Fear is a powerful emotion. We don’t experience genuine, gut-wrenching terror very often—but when we do, the experience can stick with us for the rest of our lives. But if fear is so horrible, then why do we like ghost stories so much? Why do we watch horror movies? Fear is a powerful emotion—and sometimes, it means we just can’t look away.
1. Going Up, Going Out
I took care of a lady who had end-stage renal disease, and was minutes away from passing and unresponsive in bed. My charting station was right outside her doorway, and while I was waiting for her only daughter to arrive, I was completing some of my paperwork, in full view of the door to the patient’s room. That’s when a terrifying thing happened.
The daughter finally showed up, very upset, yelling that she wanted me to help get her mother out of the elevator. We both ran to the elevator…that was empty. The daughter and I went into the room as her mother took her last breath. The daughter swore up and down that she rode in the elevator with her mother from the lobby to the 12th floor.
When they arrived at the 12th floor, her mother told her to go get the nurse to help get her back to her room, and she would wait in the elevator because she was too weak to walk back to her room.
2. Not Feeling Secure At All
I used to work in a small office, which was about 60 people at maximum capacity. We had a security guard on duty 24/7. One night, I had to stay super duper late by myself because I had to leave early the next day and needed to finish my workload. All of my other co-workers are gone by around 10pm, cleaning crew comes in, and now it's just me and the security guard.
The place is dark, but I'm not at all frightened because I'm not scared of most things, the security guard is a really nice dude, and we're in a safe neighborhood. I was about to find out just how terrifying things could get. The security guards are required to make their rounds every couple of hours just to make sure things are fine. Sometimes they say something to us, most times they don't.
Tonight, nice guy security dude stops by my cubicle and asks, "Everything alright?" Big friendly grin on his face as per usual. "All good here, thanks!" I go back to work. 20 minutes later, he's back again. Big grin. "Everything alright?" "Yup! Nothing yet!" 20 minutes later…he's back. Big grin. At this point, I am getting a little creeped out.
There is no need for him to come by this frequently. In fact, it's disruptive. But that wasn't even close to all. I also noticed that the way he interacts with me is always exactly the same, as if I were in a time loop. Same big grin, same intonation, same rhythm of speech.
Not only that, I noticed that he whistles the same thing at around the same time, so if I turn off the music on my headphones, I can HEAR his whistling coming closer before he asks, "Everything alright?" It's around midnight and I'm totally freaked out. I try to rationalize this with myself because I have to get this work done.
I'm rushing through my work and I keep hearing that whistling behind me. Surely, he won't come back again. "Everything alright?"At this point, I'm fully terrified. I no longer trust this guy I used to feel so safe around. I was a young woman in her mid-20s, and the security guard was a dude in his 50s.
I couldn't finish everything, but I wrote an e-mail to my supervisor saying that the security guard was acting VERY strange and I didn't feel safe. I shut everything down and tried to rush to the exit. I don't run into the security guard…or so I think. Just as I'm feeling free and clear, I hear "Bye now," behind me.
He's standing there in the dark hallway, big grin. Just standing there and watching. I mumble something and sprint to my car. The next day, I rush to my supervisor to try to explain what happened the night before. In the light of day, it kind of felt like I might've overreacted or maybe my mind was playing tricks on me. Then I learned the dark truth.
Turns out, the dude just disappeared. He's missing. I'm pretty sure they still haven't found him to this day. The security guard company just kind of dismissed it as some flaky guy who quit for no reason and no one seemed to be pursuing it much. He must've been suffering some kind of mental health issue or SOMEthing, but up until that night, he was just a super nice, trustworthy, reliable security guard who everybody loved.
It also felt like some kind of weird paranormal stuff because it really felt like something had "taken over" inside of him.
Pikist
3. Time To Face The Music
We were gathered at the dinner table with some friends and I had been offered a glass of beverage, despite not having been 21 yet at the time. I took it and casually turned to look out the window while drinking it. As soon as I looked out, I suddenly felt a weird sensation as if someone was staring back at me. What I saw made my blood turn cold.
I then spotted a man with no face standing on the sidewalk outside, way off in the distance. He was tall and very thin, but he had no face. There was just a blur where his face should’ve been. I obviously freaked out and let out a scream. When all the adults turned to me, I stammered trying to explain what I had just seen.
Of course, nobody believed me. They all said I was probably tipsy off of the small sips of grape beverage I had taken, but I know what I saw. I still get this acute sense of dread whenever I think about it.
4. Just The Two Of Us
I pulled into a fast food drive-thru in Odessa, Texas; it was my first time there. When it was my turn at the speaker, I placed my order—it’s been a long drive, so I’m treating myself and being a little picky, asking nicely, and building a customized meal. The cashier listens, then she says the strangest thing. “Again? You ate all that already?”
Me: “Um...huh?” Cashier: “Oh, I’m sorry. Someone who sounds just like you was just through here, and placed the exact same order". Me: “Hey, cool! Weird, but cool”. I get to the window and the girl looks at me with this exasperated expression, opens the window, and says, “It is you!” Me: “?” The cashier calls her manager over and points at me, shows him the order, and says nothing.
Manager: “Welcome back. Was there a problem with your order?” Me: “No...I haven’t gotten it yet”. Manager (clearly confused): “I made your order myself”. The cashier points at the time on receipt. The manager blinks, and says, “That’s the same order,” to her, looks at me, back at her, and says “and that’s him”. Cashier: “I said the same thing”.
Both of them looked genuinely upset and confused. But it got so much worse. At first, as the manager was handing me my food, he laughed and visibly relaxed. “The other guy had long hair,” he explained, pointing to my cap. “Like, halfway down his back. You just have a twin, I guess...with the same kind of car”. His face when I took off my hat and showed him my long hair...
They might have been messing with me for fun; shifts get long and people are creative. But if it was a game, they deserved careers in theater, because they looked terrified.
5. Is Someone There?
A few years ago, I was an intern in a medical department and happened to be on call one night. The nurses informed me around 1 am that there was a new admission to the isolation room. She was a female inmate had pneumonia and likely tuberculosis. The isolation room was right at the end of the ward, and you have to go through double doors just to enter it.
So, in addition to being a room for isolation of infectious diseases, it was also really isolated from the nearest human contact. I went in to do a clinical assessment, which involves a thorough history. One of the questions I wanted to ask was if she shared her cell with anyone who could have passed on the infection to her.
It being late at night and me being not very proficient in her native language, what I actually asked her sounded something like, "Was there anyone else in the room with you?" I still can't believed what happened. Right after that question escaped my lips, she smiled really widely, put her finger to her lips as though saying “shhhh,” and then flicked her eyes to a spot near the window behind and above me.
This horrible chill went through me and I decided then and there that I’d done enough history-taking for the night, and fled to the safety of the nursing station.
6. Big Brother Isn’t Watching You
When I was an early teenager, I got involved with a Big Brothers program. My Big Brother was a guy named Chris who, like me, was a little odd, and so we got along really well and hung out a lot. When we had been paired for about a year, he told me that he was going on a trip to Baltimore. He also told me the date that he would be back on.
I waited for a few days after his return date before trying to call him, but when I did, the person on the other line said, "There's no Chris here". I looked in the phonebook to make sure I had dialed correctly, and I know for a fact that I did because I had the number circled and it matched the number I had dialed. But the man repeated, "We've been living here for a long time, and there's never been a Chris here".
Chris never returned from Baltimore, and neither I nor the Big Brothers program ever heard from him again.
7. Sound The Alarm
I used to work the night shift in group homes for the mentally disabled or severely mentally ill. At one house I worked at, there was constant scratching coming from the walls. I figured it was just squirrels, but now I’m not too sure. We had set a lot of traps and never caught anything. But this isn’t what made me a believer.
What happened was one night I was watching TV in the living room after all the residents had fallen asleep. Around 3 am, the doorbell starts ringing like someone is frantically pushing it. I got up and went to the door, but when I got there and opened it nobody was there. Now, there are three things you need to know about this entry way.
First, the entry goes into the living room and I can see it from the couch. Second, the front door has a very large window on it that is two thirds of the door. Lastly, the walkway to the front doorknob is a 20-30 foot corridor that has brick wall on either side. So in order to ring ring ditch, you’d have to run back that entire length to be able to duck around a corner.
So basically, I didn’t understand how anyone could have rang the bell, but they did. I figured I was being pranked by one of our more mischievous residents, so I went and checked on them all. They were all fast asleep. Then as soon as I finished shutting the last resident’s door, the doorbell started frantically ringing again.
I rushed to the door again, only to find nobody there. This time I was determined to catch them, so I turned all the lights off except the TV and hid right beside the door so I’d be able to immediately open it when they came back. After 20 minutes, the doorbell started going insane again, I jumped out and quickly turned on the walkway lights and looked out the window—but nobody was there.
I then opened the door, thinking maybe they were hiding to the side of the door like I had. After seeing nobody there again, my stomach dropped and I got a feeling of dread. I slowly started closing the door, and as soon as the door was almost closed all the way the doorbell started going nuts again and stayed that way for at least 15 minutes before stopping again.
It was almost as if whatever it was took great pleasure in mocking and taunting me. I locked the door and ran my behind to the couch after turning on all the lights I could. Another disturbing thing about this is it seemed to read my mind. Whenever I got the urge to go outside and smoke, it would start with the doorbell again.
It’s like it didn’t want me to forget it’s there and a menace. Looking back, I’m pretty sure it was a poltergeist. That place was rife with bad energy, as most group homes are. A lot of suffering and raw emotions happen at those places. It also didn’t help that we had a resident there who had literally gone insane after watching his parents get liquidated in front of him and a medium-low functioning schizophrenic with what I’ve confirmed as at least eight distinct “people” talking to him in his head.
Both of these residents are constantly having stuff knocked off their shelves and walls in the middle of the night and it’s super common for them to be yelling at people who aren’t there to shut up in the middle of the night. I used to think it was just mental illness but now I’m not too sure.
8. Knocking On Heaven’s Door
One night, my wife was staying overnight at my parents' house while I was still away at college wrapping up my last day of work. I was woken up by a very loud knock on my dorm room door. When I went to open it, there was nobody there. I see that it's 3 o'clock on the dot. I'm not superstitious at all, but it spooked the heck out of me and I basically slept with one eye open for the rest of the night.
I come home that day and see my girlfriend. We get to talking and I mention the knocking incident, trying to just laugh it off. She instantly freezes up and then tells me that she had also woken up last night, to find herself in front of my bedroom door at my parents’ house after having sleepwalked there—at exactly 3 AM. To this day, even we don't believe it.
9. Private, Keep Out
This is my mother’s story. I’ve no reason to doubt her and she’s never told another or been concerned with the supernatural. She does have a vaguely spiritual streak, but that’s all. Mostly, she’s pretty no-nonsense. When she retired, she got heavily into family history. At some point, she obtained the diary of my dad’s mother, who’d passed perhaps 20 years previously, who we all called Nan.
Nan had been a very stiff and proper English type, called everyone dear, used words like “terribly” and “perfectly dreadful” and was always relentlessly formal and seemed to be slightly offended at all times. She was also an intensely private person and never wanted anyone knowing her business. So one night my dad was away and my mother, home alone, sits down with the diary and starts going through it.
It starts raining, nothing unusual since they live on the coast. She gets up and closes a few windows. Goes back to the diary. The rain turns into a storm. It gets windy. She goes to the other room and shuts the windows there. Comes back to the diary. A few more minutes go by; she’s been looking at the diary for maybe 15 minutes at this point.
Suddenly, the intercom to her right bursts to life at full volume with just static coming from the speaker. They live in a three-storey house on the side of a hill that was originally built by an electrician, so there are a million lights, power points on every wall and every room has an intercom. After recovering from the fright, she turns off the intercom.
The one in the next room is still going full blast. She gets up and shuts that off, and can hear the rest of the house downstairs still going. Every intercom. She heads down to the middle level where the master unit is and turns the intercom off. She’s heading upstairs when she notices the creepiest part yet. All the pictures on the walls are all askew.
All at similar angles, not random. Meanwhile, the storm has increased. The floor she is on is lined the length of the house on one side with timber-framed windows. Even the tops of the windows are wet with rain, which rarely happens and takes a proper storm to do. As she’s stood there taking this all in, what she can only describe as “an intense gust of wind” rattles the windows from one end of the house to the other, as if a speeding train went past on the balcony outside.
Instead of fleeing into the night in search of a hotel room and real estate agent as I would have done, she walks calmly upstairs, shuts the diary, puts it in a cupboard, shuts the cupboard, says “Sorry, Nan” to the empty room, and goes to make a cup of tea. The storm calms down. She rights all the pictures. That’s that. But here’s the kicker.
Someone from her work lives in the same street. Like, 10 houses away. When my mom sees him the next day, she mentions the storm. “What storm?” comes the reply. She’s like, “What do you mean ‘what storm?’ I’m talking about the gale-force storm we had last night". The guy looks at her funny and says he would’ve known if there was a storm since they had dinner on the balcony that night and there wasn’t a storm at any point.
Reading this back it sounds completely made up. I can only swear it isn’t. I lack the imagination to make up something like this. Shout out to Nan if she’s somehow reading this. I promise I won’t be reading your diary.
10. Ahead Of Your Time
When I was nine years old, I woke up in the middle of the night positive that my Aunt Hope had passed. The feeling was so real that it scared the daylights out of me and I ran to my parents’ room crying. I told them what had happened, and they kept saying "It’s just a bad dream, everything's okay, Aunt Hope is fine". But for some reason, I just couldn't calm down.
About 15 minutes later, the phone rang. My dad got up and went to answer it. The news was bone-chilling. It was my uncle calling to tell us Hope had just passed.
11. Angels On Earth
Back in 2001, there was a show called The Amazing Race, and my wife and I were watching the first-ever episode while my son played on the floor. As the episode ended, I thought to myself that my mom would have loved this. My mom had passed about a year earlier. As soon as I had that thought, a cold chill ran up through my body, starting at my feet and up through my head.
At the exact same time, my wife said, "This is something you and your mom would have done, and probably won". We both laughed, partly because we both had similar thoughts and partly because it was a bittersweet reminder that she was gone. Right then my son, who was about a year and a half, started waving at the ceiling saying “bye” and “bye-bye".
He often talked to the ceiling and would stop playing and sit and look up at it, so we started asking who was there and what were they saying, just kind of playing along with his game. He wasn't saying real words yet, but we wanted to encourage talking so we'd listen and ask questions that he'd "answer". This time when he started saying “bye-bye,” we asked who was there and where were they going.
Just kind of normal play-along stuff. He was saying something that the closest I can spell of what it sounded like was “annel” or “anyul". So we said, "Ok, tell anyul to be safe". A few months later, I had out an old photo album and was laying on the floor looking through it. My son came "walking" over saying “hi hi” and laughing. I said hi back…but he wasn’t talking to me.
He started chatting with a picture in the album and was waving and "talking" to it. The picture was my mom’s official graduation picture from nursing school. He had first met my mom when he was six months old and only a couple of times between then and when she passed, but he was carrying on a conversation with the picture.
I asked him, "Do you know who that is? Who is that?" He put his finger right in the middle of the picture and said "Anyul... ANYUL!" and started laughing and talking to her again. He knew what angels were...is that what he was saying? I don’t know.
Shutterstock
12. Leave!
I was stationed in Seoul, South Korea several years ago. I was taking a shower in my room and when I got out, the word "leave" was written in small letters in the fog on the bathroom mirror. I didn't have a roommate because NCOs got their own private rooms. A little freaked out, I decided to do exactly that—leave. I went off post for some Korean BBQ and wandered the city a bit.
I came back a couple hours later to find the barracks evacuated and half burned to the ground. The fire was pinpointed to faulty electrical wiring that caught some insulation on fire inside the walls. Something knew it was going to happen and to this day, whatever that something was, it didn't want me in the middle of it.
I'd gladly thank who or whatever it is if they'd give me the chance but it's been years and I still have no idea.
13. Girls Allowed
One Sunday morning I was in my kitchen having a cup of tea with my wife. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what I thought was my three-year-old daughter walk out of the front room and into the entrance hall. I went to see what she was doing, and when I got there, there was no one there. I walked back into the kitchen and said to my wife something along the lines of “I'm bloody seeing things, I could have sworn I saw Amelia walking to the front door, but when I got there she was nowhere to be seen”.
My wife was all like, “You're joking. The same thing happened to me and my mom just the other day”. She explained how the same thing happened to them in the exact same spot, with the mysterious girl taking the exact same route. In fact, they were so convinced they had seen our daughter that they crept into the entrance hall after her, to make her jump, but there was no one there. It didn't end there, though.
A few months later, we saw a post on a local Facebook page saying, “I had a lovely childhood growing up in (our address), and I’d be really keen to speak to whoever lives there now, particularly to see if they have ever experienced any paranormal goings-on”. I direct messaged the poster and asked if she had ever seen anything untoward, without giving any indication of what we had experienced.
Lo and behold, her and her sister used to see a little blonde Victorian girl in a white nightie standing outside their bedroom doors or walking through the house. She related how initially they would think it was the other sister and would go to investigate and find no one there. I am a very cynical person by nature and did not previously believe in the paranormal, but I have no explanation for the above.
14. Circling The Drain
The house I grew up in was haunted. The way it was laid out, I could see from my bedroom down the hall and into the living room. My parents’ bedroom door was on the other side of the living room directly across from my door. Late at night, I would hear someone pacing circles in the living room, but I was the only one awake in the house and we didn’t have pets.
I never said anything because I didn’t want the family to think I was nuts. Eventually, I moved out and went to college. After I graduated, I was in a rough spot financially. My parents had bought a new house, the old one was still empty (they were considering getting renters) and they offered it to me to stay in for a while.
Even though it was a sweet deal, I said no I didn’t want to move in. My mom asked why, and I finally gave in and told her I thought there was a ghost. The response was instant and chilling. My mom FROZE and turned to look at me. Her face was like you hear her too. Turns out, she had also heard it for years and didn’t say anything for the exact same reason. So spooky.
Unsplash
15. Treasure Island
This was around 2006 when I was 10 years old. It was after midnight. I was sleeping in one of my aunts' beds while my brother slept in another's, adjacent to mine. Across from us was our grandparents' bedroom and, downstairs, next to the laundry room, was my parents' bedroom. I woke up, groggy and confused and needing to pee very very badly, and suddenly I heard a voice.
With eight people in the house, that wasn't uncommon. Someone had probably gotten up to go to the washroom and either started talking to someone else or they had answered the phone. Mind you, I was still half-asleep, so to me a phone call after midnight seemed totally reasonable. But I soon realized how much trouble I was in. It turns out that couldn't have been possible because I didn't recognize the voice.
That was what immediately woke me up. And I froze, clutching my blanket while sitting up in bed. It was a man. His voice wasn't deep, not like my dad or grandfather's, and he kept prattling on about some “treasure”. He was right outside the door, but he never turned the doorknob or made any attempt at entering any of the rooms.
He just kept passing by, as if pacing, all the while talking to himself about this treasure. I was terrified and looked over to my aunt, who was sound asleep. I still don't know how I managed to not wet the bed. Eventually, the voice went silent, and I somehow fell asleep. The next morning, everyone is doing their thing, getting ready for work or school, or busy in the kitchen, so I assumed it was all just a dream.
I really wish I'd kept my mouth shut. As I'm eating breakfast, I told my mom and grandmother about the voice, and laughed at how weird the brain is. They froze. Everyone froze. It turns out the voice was real. I hadn't mentioned his obsession with a “treasure,” but my grandfather did. As did my mother. And brother. Everyone agreed about the 'treasure' thing.
Apparently, he combed the entire house, but he never actually entered any of the rooms. Nothing was taken, all the doors were locked, and all the windows had screens, none of which were missing. Two weeks later, while I was helping my grandparents clean out the garage, my grandmother found several empty Coke cans behind the old sofa, which had been up against one of the walls for quite some time.
There were also empty bags of chips, candy wrappers, fruit cores, and peels. All of which were taken from the garage. The sofa was high enough for someone to lay underneath. So the guy had clearly been inside our house. Inside our garage. We've moved now, as have my aunts. But my grandparents still live there, and we're only about a three-minute drive from them.
We still don't know who he was, how he got in, and, most importantly: How long had he been inside our home?
16. House Hunters: Haunted House Edition
When I was younger (about sixth grade), my mother and I moved to a new city and we started to check out new houses. After a long day of going from house to house, we found one that my mom and I instantly fell in love with. It was time to go into one of the last rooms, and I remember walking into this small pale blue room. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I got this weird feeling throughout my body and had to run outside and throw up. My mom and the realtor followed and that’s when she asked how we knew what happened. My mom, confused, said: “...knew what?” The realtor told my mom that someone had just recently passed in that room. I still have dreams about that room.
17. The Last To Know
This was a true experience. Many years ago, I was working in a shop and an old lady had purchased several bags of groceries. It was a little icy outside and I knew the lady lived fewer than 100 yards away from the shop, so I offered to take her groceries home for her. She was shocked that I would offer and ever so grateful.
On the way to her house, she kept saying thank you to me. I told her it was no problem and I was happy to help. She said she wished more people like me were helpful etc., etc. As we reached her door, she opened it and stepped away so I could enter. I told her that I was OK holding the bags and she should go in the house and get out of the cold.
She thanked me again and stepped in the doorway and took a few steps down the hall. I walked in behind her and put the shopping bags on the floor. I asked her if she wanted me to help her put things away, and she insisted I had done enough and thanked me again and again. I stepped outside and turned around to say bye to her.
As she was closing the door, she said, "Thank you young man, I will watch over your soul from heaven". A few days later, her body was found in her home, in the hallway, next to a few bags of slowly rotting groceries.
18. A Terrible Birthday Present
I am the first and only grandchild in my family, so my grandma was always very fond of me. She was always planning birthday parties for me, and every year she said she couldn't wait for me to turn 15 because it's a very celebrated birthday in my country. When I turned nine, I made a terrifying prediction to her. I ominously told her that she wouldn't make it till then, and that in fact, she would only be there for my tenth birthday.
I have no idea what made me say that. But the prediction came true. She passed exactly two weeks after I turned ten. My whole family still remembers this to this day.
19. The Man In Black
People turn crazy and creepy as heck when they get really sick. There's even a term called ICU psychosis…and trust me, it's real. Anyway, the creepiest that takes the cake for me is this: I had a patient who was admitted for an excessive use of substances. She also had a very long history of mental health problems. She was thrashing around in bed, very combative, kicking people's butts for days, totally incoherent.
Well, the night I had her, she started making decent sense, but still not oriented at all. She was extremely paranoid and kept talking about the man in black in the corner. I'd hear her talking to him and screaming, all night long. So I'd go in there and try to calm her down, but you could see the fear in her eyes and in the strain of her voice.
With certain patients, you try to redirect their "reality," but what I did didn't help. She said, "That man in black! Don't you see him!" And pointed to the corner. I said, "There's nobody here”. I stepped in the corner she was pointing to and waved my hands around. While I'm waving my hands around in the air, she had the most horrifically terrified look on her face.
It actually scared the heck out of me. I said, "See, there's nobody here". Her reply gave me goosebumps. She said in a matter-of-factly, you stupid-dumb-witch way: "That's what you think". I promptly got the heck out of there.
20. Bridge Of Souls
When I was a kid, my favorite uncle was the youngest in the family. He was my hero. He had just finished high school and I was like 10 or 11. We would go and visit on spring break and over the course of the summer, and I always looked forward to seeing the guy. We’d listen to records and tapes, and he introduced me to tons of bands.
As I entered my teenage years, my life started and my friends became the center of my universe. Meanwhile, those spring break and summer visits eventually stopped happening. Eventually, I graduated high school, and around the same time my uncle started a family. A few years out of high school, my mom called me up and let me know my uncle had passed.
I hadn’t seen him in a few years, and when I asked what happened the only reply I could get was “he was sick”. It wasn’t until years later I found out the whole truth. He had taken his own life. He didn’t leave a note or anything, but the general consensus was he learned he didn’t have long to live and took the easy way out. But here’s where things get interesting for me.
Shortly after the funeral, I start having dreams. I’m a pretty lucid dreamer, not in the sense that I can decide what I want to happen in a dream, but I can recall my dreams in vivid detail. Maybe there’s another word for that? I don’t know. Anyways, I started having dreams about my uncle. Sometimes we were just sitting in his room from when I was a kid.
But another dream was much darker. I had this recurring nightmare where I would find him sitting at a rope bridge. He would stare at this bridge and get up and try to walk across it, but there were snakes that would strike at him when he tried to cross. A snake would snip at him and he’d go back to where he was sitting and just look at me, then look at the bridge.
So I’d walk on to this bridge and look across, and every few feet is a very angry snake. All the way across. I grabbed my uncle’s hand and took him out on the bridge. And he would be apprehensive because of the snakes. So I stood in front of him and kinda of hopped up and down on the bridge. The momentum or whatever you call it from me bouncing on this rickety old bridge made the snakes angry, but if you bounced enough on it, the snakes would eventually teeter over the side.
It was a very strange “eureka!” kind of dream. So my uncle would step out on to the bridge walk a few feet. Bounce the bridge so the snakes would fall off. The dream would always end with my uncle making it across the bridge and me getting this feeling of reluctance to follow him across. Then I would wake up, with this overwhelming feeling of sadness.
These dreams happened for almost 20 years. Always the same. Me and my uncle talking, or me helping him solve a puzzle of some sort. The snake and rope bridge was the most common. I never told a soul in my family about what my uncle and I were up to, since I always thought it would be upsetting. Like he wasn’t at rest. Like he was in purgatory or something. Maybe he was? I eventually just came to accept that my uncle was haunting me. And for the most part, I didn’t mind.
Then my grandmother passed a few years ago. Nothing tragic; she caught pneumonia and never really recovered from it. One night she went to sleep and never woke up. We celebrated her life. Hugged and healed the way families do. Since my grandmother’s funeral, though, I haven’t had a single dream about my uncle. Not one.
I think that was the confirmation I needed that there’s something out there for us after we go. Or maybe my grandmother passing was the catharsis I needed to let my uncle go. I look back on it now, and I like to think that my uncle was just lost. He was lost in life, and that carried on in the afterlife. I also think my grandmother, on her way to the sweet hereafter, found her baby boy, picked him up, dusted him off, and brought him home.
21. A Mysterious Rearranging
It was my daughter’s prom. We had bought a beautiful gown and shoes to match and they were hanging safely in her wardrobe. The evening of the prom she went upstairs to get ready and shouts down to me, “Thanks for getting everything ready for me mom”. There was just one terrifying problem with that.
Well, I hadn't been in her room at all. When I went up to see what she was talking about I found her dress laying on the bed, her shoes next to her dresser and perfume was on top. I didn't say anything so she wouldn't freak out, but holy cow, it sure as heck spooked the heck out of me.
After that, there were other instances like a certain perfume appearing on her dresser, wardrobe doors closing by themselves, etc. After a while, we got used to it and would just say thank you when anything happened.
22. My Time Has Come
I'm a nurse who works in an intensive care unit. I took care of a patient who had a history of esophageal cancer. A while back, he had surgery, got better, and eventually went home. Months later, he got pneumonia and came back to the hospital in respiratory distress. He had to be put on a mechanical ventilator while he was with us.
He was stable; no blood pressure issues, heart rhythm looked great, breathing wasn't terrible, responsive and following commands. All of a sudden, his blood pressure suddenly drops and he lost his pulse. We called a code blue and began CPR. We brought him back after an hour and continued to run tests to figure out why he crashed.
None of the results of the labs or imaging were remarkable. 15 minutes after we had brought him back, his blood pressure drops again and he lost his pulse. We continued coding him for another hour until it was clear he couldn't be brought back. The doctor pronounced him gone, and his wife came in after the fact. Then she made a confession that drained the blood from my face.
She said she couldn't stop thinking about the conversation her and her husband had just before he had come in. Wife: "Honey, don't forget you've got an appointment with the home health nurse this Saturday". Husband: "Well, I won't be here this Saturday". Wife: "What do you mean you won't be here this Saturday? Where are you going?"
Husband: "I don't know...I just won't be here". This conversation happened Wednesday. He was admitted to the hospital Thursday and he passed Friday at 11:30pm.
23. Never Walk Alone
I was camping at a friend's family property with a group of friends. They had a huge, dingy shop full of old tools and old furniture that was super creepy. Dirt floor, clown paintings in the loft (not even kidding), stuff like that. We stayed up late drinking by the fire and I was the last one awake. I went to go pee on the side of the shop and stood about five feet away, looking inside through the window.
There was a fluorescent light on and I noticed what looked like a piece of paper or dollar bill kind of floating around. I thought it was a moth at first, but it was moving in a very flowing figure 8 pattern that was very rhythmic. It reminded me of dangling a carrot. I watched it for maybe 20 seconds, which felt like forever.
Then it quickly floated back to the corner of the shop where it was dark. There was also a wood chair near the corner that added to the creepiness. I sat back down by the fire. No one else was awake, so I played on my phone for a while. I noticed my friend Mark pop out of his tent to pee, then go back in to go to sleep. I decided sleep sounded good, so I went to my tent and feel asleep.
The next morning, we were having breakfast, and Mark said something that made my blood run cold. “I saw you guys sitting by the fire super late, how late did you stay up?" I told him I was probably 2 or 3 am. Then he said," Who was up with you?" I told him I was the last man standing. He said," I got up and saw you on your phone and two people over your shoulder watching you play".
He said one person looked bigger so he thought it was one of our friends, who was a bigger dude. He said the other person was taller and skinny, but none of us are noticeably tall, or skinny. It freaked me OUT!! We still camp at that property once a year, but I don't go in the shop, and I go to sleep whenever my wife decides she's tired.
24. The Cursed Child
When my father was a kid in the ‘60s, he would go into the living room in the middle of the night, turn the TV on to static, climb on his rocking horse and slowly rock back and forth in the dark room only lit by the TV static and slowly say "I hate mommy. I hate mommy. I hate mommy". over and over again. My grandmother says it was the creepiest thing she's ever seen.
25. Oh, You Beautiful Doll
I was out on a service call to an apartment one day, and the lady who lived there seemed to have an obvious obsession with dolls. Specifically, she seemed to really like those 15-inch tall pioneer style dolls. Anyway, she was not home on the day that I had to go over there, so I just went about my business as I normally would. I had no clue why, but I was feeling very uncomfortable from the moment I first set foot in her apartment.
When I entered her bedroom, it quickly escalated. She literally had more than 300 dolls sitting all over the room. On some of these dolls, the heads had been removed and were hanging by strings from the ceiling. There was also a small little altar of some sort in the corner of the room, with a severed chicken head on it as well as a gargoyle-like statue and several pictures of children.
There was a pig's hoof hanging from a red cord in her bathroom, too. When I finally made it into the dining room, there was a Ouija board sitting there, along with multiple dolls, which were all arranged around a dismembered doll that was drenched in what appears to have been real blood. I think I broke the top human speed record that morning. To this day, no one believes me about this experience.
26. Nosy Neighbors
Our yard had a cemetery from the 1800s in the back, so it was quite a common local attraction for visitors, since many of the graves were for children who passed back then from the flu, etc. There are some creepy stories from that place, but nothing lives up to what happened to me there.
While playing outside with my sister this one time, an old couple walking by the cemetery began pestering my sister about what her name was. They approached us and started to get closer and closer. We were just little kids and got terribly scared, so we ran inside and told our mom what had happened. Then we found out the disturbing truth.
The following week I heard a story on the news about an elderly couple approaching and abducting a teenage girl, and it turned out to be the same couple that had approached my sister and me. I still get creeped out by that.
27. Black And White
I recall a lady on the ward who was terminally ill and had all the staff on edge. She was constantly talking about a lady in white who kept visiting her. She would wake up to find this lady in her room, but she was very comforted by her presence. At the same time, we had another lady in the ward who, although unwell, was not at the terminal stage…or so we thought.
One night, I was writing my reports when I heard this “healthy” lady shouting. She was extremely upset when I reached her and asked why "the other nurse" kept waking her up in the early hours. I inquired further as to who she meant. She described a nurse in a black uniform who had woken her the past few mornings and would just stand and stare at her, not speaking.
I tried to reassure her as much as possible and suggested she was having strange dreams, but she insisted she knew this nurse was real and why was she so unfriendly. The next night, I came on duty again to discover this lady had suddenly deteriorated and passed. I often wondered about these two different experiences—a lady in white and one in black. I hope the white lady comes for me when it’s my time.
28. Down The Hatch
I was about four or five years old and my parents had just separated. My mom was living in a two bedroom apartment. I had my own room but I preferred to sleep in her bed whenever I stayed with her. Our two bedrooms were at the end of a hallway, directly across from each other. I woke up in the middle of the night and remember sitting up and seeing that our cat was sitting in the door frame of my mom's room.
This was strange because our cat was typically always in bed with us. As I watched our cat, he walked into my bedroom and meowed at something. I felt weird, so I turned to face my mom and wake her up. In the three seconds it took her to wake up and ask what was wrong, we both looked back at the door frame. What I saw almost made me scream.
There was a man standing by my open door, making his way out of my bedroom. My mom picked me up and literally threw me out of the screen window (we were on the first floor; it was maybe a three foot drop to the ground). After she jumped out, we started screaming until one of our neighbors called 9-1-1. The authorities came but they didn't see any signs of forced entry.
Only that our front door was unlocked which led them to believe the man must have exited that way. The strange thing was that my mom swore up and down that she locked the door that night, with the deadbolt and chain lock. About a week later she was cleaning the kitchen when she opened up our water heater closet and found a notebook with names and drawings, as well as a pair of gloves and some gum wrappers.
9-1-1 was called again. They said that the man had probably been in our house. He must have hid until we were asleep.
29. Scent Of A Father
On the day my father passed, I was alone in the apartment we lived in while everyone was out mourning at my uncle’s place. I stayed home because I didn't want people to stare at me sobbing. Anyways, I'm in the living room and I hear footsteps in my mother's room that has a balcony. I straight up hear the balcony door open so now I'm like sobbing and shouting asking who's there.
I go check it out and there's no one there except a strong smell of smoke in the room (my father used to smoke on the balcony). Never told anyone about it and just kept it for myself. I later learned my mother got blamed for my dad's passing, even though they loved each other since they were teens and my dad was simply a victim of cancer. At that point, a massive brawl broke out at my uncle's.
I just thought of it as my dad coming home because he couldn't be bothered to hear people arguing.
30. A Shocking Account
One time when I was fairly new at my electrical job, I was lighting a large industrial oven that basically has spark plug wires for each of the many burners. I was holding the framework of the oven with one hand and reaching in a burner access port with the other when I got pushed forward and my whole body sort of slammed up against the side of the oven.
I spun around ready to hit somebody for pushing me, but there was no one there. Then I noticed my fingers kind of burning/tingling. So yea, I realized that I had just gotten shocked with very high voltage, low amperage DC. I am not quite sure how I walked out of there alive that day.
31. You Have Definitely Entered The Twilight Zone
I was in Toronto for a concert and, long story short, I got stopped by "The Authorities" and they cuffed me, saying that they were taking me to the tank. Not a big deal. I was very intoxicated and had been before as well. I pass out in the back of the car until they wake me up in front of what appears to be a warehouse of some kind. Then my bizarre nightmare began.
We get inside and it looks like a hospital. The officers leave me there and people come up and start taking weird amounts of blood, more than you normally would take. The nurse leads me into a bedroom and some bouncer type guy slams me into a bed and straps me there, like seven or eight straps across my body. That’s when my senses start to kick in and I majorly panic.
I’m left alone in some pitch-black room, strapped in and unable to move. After passing out again, I wake up in these bushes beside Burger King. I still had my phone and my wallet with all my money in it. It boggles my mind to this day. I have no idea what happened. My friends think I was drugged or hallucinated, but I swear it was real.
32. Who Can You Trust These Days?
A girl I dated used to work at a home improvement store and there was this middle-aged guy who used to come in regularly and hang around the store and talk to her. He seemed a little slow and clingy, but harmless. He would always address her by name and say that she was pretty. Then one day he was in the store as they were closing and he saw a male coworker give her a hug before he left.
The next day that male coworker woke up to find his tires slashed in his driveway. No one made any connection to the nice middle-aged guy who came in to buy batteries five times a week. But it got so much worse. Meanwhile, this girl had been noticing that she was always losing underwear at home.
She just assumed that she had been losing them in the wash or simply misplacing them and thought nothing of it. She even joked about it with her mom. Then it happened. She was sleeping one night and woke up to find this guy standing silently over her bed, staring down at her with her panties pressed against his face.
She flipped the heck out and he ran out the sliding glass door on the back of the house. The same unlocked door that, as they found out once he was caught, he had been coming into night after night for months to watch her sleep.
33. Child’s Play
This is my brother's story, but it's a good one. He was working as a night porter at an old hotel from the 18th century in the Northern English countryside. One night, a woman came down to reception as white as a sheet with her suitcase, saying she could not sleep and did not want to stay there. My brother enquired as to why, but he wished he never heard the answer.
She said she could hear children laughing all night and a child had entered her room with a candle and was standing at the foot of the bed and wouldn't leave. My brother mentioned it to his manager the following morning, and he was told that this is a regular occurrence—before the hotel was a hotel, it used to be a school over 100 years ago.
34. Prince Charmless
The following account occurred roughly three years ago during the summer of 2012. It has always been difficult for me to talk about, but I have found writing about it to be therapeutic. I was 17 at the time, and I had just gotten my first job. I lived in rural western Virginia, in a small mountain community. My mom’s friend owned a camping resort not far from my house that had a general store, and she said she’d pay me to help out in the store during the busy months in the summer.
It was a pretty easy job, and I met a lot of out-of-towners, which was nice because our community could get so isolated; most of us lived pretty far away from each other. One day, a big burly mountain man type came into the store. He was in his late 40s/early 50s, probably 6’5”, and about 280 lbs. He looked dirty, like he worked outside a lot; his clothes were sort of tattered and he had a long beard.
We had a few of the woodsy hermit types in the area, and he definitely looked like one of them. He bought some basic items, one of which was one of our homemade bars of soap. When he came to the register, he looked me up and down carefully. He didn’t talk for a minute, just stared. His people skills clearly needed work.
“Did you make this soap?” He asked gruffly. “Possibly,” I said. “I help out with that sometimes”. “You make a lot of your own stuff?” “Toiletries and things like that, yeah". “I like that,” He said, nodding to himself. I honestly did not know how to respond. I quickly rang up his items and he paid with crumpled money. Right before he left, he asked, “You cook, too?”
“Sometimes,” I replied. “Bet the boys 'round here are itchin’ to marry you,” he said as he smiled to himself. I said nothing. I was puzzled as to what I said that stood out as wife material. I told Krista (mom’s friend/boss) about the bizarre encounter and she laughed it off; so did my family and friends.
But then, Mountain Man started turning up more often. We chatted a little bit here and there, and I found out he had a cabin in the woods that he claimed he built “with his bare hands”. He said he hunted and lived off the land, other than the things he bought at the store. Over time our chatter escalated, with him making comments about how nice it would be to have a woman like me around who could make those things and cook his kills. One time, he even said I had the "birthin' hips that men lust after". Shudder.
He even started inviting me to fish with him, hunt with him, see his place, etc. and I always politely declined. But he got more and more insistent and I told Krista about how uncomfortable he was starting to make me. The intensity with which he said those things really scared me. She said that when he came in, go get her and she would ring him up.
Thanks to her, I started speaking to him less, and I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore. I soon found out how wrong I was. One night, I was closing up, and it was late, around 10 at night. Krista had left about an hour before, and I was leaving by myself. The only two cars in front of the store were an old blue pickup and mine.
I was immediately alarmed because I knew Mountain Man drove a blue pickup. But I didn’t see him in the lot, just his car, so I walked quickly to my car and checked the backseat before I started her up. But then when I first turned the key into the ignition, I got nothing but sputters. I tried several more times and got scared quickly.
"Of all nights, why is this happening tonight?" I remember asking myself angrily. Just as I was reaching for my phone to call for help, there was a loud pounding on the driver’s side window. I’m shocked that I didn’t wet myself. I didn’t even want to look, because I knew what I would find. I knew it was him.
But I did, and my suspicions were confirmed. He smiled a big grin at me, showing me exactly which teeth were missing. “Need some help?” He said loudly through the window. I shook my head furiously. “My dad is on his way". I said, hoping to scare him off. I hadn’t spoken to my dad in years. Mountain Man laughed.
“No he’s not”. He said. “Open the door”. The hairs on my neck stood up straight. How did he know I was bluffing? “No,” I said firmly. “Leave me alone”. Suddenly he looked angry. He pulled the handle but I had locked all the doors when I first got in. He kept furiously pulling the handle and started pounding on the window. “Leave now or I’m calling 9-1-1!” I screamed at him.
He clearly wasn’t getting the message, so I pulled out my phone and called 9-1-1. I must have sounded insane to the dispatcher, and I knew she could hear him pounding. She said she would have officers out ASAP, but out here, that could be a while.
“THE AUTHORITIES ARE ON THEIR WAY! LEAVE NOW!” I screamed at him, who didn’t seem to let it deter him. But after a few more minutes of pounding, he suddenly stopped and walked back to his truck. I watched him go, hopeful he would leave me alone. But then he started walking back toward me, with a crowbar in hand.
“NO!” I screamed at him. “GET AWAY FROM ME!” He started swinging at the driver’s side window with the crowbar. I ducked down into the passenger seat on the floor and covered the back of my neck like they teach you in tornado drills. I heard the sickening crack of the window but not for long; suddenly, I heard male voices shouting, telling MM to get away from the car. I sat up and saw two men approaching, one with a shotty pointed at MM.
I recognized them as a couple of guests staying at the resort for a camping trip. I breathed a sigh of relief and got out of the car, telling them that the authorities were on the way. I thanked them profusely as we waited for the officers, and surprisingly MM didn’t make any moves to get away, but the authorities came pretty quickly after that, so he didn’t have much of a chance.
They took him away and I gave them my statement; I was pretty shaken up for a while afterward. A few weeks later I finally got the scoop on the man. Apparently, he had a history of mental illness. He had been in and out of state institutions. He really had been living in an old cabin in the woods, where he wasn’t taking his meds and his issues were only getting worse.
My cousin Luke is a cop, and later on he told me some more about the case that he had heard about through some other officers. The authorities did a search of the cabin after the incident, to see if there was anything that might be of interest to them. What they found still haunts me. They found a journal that MM kept. Apparently, in it he said he was lonely and wanted a wife.
He mentioned me by name a lot (stupid name tag), and Luke said there were a lot of lewd things in there about me that he didn’t want to share but tried to put it simply by saying that MM had a detailed plan to abduct me, starting with sabotaging my car engine to get me into a vulnerable position.
When Luke said that, I nearly burst into tears thinking about how horribly that night could have gone if those two men hadn’t come along. Thankfully, he has been put back into a state institution. With any luck, he’ll stay there for good. Mountain Man, let’s not meet again.
35. A Better Place
When I worked in the medical field, I had a dream one night about a patient of mine, a very kind elderly woman, whom I visited once or twice a week. In the dream, she came to me, dancing, and called out to me that she wasn't hurting anymore. I was so happy watching her dance after seeing her decline for years. I didn’t know how eerie it would get.
When I got to work the next morning, I told my co-workers about the dream, and later that morning we got the call from her daughter that she had passed the night before. I cannot explain that, but I am glad I had told my co-workers about it before the call and not after, otherwise they'd never have believed me. Such a bizarre experience, but so wonderful to feel she was at peace.
36. The Sound Of Silence
I had just started a new job, and the building I worked in was really old. I had to stay a bit later than I normally would to get something done, and by the time I was packing up to leave, my floor was pretty empty. I needed to use the restroom before I left, so I walked over there, and as I approached the door I saw someone else open the door and go in.
I remember vividly that they were wearing a pink shirt and khakis, because that's what I was wearing, too. I was also mildly annoyed, because I don't like being in the bathroom when someone else is in there. After deciding I still definitely needed to pee before the commute home, I entered the bathroom. When I got in, I turned pale.
It was completely empty. I don't know how to describe the energy in the room, but it was very tense. Completely silent. I remember being able to hear my heartbeat. After standing completely frozen for what felt like 10 minutes (it was probably like 15 seconds), I turned right around and left. I had nightmares about that bathroom for weeks. It seems so simple, but it really shook me.
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37. Who's There?
I work in a correctional facility. Before my job changed, I used to have about 1.5 hours of downtime before it was time to punch out. My sergeant at the time asked if I would cover the 11 pm count on one of the blocks. He didn’t care what I did before or after, just do the count. No problem. I’m sitting at our “Times Square” area; one hallway leads to four blocks, and another hallway leads to the other four.
I’m sitting in front of one of those hallways. I hear someone walking towards me from behind. But I realize I don’t hear keys; we all have keys, except inmates. I turn around, no one there. I think, ok maybe I just imagined it. Guy sitting in the area with me asks who it was...I guess I didn’t imagine it. Alright then.
11 pm comes, I go to the block. No one is letting me in. What’s going on?! I go back to the Times Square area to call and let the officer know not to panic, I’m coming, I just can’t get in. As I’m on the phone, I feel someone behind me and they lean into my ear and whisper forcefully “Whaddaya doin’?!” I wave my hand back to signal to them to stop.
I hang up and turn to yell at who it was...no one is there. No one is in any hallway, I’m all alone.
38. The Phantom Intruder
When I was in college, I housesat for my parents. I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat, so I locked every door leading up to the bedroom when I went to bed at night. I had the weirdest dream that someone unlocked each door and turned on every light, and I felt cold and woke up to my dog barking. Sure enough, all of the lights in the house were on and every door was open and unlocked.
My dog wouldn’t stop barking in the hallway, but there was nothing there. I sat in the shower with my dog and phone the rest of night, scared out of my wits. To this day, I still have no explanation for that night's events.
39. The Subconscious Mind
I'm a nurse. I work with geriatric patients, and there was this incident about three years ago. Before I explain, let me say that I DON'T believe in ghosts. Anyway, this one time I was working the night shift and I was super sleepy, so I decided to skip lunch because I wasn't hungry and go to my car and sleep for 30 minutes instead.
I got inside my car, covered myself with my sweater, set the timer on my phone, and immediately knocked myself out. Then I'm dreaming, but in my dream I'm still awake, just sitting there. Someone taps on my car window and I see that it’s one of my patients, we'll call her Dee. Surprised, I asked Dee what the heck she’s doing outside.
She tells me she is looking for her daughter. I tell her to go back inside and that we will call her daughter in the morning. My patient becomes angry and starts banging on my car window. I kind of freak out and try to reach for the door handle to get out and calm her down, but I quickly realize I can't move. Let me add that I frequently experience sleep paralysis, so even though I am asleep, I realize what is happening.
I fight it and try squirming my body in an attempt to wake myself up. I finally manage to wake up and my heart is racing and my forehead is a bit sweaty. I sit there for about a minute, realize it was all a dream, and roll the window down to cool myself off. If I knew what was coming, I would have screamed my lungs out.
My break is over and I clock back in and see that my supervisor and two other nurses are huddled in front of a room. I am still by the station clocking in when they see me and call me over. I walk over thinking maybe something was wrong with the ventilator or the patient fell, but my supervisor tells me Dee passed while I was on my lunch break.
It took a couple of seconds for the message to register, and I freaked out internally. I got goose bumps, but didn't mention anything to my supervisor about the dream.
40. Hooked On A Feeling
I was laying in my bed with my boyfriend and the lights were out. We weren't talking, just both thinking. All of a sudden, he rolls over and hugs me really tightly. I, of course, hug him back. But then this feeling just hit me. If I wasn't already laying down, it would have knocked me over. It was a total feeling of dread and panic.
I'll admit, I have had panic attacks in the past. But this was not the same. I hugged my boyfriend back as hard as I could. I never felt a feeling like this before. My boyfriend is one of those people who is always really warm, but even in his arms, I felt ice cold. I could feel this evil, awful feeling and it seemed like it was coming from the corner of my room.
It was kind of like sensing your friend behind you when they aren't saying anything. I honestly believe there was a demon or something in my room. I got the courage to speak, and I said, "Jay, do you feel that?" His answer confirmed my worst suspicions. He said he did, he felt the same cold, evil feeling. This all happened in about thirty seconds to a minute.
He decided to call his friend who was studying to be a youth pastor. He put him on speakerphone. Matt prayed for us and we both closed our eyes and listened, praying in our heads. When the prayer was done, the room felt lighter and it wasn't cold anymore. But after a little small talk afterward, Matt asked, "Were you two talking while I was praying?"
We were like, of course not. We were just listening. He said he heard a deep, gravelly voice on the phone telling him to stop. And he said he felt an awful, evil feeling overcome him while he was praying. I am convinced it was a demon. But it never came back, so.... Why was it there in the first place? That's the only problem I have with the whole thing.
What was it trying to accomplish? I don't think I'll ever know…
41. The Fire Inside
Several years ago, I had a recurring dream about being burned in a hotel fire. It was so realistic that I could feel the pain and hear screams. Each dream would be more and more detailed. In the last dream, I could make out the exact details of the building. When we went on vacation once, we stopped in a small city and looked for a hotel.
Well, we stopped at the exact hotel in my dream. I just froze and repeatedly asked if we could go to a different hotel. After pestering my parents about it, we went somewhere else. But that’s not even the most terrifying part. It burned down the night we were supposed to stay there, and 14 people perished in the blaze. Did my head in.
42. The Disappearing Student
I once worked as a live-in staff member in a college dormitory. During the summer, we housed the few summer school students who remained on campus (nearly 30 of them). It may be significant to point out that these students tended towards the highly academically-motivated, and were oftentimes high-stress students, if quiet.
One warm day in late June, my office received a call from a concerned sibling saying that she and her family were unable to reach her brother, who lived by himself in a room on the summer school floor. This wasn't unusual as our office frequently dealt with students avoiding their kith and kin due to frayed nerves or general social awkwardness.
Our normal protocol to check on a student is to try to reach them by our emergency contact information. Failing that, we go check their room to verify they're living in the building and perhaps available then and there, then have them call their family to verify we followed up on the original request. Also, we are to only enter a room with another staff member present to ensure personal safety of staff and students.
I failed to reach this student on his room and mobile phone, and was working short-staffed, so since I was on my own I decided to pop up to his room and check on him. This was an enormous mistake. I arrived on his floor around 2:00 in the afternoon and the floor seemed deserted, as I had expected. I found his room number and immediately noticed the sound of a movie playing on a TV or computer from behind the door.
I knocked three times and announced that I was a staff member checking on his health and safety. No answer. I didn't think this was that remarkable, since college students are notorious for leaving electronics running while not in the room. I checked the floor showers and bathrooms and found them deserted too. I returned to his door and knocked three more times, waiting about 20 seconds between each knock.
No answer. This is when my instincts started to buzz. I worked in residence halls a number of years as a professional, and something about all the pieces of this puzzle weren't adding up; family concerned about his health and safety, electronics running (someone must have started them recently, within the time frame of a movie run-time), summer school students and their idiosyncratic behavior.
Something wasn't right. I was by myself, so I probably let myself get more worked up than if I was with someone else. A deserted dorm floor, even at 2:00 in the afternoon, oftentimes evokes Kubrickian memories of the Overlook Hotel…I decided that for some sense of closure or sanity, I needed the immediate resolution of keying into this student's room, even though I was by myself and not technically supposed to do so.
I knocked on the door one more time for good measure and again announced myself as the hall director. I keyed into the room and my spider sense went off even stronger. The room appeared relatively vacant; the student appeared to be living out of a suitcase, which is unusual for someone staying no fewer than eight weeks for a summer school session.
The bedding was tussled like someone had been sleeping in it and all the lights in the room were on. And as I had suspected, there was an open laptop on a desk running on battery power and playing The Matrix. But no student. I began to start rationalizing to keep from feeling unsettled; surely this student and I had crossed paths on my way to his room (I'd never met him before so I wouldn't recognize him otherwise) and perhaps he was just down in the lobby picking up delivery food for a late lunch.
Sure, that's it. Then I turned to leave, planning on trying to reach the student later in the afternoon or that night. As I turned to leave, I noticed another odd piece of evidence. The accordion closet doors, which are removed in most rooms due to disuse, particularly single rooms like his, were still in this room. And they were closed.
Odd. I couldn't remember the last time I actually saw someone use those cranky, dysfunctional doors. Then my intuition spiked higher than ever. I realized I was alone in a room with a potentially suicidal student who may, in fact, have completed just that. And I am about to be "that guy" who discovers the body and then has a storm of paperwork and undesirable tasks, not the least of which would be calling the family back to break the news.
I felt like I was talking to myself when my voice cracked as I spoke to the closed doors and announced my name and title and that I would be opening those accordion doors in three seconds. I fumbled with the latch on the doors, and finally managed to get them disengaged. As I slid the doors apart, I was unprepared. I don't know what I really expected, a hanging? A wound?
I'll tell you what I didn't expect: a 7-foot dark-skinned Indian man staring at me embarrassingly as though I had found his secret hangout. We stared at each other for a good 15 seconds without blinking, breathing or speaking. I finally realized what was going on and my natural emotion was disbelief. All I could think to say was, "Um . . . are you in here hiding from me?"
He looked at me and said, "Yeah". My heart was still racing, I turned to leave and before I shut his door, I turned back to him and said, "Call your sister, she's worried about you, and, frankly, I am too".
43. When Twigs Snap
In my early 20s, I'd go urban exploring with a group of friends from college. One cold night in October, seven of us went to an abandoned, formerly state-run asylum. It was on a big campus with several large buildings. The roads were disused but not closed, so we were able to get pretty close by car, and luckily found a good spot in some brush to hide the vehicles in.
We were pretty bad at sneaking—people were talking, one dude was messing with a laser pointer, etc. Luckily, there really wasn't any security patrolling, but I knew there could be other people to hide from. We went to explore one of the main buildings, 10+ storeys tall, surrounded by a chain-link fence. Eventually, we found a hole and climbed in.
Searching between the fence and the outer wall, I swore I heard twigs breaking in the wood behind the building. We were basically trapped between the fence and the building, and the only way out was the way we came, which was also the direction the sound was coming from. Two of the girls with us were joking around, and the kid with the laser was still playing with it.
I started to get nervous and told them to knock it off, but they were having fun and didn't care. All of a sudden, there was this loud yelling like an old man in pain. Everyone shut up, and after a moment we heard tons, TONS of twigs snapping. Now I was panicking, and I yelled for us all to run. We scrambled out of the fence and back to our cars, sure that danger was right behind us.
Looking back at it now, it was probably just a few raccoons going at it, or a squatter who was more scared of us. But at the time, I never felt the need to run more in my life. Needless to say, we cooled off on the exploring for a while.
44. The Scent Of A Woman
In 2012, my grandmother suffered a major stroke resulting in at-home palliative care. Friends and family were able to come by freely and spend time with her. I was very close to my grandma and was lucky to be able to share much of this time with her. For anyone that has ever been through hospice with a loved one, you will understand how hard this type of thing can be.
One night, I was sitting at home in my office catching up on some work, when all of a sudden the room filled with the scent of perfume. I'm not talking about a faint smell, I'm saying it was very distinctive and strong throughout the entire room. I stopped everything I was doing and said out loud, to myself, "Something is wrong with Gram".
I had not spoken to my family that day but felt an urgent need to send a text message to my uncle, who was staying with her. I asked, "You guys okay?" This was at 11:20 PM. I got a response right away saying, "You might want to come and say goodbye. Not okay". I quickly rushed over. Upon arrival, the living room where my family was congregated was very silent and filled with blank faces.
Without saying anything, I walked straight to my grandmother, kissed her on the forehead, and told her I loved her. She was still warm...but no longer breathing. I told my uncle that I was there because grandma had brought me there. I asked when she passed, and he replied saying just five minutes before I sent my text. This puts the perfume in my office at nearly the exact same moment.
Now, I'm going to say that I was born into an Irish Catholic family, but I am in no way a religious person. I would have been the first person to discount this type of story if you told it to me. But, I must say, this experience had me thinking that there really is something more out there. I felt it. It was just that one night, but I felt it.
45. Get Out Of My House
I came home late one night and immediately sensed that something was off. I looked around and was terrified to find a strange man on the couch in the dark. I figured it was probably one of my roommate’s friends—I was so wrong. Ignoring the man as best I could, I went to bed. I was awoken at 4am to a soft drumming on my door.
It got louder and louder until it sounded like someone was frantically clawing on the wood. I texted my roommate and said her friend was freaking me out, and all she texted back was “What friend?” I called 9-1-1, and by that time he was frantically pounding on the door, trying to break through. The guy ended up seeing the officers coming and ran out of there before they could catch him. We never saw him again, but we never felt safe in that apartment again, either.
46. In The Dog House
I was having a sleepover at home with a friend from school. We were watching a film, and suddenly the weirdest thought comes to me: Her dog has just passed. Obviously, I can't just blurt that out. So I ask in the middle of the film, hey, by the way, how is your dog? She was quite surprised, since I had never met her dog and she doesn’t talk much about it, she just mentioned she had one.
She answered that he is ageing, but well. We moved on but I couldn’t shake that odd feeling. Anyway, she goes home the next day and calls me after a while. She asked, “Why did you ask about my dog yesterday? How did you know? He passed last night, around the same time you asked about him". I was both shocked and unsurprised at the same time.
I don’t have an explanation, it seems like a weird coincidence since her dog was not something usually on my mind. It never happened to me again.
47. Nighty Night
Years ago in college, we were sharing ghost stories when a friend told a story that terrified me. So the full story is that when his family—the parents and their two boys—moved into their new house, everything was basically hunky-dory except for my friend’s little brother, who was having trouble sleeping and insisted that his room was haunted.
The parents figured it was just a symptom of the move and that he'd get over it, but as time went on the youngest boy got more paranoid and anxious about the room and not less. Eventually, bedtime became such a hassle with this kid that the father relented and said that this time, he'd sleep in the kids’ room to prove it wasn't haunted while the boy would sleep in his parents’ bed with his mother.
So the morning after the swap comes and everyone's milling about getting breakfast when the dad comes downstairs, and people of course want to know how he slept. His reply was chilling. To everyone's surprise, he says to the youngest, "Yeah, you're not sleeping in that room anymore". Everyone was slack-jawed and demanded an explanation.
Apparently, as my friend recounted, when his dad slept in the room he reportedly had to sleep facing the wall, because anytime he slept facing out towards the room, he couldn't escape this really awful feeling that someone (or something) was knelt by his bedside, staring him in the face, and that, as you can imagine, did not lend itself well to a restful sleep.
Once the youngest was out of that room and settled into another, the drama over bedtime stopped.
48. This Isn't My Stop
This happened when I was around age 12. A little bit of context: I was out of the district for the school I was in, so I rode in a van (one of those big, creepy white ones), with about five other kids. I was the first one on the van every morning, picked up around 7:30 AM. The bus driver was always friendly enough. He was an overweight, white man, probably in his 50s.
One day as he was driving us home, he pointed out his house to us. On the first day of him driving us home, he stopped at Burger King to get us each an ice cream cone. (This alarmed me at the time, but I shrugged it off.) I was a pretty small kid, and I certainly wouldn't be able to defend myself against any sort of physical assault.
Anyway, I got on the van one morning as I always did. I think it was March. (In Minnesota, so it was still quite cold outside). I was looking at my iPod, not really paying attention. When we stopped, I looked up, assuming we were at the next stop. I looked up to discover that we were at his house. He didn't say a word to me. He got out of the vehicle and went inside.
I was alone, and absolutely petrified. Until that point, I always thought that people were exaggerating when they said they were "paralyzed with fear," but I absolutely was. You hear those stories, you know, of young girls getting kidnapped. I really thought he was going to assault and/or liquidate me. A million thoughts were running through my head.
Do I call 9-1-1? Do I hide? Do I get out and run? (I knew someone who lived nearby). But instead, I just sat there, frozen. I have no idea how long he was inside, but it couldn't have been very long, because he came back (again, still not saying a word) and we continued on the route.
I told my parents about it when I got home. They thought it was odd, but figured he probably had just forgotten something or really had to pee. They told me to tell them about it if it happened again. It did. The second time (I think it was a few weeks later), I looked up, and saw that we were at his house again. It was the same—no explanation, he just parked and went inside, leaving me in the van by myself.
This time, I texted my mom to let her know what was happening. She called me immediately, asking if I was okay, what happened, etc. I had to hang up after a few moments, because he came back more quickly this time. Again, we continued on the route. My parents called the bus company, and I guess he was yelled at. He obviously knew that I had told on him, because the next morning I rode the van he was clearly very angry and silent. I was absolutely terrified to continue riding the van after that—he was angry and knew where I lived!
So that was definitely the most terrified I've ever been for my life. I think about it all the time. He definitely should've been fired. I'm 99% sure that what he did was against the law. If school bus drivers need to make an unscheduled stop, they're supposed to call the bus company, let every kid off, etc. They probably only kept him because he was the only person who was willing to drive as far as we all lived.
49. Gone Fishing
When my uncle was young, he took a trip to the Grand Canyon with his friends. They were driving along and stopped near this area with hedges/brush on the side of the canyon and decided to take one of your standard funny Grand Canyon pictures.
My uncle stood on the side of the canyon with a fishing rod, pretending to fish off the side of the canyon. After they snapped the picture, they packed up and drove off. When the photos were developed, they noticed something very strange.
In the picture, not far behind my Uncle, was a man dressed in all black with pale white skin just staring at the camera with a knowing smirk on his face. My Uncle and his friends claimed that they did not know this man, that they were the only ones in the spot, and the Grand Canyon was vacant of tourists at this time of year. They still know nothing about the man. The picture still exists to this day.
50. Dream On
I'm at work one day when my then-wife calls me out of the blue. She usually did not call me during the day because she worked the night shift. She tells me to call my friend Danny and make sure he and his family are okay. When I ask why, she tells me that she had a dream and can't remember it, but that I should call Danny and make sure he's okay.
So I call Danny and check in with him. I tell him about my wife's dream. He's mildly amused but tells me that he and his family are fine and to thank my wife for her concern. I call her back and let her know all is well. She's very dubious when she hears the news. I found out later that within half an hour of my phone call to Danny, he got another call from his uncle in Florida to tell him that his son took his own life.
51. A Long, Long Time Ago
My brother is about two years older than me. Me, my parents, and our eldest brother distinctly remember him telling a lot of stories when he was little about his "past life". One in particular that I remember was about his grandpa and his dog who lived in a house that caught on fire. Neither survived. When he was little, he would tell creepy stories like this all the time.
At one point, unprovoked, months later, I remember him pointing out a burnt down shack and saying that it was his grandpa's house. We later came to find out that an elderly man and his dog had indeed lived there and passed in a fire. But it wasn't anyone we knew or were related to. My brother was less than 10 years old when this happened, and it was way before our internet days.
We also never read the newspaper or watched the news. Too caught up in sports and cartoons. If you ask him about any of this now, he says he doesn't remember.
52. Spine-Chilling Stuff
I didn’t see a ghost until I was 19 years old and did not believe in them until then. I had the mentality that, “I'll believe it when I see it”. Well, I got what I wished for, and it was horrible. I was at my friend’s rental house, who had a baby and they kept talking about how their house was haunted—particularly the room the baby slept in.
A woman would be seen in white, walking into the baby's room at night. A few times, my friend’s husband would be alone with the baby at night while she was at work and he would see the women walk by the open door in the hallway towards the baby's room while the baby slept.
He didn't think anything of it at first because he thought it was his wife, then he would remember she’s at work and run to the baby's room...only to find the kid crying and no one there. Fast-forward to my encounter: I was hanging out with my good friend at their house while the husband was at work and helping out watching the baby.
We started hearing a ton of noises, and my friend said she just wanted to get the kid, get in the car, and leave. I laughed and tried to tell her it was nothing, but I complied. We get to the car and she tells me she forgot the dog and asked if I could go back and get him.
I approach the window at the front of the house, peer into it, and see the dog standing at the sliding glass door, completely stiff with its tail pointing straight out, barking his behind off. I then look at the reflection and my heart skips several beats. I see the bottom half of a reflection of a woman in white.
I nope out of there and tell her I can't go in there and tell her what I saw. We eventually go back inside once the dog slowed on the barking. When it comes to ghosts, I am now a true believer and since that day, I have had a couple of other encounters.
53. Witch Hunt
One day while doing my laundry, one of the lights blew out in my basement. My basement is set up so that the laundry room is split off from the other side of the basement with a wall and a door. In order to get upstairs, you have to exit the laundry room and go through the other part of the basement. So the light blew in the other part, not the laundry room.
As it was the only light on that side, it was pretty dark. I finished the laundry I had to do while dreading the walk through the dark basement. I exit the laundry room, get halfway through the basement, and suddenly I hear a loud cackle. Imagine a sound people make when they imitate a witch.
Take that and imagine that the witch had been lighting up for 50 years, making her voice deeper and hoarser. That is what I heard, clear as day, right behind me. I did not hesitate to bolt for the stairs. I waited until my father got home and then changed the bulb. I have yet to hear that cackle since, and I have not told a single person in the house about it.
54. You Are Dreaming
I have a sleep tracking app on my phone that has a setting for lucid dreaming. It will start saying "You are dreaming" repeatedly in a woman's voice with a bit of an echo. It backfired on me in the most haunting way. I was at work one day when I started hearing the voice randomly every few minutes or so. I checked my phone and as soon as the screen turned, I woke up in my bed as the sun was rising.
A bit freaked out I went to take a shower. Then on my way to work I started to hear the voice again through the radio. When I turned my car off, a bit freaked out again, I once more woke up in my bed as the sun was rising. This happened about three or four more times, all at different times of the "day". I didn't trust reality for about a week after that and still refuse to use that particular setting of the app.
55. Hiding Behind A Costume
Many years ago, I was looking for a Halloween costume with my mom to wear to elementary school. This occasion was a big deal to me, because I was homeschooled before that. We spent a couple of hours going to several stores, and couldn't find anything that I liked. It was getting dark outside, so we were going to have to find something and go home soon.
There was an old Halloween costume store, one of those really weird places that somehow is open year round. We decided to go in and check it out, as a last ditch effort to find something. We got out of the car and walked through the front doors. We then get up the steps to go into this place. Then something comes over me that I still can’t explain.
I felt huge, unbearable pressure all over my whole body, like the physical feeling of being hated by something. Imagine that feeling, combined with a sense of something wanting to hurt me and wanting me to leave. My little third grade self turned to look at my mom, and in the same instant she turned to look at me. It was extremely freaky.
We didn't say a thing to each other. We just turned around and went back to the car, after only walking three steps into the store. I remember getting inside the car and asking my mom if she had felt the same thing that I did. She said that she had essentially had the same exact experience as me. We prayed together in the car and left.
As an adult, I can still remember how bad it was. And I am getting tensed up just writing about it. On the bright side, I did end up with a costume that year though. We went home and my mom stayed up late with me working to cobble together a cowboy costume from the things we had at home.
56. This One Will Leave You Breathless
My mum told me that she was once calling my dad, and was alone in the house. Suddenly, she gets a bizarre chill down her spine. My dad immediately says, in as calm a tone as possible, "Darling, start recording". Nothing else. So she starts taking a video and, although there's clearly no one in the room and you can hear both my dad and my mum, there is definitely some loud breathing audible.
You can clearly tell on the recording that neither person was making the sound, yet it was clearly being picked up. And it was LOUD. Not at all tiny. So I don’t think it was coming from the phone or a TV or anything like that. And it continued in the same rhythm while my dad was speaking. When I got home from school that day, I found a magazine on my bed.
It was the August 1952 edition of Autocar magazine. So I take it to my mum. Here's the weird part. It was my grandfather's. He had been deceased for more than 12 years at this point, and my grandmother kept it as it was the last magazine he had bought before he went on his tour of duty, and the only one he hadn't thrown away before his passing.
No one had seen it in almost five years. I just asked my mum for confirmation, and she did confirm that this event really happened. And now I am even more creeped out than I was five minutes ago.
57. This Is Why You Don’t Hike At Midnight
I was in a large wooded area not far from my boyfriend’s home. I was with him, hanging out nearly at midnight. We had gone in pretty deep and it required a good amount of climbing. The closest path was maybe five minutes climbing down, so it was highly unlikely someone could be at that spot, that time of the night, besides us.
As we were kissing, he thought he saw a shadow move about 20 or 25 feet to the left of us, climbing upward, but it stopped suddenly when my boyfriend looked at it. He told me to be wary, and at that exact moment we saw a dark figure climbing a little up but diagonally, like whatever it was was attempting to go directly above where we were.
We didn't move. We watch him till he closed the horizontal gap and was directly above us. Then he began to come towards us. Without skipping a beat, my boyfriend grabbed my hand and we almost ran downhill towards the path. We ran as fast as we could and made it out of the forest. We vowed never to go there at night again.
58. Get Out, Right Now
My family moved into a new house when I was 11 years old. The previous owners were a family, and the mom passed of cancer. They sold the house shortly after she passed. Growing up, my sister and I always had an uneasy feeling about that house. Strange things would happen, but everything had a plausible explanation...except for one time when I was 16.
In the middle of the night, I was having trouble sleeping. While I was lying there in my bed, the door to my room opened on its own. I could hear footsteps come into my room. I couldn't see anyone, but I felt like someone else was in my room. Ever have someone come up behind you while you're on the computer? It was like that.
I could hear the footsteps get closer to my bed. Then, right next to me appeared compression on my bed, like an invisible person was sitting there. I could even feel the weight shift. I reached out to touch the compression, and all of a sudden a bunch of blue static electricity jumped out from the spot I touched. I screamed and ran out of my room, waking up the entire house.
I couldn't explain what I saw that night. I was almost questioning my own sanity, and that's why I don't tell this story often. For the record, I was 100% sober at the time. Also, because I could move, I don't think it was sleep paralysis. The strange thing is that years later, my sister ran into the daughter of the previous family. She told my sister that her mom had actually passed in the house, not at the hospital.
59. It’s Not In Your Head
I went to a small women's college in Virginia. I only stayed a semester because of the group mentality. They would constantly perform rituals that were not "mandatory," but you were weird if you didn't go. One alone wasn't weird, but collectively it was too much. Example: One founders’ day, everyone wore white.
We went to the chapel for the ceremony and then walked two miles to the graveyard, where the founders were buried. We all had to lay roses on the graves and sing the school's song. Four girls in my class tried to take their own lives in the first semester. My class only had 64 girls. It was an epidemic, but everyone was trying to keep it hushed up.
If you discussed transferring, the dean of students and the school's counselor would suggest to have you put in a mental hospital for 72 hours. I transferred in secret so no one would find out. I didn't even tell my friends. I would wake up at 4 am and transfer stuff from my dorm room to be shipped home. It was terrifying.
60. A Real Mouthful
I’m a dental hygienist. The creepiest, most confusing thing I've seen is as follows: We had a new patient come in for a cleaning. He was around 3 or 4 years old, and the mom said he had never been to the dentist before. Not uncommon for what I see on a daily basis, so at first I didn't think anything of it. I did his cleaning, and then went to take his routine X-rays.
This is where it got weird. After looking at the X-rays, I could see that the child had already had a large amount of dental work done. He had around six fillings. When I sat back down at my chair, I asked the parents again if he had ever been to the dentist. They were both adamant that he hadn't, and also said there was no way a relative could have taken him without them knowing.
What the heck? How did this happen? Who took him? Where were the parents? Had they possibly been away for a long time and not known someone else took him to the dentist and had work performed? What if this wasn't really their child, and actually some kid they kidnapped? His insurance had no record of him having previous dental work.
I think about it often, but know that ultimately, I'll never get an answer.
61. The Music From Next Door
I lived in an old house in Athens, Ohio, which is reported to be one of the most haunted American cities. During the first year I lived in my apartment, I frequently noticed this strange music that seemed to be coming from inside the house. It's hard to describe, but it sounded like a keyboard or an organ. It sounded faint and was played in the minor key.
Always sounded the same. Regardless, I just chalked it up to my downstairs neighbors, and it never bothered me enough to investigate. It was definitely coming from inside our building, though. The following year, my original neighbors moved out, and my new neighbor, Sarah, moved in. We became friends. One night, she was hanging out in my apartment and the music started up.
She asked me pointedly where the music was coming from, and I said I didn't know—she didn't have music playing in her apartment? She said no and we both looked at each other uneasily. Sarah asked me if I ever saw or heard weird things, and I said that other than the music, I hadn't. The way she asked implied that she had, but she didn't want to talk about it.
A few months later, her boyfriend moved in, and she later confided in me that she saw and heard things: Specifically random tendrils of what looked like smoke swirling inside their bedroom. Doors slamming or opening without explanation. Her boyfriend hated going to the basement so much that he'd sing the whole time he was down there to do laundry.
Thing is, I hated the basement too because it hadn't been changed much since the house had been built and there was a creepy room that looked like where you'd keep nefarious things. I always felt like I was being watched when I was down there. One day, I graduated and was getting ready to move. I went out of town for a few days, so my parents were watching my cat at their place a few hours away.
The night I got back to Athens, I decided to start packing some of my books. I fell asleep and woke up in the middle of the night to a giant crash. I was tired and disoriented, so I assumed the noise came from Sarah's place. The next morning, I went to my living room to find that a giant antique mirror hanging over my fireplace had crashed and shattered into hundreds of pieces.
The nails supporting the mirror were intact, still in the wall. After that, I was finally prepared to admit that the place was haunted. I know Sarah saw and heard way more than she ever admitted, but she didn't like talking about it because she still lived there. She moved recently, so maybe I'll get more out of her now. I never really believed in ghosts, but too many unexplainable things happened.
I did do some cursory research into who owned the house. I learned a woman was the original owner. Back then, the house was for a single-family. She sounded like a quiet woman—a widow who was gone at an old age. In her obituary, I learned she loved to play music and had founded the Athens music appreciation group. I wonder if I kept hearing her favorite song to play . . . .
62. Dry Bones
My grandmother lives in a very old house (late 1700s), which is surrounded by graveyards on both sides. The other day, my friend who I hadn't seen in months, arrives at my house. We are walking along the old cobblestone driveway when he begins talking about his newfound spirituality, not in a religious context, but with regards to feeling "tuned in" to things.
I believed him; he had been away at a treatment program and I believe that he had experienced some kind of spiritual awakening. Anyways, as we are talking, my cat walks over to us and starts rubbing up against my leg. After a while I realize she won't quit and that she is trying to tell me something. I start to follow her. When I realized where we were going, my heart pounded.
I realize she is leading me to the graveyard. Every time I stop following her she turns around and rubs my leg until I begin walking again. When we finally get to the graveyard, she jumps up on a gravestone, balancing on the slender part of the gravestone, and will not move. She begins hissing when we try to take her off the headstone.
Then we read the inscription. We were completely stunned. It turns out that the grave was for someone who lived and passed in our own house.
63. A Creepy Story Has A Twist Ending
My friend and I had this really cool spot to hang out in the woods. You had to walk in the middle of a creek for a kilometer and duck through sharp bushes and thistles. The hike was well rewarding though. The spot was about half an acre big, it was pure green grass on an incline with beautiful clear water ponds everywhere.
One day, my friend Levi and I were to the spot. Suddenly, Levi stopped moving and ducked into a bush, I did the same because I thought there must have been a large animal somewhere. I saw him staring up the hill and so I looked up too. I felt a chill run down my spine. There were two people standing at the top of the hill heaving back and forth a lifeless body.
We watched as they threw the body down the hill. Then they took off. Levi and I were terrified and I was shaking so badly I couldn't speak. The next day we were with his parents driving to town. And we saw like 10 fire trucks at the school closest to the forest. Terrified, we told his parents, balling our eyes out worried that we were done for.
His mom started laughing at us and said, “They are training for search and rescue, that was a dummy that the firemen had to find”. I never slept as well as I did that night.
64. You’re Not Alone
A few months ago I woke up around three in the morning and decided to go downstairs to the bathroom. When I opened my door and peeked over the stairs, I saw a bright light coming from my living room. Upon further inspection, I saw that the TV was on a channel that was all fuzzy. There was no one on the couch or anywhere in the vicinity.
I yelled out my mom’s name, and as soon as I made a sound, the TV turned off and my bathroom door slammed. I checked every nook and cranny of the bathroom and found nothing. That moment still haunts me to this day.
65. Demons In The Basement
My extremely Catholic grandmother owned a house in rural New York. We'd often go there when we went to camp or for family holidays. The place always had a weird vibe to it, as it was over 150 years old. I had several paranormal experiences like seeing what I believed to be a spirit of a man in a brown coat and top hat in the kitchen.
I would also hear children's voices in the bunkbed room when nobody was home, as well as light fixtures acting strangely, like bulbs going out on holiday lights one by one in sequence instead of all at once. Anyways, these experiences were never particularly emotion-inducing or intimidating , just weird things I was convinced I saw...until one day when I was about ten.
I was there alone while my grandmother went shopping and was just watching Avatar the Last Airbender and playing with Legos, pretty standard. I went to the bathroom at one point and noticed the door to the basement. I never thought anything of the basement because it was always closed and off-limits, but being unsupervised and the bold kid I was, I opened the door to get a peek.
It was pitch black down the stairs, but within about three seconds everything changed. I felt an intense chill and an absolutely terrifying feeling of pure evil wash over me, like a primal fear. Every instinct in my being and soul went into full panic mode as I felt the presence rapidly approaching up the stairs.
I shut that door and locked it as fast as I could and ran to the common room and grabbed a cross, convinced it was some sort of demon. Upon telling my grandmother this, her face went white, as if she wasn't as shocked as afraid, and as if she knew something about it. She called a priest into the house and had him bless the place.
When he opened the door to the basement he stopped abruptly and slowly descended. He performed his blessing down there and confided in us that he had felt the same feeling of dread, but that the house was protected by the lord now and we had nothing to fear.
I was always wary after that, but never experienced it again, and certainly never went near the basement. As I grew up, it weighed less on me, and I thought that maybe I was just a kid who spooked himself, maybe I had a grandmother who was so religious that she thought a non-existent demon was present, and maybe the priest felt what we were telling him we had felt, and it wasn't real.
Unfortunately for that theory, and the reason I share this, is because I learned a few years ago that the family that had moved into the house after my grandparents moved to Florida had abruptly moved out. They had forfeited their down payment and left immediately because, and I quote from the realtor's report, “The demons in the basement were terrorizing their children to an unbearable degree”.
So I don't know what was down there, but it wasn't human, it wasn't benevolent, and it wasn't make believe.
66. Dreams Freaking The Whole Family Out
One morning when I was 15, my dad looked tired and stressed. I asked him what was up. He said he had an awfully realistic dream of me taking my own life. He said in the dream he came into my room to find me hanging from my neck in the closet. It bothered him so bad that he actually came and checked on me while I was asleep.
Not too big of a deal, but not cool as I thought. 20 minutes later my sis comes into the room, fresh from waking up. She looks at me and 1st thing she said was "I had a weird dream. I came in your room and you had ended your life, with a blast to the head. It was messed up". I told her that dad had a dream about me taking my life last night too, and had him explain it to her.
We just kinda sat there in an unnerving silence. I've never been suicidal but that freaked the whole family out.
67. Three’s Company
My best friend, his boyfriend, and a third roommate of theirs were all living in a new apartment together. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was so new that they were the only tenants to have ever lived in that unit at that point. The third roommate was a pretty quiet guy. He kept to himself and often stayed in his room, with the door closed at all times.
He was also sort of a slob. Anyway, one day, the couple comes home and sees that their roommate's door is open, which never happens. They go and peer in, and see a perfectly folded uniform for a nearby banquet hall laying on his bed. It was from the sort of place that could be rented to host events, wedding receptions, and the like.
The thing is that their roommate didn't work there. He never did. None of them ever did, and they didn't know anyone that did either. Yet here is this uniform sitting on his bed. They questioned him about it, and he seemed as baffled as they did. Fast forward a month or two, and one day my friend comes home to find the house completely empty.
He goes to the bathroom and, right there on the bathroom floor, he spots a lacy women's garter belt, the type worn on a wedding day. This is again strange, because of the three men in the apartment, two were gay and the other had no female contact. Once again, none of the housemates could explain where it had come from.
While the appearances of both items are unexplained, I think the strangest part is that there is actually a link between both clothing items. One from a banquet hall that hosts wedding receptions, and then a garter belt is worn on a wedding day. I'm a pretty skeptical person, so when they told me all of this, I tried to come up with every logical solution I could imagine.
But they had really good responses that shut all of them down, as they too had tried to come up with an explanation and couldn't. We still have no idea what happened.
68. An Unexpected Guest
I'm a paranormal investigator, so I live for the creepy and paranormal. I seek it out. Throughout my time as an investigator, I've experienced a lot of creepy things, but the strangest happened at the Sallie House in Atchison, Kansas. My team had arranged toys on the floor in Sallie's room because it's said that "Sallie" will move them if you do that.
We'd just finished a dinner break in the kitchen downstairs and went upstairs to check on our equipment in Sallie's room. But when we got to the top of the stairs, the door to Sallie's room was closed, even though none of us had closed it. Someone knocked on the door and asked, "Is anyone in there?" The response made me jump out of my skin.
We heard a distinctly male voice say, "No. Just leave". I need to point out, we were all downstairs together. No one had gone upstairs to close the door, absolutely not. But, any investigator will also tell you in old houses doors sometimes close. However, no men were upstairs. We had two men in our group, both were downstairs.
69. 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 metres 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.
70. Stranger In The Woods
I was camping with a friend in a backwoods camping area. There weren't many sites and they were all super spaced out. We had already been there one night, had the site fully set up, had been hiking all day—the works. We drove into town to get some food, and when we were driving back to our secluded campsite, we passed a man walking out of the only road to our site.
We both locked eyes with him and I got a super creeped-out feeling. He stared at us like he knew us and hated us, but we had never seen him in our lives. When we got to our tent, we went inside and everything we had in there was tossed. Our bags were dumped out and our clothes were thrown everywhere. We quickly realized both our hunting knives were gone, along with a bunch of our clothes.
We also realized it had to be that guy we saw. There were no other sites or hiking paths he could've been walking from besides ours. We jumped in the car and drove back towards where we had seen him, but he was gone. So we drove a bit further and found a common area where other campers were gathered. We sprinted down and asked "have any of you seen this guy". and described him. Their response chilled me to the bone.
The people at the gathering just stared at us and didn't speak, giving us an even more creeped-out feeling. It was at that point that I told my friend, "We need to leave this place right now". Walking back to our car, we looked over the edge of a guardrail and saw all our clothes in the woods. We gathered them up but didn't find either of our knives.
Knowing this guy was still out there with those knives and that no one around us cared freaked us out so much, we packed the car up and ended our camping trip early. No way were we staying out in those woods one more night!
71. The Terrifying Tree
Let me preface this by saying I am one of the most skeptical people you’ll ever meet. I’m not religious, I don’t believe in ghosts or aliens or any of that. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever encountered and I have no real logical explanation for it. No substances or booze were involved. My friends and I went camping up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire most summers in middle and high school.
Now, being a bunch of unorganized teen boys/manchildren, we always took forever to get in gear and actually get going, usually not leaving southern Massachusetts where we lived until late afternoon, early evening. One year, we got up there at about 10 pm or so and decided rather than hike into the woods, we’d just sort of camp out in the parking lot and start the hike in the morning.
After a bit of unwinding and some food everyone went to bed except for me and one other dude. We ended up wandering over to a small wooden footbridge over a river. It was a perfectly clear night filled with stars and a fairly bright moon, and we were engaging in casual conversation for a good couple hours about all sorts of stuff, movies, games, life, etc.
It had to be well after midnight by this point. As we were chatting, we both got this creepy feeling of something being there. Something...sinister. Looking at the far end of the bridge, there was this MASSIVE dry tree (no leaves, just clawing branches) silhouetted against the sky. We both were like, “Man, I swear that tree is creeping me out, but that’s silly right?”
At first, we tried to dismiss it, but both of us kept feeling more and more unnerved until I finally was like, “Screw this, I’m a grown man, I’m not afraid of a darn tree, I’m walking over there”. I get like two-thirds of the way across the bridge and it feels like something reached in and grabbed my pounding heart. Just went totally ice cold.
I backed up and was like, “Yeah, I’m afraid of a tree. I seriously think I’m not coming back if I go over there”. We retreated from the bridge and decided to go to bed back in the sleeping bags by the car. Next morning, after breakfast, we decide to hike into the trail by going across that bridge. Halfway across, my friend freezes. “Uh, dude...”
I look across the bridge. It’s a clearing. There are no trees there.
72. Breaking And Entering
My aunt was home alone when she heard someone open the door and walk into the hallway. Since her husband (my uncle) was not supposed to be home for a few hours, she went downstairs to see if someone was there. She did not see anyone, but outside the door, she saw a chilling sight: there were footsteps in the snow leading to the door, but not away from it.
This got her nervous, and on a second glance, she saw an unfamiliar pair of shoes in the hallway. She ran up and called 9-1-1, and when they came and searched through the house, the found a homeless man hiding in a storage room, holding my uncle's sawed-off. Luckily he had not found the shells ( was hidden in another place).
He was busted, but according to my aunt, it was the scariest thing she has ever experienced.
73. Luck Of The Irish
I was sick a few years ago—very, very sick. It was a few weeks before my amputation and I was battling a severe bone infection. I was hopped on all kinds of antibiotics and pain medication. I'm a huge Yankee fan, so my best friend got us tickets for the game at Yankee stadium. She pushed me around the stadium in a wheelchair with a ton of blankets on me (it was freezing) just to put a smile on my face.
My friend leaves our seats to go get some hotdogs and stuff. This is where it gets weird. As soon as she leaves, an older Irish gentleman sits by me. He offers me some of his spiked hot chocolate, but I said no thanks and explained that I was on a lot of medication. We begin talking, and I told to him what was going on with my life.
He asked if I was scared to have my leg amputated, and I told him that I was. I was really frightened of the unknown. He gave me some pretty valuable life advice and comforted me. He assured me that it would be fine, and he told me that, "If you have to be an amputee, try to be the best darn amputee that there is in the world!"
My friend comes back with food…and asks who I was talking to. There's no one next to me. I guess I must've hallucinated this, but I don’t know. It felt more like some kind of angel or being that came to me to let me know it would be okay. I guess my guardian angel is an Irishman with spiked hot chocolate! Not sure if this makes it more creepy or not, but the Yankees were playing the Angels in that series.
74. Don’t Call Me By My Name
I was in the living room with my grandma. We were the only ones home. She was working on a crossword puzzle, and I was messing around on my iPad. Television was off, windows were closed. All of a sudden clear as day I hear my name being whispered, but since it was so quiet it sounded loud. I looked up to my grandma, thinking it was her asking her if she said something.
She said, “No, but I heard your name”.
75. Loyal To The End, And Beyond
When I was little (no more than seven or eight years old), I woke up one night to find a white dog sitting in the doorway of my bedroom. This was weird, because we didn't have a dog or any other indoor pet. As I watched, the dog got up and walked down the hallway towards the living room.
I got up too, looked down the dark, empty hall it had headed down, and decided to go in the opposite direction to my parents' room. I woke my mom up and told her that there was a dog in the house. She got up and we looked around for a bit, but didn't find anything. She thought I must have been dreaming.
Then, at some point when I was older, I found a picture of the dog that my parents had when I was a baby. I was amazed at what I saw. I learned from my mom that the dog often slept in my doorway, guarding my room. That dog was gone by the time I was two years old. That dog in the picture was also the dog I had seen that night.
76. American Psycho
I was on a second date with a guy who wanted to stop at his house to grab something, and he invited me in. He was really hot, but I wasn't feeling comfortable with him for a reason I couldn't put my finger on. We get to his house, and it was just...creepy. He was well-off, and the house itself was gorgeous. Spotless, and totally sterile. Nothing on the walls, every surface empty.
No books. No CDs. Nothing. I ask how long he'd lived there, and when he replied the hairs on my neck raised. He said, "five years". While he was in the kitchen, he then asked me to go into his room and grab something from the top drawer in his dresser. I got the coldest chill up my spine, and immediately stepped closer to the front door. There was NO way I was letting him come between me and the exit.
He asked me again to go to his room, and I "laughed" and said, "No dude, I'm hungry, let's go!" He asked one more time, visibly annoyed at this point, and I proceeded to pretend that I was a "stupid" girl, and made a fuss about being hungry and what the heck was taking him so long. He was so mad. So, I walked out of his house down the sidewalk and made him follow me.
We got to the car, and I kept pretending to be a clueless chick, and demanded he take me home. He did. In cold, furious silence. Then, when he stopped the car in front of my place, he grabbed my face to kiss me goodbye. He bit my lip so hard I was bleeding, and he reached under my shirt and pinched me.
I luckily got him off me, falling out of my door, and ran inside to the sound of him laughing. I ended up with a bruised face, cut lip, and was scared that he knew where I lived, but I still feel like I survived a legit psychopath.
77. Apparitions As Warnings
My family has a long history with mental illness. Therefore whenever we get calls from family members, we assume the worst. It happened multiple times. First, my cousin was pregnant and she was super excited for the birth of her baby. It was around the five-month mark that my mother and I started to hallucinate and see dark figures in the shape of a baby around my house.
Since it happened to both my mom and I we both got scared but did nothing about it. About a week later, my cousin had a miscarriage and we stopped seeing these “apparitions”. Secondly, my grandma was very sick and my mother and I started hallucinating again. This time, instead of babies crawling around corners we saw a slumped figure.
Not even a week passed and my grandma was declared gone after they told us she was recuperating. Finally, and probably why my mom and I are not scared of these apparitions. My sister has been diagnosed with depression for a long time. Since she is older, she lived in another country. My mom and I were in the kitchen and the hallway lights were off, then we simultaneously freaked out.
We both saw a figure that immediately reminded us of my sister. My mom took this as a warning and called my sister immediately. Her roommate answered and my mom asked her to check on her. Turns out my sister had tried to take too many sleeping pills and her roommate found her just in time to save her life. Ever since then, I believe that whatever this apparition is, it is probably someone or something that is trying to warn us beforehand.
78. An Uneasy Feeling
There’s a cabinet near the top of my staircase and I had placed my water bottle on it, not on the edge but in the middle, where in no way would it be able to fall off on its own or due to any “breeze”. I’m sitting on the couch, which is a couple of feet away from the cabinet, when the water bottle simply flies off the cabinet like someone sucker-punched it and goes soaring down the staircase.
I was home alone, it was 1 AM, and I have no clue why it happened. Don’t want to think about it, I just keep living my life.
79. A Stopped Clock
My grandfather got into the hospital on a Friday night. Nothing too unusual. He wasn't doing well, but he had been there before. The next day, I go to work. I'm somewhat worried but again, he'd been there before. I go on with my day, there are customers, a friend stops by and we talk, and I fill the rest of the time with homework.
My grandfather is in the back of my mind, but I have other stuff going on too, you know? Right around 4 o'clock, I was chatting with a co-worker. Then I glanced at the clock and my stomach dropped. I randomly got filled with dread and profound sadness. I continue chatting but the feeling persists. I check out at 5:00, the feeling of gloom persisting, and of course my brain goes to my grandfather.
I just knew. I get home and my mother tells me my grandfather passed. I ask around what time. 4 o'clock.
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80. Come And Play
I worked in a nursing home. One time, I had a resident refuse to get on the elevator with me because she was, “scared of the little boy”. I shrugged it off until I had a resident come out of his room and ask me for "candy for the little boy". I decided to ask my mom who was the charge nurse and an employee of 13 years.
She told me that residents would periodically report seeing a little boy who was always wanting to play. He appeared to all kinds of residents from those of sound mental status to those with severe dementia. They all reported seeing the exact same thing. When they moved to a new facility, the little boy came with them.
The little boy was particularly fond of those with limited sight. The residents described him as having dark black hair and that he lived in a "tent,” where a tree had fallen on him. Then once, I was feeding a resident who had recently suffered a stroke. She couldn’t use her right hand and required complete assistance.
As I was feeding her, I felt a cold hand on my arm. Right then, the resident said, "is that your boyfriend? He looks a little young for you!" I nearly peed myself. That resident who saw him had passed by the morning.
81. Stumbling On A Ghost Town
A little over 18 years ago, I had just gotten out of the armed forces. After visiting my hometown in Montana, I got back on the road and drove to my next base at Boise, Idaho, deciding to cut across the panhandle of Idaho into Washington instead of going down the highway which is pretty twisty and dangerous in the winter when the roads are icy.
After driving for a while, I entered Washington early on a foggy Sunday morning. I really had to use the bathroom so I pulled into the next town I saw, called Linden or Linder or something. It was small but I thought nothing of it since I was from a small town in Montana. But as I left my car, my blood ran cold. There was not a single person to be found.
There were cars and business but not a single person to be found no one walking the street, no logging trucks, nothing. I stopped at a gas station, but no one was at the counter. I went around to the side to see if the bathroom was locked and it was. As I made my way back around to the front of the building, I saw a Coke Classic delivery truck. It wasn't moving, but its headlights were on, the hazard lights were on, and the passenger and driver side doors were open just sitting there in the middle of the street.
I was getting a bad vibe so I got in my car and went back the way I came. But even after I left, things managed to get even creepier. I've checked multiple maps, in print and online, and nothing by the name Linden or Linder exists. To this day, it still gives me the chills.
82. Basement Of Horrors
I used to work in low-income home weatherization, basically giving free stuff away to help lower electricity and gas bills and make the home more comfortable to people who really needed it. One step in qualifying a home is testing combustion appliances to make sure they’re not emitting carbon monoxide into the living space, because if they are and we seal up the house we could liquidate the whole family.
During a pre-inspection of a home on the outskirts of the city, I ask to see the owner’s water heater. He tells me that it’s in the basement, which is fairly normal, and I tell him I have to inspect it before work can start. So, he goes into the kitchen and starts moving the refrigerator. Turns out the entry into the basement is underneath carpeting beneath the fridge.
I should note that I went and did thousands of homes over the years, and had never seen such a thing. But, whatever, needs to be done regardless and so I pull out my flashlight and shine it down the stairs, to check out the layout but really to look for black widow spiders. At this point, I notice a deceased cat, mostly down to a skeleton.
Not my favorite sight, but really common in crawlspaces and basements. I take a few steps down the stairs and continue my spider check, and notice another couple of small animal skeletons. At this point, I start to worry about gas, or poisons, or something equally dangerous having been responsible for the skeletons. I start looking closer.
There are animal skeletons everywhere, at least ten on a cursory look. Some of them are so degraded I can’t determine what they used to be. I also happen to notice that this guy is waiting at the entrance a little too quietly, with his hand on the door. Something clicks in my brain and I get this immense sense of danger.
I’m about four steps from the door being clear to close, I have no partner on the job with me, there’s nightmares all around me, and I realize just how hidden the entrance to the basement really was. I noped the heck outta there, told the guy I needed extra tools and would be back, and marked the job as non-feasible for health and safety as I was driving away.
I have no idea if I was actually in any danger, it could have been completely innocent; but I still remember the adrenaline rush and sense of doom, and sometimes you just don’t take chances.
83. A Premonition
My mom was in a fatal accident on March 24, 2019. In the weeks leading up to it, I dreamed that my teeth were falling out. Also, I had this very persistent feeling that something bad was going to happen. It wasn't fear, just a conscious awareness that my life would change in a bad way, and that I should prepare myself mentally.
This thought kept coming up where I realized that for 26 years, nothing disturbing had ever happened to me, and that this easy-going life would end. So I started meditating to find emotional stability, and then on Sunday, March 24 I got the call from my sister that my mom was in critical condition, and later that day she passed in the hospital.
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84. Don’t Miss The Forest For The Trees
I get insomnia. It was one of those nights and I was sitting out on my back porch at about 4:00 AM, lighting up a smoke. It was one of those eerie nights where there is absolutely no breeze and it's just completely quiet out. We have woods behind our house. As I was sitting there, I watched a horror unfold.
I see this person making his way through the trees. I don’t mean just walking around. It looked like he was jumping from tree to tree, at least 30 or 40 feet up in the air. I was absolutely stunned and just sat there dumbly, too afraid and confused to even get up and run inside the house. This person or thing then stops directly behind my house and looks at me.
At this point, it's about 50 feet away and maybe 40 feet up in the air. It pauses for about five seconds staring in my direction. I'm absolutely certain that it wasn't an animal. Its body was human-shaped and it did not resemble any type of animal I know of. But the way it was moving through the trees definitely was not human. No human could move like that.
Within a few more seconds it was out of sight.
85. I See You
I was nine and watching Spongebob. I went to the kitchen for a drink, and when I came back, the TV had a message: "Welcome back. Did you like your drink?" Truly scared by now, I get my dad. And like every cliché horror movie, the message ain't there.
86. So Close, Yet So Far Away
My roommate's sister lives in a suburban part of Delaware, right outside of Wilmington. Her neighborhood had been experiencing all these weird break-ins for a bit, break-ins where nobody could figure out what had been taken. Finally, one day she comes home and finds a pair of men's boxers on her pillow (to the skeptics, she lives alone).
She immediately calls 9-1-1 and gets the heck out of dodge, locking her doors before she leaves. The authorities come with her back to her house, and find the door unlocked, meaning the man was almost certainly inside her house when she made the discovery.
87. Horror Unmasked
I used to live in a rented house that, along with my neighbors, sat across the street from a fairly bustling city park. At night, when the park was deserted, I would walk out my front door, sit on my porch and look at the trees and the stars. One night, around 1 AM, I opened the front door and started to sit down. That's when I my blood curdled. I saw a man standing in the deserted park.
He was directly in front of my house. The man was dressed all in black and was wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask seemed fairly intricate, but was most definitely a store-bought cheapo. The sight of this guy sent a chill down my spine. He didn't move at all—although I know he saw me. The entire neighborhood was silent and still and we just paused there holding our ground.
We watched each other for a long time until he finally sauntered away. I ended up calling 9-1-1 because I figured this guy was casing the neighborhood. Officers came, took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. A couple of months later, I'm doing some yard work around the side of my house. I'm pulling a huge tangle of weeds out from a thicket underneath my kitchen window.
I see something that looks like trash and pick it up: it's the mask I saw that night.
88. A Nightmare Come To Life
My room wasn't very large. A typical square room, mostly taken up by a dresser, bookshelf/tv stand combo and my twin-sized bed. The bed bisected the room, separating the entrance door from the sliding-door closet. As I was young and I liked having the fan on, I had one of those long extendo-chains for the light, so I could turn off my light and still enjoy the fan at night.
I was in my room, messing around, not long before bed. I have always been an active person, and in my childhood, I was never anywhere in the house without a trusty toy sword or toy sword stand-in close at hand, and tonight was no exception. I don't remember why I swung, because again, small room, but I swung my sword and it struck the long chain for the light.
Anyone who has ever accidentally whacked their chain knows what happens next. The chain goes flying into the air, wraps itself endlessly around the light fixture and turns off the light. In an instant, I was plunged into darkness. Annoyed, I clambered onto my bed and began to tentatively reach up. I didn't want to stick my hand in the fan blade, but I needed to reach really close to it to begin untangling the chain. Then suddenly, I heard something that made me stop in my tracks.
It was a shuffling sound...and then a groan. It sounded close by, in my room with me. It sounded like the closet door sliding open on its old track. I kept trying to reach up, but now the hair on my arms was standing on end. The groan of the door finally stopped, but what replaced it was a heavy, throaty breathing.
I imagined it, of course. I had to have, because what little boy doesn't have an overactive imagination? All the same, I was terrified. I gave up trying to untangle the light chain and instead reached for the top of it, where the chain fed directly into the light fixture. The breathing was closer now, and my brain was happy to provide the louder sounds and the horrifying image of everything they belonged to, creeping towards my bed.
I found the chain and I pulled. I know I pulled. I heard the click, but perhaps I just wanted to, because light did not flood the room and banish away the darkness of my fears. I pulled again, and again. Surely the chain was too tightly wound to activate the light. Surely that was it...right? I could not wait to find out.
I dove off my bed and lunged for the door to my bedroom, flinging it open and allowing light from the hallway to spill into the room. I whirled around, toy sword still in hand, but there was nothing there. The gloom of my bedroom stared back at me. Bed, dresser, bookcase with my TV and Xbox perched on top of it. No monsters.
I re-entered my room and climbed on the bed once again. I reached up and, with the aid of the hall light, pulled firmly on the base of the light string. With a loud click, the light turned on, and my bedroom returned to normal. I unwound the light chain from the light fixture and climbed off the bed, sunspots dancing in my eyes from looking at the light, and feeling a little woozy from the past few minutes.
But it was ok. It was all my imagination. There was no monster. The light wasn't turning on because I was pulling it wrong. I could explain everything, very easily...except for why my closet door was open.
89. 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.
90. Glitching Your Life Away
As I type this I am already feeling deja vu. I've always wanted to share this part of my life with someone but have never been able to. So... I'll just tell a bunch of people on the internet. One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had an urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur of the moment urge to walk a different way. It changed my life forever.
I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about 15 feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension. All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me. It was a bunch of strange looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits.
They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black. When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work. I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed. I've never done any hard substances, never experienced any hallucinations, never have had anything like this happen to me.
The weird thing is, when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled. It still bothers me very much to this day.
91. Haunted By A Boy In His PJs
Not long after I met my current boyfriend I would spend the night at his house. Normally I fall asleep as soon as I hit the pillow, but at his house I would be awake super late feeling creeped out. I blamed it on being in a strange house. After a while, I used to fall asleep at a decent time, but I would wake up around 2 or 3 AM and try to let my eyes adjust to the darkness (small town = very little light pollution).
When my eyes adjusted, I felt like I could see a little boy on top of the grandfather clock. This would happen every night for a while. I never felt scared just confused. It looked like a boy wearing older style pajamas kicking his legs on top of the clock. Still, I would blame it on sleep paralysis/dreaming or my imagination.
When I would go back to my parents’ house for school nights I would start waking up in the middle of the night seeing the same apparition sitting on the dresser or ledge in my room. I slept alone in the basement of the house, and after months of seeing the “little boy,” I wanted to sleep upstairs again, as I figured my mind was just getting to me.
One evening, I was home alone as my brother and parents were gone to some appointment. I happened to fall asleep on the couch in the living room, only to dream that the little boy was knocking down my mom’s ornaments that were on the coffee table. I woke up in a cold sweat and looked at the table: sure enough, the ornaments were broken.
Of course, they could have been broken beforehand and I never noticed. It started to get chilly in the living room so I moved to my mother’s bedroom to watch television before they came home. In her bedroom, I kept seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye that looked like the “little boy,” but I never really had a full-on view.
At this point, I was sure it wasn’t sleep paralysis/dreaming because I could move when I woke up and sometimes I would be wide awake. I fell asleep in my mom’s bed and woke up to the little boy laughing and running in the closet. Friday of that week, I went to my boyfriend’s house and he knew something was up but I wouldn’t tell him out of fear that he would think I was crazy.
That night, I was helping his mom bake and I happened to mention that I was having really weird dreams about a little boy and she asked me if he “was a young one with his jammies on?” She knew what I was talking about. She told me that their house was pretty old and all throughout the time they lived there strange stuff would happen such as stuff being moved or hearing voices or laughter, but the past six to eight months, things had stopped happening.
It’s been three years and I’ve moved out with my boyfriend to start post-secondary. I’m still seeing, sensing, and dealing with whatever it is. Things are still being moved and voices are still being heard.
92. I'd Rather You Didn't
My six-year-old daughter was in the passenger seat a few days ago and looked at me and said, "Dad, when I'm seven I'm going to liquidate you. No wait, when I'm eight". I asked, "How are you going to do that?" She smiled and said, "I'm gonna drive over your head with this car".
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93. Private Tutor
When my son was about two or three, he wouldn't go to sleep so I let him into my bed. My husband was asleep, so I told my boy he had to look at his books quietly while I read mine. That's right when it got unsettling. He was good for a bit, but then he suddenly started reading the book. Actually reading the words out loud. Slowly. He couldn't read and it was a newer book we hadn't read to him yet. It wasn't memorization.
I asked him how he knew what it said and he replied: "my friend John is telling me". Scared the heck out of me.
94. Smile And Say Cheese!
Back in 2014, I was sleeping over at my cousin’s house for New Year’s eve. It was just my three cousins, my brother, and myself. We all decided to sleep in the same bedroom for the night, as we had just become old enough to stay at home on our own and our parents were staying out all night, so we were a little nervous. My point here is that we were all 100% certain that we were the only people in the house that night, and we all slept in the same place together.
I woke up the next morning and was getting in the car to leave, when I just happened to take a look at the camera roll on my phone from the previous night. To my absolute horror, I discovered that there were five photos of all of us sleeping. Every single person who was there was in the photos, fast asleep, so there was no way that any of us could have taken them ourselves.
My aunt showed the photos to the landlord shortly after, and he had no explanation. To this day, nobody has any idea who took them—or how. My friends have even accused me of making the whole thing up.
95. From Playdate To Child Abduction
It was a very long time ago—back in 1973. I know that it was summer, I was six, and we were living on Monica Lane in Madison, Wisconsin. Thing is, I sort of recalled it but never put two-and-two together until a few months ago when I was talking to my mom who went into great detail.
I was a very gregarious child; outgoing, extroverted, friends with anyone. It was at the time a middle-class neighborhood, and three houses down from ours, on the same side of the street, was a huge park. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a salesman, but mom worked 2nd shift at Merriter, while my dad worked days. I rarely had a babysitter, only if they went out for dinner or a movie. But they did go out often and there were always older kids in the neighborhood to babysit.
One sitter who I really liked lived a few blocks or so away, and down the street a little bit. Vicky had babysat a few times before that and it was pretty uneventful. She'd play games with me, and do my hair, play dress-up, pretty basic stuff. So anyhow, one day I had gone with friends down to the park. I remember there was a ball field at the time, and a sandlot next to the field. My friends wanted to play on the monkey bars, but I wanted to play in the sand. I looked at the sandbox and my babysitter Vicky was standing there. I told my friends I was going down to the sandbox and ran off.
We played in the sand, building a castle, and then she asked me if I wanted to go get something cold to drink. It was stifling hot, and I, of course, said yes. So she takes my hand and we start walking to her place. She starts telling me about her puppies and asking if I want to play with them. Of course, I get giddy and now can't wait to get to her house. This was where my memory had stopped and after my mom told me what happened, the rest of it flooded back.
My mother just happened to be talking to my sister and I about some of the places we lived, and we got to Monica Lane. I told her I remembered the park and how big it seemed, and she asks me if I remember being kidnapped. I immediately thought she was kidding and then the look on her face told me otherwise. She said it was around five in the afternoon and one of my friends had come to the door to ask me to come back outside, sure that I had gotten bored and walked back home. When my mom checked the house, she realized I wasn't there and (seven months pregnant with my sister) sprints to the park, screaming my name.
After asking several kids if they'd seen me with no clue, she went to the ball field and asked the older boys if they'd seen me. One of the boys (she guessed around 14) said that he'd seen a younger woman playing with a girl that fit my description in the sand and walk off in a general direction and that was all he knew.
My mom ran across the street to one of the houses and asked to use their phone and called 9-1-1. By the time the officers got there, my dad had come home and some of the neighbors were trying to help my mom. So there's this search party out looking for me, screaming my name and knocking on doors. The authorities had gone back to the park to ask the boys if they knew who had been with me and if they knew who she was.
Between the boys and the neighbors, they had deduced who it was that had led me off, but I have no idea how, honestly. The officers and the entourage go to her home (she lived with her parents but they weren't home) and knock on the door. She came to the door and told them she hadn't seen me, and that she'd been home all day.
The officers asked to come in and for some reason, she said okay. They went through the house and went to the basement and found me. That's what my mom knew and then I remembered. It was literally like a flood gate had opened and I started crying. At six, you sort of trust everyone, and she'd been in our home. I never got a bad feeling from her and my parents didn't, either. But when we walked into her house I remember that cold, holy feeling washing over me and getting very worried. I remember starting to cry and saying I wanted to go home, over and over.
She takes me into her kitchen and gets me a glass of water and a tissue. I hear dogs barking, and next to the kitchen is an open stairway that goes down and where the barking was coming from. She starts trying to cajole me into going downstairs—telling me there's all sorts of toys and games. I reluctantly agree, and she grabs my hand to head down the stairs. The dogs are going nuttier and I start screaming.
At this point, Vicky is getting bizarre. She's screaming at me to "SHUT UP!! IF YOU DONT SHUT UP I WILL THROW YOU IN THE CAGE WITH THE DOGS AND THEY WILL EAT YOU!! SHUT UP!!" Pulling me down the stairs and still screaming. I was scared out of my mind. I remember crying so hard I was hyperventilating, and I am screaming so hard I'm not making sounds. Vicky then flips a switch and starts being syrupy sweet, trying to calm me down. She tells me that she was just playing a game and tells me she wants to play hide and seek.
She must have been relatively skilled at calming me down because the next thing I know, I hear knocking on the door upstairs and I wasn't crying. The houses were all the same sort of tract houses that Sears used to sell, not huge but not small, but you could hear everything at any spot in the house. I keep hearing the knocking and she tells me that it's her friends. They're coming to play hide and seek!!! She convinced me to let her put a piece of masking tape over my mouth, so I wouldn't make a sound, and lifted me into this big wooden box next to the kennel. She put a big pile of blankets over me and told me to be really quiet, so they didn't find me.
The whole time the dogs were going crazy but when she calmed me down, they calmed down, too. They still looked incredibly mean, but they were no longer frothing at the mouth, and only slightly growling. Until the knocking started. I remember scrunching in there, confused. Still scared and convinced that the dogs were going to get out and eat me. I was crying again and hyperventilating. I remember taking the tape off my mouth because I couldn't breathe, but remembered I needed to be quiet because I was afraid of what she'd do if I screamed.
I laid in that smelly box next to a big bag of dog food, sweating to inferno, tears rolling down my face. I sort of pushed the blankets to the side but only enough so that I could pull them back over me when someone came. I recall thinking about my dad and wondering if he'd come find me. All of a sudden, I hear what sounds like adults yelling my name. They come down the stairs and the dogs are going crazy again. Over and over men are yelling my name and then I hear a man say, "If you don't shut those dogs up I will!!"
I was in a large storage box (like a carpenter’s toolbox type of thing) with tape hanging off my mouth when they opened the lid. I remember a very nice man asking me my name and if I was okay. I don't remember answering him in anything other than screams and tears and grabbing his neck so hard my dad had to practically pry me off of him.
I remember my parents taking me to the hospital to be checked out and that's all I really remember. Mom said that Vicky was found guilty of attempted kidnapping, and last she knew was in lock up but couldn't remember when the last time was she had heard anything. We moved from the area shortly thereafter, and I haven't been back since.
I do know that mom said that her parents were odd but that they didn't know them. She had met Vicky from neighbors that had used her as a babysitter and had never heard of anything bad and that I always seemed happy with her. She lived in the general neighborhood, but it would have been two blocks over and one block down. Mom said they never picked her up, she always walked over. When they'd get home, they'd drive her home but never noticed anything out of the ordinary.
Mom and dad had only met her parents when they came to the door to ask for forgiveness; that Vicky hadn't meant to do anything bad, and was a good girl. Mom said my dad picked up her dad by the shirt and told him that if they ever came on our property again, he'd liquidate them. I remember her name and sort of what she looked like, but would have no idea if she walked up to me who she is.
96. One Man Down
I joined an “intentional community” when I was 19. There were a bunch of hippies living in tents on a piece of land. A charming, shirtless dude was the leader, the group included several young women—although there were a few other dudes and an older woman involved as well. After I moved in, I discovered their dark secret.
I learned that one of the other guys had gone missing after having a disagreement with the leader. He packed up his car full of all his belongings, and then…was nowhere to be found. They searched the property for his body, contemplated calling the authorities, but decided not to. Instead, they decided to just hold hands around the fire. I left.
97. 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. It got so much creepier than that.
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.
Pxfuel
98. Speaking To Yourself
I showed up at work one night and my boss was shocked to see me—he said I’d just called in sick. Little did I know, that was just the start of a terrifying nightmare I still can’t explain. When I called home, I expected my wife to pick up, but instead, the voice on the other end...was my own.
I said in almost a scream, "Where is Ann?" He said, "Ann's in bed. Who is this?" I dropped the phone and told my boss I had to get home, and took off towards the door. I could hear him pick up the phone behind me and say "Hello?" and then start to scream. I peeled into the driveway and ran up to my front door, but I never could’ve prepared for what I saw.
My wife was sitting watching TV and was shocked at me being home. I asked her who was there and she said no one has been here. After a rather long talk with my wife, I went to call the penal institution to tell them what was going on, but the phone was broken. I went back to work and when I came in Dave was acting weird and asked me "How on earth are you doing this?"
He told me that when I left, he picked up the phone and the person on the other end sounded like me. He kinda freaked out and hung up the phone. A minute later as he could see my car leaving the parking lot, I had called back from home and asked what was going on. He said that I was a bit irate and said I was sick and did not feel like playing these games and was telling him to stop prank calling me and hung up.
After convincing him I had no idea what was going on we went back to work. Later, I find out that the phone line for my area had been knocked down the night before by the storm. This is absolutely the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.
99. Frighteningly Accurate
My dad watched his mother perish of a ruptured gallbladder when he was 12 and still remembers it vividly. My sister, one day, randomly gets up almost an hour after she's gone to bed and goes up to him. The conversation went like this: Sister: "Daddy, your mommy lost her life in a red sweater, jeans, sneakers and with her hair in a ponytail, right? And her hair was blonde?"
Dad: Drops book he's reading and stares, wide-eyed, and then says "Yes..." Sister: "What color were her eyes?" Dad: "Blue... why?" Sister: "Oh, she doesn't have them anymore, just empty sockets. I was curious". And she goes right back to bed.
100. Friend Bear
Okay, so my daughter is now almost two and has long since moved into her own room. We have one of those video monitor things where you can see/hear the baby on this little TV thing or you can turn the picture off and just get sound. So one night maybe a month ago I'm sitting in bed and I start hearing my daughter babbling to herself.
Now, it's really late, like one or two in the morning. Much later than she is ever awake unless something is wrong and she is sick or cutting a tooth or something. So I turn the picture on the monitor on. This is when it began to get unsettling. I see her standing up in her crib facing sort of diagonally away from the camera.
I can see her hands in front of her but only like half of her face. Now is a good time to mention that we have been teaching her ASL since she was about three months old, and she has been responding and conversing in sign since about ten months. I can see her signing things like "nice," "silly," and "fun" and, oddly enough, "no," "don't like" and "bear".
Of course being the good and loving mother I am (and really not wanting to deal with an overly sleepy baby in the morning) I get up to see what the heck she is doing. When I get to her room she is still standing up and signing/babbling towards the far corner of her room.
I ask her what she is doing and who she is talking to. Her reply immediately freaks me out. She signs/says (as best as she can) "friend" which she does with her whole hands and not just her index fingers and signs "bear" again. I tell her that no, see Bear (who is actually one of her stuffed toys) is in bed behind her not in the corner of the room but she just giggles at me and signs/says "silly" and "mommy".
I can see she is wide awake so I sit down in the rocker next to her bed and try to figure out what woke her up but all she will tell me is "friend" and "bear" and occasionally duck down like she is hiding and making shhh noises. I finally get fed up and ask her who Friend Bear is. Her next response literally gave me chills.
She doesn't speak well yet but she managed to say, very clearly and with the most serious face a 20-month-old can pull off, "No name, no name, shhhhh". Well now I am well and truly freaked out so I tell her to ask "No Name Friend Bear" to go home because it is too late to play and I did what any good loving mother would do.
I gave her a pacifier, went back to my room, turned off the monitor entirely and hid under the covers in my room where my good and loving husband would protect me from nameless invisible bears.
