As much we like to think that we understand the world, the truth is we still know very little when it comes to the bigger picture. What sorts of mysterious entities are lurking out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered? Here are 50 accounts of real people’s personal experiences with unexplainable and potentially paranormal phenomena. But be warned—some of these stories are so spooky, they can leave even the most skeptical among us scratching our heads.
1. One Step At A Time
My dad had this habit of knocking his fingers on the wall in our hallway as he walked by, and he also had a crackly toe. Together, it made a very distinctive sound whenever he passed by our rooms at night. It was like a “bada bada bap,” followed by a popping noise. As kids, we always knew when we were in trouble by the tempo of that sound.
As in all cases, time eventually marched on and my older brother had a kid of his own. This was a few years after our dad had passed. One night, I was babysitting for his kid, who was upstairs in her crib. She was about 18 months old at the time. Over the baby monitor, I can tell she's not napping anymore, but she seems to be occupying herself with something or other.
All of a sudden, I hear a sound that goes “bada bada bap, pop!” and the baby starts to giggle. It took me a minute or so to recognize that sound. But when I did, I went rushing upstairs as fast as I could—and I couldn’t believe what I found. The door to her room had been closed when I put her down to sleep, but now it was wide open and she was standing in her crib, looking at the far corner.
There was nothing there.
2. Hold On A Second...
One time when I was around eight or nine years old, I had a strange experience where I suddenly felt and noticed that everything around me paused/stopped for about two seconds. We were driving to my uncle's house, which was usually a 20-minute drive, and we were stuck in traffic. My mom was talking to me and my brother, and while she was in mid-sentence everything stopped.
The car wasn't moving. No one was breathing. Clouds, other cars, my brother's arms going up in the air, any sounds (like the radio, my mom's voice, cars driving); EVERYTHING JUST STOPPED. I didn't notice this until immediately after the pause, and the first thing I did was say: "WOAH! DID YOU GUYS JUST FEEL THAT?!"
Everyone looked at me like, “Huh?! Feel what?!?” and I replied saying, "It felt like everything just...stopped for a second and then started again…like in the game Mario when you press pause!" They had no idea what I was talking about, but I remember that feeling and that moment all the time and I still don't understand what exactly happened. But I know I felt everything stop and restart!
3. Figure This One Out...
I was in elementary school. It was late at night and I was watching I Love Lucy with my dog in the living room that nobody else uses. I'm just sitting there minding my own business when, out of the corner of my eye, I see this...figure. I turn quickly to look, but it's gone. At the exact moment that I turn to look, my dog barks in the direction where I saw it and her ears are all pointed up.
That's when I knew I wasn't just imagining things. The weird thing is that I wasn't afraid at all and, somehow, I knew that whatever it was that I saw wasn't anything bad.
4. Time Flies When You’re Having Fun
This wasn't me but my ex, and it still freaks me out when I think about it. Here's what happened. One day, he went for a bike ride, rode around town, and came home. This is where it gets weird. Seemingly to him, he arrived home the same day, some two hours later like a normal ride. His family absolutely freaked out when he walked inside though.
He had been missing for two whole days. No one could find him. They had even started to get the authorities involved. He literally thought that he had just gone out for a bike ride and came home, and that was it. To this day, he still has no idea what happened. I think alien abduction is the most likely explanation, and so does he.
But I guess no one will ever know for sure.
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5. Be My Guest
I was visiting family and staying in a hotel with my boyfriend, who has since become my husband. The first night there, we went to bed and I woke up in the middle of the night facing the window. I noticed there was a dark shadow in the corner of the room that looked like the shape of a human. After staring at it for a while, I realized that it must have been a floor lamp, since that corner was kind of bare and that's the most logical explanation.
I rolled over and went back to bed, not giving it another thought. The following morning, I remembered this incident and turned to look into the corner where the lamp was. And there isn't a floor lamp there. The corner is bare. I mentioned it to my boyfriend and he went white. He told me that he woke up in the middle of the night because he felt like he was being watched, and had to get up out of bed to go to the bathroom to try and shake the feeling.
I vaguely remember him getting up, but hadn’t put two and two together until right now. The feeling still sticks with me in dark rooms to this day.
6. Bathroom Break
One year, I was at my daughter's house. She and her husband had been given his deceased uncle's house as a gift. At one point during my visit, my daughter, my granddaughters, and I had gone to the store. My son-in-law (James, who is 5'9" tall and stocky) and a friend of theirs who lives with them (Gary, who is 6' tall and with a thin build) both worked at the same shop delivering packages, but sometimes one would get off before the other.
To properly set this scene up, there are a few things you should know about the house. Firstly, it is on the older side. When you walk into the foyer, my daughter’s room is off to the right. Straight ahead, you walk into the kitchen, and off to the right is the living room with the bathroom off of that. She kept blackout drapes in the living room, so it was dark.
So we get back from the store and my daughter goes out back. The kids run upstairs in their typical way, and I am in the kitchen by the counter, unloading bags. I am facing the back door. I see a tall shadow move from the bathroom and it goes straight towards the TV and entertainment system. I think to myself that Gary must be home, because Gary would always come home and go straight to the TV, where he had a little bowl that he would put his keys and spare change in.
I didn't even think twice about it. I get done and go to use the bathroom. And, as I finish and leave, it crosses my mind that I didn't see Gary in the living room. My daughter had come in from the back, so I asked her where Gary was. She said that he was still at work. I told her no, I just saw him into the living room. She and I just passed it off.
I got to mulling over it and, when James came home first, I asked James if his uncle was more like his build or taller and thinner. James tells me his uncle was tall and thin. We got to talking and James told me that his uncle made his bedroom where theirs was now, instead of an upstairs bedroom, as he had gotten older and sicker and couldn't use the stairs.
So if he ever had to go to the bathroom, he would just walk right through the doorway where my daughter and James had their TV and entertainment system set up. Gary got home a few hours later. I didn't get the heebie-jeebies or anything like that. At no time did I ever think I had seen anything other than a real, living, flesh and blood person.
I guess everyone’s experiences with the supernatural are felt differently.
7. I’ll See You In My Dreams
A couple of years ago, I had a recurring dream where I was reliving one of my childhood experiences. It was one where I was playing with my cousin, and at the end of the dream when he was getting ready to go home, I said goodbye to him and for some reason, it felt different that time. A couple of days later, he ended up dying due to a sudden and unexpected heart problem that surfaced out of nowhere.
He was only 25 years old, so it was very shocking and unusual. To this day, even three years later, every two or three weeks or so I find myself having very vivid dreams where I'm talking with him and having full, in-depth conversations. My friend says it's my cousin reaching out to me from the other side, and while I don't believe that fully, I can't otherwise explain it rationally.
Something I forgot to mention is that he was born the same month and year as me, just eight days apart, and so we'd been very close friends since we were young kids. That’s part of what made this whole experience feel so spooky to me.
8. Man’s Best Friend
When we first moved into our old house, our uncle gifted us two puppy Labrador retrievers. I named one Charlie, and my brother named the other one Gordo. A few months later, they both came down with the very dangerous dog illness known as “parvo". Charlie ended up passing from it, while Gordo survived. More time passes, and I don’t remember what we were celebrating, but I remember being the only one inside the house.
Everyone else was in the backyard around my dad, who was barbecuing. I was sitting on the couch, where you can see the glass sliding door in the kitchen, and I could see outside. The door was closed. I got up to go to the bathroom. I was right at the end of the hallway when I felt Gordo jump on the back of my legs. He pushed me so hard that I remember I actually stumbled forward.
I turned around to pet him, and there was nothing there. And the slide door was still closed, and everyone was still outside. There was absolutely no way that Gordo or anyone in my family could have been the cause of what I felt. I was sitting on the toilet wondering what could possibly have just happened. To this day, I still tell myself that it was Charlie, but I will never actually know for sure.
9. Repeat Offender
This past year in college, we had a ghost named "Gideon" living in our dorm that followed my roommate from place to place. Or so he claims. He’s the one that dubbed the ghost "Gideon." He would hear his name, feel his bed shaking in the middle of the night, stuff like that. And he wasn't the only one to experience it...
As the school year went on, Gideon began to get comfortable with all of us, and the strange activity began to become more frequent and noticeable. When home alone, I've heard faucets running, only to look about and find nobody else in the dorm or apartment. I heard knocking on my door, and when I opened it, nobody would be there.
I'd hear quick little raps of about three to five knocks every time I was alone in the apartment with my bedroom door closed. Every once in a while, late in the night, I'd hear a loud smack on my door or on my wall. I have a metal water bottle that I keep on my window sill and, one night, it sounded as though someone was just picking it up and setting it down softly over and over again.
The bottle sounded like it was being dropped down just hard enough so that there would be a metallic clinking noise on the sill, which happened to be made of concrete or something. One time, I heard a noise as though something had fallen off of my desk. When I woke up, my Chapstick was on the floor beside my bed. It had originally been standing up in the middle of my desk.
I heard it drop to the floor the night before, but my windows were closed and my fan was off, so I don't know how it could have gotten there. On another occasion, something I couldn’t see mysteriously handed my pillow to me. I woke up at some point in the night to find it wasn't on the bed. I then reached out groggily, and it suddenly appeared in my hand.
Something had tried unlocking my roommate's door from the outside—but that’s not the creepiest part. He found little scratches from where the door meets the frame, and part of the center of the door was scratched as well. I had a guest spending the night at our place one evening, and they saw some strange shadow moving around on my ceiling. We all tried to recreate the shadow, but in the end, we couldn't succeed at doing so.
The shades were down, so there wasn't too much light coming in. My roommate was alone and saw somebody out of the corner of his eye walk past his room. I hope this doesn't sound weird, but the figure was walking towards the wall that's just floor-to-ceiling windows, and there's nothing there other than a couch. When he left his room to see who it was, there was nobody there.
And nobody could have gone anywhere, being that we were on the fifth floor. My other roommate, the one that first brought Gideon in with him, one afternoon, of course, when alone, saw a shadow figure walk into one of the bathrooms. One night, I experienced a loud knock on my door. I said, "Yeah?" I then got up and opened my door.
There was, of course, nobody there, and at the same time as I opened my door, my roommate across from me opened his door, claiming that somebody had just knocked on his door too. He thought it was me, and I thought it was him. We had our doors knocked on at the exact same time. I never felt Gideon was a bad presence, or anything like that.
He was just kind of there and doing his thing. He never caused any harm to any of us others who lived there, so I have no hard feelings against him for haunting our place. There was never anything bad that happened to any of us for having him there, other than an eerie feeling being watched in the place, as though you were never entirely alone.
10. Digging Down Deep
When I was about 13 or 14 years old, I lived in Hawaii on an army base along the side of a volcanic crater (AMR, for those who know the area well). The townhomes that we lived in were up along the slope of the mountain, but the last 500 feet or so were just empty hill space, leading to a cliff overlooking the crater (which had businesses and such in it, long dormant).
Well, anyway, my friends and I, being the young teenagers that we were, loved hiking the side of the crater and walking along the edge.It was mostly flat leading up to the edge and there was a fence along most of it, so this isn't quite as unsafe as it sounds. At one point, we found an abandoned bunker, most likely from WWII. It was about a mile along the side of the hill.
So, naturally, we decided to go exploring. We got inside and found that it was mostly pretty empty. There was a mount for what I would assume would have been some heavily dangerous equipment at some point, and then there was a locked metal door. It was pretty rusty and sounded kind of hollow, like there were a few spots you could probably see-through except for the fact that it was very dark in there and completely pitch black inside.
We'd go to this bunker and kind of hang out and play all the time—until the last time we ever went. We got there at around 5:00 in the afternoon and we were sitting around talking about random things (probably games like Animal Crossing or Phantasy Star Online at the time). All of a sudden, we started hearing this faint banging noise coming from behind the door.
We all froze up and got super silent, and the banging was rhythmically speeding up. Like, at first it would be a slight bang every 15 seconds or so, then after about 20 faint bangs they would be 10 seconds apart, etc. It got to the point where they were about 5 seconds apart and much, much louder than they were when they first started.
Then, they abruptly stopped altogether. We looked at the door and watched as some of the old "rust powder" from the top of the door crumbled and fell to the ground. We got up to nope the heck out of there, started climbing the ladder out, and the person that left last—there were three of us, and I was second, so the person climbing behind me—swears he heard a loud bang against the door as he finished climbing out.
We ran down the hill and some officers spotted us. They told us that we weren't allowed to be up there, and about two weeks later they had built a fence and sectioned off the entire area. I still have absolutely no idea who or what was down there causing that banging noise, if anything. Not to mention why the officers seemed so eager to keep people away...
11. A Friend In Need
Okay, so this is a true story that scared the heck out of me in a big, bad, way. Back when we were 18 years old, I had a mate who reckoned he was getting either haunted or stalked by this dark and menacing figure. I was kinda dubious. So one night, I am sleeping over in his parents' big old wooden mansion. He gives me his parents’ bed for the night.
It was the perfect storm of creepiness. His stepmother had a massive porcelain doll collection facing the bed, and I absolutely hate those things. The family dog was an old Aussie sheepdog, but with full cloudy white cataracts covering his eyes so that he looked as freaky as he possibly could. So, for those keeping track: old house, porcelain dolls, a blind dog with white clouded eyes. Perfect.
So at some point after midnight, I wake up in his parents’ bed. A freakin’ cold wind is blowing through the open door, in a closed house. Also, I got this feeling of intense terror all of a sudden. Then, to top it all off, I notice that the dog is hiding under the bed and crying. The actions of the dog are my proof that it wasn't just a nightmare that I was having.
Then, a big, black-robed figure coasts in through the door and hovers over the four-poster bed. It was at least about eight feet tall. To say the figure looked “menacing” is putting it mildly. On top of that, the temperature is suddenly icy cold, which also scared the heck out of me. So this figure hovers for a few minutes while I try to wake myself up. Unfortunately, I am already awake this whole time.
Then I lie there, completely still and too scared to move while the dog whines under the bed. I am too scared to check on the dog because if it stares at me with those blind cloudy white eyes, I know it will be too much for me to handle. The dog was definitely scared as heck. It stayed under the bed whimpering throughout this entire experience.
Once I gathered up the courage to move again, I went over to my friend's room and told him what had just happened. He calmly answered “Now you know what I go through every night,” then rolled over and went back to sleep. Screw that menacing figure! My friend eventually got his church to do an exorcism, which apparently worked. That's my story, and it is completely true.
12. Lifted To New Heights
This may sound weird, but to this day I still have no explanation as to how this happened. I live in a 36 story apartment building and was on my way to go out and head to the mall. We live on the 30th floor. I get in the lift at Floor 30 and press the ground floor button (Floor G). When the lift opens at the ground level, I notice that the whole foyer and lobby area look completely different.
Different couches, lights, colors, etc. I was really taken aback by it. I make my way to the exit and, after seeing the outside area and then looking back to the building entrance, I make a chilling realization. The building I’m in is not the one I live in. This building was in the same local area, not too far away from mine, but I have no explanation as to how or when I got in there.
This seemingly all happened while I was in the lift. I'm the kind of guy who is very skeptical and down to earth, but this experience still gets to me every time I think about it.
13. Pigging Out
I used to live in Arizona, near a mountain that is considered sacred to the Native American tribes in the area (Pima and Maricopa). There were a lot of Skinwalker rumors in the area. For those who don’t know, a Skinwalker is an evil witch-like figure in Navajo mythology that is said to be able to shapeshift into the form of an animal.
My friends and I loved camping, and we were lucky enough to get permission to use a site near the mountain, along the Salt River, for a weekend getaway. The first thing you have to understand is that we were a pretty sheltered group of kids. We didn't use any dangerous or mind-altering substances, and we only ever drank in moderation.
We mostly went out to share creepy stories around the campfire and nerd out for a night or two. We had all spent a lot of time in the desert and were all familiar with the land and wildlife of the area, even the rarer species. We were sitting around our fire, listening to the river and the animal sounds around us. Crickets, cicadas, birds ,etc. The moon was almost full, and the desert was very beautiful.
Then, suddenly, everything goes quiet. Just the sound of the river remains, and even that seems spooky and different than it had sounded just a moment earlier. The air grew still, and seemed to get cold. We hear rustling in the undergrowth across from our fire. Out steps a Javelina. Javelinas are in the pig family, usually a brownish color.
The biggest ones are about the size of a medium-sized dog. They're actually kind of cute. But this one was different. It was huge and looked jet black, with glowing red eyes. It paced around a bit, and seemed like it was moving around the fire so that it could look each one of us in the eye. I have never seen anything look at me like that, and I work with psych patients.
Its gaze was cold and searching, like it could see through me. After what felt like forever, it finally backed up through the undergrowth and headed away from us. The night got warmer, and the normal sounds started up again. We spent the rest of the night very close to the fires, and got the heck out of that spot as soon as the sun rose.
I really want to believe that it was just a male Javelina scoping out some territory. But every instinct I have says that it wasn't…
14. Gone, With A Trace
A few years ago, I was about to take a test and they were going over a bunch of questions, just checking for red flags and what not. At one point, the test-giver said, "Has anyone here recently lost a loved one?" I thought to myself, "Nope," Then, the next thing I know, I thought, "Huh, pretty weird, why am I still thinking about that question?"
Then I thought, "Still pretty sure the answer is no, yet here I am still feeling weird about that question. Kind of odd." When I finished taking my test, I went back to work and sat down in my cubicle. I saw a note that said, "Call Grace." Grace was the name of my dad’s girlfriend. I called and she started crying. I don’t know why, but I quickly said something along the lines of, "It's okay, I know. You don't have to say it."
My father was gone. I don't tend towards the supernatural in any way. Every story about that kind of stuff that I've ever read, I honestly just assume is either phony or a misunderstanding of actual events. But whenever someone talks about unexplained experiences, I think back to the fact that I knew my father was gone hours before I could have known or been told. And I honestly can't explain it.
15. Bringing Out Your Inner Animal
I was hunting raccoons one night on my wife's family farm, and I saw some creature come out of the cornfield that I have never seen before or since. It was bipedal, it was about two or three feet tall, it had legs where the "knee" joint bent in the opposite direction of traditional animals, it was covered in short spotty fur, and it had short, thin arms.
Think like a very skinny kangaroo without a snout that stood more vertical and had weird legs. I have never found a description of another animal like it that is even remotely close to the North Dakota/South Dakota border area where I live. I got a good look at it in the clear light of my flashlight, maybe 10 seconds before it ran back into the corn.
I don't believe in any cryptozoology or anything like that, but I know what I saw and I know that it was not normal. It freaked me out pretty bad.
16. Singing The Blues
When I was in high school, I always used to listen to music on my Discman device before I went to bed each night. One night, I was listening to Weezer's Blue Album. The album was store-bought, not burned, so it was the official, legitimate version. I was getting nice and relaxed listening to “Only in Dreams,” when all of a sudden the music cut off and it was just loud static.
It was obviously very jarring, so I opened my eyes and sat up. In the corner of my dark room, across the way and above the door, there was a white fuzzy orb-like type thing just floating there. I couldn't make out much of a shape, but I definitely could point out the head and two dark holes that would appear to be eyes.
I looked at the thing for a few seconds, then immediately dived across the room to turn a light on. By the time I looked back, it was gone. I had one of those atomic clocks as an alarm that I had never bothered to set up, even though I had gotten it two years prior. All of a sudden, the previously empty clock was now displaying 88:88. Not flashing, just the numbers.
It never set again and I had to throw it away. Eerie night, to say the least.
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17. A Leap Of Faith
One time I was over at a friend’s house. We were probably about seven or eight years old at the time. We were playing Frogger on the PS1, and as the afternoon goes on, a storm develops. At one point, lightning strikes the house. All the power in the house gets instantly cut off. Yet, somehow, we were still playing the video game.
It takes a few minutes for us to really register what is happening. Thinking this was awesome, we played for about a half hour before we started getting concerned. Eventually, we pulled the power chord for the PS1 out from the wall socket. And somehow, the game was still on. We proceeded to unplug the TV and the controllers as well.
Still on. My friend dropped his controller, and Frogger moved. That frog hopped across the highway with all power chords unplugged from any possible source and controllers disconnected from the system. This, of course, re-established the 'coolness' of the situation for us, enabling our young minds to play a little while longer without fully questioning it.
It wasn't too long, though, before the strangeness of the situation overwhelmed us and we proceeded to leave the bedroom and whatever demon spawn had decided to visit us that afternoon. Several hours later, we returned when the power was restored. Now, the game was off and all was once again as it should be.
18. All In The Family
Well, when I was a kid, a bunch of strange stuff would happen, but my parents would lie about it so as to not alert me. That didn't stop them from telling me when I got older, though. One particular occurrence was that almost every night, there would seem to be someone who went down our hall and would seem to toggle with the doorknobs as if he were locking them, but everyone in the house was asleep.
Another strange thing that happened was that I heard laughing that didn't belong to anyone in the house. I asked my mom if she had one of her friends from work over, and she just replied "Yes, but they left just now." And so I left it at that. In hindsight, there's no possible way that anyone could have gotten out of the house in the time it took for me to hear the laughter and approach my mum.
Lastly, there was a very very strange event that happened to my sister. She swears it happened. So it was sunny outside, maybe around 10:00 in the morning, and she thinks to herself "Mom and dad are gonna be late to work!" So she goes to wake them up, only to find a disgruntled couple saying, “It's the middle of the night, leave us alone".
So she goes to the window again, only to find that the day has ended and it's already nighttime. I heard this "time loss" ordeal could potentially be attributed to aliens. I think I might also have a few more if anyone's interested. There’s actually a decent handful of bizarre and paranormal phenomena that have taken place within my family.
For another example, my uncle bought a new house a few years ago, and apparently, there was an old woman who had trouble letting go. My aunt then randomly found said lady just "lounging" on the couch one day. She has no idea how the woman got there. So, as you may expect, my aunt freaks out and demands that she leave her alone, because "It's our house now."
I guess she left. I think I might have more, but I'm seriously lacking in the details department, and I wouldn't bother posting without such things.
19. Stairway To Heaven
In the house I lived in before this current one, about two years ago, I was sitting on the living room couch watching some kind of show or another. To the left, there was a staircase that opened up into the kitchen, adjacent to where I was. As I was sitting there, I saw out of the corner of my eye that there was someone coming down the stairs.
I thought it was likely my mom, as I was living with my parents at the time. I figured she was probably just coming down for a late-night snack. Instead of seeing her, however, I saw what I can only describe as a tall dark mass coming down the stairs. Somehow, I knew its intentions were good, so I wasn't scared and nothing else happened that night.
The next morning, without any mention of the incident from me, my mom starts in by saying: "I saw someone walking down the corridor upstairs." This was right around the same time when lights would inexplicably turn on and off all over our house.
20. Little House On The Prairie
I don’t claim to know whether or not the paranormal is real, but I know at least what happened to me. It happened in college, conveniently right near Halloween. My friends at the time were quite diverse in our religious beliefs and, it being All Hallows Eve to some, my Wicca friend decided that he wanted to show us all his beliefs. I enjoy the paranormal, and I always have.
As a man of science, I enjoy trying to explain the seemingly unexplainable. Mostly, I enjoy the psychology of it, watching our brains try to piece together things it wants to believe. The subconscious grasps at fragments of reality, resulting in a psychosomatic hallucination. My friend said he wanted to try to summon something.
He said to trust him and, even while trying to remain skeptical, we indulged his request. He lit candles and turned off the lights as we formed a circle around some candles. We sat down and held hands as my friend bowed his head and began humming. He kept humming his “Om” as we all closed our eyes. That’s when it happened. Suddenly, an image of a cottage appeared in my head.
It was surreal and so clear. I could feel myself there. I was in a calm grass field. I was standing just at the forest edge when I slowly walked up the path to the cottage. It had two floors and was a natural wooden brown. I looked over and saw that the window near the door was shattered. Then, suddenly, my girlfriend at the time screamed.
She got up and ran out of the room. Another one of my friends jolted back and yelled: "Oh God, what did I just see?" What he said next made my blood run cold. He then starts frantically talking about how he saw himself as a wolf. He then starts talking about the details. He was in a field. He ran towards a house. It was the same house that I saw, everything matching down to the last detail.
It wasn't just some vague description, but everything was the same, from the field to the colors. Everything. I asked about the windows because I remembered that one was broken. He said he saw himself jumping through it. We stared at each other and knew. We saw the same thing. We heard my girlfriend scream again and we ran out of the room to check on her.
She is cowering in a corner, crying. She won't stop crying about “her children". She doesn't have any children. She is in tears crying out for them, crying out for children that we know she doesn't have. We try to calm her down but we can't. We ask her what happened when she says: "The dogs got them. They attacked them. Oh God, the blood!"
We tried to calm her down, but she kept crying until slowly we all became very silent. What she was describing was what we all saw, and we just sat in silence.
21. With You In Spirit
Growing up, my great-grandmother on my dad's side was my best friend. I spent many of my days curled up in her lap, watching The Price is Right and her "soap operas" while she'd gently stroke the back of my head and call out answers or yell at characters on her shows. She was one of the coolest women that I have ever known.
Tragically, she was diagnosed with cancer when I was about 12 years old or so, and within a month she was gone. The hardest part about it was that I was living with my mother at the time, and didn't even know she was sick until my dad called to ask if I'd go with him to her funeral. For so long, I was angry at my dad and his family for not telling me sooner and giving me a chance to say my goodbyes.
One afternoon, when I was in my early 20s, while standing in my backyard getting things ready for a New Year's Eve concert and party that my boyfriend and his band were throwing, I was talking to a friend. I don't remember how we got to talking about my great-grandmother and how I was still having a hard time with letting go of the anger and resentment I felt.
I was telling her how much I wished I'd had a chance to tell her I loved her one more time. I knew she already knew it, but I still wanted to say it. I was overcome with more sadness than I usually felt when I thought about her, and was trying really hard to not break down and cry. Then, all of the sudden, I felt a warm, firm hand make one gentle stroke down the back of my head, just like she used to do when I was small.
My heart stopped and I whipped around to see...nothing. However, in that same moment, my sadness was replaced with a sense of peace. I can't explain it, and I don't go looking for an explanation. I don't expect people to believe me when I tell them about it. None of that really matters to me in this instance. The feelings that rushed through my body in those few seconds, and the emotions that came, and those that left felt like I was being told everything was already known and to not be sad anymore.
It felt like closure.
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22. Bringing The Heat
This is pretty freaky. I still don't know how to explain it. About two years ago, my sister, my infant nephew, and I moved into an apartment building that, we later discovered, was previously used by an elderly community. From the moment we moved in, we felt uneasy. The weird feeling wasn't enough to get us to ditch our seemingly awesome apartment, though.
Especially not a cheap two-bedroom that allowed dogs and had a pool! A few months after moving in, weird stuff started happening. We’d see shadows moving in an otherwise still room, objects not being where they had been left, baby toys talking to themselves in dark rooms, etc. Just the kind of things that would make your skin crawl.
To make matters worse, even when it was bloody hot outside, my bedroom would be freezing cold and the closet door was always broken in an open position. It didn't matter how often we would get it fixed, it would instantly be broken again. Now, this is where it gets a little crazy. One morning, I woke up and my bed had been moved.
I hadn't even as much as wrinkled my sheets while sleeping, yet my bed had been slid three feet away from where it normally sat against the wall. I then began having pretty intense night terrors. I'd jump out of bed screaming and throwing my blankets, begging for my sister to save me. This would happen at least three times a night on average.
One night, I had a particularly vivid night terror, only I didn't feel frightened. I jumped up in bed, looked around, and what I saw was so terrifying, it’s unforgettable. I saw eyes peering around my broken closet door. I leaned in and saw a man in his mid-20s staring back at me. I said, in the calmest voice I could muster. "I'm going to give you a few minutes alone, but then you need to leave."
I stumbled over to the living room and sat on the couch for 10 minutes, then I walked back to my bed. From that moment on, no more baby toys talked, my closet door closed with ease, and my bedroom was always at a normal temperature.
23. This Ole Warehouse
Here we go! This is a brief account of an experience that I had almost a year ago in the warehouse where I work alone. No one I've told about it has believed me, but perhaps you all will. I work in a warehouse that my father purchased. He bought it for 25% of its cost, from a farmer who seemed very excited to finally be rid of it.
It’s in the middle of Mennonite country, with no neighbors for a solid half-mile around in all directions. Look out the window, and all you see are cornfields and scraggly trees. Cell service? Forget about it. I work here alone, painting and preparing the front office portion for eventual functionality. To get to the front office, you must go through a hallway from the main warehouse, into a secondary office, and then through another door into the front.
I frequently hear bumps and thuds and occasionally will go into the warehouse and feel air movement, but I've always attributed it to drafts and animal life in the roof. The only thing that has ever made me uneasy about the building is the fact that all of the door locks are reversed. Whoever installed those locks didn't intend to keep people out…they intended to keep something in.
It never really got too freaky, until one day I was in the front office when I began to hear the thudding. I ignored it and continued to apply masking tape to the door that I was working on. But this time, it was accompanied by a screeching sound. Not loud, but audible. I was freaked out, but convinced myself that it was just an upset raccoon or squirrel that had found its way inside.
I continued working—until I heard the slam. The door to the secondary office had been open. It sounded like it had violently slammed shut. I peeked around the corner and saw that I was right. The secondary door was now closed. I tried to “logic it through” in my head that a strong draft had sucked it closed, although I knew there was no such draft.
The thudding began again. Closer this time. I've never been able to put proximity on it, but now it sounded like it was right on the other side of the door. I froze, unsure of what was happening. My eyes locked on the door handle, which began to turn. The door disengaged its latch and slowly swung open. Wider...wider...
Nothing there. Nothing visible, no air movement, just quiet. So quiet. A quiet that seemed to overwhelm me with its presence. A quiet so thick I couldn't breathe. The quiet was shattered when the screech came again. This time, it was clearly human. Pained, angered, and emanating from the main warehouse. The door slammed.
That entirely broke my frozen state—and I knew I had to go. I ran. I got into my car and drove until I was in cell range to call my father. He didn't believe anything about the doors closing, but agreed that the building had something weird about it. He told me he'd be right out. Fast forward half an hour. My dad and I met up and drove back to the warehouse.
I showed him the door that slammed, showing him that it was separated from both the front office and the main warehouse, so no draft could have closed it. I told him about the thuds, the screeching, and the sudden quiet that overcame the building. He decided that we should check the main warehouse. Emboldened by his presence, I led the way.
Something you should know about this warehouse: It was formerly a furniture manufacturing place owned by a Mennonite farmer. They made handmade chairs, tables, etc. Because of all the cutting that went on, the floor is thickly coated with dust. We walked into the warehouse and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The dust was untouched, the doors were closed, and the windows were locked.
The only thing that was out of the ordinary was one of the hanging fluorescent light fixtures. It was hanging askew, and swaying slightly. Insisting we take a look at the mount to ensure it didn't just break loose, my dad grabbed a step ladder. He supported it while I climbed up and grabbed the swinging light. I looked on top of the light...and what I saw sent chills down my spine.
There was a handprint. A single, fresh, inhumanly large handprint. No footprints in the dust around the light, no signs of a presence. Just one sole handprint. I climbed down and switched places with my father. He saw it and said, "What the heck? There's been no one in here for years!" He climbed down and told me he'd been suspicious of someone breaking in and swiping parts from the warehouse light system.
He couldn't believe me that this wasn't human, that something wasn't right here. The last thing he said was "Nothing is in here. Next time, just go back to work." And then, as if to show its presence, the thud returned. This time it wasn't just a thud, but more of an earthquake. The entire building felt like it moved. The heartbeat-like thud was then overlaid by the screech.
The awful, awful screech. It felt like it was coming from the walls themselves. We ran. We ran and I haven't returned back there ever since. My father hired someone to finish my job and has since moved into the office. He's heard the thudding, but thus far nothing has happened further. What actually happened? I don't know.
Nor do I ever care to know, if I’m being completely honest. Some questions are truly better left unanswered. What I do know, however, is that there is something paranormal going on in that building and the man who sold it to us knew about it. I'll never forget the sound of that lock turning by itself or the feeling of that thunderous silence.
24. Hidden In Plane Sight
Before I was born, my grandfather's brother perished in a plane accident while training during WWII. The plane crashed in Montana. About 50 some years after the accident, my grandfather wanted to create some sort of book about his brother. He pieced some things together, and gathered items that had belonged to him from his childhood and also from before his passing. Eventually, he took a trip to Montana to visit the crash site.
He found it. I think at that point it was some guy's farm, but a crater was still visible in the ground from the impact. There were pieces of the plane everywhere. He brought a piece back for me, which I still have. I don't know how much time he spent there, but at one point he asked the guy who owned the property if there was anything else.
The guy told him no and my grandfather asked if it was okay if he explored the property a little more. The owner was fine with this. From what my grandfather told me, he walked up some hill, looked around, and as he turned around to walk back to the crash site, he noticed something stuck in the ground. He knelt down and was shocked to realize that his brother's dog tag was sitting right there.
He wears it all the time now. I don't know if you would qualify it as a paranormal story, but I always found it fascinating, and too big a coincidence to just be left to pure chance.
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25. Still With Us In Spirit
I graduated high school and lived in the same town while I went to college. A couple of years after graduation, I was stopped at a traffic light and a guy was crossing the street. I recognized him as Chris. One of my good friends had dated him, and we hung out a few times. He looked pretty pale, like he was on some kind of bad substances.
It didn't really surprise me, as that seemed like where he may have been heading back in high school. Whatever, no big deal. A couple of years after that, I started hanging out with another girl from high school, and we mentioned seeing people around town from our graduation class. I mentioned seeing Chris. She gave me a blank look and said, "You saw who?"
I confirmed, "Chris Jones, you know, short dirty-blond hair, kinda tall, skinny guy." She paused, and what she told me next made my blood run cold. She said, "He died the summer we graduated." I was like, "...wait, what? No way." She explained that he went down to the local lake, was doing some illicit substances, fell off the boat, and drowned. I later asked my other friend who had dated him in high school if this was true. She confirmed.
So the guy I saw casually crossing the street was apparently a dead guy.
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26. He Gave You A Shout Out
My story isn't scary, but it’s pretty freaking unexplainable. I'm walking through the main station of BART one day. For those who don’t know, BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. It's the train station that takes you to and from San Francisco and elsewhere, where an average of 375,000 people pass through on a daily basis.
I walk up the escalator to my train, and pass by an envelope lying on the ground. At first, I didn't think much of it, but I took a couple of steps back to pick it up anyways. The next part freaked me out. I looked at the address, and it was addressed to me. I instantly look around to see if it was a practical joke, or if I was about to get attacked or something.
Neither of those were the case. The sender was a family friend. We'll call them the Johnsons. I knew that Mr. Johnson took the BART daily, but I had never personally ran into him there. After work, I call him up and ask him about the letter. Turns out, he had about 300 letters with him on the BART, and was going to send them out for his daughter's graduation party.
What in the world are the chances of him dropping the one letter addressed to me out of the 300 in his briefcase, combined with the chances of me being the one out of 375,000 people to pick it up? Pretty wild.
27. And It All Came Crashing Down
Many times when I sleep in a certain room in my house, I will wake up seeing a dark figure across the room facing me. Its presence never fails to wake me up immediately. Also, twice now we have heard loud crashes coming from the downstairs kitchen while we were all asleep upstairs. And when we rush down to see what happened, nothing is there. There aren't any close neighbors either.
28. Oh, You Beautiful Doll!
When I was younger, around seven years old, I started getting glass dolls from my grandmother every year for Christmas. I didn't particularly like them, but I set them up in my room anyway. After about three years of this routine, I had accumulated about 10 of them in total. The most recent one I got was dressed up in Native American attire and looked eerily like me.
For context, I identify as Native American. Something about this doll just gave me the creeps, so I put her behind the rest of the dolls in my room. They were in a row of seven and the other three were behind them. I woke up the next morning and made a disturbing discovery. The Native American doll was now in front of a redheaded one, as if they had got up and switched places.
I was a very freaking superstitious child, so I pulled her from the group and set her on my bed with a pen and paper. I then told her that I knew she was alive and that she should write something on the paper before I got back. Crazy, I know. I went downstairs for a few hours and when I returned, the doll was on the floor along with the pen.
The paper was on my bed, still blank. I wasn't taking any freaking chances, so I put her in the dumpster outside. I thought my nightmare was over—I was so wrong. The next morning, I wake up and all of my dolls’ heads are facing to the right, even though they usually face forward. And at the end of the line of dolls, the Native American one was sitting where they were all staring, facing forward.
I freaked the heck out and tore her apart, limb by limb. I then put every limb in a different dumpster, then gave every other doll back to my grandmother. My mom never believed a word of it and this is my first time recanting the experience to anyone else. And I have goosebumps as I type. To this day, if I see a doll in someone's home or even a store, I try like heck to stay away from it. Freaking dolls…
29. The Time Had Come
When I was in sixth grade, my grandfather passed. I was in English class, sitting in the front row and doing my classwork. All of a sudden, I felt a strong kick in the gut. Whatever happened, it was forceful enough that it made me bend over my desk in pain and brought me to tears. But it went away as fast as it came, and I was just fine a moment later.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the clock in the back of the room, and it was 10:35. I went home at the end of the school day and found out that my grandfather (who I was very close to, as my grandparents had raised me) had passed at around 10:35 that morning. By no means am I a religious man, but I really wish I could have an explanation for what exactly happened that day.
30. Picture Perfect
This doesn't really apply to me directly, but still. There was this guy who I used to work with, called Dan. Dan was a chill guy who everyone got along with, but he was also a little bit weird at times. He used to believe in a lot of strange things, such as aliens, ghosts, government experiments on everyday people, etc. The whole lot of out-there conspiracy theories.
He wasn't a religious man, but that's beside the point. Anyway, while messing around at work one day, he's explaining some stupid things to us about how he's seen spaceships, and how all this paranormal stuff happens to him whenever he's at home alone. Some of it sounds quite ridiculous, but I listen anyway and enjoy the fascinating narratives.
A couple of weeks later, he invites me around for a few drinks. I was driving, so I couldn't really drink, but I still went over to hang out. After some time, we get onto the subject of ghosts and he starts explaining things to me, like how he was once eating an apple and it exploded just as he went to take a bite. I laughed it off and thought it could have just been some sort of pressure with the way he was holding it that caused it to 'explode.'
He was completely serious about this. He pulled out a few pictures of this apple and started showing me the damage it had done to him. There was a picture of him with a cut on his cheek caused by this 'apple.' However, I was still not convinced of this ghost that he allegedly had in his house. He was not messing around, though.
He said, "Hold on actually, I'll show you!" He pulls out this shoebox, full of pictures from around the house. He says "Just flick through those, you'll see." I sigh and say "... okay." I'm going through these photos of a recent Christmas. The usual photos. Kids opening presents, the family having Christmas dinner, having a few drinks at night, a group shot, etc.
Then I stop. This was the photo that left me in awe. His family was standing in front of this mirror, and I kid you not, in the reflection of the mirror was an Edwardian girl, smiling straight at the camera. This was not one of those 'could be a smudge' type of things. It was not a 'hidden behind someone’ or ‘can barely make it out’ type of things either. No.
This was a clear, full color, legitimate, and high-quality photograph, with the girl's reflection being black and white. You could make out her face, her smile, her clothes, her hands, everything! It doesn't end there though. Dan says to me "I told you I wasn't kidding you!" I go on to the next photo. Same sort of thing. Family members have moved around, and so has the girl.
She's doing a different pose now. She's smiling and showing her teeth. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There was this black and white girl, standing right inside the mirror, smiling at me. Like she'd be there the whole time and wanted me to know it. I felt like someone had just thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over me. Like I was being watched.
Like I wasn't welcome anymore. And I suddenly felt like I needed to leave that place. I put the photos back in the box and not long after that, I left and went home. I still don't believe in ghosts, aliens, or anything of that supernatural sort. But I know what I saw in those photos and I know it scared the heck out of me.
31. The Most Popular Guy In Town
This one is not necessarily paranormal per se, but I guess this falls more under the general "unexplainable" category. Anyway, on the same day, I was recognized by at least five different store clerks and people on the street, none of whom I had ever met or seen before. I was just grocery shopping, running errands, etc., and they would come up to me and say hello as if I was supposed to know who they were.
The first place I went was to the corner store to pick up a snack. I walk in and the clerk says: "Hey, you're back so soon!" I had never been to that corner store before in my life, so I told him this. He acted very surprised, and claimed that I had come in earlier that day. The next place I went to was the exact same deal. An employee who was stocking things at the grocery store said he had rung me up an hour or so before, then the cashier greeted me with a "Welcome back" when I was checking out.
Later that same day, at the phone store, I was asked if my phone was still giving me problems, because apparently, I had come in half an hour ago complaining about problems with receiving text messages. The employee claimed that me and this other version of myself even had the same phone. As I walked out, a jogger ran past me and proclaimed, "Hey man, funny running into you again!"
I didn't stop him to inquire further, as I was a little confused at this point. Then, later that night, while I was waiting for the bus, a random woman approached me and just struck up a conversation as if we were old friends before realizing I wasn't who she thought I was. After saying this out loud, I realize how mundane it might sound to some. But to me, having lived through it, that was easily one of the weirdest days I've ever experienced.
If it wasn’t something supernatural going on, then either it was a huge coincidence or I was the target of one of the most elaborate and subtle pranks in history. And the prankster still hasn’t revealed himself.
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32. The Fool On The Hill
I have two crazy stories related to this subject. In elementary school, I used to walk home with my best friend and then walk through a few people’s yards up a hill in order to get to my house. I was walking up the hill one day and saw a girl walking ahead of me, in my yard, with long, braided, light brown hair. I thought it was my neighbor, who wore her hair like that a lot.
So, I shouted out "Hey! Alexa!" But she didn't turn around. Figuring she just didn't hear me, I started to run to catch up to her. The view between her and myself got interrupted by a tree for a split second, and when I passed it, woosh! The girl was gone. There was nowhere for her to go, considering that I didn't have any trees in my backyard.
So I assume that either I was just hallucinating or it was a ghost. I can’t think of any other way that a fully vivid, living version of my friend could have just appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared into thin air like that. But I know what I saw! The second story just happened to me a few days ago. I had just bought a pair of new earrings, but the cubic zirconia piece in one was poorly set, so it was very loose.
I was in a friend's dorm later in the day when I realized that the gem was gone. I was very upset, because now the earrings I had just bought were totally ruined. The next day, I was sitting at my computer in my room, and all of a sudden I felt something fall into my lap. I looked down, and there was the earring piece! I have no idea how it got there.
It must have quite literally “fallen from the sky". I see no other way that it could have just appeared like that. No one ever finds little gems like that when they go missing, they’re too tiny. That’s why I hadn’t even bothered to actually look for it when I discovered that it was missing. But apparently I didn’t have to. Neither of these experiences make any sense to me in hindsight.
They were both very spooky things to experience.
33. Behind Closed Doors
I work in a restaurant and, one afternoon at about 3:00 when business is typically really slow, I had gotten an order and needed to go into the walk-in cooler to get something to make it. And as I walked around the line and looked down the hall at the walk-in door, I suddenly saw a tall figure with a white t-shirt, gray cloth shorts (like gym shorts), and dark tennis shoes walking into it. And then the door closed behind him. I had no idea who it could have been.
Initially, I thought it must be a bartender who worked there at the time, because he was a tall and slim-ish guy. So I figured he was just grabbing some drinks to stock the bar with before the dinner shift began. I headed down the hall and opened the door. I then reached for what I needed and turned towards where the drinks were stored.
I was planning to say something to my co-worker, but nobody was there. I then looked the other way. Still nothing. I thought it was really weird, but I just grabbed what I needed and went out and finished my day of work. It wasn't until the next day when I thought about it deeper and I realized that I could have actually been in that walk-in room with a supernatural apparition of some kind.
That door was the only way in and out of the room, and I remember seeing the figure so clearly. Clear enough that I can still vividly recall all the details about it that I was just able to describe to you here. I tried to get my manager to look at the camera footage that would have been covering that general area at the time, but he just blew me off saying that ghosts aren't real and that I was full of it.
But this wasn’t just like a normal objection to a request. He somehow seemed really against the idea of looking into this. Like possibly he didn't want to know if it was real or not, and would rather just pass it off as my imagination. Or maybe like he knew something about this and didn’t want me to find out. It was a very, very strange experience for me.
And the worst part of all is that it never occurred to me to talk to any of the other managers that worked there about it, to see if they might be more willing to look at the video than my immediate manager was. This thought didn’t occur to me until after many months had passed, and the video was definitely long gone by that point.
I know for a fact that I saw that door close behind that figure. I just don't know if he had opened it himself or if someone else had opened it and then it closed slowly after they had walked out. So yeah, there you have the story of my one and only paranormal experience. I still have no idea how it could possibly have been anything but a real, legitimate ghost.
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34. Even Ghosts Have To Do Their Business
As far as haunted houses go, mine is pretty intense. We have had several experiences over several years, but this one is my favorite of them all. It all started when I walked in from the garage door one day with my brother and sister. At our house, there is a door to your left when you come in that is the downstairs bathroom that leads to a bedroom.
That bedroom happens to be my bedroom. So we are all talking and coming through the door, everything normal, when all of a sudden the bathroom door loudly SLAMS shut. The lights come on in the bathroom and we could suddenly hear the sound of a woman's voice yelling “OUT!!” At first, I believed that it was just my sister and that we must have walked in on her when she was using the bathroom.
But I quickly realized that this was not the case. I go around the house to the other door to the bedroom and enter. The lights are out and the window is locked from the inside. I go to check the other door leading to the bathroom. That one is locked as well. Despite there not appearing to be anyone in the bathroom, I could clearly hear the sweeping motion of feet, as well as seeing a shadow appear to be pacing back and forth on the floor.
I use a coat hanger to unlock the bathroom door after screaming for whoever it was to answer, and announcing that I was armed. I believe I had a large metal rod in my hand, just in case things got ugly with who or whatever was inside there. I turn the knob and then open the door. A huge wave of cold air floods the room from the bathroom.
But no one was there. My sister was at a friend's house, I quickly confirmed. The house was completely empty and locked up tight. I have no idea what kind of presence had created the sounds and sights that came from the bathroom that day. All I know is that an elderly woman passed in the house in the late 1970s. My room was her former room, because it was handicap accessible.
So I have my theories about the connection to that. But at the end of the day, who really knows for sure?
35. Your Guess Is As Good As Mine
I was out watching the stars one night, and saw a light looking like the ones you see on airplanes. But this one was moving in a square formation. It was too dark to see exactly what kind of vehicle the light was attached to, but the light was moving repeatedly in the same location for a while. Then, I saw how the vehicle started moving away.
The sudden speed increase made me think that it could not possibly be an airplane. I then pondered whether it could perhaps be a helicopter. But if that was the case, it must have had a rather large square platform beneath it with a rail or beam for the light to follow. So that theory didn’t make sense or seem plausible either.
I can’t say I definitely know what I saw in the sky that night, but to me the most obvious explanation is that it was some kind of alien spacecraft. My second story isn't as mysterious, but I simply can't explain except for me being extremely lucky, to the point where it doesn’t make sense to have happened. When I was much younger, I once fell from a third-floor balcony, and crashed face-first onto a gravel path.
But I was completely fine. I walked away with absolutely no bruises, scratches, or injuries at all on any part of my entire body. Not even scuff marks on my hands or knees. To this day, every time I think back on that accident and try to make sense of it, I can literally come up with nothing. It was either some abnormal freak of nature scenario, or something supernatural stepped in to keep me alive.
36. The Man Of The Hour
I have a mystery man in my house. My husband and I for a time slept in separate rooms. He would often come into the room that I was in in the mornings to get clothes or socks. I would be aware that he was in the room, but I generally just ignored it because I didn't want to wake up yet. This was a fairly regular occurrence that I had gotten completely used to after a while.
Then, a few times, it seemed like he was just standing there. I woke up to the awareness of someone standing there. Of course, I figured it had to be my husband. It ticked me off mildly, but each time I just dozed back off and forgot all about it. It was no big deal in my mind, just a weird little sensation that I had noticed.
After one particular episode of this, I was very upset because my husband had apparently been standing there for some time and I thought he was supposed to be at work already. I opened my eyes and there was a man at the end of my bed. But it wasn’t my husband. I have no idea who it was, actually. It took me a split second to process what I was witnessing.
And then I literally screamed and jumped up as fast as I could. But just like that, the man was gone without a trace. I finally confronted my husband about a lot of those times that I thought it was him standing and hovering over my bed silently while I slept, but it turns out it wasn't him. That spooked the heck out of me.
My husband and I eventually ended up getting a divorce for a number of personal reasons. But the mystery man has still stuck around. I don't really get a sense of malevolence when he’s there, just a general feeling of being watched. And I know that it definitely isn’t sleep paralysis, because I can fully wake up and control my body even while it’s happening.
Hey all you parents out there, you know when you're asleep and your kid comes into your room wanting something and you know they're there before opening your eyes? This feels exactly like that. I have sat up or opened my eyes many, many times in the morning, expecting to see one of my kids, but only to see the mystery man instead.
It's the same man every single time. Tall, slim, dark hair. Kind of an impish look to him. He's actually quite handsome. His features are quite pleasant. He always seems to be smiling mildly.
Over the years, he has scared the heck out of me on multiple occasions, though. If this is a recurrent dream, it really sucks and I wish it would stop happening.
But there’s more. I have also noticed that he's been slowly moving from the end of my bed up to the side, near my head. There is nothing like opening your eyes and looking right beside your head expecting to see a five-year-old child, and then instead seeing a pair of long, adult legs that go way up above your eye level. And then you see this man looming over you, and that vision continues to vividly endure even for a flash after switching the light on.
I swear I'm going to have a heart attack one day as a result of this. The last time I saw him, he did something that I had never seen him do before. He was right near the head of the bed again. But this time, when I opened my eyes, it was like he had been waiting for me and he leaned his face in until he was literally eye to eye with me.
He had a huge grin on his face, and his face was maybe only about six inches away from my face. I screamed my head off and scurried away, then I turned on all the lights. It was terrifying. Again, I don't get any sense of malevolence from him per se, but being a single woman alone in my house with my children, it's very much a sense of "WHY IS THERE A MAN IN MY HOUSE AND WHERE IS MY MACHETE?" for me.
I don't know if it means anything or makes any difference, but I've actually sat there and talked, hoping that whatever this creature is would hear me. Especially after the last time, I have made a point of giving this communication attempt a serious shot. So I sat there in my room and said out loud that if anyone wants my attention, that's okay.
But I added that this is not the way to do it, and that “You're scaring me". I haven't really had scary problems ever since making this announcement, and it has been around six months since then at this point. There has not been one incident with the mystery man in all that time, positive or negative. Which only reinforces my belief that he is some kind of supernatural ghost.
But there’s one more thing. I found out that my grandma apparently had a mystery man in her house as well. Not quite the same way, but she definitely believed she had one. And she wasn't someone to lie or over-dramatize things. She apparently often claimed that she’d see this man watching her in broad daylight in her home.
Similar thing, she thought it was an intruder. She didn't actually stop and question it until after he was gone. I wish she was still alive so that I could ask her more about her experiences with this. I do remember hearing about somewhat similar things as a kid, but I remember it as being a much more benign or even positive thing.
Back then, I would feel like I had someone sleeping with me in my bed, only to then find that there was nobody there. Yet it vividly felt like someone was. I just thought my stuffed animals must have come alive at night or something, because I was only a kid at the time and not capable of really examining the situation at any deeper level than that.
I'm trying to choose to think of it as some sort of benign and possibly hereditary guardian if any of this stuff is actually real. I have had some terrible, terrible things happen to me in my life and a consistent theme in my dreams and my sleep is me feeling completely loved, but without quite being able to recognize where the source of that love is coming from.
And then I wake up feeling deeply loved even when nobody in my life really does love me. I don't know if I truly believe any of this stuff, but if there really is any guardian out there that does this stuff for me, I am forever grateful. Either that, or my brain is just really good at fulfilling my subconscious needs in my sleep. In which case, thank you brain!
37. Take Off Your Coat And Stay A While
I may be late to this party, but screw it. I live in a haunted house. I don't mean haunted like Amityville Horror or something like that. But our house is almost 100 years old, and we have a ghost living in it. No ands, ifs, or buts about it. Our first clue to this being’s existence was shortly after we first moved in, when some money I had laid on my bedside table suddenly went missing inexplicably.
My significant other didn't take it, the dogs didn't eat it, it hadn't fallen under or behind the table as far as we could tell. It was just there one minute and gone the next, without a trace. I ended up finding the money several months later, when unpacking a box from our former apartment. The box was still sealed with packing tape, and the money was in the middle of the pile of papers and other stuff in the box.
Again, this sealed box was from our former apartment, where we had lived before moving into this house, yet money that had gone missing after we moved into this house was somehow buried deep within it, protected by many layers of tape. And for those of you wondering how I know it was the same money, nice try. I know it was the same money because of the order of the bills and the way it was folded, neither of which was usual for me.
A coworker had paid me back for something and done it that way, so I hadn’t had any other pile of cash folded that way at any other point that I could remember. And it was the exact same amount that had gone missing from the table, too. That was the first sign that something wasn’t 100% normal in this house. But it certainly wouldn’t be the last…
The second incident involved the ceiling fan reversing. The thing straight up stopped and started turning the other way while I was watching. Not like slowed down, either, but stopped completely in its own tracks. Then, I "saw" the ghost one night. My significant other swears that I must have been dreaming, but I know that I was wide awake.
When I saw him, he was hanging a hat on a coat stand in the hallway (where we don't normally have one). And he looked right at me. I could see him clearly. He seemed to sort of glow or be illuminated from a light somewhere nearby. And I can describe him in detail to this day, right down to the fashions he wore, his mustache, and even his tired but kind eyes. Somehow, I also knew his name.
His spirit seems to have somehow telepathically informed my mind that his name is Phillip. Since then, he sometimes makes mischief. My dogs seem to see him at times, too, and he occasionally has fun playing with their ball, even in the backyard. He makes winds, plays with the fan, and even leaves footprints from time to time.
If he's annoying or frightening us, we just firmly say: "Phillip, please STOP that!" And he always does. I don't mind him. I sort of like him, actually. He does not seem to have any bad intentions of any kind. I have looked for records and clues about who he might have been during his lifetime. But as best as I can piece together, he appears to have rented a room here during the Great Depression, so they weren’t really keeping any paper records that I can take a look at.
38. A Familiar Face
I've always wanted to share this story, but I’ve never had a good opportunity to do so until now. I used to work the intensive care unit night shift back in my service days. For those who have never experienced one, you should know that hospitals are always creepy at night. But that never really bothered me—until one terrifying night.
I had a patient that was on the outs, and we were expecting for him to pass that night during our shift based on how his condition was looking. The rooms in our ICU had glass partitions and curtains, so you could see the patient next door. This is about 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning, and while I'm in the next room over, something on the periphery suddenly catches my eye.
There is a man leaning over the bed, and his face is just inches away from the one in the bed. I'm looking on in disbelief, and I eventually realize that this second face is the same person as the one in the bed, and he is literally staring at his own body in the bed. Thinking I'm losing it, I come around the partition to see if it's a coworker in there, and no one is in the room.
Maybe an hour or so later, the fellow passed on. To this day, I can't really explain that experience naturally, no matter what way I try and look at it.
39. You Light Up My Life
This story is about the only time in my life that I have ever experienced something unexplainable and had another person there to back me up so I didn't feel crazy. The fact that it was my girlfriend who confirms what we saw really drives it home for me, because I know that she is the person who would take the first chance she gets to call me crazy for any reason.
Me and her would occasionally go outside to look at the stars and, on this particular night, instead of driving out somewhere, we were lazy and just laid on a blanket on my back patio in Southern Pennsylvania. The night was super clear and it was during the summer. As usual, we were there for about an hour and didn't see any shooting stars.
Then, this one light appeared. In the night sky, it looked about the size and brightness of a star, maybe slightly bigger like when you can see a planet. It seemed like it was more orangey or yellow than the typical white star you’ll see in the sky, but whatever it was it was clearly very far away. At first, I thought we had finally seen a shooting star and could go back inside feeling satisfied, because the bugs were starting to bite.
Now, imagine laying on your back, and picture the following. The object started from behind the dogwood tree by my patio in my upper left field of view. My feet were facing away from the house and I would have to tilt my head back looking upside down at the house to see it. From there, it moved slowly to the center of the sky.
Then it stopped. A complete stop. And then, before I could even process this development, it suddenly changed directions at a breakneck speed and went across the dome of the sky toward the horizon back behind the dogwood. We each said nothing. Seconds later, it was back, moving crazy fast. And then it stopped cold again, before making a 90-degree turn.
At this point, it went very slow. And then it accelerated insanely fast. And then it stopped again. It just kept doing this over and over again in random combinations and orders. It moved so unnaturally. The sudden extreme changes in speed and direction scared me, if I’m being fully honest. I had never seen anything like it before.
There is nothing on earth that moves like that. It wasn't a firefly or a bug in our face or a searchlight or anything like that. Its actions were way too irregular to be any of those. It was up there with the stars. It ripped across the dome of the sky toward varying points in the horizon, then would be out of sight for a while and then come back.
It just kept coming back. Finally, we broke the silence. We turned to each other wide-eyed and I said something along the lines of: "Umm, do you see what I see?" She just replied: "Yeah. Wanna go inside?" To which I replied: "Yes, please!" And then we spent the rest of the night racking our brains and trying to make some sense out of whatever the heck we had just seen.
For the record, neither of us were under the influence of any kind of substance, nor have we ever been. We saw this light. It was there. And it was waaay up there. None of this is in question, as far as either of us are concerned. If you saw the perspective of how far away it was, and how unrealistically it moved around, it would send chills down your spine like the ones I get from typing this story out and remembering all the details of the incident.
I hear lots of stories about strange lights that people see in the sky, but I have yet to hear one that fits precisely with the object that I witnessed that night. Has anyone else out there ever seen something like this? Any time I hear about someone else who had a UFO sighting now, I immediately want to compare notes with them. I would give anything to know what that thing was.
40. I Saw The Light
I'm a non-believer in anything supernatural or paranormal, but no one else in my family shares this point of view with me. In fact, many of them are very big believers in the supernatural nature of various weird things that they’ve experienced in their lives. A lot of their stories I’ve just chalked up to sleep paralysis, etc. But this particular one is my mother's and, as far as how it plays out in my head, I cannot think of any logical, natural explanation of any kind.
The story goes like this. When my mother was about 13 or 14 years old, she lived in Thailand with her family. They lived in an apartment building on the seventh or eighth floor. She was playing on a Ouija board with her brother and two other Americans in the evening, so the sun was still out and there were people walking out on the streets near her building.
Obviously, when engaged in this kind of activity, people naturally start asking about their thoughts on ghosts, demons, and what have you. After a while of scaring themselves with their own ideas, a red glowing orb, like some kind of strange entity, becomes visible and starts to float in through the seventh-story window. This catches everyone’s attention, to say the least.
This mysterious thing hovers in the middle of the room for half a minute or so, and then disappears entirely. All of them practically poop their pants from fear, and ran out of the room to where the adults were. As often happens, the adults sensed nothing wrong and thought they were all just lying or imagining things. And that was the end of that.
To this day, more than forty years later, neither of the witnesses relent at all about what they saw. Not even a little bit of doubt in their voices when the topic comes up. I see my uncle regularly, and he has the exact same story as my mother. Down to every last little detail. It makes no sense to me, but I simply can't believe it was a demon or Satan or some stupid thing like that.
But I honestly can't think of any rational idea that could explain away what would cause something like that. So alas, I am stuck in the unenviable position of having to wonder about it for the rest of my life, probably with no clear answers coming at any point in the foreseeable future.
41. Run For Your Life
When I was a lot younger than I am now, I once went over to a buddy’s house for a little sleepover party. His mom came down randomly while we were chilling and one thing led to another, and before we knew it we were into a full-blown conversation with her about a whole bunch of random topics. At one point during the conversation, she started telling me about some freaky stuff that has allegedly happened to the family over the last couple of years.
My buddy Justin's younger sister has some kind of mental handicap, though I’m not sure exactly what the nature of it is. When his mom was telling us stories, she would just giggle in the background and keep looking behind us. His mom told us a story of how one night their fire alarm went off randomly in the middle of the night and the doors were all opening and closing by themselves.
Once this commotion all stopped, they found a picture of her father face down on the ground. The frame was completely smashed to pieces, even though no other pictures had fallen off the wall. They found out later that night that her father had just passed in his sleep unexpectedly. Later that night, after I heard that story and another about how my buddy had always complained about a man appearing at the end of his bed, I was freaked the heck out.
There were three of us total in the room after his mom had left us to try and go to sleep after hearing those stories. Yea, like that was going to be possible! He had a pull-out couch and we set everything up for bed. One extra mattress was going to be on the floor and the second would be on the pullout. My friend Kyle was freaking out, standing against a bookshelf and looking toward the open basement.
Meanwhile, me and my friend were looking beside him at the TV, trying to convince him to lay down and take it easy. He kept saying “Screw that, I wanna see if some ghost is coming!” He had his blanket wrapped around him, just staring out blankly to see if anything spooky would happen. Me and my other friend eventually got fed up and we were like “Screw it, let’s go to sleep".
Just as I got up to turn the light out, I leaned over the edge of the bed and reached out to turn the switch. And before I hit the light, something happened that I still can’t explain. The TV suddenly shut itself off and the lights turned out by themselves. It scared the absolute heck out of me. I immediately jumped back into bed and I saw what looked like my friend with the blanket run into the darkness.
At the same time, my other buddy just grabbed me and screamed. Then, as things calmed down a bit, I said to my other friend, “Where the heck did Kyle (the friend with the blanket) run off to?” It finally hit me that he had just run out of the room in someone else’s house and never come back. But before either one of us can even process the question, all of a sudden Kyle comes out from under the bed.
He claims that all he did was hit the ground when the lights went off, and that he had never run out of the room. But that’s not what I saw. I told them I swear on my life that I saw someone in a white sheet type of thing run out of the room towards the darkness. And I still stand by that statement to this day. As you can probably guess, they were both pretty freaked out at this point, and I was pretty freaked out too.
And I could not leave the basement at this point because the exit was in the path of whatever ran away, so I just kept the TV on for the rest of the night and never went to sleep. My friend’s younger sister claimed to have a name for the ghost. Apparently, to her it was a little girl named Jodie. Just goes to show that this sort of thing really was a fairly frequent occurrence for the people who lived in that house.
42. Skeletons In The Closet
I have only had one potential paranormal, supernatural, or unexplainable experience in my entire life. And I truly never expected to hear myself say that. I am quite a stereotypical skeptical type of person in a lot of ways, but this incident has always left me wondering. And to this day, I still have no logical explanation for what I experienced that day.
So here goes. My first ever overseas holiday was to Vietnam. I went for two weeks and I would later return and stay for a year. I loved the place. Anyway, on my first visit, I was about a week and a half into the trip when my tour guide (who has since become a very good friend of mine, and remains one to this day) offered for me and my friends to have dinner at his house.
We agreed to take him up on this offer, and we had an amazing meal that gave us some real insight into Vietnamese life and the culture of the country. His house consisted of a total of three rooms. There was a bedroom that doubled as a living room, there was a laundry room with a toilet at the side of it, and there was a storage room off to the side.
Now, an important detail to be aware of before I go on any further is that this house only had one door. It was in his bedroom/living room. And the house had a total of three windows, one in the bathroom and two in his living room. The storage room had none. No doors. No windows. This is the full truth and we are 100 percent certain about that.
Anyway, back to the main story. So we have just finished dinner and are talking, when all of a sudden I hear a series of strange noises. There were very clear footstep noises coming from his storage room. And when I say that they were very clear, I mean so clear that there could be no doubt whatsoever in any of our minds that someone was in there.
My friends and the owner of the house heard it too. The house owner was kind of surprised, as you could imagine, but he kept his cool. He gets up and starts talking in Vietnamese. He calls out in the general direction of the storage room: "Hello? Who is that? What are you doing here? Please come out and identify yourself." We all watched intently, in intense fear and suspense.
But as soon as my friend said all that, the footsteps disappeared. A few seconds later, my friend decided to check things out more thoroughly. He walks into the storage room and we all follow closely behind him. We were in central Hanoi, so I was worried that it may have been an intruder and that this situation could quickly be getting dangerous. I proceeded with a lot of caution.
Anyway, we go into the room and there is no one there. Nothing. No sign of anything at all. It is then that I am reminded that there are no entry or exit points to or from this room except the one that we are standing in and had never taken our eyes off for even a second since hearing the initial sounds. To get into or out of the storage room, you most certainly would have had to walk right past us during the meal.
So we discuss this amongst ourselves and, the more clear it becomes for us that what we just thought we witnessed is completely impossible, the more we start to get a little concerned. We are all male, so eventually, this discussion turns into your typical macho nonsense and silly joking around. We continue chilling out and he plays us his favorite records.
Somehow, we managed to shrug it off and chalk it all up to some kind of misunderstanding. Amazingly, we were able to forget about it for a while and just continue on trying to enjoy our evening. That is, until my friend started to put his records on to play for us. At around this time, we suddenly all hear the sounds again.
And this time, it is past the point of undeniable. It is so obvious and so darn clear that we all spring up and get ready for a fight of some kind. The owner runs outside and gets his neighbors, who were all chilling in the street. He explains to them what was going on, and they come running in to try and help confront whoever or whatever is in there.
So here we are. Three Australians very far away from home and scared out of our minds, along with about five Vietnamese people who we’ve never seen before but look ready for the battle of the century. We gather around the entrance to the storage room and the noises are still going on, very clearly there for everyone to witness and hear.
At this point, the footsteps have picked up the pace a little bit and sound as if someone is jogging on the spot quite briskly. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Over and over again. The neighbors can't believe it as we whisper to them that this is the second time it has happened during the course of the evening. We count to three and run in all together.
When we got inside, we immediately noticed that the cupboard door was now wide open and the contents of it were strewn around all over the floor. But nothing else. No animals, no people, nothing. We were all overwhelmed with fear. Even the neighbors who had just joined us were bouncing around in shock. Every single one of us knew that something was in there and now it was gone without a trace or an explanation.
And we all knew beyond any doubt that something was terribly wrong and not normal about this whole situation. So we decide we can’t just leave the room again and ignore it. We absolutely tear this tiny storage room apart, leaving no stone unturned. We check the two cupboards. Nothing. I check the boxes in the room. Nothing.
We look at the ceiling. Nothing. There was nothing to be found. This was a room no bigger than your average bathroom’s size. There were no windows and no doors leading outside. If someone was in there, they would have literally had to squeeze past us in order to leave the house. No matter how hard we tried, we were unable to find anything unusual in the room or come up with any logical explanation for the noises or the mess that we had witnessed.
Jump forward a few years and my good friend the tour guide has now left that place, gotten married, and became a father. We still to this day occasionally talk about this incident, and we still have no idea what the heck happened back there. It was by far the strangest thing that I have ever witnessed in my entire life. I still vividly remember running in and seeing his cupboard open and spewed into the ground and thinking "Holy heck, it's on for young and old!"
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43. A Perfect Score
My grandma's sister used to get beat up by her husband. My grandma looked him in the eyes and said something so disturbing, it’s impossible to forget. She told him: "He who hits his wife will lose his arm." Two weeks later, he blew his arm off in a freak hunting accident. Also, when she was a kid, she was walking with her father and they saw a friend in the street.
As they were approaching him, a crow landed on the friend's head. My grandma looked up at her dad and said his life would be over soon. The friend passed that very night, in his sleep. I know it's not exactly a ghost story, but it's pretty darn paranormal if you ask me…
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44. Not In My House, You Don’t!
The guy who bought my late grandfather's house turned out to be the son of one of my grandfather's least favorite people in the entire world. This is not to be taken lightly, as my grandfather liked practically everyone he ever met. I have no idea what he thought of this guy’s son, or what he would think of him living in the place he used to call home.
Anyway, a few weeks after the guy moved in, he called my uncle all upset because he thought he was being haunted by my grandfather. He'd been hearing strange noises from the rafters and in the attic. My uncle, who could barely contain his laughter, told the guy that the house was built in the 1600s and has had a mouse problem for years.
He then suggested that the fellow either go get a cat or call an exterminator, whichever he prefers. And that was the end of that. He called an exterminator, and presumably, the problem was solved as he never mentioned it to us again. But deep down, I'd still like to think that it was all Grandad, and that he is currently looking down and laughing his butt off.
45. It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s...
I’m a pilot. One time, I was flying my plane like any other day and I suddenly saw this bright orange glowing thing hovering over the trees. It was kind of bouncing around like if you had a ball on an elastic string and you just bounced it around and what not. Anyways, since my course would have brought me near it, I asked Air Traffic Control if they saw anything on their radar, to which they said no.
They asked me what I saw, so I described it and they said they weren’t showing anything and were not aware of any activity in the area that could explain it. The thing shot straight up and disappeared, so I told them it was gone. They asked me if I wanted to file a UFO report, to which I said heck no. I joked that it was probably just a weather balloon, then I continued on my way.
I know it wasn’t a balloon, but I don’t want the FAA questioning my sanity for claiming to have seen a UFO. What freaks me out is that we as humans know so very little about the ocean, but relative to us, the ocean is still pretty finite. What is behind the blue sky we see above us is practically infinite, and we know even less about it than we do about the water. Really makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
46. Let’s Lock The Door And Throw Away The Key
About a year ago, I was at my dad's house taking care of the dog for the week because he had gone camping with some friends and my sister. Meanwhile, my wife was also away. She had gone to Colombia to visit her family for a month. My in-laws asked me to take care of their dog while they were gone, and I of course said yes.
So there I am, first night alone at my dad's house with two dogs who had been playing together all day. I decide to go to bed around 10:00 in the evening, so I go to lock the front and back doors. I make sure that every door in the house except for my bedroom door is closed, and I go to sleep. At about 12:00, I suddenly hear the dogs freaking out.
They’re barking and whining like mad, so I jump out of bed and go to check on them. On my way downstairs, I make a seriously terrifying discovery. The back door is unlocked and open. I look down at the dogs and they are both staring at the basement door, whining and growling while laying in a puddle of their own pee. I see that the basement door is open.
So I get the emergency number ready to be called on my phone, and I go downstairs. I search around for a while, not even sure what I am looking for. Until I decide to go back upstairs and clean off the dogs. At maybe 1:00 in the morning, the dogs are finally clean and no longer focused on the basement, so I make sure the basement door is latched and I go back upstairs after double-checking that the back door is locked as well. I thought it was over—but it was just the start of my ordeal.
At about 2:00, I once again hear the dogs barking and freaking out, so I run downstairs. Once again, I see the back door wide open. The basement door is wide open too, but this time both dogs are staring out the window and looking into the backyard. So this time, I do not bother to go downstairs. I just close the door, and then I run to the back door and I close it and lock it as hard and as fast as I can.
I then went back upstairs and did not sleep for the rest of the night. But both dogs slept on the bed with me. After about a week, my dad gets home and I ask him if we can watch his home security cameras for that first night I was there. I had to wait for him to get home because I had no clue how to work it, but he had no objections.
As we are watching the footage, I am just looking to see if anything or anyone even went near the house during the night. Oddly enough, there was nothing. The only weird thing is that at around 12:00 and 2:00, the back door randomly flings open with nothing going in or out. But the scary part is that from a different camera in the house, we can clearly see me lock the back doors every single time.
We have had no issues with the lock any other day before or since then. No idea what happened there…
47. The Man In The Mirror
When I was younger, I lived with my gramma. Her house was, to say the least, freaking spooky. We would hear noises at all hours of the night, and not just the house creaking kind of noises. What we heard was much more terrifying. It was more like people talking in hushed voices in odd rooms in the house. We heard dogs barking in our basement, even though we didn't have dogs at the time.
But the one memorable story about this that I have is that I went to the bathroom late at night, and the bathroom mirror faced our dining area. So, walking into the bathroom, of course I look into the mirror, and looking into it, I saw something that made my jaw drop. There was someone standing at our dining room table. Old, old clothes, long white hair, and a very dressy type suit.
I turned around to look and didn't see anything. Needless to say, I slept in the bathroom that night because screw that thing.
48. Sister Act
I’ve been waiting for some time to tell my story. Let me tell you, keeping this to myself has been a special kind of torment. If I ever tell this to an actual person, they would undoubtedly call me crazy or schizophrenic or something. Maybe writing it down somewhere, anywhere, will help to set it straight in my head. Perhaps someone out there reading this can help me out with a reasonable explanation that I’m just not seeing.
A little background context: when my sister was in utero, she was originally part of a set of twins, but “swallowed up” her twin as the pregnancy went on. It’s called a “Vanishing Twin". This will later become relevant to the story, so bear with me. My sister (let’s call her M for the purpose of simplifying the story), has always had trouble with sleepwalking.
My mom has had her examined by several specialists. It’s that bad. They’ve only ever eased the problem temporarily, however. She sleepwalks on average about ten times a month. At the time this story took place (about a month ago or so), I was home from college for the weekend. I often stay up late at night, and decided to relax a little and watch some TV before going to bed.
It was about 1:00 in the morning, I’d say. I was lying on my side watching my show with headphones on. I could see the hallway in my peripheral vision. When I next looked up, I suddenly noticed my sister standing in the doorway. Her eyes were half-closed. She looked like she was sleepwalking. I took my headphones off and saw her slowly walking towards me.
When she got close, I felt my stomach clench and got the most intense feeling of dread I’ve ever experienced. She didn’t look like my sister. Every facial feature was slightly off. The way an identical twin doesn’t completely resemble the other twin. What gave it away weren’t her physical features, though. It was her facial expression.
She had this smile on her face, is what I’d guess you’d call it, since the corners of her mouth were turned upward. It didn’t look like any smile I’d ever seen, though. It somehow encompassed every awful, evil feeling I’ve ever experienced, read about, and imagined feeling. It made me think she was going to start screaming at any moment, and never stop.
Every single hair on my body was raised. She was just staring at me. I noticed, dimly, that her eyes were wide open now. She didn’t look like she was sleepwalking anymore. Eventually, I managed to say her name, in an attempt to get a response out of her. What she did next still haunts me. She then stopped smiling, and said, “No. I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I’m Annie".
I think I was actually paralyzed with fear when I heard that. Somehow, eventually, I managed to scream and shove her away. My parents came crashing into my room. They thought someone had broken into the house. When they turned on the light, I knew it was M standing next to me again. Her face looked completely normal again.
She was awake at this point. She blinked a bit and said she couldn’t remember coming to my room. The reason I was so freaked out was that just a few years ago my mom had told me about the fact that M had absorbed her twin in utero. But she also told me that she had kind of morbidly considered what she would have liked to call her second daughter. She told me she would have called her Annie.
49. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
My story may not be scary, but it’s definitely freaky and unforgettable. It has to do with my identical twin brother. He was living with my dad in the DC area and I was living on the other side of the country. At about 1:00 in the morning, I had the most vivid dream, where I was freezing cold and looking up at the stars, and something was very wrong.
I somehow knew it was my brother. The dream shook me so much that I felt I was wide awake, and scared. Oh well, just a dream. I'll watch some TV to calm down and go back to sleep. The next morning, I see that my dad is calling me. So when I answer, I have no idea what possessed me, but I say, “Dad, before you say anything, I know something happened with my brother".
He told me that my brother ate a bottle of Ativan and washed it down with a lot of hard drinks. They found him in his underwear on the hood of his car looking upwards. Remember, in my dream, I was freezing and looking up at the stars. Luckily, they found him in time to save his life (which he eventually took years later, tragically). But there is no way to explain the dream and the connection I felt with him that night.
50. There’s No Place Like Home
Growing up, I lived in a haunted house that my dad just recently finally admitted was messed up. I have read these posts before and have always wanted to post this story, but I never have. Now, I think it's finally time to share my experiences. When I was little, my parents divorced and I went to live with my dad as he was moving to a new town.
We ended up buying this big house out in the country outside of a little podunk town. This house was huge for just the two of us, but it was right on a little pond with an island, so it was cool. There were other houses around, but it was basically surrounded by cornfields. This fact scared the heck out of me because the movie Children of the Corn had just come out.
That movie still terrifies me to this day, and I am as old as can be. Anyway, bizarre stuff started happening almost immediately after we moved in. On Halloween, my dad and I bought this huge pumpkin, carved it, and put it in the front window. We went out of town one night, and when we came back that thing was smashed to pieces in the middle of the living room floor.
It was at least 10 feet from where it had been sitting earlier. I didn't think much of it because my dad played it off, but I heard him on the phone with his new girlfriend later that night saying how freaky it was. Yea, he moved on pretty quick after mom. He’s a straight player. Anyway, weird and random noises happened pretty much every night and we just grew used to it over time.
Even voices started to appear, but my dad always told me it was just the house settling. I have never heard any other house say the name "Jeffrey" when it settles. Yet that was what I would always hear someone calling out. But then there are two particularly messed up instances that happened to us there. They were so bad that scared us into selling the place.
Even years later, my dad still talks about how it freaked him out. First, there was one night that we had a really bad storm. I was 10 years old, so my dad was done letting me crawl into bed with him anymore. I had to brave that out on my own. Anyway, at about 3:00 in the morning as this storm had been raging on for a couple of hours, we suddenly hear this loud BOOM from the first floor.
Both of our rooms were on the second floor. And then we hear glass shattering. My dad yells at me to stay upstairs and he goes down to investigate. He came back up 20 minutes later and tells me to go back to sleep. Turns out our basement window had been blown out by the wind during the storm. The freaky thing was that all of the glass had landed outside the house.
Not one shard inside the room. He got it fixed the next day and never mentioned it again. But then, there was the second big incident. We had a pull-down attic that was in the hallway between my bedroom and the bathroom. One night, I woke up to go to the bathroom. As I was walking down the hall, I ran into that freaking hanging attic door.
My dad was sound asleep in his room, so it freaked me out. However, as I was walking back to my room after my bathroom break, I ran into that freaking attic door again. I heard some rustling going on up there and figured dad was up there, so I walked past the attic toward his room. But he was in there, snoring. I freaked out and told my dad.
He got up and turned on his bedroom light, all angry at me. We both looked into the hall and, even though the hallway light was off, we could tell that the attic was now closed. My dad was angry. He told me to go to bed and turned off the light. To this day, I still turn on every last darn light upstairs in my current house whenever I have to pee. Much to the dismay of my wife.
We moved soon after and I have never gone back to that place. I probably never will.
Sources: Reddit,
