Don’t Forget To Set The Alarm: 17 True Scary Stories To Read In Bed Tonight

Handprints

“When I was a child, I lived in an old Victorian house, and I would always hear laughing while I was trying to sleep. I was an only child with a single mother, and when I was about 5-6, I would wake up hearing laughter in the hallway in the middle of the night.

After mentioning this to my mum, she swore it was probably just the TV being left on late.

One night, I awoke hearing the laughter in my room. I went to sit up but felt like there was someone holding my shoulders down, invisible hands gripping into my shoulders while I heard laughing. I screamed my little heart out.

My mum ran into my room, flicking on the bedside lamp, convincing me it was just a dream, until I said “but my shoulders hurt.” She lifted up my t-shirt and there were two adult-sized hand prints on my shoulders.

I honestly thought I had imagined it and that it had never happened, but the other day I mentioned it in passing to my mum and she went blanket white and said ‘I don’t want to remember that.'”

Scratching

“About two years ago, I was driving home from a family reunion pretty late at night, and the drive was about two hours. I didn’t stay the night because I had to be back for work the following day. Most of the drive was on roads with dense bushes and trees on either side – the real creepy ones you see a lot in movies. Anyway, I had been driving about 45 minutes, and I was starting to get really tired. You know how sometimes you just suddenly become really tired, out of nowhere? Well yeah, that happened to me. I knew I wasn’t going to last, but I didn’t come across any place that I felt I could park and safely sleep.

Anyway, after it became clear to me that I wasn’t going to find a place to pull up, and my tiredness wasn’t going away, I did something very questionable. I pulled over to the side of the road onto the grass, behind some bushes, to try and hide my car from anybody else who was going to come past (the roads weren’t empty, I came across another car every few minutes or so). I made a mental note that the time was 11:22, and then fell asleep.

Some time later I was awoken by a scratching sound. I looked at the clock – 11:50. The sound stopped after a few seconds, and because I was still extremely tired, I didn’t bother looking around and simply went back to sleep. I was later awoken by the same sound, and it was now 12:40. This time it really freaked me out because the sound didn’t stop. The thought ran across my mind that it was just an animal inspecting the car, but why would it return almost an hour after it had left the previous time?

I looked in my rear view mirror and just managed to catch a glimpse of something running away into the forest. Now, at the time, I thought it was the damn hook killer, you know the one that scratched that couple’s car and then slaughtered the guy when he got out to investigate? Fuck that, I thought to myself, so I got the hell out of there. There was a bend no more than a hundred yards up the road, and as I came around it, there was a fucking car, parked off to the side of the road with the driver side door opened. I slowed down just to look to see if anyone was in there (there wasn’t). Then I looked in my rear view mirror.

I didn’t see anything, and all of a sudden, this guy comes sprinting around the corner. He starts screaming at me, shouting stuff like “Hey! Hey you! Get the fuck out of your car! Now!” I noped the fuck out of there and sped off. I never saw the guy again.”

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