These real-life horror stories are so wild—they're unbelievable. From haunted houses to creepy nighttime encounters, these Redditors have come face to face with traumatic moments that might just haunt them for life. Buckle up: These terrifying tales prove that the things that go bump in the night aren't as innocent as they seem.
1. A Shade Of Gray
My parents’ two-story house had a living room that connected to stairs leading to the second floor of the house. You could see completely down the hall on the second floor from the couch in the living room. One time my family went away on vacation, so I had my cousin come over while I house sat for them. I'd been alone in this house for a couple of days now and I just really wanted company.
So, we're sitting on this couch playing Xbox. The stairs leading to the second floor are almost out of my vision. At the very top of the stairs on the left is a doorway leading to a bathroom and nothing else. We were up pretty late gaming when out of the corner of my eye I saw a grey face lean out and stare at me for a split second.
I didn't budge, I just barely noticed it, but as soon as I did, it was gone. I hadn't snapped to look at it, nor did I say anything. I just continued gaming for about three seconds until my cousin said, "Did you just see that?" As soon as our eyes connected, we both knew that we had seen the same thing. The second my cousin said that, I felt my heart sink.
It scared me a lot to have him pretty much confirm what I had seen but brushed off. I had immediately assumed it was just one of those blurs, or darting shadows you get in the corner of your eyes at times. The creepiest part is that it slid out as if it were lying on the floor. Whatever it was, its head was at level with the top of the steps right at the bottom of the bathroom door frame.
It just sort of slid out, stared, then slid back. Again, I just saw it from the corner of my eyes, but it appeared to be grey-skinned with black hair. Our descriptions matched too. We went upstairs and checked the whole bathroom, including the insides of luggage bags in the closet. We never found anything. To this day I still can't have a door in my house open. I'm afraid I’ll be looking down the hall and some gray-skinned creature will just lean half its face out to silently stare at me, and then vanish.
2. The Gentleman Caller
About five years ago, I lived downtown in a major city in the US. I've always been a night person, so I would often find myself bored after my roommate, who was decidedly not a night person, went to sleep. To pass the time, I used to go for long walks and spend the time thinking. I spent four years like that, walking alone at night, and never once had a reason to feel afraid.
I always used to joke with my roommate that even the dealers in the city were polite. But all of that changed in just a few minutes of one evening. It was a Wednesday, somewhere between one and two in the morning, and I was walking near a patrolled park quite a ways from my apartment. It was a quiet night, even for a weeknight, with very little traffic and almost no one on foot.
The park, as it was most nights, was completely empty. I turned down a short side street in order to loop back to my apartment when I first noticed him. At the far end of the street, on my side, was the silhouette of a man, dancing. It was a strange dance, similar to a waltz, but he finished each "box" with an odd forward stride. I guess you could say he was dance-walking, and headed straight for me.
Deciding he was probably tipsy, I stepped as close as I could to the road to give him the majority of the sidewalk to pass me by. The closer he got, the more I realized how gracefully he was moving. He was very tall and lanky, and wearing an old suit. He danced closer still, until I could make out his face. His eyes were open wide and wild, head tilted back slightly, looking off at the sky.
His mouth was formed in a painfully wide cartoon of a smile. Between the eyes and the smile, I decided to cross the street before he danced any closer. I took my eyes off of him to cross the empty street. As I reached the other side, I glanced back...and then stopped in my tracks. He had stopped dancing and was standing with one foot in the street, perfectly parallel to me.
He was facing me but still looking skyward. Smile still wide on his lips. I was completely and utterly unnerved by this. I started walking again, but kept my eyes on the man. He didn't move. Once I had put about half a block between us, I turned away from him for a moment to watch the sidewalk in front of me. The street and sidewalk ahead of me were completely empty.
Still unnerved, I looked back to where he had been standing…to find him gone. For the briefest of moments I felt relieved, until I noticed him. He had crossed the street, and was now slightly crouched down. I couldn't tell for sure due to the distance and the shadows, but I was certain he was facing me. I had looked away from him for no more than 10 seconds, so it was clear that he had moved fast.
I was so shocked that I stood there for some time, staring at him. And then he started moving toward me again. He took giant, exaggerated tip-toed steps, as if he were a cartoon character sneaking up on someone. Except he was moving very, very quickly. I'd like to say at this point that I ran away or pulled out my pepper spray or my cell phone or anything at all, but I didn't.
I just stood there, completely frozen as the smiling man crept toward me. And then he stopped again, about a car length away from me. Still smiling his smile, still looking to the sky. When I finally found my voice, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind. What I meant to ask was, "What do you want?!" in an angry, commanding tone. What came out was a whimper, "What the…?" Regardless of whether or not humans can smell fear, they can certainly hear it. I heard it in my own voice, and that only made me more afraid. But he didn't react to it at all. He just stood there, smiling.
And then, after what felt like forever, he turned around, very slowly, and started dance-walking away. Just like that. Not wanting to turn my back to him again, I just watched him go, until he was far enough away to almost be out of sight. And then I realized something. He wasn't moving away anymore, nor was he dancing. I watched in horror as the distant shape of him grew larger and larger.
He was coming back my way. And this time he was running. I ran too. I ran until I was off of the side road and back onto a better lit road with sparse traffic. Looking behind me then, he was nowhere to be found. The rest of the way home, I kept glancing over my shoulder, always expecting to see his stupid smile, but he was never there. I lived in that city for six months after that night, and I never went out for another walk.
There was something about his face that always haunted me. He looked completely and utterly insane. And that's a very, very scary thing to see.
3. Better A Baker Than A Butcher
When I was very young, less than four, I was afraid of going to the bathroom alone because I thought there was an old man in it with a baker's hat. I still remember his face. One night, I was forced by my mother to go alone and be brave and, I swear, there he was just standing there. I froze in fear and then I remember running back.
I ran into my mother who was just standing there with a weird look on her face. All she said was, "See, I told you it's nothing to be afraid of," in a shaky voice and she pulled me away from there. I think she saw him but couldn't process it herself.
4. That’s A Lock of Luck
I was a college student at the time and was on a late-night phone call with my long-distance girlfriend. It was around two am and we were talking while in bed. All of a sudden I saw the shadow of a man attempting to peep in and enter my front door. Thankfully I had a lock and bolt on my door, but he started walking around the side and back towards my bedroom.
I didn't have my lights on, so he didn't know I could see him. Nervous and curious, I snaked my way out of bed to find out more. Here's where the messed-up stuff happens. I had previously worked out an understanding with the other ground-floor tenant. We agreed that if either one of us needed help, regardless of time, to do a specific knock on the divider wall.
I knock on the divider wall, he meets me at the front door with only his hands. I inform him of the man around back and he goes and confronts the guy. The man starts trying to argue back but decides he better walk away to his car down the side of the road. After, my neighbor and I are talking about what happened, and he notices the guy's car is circling the block.
The car drove around the block three times before my neighbor told me to go inside, close the blinds, and call the 9-1-1. He gives me the license plate that he memorized and I go follow his instructions. While I’m on the line with help, the surrounding neighborhood was soon lit up in red, white, and blue for the next five blocks all around.
There were cop cars everywhere. A few officers came and talked to the neighbor and me about what was going on. The man they were after was wanted in several states on several warrants and was expected to be armed—and that they thought he was a HITMAN. They said to remain on the lookout. I am so thankful I locked my door that night!
5. That’s Not Dad
When I was younger we would sleep in the same room as our parents because they had an air conditioner. One night we decided to be rebellious and sleep in the TV lounge. To the right of the lounge was the main entrance and the sofa was placed in such a way that you could not see if someone was laying on it. We watched a Scooby-Doo movie and fell asleep.
Now I used to be a light sleeper. As soon as there was even a little noise I would wake up. Around two am I heard something and woke up. The sound was from the main entrance and I craned my neck to look over the couch. What I saw was terrifying. There was a guy standing inside the house, wearing all black and covering his face with a black cloth so that only his eyes were visible.
However, my first thought was, "What is my dad doing up so late?" My father used to lock the doors at night before we went to bed. But then I noticed a chilling detail. The stranger had a massive shotgun in his hands. He heard me move and was standing as still as a statue. My next thought was "Is this a dream?" because why would dad be holding a pipe in our house at night?
I woke my brother up and said "Look at what dad is doing." He woke up, stood up, and looked at the guy and then towards the center of the room. I’ll never forget what he said next. He told me: "Dad is sleeping in the middle of the room." At that point, we both looked at the guy and said "Thief!" When he heard us he ran out the door, closing it behind him.
We stayed up for a few more minutes and then got back to sleep. The next day I told my parents what I saw but they didn't believe me at first saying that it was probably just your imagination. Thankfully I had my brother to back me up. Once he told the same story they both freaked out. We got better locks and a German Shepherd named Jacky.
6. Open Up, It’s An Emergency!
15 years old, I was taking a shower at home. The rest of my family was out and it was around 9:30 at night. I heard someone knock on the bathroom door while I was showering, so I called out, "I'll be out in a sec!" thinking it's just my dad or one of my brothers getting home. There was silence for a few moments, and then knocking again.
Only this time it was pounding, like someone was banging on it with their fists, trying to break it down bare-handed. It was a little creepy, but my dad always loved to prank us so I didn't think too much of it. I decided to get a towel around me and see what his problem was anyway, but when I opened the door, no one was there.
The house was locked up, no open windows. There were no cars in the driveway. I checked every floor, every room. No one else was home. That was the first occurrence; the weird happenings continued in smaller ways until we moved out of that house, to the point that we imagined it to be some sort of Poltergeist and named it Edgar.
7. Going Up?
I was in Taiwan one year when I was younger, and had traveled to a busy night market. Nearby I spotted a sign for a netcafe in a 5-6 storey building. Thinking I’d fire off some quick emails, I walked in the dark, small entrance of the building. The building was older and hadn’t been well maintained, but that’s not out of the ordinary in Taiwan.
The entrance just had a dark hallway that led to a small elevator. I pressed the elevator call button and entered. The elevator was uncharacteristically new compared to the building, but I didn’t think much of it. Like some Chinese/Taiwanese buildings, there wasn’t a fourth floor (it’s considered bad luck), so it just read 1-2-3-5-6, which was usual.
I looked for the floor the netcafe was at– 6th floor—and pressed the button. It lurched into action quietly and began the ascent. When it stopped, I figured it was my floor, so I instinctively began to step out. Right before stepping out, however, the sight outside the elevator stopped me. It was pitch dark, only lit by the light in the elevator, and it looked like it hadn’t been occupied for decades, with some random pieces of furniture covered with white cloth.
It was a small building, so each floor was single occupancy, and I could see pretty much the entire floor from the elevator. Thinking I must have gotten the wrong floor, I checked the light that indicates which floor you’re on. Strangely, there was nothing. None of the indicators were on, but the floor button to the netcafe was still lit so I knew I hadn’t gotten there yet.
All this happened within a couple of seconds. That’s when I noticed a figure moving in the distance on the floor. It was not very visible, but I could make out what looked like a person dressed in some kind of gown, moving slowly towards the elevator where I was. I was thoroughly creeped out, so I started pressing the close door button frantically.
As soon as I pressed it, the elevator light flickered off, and I was in pitch dark. I am this close to peeing my pants, and it’s actually kind of freaking me out thinking back to it now. The lights flickered back on under a second and the door closed, and the elevator jolted back to life. A few moments later, it opened again to the netcafe.
I am beyond relieved at this point. I walked out immediately and sat down at a computer. After gathering my wits a bit, I walked over to the cashier’s desk and told them what I saw. The girl working there listened and her face turned a bit ashen. I asked her if she'd heard of a similar story. She told me that she’s never experienced it, but some co-workers and occasional customers have brought it up.
Basically, the building has six floors, and the fourth floor had a history. Apparently the floor used to be a hair salon of sorts, until one of the employees completed suicide there for some reason. The store continued operations despite stories of weird appearances—when customers got their hair rinsed the water would look a little red, like the customer was bleeding.
A couple people reported seeing someone’s figure walking away in the mirror, but wouldn't see anyone when they turned to check. Naturally, the business closed down a few months after that. The building owner tried to re-rent the place out, but never had any luck. Most businesses are quite superstitious, and no one wanted to rent the fourth floor after someone had perished in it, even at a very cheap price.
Finally, after dropping the price to nearly nothing, a stationary supplies store wanted to rent. During the renovations of the floor, however, several accidents would happen. Tools would end up in strange places, a mirror from the previous business shattered when no one was near it, and finally a worker had his hand jammed between the elevator doors when it closed on him unexpectedly.
The workers refused to continue working and finally, the business left and the building owner finally gave up and shut down that floor. He then had the elevator company come in to replace the panel so that the elevator could not go to the fourth floor. Let me repeat that—the elevator was programmed to never go to the fourth floor. It doesn’t even have a button.
But for some reason, sometimes when people take the elevator, it would go to the fourth floor and the doors would open, and some, like myself, would see a figure walking around in the dark.
8. Second Chance
One night, I got a phone call from my next-door neighbor late in the evening, asking if I can help him move a mattress into one of his upstairs bedrooms. His mom is ill and has a big heavy sleep number bed. I, of course, ran over to help, because they're great neighbors. I get over there and his friend, who is also a priest, was there to help.
I helped them figure out how to separate the mattress from the bed so we could fit it upstairs. We get it all moved up and back in place when my neighbor asks if I can help them move an armoire upstairs too. I think nothing of it and we pull it out of his travel trailer and start bringing it up the front stairs of his house. This is where I died.
The front stairs are 11 steps. I was on the lower end of the armoire about six steps up when my neighbor and his friend lose a handle on the armoire and it comes crashing down on me, and I fall backward towards the pavement. At that moment, I wake up in my dining room to my phone ringing and my wife asking me if I'm going to answer the phone. This is where it really gets freaky.
It's my neighbor asking me if I can help move a bed upstairs for his mom. I go over there and meet his priest friend again, as this is supposed to be the first time I met him. I say I can help with the bed, but I cannot help with the armoire. My neighbor was like "How'd you know about the armoire?" I then proceeded to tell them about what had just happened.
I spent the next hour talking with the priest. He was blown away, and he had so many questions. My neighbor didn't believe it until I described the upstairs bedroom in perfect detail down to the metal mattress frame on the floor and the intricate headboard leaning against the wall. I had never been upstairs in their house before.
The priest asked me what I saw after it happened. I told him I never actually passed, and that before it happened I woke up at my dining room table.
9. Avoiding Abduction
One time a few years ago my friend and I were going on a walk and we sat down at this church and just talked for a bit. Then a man comes to the same church and he's just standing there staring at us about 50 feet away. My friend and I decided to leave because he clearly wanted to do something without us there. This church was notorious for spray painting.
Once we are walking on the sidewalk I see him behind us. I calmly told my friend we should speed up since this guy is giving me the creeps and we were two teenage girls at night. We begin to speed walk, and I look behind us and he's speed walking too. We start to jog to keep a space between us and him and after a bit, I look behind us and he's jogging too.
We’re trying hard not to panic but we realize he's intentionally following us—and then it gets worse. We start running and we can hear this guy pounding the pavement behind us. He's an adult so he was gaining on us, and we quickly took a left and ran through a park. We know he’ll catch us so we try to hide in the darkest corner we can find.
We’re huddled together trying to make no noise and we can see him looking confused. He stops running and calmly walks under the only lamp in the park. It was 30 yards away and he just stood there for a second texting on his phone. He then turns his flashlight on and slowly walks around the whole park almost finding us.
We’re almost in tears wondering what is going on when we hear the sound of a truck door slamming. What I saw and heard was so terrifying, it’s unforgettable. We see four other guys come up to the first one. They begin to argue asking how we got away when they were blocking the exit. We decided to risk it and snuck through the gate of someone’s house. Now we could watch the park from the outside and saw them searching with flashlights.
They started saying that they were cops and we needed to come out and they wouldn't harm us, but we just stayed silent. Well, cops don't sprint after two girls or block exits intentionally from teenagers. After they left we stayed in this person's bushes until sunlight and then ran home. We haven't talked about it since.
10. Keeping It Quiet
My grandmother and my brother would sit under the Christmas tree playing with the train decoration running around it. She passed a few weeks before Christmas when I was very young. After her funeral, every night, at different times after midnight when we had all gone upstairs to bed, the train would turn itself on and my mom would go down and turn it off.
After a week, my mom exasperatedly yelled down the stairs "Enough, (grandma's name), we miss you but we need sleep!" The train stopped and never turned itself back on again. After that Christmas, my mom refused to put a train under the tree. We gave it to our uncle who was a train enthusiast. He never had it turn on by itself after all these years.
11. You Think You Know Someone
Once, my father went camping at a non-commercial campground, which is usually more secluded, with no camp manager or outhouses. It was during early spring so it was still pretty cold out, and there wouldn't be many people out there camping. There was only my dad, a few of his buddies, and a rough-looking old Chevy with a makeshift, Frankenstein-esque camper mounted on it just a few sites down.
Being sociable and considerate campers, my dad and a couple of other guys went to say hi to their neighbor and let them know to holler if they were being too loud while they were there for the weekend. The guy they met was a seemingly nice man who was minding his own business and politely thanked them for introducing themselves.
He looked like he'd been out there for a few weeks, with a clothesline up and everything. During my father's three-night stay, the group would wave at their neighbor occasionally and invited him over for coffee in the morning once. After they didn't hear or see him for a couple of days, they didn't think much and ended up finishing their stay.
On the way out of the campground, they passed his camp, which was still set up the way it was when they went to say hello. My dad was driving his truck toward the exit with a friend in it, who shouted at him to stop because he thought he saw something. My dad saw it as well from the corner of his eye while driving, but assumed his mind was playing tricks on him. What they had just seen was haunting.
He really did see the guy hanging from the tree and not just a plastic bag. They got out and dialed 9-1-1 their spotty reception. The scene was pretty horrific. My dad recalls a note stuck to the tree with a buck knife. He was too sickened to read it, but he felt bad for the guy and always says how badly he wanted to cut him down from the tree, although he obviously couldn't save him because he had been long gone.
Officer and the ambulance showed up. The group got a "thank you" and were sent on their way after getting some information about the situation. The creepiest part of this story, though, was the fact that it occurred at my dad's favorite campsite, which we were staying at when he told us. He waited until we weren't kids anymore to say anything about it, but it still gets to me.
12. Imaginary Friend
When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend named Jessie. A couple of years ago while visiting relatives in Ireland we were all exchanging ghost stories, when my mum brought up Jessie. When I was a kid, Jessie was my imaginary friend. Or, I thought so. My mom's story made me rethink everything. She said that one time, when my dad was on his way to work, I asked him to bring back coal for Jessie's gran.
I'd ask for weirdly specific, old timey stuff like that for Jessie a lot. It never bothered anyone until we went on a little trip to a field we visited a lot when I was young. When I arrived, I suddenly ran off and went straight into a graveyard. I ran straight to a small grave and stopped and just stared at it. The headstone said "Jessie." So yeah...my 'imaginary friend' was a ghost.
13. You Know What They Say About Bigfoot
This happened a few years ago on my neighbor Daren’s property. He wanted to do a camping party and invited my brother and me, plus two of his friends. We pitched our tents and started a fire and were only a quarter-mile away from home. After sitting around the fire, we decided to go for a midnight hike through the woods.
We hike up the mountainside and drop back down onto a trail that leads to our campsite. As we're walking back we hear some snapping branches in the woods next to us. My brother and I are familiar with the nightly sounds of the forest so we don't think much of it. Sounds change when it’s bouncing off trees in the night, and a squirrel in the woods can sound like a big cougar.
Daren looked ridiculous. He is leading the group wearing pajama pants, loose slip-on shoes, a giant bathrobe, and carrying a shotgun. It has a laser sight on it, and when we heard another branch snap next to us, he lets out this yell and waves the light into the woods. Immediately something not ten feet from us starts stomping away, fast and loud.
The group noticed this thing sounded like a person since only two footfalls were heard. Daren, my brother, and I tried to play it off as a joke. Maybe it was Daren’s dad out spying on us—we were all in our late teens and it wasn't out of the question really for him. We were all a little on edge after that. My brother started watching the back and I moved up to the front with Daren.
It’s a full moon, something is stomping around in the woods near us, and we're getting to this open clearing. His other two friends were beyond freaked out at this point and just wanted to go home. As we get about 50 feet away this huge shadow steps onto the trail. That’s when we saw it. This thing, I swear was twelve feet tall, jet black, and it's standing on two legs.
It just strolls across the clearing in one step, which is about 15 feet wide, and hops up onto the hillside and out of sight. We all freeze, no one is daring to breathe and my brother is asking "Did you see that?" Daren finally asks me if I saw what he saw, and I give him a nod. The other two guys are losing their minds, quietly.
We end up making our way to the clearing, stopping for a second to see if we can spot this thing. Daren and I spot a large "tree stump" on the hillside above us and just move on. As we start walking away, Daren pulls me away and tells me he wants to double-check the clearing. That "tree stump" we thought we saw, was gone.
That’s when I officially started to panic. That meant the thing we saw walked up there, sat down, and watched us for a good 10 minutes before leaving. It's kind of lame, but we never saw it again. There have been times weird stuff has happened like pine cones or sticks being thrown at us, but it feels like a stretch to blame the creature.
I've had people tell me it was a bear, but that's impossible. Its legs were too long, it didn't have a snout, it had massively long arms, and we did end up finding footprints. They were Bigfoot-esque footprints, but they had huge claw marks at the end of the “toes.” One of the guys won't even come back to hang out with us anymore, and Daren was like a brother to him.
14. Gut Feeling
I was 17 at the time. Me and my dad had just finished our fishing trip and it was almost midnight, mid-autumn. When I was about to get in the car, he told me that he did not want me to sit in the front seat on the ride home. We argued about it for about five minutes. He did not give any good reason as to why he did not want me to.
I gave up and got in the back seat. It was pitch black outside, and we had been driving on the main road for about two minutes when we saw a car driving in our lane. Right as we were about to collide, my dad swerved into the other lane—and so did the car in front of us. That’s when I heard my dad say something that still haunts me.
He muttered, “I knew it” at the very last second, and then I blacked out. I woke up when the ambulance showed up at the scene, and the EMTs helped me out of the car. I was barely conscious and don’t remember much after that—but there’s one thing that’s still crystal clear. I saw my dad, sitting in the car waving at me with tears in his eyes.
Later, when I asked where my dad was, they told me that he had flown out of the car window and landed a few feet from the car. They had put him in an ambulance, but he didn't make it. They also told me that the man we crashed into lost his life—but that’s not all. He was driving with his 17-year-old daughter, and she only survived because she’d been sitting in the backseat like me.
I still can’t believe that this really happened. This was six years ago.
15. Is Anybody There?
I worked with a lady once who was pretty old—I'd say about 70 years old. Since our job was pretty boring, we talked a lot and she had all kinds of crazy stories. But this one creeps me out still. She said when her grandma passed, they had her buried in a wood box in the backyard, as was pretty customary in those days. Well, years later they have a family plot in a cemetery and decide to dig her grandma up to move her to the family plot.
She paused at this point. Then she said when they took the lid off the coffin, their eyes went wide. It had claw marks all over the inside. The grandma had apparently been buried alive.
16. Giggling Fit
When my daughter was about 18 months old, her grandmother died. That evening, I put my daughter to bed as normal, but instead of going to sleep pretty quickly as she usually did, she spent over an hour giggling and squealing with laughter. When I went to check on her, she was staring at an empty chair in her room, laughing as if she was watching the funniest thing ever. This carried on every night until the day of her grandmother's funeral.
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17. Too Close For Comfort
When my mom was young, she and her mother lived in a trailer in the backyard of a family member’s house. My mom was about 12 at the time, and the man in the neighboring house started to stare at her from time to time. She got a creepy vibe from him but figured her was just a harmless lonely guy. She soon found out how wrong she was.
One night when my mom was alone, she heard something on the roof of their trailer, then she heard what sounded like footsteps slowly walking along the metal rooftop. Given they were dirt poor at the time, they did not have a phone so she eventually ran out of the trailer and into the house without looking on the roof. When her uncle went outside to investigate, nothing was on the roof.
A few weeks went by with no incidents and my mom figured she must have been overly scared of nothing. More weird stuff would randomly happen, but only when she was alone, and it was always spaced out by a week or two. If I remember correctly, this occurred over maybe a couple of months…before it stopped completely.
Months go by without any weird instances at all—until one fateful night happens. My mom wakes up to find the trailer is unbelievably hot, like she could feel the heater on full blast. She got out of bed and was about to go to the control for the trailer's heater but she was overcome with a bad feeling and decided to just go into her uncle’s nearby house.
The uncle went out to the trailer again and this time noticed that the lock on the door was broken or messed with. He looked inside quickly but didn't see anything. His wife made him call the authorities and when they came out, they searched the trailer and made a horrific discovery. They found one of the kitchen knives behind a chair next to the heating controller.
They suspected that the neighbor went into the trailer, turned the heat up, and crouched behind the chair waiting for my mom to come by and then…who knows. It's been a long time since I heard the story but from what I remember, the officers questioned the neighbor but really couldn't do anything about it. Luckily, my mom and grandmother were able to move out of that town right after that.
My mom told me that about five or something years later she was visiting her other family who lived in a nearby town and she saw the neighbor at the grocery store. She bolted out before he saw her.
18. It’s A Trap!
I was driving on a deserted highway in the early hours of the morning and saw what looked like a body wrapped in a white sheet. It was discarded on the median, so I took the next exit and drove back. When I got closer, it still looked like a body wrapped in a sheet—but then I heard a noise that made my blood run cold. As I approached, there was a loud rustling in the trees on the median.
I immediately ran back to my truck to drive off. It was before the time of cell phones, so I had no way to call the cops. I checked the paper to see if it popped up in the news, but nothing…so creepy.
19. See That Guy?
In the place where my parents used to live, there was this old couch. My mom sometimes would walk by in the middle of the night and see a silhouette sitting there. She describes it as a man, sitting down, with a hat on, just sitting there. She saw it several times but thought nothing of it. She never told my dad, who one day said to her, "It's weird, but sometimes in the middle of the night I think I see a man sitting down on the couch doing nothing."
It turned out they both saw the same man sitting on this couch, and they realized this when they told each other after they'd both seen him.
20. What Goes Knock In The Night
One night when I was 13, I woke up to what sounded like someone knocking on a glass window. I looked at the clock and it was four am. I got out of my bed and walked out into the hallway where I could tell the knocking was coming from the front door. When I was growing up, our front door had two large glass windows on both sides of it.
My dad wasn’t home and my mom was asleep, so I bravely decided to check it out. I turned the light on, slowly crept down the stairs to see the front door. I’ll never be able to erase what I saw from my memory. There was blood on both windows, and a man lying on the floor slowly knocking on the window. I immediately ran upstairs, woke my mom up, and we called for help. The man was a driver who flipped his car near our house.
21. Bed-Sharing
It was four in the morning, I was lying on the bed and watching a video on YouTube. Suddenly, I felt like someone jump up on the edge of the bed. At first, I thought it was one of the cats, but turning my head towards the chairs on which they usually slept, I made sure that both of my cats are there. The worst thing was that they were looking exactly at the edge of the bed. Turning around, I saw an imprint there as if someone was sitting there or something small was lying. As soon as I looked at it, it disappeared.
Shutetrstock
22. I Can See It in Your Eyes
My boyfriend’s younger brother and I were taking a bike ride down the street to the shops late one afternoon. As we get onto the main road, we notice a dude across the street heading in the opposite direction. He is walking with a limp, his head is bowed, and he’s got a plastic bag in his hand. We're only a few meters away from him when he crosses the street onto our side.
As the bro rides past him, this stranger lifts his head up and smiles in his direction as they pass each other. I'm a little while behind, so I don't pay too much attention to this—that is, until the bro stops, turns around, and gives me a funny look, just as this guy is passing him by. I still don't think too much of it at this point, assuming that he had just stopped to let me catch up.
As soon as I myself passed the stranger and made eye contact with him, I realized that this was not the case. When the stranger looked over and nodded at me, I saw nothing in his eyes. When I say nothing, I mean like black pits where his eyes should have been, or just an eyeball that looked entirely black. I don’t know how else to describe it.
When I finally catch up to the bro, we stop around the corner and he says to me "Did you see that???" "You mean his eyes?!" I asked. "Yeah, it looked like they weren't even there!" he replied. We then kind of sat there for a while processing what we had both just seen. Had the bro not related the same feeling and experience to me as I had felt when the stranger looked at me, I doubt I would have ever thought anything of it.
I probably would have just assumed it was the light angles playing tricks on me or some such thing. It was a sunny afternoon, so glare certainly could have played a part. He could've been wearing contacts, I don't know. But none of those explanations feel like they fit. We got home later on and told everybody what had happened, but no one believed us. They still don't to this day.
23. Carpool Creature
It was a typical morning and I woke up while it was still dark outside, got on my bike, and started riding to work. I was pedaling up a hill where there were no lights and thick fog. I thought I could see a person in the distance, and as I got closer it was moving toward me. I realized that whatever it was, it was over seven feet tall.
I immediately turned around to bike back home. I wish someone else had seen it with me!
24. You Know What They Say About Bigfoot
This happened a few years ago on my neighbor Daren’s property. He wanted to do a camping party and invited my brother and me, plus two of his friends. We pitched our tents and started a fire and were only a quarter-mile away from home. After sitting around the fire, we decided to go for a midnight hike through the woods.
We hike up the mountainside and drop back down onto a trail that leads to our campsite. As we're walking back we hear some snapping branches in the woods next to us. My brother and I are familiar with the nightly sounds of the forest so we don't think much of it. Sounds change when it’s bouncing off trees in the night, and a squirrel in the woods can sound like a big cougar.
Daren looked ridiculous. He is leading the group wearing pajama pants, loose slip-on shoes, a giant bathrobe, and carrying a shotgun. It has a laser sight on it, and when we heard another branch snap next to us, he lets out this yell and waves the light into the woods. Immediately something not ten feet from us starts stomping away, fast and loud.
The group noticed this thing sounded like a person since only two footfalls were heard. Daren, my brother, and I tried to play it off as a joke. Maybe it was Daren’s dad out spying on us—we were all in our late teens and it wasn't out of the question really for him. We were all a little on edge after that. My brother started watching the back and I moved up to the front with Daren.
It’s a full moon, something is stomping around in the woods near us, and we're getting to this open clearing. His other two friends were beyond freaked out at this point and just wanted to go home. As we get about 50 feet away this huge shadow steps onto the trail. That’s when we saw it. This thing, I swear was twelve feet tall, jet black, and it's standing on two legs.
It just strolls across the clearing in one step, which is about 15 feet wide, and hops up onto the hillside and out of sight. We all freeze, no one is daring to breathe and my brother is asking "Did you see that?" Daren finally asks me if I saw what he saw, and I give him a nod. The other two guys are losing their minds, quietly.
We end up making our way to the clearing, stopping for a second to see if we can spot this thing. Daren and I spot a large "tree stump" on the hillside above us and just move on. As we start walking away, Daren pulls me away and tells me he wants to double-check the clearing. That "tree stump" we thought we saw, was gone.
That’s when I officially started to panic. That meant the thing we saw walked up there, sat down, and watched us for a good 10 minutes before leaving. It's kind of lame, but we never saw it again. There have been times weird stuff has happened like pine cones or sticks being thrown at us, but it feels like a stretch to blame the creature.
I've had people tell me it was a bear, but that's impossible. Its legs were too long, it didn't have a snout, it had massively long arms, and we did end up finding footprints. They were Bigfoot-esque footprints, but they had huge claw marks at the end of the “toes.” One of the guys won't even come back to hang out with us anymore, and Daren was like a brother to him.
25. When All You Have Is Time
I was driving to one of my friends' houses in high school on a road that ran through dense woods for a few miles and was very dark. On my way there, I saw a man just standing on the side of the road, just staring into the darkness with a blank look on his face. There isn't anything but woods for several miles. The scariest part? He was still there when I drove home four hours later in the same spot.
26. Said The Spider To The Fly
I came home after a miserable day during my teen years once, and because I didn't have my keys, I knocked to have my sister come down. When she opened the door, her eyes were wide with panic. She asked, "Did you just get home?" I said, "Yeah, just now. Why?" She started jumping up and down like she was shaking off spiders.
She then told me that she'd been hearing my voice from my room telling her to come in. I said, "No, I haven't been home all day. Did you go in my room?" She said, "No, it was your voice... but I guess... quietly malicious? It just felt off." She then called her boyfriend to pick her up and stayed overnight with him and left me in this creepy situation by myself. I, thankfully, didn't hear anything else that night though.
27. A Message From Beyond
One night, there was an altercation in the middle of our street at 2 in the morning that woke our whole house up. My stepfather and my uncle were still up drinking and went outside to see what was going on. There was a young man kicking the heck out of one of our older neighbors. We found out afterward the young man was dating the older man's daughter.
My stepfather and uncle went out to break it up and in the commotion, the guy plunged the weapon right into my stepfather. He stumbled back on to the porch and fell, and I tried to catch him. His blood smeared down the front of my shirt, and the younger guy took off and we called 9-1-1. This is where it got truly chilling.
We were in the hospital until the early morning. When my mom and I got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was a friend of mine from school, crying and apologizing for calling in the middle of the night, but she had just had a dream that there was screaming and a fight, and I was covered in blood. She begged me to call her back.
The time stamp on the message was the same time as the fight. This is in the late 80s, before computers and even cell phones really. I lived on the other side of town from her. There was no way she could have known what had happened.
28. By A Stairs' Breadth
One night, when I was about 16 years old, I'd finally decided to get off my computer and go to bed, around 2 am if memory serves me correctly. At that time my family and I lived in a decently-sized two-story house. The staircase to the second floor was pretty basic: head up a few steps, turn on a landing halfway up, traverse the remaining few steps, and at the top you're only a couple of footfalls from my bedroom door.
Someone please explain to me, then, how I got lost on this staircase. Sure, it was dark, but even then you'd have to be a special kind of stupid to not know how to walk up these stairs after you've already done it a thousand times before. Just keep one hand on the railing and you don't need to use your eyes. I swear that as soon as I reached the landing, I spent ten minutes just...continually walking upwards.
Realistically it only takes someone five to seven seconds to walk up these stairs, three if they're running or skipping steps. I realized I'd been walking for much longer than that and stopped. At that moment, my blood ran cold. I'd walked up those stairs in pitch-black darkness so many times before, but even with my hand on the railing I was getting nowhere, just endlessly walking upwards.
My skin crawled. If my brother hadn't turned on the upstairs hallway light, I'm not sure I would've made it to my bedroom. The guy blinked sleepily at me and asked me if I was okay, and all I could say was, "I legitimately have no idea." I told him the next day what had happened and he told me that the reason he'd come out of his room in the first place was that he'd heard footsteps on the stairs "for several minutes."
What in the world, man? What was that? I wasn't so tired that I just mindlessly walked up and down the stairs for a while. I was completely awake, and not once did it suddenly feel like I'd turned around to walk back downstairs at any time. I still get chills thinking about it.
29. The Place Under The Stairs
Just a few months ago, while I was still in school, I rented an old house with two of my friends. I lived in the basement and they each had a room upstairs. Several strange things happened to me while I was living in that basement. The first was that I had just gotten a dog and he was about four months old at the time. Now and then, right when I turned the TV off to go to sleep, my dog would start whining and growling at one corner of my room.
He would usually not get on my bed because he wasn't allowed, but during these times, he would jump on my bed and get as close to me as he could, all without his eyes ever leaving that corner. This happened about five times over the course of four months. Then, toward the end of the school year, when I was about to move out, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my life occurred.
Under our stairs was a little door that led to a small space that had a dirt floor. There was also a really weird, old wooden piece of what looks like a map nailed to the inside of the door, so it's a pretty spooky place. Up until the day before this incident, we had kept a small chair in front of this door that I laid my coats and things on, but we had some friends over the night before, so we brought that chair upstairs.
It was dark (probably 8 pm) and I had just been upstairs in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the stairs and was about to open the door to my room, when the door to the little closet under the stairs opened so slowly and with THE loudest creak I've ever heard in my life. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen in fear, staring at the closet, waiting for whatever was about to come out of it to show itself.
I literally stood there for about five minutes, absolutely terrified. Eventually, I opened the door to my room and locked it as fast as I could. I wasn't sure either of my roommates was home, so I called my female roommate and she was there. I spent the rest of that night upstairs with her, still too scared to go back downstairs. I do not scare easily.
Now I know many of you will probably say it was the wind or the fact that I had just come down the stairs or something just as my roommates did, but I've had those things happen to me before and been kind of creeped out, but this was different. The second I heard that closet open and looked over to see it opening so slowly, I felt this sheer terror.
It honestly felt like there was someone or something else in the room with me that wanted me to see that door open.
30. Light-Fingered
When I was in kindergarten or maybe the first grade, we had a blackout at my school, and this kid went, “Wait, I’ll light a match,” and proceeded to pretend to light an invisible match. The lights came back on instantly, and we cheered for him. Then he said, “Oh, it’s too hot,” and he pretended to blow the match out, then the lights went back out immediately. Wizardry.
31. A Tiny Visitor
This happened probably five years ago. I was asleep in my room when my eyes suddenly opened at about 2:30 am. I was wide awake. My senses were heightened and it felt like someone or something was in my room. In the darkness, I saw an outline of something underneath my desk. It was almost like a really tiny man, maybe a foot tall give or take.
At this point, I'm totally perplexed but not really scared until I see it start to move out from under my desk and across my room. The light switch is right next to my bed, so I decided that in one motion I was going to turn on the light switch and jump on this thing the second it got near my bed. This thing gets near my bed, but I messed up and fumbled with the light switch.
I also missed when I dove at it. But I kid you not, I watched this thing move through my bedroom wall. I just sat on my bed trying to figure out what had happened. Little did I know, this nightmare was just beginning. Now, my brother had the room right next to mine, right behind the wall this thing went through. About ten minutes later my brother knocks on my door and comes in.
The first words out of his mouth were, "Did you happen to see like a little tiny human in here a little bit ago?" I was pretty shocked, and I told him that I indeed had. He replied with, "Well, I just watched something dart across my room and it looked like it came from the wall and then it disappeared through the wall and to outside."
To say I was stunned would be an understatement, but I was also thrilled that I didn't have psychosis. But, a little while later, perhaps a year passes and I am driving in my car and I'm listening to some late-night radio host, and he had a guest on. The guest proceeds to describe something that happened to him and it was almost exactly what my brother and I experienced.
32. You Don’t Belong Here
This happened when I was around 12 years old. At the time, cell phones were still pretty new, and they were also bricks. My family lived surrounded by farmland in a rural area. It was far enough that traffic was pretty sparse and foot traffic was nonexistent. We could see our neighbor’s houses on either side, but they were around a mile or more through pretty dense woods.
One night, my parents and sister went out for dinner, and I stayed home. Our living room was all windows facing out of the back and we kept the curtains open. I was sitting on the couch watching TV in the living room, looked outside, and saw someone walking through the backyard. He was walking across the property parallel to the street.
He stopped in the center of the yard and just looked at the house. The lights were off, but the TV was on, so he could very likely see me seeing him. He continued to stare at me for what felt like an hour but was probably 30 seconds. I jumped up, grabbed the phone, and ran to my parent’s bedroom. I locked the door and dialed my mom’s cell phone.
My dad grabbed the phone from her, told me to stay in the bedroom, and wait for them to call back. He told me they were five minutes from home and would call when they were in the driveway. They got home, checked the yard and nobody was to be seen. We never found out who it was or what they were doing, but they didn’t belong where they were.
33. An About Face
A really bizarre thing happened today that left me a bit shaken. Earlier today, I went to an otolaryngologist appointment with a sore throat. At the end of my 30-minute slot, I was sitting at the table across from the doctor, with her writing out the prescriptions. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and, without waiting for a response, a man stepped in.
He was tall and slightly stooping, in his 30s or maybe 40s, with balding blond hair, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt. I guessed he was the next patient in line eager to start his appointment, and only paid him a quick glance before turning back to the table. The doctor called out something to the effect of, “Sir, could you please wait outside? I’ll call you back in a few minutes” and resumed writing.
The man, however, didn’t leave right away, but continued silently standing in the doorway for several more seconds. Then, out of my side vision, I noticed something truly disturbing. There was something strange going on with his face that wasn’t there a moment ago. I couldn’t make out the details, so I cautiously gave him another look.
What I saw is difficult to put into words. The best I can describe it is, well, a glitch effect, like a corrupt image in a video file. The man’s face was now a blob of different shades of pink, misshapen and somehow almost pixilated. I was only able to catch a flash of it, though, as the man quickly turned back to the door and stepped out.
As he was turning around, I noticed that in profile his face looked flat and featureless, like that of a Lego figure. This encounter was so unexpected and so unusual that at first, it didn’t even register with me as something noteworthy. After a moment’s consideration, I figured it must’ve been a simple brain hiccup on my part due to a lack of sleep, or maybe some weird visual illusion.
But then I met eyes with the doctor. She paused, pen in hand, and asked me hesitantly: “Did you see it? His face…” “Yeah,” I said. And that was that, we didn’t discuss it further. She finished filling out my paperwork and I went home, feeling a bit lightheaded. As I left the office, the man was sitting in the corridor outside occupied with his phone. As far as I could see, his face was once again perfectly normal.
34. Remotely Controlled
My buddy and I were chilling watching TV in the living room. I was on the far-right, and he was on the far-left end of the sofa. The remote was in the middle, a good two feet away from either of us. Suddenly, it flung itself up in the air and toward the TV without either of us moving a muscle. We just looked at the spot it was in, then each other, then back to the TV and didn’t say anything about it until years later talking with friends.
35. Sticky Situation
My sister screamed one night in our apartment because she saw her phone floating above her face. She continued screaming when she saw a man at her window. Later, she made a disturbing realization. A creative thief had coated a long stick with really sticky goo and was using it to take stuff. We did not call building security but alerted the landlady.
She didn’t do anything, of course. But karma is sweet—and the thief took her phone a month later.
36. Shadow Stalker
One night when we were younger, my sister and I were hanging out in my room after lights out. We had separate bedrooms but would hang out sometimes and stay up chatting. We weren’t in complete darkness because there was a parking lot with streetlights about 20 feet from my bedroom window. It was bright enough to cast light on my wall.
As we were lying in bed chatting, one of us noticed a silhouette of a man’s head was suddenly against the wall. The best way I can describe the visual is when you see old buildings where they have a sheet hanging in front of a light and do silly things with shadows. This was caused by a man looking into my bedroom window!
We freaked out and both tried hiding in the corner of the bed under the covers. The shadow stayed there for what felt like forever. We calmed ourselves down and convinced each other that it was just our stepdad trying to mess with us. We ran out of the room to see where he was and found him sitting in the living room.
It wasn’t him outside. He would have had to run around the house in a split second to make it to the living room. We told him what was happening and he came to check. The shadow was gone, and he thought we were trying to prank him with our story. We were still so scared that he believed us, and stayed until we fell asleep.
37. What A Way To Ruin A Night
Oh man, this happened in my junior year of college. Not my proudest moment. Me and maybe half a dozen friends are hanging out on Saturday night and we are just crispy baked. Then there was a knock at the door. Serious knocking. Panicked knocking. What do we do? Gotta be officers, and we are so screwed. Like, I'm getting kicked out of housing this time.
So one of the girls goes to answer the door. A guy with insane Ted Kaczynski hair and no pants is SCREAMING at the door to let him in. The girl screams and tries to shut the door, but the guy is forcing his way in. He is bleeding pretty bad, and is suddenly basically draped over my friend in a heap. He is totally incoherent, just keeps yelling PLEASE and making no sense otherwise.
My friend runs down to help the girl. I could muster precisely zero courage. I was terrified. I stood at the top of the stairs like a housewife who had seen a mouse in an old cartoon. WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO!? OH GOD WHAT DO WE DO!? We have to call the authorities! Right? I CANT DO IT I'M FREAKING OUT MAN. I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY HANDS! Someone finally calls and tells the authorities an old, possibly homeless man is trying to force his way into the apartment.
I remain totally panicking at the top of the steps, helping in no way whatsoever. My friend has now wrestled the guy out of the apartment and is trying to calm him down. Eventually, officers come and they take the disheveled, pantsless homeless man away in an ambulance. We close the door and sit back down in the living room. "Is anyone else not baked at all anymore?" someone asked.
We were not. We'd go over the series of events a hundred times over the next few weeks. I tried to downplay my role as the guardian of the stairwell. Like a week later, though, we'd find out it was neither an old guy nor a homeless guy, but rather a friend of a friend on a really bad acid trip who had lost his pants and ran through a field in a panic.
38. Creepy Crawlers
One night when I was living in a small condo in Arizona, I woke up to a furtive, clicking sound at my bedroom metal grate. It was coming from the sliding door of my fenced patio. The fence was almost seven feet high. My neighbor's cat would jump in and scratch at the screen so I could help him or come out to pet him daily.
Hearing the sound, I thought it was the cat, so I opened the slider and looked down as I opened the door. What I saw was so gruesome, it’s unforgettable. On the ground bumping into the door were 30 or more Palo Verde beetles. They look like cockroaches with huge antennas and they can get up to like five inches long. Several were attached in amplexus mating, making them look way bigger since they mate end to end.
I quickly slammed the door, crushing a few, and shut off the light. I guess they were attracted to the moisture in the potted garden plants I kept on the patio. I slept on the couch that night so I didn't hear them scratching against the door, and by morning all but a few were gone. It was creepy and now I double-check when the cat comes over!
39. Don’t Holler Unless You Need Help
My family had moved above a holler (what we call a hollow, or small valley) near where my stepdad’s family owned a lot of land. His family lived below and I used to love running through the woods as a kid. I loved how it made me feel. Our parents' one rule was that you had to stay within hearing distance of my mom, which I never listened to, but I was good at finding my way back home.
When my cousins came up to visit they said the location gave them an off feeling. I told them to shake it off and took them exploring in the woods. We found a weird thing we thought at the time was a grave, with a bunch of stones piled up to mark it. Something about it chilled me to the bone. We immediately ran back to the house. I stopped exploring the woods soon after that.
Every time I would try to go for a run, I would get that feeling in my gut that I was being watched and just end up running home in a cold sweat—but that’s not the eeriest part. My family also started hearing weird noises outside our house at night. My mom had started calling my stepdad's family in the middle of the night to come up with flashlights and help figure out what was causing the commotion.
Each time they came up they couldn’t find anything and told her it was probably deer and left. One morning after a particularly loud night, we went outside and the tree line right next to our house had fur scattered everywhere. We moved a couple of months after that and I never went back to that place—an d don’t ever plan to.
40. Getting Warm
I stayed in a luxurious resort on a small island with three of my friends when we were in high school. My friend's dad was the manager. This was a tiny island. You could walk around in less than a day and there were only a few suites. Very exclusive and it was far from the nearest town. At night, it would get really dark and peaceful.
The staff there always talked about how they have had strange or ghostly encounters throughout the years. Full disclosure, this island was used as a camp/hiding place for soldiers back in the day. It still has the lighthouse that they used and that's over hundreds of years old. Anyway, our room had two king-sized beds. In the middle of the night, while everyone else was asleep, I woke up suddenly and felt extremely hot.
I was sweating like crazy even though the A/C was on full blast and it was blowing straight at me. I felt something weird, like a presence, next to my side of the bed. I've never felt so scared in my entire life. I was shaking and sweating profusely. But what was really crazy was that only one side of my body was hot, the one by the edge of the bed. The other was cold.
I hid under the blanket and closed my eyes as hard as I could because I was afraid that if I opened them, I would see something. I felt the energy of that presence get closer to me, like we were face to face. I kept inching towards my friend who was sleeping next to me. After a while, it suddenly disappeared and I wasn't hot anymore. The next morning, I didn't mention it to anyone until they talked about how it was so cold in the bedroom that they were freezing the whole night.
Then I told them what I had felt that night. My friend who slept beside me got really quiet. She told me not to freak out but she woke up last night too, and she saw a girl standing next to my side of the bed and just staring right at me. I've never not believed in ghosts, but I also don't necessarily believe in them. But I just can't explain that night. It was the first time I had experienced a feeling I just couldn't explain or shake off. It still bothers me to this day.
41. Quaking In My Bed
I’m a super heavy sleeper and unless I have to go to the bathroom, I’m not waking up. One winter night when I was 10, I woke up to loud, thunder-like cracks! The sound was coming from the roof and sounded like a giant rubber mallet being thrown down on our shingles. This happened on and off for a few hours and I was petrified in bed.
It wasn’t sleeping paralysis because I could technically move, despite being too scared to run to my parent’s room, and I was crying. I hugged all my stuffed animals and cried until the sun came up. I didn’t know if it was aliens or ghosts or another kind of monster. The next day I told my parents and younger brother what happened.
All of them are super light sleepers and none of them heard anything. I found that strange but eventually forgot about it until three years later. I was randomly scrolling on Reddit or Facebook about science, and started reading about “icequakes.” They sound exactly like what I heard that night and usually take place during the coldest parts of the night.
42. Peeping Tom
I have to preface this by stating that I am a guy. I used to run quite a bit—five miles every day without fail. One day after finishing my run, I got a knock at the door and it was a young man about my age, like 27, asking about the duplex next door, as it was for rent. Typical questions about the neighborhood and the street and whatnot.
I was cordial and informative, but I had some food cooking and needed to get back inside. I told him to call the number on the sign, but before I could excuse myself inside he interjected. The conversation went something like this: Him: Wait...do I smell pot? Dude, do you have weed in there? Me: No, I'm cooking salmon. Him: Oh, cause if you were, I'd be totally down with that. By the way, you've got really nice pecs. Do you work out a lot?
Me: Yeah, I guess...look, I really gotta go. If you have questions about the duplex, call the number on the sign. Him: Cool, thanks. I go back inside the house and he drives off. I instantly call my landlord and tell her to under no circumstances let that guy rent the property, because he gave me the creeps. Well, fast forward two days.
It's a Sunday night around midnight. I'd just finished watching a movie on the couch and I had played a lot of soccer that weekend. Generally, I've found that if I can soak in a hot bath for about 20 minutes, my knees feel better in the morning. So I get up from the couch, walk by my bedroom, and notice that, since I'm kind of a restless sleeper, I must have knocked the blinds and curtains adjacent to my bed askew.
No biggie, I'll fix it tonight before I go to bed. Then I get into the bathroom and notice that someone must have opened the window to the bathroom when I had friends over several days ago. I don't have a bathroom exhaust fan, so it only makes sense to raise the window and blinds a bit. I close the window and shut the blinds.
I've got one of those nifty kitchen timers that I set to 20 minutes and I just sit in the bath, waiting for the time to expire. During this quiet time, my mind starts replaying the weekend's events, and I start to get an uneasy feeling. Subconsciously, I felt something was wrong, but maybe I was just being paranoid. Then I thought about the bedroom window and the bathroom window both having blinds askew.
And come to think of it, I believe the blinds behind the TV had one little slat that was sort of peeled up, too. But, no, now I'm really just being paranoid. And I hadn't even thought about the weird encounter from two days ago. But now, I'm sitting in a bathtub and the darn timer seems frozen at this point. I tell myself that I'll get up when the timer is done, put on some clothes and take a look around the house. Well, I snapped.
Five minutes left and I couldn't take it any longer. I don't know how to rationalize what I did next. It just seemed purely instinctual. I hopped up and got a towel around me. I turned off the bathroom light, made my way quickly through the bedroom door and then the living room area. I then cut the kitchen and living room lights. In the darkness, I pulled a pair of pants up so that I was at least wearing something.
I wasn't going to go back into the bedroom for a shirt. The only light on in the house was my bedroom light. I went over to the front door and flung it open quickly to peer out. Nothing. Crickets. This was the middle of the summer, and the crickets were overwhelmingly loud. Louder than the sound of my squeaky storm door opening.
I decided I was definitely being paranoid, and turned to go back in. I turned, but at the last second I had that thought: I won't be content to sleep tonight unless I properly dismiss the paranoia with a walk around the house. So I barefootedly and cautiously make my way down the front porch stairs, and down the sidewalk to the side of my house where the bedroom windows glow.
The front of the house is definitely clear. I then tiptoe to the corner of the house to get a view of the side of the house. As I peer around the corner, not 20 feet away from me, I see the stranger from two days ago, his face glued to the bedroom window. His hand is in his shorts. I'm instantly enraged. Apparently, he is completely unaware that I have exited the house, much less flanked him.
I decided in that instant to surprise him. The following conversation was a mix between my anger, his fear, and most strangely of all, the feeling of amusement that this is actually happening to me. Keep in mind, the conversation doesn't really make a lot of sense because the guy didn't really have time to think. It really couldn't have been more than about 15-20 seconds before the ordeal was played out.
Me: YOU SICKO! Him: (Surprised and mortified) AHHH!! Me: I'm going to catch you and beat the heck out of you. Him: You don't know me!?!? (backing away) Me: (Aggressively approaching) I know exactly who you are, and I'm going to catch you. Him: (Transitioning from backing away to turning away and starting to run) Please don't hurt me. I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! Please don't hurt me!
At this point, it's an all-out chase across a neighbor's yard. I'm wearing nothing but a pair of warm-up pants, but I'm gaining on him. I was playing soccer daily at the time, so I was definitely going to catch him. But he made it easy. I chased him across one gravel driveway, which wasn't fun, but I was on his heels by the time he reached the second one, and he took a nasty fall right into the middle of the gravel.
I very nearly kicked him across the face with my shin, but I suppressed the urge. I tell him to get up. At this point he knows he is caught, so he is completely compliant...well, kind of. I ask him where he parked, and he lied and said a few blocks down. I ask his name, and he gives me one. I take his keys from him and tell him we're going to his car. We walk about 30 feet and he stops and says, "Actually, this is my car."
Wow, ok, so you parked basically right next to my house. So, I open his car and he's like, "What are you doing?" I explain to him that there's no way for me to know who he is, since he has no wallet with him. I open his glove box hoping to find some real ID. Bingo. I found a receipt for tire rotation or something. The car shown on the receipt matches the car he's driving. But the name doesn't.
I call him by the name on the receipt and he starts crying again and apologizing about lying about his name. I'm convinced I have him scared, and now I just want to go to bed. I know the authorities will take hours and it's already like 1:00 and I've gotta be up early. So, I take the little folder thing the receipt came in and I told him to write down a confession of what he did.
It was only just becoming apparent to me that not only was he a peeping tom, he had come into my house when I wasn't there to adjust the blinds in order to see in. Now I've got a written and signed confession. I write his license plate down and then I decide to make sure I never have to see this guy again. I take his phone and write down numbers of obvious relatives: Mom, Dad, etc.
Just a few. And then I tell him "I never want to see you again." I made it clear for him that if he saw me somewhere, he'd better make sure I don't see him. Anyway, at this point he's sitting in his car. I toss the keys and his cell phone into his car and tell him to get lost. He sits in the car sobbing for a while as I'm walking away, but he's got the engine started and leaving by the time I'm back in my house.
At this point, I sit down and pour a drink. And then I decide I wished I had called the authorities because I'm not getting any sleep, so I call the officer to show them the confession and all the information. The officer who shows up writes a few things down and tells me I should have detained him. Two days later, I call them and ask them about a report.
No news, and no news would come. No report. Oh well, he's never coming back. Wrong! He knocks on my door about a year later. I open the door, and he must have seen the anger. He backs away from the door with his hands up and says he came to apologize. He said he was very sorry. I told him I accepted his apology and to not screw up like that again. And then he said thanks and walked away. Very strange.
43. Campfire Friend Or Foe
I was camping at a primitive campsite with a family member about nine years ago. We went during the week and when we arrived, the park ranger informed us we were the only people in this section that night. We would be about four miles away from other campgrounds. There was only one road to get in and out so we would see anyone headed our way.
My relative fell asleep quickly, but I had gotten a weird feeling as the night got darker. No cars had driven on the road by us so I knew it was still just us, but I could hear something crunching in the brush about 30 yards away. I hoped it was a deer as they are common in the area, and I was trying to rationalize the fear away.
Just as I was telling myself there are no large predators besides coyotes in the area, something let out a terrifying scream as I’ve never heard before or since. It shook me to my core and wasn’t anything like a coyote, raccoon, bear, or even a human. My family member woke up and we heard something running away heavily in the brush. We grabbed the essentials and sprinted to the car and drove home.
44. Snowy Sighting
A friend and I were up at his mountain house. It was snowing and we were setting up some ramps at the bottom of a hill to do some snowboarding the next day. I accidentally dropped my keys while we were out there and did not notice until it got dark. We went back out to the trail to see if we could spot them and when we got out of the woods to a clearing, we saw a silhouette of a child on a hill across from us.
The kid was standing under a tree laughing. It was late, snowing, and cold so we were sketched out by it and kind of hustled back to the house. The next day we went back out, and there was a single gravestone on the top of the hill under the tree for a 12-year-old child. I am not someone who believes in ghosts but I have no explanation for what we saw. I am actually getting chills remembering it now.
45. Furry Sleepover
I was about 13 years old and was sound asleep in my bed when something woke me up by touching my pillow. I was startled as it was pitch black in my room and all I could do was feel around with my hands to see what it was. To my relief, it was just my cat. I thought it was weird because she rarely slept on my bed and if she did it was by my feet.
I left her there and tried to go back to sleep. Then she started meowing. They were low rumbly meows which were odd because that’s the first time I heard her make that noise. I figured she was upset so I started to pet her to calm her down. Her normally soft and smooth fur felt sticky and matted. She smelled nasty too. The grumpy meowing got louder.
I jumped out of my bed and turned the lights on. The cat on my bed was not my cat. It was some random stray that I’ve never seen before and I don’t know how it got in my bedroom. It freaked me out, and it was stubborn to leave my room. I know it was just a cat but it was very scary at the time. I never saw it again, and still don’t know how it got in my room.
46. Halloween Story
When I was 14, I went to a Halloween bonfire at my buddy’s place in a rural area. He had a large backyard that was surrounded by some woods. I took a break from the bonfire and headed to a nearby bush to take a leak. When I was going to the bathroom, I saw something out of the corner of my eye in the woods, which was about 50 yards away.
I looked directly at it and saw nothing. I went back to my business but then, out of the corner of my eye I saw the large shadowy figure once again. I looked over and saw nothing. At this point, I remember in science class that your peripheral vision is better in locations with very little light. So, I look towards the area where the figure was without looking directly at it. That moment, I witnessed a chilling sight: It appeared as if someone was pacing the edge of the woods looking over towards the bonfire. I rush back to the group and tell them.
The kid who lived there ran into his house and told his dad. The dad comes out with a pistol and heads to the edge of the woods. He comes back and reports nothing. It's possible my eyes could have been playing a trick on me, but I'm almost 100% sure I saw a person stalking us kids. The nearest neighbor was a mile down the road. It's just creepy that someone in the middle of nowhere would be watching a bunch of kids…
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47. Man’s Best Friend
This happened to one of my good friends. At the time he was living with his wife and kids and their German Shepherd in a one-bedroom apartment. One night he's up late, reading the paper in the kitchen when his dog lets out a very low growl—the kind that you had to be right next to him to hear. He tells the dog to be quiet and turns off all the lights in the apartment.
He slowly tip-toes to the front door and looks through the peephole. Looking back at him is a human eye. With the lights turned off he couldn’t see my friend looking back at him. He sees the guy look into the peepholes of his next-door neighbors and realizes he’s getting organized to do a burglary. He knew he had to scare him away—so he came up with a plan.
He takes a deep breath and screams, “LEAVE or I’ll let my German Shepherd loose on you!" The German Shepherd goes wild—barking like crazy and scratching to pull the door open. My buddy watched the guy run out of the building.
48. Sleepover
I shared a room with my sister around the age of 7, but she was off at a sleepover party the night it happened. As a little kid, I was terrified of lots of things - I'd never seen anything close to a horror film (not even The Nightmare Before Christmas) because of how jumpy I was. So naturally, the dark freaked me out.
I was really nightmare-prone, which caused everyone to say this was a dream later. But this was different. It was more vivid. Too realistic to be a dream. I was hiding under my sheets like the cowardly kid I was when I decided to poke my head out to get some cool air, and I saw something in my room. Something clearly not human.
I called it an alien at the time because that's the closest thing my horror-ignorant mind could liken it to. Now, I see it as more similar to the Rake or the Mothman. Its head was big and egg-shaped, like those stereotypical gray aliens. Far too big for its tiny, slender body. It was totally naked. Pale gray or ashen white skin, the lack of light made it hard to tell.
All the bones were visible. Its tiny shriveled sack and schlong just hung there between its legs. Its hands were way too big for the toothpick-like arms. It was standing at a really unnatural angle. Its eyes were totally black and shiny, seemed to be the only feature on its weird head, and were sunken in little red holes. Most unsettling of all, it was just staring at me.
After a few seconds of being completely paralyzed in fear, I pulled the covers back up over my head - what else could I do? I stayed there for the rest of the night until I fell asleep. I know this thing wasn't human. I told my parents the next day and they said I was dreaming. I made up a lot of stories back then. I remember a lot of them vividly, and the rest of my childhood is really, really hazy.
But seeing that thing in my room is one of the childhood memories that stuck with me the most. I have no idea what it was, and despite my fascination with horror stories, I don't think I want to know.
49. A Pressing Concern
You know how on cold days inside your car you can breathe on the window and draw on the glass? Well, I got in my car, and as I looked at the windshield, I saw a few small baby handprints. I thought that it was strange that someone would let a baby play on my car’s windshield. I had an urge to touch the baby prints and as I touched it, I wiped away the handprints.
The handprints were made from inside of my locked car.
50. Ghost Busters
I supervise the night crew at a Subway. The day crew has never mentioned it, but the night crew always make jokes about our "SubGhost,” although I've stopped being sure that it's actually a joke. Now hear me out. I'm not saying the Subway I work at is haunted...but I'm not saying it's not haunted, either. It's open 24/7, so past midnight just one person stays by themselves until day crew rolls in around 6 am.
I always spend at least an hour a night alone, and quite a while with just one other person. Sometimes we hear voices. The music is off, there's only one or two of us, but we can hear people having a conversation, although it's too quiet to pick out words. The first time I heard voices I looked at my supervisor and asked if she heard them too, and she looks me in the eyes and casually says, "Yeah, it's the SubGhosts talking."
It sounds like a joke, but now I realize when I'm training a newbie on the late shift I've given the casual "It's just the SubGhost" response more times than I can remember. There are voices, there are weird crashing noises, and sometimes when no one is in the room things fall off the counters for no discernible reason. Once our owner bought new paper towel auto-dispensers to replace the old push dispensers.
I was alone right before the graveyard guy came in when I heard a towel dispense. I walked around the corner and everything was quiet. I was about to walk away when another towel came out. Then another. Then another. Finally it goes full SubGhost and dispenses the entire roll continuously without stopping, much like when a cat finds out how to unroll your toilet paper.
It only stopped when there was no paper left. No one else was around, but a few days later the owner switched them back, so we now have the manual paper towels back. If there is a SubGhost, I don't really mind. Stupid day crew is oblivious, but us night crew tend to become quite familiar with the sandwich spook, and its presence is so constant that the voices have almost become comforting.
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51. Fear Pong
I used to have to climb upstairs to use the bathroom as the bathroom on my floor wasn’t working. One night I had to go in the middle of the night, maybe three am. When I returned to my room, there was a red Solo cup full of water on the floor in the middle of the room. I was the only one home…and we didn’t have red Solo cups.
52. Best Laid Plans
Since I was a child, I’d had a nightmare about this haunted house and, specifically, the balcony and upstairs. The upstairs floor plan was such that there was a hallway running horizontally, with each door to the left facing the balcony. I would be extremely unnerved in my dream, walking down this hallway, the hair on my neck standing up, just feeling the presence of evil.
In 2019, my wife and I went to an architect to design a house for us to build in the Acadian/Creole style. The upstairs floor plan was exactly like the one in my nightmare. We scrapped the plans. And it’s a good thing—we all know how 2020 turned out. I feel like someone was warning me not to build that house ever since I was a child.
53. Deja Vu
This whole thing still freaks me out. I was waiting at the bus stop around two years ago, and just start chatting with this lady who was waiting for a different bus. It was just a normal conversation, but there was an odd undertone that I could just barely make out, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I don't know what it was. but I know it was there.
Finally my bus comes, I get on, and I am the only one there. All of a sudden I hear "Hey!" I glance up and there's a little girl who says "Remember me?" She reminded me strangely of the woman I was speaking with at the bus stop, but younger. You could cut the tension with a knife, and when I got off I swear she watched me as the bus left.
I'm certain that I was the only one on the bus when I got on.
54. Lynx Jynx
When I was around 11, I was in a club and we'd go to the marshlands and stay in a nice little cabin. It was just after lights out and I was in a top bunk. Through the darkness, I saw glowing eyes from a pretty large creature. It stayed still and then eventually strolled away. In the morning, we found out what it was. We were told we had to leave early because there was a lynx loose from the local zoo.
55. Voices From Beyond
The year is 2001, and I was 16 years old with my first PC. I was so excited and couldn't stop playing with it. My parents were trying to enforce strict boundaries with online time; so when they announced they were going to my aunt’s on Friday night —I was excited! I would have unlimited PC gaming time! I counted down all day and the minute they opened the door I was dialing in.
They left around six pm and we lived in a busy, urban area so I was far from scared of being all alone. After a few hours, it was getting late and I was getting tired so I turned off my PC but not my speakers, and laid in bed watching TV. Then I heard voices. At first, I thought my parents had returned. Then I realized the voices sounded as if they were coming from my speakers.
I turned off the TV and moved closer to the speakers. I was now sure I could hear muffled voices coming through. It was one of the few times I was shaking from fear. I turned them off and the voices stopped. I turned them back on and I heard them again, but couldn’t understand what they were saying. I called my parents and urgently asked them to hurry back home.
When I told them what had happened they didn't believe me and told me that I must have fallen asleep and dreamed about it. They came home, and I fell asleep and forgot about it until a few days later. Once again, I had my PC off and the speakers on. My mum was cooking in the kitchen and I was studying. Then the voices returned.
My mother heard them this time and together we unplugged my speakers, stored them in a box, and bought new ones. We never heard anything out of the ordinary again. A few years later, I was sharing my story with a couple of friends and they told me that it was more likely white noise due to other household appliances. However, to this day I swear I could hear words.
56. Doppelgänger Houseguest
In college, I was roommates with my childhood best friend for about two years. We are very trusting of each other; we would go into each other’s room freely and grab whatever we needed. We would borrow clothes, hairbrushes, perfume, etc. There were no questions asked, just a knock if we were in the room to let each other know we were going in.
Our rooms are across the hall from each other, with the hall facing the kitchen. So, from the kitchen you could see down the hall where our rooms were. At the time my friend had very long black hair and she’s very fair-skinned. One day, I get home from work, with my headphones in my ears talking to my mom about my day.
I go in the kitchen and grab a snack. I see her walk out of her room and go into mine, leave my room and go back into hers. She looks like she has just gotten out of the shower, her hair is soaking wet and she is wrapped in a white towel. Her long black wet hair is what I distinctly remember. Also, she makes no eye contact with me but I don’t think it was weird.
I don’t say anything to her since borrowing each other’s stuff was normal. I’m still on the phone with my mom so I don’t think much of it. I grab my snack, hang up with my mom and go into my room to watch TV. I figure she’s getting ready to go somewhere and we’ll talk later. About an hour passes and I go to the kitchen to clean the plate I ate on.
I see her in the kitchen making something to eat and I tell her, “Hey, what did you grab from my room earlier? Did you find what you needed?” She looks at me like I was crazy and says, “What are you talking about?” So, I say, “Yeah, earlier when I got home, I saw you go into my room and grab something. Did you get what you needed? Sorry, I didn’t say hi. I was on the phone with my mom.”
She asks me if I’m sure I saw her. I said that I was a 100% certain. That's when all the blood drained from her face. She tells me to grab my phone and go to her car as soon as possible, that she needs to show me something. I had my phone on me, and she grabbed my keys from the kitchen counter along with her purse, and she dragged me out the front door and into her car.
She then tells me that she got home maybe five minutes before we started talking. She had spent the night at her boyfriend’s and hadn’t been home all day. So, she has no idea who I saw. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she told me this. Complete fear and panic. She called the authorities and they came along with the apartment manager.
They checked the whole apartment and found no one. There was nothing amiss. And they were in there a while checking every nook and cranny. The manager got maintenance to change our locks and gave us new keys that day. My friend then tells me that for a week she’d been hearing noises from her bathroom like bottles moving.
However, whenever she went to check she found nothing. I have no idea who I saw going in and out of our rooms, but it looked exactly like my friend. I don’t drink or use substances. I am not on medication. This was in 2014 and I still freak out when I think about it.
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57. Roll The Fear In
One morning, around three am, I woke up to an ear-piercing crash! I ran down the hall to the dining room where the sound came from. When I got to the dining room I found a miniature boulder and a broken sliding glass door. Normally we don’t use this sliding door and have metal shelves in front of it—mainly soda storage.
Someone had hurled the boulder through the door. The ear-piercing crash had been a combination of glass, shelves, and cans of coke breaking. We called our friends and it took three of them to move this rock. Cleaning up the glass and soda took forever and I didn't sleep for the rest of the night. A few weeks before, I had found some broken pieces of cinder block near that door.
On the blocks, someone had written messages in permanent marker. The tone of the messages felt like a disgruntled boyfriend or partner with unresolved issues. It wasn’t anyone in our household and luckily there were no other incidents. I would have felt better if we knew who did it, but I’m also impressed if only one person picked up the boulder.
58. Blink And Miss
One night, while driving home, my best friend and I had to exit off of the highway to use the restroom. We pulled up to a Denny's that was super busy—it was around 2am/last call—and it looked like the line to the restroom was about five guys long. We knew it was going to take forever to get through that line, so we decided to run around the back and just go behind the dumpster.
While back there, we talked about going back in and grabbing a bite to eat, since we really had no reason to rush. We agreed to go back in just to grab something small and see if we ran into anyone we knew. Then we walked back to the front...It was closed. Not just for the night, but like it had been out of business for months.
It was completely dark—no people, abandoned. We both paused and looked at each other with that look on our faces like, "Wasn't this place packed and running when we pulled up?" To this day some people don’t believe us. We worked in nightlife, so we had had a drink or two at the most, but we never drove while drinking.
We weren't on any substances or meds or sleep-deprived. It was literally like an alternate universe/reality had slipped into our timeline. We got pronto out of there. This was over 20 years ago, and we both still talk about it and remember it like it was yesterday.
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59. Knock Knock — Who’s There?
When I was 15, my friend was sleeping over and we decided to sleep downstairs instead of upstairs. My parents' room was right next to mine and we wanted to stay up late. We set up in the living room and slowly drift off to sleep. I randomly woke up in the middle of the night and my friend was already awake. He tells me he keeps hearing knocking on the window.
I was a little weirded out but decided my friend is hearing things and it must have been a tree. I got up to grab us snacks and as I walked by the window, there was aggressive knocking! I jumped back but could see someone on the other side of the window. When I got closer, I could hear them saying my name, and realized it was just one of our friends who wanted to sleep over too.
60. The Other Side
When I lived in South Africa, I traveled a lot with a Christian missionary and humanitarian aid worker named Piet. He handled the spiritual stuff, while I tended to work more with the local (mostly Xhosa) people, helping them with non-spiritual issues. In July 2010, we went to a village in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we stepped out of the truck, we knew something was wrong.
We hadn't been able to contact our guy in the village all day, and there was no one around at all. Piet and I went from house to house, looking for, well, anyone, but everywhere was completely empty. Eventually, we saw a figure run around the corner of a building on the far side of the village. It was a young woman, stark naked, running straight for us.
Her arms were flailing, and she was running like an animal, occasionally dropping to all fours, then back on her feet. As she got closer, Piet told me to get back in the truck, then he screamed at me to get in the truck. I'd seen this guy watch a Xhosa witchdoctor burn a dozen chickens alive and not bat an eyelid, so when he lost his cool, I knew it was serious.
I closed the truck door as she reached us. She was covered in blood; there were cuts and slices all over her face, arms, and breasts. One of her ears was missing—I think, there was a lot of blood—her teeth were bloody, and she had a look in her eye of absolute, untamed rage. The screeching sound she made is unlike anything I've heard before or since.
I can still hear it so vividly in my mind. Looking into her face, seeing her wide psychotic eyes and gaping mouth as she made that unholy sound froze me in my seat. Piet had started the truck, and already started reversing up the dirt track, but she followed. He turned the car, and all the while she was scratching at the windows and metalwork.
Then he sped off up the track. She followed us still. She didn't keep up, obviously, but for a while I thought she was going to. I've never seen someone run that fast in bare feet. The journey back to our base town was almost silent. I spent most of it concentrating on the sound of my own breathing, and the rumble of the road. I asked Piet what that was, and what we should do.
He said the girl was no doubt insane, had a psychotic break or something, but the locals would have immediately thought her possessed. If she didn't kill herself, the other villagers would within days. He suggested that they had gathered in one house for safety. This happened in the Eastern Cape, which I would argue is the darkest, wildest, and most bizarre part of the country.
Strange things happen there a lot, and often just get buried or only picked up by one of the crazy tabloids like the Mercury, and subsequently ignored or written off. There are vast swathes of grassland punctuated by the odd settlement, without any adequate law enforcement. A lot of people live in these isolated settlements, and will only leave to work or to get food.
Many spend their whole lives in the village of their ancestors, as do their children, and so on. We did call the authorities, and the officer said “we will look into it.” We never heard about it again. South Africa has some very developed areas (the major towns and cities, for example) but there are enormous parts of this country that have remained almost untouched for decades.
The further you go from Johannesburg or Cape Town, the more rural and strange things can become. I'm not saying that all of rural South Africa is like this. A lot of the villages we went to were nice, simple settlements where the people welcomed us, gave us food, gaped at us for being white, and so on. Some were more sinister.
We eventually got in touch with the guy we were originally trying to see a day later. Piet asked him if everything was all right, and he said “We had a bad presence in the village. It is now gone.” I don't know for sure what happened, but I can guess, based on what Piet said. Piet's been back once since to that place, without me, and they seemed fine.
He told me he didn't ask about the girl, as he didn't know what had happened, and he didn't want them to react. I don't think he wanted to know.
61. Grandfather Guardian
Before my grandfather died, he would sit in one of our living room chairs to the left of the TV with his oxygen tank. He left us in 2004, and a couple of weeks later my mom hurt her back. The doctor gave her some pain medication and she was sleeping on our couch in the living room for the extra back support. She was constantly uncomfortable from the pain.
One night while she was sleeping on the couch, she opened her eyes and saw my grandfather sitting in the living room chair. My grandfather spoke to her and said, “Donna, you’re going to be okay. This pain is going to pass. You’re going to make it.” She was convinced it was a dream and shut her eyes to fall back asleep.
On the same night, my oldest sister came home late and had to go into the living room to turn the outside light off. She was trying not to wake my mom, and quietly went into the living room, where she saw my grandfather looking at our mom from the chair. She panicked, forgot to turn off the light, and ran upstairs to bed.
At breakfast the next morning, we were all eating waffles and my mom started lecturing my older sister about not turning off the light. She’s mid-speech when Jen looks up at her and goes “Mom I wasn’t going to tell you this but I saw grandpa on the couch last night, it’s why I didn’t turn off the front porch light.” My mom dropped her fork and said, “Jen, I saw grandpa too.”
62. Wake-Up Call
My grandfather passed in 2008. He was a big fan of opera music and would blare it in the morning if he and my grandmother ever had any grandkids sleeping over. It was a good wake-up alarm. About a week or two after his funeral, I was lying on my bed when I began to hear a scraping noise. I looked in the direction the sound came from to see a clock radio on the top shelf of my desk turn to face me, sliding across the desk in my direction, and it started playing all by itself.
The music it was playing was opera music.
63. A Haunted Snack
My spouse and I were at the end of our night and we’re lounging around in pajamas. He heads downstairs to grab some snacks and I’m lying in bed scrolling on my phone. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a face show up in that darkness, just watching me. I can also see a pale, masculine torso. My immediate reaction is complete nonchalance.
My spouse loves to try and surprise or spook me so I figured any minute they would barrel into the bedroom and jump in the middle of the bed. Nothing happens and the face just stays there so I begin to wonder, what is he thinking? But then, suddenly, I feel a chill down my spine. The door slams, and I’m instantly irritated. We have a firm rule—we never slam doors in the house and also, why would you do that?
I’m confused, and still hungry so I hop out of bed and dart to the door, yanking it open, and I’m face to face with my spouse. “Why did you slam the door?” He was equally surprised and annoyed and responded, “Why did you slam the door? I was almost back to the room!” I look down, both his hands are on the plate he’s holding.
He hasn’t even actually made it back to the room yet, so there’s no way he could have slammed the door. This is not the only time something in the house has imitated my other half, but that grinning, floating face in the door still creeps me out.
64. Passing Through
When I was nine years old, my best friend and I were crossing a busy street on the way home from school. Normally we were careful, but I was distracted by a black cat following us down the road. We stopped and she bent down to pat him while I turned around to cross the street, not thinking to look both ways. A silver car was directly to my right, about to hit me.
I froze up, like a deer in headlights. My friend was screaming. Then suddenly it happened. The car was now on my left. It didn't swerve and wasn't just in another lane—the car was just suddenly on my other side, speeding away. I ran across the rest of the road and my friend asked how I had passed through the car. Everything looked a bit strange; her shape too was fuzzy and doubled.
It was a clear day and the sun was shining, even though it had been overcast and windy on the other side of the road. When I glanced back, the black cat was staring at me from the other side. Then he just strolled away.
65. Family Reunion
When I was in college, we used to hang out in a large cemetery that surrounded the campus. It was easy to hide from campus security there. One night, we were walking around and decided to check out this pyramid mausoleum that was located in the center. It looked like someone tried to break in at one point through this small sealed doorway.
I was able to wedge myself up the broken entrance and look through the crack. I saw a bunch of coffins and I heard someone whisper “Allie” and “Hey.” So I turned around and said Hello—only to make a chilling realization. No one I was with had said anything, and no one calls me Allie. Everyone calls me Allison. Allie was something only my family only called me. I immediately had this weird chill over me.
66. Listening In
My husband worked for a small old folks’ home. They only had three residents and his aunt ran the place. I had college classes nearby and would often come hang out for a few hours at the end of his shift and visit with the residents. One night my husband got the residents to bed and went downstairs to collect his paycheck while I turned off the lights.
As I reached the top of the stairs, I turned to look into the hallway leading to the residents’ rooms. Standing outside the room of one of the residents was a woman. She was wearing an old pale green Victorian style dress, and had her ear pressed to the door. I opened my mouth to say something, and she looked directly at me, put a finger to her lips, and shushed me.
I turned and practically fell down the stairs, sprinting to the owner's office. She took in the expression on my face and said the words that still haunt me: “You saw the woman in green.” It was not a question. I confirmed what she had said, and she asked whose room she had been interested in. When I told her, she nodded and sighed. I was confused, but it wasn't long until I understood.
The next morning, the owner called us to let us know that the target resident had been found comatose in her bed. She passed away later that day.
67. A Load Of Trouble
I survived a kidnapping attempt in the 1980s. This was in a Sacramento neighborhood late at night, when I was visiting a friend when I was maybe 9-10 years old. Three of us walk out to go play at this park at an elementary school several blocks away. It was around 10:00 pm at night. We were playing Frisbee in the street in front of the school, and our Frisbee lands in the street.
Just as it touches on the pavement, a white van pulls up and stops, as if to allow us to get our Frisbee. I walk toward the van and grab the Frisbee, then move to the side to allow the van to pass. As the van passed, the most terrifying thing occurred. The sliding door opened and a guy dressed in black like a ninja came flying out and tried to grab me.
He had a harness on and the van had been rigged with a telescoping mechanism that allowed him to come out around five feet while hanging from this harness. The harness was operated by another person inside, also dressed in black. So there were at least three people involved in this attempt, including the driver of the vehicle.
I barely dodged his attempt to grab me and all three of us ran toward the elementary school and hopped the fence, ran along the fence through bushes, and then hopped a second fence that allowed us to be inside the school. We were scared as heck and could hear the van driving around and assumed they were in hot pursuit of us.
We found a way to get onto the roof of the school from inside, thank God, and proceeded to observe the van driving around the school for at least 30 minutes in an obvious attempt to find us. This scared us even more because one would think the would-be kidnappers would flee, but I suppose they thought we couldn’t identify them.
This was before cell phones, so we stayed up there until around 45 minutes after we last saw them. It appeared that some of them were searching for us on foot also, which added to the fear. We eventually escaped and went back to my friend’s house, and never told anyone in our family out of fear of being punished for being out late playing.
68. A Helping Pinkie Finger
My two-year-old toddler went to a two-hour class three times a week at the local church. This was in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. I should mention that this church was on the main road through town, which often had logging trucks carrying tons of wood driving on it. I went to pick up my son one day, and I could see he had been crying.
He had puffy, red eyes, and he confirmed as much when he said, “Mommy, I cried!” His teacher looked equally distraught. She said, “I need you to stay after class.” A few of the other kids were still there, waiting for their moms. I sat there with my son, and my heart was pounding. Had he bitten another child or something?
That wasn’t like him, but with kids you never know. All the students finally left, and his teacher turned to me and said, “As you know, we had an outing today.” I had signed a release form for the outing, which was for them to leave the school and walk next door to look at the fountain. She continued, “We used the buddy system walking over and back, but once I got to the classroom and counted the kids, I realized one was missing.”
By now, the teacher was almost crying herself. As I said, this church was on a main road. My child had somehow gotten separated from the others, and was alone, unsupervised, for five to ten minutes just yards from a busy main road with fully loaded lumber diesel trucks whizzing by. The teacher continued, “I ran as fast as I could to go look for him. He was standing at the main door, pounding at it to get in and screaming. I’m so sorry.”
Apparently, he had somehow found his way back to the main building, standing outside until someone found him. At this point, my son piped up. “The pink lady helped me!” I gathered my son up and took him home, telling his teacher that it was okay, these things happened, thank God it turned out fine, etc. I felt bad that she was so upset, but I was rattled to the core.
It was terrifying just imagining my toddler running loose next to a busy street, and he was clearly traumatized by it. On the way home, I asked him, “Who is the pink lady?” At that time, if he didn’t know someone’s name, he’d identify them by what color they were wearing, so the pink lady must have been wearing pink clothing.
I wanted to know who this was, because if she “helped” him, as he said, then this person found a lost toddler, led my son up to the outside of a building, and just left him there without trying to find an adult or even opening the door to let him inside. What adult would do that? My son knew the names of all the people at the school, so this was a stranger to him.
When my husband got home, I told him the whole story, with my son again babbling about a “pink lady.” My husband got a very strange look on his face and said, “You know, my grandmother was buried in her favorite pink dress.”
69. Stranger Swing
One night after work, a friend and I were wandering around the University District in Seattle. We planned to stay up all night wandering the city. At one point, we ended up at a park with a soccer field and some playground equipment, and we were just swinging full blast super high up in the air. We were feeling a rush of childlike adrenaline and the night was really fun.
All of a sudden we realized on the bench next to the swings, a guy was sitting there staring at us silently. I don’t even remember saying anything at that moment but we both looked at the guy, looked at each other, jumped from our swings, and ran out of the park. We didn’t stop running until we got a block or two away.
70. Sister Acts
I'm a female, first of all. I'm 21 now, but when I was four years old, my sister had just turned 16. She had just gotten her license and was so excited. It was probably only September, and she got her license in July. My sister is from my dad's first marriage, and she lived with her mom and stepdad while I lived with our dad and my mom.
We lived about 30 minutes apart. My dad worked late hours, and my mom frequently traveled for work, so I had to spend a lot of time at a babysitters (which was costly) until my sister got her license. My dad finally gave her permission to pick me up after she got out of school and take me to her mom's until he was off work. She was so excited to finally be able to use her license!
I know I said I was only four, but I remember this event so vividly. It took years for my sister to even ask me if I remembered it, but when I told her all the parts I remember (about 80%) she filled in the rest for me. It was one of the first times my sister would get to pick me up from my babysitter, which means it would be one of the first times she'd been allowed to drive with me alone.
Almost as soon as we pulled onto the main road, a white pick-up truck swerved behind us. Weird, but whatever. After a few turns, my sister noticed that the truck still followed her. Even when she would just switch lanes, he was right there switching behind her. My sister, being a bit of a paranoid person, tested it a little and switched lanes several times.
She said she heard his tires squealing by his quick cuts to get behind her again. She told me not to worry, and I remember being an oblivious little kid. She looked scared, but I had no concerns. The man started to get really angry. I don't remember anything about what he looked like, but I do remember that he had this look of pure hate on his face
It’s strange that you can sometimes remember expressions but not the faces they were on. He wasn't only angry, he was full of hate. He was honking the horn repeatedly, just laying on it, and he was very close to our car. He was swerving back and forth, trying to get our attention. He would pull up beside us occasionally, flip us off, and honk.
The first big event came about when we pulled up at a four-way stoplight. It's a bigger one, so there was a lot of room in the intersection. We were the first ones at the stop light in our lane, and nobody was beside us. The man used this lane to pass us and pull his car in front of us almost in the intersection. He was now blocking us.
I so perfectly remember that white pick up truck. He got out of it, and started storming towards our car. He was screaming so hard I remember thinking his face almost looked purple. Neither one of us remembers what he was saying, but he pulled up his shirt to reveal to us that he had a gun. He pointed to it and at us, threatening us and closing the gap between us. My sister put her hand over my body, told me to close my eyes, and floored it through the intersection.
She said she was worried we were either going to hit him, or get hit in the intersection, but it was a better chance than sitting there and waiting for the psycho to shoot. But that was just the beginning of the nightmare. He hopped back into his car and followed us. My house was closer to where we were than my sister’s, so for some reason, she decided to go to my empty house.
Obviously, he followed us and blocked us into the driveway. He got out and walked towards my sister’s parked car. Once again, she had to think fast and swerve her way across our lawn back out onto the road. This was before cell phones, and she had just started driving and was still young. She had no idea what to do, really.
He followed us back onto our neighborhood road, pulling up next to our car and hitting his truck against us, trying to make us skid or wreck. There is a smallish area of grass between my neighborhood road and a major busy road, and it was obvious he was trying to push our car hard enough to send us into the traffic beside us. I remember him doing that little gesture where you drag your finger along your throat, like you're slitting it.
His face was still purple. There was a gas station nearby and my sister decided on the last Hail Mary move she could think of. I remember her talking to me so seriously and sternly. She told me she needed me to be a big girl and the second we pulled by the door of the gas station, to undo my seatbelt and jump out, and run inside so fast that I shouldn't even worry about closing my door.
I was to run inside and go directly to the person behind the counter and tell them to call 9-1-1 because a bad man was following us. We pulled in and she threw the car in park and I jumped out and did as I was told. She was only a few seconds behind, but she had to actually stop the car, park it, turn it off, whatever. She closed her door and mine for me, and just ran inside with me.
The man came into the parking lot behind us, and when we were inside, he went through my sister's car. By the time officers arrived, he was gone. They never found him, and we never knew what provoked him or what his plan was. The only thing he took from the car was my sister's ID and the cash she had on her. I can still so vividly picture what was happening, but I don't remember being scared.
I don't remember my sister ever showing that she was freaking out, although later at her mom's she did lose her mind, sobbing her eyes out and yelling, understandably. I think the way she handled it really prevented it from being a really traumatic experience for me. It's still scary, but it's not something that haunts me, and I have her to thank.
71. Blair Witch Brother
I grew up on a five-acre farm in the country. This was about 1999, we had just gotten back home from the city watching The Blair Witch Project when it first came out. My brother and I are sitting in a hidden spot near some bushes, staying up late and hiding from my Mom. Suddenly, he says "Listen! I hear something out there."
I knew there was nothing and he just didn’t want to admit the dark freaked him out. It backfired for him because he got too scared and said he thought he could hear the Blair Witch. With great timing, my mom walks around the corner of the house. "What are you guys doing here?" I have never seen my brother jump so high and run into the house so fast!
72. Nighty Night
This happened to my cousin, and my other cousin and aunt witnessed it. My younger cousin's name is Jenny, my older cousin’s name is Jane, and my aunt's name is Myra. So Jenny and her mom Myra are in New York to visit Jane while she's in her master's program. They tour around NYC and stay at a hotel in Manhattan somewhere.
Anyways, in the middle of the night Jenny is having nightmares. After talking with her after the fact, she describes sleep paralysis to the tee. Apparently Jenny was being drawn in and suffocated by a massive TV that drove her through the bed and into the ground. She woke up screaming and crying, and vomited and peed her pants in the bathroom.
My aunt Myra goes to help her and wash her off, and they both head back to bed sometime later. A while later, my aunt checks on Jenny again, who is now staring directly at her with a blank expression. She's sleeping with her eyes fully open. My aunt is creeped out, but then a new terror came to visit. She and my other cousin Jane are starting to hear whispers and children's voices.
They leave first thing in the morning…but one more creepy thing happened. There's a photo of my family from this time where Jenny has fully blackened lips. Not Photoshop blackened, but they're perfectly black. Almost as if she had put on some makeup or lipstick. But of course she didn't. To this day, we have no idea why her lips showed up like that.
73. Peek-A-BOO
I live in a ground-level studio, and my bed is near the window. I reached to turn off the bedside lamp and saw someone in a white hoodie through the blinds. I tried to intimidatingly move closer to get a better look but instead, the hooded stranger aggressively moved closer. He even put his face directly onto my window. I screamed and he ran away. I Installed a security camera the next day.
74. Scared Mute
When I was about five years old, I woke up and saw a man staring at me through my bedroom window. His hands were pressed against the glass and his head was cocked to the side. He didn't even flinch when I noticed him. I jumped under my covers and peeked to see if he had left. He was still there. I hid under my covers until the morning and still don't know why I didn't scream.
75. Whistle While You Work
This one hits me every now and then when I wake up in the middle of the night. So I was around 17 and had gotten home from work rather late. I went straight to my room to change and found myself hungry. It was probably around 1 am by this time and I didn’t want to cook anything and make too much noise as I was afraid I’d wake the parents.
So when I ventured to my kitchen, I started shuffling through the cupboards looking for a quick fix of snack food to tide me over until the morning. Now, our kitchen was positioned so that the kitchen door led to our back yard. The door itself was an old wooden door, but my dad had added one of those metal security gates on the outside for good measure. It was one of the security gates where the holes on the door were small enough so that insects could not get through, and therefore we could leave the wooden door open in the summer to allow for a breeze to go through the house.
In addition to the security door, my dad had also installed one of those auto security lights, you know the ones that go on automatically whenever their motion sensor is triggered. Usually the light would only go on when I would let my dog outside to pee at night. However, on this night my dog was already lounging in my room waiting for me to come back with some snacks for him as well.
Anyways, getting ahead of myself. So, I was busy creeping through the cupboards and finally hit the jackpot with some pop tarts. Knowing my dog, I didn’t want to chance him snagging the tart from my hand as I ate it, so I busted those things open then and there and ate them raw. As I am standing there eating the first pop tart, I hear a faint whistling sound from outside.
The wooden door was open. At first I thought it was the wind, but then I noticed that the whistling was a distinct tune and not random whistling. I didn’t know the tune but I could tell that it was from a song…it sounded like a happy and sad song all rolled into one. I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s the best way I can describe it. It was odd.
After standing there for around 20 seconds, I decided that it must be one of my friends who lives down the block screwing with me. Maybe they were on the other side of the fence and whistling there to scare me. Right when I am thinking this thought, I see the security light suddenly turn on. I quickly looked around the surrounding area but don’t see anyone or anything that could have set the light off.
The whistling is still going on……Now I am in panic mode. Is it one my friends? If so, where are they hiding? If it’s not one of them, then who is it? I am stuck standing there now and can’t move as I stare outside waiting for something to happen. Nothing does. A minute or so goes by, with the whistling continuing and the light remaining on.
Suddenly the whistling gets louder and I see the doorknob to my metal door start to move up and down. I can see through the metal door to see that there is no one there. The whistling sounds like it’s right outside now and the door knob keeps moving like someone is trying to get in. The security light is still on so I have a clear view of the front of the door and know for sure there is no one there.
Screw the pop tarts. I dropped the box and jetted back to my room, slammed and locked the door, and hid under my blankets with my bat and dog. I never went out to the kitchen at night after that.
76. Oh Deer...
I was at a camp in the wilderness of Virginia and we were walking back from the bonfire ceremony to our cabins. I was with two other campers and as we were walking back we saw two bright green lights in the middle of the path. They were five to six feet off the ground. We froze and got too nervous to shine our flashlights.
Finally, one of the other guys raised his flashlight and on the path was a six-foot-tall deer. It was massive and just calmly standing there staring at us. We all looked at each other for a few seconds, and then I stepped towards it. When I moved it walked back into the woods. We didn’t waste any time running back to our cabin!
77. An Unwelcome Visitor
When I was about six years old, I was playing with the kid next door one afternoon. Then the lights went out all of a sudden. We were by ourselves since all of her family members were at the hospital with her mom, who was suffering from leukemia then. When the blackout happened, my friend went out of the house to the porch. I was by the door looking outside when something made me look back into the house.
There, in the living room, was a shadow figure walking around—tall, dark, no recognizable features whatsoever. It was as if someone was wearing a black whole body suit, but not as definite as a real person would be in a room. It wasn't too blurry either, but I noticed it moved around the room as if it were looking for something.
I actually wasn't scared at this point, since I've never seen anything like it and I was a curious child. The next thing I knew, it went up to the second floor, so I followed it and continued to watch the shadow figure walk around the bedroom. Again, it seemed like it was looking for something. Then it started moving towards the wall on my right.
I remember thinking “Oh my god, is it gonna disappear!? Is it gonna disappear!?" And sure it enough, it vanished through the wall. I forgot about all this until I was around 17 and was watching one of those "Real Ghost Stories" on TV. One guy talked about his own experience of seeing shadow figures in a hospital where he was confined for a few months.
He mentioned that he sometimes saw them beside people who were about to pass. Chills ran up and down my spine when I heard this. I remember my friend's mom passed just a week after I saw that shadow thing. But at least I now have my own understanding of what that dark figure I saw might have been: some kind of grim reaper.
78. Down Under Fear
I live in Australia and had just moved into a new house in a not-so-nice neighborhood. The house was old and quite gross. The first couple of weeks we lived there we all had dry throats from the level of dust. We were all adjusting to the new house and still cleaning out spiders and other pests. It constantly had a haunted house vibe.
One night I woke up at three am, on the dot. My room is on the top floor or the second storey of the house. I looked around because I was immediately alert. I looked at the window, didn't see anything, but kept hearing a tapping on the glass. There wasn’t anything close to or around the window that could make the tapping noise.
I got up and went to double-check but couldn’t figure out the source of the noise. I’ve heard so many stories of three am being an evil hour, or people waking up because someone was watching them. I couldn’t fall back asleep for a few hours and just played on my phone. The same tapping sound happened for a few nights, but I never found the cause.
79. What Happens At Sleepovers…
I was at a friend’s house spending the night when I was in middle school. As expected, we'd stay up to all hours, which didn't matter most of the time except the bathroom was right near his parents’ room. About the only time we'd get in trouble was when someone would wake them up when nature called. To avoid this, we'd go out the basement door and just pee in the woods.
The door stayed unlocked most of the time because we'd managed to lock ourselves out more than once. This was also compounded by the fact that we'd all wander out and find something to do in the woods on a regular basis. This night, his older brother was home and kept barging in the basement door and raining chaos from above, so we decided to lock the door just to deter him.
Not that it really would have kept him out, but at least he'd have to use the key and that took the “barging in” fun out of it. About midnight, we heard the handle jiggling and didn't think much of it, figuring it was his brother. After about five minutes of off and on handle fondling, we finally hit the door and yelled for him to stop. Quiet.
No response, and no more clattering of the handle. Great, we can move on right? Wrong. About 10 minutes later it started again, and the process repeated. This went on for about two hours, until finally after telling him to stop we just said, “screw it” and ignored it. He continued for about 30 minutes after our last attempt for him to stop and then just gave up.
Well, fast forward to about 9 am. We were just stirring and one of my friends had to go to the bathroom. If you've ever had a sleepover like that, there are bodies strewn wherever there is space, and once the first person starts walking around it kind of stirs the nest. We all started stretching and making our way to relieve ourselves of all the soda we'd binged on the night before.
As I go walk outside, I grab the door handle to close it behind me and noticed it felt rough. After looking at it, I saw that the space around the keyhole was all but destroyed. There were giant scratch marks on every surface and the metal guides were bent and skewed. I asked my friend that lived there what had happened, and he said it was the first he'd noticed it.
Not really wanting to get blamed for something his brother did, we went upstairs and told his parents about the night before. After his dad went down to see what we were talking about, he went completely white and ran upstairs to call the authorities. Evidently someone had been trying to force the lock open while we were all inside.
That's actually happened to me more than once on different occasions, but what completely freaks me out about this time was that this person knew we were in there and that we knew someone was trying to get in. Even so, he REPEATEDLY tried to force his way inside, heedless of our complaints. God knows what sort of person that was.
80. Paralyzed Primates
I work in animal research and today a colleague mentioned that a new primate facility would be coming to our area. I have always been interested in understanding the process, even though it’s not something I would do long term. After I got home I took a nap that resulted in me waking with sleep paralysis. I was completely frozen and only able to move my eyes.
As I laid there unable to move, my right eye was open enough to see the bathroom door which I became convinced had several large primates behind it. The bathroom door was almost shut and dark as there was no window in there. In a frantic haze, I decided I had to get out but couldn’t move. All I could do was watch what I think were very mild hallucinations.
I lay there watching furry hunched figures shuffling behind the door, smaller primates crawling around the vanity lights and the occasional finger around the door’s edge. This sleep paralysis thing has happened to me before but usually, it is just confusing and frustrating, this is the first time it was terrifying.
81. Middle Of The Road
When I was younger, maybe around 12 years old, I was alone at home with my sister who was 10 at the time. Our mom had gone down the road to a family friend's house, but it was really late (past 10) and she was still not back. We were watching TV when suddenly someone hit the letterbox twice really hard, and without looking we opened the door straight away, since we assumed it was our mom.
When we opened it, there was no one at the door. Instead, in the middle of the road there was a lady just standing there, staring at us. It was really dark so we didn't see the face or anything properly. We just shut the door and freaked out. Our mom came back around 20 or so minutes later, but it definitely was one of the creepiest moments ever.
82. Gumby Gotcha!
It was the 80s and my dad bought a six-foot-tall Gumby blow-up doll. He planned to cut the back out, make eye holes and wear it as a costume. My older sister and I shared a bedroom and one-night dad puts on Gumby and walks into the room. This was our first encounter with the costume and my sister and I was terrified.
It was unbelievably scary and my dad thought it was hilarious. We moved months later and the costume came with us. It stayed in our basement, limp, and haunting us for years to come. It was in a back room that became a treasure chest of horrors. A pink light, old rolls of carpet, a flickering lamp, and the terrorizing Gumby costume.
83. No Laughing Matter
About two years ago, I was in my room reading a book when I hear it. Soft as ever, two little girls giggling. Not just any giggle. It was the kind of giggling you hear in horror movies. I immediately put down my book and listened. After about a minute of holding my breath, I decided it must have come from outside. Then that night, just as I'm about to drift off to sleep, I hear it again.
Two little girls giggling. Now it was 2 am and I was pretty darn sure there weren't two little girls outside my window at that time of night, so I began to freak out. I sat up in my bed and waited for what felt like forever just listening. Then I hear it again. I jumped out of my bed and go spend the rest of the night in the guest room. By the next morning, I was convinced my room was haunted.
For the next week, I avoided my room and spent my nights in the guest room unbeknownst to my family. I was afraid to tell anyone for fear I was going crazy or they wouldn't believe me. But every time I spent more than an hour in my room, I would hear those two little girls giggle. By the end of the week, I was a mess. I could barely sleep and was terrified of my room.
Then one morning my brother walks up to me and says, "You deaf or something?" Obviously, I was confused, and after further questioning, he tells me about this small device he had placed in my room. Apparently, its like some sort of prank device that's easily hidden and can make a variety of different noises, my brother, however, choose the creepy as heck little girls giggling sound.
He wondered why I hadn't heard it or said something about all week and I just wanted to punch him in the face. So my room wasn't haunted after all! Moral of the story, sometimes your brother is just a jerk.
84. Communicating Beyond The Guest Book
This spring my family and I rented out a mansion for a weekend getaway. After a long drive to the house, everyone else fell asleep except me. I was sleeping in the living room and my phone was out of juice. I couldn’t find an outlet so I was trying to count sheep. When I started closing my eyes, I could see a shadow looking down at me.
I still fell asleep but I woke up and felt uncomfortable in the morning. I told everyone what happened at breakfast but no one believed me. Later that day I was making my way into the garage to get some tools. I felt someone walking next to me. I was looking down at my phone and figured it was one of my cousins. When I got to the garage I heard the bathroom door shut.
When I come back from the garage my family was in the kitchen and I asked who walked next to me earlier. Everyone says they hadn’t been near the garage and just came downstairs to start lunch. That night I was officially freaking out. I asked someone to sleep in the living room with me. Thankfully my cousin thought I was being dramatic, but still slept across from me. That’s when it got even more terrifying.
We were chatting before bed when a photo frame on the coffee table flipped over as if someone slammed it with force. That was too much for my cousin and we decided to sleep upstairs. In the morning, we are talking about it with my family again at breakfast and my Uncle asks if anyone was in his room while he was sleeping last night.
No one was in his room, but when we were all in the kitchen we heard footsteps and doors closing upstairs. Later that day, I met a gardener in the gated community we were staying at named Manuel. I asked Manuel if he knew anything about the house or previous tenants of where we had rented. He thought for a minute…and then remembered something strange.
He mentioned that a month before us getting there a group of kids ran out of the house leaving behind an Ouija board, candles, and other props from a seance. He said that no one usually liked staying there for more than a night, which he couldn’t understand. It was enough for me and I convinced my family to leave early.
85. Doom From Above
When I was seven years old, my mom gave birth to my little sister. My dad and I went to visit her in the hospital to check out the new family member. As seven-year-olds often do, I got bored, so my parents sent me to the kiosk right outside the main building to get an ice cream. As I was walking towards the kiosk, I cut over the lawn as it was a shorter walk.
Suddenly I feel and hear a really heavy thud right behind me. I turn around to see an image that will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was the warped, mangled body of a man in a hospital gown maybe 40-50 cm from where I was standing. The man had jumped off the hospital roof after receiving the news he had terminal cancer.
My mom and a lot of the others in the birth ward even saw the guy flying past the windows. The guy basically just fell short of taking me with him. A group of doctors and psychiatrists asked me to get emergency therapy, but I insisted on getting my ice cream and going home. To this day, I can still recall the thud of the body hitting the ground and his body lying next to me, clear as crystal.
86. Bon Appetit
My mom just recently told me the story of her friend's creepy dad. One night when she was younger, she stayed over at this friend's house. The friend's creepy dad offered them "fresh venison" for dinner. My mom had never had venison, but of course, she ate it so as not to be rude. Well, the friend later tells my mom that her dad is not a hunter. The truth was so much more gruesome than she was prepared for.
Years later, we learned that creepy dad had cannibalized several women over the course of his life. Mom is pretty sure she ate human meat.
87. Ready Player Two?
One night when I was seven years old I stayed up late playing Roblox on my mom's computer. I noticed it was almost two in the morning and my eyes were starting to hurt from staring at the screen. I decided to shut down and leaned back to stretch. All of a sudden, I got this weird feeling down my spine. I slowly turned to look at the window.
I turn to look and see a pale woman standing there, hand pressed to the glass, just slowly looking around the room. I yelled and ran to my parent’s room, slamming the door behind me. My dad jumped out of bed and asked what was wrong. I frantically explained the situation and my dad ran to look. When he came back, he calmly said she was gone.
He had gotten her away from the window and watched her walk down the street before calling the authorities. They showed up at our door within 10 minutes and started canvassing the neighborhood, where they eventually found her. I found out later she was an escaped mental asylum patient from a town around 13 miles away.
88. Sleep Paralysis Meets Lucid Dreaming
When I was around 7 or 8, I had pretty bad sleep paralysis. One night I went to bed and in the middle of the night, I began having what I thought was an episode—however, it was absolutely evident that the shadow of an adult figure was sitting on the edge of my bed. I know this is a common misconception among the sleep paralysis crowd, because your mind is going into self-defense due to the nature of your current situation.
You begin to see and hear things. But what freaks me out about that night is what happened next. I then fell asleep and dreamt that I was in that exact situation again and I was able to move this time, I was able to project my voice. I completely lost it and started throwing everything about the room, kicking and screaming.
The shadow got up, opened the door, and left. When I woke up in the morning, my blood ran cold. My room was a mess, the covers were on the floor, and my bedroom door was open. Normally, I couldn't sleep with the door open because it freaked me out. There was something about that dream that always felt so real. 20+ years ago now and it's as fresh in my mind now as it was then.
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89. The Older Woman
When I was really little my parents would let me stay up late on the weekends and watch TV until I fell asleep. Well, one night I was almost asleep on the couch when I heard a noise on our front porch. Sitting on my front porch swing was an older woman, probably in her 50's wearing nothing but a nightgown, covered in blood and holding a huge kitchen knife. I still have nightmares about her.
90. Don’t Look Down
We were driving home after visiting cousins that lived about seven hours away. We had left late, so we were still an hour away from home at midnight. From the corner of my eye, I noticed movement on the right side of the embankment, which was closest to me since I was sitting in the passenger seat. Driving closer, I realized it looked like a person, laying on their stomach on the ground.
I thought maybe someone had gotten hit by a car and was hurt, but before I could tell my dad, we got closer and I saw something I'll never forget. It was actually a woman, wearing a tattered dress or longish tunic shirt. She was on all fours and was quickly crawling up the embankment towards the concrete underside of the overpass.
Something about the way her limbs were moving and crawling freaked me out, so I just stared in shock and horror as we passed by. She continued to jerkily climb upwards into the darkness of the overpass. Freaking terrified me, and I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep until we got home. I still don’t like that part of the highway.
91. Zombies Galore
About a year ago, I was lying in bed after having just finished reading an excellent zombie novel. It was the middle of winter, and slightly after midnight. I couldn't sleep, as my mind was still crawling with zombies, so I lay awake staring at the ceiling with the dog snoring away next to me. Suddenly I heard three loud thumps from the glass of the window across the room.
Very hard and very steady. Like someone pounding on the glass with the flat of their hand. The sound scared the daylight out of me and woke the dog, who started barking. I sat there trying to reassure him (and myself) that it was OK and there was some sensible reason for it. After a few minutes we both calmed down, he went to back sleep and I followed about half an hour later.
I was woken up in the middle of the night by the same sound. THUMP THUMP THUMP. The sound came from the same window, with the same steady interval between thumps, and just as loud as before. The dog woke and started barking again. Both of us were freaking out, and I couldn't bring myself to turn on the light and go look out the window.
The only thing I could think to do was run out into the living room curl up on the couch with the dog, a blanket over both our heads. The next morning, I woke on the couch feeling exhausted, having slept only intermittently. The dog was sitting at the door to my room looking alert and looking back to me and whining. I went back into my bedroom and looked out the window.
There was nothing unusual looking. No marks on the glass or anything. My apartment is on the top floor of our 6-story building. The fire escape was on the window nearest to the bed, not the one near the window where the sound came from. Whatever had hit the window had had a six-story drop beneath it. At a loss for any other explanation, I figured it must have been a bird running into the window.
I had no explanation for the fact that it seemed to do so three times in a row, at very steady intervals, on two separate occasions, and with a sound much louder than could be made by a lightweight creature bouncing off the glass. The fact that it had happened late at night, a time when birds aren't typically flying around, I also carefully ignored in my hope for some sane explanation
Somewhat satisfied with my rationalization, I went to work and felt much better for the rest of the day... that is until one last fact filtered into my mind. It dwelt there for the rest of the workday nagging at me and I rushed home to confirm my suspicions. Reaching the window again, just as the sun was setting, I felt a chill run down my spine: my troublesome suspicion was accurate.
There was a screen on the outside of the window. The noise had very clearly be the sound of the glass being struck. Whatever had hit the window had to have done so from inside the room.
92. The Others
My mom and older sister describe how I used to randomly start crying and asking where my mom was, even when she was right in front of me. When my mother would try to comfort me by saying she was right there, I would shout for my other mom. I would then describe this person, who apparently always held a bloody hammer. They said it scared them out of their wits, but one day when I was two years old, they tried to ask me about it and I couldn't remember anything.
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93. Innocence Lost
When I was six, my mom and dad took my younger sister and me to a baseball game, leaving my grandmother to babysit my youngest sister. When we got back, my grandmother told my folks that two guys had come by the house with photography equipment and asked whether a young girl with red curly hair lived there, a description that sounded just like my sister who was at the game with me.
They said they had spotted her and that she would be a great child model for some advertising work they were doing. When my grandmother said she wasn't home they said they would come back another time. My grandmother and mom didn't think much about it, but my dad got an awful feeling in his stomach. He said "Something's not right here" and called the authorities.
15 minutes later, several FBI agents showed up and began conducting interviews with my grandmother and my parents while I ran around and showed the agents my helicopter. The truth was bone-chilling. Turns out we had been targeted by a child theft ring; the photographers would take a bunch of photos and wait until the toddler threw a tantrum and then they would ask the mother to go grab a toy to keep the child entertained.
While the mother was out of the room, they would grab the child and bolt, leaving everything else behind. The FBI told my folks that my sister had likely already been sold and would have been out of the country within 24 hours if they got her. We were advised to change preschools and other aspects of our daily routine. It still gives me the chills to think about what could have happened to her.
Needless to say, my mom became pretty overprotective; it was a few years before she even trusted us with a babysitter. We are just fortunate that everything worked out.
94. Some Actions Have Devastating Consequences
From fifth grade to eighth grade, I was a pyromaniac. I lit stuff on fire all the God dang time. There was a grocery store that recently closed down near my house, and I started exploring it. Well, I had the brilliant idea of collecting a bunch of flammable stuff and making a giant pile, then lighting it on fire. The roof caught on fire, and I panicked.
I made sure to seem as calm as possible as I walked home nervous as heck. I didn't turn on the news, and I didn't do ANYTHING that might remotely show interest in the fire, as I thought it might draw attention to me. I purposefully avoided anything about it, and eventually, we moved, and I just kind of forgot about it. I thought the story was over—but it came back to haunt me.
Eight years later, I met a girl in another state. It turned out we grew up in the same area and went to many of the same places, and we started dating. As I got to know her, we were talking about the schools our friends and family attended. Through conversation, she told me about her brother’s school, and she said it was named after a dead fireman.
Just to continue the conversation, I nonchalantly asked how he passed. She then told me that an abandoned store caught fire, and this guy passed putting it out. My heart started pounding at this point. I asked if she remembered the location of the store. She found the news story for me, and HOLY FREAKING HECK, IT WAS THE ONE I BURNED DOWN.
My heart started beating like a jackhammer. I’d taken a life. I almost started crying. I told her the truth, and she said that it was in the past, and she'd never tell anyone.
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95. The Widowed
So, my mom remarried about two years ago. My dad died when I was twelve so she had been widowed for over ten years. This new relationship was very whirlwind with her meeting the guy, dating him, and getting married within three months. I didn't know much about the guy, but my mom was happy, so I just tried to be supportive. She moved into his house in upstate Virginia and invited me and my fiancé to spend a weekend in her new home getting to know her new husband.
My mom's new home was pretty isolated. It sat on a few hundred acres of lovely rolling hills, and was very picturesque. I was nervous about getting to know this guy, but really trying to make the most of it. Over the course of our first day there though, I started to feel more and more uneasy. We were being made to feel very at home, yet I still couldn't shake this oppressive feeling. I finally chalked it up to me being more upset about my mom getting remarried than I was willing to admit to myself.
That night, my fiancé and I showered together. When I turned my back to him he stopped talking mid-sentence and asked, "What did you do to your back?" Well, nothing. Why? "You have a large bruise." I hopped out to try and see it in the mirror. He was right. It was so strange; I had no idea how it got there, and the whole thing made me feel even more creeped out.
The next morning I had a complete meltdown. I woke up and just couldn't stop crying. I told my fiancé we had to leave. He tried to calm me down by telling me all the things I had been telling myself. My feelings of anxiety were just a result of seeing my mom with someone. The longer I spent with them the easier it would become. But I just had to leave, I felt completely hysterical. I knew I was on the verge of a panic attack, so in the end, my fiancé drove me away.
As soon as we were on the road I felt like a weight had been lifted. I was even feeling embarrassed for my behavior, hoping I hadn't insulted my mom's husband by leaving early. Then my fiancé broke the silence, "That bruise on your back....did you get a good look at it?" I had. It looked like some had touched the middle of my back, with fingers spread wide, with their hand at a tilt. I want to make completely clear, no one had touched my back the previous day, especially hard enough to bruise me.
Cut to three weeks later. My mom comes to visit me. The entire time she's hounding me to come stay with her again. After finally trying to change the subject for the fifth time, I level with her. Before I've even finished telling the story her face is white as a sheet. She tells me she has been feeling the same way in the house. She hates it. She wants them to move as soon as possible. And the real kicker...her new husband's previous wife shot and killed herself in the house.
96. Home (Almost) Alone
Once, my brother and I were sleeping, and my dad had just left for work. A little while after, someone entered the house and told the dog to be quiet. I didn't recognize the voice. I was 100% sure it was a burglar who thought the house was empty as my dad had just left. I sneaked into my brother's room, shaking with fear, woke him up, and told him that a stranger had just entered the house. He called the authorities on the spot.
Two tiny minutes later (we were impressed!) two official cars and four law officials were at the door of our house. Oh, how uneasy was my dad when they called him and he had to tell them he had come back because he had forgotten something and pretended to have a "funny voice" or something for no reason whatsoever. It was about 15 years ago and my brother and I still (jokingly) blame each other for it.
97. Non-Playable Character Failed To Load
I met a girl at university and after we graduated, we decided we'd move in with each other. The plan was whoever got a job first would pay the rent etc. while the other looked for a job in the same city. I got the job and we moved into a small house together. Months later, she's still having no luck finding a job. I feel like garbage one day, which is unusual for me, and come home from work extremely early, before lunch.
I walk in through the front door and I’m greeted by a bizarre sight. I look into the lounge and see her just...sitting there. The TV isn't on, nor the radio, and she's just staring straight ahead, not even moving. I stood there and watched her for a while out of curiosity. I'm sure everyone wonders what their partners/friends do when they think no one is around.
She did nothing, just stared dead ahead. The closest I can describe it is like in older computer games where you'd get into a room and an NPC hadn't noticed you yet and would still be stood there, waiting for you to get in and "activate" them. We'd had a fight the night before so I just shook my head and went off to bed.
At around 4, I get up and go downstairs again and she's still there staring dead ahead, at which point I obviously worry and try to get her attention. Nothing I did, even shaking her or shouting would wake her up from whatever it was, so I called my dad—he's a dentist but knows a lot about medicine generally—and ask him what I should do. He says he'll be round in 20 minutes, and to keep an eye on her till then.
Around 4:30 she suddenly gets up, goes into the kitchen, and starts doing chores, washing up and getting tea, etc. I follow her and watch before asking her if she's okay and she says she's fine, pretty casually like nothing had happened. I asked her what she'd been up to that day and she launched into this long explanation of how she'd gone out job hunting and where she'd gone and managers she'd spoken to that day. It was creepy.
I told her what had actually happened and she looked at me oddly like I was the crazy one, insisted that she'd been out job hunting and had only just got back. I told her I wasn't judging her and it was fine that she hadn't been out job hunting, but I was worried about her and she had definitely been sitting there all day.
My dad came by and suggested she may have been having an "absence seizure," which is a type of epilepsy. She had scans, etc., and nothing showed up (no tumors either). Since she didn't believe MY story things got pretty tense between us, especially because after possibly having an absence seizure, she had been banned from driving for a year.
Over the next six-ish months before we broke up, I did some pretty odd things to try and prove what had happened, including booking days off work without telling her and then pretending to go to work, only to park around the corner, come home sneakily and then observe her. A lot of the time I'd find her stood there doing nothing again.
When I asked her about it she'd still have these long explanations of what she'd done that day. It happened so often that I kind of got the feeling my girlfriend was only really "on" when people were around, and when she thought no one was around she'd just go into a default "off" state until people got back. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s all I could come up with.
Weirdly, some of her stories were backed up by other people. Like she said she'd gone to meet a friend that day, and later when I checked with the friend, she said that it was true. This is the only part I can't really explain to myself, and I've kind of just dismissed it as the friend being nice and trying to back up her friend. We broke up, though we're still friends, and I haven't mentioned it to her since.
It still freaks me out though, and I worry about what other people are like when they think no one is around.
98. The Call Is Coming From Inside The Pool
I worked as a night auditor at an old hotel. One night at around 2am, I got a phone call from the pool room, which was supposed to be closed. I picked up the phone to answer and all I heard was very heavy breathing. I hung up the phone to check the cameras, and all the lights are on in the pool room. So I go down the hallway to kick out whoever it is in there.
As I get close to the glass door, it’s so cold that I can see my breath, the door is completely fogged over, and all the lights are out. I open the door and the light above me comes on, because they’re motion sensor lights. I am looking around but I don't see anything. Then the light comes on across the pool from me, but again, nothing is there.
Then every light in a path begins to light up around one side of the pool as if something is walking towards me. I ran out of there so fast and locked myself in my manager's office and stayed until sunrise—but the worst was yet to come. I had played it off in my head as insects causing the motion sensor lights to go off.
I was telling my manager about my whole spooky experience, thinking he would get a good laugh. When I told him about the phone call from the pool, he didn't laugh at all. He asked me if I was 100% positive the caller ID said the pool room, and I said yeah. Then he told me there hasn't been a phone in the pool room for 30 years.
I told him there was no way, because that would be impossible. I knew what I saw on the call display. He told me to go look for myself. I looked and there was no phone. I didn't believe in the supernatural at all before that. But to this day, no matter how many ways I try to rationalize it, I just can't. It is completely unexplainable.
99. Spooky
There was this one night my roommate had gone home because he was sick, so I was pretty excited to have the room to myself. Later that night, I was woken up by the door to our room being opened. I thought nothing of it because I thought my roommate had probably just decided to come back. I then hear him walk across the floor and jump into his bed.
I thought it was a little weird for him to be coming back this quick, but whatever. When I woke up in the morning, his bed was still perfectly made and he had never actually come back that night. I have never been more scared in my entire life.
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