Horror movies are one thing, but what happens when your own life morphs into a real-life nightmare? From unexplainable phenomena to haunted houses, these Redditors share their most chilling experiences. Read these stories with the light on, because they're certainly not for the faint of heart.
1. A Sibling’s Messages From Beyond
At the time I didn’t live at my parents’ home, but I was there watching their dog while they were out of town. My sister had lost her life in their house about a year prior. While I was there, I witnessed a picture of her fall off the wall. But it got so much creepier. I then discovered that EVERY picture of her in the house had fallen off the wall, seemingly at the same time.
I chalked it up to something shaking the house, even though we live in Ohio and I felt nothing. I went home to my apartment. There, sitting face-up on my desk, was a picture of my sister and me that I knew I had packed away. I don’t believe in things like this, but this occurred at a time when I was still very much actively grieving the loss of my sister, and it hit me really hard.
2. An Eerie Farewell
My mom is an extremely rational person, but this event caused her to have such severe panic attacks that she had to move back in with her parents for six months. When I heard what happened, I nearly cried. My mom’s first husband was a Navy pilot during the Persian Gulf conflict. His aircraft carrier was about 10 days into its cruise when the following events happened.
My mom hadn’t heard anything from the ship since it left, but that was to be expected because it was operating with complete radio silence. On that night, my mom woke up suddenly in the middle of the night. She saw her husband standing in the room. It wasn’t an ethereal form either, he appeared solid and almost the same as in real life.
The only thing that was different about him was that his head was shaved. He only had one eerie thing to say to her. “Goodbye". This whole experience shook her up and she wasn’t able to get back to sleep. She decided to go to the kitchen for some water when the doorbell rang. All army wives know what a late-night doorbell means.
The uniformed men at the door told her that her husband had suffered a massive heart attack and perished aboard the carrier. She was grief-stricken but reasoned that the apparition had been a hallucination caused by the stress of having a spouse deployed. Also, because his head was shaved, he didn’t even look that familiar.
Her mother and mother-in-law flew in immediately to help plan for the funeral and receive the body. My mom stayed strong, but then she saw something that made her believe in ghosts. The first time she saw his body, she saw that her lifeless husband was bald. In a letter to my mom, his flight officer explained that the shaved head was the result of a lost bet.
There was no way my mom could have known that his head had been shaved.
3. Mrs. Doubtfire In Real Life
When my friend and I were 17, we worked together at a Pizza Hut. We were closing up shop one weekend, and it was about 11 pm by the time we shut down and were ready to lock up. When we walked out to her car, there was an old lady sitting in her front passenger seat. I have no idea why my friend would leave her car door unlocked, but my friend opened the driver's door and asked the old lady if she needed help.
The old lady said, "I just need a ride home". We tell her that we just have to go back inside and call our moms to tell them we'll be late. We go back inside the store, lock the door, and call the authorities. Within ten minutes, they’re there arresting her. The truth was far more horrifying than we'd realized. As it turns out, it was actually a 47-year-old man dressed up as an old lady.
They told us he was carrying a blade around and that we were lucky to have gotten out of the situation.
4. How To Catch A Gravedigger
When I was 10 years old, I lived in the middle of rural Alabama. It was 1999. We had some odd neighbors, to say the least. There was no mom, and I remember the dad sometimes being unkind to his kids. One day, being curious kids, my friend and I followed my neighbor and his son and daughter when they left their house and walked into the woods.
I was very familiar with the area because it was back when kids could roam free until the streetlights came on. Anyway, we trailed them for about two miles: through the woods, across an old cemetery, down a railroad...They stopped at a clearing beside the tracks and my friend and I hid and watched. We saw them start digging, and when we saw WHAT they were digging, we got scared and bolted.
They were pulling up bones and putting them in buckets! I immediately told my parents when I got home, but they didn’t believe me. I'm now 32 but I still remember that day vividly.
5. Nice Bedside Manner
When I was around nine years old, I caught chickenpox. I woke up in the middle of the night and called for my mom because little kids can’t do ANYTHING for themselves when they’re sick. I got so much more than I bargained for. A different woman came into my bedroom and sat on my bed and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.
In the fog of illness, I thought it was my grandmother in a strange outfit. When I woke up that morning, I went downstairs for breakfast and asked where my grandma was. My mom told me that she was at her house like she always was. I told my mom that grandma had been in my room the night before, but she just laughed and said that I must have been dreaming.
When I told the story to my aunt while she was babysitting me that day, she had a very different reaction. She asked me to tell her about the person’s unusual outfit, and I described a nurse’s uniform from the 1950s. My aunt was shocked. What I was describing was something much eerier. I was describing the wife of the previous owner of our house.
That woman had been a nurse in the fifties and had passed a few months previously. The whole encounter definitely gave me a very spooky feeling.
6. A Tale Of Two Daniels
This happened when I was seven. I was walking downtown with my dad who was buying a CD—we used to go to the record store all the time and he’d chat music with the workers while I’d play on the Sega Dreamcast. I remember there was a guy watching me play and it looked like he was crying. He was just kind of...staring at me.
But because I was just a kid with a video game, I didn’t think too much of it. About 20 minutes later there was a bunch of people gathering outside, so we went to see what the big commotion was about. I couldn't believe my eyes. The guy who was crying was now on top of the roof standing on the ledge. He screamed, “THIS IS FOR YOU DANIEL” (my name) and jumped.
My dad put his entire body over mine to prevent me from seeing it, but the guy who jumped didn’t make it. I thought about it every day for over two decades. Skip ahead to about five years ago, I’m now at a Christmas staff party, drinking heavily with my team. A guy on said team and I have heart-to-hearts about our pasts, and he tells me that he’s bi.
However, he hasn’t been with a man in 20 years. He used to date a man behind his girlfriend’s back, who took his own life when he wouldn’t leave her. My coworker’s name is also Daniel. And then I put it all together. He was in the crowd with me that fateful day. Two strangers forever changed together but 20 years in the past. It haunted me for most of my life.
7. Knock Knock
My mum used to start at work at three in the morning, and so she’d be up at about two having her coffee. One morning, I heard her up and went to see her. She made a joke about how she’d heard something outside and I, being in a bit of a silly mood, opened the blinds up wide as a joke and came face-to-face with something straight out of a horror film.
There was a guy just standing there, staring into the lounge room. That alone was creepy enough, but what sticks with me is the fact he didn't run or really react for what felt like an eternity. While I ran to get my old man and brother, he apparently just stood there and then slowly walked off.
8. Payback’s A Fright
I was spending the night at a friend’s house when I was around 12 or so. His parents weren’t home so we decided to get into some young angsty debauchery by doing some ding-ding ditching. Shortly after we got home, at about 1:00 a.m, the doorbell rang. Naturally, we thought it was an angry neighbor wanting to confront us. We soon found out how wrong we were.
My friend had a small window that you couldn’t really see into from the outside, so we took a peek at who was calling at such a late hour. Standing at the door was an old woman in a frilly dress and a young boy in a weird newsie outfit. Both were dressed EXTREMELY out of the period, which was the 90s. We ducked down because we were pretty freaked.
When we looked again, no less than 10 seconds later, they were both gone. We couldn’t see anyone on the street walking away and no cars were driving away, either. The two of them just disappeared into thin air without a trace. My friend had never seen either of them in the neighborhood before. Let’s just say, we did not sleep well.
9. I Feel You, Gramps
One Monday, out of nowhere, I started to worry about my grandpa. The moment of worry passed, and I went on with my day. Later, I posted an article about automated lawnmowers, saying that my grandpa would love this since lawncare was his hobby. Literally right after I hit share, my phone rang. I got a sinking feeling when I saw that it was my dad calling.
We all know that feeling. It’s that drop in your stomach when you know something terrible has happened or is about to. My dad told me that my grandpa had been rushed to the hospital with a bladder infection followed by several heart attacks, but he was still alive. I didn’t make the connection to my earlier worries—until I woke up the next morning.
That night I had an intense dream that made everything click together in my head. I dreamed I was sitting in my grandpa’s shed, and he sat down next to me and said, “The next few weeks are gonna be hard, and they will test you. Don’t worry about me. In a few hours, I won’t have any use for it". We ended up spending what felt like hours talking about a lot of personal things.
Most of the stories we talked about in my dream were things I honestly didn’t know about my grandpa. My dad and his brother later confirmed most of them to be true, although some were a little exaggerated, apparently. Grandpa didn’t leave us until around noon on Tuesday, which was just a few hours after my dream. I’m not religious, nor will I be, but wow.
10. A Ghostly Fan Club
I had so many paranormal experiences when I was a kid, but the one that has always stuck with me happened when I was about four years old. Back then, I used to randomly wake up in the middle of the night for no known reason. I was still sleeping in my parents’ bed at the time, so I would just lay in bed and look around. That's when it would happen.
Whenever I was looking around and trying to get back to sleep, I would see two really tall figures just standing there. They looked like the old farm couple in that famous painting, except they had hollow eyes and they were even thinner. At first, they didn’t do anything but stare back at me. One night, in particular, was especially weird…
I woke up as usual and saw the couple standing there in front of the doorway again. Only this time, something felt a bit more off than usual. It got downright terrifying. The ceiling fan was on high and the blades were going so fast that the entire fixture was shaking. I looked back at the figures and they had some really dark, creepy grins on their faces.
I was petrified. I buried myself under the blankets, hoping they’d go away. All I could hear was the ceiling fan spinning faster and faster. The beads at the end of the fan’s pull chains were tapping furiously against the glass light cover. I peeked out from under the blankets and the two figures were right next to the bed, standing right over me with their ugly smiles.
I screamed and the glass cover on the light flew off and shattered on the floor. My dad jumped out of bed immediately and turned on the light to see what happened, but the two figures were already gone. I was crying so badly that it took my mom a long time to calm me down. That was definitely the worst house I have ever lived in.
11. What Big Teeth You Have
My toddler has a big imagination, and we like to do our best to encourage that sort of creativity in her. She’s at the age where she still completely believes in things like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy—and she loves picturing them in her mind. Her description of the Tooth Fairy haunts me though. She speculated that the Tooth Fairy probably takes children’s teeth to put in her own mouth, so that she could have millions and millions of teeth. I didn’t appreciate that image much.
12. Seeing Double
I was at my house with my dad. It was the middle of the day, and I was unemployed so I was just hanging around and doing nothing with my life. We have a wood furnace in the basement that needs to be tended to regularly. My dad was in the basement tending the fire; I was on the second floor in my bedroom. I decided to head downstairs, and as I was descending, I heard my dad ascending the basement stairs.
I forgot something in my room and immediately went back up to get it. A few moments later my dad came into my room, face white as a sheet. I asked him what was wrong, and he claimed he saw my doppelganger sprint past the doorway to the basement—the only thing was, my doppelganger had different clothes on. Neither of us could make head or tail of it.
I’m getting chills all over again just typing this out.
13. Scaredy Cat
I moved into a shared house and my housemate told me half the house had burned down and been rebuilt, and the ghost of the old man who’d perished in the fire visited them. I never had any experience of the old man but when half asleep I’d very clearly feel a cat or two jump onto my bed, settle down, and purr. But here's the thing. There was never any physical cat there.
Once in that house, I had a terrifying lucid dream in which a catlike paw was coming up from inside of my bed, clawing my thigh. It hurt so much that I thought I might be gouging myself in my sleep, but I woke up unharmed. Months later I moved out and met the landlord, who lived a few doors down, to return the keys. I said something like “must have been scary when the house burned down with the owner there, were they living here at the time"? His answer made my blood run cold.
He said, “Oh no, the owner was fine he got out. But he had about a dozen cats and several of them burnt to a crisp in the fire”. I’m pretty sure I was sharing my bed with unfriendly ghost cats.
14. The Cat Whisperer
When I was around six, we had a cat that had kittens. We knew it had kittens because it was pregnant and then one day it wasn’t pregnant anymore. The problem was that we had no idea where the kittens were. I was wondering about it, and so I 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 popped into my mind. I could picture the broken boards just above our porch that our cat could jump into from pillars on the side of the porch. I just KNEW that the kittens 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.
15. Written In The Stars
When I was a kid, I was out in the mountains near Mammoth, California, stargazing with my dad and a few family friends. I was from Los Angeles, so it was the first time I’d ever seen the stars without any light pollution, and I was fascinated. I pointed at a cluster of three stars and said, “Hey look! It’s Orion’s Belt"! Only being a kid, I got it wrong.
My father corrected me and showed me where Orion’s Belt was actually located. So I pointed to the one from before and said, “Well, what constellation is that then"? He conceded that it did look very similar to Orion’s Belt, but that he couldn’t tell what it actually was. A little while later, we noticed that what appeared to be the middle star of the three started moving—quickly.
It zig-zagged through the sky for a few seconds before its brightness intensified, and then it disappeared. To this day, the only thing I think it could possibly be was some kind of experimental drone. And if it was a drone, it must've been a super-advanced one because a) this was the early 90s and b) it stood still for long enough for us to think it was a star.
16. Fork In The Road
There was a cemetery not too far from my house. It was tucked back into some hills, and because it was outside of the busy part of the city, I’d sometimes go there after work. I liked the quiet—it was where I’d go to think and just enjoy my own company. One night, my girlfriend at the time and I were driving to the cemetery in the middle of the night because it also had a better view of the stars.
On the way there, we saw a dog that was just standing there in the middle of the road to the cemetery. We stopped, but the dog just wouldn't move. We eventually had to move up a few feet—the dog started snarling and barking at the car, but still wouldn't move. I reversed back a bit and the dog was fine. Then I moved up again, and the same thing happened.
After we backed up, we figured that it was some kind of sign to not go to the cemetery that night. I started to do a U-turn and the dog came up to the side of the car and was barking at the window until we were moving back down the road. I've been to that cemetery dozens of times over the years, during all times of the day, and I never saw that dog again.
17. The Red Room
When I was 15, I dropped out of school, got a factory job, and moved into an apartment with a friend who did the same. After a few months, I managed to find a house for a cheap price. While talking to the owner, I learned that it was so cheap because the tenants would usually suddenly move out after only a few months of living there. Now, I was one of those people who really wasn’t scared of anything.
So, I move into the new house with my friend and we get settled. Everything is great for the first couple of months. After that, though, some unnatural stuff started happening. The chandelier in the dining room would sway as if it’d been hit by a strong wind, but all the doors and windows were closed. We didn’t think much of it at the time and just assumed it was stuff anyone would expect from an old house.
With the permission of the owner, we decide to repaint the kitchen and pantry. We moved everything out and started the painting process. We managed to finish the kitchen and get the pantry ready for painting, but I notice what looks like the outline of a door in the pantry wall where the shelves were. So, we take down the plywood and unveil a small door. We open that door and it opens to a smaller room, about 5x5.
The room has what looks like another door in the back wall. At this point, I became unnerved. I open that door and it reveals an even smaller room, about 3x3x4. The entire room is painted a creepy shade of blood red, and there’s a high chair, also painted red, bolted to the floor. I’m hit with a wave of absolute dread. We immediately close and cover that door, then close and cover up the original door.
I put the shelf back into place, and that same day, my friend and I packed up all our stuff and moved out.
18. A Ghost In Plane Sight
When I was in fourth grade, I was sitting in class one day, bored out of my mind, just staring out the window. It was overcast, and I was gazing at the clouds. Then a cloud came into view that looked like the fuselage of a commercial airliner. There were no wings, but the rest of it was there. It floated smoothly by and then the nose lifted and it rose into the clouds.
It was really freaky. It was like watching the ghost of a plane.
19. Kids See The Darndest Things
When I was about 14, I witnessed my Uncle Jerry’s passing. He had lung cancer, and we brought him home so that he could go peacefully. At some point, I got a very strong mental image of a man leaning against the wall, with his arms and legs crossed, watching Jerry slowly fade. He was wearing a brown suit and was very tall and lean.
I told my mom and aunt about what I was imagining—explaining that it was just something that popped into my head. Their faces went white and they started crying. “Your grandfather used to stand like that. And he wore a brown suit to work". This person I saw had been Jerry’s father, and he had perished way before I was born.
I don’t know where this vision came from, but it definitely meant a lot to my mom and aunt.
20. No, We Don’t Have Any Sugar
In the late 80s, my mom was in the market for a house and finally found one. She met the lady who owned it, signed a contract, and a few days later, the lady was brutally ended. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, but she went through with the purchase, even though they hadn’t yet caught who did it. My dad was a bad person, and my mom and dad had divorced. For years she suspected he must’ve had something to do with it and that the killer had got the wrong person.
The neighbors suspected the husband or some workers who had done some work in the house a few days earlier. But since there was no sign of forced entry, they couldn’t convict anyone. One day, a little after my mom had moved into the house, a teenage boy knocked on the door. She asked who it was, and he said he was a neighbor looking to borrow a cup of sugar.
My mom didn’t open the door and just told him she didn’t have any. 23 years later, they opened some cold cases and found the killer. It was that neighbor kid, 15 years old at the time, and he confessed he came into the house by asking the lady to borrow a cup of sugar. If my mom had opened the door, I would’ve probably lost her.
21. Catfish Catastrophe
I was 18 when I had my first long-term girlfriend. We ended up dating on and off for four years. When we first started fooling around, she clammed up and I backed off. On the car ride home, she explained that her last boyfriend was very forceful with her and that it would likely take her a while to open up. I, of course, was understanding and offered comfort—I was willing to wait.
Things seemed fine for a while, but whenever we’d have trouble, he’d creep back into the picture. This usually happened through AOL messenger. He’d talk to her, and then he’d message me threats and tell me he was going to get her back. This went on for our entire relationship. One time she called me hysterically because he’d shown up at her house and forcibly kissed her.
He was always a huge strain on our relationship until about the four-year mark, when she called me up really upset and asked if I would come over. She said she had made a big mistake. I assumed she’d cheated on me and I dreaded it was with this guy. But it was so much worse than that. When I get to her house, she explains that this old boyfriend was actually her the entire time.
I was catfished by my girlfriend for four whole years—constantly harassed and threatened in my weakest moments. It’s been 20 years since then and it still messes me up.
22. Trust Your Gut
I have a very strong danger sense that can be terrifyingly correct. Once when I was in high school training for cross country, I would usually run past a lake near my house. One day, however, when I was close to the lake I got a very strong “NO” feeling. With every step forward, it felt like I was struggling against a strong animal instinct telling me not to go any closer.
I turned right around and went home. When my mom commented on how short my run was, I told her what happened and she seemed alarmed, wondering if I’d had some sort of panic attack. A few days later, law enforcement found a body in the lake.
23. Time To Face The Music
My mom passed when I was seven. Flash forward to middle school, when I was attending a music clinic at my mom’s old high school. As my class was waiting around to perform onstage, we were just chatting away as a group. Suddenly, I looked over and saw a woman who looked identical to my mom standing at the back of the room.
This woman had the same red hair, glasses, height—everything—as my mom. A few times I even caught her looking at me and smiling. I turned away to tell some friends about what I had seen, but by the time I looked back, the woman was gone. Sadly, I didn’t see her again after that. It was super eerie, but also kinda comforting.
24. The Room That Laughed
In 1996, I was living in a northern Canadian town, working on the oil rigs as a low-level laborer. I was 20, just starting out and couch surfing, when a friend offered me a windowless basement room in his mom's house. The basement was unfinished. My friend’s mom was on disability and he and his brother ran the house. I quickly set up down there with a second-hand mattress, a little television, and a fan.
I had always considered myself a "tough" guy: I partied a lot, had fights, stupid macho stuff like that. I wasn't a squeamish young man. But after a little while of living in that room, I started hearing things. Not external groaning or banging or the house shifting or anything like that—what I was hearing was a soft, malevolent chuckling in my ear.
It sounded like someone whispering laughter. Over and over again. I thought I was going crazy. There was a bookshelf in there and I had a bunch of favorite books I packed around, and they kept falling off the shelf. I'd go up to use the bathroom upstairs and come down, and my books would be on the floor despite no one having been down there.
The laughing sound in my ear got so bad that one night I, as a big tough guy, went upstairs and asked my friend if I could sleep on the floor in his room. I remember being surprised because he didn't make fun of me. The next day he said, "Brent couldn't sleep down there either, he moved out pretty quick". Brent was his cousin—a guy I knew casually.
So I went to find him, and when we met up, he looked at me with cold eyes and said, "Yeah man, that room is haunted". I only went back in that room to move my stuff out. I ended up sharing a place in a trailer park with another buddy.
25. Uber Nightmare
This happened in India. I took an Uber at around 11 pm to get back to my house. Halfway through, the driver started taking random turns into smaller streets citing traffic. We weren't even moving towards my destination at this point. I politely asked him to follow the directions that Google was suggesting, to which he asked me to shut up. That's when I got really scared.
He then ended the trip in the Uber app but wouldn't stop the car or drop me off. Thankfully I had pepper spray with me—I'm a guy, and my friends used to laugh about how I always carry that thing everywhere—and started spraying in his direction. He crashed the car and I ran out. Here’s what I still think about...Uber takes away the SOS option after the driver ends the trip.
The driver knows where you live, so even if you take any real action, they could still harm you. The worst part was no one really cared or took me seriously. When I told my parents or my friends, they always found a way to somehow pin the blame on me. Maybe I was rude to him? Maybe I overreacted? My experience helped me understand what millions of women (and men) go through after much more serious trauma.
26. What Did I Just Witness?
When I was about 10 years old, I saw a large rocket fly almost vertically straight down into the sea. This was on a small Mediterranean island and there was no explosion or mention of anything on the news. It just slipped into the sea and there was also no sign of it after it entered the water. No one else was nearby to see it.
27. Somebunny Loves You
My grandpa, who was a tough-as-nails WWII Marine veteran, had a little stuffed bunny. He kept the bunny out in the open, and when he thought no one was looking, he would pet it whenever he walked past. It was pretty adorable to see this big, tough guy furtively petting a little stuffed bunny, and it became an ongoing family joke.
Sadly, my grandpa took his own life. When my family went over to his place to deal with the medical examiner and everything, we stayed in his house that night. It had an overall creepy vibe because of what had happened. We were all upset and struggling, and to help us cope, we started doing dumb things to try to make ourselves laugh. Until horror struck.
Suddenly someone realized that the bunny had moved. At first, it had been on the dining table, but then we saw it in the den an hour later. I definitely thought someone was moving it as a joke, but everyone swore they wouldn’t do that. We also never caught anyone moving it. I kept an eye on that bunny the entire week and I never saw anyone touch it, but it would still be moved.
28. Scared Of The Dark
When I was little, I was sleeping over at my friend's house. I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, which was located at the dark end of the hallway away from her room. When I stepped out of the bathroom, her older brother was standing outside the door, in the dark. He never said a word—he just walked up to me silently and put his hands around my neck.
Someone stirred and he dropped his hands. I immediately called my mom and left without even saying anything. My friend never believed me, and I never went back.
29. How To Summon A Demon
My kid is eight now. A few months ago, she told me she wanted to summon a demon. I briefly thought about sending her to an orphanage at that moment, but then she said not to worry, and told me this: “I just want to be its friend. I think maybe demons just take other people’s souls because they’re lonely. If I can make one my friend, maybe he won’t have to do that anymore”.
I wasn’t too sure what to make of that. But I commended her kind heart, and told her I don’t have time to deal with that type of social experiment if it goes awry. If I threw her out (or donated her), my life would be far less interesting.
30. A Scary Snack Situation
Late one night, I decided to make some toast for a midnight snack. I sat on the kitchen bench and ate for about 10 minutes. Then I gathered my plate and got up, but when I turned around, I saw that every single cupboard door was open and so were all of the drawers. I am 100% certain that they were all closed when I entered the kitchen.
There was no way that anyone could have snuck in and opened them because I was home alone. I also didn’t hear them open at the time I was there. I was so scared that I froze, let it all register for a few seconds, and then calmly closed everything and went back to my room to hide until daylight. It was one of the weirdest things that ever happened.
31. That Sinking Feeling
On June 30 of last year, I had the sudden urge to call my father at around noon. I was feeling extremely anxious and just felt like I really needed to talk to him for some reason. I knew he was at work and on his lunch break, though, so I figured I would let him enjoy his break, and I’d call him later on when he finished work. I wish my odd feeling hadn't been proven right.
My sister called me about an hour later and told me that our dad had passed, right around that lunch break. He parked his work truck, turned it off, and took his last breath. It was a massive heart attack. He was suddenly gone. I really wish I would have called. Maybe I could have told him that I loved him before he passed. Always make the phone call.
32. Never Talk To Strangers
When I was 16, I went to Tampa with a friend. We were staying in a rundown hotel with a pool. That evening we decided to go take a dip. Everything was fine, it was just us at the pool and a table of adults with a little boy. We were on the opposite side of the pool when the little boy ran over to us and started chatting. It was pretty evident that the kid was lonely and the adults weren’t paying any attention to him.
The kid was young—probably around seven years old. I talked to him and didn’t think anything of it. He asked us if we were going to the theme park there (we were) and asked how long we’d been in town. Then out of nowhere, he asks us if we like booze. It hit me as weird...I’m not sure I even knew what that was at age seven. I said no, we don’t drink.
He then told us that his parents let him have a few sips of their drinks and they would let us drink if we went back to their room. This is when I got really creeped out. Me and my friend got out of there real fast and ran back to our rooms. I’m not sure if the kid was just weird, but I felt like the people at the table (the kid’s parents) were trying to lure us to their room using their child. Very scary.
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33. We Need An Exorcist
When my grandparents passed, my family moved into their house to help take care of my uncle, who had special needs and had lived there his whole life. I remember not looking forward to it. I got a lot of creepy vibes in that house and had several nightmares while living there. One evening, I had a horribly realistic nightmare that made me not want to sleep for weeks out of fear of seeing the same thing again.
In the nightmare, I’d seen the scariest demon smiling at me with the blackest eyes: it had hundreds of razor-sharp teeth curled into a smile, and strange cracked white skin, almost like bone. The demon somehow conveyed to me that he was going to hurt me just by smiling at me. I did not tell my family about this dream. My uncle and I didn’t get along, so I rarely spoke to him unless completely necessary.
The next day after that nightmare, he asked me if I still had this stupid phone application for reading EMFs. I’d downloaded the application a few weeks prior because the house was creepy and I wanted to see if I could pick up any messages from ghosts or demons in the home. I told him I still had it, and asked why. His response shook me to my core.
He said, "Oh, I was just wondering because last night I saw something standing in my doorway". He then proceeded to describe the exact demon from my nightmare. I was so freaked out I don't even think I properly responded to him. I told my family about this, and they agreed that something was in the house. None of us slept well the rest of our time there.
Luckily, we didn't live in that house for very long before selling it. I still think about that demon from my dream sometimes and hope I never encounter that smile again. There’s also no way my uncle could've known what I dreamt, because like I said, I didn't tell my family about the dream. I fully believe that he saw the same demon in person that I saw in my nightmare.
34. A Brush With Fate
I listened to an ominous gut feeling, and it is the reason that I’m still alive today. I was 19 years old and on my first deployment with the Marines on the Iraq/Syria border. I had a weird anxious feeling that kept me glued to my seat in the rec room of our base without any reason for it. I finally got up, and a concussive wave knocked me to the ground.
The origin of the blast was an enemy driving a car loaded with explosives through a checkpoint that was attached to our base. On days that are very hard on me, I think back to that day. There had to be a reason why I felt that uneasy, anxious feeling that kept me from working out on the roof of our base—the shrapnel would have cut me in half.
I know it sounds untrue, but it’s real. I don’t talk about it often, as I try not to be that guy. So I feel kind of stupid writing this, but I have really had that inexplicable gut feeling and I guess want to let you know that it is a thing. I think it’s spiritual in nature, but I’m not really the kind of person to say what exactly it is, or what it means.
35. Strong Vibrations
I was living in a college dorm, and every night I would put my phone on top of my wallet on my desk so that the vibration from the ring wouldn’t wake me. This was a conscious effort—every night! Then one Friday night, when I had nothing to get up early for the next day, I started to put my phone on my wallet, but a thought suddenly popped into my head.
“Hmm, what if someone tries to call me"? I decided to put the phone directly on my desk this time. I had no expectations of anyone trying to call, that was just the thought I had in my head. It all came clear in the end. A few hours later, my sister called and woke me up to tell me that my cousin, who had been very close to me, had passed.
35. Tinder Trouble
I briefly had a stalker in college. I’d met him on Tinder and went on one awful date where he told me he had in fact lied about his name and age. Naturally, I got freaked out and ended the date immediately. I went home and thought nothing of it. A couple of days later, I get a call from a roommate saying a guy dropped something off for me at 8 am.
This dude lived in central New Jersey, and I went to college in NYC...He made the trip out to give me a well-used hard copy of an album I had mentioned liking, apparently his “favorite album from his personal collection". But that wasn't the worst part. He also included an inappropriate drawing of us and a very long letter, the gist of which was “if I can’t have you no one can”.
After class that day, I saw him waiting outside my car in the university parking lot. I refused to go anywhere near him and reported him to the school. He kept texting me and I kept blocking him. He must’ve made at least 15 new social media accounts before he got the idea. I’m still scared of ever going to central Jersey because I’m scared I’ll run into him and he’ll follow me home.
36. Runway Turned Runaway
When I was 13, I started to pursue modeling. My mom drove me to a Seventeen magazine contest in Atlanta, Georgia, where lots of girls walked a runway to compete for a chance to be in the magazine. I was chosen as a finalist and was super excited! While I walked the runway, a man kept snapping photos of me and I assumed he worked for the magazine.
In the huge crowds of mostly moms and wannabe models, I got separated from my mother. And that's when the worst happened. I was quickly approached by the bearded man taking photos. He said, "You're really pretty. You know, with the right photographer you could really go places in the modeling world. I freelance and work with Seventeen magazine too. My portfolio is in my car...I'd like to show it to you".
Being a naive, small-town girl, I said yes and was in the parking lot, walking with him to his car, when I suddenly got a terrible feeling. I said, “Oh wait, let me go get my dad (who wasn't there that day), he'll want to see these too"! and took off running back into the mall. When I was inside the mall door, I looked back and saw that he’d ran after me a little, but had stopped.
A couple of weeks later I saw him on the news. His name was Christopher Wilder. This was the last year the magazine held these in-person contests.
37. Someone’s Dropping Dimes
I’ve heard that people who’ve lost loved ones will start finding dimes in random places. These dimes only show up in the moments when the living are missing them the most or are going through something rough. I never believed any of it, though, until it happened to me. When my friend was in critical condition at the hospital, her aunt started telling me about her experience.
She said that they found a dime outside her mother’s hospital room, and after her mother passed, they started to find dimes everywhere. By now it was about 10:00 p.m. and I decided to go home. Just before I left the hospital, my friend’s little sister found a dime in the waiting room. When I got home, I found a lone dime on my dresser while looking for my earphones.
My friend passed the next day. The night before her funeral, I found two dimes right by my drawer. I looked all over to see if it was just loose change, but the dimes were the only coins there. I had lost another friend three years prior, so I felt that the two dimes instead of one meant that they were both still looking out for me.
38. Talk About Tempting Fate
One day, my family and some family friends were going to go on a four-wheeler ride. For some reason, I had ridiculous anxiety, even though I normally enjoyed ATV rides quite a bit. On this particular day, however, I would not stop complaining because I did not want to go—at all. Finally, my family was able to convince me to go with them.
We didn’t usually wear helmets, but since I was being difficult because I didn’t want to be there, I made a huge deal out of it. My dad responded with, “It doesn’t matter, we’ll be going slowly,” but it still irked me. I kept whining for most of the day, and a family friend kept asking me, “What’s the worst that could possibly happen"? Well, the worst did happen.
I kid you not, he probably said this to me 20 times throughout the day. After we got out of the mountains and onto the main road, and I thought the ride was mostly over and done with, my friend, who was driving the four-wheeler that my mom was on, lost control. Their four-wheeler went off the cliff, and my mom was seriously injured.
My mom ended up with a broken collarbone and shoulder blade, six broken ribs, a broken back in four places, a shattered pelvis, a collapsed lung, and a serious head injury. She actually had a pretty miraculous recovery, though. No one knows how, because it was truly unheard of considering the severity of her injuries.
39. Stranger Danger
When I was around eight years old, I lived in a nice, quiet neighborhood and would frequently take walks around the block, sometimes alone, sometimes with my mother. One evening before sunset, my best friend and I decided to go for a walk together. We were about halfway through when we were approached by an older man who was walking with two dogs.
He was panting and seemed frantic, and he immediately asked us if we knew whose dogs they were. Both of us said no and kept walking, trying to get home as quickly as possible because his presence alone gave us goosebumps. But we weren't rid of him yet. Even though we were walking away quickly, he followed us and asked us to help him find out whose dogs they were.
He wanted us to go knocking on all the neighbors’ doors to ask. We continued to say no and picked up our pace, which he then matched and continued following us, shouting “Let’s check this house! Help me find their owners"! At this point, we sprinted back home. He ran behind us for a bit but quickly got tired. The memory of him creeps me out to this day.
I have no idea if he was just somewhat socially challenged and didn’t understand that two eight-year-old girls are not the people to ask for help, or if he was hoping we would knock on that door (which I now suspect was his house) and then push us in and do who knows what. I’m happy our instincts told us to go home.
40. Scritch Scratch
When I was a kid, I heard constant scratching from the wall behind my bed. We had no idea what it was, but it kept me up at night. Being a kid, I had an active imagination and worried it could be any number of things. Was someone trying to break into my room? Was my room haunted by an evil ghost? As it turns out, we had a whole family of raccoons living in our attic, and they were making the scratching sounds.
41. I’ll Catch The Next One, Thanks
When I was a kid, I would always ask my mom to tell me stories about her father because I never got to meet him. So, she told me a story that she had never told anyone. One night, she said she had a dream that her dad got on a bus, walked to the back, and from his seat he waved goodbye out the back window. He passed the next day.
Fast forward to when my mom was in the hospital, nearing the end, and we were all there to say our goodbyes to her. My mom’s brother said he had a weird dream the night before. In it, my mom got on a bus, sat at the back, and waved goodbye out the back window. I totally lost it. I immediately told him the story about what my mom said to me and everyone’s mind was blown.
42. The Eyes Have It
When I was about 10, we lived on the north shore of the Shuswap Lake in British Columbia. It was very rural with a population of approximately 400 spread out over 15 kilometers (10 miles) of beachfront with farms up in the hills. There was just a store, a post office, and an ancient Indigenous trail that wound through the forest near where I lived.
One afternoon, my parents and a friend of mine went for a walk along the trail. My friend and I ran ahead at one point, out of sight of everyone. We were exploring the woods when we discovered something terrifying. We came across a man slumped over a rotting log with chickens pecking the ground around him and his face, too.
I can still feel the adrenaline blasting up my back as I type this, even though it happened 50 years ago. The figure slowly lifted its head and just looked at us with empty pecked-out eyes. We both screamed and ran back to the adults. When my parents came to the spot with us, only the rotting log was there. Before the incident, I would play on the trail all the time.
To this day, I would not dare to walk that path by myself.
43. An Eerie Desert Night
I was camping in the Simpson desert on a multi-day trip. We hadn’t planned on stopping, but it was getting late and one of the trailers had blown a tire, so we decided to repair it and then call it a day. Because the area was so remote, there weren’t any signs around, but our map told us we were on army grounds. We all had the eerie feeling we shouldn’t have been there, but we were exhausted and needed to rest.
After dinner, we were all stargazing. It was fantastic: there were so many meteorites and satellites whizzing around. I remember watching one satellite move very slowly...much slower than the rest. Then I noticed another, not far from that first satellite, moving very slowly in the same direction. I pointed it out to the group, and we were all watching these two slow satellites almost follow each other.
Then the first one just made this hard right turn, and we were all like, “What was that"? Then the one behind it did the same thing. And they continued to follow each other before both turned again. It really messed with me. I’m not one to put much heed into conspiracies or aliens, but I had no other explanation for it at the time, and it was so bizarre. I still have no idea what it could’ve been.
44. Do You Even Go Here?
I was at an 80s-themed internal work party at a fancy hotel in a different state. I started talking to some dude randomly—I barely knew anyone there, so I was trying really hard to network. He tells me he doesn't work for my company. Okay, no worries, I make a joke about free food. He stares me straight in the eye and picks up one of my french fries off my plate, dips it in ketchup, and eats it without saying a word.
I freaked out and dropped the food in the trash and just walked out of the room. I decided to ignore him and not think about it too much. A few minutes later, there he is, staring at me. I change rooms again; I'm short so I hid behind people and pretended to talk to people I half recognized from my home office. He keeps following me. I finally got the courage to approach a woman I’d seen around the office before.
When I asked if the party had any kind of security, she immediately asked if it was about the dude in the blue jacket and white hat. Apparently, she'd noticed him staring at me creepily, so I didn't have to try and convince anyone. Security took him away and everyone moved on, but I was scared and paranoid for the rest of the business trip.
45. Pole Position
When I was in fifth grade, I was walking under a section of my school’s covered walkways. It was raining but not too heavily. I was going in a straight line when someone yelled “Ball"! to my right. I turned my head but kept walking forward. When the surprise of a ball coming toward me wore off, I remembered there was a pole nearby.
I stopped in my tracks to make sure I wouldn’t hit the pole. When I looked around, however, I realized that it was behind me. I could see where my wet footprints were leading up to the pole, and where they were leading away. I got chills when I realized that somehow or another, I had walked on the same path that the pole was on, but I didn’t hit it.
46. The Demons Have Spoken
One time, my friends and I were playing with an old Ouija board we found. It started to say some pretty serious things about my girlfriend, so we threw it away in a church dumpster. This was a bad idea. The next day that church was struck by lightning and burnt to the ground. Oddly enough, after the fire, a bunch of my lost objects reappeared: television remotes, old wallets, and toys I thought were long gone.
47. Rescued By The Minivan
When I was about 10, I was walking around the neighborhood with a few girls that were a couple of years older than me. I didn’t know them very well. In my mind, they were the neighborhood cool girls and I was the tagalong. After a while, we noticed a car slow down behind us, and the driver was staring hard. We moved a little faster and he kept pace, so we took off running.
It was a huge neighborhood and he was crazily persistent. At one point, he even threw the car in park and started to get out. Thankfully we were faster. We dipped through shortcuts and ran through yards. To my adrenaline-fueled child's mind, we ran for an eternity. We finally got to one girl's house, but she lived with her grandmother who had a strict one-friend-allowed-in-the-house policy.
This was apparently regardless of an attempted kidnapping. Two girls went inside, and I and two other girls had to get to the other side of the neighborhood. We had gotten a couple of streets over when we saw him again and took off running. Just as I was coming to terms with possibly never seeing my family again, one of the other girls waved down a minivan, and it was her mom.
She drove me home, and I got grounded for taking a ride with a stranger. My mom still doesn't believe me to this day.
48. You Don’t Belong Here
My dad was a workaholic and never went on vacations with us. So every year it was just me, my mom, and my two sisters. One year we rented a little cabin at Lake of the Ozarks. A storm rolled in one night and in the flashes of lightning you could just make out an old lady standing out in the storm watching our little cabin. My mom got more and more freaked out as time passed and the lady just stood there, hair blowing in the wind staring at us.
Mom finally got the nerve to call out to her "Go away! You don't belong here". But she wouldn't budge. The next morning, the sun comes up and she's still standing there! And that's when it finally dawned on us. The creepy old lady was just a mop draped over a clothesline.
49. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
First, you should know that I’m a very rational person and I don’t believe in the supernatural at all. Back in the day, my best friend Travis and I used to play guitars together almost daily. That’s not important now, but it will be later. So, one day, we decided to go to the beach with our girlfriends and eat some mushrooms.
After the mushrooms started to take effect, Travis said that he wanted to wander off alone. I stayed with our girlfriends, and we were having a great time. As it started to get dark out, Travis’s girlfriend asked, “Where’s Travis"? None of us knew, but I could hear him playing the guitar, so I suggested that we follow the sound of his music until we got to him.
The girls told me that I must have really good hearing because they couldn’t hear anything. I said, “Well, I can definitely hear it, so just follow me". Now here’s the strange part. I followed the sound into the forest and went directly to Travis, but when we reached him, he did not have a guitar—I realized that we had left our guitars at home! I still have no idea how it happened.
50. A Nightmare Come True
When I was about 12, I had a very vivid dream that I was at the funeral of a young child, but no one could see me. At some point in the dream, I figured out that that child was my older sibling, but as far as I knew, I was the eldest. I woke up raving to my dad about “being there,” and that “I saw them bury the older one” before falling back to sleep.
I remember my parents being extremely shaken up when I woke up again. That’s when they revealed the awful truth to me. My mom had had a miscarriage a couple of years before I was born. She had never told me that before, and it really freaked me out. To this day, I get a little creeped out when my dreams are a little more vivid than normal.
51. Caught Red-Handed
When I was in my early secondary school years, my mum asked me to take a bag of sugar over to my elderly neighbor’s house as she’d lent us some sugar the previous weekend. Being a bit bratty, I didn’t want to take it as I didn’t feel like interacting with anyone...but I took it anyway. I stood at my neighbor’s front door (it had a timber frame and there was frosted glass panel in the middle) and knocked.
I saw her walking down the hallway to the door and decided that I really didn’t feel like chatting, so I put the bag of sugar on the doorstep and legged it back to my house. Obviously, I didn’t say anything to my mum about leaving without talking to the neighbor. Three days later, my neighbor pops round to our house and asks if we noticed anything strange around her house in the last couple of days.
Naturally, my mum says, “Oh, my daughter went and dropped the sugar off to you, I thought you’d have spoken then”. I was caught red-handed and had to explain that I’d rudely dropped the sugar at the front and left. My mum didn’t have time to get mad because our neighbor goes on to explain that three days ago, her alarm was triggered and her house was robbed.
She had been on the interstate and forgot to let us know. So it wasn’t her walking down the hallway to the front door but the people burgling her home...sometimes your intuition speaks to you in weird ways. That day, I just didn’t want to talk to anyone and I still think about how lucky I am that I bailed when I saw that figure walking down the hallway.
52. Unwelcome Paparazzi
When I was ten, I went trick-or-treating with my best friend. It was just two of us, and we were both girls. I was dressed as a punk rocker and was wearing a mini skirt. I remember walking down the sidewalk and passing a car parked on the street. I’m not sure what caught our attention, but we both noticed the man in the car taking pictures of us. We were excited since we thought we might be in the newspaper. NOPE.
We were stupid kids, and this just seemed logical—why else would a random stranger take pictures of two ten-year-old girls while he was hiding out in his car on a night when children were known to be everywhere without adult supervision? But then we noticed the car was following us very slowly. We were far from our own homes, but we were only a few blocks away from my friend’s grandpa’s house, so we headed there and went inside.
We told her grandpa about it. We looked out the window and the car was parked right outside of his house with the man still sitting in it. After about 15 minutes of checking on and off, the car had left and her grandpa told us it was safe to go trick-or-treating again, so we did. As a mom of two girls now, I’m shocked that we were allowed to go out trick-or-treating alone all night at that age, and that we told her grandpa about what happened, and her grandpa didn’t call anyone! The 80s were so weird.
53. That Was A Lifetime Ago
My wife and I were making dinner and our four-year-old son was in the adjoining room. We suddenly heard him say, “Hey, that’s the job I had in my last life". He was watching a blacksmith shaping metal over a fire on TV. We were shocked because we had never discussed reincarnation with him or in his presence. I tried to get him to elaborate, but he just went back to what he was doing.
54. That’s OK, I Didn’t Want To Sleep Anyway
The other day, my mom was telling me that when I was really little, like four or five, I would have this recurring dream about a girl named Katherine. It was super vivid and I still actually remember some of the details, though she filled in the blanks for me. The dream would start with Katherine in her room playing with her dolls.
The dream seemed like it was set in the early 1800s or so based on what the dolls looked like. Katherine had just finished putting them back into her trunk when the window slid open and a man came in. Katherine screamed, but there wasn’t anyone around to hear her. She tried to run away, but the man grabbed her roughly by the arm.
This is one of the parts I remember well because of how I could actually feel how tightly he gripped her arm. In the dream, the man would hold Katherine down and suffocate her. I never got past when she lost consciousness, as I would always wake up. One of the creepier parts of this story is that I have a birthmark exactly where the man had grabbed Katherine.
55. Remembrance
A few years ago, I was wondering about a guy I used to work with, who was painfully shy. I was the only person he talked to outside of his family. Glancing at the clock, I felt guilty that I’d not kept in touch since I left that job ten years before. I have no idea why he crossed my mind...but when I read the obituaries that day, I saw that he had passed.
His burial was at the exact moment that he came into my mind.
56. Mulch Madness
I was around eight or nine years old. I was walking to school and this older guy in his mid-sixties was going in the other direction. I remember thinking he looked weird because he was wearing sunglasses even though it was early and fairly dim outside. He was also wearing a long black trench coat even though it wasn’t cold. I stepped off the sidewalk to go around him because even my child brain registered that he wasn’t someone I wanted to allow close to me. Turns out I was right.
This whacko starts kicking leaves and throwing mulch at me from a nearby garden. I was too freaked out to register what he was shouting but he was grunting out something. I sprinted for about two blocks before I got to the crossing guard in front of my school. I didn’t want to tell anybody about it, but it kept haunting me for the rest of the day until I finally told my parents.
We filed a report with the authorities. I still have no idea what happened to him.
57. A Tale From The Crypt
Let me tell you, kids are pretty freaky. Either they’re tuned into something we’re not or there’s some trickery about. For instance, I’ll use myself as an example. My grandfather passed when I was young and I never really knew him, but he was important to my mother so we’d make pilgrimages to his resting place pretty routinely.
It was as normal as it could have been that day, my mom was praying and paying her respects in the mausoleum when she noticed me. When she saw what I was doing, a chill ran through her. I was standing by the opposite wall talking and laughing like I was with an old friend. She walked up to me and asked who I was talking to.
I said I was talking to a "Mr Jones". Up at about my mom’s eye level was a slot with Mr Jones’s name on it. This was incredibly unsettling to her because a) I could not yet read and b) even if I could, his grave was several feet above my head. There I was, just chatting and laughing with a man who’d been gone for 20-odd years.
The world is a pretty weird place and as much as we’d like to believe it, we don’t have all the answers.
58. No Guidance Counselor Needed
When I was three or four years old, I distinctly remember thinking that I loved my previous life as a great artist. Later, as a rational adult, I dismissed it, but the urge to get back to that space and continue my work has haunted me all of my life. Now I’m carried by five galleries and my paintings sell for thousands of dollars.
It’s so weird how a childhood memory can determine the course of an entire life. Despite my success, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten to the place where I can “continue the work". I haven’t let go and experienced the freedom of a child making art. That’s how I’ll know I’ve made it. Maybe there is simply more to life than we currently understand.
59. Just In Time
When I was 11, I was at softball practice and for whatever reason practice ended early. I didn’t have a cellphone to call my grandpa and let him know, so I had to wait alone at the park for around half an hour. I remember sitting on the swings when an adult man, in his 30s or 40s, came and sat down next to me. He asked if he knew me and I said no.
He told me that I must just have “one of those pretty faces” that feel recognizable to anybody. Eventually, he said that he had his car with him and could drive me home “so my grandparents didn’t have to worry about me”. Being 11, I didn’t think anything of this and started getting into his car. Luckily, my grandpa showed up just in time and I jumped out to go meet him.
The stranger sped off immediately—I often find myself thinking about what would’ve happened to me if my grandpa hadn’t shown up when he did.
60. Stakeout
When we were house shopping, we went to this big house surrounded by pretty dense landscaping in the front. There were mid-thigh bushes and such. We met our realtor and walked through the house for a solid hour or so, then met with them on the front porch and talked a bit about what we were looking for. We had parked near some bushes and the realtor (a petite female) had parked in the driveway.
My husband and I got back in the car and continued to chat while the realtor left. Suddenly, about six feet away from the passenger door, a man stood up out of the bushes and walked into the house. He didn’t look at us or give any indication he saw us. We called the realtor, who in turn called the owners, who said it was their son and “he doesn’t really want us to sell..".
We ended up not buying that house and it went off the market shortly after. I still wonder what in the world he was doing, hiding in the bushes!
61. Poltergeist-In-Training
I came home from work one night to find my darling two-year-old blonde daughter in her jammies, standing at the top of the stairs and staring up at the full moon. She should have been in bed by this time. Not wanting to scare her, I walked up the stairs, knelt down next to her, and asked her what she was thinking about. Her response freaked me the heck out.
I was imagining she would say something cute and innocent like, “Is the moon really made of cheese, Daddy"? Instead, she turned to face me with a very serious look on her face, and in a very creepy monotone voice she said to me, “We are all in the same cage”. She was only two years old! I couldn’t believe it. I nearly croaked with fright.
I literally recoiled from her and ran down the stairs backward so that I could keep my eyes on her. Growing up, she said a few more creepy things like that, but it eventually stopped as she got older. That was 12 years ago, and she has since turned into a very happy and well-adjusted teenager who is only slightly in league with Satan.
62. How To Ruin The Vibe
Me and some of my buddies were partying in a hotel room one time and at around 3:00 am, we decided to play Bloody Mary. Two of us went first and nothing happened. Then my buddy Ali went in, said “Bloody Mary” three times, and came back unscathed. While he was grinning about how scared we had been, something crazy happened…
Blood started coming out of his nose! We couldn’t believe it. When he realized what was happening, he went into a bit of shock and just sat there shivering like it was the middle of winter. The rest of us also just kind of went numb and sat there trying to figure out what on earth had just happened. No one slept at all that night.
63. A D&D Horror Story
My friend hosted a D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) game weekly for the five of us. One game night, he got a call from the authorities saying the ex was missing and he told them he didn’t know anything about it. They found her car later that same night. They’d checked a couple of security cameras and used her cellphone pings and his truck GPS to tie it all together. He'd planned the whole thing and taken her life. He’s been behind bars ever since.
I think about it daily having sat across a table from him every week for seven years. He threatened me with a pipe wrench once.
64. In The Boneyard
One time, I was out hunting in northern British Columbia on my own. I'm on my quad going down an old trail, and I come to the edge of a pond. I look down and there's a bone. This wasn’t unusual in and of itself. But I looked a bit further, and there was a deer skull there, too. That was weird—but then it got weirder. I keep looking and there's bone set after bone set.
I counted at least 20 separate sets, along with two fresh carcasses. It's completely silent. I was in the middle of this boneyard, thinking I should get out of there as soon as possible, and I suddenly get the feeling that someone is watching me. I sit and wait a few minutes, but there's nothing. It was the eeriest feeling. I later found out it was most likely a cougar kill site and given the sheer number of bones, the cougar must’ve been big and effective.
65. A Mind-Bending Medical Mystery
One night it was just me and my younger nursing assistant working at the hospital. She wanted to look something up on the computer, so she was sitting beside me at the desk. I was looking at a printout on the counter and suddenly the colored lettering started to look dim. As in the color wasn’t strong. It was almost like there was a haze in the air. It didn't stop there.
I looked across the room at a poster and, again, the colors were muted. Everything appeared very muted and the colors were so dim. I started to quietly freak out and worry that I had a brain tumor or multiple sclerosis, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want her to think I was crazy. Suddenly, the nursing assistant looked up and out into the hallway.
“Does the hallway look gray to you"? she asked. I was immediately relieved because at least that meant I wasn’t suffering from some sort of mysterious illness. But it also made it worse. Knowing it was really happening, we watched this grayness that seemed to saturate not only the hallway but also our entire surroundings.
It seemed to begin to concentrate in the hallway. Then it slowly disappeared. Afterward, it was like someone turned on the lights and the colors were back to full saturation. To this day, I have zero explanation for what this was and nothing like this has ever happened since then. nor have I ever heard of anyone experiencing something like this.
66. Shop Til You Drop
I had a chilling experience not too long ago. I was walking through an antique store in a really old part of town. It had three levels, including an old, creepy basement. I walked around a corner down there and suddenly had an overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t explain. It felt almost like an anxiety attack combined with dizziness.
I felt like I was being watched or followed. It’s really tough to explain, but I felt severely uncomfortable. I told my wife that I needed to get the heck out of there, and she could tell by my face that I was truly weirded out. When we got upstairs, my wife stopped to look at something by the counter while I stood there trying to process everything.
The lady behind the counter made eye contact with me and said, “You alright"? I replied that I was, and then she asked if I got creeped out downstairs. I replied, “Actually, yeah. Right by the—” And she interrupted me to say, “…by the corner down there"? I froze, and said, “Uh, yeah". To which she said, “That’s because it’s haunted as heck down there"!
She laughed at my shocked face and said, “It happens to a lot of us. Something bad happened to a past owner of this place, WAY back. At least that’s what they say anyway".
67. Because I Could Not Stop For Grim Reaper
I used to take different routes home from work, where I worked the third shift as a cashier/stocker. One night, on one of those routes, I thought that I saw the Grim Reaper in a field. It just stood there, leaning on the scythe and watching me drive slowly past. I was very freaked out. So much so that as soon as I got home, I told my best friend about it, just in case something was about to happen to me.
A couple of weeks later, I was taking that route home again and fell asleep while driving. I ended up almost dying in a head-on collision with a dump truck. After I came out of a week-long coma (induced after 16 hours of surgery to save my limbs and life), my buddy asked me if the route I took home was the same one I saw the Grim Reaper on. It was.
Even in my half-conscious state, the question freaked me out.
68. A Dream Visit
My dad (who I was close to) passed suddenly. COVID had just started so we couldn’t have a proper funeral. Instead, we ordered cremation and waited. Life was a blur, so I had no grasp on the cremation timeline. I was barely functioning as it was. For five days, my dreams were silent like a black hole. Then one night, I had a dream about my dad—it was so vivid that when I woke up, I was so sure it was real.
In my dream, I’d sat up in bed as he called me on the phone to ask where my mom (his wife of a half century) was. He was upset that he couldn’t find her. “WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER"?! he demanded. She had been at my house since the night he passed...so I said, “Oh she’s in the girls’ bedroom”. Then dream-me got up and walked down the hall to find her.
As I turned the corner, my dad was standing at her door, checking in on her. He turned to look at me, and raised his left arm. Every watch he’d ever owned was on this arm. He silently pointed to his watches, as if he were trying to communicate to me about time. Then he stepped towards me. That’s when my brain finally understood that something was amiss.
I started screaming—both in my dream and in real life—while simultaneously crying and apologizing to my dad for being afraid of him. The emotional onslaught was mind-blowing. My husband was next to me in bed and had to hold me down to comfort me. The very next morning, the funeral home called me to let me know we could pick up Dad’s ashes. He had been cremated the previous afternoon.
69. Tax Beast
I ghosted this guy that did my taxes for a few years. He was such a creep and really gross. I was so uncomfortable with him that I decided to do my taxes myself at home. He then shows up at the apartment building I used to live at—this address was listed on my taxes the last time I did them with him—and I only know this because my mom lives there now and says a man in a full-length trench coat was there.
She said hello to him a few times, but he never answered. My mom got a glimpse of his face before he turned and ran into the woods. It was raining out, too, and he didn’t have an umbrella. When my mom told me all this, I thought she was recounting a dream—but nope. Larry the creepy tax guy really showed up to my old place of residency, in a trench coat, on a rainy night, and then took off into the woods.
70. Moonlight’s Legacy
When my brother and I were little, there was a stray calico cat we’d always see around the neighborhood. She eventually had kittens by a Manx cat, apparently, because one of the kittens was a Manx. My brother and I would go out to the woods to play with them, and we gave them all names. We totally would have taken them in, but our parents were allergic.
We named my brother’s favorite kitten Milo. It was an orange tabby. My favorite kitten was a black cat I named Moonlight. The litter grew up and started roaming everywhere, but Milo and Moonlight stayed in our woods the longest. One night, I dreamed that Moonlight approached me and thanked me for our kindness and goodwill.
Moonlight said that her daughters and granddaughters would know that our area was a safe place and that as long as we lived here they would return. I’m 27 now, still living in the same house—and it’s true. I’ve seen multiple black cats grow up around our area. It’s never a group of them, always one at a time, but we can tell when they are the next generation.
71. Youse Better Watch It!
I live in New Jersey, and one night my friends and I decided to go looking for some of the places described in the book Weird NJ: Your Travel Guide to New Jersey’s Local Legends. We went looking for a tunnel that was thought to be a gateway to the underworld. It was supposed to be located under some train tracks in Clifton, but we had no idea which ones.
We thought it was just a bit of a lark. We quickly realized we were in serious danger. As we drove under some random train tracks, it suddenly got extremely hot in the car for no apparent reason. The temperature rose 20 degrees almost instantly. My friend then pointed out that the thermometer in the car, which measured the outside temperature, should have read something like 30F but it was up to 105F!
This all happened in a matter of about 15 seconds. As soon as we got about 10 meters past the underpass, everything went back to normal. We noped out and kind of sat in silence for a little while not knowing what to think about the whole experience.
72. A Christmas Miracle
One time there was this huge snowfall in my town, on Christmas day, which was weird for us. We didn’t usually get much snow. Me, my brother, my sister, and my sister’s boyfriend all went tobogganing on this big hill at the ball fields. There were also some trees at the park which I climbed and let myself fall out of, landing on the soft snow below. We had lots of fun that day—it was one for the books.
A while later I was walking near those trees and the snow had melted down to reveal they were surrounded by rebar stuck into the ground. I must have fallen right in between the pieces of rebar. If I’d been in even a slightly different position, I probably would’ve been impaled by rebar on Christmas day. It’s still creepy to think about.
73. The Mysterious Splatter
In 2018, I went on a trip to Bali and met some new people around my age. We all took a trip to a remote area and rented a huge two-story villa together. We were having a good time, but as soon as evening hit, it got eerily quiet. There were only four of us and we were surrounded by rice fields and other smaller villas with no one else in sight. We kept getting spooked by random sounds and movements.
That night, we attempted to sleep early because we were too scared to stay up. There was a bedroom downstairs and a bedroom upstairs, but all of us slept upstairs because we didn’t want to separate. The next morning, my friend went to the balcony to have some coffee and she shouts back, “Guys...what is this"? She’d found some smashed berries on the ground, concentrated in one area just outside the door.
This was bizarre to us, considering none of us even knew what berry it was and there wasn't a tree in sight bearing that fruit. There were only a few palm trees, but they were so far off from the balcony that there was no way the fruit could’ve come from those. We all were confused by it, but quickly forgot about it as we had to go out on an excursion. We just cleaned it up and left. Little did we know, that wasn’t the last we’d seen of it.
That same evening, we ordered some food, ate, had some fun, and then went to bed. The next morning, we woke up to the same thing on the balcony: more smashed berries, in the same exact spot right outside the balcony door. We were never able to find an explanation for it.
74. Field Of Screams
My father passed when I was 33. I am the youngest daughter of three, but I was very much placed in the role of “son". My father became my closest confidant, my best friend, and my worst critic. When my dad had a massive heart attack, I was completely bereft. Of course, my dad being my dad, he left no will, but he did leave verbal instructions for what to do with his body.
Instead of a funeral, he wanted his ashes spread in a ballpark. My father adored baseball—especially the Detroit Tigers. Our first plan was to sneak his ashes into Tiger Stadium, but they tore the original down, so we scrapped that idea. His instructions were to scatter them on “any” baseball field, so we found a beautiful park that was suitable.
I had an idea to play a pickup game on the night we were to spread his ashes. As I came up to bat, I hit the ball, which is a miracle unto itself, and ran like the wind. I had the distinct impression that someone was running after me. I kept giggling and laughing like crazy. I thought it was my brother-in-law or my new husband.
It was as if someone was chasing me in a game of tag. I cried out, “Stop it! Stop it"! in a playful way as I ran the bases until I got to home plate. I finally turned around to see the person who had been chasing me. My jaw dropped at that point. No one was there. I looked around confused. I looked at my family and said, “Hey guys, which one of you was chasing me"?
“No one,” they said. “We were wondering why you were screaming like a madwoman. We thought a bee was chasing you". I struggle daily with the concept of a higher being. But I feel, for some reason, that my life has been touched in some way, I just don’t know by what or whom. I do know in my heart that my father was with me on the field that night.
75. Nightmare At The No-Tell Motel
For my 15th birthday, I went to the Six Flags in Atlanta, Georgia with a couple of my friends. While we were driving home, my mom’s car broke down and we had to go get it repaired. By the time the dealership got it working again, it was almost dark. We decided to stay at a motel for the night, but it wasn’t anything fancy that’s for sure.
We got a single room with two beds, a rattling A/C, cig burns everywhere, and a TV that was probably made in 2000. In the back, there was a tiny bathroom with a cockroach floating in the toilet. It’s important to note that the bathroom didn’t have any windows, vents, or exits other than the one door. I even checked later to see if the ceiling was tiled, but it was solid concrete.
I managed to get some sleep, but I woke up at 3:00 am to someone turning the bathroom light on and off. I just figured it was my mom or one of my friends and ignored it. After a minute or so of flashing, it got annoying, so I said, “Dude, cut it out, I’m sleeping". The flashing stopped but the light stayed on, so I sat up to see who it was.
As soon as I put on my glasses and looked over at the door, the light went out. I laid back down, figuring whoever it was was finished. Then all heck broke loose. Someone grabbed me by my ankle—hard. I could feel their nails cutting into me. I’m not a very expressive person, so I didn’t scream, I just gasped and floundered to turn on the lamp.
When the lamp didn’t work, I used my phone’s flashlight. There was nothing there, but I did have several fresh cuts on my leg that were starting to bleed. I probably should’ve been more freaked out, but I just thought one of my friends was trying to scare me. I got up to go wash the cuts and see if I could make some sort of makeshift toilet paper bandage.
The door to the bathroom was locked. I knocked, but I didn’t get any response. I turned my flashlight toward the beds to see who was messing with me, but everyone was sound asleep. There was no way any of them could’ve climbed back into bed after grabbing my ankle without getting my attention as the beds were VERY creaky and I would’ve heard them.
I tried the bathroom door again and it opened. I turned on the lights, and was chilled to the bone. Nobody was there. It was completely empty. I searched the bathroom, and then the main room. Nothing. The worst part was that when I was inspecting the bathroom doorknob, I realized it didn’t have a lock. Somebody had been holding it shut from the other side.
I don’t believe in the paranormal, but I’m not stupid either, and I know when it’s time to say “screw that” and get out. Don’t get involved. It’s not your problem. When a horror movie monster writes “leave” on your mirror in blood, you leave. I woke everybody up, told them there was a raccoon in the room with us, and we left immediately.
76. The Voice
This happened around 2008. One day I heard the voice of a young Indian man saying "Hello, hello"? while I was using my laptop. I had always kept the camera taped over, used virus software, periodically checked the download folders—everything you were supposed to do to keep yourself and your devices safe. But when that happened, I went into a total panic and assumed I'd somehow been hacked.
I meticulously went through every possible safety check again. I looked at which programs were currently running; checked whether the neighbors were accessing my Wi-Fi; confirmed that my camera and microphone permissions were off. I couldn’t find a thing. It happened on two separate occasions in the year after that, and it was the same man’s voice, too.
I no longer use that laptop.
77. American in Cambodia
It was 1996. I was alone by myself on a motorbike in a rural area of Cambodia, back when the Khmer Rouge were still actively hunting down foreigners and offering bounties to any local villager that could capture one. Being a white guy from America, I thought I was invincible. I’d stopped to enjoy the view for a few minutes, and a logging truck had passed right by me. I could see a group of men in the cab with their eyes all lit up.
Just as they passed me, they slammed on the brakes and came to a complete halt. That's when the panic set in. I started up my motorbike quicker than I’ve ever done before and flew out of there like a rabid bat. I briefly looked back, and I saw that the truck was slowly trying to turn around—but it couldn’t because the road was too narrow. Thankfully, that’s the last I ever saw of them.
78. Whisper To A Scream
One night, in our old house, my father went downstairs to use the bathroom at around 2:00 am. In order to get to our bathroom, you need to go through the living room, the kitchen, and then the porch. It was a pain. My dad got to the bottom of the stairs and when he went to open the living room door, he could hear people whispering.
He couldn’t make out what was being said, but he thought it must be burglars. He grabbed a golf club that was in the hall and went to open the door. As he grabbed the door handle, it was RED HOT. It gave him a nasty burn on his palm. This time he pushed the door open with his foot, and the whispering stopped. Complete silence.
My dad rinsed his hand under cold water, used the toilet, and went back upstairs. His shouting had woken up my mother, so he showed her the burn. She vividly remembers seeing the huge pink welt, but here's the twist. The next morning it was completely gone. For years I thought that maybe they had had a bit too much Chardonnay...
Fut then it happened to me too. I had been up playing Dragon Ball Z: Budokai all night, and at about 2:00 am I needed some snacks. As I approached the living room door, I could vividly hear hushed, rapid voices that sounded like arguing. I opened the door and there was silence. I tried to turn on the lights, but all three bulbs in the ceiling fan popped and glass shattered everywhere. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
79. Fast Track To Terror
A friend and I were walking home on the train tracks one night. It had rained the night before and there were large puddles all around. After going far enough that the street lights no longer illuminated our path, we heard splashing up ahead. We stopped and looked at each other, both expecting some sort of wild animal to scurry into the surrounding woods.
Instead, we saw a skinny bald man crawling out of the water with a look of fear painted on his face. Half concerned, half terrified, we stared at him as he struggled toward us. We soon realized that he had no legs. His eyes were wide and he seemed to be screaming with no sound. We quickly turned around without speaking a word and took the long way back to my house.
I haven’t seen this friend in about seven years, and I always wonder if he remembers what we saw. I still pass by those same tracks regularly, and I always think about that night. I think we must have seen the ghost of someone who had been hurt by a train. Many people had been struck and ended by trains in years leading up to that night.
80. If It Comes Back It’s Yours
I had my school ID written on a piece of paper. It had been a long morning. As I got in my car, it slipped from my pocket. I reached down to grab it and it blew under my car. I was annoyed, so I decided to ignore it and just left. Hours later, as I was exiting my apartment, I noticed that the same piece of paper had blown right in front of my doorway and at my feet.
Probably not the creepiest thing in my life, but it definitely weird.
81. Ring, Ring
One night, when my dad was working, it was just my mom and younger siblings at home when the doorbell rang at around 11 pm. We didn’t answer. The doorbell rang again and again, and then it started to ring obnoxiously without stopping. I was around 13, and my mom was terrified. Meanwhile, I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I, a young kid, could possibly do in the situation.
I ended up grabbing a fire poker and approached the front door with our large dog. I threw that door open and was ready to attack whoever was on the other side...only to come face-to-face with an empty porch. It was an electrical problem. The wires were somehow crossed. My mom still tells the story about how I was ready to protect the family.
My dad still says I was an idiot for coming out with only a fire poker.
82. Things That Go Smash In The Night
When I was around nine years old, we rescued a dog that we named Billy. Billy was a 90-pound pit bull mix. He was fiercely protective of me and my mom, and he loved to sleep in bed with my parents. One night, I woke up to some commotion. My dad was downstairs and my mom was in the hallway. I quickly asked what was going on.
My mom told me that my dad had heard someone breaking in. He was a sergeant on the force and after hearing a crashing sound on our first floor, he grabbed his pistol and went downstairs. He came back up a few moments later looking really worried. He said the house was empty and no signs of forced entry or anything stolen. But there was something else.
He said that all of the pictures on our mantel were face down and a few of the frames were shattered. He also said that Billy, normally the first to rush to defend the house, had sat on the stairs crying and growling and would not follow him down. We all settled back into bed slowly, but what started to worry me was that Billy came to sleep in my room.
As I said, Billy adored my mom. He always slept with my parents but on this night, he laid on his belly by my legs and never went to sleep. He just kept looking around on high alert. I finally drifted off to sleep only to be woken by him standing with his entire body covering mine, and growling the most ferocious growl I’d ever heard come from him.
He was growling at the doorway, but there was nothing there. I screamed for my parents and I’m not ashamed to admit that I slept in their room for the rest of that night and a few more after that.
83. Just Another Trippy Day At The Office
One time I watched a guy fall off a loading dock and then defy gravity by inexplicably popping back up onto it. He seemed to just hang in midair for a second. He was pretty much completely horizontal to the dock, but then I blinked and he was standing next to me again. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who saw this. One co-worker was so freaked out he wouldn’t work with that guy ever again.
84. Home Alone
I was home alone and vacuuming. I heard my dad yell, “I’m home"! I shut the vacuum off and hear him laugh loudly. I go over to the garage to see if he has groceries, but he’s not there. I open the door and he’s not outside. I thought maybe he was calling early, and it was a message on the answering machine, but there were no missed calls. I called him and my stomach dropped.
He told me he was out working in another state. My television wasn’t on and I lived a quarter-mile from the nearest house at the time. Not enjoyable.
85. Cut It Out
I've never believed in the “paranormal”. However, my grandparents passed within a couple of weeks of each other, so we had a double funeral. After the funeral, everyone in the family went back to my grandparents’ house just as they had left it. After a few hours of drinking, people began to argue about pointless stuff. When the arguments came to a head, the lights suddenly dimmed and flashed a few times as if there was a power surge.
It stopped the arguing immediately. I can't help but think it was my grandparents saying “cut it out” from beyond the grave.
86. Ward Theft
Many moons ago I was an editor. I was cutting a commercial late at night and because of the deadline, I needed to stay overnight to finish. I’m on the second floor of a 30-story building. Half the floor is editing suites, and the rest is rented out to various miscellaneous businesses—designers, developers, tech companies. The largest office on the floor was about 600 sq ft, and it belonged to a psychiatrist.
It’s about three in the morning and I’m super focused on my work. I suddenly realize I’m starving. The deli across the street from me is 24/7, so I decide to get some food. All the offices have sliding frosted glass doors. I open mine and realize the floor is completely empty and dark apart from the emergency exit lights. Suddenly, I hear the elevator open down the hallway. This was really creepy to me.
I knew that the entire building except for the 19th floor (a French company was up there) was empty. There wasn’t even anyone at the front desk. I slowly slide the door quietly and stick my head out of the office. Nothing. I see the light from inside the elevator casting a light onto the floor. But I couldn’t see anyone from where I was in the office. Eventually, I lock the office door, put my giant headphones on, and get back to work.
At some point, I must have fallen asleep, because at around 5:30, a loud knocking on the glass wakes me up. I jump up, open the door, and see one of the building managers and a cop. I explain to them what I was doing there, and they asked if I saw or heard anything. I said no, I’d had my headphones on and had fallen asleep. I spot my manager and she looks white as a ghost.
I ask what’s going on, and she tells me that someone broke into the building. According to what she’d been told, they’d somehow bypassed the two doors downstairs that required a key card, broke into the psychiatrist’s office, and take files on three patients. I was there that whole time, either working or asleep, and didn’t hear anything. When she told me this, I was really freaked out.
All I could think about was what might have happened to me had I run into them. I ended up leaving that place several months later.
87. Ghosted
In the early 90s, I was a home health nurse taking care of a girl suffering from advanced AIDS. She was legally blind and in such bad shape that it took two nurses to bathe her and change her bed. Another nurse was with me when this girl asked, “Who is that man standing behind you"? The girl described him in quite a bit of detail. The other nurse went pale.
She then stopped what she was doing and left the room. When I went outside to find her, she pulled an old picture out of her wallet. It showed a guy who looked exactly as the girl had just described. It was the nurse’s dad who had passed years ago. I would have called it a fantasy, but the nurse was literally shaking and had never even been to that patient’s house before.
88. Aaaand Scene!
I once managed a movie theater that had an automated audio system that would play a prerecorded radio-style program in-between shows. The company that created these recordings wouldn’t update them for months, so we all got used to hearing the same 12 songs and silly jingles and banter over and over until we had it memorized.
When we would shut down the projector at night, we’d also turn off the lights in each auditorium. This turned off the speakers as well, so a shutdown booth meant a silent dark theater. One night, I had my closing usher come up to me and tell me I left the music on in theater 10. That’s funny, I thought. Theater 10 last had a show two hours ago.
I specifically remembered shutting it down, but I went back to check it out. Theater 10 was the last door at the end of a long hallway. It’s hard to explain, but in the theater, there was a blind corner before you reached the door to the projection booth. I went into the theater and it was pitch black. I knew something was off immediately.
If I hadn’t shut the booth down, the aisle lights would have been on. Yet, as my usher said, the music was still on. This was different music, though. I knew every terrible pop song on that program by heart and this was not it. The music I heard sounded like the kind of piano playing in an old silent movie. Then I heard an older woman’s voice singing.
This voice was NOT coming from the speakers. It was coming from around the blind corner. I knew that I wasn’t alone in the pitch dark theater. I bolted right out of there and as soon as the last show ended, I locked up and went home. The next day, I came in and checked the cameras. From the moment I shut down the booth, until two hours later, nobody went in or out of that auditorium besides the usher and myself.
I saw my flee of terror. I watched the whole tape and nobody came out. I even checked the emergency exit camera, but there was nothing. I closed for years after that and I never heard her again, but I ALWAYS got chills going into that theater. I started leaving the emergency lights on when I closed it. I would never be in the dark in that theater again.
89. Bunny Suit
My best friend and I were 12 years old, and out before midnight on New Year's Eve in 1974. It was maybe 10 or 11 at night. We're walking from her house to mine, and it’s a very quiet street. As we walk by this big fir tree near the side of the road, a guy steps out of the shadows. He wasn’t being menacing, but it seemed as if he’d been waiting for us to get close enough to see him. The creepy part? He had a bunny head on.
It wasn’t a mask; it was a full head covering, something you'd see in a play. He had a fancy coat on. He just steps into the light of the streetlamp and nods his head at us as we walk by. It was the 70s, and at the time adults had absolute power over children—we were taught to never confront adults them or make them mad. So we walked on by.
Half a block down the street, we looked at each other and then behind us. No one was there.
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90. Petty Cash
I’m a secretary in a solicitor’s office. The receptionist was out sick this one day, and I had to cover for her. The reception is at the very front of the building and cut off from everything else. You have to walk through at least two doors and down a hallway to get to anyone else in the building. Because we were short-staffed, I was completely on my own out there. Now, this was usually not a big deal.
But on that day, this tall bloke comes in. He’s over six feet and he's wearing old clothes and a baggy hoodie with the hood up. He has his hands in his pocket and is acting all shifty and paranoid. I go through the usual "Hi, can I help you," protocol, but he's still acting weird and not looking me directly in the eye. He asked me if we dealt with armed robberies, and my heart leapt into my throat.
I didn't know what to say to this guy, and there was no one close by that could help if anything happened. No one would even hear me if I shouted. This guy didn't explain himself either, he just asked me that question and let it sit there between us. After the pause, I realized he wasn't going to say anything else. So, with all the bravery I could muster, I asked, "Are you talking about yourself"? and gestured to his hands in his pockets.
He changed in a second. He obviously realized how he was coming across and didn't want to frighten me. He took his hands out of his pockets and pulled his hood down so I could see his face and was just repeating, "No, no, love, I'm so sorry". He explained then that he was the one who was robbed and wanted to take lawful action. By the end of the encounter, we were laughing about it and poking fun at the ridiculous situation.
But for a good five seconds there, I thought this is it, he's not going to be happy with the £30 in petty cash...
91. Welcome To Camp Fear
I worked at an all-boys summer camp for a few summers. We used radios to communicate. Now, I don’t know much about radios, but these were not your everyday walkie-talkies that one buys at Walmart. They had a crazy far radius—I’m talking miles. I could be at a hiking spot many miles from camp and would still be able to reach out.
Our camp was the only group that ever used that frequency, and I don’t think anyone could just hop in and talk or listen to us. One night, I woke up to static from my radio. I could barely make out someone saying something. This went on for a few minutes before the voice became easier to understand. I was dozing in and out of sleep with this sound in the background.
My co-counselor woke me up asking if I had heard that voice on the radio. He quickly got down from his bunk, grabbed the radio, and turned on the lights. The kids in our bunk were waking up. Everyone sat in silence with the static on in the background. I’ll never forget what I heard next. This voice sounded like a young girl…
“Help me I’m stuck". I ran the radio to the office, where more counselors had already gathered. They all had heard the same thing, and the static was still there. We woke up all of camp and did a headcount and a radio count, but nothing was out of the ordinary. We never found out where it came from or who it was. We called law enforcement, but they couldn’t do much about it.
I worked there for a few more summers after that, and every once in a while the static from my radio would wake me up. It would always freak me out.
92. I Never Promised You A Rose Garden
About 40 years ago, my mother split and then transplanted a rose bush from my grandfather’s farm. It took, but it never bloomed. She only kept it because it grew into the fence nicely and kept us kids from climbing it. My grandfather passed about five years after she transplanted it...and that spring it bloomed with red roses.
A few years after that, my grandmother passed and that spring it bloomed with white roses. These are the only two years that it has ever bloomed.
93. Casper The Tidy Ghost
At one time in my life, I lived in a house where if the dishes were clean and the sink was empty, everything was fine. But the second someone put a dirty blade, cup, or dish in the sink and left it there, the faucet would start to drip. Nothing too freaky ever happened, it was just a little reminder to keep things tidy. Still creeped me out, though.
94. The Wrong Act Of Kindness
When I was around 11 or 12, I was in a Catholic after-school program. I distinctly remember learning about how it’s best to do acts of kindness when no one is watching, and to try not to brag about doing something nice. One day, I’m walking on the street and this older guy in his 60s calls me over. I lived in Brooklyn—us kids were always just walking around the neighborhood and random interactions like this were normal.
The guy asked me to help him carry his groceries, and I remember thinking, “This is perfect. I can do a nice thing and not tell anyone about it”. So I helped him out, and when I get to his place, he tries to get me to bring the groceries inside. I was a shy kid, but thankfully even I knew not to do that. I put them on his steps and he spent a good five minutes trying everything he could to get me inside the house.
He went on and on about being a teacher and having cool things to show me—but I stood firm and eventually said I had to leave, and that was it.
95. Creepy Confessional
I had a priest ask me, during a confessional, if I touched myself. I was a nine-year-old girl at the time. I never went to confession again. I did my own penance at home and lied to my family about going for years. I told my mom as an adult. It was too bad I hadn’t said anything earlier, as we had a priest who was accused of much wrongdoing and had to be moved out of the parish.
96. Paranormal Activity
When I was a teenager, my dad invited me to sleep over at his girlfriend’s house after we’d had several conversations about supposed poltergeist activity there. There were rumors about weird sounds and objects falling over randomly. That would probably scare off anyone else, but my dad knew I’d always had an interest in the supernatural. I was very keen to see if anything happened while I was there.
Around one in the morning, I was startled from my sleep by the girlfriend’s cat bolting all over the living room. In my half-awake state, I thought it was a giant rat running across the couch rather than a cat doing their typical midnight crazies. It didn’t come across like typical midnight crazies, though—the cat seemed more freaked out than maniacally ramped up, and it was breathing heavily and darting its head back and forth.
Placing a hand on the cat seemed to settle it down, but it still looked pretty on edge. After my heart stopped racing, I got up to use the bathroom and on my way out, I heard television-like sounds playing in one of the rooms at the end of the hall. This was odd because the house was dark, my dad and his girlfriend were sleeping at the other end of the house, and both of her children were away at a friend’s and a reform school respectively.
Groggy but still freaked out from getting woken up by a maniac cat, I slowly and quietly walked down the hall and looked into the room. I don’t remember the furnishings, just that it was mostly empty with a double sliding door closet set into the same wall as the door. The light switch didn’t work, but there was enough light coming from the bathroom that I could see well enough. The first thing I really noticed, though, was a burning smell.
It was the smell of a campfire. I started sniffing as I moved further into the room—I was suddenly more concerned about a possible fire than I was about a poltergeist. But when I got closer to the closet, the sound that I’d heard earlier started again. It sounded like a child crying from within the closet, and I was hit with such a conflicting feeling of both misery and malevolence that I immediately left the room.
I grabbed the cat from the hall and planted myself on the couch, petting it nonstop so it wouldn’t leave me by myself. Nothing else happened and I woke later that morning in a seated position on the couch. That was the last time I slept there.
97. It’s All Japanese To Me
A friend of our family had her elderly mother move in with her when she was too old to live on her own. One night, her mother had fallen asleep on the couch. Just as her daughter was about to wake her to bring her to bed, her mother started mumbling and then speaking clear as day in Japanese. She didn’t know any Japanese people and she definitely didn’t speak the language.
This woman was a total country bumpkin who just did her chores and tended to her garden. There was no reason for her to be speaking Japanese. Anyway, it happened again a few times and her daughter was finally able to get a recording of it. She had it translated, and apparently, it was a poem or prayer that Japanese kamikaze pilots would say before a flight.
98. A Bloodcurdling Bedfellow
One time, my brother went through a period of several weeks where he kept having chronic nightmares. It got to the point where he didn’t want to sleep in his bed anymore. In the dreams, there would always be a shadowy old woman who was trying to get at him. One night, I decided to sleep in his bed and see if anything would happen. I wish I'd never done it.
That night, I had one of the freakiest dreams I’ve ever had. In mine, the woman my brother had been having nightmares about slid up through the gap between the wall and the bed, and she was trying to grab me and pull me off the bed. I woke up sweating and screaming. Finally, my mother decided to look into the situation herself.
Apparently, my parents had bought the mattress secondhand and my mother found out that one of the previous owners was an old woman who had perished in bed. Safe to say, we immediately threw the mattress in the trash because that kind of thing is way too spooky for my family. I think we definitely should have burned it instead.
99. Spooky Child
I have a spooky child. She’s always talked about ghost friends and how they passed. It’s usually just a quick mention of them every now and then. But there’s one incident I still don’t understand. We were living in a little rural town at the time. She was about four. She was playing out front on the patio, and I was in the kitchen getting her a snack. I could see her perfectly through the door...until I turned my back on her to reach for something in the cabinet.
Just as I did, I heard tires squealing and a huge thump. I whipped back around, and she wasn’t sitting where I had last seen her. I ran like mad over to the door, and there she was. Standing just to the side of the door so I couldn’t see her from my previous angle. I looked all around as I was scooping her up. Nothing. Absolutely nothing was out of the ordinary.
I put her down, and she was perfectly calm. Me...I was flipping out. I asked her what happened and told her I’d heard a loud crash when I was inside the house. She told me there was an accident—to which I’d responded, “Where? I don’t see anything”. Her response still haunts me. She said, “It was a long time ago. Addie was just showing me how she passed. Can I have a snack now"?
Addie was one of her ghost friends. She still says spooky things here and there, but thankfully nothing as spooky as that.
100. Crikey!
I have a twin brother. When we were around six years old, we were in central Australia with our dad and older brother. We were on a nature walk and my twin fell behind us a bit. The next moment shocked me to my core. We then heard him scream and saw him running to catch up with us. Through his tears, he told my dad he had just seen something really scary.
He didn't say what it really was then. Later that day, we were in a nearby town and my twin pointed at a painting in the window of a gallery and said that the figure in it was what he had seen on our walk. My dad went into the gallery and asked about the figure. They said it is an Aboriginal spirit that takes children who wander too far from the camp or their families.
101. What’s In The Basement?
When my son was around three years old, he refused point-blank to go downstairs into the basement. We didn’t think much of it at first and chalked it up to him being afraid of the dark, which would’ve been pretty normal for a kid his age. But then things got terrifying. He told us the basement was where the “angel man” was—and it got even creepier when he told us that this “angel man” wanted to hurt the family.
102. Possible Possession
We drove out to the middle of nowhere for a call. It was a suspected drug use, but when we got there, it was a bunch of teenagers. They all swore there were no drug, just drinks. We went to the patient who was a very, very large boy. He was just looking out with no emotion, no reaction to us, nothing. We checked his vitals and they were all textbook perfect.
Then, he came to, and there was a very heavy presence. The hair on my neck stood up. The boy got this weird look on his face and a scary smile but said nothing. So we got him into the ambulance. Once in the ambulance, we started a blood draw so they could do a drug screening. He went out again with no reaction to anything. Then, the night took a dark turn.
When he came back, he became violent so we restrained him. He broke the restraints so we immediately called law enforcement for backup. Then, he went back out. The whole time his vitals NEVER changed. Officers met us and we continued to the hospital. The boy was now handcuffed to the stretcher and he came to once more.
He smiled and JUMPED OUT THE BACK OF THE AMBULANCE. At this point, we contacted our medical director and dispatch and decided to transfer care to the authorities. They took him to the hospital. His blood work came back completely normal. They had to transfer him to a larger department and I have no idea what happened after that, but I definitely suspect a possession.
103. I'd Rather You Didn't
My six-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat a few days ago and looked at me and said, "Dad, when I'm seven I'm going to kill you. No wait, when I'm eight". I asked, "How are you going to do that"? She smiled and said, "I'm gonna drive over your head with this car".
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104. I Zipped On Out Of There
On a trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama, we stopped to fill up at some run-down gas station that was also a truck stop in Mississippi. I went to the bathroom, and as I was standing at the urinal, I had the strangest feeling that something was off. The feeling overwhelmed the entire left side of my body. I don't claim to be supernatural or have any weird premonitions, and I had never experienced that feeling before that day or since.
I got up on my tippy toes to look to my left, where the stalls were located. There was this deranged-looking guy with nasty, greasy hair and a scary scowl on his face staring directly at me. He was the most typical-looking psycho you could imagine. He had to have been standing on the toilet because I could see his whole face and the upper part of his shoulders.
I immediately zipped up and got out of dodge so fast I didn't even wash my hands.
105. One In A Million
A neighbor just regaled me with this heartbreaker. His sister, her husband, and two kids went up to Washington to camp every year. So, they were up there in May, early June, sometime during 2002-2003, and the son went to use a rope swing to jump into the lake. The whole family was watching, fun times. But then everything took an incredibly dark turn.
The boy botched the jump and ended up with the rope around his ankle, fell badly, broke a bone, and was just dragging underwater, flailing. The dad immediately springs into action to save his son and dove in—into shallow water. He smashed his skull open, was instantly paralyzed, and drowned. The mother obviously tried to save them both, dove into the water, and suffered a fatal heart attack.
The son stopped flailing and was just hanging there, head underwater. The daughter, 10 years old, had no idea two minutes prior that she would be sitting safely on shore, watching her whole family die. So incredibly heartbreaking. She was raised by my neighbor as a daughter. I just can’t even imagine what that would be like. Just normal, mundane risks proving lethal in less than 200 heartbeats.
106. A Nasty Surprise
When I was about five years old, I woke up to the snow outside our house finally starting to melt. That’s when I noticed a girl "asleep" in the garden. I went and told my dad. He took one look and his face went white. He told me to go play in my room. Turns out, the girl had been "asleep" in our front garden for about two weeks, buried and frozen under the snow.
I didn't know she was actually a body until I was about 16, when I mentioned to my dad, "Remember that girl asleep in the garden"? Dad was like, “You idiot, that was a body". As far as I know, she was in her late teens or early 20s. We lived in a pretty rough area at the time, and she had probably been out partying, sat on our garden wall, and passed out.
