There are things that go bump in the night...and sometimes, we'll never be able to explain them. Read on to discover spooky stories from Redditors who had some very freaky encounters.
1. The Phantom Call
I still don’t know what happened. I have chills. I left for work around 9:00 and my husband was home with my son for the day. I went to lunch at 12:30. At 1:00 I get a call from an unknown number. Usually I ignore these calls but something told me to answer. As soon as I heard the voice, I panicked. My five-year-old son was on the other end crying.
He said he was taking a nap and when he woke up his daddy was gone. I said ok, I will come over since I’m still on lunch. I thought maybe my husband went to work in the garage or to take a shower or something and just freaked my son out a little when he woke up. I tell him to stay on the line and that it’s about a 10-minute drive for me.
He doesn’t say much but I can still hear his breathing on the other end. This is where it gets freaky. I have chills writing this part. As soon as I enter the end of my block, the phone call ends. I pull into the driveway and my husband’s car is still there, the front door is shut. My neighbor is getting groceries from his car so I say a quick greeting and head inside.
My son and husband are sitting on the couch watching tv. My husband is playing on the cell phone. I asked him what happened, and he is extremely confused. I tell him about the call and he acts like he doesn’t believe me. I thought it was a mean prank from him so I asked my son.
“Did you call mommy and say you couldn’t find daddy?” “No. Can I have a juice box?” He’s too young to be good at lying so I 100% believe him. I feel like I’m going crazy at this point. I asked if my husband ever left the room or gave our son the cell phone. He says no to both. I check the call logs on that phone and there’s nothing.
We don’t have any other phones of any type in the house. I still don’t know what happened but I’m beyond creeped out at this point.
2. Lost In The Woods
I grew up in a densely forested rural area in central Virginia, and like most kids my age (10, at the time of this story) I spent a lot of time playing in and around the woods. My best friend and I had found a creek one day while exploring different deer trails through the woods.
This creek we happened on was a very rare find and the perfect spot for us to play. It was wide and deep enough to swim around in and had nice, soft mossy banks on either side to rest on after we had tired ourselves out. The water was cool and clear, no copperheads, and no mosquitoes because the water was constantly running. We were psyched.
After a few hours of swimming we had to walk back home for lunch, but made plans to pack lunch the next day so we could have a picnic on the creek banks and spend the whole day there. The next morning we set out for the woods at around 1 pm, planning to have the picnic first and swim after.
We entered at the same spot we had the previous day and followed what we thought was the same deer trail. It was not. This is where it began to get creepy. At the point where we should have found the creek, we walked into a small clearing that was covered in huge, thick ferns. We had definitely never walked past this before.
So, being both hungry and tired of walking, we decided to eat in the clearing. We laughed and played around there for a while, spitting watermelon seeds at each other from our lunch. It was an absolute blast by then and we were both in wonderful, giddy moods. That all changed quickly. It happened soon as we packed up and set back out to find the creek.
As we walked on, the woods started to feel darker and colder. We got skittish and I noticed my friend kept whipping her head around to look behind us. After about a half hour of walking we came upon what looked like an entire overgrown bathroom. Sink, toilet, and bathtub all sitting arranged together and covered in ivy.
It’s pretty common to find weird stuff like this in the middle of the woods, so we just walked on and made jokes to lighten the mood, calling it Bigfoot’s Bathroom. But we still had no idea what we were getting into. After another hour of walking and not seeing anything we recognized, we started to panic. Instead of trying to reach the creek we were now just trying to find our way back home or out of the woods, at least.
I told her we should follow the sun and eventually we would come up on a road or someone’s property where we could find help. She insisted on another way and we began yelling at each other out of fear and, let's be honest, little girl bossiness. I told her if she thought she was so right she should just go her way and we would see who got out first, so we split up.
Now as an adult, I fully acknowledge I was being a stubborn brat, and also an idiot. It was the worst possible thing we could have done. Not 10 minutes after splitting up I began to hear someone walking maybe 100 feet behind me. Thinking it was my friend deciding to go my way after all, I slowed down so she can catch up to me.
Instead, whatever it was matched my pace. I slow down, it slows down. I stop, it stops. This went on for hours. The whole time I was going back and forth on whether or not it was in my head or there was really something following me. I picked up a big stick, swung it a few times to make sure it was sturdy if I had to hit someone, and trucked on.
As it began to get dark, I came up on something that made my heart sink into my stomach. It was Bigfoot’s Bathroom. I had just walked in a huge circle, for hours, despite being 100% sure I was following the setting sun west the entire time. Confused and frustrated, I sat down on a log and just screamed my little heart out while smacking my stick repeatedly into the ground.
As I tried to collect myself, I heard the footsteps again walking up on me from behind. I called out my friend’s name as loud as I could. No answer. Then, after a short pause, the steps began to run towards me. I jumped up and booked it fast as I could in the opposite direction.
Now, this is the truly horrifying part. I typically omit it while telling people this story. As I was sprinting through the darkening woods, I began to hear what I thought were church bells. I looked up to see the darkest, deepest cloud I have ever seen in my life. In the middle it was so black it was like looking into the night sky, and the dark grey around it seemed to be swirling.
It gave me a horrible feeling to look at, almost like the nausea you get when looking through binoculars too long. What sickened me further is that I realized the sound of the bells was coming through the hole in the cloud. They were deafeningly loud, I mean really booming out of this thing. When I realized this, I stopped in my tracks.
I felt a sense of absolute and overwhelming dread that has gone unmatched in all my 24 years on this planet. Something in my head began screaming that if I did not run away from whatever the heck that cloud was no one would ever see me again, I would be gone. I did not want to run toward the thing chasing behind me either, though, so I made a sharp right and took off away from both.
It was now completely dark and I was running blind through the woods, smacking through branches, wheezing, and tripping every few feet for what seemed like another hour. Until I smacked into something low and flew over it, hitting the ground so hard all the air in my lungs was knocked out of me. As I lay there trying to recover, I realized I couldn’t hear the bells anymore.
Then my eyes adjusted more to the dark, and I realized what had just made me fall was an old fence. Grabbing hold of it, I prayed it would lead me to a farm, and sure enough it did. I walked up over a hill about a mile to the back of the farmhouse, explained what had happened, and the farmer graciously gave me a ride back home.
I was covered head-to-toe in scrapes, oozing blood, and more exhausted than I had ever been in my life, but I was finally safe. It was past 9 pm when I finally walked through my front door. That’s when I learned the chilling truth. My friend had gotten back shortly after we split and figured I had as well, so she hadn’t told anybody I was lost.
My family just figured I was still out after dark, which wasn’t uncommon for me. They were shocked when I walked in beat up and crying. Nobody had been looking for me at all. To this day I wonder how long they would’ve waited to come find me if I hadn’t been lucky enough to find the fence, and if it would’ve been too late.
3. Who Are You, Patty?
For backstory, my family and I have been staying with my parents for three months because I’ve had some health problems. We didn’t tell a lot of people because we were still in the same town. Last Monday my mom told me I had received a letter in the mail and I could tell by her voice she was intrigued.
It was strange that I was getting mail at her address as they had only lived there about two years and it had never been my permanent home. I head downstairs—and it got more bizarre in an instant. She hands me a written letter addressed to me, but using my maiden name. I’ve been married over 10 years and my name is now distinctly different.
The return address is in town from “Patty C”. I don’t know anyone by that name. To reiterate, my parents didn’t own this home when I went by my maiden name. So we’re obviously very interested to see the contents of this envelope. I open it and unfold a hand-written note on 9.5x11 ruled notebook paper.
The letter is very personal so I won’t type it out but it goes into detail about my health struggles and how this Patty C person cares deeply for me and is praying for me to get better. She wrote like we are best friends. At the bottom she signed her name with a PS to call her anytime.
My mom and I are so incredibly confused and concerned about who this person is, so I decide to call the number. But wait, it got even crazier. A woman picks up and I ask for Patty C. The woman pauses and then sighs and explains that her mother, Patty C, died a year and half ago.
I apologize and am about to hang up, more bewildered than ever, when this woman, let’s call her Kim, asks why I’m calling for her mother on her (Kim’s) cell phone. I’m not sure what to say and stumble through an explanation that I received a letter from her mother and it listed this number. Kim is silent for a while.
Then she says she’s only had this cell number for six months, well after her mother’s death. I apologize again and say there must be some mistake and hang up. My mom and I decided to google the address; it’s a small public park in town. I’m so confused. Paranormal occurrence? Extremely strange glitch? Extraordinary coincidence? Who knows. This is going to bother me for the rest of my life.
4. My Silent Friend
When I was 13, I babysat a little girl named Emma, who was one of the sweetest kids you could think of. I was a regular babysitter for her, so much so that when I couldn't babysit for a few months, she called all her other babysitters by my name. This story happened after I came back to being a regular babysitter for her.
It was about 10:30 at night. I had already put Emma to bed and had been channel surfing. The house was set up so that the front half was open concept. The living room, dining room, and kitchen were side by side, and in between the living room and dining room was an open doorway to the back half of the house. At one end was Emma's room, while the other end had her parents’ bedroom with the bathroom connected to the parents’ room.
Now while sitting on the couch, I heard something run down the hall to the bathroom. Assuming it was just Emma going to the bathroom, I let a few minutes go by. When I heard the feet heading back down the hall, I turned to tell her to go back and make sure she flushed as I hadn't heard it. What I saw almost made me scream.
I saw the tips of black hair that had run past the open doorway. Here's the problem, Emma is blonde. I quickly jumped up and rushed to Emma's bedroom, throwing open the door. Her nightlight was bright enough to make her out as she sat up and looked at me, rubbing her eyes in confusion.
I asked her if she had gone to the bathroom. When she shook her head I did a once-over of her room, checking under her bed and a quick peek in her closet. I didn't see anything and I just told Emma I was double-checking for monsters. I tucked Emma back in saying goodnight as I headed out of her room again, leaving it slightly open.
I began to walk away but stopped when I heard Emma speak, thinking she was going to ask me something I turn to listen—only to hear the single most terrifying thing of my life. "You should have said something, don't scare her, I really like her”. I didn't say anything to the mom about it and continued to babysit Emma until they moved away.
I always made an effort after that to "include" the being. If Emma was drawing, an extra spot was set up. It seemed to make Emma happy and nothing ever startled me again.
5. The Tapper
When my mother was about 18, my mother had a terrifying experience. She was visited by what she calls "The Tapper". Every single night for three months, someone would tap on the window of the room she was in as soon as she was alone, even when the curtains were drawn. As soon as anyone else came into the room or went outside to investigate, it would stop, and no one would be outside.
My grandpa and both uncles were living in the house as well. After three months, the tapping stopped. My grandpa and uncles decided to take off fishing one night, and my mom stayed behind. The sun had just gone down, and my mom was sitting in the living room reading when suddenly it happened again. She assumed it was my younger uncle, Jesse, because he was a joker, so she told him to knock it off.
It continued, so she got up from the couch and went to the window, which still had the curtains drawn. She tapped on the window through the curtain. What happened next was absolutely chilling. Instead of tapping, it sounded like a hand slammed against the window in response. She went back to the couch, hoping it was a prank. Almost immediately, the phone rang.
My grandpa was calling her from the neighbor’s house to tell her they stopped in to say hi, and the neighbors offered to help them dress the fish. My mom said, "Well, take Jesse back there with you and make him stop slamming on the windows". My grandpa replied, “Jesse is here". She ran to the front door and locked it, leaving the phone off the hook.
My grandpa told her they were coming over and hung up. They ran up the road from the neighbor’s, and when they got there, what they found was seriously creepy. They saw a guy standing by the front window in the bushes. He stood up when they started screaming and took off towards the fence. The guy looked like he was a good seven feet tall. They chased him to the property line, where a wooden fence separated them from the neighbor’s.
He jumped over the fence, which was seven feet high, without using his hands. His legs went completely over the top. They climbed over the fence to keep chasing him, but he was gone. The property on that side of the fence was just dirt and grass; there were no trees or buildings. The neighbor’s house was a long distance from the fence, and there was nothing else around to hide in. They never heard the tapping or saw anyone that looked like that guy again.
6. Fiery Phantasm
When I was just under two years old, we started renting a tiny little house out in the boonies. Shortly after we moved in, I started having awful nightmares, something I'd never suffered from before. I would wake up screaming, "Fireman! fireman" and point out the window. Since we were in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, there were no firemen outside, nor did my parents recall me ever being scared by sirens, fires, or firemen.
The nightmares and fear were new and inexplicable. We moved a lot back then and did not live in the house for more than five or six months, but I had the nightmares consistently the whole time we lived in this one place. After we moved, they stopped immediately. Years later, we moved to another town 30 minutes away. My mom stayed friendly with several people from the small town we originally lived in and was visiting with one of them.
Somehow the topic turned to the house we rented, and my mom mentioned how it hadn't been a great place to live for a lot of reasons, and she also happened to mention my nightmares. The woman she was visiting was horrified. She told my mom that the previous owner of the home had set himself ablaze after building a campfire in the side yard. He had passed from his injuries.
The place where he had burned to a crisp was the same place I pointed to every time I had the nightmare. I wasn't terrified of firemen; I was terrified of the fire man, the one I somehow saw outside the house every night.
7. History Repeats Itself
I grew up in a two-story house that was built in the 1920s or so. Our neighbor told us the story, as she grew up in a house a block away, and it happened when she was in school. Apparently in the 1950s or 1960s, a school teacher lived in the house. After her family had left that morning, she was in one of the bedrooms and shot herself, falling into the hallway.
So going forward about 20 or 30 years, my mom would stay up late watching TV, and would sometimes hear a loud noise coming from upstairs. Her description was terrifying. She described it as someone falling out of bed, or a picture falling off the wall, or something like that.
She'd go upstairs and check on me, my sister, and my dad, and we'd all be asleep in our rooms, nothing would be out of order. And then, when I was probably 16 or 17 or so, I was up at 2 or 3 am watching TV, and I heard a loud thud noise, like a body hitting the floor. I didn't imagine it, because my cat had been startled, too.
My sister didn't live in the house anymore, and I'm pretty confident it wasn't my parents falling out of bed or anything. So I picked up the cat, went up the stairwell, past the room where the lady shot herself, went into my room and closed the door.
8. A Friendly Tip
About a year ago, I was out riding my motorcycle on this long rural highway. There wasn't nothing around but farmland and a few cars here and there. I saw this old country store/gas station and decided to stop in and rest a bit. I'm standing there having a smoke and having a drink when this dude on a Harley Shovelhead rolls up with long stringy hair and dressed like he's straight out of Easy Rider.
He yells over the motor "Your back tire looks low, better check it out!” Then he just rides off. Now, this guy was pretty memorable not just because of how he looked but also he wasn't wearing a helmet which struck me as odd due to the fact my state has had a helmet law for decades.
I started looking at my rear tire and sure enough I could hear a hiss and found a small hole. My guess is I picked up a nail and it just came out. So I walk inside the store to see if they have any plugs for my tire. I go up to the cashier to pay for my stuff. Then I noticed the oddest thing. This dude’s picture is hanging on the wall behind the counter.
I'm staring at this old picture and I'm certain it's him so I ask the cashier, "Hey, the guy in that picture, you know him? I'm pretty sure he just saved my life. He rode up just now and told me that my rear tire looked low, and he was right. If I'd rode out of here it would've went flat with me tearing down the road at 70mph. That would've been bad”.
She looked at me all bug-eyed and said "Yeah, that's my father. He's been gone almost 50 years”. I started laughing, not taking it seriously, and said "Guess it was a ghost! How'd he die?" Her words made me tingle all over. She said "It was an accident on his motorcycle. He lost control and hit a tree. They said it looked like his tire went flat. Oh and you ain't the first person that's said they seen him".
I wasn't laughing at this point and I asked her "What kind of bike did he ride”?. "A 66 Harley Shovelhead".
9. He Knows, He Always Knows
I have four sons. My oldest is six and he's the one I'm curious about. Since he was very young, first learning to talk, he's occasionally said things that don't make any sense for him to know. We were on vacation with my in-laws at the beach when he was two and he had a blast in the water with my husband and me.
The next day, we got up bright and early to go back and he adamantly refused. He kept insisting that there were alligators in the water. We tried to reason with him that alligators didn't live in saltwater, but he wasn't having it. Well, my husband had taken one of our twins, almost a year old, into the water and they were playing. Then we hear someone start screaming.
A few moments later, a man comes running from the pier yelling at him to get out of the water and for us to get away from the water. He explained that while watching the water from the pier, he saw an alligator just underneath the water, stalking my husband from a distance. He called 9-1-1 and animal control arrived and they were eventually able to locate and capture the alligator.
It was eight feet long. There had been storms during the night and it was mating season. The explanation was that he was looking for a mate and had come in through a freshwater river that runs into the sea. But how could my son have known about that hours before it happened?
Another time, I was going outside to do yard work and he told me not to go near the bushy tree, the fig tree, because there was a rattlesnake under it. I thought it was just childhood imagination. I'm doing the yard work and I go over to that tree to see if any figs are ripe and I heard the rattle.
I looked down and I was about three feet away from a rattlesnake and it wasn't happy to see me. I quickly got away as not to disturb it further and hope it would go on its way. He shouldn't have known it was there. But that wasn’t even the scariest one.
Another time, we were going to go visit my mom and he was asleep. We hadn't told him where we were going because she had a surprise for him. We got in the car and he said you can't go this way to Grandma's because the bridge is out. We always went that way if my husband was driving and the bridge had been fully operational the day before.
Sure enough, we get to the bridge and it’s tapped off with a detour sign. There's no way he should have known because word hadn't gotten out yet, especially since my cousin is the local supervisor and he didn't tell anyone about it until after I called him. I honestly find this all a little creepy because I can't logically explain it.
10. It Follows
Four years ago, I moved into my first apartment. It was a small studio with no bedroom door. It was the first time I've ever lived on my own and I brought my two cats with me. I had a long mirror hanging on my closet door. Many nights I felt like something dark was in the mirror and was watching me.
I kept telling myself that it was in my mind and this was the first time living on my own and I was just trying to get used to things. The sight and feeling happened most nights. But things escalated very quickly. One day I was sitting on my couch and heard a rustling noise and looked over at my trashcan.
It was a swing lid and I watched it swing to the right, then to the left and then it stopped. I walked over to inspect. No vent air was hitting it, both cats were in the bedroom and there wasn't any trash inside. I thought it was strange but pushed it out of my mind.
A couple of months later, a friend and her three-year-old daughter came over and we hung out on my patio. Her daughter kept going in and out of my apartment, shutting the sliding glass door behind her each time. After a while, she ran to the glass door in a panic and opened it, jumped out and slammed it shut.
Then she threw a rock at the glass door. We asked her what was wrong and what scared her. We asked her if the cats scared her or a spider. Her reply was so disturbing, it’s unforgettable. She simply said: "ghost". I was stunned. I hadn't told anyone what was going on before this. After a while, things started to happen more and more.
My cats would fight on my bed or be doing something on my bed and then would all of a sudden stop and look at the top left corner of my bedroom simultaneously. It would ALWAYS be the left corner. I always checked to see if it was a bug or dust or anything else and it wasn't. They would be facing the opposite direction and then both turn and look at that corner.
One day I went into my bedroom to get a winter headband from my closet. I looked at my bed before walking into the closet and for some reason made a mental note that my bed was made and nothing but two pillows were on it. I'm normally a messy person. I walked in my closet knowing the headband was there because I saw it the day before.
I couldn't find it and said screw it, I'll just wear the hat I found. I turned and walked out of the closet and draping off the side of the bed right in front of the closet door was my headband. As time went on, I became more and more freaked out. I started sleeping with the bathroom light on. I woke up one night and experienced something that haunts me to this day.
First, I felt two very light footprints at the end of my bed. I looked around and saw one cat fast asleep in the cat tree in the corner and the other fast asleep next to my pillow. Out of the corner of my eye I see the corner of my comforter flip up. Then all of a sudden it felt like a large hand grabbed the right side of my face and I felt like I was spinning and felt sick and kept trying to force my eyes open but I couldn't.
It had to have been for 15 seconds but it felt longer. Finally I was able to open my eyes and the spinning and ill feeling stopped. Shortly after I felt two light footprints at the end of my bed again. Things would happen and then nothing for a couple of months. One night I woke up and saw my hair brush and night cream slam onto the ground.
At first I thought it was my older cat because she liked to knock things over to wake me up. I kept calling her name and my younger cat walked in from the living room to inspect what was going on. I kept calling my older cat’s name and peered into the living room and saw her, and she wouldn't come into the room. She looked scared.
To further explain why it wouldn't be anything else, my bathroom countertop had a round curb that went upwards so something couldn't easily slide off. I had also closed the vent in my bathroom because it would get hot air on to my hair products. After some time, I rented a bigger apartment in that complex.
I went to the first one to clean the bathroom and was there by myself. A figure walked past the door. After moving into my second apartment, I thought my nightmare was over—I was so wrong. The realization that I was being followed by the spirit came to light. It knocked on my door and without realizing it, I let it in.
Thus more things have happened and now living in a townhouse, it still appears every so often.
11. My Roommate Francis
Months back on a Sunday I was having a nightmare where I was yelling for someone to leave and they wouldn’t. I wake up to see this cloud of mist at the foot of my bed and it just glides out of the room. The whole time I’m watching I’m just like “oh cool it’s leaving” then it dawned on me what I saw and got spooked.
Obviously there are a dozen ways to argue that didn’t happen, so although I know what I saw I was like eh, not worth it. But these kinds of things got worse. My thermostat is in my living room. I KNOW the consistent temperature of my apartment. Even through the night I know it, because I do a decent amount of all-nighters.
Now, the big thing with ghosts is they have a cold presence. On Sundays I’ll always wake up sweating buckets with the furnace running constantly as though the thermostat is measuring the house as really cold. But this only happens on Sunday nights. A while back my friend is over.
I just addressed the ghost, being like “Hey let’s set some ground rules, what’s your name? Francis? I’m going to call you Francis. I don’t mind you, but you can’t be messing with me and ruining my sleep schedule”. The random intense furnace stuff stops, but still, someone could say it was all in my head, selective stuff or some logical debunking.
I will casually talk to Francis just when I get home from work, like “Hey Francis I’m home!” Or whatever. Sunday, before the start of my three-day overnight shifts, I go “Hey Francis I’m gonna be doing overnights the next three nights so you got the place to yourself. No parties though”.
Tuesday night, my same friend is over and I’m running late for work by at least a half hour. Clearly Francis is kind of salty because I’m not giving him the space I told him I would. My friend can’t find their socks anywhere while I’m getting ready for work. Get this: I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth and their socks ARE UP ON THE SHELF IN MY BATHROOM.
I’m like what the heck, Francis moved your socks. There is no way in heck those socks were there before. I was in the bathroom earlier that night and they were not there and my friend never went to the bathroom the whole time they were over. That’s the most unexplainable experience of it all. It didn’t stop there, either.
When I am leaving my driveway, my car always shines its light through the back door window all the way to the door of my downstairs neighbor’s. I’m nosy so I always peer through. That night I didn’t but my friend did and jumps in their seat swearing they saw a pale old man staring at them through the window.
I didn’t see it, so it still could be our brains playing tricks along with a trick of the light, although I’ve never had a weird glare or reflection any time I look through that window. Also, I would always shrug off the constant times I’d wake up from a nap or go to one of my doors and see it was unlocked. I’m a forgetful person and didn’t grow up locking doors.
I’ll often even be like “Oh yeah I recall forgetting to lock it when I came home”. But sometimes I don’t recall forgetting to lock it and now I’m thinking that’s because Francis will be opening it when he’s moving around the house. Eventually, I finally messaged my landlord asking about the ghost. He’d never had tenants talk about hauntings, apparently.
I go on, telling him about Francis. Then it got bone-chilling. He stops me mid-sentence BECAUSE FRANCIS USED TO OWN THE HOUSE AND LIVED HERE DECADES AGO.
12. Not My Problem
I grew up in an old farmhouse where my grandfather had also been born and raised. The house was originally constructed in 1858. I remember hearing stories of how "things" had occupied there off and on throughout the years. My parents' friends stayed overnight one evening on the living room floor.
In the morning they were speaking to my mother about how they had both witnessed what appeared to be a man in like 1700s attire, in the early morning hours, lurking around the bottom of the staircase. My mother asked my grandfather about this (as I was later told) as he might have some insight into this activity as the house had been a part of his entire life.
She said after asking him about such things, his reaction freaked us out. He "turned white and refused to discuss the topic". I had my own experiences in that house growing up there from the age of four and living there until 2001. The craziest thing I ever experienced? My girlfriend at the time (whom I later married) was living with me in the house, early 1998.
Our bedroom was on the second floor. To get a feel for this place, the floor plan of this house was very strange as there was no hallway between rooms. In order to reach the furthest room from the stairs, you had to go through every other room to get there. The closet in our bedroom always made me feel very uneasy, even at a young age.
Mind you, I lived a rather sheltered young life. No crazy movies. Never went to theme parks. Was and still am very connected to nature. In any case, one evening my girlfriend and I were sleeping in this room. At precisely 3:20 am I awoke from a deep sleep for no reason whatsoever.
I began to turn over in the bed to get more comfortable when I realized there was something next to the bed, on her side. I was against the wall. The next few moments felt like an eternity as I gazed upwards in the very dark room, finding that myself and her were not alone. A cloaked figure, face hidden by a hood stood over my girlfriend, looking down at her.
I was awestruck with fear and confused about how to handle something like this situation occurring before me. After approximately a millisecond I came to the proper conclusion that whatever was going on did not involve me. I turned away from what was happening, slowly pulled the blankets over my head and immediately went back to sleep.
13. It’s Alright Now
When I was about 12 years old, I met a boy who was only two years younger than me. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with a fatal and incurable disease known as Batten disease. I knew that he needed a friend so I stayed by his side as he faced sudden blindness and paralysis.
As often as I could, I would go over and help out around the house, read to him, and watch movies. I remember one night I grew very tired and quickly dozed off. My dream started with me walking to his house as usual, and then I suddenly saw him running towards me with a smile on his face.
I was stunned in the dream, looking at him with pure confusion. He came up to me and started talking as I stood there frozen. "So this is what you look like. I want you to know that you were my only friend and I don't want you to worry. I'm not in pain anymore”.
The dream ended with him walking away as I woke up. I lay there processing the dream and an hour or so later, my mom came into my room, crying as she delivered the news. He passed away. Even though it was very sad, the dream made me feel at peace.
14. Home Alone
I live with my parents and was home alone one day. I had just gotten off of work and was taking my standard post-work bathroom break. It was maybe 12 in the afternoon and neither of my parents got home from work until at least 3:30-4 pm. Since I was alone, I was there with the door open when I heard my laundry room door open.
My laundry room door connects to the garage, so I figured one of my parents got home early and came in through the garage door. I closed the bathroom door slightly and yelled "Hello" but didn't get a response. I yelled hello again but no response. It was at this point I came to a spine-tingling realization.
I hadn't heard any footsteps come into the house yet. We have old wood floors that creak really loud whenever you walk on them so it's always obvious when anybody is walking anywhere in the house. I finish and get up to see who's home. As I'm standing up, I hear the laundry room door slam closed.
I walk towards the laundry room and into the garage since I would catch whichever parent was home leaving the driveway. I open the laundry room door and the garage is shut and the light turned off. Our garage light stays on for 15 minutes after someone has opened the door before turning off.
I was really freaked out now so I lock the door and go into my room to watch YouTube videos. As I'm loading up a video, I hear the door that connects to my patio from my parents' bathroom open then close twice. I grabbed a fork (the only "weapon" near me at the time) and crept around the corner to see who was there. Nothing. Nobody.
I waited outside their bedroom door for about 15 minutes in hopes of catching a burglar sneaking out from the closet but no results came up. I freaked out, ran into my room and watched my door, just listening for anything else spooky going on. Nothing else happened and I still don't have a reasonable explanation for it to this day.
15. Every Rose Has Its Thorn
Growing up, my family and I lived in an old carriage barn-nursery that was built late sixties and early seventies by two men. One was a bachelor who eventually sold us the place and the other was a single dad. Well, apparently while building the place, the dad had a heart attack and didn’t make it.
I should also mention that the area this place was built in was known for finding Native American artifacts; arrow heads, pottery shards, etc. Many years later, 2001, my family buys the place. From the get go, spooky things occur. I was seven at the time and I would sleep walk, occasionally waking my parents up and telling them there was a man in the house.
Things that were in cupboards before we all went to sleep would be on the counter in the morning or in the sink as though they'd just been used. Well one winter morning, I'm like 11 or 12, I wake up super cold. I apparently walked outside the house in the middle of the night and into the rose garden, ending up under a Lady Banks rose that hadn't been doing very well.
My face and hands were all scratched up like I'd been pulling at the bush. I pick myself up and go back inside. Later that day my mom tells me she wants me to transplant the exact bush to a place with more sun, maybe that'll help it. So I go down to the garden and begin digging up the bush, being careful of the roots and all as I dig around it.
Eventually I hear the noise of metal shearing on metal. I think ugh, mom and dad are going to be angry I broke an irrigation pipe. I reach down into the hole I dug and feel a sharp corner. I dig a little more and find a slightly rusted metal box with a lock on it. Buried treasure, my over active mind assumed.
I smack the box open and inside is a sheaf of paper wrapped in a sandwich baggie. I read them out loud. That’s when I learned the heartbreaking story. It was a "goodbye" note written by the girl whose father had the heart attack while building the place. Apparently in her teens, she was so distraught at losing her father and the prospect of having to live with her mother’s family that she took her own life.
After that day, I never had visions of a man coming to me in my sleep again. I stopped sleep waking too.
16. Hush Little Baby…
My wife and I were living at my Grandma’s house and we had the entire upstairs. We were in the master bedroom and our three-month-old daughter was in a front bedroom across the hall from us. We had one of those new fancy baby monitors that has the breathing sensor and all that. Honestly, if our daughter turned wrong this stupid thing went off, but we kept on with it as we were new parents.
One night while trying to go to sleep, my wife and I were lying in bed talking about the weeks’ happenings. Basically just chatting till we got tired enough to go to sleep. We finally stopped talking and were ready to sleep so we turned up the baby monitor so it would be loud enough to wake us if the alarm sounded, or if our daughter started crying for one reason or another.
As I lay there trying to nod off, I heard a bone-chilling sound. It was breathing over the monitor—but adult breathing. It was kind of distorted, like bad reception. So I would listen more carefully to be sure it wasn’t malfunctioning. I heard my daughter moving around, and that came through clear. After a bit, I figured it was just some interference with the monitor.
However, a few moments later I heard clear as day over the monitor an older woman’s voice saying ”Shhhh, it’s ok”. In a very soft and almost comforting tone. However, being a new father living where we did, I freaked out. I leapt out of bed, thinking that someone is in my daughter’s room about to abduct her or something.
I ran through the hall and burst into her room. Her room was near pitch black but for the little toy thing we had on her crib. It would give a constant soft glow, and if there was noise, be it a kick or crying, it would turn on and move and play soft music. That was on in the middle of its song, but my daughter appeared sound asleep and no one was in the room.
Figuring I must have dreamt the voice, I walked over to pick up my daughter to comfort her. When I picked her up, I noticed she was very, very warm. I checked her temperature and it was a dangerous 103 degrees. Now, before we put her to bed she was fine, only three hours had passed since then which probably means her temperature would have continued rising throughout the night…had something not made me go in there.
My wife and I can only conclude to this day that the ghost of the old woman that we are pretty sure is in my grandma’s house was the one who got me in there. My grandma’s house is over 110 years old and holds a lot of history. So, to this day we are thankful to this ghost or happening, or whatever you want to call it, and are quite certain that whatever it was, it saved our child’s life.
17. What’s In A Name?
I was working on a construction site that was overseen by a safety representative who took his job very seriously. Once, I had to get into a very tight ceiling cavity, so I set my hard hat beside my ladder and crawled into the roof space. I had to tidy up some cable looms, which took about ten minutes, then I came back down the ladder and found my hard hat was gone.
My hard hat had veiny phalluses drawn all over it; I was an apprentice, and my coworkers were jerks. I walked around the site looking for it when the safety rep spotted me and threw me off the site for the rest of the day. I returned to work the next day with a brand new, clean, hard hat. I spotted someone in the lunchroom wearing a hard hat with large union stickers in about the same spots where the drawings were on my previous one.
Knowing that I'd always written my name underneath the plastic insert, I asked this guy if I could look at it, and he said fine. I removed the insert, and there was my name just as I had left it. My full name is fairly obscure, and my family was the only one who had that name in the phone book. I asked the guy, "Is this hard hat yours”? I also asked if that was his name.
He replied, "It certainly is". I gave him a skeptical/disappointed look, and he said, "Don't believe me"? He then pulled out his driver's license, bank cards, etc. It turned out he indeed had the exact same full name as me, and he did take my hard hat. I started pulling the stickers off to reveal the drawings. He said, "Hahaha, yeah, you got me". It was just a baffling coincidence.
18. A Night Visitor
I have zero explanation for the event. Before I tell you my story, I'm gonna give you some context about my drive home from work, the state I live in and such. This happened about 10 minutes after I left work today.
I live in northeast Ohio and I got a new job about two months ago as a process technician at a dairy plant. It pays very good money considering it's a 35-mile drive one way. After about 20 or 25 miles, I drive through a wooded area. Nothing uncommon for me, as where I live in Ohio forests are common, and I pretty much lived in the one behind my grandma's house growing up.
I work 4 pm to 4 am and the drive home sucks. Whether it's being tired, hungry or the fog almost every night, I go the same way every day and night. One day I was driving my way home. I just left the residential area of my workplace and was going through the forested area. As I said, there's almost fog every night, so I'm on high alert for deer, raccoons and such critters.
It's just like every other drive home so far. I have a podcast on, focusing on the road, thinking of getting something from McDonald's, and sometimes looking off to the side of the road for any eyes reflecting off my headlights. That’s when I see it.
All of a sudden, I see some reflecting eyes. Out of the woods comes a coyote. Now in my hometown, coyotes aren't too rare. I've seen them by my high school, but had never seen one outside of my hometown, so it surprised me. I start slowing down as it crosses the road…until it turns to my car and sits in the road. It sat about 10 feet from my car.
There had been no cars I had seen since leaving the residential area, so I was going to go around it, but I thought this was too odd of a thing to happen to just drive away from it. I expected it to just get up and walk away at any given second. This is where I began to get very scared.
I honked my horn and after about two or three seconds…it smiles at me. I have my brights on, so I can see it perfectly. This coyote had human shaped teeth. My heart dropped and every hair on my body raised, just as it is now recalling this incident. This lasted about one second, before it sat up and ran into the woods.
I sat there in fear for about five seconds before shoving my foot on the pedal and driving at getaway speed. I didn't stop or get food because I had no appetite now. I thought the rest of the ride home about what I saw, at one point doubting I saw it. But like I said, with my brights on and it as close to my car as it was, I saw it as clear as day.
This coyote had human teeth and there was no doubt about it. I'm very into the paranormal and that includes cryptids. Is it possible I ran into a Skinwalker or some genetically mutated coyote? I am Native American if that counts for anything. It's so weird typing this out.
19. Knock-Knock
There is a pattern in my life that I have premonitions, or contact, regarding trauma or the passing of loved ones. I had a friend who lived 2,500 miles away. He had an incurable brain tumor, but was hospitalized for something somewhat-unrelated. It was a grave situation, and I knew that he was in trouble.
However, my life was too hectic to give it 100% of my mental energy. I was consumed with work and my own life. Facebook well-wishes and prayers were sent and I expected him to recover and go back home. A night or two later, I awoke from a night-terror as well as sleep paralysis. That's when the unimaginable started happening.
There was a loud noise that sounded like someone was pounding on the front door. "Knock, knock, knock”! It was what you would expect from a SWAT team, before they crashed in. That sent me into a state of semi-lucidity, and I entered into a waking dream. In this dream, I fixated on my bedroom door, waiting for the intruder(s) to burst in.
The door slowly cracked, and a giant, meaty, hand squeezed through the opening. My heart was pounding, and I was in fear of cardiac arrest. I knew that I was dreaming; but it felt so intensely real that my body reacted accordingly. The dark figure's shadow filled the entire doorway, and the hand (for better lack of a description) "waved" at me like a small child would wave.
I was both terrified and comforted if that makes any sense, at all. Here was this huge monster who was both scaring me and trying to console me at the same time. Upon awakening, in the morning, I described this to my husband. I rarely have sleep paralysis, and it almost always corresponds to some specific event. I almost knew what was going to happen next.
I made coffee and went online. Sure enough, I found that my friend had passed in the night. During the exact time that I had the dream, he was semi-conscious, and his family described how he was holding up his hand and waving at them from his hospital bed.
My friend was a giant man; and (in retrospect) the huge shadow and large, meaty hand were exactly the size that would have been his. Now comes the kicker. A few weeks later, I went back through our messages and found one where (two years earlier) I had invited him and his wife to come visit and stay with us.
His reply was "Some night you will wake up to a knock, knock, knock on your door”!
20. Father Knows Best
My grandfather passed when my mom was in her early years of high school. I obviously never met him nor do I really know anything about him. She doesn’t really speak of him much. She and her best friend Ann were leaving a party when they were in their late teens and were about to walk a half hour home when they got offered a lift by a car full of guys they knew.
They accepted as it was late and got the in overloaded car. A few minutes after they started driving, mom and Ann realized these guys had been drinking, but it wasn’t so unacceptable back then so they didn’t think much of it. A few minutes go by and mom swears on her life she heard a male voice saying “get out of the car, you will die”.
It was calm but there was such urgency in the voice, she screamed at them to pull over. Mom said she had this overwhelming feeling of dread and fear and that she could hardly breathe, she felt like she was literally drowning. She got out of the car and almost dragged Ann out with her.
Ann didn’t want to walk home so they were arguing for a little while before she reluctantly went with her. The guys went on their way. They walked the rest of the way home. The next day, we got a terrifying call. We learned that my mom’s good friends had swerved off the road, rolled an embankment, and crashed into a lake.
It was all five guys from the car. They all perished in the accident—some of drowning and some from the impact. Mom and Ann weren’t wearing seatbelts, so they would have been goners for sure. She believes it was her dad who told her to get out. She has never felt anything like that feeling she had since.
21. It’s Not Just The Wind
Okay, here it goes. I have a medical background and a certification I rarely use, though I keep going back and paying to renew it. Anyhow, when Hurricane Katrina came through, I volunteered almost immediately thinking I would help those who lived through it. That was not the case. It ended up being the most harrowing experience of my life.
It started with sadness, and got creepy. There were a few of us who are assigned, once the water started to recede, to find houses that had bodies in them. We had to go to each house and go inside in wading boots and look for them. If we found anything, we spray painted a big X on the outside of the house.
This other guy and I had been doing it for a while and we got assigned with each other almost every day. We got along okay. One day we came up to this one old shack. I say shack because it was pretty run down and in what had been a very bad neighborhood. Right away, I got chills down my spine. I knew there was something really wrong. Not like find a body kind of wrong, but chilling kind of wrong.
New Orleans has certain areas that just give off these vibes and my understanding is there is a lot of voodoo practiced in certain areas. Against everything my body was screaming at me, we went in the house. The first thing I could smell was a body, the second was something almost earthy and mold. I looked at my partner, I will call him Jay. He was white as a sheet.
I could tell he was getting that same feeling I had been getting. It was obvious from the weird bones hanging from the ceiling (I would bet money they were cats) that something odd had been going down in the house as well as strange beads and carvings in the bare wood in the walls.
Suddenly, I heard the most unearthly cackling noise I have ever heard in my life and my flight or fight kicked in. Jay and I noped out of there. We quickly painted the X and literally ran to the next house. It still gives me nightmares. Jay and I discussed it that night after we went back to the hotels north of there. He had heard the cackling too but we both said it had to be the wind or something.
22. Not Quite Right
I'm a project manager for a company I can't name. Today when I met with the account manager for a vendor we may bring onto the project something was just off....He was young. Maybe late 30s. Looks as if he had a stroke in the past but that wasn't it. There was something about him.
His mouth smiled too big. His teeth looked huge. His head was so long, I mean almost unnaturally long. In fact, everything about him wasn't quite proportioned right. It sounds like I'm being insensitive and I'm guilty about feeling this way but when he started talking everything just felt wrong. Alarm bells went off in my head. "This is not human" and "You have to get out of here".
It was a normal freaking conversation and I have had hundreds of meetings like this. With all kinds of shapes and sizes of human. And I can't stop thinking about this one.
23. The Man In Black
I went on holiday to Wales in 2012 with seven friends. Five of my friends went to this club that was really expensive to get in, and being a poor student, myself and two others decided to go on the beach. Our apartments faced the beach and we had steps going down to our apartment, but you could also get to it from the back by walking down an alleyway with a sensor light that lit up when you walked down it.
We get to this alley and I start freaking out and feeling scared to the point of almost crying. We walk down the alley onto the beach. No one seems to be around. We walk down the beach seeing no one, and I still feel a bit freaked out. I look up after walking for a few seconds and see this black opaque figure in the alley we had just walked down with its arms stuck out to its sides.
I'm freaked out but try to keep my cool. It looks as though it's about seven feet tall and we're far away from it so it would be taller close up. I go “what IS that” and run along to the beach to the left and into the dock where there are street lamps, because I'm that terrified. My friends follow and my skeptical friend asks what I'm doing, thinking I'm being crazy.
Before I can speak, it got ten times scarier. My other friend says “did you not see that black figure”? Skeptical friend, who started running a couple of seconds after me and looked up at the alley, says he did not see anything in the alley after we told him what we saw, and tries to come up with answers. He says, could it have been an ill person (which is why they looked so weird)?
Obviously we don't know, but my other friend and I both saw it and were freaked out. It was freakishly tall, seemed sinister, and had a black, opaque look to it. We saw no one and heard no one when walking down the alley. I go back to the apartment—eight of us were sharing two apartments—and make them wait til 2 am until the others come back.
For the next couple of days I feel freaked out sleeping in the room I share with another friend and feel like something is watching me from the corner, although that could be because I was freaked out from this experience. Two days later we are on the beach and I need to go to the bathroom.
I'm shy and don't want people barging in, so I take all three keys to our apartment and check no one needs to go in, saying I'll be five minutes. I go in with the keys in a pocket and go to the bathroom. Before this, I had been playing a trick on a friend as the toilet light switch was in the hallway outside the bathroom, and I had been turning it off when she was in there (I was immature).
I was on the toilet and suddenly all the lights went off, both in the bathroom and in the hall; I could see through the crack under the door that the hall light was off. I heard laughter and footsteps and assumed I had left a key and my friends were playing a prank on me.
I still felt afraid when my phone went off. I looked down and almost screamed. I saw I had texts from my friends begging me to let them in. I washed my hands and opened the bathroom door, terrified but still telling myself that it was a prank. I went into the hallway and all the lights were indeed off.
I went into the living room where the main door was and saw all of my friends there outside waiting for me and looking puzzled. When I asked later why they came, they said they felt that they should come back. I checked my pockets and I had all three keys, and when asking the neighbors I found out they had not had a power cut.
The light switch next to the bathroom had also been switched down, so it seemed as though this entity had been watching me play this prank on my friend, and had copied it. I saw the black figure again down a different alleyway near some caves on the beach. But it wasn't even close to over, either.
We then went on a ghost walk and were told about a mayor that was hanged in the area. Me and the friend who had seen the figure just stared at each other at this point, and the ghost walk leader said “Wow, have you seen it”? That could have been her trying to make the ghost walk scarier and this figure didn't really look hanged, if that makes sense. But still.
We got back from the ghost walk to find that our friends had started a food fight between apartments. They ran onto the beach but some went around the front and some went around the back and down the alleyway where I first saw this figure. I ran behind them...and suddenly saw the figure ahead of me.
But it wasn't in the alleyway I had first seen it in or the second one. It was at a different angle and was on the side road ahead instead of down the first alleyway, which would have been to the right. I stopped and ran back to the apartment. The next day I made our friend drive some of us down these roads where these alleys and side roads were.
I wanted to make sure there were no statues or anything that looked like this figure that I could have mistaken for him. On the last day of the holiday we went into the other apartment our friends were in, which wasn't where I had had my occurrences e.g. with the lights going off, but it was next to the alley where I first saw this figure.
The kettle was unplugged for a phone charger to go in, and was taken off the kettle stand that kettles use to boil on. It boiled by itself, all while not plugged in or the stand.
24. Where I Keep The Secrets
The other day I was at work and a little girl says “Hey, Sammy is going home”. That was one of the other kids. The thing is, there were no cars in sight and no parent had called. Sammy wasn’t supposed to leave for another few hours so I said, “Not yet but he will in a few hours” but she was very sure this kid was going home.
Five minutes later I get a call from the kid’s mom. He had a family emergency and was going home. I thought it was a weird coincidence at the time…and it wasn’t the end of it. It kept happening with different random things with this same girl, so I asked her parents about it. They said, “Yeah, she always knows stuff before it happens. It’s very creepy, but she’s always right”.
So the next time it happens I ask her, “How do you always know what’s gonna happen?” And she replies, “There’s a crack in my brain and all the secrets go in”.
25. A Darkened Figure
I am right now sitting in my front porch. I cannot bring myself to go back inside my house. There is someone in there. Just over two months ago I moved into a new house after losing nearly everything. I won't go into details or draw this out.
Typing this out is making my eyes well and every hair on my body stand straight up, but God, I saw a human shaped shadow in my walk-in closet. Am I going crazy? Maybe, but I know that I am not at the same time. Okay, this is what happened. I am laying in my bed browsing the internet, and from the corner of my eye I catch movement coming from my closet.
Within literal milliseconds I turn and see someone standing inside of it, looking right at me. You guys. I FLIPPED the heck out, sprung up, ran out of my room, slammed the door, and grabbed a kitchen knife. I yelled and screamed about calling the authorities, that I had a knife, and basically acted like a scared monkey...no response.
After about a minute of yelling and realizing I had left my phone in my bedroom (to call 9-1-1) I slowly peeked in. There was simply nothing there you guys. Nothing. No one could have gone anywhere. I'm so ANGRY and terrified about this. I saw this person. I saw their shape. Their movement. Their arms. There was a humanoid figure in my closet, and that is all I know.
26. Guardian Angel
My daughter was a newborn at this time and I was a sleep-deprived mom. The phone rang at 3 am one night and woke up my husband and I. He got up to answer it and as he left the room I felt something under me. I was laying across my baby. I must have taken her to bed to feed and fallen asleep.
It is exactly what parents are warned about and I feel awful, awful that I made this mistake. My daughter was fine, I must have only just rolled onto her. But it got so much creepier. My husband returned to the bedroom, saying the call was someone speaking in a language he did not understand but they sounded very urgent.
We were very shaken up and I took precautions to ensure it never happened again. My daughter is 18 now and likes to think she has a guardian angel who saved her that night.
27. A Helping Hand
So, my dad died almost seven years ago, when I was 15, and this happened three years later. I was close to graduation, and my final exam in physics was giving me a hard time because I really couldn't get to grips with relativity and those shenanigans. Anyway, one morning, I was really tired, hadn’t slept at all the night before, and I was about to fall asleep in the last row in my classroom.
Then, just as I was beginning to close my eyes, I heard my dad's voice, clear as day, say "Hey, wake up and listen!" It was so clearly his voice. The tone, the "melody" (when he was calling my name in a happy manner, he was almost kinda singing), it was him.
I was baffled for a moment, but when I "rebooted" after that moment of shock, it was exactly the moment when our teacher dropped a very important hint as to what the final exam's theme will be. I would have totally slept through that, had my dad not woken me up...
That same night I had a dream, my dad and I sat on our porch, chatting, laughing, and, which I remember very distinctly, we were drinking his favorite drink together. So when I was drinking the last drops, the sun was setting, and I looked to the chair next to me and my dad was gone. I just once again heard him say "Hey, wake up!"
And that's the exact moment when my alarm clock began ringing.
28. Who Said That?
I was serving in the forces and we were in the desert posted up for a target. I saw some guys loading suspicious packages in the back of a small truck. None of the guys were the ones that I was looking for. My spotter suddenly said “let’s go LET”S GO”! Now this guy was pretty steady no matter what, so I snatch up my things and start running behind him.
Suddenly, there was a huge explosion where that truck was. I asked what he saw that scared him and he looked at me weird and said "You said run, so I ran". I never said anything, but our nest was covered in shrapnel when we looked back.
29. It’s Not Just A Dream
This story has been told to me by my mom a few times, and every single time I still get that creepy eerie feeling that someone is watching me. My mom is from a small town in Mexico located in Zacatecas. When she was around 14, she had the habit of waking her mom up to go to the restroom since it was an older home and the restroom was located outside.
My mom tells me that it was around 3 am when she woke up and felt the need to use the restroom urgently. She began calling out for her mom, and after a while of her mom not responding she began getting agitated and started screaming. At this point my mom turns around—what she saw made her jump right out of her skin.
At the foot of her bed, she sees her mom standing there. She was wearing a white robe but had a very bleak expression on her face and both of her arms were extended. My mom said that she suddenly felt extremely cold and a huge sense of dread. She had never seen her mom wear a white robe…that’s when she looked down and saw her “mom’s” feet weren’t touching the floor.
At that moment she screamed and quickly threw the covers over her head. Her mom, now wearing something completely different, runs in to find my mom shaking in her bed. Nobody believed my mom, everyone told her it was a dream. That is, until a few days later there was a power outage.
During this outage my mom and a few of her siblings with her parents all decided to sleep in the living room. At around the same time at 3 am, they all heard wailing. They think it was La Llorona. None of them slept that night.
30. Fly Away
My brother and I were best friends growing up. He was four years older than me, and he was my biggest role model. As a young boy, probably close to being 10 years old, he was absolutely fascinated by butterflies. He took care of them, loved raising them from cocoons, and he knew everything about every butterfly.
After they died, he would keep them because he thought they were beautiful, and loved them dearly. I partook in it merely because I admired my older brother so much and wanted to do everything he did, because I thought he was the best. The butterflies never seemed to care for me much.
They’d land on him like crazy but wouldn’t land on me—even when we would go to places like “butterfly world” where they’re used to humans, they would land on everyone except me. As he progressed into adulthood he struggled with addiction, which ended up making him fall very ill and his body gave up on him.
He had a heart attack the last time he used a substance, and he passed. He still loved butterflies up until then, when he was 23. Although we weren’t close at this chapter in our lives, as his addiction had really pushed me away, we still talked occasionally when he was going through his good days.
The last time I saw him, a few weeks before he died, we were visiting our mom and had brought up ghosts, since we had both always thought her house was haunted. Growing up he and I had many paranormal experiences, which we both saw together and talked about that last day I saw him.
They were experiences that made us bond even more since no one else saw these things but us, together. While still being very young, we had moved into a rental for the month, and we would play in the attic. We had been in there lots at this point, but one day we went up there to an incredible sight.
It was filled with probably 10 monarch butterflies, which we assumed came in through the slightly opened window. We both saw them and were in awe. We played with them for a while, but by the next day they were gone. I don’t remember us ever even telling our parents. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that was very strange.
Anyway, the visit I had with him before he passed, the topic of the paranormal got shifted into reincarnation. He asked if humans could reincarnate into anything, like a butterfly, he wondered. It was a very brief moment, but now that he has passed some strange things have been happening to me and I can’t get the few seconds out of my brain where he mentioned reincarnating into a butterfly.
He passed in late January, so it was still basically winter where we live. Not long after this, a bright orange butterfly was outside of my house. I thought it was so strange, and it of course didn’t make it due to the cold. I didn’t really give it a second thought, other than how weird it was that there was a butterfly in February. But now it’s escalated.
Ever since then butterflies follow me everywhere. It’s gotten to the point where it’s very strange and even the people around me think it’s strange. We are not in a very butterfly-populated place, but they land on my head randomly as I’m walking to work now. They land on my leg when I’m not looking, as I’m sunbathing, and scare the living heck out of me.
We went floating down a river in a different town, and halfway down the three-hour river ride, a butterfly landed on my arm and rested on the tube. The group of 15 people we were with saw it and thought it was so bizarre. None of them could get it to come near them. This morning I got home from work and a very bright, new-looking butterfly was seated on my front step, seemingly unable to fly.
It looks completely uninjured but wouldn’t leave, so I fed it and gave it a nice sunny place to rest and it’s still sat outside the door hours later, fluttering around but won’t fly away. I can’t help but feel somehow my brother is doing this which is a lovely thought, but it fills me with so much sadness and grief wishing I could tell him about all these butterflies.
31. The Screaming Bridge
There's a bridge near where I grew up in the sticks of Tennessee that is notorious for screaming at people at night. The screams aren't audible to the houses nearby and supposedly you have to sit on the actual bridge to hear it at all, though I personally haven't tested it or anything.
The common explanation is that it's a bobcat that lives under the bridge, but people have checked with dogs and such and never find signs of any. Well, some friends and myself had heard this story for years all growing up but never tested it. One night after a few drinks we get up the notion we're going to go test the thing.
So five guys pile into a beat up car and we drive down and park on the bridge. This is 1:30 am or so and it's completely silent out. We sat there for a good 45 minutes and nothing happened. We had the windows down and had started debating whether or not it was all lies. Suddenly, we shut our mouths. The scream happened.
We had the lights off and there was a moon so you could see pretty well and there for sure wasn't anything outside the car, but it was loud and it sounded just like a woman with particularly powerful lungs having her skin ripped off right outside the window on the rear passenger side that faced off the edge of the bridge.
Now, I've heard bobcats in heat while hunting and they do like a scream-scream-scream kind of thing. It's hard to describe but they do it in little repeating bursts. This was a good 3-4 second extended scream at incredible volume. We tore out of there like a demon was chasing us. Which it might have been.
A couple of miles down the road, we finally stopped and actually processed what happened. My adrenaline was going so badly and I was so scared I was just shaking uncontrollably. One of my friends had actually peed himself, which I'd never seen anyone actually do. One friend immediately left the car and vomited.
To give what I think was a good frame of reference for how actually terrifying this was, my friend whose car we were in wasn't even mad at the friend that peed all over his seat. It was insane. To this day I have no explanation for it.
32. Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em
Me and my buddy were playing SNES in my room, when suddenly the most bizarre thing happened. The room filled with thick and hazy smoke. The smell of nicotine was overpowering and we were both really confused, as nobody in my family ever smoked and we lived in a detached house, so it couldn't have been the neighbors either.
The smoke hung around for about a minute, then it cleared and vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. Later that afternoon, we found out that my friend’s mom had used a Ouija board to contact her father who had lost his battle with lung cancer the year before.
Apparently he smoked 60 a day and always smelled like cigarettes. She was unable to contact him that day, but that's the only explanation I have for the weirdness.
33. A Haunted Land
I lived in Adams, Tennessee growing up from about ages 14-18. A couple of weeks after my family and I moved there, something unexpected happened. I was mowing on my dad's tractor (with a big eight-foot-wide back-end mower). I was going down a hill when my horizon line violently was thrown around as the tractor tires hit something.
I disengaged the mower and pulled the tractor around at the base of the hill I had just gone down. I look up through the swathe I had just cut, and my blood ran cold. In that cut lane there were four Native American burial graves. My parents started reaching out to anyone who might be able to help us identify the graves: anthropologists, historians, accredited people, etc.
Those people unanimously agreed that these four graves were from the Trail of Tears. They corroborated this from what I remember because of how the graves were laid (very very shallow, with a giant slab of stone where a gravestone would be), the fact that they were interned on a hillside to keep the water from sinking in and raising the bodies since they had to bury them so quickly, and many other reasons.
I consider myself a very logically driven and rationally minded person. Basically I let my empirical senses try to explain something before I'll open myself to other possibilities. Yet, there were things that happened to me and my whole family while on that property that we weren't able to rationalize with the scientific mindset or anything logical.
The activity in our house started shortly after the mowing incident. We heard heavy knocking and pounding on the brick outer wall of the house, encircling the house. No matter where you were in the house you could hear the knocking. Some nights I would hear running footsteps accompanying the pounding. This activity happened nearly every night.
As the nights passed, it got so much worse. I started feeling a heavy presence in my room, a suffocating one, like a heavy weight sitting on my solar plexus constantly. Whatever was happening decided to latch onto me. Things continued to escalate. One night I was letting my golden retriever out to go pee.
We had a ranch-style house overlooking the Red River. The door we were exiting was on the backside of the house facing the river. As I open the door, I start hearing faint whispering. It was something akin to leaves being blown and scratching across the ground. I looked up at the trees to see if the wind was blowing, but everything was perfectly still.
The scratchy/blowing leaf noise continued, but as it continued it grew closer and louder. It sounded like a language of some sort, like how'd you imagine an incantation or something nefarious in the tone of the sound. I looked down at my golden retriever. ALL of the hair on her back was standing up and she was snarling like a rabid wolf.
I started getting extremely nauseous and could smell sulfur. I was completely frozen when my dog launches herself through the door's threshold and starts gnashing her teeth in mid-air, snarling and chomping. It wasn’t close to over. The voices were now coming from directly in front of me. I could hear them as if someone was standing there a foot or two away.
I grab my dog and pull her quickly inside, slammed the door and threw the bolt into place. The door and frame shook violently as a vicious pounding started hammering on the threshold. I ran with my dog to the center of the house, flipping on every light along the way. We sat there alone all night until the sun came up.
Ginger, my golden retriever, laid across my lap the entire night, pressing into me while she whimpered for hours. All I could do was pet her and try to calm her down, which was also helping me down-regulate, too. This was impossible though, as the entire night until sunrise the back door was thumping.
The next event happened when I was coming home from football practice. I had all my gear in a gym bag over my left shoulder. This is important, because of how I entered the house. As I closed the front door behind me, I began setting down the gear bag from my left side, which caused me to look right.
The room when you first walked in was our "library" where we had a leather couch, chair, piano, bookshelves, and a wooden rocking chair. What I saw still haunts me to this day. There was something sitting in the rocking chair. My peripheral vision caught it first, with the chair going back and forth.
As my vision centered on the chair there was a humanoid-looking shape sitting there, head glancing downward at the book it was holding. It had long black hair drawn down over its head and was completely void of light. To picture what I saw, imagine the silhouette of a person, but rather a "void" of light.
The light coming in around the edges of it seemed to be eaten up by the presence/void, as the light spilled over the contour edges of the humanoid shape. It felt like I had jumped off a bridge into ice cold water. I blasted myself backwards against the door, screaming, and fell down.
As I was falling I saw the "void" blur suddenly as it shot across the walls of the house and out through a huge bay window overlooking the river. My golden retriever was in the next room and she sprinted to chase the shadow across the walls, barking and clawing at the walls. After it left through the window my dog came to me and laid on my lap until my parents got home.
Next time, I was fishing with my cousin Jack on the river by our house. We were right on the bend of a river, so the moon would be shining on both sides of the river racing out at two lines like a 90-degree angle from the house, super beautiful when you weren't on edge. The reason I bring this up is there was a lot of light on the river that evening.
Jack was about 10 or so at the time. He reaches up and taps me. Then he asks a terrifying question. "Does that lady need help?" I looked to where he was pointing and there was a pale woman dressed in white clothes going back and forth picking up stones just to the left of us across the river.
I had seen her many times before around the property, and whenever I would get close she would disappear behind a tree or something similar would happen. Knowing this, I told Jack as calmly as I could that it was time for dinner and he needed to go up to my mom immediately. When I walked him up and made sure he was on his way I looked back over and she was gone, but I could hear a splashing in the water below.
Then myself, my dad, his friends, and some other family members were staked out along the river bend on the gravel bar beneath the rise to our house. Nothing out of the ordinary at first, it was July 4th and we were having an actual good time for a change. We were all spread out about 15 yards from each other.
Each man had a low-end gas Coleman lantern. As the sun was setting my dad looks over at me like something was bugging him. He told me later he felt like someone had just thrown a bucket of ice water over him. And then it all began. The sun had just gone down. In unison all the lanterns were cranked up full blast, then just as quickly became barely a flame, then the fires roared to life again, down to barely a flame, roared to life, then they went completely out.
Right as the flames went out, we heard the most God-forsaken scream by some woman across the river. Whatever it was kept on screaming despite our best attempts to call out to help. As her scream reached a crescendo, it sounded like what I could only imagine a person's throat being cut interrupted her scream.
The sound of a dead-weight fall of a human body tumbled down the hillside across from us and splashed violently into the water. At this point all the guys had their flashlights out. That's when something started swimming and splashing around in the water on both sides of the river bend. The splashing receded towards the opposite gravel bar.
Whatever it was got out and started pacing back and forth across the rocks there. We were pointing all of our flashlights to where the sound was coming from but we couldn't identify where it was originating. It's safe to say we were running up the hill at this point.
We all got inside the house, locked the doors, then gathered in the central living room. Nobody wanted to leave for fear of what was outside. We all stayed up that night because the wall pounding was more violent than it had ever been. Bam. Bam. Bam. All night like the ticking of some demonic clock. I didn't sleep for two days after this event.
Then there was the lost time. I was walking through the woods near the Bell Witch Cave, a famous haunted place near me. One moment it was completely sunny and blue skies about mid-afternoon. The next moment it was overcast and looked like maybe 4 pm.
There were Night terrors. Being held down and brutally drawn and quartered, dreams of walking through the house and the "void" person placing their hand on my chest and "pushing" through my solar plexus, body violently shaking in the dream like a having a seizure. Once I went to the Bell House (again a haunted place) in a tobacco field adjacent to my family's property.
I brought friends to try and prove that something crazy was happening to my family. The rite of passage in the area is to go to the stone marker where the paranormal events happened hundreds of years ago, then dance on the stone saying "I don't believe in the Bell Witch!"
I got them to promise that they wouldn't do that while we went. Of course the moment we get there, one guy who doubted the legends in a massive way jumps up onto the stone marker and starts screaming "I don't believe in the Bell Witch!" as loud as he could. I get so upset at him. I'm the only one that knows the way back, so I said come on guys we're leaving.
This are is known as the Tennessee River Valley. So there's tons of flowing water around these tobacco fields. We're making good time walking back across this crop field, hundreds of yards long. A mist starts rolling in from the river bends and begins to saturate the field.
The temperature drops easily 25 degrees or so and we start seeing our breath. I begin to smell sulfur in the breeze. As the mist became a fog it began all over again. I started hearing this wheezy and deeply cavernous-sounding breath around us, like being inside a cave that was breathing.
Out of nowhere we started hearing these giant blasting sounds and I realized something was walking on the chopped tobacco stalks. When you step on said stalks, they disintegrate in a very loud way as they burst apart. This starts happening all around us like an army of native spirits running around as if we were in a bandwagon battle. The blasts were coming from every single direction in the fog.
That's when I hear it. That deep cavernous noise turns into this giant sniffing sound, like some Lovecraftian beast smelling its prey just out of eye sight. At this point I yell RUN in pure panic mode. We take off across the field, trying not to trip and be skewered on the stalks (they dry out and get really sharp where they harvest them).
As we are exiting the field and our feet hit the gravel road, the lower center part of my back suddenly EXPLODES in agony. I look down and there's a massive rock laying at my feet and I realized that I had just been assaulted. By the time I got to my house and examined my back in a mirror, the bruise was about the size of a basketball and was already turning black. But the most chilling event came last.
One time, I woke up outside at about 3 in the morning. I was laying next to the four graves on the property. The night was awfully cold but I woke up soaked in sweat. We lived there for so long that I have many events to share and process. It is really hard for me to talk about this stuff without re-traumatizing myself, but my friends and family are encouraging me to share my experiences so I can try to find peace surrounding my trauma.
34. Open Sesame
I saw this about four years ago at work and it creeped me the heck out. I work for a digital surveillance company that runs the "eye in the sky" for thousands of restaurants, bars, and gas stations across the US. From time to time we get calls for investigations to look into robberies, theft, etc.
So one day we get a call from a popular fast food chain located in the heart of Detroit. They say an employee OD'd by the dumpster and they needed us to get some answers on the situation. First, they want to know basically what happened and how long was he there? The next question is where it starts to get weird.
See, the dumpster had a brick wall around it. It had two entrances to the dumpster, a gate you had to pass when you walked out the back door and the big gates where the garbage truck has access to the dumpster to empty it out. They claimed those big gates were ALWAYS open and the small gate by the back door was locked from the inside.
Nobody ever used that smaller gate. The weird thing was when the body was found an employee walked out, and that gate that was NEVER open was indeed open. The body was sitting there on full display. So their next question was WHO THE HECK OPENED THAT GATE? So we download the footage.
One night the employee goes outside, throws out the trash, and you can kind of see him through the locked gate that was never open (it was see-through but very difficult to see through). The way the camera was angled you could kind of see over the top also. He does his stuff then keels over behind the dumpster.
He was out there for two and a half days. No employees ever came to look for him. It's pouring rain both days. For two days employees come and go, taking out the trash and not seeing him. Then, on the third day in the morning sunshine, clear as day, the gate just...slowly opens by itself. Nobody comes, nobody goes.
The gate just….opens...by itself and the body is sitting there in the same position it was 2.5 days earlier. I literally felt chills down my spine. To this day I can't explain it without thinking it was paranormal.
35. Child Prodigy
When my son was four years old, I decided to play a game with him to teach him about math and probability. I picked up a dice and asked him to guess the number it would land on. "Three" he said. I rolled and it landed on a three. Ok, beginner's luck, let's do it again. "One" I rolled again and it landed on a one. Lucky, but not too weird. But it kept getting creepier.
He proceeded to guess correctly a further 15 times before I called my ex-wife into the room. Needless to say, the effect stopped the moment someone else was watching. I've thought a lot about it since and it simply should not have happened. The odds are around 17 trillion to one.
If you repeated this experiment 10 times a day, every day, from now until the sun burned out in five billion years you'd expect it to happen about once. This doesn't sound scary on its own, but ever since it happened I've had this off feeling, like something's wrong with the universe that this even happened.
Mathematics says it shouldn't have. If math is wrong, what else is wrong? Is the world I'm living in even real? It was like some force peering out from behind the veil and sticking a middle finger up, letting me know that no matter how well I think I understand the world around me I never really will. Randomness could strike at any time. There's no way of preparing for it.
Before you ask: yes, I tried to get him to pick my lottery numbers. No, it didn't work.
36. A Glimmer Of Light At The End
My grandma suffered for nine years with Alzheimer’s before she passed. She lost any ability to speak (other than mumbling gibberish quietly), feed herself, or do much of anything around year seven.
When she was moved to hospice, my mom and I visited her every day. Four days before she died, my mother and I were sitting and talking to her. Out of nowhere, she began praying the Hail Mary and speaking perfectly. She said the whole prayer three times in a row before she stopped. That was the last time she ever spoke.
It was really amazing to be there and I still can’t believe it happened. May her soul rest in peace.
37. The Tooth Fairy
I still have this one experience burned into my memory from when I was around seven or eight. I woke up in the middle of the night to find my mother standing over my bed. Only, she was a bit blurry and kind of glowing pink. Once I realized she was there I asked if she could get me a glass of water.
I then remember turning to look at my glowing balloon Winnie The Pooh nightlight to look for the cup that was usually next to my bed. I turned back to hand it to her, but she was still standing there, motionless. So I asked again... "Mom!? Can I have a cup of water”?
But she continued to just stand there, staring at me. That’s when I knew something was very wrong. I started to shout. "Mom?...MOM! MOOOOM”! Well, in burst my Mom from my bedroom door wearing a long one-size-fits all Garfield sleep tee. "What!? What’s wrong!”?
Just as she burst through my door, the pink glowing version of my mom faded from her head down to under my bed. It also just so happened that I had lost a tooth that very same day. So in my little mind…I had just witnessed…the tooth fairy! To cement my claim, the dollar bill the "tooth fairy" had left me was found deep under my bed.
I told everyone I knew that I had seen the elusive legend! It wasn't till years later that I realized the chilling truth. I was retelling the story when I realized that the tooth fairy only happened to look like my mother because it was actually my grandmother who had passed long before I was born.
She also looks a lot like my mom. So once I put it all together, there was no doubt that the figure looked exactly like images I've seen of her later in my life. To top this all off, when my daughter was around four, she told me that sometimes she'd wake up to see Nana (as in my mom) watching her sleep. Yup…still doing that.
38. A Premonition
This happened a few years back and I never told my mother or my father since it was a sensitive subject. One night, I had a dream my friend Dylan and I were in a two-storey home. He was showing me his new guitar. We’re having a good time, joking around, when we hear a gunshot downstairs. We look at each other and book it down the stairs.
When I hit the bottom step, I wake up to my mom on my bed in tears. She tells me my aunt who lived on the other side of the country just took her own life. When I ask what happened, she told me she shot herself.
We weren’t ever close as she lived 1,500 miles away from me. My father had a rough childhood, she was his half-sister and a bit older than he was. I never met her in person, it was just such an odd moment. Like I said, I’ve never told anyone. Just my current husband and my best friend at the time. I never knew what to make of it.
39. They Never Really Leave You
Years ago, in early 2000, I suffered a bad miscarriage. I was about 10 weeks along. My husband and I weren't able to find out if it was a boy or a girl due to how early it was in my pregnancy and the technology wasn't what it is today.
About a week before all hell broke loose, I had a very vivid dream, which I still remember to this day, that I gave birth to a baby girl who looked back at me and smiled. That's the only part I remember—she popped out, turned around, and smiled. A week later I started bleeding.
I have never mentioned my miscarriage to my kids. Never even talked about it. Fast forward to present day. My husband and I have two wonderful boys. Our 17-year-old, however, has terminal cancer. He is also autistic. I mention the autism because over the past few years he has always asked what our cat that passed years ago is doing in Heaven.
Just last week, he creeped me right out. He started to talk about his sister in Heaven. My hands are shaking as I type this. He mentions his grandfathers, both of whom have passed, and different people he met along the way. I never told him about my pregnancy loss, and I don't think he'd understand if he found out.
I've heard that some people with a terminal illness can sometimes "see" things, and he has said some pretty wild things thanks to the autism. But he asks what his sister in Heaven is doing. Just a thought, but I think our first child is with her family members and watching over us.
40. Repeat After Me
My three-year-old son was sleeping next to me in my bed last night. Now does anybody else, when really tired and just as you start to try and go to sleep, get a random word or phrase thrown into your head automatically by a random voice that’s louder than your usual thoughts? This usually seems to happen to me as I start to try to sleep.
The words or quick phrases never really make sense, and I don’t ever feel a presence near me or anything. It’s literally just someone else’s voice yelling into my mind really quick. Just seems like some weird glitch while my mind is starting to go into sleep mode or something. Doesn’t feel paranormal at all. Until last night, that is.
Last night the phrase was by a woman’s voice saying “Enjoy Happiness” and RIGHT after it was said in MY head, my son (sleep talking) said “I enjoy!” Like as if he was agreeing with the statement. It’s just too bizarre to be a coincidence, it’s like we had the same thought at the same exact time.. I swear there’s so much more to this life than we know..
41. Sky High
My aunt used to work in a nursing home. There was an old woman who lived there, universally beloved by all the staff, who often talked about how much she wished she were young again and could wear high heels. Every single photo of her in her room, she was wearing high heels. This woman loved shoes.
One night, my aunt was talking to another nurse, when they suddenly heard the distinct loud sound of someone walking through the corridor wearing high heels. The sound moved away from them and faded away. Both my aunt and her colleague instinctively knew what had happened.
They checked on the old woman, and she had passed in her sleep. It’s nice to know that she could finally wear her favorite shoes again on her way to wherever she was going.
42. Cuckoo!
My great-grandmother had this house in Mississippi full of cuckoo clocks. Like, she was a collector and had roughly 25-30 of them in the living room alone. She also collected old bottles, hundreds of them in the attic from the early 1900s. That part is not important other than to give you context that she liked to collect things and wasn't crazy.
The one thing she was particular about was having strangers in the house. She hated it. If she didn't already know you, you'd get promptly brow beaten by this angry 90-year-old lady until you left. I saw it happen to solicitors a few times. Well, when she passed, whoever bought the house from the estate turned it into a B&B.
The running joke was that we bet she was turning over in her grave at all those strangers sleeping in her house. The clocks and the rest of her stuff went to people in the family. So, we're watching the local news one night and see that the house, now B&B, caught fire and burned down overnight. When they interviewed the visibly shaken new owner, he said he heard a bunch of cuckoo clocks go off right before the house caught fire.
43. Playing Haunted House
Buckle up, we’re going on a journey. To give you some visuals about the land. It was a scrappy old trailer sitting on about five acres in a really beautiful valley in the South West. There is a seasonal arroyo, which during monsoons would turn the back three acres into nearly a lake. The back half of the property was lined with a wooded ridge in mountainous area.
Very rural. About nine miles from town, down the worst dirt road that has ever existed. As with most adults, I entered a period of life with some pretty big obstacles and struggles. It was a sequence of events which led me to renting this run-down trash can.
At the time it seemed serendipitous. An acquaintance had mentioned a property near her I could possibly rent for dirt cheap while we were hanging out under the new moon. Fast forward to the next new moon, this property owner contacts me and after some chatting we agree to meet.
This place was not the Ritz. It was a run-down trailer that hadn’t been cared for in, probably ever. I believe firmly in listening to my gut but any red flags that came up were squelched by my excitement to maybe have an opportunity to pull myself out of the financial hole I’d dug myself into.
The property manager needed work done on the property and would trade for rent. I was swept away at the glimmer of freedom I was staring at. I hands down accepted the keys. Before moving in, I had to first clean the entire place. So much bleach. As I cleaned out several years of other tenants’ things, it started to get real weird.
I took note of how many sentimental items had been seemingly abandoned in closets. Some of it I set aside with no idea what I’d do with it, it just felt wrong to throw it to the dump. After several weeks of bleaching and blessings, I was nearly ready. I invited a dear friend of mine, Mark, to come out with me to celebrate.
While Mark and I are finalizing the cleaning and working on a broken water pump, my new-moon acquaintance (now neighbor) comes over with her entire family in tow—two kids, two teens, and her husband. The energy shifted in a way I couldn’t not notice. The husband was behaving....off.
He wasn’t being social nor was he being antisocial. In the spirit of don’t rain on my parade I brushed it off. Some time in the course of the day, they realized they had locked their keys in the vehicle, and the husband would need to go fetch the spares from next door.
He invites my friend Mark to go along with him, leaving me with my acquaintance and children. We are chatting and listening to music. I knew a storm was coming and was feeling excited for an early summer storm. She, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly anxious. She has no, known to me, fear of storms.
She is pacing with one of her small kids, looking out the windows for headlights. I was in the kitchen and she was on the porch looking for the returning men. Then chaos came loose. There was the biggest, loudest, boom I have ever heard. My entire body swayed with it.
I said to the kids in the kitchen that Mother Nature was very vocal tonight and giggled to ease their surprise. The youngest she is holding is screaming and she has come back in the door, absolutely bawling her eyes out. I am completely confused. I take the baby to comfort him and I hold her in my other arm.
She cries and weeps for the next however many minutes until the men arrive. She departs shortly thereafter. Her husband is absolutely invigorated, and my friend is quite obviously shook. When he told me the story, my eyebrows went right up. Turns out, they were driving on the road back when the lighting struck the ground directly next to their vehicle, scaring my friend half to death.
The strange part, though, was the drive takes less than three minutes, but from the boom (lightning striking) and when they arrived was at least 20 minutes. After the neighbor family departs, my friend is ready to go. Go, right now. After arriving home and checking in with one another, he tells me he loves me but he will never go out there again.
At the time I thought maybe he was just really freaked by that freak storm and it would pass. He never would come back, and in fact our relationship took a nosedive after this. Fast forward to move-in time. I’ve got all my stuff in place, and my dog, rabbit, and cat seem very content to have places to play.
I was feeling so good that this was my ticket. I had a bonfire soon after and burned all those items I’d kept when cleaning the house. It just felt right to let them go ceremonially. Then it started. The first night I had a nightmare. The worst I have had in many years. I kept waking up and falling right back in. Each waking I awoke screaming. I know I know, it sounds dramatic. It was.
This dream took place entirely at this new place. I was so afraid. No one would help me. There was one of my acquaintance’s teen boys curled up in the corner wearing flower patterned swim short type things, but he wouldn’t answer my pleas. I kept peeking out windows into the blackness, knowing there was something outside.
I finally summoned the courage to open the door. On the doorstep were snakes. Green snakes twisted around one another. I screamed for someone to call the neighbor and that he needed to bring a gun. He arrives and gets out of his truck with a shovel and a nonchalant way about him.
The nightmare left me a little on edge, as when I have nightmares I’m typically under stress and I didn’t feel stressed in the least before it. Two days later, I am lounging in my hammock enjoying the sun and watching the rabbit and the cat play in the fenced area while the pup is sniffing about outside looking for treasures.
I hear a very loud noise near the dog and simultaneously the dog jumps back. I go to investigate—and nearly scream. There’s a darn rattlesnake right outside the fence. I have never in my life seen one or heard one for that matter. I decide I have to “take care” of it because of the cat and rabbit’s safety.
I know there’s a pellet gun inside that might do the trick. I stare at this snake a moment longer, and realize it looks weird. That’s when I see the second head. Never have I seen ONE rattlesnake in my years of life but here I am staring at TWO all entangled together. I immediately decide this job is above my pay grade and I call the neighbor over and ask him to bring a gun.
A few moments pass and he arrives. The moment he exits the truck I flash back to my nightmare and my breath just caught in my throat. He exits the vehicle with a shovel and a sardonic grin. His teenage son exits as well…wearing the exact shorts I had dreamt.
He dispatched both snakes, noting to me how dangerous it may be for me to live here without a gun. His tone and look made my skin crawl. As time went on the nightmares grew worse, but they were always at the property. I would wake up screaming multiple times per night.
In my nightmares I would scream “bruja”—a word I have never used in my life was now always inside my mind’s eye. The dreams shifted to images of something dark and slimy (I can’t describe what it looked like but I “knew” its texture) in the back room. This was terrifying for one reason.
The back room was vacant because after moving in I had felt increasingly uneasy in that space. I couldn’t go near it in the dark without feeling a fear so deep I wanted to vomit. The neighbors around me became increasingly rude and seemed to be making a point to make me feel unwanted.
I finally got to the point where I was terrified to be there and was so sleep deprived I called on a shaman to come visit me to help me bless and clear whatever weird things were hanging on. She asked me what exactly was happening that made me feel I needed an outsider. I told her. She asked me where it was. I told her. She was quiet. Her next words shocked me.
She told me no. She would not visit and it was her advice I leave, and leave immediately. I wasn’t ready to give up that easily and told her no, I would not be chased away. I called around until I was connected with two women who agreed to come perform a cleansing for me. During this we walked the yard and came to the bonfire ring and she stopped in her tracks.
“What did you burn?!” I was kind of taken aback at her tone but I told her and she says “You shouldn’t have done that”. Directly after that she informs me she needs to leave. I never heard from her again. I became increasingly isolated as anyone who would visit me wouldn’t revisit. Dear friends who point-blank told me the area made them uncomfortable.
I began to wake in the night between 1-3 am, every single morning. One of those times I woke to a deep male voice saying words I could not discern. Another was a woman’s voice saying words I could not discern. Yet again a deep male voice saying, “I’m not ready yet”. These incidents left me feeling crazy. There had to be an explanation. Had to be.
This is where I should say my belief in the paranormal was tested and I realized I don’t think I had ever really believed before then. It got to a horrific climax. One morning I feel myself wake but I do not open my eyes and I say in mind’s voice No, I will not look at you. I drifted back to sleep. I was suddenly awoken again, and this time it felt like I had a fever.
My body was so hot and my mind’s voice says It’s time to wake up. I glance at my phone and it’s 2:30 am. I downloaded a sleep recorder, because why not. And what I captured was...a thing. The most distinguishable was a woman’s voice, saying “Come Home”. Another was singing in the far distance. Another was a woman’s voice screaming “Shut Up!”
It was around this time I started seeing the thing in my peripheral vision, in the kitchen. My dog would growl at windows into the darkness and wake up barking often throughout the entire duration. She was aggressive to every single neighbor and my landlord, but no one else.
The items I burned were love letters, children’s cards to their mother, and items such that had no real value. I placed cameras outside hoping to find a person coming and messing with me, but the only thing I ever caught was a big deer coming through. I was told by ghost-chasing types that this place was a portal being used by otherworldly things.
When I finally moved, the neighbor dropped by on my last night and point-blank told me I couldn’t leave, he wouldn’t let me. The night the neighbor came over there was a lot of rambling that evening coming from him. Some it included random comments about me being a Scorpio and him a Leo, that he was stronger than me.
That I knew what I had done. On multiple occasions various vehicles would stop on the road by my driveway and sit there. This was not a traveled road by any stretch. So, coupled with the unexplained, there was a lot downright strange human behavior, too.
It was the absolute worst eight months of my life, and I contacted multiple shaman/seer/ghost people during this time and they all told me under no uncertain terms that I needed to move and I needed to move immediately. The reasons why varied. I think I can summarize it down to the area was full of nasties they were not willing to work with and these nasties meant me no good.
I reconnected with my dear friend after I had moved from the terrible place, thank God. This entire experience tested what I believe.
44. Kids Say The Creepiest Things
When I was three or four, I remember telling my aunt that I was flying some feet off the ground, and from above I saw my mom and dad in a restaurant through a window. I could also see my dad’s black truck that he owned when I was a kid parked right outside the restaurant.
Then suddenly three men with bats come up to the truck and start hitting it and my dad comes out and starts fighting them. My aunt said, “that’s cool sweetie,” and went back to playing with my toys. It wasn’t until years later when I was like 15 that my parents had a dinner party with some friends and they started to talk about paranormal stuff.
My mom said that I scared them when I was younger, then she proceeded to tell the story I told my aunt when I was a kid. She finished by saying “nobody ever told him this story and the thing is that it actually happened”. The guy who beat my dad’s truck was my mom’s ex-boyfriend, who brought two of his buddies to help because the guy was still mad my mom broke up with him.
But here’s the kicker: I wasn’t even born yet when it happened. It was actually their first date.
45. An Old Friend
This happened to me around 15 years ago, when I started study in a town away from my parents’ home. There was one man, let's call him Tony, who was a good friend of my father. He helped him at work sometimes, so I hung out with them too occasionally. When I was 17, I moved to a bigger city to start university, so I traveled every two months to visit my parents for long weekends or vacations.
After my second year away, this friend Tony passed from alcohol abuse. My father told me on a phone call how it happened, or at least how he heard it happened. Around two months later, on The Day of the Dead here in Mexico, I went to visit my parents and also to go and visit the tombs of the family as the traditions goes.
At this point I literally forgot about Tony's passing. Now, I ended up missing my bus and had to take the one that arrives at my parents’ at 2 am. It is quite a small town, so since I didn't find any taxis near the bus station, I decided walk home. Around five blocks away from the house, I had to pass a bridge that people say is haunted.
I was a little scared, to be honest. But then suddenly this friend Tony reached me on his bike (he was always cycling) and asked me if I was just arriving from university. Again, I had totally forgotten Tony was long gone at that point. So I started to talk to him, and we walked past the bridge and a couple more blocks, for around four or five minutes, talking about the school, the food in the other city, and stuff like that.
Just once block away from my parents' house he just told me "Ok, I have to go check some things over here (pointing at another direction), but keep safe, say hello to your father for me". We said goodbye and then I got home. Since it was early morning, I walked directly into my room and waited until the next day to go and see my parents.
It wasn’t until next morning, when I was just about to tell my father about Tony, that I remembered that he was already dead. At that moment I didn't tell my parents, but a bit later into the day my father told me that he saw me arriving. He asked me if I was drunk or something because he saw me "talking to nobody".
46. They Do Have Nine Lives
I had a kitten pass away yesterday. He was my little shadow. He slept on my chest every night, never left my side during the day, and literally gave me kisses all of the time. He would lick my mouth whenever I made the kissy face/noise. He was an amazing little creature.
He was only a couple months old. He got a cold when the weather got hot suddenly. This isn't uncommon. It's similar to allergies in humans. I immediately took him to the vet to get him some medicine. The vet gave me some medicine for him, but warned me that he may not make it. He passed yesterday.
He was not in pain, he was in my arms, and not alone. I was heartbroken, still am. So, I bury him in the corner of my garden, a lovely little shaded spot under a tree. I put a couple rocks over his grave and picked some flowers and placed them there. I miss him desperately, and I cried most of yesterday and today.
This evening I am going out to my car, and I walk out the front door to head to my car. You must understand that while I buried my kitten in the front garden, when you leave the front door you have to turn to look where he is buried; the path to my car is heading in the opposite direction. I walk toward my car and I hear a voice in my head say "turn around"... I stop because it startled me.
But I listen and turn around and look toward my kitten’s grave. The sight made tears well up in my eyes instantly. Curled up sound asleep on his grave is a small kitten. I walk over slowly because I don't want to startle him. He doesn't startle, but he does wake up and look at me. He appears to be blind.
He stretches out and meows and I bend over and pick him up. He immediately starts purring and licking me. Just like my kitten did. I know this is probably a coincidence…but the timing is amazing. My kitten passes. I bury him, and the next day I find a little kitten curled up on his grave.
I have never seen this kitten before. He by some miracle was sent to me. I promise I will not take this gift for granted.
47. In Another Life
My grandma lived to be 99 years old and passed about eight years ago. I’m now in my 40s and to this day I’ve never quite felt a connection to another human being like the one I shared with her. My wife was around two months pregnant with our first child when I had gotten word that my grandma wasn’t doing so well.
I was crushed that she likely wouldn’t be able to meet my firstborn child. At this point I lived across the country from where my grandma was, just started a new career, and my mom told me my grandma had developed bad dementia and suggested it was okay to stay home and handle my priorities instead of seeing her in this state.
I ultimately decided to stay home to help my pregnant wife. My grandma hung on for a couple months, then passed, and a few months later our son was born. Now this is an important detail for later: My son has these insanely piercing bright blue eyes and platinum blonde hair.
Fast forward six months or so and I’m in my son’s room one night, trying to get him to sleep. He was in his crib and suddenly turned his head a bit to look up towards the corner of the ceiling, almost as if startled. Then he started laughing…like so hard he could barely catch his breath. I’m following his line of sight and looking up there.
There are no nearby pictures or decorations up there, just a blank wall in that corner of the room. The next day it happened again, so I went to get my wife from the other room so she could see how hard he was laughing. Her response creeped the heck out of me. She told me that he was doing the same thing during the day the whole week while I was at work.
It became a regular occurrence multiple times a day and really unsettling because he was clearly seeing something up there. A couple months later my mom came to visit. One night she’s helping me get my son ready for bed and we get into a conversation about my grandma’s last days, particularly how her dementia was getting worse and worse as it went on until this one specific day. Here’s the first kicker.
She tells me this one day she goes to visit my grandma and she’s in bed, her feet dancing back and forth with a huge smile on her face. And it’s the first somewhat normal conversation they have in about a month. Mom: Wow, you’re so happy today! Grandma: Yeah, my friend came to visit me again.
Mom: Who’s that? Grandma: The boy with the penguins. Mom: Oh, is he a boy visiting someone in the nursing home? Grandma: No, he lives in there. Then she points to the corner of the room near the ceiling. To humor her, my mom asks what he looks like. Grandma: The boy with the blue eyes and white-blonde hair, he’s going to visit me every day now. At this point my jaw is practically on the floor.
She proceeds to tell me how from that day forward it’s all my grandma will talk about. Every single day until the day she passes, a blue-eyed blonde boy with penguin friends who lives on a tropical island inside the wall pops in to visit her. I then tell my mom about my son and the giggling and the ceiling.
We’re both shocked at the coincidence, and I ask what’s with the penguins. My mom has no clue, neither do I. I WANT to believe at this point my grandma and son had some sort of otherworldly connection. But the rational side of me is like...she had dementia, babies do weird stuff sometimes and penguins and tropical islands make no sense. But here’s the second kicker and I can’t deny it after this.
Fast forward, my son is roughly four and a half. Out of the blue he starts talking about this place where he used to live before he was born called Kryptodon every single day. (This is my best interpretation of spelling it). He says Kryptodon is like a planet, but not near Earth and where people can fly and animals talk (among many other details).
I listen to his stories about it and am happy he has a big imagination. At this point I had forgotten about the penguins. One day I’m going through an old photo album and see a picture of my grandma. I call my son over to come see the picture and this is the first time I’ve EVER shown him a picture of my grandma. He says, “I know her, she’s my friend from Kryptodon”.
My hair stands up and I ask him to tell me more about her and he says, “She came over and ate pineapples with me and my penguins on my island when I lived there”. I then burst into tears as the details of my mom’s story came rushing back to me. I feel like the probability of all this being only coincidence is nearly impossible.
I don’t know what it all means but I’m grateful to be able to finally share this. I’ve always been hesitant to put this out there because it is very personal to me. My son is now seven years old and rarely talks about Kryptodon, and if I ask he says he remembers and will acknowledge it, just with nowhere near the level of detail he once did.
I left out so, so many details above, too. He drew literally 100s of pictures of it and I’ve saved most in a binder. He talked about it for hours at a time on a daily basis until he was around six. He asked me once if I remember being there, I said no and he said “We’ve travelled together for a long, long time”. I asked how long and he said, “higher than people can count”.
He also claimed he was once my dad a long time ago. My wife bought him a stuffed animal when he was a newborn, a gray elephant. He named it Ellie when he was older and told us that there was an elephant on his island that taught people to travel to other places. And that since his mom gave him the stuffed elephant, that’s how he knew he was in the right place.
I know this ultimately proves nothing...but I will say when you’re a parent, you know the difference when you see your child speak with true conviction.
48. A Call From The Other Side
A couple of years ago I was asleep at home having a dream where I was on a train looking for a friend of mine. In the dream I had exhausted everyplace to look, and for whatever reason I was adamant I needed to talk to him immediately. In the dream I ran into my friend’s father and I asked about my friend's location, as he was nowhere to be found.
At this point, I get a phone call from my friend wanting to know why I had called his father. To be clear, I do not have his father’s phone number, never have, and my phone showed no placed calls in the history. My friend had been with his dad and recognized my number as his dad didn't have me as a contact either.
We compared notes the next day. His father’s phone showed the call in the history of his phone as well. To this date, we just shrug it off as a freak occurrence.
49. Keep Him Safe
This occurred over 20 years ago but is still fresh in my mind. My son was born early at 32 weeks. We were lucky and he had few issues and we were able to bring him home a month after he was born. He came home on oxygen and caffeine due to bradycardia.
Once we were home, strange things began to happen. The cat refused to go in his room. Before he was born, though, I was forever removing said cat from his room. Our dog would sit at the bottom of the stairs and tilt his head as if he was listening to something. I would be changing his diaper and start talking as I thought his dad just came into the room, only to turn and find out I was alone.
A friend gave him a peek-a-boo big bird toy that would say "peek-a-boo" when you covered and then uncovered its eyes. This toy would go off all the time. Even after I put it into a box in the closet. I often felt I was not alone in that house. My parents had given us an angel care baby monitor as a gift.
This had a pad that was placed under the mattress and an alarm would sound if it did not detect any movement after a certain amount of time. As our son was tiny...only five pounds when he came home...this alarm would often go off. I would wake up, walk into his room, turn it off and check on him.
He was always fine. And I never felt that it was anything but the fact he was so tiny that the pad didn't pick up his breathing. During this time, I would often dream of a woman I would find in his room. I never saw her directly but would dream I saw the shadow of a woman with long hair standing and reaching into his crib.
The dreams never scared me but I did find them very odd but comforting at the same time. I can't remember how long he had been home, but it was at least a month. He was still on oxygen and still on caffeine. Our bed was to the left of our bedroom door and I slept on the right-hand side next to the door and my husband slept on the left-hand side.
I was asleep and was woken up by being shaken roughly on the door side of the bed. I woke up and looked over at my husband and said why are you shaking me. Then a chill ran down my spine. I realized he was completely asleep and on the wrong side to have shaken me.
I immediately jumped up and ran to my son’s room. I flipped the light on (something I had never done up to this point) and heard a gasp from the crib. Often when babies spontaneously stop breathing, you just need to startle them to begin again. I truly believe that he had stopped breathing and my turning on the light startled him into breathing again.
After this episode, the dreams and strange occurrences with the pets and toy continued, until my son came off the oxygen and caffeine. Once that happened the odd occurrences stopped. The pets stopped acting weird and the big bird toy never went off on its own again. I believe that someone came home with him to keep him safe.
50. You Remind Me Of Someone…
When I was a kid, from about four to six years old, I had an imaginary friend. His name was John Crossen. I would see him as a little blonde boy about my age. This went on for a while and my parents thought it was cute. It actually probably went on for a few years.
It came to the point where my parents would refer to him and kid me about him. I'm sure they thought it was cute. We would play games and talk and do whatever normal kids would do. I do remember in my mind's eye he was always impeccably dressed. Literally a suit and tie. One of those old fashioned suits with short pants and a ribbon tie.
He seemed to be a bit older than me, but he never said how old. For a long time things were fun...and cute...and typical for a little kid. I had bunk beds. The top was his, the bottom was mine. He also had this very strange “power” when he was around.
My dad used to yell at me a lot. If dad was yelling at me and John was there, he would smile and indicate that I should watch him. He would blink his eyes tight and long, and my angry dad...would be gone. He would leave the room. No memory of the issue. I really loved that. Then it happened.
I remember we went camping. It was in the Rocky Mountains and very beautiful. Especially at night. One night something happened. The Milky Way was stretched across the sky. This is when "John" revealed himself. He asked me if I wanted to see what he really looked like? This confused me. I thought I knew what he looked like.
He asked again. “Do you want to see what I really look like?” He told me to look up at the mountains. Then he/it began to rise from behind the mountains. This giant, grinning distorted Pinocchio-looking thing began to rise from behind the mountain. It really scared me. It grinned at me. It was him. It was John showing me what he looked like.
This distorted clown-like golem marionette. I was freaked out. I wanted to be anywhere but there. Eventually, we went home, and I stopped playing with my imaginary friend. I told my parents I wasn't playing with John anymore. I really didn't tell them why. I told him he was gone and wasn't coming back.
Now, my parents managed the apartment building we lived in. About two weeks after the camping trip, we had a new person move into the building. Here comes the nearly unbelievable part. His name was John Crossen. They wanted me to meet him because they thought it was a funny coincidence. I didn't want to.
I couldn't explain why, but I protested and argued with them. I had no desire to meet this man. Eventually they could tell I was scared and stopped pushing. Obviously we were all freaked out a bit.
51. Little Boy Boo
I drive for Uber and I stopped at this house a few hours ago. As I'm waiting, a light turned on upstairs and this little boy was turning the lights on, waving at me, then turning them off. He did it a few times and was smiling and looked like he may be laughing. I waved back and smiled and even though it was late, I didn't even question it.
The girl got in my car a few minutes later. I thought she took so long because the kid was hers and I commented how cute the kid upstairs was. Her face immediately went pale. She looked me straight in the eye and told me no one lives upstairs. I laughed because it's spooky season and I thought she was messing with me.
I stopped shortly after looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing that she was starting to cry. She took a few deep breaths and asked me what I saw. So, I told her about the little boy turning on the lights. She called her boyfriend who was still there and was full on freaking out. Turns out her boyfriend had several people mention the kid that plays with the lights and waves!
I would have thought it was a joke, but she was shaking and almost had a panic attack about this. Her boyfriend was woken up by the call and the entire downstairs was dark when I picked her up. I have no other explanation for this because of her reaction. My hair is still standing on end thinking about it.
For anyone worried about the child and suspecting foul play, I did place a call to the local authorities and they did confirm that there is no child at the residence, although they wouldn't tell me if the upstairs apartment was occupied or vacant. I also went back to the house. I sat there for a bit and nothing happened.
I could sort of see into the window where I saw him. The lady wasn't kidding, there is nothing up there. No photos or furniture that could be seen. The apartment’s on the second floor but it is has those long windows that almost reach the floor. Anyway, there was no movement inside. However, as I started to drive away, I saw a kid in the yard running...but there was no noise to it...no crunching leaves or anything.
I had my window open, radio off, so I would be able to hear footfalls or at the very least the shuffling of leaves. It was just a glimpse and I waited for something else but there was nothing. I think it is safe to say that there is something on that property.
52. A Figment Of Your Imagination
I am currently 21 years old, and up until recently I had not experienced anything that I would call “supernatural”. I’m still not sure what to think of the supernatural/paranormal, but this really freaked me out. I don’t know if something brought it on, but I was out with my friends when I suddenly started thinking about the past, particularly about my childhood friend Brendan.
We went to elementary and middle school together, and when I was remembering this, I just assumed that he went to a different high school than me and we drifted apart. So I decide that I’m going to track him down and reconnect with him. It was off right from the beginning. I can’t find any of his social media profiles or information about him online.
I sort of forgot about it for a while. Then about a month ago, I was out with another one of my friends, Amy, whom I’d known since elementary school as well, and I ask her if she’s been in contact with Brendan or if she knew how to get a hold of him. She seems to hesitate, but when I mentioned his last name she remembered.
She told me she hadn’t spoken to him in probably eight years, but remembered his parents’ address. I drive over there, seeing as it’s not actually that far away. Then his parents open the door, and I recognize them. They say hi to me and invite me inside. I introduce myself and they remark on how much I’ve grown. It got utterly chilling after that.
They say that they don’t have a son. I immediately assumed that maybe he had gotten into substances or something and they disowned him. But no, they insist that they do not have a son at all, just two daughters. By the way, I do also recognize the daughters, so there’s no doubt that this is his family.
I ended up outright accusing them of lying and they got really defensive. So I just apologized and went home. I don’t think I got the wrong house. I recognized them and they recognized me. But regardless, I phoned Amy and told her what happened, and asked her if she was sure this was their address.
I stopped thinking about it for a little while again, until about two weeks ago Amy texted me saying that he wasn’t in any of her yearbooks. And sure as heck, I check mine and he’s not there. We met up a few days ago and we both went in separate rooms to draw what we thought Brendan looked like, just in case he was a shared hallucination.
But no. We both came back with drawings that looked almost the same, down to the way he parted his hair, and the location of his three face moles. In the last few days we’ve both been going down a rabbit hole of talking to old teachers, friends, etc. I swear to God it’s like he never existed.
We even went down to our old middle school to see if he was in any of the class photos, and nothing. I also got some old birthday photos from my mom, and on most of those birthdays I am 100% certain Brendan was there. But again, nothing. Not even my parents remember him.
Amy and I want to check hospital records for some kind of birth certificate or anything, but it’s really starting to scare both of us. If it were just me I’d think I dreamed him up, but Amy pointed out the “correct” address, and we both came up with near identical drawings of him.
53. Don’t Make The Same Mistakes I Did
My grandad used to stay with us when I was little. This was the mid/late 90s at the time. He was rather "young" to be a grandparent (late 30s/early 40s) but he would always play with me, read to me, teach me songs...that sort of thing. We didn't see him any more after we moved. I was only little, so I guessed that time/money/travel or whatever was the reason.
When I was 11, we had to do a family tree for homework. That's when I learned the chilling story. It turned out that my grandad, who I thought stayed with us, had actually perished in the conflict in Zimbabwe when he was in the army in the late 70s, when my dad was a baby.
I guess that I must have been seeing his ghost when I was little, which terrified me when I found out. However, as I've gotten older, I've realized how nice it actually was that I was able to see him. A few years ago, I was going to join the army instead of going to college. Just as I was about send off my application form online, my computer shut down.
The two other times I've tried to apply something has stopped me from being able to. The internet has stopped working and shut off, and my car broke down on the way to the assessment centre when I was due for my medical, so I missed the test. I guess he doesn't want the same thing to happen to me.
54. I’ve Got Your Back
This just happened half an hour ago. I came back to my hometown for the holidays. It's a fairly rural area with woods and everything is peaceful. I love going to pick wild berries and I was doing just that when I encountered the first paranormal experience of my life. It happened in the backyard of my neighbor.
So I used to have an old man who lived alone as my neighbor and he was a very kind person. He used to give us his berries as candied sweets. He passed due to cardiac failure when I was in high school and his house has been empty ever since. This year, I wanted to make those sweets for my family as a holiday comfort food and thus, went to his place.
Now as he passed years ago, there was a lot of undergrowth and wild grass in his yard and everything was messy. I cleared some of the growth and made my way to the shrubs, cleaning the place as much as I could and thinking about how clean he used to keep everything. All this time I had a feeling that something was off and that I was being watched, but I brushed it off.
I was two minutes into picking when I heard my neighbor’s voice. I'm sure it was him, and he was saying I should be more careful and to pick up the rake immediately. Then my whole world changed. It was as if I was fainting, and everything was too fast or maybe too slow. But as soon as I picked the rake—some homeless man who had been on the property tried to stab me with a knife.
I used the sharp end of the rake to scare him off and kept shouting loudly. He ran off. After I gathered myself, I had tears but couldn't shake off a smile I had. It was eerie, but I am unharmed. I think I'm going to clean my neighbor’s place. I owe him that much.
55. Can’t Quit, Won’t Quit
I work with one other person closely throughout most workdays. Today we got to work early as we knew we had to get stuff done before this snowstorm hit. I work at a burial vault manufacturer and we deliver and set up funerals graveside if the customer wishes.
On this morning I walk to the back and turn on the lights to each section of the shop. On the very last switch I turn it on and I see an older gentleman facing away from me, leaning against the back wall facing the back of the shop. It startled me and I turned around to ask my co-worker if there’s someone in the shop.
My co-worker kind of laughs as I tell him. He proceed to terrify me to my bones. He says “Oh so you saw him did you?” Apparently it’s the owner’s father, who has strong ties to the workplace and has been gone for 10 years. There are three recorded sightings of him and mine was the fourth.
I’m fairly new there so this completely caught me off guard. I felt like I was dreaming. I had to sit in the bathroom for 10 minutes to calm down. I literally saw someone back there and then they disappeared. I’ve always thought ghosts and spirits weren’t real but this has completely turned me sideways. I see life in a whole new way.
I can’t stop thinking about him though. Those blue overalls and white hair with a cap on. Clear as day right there and it was a ghost. My co-worker telling me he saw him too has turned me into a believer because I know I’m not losing my mind.
56. Joshing Around From Beyond The Grave
Last week my wife and I attended a wedding and had to have a babysitter watch the kids overnight. When we returned home, everything was fine except that the remote for the living room had gone missing. Usually when this happens it is stuck in no man’s land under the couch but I could not find it anywhere.
I actually gave up and ordered two more remotes off of eBay. Problem solved right? So last night right before I got up to go to bed, my son came out of his room and asked if he could sleep with his mom. I told him yes, and got the couch ready to sleep on. While I was asleep, I had the first dream of my deceased brother since he passed in 2011.
In the dream he was holding my remote in his hand and saying he was sorry for making me spend money—he knows I don’t like to waste it on things I didn’t need. He said that he would “put the remote back where it usually is”. The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was to check the spot that he told me in the dream…and it was there.
I had checked that spot at least once a day since it went missing. When I told my wife about the dream and showed her the remote she started crying. Between her and I, that spot in the couch was checked and rechecked at least 20 times. I also told my sister about it and she was ecstatic because my brother would mess with both of us when we were kids by hiding things in really tough spots until he was sure that we had looked everywhere.
He would then put it in an obvious spot when we weren’t around. This is like classic Jeff. Thanks Jeff, I’ll return those new remotes as soon as they arrive.
57. A Very Good Boy
In 2014 my beloved stink dog Jesse passed. He was 14 glorious years young. Heart disease came fast and took him faster. But I wasn't there when he passed. My mother and I shared him, two years on and two years off around. We got him from a man who had 15 puppies in a huge laundry basket in Morgan Hill, California.
I was nine and my mom told me to pick one. I couldn't believe it. We hadn't had a dog since Fritz, our Doberman. But the one I wanted was in another girl's arms. She was around 19 with tattoos and piercings, like me now, and said that he was hers once her mom came out of the dentist’s office.
I almost started a fist fight over him, telling her she had my dog and to give him to me. While we were arguing, her mother came out. She immediately told the girl no way and to put that thing down. I just grabbed him out of her arms and politely thanked her for holding my dog for me. I was a determined, smart-mouthed, little jerk.
We paid 15 bucks for a super dog. A Chow/Husky/Sheperd mix. Stout stocky boy, Chow size with Shepard markings and husky fur. Jesse knew over 85 commands and would always make us laugh. He was the smartest, most wonderful dog ever. I could go on and on about him...Well, in January of 2014, we made the switch.
I was moving from New Mexico back to Washington with my grandparents. We stopped in California and it almost ruined me to give him to my mama. I just knew that this was the last time I would see him. I didn't know why but I loved him as much as I could before leaving. Honestly I was mad at my mom because my brain thought, "She won't give him back!"
I never acted on that thought or took it out on her. It was just a thought. That day in August I was swimming in the lake with grandma. My phone went off. Something told me not to answer yet. When I checked it, lake day was over. It was like my world ended. Dramatic I know, but I treat my animals like my children and nephews (I'm infertile).
From his death to 2017, stuff was going down in the family and I was depressed. I had my boyfriend, now husband, move in with me and things were going well. But I was still depressed. All I wanted was to see Jesse one more time. He was all I wanted in my worst moments. I would beg for him to visit me in my dreams since the day he passed.
It's so hard for me to let go. All our other dogs except grandma’s had passed. Only my cats remained with me. And I was still begging for him to visit. One night I rolled over on my back, asleep but aware of my surroundings, if that makes any sense. My man was next to me within inches. But between us...I felt him!
His form, warmth, his wiry fur. It was amazing. My skin tingled and I could actually feel his weight on me. But I knew if I opened my eyes, he would disappear. It was bittersweet as I enjoyed laying with my boy one more time. Even though I wasn't able to actually see him with my eyes.
I'm greedy and want him to visit again, but I know he's busy guarding the gates above. My mom always tells me that our dogs will lead us home. Those who have passed, we have told them to look for Jesse. He will take you to the pack. All the animals and people who have left us.
Sorry this is long, there must be onions growing in my closet. I don't fully let go until I start what I call another generation. Another dog is finally in my near future, but Jesse will always hold a huge piece of my heart. Jesse, I hope you visit me again. I will always love and miss you.
58. A Shared Scare
When I was really little, I shared a room with my younger brother, bunk bed style. One night we had just started to go to sleep. Back then our mother left the door open with the hallway light on. Our room was directly next to the staircase and that night I distinctly remembered hearing the stairs creak like they always did when someone was climbing. We had an old house so I was used to the noises it made.
Then, a silhouette appeared in the doorway. I remember thinking at the time that it was my older brother. Until, that is, it turned terrifying. Whatever the shadow was started to growl this low gravely rattle. At this time my brother had woken up and both of us started to uncomfortably laugh, though I was less and less sure it was my older brother trying to scare us.
Then it got scarier. The growl started to build and get louder and both of us freaked and started crying and wailing and whatever it was went back down the stairs as my mother and older brother came from their rooms, which were further down the hallway from the stairs. I thought for the longest time it was just a bad dream.
A few years ago I mentioned the experience to my younger brother and i saw all the blood drain from his face. He thought it was a dream too.
59. Don’t Go Into The Woods
I was in the Army at the time. I was supposed to meet my unit in a parking lot on-base, right next to some woods, for some training. I woke up early, at 3:30 am, to beat the traffic. I parked and passed out. I was awoken by the sounds of children playing. For a moment I was really confused.
I looked around and realized where I was, and that it was still super early, like 4:30 am. I thought I must've dreamt it. I fell asleep again for a few minutes, and once again, a child's scream and some laughing awoke me. I realized it was coming from the woods. I listened hard and caught a few more sounds of voices and laughter, I was definitely wide awake at this point.
I stared and saw no lights. I checked a map and saw that there were no houses in that direction at all, it was just forest. I don't know what was going on but to this day, being near these particular woods makes me very uneasy. I don't see how there could have been an actual group of children playing in the pitch-black woods with no lights at 4 am, on a base, not near housing.
60. Fire Drill
It was a Saturday afternoon during summer and I wasn’t due home until dark. In the middle of my turn at Metroid or whatever we were playing, I just handed my friend the controller and said, “I need to go home”. I had an absolutely terrible feeling. I hopped on my four-wheeler and barreled the two miles or so of woodland trails that lead back to my house
My folks had 32 acres in a fairly rural area, but little of it was developed for anything As I came down the dirt drive toward the house, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The field adjacent to our house was engulfed in flames, about five acres of switch grass, scrub oak, and pines. I ran into the house and found my dad napping in one room and my mom asleep in another.
“THE FIELD IS ON FIRE”! Dad and I grabbed shovels and mom called the fire department. The day before, dad and I had burned a large brush pile, and even though we spent hours soaking the ash heap, a couple coals must have been deep down and still hot, fanned by the high winds on the day of the fire.
The wind was blowing the fire across the field toward the neighboring house, which was for sale. While dad and I stood in its front yard fighting back flames, a realtor and prospective buyers stood in the window and watched as the possible destruction of the home grow closer. In the end, all that was lost was a trampoline and some of our fruit trees, but it definitely sticks out to me as a “what made me go home?” moment.
Had I not, I may have lost my parents and burned down countless acres of forest as well as at least one neighbor’s home.
61. Something Evil
One night my wife, son, and I went to stay over at my wife's parents’ house. It had gotten dark and my son, who was about two at the time, got sleepy and I decided to put him to bed. Let me try to explain the room to you, since it’s relevant for later.
The door opens on the right side of the room, and immediately to your left is the light switch and the queen-size bed is just beside that. It’s a small room, just big enough for the bed and enough room to walk around the bed. The wall in front of the bed has a window. To the left of the bed is a closet with those weird accordion doors.
I'm laying in bed with the lights out with my son, who is laying his head on my arm. He finally falls asleep, and I just lie there for a few minutes to make sure he is completely out. Then out of nowhere I get this horrible feeling. Goose bumps, hair standing up on my neck and arms. It was such an evil feeling. Have you ever got goose bumps up your scalp where it feels like your scalp is shrinking?
I did that night, so bad in fact it literally felt like someone had a hand on my head, squeezing it. I was genuinely scared. Not so much for me, but for my son. Somehow I knew deep down if I turned away from my son, something bad will happen to him. I thought if I could turn on the light, I could grab my son and leave the room.
So where I was on the bed, I could just barely touch the plastic thing on the light switch. I was afraid to move because I knew if I did that whatever this thing is, it will get my son. His head was on my arm this whole time. I finally chanced it. I jerked my arm out from my son and turned on the light.
It honestly took a split second. When I turned back to grab him, he was at the bottom of the mattress, like something had pulled him from the top to the bottom in a split freaking second. And I know he didn't crawl down there because he was still fast asleep. I grabbed him up and we left the room and slept in the front room that night. Something evil wanted my child...that is truly terrifying.
62. Get Out And Stay Out
When I was younger I used to be terrified of the guest room in my house. I hated being near it or even looking at it while the door was open. Once, my mom was in there folding laundry because the bed was the only place we had to stack clothes. I was in the room with her because she was making me help her.
She left the room for a minute or two to go get more clothes to fold. As I was standing there, I suddenly felt like something was watching me. Then I heard a voice yell in my ear, “get out”. I don’t remember what I did next, but as a grew older I eventually grew out of the fear of this room.
About a year ago, I decided that I wanted to move my bedroom to this room since I liked the paint a lot more and there were holes in the wall of my old room. I almost immediately regretted it. I am fully convinced that something does not want me in that room. I’ve heard voices call my name, the electricity suddenly go out, but only in that room, and numerous other things happen.
The one that scares me the most, though, is the door. Sometimes at night when I’m sleeping, the door will open itself. It started out as just creeping open slowly, slow enough that I thought I just hadn’t closed the door all the way. But one night, it slammed open hard enough to break the door stopper and put a hole in my wall.
Whatever is in my house doesn’t want me in that room with the door shut, and I don’t know why. I even got home one day and noticed that it looked like someone had used a crowbar to pull out part of the door frame, which now gets in the way when I’m closing the door, making it harder to shut.
63. Tales From The Asylum
The Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, formerly known as Weston State Hospital, is a Kirkbride building that housed the mentally ill from 1864-1994. In 2007, it was privately purchased and has become a museum/historic location and ghost hunting spot. It has a most unpleasant and dark history that I've regaled to thousands of people, and it pains me to be an expert on the subject.
In 2021, I retired from my position as a guide and ghost hunt event manager under severe burnout. After all that I experienced there, it solidified in my mind that paranormal things that defy rational explanation do indeed happen, and certain phenomenon are absolutely real.
Here are a couple of strange things I experienced in my time there: One evening while training for the job, I was on the first floor with a couple co-workers while everyone else was touring upstairs. We were just kind of wasting time, quietly observing the area. Light from outside was coming in through the windows, casting on the inner hall's wall.
In that light, I saw something I’ll never be able to explain. I watched the perfect silhouette of a man from head to hip walk through that light from left to right. I said something about it, and the three of us watched as an arm and hand moved into the light from the right side. I immediately ran into the room and began looking out of that window for someone outside.
There was no one there. At that time, the realization that from the ground to the bottom of the window is like seven feet didn't even occur to me. I will never forget the crisp, clear silhouette shape for as long as I live.
We would run experiments with a "spirit box". It rapidly scans radio frequencies to communicate. One person would use one with noise canceling ear buds, so all they're able to hear is the radio static and blips of a few random stations. When they hear a word or phrase, they are to say it out loud (I always liked this role in the experiment).
One evening, my co-worker and I ran one of these experiments in a notorious room where a murder in 1987 took place. For 10 minutes, I sat and listened to nothing but radio static through the spirit box—no blips of radio—nothing except chchchchchchch of the static.
I was starting to get bored, and then it happened. I heard a woman's voice say "Evil," so I spoke up and repeated the word, "Evil" ....Next thing I know, my co-worker is shining her flashlight in my face to get my attention. I pull out the ear bud, and she was practically frantic saying, "It's time to go, time to go!"
So we haul out of the room, down the hall, down the next hall to the center section before she would even tell me what happened. Apparently while I was hearing nothing but static, she said she kept hearing what sounded like someone shuffling their feet and walking around just outside of the door. This next part makes the hairs on my neck bristle.
She said she spoke up and asked, "Whoever is out in the hallway, are they nice?" That was when I spoke out and said "Evil". In the wee hours one night, we figured it would be cool to see what would happen if we shut all the doors of the ward. On one of the doors, as I was closing it, the knob twisted in my hand and was forcibly pulled closed.
I stood there for several moments opening/closing that door trying to replicate what happened, trying to explain it. Finally the person with me was like, "What the heck are you doing?" It was so weird, I'd never felt an invisible force like that before.
We also once had three people spend the night one night and they had thermal imaging video. They set it up, pointing down the hall where we could all watch on a tablet. We thought it would be interesting to leave a device at the far end of the hall that would alarm us if the field around it was disturbed.
As one of the dudes walked down the hall to put it there, we could see his form on thermal imaging. It was clearly human shaped and in colors representing heat and warmth. When he walked by one of those doorways about 1/4th way down the ward, though, the shape of a head, neck, shoulders, and upper body of a person in colors indicating cooler temperatures lean-peeked out as he walked by.
It was like someone popped out of the room for a second as he walked by to check him out. I've never seen anything like it, won’t forget it, and would give anything for a copy of that footage. That happened a lot, a guest capturing something far out, and not sending a copy to us. But there is one more thing that absolutely changed me and that I still don't understand.
I remember the exact night and time of these occurrences—that's how profound and unsettling they were. It was June 3 and June 4th of 2017, 3:40 am. June 3, after an hour or so of hearing a female's voice (one instance even sounded like she said my name) as well as banging around, footsteps, literally running sounds on the hardwood floor toward us, I sat quietly on the floor with a group.
I started to feel dizzy, lightheaded and gross. I told myself it was my imagination and that I’d be fine. A few minutes later, I started to feel this intense burning sensation on my lower back, just to the right of my spine. Again, I told myself it was all just my imagination. The burning sensation kept amping up, getting worse and worse.
I told myself that I didn't want to be "that guy" and say anything in front of these people, you know? Finally, it got to the point where I had to say something, though. I asked my co-worker with us if there was anything there on my body. Her face went white as a sheet. She was like "Oh my GOD”.
There, on my lower back, just to the right of my spine, was a mark that looked like a burn or an abrasion about 3-4" long and about 1" wide. Now, I'd seen other such claims made by visitors of "scratch marks" and the like (often writing them off) and the marks were always gone within an hour at most. I had a visible marking on my back for almost a week.
My nerves there, to this very day, often feel weird—sometimes chilled, sometimes like a skin soreness. Especially when I think on the experience. June 4th we were in the same part of the building at the same time of night. I noticed that my voice recorder ran out of memory, so I'm holding it in my right hand, using the flashlight in my left so I could see what I was doing.
Suddenly, I feel a burning sensation on the underside of my right forearm, and shifted my flashlight to it. The person beside me and I watched as three welts began to appear down my arm. Needless to say, that blew my mind. It is one thing to see marks like that, it is a whole other thing to watch it as it happens on your own skin.
Like the majority of instances I've heard about, those marks were gone within 10-15 minutes. No lasting effects. Scared would be the wrong word, but I have no true ones to describe my frame of mind around those events. I took a week off from work after it to try and process it all and was nervous being in that hallway for the rest of that summer.
Like I said, I still don't know what to think or believe. I've got enough stories of experiences to probably fill a book, but I'll leave you with those for now. I will add a final note about how constantly poking around in the dark and talking about past true horrors of human experience day in and day out truly takes its toll, spiritually and emotionally.
Since my resignation, my mental health and overall level of happiness has greatly improved. I used to tell people for a while afterwards that it felt like I'd gotten out of a toxic relationship with that place.
64. Words From Beyond The Veil
This happened in January of 2019. My stepdad had been in our family's life for 30 years before he was diagnosed with cancer. He never had any biological children but he had me and my sister and we couldn't have asked for a better stepdad or granddad for our children.
I was with him when he was diagnosed and with him for all his treatments. From the very beginning there was no question of who would take care of him. It was going to be me. He and my mother were split up at the time and it just seemed natural that I would be the one to do it because of how close we were. And honestly, I considered it an honor.
Unfortunately his prognosis was not very good and they gave him less than a year to live. He barely made it six months after his diagnosis. He was in the hospital the last six days of his life. He had a DNR and as hard as it was, I didn't argue with him about it. Two days before he passed he was in and out of consciousness and was barely able to talk.
His last night he was able to communicate that he REALLY wanted me to go home and check on the dogs. This was just after 3:00 in the morning. I told him I would do that and then I would be right back. He gave a small smile and nodded. It took 20 minutes for me to get home, and 10 minutes after walking through the door the hospital called and said he had passed.
I felt so guilty for leaving until I thought, "He knew there was already someone with the dogs but he insisted that I check on them. Perhaps he didn't want me there at that time. I don't know". I still don't know. Now....what I do know is this.
The morning after he passed, I had a missed call from his phone that had been in my purse the whole time he was in the hospital. The call was made at 3:47 am and the voicemail that was left said "Thank you for everything sweetheart. I love you”. That message was left in my stepdad’s perfect loving voice.
Not the raspy out-of-breath strained voice he had moments before he died. Some people have said that it may have been an old message that I had JUST received that morning but either way, I thought it was amazing.
65. Wrong Time, Wrong Place
I woke up from sleeping to head to the shower in my bathroom, as it was time for school. Everything happened so quickly. As I was in the shower, a noise so loud erupted and the door felt it was being kicked in by SWAT team. It felt as if I now had 10 cups of coffee in my system, and adrenaline was just pumping through my body.
At that point, I noticed the towel rack was pulled right off the wooden door. The screws where warm when I touched it from the friction. I open the door and there was silence in the house. Now, my family sleeps in the three rooms right beside the bathroom. But nobody woke up, not even my dad who can hear a mouse pass his bed.
I have to figure out why and how this happened. The noise alone sounded as if it wasn't from this dimension. But that’s not all. As I got back to bed, I realized it was 1:30 am...and I just randomly went to the shower thinking it was time for school. I never told my parents, as it would have scared the bejeesus of them.
66. Close Call
I was 14. It was winter and the local canal had frozen over. I went for a walk and there were some younger boys playing on the canal. As I walked by them, one boy fell through the ice. I instantly jumped into action to get him out. I managed to get him, drag him to the shore—and then disaster hit.
My foot got trapped up in something under the water. The other boys pulled the boy I was helping out, but I went under. The next thing I see is a man doing CPR on a boy. I watched hoping the boy would be OK…and then noticed the boy I saved stood next to me. I looked over the shoulder of the man only to see it was me laying there, lifeless.
All of a sudden I'm coughing up water and I open my eyes and the man is leaning over me asking if I'm okay. I was so shocked I just got up and ran home.
67. One Last Message
I’ve been a career paramedic, but this happened when I had only been one for five years. This has never left me to this day, and I kid you not...it happened exactly like this. I was driving home on a rural highway one rainy afternoon. It was really pouring and traffic had slowed to about 50 mph.
I was following two vehicles, and we rounded a bend in the road as a small sports car on the opposite side crossed the center line and hit the small SUV that was leading the three of us vehicles on my side of the road. I immediately pulled over and called 9-1-1…it was a bad one. I got out to check on everyone.
There was wailing coming from the SUV on the side of the road. That’s always a good thing, because people are breathing. I went down into the field past the ditch to check on the sports car. There were two young guys in the car, and the force of the impact had driven the engine to where the front passenger seat should be.
The passenger was still buckled, his hand crumpled in the overhead handle, but he was clearly deceased. No pulse on the him, and I tried to figure out how to deal with the driver, but there was nothing I could do either. Listening to his dying breathing, I apologized out loud to him that I couldn’t do more, told him I was sorry to leave him, but others needed my help too.
In my heart, I knew he’d never make it, so I went to render aid where it was needed. In triage, we call this “black tagging” a patient who isn’t going to survive. I did what I could for the family in the SUV. Emergency medical people and fire services got to the scene and took over. The entire family had injuries, but all survived. But the whole day, those two guys in the red sports car stayed on my mind.
That night, I went through a chilling ordeal. I was home alone and getting ready for bed with just the bedside lamp on, and I heard something in the hallway. It got louder as it came closer down the dark hallway toward my open door. It was like a “thump... drag... thump... drag...” I absolutely froze. A broken hand curled around the frame of my doorway. And then, that kid from the passenger seat was standing there, busted up just like he was in the car.
I’m totally serious. He looked at me and I can’t recall the exact words of what he said, but it was something along the lines of, “Hey. My friend wants you to know he understands. He wants you to know he’s okay. We both are. Thanks for trying”. He stood there for a few more seconds, just looking at me. And then he stepped back into the shadows, let go of the doorframe, and I listened to him drag back down the hallway into nothing.
I turned on every darn light I could. I slept with the lights on for two full weeks. I clipped out their death notices from the paper later that week. Turns out they were both high school seniors, on their way home from a wrestling tournament. Their car hydroplaned, from what the investigation determined.
I’d never have recognized the blonde-headed kid had he come to me as his healthy, unwrecked self. Freaked me the heck out that he came to me busted up. I still have the newspaper clippings. I’ll never forget them, nor the ghostly visit. Anyway, that’s my experience. I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my 29-year career...but nothing quite that visceral before nor since.
68. A Helping Hand
It's about 11:30 pm. I'm the only one awake at my girlfriend's house. Secluded. In the woods. I notice her dog is barking out the back window at something, but it's dark. I don't think much of it, but it is a little odd for this time of night. I happen to look up and see the moon looking particularly nice, so I grab some binoculars and go to the door to get her dog's collar—but it's not there.
I ask him, "Where's you collar? Where's your collar, boy”? Feeling a little guilty, I go out without him. I walk about 30 to 40 yards into the field and look at the moon through the binoculars. It looks amazing. There was so much detail through the binoculars. Then, I remember the dog back in the house, and I put the binoculars down.
I look over to the porch and I kind of scan the house. That's when I see it. Someone (a human-like figure) in a blue parka-looking, hooded overcoat is walking from my girlfriend's kitchen into the hallway toward the office. Slowly. Deliberately. I know no one else is awake, so I run to the house.
Nothing. Even the dog is calmly laying on the couch. The hair is standing up on the back of my neck, and I have this feeling like I'm not alone. I check every room, every closet, everywhere in the house. No one. I calm myself down and decide to try to let the dog out again, so I go downstairs to ask my girl where the dog's collar is.
She sleepily says, "It's in the office”. I just about screamed. Was the figure showing me where the collar was? Was he answering my question, “Where is the collar”? I go get the collar. Out loud I say, “Thank you”.
69. A Wrinkle In Time
I think I somehow ended up…in another world on my drive home? Let me explain. It was about 10 pm, and I had just dropped my kids off with their dad for the weekend (he lives about 30 miles away from me). I had my radio on, and was just singing away. I love night-time drives, they bring me peace. The road I was on is a road I take every single day of my life, LITERALLY.
I am very familiar with this road, I know it like the back of my hand. The road is a back road that leads from the town my kids’ father lives in, straight to my town. I always choose taking this back road over the interstate, because they’ve been doing road construction and the interstate is restricted down to one lane.
Anyways, I was driving along, radio blasting, singing to the very top of my lungs and only about 10 miles from my house...when the radio completely went static. When I say static, I mean it actually did the weird static sound and then completely WENT SILENT. I looked around and all of a sudden I couldn’t recognize where I was.
I hadn’t made any wrong turns. I knew for a fact I was where I should be. The landmarks were all the same. Same hills, SIMILAR tree lines, but the buildings that were there before were all gone and the road looked...well...old??? I slowed down, just to take it all in I guess. There was a wooden structure on the side of the road, it looked maybe like an old cottage house and I had never seen it before.
The strangest thing about the house was that there was an old buggy outside. When I say buggy I mean like, horse and buggy type thing. A little further ahead, I noticed a light. When I got closer I realized it was a small little fire out in the front of another structure. This structure was very similar to the other, it looked super old, I believe it was a house.
Next to the fire was a man. He was dressed in old time clothes. I literally STOPPED to look at him, was so shocked. He had on suspenders, a white shirt, very long beard, and he actually noticed me and ran inside.
I started to pull away when he came back outside, but this time with a woman. The woman was dressed in one of those dresses that bell out at the bottom. It was like they were from a total different century. He pointed to my vehicle, and his wife or whoever she was covered her mouth with both hands like she was in shock.
It’s almost like they had never seen a car before. The man and woman just stood there, with HUGE looks of disbelief on their faces. They kind of seemed scared honestly. I pulled away, kept going and noticed that NOTHING was the same as how I remembered it! Literally nothing. There were no street signs anymore, side roads that were once there were completely gone, only to be replaced with fields…and again, I knew for a fact I wasn’t going the wrong way.
It’s literally just a straight shot from my kids’ father’s house to mine once you get on that road. You don’t even have to make any turns. Impossible to get lost. There were wells on the sides of the road that I had never seen before, old structures that looked like 18th- or 19th-century houses, there were horses tied up, fires going, people dressed in old time clothing, and NOBODY HAD A VEHICLE.
Everyone that saw me pass by looked absolutely petrified. Even the AIR felt different. Everything was DIFFERENT. I kept driving for about three or four more minutes, passed a few more structures, some that looked like little stores, and then all of a sudden.....boom, my radio comes back on, the air feels normal again, and I look around and I’m right where I’m supposed to be.
I’m driving on the road I knew I had been on the entire time, just a little further down, and everything looked normal again. The road didn’t look old anymore, and there were no more old houses or strangely dressed people. I was so confused that I actually pulled my truck over, did a quick U-turn and went back, only to find absolutely NOTHING OUT OF THE ORDINARY THERE. NOTHING.
I know what I saw. It was not a daydream; I didn’t fall asleep...none of that. I literally made eye contact with the one guy in the suspenders before he ran to grab his wife to show her my vehicle or whatever he was pointing out to her.
I have lived here my entire life. 25 years. There are no Amish communities here, though there are a few about three hours north from me, but none here. I truly don’t understand. Why wasn’t it there when I immediately turned back around? I don’t know what has happened to me. It’s almost like I stumbled across an entirely different time or place. Maybe slipped through some sort of portal?? I do not know.
My background is very normal. I have no history of mental illness at all, I’m a very happy person. I was totally sober. I can’t explain it away because I vividly remember exactly what I saw, right down to the look on those people’s faces and how OLD everything seemed.
70. Listen Up
I came home from work late one night, probably from working second shift. It would have been around midnight. I park on the street next to my house and walk around to the front, which faces a different street. As I am doing this, an old rusty pickup slowly cruises past me heading toward where I had parked.
I recognized the truck as one used by guys who are often knocking on doors asking for handouts or money or junk to recycle. Creepy people, and not because they want help but because they are creepy. If you looked up photos of people likely to be killers, they might be on the photo lineups.
So I am crossing my front yard at this point with my back to where I had parked and where that pickup truck had gone past me. Suddenly in my head, in my brain, in my whole body, I hear the loudest sound I have ever heard and it's a voice saying "TURN AROUND NOW”! in both a level of volume and intensity I have never heard before or since.
It was a command. Not a request. An order. And the authority behind it was unlike anything I know. Just typing this has me in tears. There just isn't any way I know to put into words how powerful this command was and also how it felt like the merest fragment of a dust mite's lost dandruff of the power behind it. I can't even describe the contrast properly.
So of course I turned around. I witnessed a scene I'd rather forget. One of the guys from this junk truck had come out of that truck and was sneaking up behind me. I had heard nothing. I was so focused on things to do once I got in my house, I just heard nothing. He was 10 feet away when I turned.
In the loudest voice I myself have ever made, I said "STOP”! and he froze and stood there. Then he turned and ran back to the pickup truck and they left. Then like it was no big deal, I went into the house. My mom was living with me at the time and was in the room closest to where all this happened.
She didn't hear anybody say "Turn around now!" nor my yell of "Stop". Nobody heard a thing. I didn't think anything of it until years later when I suddenly remembered hearing that "Turn around now!” and recalled all of it. None of it makes sense to me. I'm not deeply religious. I don't know why anyone or anything would care about me turning around or not or would want to warn me. But whatever this was, it happened.
71. A Bloody Mystery
One night when I was in college—after partying with friends—I stumbled back to my dorm with my suitemate, my best friend of four years. When I awoke the next morning, I noticed the bed was wet and sticky with blood. My pillow, bedsheets, and comforter were all covered in blood. The left side of my face was also caked in black, dried blood, centered around my left ear.
Panicking, I went to my suitemate, and he said that I might have had a stroke or something in the night and that we should probably go to the hospital. I agreed and proceeded to brush and take a quick shower. There was no pain, and my ear wasn't bleeding anymore. We went to the emergency room. The doctors took one look at me and were shocked.
They told me that my left clavicle had broken through my skin, I had a nasal fracture, a skull fracture, fractures in two of my vertebrae, and bleeding in my brain. The blood had punctured my left eardrum and made its way out. Additionally, the left side of my face was paralyzed. I had no recollection at all of what had happened the night before.
The hospital called the authorities because they believed someone must have attacked me. Two officers arrived and questioned my friend. He swore that he was in my room while I was getting into bed. He said I was looped and tottering on my feet, but I hadn't fallen anywhere, and no one had beaten the daylights out of me. I believed him, and I think the officers did too.
However, they went back to my school and conducted an investigation which consisted of questioning my friends and checking security cam footage. They found nothing. I couldn't have been beaten up as my friend was with me the whole night, and he would've said or done something. My room was locked from the inside, and there was no way to get into the room through the window.
I had no external bruising and no minor injuries, just the serious ones. There was no blood anywhere in my room except for my bed. My bed had no headboard, no protruding metal pieces—nothing. To this day, I have no idea what happened to me that night. I recovered from my injuries, but the fact that something this inexplicable happened to me is disturbing.
72. Forest Fright
A few summers ago, I went prospecting/camping with my significant other and his dad in a national forest in southern Oregon. Our claim was miles away from the nearest town, up some truly scary forest roads. We set up camp close to a stream in a big clearing. One night we were playing cards, and I heard an almost guttural scream. My significant other and his dad had been drinking and were being so loud they missed it.
After getting them to shut up for a second, I heard the scream again but from a different location. The second scream sounded more feminine. That night, we heard what sounded like someone putting their arms in the stream and lifting them out repeatedly, like they were washing something. We also had rocks thrown at our tent. I had never been so scared. What made it worse was that I couldn’t put a reason behind any of those occurrences.
73. Intruder Alert
I was babysitting my brother’s little kid while my brother and his girlfriend were at the movies. My brother bought a baby monitor, and they had gotten these little cameras for a fantastic price. He went all about and bought 16. They were mostly to observe what their personal zoo (two dogs, three cats, a rat, two rabbits, two weasels, a hedgehog, an ermine and a squirrel) were up to when they were not around.
He once simply let his laptop camera run, and what he filmed was beyond hilarious, so he bought so many cameras so as not to miss anything. Two of these cameras where in the kid's room, as well as a baby monitor. He was five at the time I believe, so technically a toddler monitor guess. The kid was fast asleep in bed while I enjoyed a movie.
Suddenly I think I hear something over the toddler monitor, and I make the volume louder. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I can hear a voice saying :"Pssst, if he wakes up, we are busted". At first I thought maybe one of the neighbor kids, but that voice was way too high. So I opened the laptop to look on the cameras.
There are two in his room. Both are on the ceiling, so you could pretty much see the whole room. I look but do not really see anything, at least not right away. Then it hits me. One corner is darker than it should be, like there is a really dark shade there.
I up the brightness of the monitor and can see two shapes. They looked like kids, but they were way too small to be the neighbor kids. While I decide how to catch or scare them, I suddenly see something that scared me. One of them looks toward the cameras, and his eyes where really glowing (like green glowsticks, with the same brightness and color), and it did not look like normal eyes at all.
I get freaked and take the baseball bat out of the umbrella stand, and sneak towards the room. I silently open the door, and I am greeted by a really shrill mix of scream and hiss from these two creatures. The two things looked at me and bared their teeth. They had a lot of them, and they were extremely spiky, like needles, but much thicker at the bottom.
I am so scared I cannot move. In that moment, they suddenly turn around and jump out of the open window. And when I say jumped, I mean they easily jumped two meters through the room from standing still, and they hit the window exactly. After a few seconds I can finally react, run to the window, and close it.
The kid, thank goodness, slept through the whole ordeal. We later looked at the footage, my brother and me, but could not identify in anyway what these things where. But we could confirm what I had seen: those crazy teeth as well as the glowing eyes, which had no pupils or anything, just two glowing orbs.
My brother and his girlfriend where justifiably scared, and the kid never slept again with open windows, but we never saw or heard anything like this ever again.
74. Word Of The Day
I came downstairs and saw my grandma at the dining room table. She was about to say something. The word "mongoose" was the only thing consuming my brain. No matter what she was about to say, the answer was going to be “mongoose”. I had no idea why I was thinking that or what she was doing. I hadn’t read or seen anything recently to make me think of the critters, and I couldn’t fathom why that thought popped into my head.
I looked over and saw her doing a crossword puzzle. She finally got out what she wanted to ask me. She said, "What is the animal that kills and eats snakes"? The answer, of course, was “mongoose”. That incident still bothers me to this day.
75. A Test Of Time
The first two years I went to college, I lived with my parents, so I had to commute about an hour each way. I had a huge final at about 10 AM and needed every second for it. For some dumb reason, I was running late. I figured I would be 20–30 minutes late, but I was a good test taker, so I thought I might still be able to turn it around.
My parents lived in the foothills, and the college was in a large valley. When I hit the valley, I also hit a wall of fog so dense that I could barely see the road 10 feet in front of the car. I had to slow my pace to a crawl and strain just to make out the yellow line so I wouldn’t be on the wrong side of the road. My speed went from about 65 mph to about 20, which was as fast as I could reasonably go.
I was stressed and mentally cursing myself for not considering the possibility that I might run into problems on the way to school. I was running through my mind different ways of begging my professor for extra time. Big mistake. I was so stressed I took a wrong turn and found myself lost. However, I was fairly confident I was going in the right direction.
So, I kept on, and after a bit of trial and error—taking this road and that—I eventually found myself on a road I recognized and found my way into town to my university. I wasn’t wearing a watch, but I knew from when I left and all the extra time I sucked up creeping through that fog that I was going to be at least an hour late.
I figured the best course of action was to go to the class and throw myself on the mercies of the professor. When I got there, I got the surprise of a lifetime. There was NO ONE there. I cursed and fumed, figuring that I had missed the final entirely. Then, I checked the clock in the classroom. I was half an hour EARLY. I have run this thing through my head hundreds of times, and there is no rational explanation for how that could have happened.
76. And The Band Marched On
A passenger and I were driving in Seattle, WA, in the middle of the night. We weren’t from Seattle and were waiting at a light to make a U-turn to find the freeway again. We were the only car at the intersection, but we waited about three minutes while the light was red. As soon as our light turned green, a huge marching band began to march across the intersection and into the lane we wanted to turn into.
This was at 1 AM. Every single member was in costume, and they were not playing their instruments. It was incredibly eerie, and my passenger and I were just sitting there open-mouthed. We both remember it exactly the same way, but it was one of those memories that you think, "did that ACTUALLY happen"?
77. We Kept Our Eyes On The Ball
When I was 13 or so, I was camping by the Kern River with my dad. We had met this dude, Jeff, who we became fishing buddies with, and he ended up setting up camp with us at our site. One night when we were sitting around telling stories, my dad got tired and went to bed. Then, it was just this dude and me talking. Everything was going fine—but then I experienced the strangest moment of my life. I looked up to see a fuzzy white ball about the size of a volleyball coming slowly toward us.
I asked Jeff what it was, and he said he didn’t know. It came closer and closer to our fire. I remember it was moving the grass, but only the tops of the grass were pushed down as it came along its path. It came right up to our fire. It was solid, but the edges were diffuse, almost fuzzed out. We were three feet from it.
It stopped right before going into the flames, went around to the opposite side we were sitting at, then floated right on up a hill and disappeared over the top onto the road. At that point, we were both sitting there breathing heavily. After a few minutes, we got up to look for it and ran up to the road, but it was gone.
My dad told me on the car ride home that if Jeff hadn't seen the same thing, he would never have believed me. I will never, ever know what this thing was, and it bothers me to this day.
78. A Strange Turn Of Events
When I was 13, my 9-year-old nephew, my 5-year-old niece, and I were having a pillow fight in my room. I was standing at the foot of the bed with my nephew directly in front of me, and my niece was to the right side of the bed. My nephew yelled out for us all to stop and look. I turned around and saw my bedroom doorknob slowly turning side to side.
We stood there and watched it for what felt like forever before I finally managed to work up the courage to reach out and open the door. The doorknob continued trying to move beneath my fingers and only stopped once the door was completely open. There was no one in the small hallway in front of my door. I ran out to ask my sister and granny if they had been doing it, and they said no.
The two kids and I decided to have our pillow fight in the living room after that. Once my sister and her family had left, I came back to my room and, being the scientifically-minded child I was, began testing out every possible way that the doorknob could have acted on its own. It was a hard-to-turn doorknob that I rarely turned all the way. I often had to open it for younger kids and my granny, as the mechanisms were rusted inside.
It would also not turn on the inside if you turned the knob on the outside. In the end, I concluded something had to have been moving the doorknob physically, and it would have had to have been directly beside me. That was merely the first in a long line of unexplainable events that happened in and around my bedroom over the next four years.
79. The Exorcism
This happened one summer in Mexico in a small ranch/village. I saw a girl get "possessed" once. She fainted and I caught her, we put her to bed and started acting weird. She was crying and didn't want to open her eyes because she would see little demons or something. Her dad was murdered when she was young and she kept insisting he wanted her to go with him and said she could see him giving her his hand.
Four grown men struggled to keep her from raising her hand to "grab" her dad's. This went on for a few days with people constantly by her side—but there was one thing that seriously freaked me out. She started speaking English, which she didn't even know. She was also adamant that her crush was going come from work and that she had to take good care of their baby. She didn't have kids.
I forgot how she calmed down, but she ended up leaving to her mother's house in the city where she got better to the point where they felt she was okay to go home to her grandmother's house. As soon as she goes in the room she was in, she burst out running and just kept going and going and going. She left for good.
She ended up coming to the US with family and never really looked back. To this day I don’t know if she just had a mental breakdown or what…but mental breakdowns don't teach you languages you don't speak or make you way stronger than you should be.
80. Terror Struck
When I was about 14 years old, I was asleep, dreaming that my sister, my friend Sarah, and I were playing in the woods in the back of our house. Suddenly, storm clouds rolled in, and the sky turned dark. I looked up at the clouds, and lightning began crashing all around us. I yelled to my sister and Sarah to run back to the house.
We were running as fast as we could, jumping over rocks, and constantly dodging lightning. When I saw my house, lightning hit me and held me inside the beam of light. I was trapped in a shell of electricity, and it was painful. I was trying to pull myself out when suddenly, I woke up. The overhead light bulb in my room was on, even though it was off when I went to sleep. But that’s not all.
The outer shell that housed the lightbulb was shattered all over the bed and me. I tried to get out of bed, and as I did, I immediately fell on the floor, unable to get my legs underneath me. I crawled into my sister's room, terrified, and tried to wake her up. I was unable to and fell asleep on the floor of her closet. In the morning, I was fine, the glass was still shattered on the bed, and no one believed me.
81. A Dirty Feeling Of Dread
While in undergrad, I was doing some research that involved soil sampling. I regularly sampled several sites in a wilderness preserve, which would take most of the day to hike through. I always brought a friend, just for safety's sake. This one site, way in the rear of the preserve, always spooked me. There was no real reason other than it was more isolated than the other sites.
However, something about it didn't seem quite "right". My friend and I were there once, and I was crouching over to sample the soil. I was looking down, and unprovoked, I felt this rising terror and had a “forget this—run” feeling. I stood up suddenly and saw that my friend had the same feeling and said, "We have to leave NOW". We ran the entire way to the car. We still have no idea why we felt that way, but I am convinced that there was a very real danger in staying.
82. A Trip To Zombieland
I had this really intense and vivid dream that involved hills of broken red rock and a cabin. I ran to the cabin because there were zombies everywhere. I get into the cabin and find my best friend in there with a trunk full of ammo. He wordlessly hands me a shotgun, and the rest of my dream was spent warding off the zombies.
I woke up and ran over to my buddy’s place. I was so totally pumped from my awesome dream that I couldn't wait to tell him about it. When I got to his place, he was all shaken up and looked terrible. He told me that he had this horrible nightmare about being trapped in a little shack in this place made of broken red rock, and he had to fight off zombies all night long with me. I had never heard of “dream-sharing" until that day.
83. A Hungry Spirit
I was eight years old when we first moved into the house on the edge of the forest. My parents had their doubts about buying a house with a backyard bordered by forest. They had concerns about wild animals getting into our bins or hurting our dogs, and were worried one of us might go too far into the trees and get lost.
But it was cheap, my dad liked the seclusion, my mom loved the house itself, and my siblings and I were excited about playing in the backyard and exploring the forest. But then we got our first sign that something wasn't right. Our dogs were absolutely terrified of the forest. They never went into the forest for any reason.
If a toy they'd been playing with found its way past the tree line, they would refuse to retrieve it, and when one of us went in they would pace anxiously until we returned. On occasion we'd notice the dogs staring at a spot in the forest in obvious distress, sometimes growling or barking, but we could never see anything there.
My brother once carried one of the dogs into the trees to show her there was nothing scary about it, but she wriggled out of his grip and sprinted into the house in a panic. If we were in the backyard when it was getting dark, we sometimes heard noises like someone was walking through the forest, sticks crunching underfoot, branches being pushed aside.
If we called out there was no response, but if we shined a flashlight around we would occasionally catch a glimpse for just a split second of something that we could swear looked like a person walking around in the dark. My parents quickly banned us from entering the forest at all after dark, and even during the day we weren't allowed to go out of sight of the house.
My sister's bedroom window looked out at the backyard and the forest beyond, and she remembers looking out her window one night and seeing a shadowy figure standing right at the edge of the backyard. She says there was something wrong with it. Like it wasn't quite standing on the ground, and it was a little too tall to be a person, and it was sort of distorted.
And she was convinced it was staring at her. She called for our dad, saying there was a man in the yard staring through her window, and when he ran outside to chase off whoever it was, she continued to watch the figure. It didn't move away, but when the light from our dad's flashlight passed over it, something worse happened. Suddenly it just wasn't there anymore.
We regularly heard knocking at the back door at night, with no one there. Our parents thought it was teenagers playing pranks, and stopped bothering even opening the door, until one rainy night when the knocking was persistent and agitated. My mom pointed out there might be someone needing shelter from the heavy rain outside.
But when she opened the door, not only was there no one there, but there were no wet footprints on the porch. The knocking continued the whole time we lived there. It would happen several times in the span of a few weeks, then stop for months, then start up again. My parents eventually installed a security camera, and there was never anyone at the door.
The camera wasn't all useless though. About three years into living there, my brother started having night terrors and sleepwalking. When he went sleepwalking, he would always go out the back door and start walking towards the forest. My mom, being a light sleeper, would hear the door open, and would run out to get him before he made it into the forest.
After the third or fourth time it happened, my brother asked to see the camera footage, because he wanted to see how he looked when sleepwalking, I guess thinking it'd look funny. What the footage showed was terrifying. It was him walking out onto the porch, then pausing as if listening to something and shaking his head, then reluctantly walking forward as if being pulled or forcefully guided by something.
One evening my dad was in the backyard, and he heard my sister calling him from the forest, seemingly in distress. Thinking she'd gone exploring in the forest and fallen over and hurt herself, he ran in and started calling to her, but quickly realized it was too dark to see her, and he couldn't pinpoint where her voice was coming from.
He told her to wait where she was while he grabbed a flashlight. When he ran back into the house for the flashlight, he saw my sister inside, safe and completely unconcerned. At the time my dad hadn't told us about hearing my sister's voice in the forest, so when I heard my mom's voice coming from the forest months later while I was outside with the dogs one evening, I didn't question it.
This also despite the fact I'd seen my mom inside recently and hadn't noticed her walk past me. Anyway, my "mom" was calling to me, saying she'd gotten her sweater caught in some branches and needed me to come in and help her. As I walked in, the dogs started barking, alerting my dad, who saw me through the window wandering into the forest.
He came outside and called to me, and I said I was just helping mom. He yelled back that mom was inside and I needed to run back to the house as fast as I could, which I did. After this, my parents had a fence built around the backyard and started looking for a new place. In the time between the fence being built and us moving out, it got way worse.
We'd hear knocking at the door more regularly, as well as tapping on the windows, as if someone was walking the perimeter of the house and trying every window. We would often hear scratching and scraping sounds on the fence, and voices beyond it. My brother's night terrors got more frequent, and one night my mom didn't hear the door open when he went sleepwalking, and he woke up standing at the fence, staring into the forest, with the dogs barking at him.
The last morning we spent there, less than four years after we moved in, we woke up to find the back door fully open, and the security camera footage showed it slowly swing open on its own. Since moving out, my brother's sleepwalking has stopped, though he still gets night terrors and he suffers from pretty severe anxiety.
A few nights ago, he called me out of the blue, and after a bit of small talk he asked me if I think the door being opened that final night means whatever was out there finally got in. He was trying to make light of it, saying he was getting into the spirit of Halloween, joking about how maybe we should all get exorcised just in case something latched onto us all those years ago.
But I think he's deeply bothered by everything that happened. I know I still am a little. I still get nervous around dark wooded areas. I don't know what I think was out there, in the forest behind our house at night. But I get the feeling that, given the chance, it would have swallowed us whole.
84. Location Is Everything
When I was around six or seven we had a cat that had kittens. We knew it had kittens because it was pregnant and then it wasn't anymore. The problem was that we had no idea where the kittens were. I was wondering about it and looked right at the cat and sort of thought in my mind "Where are your kittens”? but without using words if that makes any sense.
Immediately the location came into my mind. It was through some broken boards just above our porch that our cat could jump into from pillars on the side of the porch. I KNEW that they were there. I walked straight over there, climbed onto the stone pillar and looked through the hole in the boards.
The kittens were right there. I've never had a similar experience again in my life.
85. The Man In The Corner
This past year my family went on a sabbatical in another country. My daughter, who is four, talks a lot about returning to our old house. Something she said recently gave me chills.
Daughter: “When we go back, can I sleep in Mommy’s room?”
Me: (no backbone) “Yes, sometimes we can have sleepovers. But don’t you remember, you have a huge bed to sleep in in your room. All your toys are in there...your stuffed animals...”.
Daughter: “But that guy, remember, I wake up at night because he’s there with me”.
Me: (mentally freaking out) “What? No I don’t remember. What man?”
Daughter: “He sits in the corner. He’s all black, he doesn’t talk he just sits by me”.
Me: “What, what does his face look like?”
Daughter: “He has no eyes, but I think he has a mouth”.
Me: (in shock) “Well.....you can definitely sleep in my room....”
What the heck is that. Also how is she so nonchalant about some terrifying thing in her room like this?
86. Busted
Let me start by saying that my house is old, very old. Like 1755 colonial old. All of my friends were always terrified of my house and a couple have been scared out before, but never while I was there. I was always able to brush off the possibility of these occurrences being paranormal because I had to live in this house and if I actually thought ghosts lived there I'd go crazy—until that fateful night.
Because my house was so old we had a shed, a garage, and a barn. The barn is pretty run down, and probably 100 feet down my driveway past my house, relatively deep on the property. Past that is 32 acres of deep dark and scary new England woods, pretty isolated. I ended up using this as a chill spot when I got older, found some beat up couches on the street, and set them up around an old table.
So I'm down there having a little smoke with my friends the summer after I graduated high school, and we hear these footsteps. My driveway is cobblestone so there's a pretty unmistakable crunch of somebody walking toward us. Now we have some paraphernalia on the table, so we're like "AHHH, it's my dad!" We try to hide everything but to no avail.
The footsteps get closer and the extremely heavy barn door just slams shut, like, slams hard. Meanwhile I'm freaking out. I'm thinking my dad just came down and busted us, I'm in so much trouble, yadda yadda. But my friend who was looking toward the door the whole time said he saw nothing, only heard the footsteps.
I didn't believe him, I had to run back up to the house and like hint at it with my dad to see if he was trying to psych us out and if it actually was him. But he sounded so clueless about the whole thing I had no choice but to believe him, even though it took me a while. The wind could have closed the door. But I’ll never know where that unmistakable sound of footsteps on gravel actually came from.
87. This Creature Left Us Stumped
When I was about 11 or so, I was spending some quality time with my brother. He and I were close, but it was rare that we ever just sat around and talked about life. We had a swing set that my father had constructed for us. My brother and I sat on the swings and spoke to each other. We didn't swing; we just rested and enjoyed the weather. It was very nice until the peacefulness was interrupted by an indescribable noise.
It was a blood-curdling, human-feline hybrid-sounding scream. It had torn the silence and calm chatter in a split second. He and I jumped up and turned around, trying to figure out what it had been. We found our German shepherd barking like crazy at something in a tree. I had never seen her in so much defense. Seconds later, whatever she was growling at had lost its grip and fell.
At that moment, my heart dropped. Unable to get a good look at the thing, I depicted it to look like a large, hairy, black feline—nothing native to central Ohio. The one attribute that stuck out most was that it was the exact size of our full-grown German shepherd. It stumbled upward and darted down the woods, yelping and screeching and climbing up another tree.
My brother and I glared at each other in unison, wide-eyed, and sprinted home. We returned five minutes or so later, and nothing was there. To this day, I haven't been able to figure out what that creature was. It most certainly was nothing my brother or I had ever seen.
88. Where Dreams Come True
When I was little, I always treated my slightly older cousin like my sister. I didn't have a sister, and my cousin was the funniest and smartest person I knew. When I was about 14, she disappeared for a long time. My crazy aunt started rumors involving a cult or an accidental pregnancy, but the truth was that nobody really knew where she was.
Years later, when I was 18 and about to graduate high school, I had this weird dream. It started off with my parents—who were divorced and had been for a long time—my brother and I walking around Disney World. I was lagging behind a little, as I always did at that age. I glanced over to a little shop on the street, and there was my cousin.
I checked to make sure nobody saw me, and I ran over to her. I began barraging her with questions, and all she said was, "I'm working at Disney in Orlando. Please let the family know I'm safe". I gave her a weird look and ran back to join my family. I woke up from the dream, remembering it like it actually happened. A few months later, I came home from work late one night, and dad told me they had found my cousin.
He said, “She's working in Orlando at Disney". I was floored. I hadn't told a single person about my dream. I talked to my cousin about it, and she said she was praying for God to send someone a message at that time, but I'm an atheist. I have a logical explanation for everything, but this was beyond logic. I'm still baffled to this day.
89. The Powers That Key
In high school, my friends and I would sneak out of our houses and drive to the beach in the middle of the night. The beach was huge. We would run up and down and splash in the water. One night, after about an hour of running around, the friend who drove realized he had lost the car key. The key wasn't on a keychain; it was just a single key, and we knew we would never be able to find it.
We searched up and down for an hour but knew that, ultimately, we would have to call one of our parents to pick us up. I sat down on the beach while someone made the call and dug my hands deep into the sand, and felt something. I grabbed it and pulled it out—it was the key.
90. Blackout
My mom and I were watching TV in the living room. It had a large sliding glass door, and the shades were wide open. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the sun was shining brightly. Then, everything turned pitch black, including the TV itself. There was no light from anywhere. Both my mother and I screamed. Just as quickly as it disappeared, the light returned.
It was only gone for about two or three seconds, but we both experienced it, so it wasn't like I suddenly went temporarily blind or something. The sky was then a blanket of dark clouds, and it started to pour rain. The rain only lasted for about two or three minutes before the sky returned to bright sunshine. Nobody else that we knew experienced the darkness.
However, a friend of ours did notice that almost instantly, the beautiful weather turned terrible without notice. We even checked if there was an eclipse or something happening, but as far as any official news sources were concerned, there were no eclipses or bizarre weather that occurred that day.
91. Get A Handle On This
When I was 14, I was riding my bike and thought it would be cool to go between the two posts on a sign. As I got close to it, I realized that my handlebars were not going to fit, but it was too late to stop or turn. I wasn't wearing a helmet, either. I blinked—and that’s when it happened. The next thing I knew, I was standing on the ground on the other side of the sign safely on both feet, and my bike was just leaning against the sign. I don't know what happened.
92. Double The Trouble
I have a twin. Occasionally, she and I will experience physical manifestations of each other’s pain or injuries. She once got in a car crash and the airbag blew up in her face. We both woke up the next morning with black eyes. I was not in the accident. I blew out my ankle and she couldn’t walk for two weeks. People think we’re full of beans, but there is no explanation. It doesn’t happen every time one of us gets hurt, but it’s happened about a half dozen times in almost forty years.
93. Stop The Clock
My husband and I spent two weeks house-sitting for my aunt. One night, I was startled awake at 3 AM by a voice shouting, “YOU”! I assumed it was nothing and went back to sleep. Around six in the morning, my husband and I suddenly woke up sweating buckets. All the animals in the house were going nuts, barking, meowing, and climbing on the bed.
We realized the air conditioner had turned off, and all the clocks were blinking. The power had gone out at some time during the night, and we had no idea what time it was. My husband checked his phone, but the time was synchronized with what was on the blinking clocks, which was odd because it hadn't been plugged in and cell phones kept time automatically.
We got up, figured stuff out, and got ready for work. I didn't think about the power outage again until late that night. I was on Facebook and I noticed my aunt had uploaded a photo of my grandfather's grave. It was the 12th anniversary of his passing. I got a weird, tingling feeling. I ran up the stairs to the bedroom where I had not reset any of the clocks.
It was about 10 at night, but all the clocks were about four and a half hours behind, which meant that they had been reset at around 4:30 in the morning. That was the exact time of my grandfather’s passing 12 years prior.
94. Something Took Me By Storm
When I was a small boy of about 9 or 10, my family was camping. A nasty storm rolled through unexpectedly, and the tornado sirens went off. We went to the storm cellar with everybody else as quickly as we could. The storm was ferocious. I'd never heard so much thunder or seen so much lightning. Like most powerful storms, it moved through the area quickly.
When we surfaced, my mom made a disturbing realization. She remembered that our dogs were tied to our trailer. They didn't have doghouses, so they'd been out during that storm. We rushed back to the trailer, and both chains were broken. The dogs had run free. We found one right away, but the other was missing and wasn’t responding to our calls. My mom decided that we should break up and search the campgrounds.
The storm was moving off, but we were still getting flashes of lightning and peals of thunder. I was running around asking if anyone had seen our spaniel, but no one had. I was heading back through the playground when I saw a puddle that may have been too big for me to jump over. So I sped up and headed straight for it.
I pushed off just as another bolt of lightning struck to the east, and mid-jump, everything went pitch black. I felt a pause in my arc, and when the blackness vanished, I landed on the other side of the puddle and immediately stopped running. It was noticeably darker out, darker than it should have been. I turned and looked at the puddle and realized that with my best jump, I should have clipped the far side at least a little, but I had cleared it.
Something had just happened, and I couldn't explain it. I booked it back to our trailer, and my mom greeted me with, "Where have you been"? I told her, "I ran down there to ask those trailers if they'd seen him. They hadn't". She said, "Really? You've been gone 15 minutes, and you covered THREE trailers"? My face registered complete shock. I told her, "Mom, I swear I've only been gone five minutes". I don’t know what happened that afternoon.
95. Holy Heavens, My House Was Haunted
I was watching Lost in the living room of my house, home alone with just my dog. Suddenly, I heard the back door open and then close. My dog lifted her head and stared into the hallway. From where I was sitting, I couldn't see into the kitchen, and neither could my dog. I paused the show and said, "Hey, who's home"? There was no reply.
Then, I heard footsteps moving toward the living room, stopping just outside the hall. I got up and slowly poked my head around the corner, and nobody was there. Friends and family would also tell me about other creepy things that happened to them in that house. One day, my friend was spending the night in the room my sister and I shared.
My grandmother used to sleep in that room when she stayed with us, but she had passed several years prior. My friend woke up in the middle of the night, and an old woman was standing at the foot of her bed, staring at her. She screamed and woke me up. When she described her to me, I showed her my grandmother's picture. Her reaction was chilling. She told me it was her.
Then, when I was about 11, I started walking down the stairs. There was an old man, all dressed in black with a black hat on and white hair, standing on the bottom step, staring at me. I ran up the stairs to get someone. When I went back, he was gone, but there was a BIG arrow, in white, drawn on the wall behind where he was, pointing to the haunted side of the basement.
A few months later, I was in church with my family. The seat behind me was empty. When it was time to shake hands with the people around us, I turned around, and the same old man dressed in the same outfit was behind me. He put his hand out, and I shook it. It was as cold as ice. When I turned around again, he was gone.
Poltergeist II: The Other Side Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
96. Wedding Day Jitters
My aunt's wedding was held at my house. My aunt was getting married for the first time at age 51. My grandmother (her mom) had passed approximately 16 years prior. All day weird stuff kept happening, like doors flying open, then suddenly getting stuck shut. The strangest was when the doorbell, which had been disconnected for months, kept ringing repeatedly. My aunt chalked it up to grandma, making her presence known.
97. Stuck In A Time Loop
When I was around 11 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night. What I saw made my blood run cold. There was a younger version of myself digging around in my toy chest. I was so confused and was just watching him for a moment, until it realized I was watching him. At that moment he turned to face me and started sprinting toward my bed. I hid under the covers.
Eventually, I worked up the nerve to peek out from under my blanket, and there “he” was, back at my toy chest looking around. Until he sensed I was looking at him, then he would run toward my bed. I repeated this at least 10 times before I just hid under my blanket for the remainder of the night. I know it wasn’t a dream because it happened three nights in a row.
98. Never Use A Ouija Board
My sister and her friends were going through that Ouija board phase way back when. A girl in our school had recently been murdered, and they decided it would be a good idea to try and contact her. It was actually a horrific idea. The board kept spelling out "S-A-D, S-A-D'', over and over.
At this point in time, the assailant was not known. They asked about who it was or how they could find this person. There was some mention of a white knitted jumper of sorts, and they also received a mobile number. One of the girls dialed the number, and it rang. Someone answered, she asked who it was. It was someone local. Later, we learned the chilling truth.
That person eventually turned out to be the brother of the culprit. I actually ended up in court having to testify over this case later on because I was out that night with a few friends and had seen the accused over the course of the evening. I guess my testimony put him in those locations at specific times.
I also happened to notice he was wearing different clothes later in the night…one item was a white knitted jumper. When I was on the stand, that jumper was held in front of me as bagged evidence, and I was asked if I recognized it. I will never forget that.
99. Some Devastatingly Flawed Logic
I worked at a daycare. One of the mothers gave me the heebie jeebies. She would show up randomly and be like "my baaaaaaby, I neeeed my baaaaby." Like, moms love their kids and miss them, but her obsession with her daughter really made me feel weird. She ended up killing her daughter so that she could be an angel. It really messed me up when I found out.
100. Gut Feeling
I was 17 at the time. Me and my dad had just finished our fishing trip and it was almost midnight, mid-autumn. When I was about to get in the car, he told me that he did not want me to sit in the front seat on the ride home. We argued about it for about five minutes. He did not give any good reason as to why he did not want me to.
I gave up and got in the back seat. It was pitch black outside, and we had been driving on the main road for about two minutes when we saw a car driving in our lane. Right as we were about to collide, my dad swerved into the other lane—and so did the car in front of us. That’s when I heard my dad say something that still haunts me.
He muttered, “I knew it” at the very last second, and then I blacked out. I woke up when the ambulance showed up at the scene, and the EMTs helped me out of the car. I was barely conscious and don’t remember much after that—but there’s one thing that’s still crystal clear. I saw my dad, sitting in the car waving at me with tears in his eyes.
Later, when I asked where my dad was, they told me that he had flown out of the car window and landed a few feet from the car. Then, he died in the ambulance. They also told me that the man we crashed into lost his life—but that’s not all. He was driving with his 17-year-old daughter, and she only survived because she’d been sitting in the backseat like me.
I still can’t believe that this really happened. This was six years ago.
101. Don't Let Sleeping Babes Lie
I worked daycare and was told to never accept babies sleeping in car seats or sleeping children at all. So if Mom or Dad brought a kid asleep, I immediately woke them up and pulled them out of their car seat. This made so many parents displeased with me but it's policy.
I used to think it was to help the kid be on a schedule, then one day a grandma brought a baby asleep and he was not waking up at all. Just would raise his head, whimper, and go back to sleep. Immediately my boss called 911 and grandma was trying to downplay "he had a rough night, he's just tired, etc." I knew this baby, he wouldn't sleep if he thought he was going to miss out, we had music playing and kids loudly singing and dancing. In the chaos, grandma slipped out and at some point, someone called the parents.
Turns out Granny had a history of giving kids stuff to knock them out when she babysat, but this time she did it to a six-month-old and that's why he wouldn't wake up. I think they pumped the kid's stomach and he had a stay at the hospital. Legal actions were taken and the family moved away.
To clarify, the policy was put in place because my boss knew abusers have been known to do this. They'd break the kid's arm, dose them, dump them with the sitter who lets the baby asleep all morning then because the kid was with the sitter all day, it's easy to blame them for the baby's injury. Or worse, the baby died and they do this to blame the sitter.
So yea, to this day if I'm babysitting, I don't accept sleeping children. I flat out refuse to watch kids at their home while they're sleeping for the same reason. I've pretty much stopped doing any child care because as much as I love kids, watching parents make bad decisions on purpose when they know better, was killing my soul.
102. Kids Know More Than They Let on
My mom told me this story the other day and it freaked me out. When my oldest sister was little, like 3 years old, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up to hold her. My mom said she was like "She can't pick you up, honey, she has a baby in her tummy." And then my little sister was like "That baby is dead!" My mom freaked out, but my aunt and grandma were fine and were telling my mom it was all good, she was just a toddler and didn't know what she was saying.
Well, lo and behold my aunt goes to the doctor the next day for a routine pregnancy checkup, and the baby was dead. Give me the willies just thinking about it.
103. Glitching Your Life Away
As I type this I am already feeling deja vu. I've always wanted to share this part of my life with someone but have never been able to. So... I'll just tell a bunch of people on the internet. One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever.
I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about 15 feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension. All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me. It was a bunch of strange looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits.
They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black. When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work. I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed. I've never done any hard drugs, never experienced any hallucinations, never have had anything like this happen to me.
The weird thing is, when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled. It still bothers me very much to this day.
104. Lifesaver
I work as an ER nurse and had a patient with a little dizziness, a little nausea and a swollen abdomen. She was fairly bright, able to talk, and nothing seemed too horrific. But she was turning a grim gray color and breathing quickly. Our average wait time today was two hours. I could have put her back in the queue and moved on.
But I had a little dark feeling that there was something sinister happening here. So I called our most senior doctor out of a consultation and asked him to see her. Right now. Ever heard of your abdominal aorta? Enormous blood vessel that can pouch out, suddenly rupture, and make you bleed internally to death in minutes?
It’s called a burst AAA (abdominal aortic aneurysm). You’ve heard of it now. That’s what she had. I’ve never seen one before. But now I have. Within five minutes, she was barely responding. Within ten, her blood pressure had dropped to a barely sustainable level. Within twenty minutes, I was pouring blood into her and eight people were around the bed.
Within an hour, she was on an operating table clinging to life. But because I raised the alarm, and because my team worked their butts off, that woman is still, somehow, alive. Feels good, man.
105. Don’t Look Down
I was in class, and the teacher was asking us how our weekends were. The quietest girl in the class started to speak, only to break down in tears. She said she was on a trip in the mountains with her mom. They stopped to stretch their legs during the drive, then looked over the cliff, only to see an overturned vehicle with an entire, deceased family scattered around it.
106. The Cabin In The Woods
My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin. I used to spend time there in the summer tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One extremely early morning, when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and told us it was time to go fishing. It was still super early and we were all confused because it was pitch dark.
He hustled us down to the dock where he kept his little fishing boat and quickly launched us into the water and away from the house. At this point we were all getting a little freaked out—but this was just the beginning. My uncle wasn’t talking. We just sat, shivering under a blanket at the bow of the boat, while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline and waved a flashlight furtively ahead of us.
We eventually arrived at my uncle’s friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled into his house. Our uncle sent us to the loft to sleep. He and his buddy locked the doors and left, not returning until well after sunrise. Eventually, our uncle showed up with the truck and trailer already packed with all of our gear, and he told us it was time to go home.
Many years later, my uncle confided to me that the reason he’d hustled us home was because he’d woken up around 3 AM to a strange “Thok! Thok! Thok!” sound from outside the cabin. He’d gone out to investigate, when a massive jack pine fell directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line.
Just in time, my uncle saw a man, holding an axe. The man slinked away into the dark of the trees and woods. He and his buddy returned to his cabin later, and had to take turns chainsawing the tree that fell across our narrow driveway apart, while the other stood watch. He never found the man, and he never found the axe.
