her. I told her, very seriously, that she wouldn’t live to see that birthday and that she would only be there for my tenth.
I have no idea why I said it. But it came true. She died exactly two weeks after my tenth birthday. My whole family still remembers it.
19. The Man In Black
People can act very strangely when they’re seriously ill. There’s even a term for it—ICU psychosis—and believe me, it’s real. But the creepiest experience I ever had was this: I was caring for a patient who had been admitted after an overdose. She also had a long history of mental health issues. For days she had been thrashing in bed, combative, and completely incoherent.
The night I was assigned to her, she started speaking a little more clearly, but she still wasn’t fully aware of where she was. She was extremely paranoid and kept talking about a man in black standing in the corner. All night, I could hear her talking to him and screaming. I kept going in to try to calm her down, but the fear in her eyes and voice was very real.
With some patients, you try to gently redirect what they believe they’re seeing, but nothing I did worked. She said, “That man in black! Don’t you see him?” and pointed to the corner. I told her there was no one there. I even stood in the corner she was pointing at and waved my hands through the air. But while I was doing that, she looked more terrified than ever.
Honestly, it scared me too. I said, “See? There’s nobody here.” Her response gave me chills. In this calm, almost pitying tone, she said, “That’s what you think.” I left the room right away.
20. Bridge Of Souls
When I was a kid, my favorite uncle was the youngest in the family. He was my hero. He had just finished high school when I was around 10 or 11. Whenever we visited during spring break or summer, I was always excited to see him. We’d listen to records and tapes together, and he introduced me to so many bands.
As I got older, my own life started to take over, and my friends became the center of everything. Eventually those spring break and summer visits stopped. I graduated from high school, and around that same time my uncle started a family of his own. Then, a few years later, my mom called and told me he had died.
I hadn’t seen him in several years, and when I asked what had happened, all I was told was that “he was sick.” It wasn’t until years later that I learned the full truth. He had taken his own life. He didn’t leave a note, but the general belief was that he had learned he didn’t have much time left and chose to end things himself. But this is where the story becomes strange for me.
Not long after the funeral, I started having dreams. I’ve always remembered my dreams very vividly, and these were especially clear. I began dreaming about my uncle. Sometimes we would just be sitting together in his old room, the way we used to when I was a kid.
But one dream was darker than the others. In it, I would find him sitting beside a rope bridge. He would stare at the bridge, then get up and try to cross it, but snakes would strike at him whenever he stepped forward. A snake would snap at him, and he’d go back to where he had been sitting, then look at me and back at the bridge.
Then I would step onto the bridge and look ahead. Every few feet, there was another angry snake. The whole way across. I would take my uncle’s hand and lead him onto the bridge, even though he was afraid. Then I would stand in front of him and bounce on the old bridge. The movement made the snakes lose their balance, and if I kept bouncing long enough, they would fall over the side.
It felt like a strange breakthrough every time. My uncle would start walking forward, a few steps at a time, bouncing the bridge to knock the snakes away. The dream always ended with him making it safely across while I felt strangely unwilling to follow. Then I’d wake up with this deep sadness.
I had dreams like this for nearly 20 years. They were always similar: either my uncle and I were talking, or I was helping him solve some kind of problem. The rope bridge and snakes came up the most. I never told anyone in my family, because I thought it would only upset them. It made me feel like he wasn’t at peace, like he was stuck somewhere in between. Maybe he was. Eventually, I just accepted that in some way, my uncle was still with me. And strangely, I didn’t really mind.
Then, a few years ago, my grandmother died. It wasn’t sudden or violent—she got pneumonia and never fully recovered. One night she went to sleep and didn’t wake up again. We mourned her, celebrated her life, and leaned on each other the way families do. But after her funeral, something changed: I never dreamed about my uncle again. Not once.
To me, that felt like confirmation that something exists beyond this life. Or maybe losing my grandmother gave me the closure I needed to finally let him go. Looking back, I like to believe my uncle was simply lost—lost in life, and maybe still lost afterward. And I like to think that when my grandmother left this world, she found her youngest son, took his hand, and finally brought him home.
21. A Mysterious Rearranging
It was my daughter’s prom night. We’d bought a beautiful dress and matching shoes, and they were hanging safely in her closet. That evening, she went upstairs to get ready and called down, “Thanks for getting everything set out for me, Mom.” There was just one very unsettling problem with that.
I hadn’t been in her room at all. When I went upstairs to see what she meant, I found her dress laid out on the bed, her shoes beside the dresser, and her perfume placed on top. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to scare her, but wow, it really shook me.
After that, other things started happening too, like a certain perfume appearing on her dresser and closet doors closing on their own. After a while, we got used to it and would just say thank you whenever something happened.
22. My Time Has Come
I’m a nurse who works in an intensive care unit. I once cared for a patient with a history of esophageal cancer. Some time earlier, he’d had surgery, recovered, and eventually gone home. Months later, he developed pneumonia and came back to the hospital in respiratory distress. He had to be placed on a mechanical ventilator while he was with us.
He was stable at first. His blood pressure was fine, his heart rhythm looked good, his breathing wasn’t too bad, and he was awake and following commands. Then, all at once, his blood pressure dropped and he lost his pulse. We called a code blue and started CPR. After an hour, we got him back and kept running tests to figure out what had caused him to crash.
None of the lab results or imaging showed anything unusual. Then, just 15 minutes after we’d revived him, his blood pressure dropped again and he lost his pulse a second time. We continued trying to save him for another hour, but it became clear we weren’t going to bring him back. The doctor pronounced him dead, and his wife came in afterward. Then she told us something that made my blood run cold.
She said she couldn’t stop thinking about a conversation she and her husband had just before he came in.
Wife: “Honey, don’t forget you have an appointment with the home health nurse this Saturday.”
Husband: “Well, I won’t be here this Saturday.”
Wife: “What do you mean you won’t be here this Saturday? Where are you going?”
Husband: “I don’t know... I just won’t be here.”
That conversation happened on Wednesday. He was admitted to the hospital on Thursday, and he died Friday at 11:30 p.m.
23. Never Walk Alone
I was camping on a friend’s family property with a group of friends. There was a huge, run-down shop on the property filled with old tools and furniture, and it was incredibly creepy. It had a dirt floor, clown paintings in the loft—seriously—and all kinds of unsettling stuff. We stayed up late drinking around the fire, and I was the last one still awake. At one point, I went to pee beside the shop and stood about five feet away, looking in through the window.
There was a fluorescent light on inside, and I noticed something that looked like a piece of paper or maybe a dollar bill floating around. At first I thought it was a moth, but it was moving in a smooth figure-eight pattern, very steady and rhythmic. It almost looked like something dangling from a string. I watched it for about 20 seconds, though it felt much longer.
Then it quickly drifted back into the dark corner of the shop. There was also a wooden chair near that corner, which somehow made it even creepier. I went back and sat by the fire. Nobody else was awake, so I spent a little while on my phone. After a bit, I saw my friend Mark come out of his tent to pee, then head back in. I decided I should probably sleep too, so I went to my tent and fell asleep.
The next morning, we were eating breakfast when Mark said something that made my blood run cold. “I saw you sitting by the fire really late. How long were you up?” I told him it was probably around 2 or 3 a.m. Then he asked, “Who was out there with you?” I told him I was the only one still awake.
He said, “I got up and saw you on your phone, and there were two people standing over your shoulder watching you.”
He said one looked bigger, so he assumed it was one of our friends who was a larger guy. The other looked tall and thin, but none of us are especially tall or skinny. It completely freaked me out. We still camp on that property once a year, but I never go into the shop, and I go to bed as soon as my wife says she’s tired.
24. The Cursed Child
When my father was a child in the 1960s, he would sometimes go into the living room in the middle of the night, turn the TV to static, climb onto his rocking horse, and slowly rock back and forth in the dark with only the glow of the screen lighting the room. As he rocked, he would quietly say, “I hate Mommy. I hate Mommy. I hate Mommy,” over and over. My grandmother said it was the creepiest thing she had ever seen.
25. Oh, You Beautiful Doll
One day, I was out on a service call at an apartment, and the woman who lived there clearly had a strong interest in dolls—especially those 15-inch pioneer-style dolls. She wasn’t home when I arrived, so I just went about my work like usual. But from the moment I stepped inside, I felt uneasy, and I couldn’t explain why.
When I went into her bedroom, that feeling got much worse. She had more than 300 dolls all over the room. Some of them had their heads removed, and the heads were hanging from the ceiling by strings. In one corner, there was a small altar-like setup with a chicken head on it, a gargoyle-like statue, and several photos of children.
There was also a pig’s hoof hanging from a red cord in the bathroom. Then, when I made it into the dining room, I saw a Ouija board on the table along with several dolls arranged around a torn-apart doll that was covered in what looked like real blood. I don’t think I’ve ever left a place faster in my life. To this day, no one believes me when I tell this story.
26. Nosy Neighbors
Our yard backed up to a cemetery from the 1800s, so it was a pretty common local spot for visitors. Many of the graves belonged to children who had died back then from the flu and other illnesses. There were plenty of eerie stories about that place, but none of them compare to what happened to me.
One day, while my sister and I were playing outside, an older couple walking past the cemetery started bothering my sister, asking her what her name was. They came closer and closer. We were just little kids, and we got so scared that we ran inside and told our mom what happened. Then we learned the unsettling truth.
The following week, I saw a news story about an elderly couple who had approached and kidnapped a teenage girl. It turned out to be the same couple who had come up to my sister and me. That still gives me chills.
27. Black And White
I remember a woman on the ward who was terminally ill, and she had all the staff feeling uneasy. She kept talking about a lady in white who visited her. She would wake up and find this woman in her room, but instead of being frightened, she felt comforted by her presence. At the same time, we had another woman on the ward who, although sick, was not believed to be near the end…or so we thought.
One night, I was writing my reports when I heard this “healthier” woman calling out. When I got to her, she was extremely upset and asked why “the other nurse” kept waking her in the early morning hours. I asked who she meant. She described a nurse in a black uniform who had woken her the past few mornings and would just stand there staring at her without saying a word.
I tried to reassure her and suggested she might be having vivid dreams, but she insisted this nurse was real and wanted to know why she was so cold and unfriendly. The next night, I came in for duty again and found out that this woman had suddenly declined and died. I’ve often thought about those two very different experiences—a lady in white and one in black. I hope the white lady comes for me when my time comes.
28. Down The Hatch
I was about four or five years old, and my parents had just separated. My mom was living in a two-bedroom apartment. I had my own room, but whenever I stayed with her, I usually preferred to sleep in her bed. Our bedrooms were at the end of a hallway, directly across from each other. One night, I woke up in the middle of the night and sat up, and I remember seeing our cat sitting in the doorway of my mom’s room.
That was unusual because our cat was almost always in bed with us. As I watched, he walked into my room and meowed at something. I felt uneasy, so I turned to wake my mom. In the few seconds it took her to open her eyes and ask what was wrong, we both looked back toward the doorway. What I saw almost made me scream.
A man was standing by my open door, moving out of my room. My mom picked me up and literally threw me out through the screen window. We were on the first floor, so it was only about a three-foot drop. After she climbed out too, we started screaming until one of our neighbors called 9-1-1. The police came, but they didn’t find any signs of forced entry.
The only thing they noticed was that the front door was unlocked, which made them think the man had left that way. The strange part was that my mom insisted she had locked it that night, including the deadbolt and chain lock. About a week later, while cleaning the kitchen, she opened the water heater closet and found a notebook with names and drawings, along with a pair of gloves and some gum wrappers.
She called 9-1-1 again. They said the man had most likely been inside our apartment already. He must have hidden until we were asleep.
29. Scent Of A Father
On the day my father died, I was alone in the apartment where we lived while everyone else was at my uncle’s house grieving. I stayed home because I didn’t want people watching me cry. I was sitting in the living room when I heard footsteps in my mother’s room, the one with the balcony. Then I clearly heard the balcony door open, and by that point I was crying and shouting, asking who was there.
I went to check, and no one was there. The only thing in the room was a strong smell of smoke, and my father used to smoke on the balcony. I never told anyone about it and kept it to myself. Later, I found out my mother was being blamed for my dad’s death, even though they had loved each other since they were teenagers and he had simply been taken by cancer. Around that same time, a huge fight broke out at my uncle’s house.
I always thought of it as my dad coming home because he wanted no part of people arguing.
30. A Shocking Account
Once, when I was still pretty new at my electrical job, I was lighting a large industrial oven that basically had spark-plug wires for each of its many burners. I was holding onto the oven’s frame with one hand and reaching into a burner access port with the other when I suddenly got pushed forward, and my whole body slammed against the side of the oven.
I spun around, ready to yell at whoever had shoved me, but no one was there. Then I noticed my fingers were burning and tingling. That’s when I realized I had just been shocked by very high-voltage, low-amperage DC. I’m honestly not sure how I walked away from that alive.
31. You Have Definitely Entered The Twilight Zone
I was in Toronto for a concert, and to make a long story short, I got stopped by the authorities. They put me in handcuffs and said they were taking me to sober up. That part didn’t seem unusual, since I was very drunk and had been before. I passed out in the back of the car and woke up when we arrived in front of what looked like some kind of warehouse. That’s when things got really strange.
Inside, it looked more like a hospital than a holding cell. The officers left me there, and a few people came over and started drawing blood—way more than seemed normal. Then a nurse led me into a bedroom, where a large security-guard type shoved me onto a bed and strapped me down with what felt like seven or eight restraints across my body. That was the moment I fully came to my senses and completely panicked.
They left me alone in a pitch-black room, unable to move. At some point I passed out again, and when I woke up, I was lying in some bushes next to a Burger King. I still had my phone and my wallet, with all my money still inside. It still makes no sense to me. I have no idea what actually happened. My friends think I was drugged or hallucinating, but I swear it felt real.
32. Who Can You Trust These Days?
A girl I dated used to work at a home improvement store, and there was this middle-aged guy who came in all the time just to hang around and talk to her. He seemed a little awkward and overly attached, but harmless enough. He always greeted her by name and told her she was pretty. Then one evening, as the store was closing, he saw one of her male coworkers give her a hug before leaving.
The next morning, that coworker woke up and found his tires had been slashed in his driveway. Nobody connected it to the friendly middle-aged guy who stopped by to buy batteries five times a week. But things got much worse. Around the same time, the girl had started noticing that her underwear kept disappearing at home.
She figured they were getting lost in the laundry or that she had misplaced them, and didn’t think much of it. She even joked about it with her mom. Then one night she woke up and found that same man standing silently over her bed, staring down at her with one of her underwear items pressed against his face.
She completely lost it, and he ran out through the sliding glass door at the back of the house. It was the same unlocked door that, after he was finally caught, they learned he had been using night after night for months to come in and watch her sleep.
33. Child’s Play
This happened to my brother, but it’s too good not to share. He was working as a night porter at an old 18th-century hotel in the countryside of northern England. One night, a woman came down to reception looking pale and shaken, suitcase in hand, saying she couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to stay another minute. My brother asked what was wrong, and later wished he hadn’t.
She said she had heard children laughing all night, and that a child had entered her room holding a candle and stood at the foot of her bed without leaving. The next morning, my brother told his manager about it and was informed that this kind of story came up regularly. Before it became a hotel, the building had been a school more than 100 years earlier.
34. Prince Charmless
This happened about three years ago, during the summer of 2012. It has always been hard for me to talk about, but writing it down has helped. I was 17 at the time and had just gotten my first job. I lived in a small mountain community in rural western Virginia. A friend of my mom’s owned a nearby camping resort with a general store, and she hired me to help out during the busy summer months.
It was a pretty easy job, and I liked meeting visitors from out of town. Our area was so isolated that it was nice to talk to people from somewhere else. One day, a large, rough-looking mountain man type came into the store. He looked to be in his late 40s or early 50s, around 6'5" and maybe 280 pounds. He was dirty, like he worked outdoors all the time, and his clothes were worn out. He also had a long beard.
We had a few hermit-like people in the area, and he definitely looked like one of them. He bought a few basic things, including one of our homemade bars of soap. When he came to the register, he looked me up and down without saying anything for a moment. Then he asked, in a rough voice, “Did you make this soap?” I said, “Sometimes. I help with that now and then.” He asked if I made a lot of the things we sold, and I said mostly toiletries and things like that.
“I like that,” he said, nodding to himself. I didn’t really know what to say. I rang up his items, and he paid with crumpled bills. Just before leaving, he asked, “You cook too?” I said, “Sometimes.” Then he smiled to himself and said, “Bet the boys around here are eager to marry you.” I didn’t know how to respond. I later told Krista, my boss and my mom’s friend, and she laughed it off. So did my family and friends.
But then he started showing up more often. We made small talk now and then, and I learned he lived in a cabin in the woods that he claimed to have built with his bare hands. He said he hunted and lived off the land except for the things he bought at the store. Over time, his comments got more personal. He said it would be nice to have a woman like me around to make those things and cook what he caught. Once he even made a disturbing comment about my body. That really unsettled me.
He started inviting me to go fishing with him, hunting with him, or come see his place, and I always politely refused. But he kept pushing, and I eventually told Krista how uncomfortable he was making me. There was something in the way he spoke that genuinely scared me. She told me that whenever he came in, I should go get her and let her handle the register.
Thanks to her, I talked to him less, and I thought that would be the end of it. I was very wrong. One night, I was closing up around 10 p.m. Krista had left about an hour earlier, and I was heading out alone. The only two vehicles in front of the store were my car and an old blue pickup.
I felt alarmed right away because I knew that was the truck he drove. I didn’t see him anywhere, just the truck, so I hurried to my car and checked the backseat before getting in. But when I turned the key in the ignition, the engine only sputtered. I tried again and again, and panic set in fast.
I remember thinking, of all nights, why now? Just as I reached for my phone to call for help, someone started pounding hard on the driver’s side window. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I didn’t even want to look, because I already knew who it was.
I looked anyway, and it was him. He smiled at me through the glass and asked, “Need some help?” I shook my head and said, “My dad is on his way,” hoping that would scare him off. I hadn’t spoken to my dad in years. He laughed and said, “No he’s not. Open the door.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. How did he know I was bluffing? I said, “No. Leave me alone.” His expression changed immediately. He grabbed the handle, but luckily I had locked the doors as soon as I got in. He kept yanking on it and pounding on the window. I shouted, “Leave now or I’m calling 911!”
When that didn’t stop him, I pulled out my phone and dialed 911. I was frantic, and I knew the dispatcher could hear him hitting the glass. She said officers were on the way, but in such a remote area, that could still take a while.
“The police are coming! Leave now!” I screamed. He kept at it for another minute or two, then suddenly stopped and walked back to his truck. I watched, hoping he was finally leaving. But then he turned around and came back holding a crowbar.
I screamed at him to get away from me. Then he started swinging the crowbar at my driver’s side window. I dove down onto the passenger-side floor and covered the back of my neck the way they teach you in tornado drills. I heard the awful sound of the window cracking—but then I heard men shouting at him to get away from the car.
I looked up and saw two men coming toward us, one of them holding a shotgun. I recognized them as guests staying at the resort on a camping trip. I felt a huge wave of relief. I got out of the car and told them the police were already on their way. I thanked them over and over while we waited. Surprisingly, the man didn’t try to run, but the officers arrived soon after, so he didn’t really have the chance.
They took him away, and I gave my statement. I was badly shaken for a long time afterward. A few weeks later, I learned more about him. Apparently, he had a history of serious mental illness and had been in and out of state institutions. He really had been living alone in a cabin in the woods, off his medication, and his condition had been getting worse.
Later, my cousin Luke, who is a police officer, told me more about the case. After the attack, officers searched the cabin to see if there was anything important there. What they found still haunts me. They discovered a journal he had been keeping. In it, he wrote about being lonely and wanting a wife.
He mentioned me by name many times—thanks to my name tag—and according to Luke, the journal included disturbing details he didn’t want to repeat. He told me, as gently as he could, that the man had written out a plan to abduct me, starting with sabotaging my car engine so I would be stranded and vulnerable.
When Luke told me that, I nearly burst into tears thinking about how much worse that night could have been if those two campers hadn’t shown up. Thankfully, he was sent back to a state institution. With any luck, he’ll stay there. Mountain Man, I hope we never meet again.
35. A Better Place
When I worked in the medical field, I had a dream one night about one of my patients, a very kind elderly woman I visited once or twice a week. In the dream, she came to me dancing and happily told me she wasn’t hurting anymore. After watching her decline for years, it felt wonderful to see her like that. I had no idea how unsettling it would become.
The next morning at work, I told my coworkers about the dream. Later that same morning, we got a call from her daughter telling us that she had passed away the night before. I can’t explain it, but I’m glad I told people about the dream before the call came in. If I had mentioned it afterward, nobody would have believed me. It was such a strange experience, but also comforting to feel that she was finally at peace.
36. The Sound Of Silence
I had just started a new job in a really old building. One evening, I had to stay a little later than usual to finish something up, and by the time I was getting ready to leave, my floor was mostly empty. Before heading out, I needed to use the restroom, so I walked that way. As I got close to the door, I saw someone open it and go inside.
I remember clearly that they were wearing a pink shirt and khakis, because I was wearing the exact same thing. I was also a little irritated, because I hate being in the bathroom when someone else is there. But after deciding I definitely needed to go before my commute home, I went in anyway. The moment I stepped inside, I froze.
The bathroom was completely empty. I can’t really explain how the room felt, but the atmosphere was heavy and tense. It was totally silent. I could hear my own heartbeat. After standing there frozen for what felt like ten minutes, though it was probably closer to fifteen seconds, I turned around and left. I had nightmares about that bathroom for weeks. It sounds so simple, but it really rattled me.
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37. Who's There?
I work in a correctional facility. Before my position changed, I used to have about an hour and a half of downtime before clocking out. My sergeant at the time asked if I could cover the 11 p.m. count on one of the blocks. He didn’t care what I did before or after, as long as I handled the count. No problem. I was sitting in our “Times Square” area, where one hallway leads to four blocks and another hallway leads to the other four.
I was sitting facing one of those hallways when I heard someone walking up behind me. But then I realized I didn’t hear any keys. We all carry keys, except the inmates. I turned around, and no one was there. I thought maybe I had imagined it. Then the guy sitting nearby asked who it was, so apparently I hadn’t imagined it after all.
At 11 p.m., I went to the block, but no one was letting me in. I had no idea what was going on. I went back to the Times Square area to call and let the officer know not to worry, I was coming, I just couldn’t get in yet. While I was on the phone, I felt someone come up behind me and lean close to my ear, then whisper sharply, “What are you doing?” I waved my hand behind me to get them to stop.
I hung up and turned around, ready to yell at whoever it was, but there was no one there. No one was in either hallway. I was completely alone.
38. The Phantom Intruder
When I was in college, I house-sat for my parents. I’ve always been pretty easily scared, so before going to bed, I locked every door between me and the bedroom. That night, I had a strange dream that someone unlocked each door and turned on every light in the house. I felt cold and woke up to my dog barking. Sure enough, every light in the house was on, and every door was open and unlocked.
My dog kept barking into the hallway, but there was nothing there. I spent the rest of the night sitting in the shower with my dog and my phone, absolutely terrified. To this day, I still have no explanation for what happened that night.
39. The Subconscious Mind
I’m a nurse, and I work with geriatric patients. About three years ago, something happened that still unsettles me. Before I get into it, I should say that I do not believe in ghosts. One night, I was working the night shift and was exhausted, so instead of taking lunch, I went to my car to sleep for thirty minutes.
I got in, covered myself with my sweater, set a timer on my phone, and fell asleep almost immediately. Then I started dreaming, but in the dream I was still awake, just sitting there in my car. Someone tapped on my window, and I saw one of my patients, who I’ll call Dee. I was shocked and asked what she was doing outside.
She said she was looking for her daughter. I told her to go back inside and that we could call her daughter in the morning. Then she got angry and started banging on my car window. I panicked and tried to reach for the door handle so I could get out and calm her down, but then I realized I couldn’t move. I should mention that I get sleep paralysis pretty often, so even though I was asleep, I understood what was happening.
I fought it and tried to force my body awake. Eventually I managed to wake up, and my heart was racing and my forehead was damp with sweat. I sat there for about a minute, told myself it had just been a dream, and rolled down the window to cool off. If I had known what was coming next, I would have screamed.
My break ended, and I clocked back in. I saw my supervisor and two other nurses gathered outside a room. I was still at the station clocking in when they saw me and called me over. I walked up, thinking maybe there had been an issue with the ventilator or that the patient had fallen. Instead, my supervisor told me that Dee had died while I was on my break.
It took a few seconds for that to really sink in, and I felt a wave of shock run through me. I got goose bumps, but I never told my supervisor about the dream.
40. Hooked On A Feeling
I was lying in bed with my boyfriend with the lights off. We weren’t talking, just lying there with our own thoughts. Suddenly, he rolled over and held me really tightly. Of course, I hugged him back. But then I was hit with this feeling. If I hadn’t already been lying down, it probably would have knocked me over. It was pure dread and panic.
I’ve had panic attacks before, and this wasn’t the same. I held onto my boyfriend as tightly as I could. I had never felt anything like it. He’s usually always warm, but even in his arms, I felt freezing cold. There was this awful, heavy feeling in the room, and it seemed like it was coming from the corner.
It was like that sensation of knowing someone is standing behind you even when they haven’t made a sound. I honestly believed there was some kind of dark presence in my room. I finally worked up the nerve to speak and asked, “Jay, do you feel that?” His answer made everything worse. He said yes, he felt the same cold, awful feeling. The whole thing lasted maybe thirty seconds to a minute.
He decided to call a friend of his who was studying to be a youth pastor. He put the call on speaker. Matt prayed for us, and we both closed our eyes and listened, praying silently to ourselves. When he finished, the room felt lighter, and it wasn’t cold anymore. But after a little small talk, Matt asked, “Were you two talking while I was praying?”
We told him no, of course not. We had just been listening. He said he heard a deep, rough voice on the phone telling him to stop. He also said he felt a horrible, dark presence while he was praying. I’m convinced it was some kind of evil presence. But it never came back, so that leaves me with one question.
Why was it there in the first place?
What it was trying to do, I don’t think I’ll ever know.
41. The Fire Inside
A few years ago, I kept having the same dream: I was trapped in a hotel fire. It felt incredibly real—I could feel the heat, the pain, and hear people screaming. Every time I had the dream, it got more detailed. By the last one, I could clearly picture the building itself. Then, on a family vacation, we stopped in a small town to find a place to stay.
And somehow, we pulled up to the exact hotel from my dream. I completely froze and kept begging my parents to stay somewhere else. After I kept pushing the issue, they finally agreed and found another hotel. But that’s not even the worst part: the hotel burned down that very night, the same night we would have stayed there, and 14 people died in the fire. It seriously messed with me.
42. The Disappearing Student
I used to work as a live-in staff member in a college dorm. During the summer, we housed the small number of students still on campus for summer classes—around 30 in total. It’s probably worth mentioning that these students were usually very academically driven, and often pretty stressed, even if they kept to themselves.
One warm afternoon in late June, my office got a call from a worried sister. She said she and her family hadn’t been able to reach her brother, who was living alone in a room on the summer floor. That wasn’t especially unusual. We often dealt with students avoiding family because they were overwhelmed, anxious, or just socially awkward.
Our standard procedure was to first try calling the student and their emergency contacts. If that didn’t work, we’d go to the room, make sure they were still in the building, and if we found them, ask them to call home so the family knew we had checked in. We were also supposed to only enter rooms with another staff member present, both for safety and policy reasons.
I couldn’t reach the student by room phone or cell, and we were short-staffed that day. Since I was alone, I decided to go up and check on him myself. That was a huge mistake. I got to his floor around 2:00 p.m., and it was completely silent, which I expected. When I found his room, I immediately noticed the sound of a movie playing behind the door, probably on a TV or laptop.
I knocked three times and announced that I was a staff member checking on his well-being. No answer. That didn’t seem too strange at first—college students are famous for leaving electronics on when they’re not around. I checked the showers and bathrooms on the floor, but they were empty too. Then I went back to the room and knocked three more times, waiting about 20 seconds each time.
Still nothing. That’s when my instincts started kicking in. I’d worked in residence halls for years, and something about the whole situation felt off. His family was worried, a movie was playing—meaning someone had started it recently—and summer students often had their own unusual habits and stress patterns.
Something didn’t feel right. Since I was alone, I probably let my imagination run more than I would have if someone else had been with me. An empty dorm floor at 2:00 in the afternoon can feel eerie enough on its own. I finally decided that, for my own peace of mind, I needed to unlock the room and check, even though I technically wasn’t supposed to go in alone.
I knocked once more, announced myself as the hall director, and unlocked the door. The room immediately made me more uneasy. It looked mostly empty, and the student seemed to be living out of a suitcase, which was odd for someone staying at least eight weeks for summer classes.
The bed looked slept in, all the lights were on, and on the desk was an open laptop running on battery, playing *The Matrix*. But there was no student. I started trying to explain it away. Maybe we’d passed each other in the hallway and I just didn’t realize it because I’d never met him. Maybe he was downstairs picking up food.
Sure, that had to be it. Then I turned to leave, planning to try again later. But right before I walked out, I noticed something else strange. The folding closet doors—which were usually removed in most rooms because no one used them, especially in single rooms—were still there. And they were closed.
That was weird. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen anyone actually use those awkward old doors. Then my gut feeling got even stronger. Suddenly I was convinced I was alone in a room with a student who might be in serious danger—or worse. And I was about to be the person who found him.
My voice cracked as I spoke to the closed doors, saying my name and title and warning that I was going to open them in three seconds. I fumbled with the latch and finally got the doors apart. And standing there, completely alive and very embarrassed, was a 7-foot-tall Indian guy, staring at me like I’d just discovered his secret hiding spot.
We looked at each other for what felt like 15 seconds without either of us moving or speaking. Then it clicked, and all I could manage to say was, “Um... are you hiding from me?”
He looked at me and said, “Yeah.”
My heart was still pounding. I turned to leave, but before I closed the door, I looked back and said, “Call your sister. She’s worried about you—and honestly, now I am too.”
43. When Twigs Snap
When I was in my early 20s, I used to go urban exploring with a group of college friends. One cold night in October, seven of us went to an abandoned asylum that had once been state-run. It was a huge property with several large buildings. The roads were unused but still open, so we managed to drive pretty close, and luckily found a spot in some brush to hide the cars.
We were not exactly subtle—people were talking loudly, one guy was fooling around with a laser pointer, and so on. Luckily there didn’t seem to be any security, but I still knew we might run into other people. We decided to explore one of the main buildings, which was over 10 stories tall and surrounded by a chain-link fence. Eventually, we found a gap and climbed through.
While we were moving between the fence and the outside wall, I was sure I heard twigs snapping in the woods behind the building. We were basically boxed in, with the fence on one side and the building on the other, and the only way out was back the way we came—which was also where the noise seemed to be coming from. Meanwhile, two of the girls were still joking around, and the guy with the laser pointer kept messing with it.
I started getting nervous and told everyone to cut it out, but they were having fun and ignored me. Then, out of nowhere, we heard this loud yell—like an old man crying out in pain. Everyone instantly went quiet. A second later, we heard a huge amount of branches cracking. At that point I panicked and yelled for everyone to run. We scrambled back out through the fence and sprinted to the cars, convinced something dangerous was right behind us.
Looking back, it was probably just a couple of raccoons fighting or maybe a squatter who was more scared of us than we were of them. But in that moment, I don’t think I’d ever felt more desperate to get out of somewhere. Needless to say, we took a break from exploring after that.
44. The Scent Of A Woman
In 2012, my grandmother had a major stroke and was moved to palliative care at home. Friends and family were able to come by whenever they wanted and spend time with her. I was very close to my grandma, and I’m grateful I got to be there with her during that time. Anyone who has gone through hospice with someone they love knows how difficult it is.
One night, I was sitting in my home office catching up on work when, all at once, the room filled with the smell of perfume. Not just a faint scent—I mean it was strong and unmistakable, all through the room. I stopped what I was doing and said out loud, to no one, “Something is wrong with Gram.”
I hadn’t spoken to anyone in my family that day, but I suddenly felt like I needed to text my uncle, who was staying with her. I asked, “You guys okay?” It was 11:20 p.m. He replied immediately: “You might want to come say goodbye. Not okay.” I rushed over. When I got there, the living room was quiet, and my family was sitting together in stunned silence.
Without saying anything, I walked straight to my grandmother, kissed her on the forehead, and told her I loved her. She was still warm, but she had stopped breathing. I told my uncle I felt like Grandma had brought me there. I asked what time she had passed, and he said it was about five minutes before I sent that text. That meant the perfume in my office had appeared at almost the exact same moment.
I grew up in an Irish Catholic family, but I’m not really religious myself. If someone had told me this story before it happened to me, I probably would have brushed it off. But after that night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there might be something more out there. I felt it. Just that once—but I felt it.
45. Get Out Of My House
One night, I got home late and immediately felt like something was wrong. I looked around and was horrified to see a strange man sitting on the couch in the dark. I assumed he must be one of my roommate’s friends, but I was very wrong. Trying to ignore him as much as I could, I went to bed. Around 4 a.m., I woke up to a soft tapping on my bedroom door.
It kept getting louder until it sounded like someone was desperately scratching at the wood. I texted my roommate and told her her friend was freaking me out. She replied, “What friend?” I called 911, and by then he was slamming on the door, trying to force it open. He saw the police arriving and ran before they could catch him. We never saw him again, but we never really felt safe in that apartment after that either.
46. In The Dog House
I was having a sleepover at my house with a friend from school. We were watching a movie when the strangest thought suddenly popped into my head: her dog had just died. Obviously, I couldn’t just say that out loud, so in the middle of the movie I asked, “Hey, by the way, how’s your dog?” She looked surprised because I’d never met her dog, and she hardly ever talked about it. I only knew she had one because she had mentioned it once.
She told me he was getting old, but he was doing fine. We moved on, but I couldn’t shake that strange feeling. The next day she went home, and after a while she called me. She asked, “Why did you ask about my dog yesterday? How did you know? He died last night, around the same time you asked about him.” I was shocked, but somehow not completely surprised.
I still don’t have an explanation. It feels like a very strange coincidence, since her dog was never something I usually thought about. And it never happened to me again.
47. Nighty Night
Years ago in college, a group of us were telling ghost stories when a friend shared one that really stuck with me. The full story was that when his family—his parents and their two sons—moved into a new house, everything seemed perfectly fine except for his younger brother, who had trouble sleeping and kept insisting that his room was haunted.
His parents assumed it was just part of adjusting to the move and thought he would get over it. But as time passed, the younger boy only became more nervous and upset about the room, not less. Eventually, bedtime became such a struggle that the father finally agreed to sleep in the boys’ room one night to prove there was nothing wrong with it. The younger son would sleep in his parents’ bed with his mother instead.
The next morning, everyone was in the kitchen getting breakfast when the dad came downstairs, and naturally everyone asked how he had slept. His answer was unsettling. To everyone’s surprise, he told the younger boy, “Yeah, you’re not sleeping in that room anymore.” Everyone just stared at him and asked what had happened.
According to my friend, his dad said he had to sleep facing the wall, because every time he faced out into the room, he couldn’t shake the horrible feeling that someone—or something—was kneeling beside the bed, staring directly at him. As you can imagine, that made it impossible to get any real sleep.
Once the younger boy was moved into another room, the bedtime problems stopped.
48. This Isn't My Stop
This happened when I was about 12. For a little background: I lived outside the district for my school, so I rode to school in a van—one of those big white ones—with about five other kids. I was always the first one picked up each morning, around 7:30. The driver usually seemed friendly enough. He was an overweight white man, probably in his 50s.
One day while he was driving us home, he pointed out which house was his. On the first day he drove us home, he stopped at Burger King and bought each of us an ice cream cone. That made me uneasy even then, though I tried to brush it off. I was a small kid, and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to protect myself if anything bad had happened.
Anyway, one morning I got on the van like usual. I think it was March, and in Minnesota that still meant it was really cold. I was looking down at my iPod and not paying much attention. When the van stopped, I looked up, assuming we were at the next stop. Instead, I saw that we were parked at his house. He didn’t say a word. He just got out and went inside.
I was alone and completely terrified. Until then, I had always thought people were exaggerating when they said they were frozen with fear, but that’s exactly how I felt. You hear stories about girls being kidnapped, and I really thought he might hurt me or kill me. My mind was racing.
Should I call 911? Should I hide? Should I get out and run? I knew someone who lived nearby. But instead I just sat there, unable to move. I don’t know how long he was inside, though it couldn’t have been very long, because he came back out—still without saying a word—and continued the route.
When I got home, I told my parents. They thought it was strange, but guessed maybe he had forgotten something or had to use the bathroom. They told me to let them know if it happened again. And it did. A few weeks later, I looked up and realized we were at his house again. Just like before, he parked, got out, and went inside without any explanation, leaving me alone in the van.
This time I texted my mom to tell her what was happening. She called right away to ask if I was okay and what was going on. I had to hang up after a minute because he came back more quickly that time. Again, we just continued on the route. My parents called the bus company, and apparently he got in trouble. He clearly knew I had reported him, because the next morning he was silent and obviously angry. I was terrified to keep riding with him after that—he was upset, and he knew where I lived.
That was definitely the most afraid I’ve ever been for my life. I still think about it all the time. He absolutely should have been fired. I’m almost certain what he did was against the rules, if not illegal. If school drivers need to make an unscheduled stop, they’re supposed to notify the company and follow proper procedures. I think the only reason they kept him was because he was the only one willing to drive that far out for all of us.
49. Gone Fishing
When my uncle was younger, he took a trip to the Grand Canyon with some friends. They were driving through and stopped near an area with brush along the canyon’s edge, and they decided to take one of those typical funny vacation photos.
My uncle stood near the edge holding a fishing rod, pretending to fish into the canyon. After they took the picture, they packed up and left. But when the photos were developed, they noticed something very strange.
In the picture, not far behind my uncle, was a man dressed entirely in black with very pale skin, staring straight at the camera with a strange, knowing smirk. My uncle and his friends said they had no idea who he was, that they had been the only people in that area, and that there were hardly any tourists at the Grand Canyon that time of year. They never found out who the man was. The photo still exists to this day.
50. Dream On
One day I was at work when my then-wife called me unexpectedly. She normally didn’t call during the day because she worked nights. She told me to call my friend Danny and make sure he and his family were okay. When I asked why, she said she had a dream she couldn’t fully remember, but she felt strongly that I needed to check on him.
So I called Danny to see how things were going. I mentioned my wife’s dream, and he was a little amused, but he told me that he and his family were fine and said to thank her for caring. I called my wife back and told her everything seemed okay. She still didn’t sound convinced. Later I found out that within half an hour of my call to Danny, he got another call from his uncle in Florida saying that his son had taken his own life.
51. A Long, Long Time Ago
My brother is about two years older than me. My parents, our oldest brother, and I all clearly remember him telling all kinds of stories when he was little about his “past life.” The one that stands out most to me was about his grandpa and his dog, who lived in a house that caught fire. Neither of them made it out. When he was young, he would tell unsettling stories like that all the time.
Then one day, completely out of nowhere, I remember him pointing to a burned-down shack and saying it had been his grandpa’s house. Later, we found out that an elderly man and his dog really had lived there and died in a fire. But it wasn’t anyone we knew or were related to. My brother was under 10 when this happened, and it was long before we had internet access.
We also never read the newspaper or watched the news. We were too busy with sports and cartoons. If you ask him about it now, he says he doesn’t remember any of it.
52. Spine-Chilling Stuff
I didn’t see a ghost until I was 19, and until then, I didn’t believe in them. My attitude was always, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Well, I got my wish, and it was awful. I was at a friend’s rental house. They had a baby, and they always talked about how the place was haunted, especially the room where the baby slept.
People said they saw a woman in white walking into the baby’s room at night. A few times, my friend’s husband was home alone with the baby while she was at work, and he would see a woman walk past the open hallway door toward the baby’s room while the baby was asleep.
At first, he didn’t think much of it because he assumed it was his wife. Then he’d remember she was at work and rush to the baby’s room, only to find the baby crying and no one there. Fast-forward to when I had my own experience: I was spending time with my friend while her husband was at work, helping her watch the baby.
We started hearing a lot of strange noises, and my friend said she wanted to grab the baby, get in the car, and leave. I laughed and tried to reassure her that it was probably nothing, but I went along with it. Once we were in the car, she realized she had forgotten the dog and asked if I could go back inside to get him.
I walked up to the front window and looked in. The dog was standing by the sliding glass door, completely stiff, tail straight out, barking nonstop. Then I noticed the reflection, and my heart nearly stopped. I could see the lower half of a woman in white.
I backed out immediately and told my friend I wasn’t going back in, then told her what I saw. We eventually went back inside after the dog had calmed down. Ever since then, I’ve believed in ghosts, and I’ve had a couple of other experiences too.
53. Witch Hunt
One day, while I was doing laundry, one of the lights burned out in my basement. The basement is laid out so the laundry room is separated from the rest of it by a wall and a door. To get upstairs, you have to leave the laundry room and walk through the other part of the basement. So the light that went out was in that section, not in the laundry room.
Since it was the only light over there, that whole side was pretty dark. I finished the laundry while dreading the walk through the basement. I left the laundry room, got halfway across, and suddenly heard a loud cackle. Picture the kind of laugh people do when they’re imitating a witch.
Now imagine that same laugh coming from someone who had been smoking for 50 years, making it deeper and rougher. That’s exactly what I heard, loud and clear, right behind me. I didn’t stop to think—I ran straight for the stairs. I waited until my dad got home before changing the bulb. I’ve never heard that cackle again, and I still haven’t told anyone else in the house about it.
corby315
54. You Are Dreaming
I have a sleep-tracking app on my phone with a setting meant to help with lucid dreaming. It repeats “You are dreaming” over and over in a woman’s voice with a slight echo. It backfired on me in the creepiest way. One day at work, I started hearing that voice randomly every few minutes. I checked my phone, and the moment the screen lit up, I woke up in my bed with the sun coming up.
Pretty shaken, I got up and took a shower. Then, on my way to work, I started hearing the voice again through the radio. When I turned off the car, unsettled all over again, I woke up in bed another time with the sun rising. This happened three or four more times, all at different points in the “day.” I didn’t fully trust reality for about a week after that, and I still won’t use that setting on the app.
55. Hiding Behind A Costume
Many years ago, my mom and I were shopping for a Halloween costume for me to wear to elementary school. It felt like a big deal because I had been homeschooled before that. We spent a couple of hours going from store to store and couldn’t find anything I liked. It was starting to get dark, so we knew we needed to pick something soon and head home.
There was this old Halloween costume shop, one of those odd places that somehow stays open all year. We decided to try it as a last attempt to find something. We got out of the car, walked through the front doors, and went up the steps to enter. Then something happened that I still can’t explain.
I felt this huge, overwhelming pressure all over my body, like the physical sensation of being hated by something. Imagine that, along with the feeling that something wanted to hurt me and wanted me gone. Little third-grade me turned to look at my mom, and at that exact moment, she turned to look at me. It was deeply unnerving.
We didn’t say a word. We just turned around and went straight back to the car after only taking a few steps inside. Once we were in the car, I asked my mom if she had felt the same thing I did. She said she had basically experienced the exact same thing. We prayed together in the car and left.
Even now, as an adult, I can still remember how intense it felt. Just writing about it makes me tense up. On the bright side, I still ended up with a costume that year. We went home, and my mom stayed up late helping me put together a cowboy costume from things we already had.
56. This One Will Leave You Breathless
My mum once told me that she was on the phone with my dad while she was home alone. Out of nowhere, she felt a really strange chill run down her spine. My dad immediately said, as calmly as he could, “Darling, start recording.” That was it. So she started filming, and even though there was clearly no one else in the room, and you could hear both my mum and dad, there was also a loud breathing sound on the recording.
You could tell from the video that neither of them was making the noise, but it was definitely being picked up. And it was loud, not faint at all. So I don’t think it came from the phone, a TV, or anything like that. It also kept the same rhythm while my dad was talking. When I got home from school that day, I found a magazine sitting on my bed.
It was the August 1952 issue of *Autocar* magazine. So I took it to my mum. Here’s the strange part: it had belonged to my grandfather. He had been dead for more than 12 years by then, and my grandmother kept it because it was the last magazine he bought before he left for military duty, and the only one he hadn’t thrown away before he died.
No one had seen it in almost five years. I asked my mum about it again just now, and she confirmed that it really happened. And honestly, I’m even more unsettled now than I was five minutes ago.
57. This Is Why You Don’t Hike At Midnight
I was in a big wooded area not far from my boyfriend’s house. It was close to midnight, and we were there together just hanging out. We had gone pretty deep into the woods, and it took a fair bit of climbing to get there. The nearest path was probably five minutes back down, so it seemed really unlikely that anyone else would be in that spot that late at night besides us.
While we were kissing, he thought he saw a shadow move about 20 or 25 feet to our left, climbing upward. But it stopped the second he looked at it. He told me to stay alert, and right then we saw a dark figure climbing up at an angle, like it was trying to get directly above where we were.
We stayed still and watched as it closed the distance and ended up right above us. Then it started moving toward us. Without hesitation, my boyfriend grabbed my hand and we took off downhill toward the path. We ran as fast as we could and got out of the woods. We promised each other we’d never go there at night again.
58. Get Out, Right Now
My family moved into a new house when I was 11. The previous owners were a family, and the mother had died of cancer. They sold the house not long after she passed away. Growing up, my sister and I always felt uneasy in that house. Strange things would happen, but there was usually some reasonable explanation for them... except for one night when I was 16.
In the middle of the night, I was lying awake because I couldn’t sleep. While I was in bed, my bedroom door slowly opened on its own. I heard footsteps come into my room. I couldn’t see anyone, but I had the strong feeling that someone else was there. You know that feeling when someone walks up behind you while you’re at a computer? It felt like that.
I heard the footsteps come closer to my bed. Then right beside me, the mattress pressed down, like an invisible person had sat there. I could even feel the shift in weight. I reached out to touch the spot, and suddenly a burst of blue static electricity shot out from where I touched. I screamed and ran out of the room, waking everyone in the house.
I’ve never been able to explain what I saw that night. I almost questioned my own sanity, which is why I don’t tell this story often. For the record, I was completely sober. And because I could move, I don’t think it was sleep paralysis. The really strange part is that years later, my sister ran into the daughter of the family who had lived there before us. She told my sister that her mother had actually died in the house, not at the hospital.
59. It’s Not In Your Head
I went to a small women’s college in Virginia. I only stayed for one semester because the group mentality there was too intense. There were always rituals that weren’t officially “mandatory,” but if you didn’t take part, people thought you were strange. Any one tradition by itself might not have seemed odd, but all together it felt like too much. For example, on founders’ day, everyone wore white.
We went to the chapel for a ceremony and then walked two miles to the cemetery where the founders were buried. We all had to place roses on the graves and sing the school song. During my first semester, four girls in my class tried to take their own lives. There were only 64 girls in the class. It felt like an epidemic, but everyone was trying to keep it quiet.
If you talked about transferring, the dean of students and the school counselor would threaten to have you placed in a mental hospital for 72 hours. I ended up transferring in secret so no one would know. I didn’t even tell my friends. I would wake up at 4 a.m. and quietly move things out of my dorm room to be shipped home. It was terrifying.
60. A Real Mouthful
I’m a dental hygienist, and the creepiest, most confusing thing I’ve ever seen was this: a new patient came in for a cleaning. He was about 3 or 4 years old, and his mom said he had never been to the dentist before. That’s not unusual in my line of work, so at first I didn’t think much of it. I cleaned his teeth and then took his routine X-rays.
That’s when it got weird. Looking at the X-rays, I could see that the child had already had a lot of dental work done. He had around six fillings. When I sat back down, I asked the parents again if he had ever been to the dentist. They were both completely certain that he hadn’t, and they also said there was no way a relative could have taken him without them knowing.
So how did that happen? Who took him? Where were the parents? Had they been gone for a long time and somehow didn’t know someone else had taken him to a dentist and had work done? What if this wasn’t actually their child at all, but a child they had abducted? His insurance showed no record of any previous dental treatment.
I still think about it a lot, but I know I’ll probably never get an answer.
61. The Music From Next Door
I used to live in an old house in Athens, Ohio, a town often said to be one of the most haunted cities in America. During my first year in that apartment, I kept hearing this odd music that seemed to come from somewhere inside the house. It’s hard to explain, but it sounded like a keyboard or maybe an organ. It was always faint, always in a minor key, and always the same tune.
At first, I assumed it was just my downstairs neighbors, and it never bothered me enough to look into it. Still, it definitely sounded like it was coming from inside the building. The next year, those neighbors moved out, and a new neighbor named Sarah moved in. We became friends, and one night she was hanging out in my apartment when the music started again.
She immediately asked where it was coming from. I asked if she had music playing downstairs, and she said no. We just looked at each other, both a little unsettled. Then Sarah asked if I had ever seen or heard anything strange in the house. I told her that besides the music, I hadn’t. The way she asked made it clear she had experienced more, but she didn’t want to get into it.
A few months later, her boyfriend moved in, and eventually she told me some of what had been happening. She said she had seen and heard strange things—like wisps of something that looked like smoke twisting around their bedroom, and doors opening or slamming for no clear reason. Her boyfriend hated going into the basement so much that he would sing the entire time he was down there doing laundry.
Honestly, I hated the basement too. It looked almost untouched from when the house was first built, and there was one especially unsettling room that seemed like the kind of place where you’d hide things no one should find. Whenever I went down there, I always felt like I was being watched. Around the time I graduated and started getting ready to move, I went out of town for a few days, and my parents kept my cat at their house a couple of hours away.
The night I came back to Athens, I decided to pack up some books before bed. I fell asleep, then woke up in the middle of the night to a huge crashing sound. I was groggy and half awake, so I figured it had come from Sarah’s apartment. But the next morning, I walked into my living room and found that a large antique mirror that had been hanging over my fireplace had fallen and shattered into hundreds of pieces.
What made it even stranger was that the nails holding the mirror were still firmly in the wall. After that, I was finally ready to admit that something about that place didn’t feel normal. I’m sure Sarah saw and heard much more than she ever told me, but she didn’t like talking about it while she still lived there. She moved out recently, so maybe now she’ll say more. I never really believed in ghosts, but too many things happened that I couldn’t explain.
I did a little research on the house and found out that its original owner was a woman who lived there when it was still a single-family home. She seemed to have lived a quiet life and was a widow who died at an old age. In her obituary, I learned that she loved music and had even founded the Athens music appreciation group. Sometimes I wonder if that song I kept hearing had once been her favorite to play.
62. Dry Bones
My grandmother lives in a very old house from the late 1700s, and there are graveyards on both sides of the property. The other day, a friend I hadn’t seen in months came over. We were walking down the old cobblestone driveway when he started talking about a new sense of spirituality he had found—not in a religious way, but more about feeling connected to things around him.
I believed him. He had been away in treatment, and I really thought he had gone through some kind of personal awakening. While we were talking, my cat came over and started rubbing against my leg. At first I didn’t think much of it, but after a while I realized she wouldn’t stop, almost like she was trying to get my attention. So I started following her, and when I realized where she was leading us, my heart started pounding.
She was taking us straight toward the graveyard. Every time I stopped, she turned back, rubbed against my leg again, and kept urging me forward. When we finally reached the graves, she jumped onto one of the headstones, balancing on the narrow top, and refused to move. When we tried to lift her off, she started hissing.
Then we looked at the inscription, and we were stunned. The grave belonged to someone who had once lived—and died—in my grandmother’s house.
63. A Creepy Story Has A Twist Ending
My friend and I had this amazing place we liked to hang out in the woods. To get there, you had to walk right through the middle of a creek for about a kilometer and push through sharp bushes and thistles. It was a rough hike, but completely worth it. The spot was about half an acre, with bright green grass on a slope and clear little ponds all around.
One day, my friend Levi and I were there when he suddenly froze and ducked into a bush. I did the same, thinking he must have spotted a large animal. Then I saw him staring up the hill, so I looked too—and felt my whole body go cold. At the top of the hill were two people swinging what looked like a lifeless body between them.
We watched in horror as they tossed it down the hill and then ran off. Levi and I were terrified. I was shaking so badly I could barely talk. The next day, we were in the car with his parents on the way to town when we saw around ten fire trucks near the school closest to the forest. Completely panicked, we told his parents what we had seen, crying because we were sure something horrible had happened.
His mom started laughing and said, “They’re doing search-and-rescue training. That was a dummy the firefighters were supposed to find.” I don’t think I had ever slept so well as I did that night.
64. You’re Not Alone
A few months ago, I woke up around three in the morning and went downstairs to use the bathroom. When I opened my bedroom door and looked over the stairs, I saw a bright light coming from the living room. When I went to check, I saw the TV was on, showing nothing but static. No one was on the couch or anywhere nearby.
I called out for my mom, and the moment I made a sound, the TV switched off and the bathroom door slammed shut. I checked every corner of the bathroom and found nothing. I still think about that moment all the time.
65. Demons In The Basement
My very Catholic grandmother owned a house in rural New York, and we used to visit often for camp trips and family holidays. The place always felt a little strange, probably because it was more than 150 years old. I had a few experiences there that felt paranormal, like seeing what I thought was the spirit of a man in a brown coat and top hat standing in the kitchen.
I also used to hear children’s voices in the bunk bed room when no one else was there, and the lights would behave oddly—like bulbs on the holiday decorations burning out one by one in sequence instead of all at once. None of it ever felt especially threatening, just unsettling and hard to explain, until one day when I was about ten years old.
I was alone in the house while my grandmother was out shopping, just watching Avatar: The Last Airbender and playing with Legos. At one point I went to the bathroom and noticed the basement door. I had never thought much about it before because it was always closed and off-limits, but since I was alone and curious, I opened it just to take a look.
The stairs below were completely dark, but within seconds everything changed. A deep chill came over me, followed by a wave of terror so intense it felt primal. Every instinct I had went into panic as I felt something rushing up the stairs toward me.
I slammed the door shut, locked it as fast as I could, and ran into the main room to grab a cross, convinced something evil was down there. When I told my grandmother what happened, her face went pale. She looked less shocked than frightened, like maybe she already knew something. She called a priest and asked him to bless the house.
When he opened the basement door, he stopped suddenly, then slowly made his way downstairs. He performed the blessing there and later told us he had felt the same overwhelming dread, but said the house was protected now and that we didn’t need to be afraid.
After that, I stayed wary, but I never experienced anything like it again, and I definitely never went near the basement. As I got older, I started to wonder if maybe I had just scared myself as a kid. Maybe my grandmother’s strong beliefs had shaped the whole thing, and maybe the priest was influenced by what we had told him.
What makes that hard to believe is what I learned a few years ago. The family who moved into the house after my grandparents left for Florida had suddenly moved out. They gave up their down payment and left right away because, according to the realtor’s report, “The demons in the basement were terrorizing their children to an unbearable degree.”
So I still don’t know what was down there. But whatever it was, it didn’t feel human, and it definitely didn’t feel kind.
66. Dreams Freaking The Whole Family Out
One morning when I was 15, my dad looked worn out and stressed. I asked what was wrong, and he told me he’d had an incredibly vivid dream that I had taken my own life. In the dream, he came into my room and found me hanging in the closet. It upset him so much that he actually came to check on me while I was asleep.
At first, it didn’t seem like a huge deal, just unsettling. But about 20 minutes later, my sister came into my room right after waking up. She looked at me and the first thing she said was, “I had a really weird dream. I came into your room and you had shot yourself in the head. It was horrible.” I told her Dad had a dream about me dying too, and had him explain it to her.
After that, we just sat there in this tense, uneasy silence. I’ve never been suicidal, but it really shook my whole family.
67. Three’s Company
My best friend, his boyfriend, and a third roommate were all living together in a new apartment. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was so new that they were the first people to ever live in that unit. The third roommate was very quiet. He mostly kept to himself and usually stayed in his room with the door shut all the time.
He was also kind of messy. One day, the couple came home and noticed his bedroom door was open, which never happened. They looked inside and saw a neatly folded uniform from a nearby banquet hall sitting on his bed. It was the kind of venue people rent for events like wedding receptions.
The strange part was that their roommate didn’t work there. He never had. None of them had, and they didn’t know anyone who did either. But somehow this uniform was there on his bed. When they asked him about it, he seemed just as confused as they were. Then, a month or two later, my friend came home one day and found the apartment completely empty.
He went into the bathroom and saw a lacy women’s garter belt on the floor, the kind someone might wear on a wedding day. That was also strange because the three men living there had no real connection to women’s clothing like that. Once again, none of them had any idea where it came from.
Even though no one could explain either item, the weirdest part to me is that they seem connected. One was a uniform from a banquet hall that hosts wedding receptions, and the other was a garter belt associated with weddings. I’m usually pretty skeptical, so when they told me this story, I tried to think of every reasonable explanation I could.
But they had already done the same thing, and every idea seemed to fall apart. None of us ever figured out what happened.
68. An Unexpected Guest
I’m a paranormal investigator, so creepy and unexplained things are exactly what I’m drawn to. I actively go looking for them. Over the years, I’ve experienced plenty of strange moments, but the oddest one happened at the Sallie House in Atchison, Kansas. My team had arranged toys on the floor in Sallie’s room because people say “Sallie” will move them if you do.
We had just finished taking a dinner break in the kitchen downstairs and went back upstairs to check our equipment in Sallie’s room. But when we reached the top of the stairs, the door to her room was closed, even though none of us had shut it. Someone knocked and asked, “Is anyone in there?” The answer made me jump.
We heard a clearly male voice say, “No. Just leave.” I should mention that all of us had been downstairs together. No one had gone upstairs to close the door. And sure, in old houses doors can sometimes swing shut on their own. But there were no men upstairs. We had two men in our group, and both of them were downstairs with us.
69. I Can See It in Your Eyes
My boyfriend’s younger brother and I were riding our bikes to the shops late one afternoon. As we turned onto the main road, we noticed a man across the street walking in the opposite direction. He had a limp, his head was down, and he was carrying a plastic bag. We were only a few meters away when he crossed over to our side of the street.
As my boyfriend’s brother rode past him, the man lifted his head and smiled at him as they passed. I was a little farther behind, so I didn’t think much of it at first. Then the brother stopped, turned around, and gave me a strange look just as the man passed him. I still assumed he had just stopped to wait for me.
But as soon as I passed the stranger and made eye contact with him, I understood that wasn’t it. When he looked at me and nodded, his eyes looked completely empty. The best way I can describe it is like black pits where his eyes should have been, or eyes that were entirely black. I honestly don’t know how else to explain it.
When I caught up with the brother, we stopped around the corner and he said, “Did you see that?” I asked, “You mean his eyes?” He said, “Yeah, it looked like they weren’t even there.” We both just sat there for a moment, trying to process what we’d seen. If he hadn’t described the same thing I saw and felt, I probably would have brushed it off.
I might have assumed the light was playing tricks on me or something like that. It was a sunny afternoon, so glare could have been a factor. Maybe he was wearing contacts, I don’t know. But none of those explanations really seem right. When we got home, we told everyone what happened, but no one believed us. They still don’t.
70. Stranger In The Woods
I was camping with a friend in a remote backwoods campground. There weren’t many campsites, and they were all very far apart. We had already spent one night there, had our site fully set up, and had been hiking all day. Later, we drove into town to get food, and on the way back to our isolated campsite, we passed a man walking out along the only road that led there.
We both made eye contact with him, and I instantly felt uneasy. He looked at us like he knew us and hated us, even though we had never seen him before. When we got back to our tent and went inside, everything had been tossed around. Our bags had been emptied, and our clothes were scattered everywhere. We quickly realized both of our hunting knives were gone, along with a lot of our clothes.
We immediately figured it had to be the man we saw. There were no other campsites or hiking trails he could have been coming from except ours. We jumped back in the car and drove toward where we had seen him, but he had disappeared. So we kept going until we reached a common area where other campers were gathered. We ran over and asked if anyone had seen him, describing what he looked like. Their reaction sent a chill through me.
The people there just stared at us without saying a word, which made everything feel even more disturbing. That’s when I told my friend, “We need to leave right now.” As we walked back to the car, we looked over a guardrail and saw all our clothes down in the woods. We collected them, but neither of us found our knives.
Knowing that this guy was still out there with those knives, and that no one around us seemed to care, scared us enough that we packed up and ended the trip early. There was no way we were staying in those woods for another night.
71. The Terrifying Tree
Let me start by saying I’m one of the most skeptical people you’ll ever meet. I’m not religious, and I don’t believe in ghosts, aliens, or anything like that. This is the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced, and I honestly have no logical explanation for it. No substances or alcohol were involved. My friends and I used to go camping in the White Mountains of New Hampshire most summers during middle school and high school.
Since we were a bunch of disorganized teenage boys, it always took us forever to get ourselves together and actually leave. We usually didn’t head out from southern Massachusetts, where we lived, until late afternoon or early evening. One year, we got there around 10 p.m. and decided that instead of hiking into the woods in the dark, we’d just camp near the parking lot and start the hike the next morning.
After hanging out for a bit and eating, everyone went to sleep except me and one other friend. We wandered over to a small wooden footbridge over a river. It was a perfectly clear night, full of stars with a pretty bright moon, and we spent a couple of hours just talking about random things—movies, games, life, everything.
It had to be well past midnight by then. While we were talking, we both started getting this creepy feeling that something was there. Something...wrong. At the far end of the bridge, there was this HUGE dead tree—no leaves, just twisted branches—standing out against the sky. We both said something like, “That tree is seriously creeping me out, but that’s ridiculous, right?”
At first we tried to laugh it off, but both of us kept getting more and more uneasy. Finally I said, “Forget this. I’m a grown man. I’m not scared of a tree. I’m going over there.” I made it about two-thirds of the way across the bridge, and suddenly it felt like something had reached into my chest and grabbed my heart. I went completely cold.
I backed away and said, “Yep, apparently I am scared of a tree. I honestly feel like if I go over there, I’m not coming back.” So we left the bridge and went back to sleep near the car. The next morning, after breakfast, we decided to start the trail by crossing that same bridge. Halfway across, my friend stopped cold. “Uh, dude...”
I looked toward the other side of the bridge. It was a clearing. There were no trees there.
72. Breaking And Entering
My aunt was home alone when she heard someone open the door and walk into the hallway. Since her husband, my uncle, wasn’t supposed to be home for a few more hours, she went downstairs to check if someone was there. She didn’t see anyone, but outside the door she noticed something terrifying: there were footprints in the snow leading up to the door, but none going away from it.
That was enough to make her panic, and when she looked again, she noticed a pair of unfamiliar shoes in the hallway. She ran upstairs and called 9-1-1. When the police arrived and searched the house, they found a homeless man hiding in a storage room, holding my uncle’s sawed-off shotgun. Luckily, he hadn’t found the ammunition, which was hidden somewhere else.
He was arrested, but according to my aunt, it was the most frightening thing she has ever gone through.
73. Luck Of The Irish
A few years ago, I was incredibly sick—seriously, seriously sick. It was a few weeks before my amputation, and I was fighting a severe bone infection. I was on all kinds of antibiotics and pain medication. I’m a huge Yankees fan, so my best friend got us tickets to a game at Yankee Stadium. She pushed me around the stadium in a wheelchair with a pile of blankets on me—it was freezing—just to cheer me up.
At one point, my friend left our seats to get hot dogs and snacks. That’s when things got strange. As soon as she walked away, an older Irish man sat down next to me. He offered me some of his spiked hot chocolate, but I said no thanks and explained that I was on a lot of medication. We started talking, and I told him what was happening in my life.
He asked if I was scared about losing my leg, and I told him I was. I was terrified of the unknown. He gave me some really meaningful advice and comforted me. He told me everything would be okay, and then he said, “If you have to be an amputee, try to be the best darn amputee in the world!”
My friend came back with the food...and asked who I had been talking to. There was no one sitting next to me. Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing, I don’t know. But it didn’t feel like that. It felt more like some kind of angel or presence showing up to tell me I was going to be okay. I guess my guardian angel is an Irishman with spiked hot chocolate. I’m not sure if this makes it creepier or not, but the Yankees were playing the Angels in that series.
74. Don’t Call Me By My Name
I was in the living room with my grandma. We were the only two people in the house. She was doing a crossword puzzle, and I was messing around on my iPad. The TV was off, and the windows were closed. Then, all of a sudden, I heard my name whispered clearly. It was so quiet that it somehow sounded loud. I looked up at my grandma and asked if she had said something.
She said, “No, but I heard your name too.”
75. Loyal To The End, And Beyond
When I was little, maybe seven or eight years old at most, I woke up one night and saw a white dog sitting in the doorway of my bedroom. That was strange, because we didn’t have a dog or any other indoor pet. As I watched, the dog stood up and walked down the hallway toward the living room.
I got out of bed too, looked down the dark, empty hallway where it had gone, and decided instead to head the other way to my parents’ room. I woke my mom up and told her there was a dog in the house. She got up, and we looked around for a while, but we didn’t find anything. She assumed I had been dreaming.
Later, when I was older, I found a picture of the dog my parents had when I was a baby. I was stunned. My mom told me that dog used to sleep in my doorway, like it was guarding my room. It had been gone by the time I was two years old. The dog in that picture was the same dog I had seen that night.
76. American Psycho
I was on a second date with a guy who wanted to stop by his house to pick something up, and he asked me to come inside. He was very attractive, but something about him made me uneasy, even though I couldn’t explain why. When we got to his house, the whole place felt... off. He clearly had money, and the house was beautiful. It was spotless, but also strangely empty. Almost too perfect.
There was nothing on the walls. No personal items anywhere. No books, no music, nothing at all. I asked how long he had lived there, and when he said, “five years,” I immediately got chills. While he was in the kitchen, he asked me to go into his bedroom and get something from the top drawer of his dresser. The second he said that, I felt ice run down my spine, and I moved closer to the front door. There was no way I was letting him get between me and the exit.
He asked me again to go into his room, and I laughed it off and said, “No, I’m starving, let’s go.” He asked a third time, clearly irritated now, and I started acting completely clueless, making a big deal about how hungry I was and asking what was taking him so long. He looked furious. So I walked out of the house and down the sidewalk, forcing him to come after me.
Once we got to the car, I kept up the act and insisted that he take me home. He did, in total silence. The whole ride felt cold and tense. When he pulled up in front of my place, he grabbed my face to kiss me goodbye. He bit my lip hard enough to make it bleed, and reached under my shirt and pinched me.
I managed to push him away, stumbled out of the car, and ran inside while he laughed. I ended up with a bruised face and a cut lip, and I was terrified because he knew where I lived. Even now, I still feel like I barely escaped a real psychopath.
77. Apparitions As Warnings
Mental illness runs heavily in my family, so when we get alarming phone calls about relatives, we usually brace for the worst. It has happened more than once. The first time was when my cousin was pregnant and excited about having her baby. Around the fifth month, both my mother and I started seeing dark baby-shaped figures around the house.
Because it was happening to both of us, we were frightened, but we didn’t really know what to do. About a week later, my cousin miscarried, and the figures disappeared. Then something similar happened again when my grandmother became very ill. This time, instead of baby-like shapes crawling around corners, my mother and I both saw a slumped figure.
Less than a week later, my grandmother died, even though we had been told she was recovering. The last experience is probably why my mother and I no longer feel afraid when we see these apparitions. My sister had struggled with depression for a long time and, because she was older, she lived in another country. One day my mother and I were in the kitchen while the hallway lights were off, and we both reacted at the exact same moment.
We had both seen a figure that immediately made us think of my sister. My mother took it as a warning and called her right away. Her roommate answered, and my mother asked her to check on my sister. It turned out my sister had tried to overdose on sleeping pills, and her roommate found her just in time to save her. Ever since then, I’ve believed that whatever these apparitions are, they may be trying to warn us before something terrible happens.
78. An Uneasy Feeling
There’s a cabinet at the top of my staircase, and I had set my water bottle on it. It wasn’t near the edge at all — it was right in the middle, where it couldn’t possibly fall off by itself or because of some random breeze. I was sitting on the couch a few feet away when the bottle suddenly shot off the cabinet like someone had punched it, and it went flying down the stairs.
I was home alone, it was 1 a.m., and I have no explanation for it. I’d rather not think too hard about it, so I just keep going with my life.
79. A Stopped Clock
My grandfather was admitted to the hospital on a Friday night. It wasn’t completely out of the ordinary. He wasn’t doing well, but he had been hospitalized before. The next day I went to work. I was worried, of course, but it wasn’t anything we hadn’t dealt with before. I tried to go about my day normally. We had customers, a friend stopped by and chatted for a while, and I spent the rest of my shift working on homework.
My grandfather was still in the back of my mind, but I was distracted by everything else going on. Then, at around 4 o’clock, I was talking with a coworker when I glanced at the clock and felt my stomach drop. Out of nowhere, I was overwhelmed by dread and this deep sadness. I kept talking, but the feeling wouldn’t go away. I clocked out at 5, and the heaviness was still there, so naturally my thoughts went straight to my grandfather.
Somehow, I just knew. When I got home, my mother told me my grandfather had died. I asked what time it happened. 4 o’clock.
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80. Come And Play
I used to work in a nursing home. One time, a resident refused to get on the elevator with me because she said she was afraid of “the little boy.” I didn’t think much of it until another resident came out of his room and asked me for “candy for the little boy.” After that, I decided to ask my mom, who was the charge nurse and had worked there for 13 years.
She told me that residents would mention seeing a little boy from time to time, and that he always seemed to want to play. All kinds of residents reported seeing him — some were mentally sharp, while others had severe dementia — but they all described the same little boy. Even after they moved to a new facility, reports of the little boy continued there too.
He seemed especially drawn to residents with poor eyesight. They described him as having very dark hair, and said he lived in a “tent,” where a tree had fallen on him. Then one day, I was helping feed a resident who had recently had a stroke. She couldn’t use her right hand and needed full assistance.
While I was feeding her, I suddenly felt a cold hand touch my arm. At that exact moment, the resident said, “Is that your boyfriend? He looks a little young for you!” That terrified me. By the next morning, that resident had passed away.
81. Stumbling On A Ghost Town
A little over 18 years ago, I had just left the armed forces. After visiting my hometown in Montana, I got back on the road and headed for my next station in Boise, Idaho. I decided to cut across the Idaho panhandle into Washington instead of taking the highway, which gets pretty winding and dangerous in winter when the roads ice over.
After driving for a while, I crossed into Washington early on a foggy Sunday morning. I really needed to use the bathroom, so I pulled into the next town I saw, something like Linden or Linder. It was small, but that didn’t seem strange since I grew up in a small Montana town. But the moment I got out of my car, I felt a chill. There wasn’t a single person anywhere.
There were cars and businesses, but no people at all. No one walking down the street, no logging trucks, nothing. I stopped at a gas station, but nobody was at the counter. I went around the side to see if the bathroom was unlocked, but it was locked. When I came back to the front of the building, I saw a Coke Classic delivery truck. It wasn’t moving, but its headlights were on, the hazard lights were flashing, and both front doors were open. It was just sitting there in the middle of the street.
I had a really bad feeling, so I got back in my car and drove the way I came. But even after I left, it got somehow even stranger. I’ve checked all kinds of maps, printed and online, and nothing called Linden or Linder exists. Even now, it still gives me chills.
82. Basement Of Horrors
I used to work in low-income home weatherization, basically providing free upgrades to help lower electricity and gas bills and make homes more comfortable for people who really needed it. One step in qualifying a home was testing combustion appliances to make sure they weren’t leaking carbon monoxide into the living space, because if they were and we sealed up the house, we could put the whole family in danger.
During a pre-inspection of a home on the edge of the city, I asked to see the owner’s water heater. He told me it was in the basement, which was pretty normal, and I explained that I had to inspect it before any work could begin. So he went into the kitchen and started moving the refrigerator. It turned out the basement entrance was under carpeting beneath the fridge.
I should mention that I inspected thousands of homes over the years and had never seen anything like that. Still, the job had to be done, so I pulled out my flashlight and shined it down the stairs, partly to check the layout but mostly to look for black widow spiders. That’s when I noticed a dead cat, mostly reduced to a skeleton.
Not my favorite thing to see, but honestly not that unusual in crawl spaces and basements. I took a few steps down and kept checking for spiders, then noticed a couple more small animal skeletons. At that point, I started worrying that gas, poison, or something else dangerous might have caused it. So I looked more carefully.
There were animal skeletons everywhere, at least ten from a quick glance. Some were so decayed that I couldn’t even tell what they had been. I also noticed that the owner was standing at the entrance a little too quietly, with his hand on the door. Something clicked in my mind, and I suddenly felt a strong sense of danger.
I was only about four steps away from the door being able to shut me in, I had no partner with me, there were disturbing remains all around me, and I realized how well hidden that basement entrance really was. I got out of there fast, told the guy I needed extra tools and would come back, and marked the job as unsafe for health and safety reasons while I was driving away.
I have no idea whether I was actually in danger. It may have been completely innocent. But I still remember the rush of adrenaline and that feeling of dread, and sometimes you just don’t take chances.
83. A Premonition
My mom was in a fatal accident on March 24, 2019. In the weeks before it happened, I kept dreaming that my teeth were falling out. I also had this strong, persistent feeling that something bad was coming. It wasn’t really fear, more like a clear sense that my life was going to change in a painful way and that I needed to prepare myself mentally.
That thought kept returning. I realized that for 26 years, nothing truly traumatic had ever happened to me, and that my easygoing life was going to end. So I started meditating to find some emotional stability. Then, on Sunday, March 24, I got a call from my sister saying my mom was in critical condition, and later that day she died in the hospital.
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84. Don’t Miss The Forest For The Trees
I deal with insomnia. One night, around 4:00 AM, I was sitting on my back porch smoking a cigarette. It was one of those unsettling nights with no breeze at all and complete silence. There are woods behind our house. While I was sitting there, I watched something terrifying happen.
I saw a figure moving through the trees. I don’t mean just walking around. It looked like it was leaping from tree to tree, maybe 30 or 40 feet up in the air. I was completely stunned and just sat there frozen, too scared and confused to even get up and run inside. Then the person, or whatever it was, stopped directly behind my house and looked at me.
At that point, it was maybe 50 feet away and around 40 feet up. It paused for about five seconds, staring in my direction. I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t an animal. Its shape looked human, and it didn’t resemble any animal I know. But the way it moved through the trees definitely wasn’t human either. No person could move like that.
A few seconds later, it was gone.
85. I See You
I was nine years old and watching Spongebob. I went into the kitchen to get a drink, and when I came back, the TV showed a message: “Welcome back. Did you like your drink?” By that point I was really scared, so I got my dad. And just like in every classic horror movie, the message was gone.
86. So Close, Yet So Far Away
My roommate’s sister lives in a suburban area of Delaware, just outside Wilmington. For a while, her neighborhood had been dealing with these strange break-ins where no one could figure out what, if anything, had been stolen. Then one day she came home and found a pair of men’s boxers sitting on her pillow. For anyone wondering, she lives alone.
She called 9-1-1 right away and got out of there fast, locking the doors behind her as she left. The police returned with her to the house and found the door unlocked, which meant the man was almost certainly still inside when she made the discovery.
87. Horror Unmasked
I used to live in a rental house that, along with the neighboring homes, faced a fairly busy city park. At night, once the park had emptied out, I liked to step outside, sit on the porch, and look at the trees and stars. One night around 1 a.m., I opened my front door and started to sit down. That’s when my blood ran cold. I saw a man standing in the empty park.
He was directly across from my house. He was dressed all in black and wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask looked detailed, but it was definitely some cheap store-bought thing. The sight of him gave me a chill. He didn’t move at all, even though I know he saw me. The whole neighborhood was quiet and motionless, and we just stood there, both refusing to budge.
We stared at each other for a long time before he finally wandered off. I called 9-1-1 because I figured he was checking out the neighborhood. Officers came and took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. A few months later, I was doing yard work along the side of my house, pulling a huge mess of weeds from a thicket under my kitchen window.
I noticed something that looked like trash and picked it up. It was the mask I had seen that night.
88. A Nightmare Come To Life
My room wasn’t very big. It was a standard square bedroom, mostly filled by a dresser, a bookshelf-TV stand combo, and my twin bed. The bed split the room in two, with the door on one side and the sliding closet on the other. Since I liked sleeping with the fan on, I had one of those long pull chains for the light so I could switch the light off and still keep the fan running.
One night, not long before bed, I was in my room messing around. I was a very active kid, and back then I was rarely anywhere in the house without a toy sword or some kind of stand-in nearby. That night was no different. I don’t remember why I swung it, especially in such a small room, but I did, and it hit the long pull chain for the light.
Anyone who has ever smacked one of those chains knows what happens. The chain flies upward, wraps itself around the light fixture, and switches off the light. Instantly, I was in total darkness. Annoyed, I climbed onto my bed and started reaching up carefully. I didn’t want to get my hand near the fan blades, but I needed to get close enough to untangle the chain. Then suddenly, I heard something that stopped me cold.
It was a shuffling noise, followed by a groan. It sounded close, like it was inside my room. Then it sounded like the closet door sliding open on its old track. I kept trying to reach up, but now the hair on my arms was standing up. The sound of the door finally stopped, but then I heard something worse: heavy, raspy breathing.
Of course I told myself I was imagining it. What little kid doesn’t have an overactive imagination? Still, I was terrified. I gave up on untangling the chain and reached instead for the very top of it, where it connected to the fixture. The breathing seemed closer now, and my mind was more than happy to fill in the rest, louder noises and the awful image of whatever was making them creeping toward my bed.
I found the chain and pulled. I know I pulled it. I heard the click, or at least I thought I did, but no light came on to push back the dark. I pulled again and again. Maybe the chain was wrapped too tightly to work. Maybe that was all it was... right? I didn’t want to stay there long enough to find out.
I jumped off the bed and lunged for my bedroom door, yanking it open and letting hallway light spill into the room. I spun around, toy sword still in my hand, but there was nothing there. The dim room stared back at me: bed, dresser, bookshelf, TV, Xbox. No monster.
I went back in and climbed onto the bed again. With the hallway light helping, I grabbed the base of the pull string and tugged firmly. With a loud click, the light came on and everything looked normal again. I unwound the chain from the fixture, climbed down, and stood there with bright spots dancing in my eyes from looking at the bulb, feeling a little shaky from the last few minutes.
But it was fine. It had all been my imagination. There was no monster. The light hadn’t come on because I was pulling the chain wrong. I could explain everything pretty easily... except for one thing: why was my closet door open?
89. Spooky
One night my roommate had gone home because he was sick, so I was excited to have the room to myself. Later that night, I woke up to the door opening. I didn’t think much of it because I assumed my roommate had come back. Then I heard footsteps crossing the floor and someone jump into his bed.
I thought it was a little strange that he had returned so soon, but I brushed it off. When I woke up the next morning, his bed was still perfectly made, and he had never come back that night. I don’t think I’ve ever been that scared in my life.
90. Glitching Your Life Away
Even as I write this, I’m getting a sense of deja vu. I’ve wanted to tell someone about this part of my life for a long time, but never really could. So I guess I’m telling a bunch of strangers online. One day I was walking to work when, out of nowhere, I felt the urge to take a different route than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a random, spur-of-the-moment decision to go another way, and it changed my life forever.
I turned down an alley I had never noticed before. As I remember it, I got maybe 15 feet in before something like an actual “glitch” happened. My mind felt scrambled. I no longer felt like I had a body, just like I was some half-conscious presence drifting through a strange dimension. Then, in the middle of all these colors and shapes, I saw a group of unusual-looking people who reminded me of businessmen in suits.
They looked shocked and panicked that I could see them. One of them made a quick movement, and everything went black. When things returned to normal, I was standing on a completely different street, the same street I always took to work. I felt sick, deeply unsettled, and strangely depressed. I’ve never used hard substances, never had hallucinations, and never experienced anything else like this.
The strangest part is that, as the glitch seemed to be correcting itself and I saw those “people” looking at me like I was some trapped animal, I had this intense feeling that I was being controlled. It still bothers me a lot to this day.
91. Haunted By A Boy In His PJs
Not long after I met my current boyfriend, I started staying over at his house. I usually fall asleep the second my head hits the pillow, but there, I would stay awake really late feeling uneasy. At first, I figured it was just because I was in an unfamiliar house. After a while, I started falling asleep at a normal time, but I’d wake up around 2 or 3 a.m. and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. Since it’s in a small town, there wasn’t much outside light.
Once my eyes adjusted, I kept thinking I could see a little boy sitting on top of the grandfather clock. This happened every night for a while. I wasn’t exactly scared, mostly just confused. He looked like a boy wearing old-fashioned pajamas, swinging his legs on top of the clock. Even then, I told myself it was probably sleep paralysis, dreaming, or just my imagination.
When I went back to my parents’ house on school nights, I started waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the same figure sitting on the dresser or on a ledge in my room. I slept alone in the basement, and after months of seeing the “little boy,” I wanted to move back upstairs because I thought my mind was getting the better of me.
One evening, I was home alone while my parents and brother were out at an appointment. I fell asleep on the couch in the living room and dreamed that the little boy was knocking over my mom’s ornaments on the coffee table. I woke up sweating and looked at the table. The ornaments were broken.
Of course, they could have already been broken and I just hadn’t noticed. The living room started to feel cold, so I went into my mom’s bedroom to watch TV while I waited for everyone to come home. In there, I kept catching movement out of the corner of my eye that looked like the little boy, but I never got a clear look.
By that point, I was sure it wasn’t sleep paralysis or dreaming, because I could move when I woke up and sometimes I was fully awake. I fell asleep in my mom’s bed and woke up to what sounded like the little boy laughing and running into the closet. That Friday, I went to my boyfriend’s house. He could tell something was wrong, but I wouldn’t say anything because I was afraid he’d think I was losing it.
That night, I was helping his mom bake and casually mentioned that I’d been having strange dreams about a little boy. She asked, “Was he a young boy in pajamas?” She knew exactly what I meant. She told me their house was pretty old, and while they’d lived there, odd things had happened—objects moving, voices, laughter—but for the past six to eight months, everything had gone quiet.
It’s been three years now, and I’ve moved out with my boyfriend to start college. I’m still seeing, sensing, and dealing with whatever it is. Things still get moved, and voices are still heard.
92. I'd Rather You Didn't
A few days ago, my six-year-old daughter was sitting in the passenger seat and looked at me and said, “Dad, when I’m seven, I’m going to kill you. No, wait—when I’m eight.” I asked, “How are you going to do that?” She smiled and said, “I’m going to drive over your head with this car.”
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93. Private Tutor
When my son was about two or three, he wouldn’t go to sleep, so I let him climb into my bed. My husband was already asleep, so I told my son he could quietly look at his books while I read mine. That’s when things got unsettling. He was calm for a little while, but then he suddenly started reading the book. Not just pretending—actually saying the words out loud, slowly. He couldn’t read, and it was a newer book we hadn’t even read to him yet, so it wasn’t something he had memorized.
I asked him how he knew what the words said, and he answered, “My friend John is telling me.” That really scared me.
94. Smile And Say Cheese!
Back in 2014, I stayed overnight at my cousin’s house on New Year’s Eve. It was just my three cousins, my brother, and me. We all decided to sleep in the same bedroom because we had only recently become old enough to stay home by ourselves, and our parents were going to be out all night, so we were a little nervous. The point is, we were completely sure that we were the only people in the house, and we all slept in the same room.
The next morning, I was getting into the car to leave when I happened to look through the camera roll on my phone from the night before. To my shock, I found five pictures of all of us asleep. Every single person in the house was clearly in the photos, fast asleep, which meant none of us could have taken them.
My aunt showed the photos to the landlord soon after, and he had no explanation. To this day, no one knows who took them—or how. Some of my friends still think I made the whole thing up.
95. From Playdate To Child Abduction
This happened a very long time ago, back in 1973. I know it was summer, I was six years old, and we were living on Monica Lane in Madison, Wisconsin. I had always sort of remembered pieces of it, but I didn’t connect everything until a few months ago when I was talking with my mom and she told me the full story.
I was a very social kid—outgoing, talkative, and friendly with everyone. At the time, it was a middle-class neighborhood, and three houses down from ours, on the same side of the street, there was a big park. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a salesman. My mom worked second shift at Meriter, while my dad worked during the day. I usually didn’t have a babysitter unless my parents went out for dinner or to a movie, but they did go out fairly often, and there were always older neighborhood kids available to babysit.
One sitter I really liked lived a few blocks away. Her name was Vicky, and she had babysat me a few times before without any problems. She would play games with me, do my hair, and play dress-up—normal babysitting things. One day, I had gone to the park with friends. I remember there was a ball field and a sandlot next to it. My friends wanted to play on the monkey bars, but I wanted to play in the sand. When I looked toward the sandbox, I saw my babysitter, Vicky, standing there. I told my friends I was going to the sandbox and ran over.
We played in the sand and built a castle, and then she asked if I wanted to get something cold to drink. It was extremely hot out, and of course I said yes. She took my hand and started walking me to her house. Along the way, she told me about her puppies and asked if I wanted to see them. I got excited and couldn’t wait to get there. That was where my own memory used to stop, but after my mom told me what happened, the rest came rushing back.
My mother had been talking with my sister and me about places we used to live, and when we got to Monica Lane, I mentioned the park and how huge it had seemed. She asked if I remembered being kidnapped. At first I thought she was joking, but the look on her face said otherwise. She told me it was around five in the afternoon when one of my friends came to the door asking me to come back outside, assuming I had gotten bored and gone home. When my mom checked the house and realized I wasn’t there, she—seven months pregnant with my sister—ran to the park, calling my name.
She asked several kids if they had seen me, but no one knew. Then she went to the ball field and asked some older boys if they’d seen me. One of them, maybe around 14, said he’d seen a young woman playing in the sand with a little girl who matched my description, and then the two of us had walked off together.
My mom ran across the street to a nearby house, asked to use the phone, and called 911. By the time the officers arrived, my dad had gotten home, and some of the neighbors were helping my mom look for me. A search started, with people calling my name and knocking on doors. The police went back to the park and asked more questions, trying to figure out who had taken me.
Somehow, between the boys and the neighbors, they figured out who had led me away. The police and several others went to her house. She lived with her parents, but they weren’t home. When she answered the door, she said she hadn’t seen me and claimed she had been home all day.
The officers asked if they could come in, and for some reason, she said yes. They searched the house, went down to the basement, and found me there. That’s the part my mom knew, and then my own memories started coming back. It was like a floodgate opened, and I started crying. At six, you trust people, especially someone who had already been in your home. I’d never gotten a bad feeling from her before, and neither had my parents. But when we walked into her house, I remember a cold, awful feeling washing over me. I started crying and saying I wanted to go home, over and over.
She brought me into the kitchen, gave me a glass of water and a tissue, and I could hear dogs barking. Next to the kitchen was an open staircase leading to the basement, where the barking was coming from. She started trying to persuade me to go downstairs, saying there were toys and games. I reluctantly agreed, and she took my hand to lead me down. The dogs started barking even more wildly, and I began screaming.
At that point, Vicky completely changed. She started yelling at me to be quiet and threatened to throw me in with the dogs if I didn’t stop. She dragged me downstairs while still shouting. I was terrified. I remember crying so hard that I was hyperventilating, and I was screaming so much that no sound was even coming out. Then, just as suddenly, she changed again and became sweet and calm, trying to soothe me. She told me she had only been joking and said she wanted to play hide-and-seek.
She must have been good at calming me down, because the next thing I remember is hearing knocking on the front door upstairs, and I wasn’t crying anymore. The houses in that area were all similar and not very large, so you could hear everything from anywhere inside. She told me the people at the door were her friends and that they were going to play hide-and-seek too. She convinced me to let her put masking tape over my mouth so I wouldn’t make a sound, then lifted me into a large wooden box beside the dog kennel. She covered me with blankets and told me to stay very quiet so no one would find me.
The whole time, the dogs were going wild, but once she calmed me down, they settled too. They still looked frightening, but they weren’t lunging anymore, just growling a little. Then the knocking at the door started again. I remember curling up in that box, confused, still afraid the dogs would get out and hurt me. I was crying and hyperventilating. At some point, I pulled the tape off my mouth because I couldn’t breathe, but I stayed quiet because I was afraid of what she would do if I made noise.
I lay in that hot, smelly box beside a large bag of dog food, sweating and crying. I pushed the blankets aside just enough that I could pull them back over myself if someone came. I remember thinking about my dad and wondering if he would find me. Then, all of a sudden, I heard adults downstairs shouting my name. The dogs started going wild again. Men kept calling for me, and I heard one of them say, “If you don’t quiet those dogs, I will.”
I was in a large storage chest, with tape hanging from my mouth, when they opened the lid. I remember a kind man asking my name and whether I was okay. I don’t think I answered with anything but tears, screaming, and grabbing onto him so tightly that my dad had to gently pull me away.
I remember my parents taking me to the hospital afterward to make sure I was okay, and that’s about all I remember after that. My mom said Vicky was found guilty of attempted kidnapping and, as far as she knew, ended up in prison, though she couldn’t remember for how long. We moved away not long after, and I’ve never gone back.
I do know my mom said Vicky’s parents seemed unusual, though they didn’t really know them. She had first met Vicky through neighbors who had used her as a babysitter, and no one had ever said anything bad about her. I had always seemed happy when she watched me. She lived in the general area—about two blocks over and one block down. My mom said they never picked her up; she always walked to our house. When my parents drove her home after babysitting, they never noticed anything strange.
My parents only met her parents once, when they came to our door asking for forgiveness and saying Vicky hadn’t meant any harm and was a good girl. My mom said my dad grabbed her father by the shirt and told him that if they ever came onto our property again, they would regret it. I still remember her name and a little of what she looked like, but if she walked up to me now, I probably wouldn’t recognize her.
96. One Man Down
I joined an “intentional community” when I was 19. It was basically a group of hippies living in tents on a piece of land. The leader was a charming guy who was usually shirtless, and the group included several young women, along with a couple of other men and one older woman. After I moved in, I found out there was a disturbing secret.
I learned that one of the other men had disappeared after arguing with the leader. He packed his car with everything he owned, and then... vanished. They searched the property for his body and even considered calling the police, but decided not to. Instead, they just stood around the fire holding hands. I left.
97. The Others
My mom and older sister say that when I was little, I would suddenly start crying and asking where my mom was, even when she was standing right in front of me. When my mother tried to comfort me by saying she was there, I would yell for my other mom. And apparently, it got even creepier.
I would describe this other person, who supposedly always carried a bloody hammer. They said it scared them badly, but one day when I was two, they tried asking me about it again and I couldn’t remember any of it.
Pxfuel
98. Speaking To Yourself
One night, I showed up at work and my boss looked stunned to see me—he said I had just called in sick. I had no idea that was only the beginning of one of the strangest experiences of my life. When I called home, expecting my wife to answer, the voice on the other end... was mine.
I practically shouted, “Where is Ann?” The voice replied, “Ann’s in bed. Who is this?” I dropped the phone, told my boss I had to leave, and ran for the door. As I left, I heard him answer the phone behind me with “Hello?” and then start screaming. I sped home, rushed to the front door, and still wasn’t ready for what I found.
My wife was sitting there watching TV and seemed surprised that I was home. I asked who had been there, and she said no one. After a long conversation with her, I tried to call the prison to explain what was happening, but the phone was dead. When I got back to work, Dave was acting strangely and asked me, “How are you doing this?”
He told me that after I left, he answered the phone and the person on the line sounded exactly like me. It scared him, so he hung up. Then, a minute later, while he could actually see my car leaving the lot, “I” called again from home asking what was going on. He said that version of me sounded irritated, claimed I was sick, said I didn’t want to play games, accused him of prank calling, and hung up.
After I convinced him I truly had no idea what was going on, we went back to work. Later, I found out the phone line for my area had been knocked down by a storm the night before. It remains the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.
99. Frighteningly Accurate
My dad watched his mother die from a ruptured gallbladder when he was 12, and he still remembers every detail. One night, my sister got out of bed almost an hour after going to sleep and walked up to him. The conversation went like this:
Sister: “Daddy, your mommy died wearing a red sweater, jeans, sneakers, and her hair was in a ponytail, right? And her hair was blonde?”
Dad dropped the book he was reading, stared at her wide-eyed, and said, “Yes...”
Sister: “What color were her eyes?”
Dad: “Blue... why?”
Sister: “Oh, she doesn’t have them anymore, just empty sockets. I was curious.”
Then she calmly went back to bed.
100. Friend Bear
My daughter is almost two now and has been sleeping in her own room for a while. We use one of those video baby monitors where you can watch and hear the baby on a little screen, or switch the picture off and keep just the sound. About a month ago, I was sitting in bed late at night when I heard her babbling to herself.
It was really late, around one or two in the morning—much later than she would normally be awake unless she was sick or teething. So I turned the picture on. That’s when it started to feel unsettling. I saw her standing in her crib, angled partly away from the camera.
I could see her hands moving in front of her and only part of her face. This is important because we’ve been teaching her ASL since she was about three months old, and she’s been signing back to us since around ten months. I could see her signing words like “nice,” “silly,” and “fun,” but also, strangely, “no,” “don’t like,” and “bear.”
Being a responsible mother—and also not wanting to deal with an exhausted toddler in the morning—I got up to see what she was doing. When I went into her room, she was still standing there, signing and babbling toward the far corner.
I asked what she was doing and who she was talking to. Her answer immediately creeped me out. She signed and said, as best she could, “friend,” using her whole hands instead of just her index fingers, and then signed “bear” again. I told her no, Bear—one of her stuffed animals—was in bed behind her, not in the corner. She just giggled at me and signed and said “silly” and “mommy.”
She was obviously fully awake, so I sat down in the rocker next to her crib and tried to figure out what had woken her up. But all she would say was “friend” and “bear,” and every now and then she would duck down like she was hiding and make shushing noises. Finally, I asked her who Friend Bear was. Her next response gave me chills.
She doesn’t talk clearly yet, but with the most serious expression a 20-month-old can manage, she said very clearly, “No name, no name, shhhhh.” At that point I was thoroughly unsettled, so I told her to ask “No Name Friend Bear” to go home because it was too late to play, and then I did what any loving mother would do.
I gave her a pacifier, went back to my room, turned the monitor off completely, and hid under the covers while my loving husband protected me from nameless invisible bears.
