22 People Describe Their Creepiest, Most Unexplainable Childhood Memories

Flickr, Incase
Flickr, Incase
Found on AskReddit.

1. Laying in bed one night, it’s pitch black apart from the light creeping under the door from the landing. My mum was actually with me in the same room as we had only just moved in and she was sleeping on the floor.

I look up and the door slowly creeks open and slowly an oldish women peers around the door looks at me and goes away.

I just thought I was in a nightmare and turned around real fast and went under the covers, hoping I would wake up.

hen I will never forget my mum whispering to me ‘Did you just see someone peer round the door?’ Safe to say we didn’t sleep a wink that night.

beetlejuice

2. Not really creepy but it bothers me still because wtf.

Me and my friend were hitting each other with pillow cases (why? idk) we swung at eachother, both hold tightly onto our cases. We hit eachother simultaneously and at the end of the swing we look at our hands and we’re holding eachothers cases. They just switched, neither of us left like anything was ripped from our hands or that there was any exchange or anything. They were just suddenly swapped.

I have no idea how it happened it doesn’t make any sense. If I could see a recording of anything in my life it would be that moment.

beetlejuice

3. My sister and I were having a prank war for like a week straight. Well, we agreed to a cease fire since my birthday was in two days. I just turned 11, and later that night I hear my closet door open.

Oh so my sister wants to prank me on my special day, eh? I’ll show her i thought. So I know she snuck in and forgot my door squeaks. So I had an idea, I would get up and push her! Hahahaha im a genius kiddo.

So I slowly get up and she steps out of the closet. Wasn’t my sister, because my sister doesn’t have long black hair and scars on her face and isn’t as tall as a grown woman. I wanted to scream, but instead I just froze and silently started whimpering and crying.

She puts her finger up to her lips and let’s out a “shhh”, and opens my window and crawls out, slowly closed my window never to be seen again. At first I thought it was a ghost.
Now I’m convinced it was a crack head or something.

beetlejuice

4. When I was younger (no idea how old) I had a dream that my aunt came to visit me.

I was named after her husband who died a few months before I was born so she always loved me. So after the dream I went into my parents room and told them that Aunt Liz came to see me and she told me to say goodbye. A few hours later they got a call that she had passed away. A few years later my grandfather’s friend Mary got brain cancer and she lost her ability to speak and her face was paralyzed. The last time I saw her I told my mom I just wanted to see her smile one more time. A few nights later I had a dream where she was smiling at me. Few hours later, parents got a call that she had passed.

When I was 11-12 I had a dream my dad died. He was shitting bricks for weeks. 14 years later he’s still alive though.

beetlejuice

5. When I was a kid, I remember waking up in this room with my mom holding me down and this older Somali lady, and I remember that I was screaming and crying the whole time and I remember peeing blood the days after that memory and being in pain.

But that’s all I remember. My mom said that it never happened but I know something did. I lived in Kenya and my mom was always gung-ho about fem [female genital mutilation] but my dad refused to go along with it.

Also the fact that I have little to no memories of my life before the age of 14.

beetlejuice

6. When I was younger I used to think I was having dreams of an old woman in a blue dress and cat-eye glasses sitting at the end of my bed singing to me.

She’d always sing the same song and then leave. One night I followed her into my brothers room (he is younger than me and was around 5) instead of singing to him he woke up and they began talking. After like 20 minutes my mother came in and asked what we were doing. My brother said ‘I’m just talking to the lady in the blue dress.’ She made us go back to bed. I woke up still thinking it was a dream. My mom told me the next morning she didn’t want me sneaking out of bed anymore in the middle of the night to play with my brother. I asked her what she was talking about and she gave me her version of what she saw the night before.

To this day I believe that was real and that every night that old woman would sing to me. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. She stopped singing to me soon after that, though people in my family still caught my brother speaking to nothing on numerous occasions.

A while later an aunt came to visit from down south and refused to come in to our house after seeing an old woman in cat glasses standing in the upstairs window. She came in asking who was upstairs then freaked out when my mother told her no one and let her search the house.

beetlejuice

7. I remember almost nothing before the age of 12, and that’s kind of creepy on its own.

beetlejuice

8. When I was around 7 I was lying down on my bed with a recorder in hand. Then my hand with the recorder suddenly closed in and the recorder was gone, never found it again. RIP recorder.

beetlejuice

9. When I was in pre-school, my parents put my brother and me in a posh school.

We live in South America, where the majority of the population is brown but in that school, since it was for rich kids, it was mostly white kids. I’m quite brown, my brother is white. I got bullied a lot there by my classmates. The only kid who didn’t bully me at all was this Christian boy named Cristian. He was really blonde with curly hair and pink cheeks, he looked like a cherub. Somehow he got bullied too, I think because of his accent? His parents were american or something, not locals for sure. Anyway, one day at recess we were playing and this big bully from our class came to pick on us. Cristian was up in the slide and the bully somehow pushed him to the floor and started pinching him while Cristian asked him to stop.

I remember very clearly the bully was pinching Cristian’s shoulder. After recess we had to go to a dance rehearsal and Cristian spend the entire time complaining about how much his shoulder hurt. Next day he didn’t show up, nor did the next weeks. Last time we all saw him was when his dad brought him to the class, telling us he had to go back home and they were smiling and seemed cheery but guess what: Cristian was missing an arm. He had nothing below the shoulder, the same shoulder the bully had pinched. His dad explained to us, smiling like a catalogue model the entire time, that Cristian had had an accident and had to get his arm amputated. I turned around to see the bully’s reaction and he seemed as shocked as anybody else.

It really messed up with me and I became very afraid of bullies and didn’t let anyone touch my shoulders until a few years ago. I know it’s irrational to think a simple pinching from a 5-year-old can do so much damage but this couldn’t be a coincidence.

beetlejuice

10. When I was a kid, my dad would take us to a giant lake, with a big sandy shore, like a landlocked beach for hillbillies.

I was wading in the shallow end, when I felt something brush through my fingers. Being 7, and wishing it was a real beach, I thought, ‘Maybe these are sea plants!’ Then realized that was stupid. As I squeezed the tendrils that were brushing my hand, they squished and sunk, and I felt bones through the soft, squishy mass. Finger bones like I was holding the hand of a child my age. I got out of the water, sat on the shore, and told no one. Year later, my sister said she thought a boy had been kicking her under the water, but when she grabbed at the foot, it felt cold and squishy and she also told no one.

beetlejuice

11. I have this bizarre memory from my childhood.

I was four when this happened (about 1989). I remember being locked in an empty bedroom in this house. No bed, no curtains, no nothing. And I know I was there for a long time, over two days. I recall peeing in the empty closet and I remember being scared when it got dark and the room being partially illuminated by the orange light of a street lamp (street lamp light still creeps me out). I had a box of crayons but no coloring book. I ended up melting the crayons on the radiator that ran beneath the window. The smell of melted crayon and pee is a detail that I’ll never forget. I remember that I was too short to look out the window, even standing on the radiator.
I spent all my life in foster homes until I was fourteen so it’s hard to remember where I was supposed to be.

Some other details that are less clear: There was a black woman in a beige trench coat and maybe she left me there (I’m white, if that makes any difference). Though I don’t recall who came and got me. I have the vaguest recollection of sitting with a woman in some kind of lounge that had a small deli. It may have been the lobby of a large auditorium. I was eating a tuna fish sandwich. I remember we were waiting for something. I recall fiddling with a metal box on the wall, the kind with those pull-tab games that bars have. There was a cab at one point. And that’s all I remember.

One last thing, and this one is to me the weirdest. I was living in Tacoma, WA (USA) in 2002 and I used to takes walks down to the waterfront daily. On those walks I always passed a house that gave me intense creepy vibes and I am 87.5% certain that this was the house I was locked in. I am not psychic or even that intuitive so I think that I remembered it.

My theory is that the black woman was at one point, my case worker and she just left me in this empty house so she didn’t have to fuss with me. In any event it left a faint but eerie scar that will always be there. At least until I get old and forget everything.

My best friend once told me that it sounds like I was part of a state sponsored experiment that focused on isolation or something like that. I don’t believe that at all. But it sounds creepy.

beetlejuice

12. I had an out-of-body experience during one of the many episodes where my mother attacked me when I was really young.

When I got flashbacks to these attacks, there was one in particular for which I had a very clear, very accurate, out of body experience where I saw my ten year old self being attacked by her.

beetlejuice

13. I woke up in the middle of the night and I looked in the corner of my room and saw a hooded figure next to my dresser.

At first I thought it was just some clothes hanging off my dresser, but then it turned and I saw red eyes staring at me. I immediately jumped out of bed and turned on the lights. There were no clothes hanging off my dresser. I would have just brushed it off as a bad dream, but then I saw my dog staring at the corner.

I was outside of the room and I kept calling her to come out, but she would not stop staring where I had seen the hooded figure. She did not react at all to me calling her, and so I finally just went back in my room and yanked her off the bed. I slept in the living room the rest of the night, and my dog slept in my parents room for the rest of her life.

beetlejuice

14. I was about 4-5, and was laying in bed, either reading of playing with my toys when suddenly, the other end of the kind of lifted up and dropped back down.

That was fucking terrifying. I still don’t know what happened. The only thing I can think of to maybe explain it is that I somehow started to fall asleep.

beetlejuice

15. Part of my dad’s job when I was younger was to go around a very old house that was falling apart and check these dowel things in the walls every 6 weeks and basically replace them and package the ones we took out and send them away to find out how the building was drying out after years of rain leaking in.

This is a listed building and the company wanted to bring the house back to its former glory but as far as I’m aware since my dad stopped working for them it’s back in complete disrepair.

Basically I would go along with him on a Sunday morning to do the changes of these dowels since I loved being down there and have always been interested in history. So off we went one morning and turned on the generator and my dad got to work, I’d normally wander around playing Indiana Jones by myself since this was a huge manor house. It was a construction site but I was old enough to appreciate the rules and knew not to go near any holes or find a way to fall through the floor.

So my dad is busy getting to work on the first dowels when I’m playing upstairs in one room I always liked because it was a child’s room and had claimed it as my own play space whenever I visited. I played for about 5 minutes when I felt someone was watching me and I turned around to see what looked like a long skirt follow someone along the hallway so I sneaked out and tried to see who was there and saw the back of a lady walk into another room wearing a floor length skirt and tried to follow her but when I went into the room literally 2 seconds after there was no one there. I called my dad and we checked every room in he house and no one was there. The only way to exit would have been passed us so I have no idea what I saw.

beetlejuice

16. When I was really little some man used to call the house and say really fucked up sexual things.

It was probably the same guy who stalked my mom and babysitter. Once I found a hunting arrow in the backyard maybe five feet from a window. I don’t really remember anything before fifth grade.

beetlejuice

17. I used to sleep in the basement of our house from when I was 10-17 years old which had a staircase going down that would overlook where I slept.

My step-dad was a verbally abusive alcoholic and on these nights he would lecture me or my sisters on just crazy nonsense for hours (no joke), but after we went to bed my step-dad would stand on the staircase and watch me sleep, there were multiple times a week where I would wake up around 2-3am and see his figure standing on the stairs watching me.

beetlejuice

18. Age 11, I was walking to our downstairs bathroom in the middle of the night and passed a soldier on the way, should mention that I’m schizophrenic so I normally just brush unusual things off.

I passed by him, while I was washing my hand I heard a girly screech and watched my 19-year- old brother throw himself down the stairs and out of the front door. He moved out the next day, mum asked him what happened and everyone laughed at him when he said he woke up to a soldier pulling the duvet from his bed. Maybe I should mention that our houses were old army barracks from WWII which is why our bathroom was downstairs as it had to be built onto the house because back when they were first built toilets were outside.

beetlejuice

19. I’m not really sure how creepy it is, but when I was little, my brothers, myself, and my mom all slept in rooms near each other.

My stepdad still tells the story of us having conversations late at night in our sleep. Not normal sleep talking, full group conversations. He never specifies what they were about.

beetlejuice

20. I was doing a project late at night, say around 12:30 pm and the house was dead quiet.

I was finishing up the project and I just wanted to finish it so I can have the day off. When I hear a noise behind me and I see a round shadowy figure with the whitest eyes I’ve had ever seen in my life it was the type of eyes you see on those ghost related tv shows. We just stared at each other for a bit when I turned around rubbed my eyes, turned off the computer, slowly get up and turned towards the stairs said good night and ran upstairs like there is no tomorrow which I thought there wasn’t for me. Even today I’m still afraid to turn around in the dark.

beetlejuice

21. When I was around 5, I would catch glimpses of shadowy figures moving around in my peripheral.

Around the same age, we had a very creepy basement. My brother was down there while I was at the top of the steps, so I flipped the light on and off to scare him. Thing is, when I stopped it kept going.

I saw our dog that had long been dead go to where his food bowl used to be to eat.

When I was 8, I had a pretty lame dream about going to the laundry mat with my mom. The next day, the EXACT same events happened, even down to us running into one of my classmates and how dirty his knees were.

beetlejuice

22. When I was 4 or 5 (I’m 28 now), my older 10 year old brother and I were rough-housing in the basement.

I remember this very distinctively because I still can’t explain what happened. It was just my brother and I in the house (mom went to go grocery shopping with my brother babysitting). We were rough housing in the basement when all of a sudden a closet door just swung open. We both stopped and stared at the closet when a dark/black entity floated out of the closet and floated towards us. My older brother took off upstairs and left me by myself and I remember just staring at this black mass and I had no idea what it is. I blacked out and when I came too, I was crying on the stairwell with my mom asking me what was going on… I was crying saying there is a ghost downstairs and she didn’t believe my brother and I. Til this day, my brother and I swear a dark entity/ghost floated out of that closet.

The weird thing is, my brother slept downstairs in one of the rooms, and at night he claims he could hear someone walking around outside his room. One time his friend stayed over and slept on the floor, and his friend claimed there was something staring at him from underneath the bed.
A cousin of mine stayed over one night and claimed he saw a black/dark mass roam from room to room in the basement, he got up to check it out and found nothing in the rooms, so he sat down in the rumpus room (where my brother and I were rough housing), when he claimed he saw a dark mass staring at him at the end of the hallway. He ran upstairs.

We all sat down and talked about these experiences, and came to the conclusion that someone was possibly murdered because the house had a really big crawl space. The crawl space entrance was located in the closet that the entity came from. No idea how to explain it, so we decided on someone being murdered.

Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Horror writer for Creepy Catalog, ESFP, Kylo Ren advocate, Slytherin, sassbasket.

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