If something is hard to believe, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Everyone has creepy true stories that they can’t explain. The stories below are from Redditors who encountered ghosts, got lost in the woods, or saw things that just didn’t make sense. Sometimes, the truth is stranger than fiction. Just sleep with the lights on tonight.
1. Toy Story
My mom worked in a pediatric ward here in our local hospital. Once, while working the night shift, she heard a truly terrifying sound: There were giggling noises coming from the playpen area of the ward. She was by herself and understandably, she was very freaked out. During the night, she figured that the noise she kept hearing must've been from one of the toys (dolls, robots, stuffed animals) in the playpen.
Anyway, she tried her best to ignore the noise. Hours later, she fell asleep despite being so freaked out. When she woke up the next morning she decided to figure out what the heck had happened. She played with all the toys in the ward trying to extract every noise she could from them. Not one matched the laughing noise she heard the night before.
2. Dear John
When I was around seven, my grandmother took care of a baby whose mother was mentally ill. This woman would bring her child, let's call him John, to my grandmother’s house and leave him there for months at a time. Needless to say, our family became very attached and thought of him as part of the family. His mother came to get him one night, but they got in a car crash on the way home.
John was in a coma for about three or four days. Then one night, a terrible shriek woke up my entire house. It was my older brother, screaming and crying saying that John was dead. Once my parents get him calmed down, he tells them that John came into his room crying, saying that he has to leave but he is scared and wants my brother to come with him.
While my parents are trying to convince my brother that it was just a dream, the phone rings. It’s my uncle calling from the hospital to inform us that John’s heart stopped beating. This happened over 30 years ago, but I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
3. Look Both Ways
I lived away from home after high school, in California. At the time, I didn't have a car, but I rode my bike everywhere. My grandfather had passed a month earlier, but sometimes I felt he was around. I was on my bike, booking it down a sidewalk one day going the opposite direction of traffic. I was getting to an intersection and had the green arrow when a minivan rolled up in the right turn lane and stopped.
She turned her head and saw me, looked me right in the eye, so I figured she was waiting. I didn't slow down—that was a terrible mistake. Just as I'm a few feet from the curb, going at least 20 mph, she floors it. I'm talking life flashing before my eyes. My friend who was on his bike about 50 feet behind me later said he thought the exact same thing. There was no way I was going to avoid a nasty accident.
I hit both brakes. Rookie mistake because now my wheels are locked as my front tire skids off the curb into the busy street. As it hits, it stops but the bike is still moving, pitching me forward. I'm literally flying through the air, time has slowed down, and I can see where I'm about to land, in the path of this lady's tires.
Suddenly, I felt two hands, one on each shoulder blade, shoving me down. I didn't fall in an arc as you would expect. I was literally slammed into the pavement, knocking the wind out of me. One second I was speeding towards the minivan, the next I had just stopped like I'd hit a wall and dropped prematurely. I can't prove it, but I'm still pretty sure my grandpa had intervened.
4. Two Golden Retrievers
I was hiking in Andorra with a friend. Long story short, we got lost off the trail and ended up in Spain. Found another trail and we’re following it, without a map. A while ahead of us we see a man with two golden retrievers walking in the same direction we are. He looks young and is carrying climbing gear over his shoulder.
We’re rushing down the trail to catch up with him and finally do. We ask him for help with directions, and he tells us exactly where we are and where we need to be. About 12km away, there’s a town with a hotel. He says there’s another, smaller, town about 6km away and that he parked his car there. He says he can give us a lift if we like, but he’s in a hurry. We are over the moon and so we hike together for a while.
The dogs are nice and friendly, running circles around us. We are chatting away to the guy and he is really nice, but my friend and I are getting tired and so we cannot keep pace with him for long. This is where the day took a dark turn. The trail bends away to the right and the man disappears behind the bend. We get there a couple of minutes later, and the trail is empty, even though the trail is a straight run for quite a while and we should’ve been able to see them.
The two of us continue on, alarmed, waiting to see or hear something, but there’s nothing. We get to the town eventually, and from there made it to the safety of the hotel in the next town over. We were completely freaked out by the man’s sudden disappearance and to this day we are both convinced he was a ghost with two dogs.
5. Just Shopping
I was camping in a campground on the West Coast. I have back problems, so when I camp I have to sleep in the car. I had the backseat converted to a bench seat and put my sleeping bag there. I cover the car windows for privacy. One day, early in the morning, I hear this rumbling sound. It's loud enough to wake me up.
I'm a child of the suburbs, and I think what it really sounds like is when you push a shopping cart across a really rough parking lot, one with a lot of gravel sticking out of the concrete. Then the car gets bumped—hard. The whole car moved. Panic set in immediately. I immediately start unzipping the sleeping bag with the inside zipper, but that's not the quickest process.
By the time I get free enough to sit up and look, there's nothing there. But some big animal had walked by and I loved to know what makes a rumbling noise like that.
6. New Roommate
I lived on the outskirts of a national park in a cabin. It was a four-mile drive from the main road just to get to the property, and we had no plumbing or power. This property was right next to where a national park started, so to call it the middle of nowhere is an understatement. My roommate at the time was interning with the park service, but he is a city kid.
Every night I had been hearing noises in the woods, what I thought was someone walking. But then they'd just stop in particularly overgrown areas of the jungle, so your mind starts to doubt itself. Is it a pig? A cat? Is it just the wind? The cabin didn't have a locking door, and the owners didn't want me to install one, so I began sleeping in my car.
Now, this is a huge property, and I'd park my car over an acre away from the cabin and where I was hearing something. I started hearing those footsteps again. I moved out, but my roommate (who thought I was bonkers) stayed and still slept there without a locking door. Someone broke in, not once, but twice after I moved out. So he finally put up motion-triggered cameras. The video revealed the chilling truth.
There was a man who'd hike up to the property, set up in the bushes, and just...watch us. We never figured out who he was, but I still find it unsettling. How long had he been watching us for?
7. Follow The Trail
I’m an avid mountain climber here in the Philippines. One time, my group went on a night hike to a mountain located in Central Luzon. I still can't explain what happened out there. Naturally, we took the easier trail since we were hiking with some newbies. At around 4am, we broke camp and started our descent. Almost an hour in, we noticed that we kept passing the same fallen tree and the same boulder.
The trail was very straightforward, and many of us had climbed the mountain before, but for some reason, all of us were going around in circles. One of the more superstitious hikers decided to make us all stand in a circle, say a prayer together, and leave an offering of food. Only then were we able to complete our descent.
8. Great Minds Think Alike
My mom and dad have the same dream when something bad is about to happen. It's not exactly the same, but the general story of the dream is the same. It's only happened three times in the 20 years they've been together, but here's one of the stories. My mom and dad both dreamed that I was going to be hurt in some way. I was only three at the time.
Well, in my mom's dream, her mother came to her saying that she just wanted to hold me. I've never met my grandma, she passed before I was born. Well, she proceeded to tell my mother that she just wanted to meet me and told her, "Don't be mad”. In my dad's dream, he just felt like he lost something. Something very important and it ruined his life. He was helpless.
Well, they both woke up freaked out, but proceeded to go about their day as usual. My dad went to the grocery store, came back, and parked the truck. He had an F250. My older sister, (who was five at the time), was strapped in the front seat of the truck and couldn't get out so she was screaming and crying, just throwing a fit.
My dad went and took the groceries into the house. I went outside to the truck. I tried to get in it and I fell beneath the tire. I, being three and all, also threw a fit and just stayed there crying. It turned into a seriously chilling disaster. My sister proceeded to throw a tantrum and ended up kicking the thing into neutral somehow and the truck rolled over my head and stopped on my chest.
My dad came out, saw me, freaked out, and couldn't find the keys. (They were in a grocery bag). He screamed and yelled for any neighbors to help. They tried to lift it off me, but it was too heavy. So they had to push it over the rest of my body. I had to be flown to the hospital. In the helicopter, my heart stopped for about a minute.
That was the first dream my parents had like that. The others were when my little sister and brother were born. My little sister's lungs collapsed and my little brother was very sick. My mom had another dream years later with her mom explaining that she'd held us all now and everything is gonna be okay. Nothing really terrible has happened since.
9. Russian Twist
I live near a camp that I used to attend as a child. When I was seven, there was a counselor at the camp who was Russian (the camp has a very large staff exchange program with many different countries), and very weird at that. Counselors said he was incredibly fast, and during staff-only campfires, he would catch, skin, and eat live rabbits.
He could do this crazy, sleeper hold move. It essentially was a wrestling move that knocked you out for a few seconds, you came to, and were fine a minute later. I saw him do it on a counselor once. The guy was out for about 10 seconds. He was forbidden to do it after that. However, kids got curious and started asking him to do the move.
He would do it in secret, but he would increase the severity of his holds which would keep the kid knocked out for a longer period of time—until it culminated in an utterly horrific incident. One day, a camper went missing. He wasn't in his bunk, despite going to bed with his cabin that night. They did a camp-wide search, keeping us all on the soccer field for about two hours.
The counselors had to start searching the water. They found his body under the sailing dock, completely out cold. He was alive, but very unconscious. He had strangle marks around his neck. Everyone knew who it was. They caught the Russian guy and sent him back to Russia. Turns out they never even sent an exchange counselor. Nobody knew who he was.
10. New Friends
My four-year-old daughter was supposedly asleep when I heard a noise coming from her upstairs bedroom. I tried to listen but could not make out what was being said. I approached the room, and she stopped talking. Thinking I alarmed her, I went into the room. At the time, she was sharing it with her three-year-old sister.
I walked in and saw the four-year-old sitting up in bed. I smiled and said, “Is everything okay”? She said fine, but her sister said they were keeping her up. I asked who. My four-year-old said sorry, but that she was talking. When I asked her who she was talking to, my three-year-old sat up and said, "The girl in the window, she said you were coming”.
After I started freaking out, I asked who the girl was, and they both said a girl comes and stands in front of the window at night and talks to them. Not knowing what to say, I said okay, tucked them in, and hung around outside their door. The next day I asked about the girl. They said she came back but was mad. I waited a few days and asked again.
My four-year-old said the girl in the window was still mad. I forgot about it for about a week, when my wife said, “Who are the girls talking to upstairs”? Freaked out, I ran upstairs, and both girls were sitting under the window looking up. They turned and looked at me and asked if I wanted to meet the girl. When they turned around, disappointed, they said the girl left. It has been about five years since and I have not heard about the girl in the window since then.
11. Found At Sea
I was at sea on a container ship. I was miserable. Things had been going badly with the crew, I was missing my family, and I was regretting my career for taking me away from home for so long. I had broken up with my girlfriend because I knew she was going to cheat on me. Anyway, I'm lying in my bed one morning, and I had this dream where I saw my grandfather, who'd been gone a few years, at his summer place.
He was walking with big strides and he looked radiantly happy. He didn't have the limp that he got when he broke his leg at age 70. He was smiling at me and he gave me the feeling that he was proud of me and that I should keep at it. And I was sitting on a beach chair next to his wife, my grandmother, who'd been in a nursing home when I left.
It was the most vivid image of him, and we'd been so close when he was alive. The dream meant a lot to me and really changed my outlook. I even got up to write down my thoughts. When I got home, my dad picked me up on the dock and he handed me the program from my grandmother's funeral. She'd passed right around the same moment that I'd had the dream. She and my grandfather were together again. That's why he was so happy.
12. Not Too Young
This story is from my dad. When my grandpa left us, he and my mom decided I was too young to attend the viewing or the funeral (I was two). My aunt and uncle decided the same for my three-year-old cousin. A few hours after returning from the funeral, my dad walked into the living room to find me talking to an empty chair. What I said left him beyond shocked.
I told him I was talking to Pappy and asked how he couldn't see him sitting there, and I then proceeded to describe the exact outfit he was buried in—down to the tie pattern and pin on his lapel—despite never seeing him in this outfit. Freaked out, my dad called my aunt and explained the incident. She told him that my cousin had just done the exact same thing an hour earlier.
13. Something In The Shadows
When I was about 11, some friends and I were having a slumber party. We all snuck out of the house in the middle of the night and went to a park about half a block away. We had been there for about an hour or so when I thought I saw a large shadowy figure about 100 feet away, lurking in the shadows under some trees. We all turned to look and stared in the shadow's direction trying to make it out.
Right about when we had decided we were seeing things, the figure started running at us at top speed. We jumped up and ran back to the house as fast as we could go and locked the door. We could hear someone moving around the outside of the house and then it began tapping on the windows. We spent the night huddled together in the middle of the living room.
14. Camera Shy
A friend of mine told me a story of her good friend, a very beautiful teenage girl. One night, she’s getting ready for bed when she glances out the window and sees a red flicker. She moves closer to the window trying to figure out what she is looking at. Finally, she turns off her light and looks out the window to see a man with a video camera in a tree a few feet away.
When they caught the guy, they noticed that at the spot on the tree where he had placed his ladder, there were thick grooves, as though he'd been putting his ladder there for months.
15. Take Me To Your Leader
My mother, grandparents, aunt, uncles and several of their neighbors all swear they saw a UFO hover over my grandparents’ house in the late 1960s. They said it just hung over the backyard, silently spinning in the air, except for a faint whizzing sound for a minute or two with all sorts of colors in a ring around it.
My mom and grandma said they remember the television and radio in the living room turning on full blast, getting transmissions and broadcasts from other countries in other languages, and appliances in the kitchen rattling. My uncle said it was hanging right outside his bedroom window on the top floor, and that he was too scared to move, just stood by his window, staring.
16. Thanks, Mom
Ten years ago, my dad was getting remarried after my mother passed. Before my stepmom was going to officially move in, we had to clean out a lot of the house because we were consolidating two families' worth of stuff. One morning while we were cleaning, my babysitter and I found a fancy mug of my mother's with the emblem of her college and accidentally left it in the upstairs office.
My dad came home from work, and suddenly the mug was downstairs in the kitchen on top of a sample of the wedding invitations. We joked about the "haunted mug" for a while, how it was my mom giving her approval of the wedding. A year later, my stepmom had misplaced her car keys and searched every corner of the kitchen for them, which involved many laps around the island counter.
However, on what must have been the 50th lap around, she saw that her keys had appeared on one of the corners—with the mug next to them. We put it on a high shelf and it hasn't moved since.
Flickr, Hagerstown Community College
17. Mr. President
About 10 years ago, I was sitting in a bar I frequented, drinking a pint. It was a Sunday and the bar was pretty much empty. An older white woman walked up to me wearing an Asian-style farmer hat and started chatting me up. I ignored her at first. Then she said, "You know, you have the spirit of Abraham Lincoln around you”. I laughed, she left, I didn't think anything about it.
Now mind you, I don't look anything like Abraham Lincoln. I have blonde hair, blue eyes, and no beard. I go home and I'm curious, so I look up Abraham Lincoln and realize that he was shot on my birthday. Not insanely creepy, but it kinda gave me a weird feeling.
18. What’s In A Name?
Back in junior high, a girl brought a Ouija board to school. Naturally, almost all of us thought it was silly, but a group of girls became obsessed with the thing throughout the day. Finally, I got tired of it and wanted to prove that it was nonsense, so I told them to guess my grandfather's first name—something I knew NONE of them would know because they weren't close friends and my grandfather lived hundreds of miles away.
They guessed correctly on the first try. It was a little unnerving.
19. Don’t Talk To Dinosaurs
I once had a friend who explained to me why she took sleeping pills. Apparently, when they lived in Georgia they bought an older house, (rich family, VERY nice home) that had some character. She claimed to find some old purple dinosaur in the crawl space while her dad was fixing some plumbing. She laid with the dino for a few weeks and always slept with it in her bed, among other toys.
One day, she woke up to a frightening sight. It was staring at her, standing on her chest in a different position than when she had found it, or it had been the past few weeks. She set it aside. For the next three weeks, the same thing happened. It didn't matter if she put it on the floor, in a drawer, or anything. One day she locked it up. She couldn't sleep and heard the drawer unlock, open, and slam shut.
The nightmare didn’t end there. Slight footsteps, and it was back on her chest. She was scared. So scared. She pretended to sleep while it shifted and sat on her chest. And watched her sleep. She told her mom the next day, her mom didn't believe her until she was allowed to lock the dinosaur in their room. Same thing. They moved to another house after other paranormal things started happening around the house.
The dino stayed at the original house, buried if I remember right, for a year and a half. One day it appeared at their new house just standing as they found it on the kitchen counter. They got rid of it for good. I think they burned it and ditched it in the river. Never to be seen again. But my friend has a recurring nightmare about it that goes away with sleeping pills.
20. Lock Your Windows
When my cousin was around seven years old, his room was in the basement. The basement level was half underground and half above ground. His room had a window and his bed was right next to the window. One night, out of the blue, he wakes up and opens his eyes and there's a man crouched right outside the window just staring at him.
He didn't know what to do so he just froze for a second and then turned over in bed. He turned his back to the guy and eventually fell asleep. Why he didn't run screaming to his parents’ room is something I'll never understand. This went on for a while. On random nights the stranger would come and stare at him through the window, sometimes he would actually tap on the glass with his finger.
On the opposite wall of the window was a mirror, right across from the bed. One night when my cousin noticed the stranger was there, he turned over in bed so he didn’t have to look at the guy. The stranger shined a flashlight and bounced the beam off the mirror to illuminate my cousin's face as if to say "I can still see you”.
But the worst part was this. One night the stranger finally got bold and began to push on the window to see if it would open, but luckily the window was locked. To this day my cousin has no idea who the guy was or what he wanted, or what he would have done had the window been unlocked that night. And to this day he still has not told his parents about it. He’s 31 now.
21. The Sunday Paper
This happened to my parents about 20 years ago now. Both of them were driving out to Death Valley to a hotel for a weekend in the winter, and they had left late in the day and were going to arrive at the hotel at night. The hotel was about 30 minutes outside of the actual town center, and when they finally found the place, it was completely abandoned.
My mom gets spooked easily and didn't want to go and look, but my dad's into that sort of thing and got out of the car. Right after he walks around the back of the building to look around, a man approaches my mother's side of the car. He claims his motorcycle broke down, and that he delivers newspapers to Death Valley. My mom looks around, and sees no motorcycle anywhere.
This hotel had nothing near it, not one building. This guy was begging, begging my mom to come to get the newspapers and take them to a hotel in town, otherwise, he'd lose his job. He had the stack in his hands and wanted her to open the door so that he could give them to her. My mom’s getting serious vibes from this guy now and refuses, locks all the doors, and tells him to go away.
Finally, my dad comes around the corner. The guy panics a bit and just hands them over to my dad quickly and leaves. They drive off, and they spot the guy starting to walk off into the desert. They finally get to the hotel to deliver the papers and end up booking a room there. When they hand over the newspapers, the lady at the desk tells them they don't get any newspapers delivered to the hotel.
My parents open up the stack and look at the front page. It's a newspaper from 1954.
22. The Journey Of Mr. Bear
This reminds me of a bear that I placed in my dad's coffin during his funeral. It was a stuffed bear I used to sleep with all the time. I was 12 years old, so giving it to him was a big deal. A week after his funeral, the bear reappeared on my bed. No explanation as to how it came back from being buried with my dad. I still have Mr. Bear to this day. I'm terrified if I try to get rid of him he'll just keep coming back.
23. House Of Horrors
I grew up in a house where I just can't explain the stuff that happened. It was an old house in New Zealand. My family lived there for about five years. There were many strange things that occurred during that time. We had the normal doors slamming when there was no breeze. Many times my sisters and I would hear footsteps from the hallway when there wasn't anyone there.
My mother often claimed to have woken up and felt someone breathing on her face. My biggest scare was when I woke up one night in my room. My bed was in the middle of the room. Now I could distinctly hear a man breathing heavily as if he was lying on the floor next to my bed. I was seven years old and it was the most terrifying thing I had ever experienced.
I had had a few asthma episodes previously and was trying to tell myself it was me breathing weird, but after holding my breath for a long time I could still hear this guy breathing. I couldn't bring myself to look at the floor, but luckily it was not between me and the door. It took me about 10 minutes to build the courage to get out of bed and run to my parents' bedroom. I slept in my mom’s bed that night.
24. Thanks, Dad
When I was eight, I started sleeping in my basement on a couch. My dad slept on another couch perpendicular to mine. It was cooler in our basement and I was closer to my dad than my mom, who slept on the top story of our house. Well, the couch I slept on was right under some windows, so I would look out at night and freak myself out thinking someone was there.
My dad eventually put pillows in the window for me so I couldn't look out. My dad passed on a year or so later right before my 12th birthday in our basement, suddenly. I was too terrified to go back into our basement for a while, but eventually, I did, and I started sleeping on my couch again. One night, the pillow fell away from the window.
I woke up and looked out and started getting scared. Then I noticed I wasn't imagining someone standing there, there was really a person standing there. But I noticed they were pacing back and forth in front of the windows as if they were guarding them. The person looked just like my dad, I'm almost positive it was. I blinked and fell back asleep. I woke up, the figure was gone and I never saw it again.
25. Lights Out
My friend always said that weird things happened at her house, like hearing footsteps on the steps and no one being there or hearing the sound of music coming from the attic. I always thought she was just trying to freak me out. Then one night, I'm staying the night at her house. It is pretty late, so we close her bedroom door and turn on a small lamp she had that was next to the door.
We are both just chilling on her bed talking when the door to her room flies open and knocks the lamp off the table. We could see into the hall and there was no one there and no footsteps of someone running away. I bolt out the door because I'm convinced it is her brother, but he was in his room asleep with the door closed. We never heard anyone moving. We didn't sleep that night.
26. Stay In Bed
My friend's dad was checking up on his daughter late at night, seeing if she was asleep. When he poked his head through her door he saw that she was standing at the window looking out at the view. He said "Honey, are you okay? Why don't you go to bed”? He hears a reply from under the bed sheets saying, “Dad, I'm already in bed”.
He looks over at the bed and there's his daughter. He looks back over at the window, and no one's there.
27. Across The River
My mom told me a story about her cousin Bobby. Bobby and his girlfriend got in a severe car accident, and his girlfriend didn’t make it. After the accident, he had a reoccurring dream that he and his girlfriend were on opposite sides of a river. She would always scream and try to get him to swim across the river to her, but he refused.
One night, he woke up—and what he did next was so disturbing, it’s unforgettable. He said goodbye to everyone in his family and told them that he'd never see them again. Everyone was very confused, and he explained that he had dreamed that he had finally crossed the river. He passed on the next day. In a car crash. And no, the car crash was not his fault.
28. Party On
I live in a party house. Enough weird stuff happens on a normal day, but you really don't want to be here alone. I'm the only roommate that can stomach it, but then, I've seen some really terrible things in my time. I was home alone one night, and I was certain of this because all my roommates were in Minneapolis for Pride Week.
I was planning to have a party, but decided against it, checked the house, and locked up for the night. At about midnight, I heard the dog whimpering at my door and got up to let him out. As he did his business I thought I heard a door slam upstairs. I thought it was nothing but a stray breeze at first, but it was a pretty placid night.
As I let the dog in I heard a huge succession of slams and began to think it may be someone trying to mess with me. I headed up the stairs cautiously. When I got up there, all the doors were standing open, which was weird since roommates generally shut their doors when they were away. When I walked down the hallway to check the bathroom door I heard a loud crash from downstairs.
A moment later, the dog went streaking by and hid in the bathroom behind me. Now more than a little freaked out, I went downstairs to investigate. I didn't see anything strange so I stood still for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. I turned in time to catch my door slam itself shut and then fling itself open. I ran out of there.
29. Oh, Buster!
As a boy, I was super afraid of the dark. I'm still always "alert" when I'm traversing the darkness. One time I woke up in the middle of the night to see two eyes floating in the darkness in the corner of my room. Like a dog's eyes in the dark. Thinking it was my dog, I shout to him "Buster, come here boy”! It just sat there.
"Buster, come on”! Nothing. "Buster come here right now”! Nothing. Terrified, I lean forward for the light switch, turn on the light, and I'm alone in my room. I slept on my couch for about a year and a half afterward.
30. Kids Are Weird
The house that I grew up in was pretty old and always gave me a really weird feeling. A lot of strange things happened while we lived in that house. For one. my sister (who was about two or three at the time) would say really strange things. Once while sitting on the couch watching a movie with my mom, she pointed up to the ceiling and said "I want to go up there”!
My mother asked her where she wanted to go. Her reply was chilling. She said, "Up there, mom! With those people over there. They're nice to me”. No one else saw anything and we were too creeped out to ask further questions. Another strange thing my sister said in that house was around the same time. While my dad was giving her a bath she asked him: "Do you remember when I used to take care of you and mommy”?
He was really shocked and he asked her what she meant. She continued to reminisce. "I remember when you two were really little. I took care of you”! He basically noped right out of there.
31. Fred Follows
We used to live in an old place, and we'd always joke about it being haunted by a ghost. We nicknamed the ghost "Fred" and he was used to explain anything strange (electronics going off by themselves, items being moved). When we moved, my mom jokingly called out to Fred as we left stating he was welcome to join us at the new place.
A week later, I was up getting my usual middle-of-the-night drink of water when I thought it would be funny to do something strange for the house to wake up to the next morning. So I proceeded to open up all drawers and cupboards. I even lifted all the chairs up on the table. I went back to bed and didn't think much of it. Big mistake.
I woke up the next morning to my mum, who was 100% convinced that Fred has followed us to our new house and he wanted to let us know he was there. She seemed comforted by the thought of proof of the afterlife so I never told her otherwise. She'll still tell people occasionally about her ghost.
32. How Convenient
I was very young, so I don't remember this at all. My parents told me this story many times. They firmly believe it happened exactly as I am about to tell it. My parents, my older brother and I were going apple picking. My parents decided they wanted to go to a different orchard this year than the one they have been going to for years, so off we went.
We apparently stopped for gas at this old-time convenience store. While my dad was filling the tank, my mom said she went in and looked around for some snacks, but she said everything in the store looked "old" but "fresh”. Like, snacks from another era or whatever. So she didn't buy anything but chatted with an elderly clerk behind the counter while paying for the gas.
So, we leave that store and continue on to have an apparently amazing day picking lovely granny smiths and whatnot. On our way home, my dad stopped to get gas at the same convenience store that we had stopped at on our way to the orchard. But the convenience store was boarded up and looked like it had been abandoned for quite a long time.
So my dad drove to a rest stop a few miles down the road to get gas. My dad, being the ever-talkative guy, wound up in conversation with an older guy working there. Turns out, that convenience store had been abandoned for over 50 years when the owner, an elderly gentleman perfectly described as the gentleman my mom had chatted with, passed on.
I'm 22 now and certainly don't believe the story, but my parents swear by it. They told me they did not say a single word the entire drive home they were so freaked out.
33. Face The Music
It's not especially scary, but once, when I was younger (seven or eight), I woke up in the night to piano music downstairs. We had an old piano and I went to bed much earlier than my family, so I just presumed it was my dad playing the music. However, when I asked about it the next day, nobody admitted to playing, so I presumed I had dreamt it.
A few years later, we decided to clear out our attic, which was still littered with stuff from the previous owners. We found some dusty old sheet music in a corner, and I asked my dad to play it. What I heard made my blood run cold. I instantly recognized it as the music from that night, and subsequently didn't sleep for a week.
34. Careful What You Wish For
When I was young, I was intrigued by the paranormal, as I suppose everyone was. I outgrew it, of course. One summer, I was probably 17 years old, me and some friends were hanging out on the beach at night with some kids, 14 or maybe younger, who felt like sharing scary stories. I had outgrown the phase and I was bored so I just kept saying stupid stuff all night, provoking spirits and ghosts.
Anyways, there is this expression in Greece, something like “May Mother Mary be with you”. So late in the morning as we are standing up and about to part our ways, I said "Goodnight guys, may Satan be with you," and that's when something slapped me really hard. I turned around to slap my friend, thinking he was the one who did. Nope. He was a couple of meters away from me.
35. Don’t Pull Over
I live in a really, really rural place, so it's not uncommon to have really long stretches of road with absolutely no civilization at all. No lights, no other cars, no nothing for miles and miles. One night, my friend was driving back from a bonfire party in the desert when she said she saw what looked like a guy walking along the side of the road.
She could see him moving way up ahead of her, and as she got closer, she started to notice that the way he was moving was very unusual. His arms seemed too long and she described the way he was walking to me as nothing she'd ever seen a human being do. She said it was like he was constantly staggering, but never really falling over.
She told me that as she got close enough to pass him, she just KNEW that she didn't want to see this person/thing's face. She turned her rearview mirror away from her, drove by as fast as she could, and didn't look back. She called me later to tell me about this. She was actually really creeped out because the thing had been heading in the direction of our town.
36. Coming Up Roses
My friend told me this about a month or so after his mom passed on suddenly while she was taking a walk in their back garden. No suspicious circumstances or anything. Everything was normal around their house for about a month. Then, my friend swears that strange things started happening. The garden just seemed to stop being healthy.
All the plants just withered even though they were still being watered on a somewhat normal basis. And to add to that, strange noises could be heard throughout the house and sounds of things being knocked over. One night, he was woken up by one of these noises, so he walked from his room to the kitchen to get a drink of water to try and set his head straight.
When he came around the corner, he swears he saw his mother standing at the stove cooking something, and he said you could smell it. The ghost of his mom or her apparition or whatever turned around and looked at him, and smiled. He started to back away, and he wanted to scream and run but he just couldn't bring himself to do that.
The ghost walked out their back door onto their deck and beckoned for him to follow. He did. The ghost walked out to their back garden, back to where his mother was found. He stood there and just watched it for a few minutes. The ghost stood on the exact spot for about 10 minutes and this whole time my friend was being quiet and trying not to lose it.
Eventually, this apparition went away. My friend stuck around for a few minutes after just to be safe. Then he went back inside and tried to fall back asleep. The next morning, he just thought he had a bad nightmare. He went outside to the spot in the garden where the ghost had been. On the exact spot where the ghost had stood, there was a new group of about five new roses, one for each member of their family, he claims.
At first, I didn't believe him. That is, until he sent me a picture of the group of roses surrounded by all the wilted plants. I wish I still had the picture but this ordeal took place almost half a year ago. Still gives me chills when I think about it, I can't even begin to imagine what it's like for him.
37. The Next Step
My grandma told me that back in the 1970s, she was looking to buy this old Victorian house in Liverpool, England. On their way up to the second floor, when she stood on this one certain step on the staircase, she would feel completely overcome with emotions. She said that when she stepped on it she, felt nauseated but peaceful and a sad kind of happiness.
This happened every time that she went up that staircase on that exact step. Later on, when the realtor was telling her the history of the house, she told her that a nun lost her life on the staircase. Her body was found lying on that specific step.
38. Take A Hike
Me and my buddy went hiking pretty late one night, right before sunset. We decided to travel up a hill to explore, and as we were hanging out up on the hill it began to rain. I'm not talking about regular rain, it felt like we were in a hurricane. Anyways, we decide to start heading back because the sun was going down and it was already hidden by rain clouds.
As we travel down the hill, we thought we heard footsteps behind us but just assumed it was the storm. We realized we had been going down the hill the wrong way, and by the time we made it back down to the trail, it was totally dark and creepy. We continued to walk on the trail back to my car, but that's when we started to get a creepy feeling.
It felt like we were getting hunted. The rain had calmed down by now so we could hear things around us better. We could hear twigs snapping and footsteps. Multiple footsteps. Still not sure if it was people or mountain lions. That's when it got really creepy. As we dried off and sat in my car and started recounting our epic journey, we both notice a man just sitting in his car, which was down the street from us by about 20 feet.
We didn't see him in the car when we walked past it, and we didn't see anyone approach the car since we got in ours. From our view, he appeared to just be sitting there and staring straight at our car. His head wasn't down like he was reading or anything. After about 10 minutes of us just staring at my mirrors and watching this guy sit in his car, he turned on his headlights. Then he slowly drove off. We didn’t see him again.
39. Breakfast Is Ready!
My uncle is the pastor of a church in Oklahoma, and one of his closest buddies is a youth minister in a church in a neighboring town. He has a wife and one daughter. Every Saturday morning when his daughter was younger, she and his wife would get up really early and cook breakfast. One morning, the daughter saw the kitchen light turn on from her room and heard some of the pots and pans being moved around.
She thought, why is my mom making breakfast without me? So she got up and went to check. It was about 4 am and no one was in the kitchen and all the lights were off. She went to her parents’ room and asked, "Mommy why did you try to start breakfast without me”? Her mom thought it has been her in the kitchen making that noise.
So she woke up her husband thinking someone was in the house. He grabbed an old aluminum baseball bat and started walking through the dark house. He checked the kitchen, and besides some pots and pans being out, nothing seemed too greatly disturbed. Next to the kitchen is a reading room, with a couch and a rocking chair.
When he walked in there, he could barely make out the rocking chair, which was rapidly rocking with no one sitting in it. He jumped back frightened and grabbed a bible sitting on the shelf and screamed: "In the name of Jesus, leave my house”! And the chair instantly halted. Nothing like that ever happened again. I'm not a believer but nonetheless, it’s a creepy story.
40. Party Guest
When I was around 18, one of my friends lived in a house about three miles outside of the village my friends and I lived in. It was right next to a motorway and had a large amount of land attached to it. His parents had gone on vacation, and we were planning on having a small party at his house (about 20 or 30 people).
A few of us met up in the village and walked through the country roads up to his house, which took about 30 minutes. When we got there, we found two officers’ cars parked in the drive. We all thought that the party had started and for whatever reason, the authorities had been called. Turns out that the friend who lived there had been eating dinner waiting for people to turn up when he noticed someone standing at the bottom of the garden, watching him.
Thinking it was one of us messing with him, he slipped out the side door in an attempt to get behind whoever it was and surprise them instead. After sneaking around and not being able to find the person, he headed back, expecting us to be there waiting. What he saw in the window was horrifying. The unknown man was sitting in his kitchen finishing the dinner he had been eating.
Apparently, he looked dirty and unkempt. My friend decided to leave, ran a mile to his nearest neighbor, and called for help. When they turned up, they searched the house and property with dogs but couldn't find anyone. It seriously freaked him out, so several of us ended up staying at his for a week until his parents got back.
41. Put Your Toys Away
My sister teaches third grade at a school with a lot of lower-income kids. This is one of their stories. One of her students, normally a very good student, suddenly started having problems staying awake in class. Concerned, my sister approached her at recess and asked her what was wrong. She wouldn't say. My sister eventually brought it up with one of the other teachers.
This woman knew the family a little more personally. She told my sister what she'd heard. The little girl in question was pretty serious. Never made up weird stories for attention, never lied about stupid things like other kids her age. But this girl, one day, began to complain to her mother that, every night, a young girl with dirty hair and dirty fingernails would come out of her closet and play with her toys.
Her mother had been getting on her recently about not putting her toys away at night after she found them still out the next morning. But this young girl insisted that she had put them away, and that the dirty girl in her closet had taken them out again. Every night, the door would open slowly, and the dirty girl would emerge with her toys, and my sister's student would hide under her covers and listen.
One night, the family had come home from a movie past the girl's usual bedtime. Everyone had said goodnight and gone straight to bed. Shortly after, the girl knocked on her parent's door, sobbing and shaking, and asked to sleep with them. Apparently, when she had gone into her room and turned on the light, she'd found the dirty girl asleep in her bed.
42. Picture Perfect
A couple of years ago, a mix-up at a bank put my cousin and me back in touch (long story short, we have the same name but had accounts at the same bank that lead to a series of headaches). She was estranged from the rest of the family, and her father passed under mysterious circumstances years before. She was strange, but I had to put up with her due to paperwork related to the mix-up.
The week after everything was resolved, I moved. The last box went out of the old apartment, and I found a photograph face-down on the floor making my final walk-through. It was a picture of her father—my uncle—that I'd never seen. He was looking right at the camera, out of focus, but making a funny face. I barely knew the man, and I still don't know how the picture got there.
43. Disappearing Act
When my grandfather was a teenager, he dated a girl whose father had disappeared when she was a child. Her father was a bad man and didn’t treat her mother well, so most just assumed he had left town for greener pastures. Fast forward 40 years to when the girl's mother passed on. That’s when the dark truth came out.
She went to the authorities, as was her mother's wish, and confessed that her mother had killed her father.
44. Out Hunting
My great-grandpa purchased a farm in the early 1930s, and it was a big family project to keep it up and running. Relatives would come and help with the chores, and in exchange, they would be able to hunt the land for food. My great-grandpa had a cousin that came over one day and went out to do some hunting. The next morning, my great-grandpa noticed that his vehicle was still out in driveway, even though he should have left hours before.
It was still dark out, but my great-grandpa knew the area of the land he would be hunting and set off in that direction. He walked back towards the back pasture field, and as he came around a bend, he hollered my cousin's name. He heard a strange, yet familiar voice answer him back. He said that the voice chilled him to the bone, that something wasn't quite right about it.
So he called out again, and this time, the voice was for sure not his cousin, but almost like a growl imitating his voice. He said he high-tailed it out of there, never looking back. When the sun came up, he took a big group of relatives and farm hands to look for him. They made a disturbing discovery. They found his hat, which was covered in a brown liquid spattering, and that was all.
My great-grandpa looked for any signs of him for over 60 years. The only time he ever held out hope of finding him, my dad said, was when the swamp in the pasture fields by where he was supposed to be hunting dried up. Needless to say, there is more to this story, but it would take forever to tell.
45. The Woman In Black
My uncle always told the story of when he worked in the woods of Montana. He was a solid 10 miles away from town. He recalled pulling his ATV on top of a big hill that overlooked a valley. In between all the trees, there was this clearing he could see through his binoculars. Through them, he saw an older lady in black surrounded by six to eight wolves.
Now, my uncle is a lengthy distance from the woman, but he starts yelling and honking and all that and takes off down the hill as fast as he could. But when he reached the clearing, there was no one there. No wolves, no woman, only a silver ring with a black stone in the middle. He still has the ring to this day, and he never found out who it belonged to.
46. Secret Of The Woods
My cousin is with the forest service in the Montana/Wyoming area, and I decided to go up there with her to test the waters. She does hydrology and has to ride out to the middle of nowhere to test streams and snow runoff to ensure no contaminants, so I thought that sounded fun and wanted to do a bit of a tour with her.
We were going to have to camp out there for two nights, so we packed up all our gear in saddlebags and started out. The first day and night were amazing. Beautiful scenery and amazing air quality. It really is so peaceful out there. Anyway, we started out on the second day and my cousin said, "You want to see something weird”?
Of course, I said yes—I still can’t believe what she showed me. She led me on a bit of a side journey into this tiny little ravine. We ended up traveling about two hours away from the actual path we had laid out. At the very end of this fold in the land, she dismounts and tells me to get off my horse, too. We tie them up in this gorgeous little clearing and she tells me to follow this tiny wildlife path and bring our little rechargeable radio.
It is one of those you can plug in or wind up, and it also acts as a lantern if you really need it to, but that drains the batteries quickly. I do and, out in the middle of nowhere, there is a huge coil of wire sticking out of the ground. The wire itself was not weirdly large, like some buried transmission wire, but small, like wiring for a house. It trailed off into the brush and trees, so naturally, I decided to follow.
My cousin trails behind me as I do, and this wire, after coming straight up from the ground, is strung across limbs of trees and then back to the ground. Then it snakes around rocks and finally goes into an outlet. That outlet is mounted on the side of a desk. It looks like a schoolteacher's desk from when I was growing up. No chair, no building, no nothing, just this outlet, and this desk.
I am staring confused at this desk in the middle of a forest when my cousin takes the radio, pulls out the cord, and plugs it into the outlet. It lit up and started blaring static. The wire was being fed from somewhere. Now, the place where we were had no road access, no buildings for many miles, and no other people around. And yet, there was a live outlet. I wish I had taken a picture of it.
47. Dream Come True?
For my grandmother's entire life, she had a recurring nightmare. In this nightmare, she would be walking down a long dark hallway, turn to the left, open a door, and see something terrible. She'd always wake up before seeing what it was. In her 40s, she, her husband, my dad, and my aunt were on vacation. They booked the hotel at the last minute, so they ended up having to get two rooms.
My dad wakes up around three in the morning and can automatically tell something's not right. He calls out in the darkness, "Dad”? No response. He turns on the bedside light. "Dad”? he says, a little louder this time. There’s still no response. Getting worried, he slides out of bed and shakes his father. That’s when he makes a disturbing discovery. His dad won’t wake up.
My dad ran down the hotel hallway to my grandma's room and started banging on the door. My grandma worriedly opens the door, and my dad shouts, "Something's wrong with dad”! He leads her down the hallway. A long hallway. To the last door on the left. My grandmother reaches the door and sees her husband, who had just had a heart attack. She never had the dream again.
48. Kids These Days
In my hometown, there was a true story about a guy in my neighborhood that was going into people's homes, taking things, and harming pets. He made one strike a night, and he was super careful, so he never got caught. On like the ninth or tenth night, they caught this guy. When I found out who he was, I was stunned. It was my next-door neighbor! He was 17 years old and he did it "for the thrill.”
49. Job Well Done
One of my friends had a job in the hospital looking after patients. I heard he randomly quit his job and wouldn't talk to anyone about it. I go over to his house and try to see if I can get him talking—what I found shocked me. He was a total emotional wreck. I finally get him to talk and he says that he was working one night in the hospital when he heard a nurse shouting for help because someone was going into cardiac arrest.
So he runs down a hallway and some man runs towards him. They almost bump into each other and the man shouts, "Where's the exit”? My friend points to the exit, then runs into the room with the sick man, only to see it's the exact same person who ran past him in the hallway.
50. Not The Wind
I'm a fairly heavy sleeper. I grew up in South Florida, so if you didn't gain the ability to sleep through heavy thunderstorms and strong winds blowing against your window aided by the sweet sound of car alarms going off from thunderous booms, you were going to have a bad time. I'm serious when I say it wasn't a weird thing for your house to shake from how loud these things were.
I head to bed one night, no storm and the dogs are silent, so I fall asleep faster than usual. I was up in the middle of the night to a sound that makes my blood run ice cold. It’s a loud scream. Just one, single loud scream. Actually, now that I think of it, a better description would be a wail. It was the one, if not the most, disturbing thing I have ever heard. I couldn't understand it, but I just felt disturbed and unsettled, and I found it hard to go back to bed.
It was nowhere near as loud as thunder or wind, but it was just horrifying. From the sound of it, it came from one of the neighbors, and from someone inside their house. I seriously considered calling the authorities, because I thought someone got seriously injured. Later, I learned the disturbing truth. I find out that the sound I heard was a mother crying for her son.
He had passed on in a car accident that night, and the authorities had to go and tell the mother what happened. The guy was one of my brother's best friends growing up. There's a lot more to the story that I won't say, but the whole thing just makes me feel sad.
Sources: Reddit,
