I have never experienced something paranormal, and as someone who loves such stories, it’s a bummer. The closest I have come was when I was staying at my friend’s house after she lost her grandpa. She woke me up at night, claiming he was still sitting in his chair!
Obviously, there was nobody there when I went down to check. However, many people swear that they have had such spooky experiences. When a Redditor asked them to share, they didn’t hold back. Some of these might give you the heebie jeebies, so scroll down at your own risk!
More info: Reddit
#1
Mine is second hand. My step-mom and my dad used to work opposite shifts there for awhile. He was on nights, her on days.
They had a set of baby monitors from when my sister and I were babies. My dad said they could record short messages with them, and they would leave them out on the coffee table for the other to hear when they got home from their shift. This went on for a bit, then once their shifts lined up they put the monitors away in storage.
She died of cancer at a really young age, and my dad had just gotten back from the funeral and was home alone. He spent that night going through their things, packing some of her stuff away.
He said he had one of the baby monitors sitting out on the coffee table and it woke him up in the middle of the night with an old message going off on repeat that she had recorded. It said “I love you Mike, I love you Mike,” over and over.
My dad told me he just sat on the couch in the dark and listened to her message until the batteries died.
A couple of weeks later he had picked us kids up for the weekend. After my sister and I went inside he said he was sitting on the porch smoking, and a strong gust of wind blew and he said he could smell her perfume that she always wore.
It scared me hearing those stories as a kid, but now I can see the beauty and peace in those experiences.
Image source: anon, Kateryna Hliznitsova
#2
Have posted this before, but:
When I was a kid, my brother and I would get stuck with babysitting the neighbors kid; his name was Alex. Alex was really fond of my lego set that I had in the corner of my room–facing the window, he would play for hours (staying preoccupied) while my brother and I would play videogames in the living room.
So one night, when I fell asleep on the couch (while babysitting), my brother came to me and said, “Alex is under your bed and shaking..” I asked, “What’s wrong with him?” My brother told me to follow him into the room and try to talk him back out from under the bed.
I go inside to find him on the verge of tears as he was trembling profusely under my bed. I asked Alex, “What’s wrong? Why are you under there?” Alex whimpered, “It…” while looking at the my sliding closet. As I walked toward the bed in order to help him out, he ran; he ran all the way back over to his house and waited on his front steps until his parents got home.
Now, my parents were out to dinner with his, and he explained the whole story in detail to both his parents and mine; his explanation sent shivers down my spine when my brother and I left the house to meet up with his parents and find out what happened.
My mom told me me that Alex was playing with my legos and hear a slight murmur from my closet, something that resembled a faint vocalization of, “come here.” He said that he looked behind him and noticed the closet had a slight opening with light peering in from my lamp. He stared at the crack until he saw an eyelid open. He told us that there was a man in my closet. Alex then hid under my bed after he gave out a slight yelp (which attracted my brothers attention).
My family rushes back into my house and into my room. In horror, we find my closet door rocked open. My window had been left open, when it was previously closed, and a few things knocked over which had not been touched previously.
We still don’t know what force we were reckoning after that evening. Thank god nothing more severe happened.
Image source: nidenikolev, Getty Images
#3
I was running on the trails at the Nathan Hale Homestead (18th century farmhouse and property of a Revolutionary War hero) in CT, which is only about a ten minute drive from my grandmother’s lake house. I could not find a map of the trails anywhere online and there didn’t seem to be any signage at the place: just a bunch of random mountain bike trails in the woods. I was only going to run 4 miles, so I estimated that I would run for about 30 minutes, using my watch to keep myself on track.
So I ran around the trails for a while and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. It was about 9:00 on a Monday morning and the only sounds were the distant hums of Route 31, birds chirping, and the occasional squirrel or deer that scampered off whenever I came near. The trails seemed to wind around a lot and, if not for my better-than-average directional skills (humble brag), I could have easily gotten lost.
About 20 minutes in, I saw something strange about 50 meters off: a finely polished, light-colored wooden coffin. I was a little weirded out to say the least and waited until I got closer for a better look. I rounded a corner where several old tree stumps blocked my view, only to find that the coffin had disappeared. Where it should have been was a clump of ferns. Odd.
I turned around shortly thereafter and made my way back to my car. I was maybe a half-mile out when I heard a very distinctive knocking on a nearby tree to the rhythm of “Shave and a Haircut”: Tok tok t-tok tok, except no “Two Bits”. I was a little spooked but chalked it up to be a woodpecker or something. However, not 30 seconds later, there it was on a completely different tree up ahead somewhere: *Tok tok t-tok tok*. I picked up the pace.
The trail widened a little and I could see way ahead the entrance to the parking lot where my car was. There it was again, on a tree seemingly right next to me. *Tok tok t-tok tok*. I truly started freaking out and started to book it back to the lot. I was nearing the opening when time seemed to slow down. All of a sudden it felt like the temperature dropped about 20 degrees, the birds stopped singing, and my simple Timex watch started to malfunction, making all sorts of beeping noises and the numbers glitching on the screen. The beat sounded impossibly loud this time, like it was hacked into every surrounding tree with a hand-axe: **TOK TOK T-TOK TOK**. An overwhelming sense of dread washed over me as I anticipated hearing the “Two Bits” refrain and perhaps worse…
I burst into the parking lot and everything went back to normal. The temperature was back in the mid-70s and birds were chirping away. I looked at my watch, only to discover that it had gone completely blank. I stood there and stared at it until it flashed *12:00:00 Monday 1.01* (January 1); my watch had reset itself; it had never done this before. I got into the car and started the engine. The clock on the radio display read **12:00**. That couldn’t be right: it should have been around 9:30 or 9:45 at the latest. I put ‘er in reverse and backed up to where I could clearly make my way out to the main road.
However, as I was about to throw the car into drive as it sat there, I heard a sharp rapping sound on the back window, like someone hitting it with their knuckles. **TOK TOK**. There was no one else in the parking lot when I had finished my run, no cars, no nothing. I didn’t dare look back and hightailed it back to my grandmother’s house. I have no idea what could have caused this series of events and still cannot explain it to this day.
Image source: PM_ME_YOUR_MILE_PR, Angel Barnes
I don’t know about you, but I love a good horror story that keeps me on edge. It’s funn how despite it being scary, many people are fascinated by it at the same time. To understand their psyche about this, Bored Panda got in touch with Eden Lobo, a counselor and psychology professor. She claimed that people love these stories as they give them a safe adrenaline rush.
“On a deeper level, these stories tap into our natural survival instincts. Evolution taught our ancestors to be suspicious of every shadow and rustling bush, just in case a predator was hiding there. Today, we don’t have many tigers to worry about, so we channel that ancient threat-detection mechanism into ghosts and monsters. Basically, ou brain practicing for danger without any real risk,” she added.
#4
I used to have this reoccurring dream where this black figure with no face would visit me and try to posses me. It would typically enter my being through my mouth and at that point I would have no control over my dream. It would tell me to do terrible things to people and it had a scratchy voice. The weirdest part that every time it would be inside me I physically would feel ill. I would wake up with the same feeling often times vomiting right away. The last time this happened must have been 3 years ago.
Image source: churrosricos, Getty Images
#5
About 2 Decembers ago, my fiancé was over my parent’s house with me. My parents had gone to a Christmas party and he was helping me set up the tree and decorate the house. All the stuff is in the attic and everyone has said the attic had a strange feeling about it.
So we are up in the attic and he mentions he feels like someone was watching us. I say “It’s probably just the cat” as I hand him boxes. We go downstair and we are unpacking the boxes when we heard a series of huge thuds. I say “the cat must have knocked something down” but my fiancé points out that my cat is on the couch asleep. It scared me and I go outside. At that moment, my parents pull up and my dad tells at me for being outside in the cold without a jacket.
My fiancé and I tell my parents we heard something and we were officially creeped out. My mom and fiancé decide to go to the room where the attic entrance is. Low and behold, a box that had been sitting far away from the stairs had fallen down the stairs.
Then there was the time my fiance and I were sleeping at my parent’s house. We were getting comfy and slowly dozing off. All of a sudden, right in my ear, I hear a demented, creepy voice say “sweet dreams” and a cackle. I sit up and grab my fiancé. I asked him if he heard that and he said “heard what?” I tell him I heard a creepy voice in my ear tell me sweet dreams. And he was like “Oh, I thought you meant that creepy laugh you just did”. But no one was in the room with us and I didn’t laugh.
Image source: YankeeDoodleShelly, miksturaproduction
#6
Not me, but a friend of mine told me about a dream she had years ago about a decrepit old man who was being chased by wolves. In the dream, he kept referring to himself in the third person as “Old Skin” (“Old Skin’s gotta get away from the wolves…”)
Eventually, the wolves caught up to him and started ripping him to pieces in front of her, and he kept narrating the events in a monotone voice “(Old Skin’s being eaten alive…Old Skin’s gonna go away…”)
She woke up feeling creeped out, but the weirdest part came when she started describing the dream to her brother. He stopped her mid-sentence and asked, “Was his name ‘Old Skin’? I had the EXACT SAME DREAM!”
I don’t know if that counts as paranormal, but it’s f*****g creepy.
Image source: eatelectricity, vladimircech
Our expert also elaborated that for some people, hope lies hidden behind the horror of paranormal experiences. “Even though ghosts are scary, the idea of them suggests that life doesn’t just end when we perish. For many, a world with spirits is much more interesting and meaningful than a purely clinical and scientific one,” she added.
She also stressed that we are fascinated by the paranormal because it suggests that the universe still holds secrets for us to uncover. Prof. Lobo believes that somewhere, it helps people deal with the grief of leaving this life behind. It gives them comfort that their souls, and those of their loved ones, carry on in some mysterious, unexplained way.
#7
(okay, not me, but my family).
My grandfather was a baaad man. Alcoholic, extremely violent, tried to k**l my grandmother in front of their kids. One of his less horrible acts was abandoning my grandmother with their six kids, all under the age of 12. Some of his kids maintained minimal contact with him. He lived about thirty or forty miles from my grandmother and the two kids who’d stayed in the area.
When he was in his 80s he was hospitalized and then passed away in the middle of the night. In the morning his oldest child, one of my aunts, went to the morgue to identify the body and fill out paperwork. On her way she stopped by my grandmother’s to break the news. When she came in my grandmother said “oh it’s a sad day. He died just past midnight, I imagine.” My grandmother had begun to show some signs of dementia or just basic old age and so the weird comments weren’t too out of character. And, my aunt assumed that the hospital one of her siblings had already called to tell their mother the news.
My aunt shook it off and drove to the morgue. When she saw the death certificate she was shocked to see the time of death listed as 12:10 A.M. On her way home she stopped back at my grandmother’s and asked her who had called her to tell her the news and asked why she said that she thought he’d died “just past midnight.” My grandmother said “he came to see me at 12:30 and we talked for a spell. He wanted to apologize for all he’d done to me and you kids. I think he made his peace and was able to move on, so I’m glad for that.” My grandmother than resumed humming and doing a jigsaw puzzle.
TL;DR: my grandmother knew her ex-husband had died and the approximate time of his death because his ghost visited her in the middle of the night.
EDIT: When to bed and then awoke to an immense set of comments, many relating similar experiences. I don’t have time to reply to all of them. But thanks for the comments. Many are very interesting.
#8
Late to the party… but here is mine..
I used to be in the military and the training camp bunk that we lived in was said to be haunted.
Occasionally, our stuff would go missing and reappear in weird places, like under our bed, or inside a bag that we had zipped up and stuff.. no big deal right? i mean human error and all. Then came the instance that freaked everyone out.
It was one night after lights out and my friend was on his phone texting his girlfriend. Most of us were drifting off to sleep, and were lying on our beds etc. suddenly, he heard the shuffling of feet from the corridor, so thinking that it was our sergeant, he quickly hid his phone under his pillow, rolled over on his side and pretended to sleep.
Till this day, what happens next chills me to the bone. While he pretended to sleep, he heard someone right behind him, at the other side of his bed going “Don’t worry, you can continue to pretend sleep.”
I would dismiss this as a figment of his imagination, except about five other people around him heard it as well, including me. creepier still, there was no one there, and it was the voice of a little girl that said it.
For reference, our training camp was in the middle of an island, and was set up away from the main admin blocks. The island has been closed by the government for army training purposes for the past 15 years so there were definitely no civilians around, let alone kids.
To make matters freakier, when we came back from our weekend home leave, there was a bunch of female hair on his bed, neatly bundled up, long and jet black. under his pillow was a note – “remember me?”.
Now as i said we were in the middle of a forest, in the middle of an island. And at that point in time, there were no female recruits / personnel on the island. Our bunks were locked up for the weekend and the duty sergeant had no idea that the incident happened. we never spoke about it after that night.
still chills me to the bone thinking about it.
EDIT: yes guys, I am from Singapore.. and as those of you guys who are from there would know, until recently, army camps in Singapore did not allow handphones with cameras… so no pictures.
Also, for those of you that say it may be a prank.. yes it very well may have been.. but if it were, it’d be one heck of a prank and i was really fooled bad.. the complexity of that prank would have been crazy and i applaud anyone that was able to pull that off.
That being said.. many Singaporean guys will tell you that the camp (Tekong) is a place where a lot of paranormal stuff happens.. most guys that have been through that camp have either experienced something first hand, or know someone that has experienced it first hand.
Lastly, for those of you saying i fabricated the whole thing.. My job is not to convince you, i’m simply relating what the heck happened to me and my army buddies, believe what you will but i know what happened to me.
Image source: madrampager, Filip Andrejevic
#9
Growing up, my older brother had a computer program that he used to compose piano music on. I remember I was reading in the living room when I heard the most beautiful violin melody I have ever heard. I listened to the whole thing which was several minutes long. I walked down the hallway to compliment my brother on his masterpiece when I realized my brother was not using the computer, and I was home alone.
Image source: feeling_psily, Providence Doucet
While elaborating about such experiences, Prof. Lobo explained, “When people have a paranormal experience, it is usually the result of a glitch between the brain and the senses. Most of these encounters happen during transitional states, like the moments right before you fall asleep or just after you wake up.”
She stressed that during these times, the brain can briefly mix dream imagery with the real world. Apparently, in these moments, the brain can briefly “dream” while your eyes are open. Our expert believes that this leads to vivid sightings of “shadow people” or the feeling of being watched, which feels entirely real to the person experiencing it.
#10
Lived in an old two bedroom, three storey walkup for a time in my early 20s in Toronto. A few days after moving in my roommate Mike chides me in the morning for banging on the wall that separated our bedrooms and pacing back and forth across the apartment at night. We just agreed he must have been dreaming or it was sounds from other apartments as I had done no such thing. We agreed that it must have been nothing and left it at that but this became a regular nightly occurrence.
Shortly thereafter I started noticing at certain times in my own bedroom the cloying smell of cheap women’s perfurme mixed with a damp musty smell. Imagine an old person’s clothes left on a damp musty basement floor near a litterbox that wasn’t being changed often enough and you get the idea. What made it even weirder is that I would be filled with a sudden horrible sense of foreboding a few moments before the smell would begin.
Mike flaked out and left only 4 months into our 1 year lease which meant I was left footing the rent for the entire place until I could find another roommate. I had decided to try and sleep in his bedroom shortly after he moved to see if things would get better. The very first night I slept in his former room I had an incredibly detailed and realistic nightmare of myself standing in the dimly-lit bathroom of the apartment and cutting my own face with a large shard of glass while staring into the broken bathroom mirror (it was only broken in the dream)
Soon after that I started to hear the loud bangs at night and the flushing of the toilet in the bathroom. Several times the hot water in the bathtub turned on full blast in the middle of the night.
One of the freakier things that happened not too long before I moved is the time I was woken up by the TV blaring Poltergeist on CityTV at about 2 in the morning. At the time that channel would always play movies late at night but the fact that the one time my analog TV (turn a k**b to change the channel or the volume, pull a k**b to turn it on) turned on by itself at full blast was the time a movie like Poltergeist was playing.
Image source: anon, Moreno Matković
#11
When I was younger, I was sitting in my great grandmother’s living room. This house was known to have some issues in regards to paranormal activity. A lighter was casually sitting on the table (my mother smoked). The lighter literally flew across the room and went into the wall, sticking slightly out of it. This was a closed room with no wind or interference. My mother practically s**t her pants and the only time we ever visited with her was when she came to us. Have not been back to this day.
Image source: theBfZ, https://unsplash.com/photos/black-and-silver-jack-daniels-flip-lighter-yHDMYha45T0
#12
When I was in elementary school, I shared a queen size bed with my older sister and our family dog (a mutt that looked like a short haired Lassie) would sleep at the foot of our bed every night. When I was about 6 years old, I woke up one night around midnight and saw a dark figure standing at the foot of the bed. The figure was entirely in black without any eyes or a face. I tried to wake my sister up, but she rolled over to go back to sleep. My sister must have accidentally kicked the dog, because the dog woke up and raised her head and started growling at the figure at the foot of the bed. The growling then woke my sister up and she saw the figure and started screaming. When my parents came into the room and turned the light on, nothing was there.
To this day, both my sister and I are adamant that we saw a ghost or other demon in our room. We know we aren’t crazy because the dog saw it too.
Image source: KimJongFunk, photoangel
Finally, Prof. Lobo stated that our environment also plays a huge role in tricking our bodies. She elaborated that research has shown that low-frequency sounds we can’t hear, called infrasound, can actually cause the fluid in our eyes to vibrate. According to her, this is what creates ghostly shapes in our peripheral vision.
“Combined with cold spots caused by natural drafts, our brains, which hate random patterns, try to make sense of these physical sensations. We turn them into a story about a spirit or a haunting. So, most of the time, these eerie sensations, or a presence that we feel, are nothing but the environment playing a trick on us,” she concluded.
#13
Re-posting this from before. I generally don’t believe in ghosts but d**n I have no way to explain this.
EDIT: TL;DR: Had a ghost that would visit me on command.
Okay. I haven’t told anyone this story since I was a child, because when I told my cousins what was happening it scared them really bad and I got my second-only whooping with a belt by my Dad. As an adult I don’t mention it because…I just don’t know what it was and I don’t want other adults to think I’m nuts.
When I was in second grade I woke up one summer night, dead of night, to a woman floating through my window into my bedroom. Oddly, I wasn’t scared. I just sat up and asked “What are you doing here?” I remember she answered me, but oddly enough the next morning I couldn’t remember what she said or even what her voice sounded like. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. So next I said to her, in true 8-year old fashion, “Well, you better get going because my Dad might wake up and then he’ll be mad.” She slipped out of my already cracked open bedroom door and I went back to sleep.
Sounds like sleep paralysis right? Wrong. The next day I was really excited that I had my own fairy godmother and I named her Crystal. And I thought in my head – Please come back! Come back and wake me up at dawn so we can talk!
I s**t you not, the next morning, just as it was getting light outside, I hear someone whispering my name. I realized that this s**t was real, and she was a ghost, and I froze. I stayed as still as I could, not even able to breathe, and just prayed as hard as I could ‘Go away go away go away.” I could FEEL her right by my head. As I’m typing this tears are coming to my eyes.
Okay, happened once, coincidence, right? Nope. Every time I would get brave and say out loud to her, before going to bed in my room, “Okay, come this time I swear I won’t get scared.” She would come, whispering my name, and I would almost s**t my pants in fear and never open my eyes.
So at this point I’m thinking, still could be night terrors, right? I mean, our eyes have receptors sensitive to light that wake us up, thus causing me to wake up at dawn and hallucinate this s**t.
Here’s where s**t gets real. Next summer I tell a friend that this is going on while we were camping together. She doesn’t believe me, says to me, okay, ask her to come tonight. We’re sleeping in same tent and my friend wants to see for herself. So I do. And at dawn, I hear her, calling my name AND MY FRIEND’S NAME. We don’t move, she leaves, and we both sit up and my FRIEND HEARD HER TOO. She freaks out, tells her parents later that day sobbing, I get in trouble for scaring the s**t out of kids with ghost stories.
Later that summer I told my cousin this story, and before that night, she freaks out, tells her Mom, and I get my a*s beat for telling ghost stories.
I got pissed about said beating, and angrily said out loud – I got in trouble because of you, and I never want to see you ever again!
And I haven’t. Ever.
Thank f*****g god. And I just don’t think about it anymore, and never when I’m alone at night.
EDIT: So, decided to try tonight to ‘summon’ my little ghost friend. Mostly ’cause I’ve had a few. Probably won’t end up being anything (I’ve tried before). Will update tomorrow am. :)
EDIT 2: Holy f**k my inbox – and my highest rated comment is about a ghost?! Sorry to disappoint Reddit – but nothing. No ghost. But because of you I STILL woke at dawn paranoid as f**k and couldn’t sleep.
Image source: anon, Joylynn Goh
#14
When I was a kid, about 7-8 years old, I was on my way to the park. It was in the middle of day in the middle of summer, but as I open the gate I freeze, as I hear a very creepy voice whisper my name in the distance. I look around. No one within sight, and I live in the middle of town (small town). Then I hear it again, but this time closer. Still frozen on the spot, still scouting for the source of the voice. Then, I hear it agin, but this time – *RIGHT* in front of my face. I immideately unfreeze, sprint back inside, and hide under my desk, shaking like crazy. I never went outside that day.
Image source: anon, Caleb Woods
#15
This happened when I was 17:
When I was still living at my childhood home I was sneaking out late at night to meet some friends. I went through the back door of the house and as I turned to face the door I could just *feel*** somebody watching me. I thought I was busted. I turned to look at who had caught me, and saw a totally monochrome figure. The hair was completely black, like blacker than black. Her face was like a static washed over white/grey and she was wearing a dress that was in between the 2 colors. No facial features. Just the silhouette of a young girl facing me. I reached for the door as fast as I could and when I went to shut it it closed very quickly on me. I bolted through my yard and onto the street and couldn’t shake the feeling I was being followed. I stayed at my friends that night.
Soon after this happened I was up late with my mom watching a movie. My dad had just passed away. We finish our movie up and say goodnight after turning the tv, stereo receiver, and dvd player(all with their own remotes). After a short amount of time in bed, I am jarred awake by the sound of static with the speakers cranked up and the tv on with no input.
my mom and I meet in the hallway, surprised to see that we had both been awoken to an empty house.
A few years ago, when I was 23ish and graduated from College I finally told my family about the first occurrence. before I am able to finish my description of the ghost, she finishes for me. telling me that her and her friend used to see a little girl in our backyard playing in a sundress. She said that she looked maybe 12.
Our neighbor who was the original owner shared a story with us about the family that originally bought the house after it was built. It was a Young family whose daughter passed away from Leukemia. She would have been about the right age.
Looking back, the girl wasn’t scary or harmful.. my sister had the same impression. To this day I believe what we saw and haven’t seen anything like it ever since.
Edit: I also want to say that my dog used to scare the c**p out of me because he would randomly stare down the hallway to my sisters room and he would growl with his hair on end. It would always freak me out and I never connected the two until some time after seeing the ghost or whatever it may have been.
Image source: tof-corey, edoardzenadze
While experts might claim that it’s just the brain or the environment that’s playing a trick on us, there’s no escaping how terrified we can feel in such situations. Anyway, dear readers, I hope you can survive this creepy list. Don’t forget to upvote the story you enjoyed the most. Also, if you have some paranormal stories to share, feel free to do so in the comments below!
#16
When I was growing up my family moved to a cul-de-sac when I was around 8 and my brother was in the ballpark of 9. We immediately befriended two girls who lived next door to us who were basically our exact same age and we hung out with them every day. We would frequently go down to a bike path located behind the circle of houses that occupied our street to ride around on our skateboards, walk to the nearby shopping center it eventually led to (it was very long), and basically just hang out. The bike path went through the woods and went in both directions for a long time and we would often wander into the woods and play in the creek and catch crawfish and frogs and all that huckleberry finn kind of stuff. Well the first or second week we lived there my brother and I and these two girls were playing around in the creek a good ways down from our house and we went exploring into a short sewage pipe. It was barely 20 feet in total and you could easily see both ends, which drained into a collection of large rocks. Well after we had sufficiently crawled around in this sketchy rainwater runoff pipe, we started climbing up the rocks to leave. My brother noticed something in the rocks and picked it up to discover that it was a small, wallet-sized, and relatively recent portrait of himself that had been taken at our school for the yearbook the prior year. It had signs of aging and water damage, and seemed to have been there for a while. I think our initial reaction was to laugh at my brother for looking goofy or something, but looking back I can’t believe I didn’t see how sinister it seemed. Kept going back for a long time and it was not the last creepy thing to happen on that bike path or in that neighborhood.
EDIT: I have a few people asking for more stories from the path, so here is another:
We continued to hang out on the same bike path on a regular basis for the next two years or so. It would have a lot of snakes during the summer/spring months and we would run over alot of them when we were riding our bikes down there, which would scare the s**t out of us. The snakes were usually garden snakes, or some such similar harmless snake. One time, with the same group of people (my brother and these two girls) I ran over a HUGE black snake (at least 4 feet long). It writhed around in pain and started lunging defensively at us, which we decided to think was dangerous because we were kids looking for a thrill. I’m definitely not proud of this, and I regret it now, but we proceeded to chase the snake down the bike path and eventually cornered against a tree. My brother ended up throwing a stone, k*****g the snake. We poked it a while and my brother was actually ballsy enough to pick it up and try and freak us out with it and all that childish stuff. We ended up getting called into dinner at some point and said we would meet up after and head up to the local shopping center after we were done eating. When we reconvened, we we started to head back down the bike path. When we got a little ways down, we noticed something ahead of us barely 3 feet off the paved path. It was a cross made of bound together sticks with the snake draped over the horizontal arms of the cross. We stared at it for a long time, or at least it seemed like a while, without saying much. A runner eventually came and tore it down hastily, reprimanding us and calling us delinquents and mumbling about blasphemy. At this point we started getting cautious about going down there at night.
Image source: yearightt
#17
Not creepy but kind of cool. My mother split and transplanted a rosebush from my grandfathers farm about 40 years ago. It took but never bloomed. At that point she only kept it because it grew into the fence nicely and kept us kids from climbing it. My grandfather died about 5 years after she transplanted it and that spring it bloomed red roses. A few years after that my grandmother died and the spring after it bloomed white roses. These are the only two years it has ever bloomed.
Image source: TheTrueLordHumungous, Yellow 3423
#18
I lived in a haunted apartment. It was two rooms, but one of the rooms was locked, and I didn’t have the key. So I only had one small room as kitchen, dining room and bedroom, and a screened in porch.There were two especially freaky events. One night, my girlfriend slept over, and she woke up in the middle of the night and said she saw the bathroom door open and a shadowy figure standing in the bathroom, staring at her. The bathroom was right across from the locked room. Another time, I was jerked awake by the fire alarm going off, just *blaring*, but when I went to unplug it the alarm stopped and no other alarm in the building was going off.
A lot of the things that happened *could have* been just my neighbors, but the way they happened was, well, weird. I would hear knocking – it sounded like someone tapping a spoon on a counter – coming from the downstairs apartment. It could have been my neighbor, but I’m not sure why she would do that every couple of minutes for hours on end, or in the middle of the night. I would also hear knocking on the walls, it sounded like someone tapping their way up the wall, like they were looking for a stud. I would also hear this weird moaning/howling that I couldn’t trace the source of, again, could have been a neighbor’s dog, but it didn’t sound like it was coming from her apartment. The apartment across from me had three tenants in a year, I think because it was just as or more haunted than mine.
I had, I think, a unique way of coping – I named the ghost Pete, after a previous tenant’s mail I would get from time to time, and I tried talking to him, basically treating him like a roommate I wasn’t friends with. My girlfriend was much more freaked out by the situation than me and basically stopped coming over after a few months, so I wasn’t there much anyway. When I was, I felt that talking to Pete made the atmosphere of the whole place much more friendly. I also left out a sheet of paper with “Pete’s Notes” written on it, and told him if he had any problems, just write them down.
I still don’t know if I quite believe in ghosts, though I find the supernatural fascinating, but that experience did push me closer to the “science doesn’t know everything about the universe” camp.
Image source: FloobLord, حامد طه
#19
Just told this story to a coworker:
Was around 7 years old and it was near the holidays. The house I grew up in has a downstairs and a basement. So I left my pillow downstairs after a day long movie binge and went to grab it later that evening.
Grab the pillow and look up, see a man on the other side of the room dressed to the nines just looking around paying no attention to me. Weird thing was he was entirely grey. Head-to-toe, skin color and everything, grey.
I’m staring, jaw wide open, completely petrified with fright. He looks up at me, notices I’m able to see him, and drops his jaw lower than humanly normal almost as if he was screaming at me, but without sound. He then ran through the wall and disappeared .
I wasn’t able to go downstairs if the lights were off until I was a teenager.
#20
When I was around 12 my mother had to go out of town for a bit and she left me home alone for a few days (we lived close to relatives so it wasn’t a big deal back then). She refused to give me a mobile phone because she figured she could just call me on the landline if anything came up.
She told me the date when she’d be back and that was that.
The date arrives and I hear my mom knocking on the door downstairs, calling my name. My dog (who loved her) got excited when she heard her voice and ran down ahead to greet her. She got to the door, freaked the hell out and ran back upstairs to me.
I refused to go down and open the door. The phone started ringing and the knocking stopped. I picked up the phone to hear my mom say, “Hey, I’m sorry, I have to stay one more day here. I’ll head home tomorrow.”
Tl;dr – Someone/something pretended to be my mom. Didn’t fool the dog.
EDIT: Syntax.
Image source: rowhesr, pvproductions
#21
This didn’t happen to me, but it happened to my dad. We used to live in a home that was part of the Underground Railroad. It a few hidden crawl spaces around the house that was being used a storage in the present. While we lived there my brother started sleep walking and talking. One night while my parents were sleeping they heard my little brother scream from my bedroom even though he slept downstairs. My dad ran up there but my bedroom door was closed like something was blocking it, so he kicked the door open. But when he kicked it open, a shadow ran past him and my room was ice cold. My brother was laying on my bed (sound asleep) pointing at the closet screaming “get her daddy, get her!” My dad looked but saw nothing but darkness, quickly picked up my brother who was stiff as a bored, covered in sweat, and ran out. When my brother finally woke up that morning he remembered nothing that happened. After we moved out he stopped sleep walking.
Image source: Ray_ofsunshine, wirestock
#22
When I was growing up, I was tight with the Daughter of my Dad’s cousin. So My 2nd cousin I suppose. Her name was Lisa. We grew much closer as teenagers. Too close really. Anyway, we wised up a little and went our separate ways when it was time for College.
A few years passed and I had moved on. One night I got up to take a p**s. Didnt bother to turn on the lights. I was washing my hands and glanced in the mirror. There she was. Lisa was standing in the doorway behind me. I heard the echo of her voice. She told me that she still loved me and always would. She then turned and walked out of sight. I stood holding onto the sink for a moment. My heart pounding in my chest. I calmed myself down and decided it had just be a dream. I tried to go back to bed. My pillow smelled like her. She could have been in the room seconds ago. I lay back down and as I drifted off to sleep I felt her warm familiar presence against my back.
The next morning the was no sign of her. No scent, no indent in the covers. I wrote it off as a dream. I got a call from my Mom later that day. She told me Lisa had died a few days earlier. She had been k****d by her boyfriend. He got drunk and angry and he hit her and that was that. I guess she stopped by to see me one last time. To say goodbye before she moved on.
Here’s to you Lisa! 20 years later and your still the only woman I ever truly loved.
Image source: JadeLegume, pvproductions
#23
I have tons of stories especially since I attended a 140+ year old Native American boarding school. A lot them happened to other people. But I only had one personal experience. When I was maybe 8 years old I had a puppy that stayed outside (this is the rez. All dogs are outside dogs). While I was asleep one night I heard the pup crying and I tried to get up to see what was going on. But I couldn’t. I felt like there was two huge hands holding me down by the shoulder. I could move my legs but not my upper half. I opened my eyes but saw nothing. I started lose my breath because as I was pushing up I was choking myself. My puppy got louder and louder. Then it all stopped. I took a big gasp as I popped up and ran to the front door. I opened it up to see my puppy dead on the porch. No blood, no other animals. I went to bed and the next morning we noticed two eye looking goggle marks high up on the door. We thought it was dirt but it never could come off. This was on the reservation in middle of nowhere so skinwalker was a possibility. Otherwise, I really don’t know.
Image source: punyturtle, Austin Kirk
#24
When I was a kid, I lived in a house that was haunted with all sorts of paranormal beings.
One of my first memories was actually an experience with one of these beings.
I was about 4 years old, standing in the entryway in our house, facing the door. I stop and notice there are two people standing in front of the door, staring at me. One was a tall, middle-aged man, dressed in an black 1900s-era suit. The other was a boy, wearing what I figure now was a red baseball uniform.
The boy looked up at the man and said, “Why is he staring at us?” And the man replied, “It’s okay. He can’t see us.”
I still remember that experience clear as day, almost 14 years later.
We also had multiple incidents of poltergeist activity. Stuff like baskets literally flying 10 ft. off the wall and aimed at me and my family, pictures falling daily, etc.
My sister also used to see priests and some of our deceased relatives from her crib.
TL;DR: I lived in a haunted house.
Image source: musicman0326, Helena Lopes
#25
My friend’s aunts were playing with a Ouija board when they were in high school. They asked it who their little brother would marry and the board spelled Julie James then the lights shut off. 18 years later their little brother married Julie James.
Image source: arenae26, Colton Sturgeon
#26
We used to live in a battered women’s and children’s shelter when I was young, because my father was looking for us(ugly divorce, Alabama gave him custody, mom took us to WA). One night, I looked in the mirror, and saw a hairy demon looking back at me. I screamed and cried and ran to get my mom who assured me it was a normal mirror. But that night, a kind looking man, that I can only describe as a ghost, appeared at the end of my bed. He was there all night, but gone when I woke up in the morning. Then, the next night, and the next night. He was there every night for 4 months. We never talked, he never moved. Just stood guard.
Then, one night he woke me up from my sleep, and I’ll never forget how surprised I was, because I’d never seen him move or talk. He said, “He’s coming. Get out now.” So we packed up the car and left to a hotel for the night. The next morning, we went back to find out someone had broken in and gone room to room looking for someone.
I never saw him again after that.
Image source: CharlieBaumhauser
#27
I was watching TV one night when I was twelve. The TV kept turning off by itself. It was the late seventies and it had a push/pull on off switch. It happened three times and I never could figure out how or why. I’ve had other things happen, but that was the most unexplainable. Everytime I post it I get down voted.
Image source: Riccardo42, Елизавета Крылова
#28
Oh I have so many stories I wish I could share! But the one that I will always remember…one typical morning, my husband got up and went to work. When he has to get up early, our great dane would get on the bed and sleep with me for the rest of the morning. Great Danes are huge as everyone knows. When she would stand up on the mattress, it would shake the whole bed and it felt just like 150 pound adult standing on the mattress. This one morning she stood up, circled around. I guessed couldn’t get comfortable so she jumped off the bed with a huge thud as you would expect from a dog her size. I heard her walk down the hallway (we had squeaky floors). I was kind of awake but had my eyes closed. I wasn’t ready to get up so I rolled over only to feel her still laying there fast asleep, even snoring a little. I had no idea who or what was standing on the bed and had jumped off. I was laying there kind of freaked out and wide awake. Then I heard a loud smack on my husband’sside of the bed. Just like someone smacking the palm of their hand on a wall. Then I heard another thud at the foot of the bed followed by what sounded like little footsteps running down the hallway. It ended with a rustle of a plastic bag that was sitting in the dining room. My dog immediately woke up and popped her head up and started growling. Then she fell back asleep…thanks a lot Lily. By this time I’m freaked out, but wondering, maybe there was no work that day and my husband was sent home early. I didn’t want to move, so I called his name. No response. I grabbed my phone and called him from under the sheets. I asked if he was home. He was still at work. He asked of everything was ok and I said the house is creeping me out again. He said he wanted to tell me some but didn’t want to freak me out. I wanted him to tell me. He told me that morning, he sitting in the chair in the dining room, at the end of the hallway. He was bent over tying his shoes when he heard what sounded like little footsteps running down the hallway toward him, at his face since he was bent over. He said he felt a breeze hit his face and immediately after he heard what sounded like someone stepping on a plastic bag. The same one at the end of the hallway. He said he saw it move. He had forgotten his lunch because he said he booked it out the door right after it happened. ….oh yeah….thanks for leaving me lol. That weirded me out so bad.
Image source: sauerpatchkid, gpthree
#29
This one is short and sweet.
I was 23 at the time, living about 7-8 hours away from my family while doing university. One night I abruptly woke up in the middle of the night from a force physically moving me off my bed, towards the foot of the bed. What was even more weird, I was already covered in sweat and felt like I was mid-anxiety attack. Needless to say I was extremely disturbed and had trouble sleeping the remainder of the night.
Fast forward to the morning, I finally dozed off, but get woken up to my phone ringing. On the other side is my Dad telling me that my Grandmother passed away last night.
After hearing that it is not something that scares me, in fact I find it rather soothing that possibly she was just coming to say goodbye and as a new spirit was unaware of how she could still affect me in the physical plane.
Image source: Cpear805, freepik
#30
My mother’s favorite animal was the hummingbird.
Last year, shortly after my she passed away, a hummingbird came right up and looked at me as I was on my way to my car to go to work. Like a foot away, and just checked me out for a while and flew off to do hummingbird things.
Once I got to my car, I broke down. Just sat there in the driver’s seat and cried. I’d like to think my mom was somehow checking up on me. I know it’s silly, but for that moment I felt like she wasn’t gone and she was still there watching over me.
Image source: Fauxrace, Zdeněk Macháček
#31
A few years back while I was sleeping I had a nightmare of an old lady that was attacking me. she looked like one of though typical horror movie old witches with accented wrinkles and what not. Anyways after that night I woke up to use the bathroom and on my way there my grandfather stopped me.
He told me to turn around so he could have a better look at my back, I would sleep without a shirt on and called my parents over to see a big hand print on the left side of my back as if someone slapped really hard and asked them if they were hitting me. Of course they weren’t and I assured my grandfather it wasn’t them.
Later that day I also noticed three scratch marks, very lightly, barley noticeable on my chest. To this day I have no idea what it was. By the way the mark cleared up after about three days.
Image source: ineedto_learn
#32
I grew up in a Victorian house built in 1887 so I’ve experienced some things, mostly explainable by drafty wooden floorboards or the heating system making noises. I can’t, however, explain what happened to me when I was about ten years old. I was bringing a snack back from the kitchen to the living room where my Mom and I were watching TV together. When I walked through the dining room I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and I froze.
We had these wood-turning salt and pepper shakers that you had to turn to crunch the sea salt to come out of. It was floating, in the air above the table, crunching salt onto the floor. I remember like it was yesterday.
Image source: BreakingBattier
#33
This creeped me out and I can’t explain it, but I can’t say it’s paranormal. Long story short: left my house for about half an hour one morning, locking the door with the same key I’d had for more than a year. Came back and found my key wouldn’t fit in the door. On closer inspection, turned out that my house key seemed to have vanished from my keyring and had been replaced by a completely different key that I’d never seen before. It was weird as f**k. Had to wait for my roommate to come home and let me back in. Neither of us could figure out what had happened. I’d been out in a supermarket with my keys in my jacket pocket. My keyring was very distinctive (a handmade thing I bought from a stall in Corsica years before) so doubt that anyone else would’ve had another one like it that could have been substituted for mine. I’m sure there’s an explanation somewhere – possibly in some detail that I have forgotten. Nevertheless, there you go!
Image source: anon
#34
When I was 11, my family moved to a very old house (built in the 1890s, I think) in a different state. The first night there, I didn’t have many of my things unpacked yet and the TV wasn’t hooked up, so I drag out my keyboard and start to play. As I’m playing some terrible song I learned in music class, a chill goes down my neck. I look over to the window on the other side of the room and see my reflection — and an old woman standing over me, her hands clasped in front of her. I booked it downstairs, screaming to my mom, but of course it was dismissed since I was a dumb kid.
Over the 7 years I lived in that house, I saw her three more times: once on the stairs, slowly descending and staring at me, and twice in the spare room catty-corner to mine, hiding in a rack of clothes in the corner. Every single night, I would hear the threshold creak, then footsteps going around my bed, to the dressing room (it was, once again, an old house, so there was a tiny dressing room attached to the main room), and then back out. A few nights I woke up to a cold breath on my face.
Come to find out a woman died in that room in the 1960s of some sort of illness, but the room she usually stayed in was mine. I don’t really believe in ghosts anymore, but d**n if I can’t explain the lady in that house.
Image source: VorpalSingularity
#35
In 1985 we moved in with my grandma because grandpa just died, and she couldn’t care for the property herself.
Anyway, grandpa would keep his watch on the night stand every night when he went to sleep. After he died, grandma put it in the drawer of the table. His watch would routinely (once a week?) show up on top of the stand in the morning, right where he would put it.
Image source: Ralph-Hinkley
#36
When I was about 16 years old I encountered something that still bugs me to this day. I woke up around 6AM on a normal week day and went downstairs to get ready to school. No one else in my family had woken up at this point. I got in the shower, still sleepy and could barely hold my eyes open. After a few minutes of showering someone tried to get it and I told who ever it was that I was in the shower. The ‘person’ then proceeded to aggressively open the door, I saw the door handle going up and down like crazy and he/she/whatever knocked on the door harder and harder. And then it suddenly stopped.
Didn’t think that much about it, but when I got out of the shower I realized that nobody was up yet. I proceeded with eating breakfast. And after a while my dad came down the stairs, so I asked him if it was he who had wanted to use the bathroom earlier. He said no, and that both my mom and younger brother was still asleep, so it could’ve not been them either.
And even if it had been any family member, they would not have tried to open the door so aggressively at 6 in the morning.
First post, don’t hate me. /Scared Swede.
Image source: anon
Follow Us
