They could be strokes of luck, happy coincidences, or just plain scary experiences you just can’t explain. These are moments where you can feel incredibly blessed or cursed! Even if you’re a skeptic, these true but unexplainable stories from Redditors will send a chill up your spine and make your blood run cold.
1. Running On Empty
Way back in 1996, I had just dropped out of university and moved back home to my parent's place. My tail was firmly between my legs. I had almost no money and absolutely no job prospects. What I did have was an old Jeep Comanche with all my belongings in the back and 200 miles to go. I borrowed $20 from a friend for gas and started the trip.
I got to a point that was 30 miles from home, and realized that the gas tank was empty. I pulled into a gas station/rest stop and sort of cried for a minute in my truck. I needed $5 for gas to make it the rest of the way, but I had nothing. There was no way I could call my dad and ask for help. He was already so disappointed.
After a minute, I started searching around my truck for change. I opened the glove box, and there were these paper 'loyalty bucks' for a gas station that I never used. It turns out it was the same gas station that I was stopped at. The vouchers were worth $4.70. I found another $2.00 in change, put $6.00 in the gas tank, and bought a coke.
I made it home. Fast forward 20 years, I had sorted my life out and am a lawyer. That gas station hired me as their outside counsel. I got to tell this story to the president of the company.
2. Spooky Song
My cousin's daughter is four years old and an absolute sweetheart. But she also has a kind of eerie side. She says she talks to our dead grandpa all the time. One time my cousin caught her singing along to my grandpa's favorite song, giggling and running around the room. She asked her what she was doing, and she said, "I'm playing with Tata, and he's teaching me a song."
She got so spooked because there's no way her daughter could have heard it anywhere as my cousin doesn't like to listen to it. After all, the song reminds her of him, and it makes her sad. It’s also an old tango that you have to search on the internet to find. There are other things about her kid that are straight-up weird, and everyone is convinced she's a medium or something.
3. Weird Kid
So one night, I'm driving home from a friend's place. It’s pretty late, like two or three in the morning. I live in the suburbs, and I am driving pretty slow. I'm nearing the turn to enter my house, and from a distance, I see what looks to be someone outside. Pretty unusual this time of night as it's all young families and retirees around me.
As I get closer, it's a kid which is even stranger. Doesn’t this kid have parents? He’s standing directly under the street light with a raincoat on (it wasn’t raining) and hood up over his head so that the shadow cast completely covers his face. I know my neighborhood pretty well, and while I don't know most by name, you know who has kids and who doesn't.
This corner house doesn't have any kids. That kid’s gaze was locked onto my truck, unwavering, turning his head and staring straight at me as I slowly passed, turning right towards my house, this kid only a few feet away. This kid did a full 180 with his body and watched me drive down my street.
It was super unsettling. I couldn't even quite explain to you the feeling I got from it. I backed into my driveway, put my truck in park, thought about what I saw, and said I’ve got to check this out. I put the truck back into drive and went back down the street. It was maybe 20 seconds since I passed and the kid was gone. Vanished.
The roads are straight enough in any given direction that a kid would have had to sprint to stand a chance of being out of sight in that short amount of time. So the demon child is gone. I went home, parked quickly, and didn't take my time getting inside and locking the door. To this day never saw the kid again or anything that's given me a bad vibe like that. If it was a prank, hats off, you did it, kid.
4. Heavenly Bodies
When I was younger, like barely able to speak, I was sitting on the floor playing with some toys nonchalantly with my mom. Suddenly, I just said to my mom, "When I was in heaven, I met a woman who said you'd be the perfect mommy for me." I held the belief that I was in heaven before being born, and an angel looked at me and chose the mom I went to.
My mom asked me to describe the woman, and I described my mom's great-grandmother, perfectly down to the eye color. I had never met my great-great-grandmother nor seen a picture of her.
5. An Uplifting Experience
When I was about 12 years old, I went to Lake Tahoe with my friend and his parents, who had a condo in Incline Village. One day, the two of us walk to the bowling alley and cross a street at a crosswalk. Right before we get to the curb, a car comes close to hitting us. All of a sudden, we're both up on the curb, like we were somehow lifted a few feet.
We both looked at each other strangely. "Did you jump?" "No, did you?" "No." We spent the next hour kind of dumbfounded. It didn't feel like a shove or any use of force. We were still in the street. Then we weren't.
6. Sick Day
When I was 10 years old, I didn't want to go to school one day. I faked a stomach ache so my grandmother would let me stay home. I’ve always been a lousy liar, so my grandma tried to call my bluff. She told me if I were too sick for school, she would be scheduling me a doctor’s appointment. So I went. It was still better than school.
Little did I know, my life was about to turn upside down. Three hours later, doctors rushed me into emergency surgery. My fake illness was actually appendicitis, and It was so inflamed that if I hadn't come in that day, my appendix would have ruptured, potentially ending my life. I felt 100% fine that day. Faking sick saved my life.
7. Have You Seen This Belt?
I once was changing pants in my room before work and took off my belt. After putting on my other pair of pants, I went to put my belt back on, but my belt was gone. No one else was in the room, and I spent a good 10 minutes looking for it as I had simply set it on the floor. It’s been 10 years, and I’ve never seen that belt again.
8. Mystery In The Sky
I was about 18-20 and in the backseat of a car that was going down the highway. It wasn't windy in the slightest. We're going between two large hills and atop one of the hills is what looks like an all-black hot air balloon kind of thing, but not made of cloth or fabric. It was metal and had no basket, and it has no sunlight shine/reflection, like a black matte color.
There was no wind, but this thing is moving like you see UFOs zip around in movies. It's going 100 mph all over the place in different directions and turning upside down and sideways super fast. Several cars pulled over on the side of the highway, with people outside gawking at it. We didn't pull over, but mom and dad also commented that they had no clue what it was and had never seen anything like it before.
My dad tried rationalizing that it was a fallen weather balloon, but it looked nothing like a weather balloon on Google Images. Someone else I told this to said it was probably a broken hot-air balloon, but this was very clearly not made of anything flexible like cloth. It was very stiff and not 100% of the same shape. I still don't know exactly what it was and the whole experience still weirds me out.
9. Voice Of Mystery
I’m a firefighter, and we got a call for an O.D. around 3 am to a rough part of our district in the middle of winter. Unfortunately, the patient was long gone, and her dealer or whatever found her like that when he dropped some stuff. This is a trashed mobile home. As we were packing up our stuff, I felt a chill run down my spine. I heard something down the hall that said, “Lights?”
I ask my partner if he said anything as it was just him, and I clean up. He said no. I walked to the far end of the trailer, where I heard it and shone my flashlight. I get a reflection out of the window. They have a small tool shed, and it has a flickering light. It piqued my interest, so my partner and I went out there. We hear crying and notice the door is padlocked.
We cut it, and this little six-year-old girl was in there. She said her mom puts her in there when she gets mad at her. She said she was scared when she heard the sirens and didn’t know what to do. To this day, I have no idea what happened or where the voice came from, but I’ll take the win on it.
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10. Timing Is Everything
I'll never forget witnessing this moment: In my physics class last year, we were split up into groups and working in a lab. A guy at another table let out a yell while extending his arms and fell headfirst off his chair. The very second in between his cry and hitting the floor, a beeping started going off in the room, followed by the words “an emergency is happening in your building. Please evacuate at the nearest exit.” and accompanied by flashing lights.
The guy has a seizure on the floor, so all we’re focusing on is getting him help. A campus officer comes in and tells us the rest of the science buildings have already evacuated for the fire alarm. Most of us leave to give some space to the people helping the guy. While outside, we’re talking amongst ourselves, absolutely baffled by the coinciding events we just witnessed. Did the flashing of the alarm trigger epilepsy?
No, because he was already on the floor by the time the lights kicked in. Was there some kind of sensor on him that alerted when his body was experiencing an emergency? No, because it was his first seizure.
Just reading it might sound lame, but witnessing it and working out what was happening in real-time was slightly eerie.
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11. Hit And Run
A car going 50-60 kph hit both of my knees in 2008. It was 100% my fault, I wasn't paying attention when I crossed the road. Not only I didn't have any broken bones whatsoever, I didn’t even fall. I did cringe quite a lot, though. My knees and leg hurt for about two days, but I really can't explain how a car going relatively fast hit me. It only got me to have barely more than a couple of bruises.
12. Playing With Grandpa
My grandpa passed, and after about a year or two, my baby brother went looking for him in my grandpa’s old room My parents thought I was with him, as he was laughing and babbling, and seemed entertained, which knowing him, would be if someone else was there. But I wasn’t with him. I was in my room. And my parents were downstairs.
Thirty minutes go by, and my parents start looking for him and find him just there. He’s not playing with anything in the room and just lying there. Now, he still goes into that room. He was looking for him. I wonder if he had seen his ghost or something like that.
13. Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty
I was at a friend's house. The friend was in the garage, working on a dirt bike. The driveway was empty because his parents left a while ago. I go inside to grab a soda but decide to look for his cat, which I haven't seen all day. I walk into the office, and as I’m calling her name, a deep man's voice goes "meow" right into my right ear. I jumped and ran around the main floor, looking for who said that. I didn't find anyone.
14. Someone’s Toying With Me
This one is strange to me because it was so long ago, and I'm convinced I have to be remembering things wrong. I was a young kid at the grocery store, and I saw this toy helicopter that I wanted for some reason. I, of course, didn't buy it, but the memory of it stuck in my head. A few nights later, I had a dream where I was playing with the helicopter, but I realized it was a dream, and stupid young me thought that if I put it under my pillow, it would still be there when I woke up.
After that, I woke up and eagerly checked under the pillow to get it. For some reason, it was right where I left it in the dream. As a kid, I wasn't surprised to find it there as it all made perfect sense to me then, but years later, I have no clue how the toy helicopter got underneath the pillow.
15. Icy Patch
I hit a patch of black ice in the dark going 100 kph down the highway. At the time, I drove a 1-ton cargo van. It hit the guard rail and flipped. Here's the eerie part: Not only did I walk away without a scratch, but the car was also drivable, and I was only 30 minutes late for work.
16. The Forest Through The Trees
I had just gotten my car serviced, oil changed, tires rotated, and pumped up the works. A week later, I was driving home from a family party, and my back passenger tire exploded while I was in the far left lane of the highway. I tried to veer off to the left to hit the guardrail so I wouldn’t spin out and hit anyone to my right, but I spun out anyway, across the entire highway and about 50 feet back into the woods.
I must have driven through 20-30 large trees, right between them. I was sure this was it. I was a goner. But the car finally stopped, and I walked away without a scratch. They had to call a crane to get my car out of the woods. Firefighters, paramedics, state troopers, everybody came and asked where the victim was. I said, “Right here,” they looked utterly dumbfounded. No one else got hit either, thank god.
17. Weekend Dreaming
When I was younger, in elementary school, I used to have the same dream every weekend. Starting on Saturday night and then waking up in the middle of the night on Sunday and throwing up. The dream was always a bunch of numbers. Not even anything was happening, just a bunch of random jumbled-up numbers all over the place.
I never understood why that happened where the same dream would happen on the same night every week, and I would throw up every single time. I always think about it and wonder what it was or if it was just some weird coincidence. Also, I would not have any signs of being sick before or after. Maybe someone else has experienced this?
18. Mysterious Memories
I have a vivid memory of being at the as a child, on my dad’s shoulders, seeing the skyline of New York City. I remember what we ate for lunch that day, etc. I remember the ferry we took. I’ve always thought about this memory and talked about it, but my family denies I ever went to NYC. I didn’t go for the first time until I was 23, but strangely enough, when I went, I remembered everything, just how it had been when I was there with my dad.
19. Unwelcome Roomie
A few years ago, one of my friends went off to a college in California. She spent a few semesters in the student dorms there and felt it was really expensive. So she found herself a townhouse, I think, which had a separate entrance to her living space. It was a little distance away and she would commute every day to and from her classes and she'd stay gone for most of the day.
In the first week, she started to notice some signs. Her clothes on the floor in the morning when she would clearly remember she'd left them on a chair, water spilt on the floor in her living room, shower which never seemed to dry entirely, and little things missing here and there. I remember we used to joke about how she was getting old and forgetful during our calls.
However, this one day she comes home to a broken cup that she swore was a new one, and she never used it. She thought her place was haunted. Later that day, when she talked about it on a group call, most of us said she is paranoid, and a broken cup was not a sign enough that her house is haunted. This one guy did recommend that she record the house while she was gone.
She took his advice, did a bit of research and decided to buy a camera for her front door and some cheap motion sensor camera for her kitchen and living room. The door camera got delivered first, and she set it up immediately while the rest of her stuff was due to be delivered the next day. The following day, she goes about her day like she always would, gets back home, and checks to see what the camera captured.
The footage absolutely terrified her. She sees two events. One video captures a guy leaving the house and the other, the same guy getting back into the house. The second video was captured just a few minutes before her viewing. She freaks out as one would expect and gets out of there. She called the Sheriff who came in and got this guy, who was LIVING IN MY FRIEND'S APARTMENT WITHOUT HER KNOWLEDGE.
There was an attic door of some sort which my friend never opened and that gave access to the place from the roof. He would wait for my friend to leave, then get in the house, take a shower, pour himself some coffee, help himself to something from the refrigerator, get out if he needs to and make sure he comes back in before my friend gets back, which used to be pretty late in the evening.
This incident scarred her, and she chose to move back to the dorms soon after. When she was packing to leave, she found a pillow and some blankets in her bedroom’s walk-in closet, which she never saw when moving in. That freaked her out even more because she believes that dude must have spent several nights in the closet while she slept on the bed, and she never knew.
20. Shot In The Dark
About five years ago, I was out with two friends. At the time, this group of friends liked to party hard, as did I. We were a few years out of college, living in a resort town. That night, we went out to dinner and then went to a bar. We all did a round of shots when we got to the bar. Immediately after the shot, I felt like I needed to throw up.
It was odd because I didn’t have much at dinner, and I was very accustomed to taking shots. This was a very bizarre reaction for me. I had been driven there by one of my friends, but I immediately decided I needed to leave, so I got a cab, went home, and felt completely fine when I got home. I would usually have been out until 4 or 5 a.m., but I was home by 11 p.m.
I watched TV and went to bed, but the whole night, I had a weird feeling. I woke up the next morning, and the two girls I was with had been in a car accident. The person driving was texting, and she hit a huge telephone pole. The pole fell onto the car, almost splitting the vehicle in half. Neither of them was harmed, but if someone were sitting in the back seat, they would have potentially been dead.
I am 100% certain I would have gotten into that car and likely would have been sitting in that seat. I don’t drink and drive or get in a car with anyone who attempts to drink and drive anymore.
21. Under Lock And Key
In my teenage years, I lived in a townhome owned by my then-stepdad, who freely admitted that he thought the place was haunted. He was self-employed as a sound equipment installer and often would come and go during the day and my mom worked 9-5 at a lawyer’s office. It was summer break, but I wasn’t driving yet. I spent a lot of time outside, and this was before the time everyone had a cell phone, so I’d often take our cordless home phone out with me.
I went outside one day and realized I’d forgotten the phone. When I tried to go back inside to get it, the door was locked. Not the handle, which I may have written off as something I accidentally did on my way out, the deadbolt. The handle freely turned, but the deadbolt was engaged. The deadbolt requires a key to lock from the outside, which I did not have.
I stood there, dumbfounded for a few minutes. Nobody else was home, and the only other entrance to the house was a set of sliding doors in the basement that were always locked. What just happened? I kept trying to open it like an idiot for a while before finally resigning to borrow the neighbour’s phone and calling my stepdad.
After asking me if I was sure 1,000 times, he was in town and came by to unlock the door. I’ll never forget him saying, “Yep, the deadbolt was completely thrown. I can’t explain that.” I spent the rest of the afternoon inside, trying to recreate the situation. I slammed the door shut so many times in an attempt to get the deadbolt to wobble and lock itself. But it never did, and honestly, I didn’t expect it to.
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22. Imaginary Friend?
To this day, there was a kid in my class that no one else remembers. I distinctly remember playing with this kid in kindergarten, and we were pretty much inseparable. About a month past Christmas break, he disappeared. No one remembered him. Not the teachers or the others in my class. No one. I even asked the school counselor if he was okay, and she humored me by going through records to see if he’d transferred. She couldn’t find a thing.
I think about this at least once a month.
23. Who Was Down The Stairs?
Soon after I got my driver's license, I started staying late after school as I was in theater and had rehearsals. One afternoon, I had about 30 minutes between class and practice, and I drove home to get a snack. When I got there, my mom was at work and my stepdad’s van was gone, so I assumed he was gone as well. The door was locked. Now when you walk into this home, right in front of you to the left is the kitchen, the right is my bedroom, and the middle has a staircase going downstairs.
I unlocked the door, came inside, and turned into the kitchen with my back to the stairs. As I was making a sandwich, I heard someone downstairs. I turned back around, and the staircase door was open, the stairwell light was on, and someone was downstairs. At the time, I thought, “wasn’t that door closed when I got here?” but I also rationalized because my stepdad's van was a cargo van, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to borrow it to haul things.
So I assumed he was home, he lent out his van, and I went to the top of the stairs. I stood there, looking down the stairs, eating my sandwich and I almost said something. It was almost out of my mouth, but something stopped me. I still don’t know why I didn’t yell down the stairs. Instead, I turned around and left, and I left the door unlocked because he was home, right?
When I got back from practice, my mom was mad because Jay said he came home around 5 p.m. to an unlocked house. He had a lot of expensive equipment in the basement. I was always supposed to lock the door. I tried telling her what I’d seen. He was home at 4. She said he wasn’t. I swore he was. Someone was home. My brother believed me, but my mom never did.
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24. Random Stranger
A few years ago, I was at my lowest point in life. Several people close to me had passed unexpectedly. I was being bullied every day at my job. My life was falling apart. I was past being depressed. I could barely imagine waking up another day. So I started planning to take my own life. I bought a one-way plane ticket, got sleeping pills, and wrote a series of notes explaining my actions to my loved ones.
On the day I was to fly out to fulfil my 'plan', there was a terrible accident on the freeway to the airport. It was shut down both ways. So I drove into a nearby pub to wait out the traffic. The second I sat on the patio with my drink, a gentleman asked if he could sit with me. Whatever, I thought, sure, who cares. But I couldn't be prepared for what he told me next. He told me that whatever I was doing next was a terrible idea, and I would regret it.
He said that he sensed I was in pain but that I had an incredible life ahead of me and that this was not how my story was supposed to end. Again, I'd never met this guy in my life and hadn't mentioned a word to him about my 'plan'. He asked me to hand him my keys and my wallet, and he'd give them back to me after I talked, and he listened.
I poured my heart out to this random guy. I told him all my traumas and pains in life and why I was heading to the airport on a one-way ticket to kill myself in a cemetery across the country where my family was buried. He just listened. And then he pulled out a lighter, asked me to pull out my goodbye letters and helped me burn them.
He told me I was worth so much to the world, and that after I finished my drink, I needed to head home and get some sleep. He told me I was going to be okay tomorrow, and I believed him. He then gave me my keys and wallet back. I left that afternoon and went home, hugged my family. I got some sleep - and the next day, I started working on myself - finding a therapist, and a new job.
Years later, I'm in a fantastic place in life, so, so far from where I was that day. To this day, no one in my life knows how close I came to ending it. But this random stranger just somehow understood me. He saved my life. I never saw him again. I don't even know his name. It's the most unexplained thing that has ever happened to me. And I think about that guy every day - so, thank you, kind stranger, for saving my life that random September day on a pub patio.
25. Deadbolt Dread
I lived in a trailer in my early 20s when I was poor with two young kids. It had two bedrooms, which I’d given to the kids, and I slept on the couch in the living room, which was in direct line of sight to the front door. I put the kids to bed around 9 p.m., and I always locked the door. Always. To this day, I still clearly remember locking both the handle and deadbolt and checking to make sure it was fully locked before taking a shower.
Eventually, I fell asleep. I woke up suddenly around 3 a.m. on high alert. As my eyes cleared and I started thinking sensibly. I realized I was staring into the street. My front door was wide open. Not like, oh it’s a little open or cracked, or I didn’t quite close it all the way, and a strong wind came along. It was fully open, like a 90-degree angle here. Plus, I had a glass storm door that was fully closed and latched, blocking any wind we might have had.
I got up and walked to the door to close it, and that’s when I lost it. The deadbolt was still in the locked position. It was fully turned to lock, sticking out into the living room air for everyone to see. Have you ever had those moments where you swear there’s ice in your veins? That was it for me. I’ve never been scared like that in my life.
In a closed-door, you can’t even turn the deadbolt to “fully locked” without it being lined up in the door jamb properly. I knew I’d locked that door. And yet, here it was, staring me in the face. I didn’t sleep without the lights on for a week.
26. Hand It To You
My girlfriend got out of the shower and called me into the bathroom to show me one of our mirrors. There was a very strange, distinct handprint placed on the mirror. I lived alone, and she was the only adult that had been to my house in about two years. We each placed our handprints on the mystery handprint’s sides for reference, and neither looks anything like the mystery print. I still have no idea how it got there.
27. A Strange Presence
My sister used to live in the penthouse of a Tudor-style home built in 1910 that my parents owned. One day after getting out of the shower, she saw wet footprints from the shower to her bedroom. The door was locked, and she was the only one in the apartment. Years later, I had moved into the basement of the five-story home as our parents offered us cheap rent to keep us close.
I was chilling with my dog, a Labrador, in the living room, and suddenly, she got up to look above the fireplace mantle, which was just a blank wall. All of the hair rose on her back, and she growled, showing her teeth. The moment I said, ‘what’s wrong?’ She went ballistic and wanted to tear apart whatever she was looking at. It took all my strength to get this 65-pound dog out of the room to calm down. This happened twice.
A few months later, in the afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, which was in the next room to the living room. No doors were separating the spaces, just a large archway. And I started to feel a chill, and that something was in the room with me. I looked over to my left, and hovering right above the daybed against the window was this clear as day foggy orb. I wasn’t scared. I felt a calming nature about it all.
It was so clear that I got up to walk over to it, which was at the height of my chest (I’m 5’9" tall) and slowly ran my hand through it. When I did that, it had dissipated, and I never experienced anything odd in that home again. We always used to have weird vibes about the place, but it never felt threatening, to be honest, just that something else was there.
28. Yay For Yellow Cups
When I was in primary school, our school had all these cups filled with milk every lunch in the cafeteria. Red, green, blue, but only one yellow cup. Everyone would fight to get the yellow cup like it was the holy grail, and it had been this way for years. One night I had a dream that the cafeteria had gotten more yellow cups in, and low and behold, there were hundreds of yellow cups the next day.
29. The Boogeyman
I had a sleep paralysis nightmare when I was a kid, where I saw a red-eyed dark figure standing in the doorway. It's always stuck with me, and I've called him the boogeyman ever since. One day, I browsed Reddit, and came across a post that chilled me to the core. Somebody painted a picture of their "sleep paralysis demon". It was like the guy had painted my exact dream. And then a bunch of people commented that they had seen the same creature. It always makes me uneasy.
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30. Just Breathe
Both of my lungs collapsed at the same time (almost over 50% collapsed), and I was walking around like I was perfectly normal...until I decided to go to the ER for bubble sounds in my chest. None of the doctors could figure out why this had happened to me. They didn’t know how I was just up and walking around and laughing.
31. Falling For You
When I was in college, a dude fell from a third-floor balcony and got up and walked away like it was nothing. Seriously one of the weirdest and freakish things I’ve ever seen in my life.
32. Quite Alarming
I was reading on an internet comment thread about a guy who was hallucinating weird stuff. One commenter suggested that he check for a carbon monoxide leak. The commenter probably saved his life. I went to bed thinking, “Oh yeah, I never did check whether my new house’s smoke alarms also detect carbon monoxide. I need to check that out in the morning.”
At maybe 6 a.m., my wife and I awoke to our fire alarms screeching, with a recorded voice telling us carbon monoxide was detected. We grabbed the baby and the dog, piled into our car in the driveway, and called the fire department to check it out. They told us no carbon monoxide was detected after they tested, but sometimes fire alarms behave unexpectedly when their batteries are low.
This was maybe five years after moving into a new construction house, so yes, I was super delinquent in checking it. It wasn’t even the first time I’d read that kind of story on the internet. Anyway, there is absolutely a logical explanation: an improbable but possible coincidence. But that’s how I ended up spending huge piles of money on a bunch of Nest Protect units, so I could at least get a pleasant phone notification when my alarms’ batteries are low.
33. Thinking Of You
Several times a year, I'll suddenly get a thought that it's been a long time (usually months) since I last spoke with a particular friend or relative, then I will get a voice call or an email from that person within a few hours. I can’t explain it. I never tell them about this because I fear losing this strange thing that I have. Anybody else has this?
34. All Shook Up
I have very vivid and intense dreams. One night when I was around 13 or 14, I was dreaming of a safari hunt for T-rex dinosaurs, and we had to save a golden idol from pirates in the jungle. A strange dream, but during it, while running, everything suddenly stopped. I saw myself face me (not sure how to phrase that), and I said, "Wake up! Everything is about to shake, and you're in danger. Wake up!"
I woke up instantly and sat up, confused. Roughly 15 seconds later, my boxer puppy woke up and started whimpering and whining, and the rabbit I had started hopping in his cage. Seconds later, an earthquake occurred. It wasn't huge but strong enough to knock several photos down. It also knocked down a shelf mounted above my head.
It was made of a very thick type of wood and on it was a collection of random "prized" items, including a quart jar filled with sand and shells, several large books, a heavy figurine, etc. Sufficient to say it was quite heavy. When it fell, it fell directly onto my pillow, where my head had been a moment before. I hadn't ever felt an earthquake and live in a northern Midwest state that rarely gets quakes strong enough to be felt.
I have had other dreams since that foreshadowed events, but that was the only one that immediately happened. It still gives me chills.
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35. Lucky Rabbit’s Foot
I lost a jacket at a roller rink when I was in third grade. I had a lucky rabbit foot in the pocket that I bought at the skate shop inside. Months later, my mother, who is adopted, found her birth mother and her half-sister. The first time I went to my newly found Aunt's house, she said she had a jacket that might fit me. It was my jacket, rabbit foot still in the pocket.
Long story short, I lost a jacket at a roller rink when I was in third grade. I had a lucky rabbit foot in the pocket that I bought at the skate shop inside. Months later, my mother, who is adopted, found her birth mother and her half-sister. The first time I went to my newly found Aunt's house, she said she had a jacket that might fit me. It was my jacket, rabbit foot still in the pocket.
36. Cold And Dark
I was walking to work one early winter morning, and about 30 feet from my house, it felt like it got significantly colder. I zipped up my jacket and kept walking. About a third of the way to work, the light where I would cross went out. It just went from green to dead. I thought, "Weird, but I got work to do." With no sunlight anywhere, a street light way ahead of me went out at the halfway point.
I stopped because as it flickered before dying, it made me uneasy. I stood for less than a minute, and all the streetlights in front of me, starting from the closest to the first light, started flickering and going out, and it was only the ones on my side of the road. At this point, I said nope, turned around, went home, and called in. I heard sirens later in the morning but was not going to investigate.
It has been maybe five years, and it still freaks me out when a street light suddenly flickers and goes out.
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37. Intruder Imagined?
My dad owned a small garden shop, so I'd stay behind the checkout after school till the shop closed. Or I should say that I did until a chilling event made me too afraid to go back there ever again. One day, I saw a tall man wearing all black, like a trench coat, walking past my dad and smiling at me before going into a staff-only area. I jumped up to stop him, even though I was only seven years old.
The back area was filled with new shipments and in my little kid brain, I didn't want this guy stealing anything. I didn't even realize the risk to my own safety. So I turn the corner, but nobody is there. There was nowhere he could've gone. I ask my dad to check the CCTV after closing, but it's only shown me jumping up and running out of frame. Weird stuff never felt comfortable there again.
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38. Deadpan
One time when I was little, I had fallen asleep on the couch and woke up in the middle of the night. When I got up to go to the kitchen, I saw a black silhouette of a woman with a bun and glasses, and she went into the kitchen and heard all of the pans fall. I rush into the kitchen. No one is there. Everything is in its place. I know I could've imagined the figure, but I can not explain the sound of the crashing pans, and no one else heard it; they were all asleep.
39. A Prior Engagement
I turned to the other person in the room, who I barely knew, and said, "My sister is getting engaged right now," without really realizing what I was saying or why. He politely asked why I said that, and I had to shake my head and say, "I don't know." A few days later, I found that, sure enough, at that exact moment on the far side of the world, she had said "Yes" to Mr. Right. I hadn't even known she was dating.
40. Have A Seat
When I was 10, I had a radio and a bean bag chair in my room. As I was starting to fall asleep, the radio suddenly changed the channel multiple times before I heard the bean bag chair in my room slowly fold in on itself making the noise a bean bag chair would make if someone were to sit in it. Not sure what caused this, but it certainly freaked me out.
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41. House Of The Paranormal
When I was younger, we lived in a 110-year-old Victorian house. Everyone would notice weird things. I was home alone organizing the silverware when I dropped a fork to the table only to have it bounce once and fly at the wall as someone slapped it. I still have no idea how you can drop something straight down and have it launch horizontally.
My parents, when they first bought the house, turned off all the lights (five floors if you count the basement and attic). My mom did the top two. Father did the bottom. They met in the middle, went to the first floor, left, got to the car and noticed not only was the third floor light on, but the blinds were now up. That’s just the beginning of the eerie things that happened there.
We had a seesaw. My mother turned on the light and saw it violently going up and down. Another time, I was in the basement and felt a hand brush down my back. I jumped and turned and saw no one there. I convinced myself it was just my shirt moving weirdly. As I went up the steps, I heard giggling. When I was older, I was sitting on the couch and heard my dad say, "Watch out!" right before a framed puzzle fell on me. My dad said he saw it lift itself off the hook.
We had a Mastiff, a rottweiler, and a German shepherd. They refused to go to the attic. Our entrance had two sets of doors. The front doors, then a small room, then the second set of doors. We never locked those doors as two large bolts went into the floor and then a third bolt that held the two doors together. Closing it was very hard with a key, so you could only do it from the inside with considerable force.
We came home one day and the door was locked with all three bolts. In other words, our completely sealed house was somehow locked from the inside. My mother flipped, grabbed us, and ran to a payphone to call the local law enforcement agency because if that door is locked, then there is someone in the house unless they left via a second or third story window.
Three cars came. They unlocked the door with my mother’s key and swept every last inch of the place down to one of them going into our crawl space. Nothing. Not only that, my mother’s gold necklace was laying on the table, and all the windows were locked. We had a family friend who is a constable spend the night. The next morning everyone gets up, and my uncle notices the door is again locked from the inside. We removed those locks that same day.
My mastiff was laying next to me while I was watching TV. Suddenly he jumps up and backs into me. He's growling and snarling while staring up the steps. The other two dogs run in and immediately have their ears go back, and their mohawks go up. This went on for several minutes. Our German shepherd started inching toward the step and did a little lunge, nipping at the air bearing his teeth.
Years later, my parents divorced. I’m with my dad for the weekend. I helped him clean the third floor. We put the toys in a large toy chest from the closet they were in. While we were brushing our teeth, I went pale. I heard something, so I shut off the water and asked my dad to listen. We both are completely quiet. The sound starts again.
It’s the sound of clink-clink but a bit of rhythm to it. I couldn't place it at first, then said, "Dad, I think that's the xylophone" we went up, and the toy chest is open, and the xylophone is on the floor.
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42. Telepathic Siblings
I have a 40-year-old younger brother. I knew he was happy. I called mom, and she confirmed that he had started dating a hospice nurse he knew. They had known each other all their lives, and they finally got together. A few months go by, and they get engaged, and he moves in. One day, I woke up laughing. My husband woke up, and I told him why.
I told him my brother had knocked up his girl. A month later, my brother calls me and tells me he needs my advice on something. I simply say to him that he should have listened better when he got "the talk." Blew his mind.
43. Dream Or Reality?
So when I was a kid, I slept with my bedroom door open because my cat liked to cuddle me. Our hallway was just a round hallway, and I could see the bathroom door and my parent's bedroom door (though it was dark, it was in view). I also slept with my lights on but dimmed. One night, I can't sleep for some reason, and that’s when this weird thing happened.
I called out for my mom, and I saw her standing near my doorway, kind of turned away from me with her hand on her face and her hair draping. I know it's her because she slept in an oversized purple t-shirt that night, but she's entirely still. Static. Mind you, I’m wide awake. I might have been watching TV before this. When I call out to her, she doesn't move at all.
And then blink. She's gone. I start freaking out and calling out to her for real, and that's when I hear their door open and close, and my mom rushes to my aid. I think she slept with me all night, or I stayed up all night watching TV to soothe myself. I started sleeping with my door closed out of that, and I don't look too carefully in the darkness.
44. Missing Time
I used to fence. I was at a tournament and had just started a bout against a competitor. You win the bout by being the first to five points. I scored what I believed to be the first point, but then, all of the sudden, the official indicates that the entire match is over, and that I've won? I stood there confused for a second, but my opponent seemed to agree.
He salutes and approaches me for a handshake, so I go along with it. I check the scorecard, and it says I've won 5-2. I lost probably four or five minutes. It hasn’t happened since, to the best of my knowledge, but it's been 20 years, and I still wonder what happened.
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45. Demon Child
When my daughter was little, we kept encountering these strange coincidences. Every time she would get upset, something in the kitchen would randomly break. It happened way too many times to be coincidental, and the things that broke did so in inexplicable ways. I clearly remember one instance very early in the morning standing in the kitchen, telling her she couldn’t have cake from the night before.
She immediately looked angry, and I heard a weird “plink” sound in the cupboard. I opened it to find the plate on the top of the stack was cracked in several places. There were no signs of this in later years. She’s 24 now, and I often allude to this and remind her boyfriend not to make her angry.
46. Right On Cue
I was walking between bars in a college town and felt something hit me in the back. I turned around and saw a cue ball rolling down the sidewalk. I then spent the next five minutes walking up and down the street, trying to figure out who threw it or what the heck happened. I never found anyone, and I still have the cue ball.
47. Wave From The Grave?
When I was a child visiting my grandma's house (my mother’s mom), I'd wave next door to her neighbor Ken, who always sat in the bay window looking out at the sea. My grandma and Ken both lived right on the coast of the North Sea in Hartlepool (UK). We'd never really talk, but we always shared a little wave each day before I went to get into the car.
One time I'm leaving my gran’s house, I'm in front of my mom who's stopped at the door to talk to my gran. So I head down the steps and towards the gate. I turn back and see Ken in the window. He had a big smile, as usual, waving at me. I give him a wave back. He stands up, gives me the thumbs-up, and wanders towards the back of the room.
My mom comes walking down the steps and asks, "Who are you waving at?" I replied, "Ken". To this day, I can remember my mom's face. She just went white but didn't say anything to me. A few weeks later, she plucked up the courage to tell me that Ken had passed a few days before we visited my gran’s. I don't believe in ghosts, but I know I saw him.
I can still picture his striped grey sweater with light stripes across it. Him waving and getting up out of his chair. There was no one else in the house. He lived by himself. Brains are weird.
48. The Woman In White
Once, my mom and I were driving to Las Vegas from Santa Clarita. We were just passing Barstow and on the I-15. It was about noon and very hot. Not a cloud in the sky. She had a fancy Lexus at the time with a touch screen console on the dash that could play DVDs while driving. I remember we were on a long stretch of road with a lot of space between cars on the highway.
One minute we see nothing ahead of us, and then all of a sudden, a woman was walking across the street right in front of our vehicle. My mom swerved and barely missed her. She pulled off to the shoulder, and we looked behind us, and we saw her go all the way across the highway, including westbound traffic. Then she turned around and walked all the way across again.
Each time, she was nearly getting clipped by an unsuspecting and oncoming car such as ourselves. At one point, a semi-truck almost hit her head on, missing her by literally one step. Each step she took was a steady and confident step, looking ahead of her and never batting an eye to any oncoming traffic. She was barefoot, mind you, and walking on the boiling asphalt with zero sense of urgency.
So my mom calls 9-1-1, we’re directed to the highway patrol. They say they’ve received numerous reports, and they’re headed out to it. My mom decided after hanging up to slowly reverse down the shoulder to get a better look and see if she’s okay (yes, I know, stupid in more than one way). As we get to a spot behind her now, she’s crossed the highway and is now in front of our vehicle.
This part, I will never ever forget. The woman slowly turned her head, looked at us, and started walking towards our car. She was white as the day in every way. A white nightgown, pale, dry, wrinkled skin, white hair, and the palest bluish-grey eyes I’ve ever seen and barefoot. She almost looked like a zombie version of Rose Dawson from Titanic.
I was in the passenger seat, which was on the shoulder. When my mom made eye contact, she froze. I remember the woman walking so I closed my door. I could see her eyes make contact with mine. It looked as if she was blind and lifeless but could not just see me, but see into and through me like into my soul. I went cold immediately.
She reached for my door handle, and I remember screaming at my mom to punch the gas, and without hesitation we peeled out of there. I saw her watch us speed off in the back window and then continued across the road again. A mile down the highway, we called highway patrol to see what happened, and they didn’t know what we were talking about and said they got no reports of a woman crossing the highway.
My mom, to this day, still doesn’t remember the time between when we reversed to when we dipped out. I have no idea what happened that day, except for what I witnessed and experienced.
49. This Is Scary
One morning I woke up and noticed my camera was on top of the sofa opposite my bed. I knew I didn’t put it there because it was a costly camera and could very easily fall from this place. I had placed it in my cabinet. I went over, picked it up, turned it on, and clicked the button to view photos. There were hundreds of pictures of me sleeping, all seemingly taken from the back of the sofa.
I was so freaked out. I couldn’t stop crying. I lived alone. It was just photo after photo of me sleeping. The images were taken in “quick snap”, where the camera takes approximately one shot per second. I later realized the camera didn’t even have a “quick snap” setting, so technically, the camera couldn’t take the photos at all. The timestamps suggest all photos were taken between 2 and 3 a.m.
I’ve never figured out what happened, how the camera got to the sofa, or how it is even possible for a camera with no quick snap to quick snap, but I still have a USB with the photos on it. It still freaks me out.
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50. Under The Covers
I've had sleep paralysis off and on my entire life. Sometimes it was super scary, and I'd see shadow figures. One time it was these little black sharp-clawed figures crawling up my bed, sometimes I wouldn't see anything dangerous at all, but I'd feel something in the room with me. I always chalked it up to just being my brain playing tricks on me. Until this happened.
I had gone out bar-hopping with friends and ended up back at my best friend Grant's house to crash afterwards. We had fallen asleep watching Netflix on his couch. It was one of those big U-shaped couches, and we were sleeping at opposite ends. I woke up, unable to move, sometime around dawn. The light was very dim in the room, but I could both see and feel the blanket slowly being pulled off of me.
After the blanket hit the floor, I felt a cold, clammy hand grab my wrist and start pulling my arm, I couldn't see anyone touching me, nor could I stop them from pulling my arm. I was terrified and was trying to do the "finger wiggle" to wake myself up. Suddenly, my best friend sits straight up and screams, "LEAVE HER ALONE!!" I woke up immediately and could move.
Grant runs to the light switch and flicks it on. His eyes are wide, and he's freaking out, looking around for some kind of weapon to fend off the intruder that has found their way into his apartment. But, there's no one there. He told me that he was half asleep, and when he opened his eyes, a tall, thin, red-headed man, wearing a Chicago Bulls bomber jacket (we lived in Oklahoma, so this detail stood out to him) was bent over me pulling on my arm.
This man was so real to him that he checked every room in the apartment, every window, and door. It took him half an hour to conclude that no one was ever actually in the apartment with us. The entire event is terrifying to me because we both felt and saw things that "didn't happen", and those things match, just in different ways.
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Sources: Reddit,
