30 Absolutely Terrifying Stories That Will Haunt You For Days

Found on r/AskReddit.

1. These things actually happen?

When I was six (28 years ago) my mom and dad took me and my younger sister to a MLB game, leaving my grandmother to baby sit my youngest sister. When we got back my grandmother told my folks that two guys had come by the house with photography equipment and asked whether a young girl with red curly hair lived there, and that they had spotted her and that she would be a great child model for some advertising work they were doing. When my grandmother said she wasn’t home, they said they would come back another time.

My grandmother and mom didn’t think much about it, but my dad said “Something’s not right here,” and called the police. About 15 minutes later, several FBI agents showed up and began conducting interviews with my grandmother and my parents while I ran around and showed the agents my matchbox police helicopter.

Turns out we had been targeted by a child theft ring; the photographers would take a bunch of photos and wait until the toddler threw a tantrum and the photographers would then ask the mother to go grab a toy to keep the child entertained. While the mother was out of the room, they would grab the child and bolt, leaving everything else behind. The FBI told my folks that my sister had already been sold and would have been out of the country within 24 hours if they got her. We were advised to change preschools and other aspects of our daily routine.

It still gives me the chills to think about what could have happened to her. Needless to say, mom became pretty overprotective; it was a few years before she even trusted us with a babysitter.

2. Be careful of Craigslist ads

A guy made a Craigslist posting saying he was a talent scout and ran an agency. He got the interest of a father, grandfather and his granddaughter. This guy’s specialty was casting families, (preferably children) under the guise that he was looking to produce a film and needed actors.

Not too long ago, the grandfather and his granddaughter went to meet this guy up at the house. They actually drove by 2 hours early to check out the house before going to it. There was a for sale sign outside the house and it appeared vacant. The family drove by later at the agreed time of meeting in the morning, and were greeted at the door by a man in a suit. He tried to convince the little girl to come inside many times. The grandfather got a bad feeling and left. Turns out, in an unrelated sting, the police caught this guy for child porn charges. He had 10 counts of child porn, and his home was raided. The father/grandfather, around the same time reported this incident to the police. When the police found this guy, he had a bag with him. In it was a knife, zip ties, sex toys, and he even had plastic sheeting. He was going to pretty much kill the grandfather, then rape and murder the child. His plan was to get this all on film. The camera was set up and ready to go. Luckily the father and grandfather had a gut feeling something was off and reported the incident.

This guy happened to be a kid I pretty much grew up knowing for about 15 years. He was even my brothers roommate for a while. He was always very creepy and I couldn’t never pinpoint why exactly. I felt my stomach drop reading this news. This guy has been inside my home, went to parties I had (My birthday party). I have had multiple conversations with him.

Luckily, he won’t be getting out of jail anytime soon. News story for further clarification.

3. A Walmart citizen

Ok so I am at WalMart standing in front of the french bread. Notice this strange guy standing there, staring at the food. About 40 years old, jeans shorts, little overweight, handle bar moustache, tight shirt, flip-flops.

I pick up one loaf of bread and he turns to me with a strange smile. Walk away from creepyfuck.jpeg… After a while (30 min or so) I change my mind and go back to the bread aisle and that dude is still standing in the same spot …just starring. So i put the bread back…He IMMEDIATELY grabs it, the one I just put down, and storms to the cash register. Pays and leaves. That is the only thing he bought…What the hell?

4. Intuition

When my mom a a youngin, her and her mother lived in a trailer in the backyard of a family members house. My mom was about 12 at the time that the man in the neighboring house started to stare at her from time to time.

She got a creepy vibe from him, but figured it was just a harmless lonely guy.

One night when my mom was alone she heard something on the roof of their trailer. Then she heard what sounded like foot steps slowly walking along the metal rooftop. Given they were dirt poor at the time they did not have a phone so she eventually ran out of the trailer and into the house without looking on the roof. When her uncle went outside to investigate nothing was on the roof. A few weeks went by with no incidents and my mom figured she must have been overly scared of nothing. More fucked up stuff would randomly happen, but only when she was alone, and it was always spaced out a week or two.

If I remember correctly. this occurred over maybe a couple months before it stopped completely. Months go by without any weird instances at all until one night my mom wakes up to the trailer unbelievably hot, she could feel the heater on full blast. She got out of bed and was about to go to the control for the trailer’s heater, but she was overcome with a bad feeling and decided to just go into the house.

The uncle went out to the trailer and noticed that the lock on the door was broken or messed with and he looked inside quickly, but didn’t see anything.

His wife made him call the police and when they came out they searched the trailer and found one of the kitchen knifes behind a chair next to the heating controller. They suspected that the neighbor went into the trailer, turned the heat up and crouched behind the chair waiting for my mom to come by and then who knows.

It’s been a long time since I heard the story but from what I remember the cops questioned the neighbor, but really couldn’t do anything about it. Luckily my mom and grandmother were able to move out of that town right after that. My mom told me that about five or something years later she was visiting other family who lived in a nearby town and she saw the neighbor at the grocery store and she bolted out before he saw her.

5. Someone was standing there

My best friend and I were having a sleepover at her house. We were teenagers, and for some reason we were home alone. We’re goofing off upstairs when suddenly we hear a crash downstairs. We of course freak out for maybe 30 minutes before we get the nerve to go check it out. I grab a bat and we slowly creep down the steps. In the kitchen, we find a glass bowl had fallen and broke, but the really creepy part is that all the pieces had been picked up and put in another bowl on the table. We still have no idea how that happened.

Another time with the same friend, we decided it would be fun to sleep outside in my friend’s parent’s camper. In the middle of the night I woke up to the silhouette of some guy standing in the doorway. He stands for a minute and then walks out. I was still half asleep and wondering if that really happened when I fell back to sleep. The next morning my friend tells me about a “dream” she had about someone coming into the camper. Of course, freaking out ensued. Apparently someone (a hobo perhaps, she lives right next to the tracks) had been sleeping there without anyone knowing.

6. A dog’s sense

I had a dog once that was super loyal and loving and would always come running to me when I called and would almost crash into me whenever I had treats for him. One day sitting in the living room, all of his hairs stood up on his back and he was just staring over my should growling and showing his teeth. No matter what I would do to try to get him to come to me, he would never break his stare at that one spot and just kept growling. I eventually carried him out of the room because it was freaking me and my roommates out so bad.

7. Animals can sense something we can’t

Growing up there was an extra room upstairs in our house we used as an office. It had a closet with one of those tiny attic access doors on the side.

We’d sometimes all be downstairs watching TV and we’d hear a creaking sound moving toward that room. The room was next to mine and sometimes I’d find the closet door open with the light on and the little door to the attic cracked open.

There was a spot on the wall that our (declawed) cat would always attack. There was missing paint from the cat attacks.

All of that was creepy, but the night the dog (who never came upstairs without my Dad) started barking in the hallway by my room toward the office was the worst. She barked and growled for a bit, then she started backing off (into my room) while looking up as if staring at the face of a person coming toward her. She backed into my room, then squealed like she’d been stepped on and ran into the far corner from my door and put her nose and eyes into the corner and whimpered. I picked her up and went downstairs to sleep on the couch.

That was 14 years ago and I’m still freaked out by it.

8. Covered in blood

When I was 15, my stepfather got stabbed right in front of me. There was an altercation in the middle of our street at 2 in the morning that woke our whole house up. My stepfather and my uncle were still up drinking and went outside to see what was going on. There was a young man kicking the shit out of one of our older neighbors- an alcoholic gentleman who lived a few houses down from us (found out afterward the young man was dating the older man’s daughter).

My stepfather and uncle went out to break it up and in the commotion, my stepfather was stabbed by the guy. He stumbled back on to the porch and fell, and I tried to catch him. His blood smeared down the front of my shirt. The younger guy took off and we called 911.

We were in the hospital until the early morning. When me and my mom got home there was a message on our answering machine. It was a friend of mine from school, crying and apologizing for calling in the middle of the night, but she had just had a dream that there was screaming and a fight and I was covered in blood. She begged me to call her back. The time stamp on the message was the same time as the stabbing. This is in the late 80s, before computers and even cell phones really. I lived on the other side of town from her. There was no way she could have known what had happened.

9. Saw it in a dream

My grandfather is Algerian and was a soldier during the Algerian War.

During the war he took my grandma and my mum to France. He was often hanging around in bars around bad guys. Anyway, one night my mom who was 12 at the time wakes up in the middle of the night, choking. She had difficulties to breath. After a few seconds, she went to my grandma crying and begging for help, screaming “DAD HAS BEEN KILLED, HE IS IN DANGER!” My grandma sent my mum back to sleep.

The next day they got a call from the hospital.

My grandfather got into a fight and head butted a guy in the mouth (he still has the guy’s teeth scar on his forehead). The guy cut his throat open later that night.

Somehow my grandfather survived and still has the scar from the knife.

10. Door to hell

Just a few months ago, while I was still in school, I rented an old house with two of my friends. I lived in the basement and they each had a room upstairs. Several strange things happened to me while I was living in that basement.

The first was that I had just gotten a dog and he was about 4 months old at the time. Now and then, right when I turned the tv off to go to sleep, my dog would start whining and growling at one corner of my room. He would usually not get on my bed because he wasn’t allowed, but during these times, he would jump on my bed and get as close to me as he could, all without his eyes ever leaving that corner. This happened about 5 times over the course of 4 months.

Then, toward the end of the school year, when I was about to move out, the scariest thing that has ever happened to me in my life occurred. Under our stairs was a little door that led to a small space that had a dirt floor. There was also a really weird, old wooden piece of what looks like a map nailed to the inside of the door, so it’s a pretty spooky place. Up until the day before this incident, we had kept a small chair in front of this door that I laid my coats and things on, but we had some friends over the night before, so we brought that chair upstairs. It was dark (probably 8pm) and I had just been upstairs in the kitchen. I had just gotten off the stairs and was about to open the door to my room, when the door to the little closet under the stairs opened so slowly and with THE loudest creak I’ve ever heard in my life.

I stood rooted to the spot, frozen in fear, staring at the closet, waiting for whatever was about to come out of it. I literally stood there for about 5 minutes, absolutely terrified. Eventually, I opened the door to my room and locked it as fast as I could. I wasn’t sure either of my roommates were home, so I called my female roommate and she was there. I spent the rest of that night upstairs with her, still too scared to go back downstairs. I should mention that I’m a 21-year-old man who does not scare easily.

Now I know many of you will probably say it was the wind or the fact that I had just come down the stairs or something just as my roommates did, but I’ve had those things happen to me before and been kind of creeped out, but this was different. The second I heard that closet open, and looked over to see it opening so slowly, I felt this sheer terror. It honestly felt like there was someone or something else in the room with me that wanted me to see that door open.

11. Felt the thud

When I was 7-years-old, my mom gave birth to my little sister. Me and my dad went to visit her in the hospital to check out the new family member. As 7-year-olds often do, I got bored, so my parents sent me to the kiosk right outside the main building to get an ice cream. As I was walking towards the kiosk, I cut over the lawn as it was a shorter walk, suddenly I feel and hear a really heavy thud right behind me.

I turn around too see the warped mangled body of a man in a hospital gown maybe 40-50 cm from where I was standing. The man had jumped off the hospital roof after receiving news he had terminal cancer. My mom and a lot of the others in the birth ward even saw the guy flying past the windows. The guy basically just fell short of killing me with him. A group of doctors and psychiatrists asked me to get emergency therapy, but I insisted on getting my ice cream and go home.

This day I can still recall the thud of the body hitting the ground and his body lying the next to me, clear as crystal. I still tell this story sometimes, mostly when I’m drunk or high. I dont know why it comes up, but I think shit stuck with me.

12. Just straight down

Back when my grandfather was alive, my grandmother woke up one night to hear something smash downstairs. She woke my grandfather up and made him go check it out with a baseball bat, and when he got downstairs there was a broken flower pot in the middle of their family room floor, about 20 feet from where it usually was. There was no dirt trail, it was just smashed on the floor in the middle of the room, as if someone dropped it straight down.

13. Rocking back and forth

I had to take care of my mentally handicapped cousin a few years back. She could get around well enough, but due to severe arthritis in her knees and ankles, she had to be watched, helped into the bath, shit like that. I would go into her room in the morning, help her to her walker so she could piss, and make her breakfast.

One morning I heard the water running in the bathroom when I went to check in on her. I had to pass her room on the way to the bathroom. When I did, I saw that she was in her rocking chair in the corner, her blanket over her head, and she was rocking back and forth.

“Don’t leave the water on, you’re going to flood the place.” I went into the bathroom to shut the faucet off, and my cousin was there, washing her face.

I immediately ran back to the room, but it was just her blanket crumbled up in the rocking chair. My cousin wanted to know why I undid her bed. I didn’t stay too long after that.

14. Secret society

My friend’s dad (we’ll call him Jack) and his brother (we’ll call him Tom) lived with each other in the 80s.

It was just the two of them living in the house, no one else. So, this one night Jack is coming home at night and walks into his living room to see a bunch of old people sitting around talking. As he walks in, they all just quiet down and awkwardly look at him as he walks by. He doesn’t see Tom anywhere, so he just assumes Tom will be back to tend to his guests. Jack has work the next morning, so he goes in his room to get some sleep, but is kept up from all the people talking. He walks out from his room and is promptly met up with Tom who is coming out of his room to tell Jack to keep his friends quiet. However, Jack was coming out to tell Tom to keep HIS friends quiet. They walk out from the hallway into the living room only to see that it’s empty with the leftover smell of musk.

15. Taken away

I live in a completely normal neighbourhood. There was a house once for sale (a couple of years ago) that is about 100m away from my house. It was for sale for quite a lot of time actually (a few months) and it was completely empty. There weren’t any curtains or anything so you could see inside that the house is literally completely empty, no furniture, just white walls, empty rooms.

Anyway here’s where it gets creepy. I walked by this house every night at around 10pm when going home (from hanging out with friend’s or something) and I always looked through the windows to see if someone moved in but it was always empty and dark. One night however…there was this one night when I walked by the house and it had lights on, there was furniture (couldn’t see much but there were tables, tv, refrigerator most likely etc.) and there were a bunch of old people sitting around a round table talking and smoking cigarettes. Okay I didn’t find it creepy at all, I just thought to myself hey, they must have finally sold the house and I haven’t noticed it in a few days…they moved in very quickly.

But…the next day I walked by the house again when it was daylight and it was freaking empty (again no furniture, no tables, just white walls and empty rooms) and “for sale” sign was still fucking there. I still didn’t think much about it…to be honest I didn’t even care, I was really weirded out for a bit but I forgot about it in a few hours.

16. Mising pants

Oh man, junior year of college. Not my proudest moment. Me and maybe half a dozen friends are hanging out on Saturday night and we are just crispy baked. Basically the second the last bowl was finished it happened.

Knock at the door. Serious knocking. Panicked knocking. What do we do? Cops? Gotta be cops. We are so fucked. I’m getting kicked out of housing this time.

One of the girls goes to answer the door.

A guy with insane Ted Kaczynski hair and no pants is SCREAMING at the door to let him in. The girl screams and tries to shut the door, but the guy is forcing his way in. He is bleeding pretty bad, and is basically draped over my friend in a heap. He is totally incoherent, just keeps yelling PLEASE and making no sense otherwise.

My friend runs down to help the girl. I could muster precisely zero courage. I was scared to death. Terrified. I stood at the top of the stairs like a housewife that’d seen a mouse in an old cartoon. WHAT DO WE DO, WHAT DO WE DO!? OH GOD WHAT DO WE DO!?

We have to call the police! Right! I CANT DO IT I’M FREAKING OUT MAN. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY HANDS! Someone calls and tells the police an old, possibly homeless man is trying to force his way into the apartment.
My terrified, super-baked mind could only reason that a homeless guy was breaking into our place. Someone calls the police and I remain totally panicking at the top of the steps, helping in no way whatsoever. My friend has wrestled the guy out of the apartment and is trying to calm him down. I made sure the top of the steps were secure.

Eventually the cops come and they take the disheveled, pantless homeless man away in an ambulance. We close the door and sit back down in the living room. “Is anyone else not baked at all anymore?” someone asked. We were not. Frazzled, we decided we’d smoke some more and try to relax. We’d go over the series of events a hundred times over the next few weeks. I tried to downplay my roll as the guardian of the stair well.

Like a week later we’d find it out it was neither an old, nor homeless guy, but rather a friend of a friend on a really bad acid trip who had lost his pants and ran through a field in a panic.

17. Peeping Tom

I have to preface this by stating that I am a guy. I used to run quite abit – 5 miles every day without fail. One day after finishing my run, I got a knock at the door and it was a young man (about my age at the time -27), asking about the duplex next door, as it was for rent. Typical questions about the neighborhood and the street and what-not. I was cordial and informative, but I had some food cooking and needed to get back inside. I told him to call the number on the sign but before I could excuse myself inside he interjected. The conversation went something like this:

Him: Wait…do I smell pot? Dude, are you smoking weed in there?

Me: No, I’m cooking salmon.

Him: Oh, cause if you were smoking in there, I’d be totally down with that. By the way, you’ve got really nice pecs. Do you work out a lot?

Me: Yeah, I guess…look, I really gotta go. If you have questions about the duplex, call the number on the sign.

Him: Cool, thanks.

I go back inside the house. he drives off. I instantly call my landlord and tell her to under no circumstances let that guy rent the property. he gave me the creeps. Anyway, fast forward 2 days. it’s a sunday night around mid-night. I’d just finished watching a movie on the couch and I had played a lot of soccer that weekend. Generally, I’ve found that if I can soak in a hot bath for about 20 minutes, my knees feel better in the morning. So I get up from the couch, walk by my bedroom and notice that, since I’m kind of a restless sleeper, I must have knocked the blinds and curtain adjacent to my bed askew. No biggie, I’ll fix it tonight before I go to bed. Then I get into the bathroom and notice that someone must have opened the window to the bathroom when I had friends over several days ago. I don’t have a bathroom exhaust fan, so it only makes sense to raise the window and blinds a bit. I close the window and shut the blinds. I’ve got one of those nifty kitchen timers that i set to 20 minutes and I just sit in there, waiting for the time to expire. During this quiet time, my mind starts replaying the weekend’s events and I start to get an uneasy feeling. Subconsciously, I felt something was wrong, but maybe I was just being paranoid. Then I thought about the bedroom window and the bathroom window both having blinds askew. And come to think of it, I believe the blinds behind the TV had one little slat that was sort of peeled up. But, no, now i’m just being paranoid. And I hadn’t even thought about the weird encounter from two days ago. But now, I’m sitting in a bathtub and the damn timer seems frozen at this point. I tell myself that I’ll get up when the timer is done, put on some clothes and take a look around the house. I snapped. 5 minutes left and I couldn’t take it any longer.

I don’t know how to rationalize what I did next. It just seemed purely instinctual. I hopped up, and got a towel around me. I turned off the bathroom light, made my way quickly by the bedroom door and through the living room area. I then cut the kitchen and living room lights. In the darkness, I pulled a pair pants up so that I was at least wearing something. I wasn’t going to go back into the bedroom for a shirt. The only light on in the house was my bedroom light. I went over to the front door and flung it open quickly to peer out. Nothing. Crickets. This was the middle of the summer. And the crickets were overwhelmingly loud. Louder than the sound of my squeaky storm door opening. I decided I was being paranoid, and turned to go back in. I turned, but at the last second I had that thought: I won’t be content to sleep tonight unless I properly dismiss the paranoia with a walk around the house.

So, I barefooted and cautiously make my way down the front porch stairs, and down the sidewalk to the side of my house where the bedroom windows glow. The front of the house is definitely clear. I tiptoe to the corner of the house to get a view of the side of the house. As I peer around the corner, not twenty feet away from me, I see the stranger from two days ago, his face glued to the bedroom window. His hand is in his shorts and he is masturbating furiously. I’m instantly enraged. Apparently, he is completely unaware that I have exited the house, much less flanked him. I decided in that instant to surprise him. The following conversation was a mix between my anger, his fear, and most strangely of all, the feeling of amusement that this is actually happening to me. Keep in mind, the conversation doesn’t really make a lot of sense because he didn’t really have time to think. And it really couldn’t have been more than about 15-20 seconds before the ordeal was played out.

Me: YOU SICK FUCK!

Him: (Surprised and mortified) AHHH!!

Me: I’m going to catch you and beat the shit out of you.

Him: You don’t know me!?!? (backing away)

Me: (Aggressively approaching) I know exactly who you are, and I’m going to catch you and beat the shit out of you.

Him: (Transitioning from backing away to turning away and starting to run.) Please don’t hurt me. I’m so sorry! I’m so drunk! I’m so sorry! Please don’t hurt me!

At this point, it’s an all out chase across a neighbor’s yard. I’m wearing nothing but a pair of warm-up pants, but I’m gaining on him. I was playing soccer daily at the time, so I was definitely going to catch him. But he made it easy. I chased him across one gravel driveway, which wasn’t fun, but I was on his heels by the time he reached the second one and he took a nasty fall right into the middle of the gravel.

At this point, I very nearly kicked him across the face with my shin, but I suppressed the urge…I need my license to practice my profession in my state, and I’ve already chased this guy across someone else’s property…not to mention the threats. Also, quite pathetically, he is crying and bleeding and pleading with me in a very effeminate voice – a completely different voice from the only other encounter. I tell him to get up. At this point he knows he is caught, so he is completely compliant…well, kind of. I ask him where he parked. he lied and said a few blocks down. I take his keys from him and tell him we’re going to his car. I ask him his name. he tells me. We walk about 30 feet and he stops and says,”Actually, this is my car.” Wow, ok, so you parked basically right next to my house. So, I open his car and he’s like,”what are you doing?” I explain to him that there’s no way for me to know who he is. He has no wallet with him. At this point I’ve got his cellphone and keys. I open his glovebox hoping to find some real ID. Bingo. I found a receipt for tire rotation or something. The car shown on the receipt matches the car he’s driving. But the name doesn’t. I call him by the name on the receipt and he starts crying again and apologizing about lying about his name. At this point, I’m convinced I have him scared shitless, and I just want to go to bed. I know cops will take hours and it’s already like 1:00 o’clock and I’ve gotta be up early. So, I take the little folder thing the receipt came in and I told him to write down a confession of what he did. It was only just becoming apparent to me that not only was he a peeping tom, he had come into my house when I wasn’t there to adjust the blinds in order to see in. Anyway, I call him a “sick fuck” a couple more times after that dawns on me. Now I’ve got a written and signed confession. I write his license plate down and then I decide to make sure I never have to see this guy again. I take his phone and write down numbers of obvious relatives: Mom, Dad, Uncle someone or another. Just a few. And then I tell him, that I don’t know if I’m going to call the cops, but “if I ever see you again, I’m going to try to kill you.” I had no such intentions. It’d be hard for me to hurt someone unless they were hurting someone I cared about, but he didn’t know that. I made it clear for him that if he saw me somewhere, he’d better make sure I don’t see him. Anyway, at this point he’s sitting in his car. I toss the keys and the cellphone into his car and tell him to get lost. He sits in the car sobbing for a while while I’m walking away, but he’s got the engine started and leaving by the time I’m back in my house. At this point, I sit down and drink a beer. And then I decide I wish I had called the cops because I’m not getting any sleep. I call the cops to show them the confession and all the information. The cop who shows up writes a few things down. He tells me I should have detained him. i give him all the info. Two days later, I call the cops and ask them about a report. No news. And no news would come. No report. Oh well, he’s never coming back.

Wrong! he knocks on my door about a year later, I open the door. He must have seen the anger. He backs away from the door with his hands up and says he came to apologize. Said he was very sorry. I told him I accepted his apology and to not fuck up like that again. And then he said thanks and walked away. Very strange.

18. Subway ghost

I supervise the night crew (4-midnight) at a Subway. The day crew has never mentioned it, but the night crew always make jokes about our “SubGhost”, although I’ve stopped being sure that it’s actually a joke.
Now here me out. I’m not saying the Subway I work at is haunted… but I’m not saying it’s not haunted, either. It’s open 24/7, so past midnight just one person stays by themself until day crew rolls in around 6 am, and I always spend at least an hour a night alone, and quite awhile with just one other person. Sometimes we hear voices. The music is off, there’s only 1 or 2 of us, but we can hear people having a conversation, although it’s too quiet to pick out words. The first time I heard voices I looked at my supervisor and asked if she heard them too, and she looks me in the eyes and casually says “Yeah, it’s the SubGhosts talking”. It sounds like a joke, but now I realize when I’m training a newbie on the late shift I’ve given the casual “It’s just the SubGhost” response more times than I can remember.

There’s voices, there’s weird crashing noises, sometimes when no one is in the room things fall off the counters for no discernible reason. Once our owner bought new paper towel auto-dispensers to replace the old push dispensers. I was alone right before the graveyard guy came in, when I heard a towel dispense. I walked around the corner and everything was quiet. I was about to walk away when another towel came out. Then another. Then another. Finally it goes full SubGhost and dispenses the entire roll continuously without stopping, much like when a cat finds out how to unroll your toilet paper. It only stopped when there was no paper left. No one else was around, but a few days later the owner switched them back, so we now have the manual paper towels thingys back.

If there is a SubGhost, s/he’s a homie, and I don’t really mind. Stupid day crew is oblivious, but us night crew tend to become quite familiar with the sandwich spook, and it’s presence is so constant (it’s a strange night when something isn’t explained that by “SubGhost”) that the voices have almost become comforting.

19. Mysterious jumping man

This happened to my friend. She told me that when she was little she was playing with her little brother and sister one night. Her little brother looked out the window and said “who is that man?” They all went to the window to see what he was talking about. She said there was a white figure sitting on top of the telephone pole. Looked like a man. He was staring at them with a huge creepy smile. Then he just stood up and jumped off the pole and simply vanished before they saw him hit the ground. She said it scared them so much, her sister won’t even talk about it.

20. The night starer

Creepiest thing will forever be the man who watched me at my window. It’s nothing paranormal, but honestly. I was texting my girlfriend, playing a game, and I heard rustling outside my window (keep in mind I live in the basement as an “apartment” at my mom’s house). I don’t have any curtains, and I turned off my iPod. I could see someone actually fucking staring at me. This went on for about 10 minutes. I texted my little sister to get the fucking bat, and turn on the lights upstairs. After he saw the lights, he ran off.

I have never been more creeped out, except for the recent occurrence. Thought I imagined the “FWOOSH” and “PLOP” sound in the middle of the night. I brushed it off. Next morning, step dad was cleaning the yard and found the A/C cover in the other window well. I went upstairs to get ready to wash my mom’s car when they told me. They asked me if I heard anything, so I told them. I keep a knife and an aluminum bat with me.

For the people who will likely ask why we haven’t called the police: We did the first time, they said they couldn’t do anything. Short of breaking into the house, we’re stuck dealing with this person (or people) until they do break in.

21. Ran after him

I delivered newspapers in a fairly rural area the summer after I graduated high school. One night, it’s pouring rain and I’m driving down this dirt road that is a dead end to a farmer’s house. I’ve been down this road a few dozen times and know the routine – drop the paper off in the box at the end of the drive, whip a shitty, back up the road and off to my next stop.

This time, as I am getting out of my car to place the newspaper in the holder I see this man in the ditch wearing a drenched white shirt running at me as fast as he can. He got within 20 feet of me. I could see what my mind pictured as a hatchet or axe. I had never ran so hard in my life.

It must have been about 5-10 miles later that I attempted to call 911. No signal using my Motorola flip phone in the middle of no where in the year 2000. I had to stop at a farmer’s house to call the police at 2:00 am.

Turns out the guy killed himself within an hour of his run with me in that wooded ditch.

22. Wait, what?

There I was – a young man in a crowded Chicago bar. It was 2am, and I was slightly intoxicated.

I had just been denied by the girl I foolishly spent the whole night talking to, and I “celebrated” by taking a couple more shots.

Suddenly, all the alcohol I had drank that night came rushing to my bladder, so I decided to head to the bathroom before calling it a night.

After stumbling through the crowd, I finally made it to the dilapidated bathroom that was located downstairs. When I walked in, I was met with a shocking sight.

There, standing in the middle of the men’s bathroom in a shitty bar at 2 in the morning, was a topless blonde breastfeeding what looked like a newborn babe.

Whether I was too drunk, or just in shock at what I was seeing, I couldn’t seem to move or speak.

The silence was broken when the woman, clearly appalled that I was staring, yelled, “Do you mind?” and proceeded to squirt her breast milk at my face.

The woman’s attempt to hit me was successful. Without saying a word – drunkenly thinking I was somehow in the wrong – I walked out of the bathroom, wiped the breast milk from my face, and exited the bar.

Since it all happened so fast, it wasn’t until the next morning that I was able to process the absurdity of what had happened the night before.

23. A figure

I live in a heavily wooded area just outside my hometown. My backyard goes directly into the woods since my family owns the land I live on. As a child, the woods around my house were always a fun place to explore; my parents built a cabin, and I even built a little fort for myself further down as a little place to go to escape from the world, it was great.

When I was about 10 years old and bored, I decided to go outside and walk around the woods in my backyard, maybe hit up the fort or climb some trees. Alone I walked into the woods and made my first stop at the cabin. So once I was there I just kinda sat in a rocking chair and started reading some book left on the floor. I kinda passed out while reading and I had NO idea how long I was out but when I woke up I saw that the sun was starting to set. Naturally I was pretty scared of the idea of being in the woods at night so I got up and decided to leave.

As the sun set more and the woods got darker I started walking faster and faster to get home till I saw my house in the distance. All of a sudden, while I’m walking and not looking where I’m going, I tripped and fell hard on the ground. So I got up and looked for where I tripped and I couldn’t see any stump or branch that could have made me fall. This next part is what still makes me chilled to the bone every time I think of it, After scanning and finding nothing I turned around to leave and from behind me I heard SOMEONE whisper “Don’t Leave” right into my ear. I gasped and got the FUCK out of there.

I ran so fast to my house that on the last stretch back I tripped again and rolled down a dirt hill and scrambled to get myself up. So I ran till I was in my backyard and looked back into the woods and all I could see was a dark silhouette of a man (no face just blackness) walk out until it was on the very edge of the line of trees and it just stood there watching me. In the midst of my fear I just could not move at all and kept staring at it, I really had no idea who it was. After a while of watching it stand there my senses came back and I ran into my house and didn’t leave my parents side for the rest of the day. The creepiest part is I didn’t see any clothes on them or anything, it was just a dark figure standing in the woods looking at me, no face or eyes.

24. A reaver lived in South Africa (Firefly reference)

When I lived in South Africa, I travelled a lot with a Christian missionary/humanitarian aid worker. He handled the spiritual stuff, I tended to work more with the local (mostly Xhosa) people, helping them with non-spiritual issues.

In July 2010, we went to a village in the middle of nowhere. As soon as we stepped out the truck, we knew something was wrong. We hadn’t been able to contact our guy in the village all day, and there was no one around at all. Piet and I went from house to house, looking for, well, anyone, but everywhere was completely empty.

Eventually, we saw a figure run around the corner of a building on the far side of the village. It was a young woman, stark naked, running straight for us. Her arms were flailing, and she was running with like an animal, occasionally dropping to all fours, then back on her feet.

As she got closer, Piet told me to get back in the truck, then he screamed at me to get in the truck. I’d seen this guy watch a Xhosa witchdoctor burn a dozen chickens alive and not bat an eyelid, so when he lost his shit, I knew it was serious.

I closed the truck door as she reached us. She was covered in blood; there were cuts and slices all over her face, arms, and breasts; one of her ears was missing – I think, there was a lot of blood – her teeth were bloody, and she had a look in her eye of absolute, untamed rage.

The screeching sound she made is unlike anything I’ve heard before or since. I can still hear it so vividly in my mind. Looking into her face, seeing her wide psychotic eyes and gaping mouth as she made that unholy sound froze me in my seat.

Piet had started the truck, and already started reversing up the dirt track, but she followed. He turned the car (all the while she was scratching at the windows and metalwork) then sped off up the track. She followed us. She didn’t keep up, obviously, but for a while I thought she was going to. I’ve never seen someone run that fast in bare feet.

The journey back to our base town was almost silent. I spent most of it concentrating on the sound of my own breathing, and the rumble of the road.

I asked Piet what that was, and what we should do. He said the girl was no doubt insane, had a psychotic break or something, but the locals would have immediately thought her possessed. If she didn’t kill herself, the other villagers would within days. He suggested they had gathered in one house for safety.

I saw a lot of fucked up shit in that country.

1. This happened in the Eastern Cape, which I would argue is the darkest, wildest, and most bizarre part of the country. Strange things happen there a lot, and often just get buried or picked up by one of the crazy tabloids like the Mercury, and subsequently ignored or written off. There are vast swathes of grassland punctuated by the odd settlement, without any adequate law enforcement. A lot of people live in these isolated settlements, and will only leave to work, or to get food. Many spend their whole lives in the village of their ancestors, as do their children, and so on.

2. Yes, we called the police, or rather Piet did; the officer said, “We will look into it.” We never heard about it again. South Africa has some very developed, civilised, Westernised areas (the major towns and cities, for example,) but there are enormous parts of this country which have remained almost untouched for decades. The further you go from Joburg, or Cape Town, or even East London (our nearest city,) the more ‘rural’ and strange things can become. I’m not saying that all of rural South Africa is like this. A lot of the villages we went to were nice, simple settlements where the people welcomed us, gave us food, gawped at us for being White and so on. Some were more sinister.

3. We eventually got in touch with our guy, a day later. Piet asked him if everything was alright, he said, “We had a bad presence in the village. It is now gone.” I don’t know for sure what happened, but I can guess, based on what Piet said.

4. Piet’s been back once since (without me) and they seemed fine. He told me he didn’t ask about the girl, as he didn’t know what had happened, and he didn’t want them to react. I don’t think he wanted to know.
This incident was by far the weirdest thing that happened to me there; the other ‘fucked up shit’ I mentioned didn’t come close, but was just the kind of thing you wouldn’t see in the West.

5. I mentioned the Xhosa sangoma burning chickens alive, I’d seen people breeding housefuls of dogs – literally cramming shacks full of these ‘pavement specials’ – I’ve seen young girls carry guns to school to defend themselves against rapists (there’s a popular myth in SA that having sex with a virgin will make you immune to AIDS). I’ve seen the Xhosa coming-of-age ritual (survival in the Bush, then circumcision,) I travelled to a village which ‘preserved’ some of its elders by perching their bodies in a tree just outside the town, and so on. Lots of bizarre things with witchdoctors, lots of bone-chilling stories from other aid workers in the area. Nothing matches the reaver girl, but still unusual and a bit unnerving for me.

6. Some of my more boring stories include twice being caught in a riptide and sucked out to sea, having to identify the body of someone I’d never met, cramming five big African mamas in my tiny bakkie for a 40km trip, seeing my Xhosa friend’s 85-year-old mother-in-law physically hurl an adult goat into a carrel, and seeing my friend shoot a large fish at close range with a 30-06 rifle.

7. A couple of people have told me I’m a ‘horrible human being’ – or words to that effect – for not helping this woman. I have a couple of reasons why I didn’t do anything. The AIDS rate in SA is very high; if I touched this woman’s blood, which was all over her, I could well have contracted the disease. Touching blood in Africa is a really bad idea.

8. Secondly, she was quite clearly psychotic – possibly rabid, someone commented. She was trying to kill us. I don’t think my description did justice to the sheer ferocity of her movements. She was clawing at the windows, flailing against the door, scrabbling at the metal… She was genuinely trying to kill us with her bare hands. I was scared out of my mind. I grew up in a quiet little town in England; I’d never seen anything like this in real life. When I met Piet, I agreed to do whatever he told me when we were in the villages, for the good of my own safety.

9. We did what we could. We got out of there, we called the police. We are not bad people, just unwilling to be eaten alive, or contract AIDS or whatever.

I love South Africa, the Eastern Cape in particular. It is the place I love the most in the world. It’s beautiful, it’s fascinating, the people are generally lovely, and the food is brilliant. The mix of cultures, languages, peoples, and lifestyles is one of the most diverse in the world, and I count my time there among the greatest things I’ve ever done in my life.

It can be scary, but then so can anywhere.

25. Not a hunter

My mom just recently told me the story of her friend’s creepy dad. One night when she was younger she stayed over at this friend’s house. Friend’s creepy dad offered them “fresh venison” for dinner. Mom had never had venison, but of course ate it as not to be rude. Friend later tells mom that her dad is not a hunter. Years later we learned that creepy dad had murdered and cannibalized several women over the course of his life. Mom is pretty sure she ate human meat..

26. Kidnapping attempt

Kidnapping attempt in the 1980s.

Sacramento neighborhood late at night, visiting a friend when I was maybe 9-10 years old. Three of us walk out to go play at this park / elementary school several blocks away at around 10:00pm at night. We were playing Frisbee in the street in front of the school and our Frisbee lands in the street as a white van pulls up and stops, as if to allow us to get our Frisbee. I walk toward the van and grab the Frisbee, then move to the side to allow the van to pass.

As the van passed the sliding door opened and a guy dressed in black like a ninja came flying out and tried to grab me. He had a harness on and the van had been rigged with a telescoping mechanism that allowed him to come out around 5 feet while hanging from this harness (like they do in some haunted houses where people appear to be flying) and it was operated by another person inside, also dressed in black. So there was at least 3 people involved in this attempt.

I barely dodged his attempt to grab me and all 3 of us ran toward the elementary school and hopped the fence (about 6 feet tall), ran along the fence though bushes and then hopped a second fence (about 15′ maybe) that allowed us to be inside the school.

We were scared as hell and could hear the van driving around and assumed they were in hot pursuit. We found a way to get onto the roof of the school from inside, thank god, and proceeded to observe the van driving around the school for at least 30 minutes in an obvious attempt to find us.

This scared us even more because one would think the would be kidnappers would flee, but I suppose they thought we could identify them. This was before cell phones so we stayed up there until around 45 minutes after we last saw them. It appeared that some of them were searching for us on foot also, which added to the fear. We eventually escaped and went back to my friends house, and never told anyone in our family out of fear of being punished.

27. Cool power

When I was child I vividly remember having dreams where I was in a toy store, or was playing with a toy I didn’t have, and if I gripped it really, really hard, I would wake up with the toy in real life.
My family was by no means poor, but very often my toys were bought from garage sales. They had bought me a really cool He-Man action figure. For too long he didn’t have a Skeltor to fight. I begged and pleaded, and my family tried to find one at garage sales. No luck.

One night I dream about playing with a Skeletor at the toy store. I wanted it SO DAMN BAD. At some point I realized I was dreaming. I didn’t want to stop playing with it. So I gripped it hard in my hands making sure that when I woke up I would have it. And I did.

I was stoked. My family asked me where I had gotten the toy, knowing that I wanted one. When I told them I took it from a dream they seemed pretty amused. In retrospect they likely bought it for me and slipped it to me in my sleep. If that was the case, they did this a few more times. Another time I had took a Power Ranger from my dream, and then a GI Joe car. Hell of a power to have as a kid.

28. Ghostly apparition

One of my good friends and her daughter took a picture of them kissing each other inside their newly purchased home. In the background you can clearly see a figure of a little girl who was not present for the photo. After research they found out the house used to be a crematorium. They had “ghost experts” come in to see if they could find anything and they could not. This picture changed my opinion on ghosts.

29. Recorded seance

Tried contacting a friend, who had committed suicide shortly after high school, via a seance with another friend of mine. Last minute she opened up garage band and hit record on her Macbook Pro.

We caught some skeevy voices that weren’t our friend including a creepy female child’s voice. Fucking weird.

30. The moral of the story

So about two years ago I was in my room reading a book when I hear it. Soft as ever, two little girls giggling. Not just any giggle. It was the kind of giggling you hear in horror movies. I immediately put down my book and listened. After about a minute of holding my breath I decided it must have come from outside. Then that night just as I’m about to drift off to sleep, I hear it again. Two little girls giggling. Now it was 2 am and I was pretty damn sure there weren’t two little girls outside my window at that time of night, so I began to freak out. I sat up in my bed and waited for what felt like forever just listening. Then I hear it again. I jumped out of my bed and go spend the rest of the night in the guest room. By the next morning I was convinced my room was haunted. For the next week I avoided my room and spent my nights in the guest room unbeknownst to my family. I was afraid to tell anyone for fear I was going crazy or they wouldn’t believe me. But every time I spent more than an hour in my room I would hear those two little girls giggle. By the end of the week I was a mess. I could barely sleep and was terrified of my room. Then one morning my brother walks up to me and says “you deaf or something?” Obviously I was confused and after further questioning he tells me about this small device he had placed in my room . Apparently its like some sort of prank device that’s easily hidden and can make a variety of different noises, my brother however choose the creepy as fuck little girls giggling sound. He wondered why I hadn’t heard it or said something about all week and I just wanted to punch him in the face. So my room wasn’t haunted after all! Moral of the story, sometimes your brother is just an asshole.

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