This collection of harrowing, heinous, and horrific true tales comes straight from Redditors whose experiences left them forever haunted. Brace yourself for stories about creepy kids, ghastly ghosts, and even some suspicious soaring scat. Do we need to spell it out with a Ouija board, already? Throw on a YouTube campfire, microwave some s’mores, and settle in…sleep is highly overrated, anyway.
1. Off To Grandfather’s House We Go
My mother passed on suddenly, eight days before the birth of my son, but we have a picture of her on our wall and he knows that it’s her. My father still lives in the house that she passed in. Since then, we have not visited him. Partly because I have a hang-up about going back and partly because we would need to take an overnight ferry.
Anyway, my son has never seen my parents’ house and I have never shown him photos of it. He hasn’t been to the village, the region, or even the country (France). Last week, I was using Google Maps Street View to show him our house, his school, the park, and some of the other places from around our neighborhood.
My dad lives in rural France, so I decided to see if the Google Maps car had photographed his street yet. I dropped the pin and opened it up. The view showed my dad’s house, so I started to move the tablet and my boy shouted, “Grandma’s house”! I was a bit taken aback and asked, “How did you know that”? To which he replied, “Because it is”. What happened next still haunts me.
It was all a bit inexplicable to me. So I asked him to point to the kitchen window—and he put his finger on it straight away. Then I asked, “Which room did daddy sleep in”? Again he put his finger on the right one. I then asked him to show me grandma’s room and he immediately pointed to it. Needless to say, I was totally creeped out.
2. The Haunting Of A Healthcare Hero
When I worked at a hospital, I got friendly with a patient who had been there for some time. I’d often stay on at the end of a shift to chat. One night, I went to his room and his wife tried to give me money for looking after him. I repeatedly declined until I noticed him looking at me from over her shoulder. I decided to take it as it was obviously important to him that I did.
That night I was sound asleep in my bed when I was awoken by the sound of my front door opening. Then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and toward my room. The door opened and there was a completely dark figure standing there. I wasn’t frightened because I didn’t feel threatened. I just rolled over, pulled the covers up, and pretended to be asleep.
I finally heard it walk back down the stairs and out the door. I fell into a very deep sleep. When I went back to work two days later, I went in to see Jack (the patient). He was gone from his room. I asked one of the nurses on duty where he was—you know what happens next, don’t you? Jack died on the same night I saw the figure. My blood ran cold when she told me and it’s something that always stayed with me since.
3. The Woods Are Scary, Dark, And Deep
One time when I was in fifth grade, I was walking to the bus just as dawn was breaking. This walk was about a half-mile down a back road with woods lining either side. When I was about halfway there, I was suddenly surrounded by about eight or nine domestic dogs of various breeds—they were definitely not wolves or coyotes.
They didn’t make a noise, but they blocked my path in a half circle. It really freaked me out. I was so terrified that I sprinted back home and when I finally looked back they were gone. When I think back on it, I hope that maybe they were protecting me from an unknown danger down the road that morning, but I really have no idea.
4. Pandora’s Ouija Board
About 15 years ago, my 12-year-old cousin somehow got a Ouija board and would play around with it almost every day. No one thought much about this until one day my mom asked my cousin if she was ever able to talk to anyone with it. My cousin replied that she only talked to our uncle Steve, who had taken his own life a few years earlier.
In our family, Steve’s demise was never discussed—especially in front of children. My mom asked my cousin what uncle Steve had to say. Her answer was horrifying. My cousin casually said that Steve told her that she should kill her dad. Needless to say, the Ouija board was taken away from my cousin and never seen again. Well, not exactly…
The Ouija board did pop up recently when my mom was clearing up their house. In the space of one year, my uncle succumbed to heart failure, his wife, who had suddenly developed dementia, suffered from a fatal head injury while moving a tool locker, their youngest son perished in a motorcycle accident, and one of their daughters succumbed to asthma.
The two remaining children were the oldest son who was living in a different country and my cousin who previously had an interest in the Ouija board but was now married and living in a different state. Everyone else living in that house expired in different ways in a space of about 12 months. Mom decided to finally burn that old Ouija board out in their backyard.
5. Teen Moms: Supernatural Edition
A few years ago I had a friend who became pregnant but ended up having an abortion because she was so young. She never said a thing about it to anyone except me. No one knew, not even her parents. Well, a week or two after she had the procedure, we went to visit her sick grandmother. When we started to talk to her grandmother, she got this weird look in her eyes.
The grandmother told my friend that she didn’t want to have anything to do with the one who slaughtered her own child. She started to get more and more agitated. She then yelled that she has been hearing the baby crying at her feet for the last week. My friend and I both looked at each other in shock. It scared the pants off me then and still does to this day.
6. The Girl With The Uncanny Earring
I have a pair of earrings that are made with a series of distinct black Czech glass beads. Not long after I bought them, I was sitting at my old desk absentmindedly fiddling with one of them in my hand when a bead slipped off the brass wire. I heard it fall onto the hardwood floor and bounce a few times. I immediately searched for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere.
The earrings were uneven after that, which annoyed me, but I kept them anyway. A few years later, living in a different city, I dropped another piece of jewelry on the floor while sitting at a completely different desk in my home office. When I bent down to find it, the first thing I came across was that exact missing bead.
I was in utter disbelief when I picked it up and found that it slipped perfectly back onto the brass wire. I have nothing else like it in terms of jewelry. I had even vacuumed earlier that same day with a new vacuum (our old one bit the dust before we moved). I have no logical explanation for this, and, believe me, I’ve searched long and hard for one.
7. A Chilling Time Was Had By All
In 2006, I was in New York for work. On one of the days, we finished early, so a few of us decided to go down and visit Ground Zero since none of us had been to New York before. We had about three hours before we had to be at a company dinner, so we figured we’d head down and check it out and then come back and have plenty of time to shower and get ready for dinner.
There were four of us, and we all were checking the time before getting on the subway to make sure we had enough time. So we took the subway down there and walked around the site. There were some pictures and signs up then, but the museum wasn’t there yet. It was very eerie and quiet even with the traffic and bustle around.
There was a strange energy around the site. We all felt it. We weren’t there very long before someone from our group said we needed to hurry back because we’d been gone for nearly two hours. That’s impossible, I thought, we just got here a short time ago. We started to panic because there was no way we’d have time to get back, shower, and be on time for dinner.
We needed to look presentable because we were meeting with our parent companies. We all looked at our phones and watches, and sure enough, we had been gone way longer than we thought. We practically ran back to the subway station trying to figure out how we were going to clean up so quickly. After we got on the subway, we all sat there dumbfounded by how time could have passed so quickly. But then things got even stranger.
Partway through our ride, I looked at my phone and—wait a second—the clock was now an hour earlier than what I had just seen at Ground Zero. I showed everyone. I knew I had seen a different time at Ground Zero because I had double- and triple-checked it over and over not believing we had been gone that long. I told them my time was off and asked them to check theirs.
Now we were all back on the same time with more than two hours until dinner. What the heck? All four of our clocks and watches had jumped ahead an hour while we were at the Ground Zero site. We just sat there in complete shock for the rest of the ride. My co-workers ranged in age from 42 to 66, so this wasn’t a prank someone was trying to pull.
The entire experience gave us all chills. None of us were ever able to explain what happened. After we told the story at dinner, someone else said they had also recently had some strange experiences down in that area of New York as well. It was all very creepy.
Public Domain Pictures
8. Cujo Vibes
About 13 years ago I was walking my year-old beagle with my son. All of a sudden, I see a golden retriever sneaking up on us. I started to worry that I was going to have to break up a dog skirmish in front of my young son. As I started to yell at the dog, I noticed another golden sneaking up to the left of us. Believe it or not, I then noticed another golden coming.
They were starting to get into some sort of perfect triangle formation. I freaked. Luckily, a man ran over and started yelling at the dogs. The freakiest thing is when I told him he needed to make sure that his dogs didn’t get out he told me that only one of them was his. Then another neighbor came out and grabbed his dog.
I have no idea how three goldens knew how to break out at the same time and were able to practice their strategic moves on people. I do not know who the third dog owner was or where that dog lived but it was all very bizarre. One of the owners was just like, “Yeah, we don’t know how the heck they keep doing this”.
9. Worst Babysitter Ever
When I was in high school my uncle would throw me a couple of bucks to help babysit his and my aunt’s kids. They lived in a two-story house by the water in a nice area. The kids were about three and six. One day I was sitting in their den on my phone when I started to hear a baby crying. Thinking it was the three-year-old, I headed to the bottom of the stairs.
Since my aunt was home, I thought she was up there dealing with it. I called for her a couple of times with no response. The baby kept crying. I called her one more time and when I got no response, I decided to go upstairs. Just then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye.
I looked out the window and saw my aunt and both of my cousins playing outside. Wait, what? All the hairs on my body suddenly stood up and I literally felt a chill run down my spine. I quietly turned around, walked out the door, got in my car, and drove away. The “baby” was still crying when I closed the door behind me.
A few years later, I was a bit tipsy at a family party and I told my uncle the story. He told me that he and his wife used to hear the baby, too. Apparently, the previous owners had a kid succumb to SIDS in that room upstairs. My uncle is a devout Catholic and had a mass said for the baby. He said that it never happened again after that. It still gives me the willies when I talk about it, though.
10. IKEA Is Looking Good Right Now
I grew up in a really small town, and recently it’s gotten some fame for being “haunted” because one of those Discovery channel ghost shows filmed an episode here. One night, before my town gained a reputation for having ghosts, my mom and I were taking a stroll down Main Street, which we do quite a lot during the summer.
I was about 14 when this happened. As we were walking, she stopped in front of a furniture store that was in a pretty old building. Since it was nighttime and the store was closed, we were just looking through the windows and talking to each other. I suddenly turned to my mom and told her that we needed to get out of there. Now.
She asked why. I said, “I don’t know, but we just need to go”. She protested again, saying that she was enjoying herself. I then told her that there was something bad in the store and that it was a very bad place. It took some convincing, but we finally got out of there. The thing is, I don’t remember having that conversation. At all.
I don’t remember looking into the furniture store or needing to leave, but I do remember going on walks with my mom plenty of times. I don’t ever remember being creeped out on any of them, though. The only reason I know this even happened was because my mom told me this story years later, asking if I remembered any of it.
So big deal, right? Most 14-year-olds say dumb stuff all the time. Here is why it bothers me: My mom is friends with one of the ladies who work for the town. This woman organizes town activities and helps out with historical stuff. Anyway, this woman once gave a tour of the town to a film crew that had a psychic with them.
Now, I don’t know about you all, but I think the whole psychic shtick is fake. Apparently, though, once the group got to the furniture store, the psychic refused to go inside. He said there was a lot of evil in there that wanted to harm people. So, yeah, when my mom’s friend told her that story, my mom told her about the time when I was 14.
They, and pretty much most people in my town, believe that the furniture store and a lot of other buildings are haunted.
11. Way Worse Than Bedbugs
My mom once told me that when she was young, she had a dream that she was playing in the basement, jumping on the bed with her two brothers. In the dream, her mother came into the room and used a spooky voice to say, “You have to stop jumping on the bed or the Bed Witch will get you”. The kids ignored her and continued playing—until my mom suddenly noticed something…
At the foot of the bed, a thin, pale hand was reaching up onto the sheets from underneath the bed. They all froze and stared as a sheet-white woman with black hair emerged slowly and stared at them with a too-wide smile. Paralyzed with fear, they all watched her slowly crawl onto the bed. The woman started to reach out toward them.
Just as the woman’s long fingernails were about to touch my mom’s leg, my mom woke up and ran to the living room. She was surprised to see that her brothers had done the same thing. They all shouted over each other, claiming to have had “the scariest dream”. They soon realized that they all had the exact same nightmare.
I thought that maybe my mom was messing with me, but when I checked with her brothers, they both confirmed it. I don’t know how or why it happened—totally bizarre. All I know is that I still can’t sleep without my feet under my blanket.
12. Chill, Cuz
My aunt moved into her house when my cousin was about two years old. Almost instantly, she knew it was haunted, but stayed because the ghosts were not malicious. My cousin, who is now about 30, grew up there knowing it was haunted, as did my two younger cousins. They always talked about it so nonchalantly, as if it was normal.
Now, I’m way into spooky stuff, so after hearing about this time and again at family functions, when I was 17, I asked to spend the night there specifically so that I could listen for the ghosts. On the night in question, my cousin, my aunt, and my aunt’s friend were watching Carrie.
My cousin said out loud, “When is this movie going to get scary”? Just then the glass patio door in the kitchen opened all by itself. Strange, but maybe it had not been closed properly. After the movie, we decided to go in the hot tub because we were cold. It was winter and all week their gas fireplace had not been working.
After some time in the hot tub, we came back inside to find the fireplace blasting full heat out of it. My aunt just laughed it off as the ghosts messing with us—apparently they play pranks like this a lot. After everyone was asleep, I was on the couch and my cousin was on the floor next to me. I suddenly heard footsteps coming up the stairs from the basement.
All I could do was stare at the basement door in terror. I listened as the footsteps came all the way up the stairs and then stopped at the top. I was expecting someone to open up the door, but nothing happened. A moment passed and I then heard the steps go back downstairs only to start coming back up the stairs all over again.
After a few times, I couldn’t take it anymore. I woke up my cousin. “Listen! Listen! It is clearly a person walking up and down the stairs”. He looked at me and was like, “Dude, that happens every night. Go back to sleep”. The sounds went on for about 30 minutes. With each footstep, I became more mortified.
My aunt lives across from a school and she thinks it might be the ghosts of children. I have no idea, but I definitely wasn’t in a hurry to spend another night there ever again.
13. Ghosted
I lived in a house where in which the previous owner had died of old age. After that, his wife moved into a retirement home. According to our neighbors, the wife was very rude to everyone—especially her husband. Sometimes at night, we could hear noises in our attic. It sounded like someone was walking around with a cane.
It drove us crazy, but we checked and checked to make sure it wasn’t the pipes or anything. One time, I was in a bad mood because of my boyfriend (now ex) who I was living with at that time. He cheated on me so, yeah, I was talking to myself, saying what a jerk he was. When I came to the top of the stairs, I felt a hard push in my back…
I quickly grabbed onto the railing or else I would have fallen. I was home alone at that time. Let me say it again for those in the back: I was home alone at the time. Not long after that the boyfriend and I split up and we moved out. Thank goodness!
14. There’s A Ghost Of A Chance…
When my sister was four and I was three, we went to visit my grandparents’ summer house in the Adirondacks. The house was a beautiful old Victorian that my grandmother had inherited from her father. Once we got there, my sister started talking about a “friend” she met at the house named Missy. She said that Missy lived in the house.
At first, my parents assumed Missy was just an imaginary friend and they thought the whole idea was cute. However, my sister became fixated on Missy and the novelty of the “imaginary friend” wore off. At some point during the visit, we drove past a graveyard. What my sister did was seriously disturbing. She started freaking out screaming “Missy lives there”!
My parents decided to take my sister to a therapist when we got home; however, after we left the summer house, my sister, thankfully, never mentioned Missy again. About 20 years later, we learned that the house was originally built by a dentist in the 1880s. The dentist had a brother who was a doctor who built a lake house nearby.
That lake house still belonged to the heirs of the doctor. Our family met the heirs and they told us that the dentist (who had built our lake house) and his family had abandoned the house after his young daughter drowned after falling off the dock. We never learned the girl’s name, but I wonder if she was called Missy.
15. Sweet Dreams M’Lady
When I was a baby, we lived in a big old manor house with my grandparents. One day, my dad woke up in the middle of the night and saw what looked like a ghost version of my mom, hovering over the bed, screaming and trying to get into my mom’s sleeping body. It freaked him out so much that we moved out immediately and he refused to ever go back to that house again.
16. How Many Points For P-O-S-S-E-S-S-E-D?
My grandmother, who passed on before either my sister or I were born, was a huge Scrabble player and she even won a regional Scrabble championship for the Midwest United States. When my sister was very young, my parents got out my grandma’s old Scrabble set to show her how to play even though she was too young to spell anything over three or four letters.
If you don’t know, Scrabble starts with each player pulling seven tiles from the bag. My sister pulled out seven tiles and said, “What does E-I-L-O-A-R-S spell”? That’s when they made a chilling realization. My parents looked at the letters and realized that my sister Rosalie, who was named after my Grandma Rosalie, pulled her exact seven-letter name from my grandma’s Scrabble set.
17. Hope They Have Danger Pay
I worked overnights on and off for about a year or so at a mental health residential treatment facility. The program was in a very old house that had been donated to the company that ran the program. Sometimes patients would get up to smoke in the middle of the night, so it wasn’t that odd to hear noises during the shift.
One of my duties was to do rounds every 30 min to make sure everyone was still in the facility. So, one night I was sitting in the office and I heard the stairs squeaking like someone was coming down them. Then I heard noises in the kitchen as if that person was making something to eat. A few minutes later, I did the rounds and everyone was sound asleep.
I’m convinced to this day that the house is haunted. On another occasion, one of my co-workers opened a patient’s door to find one of the patients standing by her roommate’s bed like something from Paranormal Activity. When asked why she was doing that, the patient seemed to snap out of a trance and said she was praying for her roommate.
Public Domain Pictures
18. The Mystery Of Max
Growing up, my grandparents had this big, grey German Shepherd named Max. He was a super sweet dog, but my grandparents kept him chained up in the yard and I can’t recall anyone ever interacting with him except us kids.
When we stayed at our grandparents, I remember bringing leftovers to Max and leaving them in his bowl. My sister and cousins remember this as well.
Eventually, my family moved a couple of hours away from my grandparents, and we saw less and less of Max. He was an old dog to begin with, but I recall he started developing tumors around his neck. Then one day he was gone. Years later, when I was a teen, Max was on my mind because our dog had recently died. I mentioned Max to my dad, wondering what, exactly, had caused his demise. His reaction was bizarre.
My dad was very confused that I even knew who Max was. He said Max had succumbed to cancer, but he had been my dad’s first dog, which I was confused by since I had only heard him mention him having a dog named Boots when he was a kid. He told me that Boots was the dog his parents bought to replace Max who passed when my dad was nine.
I was sure my dad must have gotten mixed up, or maybe misremembered the dog, but here’s where the story gets weird. My cousins and my sister all remember Max the German Shepherd. The timeline doesn’t work because he was gone by then, but even my youngest cousins remember Max. Now here’s where the story gets even more insane…
There was a concrete platform where Max was chained up. When (we thought) he passed, my grandparents put a tool shed there. There are even pictures of me and my cousins playing together with the shed in the background. The fact that my cousins remember the dog makes no sense on that basis alone. That’s not the insane part about that shed, though.
When I was a teenager, probably 18 or 19, I helped my dad and my uncles tear down the shed. On the concrete platform, right on the edge, there was a child’s handprint with my dad’s name written underneath. Beside it, there was a big German Shepherd-sized pawprint. Underneath the pawprint, in the same handwriting, was the name “Max”.
Although we have our theories, to this day, none of us know why all of us remember this dog. I was born in the late 80s and this dog passed in 1969.
19. The Tickle Girl
When I was around three years old or so, I would often have dreams about a little girl who lived on my bookshelf. This girl had short hair that was pulled aside with a barrette and she wore a simple dress with shoes that had buckles on them. In these dreams, she would always appear in the form of a yellow translucent person.
I was friends with this little girl. I would often sit on the floor, and she would sit on the top of the bookshelf and look down at me. We always had fun, but when she got mad she would zap me. This felt like being tickled badly by a friend who keeps going even though you are begging them to stop. I would yell at her and run away.
Fast forward 20 years. While on vacation with my parents we were talking about old dreams and memories when “the tickle girl” was brought up. I reminisced about the dreams with her, and my parents' faces went funny. When I asked them what was wrong they said, “Honey, those weren’t dreams”. My jaw dropped.
My mom continued to explain, “You used to sit and talk to your bookshelf all the time. We would hear you laughing and laughing from the other room. Other times we would hear you get so mad that you would scream and yell, but when we came to check, you were the only one in the room”. It still gives me chills to this day.
20. A Scary Spot To Sunbathe
This was one of the scariest moments of my life. Four friends and I were exploring a huge cemetery located near the city where I live. It is very old, and it has sprawling hills that go for a least a few kilometers, so it is impossible to see everything at once; this is a very important detail that I will explain soon.
In the cemetery, there are graves dating back to the 1800s, as well as beautiful mausoleums and churches that have withered away over the years. When this incident happened, it was a bright sunny day. And while the cemetery is located near the more questionable part of the city, we felt no fear.
We sat down near one of the more intricate gravestones and decided to take in some rays. My friends were facing in a different direction at this point, so I was the first one to see him: a man walking up the hill toward us with a shirt over his face that had two eyeholes cut out of it. He was holding a large machete.
I know this sounds insane, and I know it must have been either a prank or a fake weapon, but I know what I saw. My friends all turned around to see what I was staring at, and then they all stared too. The man slowed down and stopped to look at all of us. He then turned around and ran back down the hill from the way he came.
While this exchange took no more than 15 seconds, it felt like an eternity. We ran out of there as fast as humanly possible. I didn’t know what his deal was, where he was going, or what was happening, but I wasn’t planning on sticking around to find out. I didn’t alert the authorities because I was just a stupid 15-year-old kid, but I’ll never forget that day.
21. Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good
This happened 20 years ago, in the early evening. I remember it vividly—better than yesterday even. I was at my mother’s kitchen table attempting to repair a wall clock. She was prepping some food at the counter behind me. We heard something that sounded like a small object hitting the floor in the dining room, which I can clearly see across from me.
My mom thinks the cat knocked something over but the cat is not in there and nothing seems to be out of place. We go back to what we were doing but this registers strangely with me for some reason. After another minute or so of working on the broken clock, I look up at the dining room. About three meters (12 feet) across from me there is a grey cloud floating.
I calmly say, “Mom, there’s a ghost in the dining room”. She looks at me quizzically. “I’m serious. It’s right there. A ghost”. Now she sees it too. From the kitchen, we observe the slowly undulating greyish opaque mass for about a minute. We decide to go into the dining room to turn on the overhead light and get a closer look.
Several inches from the back wall near the corner, maybe a meter (three feet) or so off the ground, there is something that looks like greasy, wispy smoke that’s slowly churning inward—kind of like some dye in water. We stood observing it in awe more than fear for the next five minutes. We decided it was probably sentient.
We slowly got closer and tried to communicate with it. “What do you want? Do you need help”? Silence. We were now standing right next to it. For a brief moment, I reached forward and touched it. The wispy air moved around my hand. It was without any mass and it only felt just a few degrees cooler than the ambient temperature of the room.
After another minute, a chill crept over me and I felt a slight shiver. Mom asked if I was afraid and I replied, “No, it's more like an eerie feeling”. Then, as if she were shooing away a neighborhood kid, my mom bravely said, “I think it’s time for you to go home now”. Within a minute it faded away and life slowly returned to normal. My mom is tough—she’s made me a braver person.
22. Sliding Into Your Nightmares
When I was about 13 years old, my family and I went out for dinner one night. When we got home, my mom noticed that the upstairs light in the hallway was on. Not a big deal, one of us probably forgot to turn it off, right? However, when she walked upstairs to turn it off, there was a single Adidas slide laying in the middle of the hallway.
The shoe must’ve been about size 13 and my dad wears size 10 and doesn’t own that style of shoe. I remember feeling pretty freaked out at the time, as we always lock the doors before we leave the house. The only possible explanation was that someone broke into our house, heard us open the door, and bolted through a window before we got upstairs.
We never found any indication of a break-in, and the windows upstairs are a good five meters (15 feet) off the ground with no way of climbing down. I remember looking at that single shoe just sitting in the hallway, thinking about what it had to have represented. I have never seen my mom so upset. Even to this day, it is pretty darn unnerving.
23. Four Ears Are Better Than Two
I was around 11 when this happened. I was just chilling in my room playing my Nintendo DS while my mom was in the next room doing laundry. I knew my brother and dad were out of the house at the time and everything was pretty quiet. Then, I heard a little girl’s voice clearly shout “Mommy”? It was coming from downstairs…
I knew my little sister was playing downstairs, so I gave it a few minutes before calling to my mom to tell her that my sister had called her. My mom then came rushing into the room confused and wide-eyed saying, “You heard that too”? So, naturally, I responded, “Well yeah. Sister is downstairs. She probably wants you for something”. At that point, my mom turned white as a sheet.
She told me that my sister was over at a friend’s house. We both did a half-scared giggle and then I brought my DS into her room so that we wouldn’t be alone until everyone else got home. I still don’t know what it was as the TV was off, but there have always been rumors that our house is haunted by a little girl.
The reason it didn’t bother my mom at first was because she works with kids, so she often “hears” kids calling her or playing—much like when you sometimes hear your phone go off even though it actually hasn’t. It was only when she realized that I heard it too that she freaked out.
24. Home Spooky Home
This happened just after my parents had moved into their first real house. At the time they only had one child, my brother Tony, who was about five. A few weeks in, my dad woke up in the middle of the night because he heard a small child crying and saying, “Dad”? My dad just thought that it was my brother, but when he said, “Huh”? It took off running.
The first thing my dad did was go and check on Tony who was fast asleep. My dad then heard a loud crash in the kitchen. When he went to check it out, a stack of empty pop cans had been knocked over. My dad was so spooked he ended up doing some research. He found out that the lady who lived there previously had had a miscarriage. My dad says he never saw the kid again after that night.
25. Visited By A Banshee?
Several years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night because my cat was growling at something outside the window. She was in a very aggressive posture and all of her fur was puffed up. I tried to calm her down, but she was ignoring me and not responding. At the time, my bedroom was on the second story and the window was missing the screen.
Since my cat was not giving up, I turned on the light in my room and pushed the curtain aside. What I saw will haunt me until the day I die. There was a woman with long silver hair and a bloody face crawling up to my window. She started screeching and then, all at once, she vanished. My cat stopped growling and started to slowly calm down. I found out a few hours later that my great-grandma had passed on in the middle of the night.
26. Gone But Not Forgotten
My family is Japanese and my grandpa used to sing traditional Japanese songs whenever he felt like it. It didn’t matter if it was 3:00 pm or 4:00 am. When I was a kid, he got very sick and wasn’t able to get out of bed by himself. Eventually, he succumbed to his illness. The night after his death, my whole family slept over at his house.
It was almost midnight when everybody suddenly heard a man singing. It was a traditional song and the volume was quite low. We went to the door of his room and when we put our ears next to it, the singing got louder. However, as soon as someone opened it, the song stopped. Even after we left his house, a relative said that the singing kept happening. Then, 49 days after his passing, it just stopped.
27. Ghost Hunters: Bed And Breakfast Edition
My girlfriend and I were staying at a bed and breakfast that was reputed to be haunted. One night we were out late, and when we returned, we were a little disappointed that we didn’t see anything obviously spooky. The next day at breakfast, we decided to ask the innkeeper for some stories.
One of the stories was about a film crew that stayed in the inn while filming. The male lead was staying in the room where we spent the night and apparently he reported having some very arousing dreams. When he woke up, he saw a male spirit hovering over him. It stayed there, up in the air, for almost a minute before fading away.
The innkeeper told us that this was their gay ghost and laughed as he told us that the ghost would often grab men’s butts. My girlfriend then remarked that it was weird how I jumped in bed last night, and I said, “Well, you surprised me when you grabbed my butt”. She paused for a second and said, “No I didn’t”. After a little back and forth we laughed it off nervously.
28. Creepy Times In Colorado
Late one night, I was driving down a highway in Colorado on my way to get tacos. Suddenly, I heard what sounded like screaming children echoing through my car. I happened to be recording a voice memo at the time, so I got it on tape. When I listened to it, I could definitely hear the screams of little girls. My mom even swears that she can hear them saying “Help me”.
29. Let The Bad Times Roll
When I was 15, I was staying at a family friend’s place while working for them because my parents were out of town. They had gone to bed, but I decided to stay up late and play some pool in their living room. It was already weird hearing their parrot randomly saying “Whatcha doing”? in the next room at 3:00 am, but it got weirder…
As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t shake the eerie vibes. I decided that maybe I just needed to sleep. I put the cue stick away and begin walking toward the spare bedroom, which was all the way at the end of a dark hall, of course. Then, as I was halfway down the hallway, I felt three distinct tugs at the back of my shirt.
I turned around with a smile, expecting it to be the husband joking around. My smile evaporated and I filled with dread when I realized that no one was there. I scurried to the bedroom to try and get to sleep. Fast forward to the next morning. I mentioned it to the wife and, without missing a beat, she said, “Oh, you probably encountered my son. He was just trying to say hello”.
My blood ran cold. Her son, who was quite a few years older than I was, had been slain at Mardi Gras some years back. Someone had mistaken him for someone else and tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention and then beat him with a lead pipe.
30. Maybe It Just Wanted To Google Something
We had a computer room in our house that was at the end of a long hallway. One time, I went down the hall to use the bathroom and I could see the glow from the computer screen dimly lighting up the room. Then it looked like someone walked in front of it and cast a shadow on the wall. I jumped and then started laughing. “Jeez, you scared me”.
I looked into the room, thinking it was one of my parents, but there was no one in there. I booked it out of there and avoided that bathroom for weeks.
31. You Tell ’Em, Lady!
A few months after I was born, my parents bought a house. The lady who sold it to them was an old widow and she left behind all of her old furniture. My parents got rid of most of her stuff. Every night at the same hour, they would hear a rocking chair downstairs and the lid of a trash can slamming. These were objects that they had gotten rid of.
These creepy sounds kept happening regularly, at least until my aunt came over to babysit me. She was totally unaware of the phenomenon, and when she heard it, she freaked out. She screamed, “You don’t live here anymore, you don’t belong in this world. Don’t come back”. After that, my parents never heard those sounds again.
32. A Spine-Chilling Samaritan
This happened to me when I was a senior in high school. After my first and second classes of the day, I decided to take my Spanish textbooks home so I could study during my lunch hour and spare class. When it was time for lunch, I was standing at my locker gathering the books when I heard a sound that made my blood run cold. It was a voice telling me to get out.
I tried to ignore it, but the voice whispered, “Get out of here. Go home”. There was no one else in the hallway and all the classroom doors were closed. The voice told me to grab all of my things and leave, so I emptied my locker and walked home. Later, my sister who was a junior at the same high school, texted me saying the school caught on fire.
The fire happened in the bathroom that was right outside my locker. There was so much damage that my things would have been destroyed. Luckily for me, someone was watching out for me.
33. Good Advice
One time I was visiting a small, old Medieval town in England called Tewkesbury. I had been told that there was a haunted pub there so I had to check it out. While there, I got up to use the bathroom. As I passed another woman on my way there, she just shook her head and said, “I couldn’t get the door open”. When I got to the women’s bathroom door I tried to push it.
The door gave a little. It was as if someone was on the other side holding it closed. At this point, my boyfriend’s mom said, “I don’t know what’s going on”. So I said, “Sometimes they like it when you knock”. I then knocked and the door opened just fine. Once inside, I checked for uneven floors and weird hinges but there was nothing out of the ordinary.
34. Kids Say The Most Terrifying Things
This happened when I was around four years old and I was sleeping in my mom’s bed. She woke up in the middle of the night to me waving to the open wardrobe and she asked me who I was waving to. I replied, “To the man in the wardrobe. He’s called George”. It turns out George was the previous owner of the house who had passed on the previous year.
There is no way I would have known that—especially at that age. I always felt uneasy after she told me that story. Hopefully, George left the house before I became old enough to start banging one out, the poor guy.
35. Nightmare Fuel
I don’t remember too much, but my mother told me that when I was about three years old I used to be afraid of going to bed because there was a man who would stand at the end of my bed. He used to ask me if I was OK and then he would just leave. Fast forward to a few months later and the man said, “You’re OK, so I can go now”.
He never visited me again, but months later, when we were looking through old photo albums, I made a disturbing discovery. There he was! That the guy who had been scaring me was in one of the photos. It turns out that I was being visited by my paternal grandfather who passed 10 years before I was born.
36. Baaaad Vibes
I used to have a paper route in my town. It usually took me about two and half hours per night to finish. About halfway through it, there was this house with a metal goat lawn ornament. After I first saw it, I started noticing that it was in a different location every single night. For two years, this goat would be in a different place every single night. Definitely gave me the creeps.
37. No Laughing Matter
Back when I was a teenager, I had a pretty creepy experience one night. My parents were out for the evening, and I was chilling in the basement playing Chrono Trigger and listening to music. Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” came on and there’s a part near the end of the song where the music stops briefly for evil laughter.
At this particular time, the song stopped but the laughter didn’t. It took me a quarter of a second before I realized what the heck was going on. I got the heck out of there so fast and stayed in the well-lit kitchen until my parents came home. It was SUPER disturbing. Thankfully, nothing like it has happened to me since.
38. Down In The Dumps
This happened when we were visiting our new house that had been sitting abandoned for four years before we bought it. My mom was alone in the backyard and someone threw poo at her. She looked everywhere and there was no one around. It wasn’t bird poo either. She said it looked at smelled like human baby excrement. We still can’t figure it out.
39. A Ghastly Getaway
In 1980, my father, who is a scientist with a very unusual job that requires top-secret security clearance, moved to a house in the woods outside a large city. My parents were divorced; he lived there with a girlfriend. After he moved there, I started having night terrors when I’d visit—really bad ones.
Strangely, I never remembered them in the morning, though I was told I did all kinds of things—apparently consciously—during the night. I would yell, throw things, throw myself around and even cut myself with a box cutter. I grew distant from my dad for a few years and went off to a fancy college where I met my girlfriend.
Right before graduation, my hot girlfriend and I decided to “run away” to my dad’s house in the woods. I knew he was out of the country at the time. I deactivated all of the alarms, and we went up to my childhood room for some insane intercourse. Afterward, we were basking in the afterglow when a look of pure terror suddenly came across her face.
“We need to leave”, she said. Now, this girl is ultra-rational (she went on to become a Hollywood bigwig) and is not a flighty person. “Why”? I asked. But I must admit also felt it—the room was getting so cold you could see our breath. I was overcome with an intense feeling of anger and sorrow that I’d never felt since.
My girlfriend started crying, and we dressed, packed, and ran out of there in about 30 seconds. As I was re-arming the alarms at the front door, we heard the upper bedroom door slam angrily. We drove the 320 kilometers (200 miles) back to our college at 2:30 am. My father got very angry that we had visited without his permission.
I also told him what happened, and in the ensuing conversation, I learned that the house’s previous owners had a teenage son who ended his life in that bedroom (Thanks, dad). I never spent another night there. Ever. And I went through a lot to avoid it, too.
40. He Knows When You Are Sleeping…
When I was 13, my friend and I were home alone at his house. It was during the holidays, so the Christmas tree was up in the living room. We were watching a movie and the tree started shaking violently, but no one was there. We both bolted out of the house and ran to the neighbor’s place until his parents came home. I was supposed to sleep over, but I made his mom take me home.
41. Shower Thoughts
This happened when I was in my early 20s. I was taking a shower with the door locked when suddenly the bathroom light went out. I was a bit freaked out, but then I thought it must have been a burnt-out bulb. I got out of the shower and couldn’t believe it when I saw that the light switch was in the OFF position. The switch was down. The door was locked. No one was home.
42. Who Needs A Guard Dog?
One night, my friends and I went into a building that was rumored to be haunted. Suddenly, a shadowy figure appeared in front of us. As we were booking it out of there, I heard my friend scream in pain. He said his stomach and back were burning. When we got back to my dorm, he took off his shirt because it was still burning. What we found was horrifying.
We lost our minds when we saw that he had three bright red claw-like scratches on his back and three on his stomach.
43. No Guts, No Glory (Hole)
I was in a department store and needed to use the bathroom. I sat down on the toilet to poop and all of a sudden, I just had a weird feeling come over me. I noticed a hole in the divider wall and bent forward to look through it. When I did, I saw an eyeball staring back at me.
44. You’re In For A Big Surprise
I was walking through the woods with a couple of friends once time, and we came across an abandoned car. I have no clue how it even got there, as it was deep in the middle of the woods. We were all kinda creeped out, but curiosity got me and I decided to go in for a closer look. Some of the windows were smashed, and some were covered in filth and grime.
I peeped through a smashed window and saw what was, without a doubt, a distinctly human leg. I screamed and took off with my friends close behind me. I’ve never told anyone about this before now, but I still think about it all the time.
45. Spooky Sleepover
When I was nine or 10 I was invited to a sleepover at my friend’s house. It was in a crummy part of town, and I was already apprehensive about the whole thing. Turns out my friend had planned for us to sleep in tents in the backyard. In the middle of the night, I unexpectedly woke up and realized that all of my friends were gone from the tent.
Freezing cold and absolutely terrified, I looked around the yard and eventually went into the house. None of the doors were locked and for the life of me, I couldn’t find another living soul. I was scared, alone, and in my pajamas. I eventually found a phone and called my mom. About 15 minutes later she arrived to pick me up and take me home.
Later I found out that my friends had moved to a different tent in the yard without telling me. In my half-awake state, I panicked and thought they had all disappeared. At the moment, it was the most horrifying, inexplicable thing I ever had the displeasure to experience in my childhood.
46. A Harrowing Hike
Back in the day, my dad was on a university holiday and he decided to go hiking with his two brothers. They chose a trail that was only a few feet wide and spiraled around a cliff formation with sheer drop-offs the whole way. So, they’re working their way up and around this cliff face, and my dad’s bringing up the rear. Suddenly, he loses his footing in the slick mud…
He falls backward, headfirst, off the cliff. He clearly remembers looking down at his feet and seeing the cliff edge a few feet above him, which means he was well on his way down with no chance of grabbing onto anything— nothing. He felt utter hopelessness. Then he says, “It felt like I was being tackled by a linebacker”.
“Something slammed into my back, the wind was knocked out of me, and I shut my eyes for a split second. When I opened them, I was standing back on the trail”. According to him, he was a goner until something pushed him back up. This story drives me crazy because my dad is 1000% NOT a liar. This story is the only shred of hope that I have that something else exists.
47. It’s Giving Stephen King
My family moved to a standard upscale suburban home after roughing it for a couple of years to save up the money. We also got a deal on the home because it was a model home before it was ours. You know, the main house in the development with all the fake furniture to show off what the final homes would eventually look like.
Anyway, our house had this loft area with two stairwells that go up to it, one in the front and one in the back. You could pretty much hear everything from this loft since it was so open. One day, my two best friends (a guy and a girl) were hanging out in the loft. We were in high school and they were always all over each other.
We were watching TV and I got up to take a pee. When I left, they were all up on each other. When I came back, they were on different ends of the couch. I thought that they had gotten into an argument, so I asked what was up. “Your little sister is home”, the dude said. My blood ran cold. “What’s wrong”? the girl asked.
I asked what made them think that. They said they heard her. By this point, I am sort of freaking out. “No one’s here,” I say. We check the house, and I’m right. Well, I later found out a devastating story about the house. A family had actually lived there before us. Their little girl had been playing in the loft and climbed up on the railing and fell two stories to her demise.
My two best friends swear to this day that they heard what they thought was my sister laugh and run up the stairs, hitting her hands on each step like she was running up on all fours. I never had any encounters with the girl other than the fact that right next to where she landed was the main intercom for the house.
Every so often at night, I would wake up to the sound of the intercom button being pressed. All you could hear was static like someone was holding down the talk button but no one was speaking. My room was on the third floor and I’d have to walk downstairs to the main unit and turn it off there. I always thought I’d see her.
48. No Ouija Board Required
My brother-in-law lost his life when he was hit by an inebriated driver. On the first anniversary of his death, my ex-husband got a call on his cell phone while he was cooking dinner for our kids. The call display said it was his deceased brother, so he didn’t answer. He just started shaking and hyperventilating.
It really freaked him out at the time because his brother’s cell phone had been destroyed in the crash. Once he had a chance to calm down, he says it now comforts him to know that his brother is with him and wanted to reach out on that first anniversary.
49. Identity Crisis
A few years ago, I was helping my brother renovate the house he had just bought. It was definitely a fixer-upper steeped in the neglect of its former occupants. When my brother was crawling around under the house he found a Tupperware container wrapped in a black plastic bag. Inside the Tupperware was five random ID cards from five unrelated people.
We were pretty unfazed by it at first, but the more we thought about it, the more creeped out we were.
50. That Took A Turn…
This happened to me when I was around 11 years old. One night I fell asleep watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. At about 1:00 am, I felt a weight at the end of my bed. It felt as if someone was sitting on it. I opened my eyes to see my nanny who had been deceased for about three years. She started patting my leg.
“You’re gonna hear and see something in the next few minutes”, she said. “It’s going to scare you but you’ll be okay”. I said, “But I need to pee”. She replied, “Okay, but don’t be scared”. I fumbled my way out of my room and onto the landing. What I heard next chilling me to the bone. There was a massive, loud crash. It was the window of our front door getting smashed in.
I stood there paralyzed…just watching as someone used a hand hatchet to break the window of our front door. Then an arm started coming through the door trying to open the old twisty lock on the door frame. Because there was wire in the glass, the window didn’t fully smash, but the guy was still trying to get in. He kept hacking at the glass.
Then, in frustration, he started kicking the door. The next thing I heard was my mom screeching at him from a second-floor window. She was asking what the heck he was doing. He said he was here to get her son who has just slashed his tires. She screamed that she doesn’t have a son. He called her a liar, and she said, “Come in and I’ll show ya”! To which he replied, “That’s what I’m trying to do”!
They exchanged a bunch more curses before he decided to smash most of the windows at the front of our house and then leave. After four hours, law enforcement eventually arrived and told us that they wouldn’t be able to get any DNA from the blood smeared all over the window because it would be a complete nightmare in paperwork.
Turns out that guy went nuts on our house because when he was chasing our stupid next-door neighbor, the idiot ducked into our garden to hide. Our tree made it look like he’d run into our house. However, my mom was more freaked out by the fact that I’d seen and spoken to my nanny than by the axe-wielding maniac trying to gain entry into our house.
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