20 Creepy True Stories To Read In The Dark Tonight

20 Creepy True Stories To Read In The Dark Tonight

The man in the bunny costume

When I was younger I used to live by the woods and could see a cemetery from my back porch. One Easter I remember waking up and seeing the Easter bunny (one of those terrifying costumes) and what really gets me is I remember smelling the wet hay. When I woke up I didn’t tell anyone, but there was an extra Easter egg in my house that my parents didn’t hide. Years later when I was in high school I asked my parents if they ever dressed up like the Easter bunny and came into our room, they said they would never go through so much trouble. Then my younger sister, who I shared a bunk bed with when this happened, said she remembers when the Easter bunny came into our room and made a remark about the hay smell. I was terrified that we both remembered seeing a person dressed as a bunny in our room. To make it even stranger, I told the friends I sat with at lunch what happened. One of the girls was my neighbor across the street. She told me one Easter a long time she looked out her window during the night and saw the Easter bunny standing in her driveway. I had chills. To this day I am terrified of people in rabbit costumes.

The ghost babysitter

When my niece was really young, she was in a bouncer at my sisters house, I was house and babysitting.

I had left her to go to the kitchen to grab some water. My sisters chocolate labs were probably sniffing and licking her head because I could hear her giggling like she was having a blast. I hadn’t notice how cold it had gotten. Then I heard it. A loud wooden SNAP. Like a thick piece of wood had been snapped in half suddenly or a tree was knocked over.

I ran into the room and what I saw and smelled freaked me out. The dogs were huddled in the corner whimpering, my niece was just staring at the ceiling corner with wide eyes, and it was cold and smelled like Stetson.

I took her and we decided to go to a different room. When my sister finally came home, I told her what happened. She just rolled her eyes and said “that is Hugh.” I was confused. She said Hugh was the previous owner of the house who had died ten years before his wife sold it. She said he likes to follow my niece around and you can tell it his him because the dogs freak, it gets cold and smells like cheap cologne.

I don’t believe in that shit, but I do believe that feeling you get in your gut when something doesn’t feel right.

Stranger in the house

In college, I would go home every other weekend to work at the job I had since high school. I would drive directly from campus after my last class on Friday to my job (about an hour) and, after my shift was done, I’d go back to my parent’s house which was out in the middle of nowhere.

My parents weren’t yet home when I got back from work (they often spend their Friday and Saturday evenings drinking like they were the ones in college), so the house was dark and, since it was mid fall, so was the yard – save for the yard light. I pulled into my normal parking spot, got out of the car and then turned to open the back door of my car and get my backpack out of the back seat.

That’s when I noticed that the bathroom light was on.

Was that light on when I pulled up? It must have been, right?

As I was contemplating the light and reaching for my backpack, there was suddenly a very angry looking old woman standing in the window staring at me. We’re not talking resting bitch face here either, she was pissed off at me and I knew it.

We stood there staring at each other for a good ten seconds when my parent’s pulled into the driveway and distracted me from my stare down with the woman in the bathroom. By the time I turned back, the light was still on, but the woman was gone.

When the dead walk the halls

I used to volunteer at a nursing home where we had several instances where new residents accurately described former residents down to specific nightgowns or color of glasses who I and the staff knew had died in that room and complain about them coming into the room at night. Then once I was walking through the hallway and it was normally uncomfortably warm inside but I felt a chill and goosebumps. One of the CNAs said I had just walked through a ghost. I couldn’t get warm again for the rest of the day. There were flickering lights and tvs turning themselves on. Several of the staff were from the same southeast Asian country and they were talking about ghosts and disrespect for the dead so much that management had someone come in to do a candle light ceremony and this Lady with crystals and dreadlocks came in to do a sage brushing. Things calmed down after that. Lights stayed on better and the residents seemed calmer.

The phantom hairdryer

I was in my sophomore year of high school. I would usually get ready and then wait for my mother to drive me to school. While she was getting ready, I was just kind of hanging out in the bathroom with her while she was putting on make-up and curling her hair. She looked a little frazzled and I asked if everything was ok. She told me about a weird occurrence the night before. She told me that she had been woken up at around 2:00 by a strange noise. It wasn’t super loud, but it was pretty constant. My dad wasn’t woken up by it, though it’s not surprising as he sleeps like a log. Anyway, she starts looking for the source of the noise, first checking the bathroom attached to their room, but there isn’t anything in there.

Next, she walks out into the hall and hears the noise from the bathroom nearby. When she walks in, she sees a hairdryer plugged in and turned on, just sitting in the middle of the bath mat on the floor. She thinks it’s strange, but there are 4 kids living in the house, and she thought maybe someone had sleepwalked and turned it on. Whatever. She unplugs it and puts it away. She goes back to bed and eventually falls asleep.

About an hour later, she wakes up again, and hears the same noise. She’s kinda pissed off and goes to check it out again. Except, now the noise is from downstairs. She tracks it down into the guest bathroom in the main entry hall (my parents house has, like, 4 bathrooms). She opens the door and, again, there’s a hairdryer turned on, laying in the middle of the floor. She’s freaked out by this point, but she unplugs it and puts it away. She didn’t get a great night’s sleep after that.

So she’s telling me this story, and as soon as she comes to the conclusion, we both just freeze, and turn our heads into the walk-in closet off her bathroom. As soon as we look in there, the entire light on the ceiling shatters. Not the light bulb, but the glass cover. It shatters, sending shards of glass everywhere. Welp, we both freak and get the heck out. We didn’t know what to make of it, but we haven’t really had any experiences before or since, and none of my family have experienced anything either.

The nightmares

I was a caretaker of a small uninhabited island off the coast of Maine and my girlfriend and I started having synchronized nightmares about things that we had never discussed before. They involved very specific themes and after month of this happening we were gifted a history book of the island that had a small chapter in the back that mentioned the exact hauntings.

This is why the basement is locked

My mother was having dinner at a friends house. It was a small old cottage that’s been around for 100 years. She tries to find the bathroom and pulls on a door that is locked. The friend sees and says “Sorry that goes to the basement, the bathroom is over there.” Thinking it is odd, my mother asks why the basement door is locked. “Its always locked, in fact I don’t even have a key for it, the real estate agent advised me not to go down there as its not been upgraded like the rest of the cottage. Its little more than a root cellar.”

Fast forward a few weeks, when my mother (who works for the police department’s community division) is working on a project about the history of the police department in the town. An old man comes in with news clippings about various community events, as well as a news clipping from the 50’s about a gruesome murder. My mom was a bit taken aback. “Sorry, I forgot those clippings were in here too.” “No…I know this address, its my friends house! What happened there?” “Oh…” said the old man. “Well, that use to be my mother’s house. She had been dating this man who was cruel to her. Beat her horribly. She tried again and again to break it off with him, but he’d always come back. Finally my aunt moved in with us, and my mother finally broke up with him.” He starts getting emotional “Then one night he broke in, and tied my mother, aunt, sister, and brother up in the basement. He shot them all in front of my mother. Then he shot her, and killed himself, leaving a note that she would never leave him again. I was away at college….” He started to sob.

And that is how my mother’s friend learned she has a haunted quadruple murder-suicide scene in her basement. She moved out a year later.

The dying patient

A good friend of mine while doing his rounds as a young intern, he is now a neurosurgeon, he had just looked in on a dying patient. After making the patient comfortable, he exited the room , sat on a nearby chair to write his report. After few minutes he looked up and saw this patient walking down the hallway. He called to the woman but their was no response . As he stood up to walk after her, she disappeared. He quickly walked toward the patients room and saw a light under the door. When he opened the door, it was completely dark in the room. So he turned on the night- light, went over to the patient and felt for her pulse. She had died. He swears to this experience.

What I saw on the country road

While in University, I loved finding snakes (I was a biology student). So a friend from herpetology club showed me this road that he would “cruise” for snakes. Cruising is when you drive slowly down old back roads after dark looking for snakes that have slithered onto the warmer road to heat up. The road we took was about 4 miles and had around 4 houses on its entirety. We had taken a few laps on this road, and we were making our final pass. There are two houses near the beginning of the road, one at the end and one near the middle. We were getting close to the center house when we see movement on the left side of the road. There are a lot of animals (obviously) on this road so we aren’t surprised to see this. However what shoots out is this kid, probably around 8 or 9 in torn blue jeans and a ripped dark t shirt.

He takes one look at us, and his face is a mix of fear and pain. He looked back really quickly from where he had come out of then booked it across the road. The guy I’m with gets out of the car chasing to see if he’s alright and I pull the car up to the point where the boy went into the woods. Im starting to get out of the car when my friend walks quickly back from the trail and just says, “lets go, now!” We hop in the car and tear out of there. He says there is a grave yard about 10 yards into the woods where there are 5 grave stones with the same death date. They all had the same last name, and one was a boy who was 9. We never came back the rest of the summer to that road (we usually would go out once or twice a week).

The next year when my friend had graduated I took my girlfriend out to the road. We had gone early to try to find different types of snakes (different snakes tend to move at different points of dusk/night). We got to the house near the graveyard and theres 3 men doing some yard work. I rolled down the window explained what I was doing and asked them about the graveyard. Apparently their Dad’s brother’s family had all died when their space heater caught fire around 20 years ago. I kept pushing and asking about it, and they told me the firemen or whoever does it had found all the bodies in the rubble except for the youngest son but they assumed he was too far burned. I asked if they had a little brother, and the 6’4″ 250 pound man said he was the youngest. When I gave the description of the kid I saw and they all went white.

They all have individually seen the kid I was talking about. And he always runs to the gravesite. I have never been down that road again.

A helpful spirit

A few weeks after my mom gave birth to me she went to me in the middle of the night because i was crying, when she went in the room she saw a dark figure of a man who she thought was my dad holding me and decided to go back to sleep, in the morning she thanks my dad for taking care of me, as it turns out my dad was not even awake then and nobody else was in the apartment, gets worse later on in life not only me, but my sister, cousins and friends have all seen it somewhere in our home, all in separate accounts and we dont normally tell people about it unless they’ve seen it and it follows us wherever we move to and at this point me and my family have all learn to ignore it though we all know its there.

The fan

When I was 12, me and my mom were watching TV in her bedroom. It was one of those really stuffy summer evenings. Stating the obvious, I said aloud, “it is SO hot in here.” Immediately, the fan that was sitting on the dresser 5 feet away turned on.

The switch couldn’t really be flipped on by accident… it was pretty “sticky” and required a little bit of force to go from off to on. I can’t really explain how that happened but I like to think it was a friendly ghost.

Crying

In middle school my friend was in a church youth group and they often had these overnights at the church that he would invite me to and they were actually tons of fun. Towards the end of the night the guy who ran it (he was chill af the lord was with that guy) would let us play manhunt in the entire church area (place where actual mass was held, kitchen, rec hall, nursery, etc). We turned literally every light in the whole place and all we had were tiny flashlights. It was spooky but sooooo much fun.

One of these nights we were playing and we decided to hide in a closet in the nursery. We hid there for about 10 minutes and out of nowhere we heard a baby crying. We got spooked the fuck out and bolted out of there. In the morning we went back to the nursery to see what could have caused it, we figured it was one of those toy baby dolls that would cry but we found nothing. Still spooks me to this day but I would give anything to relive it because I love paranormal shit.

Clapping

Played piano in a dark and empty auditorium back in the day. When I was finished, someone softly clapped for me. Sort of sounded like it was coming from everywhere, but just one person. Never saw them, and the auditorium was locked except for the door I came in.

Bad connection

This was actually on Halloween morning one year. I lived in a small apartment with an open floor plan where you could see the entire apartment from the kitchen. I was in the kitchen packing my lunch to take to work when the TV turned on by itself, volume on full blast, to some static-y channel that kept cutting in and out. I was nowhere near the remote or the TV, and had no other people or animals living with me who could have done it accidentally. Probably not the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced (i’m sure there are many perfectly reasonable explanations as to how it happened), but it definitely freaked me out at the time! It had never happened before and hasn’t since.

The woman in the middle of nowhere

I grew up in a small town, and lived out in the country. My mom and I were coming home from Walmart really late one night and decided to take the back way home. I still had my learners permit, so I wanted to take a road with less traffic. Anyone who has ever lived or been to the country knows how creepy these roads can be at night. I was going around a curve, right before a one lane bridge, so I slowed down in case I had to stop. Out of no where this woman jumps in front of me to the drivers side of my car and starts pounding on the hood of my car. Her mouth was moving but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. My mom started freaking out and told me not to stop, and just keep driving. I kept going and we both looked back to see where she was and no one was there. To this day my mom and I still remember it clearly. Turns out there’s apparently a legend about a woman who died around the bridge and supposedly can be seen sometimes late at night. I get goosebumps to this day just thinking about it.

Who turned on the radio?

When I was about 10 or 12, I don’t really remember, I had an odd experience. At the time, I was sharing a room with my sister. We had lofted beds and I slept on the top bunk. We had this stereo and when you would press the button to turn it on, it would “click” and a red light would pop up. Our beds were on one side of the room and the stereo was on a desk on the opposite side. One night I was woken up by the “click” sound that the stereo makes when the power button is pressed. I recognized the sound and sat up in bed. I looked over at the stereo and the light blinks on. I look over at my sister and she is fast asleep (her bed was under mine but perpendicular, so I could see the top half of her from my bed).

The stereo is playing that white noise sound that it makes when it isn’t on a specific station. Suddenly, I can hear someone saying, “Away,” coming from the stereo. Just one word, “Away”. First, it starts off soft and gradually gets louder, until it becomes a yell, “AWAY, AWAY, AWAY”. It took about 10-15 seconds probably to build up to the yell, and then it died back down to a whisper. I thought this was a dream. I was frozen out of fear. I thought this had to be my imagination, and I tried telling myself that during the whole thing. I had almost convinced myself of it until it stopped. After the voice died away, the stereo went back to static. Then, I heard the familiar “click” and the light turned off. I was positive I wasn’t dreaming the ending “click”. I stared at the stereo for a few more moments, too freaked to move, looked back at my sister and saw she was still asleep, and finally laid back in bed, covered myself with my sheets, and willed myself back to sleep.

I consider myself a rational person, but I had no rational explanation for this. Freakiest shit that has ever happened to me.

This is why you should never let anyone know where your spare key is

I was seventeen, still living in my parents’ house. Everyone was away on a Friday night so I had a few friends over. We smoked a little, and were chilling in the basement playing video games. Two of my friends ran upstairs to get some snacks out of the pantry. After a few seconds they came running down the steps yelling my name. They say somebody just pulled into my driveway. I hear the dog start freaking out. I panic, thinking my parents are home, and I scramble to hide the weed and pipe we had sitting next to the back door.

I walked up the steps and looked out the window. There was no car in the driveway but my dog was still freaking out. I went outside to see if anyone was out there. It was late, almost midnight, and cold. I was barefoot and poorly dressed. I walked around my house, shivering and nervous, and found nothing. I went back inside, took my dog down to the basement with me and tried to relax.

Maybe twenty minutes later, we hear a huge crashing sound. It sounded like something had exploded right in front of the house. We ran outside through the back door and saw a car wrapped around a tree right by the road in my neighbor’s front yard. My dog starts freaking out again. It was my brother’s car. My brother had gone with my parents to my aunt’s and left his car in the garage. I ran to look inside and there was nobody in it.

I immediately called my brother, freaking out. When he answered the phone I was both relieved and confused. He instructed me to call the police. He came home. The police came and looked around. They took statements from everybody (we hid the fact that we were high pretty well). As the tow truck was pulling my brother’s care out of the front yard, the police received a call about a break in down the street. They left an officer with us and the rest left to respond to the call.

It turns out that a group of people were going through my neighborhood, breaking into houses and stealing cars out of garages. I was in the house when the burglar stole my brother’s car. I may have even walked right past him at one point. When they caught the group, one of the guys was injured as if he had been in a car wreck. He was the one who had broken into my house. I knew him. He had graduated from my high-school when I was a freshmen. He had house-sat for us. He knew where we kept the spare keys, he knew that if one of us was home that the doors would be unlocked and he waited until it was just me, alone in the house.

It wasn’t paranormal, but it still creeps me out to this day that the guy had waited for myself, or any of my other family members, to be alone in the house and had broken in. It scares me that I was so completely unaware of my surroundings back then that I would have let that guy get the drop on me if he had hostile intentions. It makes me sick that somebody we had trusted to stay in our house while we were gone would come back a couple years later and do something like that.

The night I spent with 20 dead bodies

I once had to work a very late shift at the funeral home to prepare a body for a viewing the following morning. I think I finally finished my work around midnight. Anyways, it was winter, and I ended up getting snowed in at the funeral home. I had to stay the night until plows came early AM to plow out. Let me tell you – it’s fucking creepy sleeping in a funeral home knowing there are 20 dead people in the basement.

Worth the long read: two little girls were dancing in my bedroom

My fiancé and I rent a house together, and we live alone.

About two years ago, my fiancé and I were lying in bed. It was actually pretty late in the morning– 10:30 or 11:00 AM., or so. I’d been awake for about ten or fifteen minutes, and my fiancé was just waking up.

We lied there, talking softly about whether or not we should get up yet, or try to go back to sleep for a bit, since he had the first half of the day off of work, and it might be nice to catch up on sleep since we’d had a busy couple of days. He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, and I was on my right side, facing him, with my hand on his chest while we talked. In that position, I had my back to our bedroom door, which was maybe 8 or 9 ft. away from the bed behind me.

Suddenly, an odd feeling came over the room. Seriously, it felt like the air in the room was suddenly either sucked out, or made very, VERY heavy, and it almost felt like I was under water, or gravity changed… and the room seemed to almost feel like it was tilting to the side. It felt like the air in the room was pressing down on top of my body, while at the same time slowing down time and making me dizzy and loopy. My ears were popping.

Well, I thought it was just me feeling this, and for a moment, I wondered if I was having a blood pressure drop (I get those sometimes, though it still wasn’t quite what it felt like), but my fiancé said in a very frightened voice that sounded like he couldn’t breathe very well, and like he couldn’t get out the words without struggling, “Do you feel that, too? What’s happening?!…” And that was when I knew something odd and scary was going on, because he was feeling the exact same thing.
I tried to speak, but my speech actually came out kind of slurred and I had to force the words out of my mouth to say “I don’t know…I can’t move…”

He said “I can’t…either…” and I saw him trying to turn over onto his side, and trying to raise his arm up. He just kept saying “what’s happening? What’s happening?”

I tried to raise my arm up, too, and found that I couldn’t. Again, it was like being under water, and in an intensely pressurized room. I started trying to push myself up, to see if I could sit up… I couldn’t do it. It was just too heavy.
Then, we both heard the doorknob of our bedroom door turning.

It was turning over and over again… almost like someone was trying to come in, but they weren’t jiggling it, or trying to open the door… it was actually turning in a rhythm. It was turning back and forth, back and forth, in a rhythm at about the same tempo as a metronome. Like a beat to a song. It was very deliberate.

We were both terrified and we froze– the first thought in my mind was that someone had broken in, though I couldn’t figure out why they would turn the doorknob back and forth, back and forth in a deliberate rhythm, especially because our bedroom door has no lock on it. They could just open it and walk right in.

We couldn’t move, that weird heavy-gravity feeling that was holding us down still would not allow us to move, but I was trying to, and I could feel my fiancé trying to, as well. All I was able to do was turn my head very slowly and look over my shoulder at the doorknob, and watch it turning. I could see it.

Then, we both heard it… singing. Two children’s voices, what sounded like a pair of young girls, started singing a song that I could not make out most of the lyrics to, and the only clear lyrics that I could make out was the very last word at the end of the sentence: “dancing”.

So let me clarify what I’m trying to describe: These two young girl’s voices were singing an almost nursery rhyme type song outside our bedroom door, while turning our bedroom doorknob back and forth, to match the tempo of what they’re singing: the doorknob is going chhck-chhck, chhck-chhck, chhck-chhck, chhck-chhck, as these little girls’ voices are singing:

“Something, something, something something! Something, something, daaaaancing! Something, something, something, something, something, something, daaaaaancing!”

…and the doorknob would turn with each word they sang, keeping perfect rhythm.

I couldn’t make out nearly any of the other words of this song they were singing, except for the word “dancing” at the very end of each stanza.

And they were singing it in a way that was kind of playful and taunting… maybe, for instance, kind of like two little girls would do if they were teasing an older sibling, or their mom or dad, by coming up to a room they’re in, shaking the doorknob and singing at them, just to tease– the song almost sounded made up, the way kids sometimes sing little made-up songs to be silly or playful…. Just trying to give you a feel as to how this sounded. It also sounded like they were laughing, or trying not to giggle while doing it.

So, as this is all going on, and I’m watching the doorknob turn as these voices sing at us, and near the end of the song, I turn my head– in slow motion– back to my fiancé to see if he’s seeing and hearing the same thing I am, and I can now see has finally managed to be able to turn his head and he was watching the doorknob, too, and the look on his face… was just… I’ll never forget it. His eyes were as big as dinner plates, I’ve never see him that shocked or that scared…his face was just white.

And then the song ended. It was short, just two stanzas, then just as soon as it started, the doorknob just stopped turning on the very last word of the song, “daaaaanciiiing”, and all at once, that heavy, dizzy weight that had been holding us down and making it so hard to move and breathe just lifted. Just went away. Just like that. Suddenly we could move again, and the air and gravity felt normal.

It seriously was all over, from start to finish, in about 10 seconds.

My fiancé sat up and goes “What the hell just happened?”, and he jumped over me and out of bed, raced to the door and yanked it open. Nothing was there. We don’t have a hallway, it’s a small house and our bedroom door opens right up into the living room, and he just looked out into it and goes “Nobody’s out there!”

I got up and ran over to him, and looked for myself. No one there. House empty, and our two cats were both backed up against the far wall of the living room, hissing and growling. They’d either heard it, too, or even seen what did it… and from the spot right in front of our bedroom door, all the way through the living room, through the dining room, and out to the kitchen door, there was this trail of heat. I don’t know how else to describe it, it was just a trail of heat. The air just felt hot and oily, and you could almost see a haze, like fog, trailing from our bedroom door, through the house, to the kitchen door.

We checked both the front door and the kitchen door. Locked. Both locked.

We both sat back down on the bed, and we were just shaking. We kept asking each-other “Did that really just happen? We both heard the same thing right?” and yeah… we both felt the air pressure holding us down in bed and making us move in slow motion, and we both heard and saw the bedroom doorknob moving back and forth in rhythm, and then both heard the two little girls singing that song. So, I know it wasn’t a hallucination or anything.

The only difference was that my fiancé understood a couple more of the lyrics of what they were singing, though not many– he said it sounded something like “and we come in a’dancing!” or “and we go a’dancing!”

It was just so unsettling and spooky. And to be honest, the way the girls’ voices sounded, they didn’t sound mean or creepy– they seriously sounded like two, real little girls who were just having fun and teasing us. It didn’t feel or sound malevolent, or anything… it still creeped us out, just that it happened, though. We were both shaken up for the rest of the day, and I BEGGED him not to leave for work that afternoon (but he had to). The whole time he was at work, I kept every light in the house on, along with both the TVs in the living room and our bedroom. It’s never happened again, but it still creeps us both out just talking about it.

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