100+ “Scary Stories to Read in the Dark” to Leave You With Chills [2021]

1. She nearly died in an elevator. I heard this when I was in Korea. One day a girl was walking home late night after work or something. It was dark and around midnight. She lived an apartment where they had an elevator. She got in the elevator and when the door was about to close, a strange man with a very red hoodie entered the elevator. He apologized for scaring her and asked which floor she is heading to, without making eye contact. She told him out of fear and the man casually press the button and the one below. As they were on the way, he asked her for her cell phone if he could use it but she declined out of suspicion and isolated herself in the corner. After seconds of silence, the elevator arrived at the floor below the one girl was heading to and the door opened. The guy slowly walked out of the door and turned around facing toward the elevator and the girl, and just stared at her without any movement. Slowly the door started to close and from the gap, she could see him turning around heading for up-stairs… pulling a knife out of his pocket.

2. Something was wearing her skin. ‘Daddy, I had a bad dream.’

You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness—it’s 3:23.

‘Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?’

‘No, Daddy.’

The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter’s pale form in the darkness of your room.

‘Why not sweetie?’

‘Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy’s skin sat up.’ For a moment, you feel paralyzed; you can’t take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

3. My dead grandfather stopped by the house. Two days after my grandfather died, the neighborhood security guard knocks on our door on a Sunday morning. He told us: ‘An old man came to your house earlier, knocked on your door for half an hour, and finally left. When I asked him what he wanted, he told me he needed to say goodbye to someone he had never had the chance to meet.’ We were all stunned, had no idea who this old man was, or who was he looking for. When the guard came in, he shouted: ‘That’s the old man!!’ pointing at a picture of my grandfather. My entire family froze for a minute. I’m not 100% sure if the guard was telling the truth, but I almost like believing that my grandad wanted to say goodbye to my newborn sister, before resting in peace.

4. Who was turning the doorknob? When my family hit hard times we had to move into a small house where our uncle had recently shot and killed himself. He had done this because of his depression after his wife had overdosed on pills, and died the summer before. It all happened so quickly that when we moved in there was still a bit of blood in one of the rooms. But on the third or fourth night of living there, my sister and I, who were sharing a room in the tiny house, were awake in our room playing video games at around 1-2 in the morning, when someone knocks at our door. We didn’t think anything of it and shouted for whoever was outside our door to come in. No answer. Another knock. We stop and stare at the door and another knock comes, the doorknob does a full rotation and snaps back as if someone turned it and let go very quickly. I get up and open the door expecting to see one of my other sisters or my mother, the only other people in the house. I opened the door and stared into an empty hallway. I walk down the hall and peek into the other bedroom, my two younger sisters and my mother are both fast asleep.

5. There was an eerie message on our television. I have a really good one that is actually true; it happened to me. This could have been a dream, but I testify to this day that what I saw was a ghost. So here I am, a young boy who awoke in the middle of the night. I am currently sharing a bunk bed with my brother, and I am on the top bunk. I look out into my living room and notice everything is dark, however, there is a person in an evening gown dusting my fireplace mantle. The woman was slender, which threw me off guard because my mom is obese. I yelled out ‘mom?’ To the person dusting the counter, and the person turned around. It was not my mom, but some older woman. Suddenly, she shrieks, and her face becomes severely deformed. It was like that shit you see in horror movies, like ridiculously scary especially for a young kid I blink my eyes and she was gone. I somehow went back to bed, and the next morning I went to my living room and noticed that even though the tv was off, there was something ‘written’ on the screen. It said: ‘Do not be afraid.’ The text slowly faded, and no one else saw it. As a young boy, this was, and still is, extremely terrifying to me.

6. Playing hide and seek with Alli. I still have fresh memories of this.

When I was very young, about three or four, I remember having a friend named Alli.

Alli lived with me and I would play hide and seek with her in the back yard. Alli was a year older than me. Alli loved my mom but wouldn’t stay long enough to meet her.

My mom didn’t believe I had a friend named Alli, I kept telling her, and my mom first got a very white face and told me to stop, and Alli isn’t real.

Well one night Alli told me she had to leave, so she did. Never heard from her again.

Fast forward to when I was 16, and mom told me that before I was born I had a sister named Alli, and she had passed away due to complications (idr what the problem was, something about her lungs I think).

My mom tells me that it was probably all a coincidence since a divorce was going on during that time and I wanted a friend.

But I still remember everything about Alli, and I refuse to believe it was all pretend.

7. The man that comes and talks to us at night until we fall asleep. I have four little cousins in who never got to meet my grandfather—he passed before they were born. One morning, they ran downstairs for breakfast as they usually do. As my uncle was getting their food ready, one pointed to the fridge and said ‘that’s him!’ My uncle, not thinking much of it, said ‘who?’ and looked over. They were pointing at a picture of my grandfather that they never got to meet. My cousin responded ‘The man that comes and talks to us at night until we fall asleep sometimes!’

8. ‘Please tell the little girl to get out of my room.’ I worked night shift as a palliative care RN in a very big, very old nursing home. It’s important to note that this home and the religious organization that ran it are currently part of the royal inquiry into the institutional response to the abuse of children. The nurses that had worked there for 30+ years used to delight in telling younger staff that when it was used as a children’s home they used to bury children that died in the rose garden. This old rose garden was apparently under a newer wing of the home.

At least four times in my two years of working there we would have elderly, close to death patients wake, totally lucid in the dead of night and ask us ‘please tell the little girl to get out of my room’ or ‘please get that little boy out of the corner, he’s looking at me.’

Being in this huge, dark, old, creepy building that had a very awful history and then that happening? Fuck that, I would never do my rounds alone when it happened, it was terrifying! It made my blood run cold and I’d get a friend to work with me the rest of the night.

I was not the only person this happened to, either. It was a regular occurrence.

9. Ghost writing appeared on the wall in paint. When I was in high school, my family had to move from central Texas back to West Texas for my dad’s job. We were under a lot of stress and other family issues at the time as well, but that is beside the point. My sister and my mom were painting the upstairs walls as we got the house to get ready. My mom was on the wall to the far right, there was a blank wall in the middle, and my sister was on the far left. I was downstairs packing up things into boxes. Anyway, suddenly, my sister comes downstairs (she is older than me) looking scared out of her mind. She asks me to come upstairs. On the wall in between them, for no apparent reason, this ‘writing’ appeared. Looking closely enough, you can see it was not written by accident, but rather by broad strokes made by a human hand. Problem is, the handprint is too big for any of us three to make it. The longer we stayed in the room, the more freaked out we got as we realized that nobody was playing a prank on anyone else. I still have no explanation to this day of what it means.

10. This Number Has Been Disconnected. A few years ago my brother would get a call on his cellphone around 2:00 – 3:00 A.M. every night. He would answer and it was this hellish sounding noise. Like static mixed with screams. He changed his cell number after a month of this and it stopped.

Then after a week or so it began again. The exact same noise. Exact same time. Finally one day he decided to back dial the call. It was an old man that had no clue what he was talking about. Still, the calls persisted. If he didn’t answer, it would call a few more times. No messages were left.

He decided to say screw it. Ended his contract with his phone company, switched to a new one and then got another new number. You guessed it, the screaming static calls continued after a short delay. By this time he was terrified every night. Unsure why this was happening. He back dialed the number again and got a different person.

Around this time he lost his job and his phone. The calls stopped of course. His phone was disconnected now. So one day my mom asks me to listen to this weird message she got on our home phone.

It was the static screaming. We showed my brother and he was freaking out. He back dialed the number again and it said the number was disconnected this time.

Never heard from it again after that.

11. Sis Gets Her Own Phone. When my sister was young, my parents got her a personal “phone” – a landline so that she could feel ‘special’ (yes, she was extra spoiled). It was a pre-paid landline though, so basically no one could call in or out if she ran out of credit, much like a mobile phone. Anyway, every night at 3am her phone would ring. She said there was a man on the other line, and she would get really scared and come running to my room. It escalated to the point that I asked her to please disconnect her phone before going to sleep because it was becoming extremely annoying to get woken up every single night by this ‘person’ that called her. To be honest, since she was about 10, I thought it was just these stupid scary movies she liked to watch. Eventually she just got rid of the phone.

In any case, I recall this stopping. A few years ago we were talking about it, and she confessed that her phone continued to ring even after she disconnected it, which is why she said she didn’t want it anymore. She has no recollection of what the person on the other end was saying, or maybe she’s just completely blocked it out.

12. Checking The Meter. My former teacher was home alone when she was a child some at some point in the 70’s probably. A man knocked on her door and she opened her main door but kept her screen door locked. He said he was from the gas company and wanted to talk to her parents. She told him they weren’t home and he, without missing a beat, tried to start forcing his way into the home. When he found the screen door to be locked he pulled out a fucking box cutter and started to cut through the screen. My teacher ran to hide in a clothes hamper in her parent’s closet. She said she sat there for about 10 minutes before the police arrived. Thank god a neighbor saw everything and called the police or she probably would be dead. Also to put the cherry on the freaking creepy sundae, they found the intruder hiding in the attic.

13. Not alone in bed. A few weeks ago my girlfriend and I were sleeping together, when I woke up to her saying “What are you doing?” She sometimes talks in her sleep, but this sounded so coherent and urgent that it jolted me awake and I asked what she was talking about. She then woke up and said she thought she saw someone at the end of the bed. Thinking it was just a dream, or semi-awake hallucination, we thought nothing of it and went back to sleep. About an hour later, I woke up and saw someone standing on the bed, with the sheets wrapped up and twisted to their neck. I didn’t know what do but the first thing that came out of my mouth was “What are you doing?” My girlfriend then woke me up. I had been dreaming the exact same thing that she did, and said the exact same thing.

14. A Man Watching Through The Window. When I was growing up one of my best friends told me a about a very creepy situation involving him, his younger brother, and a man in the window. When my friend and his little brother were younger they shared a bedroom. They’re some years apart, but his younger brother was born with a multitude of different health issues, including multiple sclerosis, and he’s confined to a wheelchair and cannot care for himself. So, to keep an eye on him overnight when his parents couldn’t, they shared a bedroom.

One night my friend randomly woke up for no in particular reason and happened to glance over at his younger brother, but noticed something very startling; a strange silhouette of a man wearing a top hat looking in through the window behind his younger brother’s crib. The first thing my friend did was jump up and turn the light on, then ran into his parents room to tell them what he saw. When his parents came back into their room to investigate, his younger brother was having a seizure in his crib.

A few of his family members say it was his younger brother’s guardian angel standing in the window that night; my friend believes it was death.

It’s all still pretty unsettling to me.

15. He saw baby sized handprints on the windows. My friend and a few of his college buddies were going on a ghost hunt, and had heard about some graveyard where children murdered by their mother had been buried. The graveyard was located off the main road, so my friend parked his car on the side of the road, and the group (5-7 people I believe) got out and followed the small path through the woods for a couple minutes to get to the graveyard.

Once there, nothing exciting happened for the first 10 minutes or so, and they had tried everything the website or wherever they heard the story told them to do, with nothing resulting. They got bored, and being typical, inebriated college kids, started taunting the supposed ghost of the mother. This continued for a few minutes before they tired, and decided to go back to the car as one of the girls had to go to the bathroom.

Once they got back to the car, my friend, the sober driver, tried opening the handle without unlocking the car because he hadn’t locked it in the first place, but found it locked. He attributed this to bad memory at the time. The group drove home, laughing and talking like normal. After he had dropped all the others off at their homes, he went back to his own house. He got in at the same time as one of his roommates, who stopped and waited for him to pull in. The roommate had his phone out, and shined the light in the window when his friend pulled in as a joke. What he saw was tiny, baby sized handprints all over the windows. As soon as my friend got out, he went into the house without saying a word to the roommate. The roommate, confused, went back to the car and tried to rub one of the handprints. They were on the inside of the window.

To this day, my friend will not speak of his drive home after he dropped off his other friends, and has since sold the car without ever driving it again.

16. My friend called me after she passed away. True story. My best friend died of cancer back in 2002 – we were incredibly close in every way and we spent the majority of our free time together. Almost a year after she died, I was in my apartment sleeping and my phone rang around 3 am – I had one of those sony erricson t610. I was very groggy and picked up the phone from my nightstand and looked at it – I saw it was my friend’s number. I immediately became alert and awake and answered the phone very curious. I said hello a few times but all I could hear was very loud static for about 30 seconds. Eventually, the call ended. At this point, I was freaking out and called the number back only to get an automated recording that this number was out of service. I then called her mother’s house to see if possibly her older sister may have had my friend’s old phone and might have called me by accident, but there was no answer at my friend’s mother’s home. Come to find out the remaining family was away in Miami. After they came home a few days later, I took the phone to them and showed them the call log and they were in disbelief. They went to my friend’s room and got the phone out of the drawer where it had been sitting for months.. battery stone cold dead.

17. A ghost haunted the hotel room. A man goes to a bed and breakfast. While checking in, the owner tells him that the room next to him is undergoing some repairs, so don’t open the door or anything. The man goes to his room, drops off his things, but then is bored. He pokes around the house a little, and with nothing else to do, decides to see the room that needs repairing. He tries the door and it’s locked. He wonders why the owner would even bother warning him about this room since it’s locked anyway. Whatever. He peeks through the keyhole, and the room beyond isn’t actually being repaired. It’s completely empty, except for a figure in the far side if the room sitting in a chair facing the wall. The man stands up again, creeped out. Just to make sure he wasn’t imagining things, he bends down and looks through the keyhole again. This time he doesn’t see the figure, or the room at all, just the color red, like someone was blocking the keyhole with construction paper.

Weirded out, the man goes to bed. When he’s at breakfast with the owner the next morning, the man asks him casually about the repairs in the next room. The owner sighs and says, ‘Truthfully? I don’t rent out that room because so many people have told me it’s haunted by a ghost with red eyes.’

18. Twisted portraits hung on the walls. There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middle of an immense forest. It was getting dark, and having lost his bearings, he decided to head in one direction until he was clear of the increasingly oppressive foliage. After a what seemed like hours, he came across a cabin in a small clearing. Realizing how dark it had grown, he decided to see if he could stay there for the night. He approached, and found the door ajar. Nobody was inside. The hunter flopped down on the single bed, deciding to explain himself to the owner in the morning. As he looked around, he was surprised to see the walls adorned by many portraits, all painted in incredible detail. Without exception, they appeared to be staring down at him, their features twisted into looks of hatred. Staring back, he grew increasingly uncomfortable. Making a concerted effort to ignore the many hateful faces, he turned to face the wall, and exhausted, he fell into a restless sleep.Face down in an unfamiliar bed, he turned blinking in unexpected sunlight. Looking up, he discovered that the cabin had no portraits, only windows.

19. He saw a shadowy figure he couldn’t explain. My house was built in 1904. It is a single family home, wood frame setting on a concrete block foundation. I have been living here for about 12 years. Of all the weird things that my siblings and me have seen or heard in this house this one event is my favorite. This happened to my brother. About ten years ago my brother and his best friends had started a garage band playing mostly ‘Spanish rock,’ alternative music but in Spanish. His friends could only get together on Sunday afternoons. They would practice into the early evening, they would usually call it quits by 8 pm, this was the time I usually showed up and went to bed, cause I worked the graveyard shift. This happened in late fall, so the days were getting shorter, they had just finished a long session when the decision to head to someone else house came about. My brother handed his car keys to his buddy so they could load up the equipment, every one had filed out of the basement, the tricky part was that they needed to walk all the way to the back of the basement, up the back stairs, through the kitchen doorway down the hall into the living room and out into the front porch. Everyone was outside sitting in my brothers truck waiting for him. My brother was walking up the back stairs when he remembered that he had left his pancakes in a to go container sitting on a speaker in the basement. He made the decision to go back. Now the basement is not clean, with full sight lines, there had been partitions made, and the boiler and main heating unit are right smack in the middle. So after my brother walks back, he is about to retrieve his food container, when out of the corner of his eye he sees it.

It is a shadowy figure, right at his peripheral vision, this feeling of dread and uneasiness washed over my brother. We had been taught that if you are in the presence of a spirit or ghost and you felt a bad vibe, to say quick prayer or to cuss at it. My brother chose the latter, he basically just told it, ‘Hey fuck you, I don’t have time for this shit.’

My brother started to walk to the back of the basement and briskly up the stairs, closing doors and turning off lights as he was walking out, the last light switch is on the opposite side of the front door… Luckily the door was open and the light from the street lamp was flooding the living room with its amber light. My brother said he felt something at his back, but at no point did he turn around, as he flicked the last switch the living room went dark, as the rest of the house. As he stepped out he pulled on the door closing it behind him, still holding his food container in one hand he jogged down the few porch steps, he walked towards the front gate…our house resides far from the main street, essentially having a large front yard but no rear garage. As he closed the gap between himself and his friend laden truck he kinda smiled and thought things over in his head, mad at himself for spooking out when there was no reason.

He climbed into the drivers side of the truck, putting on his seat belt and getting ready to pull out of the parking spot directly in front of the house, when one of his friends asked, ‘Hey wait what about your brother, isn’t he coming with us?’

My brother answered, ‘What do you mean? He went to work early tonight he is already gone, do you see his car anywhere?’

The next question they asked, ‘So then who was walking behind you when you were leaving the house?’

20. I saw an extraterrestrial creature. In my old house, I would be sitting on my computer, listening to music on my Ipod while playing WoW. Periodically, at random times. The screen would flicker and my Ipod’s volume would adjust either up or down. I never thought anything of this, until it continued to do so only in that house. Eventually I just said ‘whatever, if it likes the song it likes the song.’

However, inside this house I had constant issues. One of which, would be my sleeping in bed/living room depending on the night and waking up to a low grumbling sound… Feeling fear strike my heart and listening to the beat of my now panicked state… I would try and move, to wake up and see what is happening. I couldn’t. Not even my finger tips would move… Completely conscious and able to see silhouettes… I hear / see my cat hiss and I can feel myself being moved as light shines over my eyes and I fall asleep again. This particular case, I remember waking up and seeing a man standing on this 100 ft tree in my back yard. Real tall and slender this guy. I muster up as much strength as I can, raise my hand up and give this guy the finger. After which, I immediately fall back asleep with a ‘thud’. I hear my back door open (on the second floor) and my dogs start barking / whining from the down stairs… (I was 16 and 250 lbs, no one was moving me anywhere… realistically speaking of course). Anyways, to this day. I swear that thing was an ET. Because I saw it multiple times throughout my life. Once standing in the kitchen window, which was 8 ft off the ground. That particular night, and in the first house I ever lived. I used to see him in my bedroom window and he would talk to me. Scariest shit I have experience. Ended when I moved out of the last house. I am now 21.

21. I saw an old ghost in a wheelchair. During hurricane Gustav (in 08, I think), I evacuated to a church in Baton Rouge with a friend and his family.

At the same time, there was an entire nursing home’s worth of old people staying in the church. My friend, his family, and myself all shared one room together.

In this church, there was one bathroom that was large, similar to something that would be in an elementary school (a few stalls, a trough urinal, etc.).

One night during the storm, my friend and I made a trip to the bathroom. The lights had since gone out (middle of a hurricane and all). The church had a musty, eerie feel to it. Kind of like when you turn out the ac in a house for a few days. The area surrounding the church was also dead quiet, since there was no electricity in the area.

The bathroom was several halls over from our room. So, we grabbed our flashlights and set out. While walking down one long hall, we shined our flashlights ahead, and there, at the end of the hall, sat an old man in a wheelchair (in the middle of the night with no one around).

Now, this hall was incredibly long. So we could make him out, but we couldn’t really see all his facial features, etc. Once we grasped what we saw, we turned and looked at each other, semi-freaked out. Then, we shined our flashlights back to where he was, and there was nothing there. It was as if he vanished.

No signs, no sound…. nothing. Needless to say, we hauled ass back to the room.

22. I heard phantom footsteps running toward me. Okay. This happened to me when I was a junior in high school. It was December and it had just started snowing, that evening. My best friend and I were in debate and getting ready for our state qualifiers, that were the next day. We were writing our cases and as usual, at each others throats over the details of the cases. It was a stressful, tense evening. We finally finished our cases at about 3am. Then, we went to my room for the night.

Almost as soon as we get into my room, we hear what sounds like the water turning on in the other end of the house. No big deal, probably my parents, I think. Then, we hear the front door open. I told her, “I bet mom woke up and wanted some fresh air.” It made sense. I really thought thats what it was. Until we heard incredibly heavy foot steps in my living room, headed for my room. They were NOT anyone in my family’s foot steps. Then they stopped. My friend and I looked at each other and were both freaked out, just standing, frozen in my room. We walked closer to each other and the foot steps started again, but this time they were running toward us. We both flipped. We grabbed each others hands, out of fear, and my bedroom door flew open. We both looked at the door. Nobody was there. We ran to the bathroom that’s connected to my room. I closed/ locked the door and stood against it. When we finally got the balls to do it, we sprinted to my parents’ room, crying and hysterical. We obviously startled my parents awake. They said neither of them had gotten up. My dad grabbed his gun and looked outside. No tracks in the snow, anywhere around our house.

23. She had marks across her neck. My brother once lived in a flat in down town Mt. Clemens, MI. The Clem was known to be a hot spot for “baths” back in the depression era and was booming with activity. Nowadays it has some run-down parts, this is where my brother rented his flat. It was a giant old raggedy house which was now separated into multiple odd apartments. Anyways, long story short, he always admitted to odd experiences, cupboard doors opening up, things missing, but one peculiar oddity was that he was always missing boxers/underwear from his drawer. He admitted that he thought his house was haunted and that the ghost had a crush on him. Never anything violent or disturbing, just odd things.

Later on he starts dating his future ex-wife. She starts coming around and he notices that the oddities begin to increase. New oddities began to occur, his girlfriend would always find her shoes (which were left on a mat inside the apartment) outside the door on the patio in the morning. She’d always comment to my brother to stop putting her shoes outside, he had an idea of why but didn’t want to frighten her… besides, it wasn’t hurting anyone right?

Well, things started getting worse, he comes home from work and his girlfriend was staying there while he was gone, claims that the stove burner kept lighting itself, she’d walk into the kitchen and it would be lit, she’d turn it off and shortly later it’d be lit again. Then, one night my brother wakes up in the middle of the night and sees his girlfriend sitting at the end of the bed, not just sees but feels her near his feet, staring at him. He calls out for her to come back to bed, she doesn’t respond so he calls out louder telling her to come to bed and asking what’s wrong? His girlfriend then asks what he’s doing, he turns and she’s sleeping next to him, he turns back, no one is at the end of the bed. Now, he’s freaked out but doesn’t want to scare his girlfriend from coming over his place.

A few nights later, they’re both sleeping and he wakes up to his girlfriend screaming. He looks over and she’s sleeping but thrashing around holding onto her neck. He doesn’t see anything so he starts yelling and shaking her to wake her up, after a few shakes she wakes up crying and terrified. She starts telling my brother about how real her dream felt that a woman was strangling her telling her to get out, that she doesn’t belong there and to leave her man alone. Her neck had red marks on it, possibly from herself trying to ‘defend herself’ but they believed it to be from something else. My brother then comes clean with her, the decide to do some research and find out that the address that they live in was an old brothel back in the day that the rich bathers used to stay in. My brother lived in that house for a few more weeks before he could locate a new place, she never came back to stay the night though, and he never experienced anything aggressive while there. Still, kinda fucked up though. I know my brother and I can tell when he’s lying, this shit was legit and when she talked about it, you could see how shaken up she was.

24. She found creepy pictures on her own phone. The story of the kid who borrowed his moms phone to play with and ended up falling asleep in bed. Mom finds the kid sleeping, grabs her phone and looks at her phone pics to see a pic of this crazy half face close up and the kid sleeping in the background.

25. My dead grandfather played with my baby. My daughter was born with mild tracheomalacia (soft wind pipe). The only ‘trouble’ it ever caused was that she would make a whistling sound sometimes when she was breathing, especially when she was excited or upset. Fast forward to when she was about 4 months old and fast asleep in her crib one evening. Her older brother had the stomach flu that day and had been throwing up. We thought the baby hadn’t caught it. But, a little while after we put her to bed, we suddenly heard her softly sputtering on the monitor, then silence for a few seconds, then a HUGE loud wail, which made both my husband and I run even faster to her room. By the time we got to her, she had fallen earily quiet again. We saw she was gasping for air, choking, unable to clear the vomit from her throat or get a clean breath. Even after we picked her up and cleared her mouth, she continued to gasp. She turned blue, then grey as I drove with her quickly to the ER. She had partially recovered by the time we got there. They gave her o2, chest xray, then a clean bill and we left.

Fast forward about two hours later when I’m back in my bedroom with her sleeping upright in a baby seat next to me on the bed. My husband and I talked briefly about what would have happened had the baby not cried out so loudly. Would we have reacted so quickly? Would she have recovered?

I’m in and out of sleep myself because I kept checking her. One of the times, just before I had fully awoken, I looked out in the hallway and saw my grandfather, who had passed away a few years prior. When he was alive, he was not the most involved grand dad. But, when he met my husband (my boyfriend at the time) they had an instant connection. When he passed away, his last coherent words were, “I’m not going to make it to altruitis and Mr altruitis’s wedding, am I…” He loved my husband dearly.

Anyway, I see him out in the hall this night. He is just standing there in khakis and a polo with his hands in his pockets. In my dream state, I see all my children, except the baby, pulling at his arms and playing with him. He has a simple smile on his face, he looks over toward the baby’s room and back at me and says, ‘I’m sorry I made her cry, but I’m glad she’s okay.’

26. The television turned off when he entered the room. My friend told me a story his Dad told him.

Every day he would come home from school and he would be the first one there for at least an hour or 2. One day he walked in the front door and the TV was on and instantly turned off. He stood in the doorway for a second, turned around and walked away. He didn’t go back into the house until his parents came home.

27. I heard whispering all throughout the house. This is a story I do not often tell. I promise, sincerely, that this has scarred me for life and although I have looked into psychological explanations for what I heard and natural explanations for what occurred, they remain unsatisfactory.

When I was a child, I was scared of the dark. I swore to my mother I heard voices in it. They were not evil, but they were not familiar and so they scared me. It was not uncommon in the middle of the night for me to wake up and hear ‘whispers’ as I would call them when asking my mom. She figured they were just ‘bumps in the night’ and typical kids nightmare material. I tried often to explain to her that it was more than that, that they sounded different from one another the way people’s voices do.

On some nights I would get so scared from these ‘whispers’ that I would sleep in my mom’s bed with her. It was an added bonus that the bathroom was directly outside of her bedroom door for my late-night tinkles.

I should add at this point that when walking out into the hall to go to the bathroom, you looked directly down the stairs that would lead you into my living room on the first floor (as my mom’s bedroom was on the second floor).

On one such night, around Christmas, I awoke and felt the need to relieve myself. I walked out from the door and distinctly heard the phrase ‘Look!”‘and to my astonishment, a red light, almost like a spotlight, was cast upon the wall at the very bottom of the stairs. The light had no other source, it was by itself, and I was transfixed by it.

Being a little kid, and it only being a few days from Christmas, I KNEW what this light was. IT WAS SANTA!!! How else could he get into my house to know I was being a good boy. I was so excited I began walking down the stairs to greet him, picking up my pace after the second step as it began to creep off the wall and fade into the darkness in my living room.

That’s when I heard him. A very strong, masculine voice. Different from the first. Not at all like my father’s (not to say he isn’t masculine, it was just distinctly different). It said “Stop! Right now. Go back up those stairs.”

I listened, turned around, and what happened next I am not sure I would believe if someone had told me this same story. After reaching the top of the stairs, I heard a very loud CRASH that sent me running back to my mother’s bed where I jumped straight under the covers and stayed there the whole night.

When we awoke the next morning, the poinsettia lights (little Christmas flower lights that glowed red) my mother had put on the railing down the stairs were pulled straight down to the bottom of the stairs, some broken from what seemed like a forceful tear, laying in a single pile. The dry sink in my living room had fallen from the wall. My mother could not explain it! My father was worried we had been the victims of a home invasion. My sister was crying.

There was nothing missing, nobody had broken in, there did not seem to be any reason this had happened. And then I saw it, and I kept quiet about it because I was so afraid that I could not force words out of my mouth.

There, on the edge of the wooden dry sink which had been facing up, were three indentations where the finish on the wood had been worn, almost as if in a forceful grip. Something down there had GRABBED IT AND THREW IT DOWN. That was what the bang was.

I was mortified. After that day I never heard a single voice again. I do not like to imagine what was waiting downstairs for me that night, if it was anything at all, but I can tell you that the reality was that something had physically acted upon two things in my house near the bottom of that stairwell.

After this, I had never heard another whisper again. Which is sad, because in some ways I would have liked to thank the man (masculine energy?) that had stopped me from going down those stairs. This happened when I was 7 (or 7 and a half! as I liked to say at the time).

I am 20 years old now, and because of this incident I am still afraid of the dark. ESPECIALLY shadowy stairwells.

28. He felt a ghost in his bed. I don’t remember all of the details because my dad told me this story several years ago, but here it goes. When my dad was younger and still living in Poland, he and a few friends took a trip and one night decided to stay at a bed and breakfast type place. Everything seemed normal until he suddenly woke up in the middle of the night. He told me he felt some sort of presence behind him, so he slowly turned around but there was no one there. He swears he could feel someone there on the bed with him though, along with a slight shift in pressure on the bed. It went away after a few minutes and my dad went back to sleep. The next morning he found out that a man had died in that bed about a week or so prior.

29. The window opened on its own. I was a junior in college and was living in a dorm which had a reputation for being haunted. Of course the RAs spread this around and we had a fun time scaring ourselves for the first month or so of school. The floors which had the greatest reputation for being haunted were the 2nd and 5th floors. My room was on the 5th.

I lived on the “International” floor, even though I myself was not international, so my roommate was from Tokyo. In this dorm, each floor alternated a single, a bathroom and a double, so three people would share a bathroom. This setup was called a “suite” and the person who lived in the single (or the double, if you were in the single) was your “suitemate”. My suitemate was from Cairo. Really fun ladies, it was a great year.

So I come home at about midnight after a long night of chatting online, and my roommate has the curtain shut between our halves of the room. She hears me walk in and says, “Oh, $MYNAME, I’m so glad you’re here! While I was in the bathroom, the door opened by itself!”

Now, I enjoy a mystery as much as anyone, but I like to be practical about things so naturally I think there’s a rational explanation. I walk into the bathroom. The curtain over the bathroom is drawn closed, so I peek under it. Sure enough, the window is open about an inch. I figure it must’ve been a draft.

I walk back out into the room and tell my roommate, “Well, the Windows’s open about an inch, so it probably just blew the door open.” My roommate is greatly relieved and says something to the effect of, “Whew! I’m so glad to hear that!”

Total time transpired: about 20 seconds.

I turn around and go back into the bathroom so I can take out my contacts and brush my teeth…and stop dead in my tracks. The curtain, which had previously been closed, was now open. But it wasn’t drawn open, like someone would do to see out the window, but rolled to each side, like one would roll up a newspaper. Just as if someone had been sitting in the window.

I looked at that for about 30 seconds. Turned out the light. Walked back out. Went to bed, contacts and all.

The next morning, it took me a few minutes to unroll each curtain and flatten it out so it would lay flat again.

30. I saw a black shadow from my car. I was on a college ghost hunt with a guy name Chris Fleming. Cool dude, we did all the normal college ghost hunt stuff walking to supposedly haunted dorms and experiencing some cool stuff, but nothing crazy. The city we where in had this special place called the Ghost Trestle. It was basically a Railroad bridge in the middle of a corn field that had a dirt road underneath it. Anyways during the ghost hunt with this guy who was actually featured on Ghost Adventures, we told him about this place. He was pumped and rushed through the rest of the college ghost hunt. Him and his assistant and a few of my friends took two cars with all his equipment to this ghost trestle. When we got there a train was coming so he interviewed us on camera to tell the story about this place.

The Story:

Back a long time ago there was a farm house (still there but rebuilt) and a farmer, his wife, and son escaped a fire in the house. Also on fire was the horse stables. The farmer ran in to try and rescue the horsed before they succumbed to the fire while the wife and son went to wave down a train that was passing by. The story ends with the farmer dying in the stable fire and as the wife and child were waving down the train they were struck and killed. To this day if you park your car under the bridge while a train crossed you above its suppose to open up another dimensional world to be able to communicate.

Well we show up and of course to our luck there is a train coming. We all freaked out and got pumped while the Medium Chris Fleming attempted to communicate. We were all taking pictures and began to experience weird technological failures. My camera which was my own began flashing and taking multiple pictures. same thing was occurring with our disposable camera Chris Flemings assistant had.

At one point we began to see stuff mostly out of the corner of our eyes, and Chris Attempted to communicate, but what ever spirit was there seemed more intimidated. He (Chris) believed it to be the spirit of the little boy. We would every now and then see a figure poking its head out from behind a concrete wall under the tracks. It seemed like it was playing hide and seek.

I can honestly say that I was young and thought this stuff was hoax and just fun for college kids to pretend. Until this night when we had a real professional experience the same thing we all did.

Fast forward to a year or two after this event. I came to this same place for the first time since the night we went with Chris Flemming. This time it was just me and my then GF. I parked under the bridge turned off the car and lights and took the key out of the ignition. We were joking together about how we were getting to old for this stuff. And when I looked in the rear view mirror I saw a black shadow flash by the rear window of my car follow by some noises that sounds like someone running towards my car. My heart never raced so fast to put my key into the ignition and peel out and get out of there. Whatever, it was didn’t seem like it wanted us there and I have yet to drive under or by the bridge since.

31. Lake Havasu ghost. A few years back I was camping in Lake Havasu with my brother and a few friends; my brother and I were working on building a fire while the other guys were on the boat mooring it to the shore. We had a hole we dug where we had our previous fires that trip, so my brother and got the fire going and sat down around the pit. The fire was burning for a good 10 minutes and was at a decent size before the most bizarre thing happened. The fire just went out, completely extinguished, as in no more flame. The embers were still there emitting heat, but the flame was gone. My brother and I looked at each other then back at the fire pit. A few seconds go by then the fire re-ignites to level it was at before it ‘went out.’ We are totally confused and we just start screaming for the guys to come check out what happened.

32. The time Grandma came to say goodbye. My paternal grandmother died when I was six. I lived in NY. She lived in PA. I met her maybe twice.

I was six years old, asleep in bed one night and for whatever reason I woke up and walked into my parents’ bedroom. My father had an easy chair in one corner for reading. I sat in the chair. On the opposite wall was my father’s closet. It opened, and Grandma came out and stood about six feet away.

‘I just wanted to say goodbye,’ she said, smiled, waved, and turned back and walked back into the closet, closing the door behind her. I went back to my room.

About two hours later, about 6am, the phone rings. It was a call from PA that Gramma Catherine had died in her sleep. My mother came to wake me up to tell me, and I said, “I know.”

‘What do you mean?’

‘She came to say goodbye last night.’

She made me repeat the story three times, and then told me never, ever to tell my father that story. And I never did.

33. You didn’t hear that little girl singing? This happened my senior year of college, Christmas break 2006. I worked for a professor that asked me to house/dog sit for him while he was outta town to see the bowl game that we were in. He was gone for three days and had a huge piece of land in the middle of nowhere. I invited my GF at the time. He had horses and fishing and a gator to ride around on, etc., etc.

So the first two nights went down with no incident, but the last night, his little foofy dog is having a fit. She keeps barking at the back door. At first we blow it off but decide to lock the dog inside in case of a coyote or something. After a while we start to get a little creeped out. I keep saying it’s probably an animal and we’ll be fine. My GF (not too bright) wants to go investigate to see what’s outside, so I lock the door behind her (he-he, just kidding). She goes outside and says she saw something small and grey (probably a coyote) and it ran off. So, just an animal, no worries. but by this time, we’re pretty spooked.

The dog now starts barking at the window on the other side of the house, we’re still trying to ignore it, but a little worried. We decide to get into bed…awkward silence…then I hear it…it sounds like a young girl singing a soft, eerie lullaby. I don’t say anything, hoping that my mind is playing tricks on me. My GF says, ‘Let’s get the fuck outta here.’ I say, ‘Why?’ she says, ‘You didn’t hear that little girl singing?’ ‘OK, let’s get the fuck out.’ We got the fuck out. I even called someone to talk to me while we walked out to my car. Next morning, went to clean up the house and such.

Most scared I’ve ever been. Ever.

34. ‘Get out.’ So, this happened last summer (2 summers ago now). We have an old Mercury Grand Marquis that my dad had wanted to buy for years. The owner would never sell it, even though it was just left sitting there. After he died, his daughter sold it to us for pretty cheap, because she knew how bad my dad wanted it. So, one day I had drove it to my friend’s house on a rainy day to play some smash bros. I left at 10 that night, and it had stopped raining, and I had to drive my friend home. So, this car’s radio didn’t work, and it would only be static if it was on. Well, I turned down my friend’s road, and when I turned, I heard someone say get out. I know it wasn’t my friend, because he was talking to me. So, we continued conversation and I got to his house about 5 minutes later. When we got there, I asked him if him if he heard something weird when we turned onto the road. He said he heard the exact same thing I did, and I was freaked the fuck out. This sounds like such a made-up story, but I really wish it was. Safe to say I haven’t driven that car since.

35. ‘I forgot to tell you about George.’ I worked the graveyard shift in a hospital kitchen about five years ago. Before the kitchen was renovated a few years prior, our dish room used to be part of the morgue.

While I was training, I’d frequently feel like someone was watching me, especially when I crossed into that part of the hallway. Every time I went into the dish room, something would be moved, turned over, or missing. Assuming it was my coworker, I didn’t think anything of it. About a week later, my coworker leaves, and I’m left on my own.

Every night, I would hear carts being moved around, dishes being put away, and silverware rattling. If I would leave for a minute, I’d get back and my radio would be switched to a different station. It got to the point where I was terrified to come to work every night. I called my old coworker, told her what was going on, and she very calmly said, “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about George”. Apparently, George was a nurse/medical examiner who had a stroke and died while at work. He was in his 50’s, I was told. From then on, everything actually went quite well. I introduced myself to George, asked him to please keep it down, and as long as I said hi to him as soon as I started work, he didn’t seem to want to bother me anymore. It took us a little while to find a radio station we could agree on, but we worked harmoniously after that.

When I left the job a year later, I made sure I told the girl that replaced me.

36. Let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the ghost. We moved into a new house a few months ago. As we were in the process of purchasing the house, the renter who was living in it died unexpectedly of natural causes in his mid-40s. He died right in the middle of the living room.

Shortly after, we move into the house, and almost immediately our 2-year-old daughter starts talking about the ghost that lives in our house. Now let’s be real here—she is 2 and 2-year-olds are VERY impressionable. Halloween had recently passed, and she had this Halloween-themed picture book that she loved to read, so it’s entirely possible that all this talk of ghosts was just coming from looking through that book on a regular basis.

Still, she was always telling me that the ghost was in her playhouse in the basement, or that the ghost was on the stairs, or that the ghost was standing in the corner. She never seemed to be afraid of the ghost, and considered him to be her friend, so I wasn’t all that concerned even if there really was a ghost haunting our house. If he’s a nice and helpful ghost, it could certainly be a lot worse. I would often tell the ghost that he was welcome to stay if he wanted to, but he was also welcome to go if that would make him happier. I was about 30/70 on the ghost being real and she could see and talk to him versus the ghost being just her imagination fueled by her Halloween book.

… until one day, when we were going out to the car to go to daycare in the morning. It was still dark out and rainy. My daughter told me that the ghost was on the back deck, and then she told me that today was the ghost’s birthday and she wanted to sing him Happy Birthday. Once again, I mostly disregarded what she was saying, as she is birthday obsessed and has in the past made us sing Happy Birthday to Mickey Mouse, a bowl of fruit snacks, and the bathroom. So we sang and wished the ghost a happy birthday and went on with our lives.

Later that day, out of pure curiosity, I looked up the obituary of the man who had died in our house.

And wouldn’t you know it? It was his fucking birthday.

37. This demon lady literally got inches from my face. Know how when you die you see ‘the white light’ and some report the lady or whatever that guides you through?

So I’m lying in bed, wake up, heart racing, died in a dream so I woke up. Except I can’t move. My body’s frozen. I see at the foot of my bed this almost demon-like lady in a white dress walking toward me. I thought Well I’m dead, must have had a heart attack in my sleep. This demon lady literally got inches from my face. Then I could move and it was over.

38. The disembodied head of a woman floating above my bed at night. Lived in this dark, creepyish rental house from 4th-7th grade. I don’t know if the house was actually haunted or not, but my mom, my sister, and me always got these creepy feelings around various areas of the house (particularly the closet and bathroom in the master bedroom). Anyways, my sister who was a little bit younger than me would tell me about how she saw the disembodied head of a woman floating above my bed at night looking at me sleep. I admit, at night, I would get the eerie feeling that something I couldn’t see was watching me, but trying to be the tough 9-year-old, I brushed off what she was saying as the ramblings of a 7-year-old.

Nothing really happened for months and I even forgot what my sister said about the disembodied head, until one night I was in a particularly deep sleep when I suddenly heard the blood-curdling scream of a woman right outside my ear. At first, I thought it was my mom or sister messing with me but when I glanced across the room, I saw my sister sleeping in bed and went to my mom’s room and saw her sleeping as well and there was no other woman in the house that could have possibly done it.

39. I’ll never forget the sound of that lock turning by itself. This is a brief account of an experience I had almost a year ago in the warehouse where I work alone. No one I’ve told has believed me, but perhaps you all will.

I work in a warehouse that my father purchased. He bought it for 25% of its cost from a farmer who seemed very excited to be rid of it. It is in the middle of Mennonite country, with no neighbors for a half-mile around. Look out the window…you see cornfields and scraggly trees. Cell service? Forget about it. I work here alone, painting and preparing the front office portion for eventual functionality. To get to the front office, you must go through a hallway from the main warehouse, into a secondary office, and then through another door into the front.

I frequently hear bumps and thuds and occasionally will go into the warehouse and feel air movement, but I’ve always attributed it to drafts and animal life in the roof. The only thing that has ever made me uneasy about the building is the fact that all of the door locks are reversed. Whoever installed those locks didn’t intend to keep people out, they intended to keep something in.

I was in the front office when I began to hear the thudding. I ignored it and continued to apply masking tape to the door I was working on. But this time, it was accompanied by a screeching sound. Not loud, but audible. I was freaked out, but convinced myself that it was just a pissed off raccoon or squirrel that had found its way inside.

I continued working, until I heard the slam. The door to the secondary office had been open; it sounded like it had violently slammed shut. I peaked around the corner and saw that I was right… the secondary door was now closed. I tried to logic it through in my head that a strong draft had sucked it closed, although I knew there was no such draft. The thudding began again. Close this time. I’ve never been able to put a proximity on it, but now it sounded like it was right on the other side of the door. I froze, unsure of what was happening. My eyes locked on the door handle, which began to turn. The door disengaged its latch and slowly swung open. Wider…wider…nothing there. Nothing visible, no air movement, just quiet. So quiet. A quiet that seemed to overwhelm me with its presence; a quiet so thick I couldn’t breathe. The quiet was shattered when the screech came again. This time, it was clearly human. Pained, angered, and emanating from the main warehouse. The door slammed. That entirely broke my frozen fearful state… I ran.

I got into my car and drove until I was in cell range to call my father. He didn’t believe anything about the doors closing, but agreed that the building had something weird about it. He told me he’d be right out. Fast forward half an hour. My dad and I met up and drove back to the warehouse. I showed him the door that slammed, showing him that it was separated from both the front office and the main warehouse, so no draft could have closed it. I told him about the thuds, the screeching, and the sudden quiet that overcame the building. He decided that we should check the main warehouse. Emboldened by his presence, I led the way.

Something you should know about this warehouse: It was formerly a furniture manufacturing place owned by a Mennonite farmer. They made handmade chairs, tables, etc. Because of all the cutting that went on, the floor is thickly coated with dust. We walked into the warehouse and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The dust was untouched, the doors were closed, windows were locked. The only thing out of the ordinary was one of the hanging fluorescent light fixtures. It was hanging askew, and swaying slightly. Insisting we take a look at the mount to ensure it didn’t just break loose, my dad grabbed a step ladder. He supported it while I climbed up and grabbed the swinging light.

I looked on top of the light…. and saw a hand-print. A single, fresh, inhumanly large hand-print. No footprints in the dust around the light, no signs of a presence. I climbed down and switched places with my father. He saw it and said, “what the hell? There’s been no one in here for years!” He climbed down and told me he’d been suspicious of someone breaking in and stealing parts from the warehouse light system. He couldn’t believe me that this wasn’t human… that something wasn’t right here. The last thing he said was ‘nothing is here. Next time, just go back to work.’

And then, as if to show its presence, the thud returned. This time it wasn’t just a thud, but more of an earthquake. The entire building felt like it moved. The heartbeat-like thud was then overlaid by the screech. The awful, awful screech. It felt it like was coming from the walls themselves. We ran. We ran and I haven’t returned. My father hired someone to finish my job and has since moved into the office. He’s heard the thudding, but thus far nothing has happened further. What actually happened? I don’t know. Nor do I ever care to know. What I do know is that there is something paranormal in that building and the man who sold it to us knew. I’ll never forget the sound of that lock turning by itself or the feeling of the deafening silence.

40. The ghost in grandma’s house. My grandma lives in a very beautiful old house in New Jersey. It’s pre-Civil War and was built around 1820, if my memory serves correctly. For years, my grandpa would tell stories to me and my cousins about the ghost that lives there, and my dad would always get very mad at him because he didn’t want us to be scared. Now, my dad is a former marine of 12 years. There’s not much that scares him, he’s been to some pretty bad places and done some dangerous things. But he refuses to be in the house alone. If everyone goes out to go get pizza, he won’t stay at the house, even if we’ll only be gone 20 minutes. I have never seen the ghost myself, but of course this gives me the creeps. However, there’s a few people in my family who have:

• One night, my grandpa, who had very bad vision, was walking up the stairs. He said he was startled by something and he realized he was actually INSIDE the ghost, as in he had walked straight through her. The ghost seemed startled too, and ran away.

• When my cousins were born, my aunt took them over to my grandma’s house. My grandma was holding one of them, just a little baby, when the ghost appeared. She said that it was a woman, and it was holding a baby. She was convinced that the ghost was trying to tell her ‘Look, I also have a baby like you.’

• After my grandpa died, my dad slept in the house with just my grandma there for a few nights. He said he was absolutely positive something weird was going to happen, and he barely slept. I don’t really know if he saw anything, but I would’ve been spooked out of my mind.

• My aunt forgot her keys or something one time and had to run back to the house alone. She saw a face peering out of the window, even though nobody was home. It was that of a woman, just like what my grandma had seen.

41. “There’s A Man Sleeping There”. This happened to a friend of mine – she told me about it a year or so ago. We’ll call her Minji.

Minji is in her late 20s, and works as an English tutor in South Korea. One evening, a few years ago, she was tutoring a high school boy. They were up studying pretty late, and the buses stopped running. Being a long way from his house, the boy asked if he could crash on her floor overnight and get the first bus the next morning.

Minji was very reluctant, because inviting a teenage male student to stay the night didn’t sound like a great idea, but he was begging her and eventually she relented. They went back to her one room apartment, and she got into the bed, while he laid a blanket out on the floor, and they both fell asleep.

A few hours later, at maybe 2am, the boy wakes Minji up. “I’m really hungry”, he says, “let’s go get some food”. Minji opens her eyes and looks up at him in disbelief. “Food? Now? It’s 2am, go back to bed.” But the student insists, “no, I’m so hungry, let’s eat something now.” She tells him that there’s some ramen in the kitchen, and he can fix himself some. This doesn’t satisfy him – he doesn’t want ramen, there’s a 24 hour place just down the road, let’s go there.

Eventually, after several minutes of persuasion, the boy gets Minji to come with him to the restaurant. They leave the apartment and head out. As soon as they’re on the street, the boy turns to Minji, and says “I’m not hungry. I woke up in the middle of the night, and looked under your bed. There’s a man sleeping there.”

They call the police, and discover that a homeless man had been living in Minji’s apartment, sleeping under her bed, for over 2 months. The boy only saw him because he was lying on her floor, so had a clear view under the bed.

The police arrested the man, and thankfully there were no other issues, but that’s by far the creepiest thing that’s ever happened to anyone I know.

42. Didn’t Sleep A Wink That Night. My friend and I were going to a party a few hours out of town, so we decided to stay at her family’s holiday house about an hour south of the party (now three hours from home). We arrived around mid afternoon, and it was winter in a holiday town, so the area was completely empty – no other cars on the street.

When we left for the party I spent a moment deciding whether to pull the gate all the way closed. I’d had some trouble opening it earlier when we arrived, and if we were getting home late at night I didn’t want to be stuck outside. I decided to shut it for security.

Party was great, we got back to the house around 12:30, and the gate was open. I immediately felt on edge because not only did I know I’d locked it, but I knew it couldn’t just blow open in the wind, but I didn’t want to make a big deal so I was vague when my friend asked if I’d shut it. We went inside, and decided to make a snack. I was wandering through the house when suddenly my friend raced from the kitchen into the hallway and virtually tackled me to the ground; she was convinced she’d heard someone walking around outside. We tried to calm ourselves down, but we had no cell reception and there was no one else around. Over the next half hour or so, as we sat in the hallway paralysed with fear, we heard footsteps outside, and the back door being jimmied.

We decided we had to leave, so we gathered everything up and got ready to make a break for the car. Just as we were at the front door ready to leave, there was a huge bang in the back yard, and suddenly what sounded like hundreds of birds started screaming. We legged it to the car, ended up starting it with all our stuff still on our laps, we hadn’t bothered to even put it in the backseat. As we reversed out the driveway we saw somebody running up the side of the house towards us.

Sped the entire way home and even once we got back to my place, didn’t sleep at all that night.

43. Music At Myrtles Plantation. When I was in eighth grade I went on a school trip that was called the Louisiana Tour. It was mostly going around to significant sights in south Louisiana. One of the places we went was Myrtles Plantation, which is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the country.

There are all kinds of stories about the place, but at one point we were standing in a room as a part of a larger group and the tour guide was talking about something, I don’t remember what. As I’m standing there I start to hear what sounds like someone hitting a piano key. After I heard it a couple of times I started to look around for the source of the noise. I didn’t see a piano, but I kept hearing it. So I asked my friends who were standing near me if they heard it, they said no. When I heard it again I said there is it again and that they must have heard it. They thought I was crazy.

So I went back to looking around the room. Everyone’s eyes were on the tour guide except for one woman. She caught my eye and pointed at me and then at her ear with a questioning look. I realized she was asking if I heard it too and I nodded.

At this point the tour guide starts telling a story about a soldier who had died there and that he played the piano and multiple guests had reported hearing him playing in the night.

I honestly didn’t know what to think, I guess I still don’t. I talked to the woman as we were all leaving the room and she had heard the exact same thing as me, but her husband and son had not heard it.

44. Something In The Dresser. When I was younger, I had an imaginary friend who lived in this massive antique dresser. We’d chill out and I vividly remember him telling me stories, although I have absolutely no recollection of what they actually were.

I remember one day talking to my parents about it (Dad traveled quite a bit so he wasn’t up to date with what I was into) and when I started telling him about my dresser buddy, he wanted to know his name. It was something innocent like Peter or Patrick but I can still see him going white in the face.

I drew Peter/Patrick out for him and the very next day him and my uncle took out that dresser and burned it. It wasn’t until a few years later when I found out my Dad’s little brother (my uncle) also had the same friend with the same name who lived in the same antique dresser. After a few months of the typical imaginary friend shit, my uncle started having night terrors and couldn’t sleep because of Peter/Patrick. It got so bad that they had to move him out of his room before he managed to get back to normal.

• The dresser was an old dark wood ugly thing. As far as we know, it belonged to my great great grandfather who had always been into some weird shit if family history is to be believed.
• Dad never talked about what was actually in the dresser and he was the only one who believed his brother when they were kids. Their parents didn’t really care because they thought kids were just being kids and who honestly believed in spooky ghosts back then? Must have been a shock that 30 years later, his own son started having the same friend.
• My uncle’s night terrors ended when they moved him to another room, the bedroom he was in with the dresser was converted into a little sitting room since it had some nice views. It remained relatively unlived in until dad moved our family into that home and that room became mine.
• I haven’t seen my uncle in 14 years now, don’t really speak to him since he is on the other end of the world. Afraid to bring something like this up since I know he struggles with depression and alcoholism so I would hate to add stuff to his plate.
• To everyone asking what he looked like, I remember tiny old man. Not like old man tiny, but kid sized tiny. He had very large hands, long fingers. Which in turn led to how I draw people even today, hands always come out longer and larger than what they would normally be. Smelled of wood, mothballs, old cloths, and what I now know is mold.

45. Margaret Tries To Adopt. When my son was about 3, he had an imaginary friend in his room who he used to talk to all the time. He would tell us stories about things she would tell him and we’d hear him chatting to her at bed time. We thought it was pretty cute.

After a few months my son said he wasn’t friends with her anymore. We figured he was over his phase of “seeing” her, so were surprised to hear him still talking to her at night. Then he started not wanting to go to bed and having really bad dreams.

At some point we ended up asking a lot of questions about her. We had assumed she was a little girl, but apparently she was 47. She lived in the wall and he stopped being friends with her because she wanted him to call her mummy (her name was something like Margaret). She wanted him to come and live in the wall with her.

He had told her he didn’t want to talk to her anymore and she wouldn’t go away. We eventually moved house, and he stopped talking about her.

Funny thing is, when I was pregnant with him (living in the same house) I used to have dreams about a lady sitting at a dining table in our bedroom, except it was obviously a different era, and the room was not a bedroom at the time. The lady used to knit and make me listen to her giving me parenting advice, while her two 20ish year old sons sat at the table quietly.

46. Jim Reaches Out. About a couple weeks after I was born my dad’s best friend, Jim, died. They were really close, and one of the last things he wanted was to hold little me before he passed. His wish was filled, and some short time after that he was gone.

Fast forward 7 years. I’m now a happy 7-year-old with a 5-year-old brother and recently born sister. One day the phone rings, and with my mom out and dad in the washroom I thought it was going to be ignored as we kids were still too young to answer the phone (no call display, we didn’t know if there would be a stranger). But my brother broke the rules and answered. “Hello?”

At this point my dad is out of the washroom and is asking my brother to hand him the phone. He ignores him and keeps listening to whoever is speaking. Before my dad could ask a second time my brother hangs up, looks at him and says, “Jim says hi, and he misses you,” then goes back to playing. The look of shock my dad had is what I remember most about this.

47. Pen Pals. I was once featured in a St Jude’s survivor newsletter when I was about 5 years old in the early ’90s. The newsletter went out across the country and apparently into Canada. There was this guy named Mitchell that called my family up out of the blue because he had read my cancer survival story. He lived somewhere in Canada and claimed to be this big-time Christian and wanted to talk to me God and prayer. My mom let him talk to me for whatever reason and the guy actually just wanted to talk to me about ALF. This Canadian dude named Mitchell was obsessed with ALF and somehow got a hold of our mailing address and sent me tons of ALF merchandise: coloring books, pencils, ALF everything. For some reason, my parents let him talk to me whenever he would call because they bought into his God stuff and liked how he sent me ALF crap.

This went on and off for about a year until he asked me if I had ever heard of John Wayne Gacy. He told me who he was and that he had escaped him when Gacy tried kidnapping him when he was a kid. He told me I should tell my parents they shouldn’t trust strangers because you never know who you could really be talking to. I remember he didn’t sound menacing when he said it, just matter-of-fact.

Of course my parents freaked when I told them that and they changed numbers and called the police. They never really did anything since the guy did live in Canada by all accounts and hadn’t really threatened me. Also, keep in mind Mitchell somehow had our mailing address and knew exactly where we lived. We had plans on moving soon anyway though.

Fast forward 10 years to about 2001. We live in a new house, a new state, everything unlisted. I’m now 15. What did we get in the mail? Yes, you guessed it, a fucking ALF coloring book.

48. Johnny Says Goodbye. Hard to say what qualifies as creepy. It could maybe be seen as heartwarming. I don’t know. My mother swears this is a true story, and frankly, I don’t see why she would lie about it.

My mom had three kids. There’s me, the youngest, and my older brother – but before either of us were born, there was Jonathan. He was a sweet little blonde boy, big blue eyes, known for accidentally repeating Dad’s swears in church. Wholesome kid, great in school, active outside.

When he was almost six, he was riding his bike and fell and hit his head on a rock. He got up and said he felt fine. My mom found him the next morning in his bed when she tried to wake him up to get to kindergarten, one pupil dilated and the other not. She got him air-lifted to the nearest hospital.

During this time, Jonathan’s best friend Nick was sitting at the breakfast table eating cereal. Nick suddenly gets up from the table and goes to the door. When his mom asks him what’s up, Nick says that Johnny was calling for him.

You see, Nick and Johnny lived on separate blocks, but they weren’t allowed to cross the street without a parent yet because they were still fairly young. But they lived close enough to call to one another to come out to talk at their respective street corners.

So Nick goes out to the street corner while his mother receives a call from mine that Johnny was just declared dead in the hospital (idle brain aneurism that was triggered by the fall). Nick’s mom can hardly handle this news and is now wondering where her son went.

But Nick comes back a few minutes later and says that he heard Johnny calling to him but he wasn’t at the street corner when he looked, then sits down to continue eating his cereal. When his mom asks Nick what Johnny was saying, Nick says he had come to say, “Goodbye.”

My mom told me this story when I was young but it’s stuck with me. I wish I could have met him. But truthfully, I wouldn’t be here to type this story to all you random strangers if he hadn’t died; my mother only wanted two kids. I’m thankful for the chance I was given to live, and feel like he died FOR me sometimes. I’m not religious, but I do feel spiritual when I think of Johnny.

49. The Cat Lady. Weird one that happened to my sister a couple years ago.

Background info: she and her (now) husband are house sitting for my brother in laws uncle. The uncle is old and starting to lose it. He rents out a basement suite and a nice lady lives downstairs. She cleans the house when she is there but he wanted my brother in law to come check on things and feed his old cat once in a while.

Okay so first day they go to house sit they get in but can’t find the cat to make sure it’s okay. My sister has cats and know they like to hide when they are dying so they are all worried and are looking everywhere for this cat. In all rooms under the beds and everything. Even check with the lady downstairs, she hasn’t seen it. So my sister opens up the closet in the spare bedroom and is looking around stuff on the floor. Moves a couple of things and sees a set of feet on the ground in the closet, with clothes blocking anything above the feet. The feet have nicely painted toenails and look human, but she assumes it is a doll or something. They look in a few more places and all of the sudden the cat is in the middle of the living room just hanging out. So they lock the deadbolt and leave.

Sister and her boyfriend go out for dinner and a movie and she can’t stop thinking about the feet and how real they looked. My sister had started dating her bf fairly recently and didn’t want to seem crazy so she didn’t bring it up but a few hours into the night she decided she needed to tell him. He decides that it’s probably a doll but he offers to go back and check anyway. When they arrive my sister will only stay on the patio because she is scared, which makes him realize that this must be something serious. They go to get in the door, but the deadbolt is now unlocked and the handle is locked. Now he thinks there must be someone in there. At the door there is a fireplace so once he is in there he grabs the sharp poker stick from the fireplace tools and starts to sneak towards the closet. He opens the closet and sees the same set of feet with painted toenails on the floor. He pokes it lightly with the fire stick and the toes scrunch up. He proceeds to smack the foot as hard as he can with the sharp stick and yells “Get out of there!” Out comes a lady in her mid-30s, holding the cat and a can of coke.

Turns out she was friends with the basement tenant. When she became homeless the friend let her stay with her until she found out she was addicted to crack. Started leaving drugs around the house and had shady people coming into the house so she kicked her out. Somehow she got a key to upstairs and had been staying there while the uncle was gone. Police were called and she was arrested.

50. A Ted Bundy Encounter. It was near Halloween time when my friends and I were telling ghost stories. My friend said she was going to tell a story about her parents’ first date. She said she didn’t like telling the story, since it was actually true, but we prodded her on.

To cut to the chase, the parents had spent a nice, if awkward first date, and around the time that they would have said “good night,” the man in the situation–my friend’s dad–suggested that they go for a midnight hike up Provo Canyon. He apparently knew the place, since he had done a fair amount of rock climbing in the area. So the two drove up the mouth of the canyon, got out of their cars and started hiking under just the light of the stars, since it was a new moon.

At some point, my friend’s dad starts getting a “bad feeling,” since the pathway ahead, which would pass under some trees, would be dark, and because it was getting to be quite late. He ignores the feeling and presses on. In later retellings of the story, the my friend’s mom would say that she had felt the same feeling at what was probably the same time, though she didn’t know the trail like he did. A minute later, the feeling came back to my friend’s dad. He ignored it again, and started walking a bit of the way into the trees when his foot hit something “soft” in the middle of the path. Under the trees, it was too dark to see just what this soft thing was, and the feeling came back stronger than ever. Instead of finding out what his foot had bumped into, he and my friend’s mom both agreed to hightail it out of there…

Years later, after being married for some time, they were watching an interview with the serial killer, Ted Bundy. In response to a question asking him to describe the time that he felt the closest to being caught, he explained about the night that he lured a girl into Provo Canyon, and had just killed her when he heard some people coming up the trail. He explained how he hid in the trees just in time, only to watch some guy walk right into the body, and for some reason, just turn around and walk away.

51. A Call From The Front Desk. Before my family and I moved to another state, my father went and visited the area to check on the progress of our new house which was being built. My father was there for a few days and was staying at some crappy Motel 6 in a shady area of town. His room was the last room at the end of the hallway on the top floor. In the middle of the night on the last night he was in town he is woken by the phone ringing in his room. He groggily answers. It was the front desk and they say something along the lines “Sorry to wake you, but we’ve been receiving a couple of reports about rooms being broken into and some stuff being stolen. We are calling to make sure you lock your door and are safe.” My father replies that he is fine and hangs up. He decides to go double check that he locked the door. As he sits up in bed he notices that the door to his room is ajar. Being spooked, he cautiously checks the room and finds that nothing is missing and no one else is in the room. He creeps to the door and peaks out. Sitting right outside his room on the window sill of the hallway window is his shaving kit. Creeped out of his mind, he quickly grabs it and locks the door. After he calms down a bit he calls down to the front desk and says “Hey, you just called me about the break ins around the hotel, and I just want to report that my room was broken into when I was sleeping, nothing stolen and I am fine. Figured you would like to know” The front desk replies, “You must be mistaken, we never called your room and we haven’t received any reports of breaks ins.”

52. A Little Boy Sees The Light. My wife’s mother passed away in 2003 from cancer. After the funeral, family and friends gathered at her house for a final celebration of her life. The gathering went late into the evening. My son, 3 at the time, needed to go to bed at that point.

I walked with him up the stairs to where he would sleep. The room that my mother-in-law passed away in was upstairs, and straight down the hallway as you reached the top of the landing. My son and I walked upstairs together, with me holding his hand. As we nearly reached the top of the stairs, my son stopped and wouldn’t move…at the point which he could just see down the hallway. He was staring straight down the hall. I looked at him, then down the hall to an open doorway to a completely dark bedroom. He just stared, and would not move any further. I asked him “Buddy, are you OK?” His response was…”Daddy. The light. The light scares me.” I looked again down the hallway where he was staring into darkness. “Buddy, you see a light?” “Yes daddy. It scares me.”

I promptly picked him up and went back downstairs. To this day, the hairs still stand on the back of my neck when I think of it.

53. Tanya. When I was a child we would frequently get calls for a woman named Tanya. Didn’t seem like a big deal, she had the same last name as us, although it’s quite a common one around here.

When we moved across the city and phone books stopped being the go-to for finding somebody’s number, the calls for Tanya gradually stopped. Those days seemed to have ended and we carried on, forgetting about the mysterious Tanya.

It was about 4 years ago that she popped up in our lives again.

I was driving home from work one afternoon and was greeted by a pretty grisly car wreck at the turn to my house – two cars had collided and one had wrapped itself around the signage pole that had house numbers and directions on it, one of which was my house number.

Several days later we get a call from the police. They asked if Tanya was at this residence. Her car was found wrapped around a pole – down the street from my house – and she was nowhere to be found at the accident site.

Haven’t heard anything about her since.

54. Demons On The Hunt. When I was younger my family was extremely poor and lived in a very old mobile home on some land my grandpa owned. This piece of land was in a very small town out in the middle of nowhere Texas and was covered in woods. The town itself was your typical small country town where football was king and there was nothing to do but get drunk or high on the weekend. It was also the type of town, along with it being early 90s, where one didn’t typically have to worry too much about locking their doors or setting an alarm.

Now, our trailer was a two bedroom and my parents, always putting us kids ahead of themselves, slept in the living room on a fold out couch. My room was directly connected to it and my sisters room was down a hallway past the kitchen and bathroom at the other end of the trailer.

One night, after everyone had gone to bed, my dad is woken up by a feeling that there is someone in the room. He looks around a bit and sees a large male figure sitting in the easy chair just feet from the bed. My dad quickly flipped on the light switch next to his bed and saw it was a neighbor from down the road named Carter. Carter was known to be a frequent drug user and was often in trouble with the law because of this.

My dad asked him what the fuck he was doing here and told him to get out and he responded. “I can’t get out. The demons are chasing me and your house is the only safe one.” My dad, who I should is fairly large and terrifying person, responded that if he didn’t get out and get out quickly that the house would be a lot less safe for him. “If I leave they’ll get me! They’ve been chasing me all night. If they catch me I’m dead.” My dad’s response was that there was no demons but that if he didn’t get the fuck out of his house that he’d be dead. From what I’ve been told, since I was asleep for this part, my mom also hurled a few threats and, while she may not be big, she was equally as terrifying. I believe it was her anger that finally scared him off.

My dad got up and locked the door and watched through the blinds as Carter decided, since he couldn’t outrun the demons he’d steal our old beater Suburban that my dad always left the keys in. He drove around for about an hour. We called the police and it took them about that long to get out to us since the closest police station was about 20 or 30 minutes away. He finally brought it back and was arrested and taken to jail. He was deemed crazy and ended up locked in a mental institution.

The scarier part is that for years after this we’d get phone calls where all we’d here is music that would have lyrics like “I’m going to fucking kill you!” These calls lasted for years and followed us from house to house even though we always had different numbers and would even be in different states. We always thought it was him sending us a message.

The calls stopped when I was about 12. I later found out that it was around that time that Carter thought the best thing he could do for himself was soak himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.

55. An Evil Little Shit. My dad used to work in a juvenile detention center in the Miami area in the early 70s. He said there was one inmate that reminded him a lot of a young Hannibal Lecter. He wasn’t strong but he was smart and very persuasive. One day he started a riot in his block of cells, just by talking the other inmates into it. My dad and another guard were sent in to check it out an try to calm things down. Everybody in the block was going crazy, banging on the bars, howling and yelling at each other. Everybody except young Hannibal Lecter. He was standing still in the middle of his cell with his arms folded, smiling and muttering the same phrase over and over, quietly. My dad tried to focus on what he was saying, and after a couple seconds he understood. The inmate was reciting my dad’s home phone number. EDIT: I don’t know how he got it. Maybe he bribed another guard into getting it for him, or he saw it written on some form on his way between rooms or something. The guy never called my dad, in fact he never really got any strange phone calls ever. But the level of determination this inmate must have had, all just to freak my dad out, was simply impressive.

56. The Object Of A Ghost’s Affections. This happened about two years ago to me, but it was pretty unsettling.

I’ll start by saying I used to have a shop in an over 100 year old building that was split up into three different storefronts. I had one shop, my best friend had another, and then the third was rented to another girl.

One day, I’m at the shop when the phone rings. A man is on the other line asking me for something or other and is being really spacey. I am trying to talk to him, but there are long pauses before his answers and he is just being a little odd. Finally, I ask him something and there is a long pause on the other end, long enough to make me ask, “Hello?” because I think he has hung up on me. Instead he replies with, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just having a hard time focusing on our conversation because there is a spirit standing next to you that is yelling into the phone, trying to get my attention.”

At this point, I’m intrigued and decide to play along, so I say, “Oh really, what is he saying?”

The “psychic” goes on to make a few broad comments about me and the space I’m in (all of which he could have easily found if he had looked on our website, so I’m not impressed), and says the man has been in the building since the early 1900s and is “infatuated” with me, has been following me for years, and frequently tags along with me to my house, my friends’ houses, and even places like the grocery store.

Okay, that’s interesting, but then it gets more-so.

He tells me the man is very jealous of the guy that I am dating, and doesn’t like him because we are so close. He then goes on to say that the spirit hurt the guy I am seeing when he was doing renovations on the building (which was 100% accurate, I put that story below) and that he didn’t like that he was in his personal space changing it.

So, that was weird, but his next comment really bothered me.

The psychic says, “And he is very glad you broke up with that army dude. He really hated him.” Now, this was weird to me because I had dated that guy about three years prior before and had been restationed right after we broke up and had never set foot in the building, nor had I seen him since we broke up. At the time of the phone call, I had only had my shop in the building for about six months, so I couldn’t figure out how this “spirit” would know about him.

The guy told me some other stuff, most of which was pretty basic, and then I finally got him off the phone because he started getting weird, and I just wasn’t interested anymore. The whole conversation lasted about fifteen minutes, and I was thoroughly creeped by his couple of comments and couldn’t figure out how he knew so specifically the last two people I had dated (I should add that I don’t have any personal social media that someone can search for me for, so there wouldn’t have been any couples pictures up of me with either person I dated).

Then, it dawned on me. I had worked for about six months for my friend at her shop in the same building for some extra cash after I moved back to the city, which was about four years prior and in the time that I had dated/broken up with the army guy, which would also explain why the psychic said the spirit had been following me for years.

I no longer have the shop in that building, but still go in there every now and then to see my friend. We both agree that building has some bad vibes, especially at night, and there’s a couple more weird things that happened to me while I had the shop there.

57. An Impossible Voicemail. I’ll try to get through this without breaking down. It’s still kind of chilling to think about.

Around the time I was 19 I was deployed to Iraq. My unit worked with bombs, and honestly, I didn’t know I would make it home intact. About halfway through my tour the red cross notified my unit that my father was terminally ill. Within a week I was on a plane back to the states.

Now my dad being ill was something I had grown used to. He was strong though, and I never expected to actually lose him. I lost my mother when I was 7, and my father’s lungs had collapsed shortly before then. He was on oxygen and needed a wheelchair to go anywhere. Medication by the handfuls were needed every few hours. He gained weight from limited movement, developed diabetes, and had already beaten cancer once. I never expected to lose him and he wasn’t the type to ever give up.

I arrive home, head to the hospital, and he assures me he’s fine and they’re overreacting. I visit him every day I’m there, but he tells me he’ll be fine by the time I get home “for good”.

I reluctantly go back overseas. I call his hospital whenever I have a few minutes of free time and we’re near a call center. My deployment finishes, and he kept his promise. He comes home from the hospital, because he says he doesn’t want to die there. He gets worse, and goes back. The family all visits, but we know he isn’t improving.

One day I’m at home and the phone rings. It’s an unknown number, so I don’t answer. It goes to the answering machine, and a very raspy voice mumbles “Call the hospital.” It’s my dad. I grab the phone, but he already hung up.

So I call. They tell me he’s been intubated for the past couple hours and he just started going into cardiac arrest. He’s non responsive, and we need to come say our goodbyes. I argue that he just called me, and she says that’s not possible. They’ve been working on him for some time now.

I hung up and told my family the news. My sister and I stared at the answering machine. We played the tape again, and again.

That was the last time I heard my father’s voice. I’m a skeptic. I don’t believe in the paranormal or ghosts, and I cannot come up with any logical explanation. I still get watery eyed thinking about it.

58. The Christmas Party Guest. A few years ago I went to a Christmas party. That night my housemates went home earlier while I decided to stay and get in the Christmas spirit with a few other friends. I ended up getting pretty hammered and got home around 3am. Instead of going straight to bed I got another beer inside then went out the back porch to have a smoke and look at the stars. I was outside a couple of minutes when I see the light go on in the kitchen, my housemate comes out and look at me out the back, I wave and generally look like a drunk idiot. I thought he was going to come out and get a debrief on the rest of the evening, as there were some good laughs we had not relevant to this story. Anyway, he just gets a glass of water and goes to bed, I finish my smoke and beer and so do I. The next morning we’re re-hashing the previous night when he mentions getting up and seeing me having a smoke out the back “who came back from the party with you last night?” I give him a sideways look and reply “no-one dude, I was out there alone”. He insists, “nah man there was someone out there with you, behind you on the porch, when you were looking inside waving. I didn’t come out cause I thought it was some random friend from the Christmas party I didn’t know, couldn’t be bothered making introductions.” To this day he stands by this version of events, whoever it was must have been standing close behind me the whole time, I saw no-one and heard nothing. Gives me the willies every time I think about it.

59. A Sacred Moment Becomes Terrifying. I used to work at Philips, up near Sleepy Hollow in New York. At my lunch breaks, I liked to wander through the forest on the work property. One beautiful October day, I was admiring the autumn leaves when I saw a buck standing in front of me. There’s a word, numinous, for feeling in the presence of something spiritual, something unworldly. That’s how I felt. I quietly and carefully stepped closer to get a better view. I was able to approach quite close: almost close enough to touch him. At that moment, though, the deer turned, and I felt all the hair on my arms rise. The deer’s eyes were red and dripping with blood. It must have had some disease that had blinded it and its blindness allowed me to get so close. In the moment, though, it was terrifying and uncanny.

60. Poomie And Punkie. When I was three or four we lived in a 1950s ranch house my parents bought at a sheriff sale. It was kind of run down, but a bargain because it was a only few blocks from my grandmother’s home, on the same block as my sister’s school, and my dad could be to work in 5 minutes.

Where the side door came into the house from the carport, there was a utility closet. It housed the hot water heater, a furnace, and a trap door down to the crawlspace below the house. The utility closet was in a short L-shaped hallway between the kitchen and the den which we used as a family room.

I remember the crawlspace always had a “dirty water” smell to it. The floor of the crawlspace wasn’t poured concrete, but was composed of loose gravel.

My sister would be at kindergarten all day, so it was just me and my mom until it was time to walk to the school to get her. I would play alone in the den while my mom was decorating cakes (her side job) in the kitchen. My mom would hear me carrying on long conversations in the den with my toys.

One of my favorite things was to make a “cave” by lifting the leg rest of the recliner and playing with my toys underneath. It used to annoy my mother because I never put it back down. One day she asked me why I always did that and I told her, “Because the light from the big window hurts their eyes.”

“The light hurts your toys eyes?”

“No. The two little black boys who come out to play with me.”

That freaked her out, so she talked to my dad about it and they asked me more about it.

I told them I had two friends named “Poomie” and “Punkie”. They were two little black boys that lived under the heater in the utility closet. Poomie always wanted to play, but he had to drag Punkie along with him because he never wanted to come, but they weren’t allowed to ever be apart. They were both terrified of my dad, and they would disappear back into the closet when they would hear him coming.

At night, since my dad was home, they were too afraid to come out. So they would fall down into the crawlspace and crawl until they were under my bedroom. Sometimes they would whisper jokes to me through the floorboards, but mostly I would just hear them moving around in the gravel.

It ended when my mom found me sitting in the utility closet with the door shut. I told her that Poomie and Punkie had to leave because a “Raggedy Man who walked along the train tracks at night” almost found them. They saw him in our backyard trying to peek through the screen door. So they crawled into the furnace and turned to cinders and flew out through the chimney.

61. Foul Play At An Upscale Hotel. One of my brothers worked security in one of New York City’s most upscale hotels. The security desk received a frantic call during one of his night shifts. A guy was calling, all freaked out that his wife was in the bath and was not breathing. My brother and another security guard rushed upstairs to the room.

Sure enough, they found a woman in the tub, and she was unresponsive. My brother and the other guard got her out of the tub and attempted CPR. In the interim, during resuscitation attempts, the NYPD arrived. They told my brother to stop CPR because the lady was obviously dead and in their opinion, had been for a couple of hours. The husband was questioned extensively. He told law enforcement that he and his wife had a fight earlier in the evening. He went out on his own and when he came back, his wife was in the bath. He says he went to bed at that point but later became concerned when his wife didn’t come to bed.

Privately, among all those present, the general consensus was that the husband had something to do with it but it could not be proven. A couple of weeks later, the room was again made available to guests, and of course the incident was not mentioned. A woman who frequently stayed at the hotel, made a reservation for a week and was assigned to that room. She was the first person to stay in the room since the incident. She came to the front desk first thing in the morning, very upset, and with all of her luggage in tow. She said that she was canceling the rest of her reservation and that she would NEVER be staying in the hotel again. She said that she did not sleep the entire night and that the room was haunted. No one at the hotel had mentioned to her what had previously transpired in the room.

While my brother worked there, every guest who stayed in the room, called about strange goings on and many asked to be switched to another room. People reported they heard the sound of water…like spilling over.

62. Taking Care Of The Ranch. When I was young, I went to see my grandpa who happened to be caretaking for a multi-millionaire’s ranch while the prior caretaker was having rotator cuff surgery.

One day he takes me into the prior caretaker’s house and a few others and has me flip the breakers off (All of them.) I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I figured it was maintenance if some type.

That night at about 11:30 I was sitting on the couch watching the news and he calls me out onto the porch. He points at the caretaker’s house (where we turned the breakers off, btw) but there are three lights on. I grab binoculars and look through the windows. No people, no movement, nothing.

He looks over at me and says “That’s the third time this week. The first time I went over with my .357 expecting someone to have broken in. But when I got to the house, the door was locked just like I’d left it. I went inside and nothing was out of order except a barstool was pulled out.”

Sure enough, we went over and nothing was out of order except the barstool. So I go downstairs to check the breaker box and the second I open the breaker box, the lights go off upstairs.

I quickly wised up and got the fuck outta there.

63. Curt Says Hello. Spring break of 2010. My buddies and I decided to camp out on an island at a local lake. One night as we are cooking food and drinking beer, a canoe floats by with one guy in it. He asks how we’re doing and we invite him to our island for grilled meat and beers. Being in South Arkansas, we naturally assume that everyone is friendly and wants to hang out. His name was Curt and he was super friendly but really seemed to be sad. We asked him what was up and he replied “Oh nothing really, it’s just that my friends are probably worried about me.” He looked at me and winked. “they’ll find out soon enough.”

That still haunts to this day. Everyone liked Curt and, noticing that it was getting dark and he had been drinking, we offered to let him stay with us that night. He declined saying that he had to get to where he was going and he seemed very adamant about that. I asked where he was headed thinking maybe we could give him a ride on a jet ski or something. Curt ignored the question and said “you boys don’t know how lucky you are.” He hopped in his canoe and left. We didn’t think much about it.The next morning we woke up early to do some fishing. As we’re fishing, a police boat pulls up. The officer asks if we’re part of the search party that found the body. We obviously have no clue what he is talking about so he tells us a story about a young man in a canoe that disappeared last week. Apparently divers found his body at the bottom of the lake two days before. The young mans name was Curt Clark. This was so freaky for us that we all packed up and left camp that day.

Here’s a link to the story.

64. A Shadow Visits After Hours. I worked in a nursing home as an aide in a hospice unit. One night I had three patients trying to die and my job was to ensure that they were comfortable. The girls that worked the floor with me at night were awesome. We would always try to make each other laugh and get through the night as best as we could. I was known for scaring girls. Sometimes I’d hide in the closet of a room where someone had recently died (their body and belongings long gone in the empty room) and I’d press the call light and wait. The girls would come in and hastily shut it off but I’d always jump out and scare the shit out of them.

One night I was in the nurses station filling out a report since I had to give a pt Kent some narcotics when an aide rushed in. She swore that she thought she saw my shadow on the wall as if I were hiding trying to scare her but then she heard me laugh in the nurse’s station. I decided to check it out since there wasn’t suppose to be anyone on our floor. As I walked over to the wall I stood where the light would have created my shadow and there was nothing. I laughed it off until the CNA started shrieking and I turned around and a shadow seemingly rose up the wall from the ground out of nothing. I just stared at it and said, “oh for heavens sake is that the best you’ve got?” And walked back to the nursing station.

A while later I had to do rounds. As I walked towards a patients room I heard three knocks on the door that lead outside to the patio by their room and I saw an older gentleman dressed in all black. I couldn’t let him in because I didn’t have the access code so I told him to hold on a moment and i would get the nurse to let him in. When she and I returned to the door he was gone. She went outside and we couldn’t find him, so I continued to the patients room to check on him.

Blood everywhere and the patient is on the floor bleeding. He had tried to get up it appears and flopped around a bit in his blood trying to get up. The nurse lifted him back into the bed and we cleaned him up. There was nothing else we could do as he was DNR besides make sure he was comfortable. I went to my next patients room and bam…dead. He had stopped breathing. I rushed to get the nurse and pulled his file. DNR also. We call the morgue and his family while I clean his body with an aide. I go to check on the patient that fell (vitals every 15 minutes for non witnessed fall) and he’s dead. I’m get the nurse, she’s frustrated because this takes two aides off her floor to care for the deceased and lots of paperwork for her. As I’m walking down the hall for linens I see the ol man I originally saw outside walking past the nurses station and he whispered, “one more and then I’m done for the night, just one more” I jumped up because his whisper was so eerie and I run to the direction he was going. A patients room door slammed shut and when I ran in she looked directly at me and took her last breath and died. Her eyes still staring directly at me. For some reason I remember her window being open and how odd it was. I ran to the window and didn’t see anything and slammed it shut, checked the woman for a pulse and found nothing.

The nurse had followed me and saw exactly what I saw and heard the voice whisper as I did. She was coming around he corner and swore she saw the man and then me jump up and run after him and, like me, saw the patients room door slam shit before I could get in there. When I had turned around I saw the nurse standing in the door way and she could only say, “I fucking saw it too oh my god I fucking saw it too”.

65. Nice Guy Poltergeist. I was stuck in a bathroom in a creepy house my family was staying at. I was home alone. You had to force the door into the jam to get it to close and latch, only to find out that the knob didn’t work the latch. I heard the side door slam shut downstairs. I thought my dad was home.

I called to him. “Dad. Dad! I’m stuck in the bathroom!”

I heard him walking on the hardwood. Through The kitchen. Down the hall. Stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

“Dad! I’m locked in!” I yelled.

I immediately heard him run up the stairs and stop at the top.

Once more I exclaimed “I’m locked in the bathroom!”

4 more steps to the other side of the door.

“Dad?!”

BOOOOOOOOOOM

The door swung open and slammed into the wall. I stepped into the hall. I looked around. Nobody was there. Nobody at all.

I politely said “Thank you!” and went straight to bed.

66. The Boy Who Lived. When I was 2 years old my uncle committed a double murder and suicide. He was a meth head and had been taking money from my grandmother and finally one day she told him no more. That just happened to be the day I was at their house. He went to his room and brought out a shotgun. He shot my grandfather in his face. My grandmother ran and grabbed me. He shot her in the back. She dropped me and rolled over. He pulled out a big knife and hit her in the neck with it. He the turned his attention to me. I remember this vividly. I was crying and he picked me up. Rocked me for a minute and sat me in my swing. He thing pointed the shotgun right at my face. Then all of the sudden he just stopped. Like something was fighting with him. Like physically prevented him from blowing me into a million parts. Next thing I know the gun is in his mouth and bang. That is all I remember. My parents never told me a single thing about it and up until a year ago they didn’t know I knew about it. When I told my dad he starts crying and tells me how I was just swinging in my swinger like someone was pushing me. I had forgotten about it until I was like 13 and all the sudden I remembered. It fucked with my head for a while.

67. My Brother’s Friend Friya. I have a younger brother who had an imaginary friend when he was younger. He was also an avid sleep walker. When he was around three or four, he started talking to someone he called Friya (Fry-uh). He described Friya as a dark skinned man with little clothes who loved to hunt in the wilderness. Then one day he told me that Friya used to live nearby the house a long time ago. And then some white people came and burned him alive and killed his village. Not exactly something you expect to hear from a four year old. I remember I would be in my room and hear him talking like he was having a conversation and when I would try to check on him, he would immediately become silent and turn his head as soon as I peeked around the corner. Very unsettling.

Well my other brother, the middle child, was visiting his dad for the summer but the day before he got back, my youngest brother told my mother and I that “Friya does not like when (brother) is mean to me. He’s going to scare him.” The night he got home, my mom and I were downstairs and heard a scream that I can still hear to this day. We ran upstairs and found the middle brother swearing that someone was shaking his bed violently. It was a bunk bed. My youngest brother was sound asleep. A month later, my youngest brother took a bad fall and cracked his skull. He was fine, but never talked to Friya again after that. He would also sleep walk constantly. And show up right next to my bed and stare at me until I woke up and promptly shit myself.

One night I heard my front door open and close. Since it was 4am, I went to check it out. I opened the door and found my brother at the far end of the yard, in the snow, only in his underwear, staring right at me. Then he slowly waved. Those shivers weren’t from the cold.

68. Visitors At Lover’s Lane. Back in high school (probably junior year, I think), I was in a long distance relationship with a girl from several states away. She would visit a few times a year and when she did, we obviously spent as much time together as possible. One night, we were kind of making up from a fight we’d just had and we drove up in my dad’s truck to basically the Lover’s Lane of the area – a dirt cul-de-sac at the end of a road on the mountainside. From this little lot, you could look out over the town at night and it was pretty cool, which is why it was kind of a popular place to go.

So we’re parked in the truck just off the road, looking out over the town and cuddling while we talk out our issue. Like many trucks, it had a small hatch window on the back of the cab facing the bed of truck. We opened this to let some fresh air in. At some point during our talk, another vehicle pulled up along the cul-de-sac. Since I didn’t make it clear before, the cul-de-sac didn’t really have a curb all the way around it because it was partially dirt (I think there was construction in the area or something), so you could pull off the actual road and out onto the flat area overlooking the town. We had pulled off the road like that, but the other vehicle stayed in the area with the curb, so we’d have to go right past them to get back onto the road.

Anyway, this vehicle pulls up and a bunch of guys a little older than us get out and start messing around. Seemed like they probably were doing some drinking but maybe not. The thing is, they had left their headlights on and their car was facing into the back of the truck, so their lights were shining right on us and it was annoying. But we ignore them for a while, figuring they’re probably just being idiots and will eventually leave.

Then, we get curious what they’re talking about (because we can hear them talking loudly through the open back window), and we start listening in and picking up pieces of their conversation. It gradually became clear that we were the center of their attention and they seemed to be working themselves up to doing “something.” I don’t remember exactly what they were saying, except for something that one of them said that sticks very clearly in my memory: “I swear to god, I’ll do it.” At this point, I am becoming nervous, and put the keys in the ignition, telling my girlfriend that I wasn’t interested in finding out what exactly was going on.

So now, we’re both watching nervously out the back window as we listen to them egging each other on to this mysterious dare, when a few of them start walking toward the truck. They’re maybe 15 yards away, and I don’t want to make an idiot of myself in front of my girlfriend by immediately flipping shit, but I do turn on the truck and put it in reverse, but not moving yet. When they saw the brake lights, they started walking quicker, and that’s when the NOPE button officially got pushed in my mind and I turned the truck around and started driving back to the road. But like I said, their car was between where we were and the road, so driving back to the road takes us right past them. As we’re passing their group, a couple of them run at the truck and one of them jumps onto the back bumper, grabbing the tailgate. Now, whatever traces of doubt had been there about whether or not we were the target of something (innocent or not) was gone, so I floored it and the guy fell off. I don’t know if he was hurt; I don’t care. It looked like they were starting to get into their car as well, so I booked it out of the area and we didn’t see them again, nor did we ever return to that place.

I still have no idea what would have happened if we hadn’t gotten out of there, and that, to me, is the scary part. I’d like to think that they were just trying to scare us and wouldn’t have actually done anything, but at the same time, I’ve heard stories of people at places like that getting raped/killed/whatever else. It’s entirely possible that we both came very close to something horrible that night, and the experience scares me to this day.

69. Frank From Sweden. When I was a kid (4-6 range) my mother had this boyfriend…. lets call him Frank. For the most part he was an okay guy but he had some serious mental issues which we found out later.

At some point they decided to move to Albuquerque (we were in California then) and off we went. Things were okay for a bit but Frany drank more and more and was growing more and more paranoid each day. Eventually my mother found that he had bought plane tickets for himself and a child (me) out of the country. She freaked out and they got into a bit of a tiff that ended up with the cops arresting him because of attempted kidnapping.

She was told he would be in holding for about 4 days, long enough to pack up and leave, but that night the cops decided to let him out, why? because he knew how to vomit blood and they freaked out (the cops were not the brightest) and instead of taking him to the hospital they dropped him off at a fucking Walgreens to “get his medication” since CLEARLY this guy was no threat. To make things worse, they didn’t even bother calling her to warn her that, oh hey, the fuck who was planning on kidnapping your child is our roaming the streets.

A few hours later I am asleep in a sleeping bag next to her when I wake up to find his shadowy figure standing over me. He broke in. I scream, she jumps up. She throws (LITERALLY throws) him from the room, slams the door and screams for me to lock it, I do…. I think anyway (never really came up). They start screaming at each other, the neighbors have already called the cops at this point because, hey there was some creep sneaking around this place.

At some point during their fighting she threw him through the sliding glass door, about the same time two officers were sneaking around the house to see what the fuck was going on. She was arrested and he kept trying to tell them to let me stay with him. I was still locked in the bedroom. Eventually the cops acquiesce and she is (while still handcuffed) allowed to convince me to unlock the door. While he is screaming that I would be fine they find all the evidence of him planning on killing her and taking me to Sweden (where he was born and had dual nationality) so he could somehow keep me away from my grandparents and father.

I spent a few days in a CPS house while they sorted her information (it was a weekend which added time) and as soon as she was out we were gone.

He kept calling my grandparents house to tell her he was sorry and he would be there soon to make things better…

70. Strange Sounds Among The Stacks. My school’s library is open until around 2 in the morning for the idiots like me who don’t do their essays until the last minute, it’s a pretty small building and most of the books are in the basement area called the “Stacks”. Just to give you a quick layout, there’s the big main stairs that go down to the Stacks, a vending machine room, and the long hallway with four entrances into the Stacks. The Stacks are two really big rooms on opposite sides of the hallway with a huge amount of bookshelves and study desks lining the walls.

I was there around 11pm last year, it was a pretty research intensive essay so I was down in the Stacks working in one of the study desks so I didn’t have to keep going upstairs and downstairs again. I had been there for maybe two hours and everyone except for a boy working a few desks down from me had left already. I was pretty zoned out by this point, it was an 8am class so I didn’t have much time until it was due and I was sort of panicking, so it really pissed me off when I heard someone flipping through book pages really fast to make them do that loud whir noise at the other end of the room. I sort of ignored it for a while thinking they’d go away eventually, but they just kept doing it.

After about five minutes, I got sick of it and started to walk over to tell them to be knock it off. I get about three steps across the room and it just stopped. I sat back down and it was quiet again for like ten more minutes before the flipping pages noise started again, only loads louder, like they’d grabbed a huge book that time.

The boy started to get pissed off too and he stood up and started walking through the bookshelves trying to find them. It keeps going so I got up too and started looking around with him. It got really loud and it was pretty obvious where it was coming from by that point, so we started walking towards it, he was on one side of the shelves and I was on the other.

We walked all the way down the shelves. No one there. We hadn’t seen anyone come in the stacks and we were on the side of the room with the entrances, no way could anyone have come in without us seeing them. The noise stopped again and we both just sort of slowly walked back to our seats, I assumed it was just a fan or something in the other room and I really needed to get my essay done.

We sat down and immediately the noise started again, it sounded like it was coming from right next to the guy’s chair. He shoved his stuff in his bag, looked at me, said, “Fuck this” and took off. I was out of there maybe five seconds behind him. I still won’t go back in the Stacks at night, even when there’s other people down there. No essay’s worth getting murdered by a weird book ghost.

71. My grandfather. Grandpa revealed this story during the wake for my uncle.

My grandfather was an engineer. When he was young he worked for this big cement company. During his first few months on the job the company sent him and other fresh recruits up in the mountains to oversee some work. Including a couple of seniors to mentor them, a guide for the hike, and the company’s caretaker for the hut they’d live in, they were a total of ten people.

My grandfather recalled living in an old wooden hut practicing the Filipino country life. There was no electricity and they had to light a fire with wood if they wanted to cook. He said it was a really good learning experience for him not only with regards to his job, but also with living a practical and simple lifestyle.

After two weeks their little project was done. Their group decided to take a photo together on the front porch steps of the little hut to have a memento of their time there. Grandfather said they were lined up standing in two rows in front of the house. Five people in front, five people in the back standing on the porch.

Remember this was the 70s, an era before selfie sticks were invented. They used one of those old film cameras that you have to get developed at a Kodak store.

Everyone went back home. At work a few days later the guy who owned the camera had the photos developed. Everyone crowded to admire the photos.

When they reached the last photo they took as a group, my grandpa did a double take. There were eleven people in the photo. Five in the front like they had posed initially, but six in the back.

All of them were wearing work t-shirts in the photo, but in the corner of the row of smiling faces stood an unfamiliar face of a middle-aged man wearing formal outdated clothing that seemed to be from decades ago. He had a grim expression and was looking straight at the camera.

My grandfather said that when he and his workmates bumped into the caretaker and hiking guide again, they asked them if they knew who the man in the photo was. Both were surprised and said no. Nobody knew who the man was.

My grandfather still has his copy of that photo tucked somewhere in his house…

72. Grandpa’s secretary. As I mentioned, my grandfather relayed his story during the wake of my uncle (my grandpa’s sister’s son). What prompted the discussion of ghost stories from my otherwise rational grandpa was the experience of his secretary just a few hours earlier.

My grandparents have a couple of small businesses and they have an office in a room in their house for their secretaries. This was at the front of the house. If the secretaries wanted to pee they had to go to the kitchen, which was at the back of the house, to use the staff bathroom.

My grandparents’ house is situated in a big compound with the rest of our relatives’. Basically our neighbors are our family. To the left of our house is my grandpa’s older brother’s house, behind theirs is my grandpa’s younger brother’s house, and behind our own house is my grandpa’s sister’s house.

Confusing, I know, but bear with me.

My uncle lived at grandpa’s sister’s house. Since their house is behind my grandparents’, his room happened to be directly behind the staff bathroom. Like literally back-to-back with only a couple of feet between one house and the other. My uncle passed away in his room in the early hours of the morning from a long-term illness. You know where this is heading, right?

It was already a couple of hours since my uncle’s body was transferred to the mortician. Grandpa’s secretary went to pee. She was sitting on the toilet when she heard a very loud thumping sound coming from my uncle’s room as if something heavy had fallen on the floor.

Just as she shrugged this off, she heard a man’s voice call out, “Help. Help me.” She said the voice was unmistakably my uncle’s. She pulled up her pants and hurried out of the bathroom. She figured someone must’ve seen her using the bathroom and decided to play a prank on her, so later that day she confronted my uncle’s son about it.

He denied playing the prank and said nobody was even home during that time.

He also told her that right before my uncle died, he had stumbled on the floor and yelled for help.

73. My grandfather’s best friend. Grandpa had a best friend from ages ago that I think he met when he was still working for that same cement company. This friend was such a big part of our lives that I called him Uncle Eddie*. He died a couple of years back and I hope he’s in a better place (Rest In Peace, uncle!).

Before that though he had a pretty traumatizing ordeal that I can only describe as horror-movie level fucked up.

Uncle Eddie and my grandpa were the same age, but while my grandpa is a bit of a workaholic Uncle Eddie wanted to retire. Since Uncle Eddie lived in a tiny countryside town, he and my granddad decided to make their own little farm in a lot down a hill a few kilometers near uncle’s house. Like legit you could drive to the farm from his house in 10 minutes.

We would often go there every other weekend and we’d grill some fish, roast some chicken, and pluck some coconuts for a Sunday “picnic.” It was nothing big – just a little yet spacious wooden cottage with a bed, bathroom, and porch. The cottage was surrounded by the “farm” AKA a super thick garden of various fruits and vegetables Uncle Eddie and his family had grown, though majority of the trees were already there when the land was purchased.

There was a modest handmade stall in the corner that housed some chickens and occasionally pig or goat. Mostly it was just a crap-ton of trees – mango trees, coconut trees, water apple trees – and other food-bearing plants. There was so much vegetation that you could almost not see the cottage if you were standing from the car parked out on the road.

Some nights Uncle Eddie or one of his sons would sleep at the cottage either to watch over the farm or just to relax. They say nearly every dawn at approximately 3AM (or at least according to the clock above the bed), if you were alone there you could hear someone knocking on the door even though no one was there when you opened it, you could sometimes hear gigantic bat wings flapping right outside the window, and other times you could hear someone calling your name, but mostly it was only Uncle Eddie who experienced the last one. I’m pretty sure he also claimed to have talked to a dwarf. Apparently uncle had already come across some eerie stuff before, but none as sinister as this particular night.

Uncle Eddie decided to sleep at the farm again, probably after tiring farm work. The clock struck 3AM and the knocking began. Since he was used to this he ignored it. Then he started to hear someone call his name.

He told us it was the voice of a young woman and at first it seemed to be from somewhere in the garden, calling for him to open the door and come out the cottage. As time went on, the voice became louder. It seemed to come from right outside the door.

Uncle Eddie said he was too afraid to open the door, but that the young woman sounded enticing. She told him she was a princess from another world and that she lived in one of the big mango trees in the garden. She wanted Uncle Eddie to go back to the other world with her and become her prince. All he had to do was open the door.

Uncle Eddie told the voice he didn’t want to do that. He firmly told it to go away and leave him alone. After this, objects in the cottage began to move which obviously freaked out my uncle even more. The mysterious voice still kept asking him to open the door and come with her.

He waited until daybreak to leave because there was no way in hell he was opening that door. By then the voice had stopped. He was so shaken by the experience that he frantically called my grandfather and stepdad as soon as he left the farm.

The next day my grandfather found a local medicine man and invited him to the farm. Grandpa, uncle, uncle’s son, grandpa’s house driver, and my stepdad ate dinner with the medicine man. They didn’t say anything about my uncle’s experience.

Without prompting the medicine man then told them there were many creatures “not like us” residing in the area surrounding the farm. There were little dwarves living nearby who were capable of making inanimate objects move (because they could make themselves invisible) and he suspected there was a creature called aswang or wakwak with big wings from the mountains as well. But the most striking thing he said to them was that there was a non-human entity, calling itself a princess, who would convince human beings to go with it so it could keep them trapped in another dimension – and she lived in a mango tree.

121. Mom’s ex-boyfriend. My mom dated her high-school sweetheart for more than 10 years. I grew up with him as a father figure of sorts. I was 15 at the time and lived with them during school days then slept at my grandparents’ during weekends.

I had gone on a weekend vacation with my grandfather in another city. When I came back home they told me their apartment was haunted.

Theirs is a very small apartment. When you open the front door you’re immediately in the living room-slash-kitchen. The 60sqm room is separated by a countertop with barstools, which serves as the dining table. Right beside the fridge is the door to the bathroom. You can basically see everything in the room if you stand in any one corner.

Meanwhile, there’s a small spiral staircase like this leading to the bedroom. The staircase is directly beside their living room couch. For reference, I’ll put a drawing below:

My mother and her boyfriend (let’s call him Ken) had a fight. She made Ken sleep on the couch while she slept in their bedroom on the second floor. All the lights were turned off except for the front porch light outside.

Ken said he reckons it was around midnight when he began to doze off on the couch. Suddenly he saw my mom descend the spiral staircase precisely in front of him. It was somewhat dark so all he could see was her long hair and plain white night gown.

Ken thought it was a bit strange for my mom to wear that nightgown, as he had never seen her wear it before. He saw my mom pass him on the couch and walk to the bathroom door. Even in the dim lighting of the room he could see her touch the bathroom doorknob and then pause to look at him. He couldn’t see her face, but he saw her head turn towards him and felt her eyes staring at him before she went in the bathroom. He closed his eyes and heard the bathroom light switch being flicked on.

Around fifteen minutes had passed and it dawned on Ken that my mom still had not finished using the bathroom. He called her name to make sure she was okay, “Em?” No answer. “Emma?” Still no answer.

Ken began thinking maybe my mother was sick and had fainted so he stood up and crossed the room. He noticed no light was spooling from under the bathroom door despite him being certain he had heard my mom switching it on. When was in front of the bathroom, he noticed the door was ajar a couple of inches, but the light was not turned on.

“Em?” he called again. Silence. He yanked the door open and switched on the light. The bathroom was empty. He felt goose bumps rise on his skin and he ran! He ran up the stairs and went into the bedroom where he saw my mom sleeping soundly in a colored shirt…

He hurriedly climbed on the bed and yanked the blankets over his head, which woke up my mom. My mom, annoyed, asked him, “What are you doing here? Go back to the couch!”

“There were a lot of mosquitoes,” Ken lied without looking at her. Mom let it go and went back to sleep. Next morning when I arrived from my vacation, he told her the truth.

One night a couple days later my mom was at work when I was cleaning the living room. I lifted the cushions on the couch and saw there was a gun hidden there. I asked Ken why it was there and without answering, he looked at the bathroom door and I understood.

74. My uncle. Do you know why my mom and I didn’t question Ken’s story?

Well the year before, her brother had come home to visit. My uncle had moved to New Zealand and was visiting family for the holidays. My grandparents’ house was getting renovated at the time whereas my mom’s apartment didn’t have a place for him, so my uncle stayed at my grandmother’s hotel, which, as you can guess, is right beside my mom’s apartment.

It was my uncle’s second night at the hotel. He was staying at a room close to the reception desk. It was just after dinner and he was relaxing on the bed watching TV when suddenly the channel changed. And changed again. And again. And again.

He saw the remote was untouched on the coffee table beside the bed. The TV screen turned to static. Scared, my uncle grabbed the blanket and pulled it over his head. That’s when he felt someone forcefully yanking the blanket from his body. The blanket fell on the floor. There was nobody else in the room.

My uncle ran outside and yelled for help. The hotel staff came and asked what was wrong. When he told them what happened, they laughed and said this was normal. Apparently, there was a woman’s ghost haunting the hotel and everyone had already either seen it or experienced something creepy.

Do you know what they said she looked like? Long black hair, plain white night gown.

75. The hotel employees and grandparents’ house-help. The hotel’s employee bathroom was a row of toilet and shower stalls with individual doors which didn’t go all the way up so you could still see people if they were standing on the other side.

One of the hotel employees recounted he was using one of the stalls when he heard someone come in. He was on the toilet doing his business when he happened to look up. The ghost lady was peeking from the door, looking right at him.

***

In the Philippines, it’s typical for a household to have live-in help or housemaids. My grandparents have a huge two-story four-bedroom house. During this time they employed three female housemaids and one male house driver.

One evening they were having dinner in the maids’ quarters (which is a separate area from the main kitchen where you could clearly see out into the backyard where there was an altar for a crucifix) when one of the maids said, “Who is that out there? Is that madame lighting candles at the altar?”

The driver froze and said, “That’s not madame.”

Middle of the evening, pale almost glowing skin, white dress, long black hair… then seemingly disappeared. They all attest they saw a lady ghost walking in the backyard.

***

The maids once told me they could hear disembodied voices in my grandparents’ big house. Like sometimes they would hear someone talking in the dining room and go there only to see it’s empty. A couple of times they would hear my grandma yell their names from the office or the master bedroom. However when they went to my grandma and asked what she needed, my grandma would be confused and say she didn’t even call for them in the first place.

***

My childhood nanny, who was one of our maids, ended up marrying the house driver and getting pregnant. At the time, though, they kept this a secret from my grandparents so they were still sleeping in different rooms – a room for male help and a different room for female help. Let’s call our three female maids Anne (pregnant), Jessica, and Norma.

Norma had her day off and went to visit her family so it was only Anne and Jessica in their bunk-bed bedroom. Around 1 A.M. Jessica woke up to a strange sound outside their window, which, again, is situated near our backyard. It sounded like something with long claws or nails was scratching at the windows.

“Anne, are you awake? Do you hear that?”

“Yes.”

Along with the scratching, they heard a weird high-pitched laugh-like sound that they described as almost inhuman; somewhat like the sound of a bat except the volume of the scratching and screeching became so loud that it definitely was made by something much bigger than a bat. Kind of like the cackling sound of a witch in the movies, but just not quite?

The sounds were also coming from the window beside the pregnant Anne’s bed.

124. Me in my old bedroom. It was a typical Friday night and I was in my bedroom watching TV. I was probably 12-years-old at the time. My bedroom was beside the helps’ quarters and from one of my windows I could see the entire maids’ area.

I had been having some trouble sleeping a couple of weeks ago due to someone keeping me up by calling “Pssst” from my window. I figured it was just the maids making fun of me and I’d say, “Cut it out!” and sometimes they’d stop. Other times, they seemed to enjoy torturing me and would keep doing it for a long time until it drove me insane.

Lately, however, it had stopped. I had completely forgotten about it until it happened again. “Pssst!” I heard it again. This time it happened earlier around 7PM instead of the usual 10-12PM annoyance. On the other side of the wall I could hear the maids’ were still eating.

“Aha! You’re not getting away and fooling me this time!” I excitedly say to myself as I jogged from my room to their dining area to catch the culprit red-handed. A minute later when I got there, they were talking to each other and clearing the table.

“All right, who did it?!” I asked in an angry tone and they looked at me like WTF?

“Did what?” Jessica asked.

“Don’t lie to me. I know one of you keeps pssst-ing me in the middle of the night and it’s really annoying!”

They became quiet and looked at each other. I could see the genuine confusion on their faces. They also had an uncomfortable yet familiar expression, as though they knew what I was talking about but were surprised I mentioned it?

Anne looked at me dead serious, “We aren’t the ones doing that to you and nobody said ‘pssst’ just right now.”

76. My stepdad. My mom and her boyfriend broke-up and she eventually got together with my stepdad, who is very sensitive to the paranormal.

When they were pregnant with their first child, my mom left her and Ken’s apartment and moved away to my stepdad’s city. They lived in my stepdad’s grandmother’s house that my stepdad inherited along with his siblings. The house was old and dim.

My stepdad said that when he was single, his sister and her family moved to another house while his brother was rarely home because his work often took him to other cities. One early morning he was eating breakfast in the kitchen when from his peripheral vision he saw someone standing in the corner of the room.

He ignored it until he saw the figure move and felt a presence walk directly behind him. The hairs on his neck stood on end and he turned around to see there was nobody else in the room except him. His siblings also claim to have similar experiences and sightings of a ghostly figure.

When my mom got pregnant and moved in with him, the sightings became more frequent. Again, it was an apparition of a woman with long hair and a white dress. Whether it’s the same one that Ken, the maids, and hotel staff saw or whether it’s a different one, I don’t know.

But my stepdad says that many times he would see the woman outside in the garden, slowly walking in front of their bedroom window. Then it escalated. He was talking to my mom when he looked up and saw the woman standing still right in front of their window, staring at my heavily pregnant mother.

He told his sister who went to a local medicine man (shaman) to ask for help. The medicine man gave them the tail of a stingray and told them to hang it in their bedroom for protection. My stepdad said it apparently helped. He could still see the woman sometimes, but not as often as before and never as close as their window.

After my mom gave birth, she and my stepdad decided to move in with my grandparents to save money and also so my stepdad, who is also an engineering graduate, could work for my grandpa. During this time I was already attending University in a different city. A few months after my parents moved back I visited them.

Out of the blue my stepdad casually asked me, “Hey, when you were still using your old bedroom before did you ever feel… I don’t know, anything strange?”

“Why?” I asked him, surprised.

“When I’m walking by it or using the bathroom there I just feel like… there’s some strange presence there or something.”

***

A few years later my grandmother hired a feng-shui expert to inspect and bless the house. He had these red little cards with Chinese writing on it that he’d hang on places he said had negative energy and those cards supposedly counteracted the negative energy or something. Without me or my stepdad mentioning anything to the feng-shui guy, guess where he placed a red card because he said it was an area of the house that had one of the most negative energies?

Yep, my old bedroom.

77. My half-brother. My parents and even my brother’s nanny told me this.

When my brother was still a baby (from 1-3 years old), he would sometimes begin laughing in his crib and looking at an empty space as if someone was there in front of him, playing with him. Sometimes it happened during daytime at other locations, but usually it was in the middle of the night when he was already in his crib.

***

There’s a big public elementary school in the middle of the city. If you were going to our home from church, the park, or any other city location you’d most likely have to pass by this school. This also occurred when my brother was still young.

Every time we’d pass by the school he would wave to someone then say, “Ate” (ah-teh which means big sister in Filipino). Same specific road, same specific part of the school.

Even during weekends or on summer break when the school would be 100% empty, he would look up on that same certain spot on the school’s deserted second-floor classroom, wave, and say, “Ate.” He’s 9-years-old now and hasn’t done that or the crib thing in a long time.

My parents, however, had another baby.

He’s turning two-years-old next month. They say he’s beginning to do the exact same things…

126. Chula Means Fox. My mom is Native American. She named my sister Chula which means fox. Most likely because of her name sake but maybe not ,my sister loved everything that had to do with a fox. Last November my mom was doing dishes at the sink and looking out the window at the woods like she always does. Well she looks up from the dishes to the edge of the woods and at that moment a Fox steps out of the woods. It sits on it’s hind legs and stares right at my moms face while she stares back through the window . She said it seemed like five minutes they stared at each other. Suddenly the fox got up turned around and slowly walked into the woods. my mom said her first thought was to call Chula tell her about the fox. My sister never answered she died in a head on collision that day due to some asshole drunk driver. My mom keeps looking for the fox. It has never come back.

78. Copper Queen Hotel ghost. I stayed in the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, AZ. It has a number of fairly infamous hauntings. Usually, people report seeing women in 1900s-era dresses and miners and a little boy who supposedly drowned in a nearby stream.

I was always fascinated with the paranormal growing up but never REALLY completely believed in ghosts (even now, my belief is TBD one way or the other). My mom threw herself into the interest head-first as well but she put a significant amount of trust in the hoax-y TV shows like Ghost Adventures and whatnot. I was moving out to AZ for college and before they dropped me at the dorms for my freshman year, my parents wanted to do an AZ tour. My mother BEGGED for us to stay at the Copper Queen since it’s been the focus of many a ghost hunting show. She downloaded a stupid hunting app too that “allowed ghosts to use their electromagnetic energy to choose words in the app and speak to you”. Obviously, it was a random word generator.

The Copper Queen was GORGEOUS. Really well-maintained and antiquated. My mom immediately took my dad by the arm, ghost app pulled up, and dragged him to the bar/lounge area to look for ghosts. I took our bags upstairs and began unpacking. Okay, here’s the weirdness.

As I unpacked between the two beds, I suddenly felt little tiny footsteps in the floor coming from the other side of my parents’ bed. I stopped and listened. Then I heard the footsteps coming closer and felt them stop directly in front of the gap between the two beds where I stood. My heart was racing like crazy and I was frozen in place. I finally gathered up the nerve to “ask” whatever it was, “Are you there?”. I was embarrassed the moment it came out of my mouth because it may very well have been a kid out in the hallway.

I shit you not, guys. I heard a giggle. Something was giggling right in front of me. It was clear as day and sounded so close I thought I could touch the source. Then it stopped and the little footsteps ran around to the other side of my bed, it giggled and disappeared.

I immediately ran out of the room into the hallway to look around and find a kid somewhere. But it was empty. My parents were just arriving to the room, as well. I asked them if they saw any kids running around by the elevators or stairs. They said no. I barely slept that night.

79. Historic Jefferson Hotel ghosts. My girlfriend and I stayed in room 14 at the “Historic Jefferson Hotel” in Jefferson, TX just for fun. She always “wanted” to stay in a haunted hotel so I obliged.

Around 2 am I was abruptly woken by what seemed to be some drunk walking down the hall scratching the wall and rattling all the doorknobs as they were passed. Even saw the shadow under my door of what I believed to be someone walking past without stopping as our door knob rattled.

Got up, opened the door to have a “word” with the prankster/jackass. However, no one in the hallway at all. Yet the scratching sound of the wall & “rattle” of door knobs on my side continued farther down the hall away from me one after the other.

Forced myself back asleep and then woke up about 3 AM for an unknown reason. Just felt like someone was in the room, in the dark, standing and watching me/us. I just laid there, eyes open, refused to roll over and look. Laid there for what seemed to be an eternity until the feeling went away. Next thing you know it was dawn.

Girlfriend experienced none of it. She slept through the whole thing. Oddest experience of my life so far.

80. The Man With The Suitcase And Brimmed Hat. Before I get to the story of the with the suitcase, I have to preface it a little bit. Many years ago, when I met my ex her and her family live in a mobile home. My ex has this younger sister, who is a bit messed up (in and out of pysch wards, etc..). My ex and her younger sister shared a room in the mobile home. While we were dating, and before my son was born; she told me this story about how her younger sister would wake up, and talk to the man in the hallway. The man always had a suitcase, and wore a brimmed hat. My ex and her family always dismissed them as, well the younger sister is a bit nuts.

Flash forward a few years. My ex and I have a son together. Her parents moved out of the mobile home and into a house; and were renting the mobile home to my ex. Our son’s room was the exact same room my ex and her sister slept in. One night after our son had gone to bed, and was asleep for a long while (I checked on him), we heard him get out of bed. We figured he would come out of his room and ask to use the potty. Instead he started talking to someone. He said “hi and started talking about his favorite stuffed animal (at that time it was a ducky). Curious, I called back and asked who he was talking to. He pops his head out of his room, and informs me he’s talking to the man with a suitcase and is wearing a hat. At the time he was about 2 1/2, and never heard about his aunt seeing the same guy.

81. A Military Man Encounters True Horror. I should start off by saying my brother is not only a military man, but he’s your basic hetero “never let them see you cry” cliche of a military man. He’s not afraid of anything, well, except for the entire country of japan. This is his story.

My brother joined the marines when he was 18 and was stationed in Japan. He really enjoyed his time there for a while. The girls, specifically. He made friends with some of the Japanese guys his age who worked around the base. On nights where him and his soldier friends had the night off, the local Japanese guys would show them around, bring them to bars, introduce them to girls, etc.

One night, after a little drinking and no luck with girls, the guy invited my brother home to play video games. My brother accepted the invite and they played video games for a few hours. During this time, he tells my brother the main reason he wanted to get home early was because his little sister had been suffering from night terrors, causing her to wake up screaming, crying, and sometimes vomiting. He was worried about her and wanted to be home in case she had an episode.

At this point in the story, I should explain how this guy’s house was shaped. The house was built in the shape of a horseshoe, with a garden in the middle. His bedroom was at the very edge of one side of the “U” shape and his sisters all the way at the other end. So they are essentially across the garden from each other. If he looks out of his window, he can see into hers and vice versa.

So anyways, they decide to call it a night, and the Japanese guy walks over to the window to look across the garden into his sisters window, to check on her. He lifts the blind and peers out for a fraction of a second before jumping back screaming and looking at my brother like he just saw something horrible. My brother then goes to look and he stops him. He tells him that he saw a dark cloud with red eyes hovering over his sister’s sleeping body. My brother, naturally, does not believe him and decides to look for himself.

He creeps quietly over to the window and lifts the blind but this time, he finds himself eye to eye with what he describes as a “dark black puff of smoke with a face”. My brother and this other guy admit that they got under the guys covers and stayed there until it was light outside, too afraid to lift the blankets and see that the smoky figure had come a little closer, and was in the room with them, just on the other side of the thin sheets.

I don’t know what to believe, or if maybe they drank more than what they said they did that night and imagined it all, but I know my brother believes what he saw. He sticks to his story, and when he tells it, he looks like someone who saw something truly sinister.

82. Shaped Like A Person, But Not A Person. This occurrence didn’t happen to me, but to my grandmother. It would have taken place in the 1930’s. My grandmother was a young teen at the time and she lived with her mother and five siblings in an old house in the middle of the woods. The area was the Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri.

My grandmother had got into a fight with her mother. She took off into the woods all day to get away from her for a while. When it got dark she decided to come home. When she got home, the doors were locked and everyone was in bed. There was an old cot sitting outside the house and she decided to just sleep on the cot until morning.

In the morning when she woke up, there was some creature sitting at the end of the cot. It has been 15 years since I have heard this story, and she only told me once, so my memory is a little fuzzy. I remember she said it was really ugly and had a full set of sharp teeth. It was shaped like a person but didn’t look like a person. She said that it just sat there and smiled at her with its abnormally large mouth of sharp teeth. When she started to get up from the cot to get away, it would start to get up and move towards her. When she would sit back down, it would sit back down. She sat there staring at it for a few seconds and it continued to sit and smile at her. The creature was sitting between her and the front door. She finally jumped up and made a run for the back door.

When she got to the back door it was locked but her mother was in the kitchen making biscuits. She was banging on the door screaming to be let in and her mother told her to go around to the front because her hands were covered in dough. My grandmother screamed she couldn’t and was frantic enough that her mother ran to let her in.

She told her mother what she had seen. She had my grandmother’s two brothers take the cot out to the woods and chop it up and burn it.

83. The Cateyote. So about 5 years ago, some friends and I went camping in Oconee State Park in South Carolina. We were in high school and went with our school ROTC instructor. This guy was in his 50’s but still a damn ox. He was a Sergeant Major while in the Army and was the definition of badass. So, the first night camping it was really cold so we decided to sleep around the fire. We woke up all at same time in the middle of the night to the smell of wet dog and rotten flesh. We decided it might just be the damp leaves and we sleep through the rest of the night. Well, we wake up the next morning and there were paw prints all over the place. I’m not talking just around the outskirts of the site, I mean there were paw prints 4 feet away from where I laid my head that night. We were all pretty creeped out so we decided to head into town to get some lunch. We stayed in town the rest of the day and headed back to the site around dusk. My friends and I are in the back of the truck as we drive down the gravel road to the site. Then all of a sudden, Sargent Major slammed on the breaks and we came to a stop in the middle of the road. We all jumped up and looked over the cab to see what it was. Standing in the middle of the road was a hairless animal, around 50lbs, standing on its hind legs. While still on its back legs, it walked to the side of the road and let out this god awful screeching noise. It darted into the woods and left us all frozen in fear. Then we smelt it. It was the same terrible smell from the night before. We got into the cab and I saw Sargent Major like I had never seen him. I was absolutely terrified. The animal/creature we saw shook him to his core. We drove in silence for the rest of the ride back to the site. When we got there he told us that we were leaving and too pack everything up. None of us have been back since and Sargent Major won’t let ROTC camp there anymore.

We agreed that what we saw looked like a mix between a bob cat and a coyote, but walked like a bear on its back legs. We named it the Cateyote. A few of my friends who hadn’t heard the story decided to go up there one day and said the entire area gave off a really creepy vibe and decided to leave. After I told them the story, it sealed the deal that none of us will be going back.

84. The Kid Next Door. When I was 6 years old we lived in the center of the set of 3 very similar houses. I remember ours was Purple, the one to the left was blue and the one to the right was yellow. I recently had bought one of those big inflatable bouncy balls from Walmart, and had no-one to play with me so I played with it in the backyard by myself. After school one day I accidentally hit the ball to the yellow house side of the fence. I was going to ask my mom what to do but a kid on the other side hit it back over for me. Thinking we could play, I hit it back over and he returned it. It became a daily thing and I would just hit the ball back and forth with him until I got bored after school. The kid wouldn’t respond to any questions I had so I assumed he was just shy.

At one point I hit it over and he didn’t return it, so I asked my mom if I could climb the fence and go get it. She Was never outside with me, so she always thought I was playing alone I guess. We only got the house because my mom was friends with the landlord and the houses were recently built. She told me that no-one had ever lived there, they were still trying to sell it. We moved not long after, but I still have no idea who was returning that ball to me.

85. The bunker. I live in the north of Switzerland. We have a lot of old military bunkers from the Second World War. When I was 7 or 8 years old, three friends of mine and I went out to explore one of these bunkers who was built on a hill inside a small forest. The main door was jammed, so we had to break it up. We found a big log nearby and used it as a battering ram.

After many tries the door won’t budge. But there was a peephole. It was about 10 cm (4 inch) in diameter. We opened it and illuminated the dark inside. There was a long, ruined and dark hallway with rooms on the left and right side. We couldn’t see the end of the hallway. It was just too long. Every one of us wanted to catch a glimpse of the inside, when one of my friends says: “There is a small light at the end of the hallway”. This light was not there when I watched trough the peephole. So I pushed him away and took a second look.

What I saw gave me a shiver. There was not a small light, it looked more like a flashlight pointed directly towards me and behind it was a silhouette of a person. I walked a few steps back and said: “There is someone in there!” At the same moment someone (or something) knocked on the door from the inside of the bunker. This was the moment we got into panic, start screaming and run away. I was so scared I run straight home and locked the door. On the next day in school, my friends and I talked about the event. We came to the explanation that probably some older Kids have played a prank on us. One week later we went to the same bunker again. But as we saw, the welded connection, that should keep the door locked, where rusty and not broken, we just left without saying a word to each other. It was impossible someone opened this door before us, and this was the only entrance. I still live in the same region.

Standing in front of this door again was not very comfortable. The story happened 20 years ago. But it still looks the same.

86. On the sofa. Years ago I fell asleep on my mother’s living room sofa. She was already in bed but my brother was out somewhere. Some time in the middle of the night I woke up to see someone standing over me and covering me with a blanket. It looked like a man wearing a bandana. I assumed it was my brother but thought it was strange for him to be wearing that. The next morning I asked him about it and he said he didn’t even come into the living room when he came home and it wasn’t him who covered me up. My mother also denied doing it and no one else was in the house that night.
I didn’t really find that creepy until a while later when one of my aunts stayed at my mom’s house and reported the exact same thing happened to her. Apparently there was a ghost in that house that wanted to make sure people were tucked in when they fell asleep on the sofa. Could be worse!

87. The farmer. My mother in law was a very funny and cool woman. She and my wife were really close and sadly, she passed away when our son was about 4 months old. Flash forward a few years. We live in an old 1930s era craftsman house in Pasadena, CA. Our son is about 3.

I was giving him a bath one night and he starts looking over my shoulder, not at random stuff, but at something. A moment passes and he asks me why Grandma calls Mommy a funny name. Long pause. I asked him what he meant thinking he was talking about MY mom. He then says why does Grandma call Mommy ****** (My mother in laws nickname for my wife). I was really set back by this. My wife and I never used the nickname, it was just what her mom called her since she was a baby. I asked him where he heard that. His reply:

“The Farmer told me”

I asked him who the farmer was and he replied “his friend.” I tell my wife this story later and she’s of course reduced to tears over the whole nickname thing. We both know there is no way for him to know this and we just kinda marvel at it.

Flash forward to the next weekend and my son is playing in his room. My wife is at work (retail) and I’m home (I worked M-F).

I hear him start talking like he’s having a conversation. He’s saying things like “yes” “no” “I don’t know that” then some laughing. I go into his room and ask him what hes doing and he says playing. I ask with who. He says The Farmer.

At this point I’m already thinking about the fucking Exorcist movie and Captain Howdy. It’s a little unsettling. I ask him where the Farmer is. He says he left when I came in.

THE FUCK. So my wife gets home and I tell her this and now shes just as weirded out as I am. We have no idea what do and figure if it happens again we’ll do something.

A few days later in the middle of the night we both over hear our son saying the following: “Grandma says you and I can’t be friends anymore.”

Wife and I go check on him, both of us a little freaked. He’s just sitting up in bed. I ask if he’s ok and he says yea, Grandma says i cant play with the Farmer anymore.

He never once mentioned the Farmer again. Not ever. He’s 13 now and doesn’t remember any of it. We do though.

88. The boy who hung himself. Was at a friend’s house when I passed out on the couch. Woke up a bit later and realized it was time for me to go. Got up and noticed my buddies light on in his room but the door was shut. Walked by the door and told him I was leaving because I had to work in the am. He said “YUP, SEE YA!” Went to fridge to grab my drink. Walked back by his room and said “later dude”. He said “YUP.” Something didn’t seem legit, didn’t sound quite like him so I opened the door….. No one there…. No one in the house. Went outside and his truck was gone. I freaked the fuck out. Called his cell an he had left to go to McDonald’s 15 minutes prior. I bolted outside and waited for him to get home. He told me the kid that use to live there years ago hung himself In the attic an ever since he lived there he has notice strange things and voices. This was confirmed by the neighbor… The kids older brother! After that just about anyone who goes over there has a weird experience. My buddy has dealt with it for years. When it gets weird he yells out loud “LEAVE ME ALONE” and he says the weird vibes stop for a bit. But they always come back.

89. A call from grandma. My mom had a seizure in her sleep (she was epileptic), got wrapped up in her blankets, and suffocated herself. Paramedics were able to get her breathing again, and loaded her into an ambulance. This was very early in the morning, like 4:30 am.

I was tasked with calling family to tell them my mother was in the hospital. The first and most important phone call I had to make was to my grandmother, her mother. Before I had a chance to grab the phone and call, the phone rang. It was my grandmother calling. This would have been about 5:30 in the morning, but about 2:30 in the morning in her time zone. She wanted to tell us that she’d seen my mother bathed in golden light, and claimed they’d talked and that she was dead, but headed to a better place now.

At this point I didn’t know my mother was going to die. My father was at the hospital with her, and didn’t know she was going to die yet. The doctors didn’t know she was brain dead yet. But somehow my grandmother knew and contacted me.

Incredibly spooky.

90. The phone call. There was this lady (we’ll call her Annie) that was a friend of my mom’s and I lived with her for a few months after college.

I worked 2nd shift, so I was up late watching TV after everyone else was in bed. Annie comes walking into the living room, half asleep. I say, “What’s going on, Annie?” and she says, “My grandmother just called.”

I’m like, “Nooooo, no one has called.”

She insists that she just talked to her grandmother and that her grandmother called to tell her goodbye and now she wants to call her family to check on her.

“Nonsense,” I say. “It was just a dream. Don’t bother your family in the middle of the night. Go back to bed and call them in the morning.” And she goes back to bed.

About an hour later, I’m just getting into bed when the phone rings. No, shit. And it’s her family calling to tell her that her grandmother died about an hour ago.

The grandmother was old, but not sick or on death’s bed or anything. Annie did not remember any of this the next day and we never spoke of it. I thought about this for years and struggled with labeling it a ghost story or just an eerie coincidence. My skeptical and logical tendencies decided to label it a coincidence. The only times I have re-told this story have been to people who do not know Annie in situations where everyone is telling their “ghost-stories.”

THEN

About a decade later, Annie died unexpectedly. I went to her funeral and her brother delivered a eulogy. In it, he tells this story.

When Annie was about 4, her great-grandmother died. All the family was gathered in the house and someone noticed that little Annie had disappeared. After a brief search, they found her in a bedroom, rolling on the floor laughing.

“What on earth are you laughing about, Annie?” and little Annie replies,

“Great-grandma was tickling me. She came to tell me goodbye.”

91. Children. Stop. Now. Many years ago, as a 14 year old, staying overnight at a friends house, with 3 other friends, similar ages. We’d all grown up together, except one, who was a cousin of the kid who lived there, and we’d never met him before. His older sister, 16 at the time, was the babysitter while the parents were out for the evening.

She decides to unearth a ouija board from a cupboard somewhere, and thinks it’ll be a laugh to scare us shitless. This was back in the days, when you could buy ouija boards as a ‘board game’ from your local toy store.

So we all gather round, and she starts off with a kind of yes/no lie detector, directing questions to the each of us in turn. Cue nervous giggles, but also a feeling of unease, as we all began to feel like this was awesomely amazing, like some kind of secret that we’d all been unaware of before.

Shit gets strange, when the sister asks out loud, that ‘if anybody is here, please show yourself’. A pause of a few seconds, and then a framed picture falls off the wall, and onto the floor. Naturally, we all freak the fuck out. She calms us all down, and insists we go back to the board, because we have to help whoever knocked the picture down.

Ashen faced and hearts pounding, we start asking questions (And I should also add, the pointer is moving smoothly and rapidly, in a completely different manner than before.)

Are you in the room? Pointer says yes. Are you a man? Pointer says no. Do you need help? Pointer says no. What’s your name? Pointer spells out S-A-R-A-H. Tell us a secret, we ask… pointer spells out FLIPACOIN.

So we did. Someone leaves the table and gets a 10p piece from out of the loose change jar in the kitchen. This was in the days when 10p coins were big and chunky. The coin goes spinning high up into the air…as we watch it coming down, it stops spinning and serenely falls edge down to land on the table. When I say land, it didn’t bounce, it didn’t rock, it just came down and met the table, perfectly balanced on it’s edge, as if someone had reached out, and gently placed it there

Breaking the silence, the pointer starts moving again. Seemingly random letters, we soon realize they’re initials, including middle names. Family tradition for my friend and his sister was to have 3 middle names, something not all of us knew. Aside from the brother and the cousin, no-one else would have known the older sister’s full name, and we’d met the cousin for the first time that night. Somehow, every person present, had their initials correctly spelled out to them.

Pointer pauses, and then spells out 3 last words. CHILDREN. STOP. NOW.

Took me many many weeks to be able to sleep properly. No one told their parents, and over the years it became our collective shared secret. Couldn’t rationalize it then, still cant rationalize it today.

92. The ghost hunter. I’m super skeptical but my friend does all kinds of ghost hunt things. I go along with him sometimes because it’s very different and always a silly experience.

Except once, when we were ‘going over the evidence.’

I do a lot of his sound work, and I was with him this particular time so we’re going through the audio and he hears something that sounds like a piano playing, I stick it into goldwave and clean it up immensely. It fades in slowly, and fades out slowly; it’s clear as day.

There was no piano in the house, no power in the house, no access to radio (this was in the middle of NOWHERE), and the closest neighbor was approximately one mile away. We also didn’t hear it during the time it was playing, so only the equipment picked it up.

Goddamn it gave me chills with zero explanation. There were several other unexplainable pictures/noises that we picked up but NOTHING to that magnitude. I think I still have it on my computer. Not a creepy clip at all, but the context makes it so I think.

93. The mine. About 10 years ago, I would have been in my early 20s, me and two of my friends decided one night to head down some train tracks and “break in” to an old abandoned coal mine on the outskirts of town. My friend had been there a week before exploring with a buddy, and so we climbed through a hole in the fence they had cut.

This place was pitch black and I had no experience with mining yards, so I could only imagine what these giant looming towers and silos were all around us. I could just barely make out these darker patches that were giant doors and holes in the structures and here scuttling noises beyond. Those noises could easily be explained as pigeons or bats so we were not too fazed. So we continued to our destination. We knew that our town was surrounded by old wwII forts and bunkers and there was one on a hill in the middle of the mine yard. As we slowly crept towards our goal I kept hearing a small tapping noise. Not too alarming, just a small “tink tink tink” coming from the dark behind us in the direction we had come.

We make it to the base of the hill that holds the bunker and find some way to sneak around the only pole light in the yard and up the hill. The whole time we hear the soft “tink tink tink” behind us. Having made it up the hill and faced with the option to head into the bunker us brave men decide to pass. Little too creepy for us with no lights to find our way in or out. Instead we decided to head around back and this is were things get interesting.

We find ourselves standing around a hole with a ladder leading down into a lower level of the bunker with that relentless “tink tink tink” coming from somewhere out in the shadows. Now On two sides of us are the steep drop off of the hill, on the other two sides are the walls of the bunker. We were boxed in on all sides with only a small path leading out and with the hole and ladder in ground at our feet. So we decide this is as good a place as any to light our joint and so I break it out. With my back to the drop off of the hill a few feet behind me and the hole directly at my feet I try. Well Im on top of a hill without much cover from the wind and having a difficult time getting the joint lit and Im growing frustrated. Not to mention that “tink tink tink” is starting to get annoying. Up until this point I assumed it was a metal sign hanging on the fence we climbed through, gently blowing in the wind, and so ignored it.

Frustrated with the joint and getting annoyed with the sound I turned around and stared in its direction. I asked my friends what they thought it was and tried again to light the joint, but this time I was facing the noise and did not try to conceal the flame. As soon as the lighter flashed the noise changed from a soft “tink tink tink” into a thunderous “boom boom boom.” “Oh shit, security guards!” is the first thing that pops into my head. That booming noise is them running down metal stairs in one of these dark towers. They saw my face when the lighter’s fire illuminated it and are now on the way.

All three of us crouch half way between flight and fight, unsure if we should run, hide or do nothing. We decide to wait. Its too dark for them to find us easily and they’re so loud that we’ll hear them the minute they get close. “Boom boom boom” the noise just wont stop and I swear its getting louder. “How long are those stairs” I think, “this is weird.” And I swear I hear movement in the grass in the darkness at the bottom of the hill. We all agreed it was probably just the wind in the grass but decide it was time to sneak our way back out of this place. Slowly crouching through the dark we move through the mining yard towards the our exit when we run into a problem. Whatever is making that noise is in-between us and the exit. We squat down the middle of an open gravel road to try to figure out our next move, safe in the thought it was just too dark for anybody to see us sitting there in the dirt. But just to be sure we picked a spot that placed a large chain link fence between us and that god awful “Boom boom boom” of the charging security guards. Now at this point I decided to upgrade the guards to Cops in my mind and was becoming a bit antsy, but we decided to wait them out. I guess at this point we all realized that none of this is making any sense and those guards or cops should have reached the bottom of those stairs by now. Thats when things got weirder.

With the “Boom boom boom” in front of us and nothing to do but wait if we want to use our only known exit we start to hear something else. In the dark all around us, but some where close and on the same gravel we are crouching on. Things start to move. There was a “thud” noise and then a slow scraping noise as something was dragged across the gravel. Then again from somewhere else, quiet but very close. These noises were all around us, thuds then a slow dragging across gravel, but we could not really pin point in what direction they were coming from. At this point I go from rational adult to scared kid and I think of all the people who died at this mine, or what could be living in those tunnels. In my mind the noise went from guards/police, shot past ghosts and now is smack dab in the middle of goblin and giant rat town.

Of course we have to get the hell out of there and decide that climbing the fence behind the mine, running into the woods and making our way to the highway is our only option. And so we pick our butts up out of the dirt and sneak as fast as we can the hell out of there. We’re making it, the noise are behind us and not getting any closer and we find rows and rows of empty coal train cars, perfect! We can walk freely between them with no chance of being spotted from a distance. With the end of the mine yard close by and with the protection of the train cars we relax a bit and talk in less hushed whispers. I guess that was a mistake.

A few seconds after entering the rows of train cars the first car explode in noise “BOOM.” Whatever was making that booming noise was right behind us only feet away. I have never in my life, nor will I ever, I’m sure, move so swiftly again. The hundreds of feet between me and the fence to the outside world flew by and I still do not understand how I got over the ten foot fence so easily, I just remember leaping off it into the dark. We make it to the road and head back to town. The road bends around the mine and we can still hear that relentless “boom, boom, boom” of something smashing that train.

My friends get too uncomfortable talking about it and seem happy to forget anything weird ever happened, but my curiosity is drives me nuts and I’ve gone back a few times over the years. Nothing out of the ordinary happened and the last time I went by myself and everything was torn down and taken away.

94. The balcony. I lived in some really unsettling places. One of the events that stuck with me the most is probably this.

I woke up one morning and as usual I walked to the mirror to brush the teeth and fix the hair. Now, I’m in a relatively small place with a balcony and sink in the same room without openable windows. I looked in the mirror and I see one of my plants moving, like there’s wind blowing against it. I turn around and walk over to the plant – that is next to the door – and check if the balcony door is closed. It was.

For some reason, while walking back to the mirror my eye fell on one of the pens lying on my desk. When I arrive at the mirror the first thing I notice are all these pen markings on my face. My heart stops and there’s goosebumps everywhere. I cleaned up and fled the room. When I came back the door to the balcony was open.

Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy being there for quite some while after.

95. The boarding school. I’m gonna preface this by saying I went to boarding school for 6 years. This boarding school was in the middle of a one stop light town and on a hill 800 ft up. The school used to be an old monastery. It was hundreds of years old and huge. 4 stories including a basement where there was a boiler room and long hallways.

Not all of these stories happened to myself, but the people who told me them were reliable enough to believe. Also, the school didn’t want us telling stories to other people because they were afraid that it would make them not want to go to the school due to it being haunted.

The first one happened to me. I used to be in charge of cleaning the gymnasium at night. Every student had a job that they had to do either at night or in the morning to help take care of the school. Taught you some practical things and all.

Anywho, I was there by myself that night getting ready to start sweeping the gym. The gym had 2 floors to it. The upstairs part was the weight lifting area, and you could see it fully from the bottom part of the gym where the basketball court was. As I stepped into the gym, one of the basketballs starts rolling a bit. I look around to see if any doors are open, none are. I chalk it up to randomness, but see that it is continuing to roll. As I watch it, it makes a full circle around the entire gym and stops right next to my feet.

At this point, I’m a bit scared, but figured it was nothing. I heard a creaking coming from the second floor and look up. There is a girl there, just staring right at me. As soon as I made direct eye contact with her, she bolts to the stairs that would take her too me. She let out a scream that I can not describe. I was terrified and froze in place. Thankfully, she didn’t come to me, but took a left and bolted through the main doors of the gym. They didn’t open, she just went right through them.

I noped the hell out of there.

There was a Chapel that was in the middle of the school really. This is a non religious school, so we used it for musical performances and all that sort of stuff. I was in choir for the years that I was there, so I was very used to performing in it.

There was stained glass on all of the windows and such. Every time you walked in there, it always felt as if someone was watching you. It wasn’t only me, but there were multiple people who felt that way.

There was a big grand piano that was on the opposite side of where you walked in that was our stage. People would go in there at night, and practice on it or just play for fun. Most people would just go in there and only turn on the stage lights and leave the rest off while they were practicing.

This story isn’t something that I witnessed, but a friend of mine.
She was playing on the piano by herself and just having fun practicing. While in the middle of a song, the keys next to her start going up and down as if trying to add another part to her song. She jokingly said, “Hey, stop. That doesn’t go with what I am doing.”

She immediately felt as if someone has boxed her ears and she became really dizzy. She freaked out and bolted out of there. She came crying down to the area where all of the students hung out on their free time. She told myself and a few friends the story and took quite a while to get her to calm down.

Many people have seen a girl in a white dress constantly roaming that area.

Another was that the high school of the school was on the highest floor of the building. One night one of the seniors was studying late trying to graduate.

He was working on something at about 3AM and one of the window blinds started flickering. You know that noise blinds make when winds goes through them quickly. He thinks nothing of it until it starts happening on the other side of the room.

This is a huge room, it fits over 200 students in it.

He goes over to the window to close it. He finds that it isn’t open. He laughs and thinks he must just be really tired. He goes back to continue studying and a blind on the other side of the room starts going, then another, and another until all of them are going. There are about 30+ windows on the top floor.

He said he just stood there dazed about the whole situation until all of them just stopped at the same time. He left his stuff out and ran to his dorm room. His roommate said he looked like he had seen a ghost.

Another job I had around the school was preparing the salad bar we had for lunch and dinner. To do this, I would have to get out everything we would need for the day from the basement in the giant freezer we had down there. I would then have to wash it and cut / peel everything. I was one of the first people up every morning to do this job. I would get up at about 6:00AM to do this everyday. I HATED having to go into the giant fucking freezer on my own when no one else was up and it was pitch black outside. It was one of the few things I never liked doing. The reason for this is this story.

I got up at about 6:00. As soon as I woke up, I was feeling uneasy. I quickly took my shower and got dressed so I could get to the lunchroom at about 6:30. The person in charge of the kitchen was already up and getting everything warmed up. I said hello and checked out what we would need. I made a list and headed down.

Now, that feeling of uneasiness was there the whole time. Through my whole shower, walking the dark hallways in the morning and even when I got to the kitchen. I opened the freezer and felt the cold blast of air. Needless to say, I could have cut diamonds with how cold it was.

I stepped inside and started getting vegetables. As I was reaching for one I heard a giggle. This wasn’t a normal one, but like a small child’s giggle. I instantly froze and whipped around. No one… I brushed it off and continued, another giggle.

I was like, no fucking way. This is not happening to me, flick, lights go off in the freezer. I still had a bit of light because I left the door open. I start seeing the door close, and it locks from the outside. I bolt for the door because I knew I would be locked in there for at least 15 min with the lights off if I didn’t.

I caught it RIGHT before it closed. Again, I hear the giggle, this time, it was right behind me. I screamed, I was 17 and screamed like a girl.

I ran upstairs, told the guy I wasn’t feeling well and went and hid in my room till everyone else got up that morning.

96. The baby monitor. Four years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night. We had a 2-month newborn sleeping in the room next door. I had a video monitor on my bedside table, so that my wife and I could easily check on him.

So, I clicked the button that turns on the video image, and what I saw scared me like nothing ever before.

My baby boy was gone.

Now, I know that instincts should have made me run right into the baby’s room. Instead, I froze. I looked over, and my wife was sleeping next to me.

Finally, I moved. But not to run into the other room, like I should have done. Instead, I turned up the volume on the baby monitor.

I heard another woman’s voice singing a lullaby. I’m not kidding. Another woman was singing to my baby in a very soft, gentle and melodic voice. I don’t remember what song it was, something like “Go to sleep, little baby”.
Finally, my freeze broke. I jumped up, ran through the hallway and burst into my boy’s room.

He was sound asleep in his crib. No woman. No singing.

Turns out, the monitor was picking up my next-door neighbors’ monitor. They had just bought the video monitor for their own newborn (on our recommendation).

Nothing supernatural here, but I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced something scarier.

97. The church. When I was in high school I was a horrible student. One time after my usual poor report card, my punishment was to help my dads janitorial company by cleaning the newest account he had picked up. It just so happened to be a church.

Due to the church keeping odd hours, I would usually start cleaning around 10 or 11pm. The first night, my dad helped me out by showing me what to do/helping me. We arrived a little early (8pm?) so he could meet with the pastor and get the keys. During the brief meeting with the pastor, I got the major creep vibe, but my dad seemed cool with it, so whatever…

Cut to an hour or so later, my dad and I are cleaning separate rooms. I feel somebody watching me so my head shoots around. To my relief if was my dad. I noticed he was pale while and he said “you weren’t just in the other room with me were you?” I said no and he told me that he had just seen me standing there watching him. He had asked what I needed and I didn’t respond. Then he said I put my hand on his shoulder just as he started to say “I get a weird feeling from these people” (referring to the people of the church). He told me that just as he finished saying that, the hand on his shoulder squeezed hard enough to bring him to his knees. He turned and nobody was there. So, that probably should have been enough to make us stop cleaning the church, but we had a job to do, so we did it.

I started cleaning the church weekly and nothing else happened. One week, since I had just turned 18, my buddy wanted to take me to the strip club, so he agreed to help me clean if it would speed things up. At one point he took the trash out to the back alley, and I suddenly hear him running back in screaming “WHAT? WHERE ARE YOU?” I run out to see whats going on and ask what he’s talking about. He said he stopped outside to smoke a cigarette and he heard a huge crash of broken glass and that I started screaming his name in a blood curdling scream. He had been standing about 30 feet from where I was, and I heard absolutely nothing. To this day, I don’t know if he was joking with me, but he swears he wasn’t.

Finally, I was there cleaning the community part of the church by myself one night. The layout was a set of double doors in the front which followed by an open area. If you walked straight through, you would go straight to the back door and to either side along the way, there were rooms (classrooms, kitchen, daycare etc…). The last two doors on the left, before you reached the backdoor were the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The front double doors were always locked with a chain and padlock wrapped around the outside door handles. When I took the chain off, I would always wrap it around the inside handles, but I wouldn’t lock it. It was mainly just to keep the wind from blowing the doors open.

So I am cleaning the closest bathroom to the backdoor when I hear the water start running in the other bathroom. I stop what I’m doing and go see whats going on. I get there and see the toilet filling up, like it had just been flushed. I watch for a moment, and see the water fill to the line and stop. Ok, faulty plumbing I assume. After the toilet stops, I still hear the water running, so I take a quick look for the culprit. I don’t see anything, so I head back to the original bathroom. I walk in and immediately the blood rushes from my face when I see all three of the bathroom sinks pouring full blast. Steam is rising from the sinks and I realize its the hot water. I gather my composure and turn all the sinks off. I turn to walk out and just as I get to the hallway, the front door starts bucking, as if somebody were trying to get in. The two doors are thrashing back and forth. Because they are only held closed by the chain wrapped around them, they are opening far enough for me to see that nobody is there. If there was somebody there, the would be the worst door opener ever.

I don’t know what to do, so I just stand in the bathroom doorway. I’m praying and chanting and doing whatever else I can think to do. Suddenly the door stops moving. And INSTANTLY the back door, which is about a foot to my left starts doing the same thing. This is a standard single door which is fully locked, but the knob is turning wildly and the door is bowing towards me, like somebody is pushing it in. There is a window to the left of the door and again, I can see that nobody is out there.

Finally, just as quickly as it started, everything stops. I immediately turn and get in my car and go… I didn’t even dust the pulpit, you guys. THAT’S how scary this was.

I get home and my dad is sitting at the kitchen table, awake, which is out of the ordinary. He takes one look at me, and says, we are canceling the church account. Nothing more needed to be said. To this day, whenever I ask him about it, he just says, he had a bad feeling about it.

98. The footprint. I’d like to begin saying that there have been many happenings in this house, but I’ll share the most frightening. Backstory: the area where my house is was once open prairie and we have found Native American artifacts laying around the area.

When my parents divorced when I was a young teenager my mother and I moved into this house. Now, at first it seemed great! There was plenty of space and it had a very cozy feel to it. However, as time went on strange things became to happen. The more I noticed them the more frequent they would become. I’d hear someone walking downstairs as I was brushing my teeth and would assume it was my mom, but whenever I’d check no one would be there. Footsteps began to be a very common sound in my house, especially at night. So, after some time I came to the realization that, oh shit, my house is haunted!

Now here is where things got really weird. One day my good friend and I had just gotten done from being out in the sun and decided to retreat to my moms house. Considering she had been away on a business trip we figured this would be awesome. My friend and I could go drink or do whatever mischievous actives we wanted to. We were wrong.

We walked inside and headed straight for the basement where it was cooler than the rest of the house. While walking down the stairs I noticed that The Beatles Yellow Submarine poster hanging at the bottom of the stairwell was tilted slightly to the left. No bother I figured, it must have gotten bumped by me or something. I fixed it and we walked into the main room. Mind you, we had pictures and posters hanging everywhere in the basement. What my friend and I saw instantly creeped us out. All 10-15 pictures on the walls were each tilted slightly to the left. Just as the Beatles one had been. But the weirdness of the situation didn’t stop there. The storage room (essentially a dirt floored room that is lifted about 4 feet off the ground) had its door cracked open. So I walk over and see a golden glow emanating out. There is a pull chord light located about 10 feet from the door that is turned on.

So, I hop up and into the storage room, crawl on my hands and knees to the light, and turn it off. Hoping that all of this had a natural explanation I call my mom up and ask her about it. She says she has no idea what I’m talking about and hasn’t been in the basement for weeks before she left on her trip. Shivers shoot down my spine. I look back into the storage room, and in the dirt there’s a footprint. The most distorted and mangled footprint imaginable. I’m frozen in fear. My friend is too. Without words we look at one another each feeling a sickening, gut wrenching feeling. I slammed the storage space door shut, locked it, and we bolted out of my house as fast as we could. Ill never forget how sickening and mangled that footprint looked, and thinking that I had crawled in there to turn off the light still gives me shivers to this day.

99. The boy and the old man. My house is definitely haunted. Actually, I don’t know if it’s a haunting, or if my son managed to bring in a poltergeist. They say emotionally disturbed children attract them, so that could be it too.

Anyway, my house was built in 1889. It’s inevitable that someone would have died here. There are two that we know of for sure. One was a child, and he died of an illness, it was listed as natural causes in 1944. The other was an older gentleman, he died of undetermined causes in 1979. Both in the house. The boy died in my bedroom, the older man died in the area that was once the enclosed front porch and is now my daughter’s room.

The little boy is mean, not evil, but mean. I have pictures of him, in silhouette, standing in my bedroom. I will dig them out and scan them if I can find them. The only thing he’s ever done that was potentially harmful was push a dresser down the stairs. The dresser was sitting at least a foot back from the top of the stairs, on solid ground, was not leaning at all. All of a sudden, when my roommate was about 3/4 of the way down the stairway, it comes flying down the stairs. He threw himself out of the way, and the dresser hit the bottom of the stairs so hard that it literally exploded. Creepy shit.

The old man doesn’t do much, just hangs around in our entryway. He covers my daughter up when she’s cold and she claims to have talked to him, but I have never actually seen him myself. When we moved in, there was a satchel full of dried red peppers hanging in the entryway. I took it down and threw it away, it was put back up. This went on for literally months before I asked him to please stop putting them back up, because they had a potpourri smell to them and it was making my roommate really sick. He let me throw them away for good after that. Not that creepy.

There’s a female here too, but I know nothing about her, and no death of a female was disclosed to us when we bought the house. The guys hear her more than I do. My husband has heard her come on to him when he was the only one in our bedroom, multiple times. I’ve only heard her once. Clear as day, in a room that should have only had my husband and I in it, a female said, “Who is this bitch? I thought you wanted to be my daddy.”

That freaked me right the fuck out. I blessed the house, with holy water, even though I am not religious. (In fact, I’m leaning towards a belief in no god, but I was fucking scared.) No one slept that night. We heard a woman crying, pounding on the side door, which we use as the front door, begging us to let her in. That door has a peephole, and it was winter, so we could have either seen anyone that was really out there, or seen tracks leading to the porch by looking out our window. There was neither. By dawn the screaming had faded out to crying and by 8 a.m. it was completely gone. My husband and roommate think that whatever it was is gone. I think it was a ruse and she is still here. Just a gut feeling.

100. The old asylum. When I was a student, the campus was located on what had only 20 years before been an old asylum for the insane. Like, batshit crazy people. They did lobotomies there and what not. Most of the buildings had been refurbished into “normal” school buildings with lecture halls, study group rooms et cetera. Seemed pretty normal, except the small study group rooms that only had one window, that was 1 square feet, 15 feet up on the wall, with bars in front of it. Yeah. Now, walking around the halls at night was creepy enough in it self, but one experience I will never forget.

I was the leader of a student/professor team that was in charge of evaluating lectures, professors, timetables et cetera, and we usually had our meetings after hours. This one time, we were sat in what used to be the old employee cafeteria (according to one of the old professors, who had been around for a long time). Now, I had seen the original blueprints from back when it was an asylum, so I knew what buildings had been the women’s cell wing, the men’s wing, administration (including morgue) et cetera. A little while into the meeting, suddenly all of us (8 people in total) turn at the same time, everybody hearing what seemed like a woman’s scream coming from an open window towards the old women’s wing. We all knew we were the only ones at the campus at the time (small part of a larger college), and we had all heard it – as evidenced by the fact that everyone turned their head.

Now that was fucking creepy.

101. The stranger thing. I was a graphic designer at an agency shortly after I left college. Every day was incredibly stressful; they never knew how to say ‘no’ to the client and always over promised and under delivered. Every project was an emergency. Finally my (then girlfriend, now wife) suggested that I try meditation. I am in no way a religious guy but I can admit strange and unexplained things happen outside the realm of what we understand is ‘normal’. So I did some minor research and started off with Kundalini meditation and borrowed an album, from a co worker, to guide me through it. The first time I did it, I was just a little dizzy, there are a lot of breathing methods implemented in most meditations but Kundalini asks you to do several different types.

The next time it was around three-a.m (this was also to help me sleep), my girlfriend was asleep and I was sitting on the floor in the bedroom by the bed. I could hear my breathing and my gf’s breathing and, distinctly, the breathing of someone else. My eyes snapped open and I turned around expecting Tina to be standing there. Nothing. I turned back around and was facing the door way that leads out into a short hallway. That was where I fist saw it: it was human-esque but standing awkwardly, like this is not how it normally stands; it looked like it was struggling to stay on two feet. I could not make out details, it was entirely black (not to be confused with an absence of light, but black as a color) and it was standing in a dark hallway. We have a wireless switch for our fan/light, I hit the light. Nothing was there.

The next day I tossed it off to it being late and a weird breathing exercise. It was just my brain playing games on my overactive and tired mind. I went to work and came home. Tina called and said that she was running late and that she would be home in a few hours, I said I would have dinner ready. The water was boiling with the pasta and the meat-sauce was on a low simmer and it had gotten dark. I had been playing a game when the timer went off and suddenly realized just how dark it had gotten. I went into the kitchen to strain the pasta. (This part happens in the blink of an eye) I had that feeling that someone was there, like having your eyes closed and someone holding their hand in front of your face. I freaked out and thought it was an intruder and turned quickly with a knife from the counter. With all of the survival skills I have… I still dropped the knife when I saw it. It was only there until it was in my direct field of vision; it was, again, in perfect lighting still a totally black spot – not really reflecting any light – still no details inside the silhouette. I stood for what felt like forever staring in the space that it had been (possibly still was) and darting my eyes around to the other dark places to make sure I was alone. I did not want to tell Tina about it, a few years before, she had nightly night-terrors and would wake up screaming this horrifying scream.

Weeks passed and my hesitation to walk into a dark room passed with them. Eventually I decided to leave my job and because of the backwards work-ethics, they were not going to pay for the two weeks of off-time I had not used, I took the two weeks as vacation and decided to give my two weeks notice when I got back. It was going to be a ‘stay-cation’, sleep as long as I can, play games the rest of the day. I would cook dinner and be all-a-round relaxed when Tina got home. About a week in, I woke up briefly as Tina was getting ready for work and fell back asleep. What I thought was minutes later, something felt off and I opened my eyes: out of the darkness of the hallway came a figure, like a rigid corpse being thrown at me, flying over me and landing on me. I sat up with a short scream. There were three deep impressions in the carpet in the hallway. Seeing them made (and thinking of them still makes) my skin crawl. They were larger than my feet and definitely larger than Tina’s. Totally could have been anything besides feet – the shape of them is the only thing I could relate to feet.

I was twenty-eight years old at the time of writing this and had been a working freelancer from home since I left the job in 2009. I have seen, what I like to call, ‘the stranger thing’ about ten times. The sightings have not always been at night or inside the house. I have not seen them since earlier in 2010 but I have also not practiced any mediation since those first few times.

102. The demon road. Outside of Huntsville, TX, there’s a road they call “Demon Road” that runs parallel to another road. In between is an old cemetery and a dirt road connecting the two roads. Rumor has it that on Demon Road a few years ago, there was a car accident and a police shootout that left two people dead. The car was never taken from the spot it crashed and the angry spirits never left.

About four years ago, I went down there with some friends to investigate. We parked on the dirt road and a truck pulled in from the other side, KC Daylighters on, blinding me. A woman got out, I thought I was going to die, technically we were trespassing. She walked to my window and said, “you be careful.” She got back in her truck and drove off.

I got out, rubbed some dirt on my car in an attempt to reveal fingerprints, and headed down Demon Road. About 1/4 mile down the road, I felt a cold punch on my chest and froze in my tracks. I tried to walk forward and again felt a press on my chest. I turned back to my car with a friend while everyone else continued to the car; I decided something was telling me it was a bad idea to continue. About 30 minutes later, the group came back and we started comparing pictures, audio, and *EMF readings. We caught some quality pictures and EMF readings, but no audio.

One of the girls asked the guy next to her, “why did you pull my hair?” He said he didn’t and about 10 seconds later, she screamed, “something jerked my ponytail” and we scrambled back to our cars and sped back to the city. When we got back to civilization, I got out and saw handprints and finger drawings all over my car. The most compelling were the two smeared handprints on my trunk, like someone was hanging on, lost grip, and slid down the trunk. The Roman Numeral XII was also fingered into the dust.

I don’t try to make sense of what happened that night, but that will always be burned into my mind as the absolute scariest encounter of my life.

103. The octagon pendant. My friend Aaron is a completely normal guy, and I’ve worked with him in the engineering realm for a bit.He’s definitely a smart guy, and doesn’t have a screw loose, so to hear this story was crazy. It’s still left me thinking about things like the supernatural until today.

He moved into this house in Portland Oregon, and it was always a little off. When he first moved in he heard some creaks and stuff, but it was mostly just old house noises. Then sometimes he could swear he heard footsteps, or doors creaking open or closed. The most peculiar thing about the house was that even with all the shades drawn up and letting the sun in, the house was always dark it seemed.

As some of the noises increased in frequency, so did some strange things. He asked his roommates about the noises and they all had agreed that they had heard peculiar things around the house too. In particularly the basement.

The basement had some stairs leading down and from what he described there were two rooms. The main room with the stairs in it, then another room attached that had an extra door in it on the opposite corner of the first door. He was a drummer and had his drums set up in the main basement room to practice drums.

The first of the strange things to happen would be in his bedroom. He saw smoke like stuff coming from under the door and it started moving up towards the upper corner by his door. He thought the house was on fire as the smoke like stuff began to cluster in the corner so he opened the door and was gonna bail, but when he opened it and looked into the hallway, the hallway was totally fine. No smoke, no fire, then he looked back into the corner and all the clustered smoke had vanished.

After that, some time later, he was in the bathroom taking a piss, and he heard the door open. Without looking behind him he says “hey hang on a minute I’m almost done” But the door didn’t shut so he finished up and turned around to one of the most frightening things he’d ever seen. Clearly in front of him was an apparition of a young girl in a plaid dress, and he looked up and up and when he got to her face starting from her feet, there was nothing there and he could clearly see through her. Just a blank face. He was so scared he said he didn’t even remember putting his pecker back in his pants, he just shut his eyes and ran to the door (that he thought was open) through the ghost but then he ran straight into it, because apparently it was closed! Frantically he opened the door without really opening his eyes and scrambled to his bed and he said he dove in like a little kid and held the sheets over his head until he went to sleep, terrified.

The craziest thing of all that happened is what’s next. In the basement where he practiced drums, he could swear that in the doorway to that extra room, he would see someone walk by the door. From one side to the other. It would happen rarely but one time he decided to go into the room. (I’m seriously getting shivers in my spine writing this.)

That extra door was on the opposite corner, and he thought it was peculiar that there was door there, and that it should lead to the outside, but he knew it didn’t because there was no other way into the basement. He walked over to the extra door and opened it and he said that it gave him the most sinking feeling in his stomach looking into what was behind the door. There was a stairway that had been cemented off, but in one of the most creepy ways possible. He didn’t get into details but he basically said “I shut the door and never opened it again because of the terrible feeling I had when I opened it”

Now being a drummer, he had met all kinds of people in his travels because he had toured the nation. One time he was talking to a man he had met about his house and these strange happenings, and the man looked at him as serious as a heart attack and said “I can help you with this house and these happenings.”

My friend was skeptical because he doesn’t really believe in these kinds of things but he accepted the offer saying “well why not, the worst that could happen is nothing.”

The man met him at his house and brought with him a most peculiar bell. My friend described it as having the most piercing sound he’d ever heard and the man entered the house ringing it, and was mumbling something under his breath as he moved through the house. Eventually he asked my friend where the most activity happens, and my friend told him the basement.

The man goes into the basement and instantly went into the extra room. He asked my friend, “This door, does this door have something.”

My friend was amazed at this man for pointing out, because my friend had said nothing about anything specific in the basement. My friend told him yes, and how he had opened it only once because it was terrifying.

The man then proceeded to open the door and instantly fell to his knees shrieking and ringing the bell furiously. My friend was totally freaked out and didn’t know what to do and before he knew it the man jumped up and ran up the stairs screaming and out the front door. My friend quickly followed him and met him on the sidewalk.

My friend said “What was that all about” and the man looked to him and said “Whatever was in your house, I just chased it out.” My friend was bewildered, then the man handed him an octagon shaped pendant and told him to put it above his door, explaining that it will protect him as long as it’s on the door.

My friend said thank you as politely as he could because he was still skeptical and trying to figure out exactly what all had happened but he put the pendant above his door.

No joke, from that day on, all the strange noises, footsteps, doors creaking, stopped. The darkness that always seemed to loom inside the house even with the windows open, vanished.

Finishing this story I have such crazy goosebumps…. I hope you liked it. I promise you it’s not BS.

I FINALLY Got in touch with Aaron (whose story this is) and this is his reply:

As the Aaron in the story, I can tell you it is 100% true. The woman wore a plaid dress, big white squares with thick, brown, cross-hatches around the white squares. She had no shoes on and I could see the faintest outline of the open door behind her. I assumed it was my roomate Daphna. When I looked up at her face, nestled between her shoulder length blonde hair, her face was nothing more than smoke. It was like someone was smoking a cigarette, but no cigarette, no face… only smoke moving in the faintest breeze.

When I ran through her, it was if I had jumped into a frozen pond. i can still feel that cold to this day.

As for the octagon that my friend placed above the door, it was a yellow octagon made from a piece of wood. On it, there were three, black, horizontal lines on the side closest to the top. It also had an octagon shaped mirror in the center of it.

Months afterwards, while still living in the house, I had a dream that felt so real… unlike any other dream I’ve had before. I was asleep in bed and a man in a suit woke me. It was a black suit and he was wearing a fashionable hat like men would wear in the 40’s. I awoke (in the dream) to the man shaking me. I gasped, startled by the foreign figure in my bedroom and looked at the man with no face. He leaned in close enough to feel his cold breath. As he leaned in, he whispered to me, “it’s all been reset.” As he said it, it was if those words caused him to drift away in white smoke. everything. his clothes, his hat, his entire body.

I awoke in a panic. I’m not sure what it meant, but after that moment, when I could feel his cold breath on me… my life became instantly better. It was some strange turning point in my life.

I’m not sure if the octagon is still on that door, but for the sake of those that may live there, I hope to god that it is.

When we first moved into the house, it had thick metal gating over every window and door. Not like regular metal bars, this was the kind that you could barely squeeze a finger through. We took them all down, but even still, the house always remained dark. It didn’t make any sense since one entire side of the house faced the morning sun and had no obstructions.

The house was incredibly old, a 3 story house with a full basement. Six bedrooms in all and everything was the original wood that came with the house. Dark, polished, but covered under years of dust. The date on the furnace was 1893 it was a huge furnace which seemed like it was converted from coal to oil. My thought was that the cemented off steps was a way of getting coal down to the basement.

There were things in that house that were unexplained. So strange. One night, well before i met my wife, I was dating this woman named Elizabeth. One night in the gigantic living room, we were hanging out enjoying a fire in the woodstove that was seriously the size of a stove. We were just sitting in the room, which you could close off the french doors and heat up the entire front section of the house. As my wife would probably not want to hear, she looked me in the eyes and told me that she loved me. At the exact moment, the moment she uttered to words to me, someone pressed the G7# sharp key on the piano sitting in the living room. If you have any doubt as to how creepy that note is… press it on your piano. In that cavernous room, with that key being pressed, both of us started screaming.

We shut the door to the stove and ran upstairs to the bedroom, trying to stay as far away from the piano which was leaning up against the stairs. To this day, that note creeps me the fuck out.

Imagine an old basement, rough foundation setting on crumbly cement made up of pebbles. When you touched the walls in the basement, it just crumbled in your hands. The door itself was made of 4 or 5 planks of incredibly old wood. Seiously it looked like that door on the blair witch project, right before the last guy dies in the film. Imagine the wood ill fitting, splintery, and upwards of 1 inch gaps between the planks. The handle of the door was hewn from an old piece of wood, again splintery to the touch. When you dragged the door back towards you, it’s rusty hinges screeched back to life. Since it was such an old door, it dragged across the basement floor as you opened it.

I only looked into that room/stairwell for a few seconds before I slammed it shut. Here’s what I remember. It was dark, and incredibly dirty. As if that door hadn’t been opened in 50 years. The stairs went from ground level straight into the ceiling. There was a handrail which looked like it had been cemented into the ceiling as well. Inside there were a few objects, a lamp, boxes and paint cams. Those looked like they had been there for just as long. It was basically like someone poured a huge cement slab over the top of the stairway. The stairs just went up… into nothing.

I used to practice drums in the adjoining room. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d always see someone walk by the doorway. I’d stop playing drums, get up and walk just close enough to see the door from where I was standing. no one. creeped out I’d go upstairs.

The thing is, that whole basement was creepy. It was the creepiest basement WITHOUT the ghosts. You know those basements that your grandmother might have had? the turn of the century Farmhouse basements that looked they’ve at least flooded a few times in their lives? It was like that.

104. Housekeeping. I worked housekeeping in a chain hotel.

There was one room at the end of the hall where things would happen while you were working on it, and the same two things every time: sometimes the faucet would start running. Not full blast or anything, but turned on enough to be running steadily. A half turn of the knob I’d say. I’d be in the other room and suddenly hear water gurgling down the drain. Sometimes I’d be working on the tub and hear it on behind me. Whoever/whatever would also turn on the tv. I’ll never forget being warned on my first day that things would happen in the room, and then while making a bed and rustling the sheets noisily–suddenly aware I was hearing muffled voices and seeing the tv was on. I’m getting chills thinking back on those moments. Whatever part of the room your back was to, it felt like someone was there. I got the feeling they didn’t want to be in the way, but they wanted to be there with you.

One thing we all felt throughout the staff: none of us felt threatened….none of us felt like it was a bad person or someone who was trying to frighten us. We all felt overwhelmingly like it was someone trying to reach out. And had limited ways. And was lonely. Sometimes I’d say hello, sometimes I’d say sorry, because I felt like if they were frustrated trying to tell me something, I’d want them to know I felt for them.

I realize I sound crazy but it happened super regularly and was witnessed by a lot of people. I thought about whoever it could be, a lot. The hotel has since been bought by a college and was turned into dorms. I hope having people staying in the room more steadily will be a good thing for whoever that spirit was. Maybe they felt less lonely with students actually living there than a revolving door of hotel guests.

105. Staying in Downtown Chicago. Not me but a friend who is a pilot. She stayed at an older hotel downtown Chicago and was studying for her recurrent class which was in a few weeks. While at the desk, deep in thought, she heard people talking and laughing. When she looked up, it got quiet. She said it sounded like it was in the room with her and went back to studying. The noise started off softly and then again sounded like a party was going on in her room. She got up and looked around and there was silence. There were no sounds coming from any rooms, no televisions on, no radios, no people in the hallway – the noise was definitely in her room. That night around 2 am, she was in bed and felt someone brush strands of hair from her forehead and tuck it behind her ear. She jumped up and turned on the light and there was no one there. She didn’t get back to sleep and bid around that overnight so she wouldn’t be in that hotel again.

106. Attacked by men in armor. A friend’s grandfather either worked in or owned a hotel at some point. The building was hundreds of years old, dated back to the English Civil War. The story goes that he was cleaning up in the dining room and he saw three men in armour charging at him with weapons, being “ghosts” they just ran through him, but apparently, he was left feeling physically ill afterward having come into contact with the apparition.

Friend’s grandfather called a medium to come check the place out and she freaked out at the nature of the supposed presence in the hotel. If I remember correctly, they found through later research that there had been some murder committed by three soldiers in the building during the civil war.

107. Waiting tables at a haunted hotel. I was a server at a restaurant that used to be a hotel. It was said to be haunted by all kinds of things. My second day of training (and before I learned about the rumors), I saw a little girl about 3 or 4 years old pop her head out of a cupboard below the bar and look around. I turned my head toward her to tell her to get out of there, but- here comes the cliché- she was gone!

Once, I walked into the kitchen and two of my friends were standing in front of a pile of shattered glass, jaws dropped and faces pale. Dropping a glass in a restaurant happens daily; no one reacts like that. I asked what was wrong and they sort of babbled together that the glass threw itself off of the counter, and they watched it happen. I ain’t seen that shit, so idk personally. But I trust those two and they’re great friends, so I believe them.

108. Ghost harlot. When my family was staying in the Silver Queen Hotel in Virginia City, there were a lot of stories told about this ghost harlot who couldn’t find true love in her life, so she kept searching after death. I was sharing a room with my older brother, who’s always the first to sleep and last to wake up, so I know he wasn’t able to be tricking me. Nobody else had a room key, so I know it wasn’t any of my other siblings doing anything. The room we were staying in had one bed, so he slept on a travel cot. He didn’t have a blanket since the bed only had one, but it was warm so he didn’t mind. He woke up not too long after I did one morning and started freaking out. His jacket was over him like a blanket and he was fully tucked in, and it looked like whoever did it did it with care. To this day we joke around about his ghost girlfriend.

109. Lizzie Borden B&B. I stayed at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in April 2016. After our grand tour of the place, all of the guests were encouraged to explore the house and take pictures and whatnot. Well, my friend and I decided to hang out in the parlor (aka where Lizzie Borden’s father was axed to death) and ask our tour guide more questions. As we were hanging out on the floor in a circle, the door to the dining room starts violently shaking. One of the other guests whispers, “I wonder if Mr. Borden is pissed we’re lounging around his death site?” and the door immediately stops shaking. Now, I don’t really know if I believe in ghosts but I do know that I def took a Xanax that night to knock me the fuck out.

110. Wallowa Lake Lodge. I worked at the Wallowa Lake Lodge in the early 90’s. I was front desk clerk for graveyard shift so work consisted of me mostly just doing lots of laundry. (I can now fold a fitted sheet perfectly like when you first buy it)

I was told “if you hear a customer walking around, make sure they have what they need .. tea, snacks, a fire”

I’d hear footsteps from the basement stomping around upstairs in the front room, go upstairs, and no one was there. This happened dozens of times. Eventually, I just decided if I kept going upstairs every time I heard footsteps I’d never get any work done. So I’d just ignore it.

Well, so one night I heard the front door ringer go off. Less common but still common and probably just the “friends”. Then footsteps. Same ol same ol no big deal.

But then the footsteps turned the corner. They approached the door to the basement. The creaky cellar door slowly opened.

My butthole clenched. I approached the stairwell slowly. Peered around the corner. I saw a face.

I said “AAAAHHHHHH!!” and the guest who arrived late said “AAAAAAHHHHH!!” so I said “AAAAAAHHHHH!!” again. Then as she’s panting I collected myself and said “I’m sorry, ma’am. Are you checking in? Do you have a reservation?”

Oops.

Another time while walking out of the kitchen I saw a little girl in a powder blue dress at the edge of the dining room. I said “hi sweety do you need something?”

She ran up the stairs to the rooms. I don’t know why but I took off after her.

The guest doors were all loud. I got upstairs. No girl. No door closing noise. Every door closed.

111. A loud knocking. I work in a haunted hotel. Have plenty of co-workers share stories of stuff they’ve seen but I’ve personally only had one incident.

I was working late, just past midnight, when I had to go to the bathroom. This bathroom I’m using is in a public area, and is fairly large. Standard men’s bathroom in that it has both stand up and sit down stalls. So I go in and I’m the only one present. It’s quiet, and I walk to the stand-up stalls and start to go. As I’m going, I hear a knocking sound (very fast paced like someone rapping with their knuckles) coming from behind me and over my shoulder. I look and I see the door for the handicap sit down stall is vibrating, which is what is making the knocking sound. It’s moving like if someone had locked it from the inside and was bouncing it off the lock and the outer doorstop. I’m still pissing, mind you, and I get overcome with chills. But I finish up and it still is making that noise. I think that it could possibly be a co-worker playing a prank, so I laugh and say “very funny” and it immediately stops. So I walk over expecting the door to be locked with a coworker inside, so I knock. And the door swings wide open with no one inside. I get overcome with chills again and just ran out. There was no way the door could’ve made that noise without being locked. Anyways, I still use that particular bathroom, but never late at night. Freaked me out good and proper.

112. Ghosts in North Carolina. Didn’t work or stay at a haunted hotel, but my uncle did unintentionally. He said that he kept seeing an old woman laying in the bed behind him when he’d look in the mirror. She’d disappear when he’d turn around.

113. Ghosts in a new building. I worked briefly at a hotel that everyone claimed was haunted. It was surprising because it was a brand new building, but sure as shit, nobody wanted to work alone in there at night because all sorts of weird happenings went on such as paperwork going missing. Rooms being locked by deadbolt from the inside with no guest in there, guests complaining of loud footsteps above them for hours and when we went to check the room above was unoccupied.

114. Bathing spirits. I stayed in one haunted hotel with my friends and woke up in the middle of the night to hearing something running up and down the hallway, I looked and of course, nothing was there so I went back to sleep. I woke up not long after that and heard the tub in the bathroom running but nobody was in there.

115. Ghost guest. Lately our ghost has been pretty quiet or our living customers have been so turned up that even the Ghost Guest doesn’t wanna mess with them. Oh but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still have her fun here and there.

We have these ladies that work for some kind of schooling/public works program and they do a lot of training in our area. So some of them stay with us every other month and most of them have their favorite rooms and some rooms they don’t like. One of these ladies showed up as part of their group tonight and she asked to be on the Ghost’s floor. So I start selecting a room and she stops me and says, “But I don’t want to stay in that back hallway. No way, never again.”

Me: Ma’am I’m sorry was there something wrong with your room last time?

TeacherLady: No but she don’t like me at all. You know who I mean.

Me: Wait… what room were you in?

TeacherLady gives me a room number that is not exactly the Ghost Room. It’s the connector to the Ghost Room though, like if you wanted to rent that room and the Ghost room you can swing a door open between the two and sort of have a suite. I definitely raised my eyebrows because I have this theory that the person responsible for our Ghost Guest becoming a forever resident entered the Ghost Room through those connecting doors. TeacherLady then says “I know it’s not the room but SHE was in there and never again.”

Me: Actually I do know what you’re talking about. She’s generally harmless, a little annoying but harmless usually.

TeacherLady: Last time she jumps on my chest and tries to strangle me. I’ll never stay back there again.

TeacherLady does not look like she is joking so I gave her a room closer to the front and her friend that she traveled with was supposed to have a room of her own but after listening to all of this decides she wants to share the 2Q room that TeacherLady was staying in, so I cancel her reservation and those two go off to their Ghost Free room.

Later the TeacherLady comes back down and says “You must think I’m crazy. But that girl she can not rest. She’s angry. She’s getting angrier. This is what I felt in that room. You must think I’m crazy.”

Me: Actually ma’am I believe you. You’re not the first woman in those rooms to ask to be moved or to complain about something feeling off about the room. I don’t think you’re crazy, I don’t really like going up there either.”

TeacherLady: Someone needs to find who killed that poor girl.

And then the TeacherLady makes the sign of the cross and takes a cookie and goes back up to her room.

Man mother eff the top floor.

116. A dream among siblings. When my son was about six months old I had a dream that I was at my grandparent’s house with him. My grandfather was holding my son and crying while I talked to my grandmother… I told her that I wished her and my grandfather were still alive to see my son and she said “Don’t worry, we see him.”

I didn’t think anything else of it until about five years later I was talking to my sister and I mentioned that I’d had a dream about our grandparents. She said “Was Papa Joe (what we called our grandfather) holding your son while he rocked in his chair, and did Grandma tell you they were watching you?” I said yes and asked how she knew and she said “I had the same dream when my son was six months old.”

And more recently… my son (he was 20 at the time) was driving home from work late one night. As he drove he said he very clearly heard my mother (who had been dead for two years) say “Johnathan, stop the car.” Out of reflex he did, and as soon as he stopped three dear ran out in front of him. Had he not stopped the car he’d have hit them.

117. My grandmother had gotten my mother a phone for her room when she was a girl. The lady across the street had died a few days before. Supposedly the phone rang and when my mom picked up, she heard ‘Cher (Cajun for child), let me speak to your momma.’ She immediately hung up the phone and told me that there was no mistaking whose voice it was. It was the lady who just died.

118. I was driving home late at night (2-3AM), there was this old rusty truck exactly the type you were to see in scary movies. Anyway I went to overtake him and when I look to the right and the guy has no head, I could’ve seen wrong but I swear he didn’t have a head.

119. All my life I’ve seen people on the side of the road when I drive at night. I always thought they were ghosts of people who died in car accidents. The scariest part is that it turns out I have schizophrenia.

120. I smelled my dad’s cologne and felt a safe, warm…presence standing at the foot of my bed. I was perhaps 4 years old, no older. My dad died when I was 2.

121. When I was about 14 I was sleeping over at a friend’s house in the finished basement. I was lying on the couch, not asleep yet, when I heard footsteps in the room with me. There was enough light to see there was no one there, and I knew it wasn’t his parents because I would have heard them come down the creaky stairs.

It freaked me out a bit, but not as much as when I told my friend about it the next day and he informed me that the previous owners of the house had died by murder/suicide. In the basement.

122. My great-grandmother watched my great-grandfather die. They were truly in love forever. After he died, she woke up every morning and said ‘damn it!’ because she was ready to pass away. My great aunts would hear her talking on a baby monitor they set up talking to members of the family who had already passed. Finally one afternoon, they heard her go ‘John, finally! Why are you always late?’ They were frozen as John was my great-grandfather’s name. They walked in 10 minutes later and she passed away. She was just waiting for her husband to come get her.

123. So I spent six months living in my family’s cottage in the far north of Michigan. That place always felt weird, but I chalked it up to my nerves and the odd noises of the woods, as I was born and raised in cities and had never been so isolated before.

Then, the night before I moved out into an apartment with a friend, as I was falling asleep I experienced a powerful hypnagogic jerk (that thing where you feel like you’re falling and sit up really hard) and as I did so I heard a tiny voice in my ear say—‘Goodbye.’

124. My parents have both passed away. Their wishes were to be cremated, the ashes put in a nice box and be set on our wine rack. This wine rack has three shelves, and I was instructed to keep one shelf between the boxes. Well, my dad passed in 2011 and my mother in 2015.

It took me a few weeks to find a box for my mom. In that time I kept her ashes in the same room but a few feet away from the wine rack. Apparently someone wasn’t happy about this. Outside we had a doorbell. Every single night at 3AM it would begin ringing and wake me up. I took the button portion inside so nobody could push it. Still would ring at 3AM. Took the batteries out, still rang at the same time. Broke the whole thing apart, still rang. Our phone began to call itself and displayed my mom’s name on the caller ID. Even though the bill was in my name. My dad’s guitars hung on the wall next to this wine rack. The strings started breaking, one every few days.

All of this stopped as soon as I got my mom a box and put her in the correct spot. None of it has happened since. I have zero intention of moving these boxes and if I ever move to a new house they will be transported together, with something acting as a divider between the two of them.

125. As a kid, I grew up in a wildlife refuge in Long Island (Wertheim).

Way back (around the Revolution), The Hawkins family had established the area (Town of Brookhaven) and owned a ton of property. The Barteau Family (also spelled Bartow or Barto) was the other major landowner at the time. Between the two, they owned most of the county.

There’s a Barteau family graveyard across the street to the north of the preserve, and a Hawkins family graveyard a few miles further north.

While exploring the preserve, we found an additional Barteau family graveyard.

Most recent stone was from the mid 1800’s, and it looks like no one has been there in decades. Fence was knocked down, trees down all over the place, no path, no markings, nothing.

While looking around and reading the stones, we noticed something strange. It was silent. This is a wildlife refuge. There’s animals everywhere. Birds are chirping, deer are running, squirrels are scurrying.

Not here. Dead silent. No wind. No traffic. No birds. No animals. Not even a mosquito. It was so quiet you could hear the blood pumping through your head.

It’s also clear. There’s no trees inside the fence. There’s no plants. It’s covered in leaves, it’s clearly untouched, but there’s nothing growing. Everything around it looks like it’s dying too.

Suddenly, a loud crack, and an earth-shaking thump as a tree on the outskirts fell within a few feet of us.

That put the creepy level over the top, and we made a run for it.

Between the library, town records, refuge records, word of mouth, and the internet, we can’t find any mention of this graveyard anywhere. The others are all photographed with full logs of every stone, but this one doesn’t even get a footnote.

126. This is one my grandma used to tell about one of her aunts.

They lived in Laos during the Secret War. Her aunt started talking with one of the American soldiers and he started learning basic Hmong. After some time, though, he stopped showing up. The basic consensus was that he was dead, but she kept waiting for him.

When things got really bad and the bombs started dropping, they fled to the caves for shelter. One night, as everyone is sleeping, she hears a familiar voice. It’s the soldier. He’s mumbling in a very broken Hmong, ‘I’m back for you’ over and over again.

Her eyes are still closed until she feels something reach out and grab her shoulder and slowly move down to her hand. When it reached her hand, she said it wasn’t a human hand at all…but like a large animal paw. She briefly opened her eyes to see a dark figure, clearly not human though, standing over her.

Then, she heard her aunt get up. Something was said but she couldn’t make what it was. The figure then left and the aunt followed. This was still in the middle of the night, mind you.

The aunt was never seen again. The story is that the dead soldier came back to take her with him. Or something else imitated him in order to take her.

127. I used to work as a cook in a tea room that used to be a brothel back in the 1800s. We had the dining area and a little gift shop that sold different kinds of pottery, silverware, etc. I would often be the last to leave and lock up and would hear random sounds like footsteps or something falling on the floor quite regularly but never was fazed by it. One night I was called in late to start prepping stuff for the Sunday brunch so probably at around 10-11pm I hear footsteps upstairs and hear the lights coming on. I knew I was the only one there at the time, so I decided to investigate. Walk up the stairs, look around; everything seems normal so I turn out the light and start heading back downstairs when I see the lights come back on. I’m starting to get a bit freaked out so I yell out ‘hello?’ With no response. I walk back upstairs to turn the lights off and as soon as I reached for the switch I see this large vase just sorta lift up and move to the right, then drop to the floor. Holy shit, was I freaked. Called my boss and she casually brushes it off like meh that’s regular here.

128. I was helping my younger brother move into an apartment with his buddies and had to bring my two very young daughters with me. My youngest at the time was about three and fearless. She went to different rooms with my brother, exploring and having a jolly old time.

Until she got to the kitchen. Upon entering, my daughter froze; her eyes were huge and fearful and within ten seconds she was screaming bloody murder and running for me as fast as she could, mumbling about ‘da yaydee’ (the lady) in the kitchen.

Brother and I tried laughing it off, redirecting her and taking her mind off it, but my normally calm kid was hysterical and we had to leave.

She told me in bed that night the lady had red eyes and was scary….if you knew my daughter you’d understand how unlike her all this was. She was 100% convinced that she saw a lady just standing in the kitchen, and still to this day (7 years later!) she swears she did.

I don’t believe in ghosts or what have you, but her reaction made us question that.

129. A girl I knew for a few years and was very good friends with passed away in a car accident. A few days later I have a dream that she’s standing in the center of the road and I’m barreling toward her. I run into her, but then she appears in the seat beside me. She forces my head toward her abdomen. Where her stomach would be there’s a large mouth. The teeth are made of broken glass and sharp metal. She keeps saying ‘sssshhhhh shhhhh.’

I wake up from the dream and I’m still hearing ‘sssshhhhh.’ I look at the foot of my bed and she’s standing in my room. She walks through my door and into the hallway. I follow her. She walks down the hallway and vanishes through the front door of the house.

I didn’t realize at the time, but my dad was on the couch. He asked me if I was okay and asked if the flickering lights are what woke me up. He didn’t see her and I never noticed the lights flickering.

130. I went on a Tinder date a couple of years ago. Everything started out relatively normal. We met at a nice downtown restaurant for dinner. She was even prettier in person and the conversation was flowing. However, it didn’t take long for me to realize she was a super private person. For example, she would not tell me her last name, where she worked, or say anything about her family. She made it clear that she was protecting herself, and honestly I don’t blame her. I shrugged it off and the date continued.

She took great interest in the fact that I was in seminary studying to be a pastor. That was nice because usually that’s a deal-breaker for most women, at least in my experience. Toward the end of our meal, she confessed something to me. ‘I have something to tell you,’ she said, ‘but please don’t think I’m crazy.’ I braced myself for whatever she was about to say.

She explained that she recently moved into a new apartment. She lived alone, which was also a new thing. Though she couldn’t put her finger on it, she was convinced there was a presence of a sinister and paranormal nature in her apartment. She had hardly slept since she moved in because she was plagued with constant nightmares and strange occurrences. I could see the fear and exhaustion in her eyes. She seemed quite sincere.

‘I can tell you’re a good guy,’ she said. She elaborated that I seemed trustworthy and had a calming presence. ‘I know how this sounds, but would you PLEASE come home with me tonight? Honestly, I’m just scared to go back there alone. I am NOT looking for sex.’ I was really taken aback by this. It’s not every day I get asked to spend the night with a beautiful woman whom I just met. I figured she was either telling the truth or she picked a really odd way to initiate sex. Either way, the night would be interesting.

We talked for a bit longer and I agreed to spend the night with her. I followed her home, and when I walked into her apartment I was immediately struck with bad vibes. There was just something ominous about that place. I didn’t want to freak her out, so I kept these feelings to myself. I said a quick prayer and followed her to the bedroom.

She wasn’t kidding about the sex. I tried my luck but was met with swift rejection. We kissed and cuddled for a bit, nothing too crazy, and then she fell asleep. I just laid there for a while in the silent darkness, lost in thought. Some time later, I 100% heard someone walking down the hallway outside the bedroom. The door was closed, however, so I couldn’t see anything. I was definitely frightened, but my curiosity got the better of me, so I went to investigate.

Slowly I opened the door. I looked to my left, then to my right. Nothing. I walked downstairs to check out out the rest of the apartment. Nothing. I went back upstairs to check the bathroom and the guest bedroom. Nothing. When I walked out of the guest room, which was right across from my date’s bedroom, I looked to my left and right again. At the end of the hallway, I saw a black, humanoid body standing there perfectly still. It was almost like a shadow, but I could discern that it was a three-dimensional figure. This figure was large in stature; there’s no way it could’ve been my date. She was maybe 5’1” at best.

I hauled ass back into my date’s room. To my horror, she wasn’t in bed where I left her. I called out her name, but there was no response. I had just walked through the entire apartment, so it literally made no sense to me that she wasn’t there. The bed was low to the ground, so she couldn’t be under it. The closet was opened, too, and it was packed with boxes so I knew she wasn’t there, either. The window was shut tight, plus it was the second story. It was as if she vanished. I grabbed my wallet, keys, and cell phone and ran out of the apartment in nothing but my underwear. The shadowy figure was gone. I jumped in my car and sped away.

I never heard from her again. Her Tinder profile was deleted the next day, and she never responded to any of my texts. Till this day, I have no idea WTF happened that night. I checked the news and stuff like that, but never found anything. Easily one of the most terrifying, unexplainable things I’ve ever experienced.

131. I had a shadowy figure go across my wall once as a child. The only place it could have come from was the hallway outside my door but everyone was asleep and nobody walked by. We lived in an old funeral home that was turned into an apartment.

132. So I grew up in Northern Virginia, and we had plenty of battlefields and such to visit for school field trips. In fifth grade, my class went to the Belle Grove plantation, which was at Cedar Creek Battlefield. Cool house, still has damage to her columns from gunfire from the battle.

Anyhoo, my class was in the kitchen of the plantation, listening to the tour lady talk about whatever it is you’d tell a bunch of ten-year-olds about plantation life. There are these big double doors on each side of the room, and they are open. And then we hear humming coming from outside.

The teacher’s aide, who I’ll call Bulldog ’cause she looked like one, told us that whoever was humming to knock it off. But that’s the thing; it wasn’t any of us, and it was coming from outside. Bulldog goes out one side of the kitchen, comes back in, and goes out the side that leads to the garden. She comes back in, says to the tour lady no one at all is out there, but she could hear the humming right there in the garden.

Doesn’t sound like much, right? Well fast forward a few years, and I’m reading a Ghosts of Virginia book. There’s a story about Belle Grove in it.

Apparently the Lady of the house was found in the smokehouse one day, badly beaten, half in the embers, with clear fist imprints on her face. She dies just a few days later. A slave girl was accused of the beating and murder and was hanged for it.

And the lady of the house liked to walk in the garden and was always humming. And various people over the years was witness, I guess you could say, to the ethereal humming that would take place in the garden.

That just thoroughly freaked me out when I realized I got to witness it, too.

133. There is a place called Meadowbrook Manor in Rochester Hills, MI (my home town). It’s on the campus of Oakland University, it was owned by the Dodge family and quite a few people have died there including the young. My buddy worked there for years and my wife hosts events there; I even proposed to her on the property. The house is both beautiful with stuff like secret staircases through book shelves but it’s also very creepy. There are a few ‘known ghosts’ including ‘caramel apple girl.’ The story is she is a young, quiet ghost that lives in the house and holds a caramel apple with peanuts. Numerous people have claimed to see her including my best friend who is a no-bullshit guy who would never tell anyone. He was cleaning up at the end of an event there and he saw a girl on the staircase eating a caramel apple. He asked her ‘are you okay?’ and she said she was lost. My buddy said ‘hold on, we’ll find your parents so come on down.’ He turned to grab a phone for a moment and turned around and she wasn’t there. He checked the stairs and the peanuts were there. He and a few others roamed the house looking for the girl. He called me and I drove over real quick because I thought this was awesome. After another 30 minutes of searching we finally called the police and the employees locked the place up. When we were on the side of the house chattin’ with the university’s police officers, a light turned on in one of the bedrooms and we immediately freaked out because that house had been searched for hours. My buddy looks at the two cops and they look at us and we’re all figuring out who’s going to do what. The cop stars walking over, stops, looks at us, and says ‘fuck that’ because he had heard the stories. He called in a bunch of backup before searching and apparently there were no peanuts on the stairs when they went in.

134. There’s a bridge near where I grew up in Bumfuck, Tennessee that is notorious for screaming at people at night. The screams aren’t audible to the houses nearby and supposedly you have to sit on the actual bridge to hear it at all, though I personally haven’t tested it or anything. The common explanation is that it’s a bobcat that lives under the bridge, but people have checked with dogs and such and never find signs of any.

Well some friends and myself had heard this story for years all growing up but never tested it. So one night after a few beers we get up the notion we’re going to go test the thing. So five drunk guys pile into a beat-up car and we drive down and park on the bridge. This is 1:30 AM or and it’s dead silent out. We sat there for a good 45 minutes and nothing happened. We had the windows down and had started debating whether or not it was all bullshit when the scream happened.

We had the lights off and there was a moon so you could see pretty well and there for sure wasn’t anything outside the car, but it was fucking loud and it sounded just like a woman with particularly powerful lungs having her skin ripped off right outside the window on the rear passenger side that faced off the edge of the bridge.

Now I’ve heard bobcats in heat while hunting and they do like a scream-scream-scream kind of thing. It’s hard to describe but they do it in little repeating bursts. This was a good 3-4 second extended scream at incredible volume.

We tore out of there like a demon was chasing us. A couple of miles down the road we finally stopped and actually processed what happened. My adrenaline was going so badly and I was so scared I was just shaking uncontrollably. One of my friends had actually pissed himself, which I’d never seen anyone actually do. One friend immediately left the car and vomited. To give what I think was a good frame of reference to how actually terrifying this was, my friend whose car we were in wasn’t even mad at the friend that pissed all over his seat.

It was insane. To this day I have no explanation for it.

135. My BFF once mentioned to me that her BF could see/feel ghosts/spirits. He’s kind of a ‘one upper,’ so I brushed it aside and never thought more of it. One Saturday night, we are hanging out at my house (where I lived with my mother at the time). We weren’t drinking, just hanging out and chatting. Suddenly he went very still and silent, my BFF asked him what was wrong. He said he felt a presence in the house and it was very strong. He told us to keep chatting like we were and he was going to ‘feel for it.’ BFF and I return to our gossiping.

A while later he speaks and mentions the spirit is in the kitchen and it appears to be male, at least to him it does. He says it doesn’t feel like other spirits though, more like a good presence/guardian angel type deal. I still don’t really believe him, so I start asking question. He says the entity is definitely related to my family and that he is young.

Then suddenly, he turns to me and asks, ‘Did your mom have a miscarriage?’ The blood drained from my face and I got goose bumps everywhere. My mother miscarried a child before me, it would have been a boy, my older brother. There is no way he would have known that about my mother, because my BFF had no idea either. Then he said ‘Had she named him? He’s trying to tell me his name… it starts with an A.’ I started trembling, my mom had told me she had planned to name him Alex. He went on to explain how he believes it is my unborn older brother, and he’s a guardian angel figure to my mother. He assumed he was there at that time to watch over her. It was unbelievably scary and accurate because at the time, my mother was going through a really rough time (depression).

I never doubted his ability after that. When I told my mother about what had happened the next day, she was sobbing and always thought that the presence she felt by her side was her grandfather whom she had always been close to, not her unborn older son. I still get chills to this day just thinking about it.

136. My brother saw my father floating up the stairs and to his room. he started screaming when he entered his room. He disappeared when we went to his room to see why my brother was screaming. My father died in 2005.

137. I personally do not believe in the paranormal but some of the experiences I had at my dad’s house as a teenager sometimes make me think otherwise. My whole family experienced plenty of strange happenings at this place but the most jarring occurred when I was 17 years old.

I rarely visited my dad’s, but whenever I did make that hour-long trip into the nothingness of Wisconsin I was always uneasy of what I might see or hear that night. The house had some very unique features that always struck me as strange, the most notable being a small crawl space in my bedroom that connected to my sister’s bedroom adjacent to mine; both sides of this crawl space were fitted with a small door. We never really knew what the purpose of the tunnel was as it was far too small to use for storage and even too cramped for a grown adult to comfortably navigate.

Anyway, this particular night when I went to bed I heard some very strange noises, almost like a faint whimper or crying. I didn’t think much of this because it wasn’t uncommon for coyotes to come by the house at night looking to prey on our poor barn cats. The night went on and the noises came and went. Struggling to sleep, I went downstairs to grab a glass of water from the kitchen. When I came back into my room I noticed that the door to the crawl space was now ajar and the whimpering had stopped. More than a little startled at this point, I quickly got back into bed and tried my best to fall asleep.

Eventually I was able to fall back asleep but was later awakened when I felt a sinking feeling at the foot of my bed. I assumed that I must have left my bedroom door cracked and one of the house cats had climbed on my bed. I closed my eyes and tried to fall back asleep and was forced awake by the sound of a slamming door. I opened my eyes and noticed that the door to the crawlspace had been slammed shut, then I quickly glanced at the foot of my bed and saw the outline of a large figure staring at me from the end of my bed. The figure was all black with bright, white eyes. I got out of my bed as fast as I could and ran downstairs; I spent the rest of the night awake on the couch.

I still don’t know what I saw or if it was even real. I was ready to chalk it up to sleep paralysis but my sister told me the next morning that she also was woken up by the sound of the crawlspace door slamming. That was one of the last times I spent the night there.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, five years later my dad and stepmom decided to add an extension to the house and when they were digging the foundation for the extension they uncovered grave stones from the 1800’s. No thank you…

138. The hallway on the second story of my house is quite narrow. Not even two people wide. I was home alone, and walking through the hall. With no warning, I hear an EXTREMELY loud pop from my right side. But there was only a wall on that side. And it sounded as if it came from RIGHT above my shoulder. Like someone fired a gun next to my ear. I was so startled, I leaped down a flight of stairs accidentally slammed my face on the wall. Hasn’t happened since, so maybe the spirits feel bad.

139. This happened about 8 or so years ago around Thanksgiving at my grandma’s house.

Everyone was asleep except for me. The only people in the house were my grandparents, my mom, brother and I. No one else. (This is key.)

I was on the computer because I couldn’t sleep. I turned on a small TV to watch Adult Swim while I browsed the Internet. At around 4:30, I started getting a chill up my spine, and I heard some children laugh. Distinctly the voices of a little girl and boy.

I know I’m all by myself, as far as being awake, so I turned to look at the TV and it was in the middle of an InuYasha fight sequence so there’s no way the laughter was coming from that. I checked the computer sound settings and I had every possible output muted, so it wasn’t that, either. I sat there confused for a few moments while the giggles of the two children were playing in the background.

I figured maybe the radio in the kitchen was on. It was digital, so maybe it just came on for some reason or it had a timer.

I got up, and I kid you not, as I was walking to the door, with each step the laughter grew louder. From giggling to guffaws to hard laughter. Once the guffaws started, I started to hear a baby cry as well.

What’s going through my mind now is ‘what the fuck kind of radio show is this?’ And I just took three steps. Nowhere near the door.

I took a few more steps and the laughter turned hysterical, if not maniacal. The baby’s cries turned to screams and wails, as if it were in pain. I was trembling and terrified with each step I took to the doorway, but my mind was on autopilot; I needed to get out of there and across the hall to my mom who surely would help me and notice the weird sounds, too.

The last couple of steps increased the laughter and crying to an almost deafening level. It was like I was at a concert and the speakers were directly in my ears, blasting noise. It was painful and scared the shit out of me. I took all the courage i had and as soon as I reached the doorway I was going to sprint.

I started to run but then something shoved me. I felt these hands at my chest push me back into the room with enough force to throw me off balance. The crying and laughter stopped as soon as I was back in the room. This all happened within 20-30 seconds, but it felt like 10 minutes.

I was so scared I cried and slept in the tiny arm chair before my grandma came in the room and made me sleep in her bed downstairs.

140. I was 13 and living in a small farming town. It was close to Halloween, so the change in seasons was in the air. My friend was staying the night with me but by 10 PM we were bored and decided to walk to their house that was about two miles outside town. We reached the edge of town and the last streetlight illuminated the start of the empty country road we had to walk along. We didn’t think twice about anything scary, as it was mostly fields and tree lines, with the worst predator the occasional coyote.

We walked far enough down the road that the streetlight behind us was a distant oasis of light. It provided just barely enough illumination to remind us it wasn’t all empty fields along the road. There was also the cemetery that ran for a short section beside this part of the road. My friend tried to jokingly say scary things, but their words echoed hollowly in the silence. Just as we reached the end of the cemetery and the tree line that separated it from the fields, we heard a noise. There was something in the trees and it was BIG. It was making a lot of noise but it wasn’t thrashing wildly. It seemed to be moving toward us slowly but purposefully. The sound of the dead tree limbs breaking as it pushed past them sounded like explosions in the darkness.

That was the first time in my life I understood a deer in the headlights. Even though my heart was hammering in my chest and adrenaline was being poured into my system, I was frozen. The primal part of my brain was screaming danger, but it wasn’t providing me with any choices to pursue. It wasn’t until a blur of movement crossed in front of me that my full mental faculties engaged. I was able to process the fact that movement was my friend running past me down the road as fast as they could. I decided that was a valid option and took off after my friend as fast as I could.

We reached my friend’s house safe. We spent the rest of the night theorizing what that was in the trees. In the morning I walked back down the road to town and past the cemetery. During the day the eerie atmosphere was gone.

141. First of November this year. First night in my new flat and I woke up about 2 AM feeling like someone else was watching me sleep. I looked down the end of the bed and there was a figure of light standing there. It wasn’t a normal light though as it didn’t illuminate the room or anything around it. The figure then moved around my bed and went out the bedroom door. Last thing I remember before falling back to sleep was my heart thumping like crazy.

I’m very much an atheist and I don’t believe in the afterlife, but this one experience has just played on my mind a lot since happening.

142. This happened when I was around 5 or 6 ish. I lived in this isolated house so there was pretty much no one around for miles. We had a car garage and me, my sister, and cousin were playing at night around 10pm. At one point me and my sis were trying to hop on my cousin’s back since he was the tallest, and we all ended up facing the garage wall. At this point, I felt like someone was watching me, so I turned. I kid you not, there was this transparent-looking man standing in front of our house just staring at me. I froze and stared back to see what I was seeing was real. We eye locked for at least four seconds, which felt like eternity. My plan was to keep an eye on him until the others also turned and confirmed what I was seeing was real. But at this point I couldn’t hear my sister laughing or my cousin, it was super quiet. I kept on calling my cousin’s name but I didn’t hear back. At this point I thought they were dead. I freaked out, lost my eye contact with the ghost, turned and screamed my cousin’s name again. All of a sudden I could hear them laughing; I quickly turned back and he was gone. I cried, telling my cousin to go back in the house and it isn’t safe outside. All he did was giggle. I told my mom about this years later and she said we had two different maids that lived in the guest house who started screaming in the middle of the night because they saw this ghost-looking man. Idk still to this day I am afraid of ghosts. And thank God I left that house. I had so many weird dreams and experiences in that place.

143. I was visiting a friend of mine who lives in Virginia. He has a nice little cabin in the mountains that holds a mere four people max. The highlight of his little home is his massive basement. This thing has to be 4x the size of the house itself. He turned it into the ultimate man-cave complete with beer cooler, multiple TVs, couches, bean bags, pinball machine, pool table, you name it. The perks of being a bachelor know no bounds. He and I were having a few drinks with some of his friends and playing video games one night when we all fell asleep in our respective seats. I woke up around 4 AM with an insane urge to piss due to the drinking earlier in the night. I went to use the bathroom but the door was locked. I could hear water running so I figured one of his buddies was using the bathroom. I walked up the stairs to use the upstairs bathroom and when I turned the handle, the knob fell off. ‘Well, shit,’ I thought to myself. I’ll just wait until his friend gets out of the bathroom so I can go next.

I turned to walk back down the stairs when one of the steps below my feet collapsed. I fell through the step and caught onto the low board adjacent to the one that fell. The staircase is pretty high up so I was kind of dangling there in a daze. My friend and his buddies all wake up and ask what I’m doing. I tell them the board broke underneath my feet. As I was trying to lower myself down to the ground, the bathroom door flings open and slams into the wall. We all look at the door and there’s no one inside. The lights turn off, the sink stops running, then the door slowly starts closing again. I let go of the step in fear and crash to the ground. All the others in the room stand up and cautiously start backing up toward the stairs. We hear the toilet flush from behind the closed door and all start screaming. They booked it upstairs while I scrambled to get out from beneath the stairs but our escape was all in vain. I had ripped the doorknob off so we couldn’t get the door open. This basement had just about everything you could want, but it was lacking any kind of exit aside from the door that I broke. My buddy was jiggling the knob stump and slamming the door with his shoulder but it wouldn’t budge. Then, out of nowhere, the door bursts open and the pile of scared men falls into the living room. We all rushed into the living room, closed the basement door, and slept on the couches. No one could explain what happened the next day and my buddy avoided his glorious man cave for a few days afterward. I haven’t been back to his cabin in a while, but he claims nothing like that has happened since my visit.

Read some celebrity ghost stories here.

image credit — @Jovanadventures