Other humans

“My mom used to live in a small town in the cascade mountains and worked as a forest ranger. The creepiest thing that happened was when the oldest male ranger kept hitting on her and trying to get her to come home with him, not very out of the ordinary, but many years later after she’d left the town she found out he had been convicted of manslaughter and had killed a young female ranger right before she got hired. She would have probably been his next target.” — Keira-k-is-gay

Alone with a burglar

“Used to be a supervisor for a janitorial company and a couple times a week I had to go to a middle school and clean their hallway floors and gymnasium with a zamboni type vehicle that mopped and scrubbed the floor. When I was there I had the whole school to myself. Used to get finished quickly and go to the library and read while eating my dinner. Well, one morning after being there, I get a call from school security and they want me to come in. When I get there I see a police car too. Uh oh, I think. They ask me a few questions like “did you notice anything out of the ordinary or strange while you were here last night?” No, I hadn’t (usually have headphones in). Security then shows me camera footage of someone breaking into one of the classrooms WHILE I WAS RIDING THE ZAMBONI not far away. I was there for another two hours. Nothing was stolen. But the worst part was they didn’t have footage of the person leaving, they didn’t go out the way they came in, and police had to sweep the entire school. Never did find out what happened with that one.” — TheDaveHimself

Peepers

“When I was 15 years old, I was doing my 4am newspaper delivery round on bicycle. I was driving into the garden of this one subscriber where I saw two guys with flashlights looking through the windows of the house. I was a bit in shock and just said ‘Goodmorning guys’. They were just as much in shock and an awkward silence followed.

I tried to break the silence by asking if I could pass them to deliver the newspaper through the door. One of the guys said the person living in that house did something to his family and they took it as an opportunity to get away in their car that was still running.

When they were gone I rang the doorbell at the house to tell them what happened and they should keep an eye out.” — Kopi0Kosong

Wild animals

“We were wrapping up for the day in northern canada. I am fueling up the sideboom, Im all by myself at this point cause i was tired of listening to the labourers whine of the cold so i told em i would take care of the rest. (Think bulldozer with no blade but a giant metal boom on the side that we use to raiser and lower pipe). Its february so pitch black. I keep hearing some weird sound. I cant quite hear it cause the pump is too loud.

I search around a couple times and see nothing. I get in the truck and take off drive past the front of the sideboom to see a cougar sitting on top of a dirt pile 15 feet away. The damned thing was just watching me there and probably could have ended me without me even realizing it. I’ve never seen a cougar in the wild before and its hard to understand just how big they are and how powerful until you see one up close. That thing leaped off the 6 ft pile and probably didnt touch ground for 15-20 ft.

Its terrifying to think something so big and powerful could just be sitting there deciding if they want to make you dinner.” — old_balls_38

A heart

“I found a random heart in the parking lot of my apartment complex, which was right on a trail in Boulder, CO. I still have a picture of it, but it was on top of a sheet of ice with another piece of sinew, no blood around it. I really can’t imagine what the story is behind that. I never found out what happened to the organs. Also, not long after this happened, someone hung themselves along the creek path right behind my house. I’m still not sure what to think about all of it. Needless to say, I moved.” — lmcgeh2

Armed intruders

“I’m not sure this counts but I’m a teacher at an urban public school and was at work late grading and getting ready for the next day. Time had kind of flown by and before I knew it, it was 7pm. I start packing up to leave in a building that is, in theory, locked and empty besides me, when our ALICE alarm goes off, indicating an armed intruder in the building. I am 1. Alone 2. Young 3. Freaked AF because I am absolutely not ready to fight a gunman over my lesson plans. I book it out of the school and dive into my car, hearing the alarm blaring the entire time. I peel out the parking lot, and can see in my rear view the alarm lights still flashing and debate never going back, cause fuck that lmao. Turns out they were doing “routine maintenance” and didn’t send out an email to the teachers 🤦🏻‍♀️” — msdoublenegative

Screams

“I’ve been fishing out in the gulf of Mexico where they have some oil rigs. This rig wasn’t being used (from what we knew) so we would get pretty close to it to fish for red snapper. While we were out there, we could have sworn we heard screams of a woman over and over. It was some shit but the explanation was the wind making the noises as it blew through the rig.

Well, that’s what we were told but it totally creeped us the fuck out.” — houseofamon

Bullet holes

“I work as a polar bear guard. As in, I escort people across tundra and mountains and protect them from polar bears.

I once saw a snowman totem with reindeer antlers coming out of his head. It was deformed, full of bullet holes and rather creepy.” — Jalsavrah

A welded shut room

“On our drill ship that was built in China, we noticed on the drawings there was a room. We went to look at it and couldnt find an entrance but the spacing was obvious there was an extra room. It might not sound so creepy unless youve been in these shipyards where two things are known to happen: stowaways, although i doubt it in this case, but also hundreds of workers at any given time following orders blindly. So we confirmed that the room had all six sides, yet not a single weld on the outside. There is only one way this couldve happened and im sure youre starting to get it now. They must have welded from the inside for this room and then realized they had no way out upon completion if the gasses didnt kill them first.

Its extremely heavy around that room. People say they hear things. I have definitely. This isnt some old ship either. I rode this ship from China to Amsterdam after completion and then the maiden voyage to America. I guess it happens quick.” — JohnMayerCd

Sharks

“In deep, open water, the water itself is really clear, so everyone can plainly see all the tuna and barracudas hanging around the rig waiting for the onboard cook to throw off whatever food waste he needs to. Every once in a while a huge great white shark would swim up from underneath and snatch a tuna and it really took like less than a second. They’re really scary.” — DONOTENGAGEWITHME

“It’s better to hike at night”

“During college that was located away from major cities, the woods were all around us. That being said, there was a highly rated trail, the Loyalsock Trail, which was about an hour drive from the university. I invited a friend to come with me as he had never been on an extended backpacking trip. A 50+ mile trail that we intended to backpack over the four day weekend. I am an Eagle Scout who has spent countless hours in the woods and went on backpacking trips consistently throughout my college experience. As many have said before me, you get used to the minor “spooky” things happening; Coyote howls, raccoons in the middle of the night, even the occasional unknown noise. The scariest thing to find in the woods, however, are people.

We were about 20 miles into the trail and, being Pennsylvania where the underbrush and trees line the trails pretty densely, I always walk about 100 meters off of the trail to reduce the chances of me disturbing people/people disturbing me (especially in the early morning when I choose to sleep in). Following that same strategy, my friend and I go out of our way to be in this amazing spot a good ways off of the trail where it would even be difficult to see our flashlights from the trail. This spot was on a peninsula where a creek met a river, meaning there was only one way into our camp and only one way out. We start a fire, cook our food, and drink some (but not enough to get either of us drunk). We put the fire out about midnight and head in to our individual tents. All is quite. It is the fall semester, so leaves are on the ground, the moon is brightly shining through the bare trees, and the air is cool. The only noise is the occasional time when I would hear my friend turn over in his sleep. Then, I hear the voices…

The voices sounded very close for being on the trail 100+ meters away. I check my watch; 3am. Who hikes at 3am? We are 20 miles in. I slowly get out of my sleeping bag, slowly unzip my tent, only to see my friend peaking out of his tent in the exact same fashion. He quickly moves his finger over his mouth in an exaggerated “hush” signal, then used the same hand to frantically motion towards the way of the trail. Then we see them. Four adults, three men and one woman, walking directly towards our camp. No lights illuminating their path; They are walking silently at this point. Only one of them has a backpack; An impossibility for the long hike they were 1/3 of the way through. Being a long trip, you bring wood cutting supplies to chop branches into smaller branches to burn; For me, this was a survival knife. Grabbing the knife, believing it is my only way of defending myself, I am more disheveled than I ever have been, especially knowing that a knife is barely defense at all. These people walk into our site, sit down by our extinguished fire pit, and just sit there for what felt like an eternity.

My friend speaks up and asks what they are doing in our campsite. Without answering the question, they ask if we have any food. Having packed as lightly as possible for the long trip. We had only a few extra Mountain House, MRE-style meals. I grab one out of my bag and toss it to one of the men. In rapid succession, I ask why they aren’t using a light, if they need help finding the trail, and why they are hiking so late. They respond with the following:

“We don’t use lights”

“We know where the trail is”

“It is better to hike late at night”

Unnerved at this point, my friend asks them to leave. They respond by asking if we want to light the fire and hangout for a bit. No we do not. They grab their bag, get up, and leave without speaking another word. We watch them leave and take shifts making sure that they didn’t come back. Needless to say, we both got very little sleep that night. When the sun rose the next morning, we finally got “real” sleep. By the afternoon, when we woke up, it all felt like a weird dream of sorts. The only evidence was a fuzzy cap that they must have dropped that I have to this day.

I have never had something as weird/spooky as that happen in the woods and hope to never have it happen again. In the eight years since that trip, I haven’t been back to the Loyalsock Trail.” — OandGTechy

Placenta

“I worked at a public forest. One day we had someone report a dead animal on the side of one of our trails. A few of us from the front desk hiked out to see what it was. It looked like a giant peice of…liver maybe? Just a pile of smooth red meat…no blood around. And it was wrapped up in a t shirt, with some coins scattered around it. We called our rangers to go check it out, and one of them was pretty sure it was a placenta. The weird part is, you have to check in thru a front desk. So someone either snuck a placenta/liver in or gave live birth/removed an organ on our trails. We never got an answer on what the pile of meat was, how it got there, or why.” — WhiteOwlz

Footsteps

“Spent a summer doing conservation work out in the absolute middle of nowhere in Wyoming. Was part of a crew that would spend two weeks camping in remote places to do manual labor in places machines couldn’t get to.

For this story, we were building new hiking/biking trails in the back portion of a designated wilderness area in a high altitude desert. This means that the nearest civilization was a 2 hour car ride to a town of 41 people in a sandy soil area where tracks last forever.

It was the middle of our stint during the early part of the night where everyone else had gone to bed but I stayed up to read, so maybe 11:30 or so. Still pitch black outside, clouds had covered stars. so my head lamp was probably the only light on in a 40 mile radius.

Suddenly I hear footsteps walking around our camp and head towards the tents from where I was in the community tent. That sound immediately put me on edge as I felt the hair on my arms raise and my adrenaline spike. I recall thinking to myself that two things are very wrong since the person was not using a light to see and the footsteps were not coming towards me from the tents, rather it was the opposite.

Within the four seconds it took me to drop my book, get up, and turn the corner of the tent to cast my light on the sleeping tents, the sound had stopped but I saw tracks in dirt before me. Looked like they came from one end of camp, looked into my tent, walked through the sleeping tents and kept going out of camp again.

I don’t know if I was making too much noise or not by walking around, but the rest of my crew ended up waking up and asking me what was going on from inside their tents. After explaining what I found, they all got up to look at the boot prints in the dirt. They were damn near perfect copies of my own boots except for one small thing, I had a rock stuck in my treads that messed up the symmetry. (I was wearing fairly common work boots, except I also happen to wear US size 15 double wide boots, so there was no way in hell this was one of the other crew members)

I don’t think any of us slept much that night. Never saw or heard anything more after that night. A light rain removed the tracks a couple days later, but I do remember none of us were willing to step on the prints themselves and choose to step over them like cracks in the sidewalk.” — GrumpyCTurtle

Smokers

“Read a story on here about a backwoods elk hunter who was two days into a hike in an area only accessible by foot. Woke up in the morning and there was a pile a freshly burnt cigarettes right outside his bear line.” — FrozenMrPotato

Silence

“My parents live pretty far back in the country and have 1 neighboring house.

The neighbors would let their Basset Hound outside for about 10 minutes to use the bathroom every morning.

One morning they let him out, and he didn’t come back inside. After a couple minutes they walked out to his favorite bathroom spot, and found…his head. Judging from the tracks, a mountain lion had ambushed him and apparently torn his head off before carrying the body away.

What I thought was the creepiest part was that the family hadn’t heard a sound.” — schoonerw

Ghosts

“My oldest brother used to work the overnight sprinklers on a golf course. He took me out one time just for fun and as we were driving uphill on a fairway, a figure of a lady appeared in the headlights at the top of the hill. My brother steered a little to the left of her and kept driving right on by. I stared right into her eyes as we drove by and she stared back. Her eyes glowed like a cat in the night.

As soon as we were out of voice range I asked my brother “What the hell was that?!” He calmly responded, “Yea, she lives on the golf course and likes to terrorize the workers from time to time. I usually see her out here once a week.”” — ArtshowSkittles

Being alone

“I’ve worked in Canada’s north for a few years now in oil and gas.

It’s pretty creepy when during night shift you realise a moose has just been standing at the tree line staring you down for an unknown length of time.

Or finding bear tracks crossing the tracks you just made 5 minutes ago

Honestly the silence of a snowy forest in the dead of night 100s of km away from anything is pretty spooky. When Your only contact to the outside world is a radio channel nobody’s listening to, you feel pretty alone.” — gooberplsno