1. A misty fog chased me down the hall

“I was working overnight at a small 24 pt psych ward in a medium sized hospital built in the 1950s. Everyone always says the floor was haunted, but I’d been working there for about 10 years, and never had a paranormal encounter there myself.

Anyway, it’s about 1am, and a tech that was stationed outside the door of a sleeping pt’s room (doing a direct line of sight observation) comes to the door of the nurse’s station with another tech in tow. They both say they just saw a ‘shadow person’ walk out of room 610, down the hall, and walk into the assistant director’s office.

I look at my monitor tech, (her job is to watch the panel of cameras on the unit.) She nods: “Yea, I saw it too, on the camera.” Now, I’m super jelly, everyone’s always talking about the shit they see, and I’ve never seen anything. I decided to walk down there and peek in the window in the door, see what I can see.

Well, I immediately regretted it. Let me explain, I’ve been down that hall 10,000 times, probably more. But something is decidedly off. Yea, it gets cold, colder than it has ever been, not even winter, but it is more then that. Each step is harder to take than the last, I can feel something, something oppressive, something heavy, I’m starting to get tightness in my chest. I feel hate, the feeling of something hating, pure undiluted hate. It wanted me to know that it isn’t human, it never has been human, and it hates all humans.

I’m starting to consider turning around, I look back, and the entire crew is standing at the nurses station peaking their heads around the door watching me. Can’t chicken out in front of that many people. I keep walking.

I get about 5 feet away from the door, and I have feelings of impending doom. I’m almost sure I’m going to die right then and there, I can’t will myself any closer to that door. About that time the blinds in the window in the door open all by themselves. I see a face, an outline, it’s got a cone shaped head, like someone in a hooded robe maybe, and a mouth frozen in an eternal scream, and giant holes where eyes should have been.

I turn around and start running, back towards the nurses station, back toward other people. I never looked back.

When I get there they say I was white as a sheet, shaky, mumbling, and had cold sweat beads. The monitor tech shows me the footage. Some kind of misty black fog chased me about 150′ down the hall and dissipated around room 610, and everyone saw it.

The administration of the hospital tell me I can’t have a copy of the footage, says it can’t have the hospital getting a bad reputation, especially the psych ward. Fine, I’ll record the footage on my phone next time I work. Nope, they deleted it. But I do have about seven good witnesses who saw it all.” — illiternati

2. Mannequins moved around the kitchen on their own

“When I was younger my mom was dating this guy (who we will call JB) and after a few months he invited my mom, me, and my brother to go with him and his son (about my age) out to his lake house for the weekend. It was right on Lake Michigan but up in a more secluded area which was pretty awesome. Well we got up there and for one I already felt really creeped out. It was a smaller two (maybe 3 if you count the really big attic) story house that had the living room/dining room/kitchen on the first floor and had 2 bedrooms on the second floor.

His grandfather had helped to build the place with his (the grand fathers) dad and then he lived there for most of his life working as a tailor in the nearby town. We went up to the attic to get some beach toys because that’s where JB kept all of that stuff so he didn’t have to haul it every time he went out there. Well when we went up to the attic I noticed in the corner covered in some dust and cobwebs about 8 mannequins, some just upper torsos and some full body. Not to out of the ordinary considering a tailor had lived there.

Me and JB’s son slept down in the living room on the couch since there were no more beds, and near midnightish I heard on of the stairs squeak a few times. Figuring it was my mom coming to check to make sure we were asleep I told his son to be quiet and quickly turned the TV off and hid under the covers. After not hearing any noise for a few minutes I looked out from under the covers and saw three of the mannequins moving around in the kitchen. Like their body parts weren’t moving but they were sliding around the kitchen.

I swore I was dreaming but was so terribly frightened I hid back under the covers with a small yelp and then heard the dragging on the floor coming closer and peaked out seeing one of them just a few feet from the couch. I hid back under the covers and shut my eyes tight hoping it would go away.

The next morning I got up and tried not to think about it, really really hoping it was just a bad dream but when we went back up to the attic to put the beach stuff back the mannequins were in different spots and weren’t covered in cob webs any more….. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to but it happened and I’ve been scared shitless of mannequins ever since.” — Nexaz

3. I spotted the ghost of an old man during a childhood sleepover

“When I was little my brother and I would go to my Aunt’s and Uncle’s house and have a sleep over, they would set up this tiny tent for us in their living room. However, when I was around 10 I couldn’t fit in the tent anymore, so my Aunt had us sleep in their basement, me on the guest bed and my brother in the tent.

After going to bed I woke up in the middle of the night to the window well window open and blowing the small curtains up, I felt no wind at all and as I look down there was this old man wrapped up in a blanket warming his hands over the night light. As he’s rocking back and forth he slowly tuns towards me and I dive to the bottom of my sleeping bag (because obviously that was the safest place) and refuse to look again. I was so so scared I couldn’t speak and wake up my brother (who was safe in the tent) and I was sweating so much in my sleeping bag.

I told my aunt the next day and she an my uncle laughed. The last couple of times after that night when I’d go over to their house they would put me in their upstairs guest room beside their bedroom, but I never thought anything of it.

Years later (I was home from university) at a Thanksgiving dinner, we were talking about nightmares and such, and that’s when my Aunt brought up my ‘night terror’ and told everyone that before they bought the home off an elder gentleman lived in the house but unfortunately passed away after. He had made a rocking chair and my Aunt and Uncle had kept it because it was really nicely made. She told me that when I described the old man to her, it matched what he looked like to a T. So after that night when I came over she wouldn’t put me in that room again, and hadn’t told me all those years because she didn’t want me to not keep visiting her. I would also like to point out I do not believe in the supernatural so there probably was an explanation for this…” — dopebananas

4. I saw a child with white eyes covered in a black shadow

“When I was in my living room at like, 2 AM few years ago. I was scrolling about the internet when I decided to get up to get something to drink and put my laptop down. When I got up and turned my head to the entryway there was a child about a foot smaller than me covered in a black shadow with white eyes. I didn’t even have time to scream when he opened his mouth (also white) and disappeared. I cried and called my best friend to comfort me. I haven’t seen it since and i honestly don’t want to know what that was.

I have more stories but thats the scariest and most vivid in my head.” — WiltingDaisy

5. My grandparent’s house has had poltergeist activity since 1970

“It started when my Mother and her two sister ‘Louise’ and ‘Theresa’ were playing around in a cemetery (I knoowww… wtf were they ‘playing’ in a cemetary? You got me by the ass on that one!). My Mother apparently forgot about the age old ‘don’t walk on the actual graves asshole’ rule, while they were playing hide and seek, and was running from Theresa. She stepped onto a grave and the ground gave way and she fell INTO the grave. According to her, the grave was from 1907 and bore the same name as her’s. They scooped some of the dirt out, took it home, and got out their Ouija Board. Jimi Hendrix had just passed away and her older sister decided she wanted to contact him. They decided that the best way to increase the power of the board was to sprinkle the grave dirt around the board, light some candles, and turn out the lights. Jimi Hendrix did not answer them, obviously, but a woman named ‘Amy’ did, and she apparently thoroughly chastised them for being ‘naughty girls.’ The planchette immediately after moved to ‘goodbye’.’ According to all three women, the room was silent until the wind picked up outside and blew around the outside of the house in such a way that it sounded like a ‘shrieking woman and a moaning man all at the same time.’ There was no wind in the room, yet, the candle flames instantly went out, and the lamp on the bedside table switched on by itself. All three girls ran screaming out of the room and hid in their Father’s bedroom, between the wall and the bed. After they calmed down and no longer felt threatened they discussed what should be done next.

They went back into Louise’s bedroom where they had been performing the seance, brush the dirt into a linen handkerchief, retrieved the board, retrieved salt and matches from the cupboard in the kitchen and went outside. In the backyard, they said the Lord’s Prayer while holding hands, sprinkled the board and grave dirt with salt, poured gasoline on the items, and burned them.

They went back inside, feeling like this was over, and tried not to think about it anymore. Nothing happened for a few weeks, until the youngest (Louise) began having terrible nightmares, to which she would wake up screaming several times a night. My Mother was next, followed by her older sister, Theresa. My grandparents (both very quiet, and not the type to tell tall tales) described the upcoming months as nights with no sleep, rushing from one room to another, flicking lights on and off, falling into bed after soothing one daughter, drifting into sleep, only to be awakened by another screaming girl. This went on for several months and then stopped abruptly.

Just as my grandparents were beginning to feel well-rested, Louise began screaming for her Mother and Father in the night again.

‘There are people in my room!’

According to Louise, she would wake up because she could hear people talking, and when she would open her eyes, the bedroom lights would be on and there would be a man and a woman standing in the corner of her bedroom, sipping coctails, and having discussions about the weather. My grandmother started sleeping in bed with her now 16 year old daughter. For the first few days, nothing happened, then my Aunt poked her awake in the middle of the night. Grandma opened her eyes and looked around the room, seeing nothing, heard no noises, and when she began to ask Louise why she woke her up, Louise grabbed a fistful of her nightgown and said ‘ssshhhhhh’- and then the lamp on the bedside table turned itself on. My grandmother jumped out of bed, grabbed Louise by the arm, and dragged her into my grandpa’s bedroom. She woke him up, told him what happened, and they both slept in his bed for the next several weeks until Theresa, now 18 and going off to college, moved out, at which time they moved Louise into Theresa’s old bedroom. There were more things that happened over the years but it slowly tapered off into an ‘every once in awhile thing’ once they moved Louise into another bedroom. Now, 47 years later, that bedroom is like a time capsule. My Grandmother used to clean it weekly, but, they never moved anything out of it except Louise’s clothing. All the furnishings have stayed the same, and after years of refurbishing every other room in the house, that room still has pea green shag carpeting and orange and gold owl wallpaper. Since Grandma died ten years ago, no one has really bothered with the room, except for the occasional cleaning it gets when there’s one too many extra overnight guests and someone has to sleep in there- and, no one ever makes it all night, we almost always wake up to find this person sleeping on the couch. At night, when no one is in the room, you can hear people talking- a lot of people, like there’s some kind of party going on in there, coming from that room. As a child, that room was the source of nightmares. All the older cousins would play tricks on the younger ones to force them into that room, only to lock them in (I myself was locked in the closet when I was 7, but that a whole ‘nother story) until their cries for help attract adult attention, or even just the standard “You’re too little to play with us. You have to stay in the back bedroom for FIVE minutes alone if you want to play”. There’ve been small bouts of activity throughout the home over the years (this post is getting pretty long so I’ll cut myself off and not go into any more detail) but, it’s really just something that everyone is used to, and for the last 35 years or so, that room has just kind of belonged to ‘them.'” — Alliekat1282 

6. A ghost girl vanished and reappeared all throughout my childhood

“When I was little I saw a recurring ghost/image. She would appear for a split second and then vanish, but I could always perfectly recreate the image.

She was a short little girl wearing a frilly blue dress and a big red bow, blonde hair, blue eyes, large ears. A couple of notable sightings were her looking through my mom’s jewelery box and one peering through our glass door at me (with her hands over here eyes binocular style)

It never really bothered me and these happened for a while. A few years later ar my Grandfathers house and we were helping him unpack his attic and I found a portrait of his long since deceased sister.

Not quite the same dress, slightly different bow, but the face was absolutely her. She had died as a child quite tragically so obviously I had never met her, but I did know of her but had never seen a picture of her before.

So, not a scary supernatural encounter but rather a heartwarming one knowing the great aunt I never met was saying hello.” — Omni_Omega 

7. We visited an old, haunted sanitarium together

“There is an old TB sanitarium outside of Louisville, KY called Waverly Hills. I went with a group of 10 or so friends for an overnight excersion. We paid a private group fee and got the entire facility to ourselves from 8pm-4am.

It was my first time ever going to a ‘paranormal’ event and I was very much so skeptical of the entire thing. The place had been on multiple ghost hunters shows and a lot of research I did online toted it as ‘one of the most haunted places in North America.’ I walked into that building a skeptic and walked out convinced that the paranormal was a real thing.

After the guide gave us a tour of the grounds and just a couple of stories (she did not want to put shit on our heads. She wanted our experiences to be our own) we split up into groups, guys and girls.

We went to the 4th floor where there had been I believe 2 suicides with one potential murder and we sat down in the breezeway. We sat one twist light in the center of the circle…and we started talking.

‘Is anyone there? We just want to talk,’ always followed by a directive for any spirits to turn on the light.

This went on uneventfully for 5-10 minutes until finally… ‘if you are there please let us know by turning on the light’ …and it turned on.

‘Ok if you’re there, please turn it off’ the words were barely out of his mouth and the light went out.

‘Did you work here?’ Nothing “Were you a patient here?’ Light on Were you a child?’ Nothing

Finally after several minutes of nothing I said ‘if we are bothering you, let us know by turning off the light and we will leave you alone’ light off immediately.

Later that night (we set up a HQ on the ground level) I was with my girlfriend and 2 other ladies from the group and we were in one of the children’s wards. Now one of the most famous aspects of Waverly is people claiming to have ghosts play ball with them… well we brought one.

We were sitting in a room with this child’s ball doing the flash light test. We had mild reactions with the light and we were trying like hell to recreate our successes from earlier. One of the ladies (who is a nurse and is fantastic with children) stood and said, ‘Ok I’m going to kick the ball and if you want to play with me that would be just great! And if not well that would be ok too.’

She very gently kicked the ball and it rolled and then stopped suddenly… in the middle of the breezeway. Wobbled back and forth for 2-3 seconds and then ever so gently… rolled back to my friend.

It was a great night and I highly recommend it to anyone on the fence.” — HiDiddlyHove

8. I had a conversation with a dead man

“I was 6-7 years old, Saturday morning, I wanted to eat cereal but there was no milk, so I decide to go to a small store that is on the same block as my house. So I walk to it (50 or so meters away from my house) and I see the owner outside looking at his store which is closed. I say hi to him, he says hello, I ask if they are not opening today and he says not today I don’t think anything of it and said, “Okay thank you.” He asks me to say hi to my parents. They have been neighbors and friends for more than 30 years at that moment. I go home make some toast and I see that my parents are dressing up. I ask them where are they going and my mom says they are going to Mr. Ricardo’s funeral whom died last night. Mr Ricardo was the owner of the store I went. The one I saw and talked to 30 mins before.” — PimpangryMX

9. I heard boots down the hall and a light switch flicking

“When I was 10 my family and I moved into an old Victorian house. It wasn’t too weird overall, but the first day I was alone in there I had quite a memorable experience.

My dog and I were left home alone while my sister went with our parents on an outing somewhere. My dog was a hald-shepherd half-godonlyknows with a temper problem and what would’ve been balls of steel if he weren’t neutered. He was my best buddy.

We were still unpacking so I went downstairs to the basement to move a few things, and Dog came with me. That didn’t strike me as weird, I figured he wanted to explore too, but he stuck right by me the whole time. While we were down there I heard footsteps and voices from above and thought my family had come back–except the voices weren’t theirs, and there was music and laughter, though we hadn’t hooked up the entertainment center yet. I thought it might have been neighbors, but Dog was standing at the basement stairs and I knew he’d heard something too. But it stopped, he relaxed, and we went upstairs.

On the ground floor everything was still dark and my parents were still gone, and there weren’t any neighbors around. But I didn’t think much of it.

I went up to the floor I shared with my sister, which was fairly squared away at this point. The hallway light was on, and so was the lamp in our playroom. I went to the playroom and curled up on my armchair, under the lamp, and Dog went with me.

He jumped up and sat with me while I read, but at some point randomy growled and jumped off the chair and lay down in front of the doorway, facing the hall. I heard footsteps come up the stairs, quiet but heavy, like faraway boots, and under the light fixture they stopped. Something I couldn’t see rested on the one creaky board and rocked it back and forth for a few seconds before turning the hallway light off and on. It wasn’t flickers; I could hear the clicks of the switch.

Dog sat up, growling slightly. I couldn’t see anything in the hallway but there was suddenly a deep chuckle, and the sound of bootsteps hurring down the hall.

Dog flew into a fury and he raged and snarled and snapped and made noises I’d never heard come from any animal. I was scared and tried to go to him but he barked at me and turned his attention back to the door. This continued for a little longer and suddenly stopped.

Dog dropped back to a guarding pose, and then drooped and came over to my chair. He curled up with me and we stayed there until my family came back. He didn’t leave me for the rest of the day. But after that day he never went back to that floor, and no dog since has ever willing gone into the basement.” — GlitterFire

10. The blinds moved all on their own

“I was watching my girlfriend’s house while her and the family went on vacation. I was unemployed and hurting for money. They have two dogs – a big german shepherd and a fat black lab – and her mom paid me to watch them, along with various other gifts and food for the week.

I lug my desktop over there with the intent to game with my friends over the week, stay up for all hours and general be a giant piece of shit for the week and really relax.

In the living room, the rest of the house is behind you. Not my favorite thing.

After relaxing with video games and a big screen TV for a day, the german shepherd starts staring at the bathroom. This dog is VERY protective and loves me. She’s sitting at the foot of the bathroom door, staring directly at the window.

They built a covered deck to the house. The bathroom window originally looked over the yard, but is now just a window to the deck. Kind of creepy in the dark, but I always lowered the blinds.

I see her staring at the window, blinds up, and she’s whimpering. I walk toward the window to close the blinds. Maybe she saw a squirrel or a bat and went into protect mode? As I get closer to the window, she charges around me and stands between me and the window. I try reach for the draw string, the dog jumps up and on me to push me back. Even when she’s up on me, I try to grab for the draw string and she uses her snout to try to push my hand away. I finally close the blinds, and sit back down. The german shepherd remains at the foot of the bathroom door, staring.

And that’s when I hear it. The blinds draw themselves up. Very slooooooowly. At this point the dog is baring its teeth, hair standing on end. I freeze and felt like I couldn’t move. From fear.

I finally get the nerve to stand up and peek inside the bathroom. The blinds are up.

I take one step in to the bathroom, to go lower them again, and they lower. Again, terrifyingly slow. The draw string going up as the blinds go down, but not swaying or dangling. Taut.

I take a step back again. I can’t describe what I felt. It was this terror. Like I had just seen something I can’t rationalize or write off. It’s here, in front of my face, happening. I’m staring. Just in shock. The dog is losing its mind and starts whimpering, but still won’t let me walk forward and stands between me and this damn window.

It starts slowly lowering itself, then raising itself. It seemed like forever. Finally, the blinds just dropped, real quick like, and then nothing.

I didn’t sleep that night, and couldn’t leave the dogs, so I just shut that door, moved a heavy cabinet in front of it, and turned on some funny movies for the rest of the night to try to wash my brain.

I’m sure there’s a million explanations for what happened. But that dog doesn’t spook for ANYTHING (even if german shepherds are notoriously skiddish and paranoid) and in that moment it was just… surreal.” — beareolas

11. We saw ghosts from the Civil War era

“My SO’s house was built over a civil war battlefield in Virginia. For years she claims to have seen a shadowy figure standing in her bedroom doorway at night, which she sometimes dreams about. Her dog often stares through her doorway on alert for extended periods of time and sometimes barks at it.

Another civil war battleground house- a family friend’s child had an imaginary friend when he was little called ‘red man.’ When asked to describe his friend, he said he was covered in red paint and only appeared to him in a particular spot in the backyard. In one family picture there appears to be a shadowy human shape in that particular spot.

Lots of these stories in Virginia. That’s what you get for building over Civil War battlegrounds.” — asheddrva

12. My brother saw glasses hovering in the air

“When I was in high school, my dad and stepmom lived in an old farmhouse that all of us had some sort of paranormal experience in. For what it’s worth, my brother and I are very logical, scientific, skeptical people and we both saw different things we couldn’t explain.

We were out one day while the house was being fumigated. My bedroom was up in the attic space, and when I went upstairs the window was open, the box fan on the floor was on full speed, and the room was FREEZING – probably 20 degrees colder than it had been outside. I turned the knob all the way to the left on the fan to turn it off, and it kept going full speed. Oh, maybe you have to turn it the other way. Still full speed. I go to unplug it, and on going over to the outlet, I find that the fan was not plugged in, and as far as it was from the wall it COULD NOT have been plugged at any time. When I saw that, the fan slowly came to a stop. I hauled ass downstairs.

My brother slept in the first floor bedroom, and one night was playing Gameboy in bed or something after lights out. He heard his door open, so he puts down the Gameboy and pretends he’s asleep, but when he peaks he sees nothing but the moonlight reflecting off frames of glasses ‘hovering’ – he says there was no outline of a person. He freaked out and hid under the blankets. The next day he asked our dad (only person that wears glasses in the house) if he was staring at him when he was sleeping last night, dad said no and that he didn’t get home from work until later.

My dad couldn’t find his wallet while he was alone in the house (he was the type to always stop at the side table on coming in to the house and put his wallet and keys in the same place). He searched every where and after a while said out loud, ‘I don’t have time for this today – please just give it back.’ He walked in to the living room and his wallet was in the middle of the floor.” — glorious_one

13. I thought I closed my eyes for two minutes — but it had been an hour

“My mum’s really into all the psychic medium stuff and in 2015 she became really ill so I left school to look after her full time. I started going to this like, psychic medium class thing with her because she didn’t want to go on her own. Frankly I thought it was bollocks after they had us drawing with crayons and melting it to reveal some inner truth. It came to the third week and the woman decided to show us our spirit guides so we started meditating, just shutting your eyes and following her instructions. Pretty soon I turned around while closing my eyes and saw a man appear behind me in First World War military uniform, he then put his hand on my shoulder and I opened my eyes and felt more sick than I ever have. I’m fairly certain the man was my great great grandfather. the two minutes I thought I’d been closing my eyes for was in fact over an hour. Still don’t know what happened but I like to think that there’s something more because of it, I thought I’d just imagined it but the deep feeling of sickness I just can’t account for no matter how I try.” — MrBlackadder

14. We stayed at a haunted inn that absolutely horrified us

“A few years ago I went on a long weekend trip with the boyfriend at the time to a small college town with a supposedly haunted inn. We got checked into our room and hung out for a bit. Everything was normal except for the thermostat on the wall. The bright blue backlight kept lighting up for no reason. We started joking about it being a ghost trying to communicate with us, but we chalked it up to bad batteries. The first night, I had trouble sleeping because that damn blue light kept randomly coming on, and honestly in the dark in a strange place, it was kind of creepy. So, I kept falling in and out of sleep. At one point, I woke up when I heard my ex shuffling along the carpet at the foot of the bed toward the bathroom, so I opened my eyes and saw him heading that way…until I realized that, no, he was still sleeping right beside me… I’m not sure how I made it through that night. The next day, the stupid thermostat continued its shenanigans. Finally, my boyfriend took it off the wall and removed the batteries. Not long after he put it back on the wall, the damn thing lit up again for no reason. I think I screamed. Another night of not sleeping well because of the randomly flashing blue thermostat. Fell asleep at one point only to wake up to that sound of feet shuffling on the carpet. I open my eyes to see the man walking back from the bathroom crossing past the foot of the bed. Again, the boyfriend was right there in bed next to me. I’ve been able to explain away the lighting-up-for-no-reason thermostat — I’m sure it was just defective — but I have yet to come up with a reason for the man walking to and from the bathroom. All I know is that I am never staying in that place again.” — igotbooks

15. I felt someone blow into my ear and speak to me

“This was in the summer of 1995. I am sitting in front of my computer which was off and just relaxing in my office chair when I decided to close my eyes and just kind of rest for a bit.

I just sat in my chair breathing normal and just being relaxed. For whatever reason I decided to pretend my body’s energy was like a radio dial and I remember picking a radio station 98.5 so my normal energy vibration is what I assigned this number to.

I was wondering if I could mediate on that number and see what would happen if I lowered that number, 98.4, 98.3, 98.2 etc and trying to feel the change in energy and vibration, each time by .1

When i got to the low 90’s if felt darkness and heaviness (hard to describe) and felt that there was no point in going lower as this feeling just got worse the lower number i went.

I decided instead to try to go higher and went back up to my original 98.5 and started increasing .1 each step so 98.6 98.7 etc..

I forget what number I was on but then after a certain higher level was reached things got really weird. I could feel my pulse and heart. Then I could feel my pulse on each of my finger tips (never felt that before!) I am still raising my imaginary vibration number

and now i am feeling what felt like 100s of pulses through my entire body (really weird feeling!) but I did not let it deter me from moving even higher to see what would happen.

As I do so all of the sudden I don’t feel the pulses anymore it is now completely quiet and calm. Then the weirdest thing happened, I felt and heard one big ‘POP’ sound. So now I am getting scared because what I heard and felt was totally real.

Trying to keep calm and to see what happens next. The next thing that happened was, I felt someone blowing air in my right ear. You ever had someone blow air in your ear? Same thing. Did it once. (I am scared shitless now but I decide to stick with it to see what would happen.) It blows air in my ear again a few seconds apart. I am ready to open my eyes and jump out of my chair at this point because I can feel this, this is real but I stick with it to see what happens next.

To this day I cannot explain this. As i sat there waiting for another blow if you will, this voice starts talking to me in my ear in a language I could not understand. The voice was male, 30’s or 40’s and the tone of voice was a normal conversational voice. The kind of voice that a friend would be talking to you about their day.

Now that scared me and I immediately jumped out of my chair and opened my eyes but there was no one in my apartment.

I have never tried doing it again.” — Underdark8

16. A strange man with a suitcase appeared in our home

“I was 13 years old and drinking lemonade with my best friend in my kitchen. We were alone. From where we were seating we could see a corridor that leads from the front door to the backyard. We were talking and something made us shut up. We looked to the corridor and there was the shadow of a man walking by with a suitcase. I know she also saw him because we both described the same thing: a tall shadow with a suitcase

Fast forward to a few years later, I had to do a school project with another girl. Again I was alone at home, working on the computer when she arrived. She then asked me where my dad was. When I told her my dad was away, at work, she asked me, ‘Well, then who’s the man I saw walking downstairs and carrying a suitcase when I came in?’

So far, no one else from my family has seen him. I haven’t seen him again ever since, but for a while it really scared the shit out of me to be home alone.” — rraarraarraasputin

17. A ghost attacked me in the middle of the night

“One of the stranger ones would be when I got punched in the face while I was trying to fall sleep.

So one night I was trying to fall asleep. It was around 10 or 11 and I was laying in bed on my left side with my eyes closed. I remember I was really relaxed and close to falling asleep when I had this strange sensation that something was coming towards my face. Even stranger, while my eyes were closed I saw what looked like a fist coming towards me. Then, suddenly it felt like a solid gust of wind (kind of hard to describe) hit me right in the face and my head actually snapped back as if I had been hit. I snapped my eyes open and looked around, nothing was there. It freaked me out, but I was tired so I just ignored it and forced myself to go to sleep in order to stop being scared.” — redmoon_3

18. My cup floated into the air and dropped back down

“One time when I was driving with my mom, my drink cup turned raised a few inches and turned completely upside down and then dropped. We both saw it happen and were pretty freaked out for awhile.” — iamthetoe

19. We experienced a poltergeist

“When I was a kid (probably between 2nd-5th grade) I MAY have had a poltergeist. I consider myself a bit of a skeptic so I’m not sure, but sometimes I experienced things.

I’m sure many of you won’t believe this story, but I promise it is 100% true. I was raised by my grandmother and she would always buy me these porcelain dolls in which to decorate my room. I liked them, but I wasn’t allowed to play with them, I was only allowed to look at them. Also, it should be noted that now that I am an adult, I consider myself a problem child at that time as I had such a sassy attitude and some anger issues. Well, I was upset about something dumb and I had an attitude so I stomped off to my bedroom. I had a couple of these dolls displayed on high shelves that I could not reach without help and one in particular was a beautiful doll dressed in a wedding gown. As soon as I walked into the room, it flew from the top shelf, across the room, and landed right on my bed. There is no way it could’ve simply “fallen” onto my bed as it was on the opposite side of the decently sized room. Had it fallen, it would’ve landed on the floor. Anyway, I thought the doll flew off the shelf to be played with so I was playing with it when my grandmother came in and asked how it got off the shelf and I told her it flew off the shelf onto my bed.

Also, in this same house, I woke up many times during the night to my bed shaking like there was an earthquake but earthquakes were not regular occurrences where I grew up. I also sleepwalked (sleptwalked?) frequently. I would go to sleep in my bed and wake up in the basement or sometimes on the couch. (Our basement was fully furnished. Not creepy btw. Our playroom and a family living room was in the basement).

Yeah basically, all that stuff stopped after my grandmother died in 2006, but my aunt, who bought the house after my grandmother passed, said that on the day of my grandmother’s death, she always smells her perfume.” — NotAGinger42069 

20. Everything in the house was knocked over

“I live in Missouri, my parents had left on a trip to Texas. My mom always talked about how she thought there was a ghost or something in our house, always saying she had little weird things happen to her in the downstairs bedroom (which is right next to the downstairs bathroom).

I had been at a friend’s house and came home around 2 or 3 AM. As far as I know the house had been locked up tight, this is why I used our spare key to get in. I opened the front door and noticed the downstairs bathroom light was on. This bathroom is small…the sink is barely far enough away from the toilet to sit down, and above the sink is a very big half body size mirror, there are also small trinkets on several shelves. Every trinket on the shelves was either knocked over or in the bathtub right next to the toilet and this heavy half body sized mirror was laying face down in the floor between the toilet and sink, maybe this doesn’t seem strange to anyone else but the mirror wasn’t broken, it was like someone took it off and set it down on the floor.

Nothing else had been messed with in the house from what I could tell, I called my parents who were still on Texas creeped myself out and then went back to my friends house.” — hpdovesmash

21. We heard knocking on the door — when no one was there

“When I was still in school we were in paris for a week, in a youth hostel. A lot of people around, some of them younger than me and my friends. Anyway, a few times a day we would here a very distinct knock on the door, always three times. We just asumed the other kids there were messing with us as nobody was there as we opened. We made it into some kind of game to catch the guys who did it, but we’d never see anyone, no matter how fast we opened the door. As I come back to the room from the shower and walk towards our door I hear the knocking again, as if someone inside the room was knocking. I froze in the corridor, with nothing on but my towel. Immediately one of my friends opens the door, convinced that this time he’d catch the kid because he happened to be right at the door. Well he didn’t.. He just looked at me and knew it wasn’t me, because I was still to far away.” — sirspamelot 

22. My deceased dog visited me

“I’m sure this will get buried but my little dog, Benji, who died a little over 3 years ago, still visits me. Ever since he passed, a few times a month I’ll feel something jump into my bed just like he used to, but when I look I can’t see anything. I’m absolutely sure it’s him coming back to visit and cuddle.

It doesn’t happen as often now as when he first died, though.” — omg_its_ica

23. A man overdosed and floated above his body

“I knew this frat kid from Ole Miss that I used to party with. He had a xanax problem. One night he had too many bars and alcohol and overdosed. By time the ambulance came he had stopped breathing and didn’t have a pulse. He was clinically dead for a minute or two before being revived.

He claims to have floated above his body looking down on what the medical staff was doing. He said he started going through the roof towards a light. He said it was the most peaceful feeling he has experienced. Almost indescribable he said. It compares to know drug and you feel like the weight of the world is suddenly gone. He claimed to see a few family members just as he was pulled back to his body and revived. Is he telling the truth? Who knows. Trustworthy guy though. It changed him forever.” — DownvoteDaemon

24. We all shared the same dream

“I’ve been friends with the same group of girls since I was around 5-6 years old. When we were 18 one of us was killed in a brutal car crash. She hit a tree and snapped her neck. It was devastating.

A few months after it happened I had a dream that I was back in high school and I saw her. I said, ‘I miss you so much. I’m so sorry about what happened.’ She looked at me and said, ‘No! I’m not dead. It’s all a fraud!’ –then I woke up and shook it off.

The next day I got a call from my friend (another girl in our group) who says, ‘I had the weirdest dream about _ last night. We were back at our high school and she told me she wasn’t really dead.’

All the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.” — aquabatgalv

25. My sleepwalking got so bad that I scared my mother

“Okay I have something a bit disturbing that I recently found out from my mom. My older sister and I use to share a room when we were younger. I was 10, where she was 16 and we had bunk beds. I would sleep on the top bunk, and we had a long mirror on the wall across so I was able to see my sister sleeping on the bottom bunk.

My sister use to sleep walk really bad for a period in her life. I would wake up and notice she wasn’t in bed, and my mother and I would find her just aimlessly walking down our narrow hallway. One creepy incident was when I noticed she had slept walk again, and instead of grabbing my mom because I felt bad, I decided to get her myself. I searched the whole house and couldn’t find her. Eventually I heard muffles from our closet in the bedroom and opened it to her with her chin low and hair in front of her face, ripping one of my jackets. I put her to sleep, and for some reason at the time it didn’t scare me that much. Not sure why, maybe because I was scared I couldn’t find my sister? But thinking of it now it was beyond alarming.

Anyway her sleepwalking got so bad to the point that my mom set up a camera with an alert system in the hallway because she worried she would fall down the stairs at the end of the hallway. I never sleepwalk ever, at least not from what I know. My mom woke up one night to the noise of the alarm going off and went in the hallway to do her usual grab and direct my sister back to sleep routine. However, she said she saw both me and my sister in the hallway with our hands holding each other’s and having our backs to her. Figuring I was awake and not worried, she told me to bring my sister back to bed. Only…I wasn’t responding and I was apparently sleep walking too. She came over to us and we both were staring ahead and bitting our lips apparently. My mom asked again what we are doing and tried her best to direct us back to our bedroom, with no success.

She said we were like rock solid. I was a 10 year old who weighed probably 60 pounds and my mom said she couldn’t move me at all. Eventually she said we both almost jerked our heads at the same time and looked up to the ceiling above us (were still holding hands like the creepy girls in the shining) and apparently said “were waiting for her, she wants us to go with her.” My mom was beyond freaked, and didn’t know what to do. My dad had overnights all the time because he was NYPD at the time, so she kinda just forced us awake. I don’t remember any of this and my mom said that was the only time she has ever seen me sleepwalk. I didn’t believe much of it, but she’s also spiritual. Recently when she told me this and I denied it, she brought out the old recordings of the hallway and I shit you not you can see our creepy slow hold handing down the hall, and that creepy voice my sister and I said. Just such a creepy weird incident.” — Jiilllzzz 

Holly Riordan is the author of Lifeless Souls, available here.