Every one of us has a scary story or two to tell. In years gone by, they’d be shared around a campfire; today, they’re probably more likely to come out around a water cooler, or perhaps in on an online forum. Sometimes it’s a sinister tale we’ve heard from others; sometimes it’s something that actually happened to the storyteller.
However, for a story to truly leave us in shivers, there’s one special requirement: it needs to be actually true. We can never be 100% certain that the scary stories we hear from others are entirely based in fact, and sometimes there’s bound to be some degree of exaggeration. But when the teller is insistent that it’s totally and utterly true, and the tale is truly terrifying, the impact is impossible to deny.
Read on for some of the scariest true stories shared by users on Reddit – but don’t blame us if you have trouble sleeping afterwards.
1. An uninvited guest
My mom’s friend had a small house and lived alone. She noticed weird things: a batch of soup depleting faster than usual, missing eggs, damp towels in the hamper when she hadn’t used any, extra dishes in the dishwasher, etc… This went on for months, she thought she was just being forgetful.
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One day she heard some thumping around in her attic and went to investigate. She found some make shift living quarters. Small radio, hot plate, sleeping bag, pillow, food wrappers, etc… She called the cops who came to keep an eye on the place. They ended up catching a homeless man climbing a tree, trying to sneak into her attic window. He had been doing this almost daily. He would wait for her to go to work, then go down stairs and help himself to food and amenities.
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2. A narrow escape by car at night
My mom was driving, and a guy ran out in the road, so she stopped so she couldn’t hit him. It was night time, so it was pretty dark out, and 3 other men emerged from the forest around.
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[They] all [tried] to use the door handles of her car to get in. She locked them luckily, and gassed it to the nearest town. Remember to always lock your car after you start it, because if it wasn’t unlocked who knows what would’ve happened to her.
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3. Hanging out all night
There are some really big houses in the woods in my hometown. One of the owners went out drinking with his buddies and realised he forgot the key to the gate when he got home. So he decided to just climb the gate. While climbing in his drunken state he slips and his leg gets pierced by one of the spikes on the gate.
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He was hanging there but too afraid to call for his wife. Since he was sure she would just open the automatic gate from inside the house and since it was one of those gates that slides to the side it would just rip his leg off if she did. He was hanging there the entire night until his wife woke up, saw him and called the fire department.
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4. A page from nowhere
As an “on call technician” working in the Audio Visual field, my pager would go off all the freaking time… One afternoon traveling from Orlando to Saint Petersburg via Interstate 4, my pager goes off with a number I don’t recognize… I find the first exit, and pull into a little truck stop looking place outside of Plant City, to use the pay phone… I pop my quarter in and dial the number displayed on my trusty pager. It rings…….. and rings…… it’s just about then that I notice another ringing sound in addition to the one in my ear…..
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I pull the handset from my ear and two phones over on the wall another pay phone is ringing, but with an incoming call. I hang up my the handset and the ringing stops on the other phone. I walk a few paces over, pick up the handset and look at the phone number printed above the buttons, I look at the number on my pager, I look at the number on the phone….. they are identical. I kinda lose my breath for a second and then I make my way over to the girl at the counter and ask if she saw anyone use the pay phone. She said I was the only person in the store in the last hour.
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5. Train track terror
My friend tripped and fell onto the tracks, landing his face onto the 3rd rail. We kinda stood there in absolute shock because we thought he was dead, but then he said, “can I move? Will I be electrocuted?”
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We told him to move instantly and he did, we got him off the tracks, and no less than 2 minutes later a train went zipping by. I think the 3rd rail turned on seconds after his face came off of it.
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6. Rugby injury nightmare
Amateur rugby. Guy gets hit pretty hard and dislocates his hip. While waiting for the ambulance, a guy runs up saying he’s a physio and can at least relocate the joint.
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He cracks the hip back into its socket and the guy SCREAMS. One of his testicles had been jolted out of place in the accident – and had been chilling out in the empty hip socket.
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7. Boiler room horror
I used to run the boilers in a DOE building. Apparently at some point in the eighties, three people were murdered over involvement in a big vcr theft- vcrs meant for the school system had apparently been stolen out of this warehouse, it was an inside job, something went wrong.
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The head custodian was found shot to death, and later the bodies of the other two were reported buried in Monticello – but word is, they had first been incinerated. In the boilers I was in charge of operating and maintaining.
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8. Truck attack
I once heard a property was abandoned, and it was all over school that it was haunted. My friends and I decided to drive up to take a look at it one night (it sat on a few dozen acres). There was no fence and no signs prohibiting access, and all we had to do was take a dirt road for a mile to get to a hill that overlooked the whole property.
Turns out it was abandoned but still owned, and had a caretaker. The caretaker literally drove a truck with the lights off right up to us and then turned them on and tried to ram us.
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We were able to avoid him but he then followed us at 60 miles an hour off his property back onto the road, then into and past a residential neighborhood, trying to ram us off the road the whole way.
My car and his truck narrowly avoided hitting houses, parked cars, and narrowly missed driving straight into a church before he stopped and turned around.
I know I was on his property, but there were no signs and no barriers, and we were just on the edge of it. That he chased us way past his property and tried to kill us multiple times, and probably felt justified because we were trespassing, still gives me the chills.
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9. Death in the water
An acquaintance of mine sent his son to triathlon camp in Texas. A week later, his son came back from camp. The next day, the son was complaining of a headache. Four days later, he was dead. Healthy, happy, fit 12 year old one week, dead the next.
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Turns out the lake had Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba. Nothing scares me as irrationally as already being dead and waiting for your body to catch on.
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10. Cottage of insanity
A colleague of my dad’s went on holiday to a small cottage in Wales (in the middle of nowhere in the UK’s winter time) with his wife. They were found by the owner of the house after the week they rented it for was up, completely insane, clawing at their skin and the whole place was a wreck.
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The full story was never found out, but the guy and his wife both were rambling about a red knife that followed them wherever they went that they found in the bed of the cottage. They are both still alive and as far as I’m aware under psychiatric care.
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11. Waking up with no idea how they got there
I experienced a non-substance related blackout. The last thing I remember before the incident was driving toward a four-way stop in the middle of a residential area. When I came to, my truck was in park and running with the driver door open in the middle of the intersection, my shoes and socks were off and scattered on the ground next to the driver side door, and I was in the middle of a middle-aged woman’s yard about 40 feet away.
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She was screaming at me from her front doorstep, yelling “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” and standing with a child behind her as if I was a threat (which I am absolutely sure I appeared to be). I apologized fervently and drove straight home after collecting my socks and shoes. I have absolutely no recollection of the events during the blackout, no idea how long it was, and still have no clue as to what caused it or what it actually was.
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12. Seeing double
I moved in to another town. I was surprised by people who looked as they knew me, even though I saw them for the very first time. And everyone around was so rude, despite of all other sources telling how friendly people there were. I was also greeted by “oh no, you again?” in one place where I went for the first time…
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And then one day, I finally saw myself on the CCTV, trying to steal something. Right. Stealing, following people and stalking, and being disliked, makes sense. There was some thief who looked exactly like me, even had similar hairstyle (which was in fashion around). As of now, I already know of 2 guys who look identically like me.
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13. Gas leak tragedy
In 1984 Bophal India existed a chemical plant, responsible for pesticide production. With regulations being as poor as they were in the time and place, the plant was built above the slums of the city… The faulty equipment, which regularly gave false readings, foretold of a leak that nobody took seriously. The chemical, which was denser than air, leaked from the factory to the slums down below and began to poison the townspeople.
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For hours the gas went on to kill at least 16 THOUSAND people in the dead of night, as those numbers are considered conservative (and maybe even part of one of the largest cover ups in history) as well as injuring an additional half million. The company didn’t even alert anyone for at least a few hours, and failed to let any medical professionals know about the possible dangers of what they were producing before hand.
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14. Cave of no return
The Nutty Putty is a cave in Utah with some really tight areas, and one guy was trying to navigate a compact undiscovered section in hopes of finding a place to turn around.
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The path was a dead end and he got stuck in a hole upside down with no way to re-orient himself. Rescue teams weren’t successful and the cave is now sealed off with his body still inside.
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15. Heart-stopping hits
Commotio cordis. Your heart can stop if you’re hit in the chest at just the right time in the cardiac cycle. The original story I read was about a kid playing baseball and he was hit in the chest with a baseball bat.
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His heart just stopped dead. That’s always freaked me out because it’s such a simple thing and… that’s it. You die. Humans are both really f***ing hard and also really f***ing easy to kill.
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16. Watched in her sleep
My brother was at a college party while in college (about 10 yrs ago) that a friend of his was throwing. Everyone’s having a good time and everyone leaves around 1-2AM. The hostess goes into her room and falls asleep. About an hour later as she’s tossing and turning, she said she saw a faint outline of what appeared to be someone standing at the foot of her bed.
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As soon as she screamed, she realized the outline was truly that of a man as he bolted out the door and out of the apartment. She told my brother she’s been sleeping with a bat under her bed ever since that day.
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17. Campsite killer
Stanley Park in Vancouver. 15 years back I venture in with my girlfriend and mate to go camping. Girlfriend on her way back from work to the campsite messaged me saying some creep is following her. This is around 10pm, so practically dark.
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She gets to the campsite and I ask who was following her. She says she doesn’t know as she just flat out went into a sprint to lose him. Next day in the newspaper a body was discovered murdered in the park not too far off from where we were camping.
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18. Moonlight monster
So my dad is super skeptical about anything paranormal… One afternoon he was out doing something in the fields, and it was getting dark as he walked back. When he got closer to home, it was pretty much complete darkness minus the moonlight so he could make out enough to get through. Plus he was very familiar with the land so he was fine. Suddenly he said he smelled a very strong stench of rotting meat.
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He walked around some trees and when he came to the clearing before his house, he saw a creature standing there. He described it as a horse with no head. No open fleshy wound or anything, it was smooth and had fur on it. But no head. And it was standing but as he walked around it to take a better look, he said it wasn’t breathing. He said it filled him with so much fear and dread that he took off running.
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19. Sinister cinema patron
I was working in a theater a few months ago. I would clean the theaters after movies. I was waiting for people to exit a theater and when I thought everyone left, I went in to clean. I was cleaning row by row and was in the middle when I looked up to see someone still sitting at the top (there weren’t any lights at the top row so I could just see his silhouette.
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I was creeped out, but kept working my way up there. I told him the movie was over and he needed to get out. He didn’t say anything… I started heading back down to talk to the manager but he said something like “You forgot to clean up here”. I quickly left and told my manager. He and I walked back to the theater and no one was there.
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20. Permanent stain
I work for a museum in *supposedly* one of the most haunted towns in America. There’s a really cool abandoned Asylum there that is currently being used by University staff. There’s this story about this “Stain” on some of the concrete in one of the rooms there… Turns out there is a stain, and it’s f***ing huge. Now I thought this stain was water… it wasn’t.
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Back in the early 1900s, a young woman who was a patient at the asylum had gone missing. This was the middle of winter… It wasn’t until about early March, when things start warming up, that they started to notice a smell coming from a section of the asylum that was closed off due to construction. They found her there with her arms crossed and she had been decaying in the room all winter. When they picked her up, the goop from her rotting body had seeped into the floor there, leaving a permanent stain.
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21. Father’s skeleton
I work as a crime scene body remover. I was called to a scene of a skeleton in a bedroom. When I got there this older man was sitting in the front yard. We small talked a little and he mentioned, “I can’t go into the room my dad died in, I feel like I have bugs on me.”
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After going into the house I find out that the skeleton was his dad. He died a year and a half prior and him and his brother kept him in his bed. In the room were over 100 burnt incense and about the same amount of those swirly fly traps and multiple bottles of odor eliminator.
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22. Ghosts of Alcatraz prison
For years, people in solitary in Alcatraz reported seeing glowing eyes and hearing voices of people who died in the cells before them.
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The prisoners who reported this had no idea who, if anyone had ever been in the cell before them, but they reported names, voices and words that matched up, and even events of how they died.
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23. A narrow escape – or not
My ex-boyfriends best friend had gotten into a terrible car accident, flipping the car multiple times, hitting an electrical pole, and miraculously walked away.
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After getting out of the car he called his grandma (who he lived with at the time) about the accident and to say he was okay. He then stepped on the downed power lines and was electrocuted to death.
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24. Little sister saves family from certain death
First time we are in a car driving to FL to visit my grandparents. When we get a couple hours away from our destination we see the sick colored skies associated with tornadoes but none have been reported on the radio. My sister, who is less than 2 years old at this point starts screaming her head off for food. She has been great the whole trip, but this is the time she chooses.
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After 20+ hours in the car, my parents stop to make her happy before they go crazy. All told, maybe 45m to an hour parked. We continue the drive for about an hour and one of the main roads we would have been on is absolutely ripped to shreds from a tornado.
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25. Under the patio
A distant family friend was inquiring about building a patio on their backdoor (leading out to their garden) but ultimately decided not to and told the contractor thanks but no thanks. Fast forward a few weeks when the family comes back from vacation and lo and behold what do they find but a patio on their backdoor.
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They try calling the contractor that they were inquiring with but he wouldn’t return their calls and seemingly had vanished off the face of the planet. They eventually decide to take it out and find a body set into the concrete. Turns out the contractor had done this multiple times and used patios to conceal his victims’ corpses.
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26. Break-neck speed
My friend’s boss bought an Audi A4 convertible, back when they were new and interesting. One of the talking points was the pop-up roll hoops that were hidden unless you rolled it. A few months after buying it he got to test those roll hoops out, as he lost control and skidded down a steep bank about 10m (~35ft) deep.
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The roll hoops did their job, and he survived with just cuts and scratches from the bushes he’d plowed through. The car ended up the right way up and he got out, walked back up the bank to the side of the road, then got on the phone to the police to report the accident. While he was standing there a driver from a car that had seen the accident came over to speak to him.
Approaching from behind the other driver asked if he was okay. My friend’s boss turned around to reply and dropped dead. His neck had been fractured, but was in one piece right up until he turned his head, when it severed his spinal cord.
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27. Saved by the ghost of a soldier
Before my Dad died, he once told me a story from when he was in Vietnam in the 1960s… just as he started to step out onto [a trail through the jungle] he sees a light skinned Black Union Cavalry Soldier in full battle gear laying alongside the trail just shy of the intersection. My Dad said the Union Soldier had two pistols, a Spencer rifle and a short curved club at his hip.
As my Dad was trying to process what he was seeing, the Soldier looked directly at him and smiled. Then the Soldier slowly placed a finger up to his lips as if to tell him to be silent and then motioned my Dad back off the trail. My Dad said he signalled for his men to remain hidden and he recalled that as he slipped back into the jungle on one side of the trail, the Union Soldier did the same on his side of the trail.
Less than 10 seconds later he said the lead element of a group of NVA (North Vietnamese Army Soldiers) walked right through the trail intersection some 30 feet away. My Dad estimated that the group was comprised of some 70 – 80 Soldiers equipped with automatic rifles, light machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers. He has no doubt that his entire team would have been wiped out on the spot.
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He said as soon as the enemy Soldiers had passed, he and his team beat feet out of there as fast and as quietly as they could and rejoined with the rest of the patrol. He reported the enemy Soldiers his team had encountered, but decided not to say anything about the Soldier he had seen.
My Dad kept this secret for many many years; only telling me just before he passed and earlier only telling his Grandmother on her death bed in the 1970s. He said when he told his Grandmother, she smiled and without opening her eyes told him, “you saw Old Red Tom”.
Red Tom was my Great Great Grandfather. He was a half Black / half Creek free man who was a scout for the Union Army during the Civil War and later served with the U.S. Cavalry in the American West. He was know for carrying two pistols, a Spencer rifle and a Creek warclub into battle.
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28. Asphyxiation just by bending over
Guy goes into a small building and dies. Later, investigator shows up and sees the body, calls 911 and then dies. Paramedics show up to help them, then die.
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The reason? Oxygen levels at head height were normal. Oxygen levels went bent over was basically 0. Bending over in this room killed 4 people by asphyxiation… they could breathe [but] the air they were breathing contained no oxygen. The human body can’t tell the difference.
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29. Brutal dirt bike theft
A guy I worked with was riding his dirt-bike through the woods and somebody hung a cable between two trees. My buddy caught his throat on it and saw the dude steal his dirt-bike.
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He woke up in the hospital with a lacerated throat and a broken larynx. It’s pretty crazy what somebody will do for something so cheap.
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30. Close to an infamous serial killer
Carol DaRonch was at a shopping mall in Salt Lake City in 1974 when she was approached by a man claiming to be a police officer. He said that someone had tried to break into her car and asked her to come with him. He then said he would drive her to the police station and she got into his car.
However, this guy was not a police officer and he did not drive her to the police station but rather, pulled into a parking lot. He then cuffed her, pulled out a gun and threatened to kill her if she resisted. Only, he messed up. He meant to cuff both of her wrist but only managed to cuff one.
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She escaped and fought him off despite being hit over the head several times. Her kidnapper was Ted Bundy. He killed another woman just four hours later. Her escape also helped identify Bundy and she is part of the reason he was eventually arrested.
- Credit: State Archives of Florida
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31. Home invader
Years ago when I was 8 my family lived in this big weird house kind of on the edge of a small town. The school district was in the middle of a big restructuring so even though we were only a couple grades apart my brother and I went to different schools and took different buses.
This left me as the last person to leave in the morning and the first person to get home in the afternoon, which meant it was my job to make sure all the lights were off and the door was locked.
One morning I noticed the basement door was open and the light was on so before I left I turned off the light and closed the door. When I got home that afternoon the light was on and the door was open again. I just assumed that I’d forgotten to actually take care of it when I noticed it in the morning so I went over to turn off the light and close the door. When I got to the top of the basement stairs I looked and there was a big shadowy male figure towards the bottom of the staircase.
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I freaked out, slammed the door and pushed a bunch of boxes against it and then went and hid in my closet. For months I didn’t tell my family because I was positive what I had seen was a ghost and didn’t think anyone would believe me.
Then about a year after that incident my mom and her boyfriend realised that small amounts of money had been going missing for months (totalling around $800-900, but never more than $60 at once).
So we all walked around the house with flashlights trying to figure out how they could have gotten in. Turns out some creep was climbing in through a small hole in the outside of the house, shimmying through a crawl space, then coming up into the house through the basement. Realising I had been alone in the house with him on at least one occasion was one of the worst, most terrifying moments I’ve ever had.
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32. A murderer plays friendly neighbour
In my town in the early 90’s there was a notorious killer that had all of BC, Canada on watch. My wife’s mother (years and years before I knew them) had been home alone while her husband was in England doing tree surgeon work.
She was in her laundry room when a man walked up from her basement, completely scaring her, she freaked out and said what the hell are you doing here?
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He said he was friends with her husband and was just coming to see if he was here, apparently he told him he could just walk in. Which she knew was bulls***.
She was smart enough to tell him that he was just at the store and would be back any minute. He said he would wait outside for him, as soon as he left she called the police, but he was long gone by the time they got here. Two weeks later, the killer was caught, his mugshot put on TV and it was the guy in her house.
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33. Saved from a stranger
Once, a friend of a friend, was on a tinder date. She came back home with the guy. They ended up talking for long and since they had a great time together, the girl let the guy crash at her living room pull out bed downstairs, while she went off to sleep in her bedroom upstairs.
After about 10-15 mins, the guy came up to her bedroom, knocked, made a lot of noise and told her he was very hungry.
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The friend tried to find something for him in the kitchen, but whatever she suggested he said no and was adamant that she go out with him, she got irritated as she didn’t know the guy that well and he was suddenly acting very weird. Just to get him off her back, she agreed to go out.
When they finally stepped out in the street, the guy told her that he saw someone hiding behind the curtains in the living room. He wanted her out to make sure they both were safe.
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34. Woken by an attempted break-in
I had recently broken up with my ex and was thus left to live alone with our animals in a 3 bed, 1.5 bath house we had previously been in together. It was my first time living alone so I was already a little on edge.
At like 2 in the morning, my dog darted off my bed and started barking her head off. I woke up and heard the crackling of leaves underneath my window and then someone tapping on the glass. I froze for like two whole minutes as the tapping continued, getting much louder, and she kept barking like a maniac.
I opened my bedroom door and ran into the living room with my phone, not really knowing what to do in this situation. There were two entrances to my home and all of a sudden I could hear someone frantically turning the knob on the door off of the kitchen, slamming on the door trying to get inside. Thankfully it was locked. I called my girlfriend… woke her up, explained what was happening, and screamed “WHAT DO I DO??” She was like “WTF call the police”.
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As I was dialing 911, the slamming on the door stopped and I saw a man’s face through my kitchen window, looking inside. We made eye contact and I nearly pissed myself. He rounded the corner of my house to get to the front door and started doing the same with the knob, yelling unintelligibly at the top of his lungs.
I finally got through to the dispatcher and she said a patrol car was near and just to stay in my house. I went and hid in my room with my dog, locking the door behind me. Less than five minutes later all of the noise stopped and it took me a few minutes to get out and check to see what was going on. The patrol car was already gone.
I got a call from the officer about thirty minutes later that the man had been very drunk and got my house confused for his. He was angry because he thought his wife had locked him out. I am so, so glad I lock my doors religiously because I have no idea what would have happened if the man had made entrance into my home and found me alone.
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35. Distress call really a trap
This happened to my parents some time after my sibs and I had moved out as adults and they still lived in the big house as empty nesters.
They’re asleep and all of a sudden my mom hears frantic knocking and a woman screaming “help me! Help me! He’s after me!!” Our dogs are barking and going crazy, she keeps banging. My dad was about to run down when my mom stopped him because she said it felt suspicious (I forget why, I think it was because it sounded a little fake).
My mom had left the entranceway light on so the woman could definitely see inside from a big window next to the front door (we lived on a quiet road in upstate New York) and therefore my parents couldn’t go downstairs to assess the situation without being seen by the knocker.
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My dad has the idea to keep the upstairs lights off while looking out the window from all the rooms on the second floor that face the front. He gets to my old room and looks out the side window by chance (I had the corner room) and sees what looks like a man crouching in the bushes.
My mom called the police immediately, and sure enough, as they roll up a few minutes later, a guy runs out of the bushes to the street and proceeds at a leisurely pace as if he’s going for a night jog. The police questioned the two people but couldn’t legally hold them because apparently the “jogger” insisted he was in fact jogging, and the woman I forget what she said but they didn’t have reason to arrest them.
Anyway later that week my parents hear that 2 neighborhoods over (different police precinct), a couple had been tied up and robbed by a pair of con artists who made their way in by the woman pretending to be in distress.
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36. Cooked to death
In Colorado Springs my uncle is a cop and he told me a story some years ago about a kid who tried breaking into the high school by climbing down an air vent from the roof of the school.
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It was really hot, over 100 degrees. The vent was too small and he was sort of wedged in there and cooked to death. After a manhunt they found him from the odour in the high school.
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37. Saved by my appendix
A couple of buddies and I decide to go on a rock climbing trip one weekend. We leave Friday afternoon and drive the 4 hours there. On the way up my stomach is feeling kinda bad, but I just dismiss it as stomach cramps. We get to these cabins near where we will be climbing and light a fire in the fireplace. Over the next couple of hours we get settled, have dinner and relax.
The whole time my stomach isn’t feeling too great. Because of this I end up being the last one up because the discomfort is manageable if I’m not laying down. At this point I’m the only one awake. We had closed the door to the fireplace but hadn’t latched it because the fire had died down a lot, just one or two mostly burnt out logs resting on one another.
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I decided that maybe I could try and s*** out whatever demon was living inside of my stomach . After about 5 min on the toilet, I heard a thump. I was sitting there, on the toilet, pants around my ankles, trying to figure out what the noise could of been. After about 2-3min, it suddenly clicks and I burst out of the bathroom trying desperately to pull up my pants. The entire living room is filling with smoke because one of the logs decided to roll out suddenly, knocking the door open, and landing on the rug.
Thankfully the rug hadn’t caught yet and I was able to get the log back into the fireplace and air out the smoke. It turns out that my stomach pain was appendicitis and I ended up having to get driven to the nearest town for surgery. So basically my appendix gave up its life so I wouldn’t die in a cabin fire with my friends.
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38. Sleep-walking cop
I’m in law enforcement. I got home one night, really tired. Took off my gun belt and uniform. Went to bed. I remember moving the alarm clock because the light was hitting me in my face.
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Anyways, I woke up that morning and walked to the bathroom because I had to pee. Had to loosen my gun belt to pee. The one I had removed that night. I was dressed in my uniform. I didn’t know that I sleep walk… I now remove my uniform and leave my stuff in another room.
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39. Late night pursuit
About four years ago, I was driving my friend home from an out-of-state karate tournament through the backroads of NC. I mean absolutely nothing but farmland and woods for miles. It was 2am, but it was a bright moon so you could still see.
I turned a corner and a car pulled onto the road behind me; no big deal, but then the car raced up to my bumper and stayed on my ass for a couple miles. I figured they would pass me, but they never did.
I wanted to go into law enforcement at the time, and my friend was a country girl, so we were both putting on brave faces, but honestly, both of us were terrified. I began taking turns and speeding 70, 80+ mph on cracked concrete roads hoping I didn’t hit a deer, and the car behind me never let off and never passed me.
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We were scared, but time was very real to us, and this guy had been following us so closely and for so long that my nerves began to give out. We considered calling the cops but we were so far out in an unfamiliar area, we had no idea if we could even reach a 911 dispatcher.
After 45 minutes of literally speeding for our lives, we began to get close to her house, and I started theorizing what do to when this lunatic pulls into her very long, dark, woodsy driveway behind us. I told my friend I have an ice pick in the glovebox and a pocket knife in my purse.
We pull up to the last stop sign before her driveway where the road also splits into two lanes: one going to my friends house, and one leading towards our hometown. The PsychoCar pulls into the turn-lane beside me heading towards town. As they slowly pulled up beside me, I really & truly thought I was about to get murdered; then I noticed the writing on the car. It was a county sheriff’s deputy.
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40. Almost stolen away
In the late 90s I was about 5, my little brother was 1 and older brother was about 9. We used to get our drinking water from the grocery store by filling up those giant 10 gallon jugs. My mom, being by herself to fill up the two jugs of water, decided to pull the car right up to the water filling machine in front of the grocery store.
All us kids were in the car and it was summer so my mom left the car running assuming it was gonna be quick. My older brother gets out and begs my mom for money to go into the store to buy chips. She gives in and lets him go. I decide I want to go too so I unbuckle myself from my booster seat and turn and unbuckle my baby brother and take him with me.
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When we come back out from the store my mom is in tears. Turns out our car had been stolen while my mom had her back turned. They found our car on the side of the road a few days later like 50 miles away.
Till this day I wonder what would have happened if I had decided not to get out or not to grab my baby brother. Would the guy have just decided not to steal the car? Would we both be dead? My mom still thanks me for taking my baby brother with me.
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41. Attempted kidnapper pretended real parent was kidnapper
My friend (a father) is at the store with his daughter (11 or 12 at the time). They split to grab different things in the store. A lady comes and starts scolding daughter. daughter protests and lady drags her out of the store.
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Father catches this at the end, and the lady yells out that he’s trying to kidnap HER daughter. The actual father is held back by bystanders while lady almost gets away with kid. Thankfully the kid got free but holy s***. My buddy is now paranoid about his kids, and it’s been 5+ years now.
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42. Ghost in a red flannel shirt
Back one summer in the 80s when I was about 10 I went with my grandmother to visit my uncle(her son) in Upstate New York. He and a few roommates lived in a house that was connected to an old cemetery dating back to the early 1800s.
One day through the screen door I see a guy wearing a black and red flannel shirt with thick black hair and a beard sitting on the couch. I don’t know who he is but figured it was a roommate I hadn’t met or a friend that stopped by. There always seemed to be someone new coming around.
I finish my comic book and go inside and he was gone. I don’t think anything of it. Never mention it to anyone or think about it again.
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Fast forward 40 + years and my uncle comes down to visit my grandmother, mom, me and my family… he starts talking about this ghost he would see out of the corner of his eye that would vanish when he would try to look at him directly. He would usually see him sitting on the corner of the couch while watching tv. He had on a red and black flannel shirt with thick black hair and a beard.
I made a loud gasp sound, dropped my fork, my jaw went slack and my skin went super pale. Everyone got worried… It took me a minute to snap out of it fully and explain why I reacted like that. From my appearance they believed me. I never once told anyone about that either. Both my uncle and I said we didn’t feel anything negative from this ghost. He was just a guy hanging out not being a bother.
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43. The Ring – for real?
A bunch of friends and I watched “Za Ringu,” which is the original Japanese “The Ring” horror movie. The main baddie, a creepy little girl with long hair, is an evil ghost trapped in a well. When she can, she kills people by walking out of their TV sets, water dripping everywhere. That’s the set up.
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So the next day I come out of the shower, toweling off, sit down on the couch – and the TV turns on! Then the shower! I nearly fell backwards, jumping up all panicky, but it turns out I just sat on the TV remote and the water was just left over pressure in the pipes. She didn’t get me!
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44. Walking in on a burglar
I went to the store next to my house one day. I was literally gone 15 mins. I walked through the front door into my kitchen and heard some ruckus in my bedroom. I thought maybe I accidentally left the window open and a bird got in, or my partner had maybe come home early from work.
I called up to him to ask why he was home early. Then a dude answered me in a foreign language that I didn’t understand.
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I started screaming at him to get out of my house and that I was going to call the cops. I heard the window in the bedroom shaking and the blinds being pushed aside. When it got quiet, I ran upstairs to get my cellphone which I had laid on the bed. I immediately phoned the police.
They told me that this guy had probably been watching me to see when I would leave the house, and that I had likely disturbed him just as he got in through the window. Later, I found that he had used an old bike to boost himself through the bedroom window from the outside. The police also told me that there was no guarantee that this guy wouldn’t come back.
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45. Inner tubing terror
When I was around 7 my family went on a family vacation to Hawaii. My parents were talking to some locals who told them about an old irrigation canal that they go inner tubing through. It was supposedly where they filmed Jurassic Park and my parents thought it would be a free, fun, non-touristy excursion. Without telling anyone where we were going we bought inner tubes from the dollar store and drove down miles of gravel roads until we thought we found the place. On either side of the road were old irrigation tunnels that switched between covered underground tunnels and open top above ground tunnels.
My dad sent a tube through the first tunnel and when it popped out the other side we thought it was safe enough so we all jumped in. We when through the first tunnel no problem but when it opened up the current was too strong to climb out so we were forced to keep going through the second. This one was a lot longer and pitch black and we couldn’t see the end it.
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Everything seemed fine until we started feeling our heads scratch against the ceiling as it gradually got lower and lower and the tunnel became more and more narrow. My mom’s inner tube was was the first to pop and both my sisters and mine followed as we were dragged along in heavy current through pitch blackness trying not to get caught on roots underneath us.
It got so narrow to the point where I had flipped on my back and I could feel the rock ceiling scraping my nose. this went on for a solid minute and a half to two minutes but in the pitch black water it was unbearably long. Finally I heard my dad scream he could see the end and we all made it out, but the silence in that tunnel as we all tried not to panic and just hoping we’d see the end and not all drown together was f***ing scary. Safe to say I don’t do caves well anymore.
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46. An uncanny dream
One night I had a creepy dream. In short what happened I was in a weirdly familiar forest with my boyfriend. We were walking through and it felt like it was in a warehouse. Then we found ourselves in a big field. It was dark and his mom was standing a few metres behind me in a black trench coat. She then hands me an orange lighter with a white sticker on it that hand smudged writing on it.
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When I woke up from this weird dream, I told my boyfriend about it. Here comes the scary bit. He told me that they had a lighter just like the one in my dream and that a few days before, his dad threw it out. I told him how his mom looked in my dream too, after he asked. He told me that I’d pretty much perfectly described her. I’ve never met his mom because we live very far away from each other and I had no idea that this lighter existed.
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47. Pet snake peril
This friend had a pet reticulated python, you know, those absolutely giant constrictor snakes. This snake was her baby, and being that snakes live a surprisingly long time, she’d had it for years. At night, the snake would sleep with her, curled up at the foot of her bed like a dog.
But suddenly the snake’s behaviour started to change. It wasn’t eating well, really at all. It had become more active than it normally was. And at night, instead of sleeping curled up at the foot of her bed, it stretched itself along the length of the woman’s body.
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Being that this was her dearest companion, the woman took the snake to the vet (this was Los Angeles, exotic pets are very common down there), and the vet told her, quite sternly, to get rid of or destroy the snake.
When the woman asked why, the vet explained “your snake is preparing to eat you; it has been fasting and measuring your body to see if you would fit inside of it.” The snake was gone by the next day.
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48. Unexplained blackout
My house has a refrigerator in the basement where we put extra milk and stuff. My mom came home from the market gave me some milk to put in the basement. I skip down there and put it away but when I come up the hallway is dark. I look outside the windows, pitch black. I try to open then front door, it won’t budge.
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I start freaking out. I head back to the basement cause its the only place that doesn’t have screened windows. I come down there sobbing. But light is peeking threw the windows. I walk back upstairs and everything is normal my Mom is on the phone is the kitchen, my sister is watching TV. But I don’t tell my Mom in fear she won’t believe me.
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49. Saved by gut feeling
Many years ago, a group of us were out drinking on a Friday night in a small town in Wales. One of the chaps was playing designated driver, as we all lived in various places dotted around outside the village.
When the pub closed, we all went to pile into the car, but one of the chaps said he wanted to walk, as he felt sick and wanted fresh air. I had this really weird, surreal “feeling” that I should walk with him. It wasn’t a voice in my head, more an overwhelming instinctive urge to follow him.
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Despite the protests of the other four chaps, we both said we’d speak to them over the weekend but we were going to walk. As we walked, I asked my buddy why he was so adamant he wasn’t getting in the car and he just shrugged. “Gut feeling,” he said. “Just seemed like it was important to walk.”
The next day, I was woken up by a frantic phone call. The car had crashed on its journey the night before. It had hit a wall along a country lane and all four of my friends inside it had been killed.
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50. Picked up by a notorious killer
When my parents were in college they went on a trip down to Florida. They had met through mutual friends and were down there together but hadn’t gone on a date yet. My dad and one of his friends were planing to meet my mom and some of her friends at a hotel but being the carefree college guys they were they lost track of time and realised it was impossible to get to the hotel on time by walking. They decided the best solution to their problem was to hitch hike and a car with two women picked him up.
Everything seemed fine until the driver asked them if it was okay to stop for gas. My dad and his friend agreed it was no problem since they were making good time and she drove into a gas station. She then pumped her car full of gas before hopping back in and flooring it, basically stealing the gas with two hitch hikers in the back.
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My dad and his friend were beginning to freak out when she pulled a gun from under her seat and asked “are we gonna have a problem” or something like that. They shook their heads vehemently because what else do you do in that situation. She then drove them to the hotel and dropped them off without so much as a scratch.
They kinda thought nothing of it until the news started reporting on a serial killer in Florida known as Aileen Wuornos. He took one look at her picture and instantly recognised her as the driver. The only reason my dad thinks she didn’t straight up kill them was because they were supper polite and respectful to her and her victims where usually scumbag guys trying to take advantage of her.
- Credit: Nick Broomfield
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51. A head around the door
I’m 17, at home watching my baby sister who is 11. She’s downstairs watching TV or whatever, and I was upstairs playing video games, getting ready for bed. My sister was/is pretty awesome, and I could always trust her to go to bed at a relatively decent time.
To my surprise, my mom peeked her head in my darkened room and I cheerfully waved goodnight. I couldn’t see her face, just a head poke itself into my room, look at me and back away.
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About a half an hour later I go downstairs for some water and I’m surprised again, this time by my sister who is still watching the last of her tv show. I didn’t care if she was still up, but my mother would have promptly put her to bed, as she was much stricter. She asked me if I knew when mom and dad would be home, and I just immediately took her hand and took her out to my car and we sat there while I called my parents who came home immediately.
No doors and windows were unlocked besides the side door I unlocked to bring my sister outside. I still wonder who or what the f*** poked its head in my room.
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52. A scream in the woods at night
In 2006 I went to Germany with some friends (I’m from Italy), and we had planned to camp in the Black forest with a group from Germany, a group from Switzerland, and a group from Hungary. Pretty cool right? Well, one night me, and some other friends really had to pee, but we were terrified to leave our tent because ya know… black forest is freaking pitch black.
So we took courage, left our tent, and went all together to pee… while we were doing the “act”, me and a friend of mine hear a woman screaming in the distance… we start to freak out, we don’t know what to do, what if it’s like a big animal coming for us.
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Then, an older guy that was with us (I was 13) tried to calm us down and said that it probably was an animal running away from another one, it happens in a forest so big. So we went back to our tent, all cool. Camp was freaking awesome, went back to Italy all happy, and almost forgot about that night.
Well, after a few weeks I am home, reading some stuff online, and just for curiosity I go and see if during the summer of 2006 something happened in the spot where we were camping. Found out that in the same period (August 2006) a few kilometres away from where we were, a woman was found dead.
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53. Slumber party scare
Middle school slumber party at a friend’s house, and we’re watching a movie in the host’s garage. Not even a scary movie, but her parents were asleep and everything is scary when you’re a kid.
One of my friends runs back from the kitchen getting a snack and says she saw someone looking in the window. We all tease her and say she’s seeing things, right as there are three loud BANGS on the garage door.
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We all freak out and run inside, then see a figure approach the window and look in. It was dark so we couldn’t see the person, just that they were leaned against the window cupping their eyes to peer in. One of my friends calls her dad who’s a cop, and he says to wake the host’s parents up, so we do.
The host’s dad looks through the peephole in the door and sees my mom. She came by because I forgot my toothbrush and heard us in the garage so she was knocking to get us to open the door.
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54. Hitch-hiking horror
Was hitchhiking when I was 16 up on the trans Canada in Ontario with another dude I just met on the road. Back in around 1978. Small town, night descending, pouring rain, trying to get a ride. Big car stops, I run up and open the back door.
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Two really creepy guys in the front seat, passenger turns around and says, “We can only take one of you.” Noped out, closed the door, they took off. Heard later there might have been a serial killer driving through northern Ontario.
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55. Unknown presence haunts two different people
Same house, same bedroom, different women, 5 years apart. 1st woman – we are asleep in bed and she takes this huge, deep breath that wakes me up. Then, she says “They are here now and want to speak to you. I’m going to let them use me…”
So, of course, I wake her up violently like WTF?!? All she can tell me is that she saw several shadowy people in her dream who told her that they had a message for me but needed her to talk to me. Ok…
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2nd woman – we are asleep together and the same thing happens. Deep, long breath that wakes me up except this time, she screams “THERE ARE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM WITH US!!!!”
I get her calmed down by assuring her that we were alone. She never sleeps over again. I sell the house. Lol…
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56. Spontaneously talking toys
3:30 in the morning, my daughter wakes me up and says her toys are loud and she can’t sleep. We walk in her room and 4 or 5 “talking” toys are going off continuously.
For example, her Buzz Lightyear is saying “To infinity and beyond!” over and over. A lamb plush that says “I need a hug” when you press its belly is saying that over and over.
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Normally, these toys say their phrase when a button is pressed and then go quiet. I grab a toy and hit the off switch. Nothing happens. I run into the laundry room and get a screwdriver so I can take the batteries out of the toys.
I run back to her room and as soon as I walk in, all the toys go silent at once. We did not go back to sleep that night.
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57. The dog that wasn’t there
This was strange and filled my body with dread. I was sleeping and woke up in the middle of the night to my dog’s collar jingling up and down the staircase. I disregarded it and put my head back down on my pillow and I began to think…he’s going so slowly up and down..did he get hurt or need something?
I sit up and hear the collar coming back up the stairs again. This time it goes down the hallway to my parents’ room, pauses, then comes down to my locked door. It stops right in front. Okay, he laid down? I stood up, and when I did..the tags of the collar began hitting my door. At my shoulder height. Just like…knock…knock…knock.
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I froze and my body was thick with dread. I stopped breathing even. After the longest 10 seconds, it slowly jingled down the steps, one by one…then silence. I waited for about five minutes to see if I heard anything else. My shaky feet and on edge self descended the stairs and checked the dog, no collar.
I went to the kitchen table where we leave it off for the night (so it doesn’t wake us) and it was right where we left it. I tossed it as me being crazy, but the next morning my parents came down and said “Did we forget to take the collar off the dog? He woke us up.” That’s why I’m still questioning what could have happened.
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58. A man possessed?
I was about 12 at the time. I was waiting in the lobby of my church for my part of the Christmas musical we did every Christmas.
As I sat there, a guy across the road was looking at the church. He started to walk across the road. Then a car hit him.
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He got up from the ground, bloody. Then continued to walk towards the church. As a 12 year old I’m officially terrified. He then walks into the church lobby and said “I’m possessed by a demon. Help.”
Without saying anything I just went into the auditorium and grabbed our pastor. He grabbed some elders and took the guy to the offices. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I’ll never forget watching a guy get hit by car and then continue to walk up to me while covered in blood.
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59. A face at the window
My house as a kid had a kitchen window that had a clear view of the entire kitchen, with the sink facing away from it. The window was on the side of our house, with about 15 feet between our house and the one next door. My mom ALWAYS left this window open/unlocked, and the blinds were always open.
This bothered me for some reason. I just felt like the neighbors or some rando could easily see or climb in. Our house had been burglarized a year earlier by some neighborhood kids, and we knew they came in through the garage, but this window still felt like an easy access point. So I was always closing and locking the window and shutting the blinds. I would complain to my mom about it but she would always brush me off like it was no big deal.
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So one night I’m at a school dance, and my friend’s mom offers to drop me off at home. As we pull up to my house, we stop on the street in a position where I can see the area outside my kitchen, between homes. Crouched low, in dark clothes, is a person peering through the window. My immediate reaction was to jump out of the car in a full sprint toward the person. He/she/it heard the door open and saw me and immediately took off, running down the dark alley. I was screaming all sorts of things, sprinting up and down the alley looking for them, but they got away.
I come back to my house, walk inside, and my mom greets me cheerily as she stands at the kitchen sink, washing dishes – totally oblivious that someone had been a few feet away, staring at her through the open kitchen window. I calmly walk over, close the blinds, lock the window and tell her to never open that window again at night.
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60. Something behind the door
I was staying at a friend’s beach house, let’s refer to her as M, and her little sister is B. Then there was B’s friend C. And M and I’s friend R. Keep in mind that this house was built over what used to be a train station. I’m not sure what it’s called but you get my point. The adults/moms were all outside on the front porch drinking and talking. We all decided we wanted to play hide and seek. C was going to count to 500 because the house was so huge it would take a while to get to the best hiding place. M and B decided to hide together, so R and I were going to hide together.
We decided to use the front bathroom, which the porch is in front of. First you open the door into this long bathroom that has a sink, closet, and shower/bathtub. Then there’s another door that leads into a small room where the toilet is. It’s maybe 4 by 4. It’s tiny. We chose the bathroom, because I had to pee. So we ran in there and R held the door shut while I used the toilet, and we were both in the toilet room. I was looking at the windows and realised a single plate of glass had a large crack across it out of this huge set of windows that reached up to the ceiling which was like 20 feet up. I didn’t say anything about it though.
So once I finished I stood up and R had me hold the door because she was getting those nervous jitters. Keep in mind, I was like in the fifth grade, but I was one of the strongest of my grade at the time. So I was holding the door shut, when it felt like something was pulling and jiggling it from the other side. I was really struggling to keep it closed. R even held onto me to try to help me. She noticed the knob shaking and noticed me struggling, so it’s not like I was the only one. After about five minutes of consistently fighting to keep the door shut, it stopped. We had been laughing nervously the whole time about it, so once it stopped, I swung the door open and laughed expecting to find C. But I didn’t.
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No one else was in that bathroom and it was too big of a room for someone to have escaped and shut the other door that quickly. Though we tried to tell ourselves otherwise because it was a little freaky. I mean this place used to be a train platform so there’s no telling what supernatural force it could’ve been. So we ran back across the house to the very back where we had left C counting. The only thing was that, she hadn’t even reached 500 yet. And when we tried to find M and B we found them in the very opposite end of the house, stuck between the floor and beds they had hidden under. They slipped under it easily before but somehow couldn’t get out. R and I told our story, starting to get a little scared.
That’s when everyone ran out to the parents, crying and scared. M and B’s mom stood up and said it probably was just the air vent but I knew I could resist a bit of a breeze. So she went into the toilet room to check, when she noticed this huge crack in the window. I had seen it all through out the day when I had used the bathroom as well as the days prior. But apparently it wasn’t like that until R and I left the bathroom. She yelled at me, blaming me, and scolding me for trying to scare everyone else.
The only one that believed me was my mom. Because she knew I wouldn’t lie about that kind of thing and I was shaking like a leaf and I don’t scare easily. She also knows just how strong something has to be in order for me to struggle with it.
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61. Living gnome?
When I was younger I lived in a small town in Mexico. All the kids in the town would play hide and seek at night outside. But instead of one person seeking, it was two teams seeking and hiding. One night I was hiding in a bush with another girl, when all of the sudden a kid starts screaming his head off and running. All of us hiders started to tell him to shut up because he was gonna give us away.
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He yelled “Un muñeco! Un muñeco!” (A doll! A doll!). We all turned our heads and there was a tiny figure just walking. We all ran and never hid there again. My grandma was always adamant about duendes bring real and I never believed her until that night.
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62. Stalked through the jungle
Was doing research in a rainforest in Central America. It was dusk and I was off trail. The monkeys were quiet. I remember smelling a musky smell, then a low chuff. Behind me was a Jaguar.
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Scariest but most amazing moment of my life. Made it out because it was mostly just curious about me and was startled by noises from other researchers a couple kms away. It followed me for a good while on my way back to camp.
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63. Haunted by a previous tenant
I lived in an old apartment in 2002. The place was built in 1900, so it was just over 100 years old when I moved in. The living room and kitchen were fine, but the bathroom and bedroom we’re unnerving, like I just always felt like I was being watched, especially in the bedroom if the closet door was open. Those unnerving feelings just became moderately uncomfortable as I settled in. I felt safe in the bedroom, but only if the door was locked. One night I was dead asleep when there was a loud BANG on my bedroom door. When I got up the courage to get out of bed, I checked the apartment and all the windows were closed and locked from the inside, the door still had the chain secured, no one was in there. I mentioned the closet in the bedroom, I never liked going in there, and I never liked if the door was open. For some reason, in my head I would hear gasping noises. So for that reason, the closet stayed closed.
A month or more after I was woken to the bang on my door, I was dead asleep. But something woke me up, and it was a pressure on me like being held down. It was pitch black in my room, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew some was standing over me. When I could finally turn on a bedside lamp no one was there. After then I couldn’t sleep in the dark, I had to sleep with a lamp on. That incident scared the life out of me. And after that the unnerving feeling of being watched intensified. Friends would come over, and comment about being uncomfortable in the bathroom like being watched. It became so uncomfortable for me, when I had the chance to move to another unit, I jumped at it. I packed up and got out.
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After me, several people rented the apartment, and they would move out within months. I became friendly with the building manager, and I told him that I felt the place was haunted. He kind of laughed it off.
Years after, they were renovating the place, building manager was doing some painting in there, the building owner was there too. I went and checked out the apartment, and it looked nicer, it didn’t feel as creepy. I got to talking with the building owner, and through the course of conversation he just throws it out there that a former tenant committed suicide in the closet by hanging themselves. He also mentioned that the original designer of the building lived in that apartment, and died in there. I wasn’t mad when I heard that, but felt validated that what I experienced was real.
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64. A glimpse of a different world
While at uni my friends and I ran out of booze. Hardly any shops were open because it was late on, so the only option was to walk the mile or so to the nearest 24 hour supermarket. Between the supermarket and the dorms we lived in was just row after row of suburban houses which all looked the same.
As we were walking down one road we passed a field with a large camp fire and some people riding horses around it. There were people playing musical instruments, and general sounds of a good time going on – the horses and fire, and the lanterns which were dotted about, gave it a very old fashioned feel.
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Maybe 5 minutes after passing the field, now walking past houses again, one of my friends commented on how weird and out of place that gathering of people had been. My other friend and I had been thinking exactly the same thing so, curious, we turned around and walked back to find out exactly what was going on.
There was nothing there. Not just no people or horses, there was no field; just more and more houses. Even though we were absolutely certain we were on the right road, as we’d simply turned around, we walked up and down the neighbouring roads too. We found nothing. We weren’t drunk, though we’d had some drinks, and so I’ve got absolutely no idea what happened that night.
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65. A final visit from Grandpa
My wife and I were having a great weekend in Las Vegas when my father-in-law passed away in the early morning hours. We get the call and haul ass to get back to the rest of the family. After a couple of hours the family is all together and talking sharing memories when we arrive.
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Shortly after we arrive it gets brought up how are we going to share this news with our niece (who was in prison at the time). While trying to figure it out a call comes from out of no where ….. its our Niece and she asks what happened to Grandpa. She had a dream that he visited her and said good bye. She freaks and calls us.
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66. The cat returns?
My ex had this lamp that she had on the island in our kitchen. She turned it on pretty much every night and in the mornings to make coffee. It was a pretty solid little lamp. I brought my cat to live with us late in our relationship because she had dogs and my cat was pretty up there in age and not used to dogs, so I tried to spare her little heart from that shock. She came to love laying down in the spot by where that lamp plugged into an outlet on the wall of the island.
She died soon after I brought her over, and I was absolutely heartbroken. I had a hard time accepting the loss.
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About a week after my cat died, my ex was grinding coffee in a little electric grinder and I heard her shriek from the other room. I rushed over to see what was going on, and she told me she felt something cold pass by her feet, then the light on the lamp started flickering. She tried to show me again the flickering, but it didn’t happen. I just chalked it up to her being weird at 6AM.
A couple of days later, she asked me to make coffee for her. I grab the grinder, flick on the lamp to see what I was doing, and sure enough the same thing happened to me – a cold wind whipped past me like a cat running around my feet, then the light on the lamp flickered before I could even get the grinder going. It never happened before or after, despite the hundreds of times I’d used that grinder in the same outlet as the lamp. I like to think it was my little girl saying goodbye one last time.
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67. A grandmother’s clairvoyance
For about ten years now, my nana has been living in a nursing home. She had a stroke and mentally she is not all there. She still recognizes us when we visit and gets happy to see us, but she often talks gibberish, thinking she is in a distant memory in the past. It makes me sad because she and I always had a very close connection growing up. My parents both worked a lot and she would stay with me. She used to know when I was lying, she could always sense when I was sick, even when she wasn’t over, and she and I are eerily similar both in personality and looks. There are pictures of her when she was 21 and it could be me in the picture. We were very close growing up and I love her dearly. I introduced her to my now husband when we started dating in college. He is from a different country than I am and I live in his country.
So we had been dating a few years when my visa was going to expire. In order for us to live in one place, we decided to get married. However, we were still young, fresh out of university and decided to just elope. We decided to get officially married at a courthouse while announcing our engagement and then having a wedding a few years later (official documents and wedding ceremonies are separated in my husband’s country anyways). No one knew of our plan. We were (and are still) stupidly in love and thrilled to have such a crazy secret between us two. In hindsight, it was stupid and no one would have judged us, especially considering we are still happily together years later, but we still decided to hide it because we were stupid kids.
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So we flew to visit my parents in my home country and announce our “engagement” and my dad picked us up from the airport. We were chatting in the car, when he tells us that my Nana was freaking out while he visited her the other day. The day we decided to elope. Why was she freaking out? She announced to my whole family that she saw in her dreams that I had eloped and was now married. They dismissed her because they didn’t expect that at all. She kept insisting and was incredibly lucid about it. She raised her voice, which she hand’t done since before the stroke. My dad had mentioned because he thought it was sweet that she was so worried about this and became so lucid.
My husband and I just got silent in the car and I went cold. We don’t know how she knew that or if it was just coincidence. But she knew somehow. We went to visit her a few days later and she didn’t remember it at all. She was thrilled we were engaged. We are happily married now and had our wedding and stuff, and no one ever found out we had eloped before the wedding day, except my Nana apparently.
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68. Messages from the other side
Okay so this was probably 15 ish years ago now. When I was in high school, my group of friends used to spend a lot of time at a particular friend’s house because it was huuuge. It was also quite an old house, but his parents were cool with us basically taking over when we were there – we’d make dinner for about ten people, stay up late listening to music and playing video games and they never minded.
Anyway, one evening we’re all sitting in his room, watching TV. It’s dark and the lights are on but the curtains are open. Suddenly two different people on opposite sides of the room jump like they’ve been startled and look around. Both of them explain they saw in the reflection in the window (on the second floor, just FYI) somebody walk across the room. None of us had moved. It freaked a few of the girls out and we had to calm them down a bit.
Flash to a couple of weeks later, and we found a pack of cards in our friend’s house that had letters on them. Somebody suggested we could use these as a Ouija board and figure out if our friend’s house was actually haunted. We got a big wooden board (I think it might have been the top of a table once upon a time), arranged the cards in a circle around the edge with an extra 2 homemade Yes/No cards, got a glass and off we went.
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It started to answer questions, telling us it was a man who used to live in the house and who died there. We asked when he died and just got the answer “long”. We asked if he was moving the glass, and he said yes.
This is where I decided to be dumb, and I asked if he could move anything else other than the glass. “Yes”. We all paused and listened for the sound of something moving, but nothing happened. We asked if he had moved something. “Yes”. Nothing happened again so we moved on and asked some more questions. This was at 10.30pm. After a while longer we said goodbye (I think at least one of us was aware enough about Ouija board lore to know we had to close the conversation properly) and then a little later we all went home, a little spooked but enjoying it nevertheless.
I walked home with another friend who lived nearby. As I walked in my front door my Mum called through to me to be careful in my room because a mirror had fallen off the wall earlier and they weren’t sure if they’d picked up all the bits of glass. When I asked when this had happened, she told me “Oh, about half ten?” The same time I asked the spirit to move something. I did not sleep well that night.
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69. Owls to the rescue
This was at the house we lived in for about seven years. Many strange things happened in that house (you could hear voices murmuring from time to time, I saw a shadow person, saw someone stick their head into the room once). None of it felt hostile, but the same couldn’t be said for this pervasive feeling my mother and I both felt if we went out front at night. She and I both felt like there was something watching and it wasn’t friendly.
On this particular night, it was about midnight or so and I felt like driving to the 24/7 grocery store since I wanted some snacks. As I stepped out the front door, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and turned to look.
There was this very tall thing just floating, for lack of a better term (I’d almost describe it as hanging but there was nothing holding it up), outside of my brother’s window. It was seemingly covered in a sheet that had once been white, but was extremely dirty so it was more off-white, and got brown with mud and dirt the further down it went. There were no visible feet, nor eyes or face, but I could tell it was staring at my brother’s window.
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As I stared at it, it turned to “look” at me and I remember feeling like one of those butterfly specimens, pinned to a board. It was as though its stare was physically holding me in place. It felt like an eternity but only a second or two passed, and it looked back at the window, the pressure lifting, and then vanished. Right as it vanished, there was a fluttering of wings in the tree above, and one of our neighborhood’s owls came to perch there. In a way it felt like the owl came to my defense, as silly as that may sound.
Our cul-de-sac loved the pair of owls, they were more like neighbours to us, so maybe it was just protective of a fellow neighbour. That’s how I like to think of it, anyway. In any event, I decided that it might be best to just…make some popcorn or something that night instead. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever told my brother about the thing. I probably should.
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70. Ghostly roommate
I currently live in a haunted house. I’ve heard voices, footsteps, lights have been turned on/off, one of the ghosts has a thing for silverware (I hear it clattering in the drawer all the time, and sometimes a knife or two will end up in the wrong slot in the drawer).
But the strangest/scariest experience I had was the first night I spent in the house. I wasn’t finished moving in, there were boxes everywhere, I didn’t even have my mattress up there yet. I was bedding on an old futon mattress, watching a video on my phone, when I get the pins & needles feeling of my feet falling sleep.
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Except it wasn’t on my feet, it was on the top of my head in the shape of a hand. I said, “Good night”, turned off my light and tried to sleep. When I woke up my closet door was ajar, but other than that everything was otherwise untouched.
I guess whoever my unseen roommate is, just wanted to check out who I was on my first night.
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71. Smoking spirit
When my daughter was 7, she kept asking me why I was smoking in her room late at night. I was a smoker at the time, but I never smoked in her room. I never smoked upstairs at all. I told her that I sure wasn’t smoking in her room late at night or at any time but she was insistent that someone was coming in, sitting on her bed and smoking. I was kind of freaked out, but I knew nobody was sneaking in to our house just to catch a late night smoke in my daughter’s bedroom.
The house had belonged to the in-laws of my daughter’s teacher at the time. So, her teacher asked her how she liked the new house and her new room and of course, my kid says “It’s great, but someone smokes in my room at night and mom swears it not her.” So, on parent conference night, the teacher pulls me aside and asks which bedroom our daughter sleeps in. I tell her and she says, “I don’t know what you believe and I don’t want to offend you, but kid says someone is sitting on her bed and she smells cigarette smoke late at night.”
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I’m getting ready for a deserved lecture on smoking around children which I did not get. The teacher went on to tell me that her mother-in-law wasn’t allowed to smoke due to health issues and that she would sneak in to what was now my daughter’s room at night for a few quick drags. My daughter’s bed was in the middle of her favourite clandestine smoking spot.
We actually lived in harmony with Hazel the ghost for quite some time. She had an annoying habit of putting things back where she thought they belonged, but otherwise, she was a fine ghost. She had said in life that she had no intentions of leaving her house even after death. I did end up having a “chat” with her about her chosen smoking spot though and that stopped pretty quickly.
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72. Whispers in the dark
The house I lived in from when I was about 13 til I was 24 had some darkness. I remember hearing stories from my parents that the son of the previous owner had OD’d (but not within the house, somewhere else). Still that always creeped me out a bit. Throughout my entire time living there, I saw and heard all the classic signs of “haunted house”. We had a glass cube wall (very 80’s) that separated the living room from the dining room and I saw all sorts of shadows running past on the other side in the dead of night when I would stay up watching movies or gaming. There was never anyone awake when I’d go look.
One night when I was about 15 years old, I was sleeping in my room, when all of a sudden I wake up. I used to have this HP laptop that would let off a blue light when closed, just dim enough to check the time from my wristwatch that was laying next to it. (I don’t know why I didn’t have a regular nightstand clock). As I’m squinting to see the time, I hear something whisper my name RIGHT NEXT TO MY EAR. It was as if it was standing an inch from me.
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I jumped up out of bed, scrambled out of my room knocking s*** over in the process. I didn’t stick around to see what else I could hear. I ran to the living room and passed out on the couch til the next day. For the next few nights I couldn’t sleep well and kept waiting for it to speak again. Never did.
The house came with a camera system installed, and I remember seeing all sorts of wacky things. The back fence door opening on its own, when it had two clip locks. Granted, they’re the locks that you only need to push up to get it to unlock, so it could’ve been a strong wind, but something about the movement of the door unnerved me. I can’t explain it, it was something I felt in my bones. I learned to live with that feeling during those years, but it was always there.
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73. Ouija board shocker
In high school my friends and I were messing around with a Ouija board one night. We had done it before and nothing remarkable had ever happened. We usually did it to try and scare each other or our girlfriends. We all thought it was a joke. That night there was no one else home except the 7 of us and we were all together around the board. One of the girls there wanted to try it. She had never done it before.
This time was different. The board misspelled some of the words the same way every time. It gave answers that seemed really historically accurate for our town (things we neither knew or cared about). Long story short, the “spirit” claimed it was a 10 year old boy who had died on the property in the 1800s and was buried there too in an unmarked grave (my friends house was on a farm in the edge of town).
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We were all a little freaked out because the board had never been so detailed and consistent. However, we were still skeptical and we were all assuming one of us was trying to scare the rest.
Finally, my friend asked if the spirit could do something to prove he was there with us. It went to Yes and then spelled out k-n-o-c-k. Then the planchette stopped moving. We just all stared at it silently and then there was a rap-rap-rap on the window right next to us. The lights were on outside and there was absolutely no one out there. We never touched that f***ing board again.
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74. Ghost glimpsed in the mirror
My mom used to clean the house of a elderly couple. They didn’t have any kids, so their house was empty aside from them. The husband ended up dying of lung cancer and about a week after the service we were at their house cleaning. I was in their bedroom and my mom was in their restroom. I had my back turned to the bed and off to my left was a mirror that they had that was facing the bed.
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While cleaning I kinda half turned and momentarily looked into the mirror and see the lady’s deceased husband standing next to the bed and looking down at it. He then looked up at me through the mirror so I quickly turned to look at their bed and he was gone. Really freaked me out at the time and I quickly joined my mom in the restroom.
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75. A figure in the garden
We moved into an old three storey house that was built at the turn of the century. From the deeds we saw it was owned by a single woman for many years before being sold to a man, and then us – my husband and my grandmother.
It needed a lot of work doing but luckily the next door neighbour was a builder. He came in to do work while my grandmother visited my parents in another city. On the final day he said “Your grandmother is always out working on the garden, it looks great!”
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After I questioned him a bit I realised he had been seeing a white haired woman walking outside of the back bedroom window in the garden. It was definitely not my grandmother, she was 100 miles away. I never told him because he’s really superstitious and probably wouldn’t have come back!
In the same house while we were eating dinner I looked up and saw what looked like a huge black hooded figure hide behind the doorframe into the hallway. It was so big it looked like it was ducking down and peering into the room, before whipping up and away when I glanced over. That scared the hell out of me, particularly as I only looked up because the dogs were whining. I never went in that corridor again when the lights were off!
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76. Don’t talk to strangers
My former teacher was home alone when she was a child. A man knocked on her door and she opened her main door but kept her screen door locked. He said he was from the gas company and wanted to talk to her parents. She told him they weren’t home and he, without missing a beat, tried to start forcing his way into the home. When he found the screen door to be locked he pulled out a f***ing box cutter and started to cut through the screen.
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My teacher ran to hide in a clothes hamper in her parent’s closet. She said she sat there for about 10 minutes before the police arrived. Thank god a neighbor saw everything and called the police or she probably would be dead. Also to put the cherry on the freaking creepy sundae, they found the intruder hiding in the attic.
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77. Haunted by grandpa
My grandfather died last year sometime when my son was maybe a year old. We had dinner with the whole family every Friday night so my son had seen him several times. Mt grandfather was a very quiet, proud man, but when he thought he was alone or unseen he would make silly faces at my son to get a laugh. A couple nights after his funeral my son (who liked to crawl into bed with us in the middle of the night) started just laughing uncontrollably at like 2 am.
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So I get out of bed to see what’s going on, and find my son sitting in the middle of the living room, in the dark, laughing. I say “hey buddy what are you doing?” In toddler speak he says “Papa funny!” I got a little nervous for some reason and went to pick him up and bring him to our room for the rest of the night. And as I’m hauling him away he says “Bye papa!” and blows a kiss at absolutely nothing I can see.
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78. A horrid dream
A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were sleeping together, when I woke up to her saying “What are you doing?” She sometimes talks in her sleep, but this sounded so coherent and urgent that it jolted me awake and I asked what she was talking about. She then woke up and said she thought she saw someone at the end of the bed. Thinking it was just a dream, or semi-awake hallucination, we thought nothing of it and went back to sleep.
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About an hour later, I woke up and saw someone standing on the bed, with the sheets wrapped up and twisted to their neck. I didn’t know what do but the first thing that came out of my mouth was “What are you doing?” My girlfriend then woke me up. I had been dreaming the exact same thing that she did, and said the exact same thing. I know it’s the power of suggestion or whatever, but f*** that.
- Credit: Rachel King
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79. Furnace ghost
I was at a friend’s house around 12 years ago, we were in the basement watching TV, when his mom’s boyfriend comes down the stairs and tells us to keep it down. We looked at each other, confused because we were literally just watching TV and it wasn’t on high volume at all. We said we weren’t being loud, and he said ‘You aren’t yelling?’ and we shook our heads. He just sort of does the ‘huh..’ look and tells us he and my friend’s mom had heard someone screaming coming up from the furnace vents, so he though it was coming from the basement where the furnace is. We didn’t hear anything and were like 15 feet away from the furnace.
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Sadly I can’t verify the next story because I wasn’t there, but my friend (from the basement) and another friend say they were upstairs in the kitchen one night hanging out, and they heard a scream, clear as day, coming out of one of the furnace vents.
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80. An otherworldly sight
I used to work at Philips, up near Sleepy Hollow in New York. At my lunch breaks, I liked to wander through the forest on the work property. One beautiful October day, I was admiring the autumn leaves when I saw a buck standing in front of me. There’s a word, numinous, for feeling in the presence of something spiritual, something unworldly. That’s how I felt. I quietly and carefully stepped closer to get a better view.
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I was able to approach quite close: almost close enough to touch him. At that moment, though, the deer turned, and I felt all the hair on my arms rise. The deer’s eyes were red and dripping with blood. It must have had some disease that had blinded it and its blindness allowed me to get so close. In the moment, though, it was terrifying and uncanny.
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81. Visions of a fox
My mom is Native American. She named my sister Chula which means fox. Last November my mom was doing dishes at the sink and looking out the window at the woods like she always does. Well, she looks up from the dishes to the edge of the woods and at that moment a fox steps out of the woods. It sits on its hind legs and stares right at my mom’s face while she stares back through the window.
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She said it seemed like five minutes they stared at each other. Suddenly the fox got up turned around and slowly walked into the woods. My mom said her first thought was to call Chula tell her about the fox. My sister never answered – she died in a head-on collision that day due to some a**hole drunk driver. My mom keeps looking for the fox. It has never come back.
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82. A paranormal encounter
A few months ago I had this really scary dream that seemed so real. In my dream, I was in my bed doing something on my laptop. Suddenly I just had a bad feeling something wasn’t right. Like I somehow knew something was in my room with me that shouldn’t be there. I jump off my bed, and hurry and flip my light on. I flip it on just in time to be this weird black shadow sphere thing with legs zoom under my bed. I woke up scared and crying, but it felt so real and I just knew whatever I saw was very evil.
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The next day me and my dad were watching one of those ghost shows like My Ghost Story on TV. In the episode this woman was in her room, and all of a sudden she felt like something wasn’t right. She turned her light switch on just in time to see a weird black shadow sphere thing with legs scurry under her bed. It pretty much looked exactly like the thing I saw in my dream. I flipped the f*** out.
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83. The mango tree
When I was in my teens, my family went for a retreat to an old bungalow near the sea. There was this huge mango tree at the side of the garden. Woke up around 3am due to being in unfamiliar surroundings and noticed my dad outside the garden staring at the mango tree. Couldn’t get back to sleep so I joined my dad out on the garden. We kept looking at those big juicy mangoes located very high up the tree and at that time, I thought it was a grand idea to climb up and pluck some of them at 3 in the morning. Climbed up to about 15 feet and started plucking those mangoes while my dad collected them below.
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While I was trying to reach a particular mango on a faraway branch, I felt like my hair fell down covering half of my face. So I absent-mindedly tuck it behind my ears. As I tried to reach it again, it fell down covering part of my face again. Then I just froze. Since when did I keep my hair long? (I’m a guy by the way). I didn’t dare to look up and kept staring down at my dad who was busy picking up mangoes and didn’t have a clue what was happening. Slowly made my way down and only picked up the courage to look up once both my feet were firmly planted on the ground. I didn’t manage to see anything but I thought I heard a faint female laughter coming from up the tree.
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84. A spooky apartment
My wife and I woke up in the middle of the night to find all our lights out in the house. We had not lost power. The living room light that we always leave on overnight had been turned off. The bathroom night light was removed and placed under the sink. The computer had been unplugged, and the monitor cord was unplugged and neatly folded on the desk. All of the doors and windows in the house were unlocked, undamaged, and standing wide open. Our bedroom door was open, and the TV we always fall asleep to was turned off. Nothing was taken.
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Our cats were both hiding behind the refrigerator and stayed there for most of the next day. Whenever someone came and knocked at the door, our larger cat would start to growl and stare at the door from then on. She no longer does this after we moved. We had a couple of other mildly strange things that happened in context with that apartment as well.
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85. Haunted woods
When I was a teenager I was big into skateboarding and building ramps and shit. There was a neighborhood being built behind mine and I’d go over there on the weekends and get scrap wood and bring it back to my house. You had to go through a little bit of woods and cross a creek to get there. I went one day by myself and when I crossed the creek and started walking through the woods to the construction site I could hear a man talking.
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I stood still to try to hear what he was saying. It was getting louder as if he was coming through the woods towards me and I finally heard what he was saying and he made a little jingle singing “I’m gonna get you”. I couldn’t hear any leaves crunching and I never saw anyone. I ran like hell and was slipping while I was trying to climb up the muddy bank in the creek. I don’t believe in ghosts or anything but that’s one thing that’s stuck with me that I can’t explain.
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86. A lucky escape
My grandmother told me this story a few years ago, and I still get chills when I think about it. She was living in Louisiana with my step-grandfather, Bill, in a small apartment complex. One day, a nicely dressed man came to the door and told her other tenants were having trouble with the A/C units, so he was inspecting them. She opened the door to let him in when Bill and his sister came around the corner. The repairman immediately stepped back outside and told them he would come back later when they didn’t have company.
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Several hours later, my grandmother heard sirens outside. When she went to find out what happened, someone told her a lady had been murdered in her apartment and the killer got away. Months later, my grandmother was sitting in her room watching TV when a special report came on about Ted Bundy. When his face came on, she immediately recognized him as the A/C repairman.
- Credit: AP
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87. A spectre
When my son was a baby, from newborn to 8 months old, we lived in a small apartment in an old building. He must have been about 7 months old or so when this happened. In the past year we had lived there, I had woken up to the sight of a human shaped transparent white … thing… standing at the end of the bed, and then it would drift away toward the wall as soon as it “realized” I was awake. I assume.
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All these times I see it, I don’t want to make a big deal because pregnant women are crazy and have crazy dreams, etc. Same with sleep-deprived new parents. Until one night, I wake up to my son cooing, and he’s pointing at the white figure.
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88. The man in white
It was in the winter of 2007, and my friends and I would get together every Tuesday to go to Buffalo Wild Wings for their specials. I drove a van at the time, so, of course, it was my job to shuttle everyone around. I had just picked up my friend, and was pulling out of his driveway when I noticed someone standing in the middle of the street at the end of his road. It was already dark out, but there was a streetlight over top of him. I figured at first it was someone out for an evening walk, but as we start to get closer, we notice that the person is just standing there, staring blankly down the road in our direction.
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I slowed down as I was pulling up next to him and noticed that it was an old man dressed in all white. I’m stopped next to him at the stop sign, and we were about to roll down the window to ask if he needed help, when he slowly turned and began walking towards my van without saying a word and still just blankly staring. At this point I sped off, my friend and I both screaming. As I was driving away, I looked in my mirror, and the old man was still just walking slowly after my van. A few weeks later, a different friend, one not part of the Buffalo Wild Wings group and not likely to hear my story, was telling me about the weird car ride he had the night before. As he was driving home from class one night, he almost ran into an old man in white standing in the middle of the road.
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89. The bathroom ghost
A year ago my friend and I were living in the house his parents had been renting out. The previous people living there had just moved out earlier that week and the house had zero furniture and stuff other than a fridge. We had moved a TV into the living room and were both sleeping in that room and the only other room with anything in it was the master bathroom which had all our toothbrushes, soap, etc. in it. I’m always up late and I would always think I heard stuff but usually just thought I was hearing things but one night we were both awake and heard a loud bang from the bathroom in the master bedroom. We both looked at each other and went to look at what had made the noise.
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The door to the bathroom was open which wasn’t a big deal because one of us probably had left it open, but all our toiletries were all over the place on the floor and the door to the walk-in closet was open and neither of us had been in there at all. None of the other doors in the house were opened and nothing bigger than that happened since but I still wonder what the hell happened that night.
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90. Back from the dead
I work in an old folks home at night. It’s usually pretty calm since most of the residents go to sleep early in the night, and then it’s just answering the alarm phones. Every resident has an alarm they can press if they need help with anything. Usually it’s just going to the bathroom but now and then someone falls over or something. A few weeks ago when I got to work they told me one of the ladies there had died during the evening, which happens now and then since the residents are old and sick. She was still in her room since it was getting late, but they locked the door so none of the other residents wandered in there. Her apartment number was 18, which is on the second floor.
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So later that night, around 3 am, my coworker (we’re always two people working) was off doing laundry so I was alone in the staff room watching TV. My alarm phone rings and I see it’s number 18. I do a double take and recheck it, but it’s definitely number 18. I just pretended like I didn’t see it, no f***ing way I’m answering that. I know it was probably a glitch or something but I did not go near her door until the funeral home retrieved her body. I never told my coworker either.
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91. Telephone psychic
I work in a call center. About two weeks ago I got a man on the phone looking for an address related to the business. The first thing he tells me is that he was born blind, something that went wrong during his birth, but that he was psychic. I proceeded to roll my eyes, and went on with the call. We chatted a bit, and he talked a bit more about some random things, and then he said, “I’m a Gemini. Are you a Gemini?” Indulging him, I said, “Nope, I’m a Libra”, which is true. Then he said, “Oh silly me, of course. Your birthday is the 10th of October. That’s on a Friday this year you know.”
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The 10th of October is indeed my birthday. I didn’t say a damn thing for about 10 seconds. He only knew my first name and that I’m a Libra. This was about 2 minutes into the call. I struggled with wanting to hang up on him or ask him more questions about my future. I was pretty freaked out.
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92. The ghostly babysitter
So when I was a wee little lad, my mother used to rock me to sleep on a hammock because that was the quickest way to get me to fall asleep. One night while she was alone in the house with rocking me to sleep on the hammock, she was tired and accidentally fell asleep on the floor while rocking the hammock back and forth. she then had a brief dream in which she saw her elder sister, my aunt, who passed away years before I was born.
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My aunt supposedly walked up to her sat down in the dream, comforting and telling my mom to go to sleep because she can take over the hammock rocking for my mom. My mom said she immediately woke the f*** up and saw the hammock rocking back and forth on its own as if she never stopped rocking it the whole time.
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93. Their guardian angel
Buddy of mine lost his wife when she was serving in Iraq, she was in a convoy and it was attacked, she was killed but they got her body back and home. During the fight she fired two full magazines but the third had only two rounds in it, and one in the chamber before she was killed. So he was left alone with their three year old.
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They live in a low population area and one day a rabid dog came out of some trees and charged him and his boy when they were sitting on the back porch. He grabbed his son and tried to shield him when they heard three shots fire from a rifle just a couple feet away and the dog fell dead feet from them. When he got up to see who it was, there was noone. He did find the shell casings, three 5.56 cases. He didn’t own an AR or any rifles, just a shotgun.
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94. The made man upstairs
So, a buddy of mine and his wife and kids live in Santa Monica. They are a typical friendly couple and they lived below a nice elderly couple. No kids or grandkids, but very friendly and my buddy would go over and visit with them every once in a while. The kids became very friendly with them as well and become so familiar that they became surrogate grandparents to the kids.
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Anyways, my buddy and his wife and kids go on a bike ride in Santa Monica one afternoon and they come home and their apartment is SWARMING with cops and FBI guys. I mean, everywhere. My buddy has no idea what’s going on. Goes up to one of the cops to see what’s going on and to see if they can get back into their home and finds out that the sweet old couple that lived upstairs was Whitey Bulger and his girlfriend.
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95. The haunted stall
When I was in first grade, I remember having a friend who asked me to go with him to the restroom during recess. I waited for him outside. As I waited, I heard a scream coming from the restroom, a scream that til this day I can’t get out of my head. He ran outside crying and threw himself on the floor. I asked him what was wrong, he said he saw a hand falling from the roof, into his stall, said there was blood everywhere.
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He then kept saying, “a man up there, a man up there!”. Teacher and staff came to the restroom after hearing his cries and screams. They went inside, and it was empty, nothing there. Asked me if I had seen anything, and I hadn’t. no one had gone in with him, the restroom was empty. He was taken away by the nurse. It wasn’t until later that I realised that he might have seen some kind of ghost. To this day I wonder if anything happened in that restroom in the past.
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96. A disturbing evening
This happened about five years ago when my girlfriend and I had first moved in together. It was a nice little one bedroom apartment with a little bathroom that was connected to the bedroom. It was both of our first times living away from our parents so we were light on the furnishings. We had one mattress that lay in the corner of the room and a cheap lamp we got from a garage sale at the other. I was on my laptop, as a normally was before going to bed, and my girlfriend was sewing some sequins onto a shirt for some project she was doing.
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She decided it was time for bed so she got up, turned off the light, and laid back in bed. She cuddled up to my arm as I was browsing the internet and then out of the bathroom I hear “Babe! Can you bring me toilet paper?” I literally shot up from my bed dropping the laptop and ran and turned the light on to find nothing in the bed. I was so shocked/scared that I pretty much broke down right there and then. To this day we sleep with Christmas lights on in the room.
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97. The lost twin
My sister has this new friend that apparently has abilities to see ‘things’. You would say like a psychic. She can see people who tag along with you, like loved ones or spirits or what have you. I guess one day they were talking about it and my sister was like, “well, use me as a test dummy: what do you see?” Her friend started telling her stuff. The creepiest thing she said is that there is always a little boy, with blonde hair and blue eyes, maybe about 2 or 3 that follows my sister around all the time.
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I have a 3 year old niece with blonde hair and blue eyes. And something that not many people know is that she was supposed to be a twin but the other baby died in the womb. It definitely gave me cold chills but I think it makes my sister feel better.
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98. A friendly ghost
So one night when we were living in Salem, MA my mother was reading me a bedtime story when I stopped her. I told her that the man said everything was going to be fine. She had no idea what I was talking about and asked me about the man. “The man behind you, his hand is on your shoulder and he has a cat on his arm. He says everything will be fine.” She was a little bit freaked out at the time but figured I was just talking some little kid crazy s***.
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She said later it hit her and she realized I was talking about my uncle. My uncle died a few months before I was born after being sick for a long time. Obviously I had never seen the man before and hadn’t been told any stories at this point. My uncle (dad’s brother) was very close with my mother and also happened to have a traditional tattoo of a panther on his forearm. Apparently this all happened at a time where my parents were going through a lot of financial issues and were pretty stressed. I’m also named after my uncle and my parents say it’s eerie how close I am to him in terms of personality. They’ve told me stories of him since and he really was a good man.
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99. The cursed spot
I have a brother 2 years older than me, let’s call him John. My parents told me that when he was a few months old, every night at 2/3am, John would wake up and point and the ceiling and start crying and screaming. This wouldn’t stop till he was 1 and a half years old, when he was moved into my grandmother’s room (she was staying with us to look after him).
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Anyway, while the problem seemed to go away, it came back when I was born and my parents put me in the same spot where my brother used to sleep. From what my mother told me, I would do the same thing John did, scream and cry, while pointing to the same spot. My dad decided to call in a priest to bless the house and the problem seemed to stop. We moved out of the house a few years later, and even now, I get the chills just thinking about it.
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100. Mystery caller
When my grandmother died in a car accident about 6-7 years ago, my mom’s home phone kept getting calls, about 3-4 times a week, give or take. But every time we’d pick up these calls it’d just be some very old jazz type music (probably from the 40 and 50s) playing softly. This was the same music my grandmother used to always be listening to around the house, I remember being around it all the time.
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No one would talk, it would just play the music for a couple minutes then disconnect. Was also an unknown number, and these calls only started a couple weeks after she passed and probably went on for a few months then randomly stopped.
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