Kids are adorable! Movies and TV are full of stories of angelic, chubby-cheeked toddlers and precocious child geniuses, whether they’re solving the neighbourhood’s biggest mysteries, saving the world, or just trying to reach the cookie jar on the top shelf without dad finding out. With that said, for every Matilda or Harry Potter, there are plenty of Kevins, Damiens or Regans: stories of possessed, evil or just downright creepy kids that will send shivers down your spine. Courtesy of Reddit, here are the scariest things parents ever saw their kids doing.
1. Screams in the night
My 12-year-old occasionally screams while sleeping. It makes your hair stand up when you get woke from a deep sleep. I have also woken up in the middle of the night to see him standing right next to my bed.
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Sometimes I wake up and he’s just facing the wall or staring at me. He is always “sleepwalking” and I can usually escort him back to bed with no problem. The trouble is, I never know how long he has been up and how long he’s been standing over me when I wake up. He never remembers any of it.
2. Monster in the garden
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I once woke up to my five-year-old sneaking through the house with a 10-inch chef knife at like 2 am. Thankfully he gave me the knife when I asked him what he was doing. He said he was afraid of “the man who walks around in the yard at night” and said he was out there now. I hyped up both my dogs and we searched EVERYWHERE: the yard, the shed, the barn and under the house. I didn’t find anyone, which was super worrisome.
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The next morning I told my wife and she was like “oh yeah, he just does that sometimes. It’s like his monster under the bed or whatever.” She just put the knives on a shelf he couldn’t reach.
3. Past-life hitchhike
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My three-year-old once stuck her thumb out on the main road as if to hitchhike, while I was taking her for a walk in the park. I was obviously shocked and I asked where she learnt that from.
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Without hesitating, she looked me dead in the eyes and said that she used to do that to get around when she was a big girl. It was super creepy, as she was way too young to have picked up that information anywhere.
4. Hotel walkabout
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We were on a vacation in Chicago and staying at a random Fairfield Inn downtown. Our bed was separated by a divider in the room and two of our kids were sleeping on a pull-out couch on the other side. Around three in the morning, I awoke to the sounds of velcro and immediately knew that my kid was putting his shoes on, which he was.
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The next thing I know I heard the hotel room door opening. I leapt further than I thought possible across the entire suite and was able to grab my son just as the door was about to close and pulled him back into the room. He was sleepwalking, but I shudder to think what might’ve happened if I wasn’t woken up by the sound of him putting on his shoes.
5. The price is wrong
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When my son was four years old he loved watching The Price is Right, especially the episodes with Bob Barker as the host. My son would clap and yell with excitement along with the audience. When someone would lose he would be so disappointed for them that he would even cry.
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One day he stopped being upset for the contestants and started being p**sed off. I was in another room and heard him yelling “throw the old man in the dryer!”. I came out asking what was wrong, and my son explained that the lady hadn’t won the washer and dryer, so he wanted Bob to be burned in the dryer. We didn’t let him watch unsupervised after that.
6. Brambles? No bother
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Due to SPD my son has a dulled response to pain. One day, I had the morning off and school was on a two-hour delay, so we went in the backyard to play before I dropped him off. He fell into a patch of brambles on his way to the car, but he said “I’m okay” and kept running to the car. I got him buckled in but wasn’t really paying too much attention.
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When I got in the car and turned my head to back out of the driveway, I saw blood gushing down the side of his face. I didn’t hear a peep from him about it. He cried when I tried to clean and dress the wound but he was a-okay with falling into a bunch of thorns.
7. A good day for murder
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When my son was around five, he said at breakfast out of the blue, “Today is a good day to go on a murder streak.” No one in my house is allowed to watch violent movies or play violent video games, so we have no idea where he got that kind of language from.
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He also once showed me a drawing of him looking in a mirror and in the reflection, there was a demon staring at him. He then pointed to the demon and said “That’s me.” He ended up getting a mental evaluation from a doctor, and it turned out that he’s fine, just creepy.
8. Playtime mastermind
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My three-year-old has a physical disability but talks better than any of his peers. I got a call from the daycare a few weeks ago because he has found a creative way to solve his social problems.
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The trouble is, other kids always overpower him to get toys, because he isn’t really strong. Apparently, my son has started subtly manipulating the kids with his words until they act out and are removed from the play area. My son then has solo access to the toys.
9. Generational imaginary friends
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My daughter once told me all about her imaginary friend: details about her clothes, her dress colour, her hair colour… on and on and on. I stood there saying “oh that’s neat” at three am, trying to coax her back to sleep. Then she said “oh she says she knows you. Her name is Mischa!” Growing up I had also had an imaginary friend named Mischa, but I had never told my daughter about her.
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She fell back to sleep a little later and I figured it was a fluke. A couple of months later my mom gave me a box of drawings that she’d found cleaning out the closet from when I was young. While I was going through them my daughter grabbed my arm and said “see- Mischa!” and pointed to a drawing I’d done from school titled My Friends. It was a picture of my own imaginary friend, and my daughter just knew.
10. Concrete hide and seek
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My three-year old’s dad has a girlfriend with another three year old, named Millie. The other day when it was my turn to have my kid, he pointed to the ground and said, “Millie hide in hole.” That was creepy enough. Then later while walking, we went past a hospital. My son who hasn’t been in a hospital since he was an infant, started pointing to it and saying “booboo.”
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I said, “Yeah that’s where you go when you have big booboos.” To which he responded, “Millie will go for booboo” while pointing at the hospital.
11. Sibling threats
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I remember when my daughter was about four and my son was about two, she gave him this dark look. He had just chewed off the head of her favourite cat doll, and she said: “It would take more than fire to destroy you.”
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It was clear as a bell! She had a slight tremble in her voice, and couldn’t pronounce certain words well, but she said that sentence clear as day in a really angry tone.
12. It’s what’s inside that counts
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My son was learning about the body and how organs functioned in school. When my husband woke up from sleeping in that weekend, he ran up to him in bed and shouted “I love your organs!”, then skipped away merrily.
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My husband had no context and was super weirded out until I explained. Even once I explained, it’s still concerning just how excited my son was to talk about what was going on inside people’s bodies.
13. The evil eye
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The other day, my 6-year-old daughter and I were sitting on a bench and she started drawing shapes in the air with her fingers. I guessed the shapes and we laughed. Then she got serious and drew: a circle, a triangle, and an eye.
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I laughed and asked what they were and she responded, “it was a circle with a triangle and eye inside… it’s a demon circle.” Then she laughed maniacally.
14. Toys in a trap
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When she was about four or five, my daughter had a phase where she kept tying her toys together. I’d come into a room she had been playing in, and she’d have a string wrapped around a toy horse’s neck, then wrapped around a lamp, then wrapped around a doll’s neck, then wrapped around a chair leg, and there’d be several strings and ropes tied in this way.
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Literally, the entire room would be a web of toys and strings. It always looked like a child’s version of a SAW movie, and it was a pain in the a*s to help her clean up. I asked her why she did it once and she said: “Sometimes I just do things and I don’t really understand why I’m doing them.”
15. Demon in the grass
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My daughter ran into my room at like 1:30 in the morning and told me there was a man watching her through her window. I ran outside ready to beat the s**t out of someone and to my surprise, there was no one there. In confusion, I looked through the window only to see her covering her eyes. I waited until she opened her eyes to tell her that it’s alright but the next thing I know she yelled “LOOK OUT DAD”. I turn around and threw a punch, and hit absolutely nothing.
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She then ran outside with a knife and stabbed the floor and said “we did it, we killed it!”. I asked her to draw a picture of “it” and she drew something that resembled a red Enderman. I was confused as heck but I played along and celebrated. She never did anything like that again but that was super weird.
16. Minion murderers
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My three year old is currently terrified that Minions are going to crawl through our TV and requests that we unplug it every night before bed, just in case.
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I went along with it, but once asked what would happen if the Minions got in. He said: “they’re going to go find bad guys so they can cut them all up and throw them away!”
17. Midnight playdate
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One time I came downstairs in the middle-ish of the night, and my son was sleepwalking. The dogs just would not stop barking at him which was out of character for them, but he seemed completely unaware of it.
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As I watched, he went to the front door, opened it, and just kept saying variations of “I can’t come play right now” “I can’t play with you” to some imaginary person outside.
18. Sibling adventures
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When he was a bit over two years old, my son stole my premature newborn daughter out of her bassinet when she was two weeks old. twice. I woke up and heard her crying at three am but her bed was empty. So I yelled for my husband, jumped up and noticed the light was on in my son’s room. I ran in there and he was sitting on the bed with her. She seemed fine but I asked him not to do it again.
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Just a few days later, he brought her all the way down the hall to our living room and onto the couch. I tried asking him what happened and he just said yes to everything, even when I asked if he’d dropped her on the floor. She seemed unharmed but I was baffled about how he could grab her from her bassinet, since it went up to his shoulders. He’d have to reach over his head to pull out this tiny five-pound baby who has a floppy neck.
19. Video game torture
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When my son was away from the computer for about 20 minutes, my seven-year-old daughter changed the Minecraft mode to creative, deleted his inventory, then brought him to the bottom of the ocean, and built a house for him there.
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It was a tiny house with a bed. She set him to respawn endlessly in the bed at the bottom of the ocean and then set the game mode back to survival mode. So, he starved to death repeatedly until he was able to beat his way out. Then he drowned and kept dying over and over… and respawning at the bed in the ocean each time.
20. Blood on the Bible
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We were celebrating Christmas at my grandparents’ house in Louisiana and I don’t remember how it happened but at some point I gashed my hand wide open. Usually a small child would scream and cry, but apparently I just waddled through the kitchen, completely expressionless, and into the next room over.
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In the room was a very old Bible, I think it was my great grandma’s. My family noticed my lack of presence in the kitchen and went searching for me. They eventually found me smearing my bloody hand all over the old Bible and tearing its pages to shreds. It really scared my religious parents.
21. The comeback baby
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About two months before I got pregnant with my daughter, I had a miscarriage. When my daughter was around three years old she started to apologize, saying: “mommy I’m sorry I had to leave you.”
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I asked her what she meant and she said “I was in your belly but I had to go away, then I came back and stay and I’m here now.” She didn’t know about the miscarriage.
22. No more night light
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I woke up in the middle of the night to hear a little voice softly repeating “it’s so dark”. Still half-awake, I briefly thought I was being haunted. It eventually registered that the voice was coming from my toddler’s bedroom across the hall.
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I went to investigate and found him awake in his bed. His night light had run out of batteries, and the sudden darkness scared him so much that it woke him up.
23. Toddler in a moustache
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Every now and again my son will throw on a sticker moustache that he’s trimmed down to look about like a Charlie Chaplin moustache. He’s seven now, but he started doing the moustache thing around age three or so.
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We once got to talking about how he wanted to do great big things in the world. I said, “Like what?” He said: “Like make all the bad people stop being bad”. I said “That’s a pretty big goal. How are you going to do that?” and he replied with “Threaten them with violence.”
24. Leaving the lights on
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Our parents were out and my sister was looking after our brother. He had gone to bed, and she went to close his door. As she did, he bolted up and had a huge grin and he just told her, “The man is coming for us. He likes the darkness.”
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My sister kinda just froze, nodded, said okay, walked over to him and pushed him gently back down onto the bed, walked out of the room and turned on every single light in the house.
25. Waiting in the graveyard
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We live across the street from a graveyard and we get up super early to catch the school bus. So me and my daughter were once waiting for the bus at six in the morning when it was still dark.
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My daughter pointed across the street and said: “Why is that man sitting by himself?” There was no one there. Nearly s**t myself. Thanks, kid.
26. Dolls in time out
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I walked outside and my son was playing by the side of the house with a toy doll and a cord wrapped around its neck. The rope was tied to a pole and he was hitting it with a little plastic shovel or something.
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I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was putting the doll in time out because it had been bad. He then asked to borrow mum’s scissors so he could cut the doll’s hair and also tie it up more, because it had been “very very bad”.
27. No more tears
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When my daughter was two and a half and her baby sister was just a couple of months old, twice I caught the older one putting her hand over the baby’s mouth and nose because she was crying and she wanted her to stop.
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Luckily I caught it very early both times but I didn’t take my eyes off her after that. About a year ago I read about a baby dying when a toddler sibling did the same thing during a car ride. Chills.
28. Hidden in the back
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Believe me or not, this is what happened before my eyes. I was down Main Street Vacation Town USA with my family on holiday. My four-year-old kid came to a dead stop at a kitchen store and said, “I want the robot!” We looked at the display window, the name of the kitchen supply store and just think “oh, kiddo saw something he thought was a robot.”
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Nope. He repeated his demand when we walked in and the sales girl heard him and said “Oh, it’s right this way!” We were floored. All the way in the very back there was a wooden robot. My kid couldn’t possibly have seen it through the window, so how did he know?
29. Silence in the forest
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Not my kid, but I was camping with some friends, and I took their 2-year-old for a short walk on the last day to give his folks time to pack everything up without him underfoot. We walked about 50 yards, talking about the colours of leaves and whether squirrels exist and out of nowhere he calmly tells me:
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“No one is screaming.” There was no inflection in his voice, and I couldn’t tell if he thought this was a good thing or a bad thing. “At last, the screaming has stopped,” he repeated. Then he said: “No one is screaming… and I have to do something about that.”
30. An uncharacteristic outburst
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Our neighbours were over for a cookout and they had brought their dog with them. About 20 minutes into eating, the dog started barking and yapping at something and our daughter, who was about six at the time, got out of her chair, walked over to the dog, picked it up by the neck and started squeezing, muttering, “Will you shut up you annoying little dust mop!”
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We stopped her, the neighbours freaked out and left and that was the one and only time that my daughter showed any type of aggression towards an animal. She’s in her 20’s now, doesn’t remember doing it and we have no idea what sparked her that day.
31. Out of control
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Not a parent but when I was a daycare teacher there was a little boy who would run around shoving and hitting other kids until they were terrified and crying. When I would go to stop him he would hit me with his eyes closed until I had to forceably pin his arms to his sides.
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When I asked him why he did it he would cry and say he didn’t know but he couldn’t control it and liked it. He would say this with the most dead look in his eyes, it really scared me.
32. Old mum, new mum
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I’m an atheist and do not believe in life after death or reincarnation. I haven’t brought my kids up with any ideas about God, and we haven’t watched any TV about the afterlife, ghosts, or anything similar.
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However, when my son, now 19, was four, he told me very plainly and clearly that his last mom had black hair instead of yellow hair like mine.
33. Jelly belly auras
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My son used to say everyone had a “jelly belly.” He was about two when it started and when pressed slowly over a period of about a year. We thought he was talking about people’s stomach’s at first, but we later found out that it was the colour of that person’s brain, or their aura.
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We intentionally didn’t bring it up for an extended period of time and we would then ask about family members that he hadn’t seen in years. Their colours would never change. We never figured out exactly what a jelly belly was because at about age seven his memories of it vanished. he doesn’t remember people’s colours and has no idea what we are even talking about now.
34. Hiding in the closet
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One night, I heard this weird sound coming from the linen closet in my bathroom. Thinking it was a stuck cat, I ignored it for a while, but it wasn’t resolving. So I reluctantly got up to let the cat out, but instead, I found my 7-year-old son tucked back into a shelf holding a plastic razor whispering “shh, it’s right behind you.”
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He then pointed to the closed shower door. At the time, my husband was working nights and I was home alone with a demon child finding demons in the house. Needless to say I didn’t sleep well that night.
35. Snake in the road
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My two-year-old ran over a sunbathing snake in the road with his ride-on truck last summer. I was mortified as I watched this poor snake’s soul leave its body. When I tried to talk to my son about it he laughed and seemed happy about it.
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I freaked out about him being a sociopath for a minute there, but he’s gained a lot more empathy as he’s grown up. Still, it upsets me out when I think back on the memory.
36. Holes for heads
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my kiddo loves action and scary movies, even though she’s a super sweet kiddo. That being said, one day she was digging a moderately sized hole outside, I thought nothing of it and continued to clean the house. I checked out back a few moments later and there was a second hole about the same size.
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I was curious at that point and asked why they were for and she replied “they’re head holes. Do you think they’re big enough?” I asked why we needed these head holes and she said “in case of the bad guys.” I chose not to pry after that, but I did find myself randomly thinking about it a few times for a couple of days.
37. Creepy wake-up call
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My toddler had a few weeks where, instead of sleeping in until between eight or nine, she’d wake up in the dark, closer to six. She’d then come into our room, stand next to our heads or at the foot of the bed and whisper “Mommy….mommy…” until I woke up.
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I straight up screamed a few times upon waking up; since there was a teeny white-haired child with huge eyes whispering at me in the dark. It’s the stuff of horror movies, no matter how cute my daughter is during the day.
38. Stuffed animal guardians
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My son used to always get his stuffed toys and line them up in his bedroom facing the door. It scared the s**t out of me when I opened the door to check on him. He used to do it a lot when he was little and he said they were protecting him while he slept.
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Now he’s 12 and every now and then I wake up to a random stuffed animal on my bedside table starting at me. He thinks it’s hilarious to creep me out.
39. Scissors for spoons
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Not my kid but I used to nanny a four-year-old girl. She was starting to get more creepy and angry the older the younger sister got. The four-year-old showed me “where the skeletons lived” and pointed to the attic by the stairs. She would also chase her younger sister with salad tongs trying to cut her, and she regularly asked for the scissors because the spoons weren’t cutting it.
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The worst moment, near when I decided to change careers, was when she was mad at me for taking some scissors away from her. She got real close and said, “I want to cut your eyes out so you can’t see your loved ones anymore”. Yikes.
40. Picking on grasshoppers
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Last year when I was teaching kindergarten, I caught a couple of my students repeatedly drop-kicking a grasshopper. They’d follow it, laughing at its inability to fly or jump well, pick it up, and do it again.
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The worst part was that two of the four kids doing it had parents who teach at the school. It’s hard to tell a coworker that their kid’s an animal abusing monster.
41. Hairdressers for frogs
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Here’s the conversation I had with my son as he played with his building blocks: ‘”Daddy, I’ve made a machine! It makes frogs!” “Oh that’s nice honey, what else does it do?” “It chops heads!’ “It chops heads?” “Yes! It gets the frogs, and it goes CHOP and chops the heads!'” “…ok honey, sure thing…”
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Haircuts. I later figured out with some clever questioning that he meant haircuts. For a minute though I thought we had gone into serial killer territory.
42. Inspired by the nature channel
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My son was being visited often by social services because he had been diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, and the social worker noticed he was drawing a shi**ton of violently graphic images of animals killing each other.
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Naturally, they went into high alert and demanded I explain why he was drawing these kinds of images. I had to explain that he was glued to the nature channel, and was copying what he had seen lions and tigers do to each other.
43. Dead or cancelled?
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Not a parent, but one time a six-year-old that I spent a lot of time with told me, without any context whatsoever and while looking really sad: “Luna is going to die next week.” I started freaking out on the inside, wondering if she had a terminally ill friend that I’d never heard of.
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Then her brother explained. The girl’s favourite TV show was Soy Luna, which was going to be taken off Netflix the week after, which is what she was trying to say.
44. Wishing death on the parents
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My daughter learned the word dead and death on her own, and then realised that we always pulled funny shocked faces when she said it. So of course, she then kept repeating them over and over.
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To make it worse she only knows around 20 words right now, so she makes sentences with what she knows, which go like: “mama die” or “please daddy, die please”.
45. Lost at the campsite
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My sister was sleepwalking and left our campsite in the middle of the night! She was around five or six, and we had a pop-up camper. In the middle of the night my other sister, my parents and I were all asleep when my youngest sister started banging on the outside of the camper door, crying.
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My mom freaked out asking her “how did you get out here? Why? Where did you go?” We have no idea how long she was out there. My sister had always had a history of sleepwalking but we have no idea how she left the camper without waking anyone else. She could have been kidnapped, lost, assaulted, hit by a car…anything, and she was also caught in the rain.
46. No more sweets
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his is something that happened with my niece. She was around 7 at the time. It’s late at night, and she asks my wife if she can have a piece of candy. My wife says yeah, and I whisper to her “it’s pretty late, we may want to wait till tomorrow before she has any more”. My wife turns to her and says “ya know what, it’s pretty late. How about we wait till tomorrow.”
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I don’t think anything of it, and in about 5 minutes I go into my room, lights off, and lay on bed to play a game on the laptop. A couple minutes go by, and I notice my niece at the foot of the bed staring at me. She says “i know it was you that said I couldn’t have candy” and walked out of the room.
47. Silver linings
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My partner was putting my 3 yr old stepdaughter to bed and the little one holds my partner’s face in her hands, stares deeply into her eyes and says quietly:
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“Mummy, you will die tonight, but it’s okay because Robbie (me) will live.”. It genuinely freaked my partner out, but luckily she survived the night.
48. Lost in translation
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When my daughter was three she started climbing, with effort, the steps on the slide at the park. Two steps up she sighs and says “I’m going to kill myself.” I asked her if she was ok and knew what that meant. She assured me she did. That night as she was climbing up onto her bed she struggled a moment and said “I’m going to kill myself.”
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The next day, while watching the first Frozen film, while ascending the ice covered mountain to Elsa’s magical ice palace, Anna foolishly tries to climb the ice structure and Christoph says…”You’re going to kill yourself.” She thought it was something you said when you were having trouble climbing.
49. Invisible twin
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My son woke up in the middle of the night when he was 4. Walked into my room and woke me to ask where the other little boy went?.
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When I asked him “what other little boy?” He said “you know, the little boy with no feet”. We moved out of that house the following month
50. Ears full of flies
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My son was 2-3ish and woke up screaming “flies, flies mama!!!” With his hands covering his ears and tears streaming down his face. My kid was the chillest baby/toddler, so this was really unnerving.
We turned on the lights, but there were no flies, nor mosquitoes. I held him til morning when we were able to get him to the Doctor. Turns out he had an ear infection. I guess he had ringing in his ears and thought it was flies buzzing around him. Poor little dude.
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