27 People Share The True Terrifying Encounters With The Dead That Haunt Them To This Day

simpleinsomnia

1. Jake’s Bell

Friend’s grandmother was out of town and asked us to check on her dog. Real friendly German Shepherd dog, jumping with excitement at the door when you showed up kinda pup. We went over and to our surprise found no dog waiting at the door. A little weird, but we thought nothing of it and went inside to find him. Got into the house and heard nothing, start calling for the dog(Jake) and are answered with footsteps running down the stairs. We call out, assuming some other family was there, but get no response. Start to freak out a little, we call his mom and she assures us no one is home and we’re being ridiculous. More footsteps but this time running up the stairs. I suggest police, the house is being robbed, but friend convinces me we should check it out to be sure. Make our way to the stairs and hear a bell chime. Buddy tells me the dog occasionally wears a bell, that it’s probably Jake. Get to the door which leads to the stairs, see there’s a small bell around the handle. My friend is terrified, so am I, but trying to play it cool I lead us up the stairs. At the top we see Jake, laying in a chair, shaking and obviously terrified. We couldn’t get him to move no matter what we did, he just kept staring down the stairs. We searched the entire house after and found nothing and no one. Only time in my life I have been genuinely afraid I was dealing with something paranormal. Friend’s grandmother assures us to this day it was her husband, and that she still hears him walking around/talking from time to time.

BrahmenNoodles

2. Loud Voices And Bacon

At a friends house for a sleepover one night, their house was old early 1900s. Her brothers always said they saw an older woman in the basement, I just assumed they were being dicks.

One night I woke up to loud talking and could hear everyone in the kitchen, I looked over where my friend was sleeping and she wasn’t in her bed, assuming she had gone downstairs for breakfast( didn’t realize at the time she was actually in the bathroom)

As I walked down the stairs the voices got louder, just general chit chat and I could smell bacon, eggs cooking, could hear the bacon sizzle but as soon as I touched the bottom step all the sounds disappeared, no smell

I walked into the kitchen, all the lights were off, stove was cool, nowhere to be found, I went back upstairs to find my friend as I walked up the steps she was coming out of the bathroom, I told her what had happened and she told me I was dreaming

The next morning I was up before her so I know she never mentioned it to her older brother but he scolded us for being so loud in the kitchen so early in the morning…. that house just gives me the creeps

They moved, whoever it was moved with them also, their new house still gives me the creeps and multiple people have seen the older lady in various parts of the house, even new friends who haven’t heard about her before can describe what she looks like.

Cathyg_99

3. The Old Man And The Girl

Lived in a house with a bunch of friends. We always said the house was haunted. Just so many eerie experiences.

We all agreed one spirit was of a young playful girl, and the other one was of an angry old man. There was a shed in the backyard that had locks on the inside. We always imagined what bad happened in there.

Anyway, me and one friend are sitting outside on the porch steps, both quiet. Everyone else is downstairs.

I hear a very old sounding “heh heh heh” from behind my shoulder, where the wall of the house is. I didn’t want to say anything, cause crazy, but out of my peripheral vision I see my friend glance over his shoulder.

So I go, “you heard that too?” and he said, “an old man going heh heh heh?” and I concurred and we both noped down to the basement where everyone still was.

njdeatheater

4. Down. Your. Spine.

The most terrifying paranormal experience I had would have to be the experiences I had in my grandma’s guest room. When I was young I remember staying in that room and ever time I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sensation of someone or something running their fingers up my spine. I would be fully awake, but too petrified to move. This happened every time I stayed in that room. When I was in middle school my parents end up moving into my grandma’s house and guess what? My sister and I would share the old guest room. I thought things would be different, but every so often I would wake up and experience that sensation again. At one point I even shot up and looked around the room, only to find nothing in sight. I’d lay down again and try to sleep, but there it was again…the feeling of someone running their fingers up and down my spine. It got to the point where I was just laying in bed trying to sleep and it would just happen. You’d think something like this wouldn’t be scary, but something about that feeling made me feel terrified. As if I was getting touched inappropriately by some stranger. There was nothing I could really do to make it stop. I could only lay there and wait Until it was done. We ended up moving out of my grandma’s house for a while when I entered high school and moved back around my sophomore year of college. I’m happy to say that I don’t experience that anymore in the room.

XxGardeniaxX

5. The Smudge

Went camping with a friend in an isolated southeastern forest.

We left a little too late and realized we wouldn’t make our designated campsite so decided to camp under an overhang of rock that would be sufficient to keep the rain off of us.

We started a fire, cooked chicken, talked and he went to sleep fairly early. I’ve always been a night owl and I was sort of just chilling there on my side when I realized I was putting a lot of pressure on my phone. I lean up to get it out of my pocket and I see it.

It’s a smudge. A gray film hanging in the air. My first instinct is it’s the moon reflecting light off the aluminum foil onto the rock ceiling. I look for the aluminum foil – can’t see it. I look for the moon – it’s raining, no moon.

That’s the moment I realized I had no idea what I was looking at. That’s the only time I’ve ever felt actual terror in my life. I immediately scrambled back and yell for my friend to wake up. And the smudge hesitated then accelerated away and dissipated as if it was never there.

It was frightening not because of how it looked, but more so that I didn’t have a damn clue what it was.

We thought maybe some folks were screwing with us with flashlights, but no one was around and it honestly wasn’t bright enough to be a flashlight. It was just slightly brighter than the dark wall behind it.

I’m a scientist and while I have an open mind, I’m also pretty skeptical; but I honestly believe I saw something.

No idea what it was; damn interesting though.

Slovish

6. The Lone Survivor

Couple of years ago, I’m with my ex on vacation in another country.

One night I had the weirdest dream – I’m with my coworkers and it’s in the middle of the night and all of us see a plane crash far away in the horizon. We all panic and I’m suddenly teleported to my own apartment. Waiting for the elevator with my ex when it arrives and out comes the happiest kid I’ve ever seen. Smiling and jump walking like kids do. I turn to my ex and say “Wonder what she was so happy about”.

Then I wake up. My gut says something is wrong. I instantly remember the plane, thinking “what the hell was this about? Am I safe to fly home after this?”

My grandmother is one of those that always have an explanation for your dreams. After about 5 phone calls, I finally get in touch with her. She calms me down and says “Don’t worry if you weren’t on the plane” I start to relax but can’t stop thinking about it.

Day goes on as usual, we head back and forth to the beach. Later when we’re getting ready before going out for dinner, we take turns to shower and I’m sitting on the bed watching local Turkish news.

There it was, plane crash in Africa and one kid survived. I froze.

r0ss0neri

7. Projector 5

I worked at a movie theater for a few years in high school. Throughout my time there I was always told of the ghost names Fred who haunted screen 5. There were always weird thing happening in that theater – screen randomly flickering despite changing projectors, colder in there than anywhere else, stuff like that. The doors to the building would randomly open and close sometimes too.

The story behind Fred was that he was an old custodian who worked cleaning the theater overnight. He was very religious and kept a rosary with him. He died of a heart attack and somehow his rosary ended up hanging next to projector 5. A few years later the theater remodeled and one of the managers took the rosary as a joke. On his way home he crashed, his car rolling down a ditch leaving him with some moderate injuries. The next day, the rosary was back hanging by the projector with no one knowing how it got there. Strange stuff.

TheKangarooKing

8. Roommates Share Nightmares

When I lived off campus with my two friends, our apartment had multiple weird occasions. First I noticed that my closet door would always be open. I always close my closet before going to bed because I had way too many nightmares as a child, so I knew for a fact I would close it. My roommate told me she would have a reoccurrence of the same dream most nights. It was of a man that she said she never met and he would be choking her in her room, and she would wake up gasping for air.

This was also the only time I ever had sleep paralysis. I never had it in my life and after graduating I haven’t had it since. I know some say sleep paralysis is linked with the paranormal. One time I came home and no one was at the apartment, so I decided to take a quick 20 min nap before my next class. I heard knocking on my door and assumed it was my roommate since we both had the same class together, we always carpooled. I told her to come in but she wouldn’t and just continued to knock. I got annoyed and got up to open the door quickly and no one was there. I yelled her name but no one was in the apartment. Then, I kid you not, the microwave turned on, and it freaked me the fuck out. I grabbed my bag and went to class early.

When the lease was up we were talking to the owners, they told us apparently the apartment building use to be an old movie theater that burnt down and we weren’t the first that had weird occurrences.

Jiilllzzz

9. Dodgeball

One time I was with my mom and we were visiting one of her friends. I was 8 at the time.

I was playing with some toys while mom and her friend were talking, and a rubber ball (think the kind that you used to have in gym class, for dodgeball) rolls down the stairs, stopping on the bottom stair (as in, one up from the floor).

All three of us stop and look at it for a moment, and my mom being the shithead she is, she says, “Okay, but can you throw it?”

The ball goes FLYING across the room and breaks a window.

Yeah, we got the fuck out of that house very fast.

partofbreakfast

10. Unexplained Scratches

I went to St. Augustine, Florida on vacation years ago with friends. We went on a haunted places tour. One stop was the old Spanish war hospital. I stood between two of the beds in one of the recovery rooms while the tour guide was speaking. When we got outside my friend panicked, pointing at my ankles. They were covered in brand new bleeding gashes and scrapes. I was about a foot away from either bed and hadn’t brushed against anything or touched my legs in any way. The tour guide gave me spray and bandaids and told me I wasn’t the first person this had happened to.

The scratches didn’t hurt at all, and I know they weren’t bug bites because they were about an inch long and wrapped from the front of my leg around toward my Achilles’ tendon. They were almost exactly uniform. I know I didn’t do it myself because my fingernails were too short from a nail-biting habit and lack of blood on my hands. It was bizarre. I’m sure there’s some explanation but I don’t know what.

sweetrhymepurereason

11. A Shocking Message

Was talking to a friend on my laptop, who was in a really scary situation with their mother who had flipped out at them and threatened to call the police on them. I was trying to console this friend, and reassure them that if the police showed up then the police would take the side of the friend (who had literally done nothing wrong – for context, this mother was a manipulative shit who would often make up lies about her kid so that she could be in the right)… And then my laptop suddenly glitched out, and suddenly my textbox filled with multiple iterations of this exact quote:

‘They won’t help you’

That. Just repeatedly over and over, something like twenty times. I went sheet white. Checked my pastebox, no, there was nothing like that there. Scrolled up through the chat log… Nothing like that there either. It was just a phantom string of text – and I have no idea where it came from. It never happened again either.

I never told the friend about that particular incident. Some things are kinder just to not say.

ExSightAbleDeafFuck

12. The House That Left A Mark

My family and I had just moved into a new house, and I began getting these recurring dreams where I would enter into a dark square room with only one door at the other side, nothing else. I could always feel this dark presence behind me, but I was always too scared to look.

I usually woke up just before I entered through the first door, but there was one night where it was different. That night, I stayed in my “dream” long enough to enter through the first door. Nothing happened. I looked around the second room, and it looked exactly as the first. There was nothing around except for a door at the other side of the room.

I could feel the dark presence following closely behind me as I made my way to the door. As I entered the third room, I noticed there was no door at the other side. I quickly turned around to try and run back to where I came from, but the door slammed shut. Suddenly, I feel several SHARP stabs piercing through my back. I woke up then drenched in my own sweat.

As it was summer time during the period I had these recurring dreams, I went out to the pool a lot with some other neighborhood friends. Shortly after I had that dream, I went swimming again with said friends, and they pointed out a huge cluster of marks on my back. I went home and did the two mirror thing to view my own back, and sure enough, there it was.

This was nearly 15 years ago, and the marks have faded quite a bit but still visible. I have other stories about living in that house too, but this was by far the scariest to me since there was actually a mark left on me.

beepboopbeepmeow

13. Home Alone?

Hearing a baby cry and a man saying help me in a distressed voice when I was home alone. Happened within 5 seconds of each other but nobody believes me and I don’t blame them but it’s what I heard and it freaked me the hell out.

chadthecrawdad

14. The Old Hag

As a young teenager, I had a really scary nightmare in the middle of the night where I was sitting on my parent’s bed and looking in their mirror; and in the mirror, I saw a woman sitting behind me with dead-looking eyes and long, black stringy hair covering her face. In the dream, I turned around and no one was there. When I turned back around to the mirror, she was even closer. This was probably around 1999 or so; and at that point, I hadn’t seen a lot of scary movies that used that effect, so it scared the absolute crap out of me.

I woke up from the nightmare, and my bed started shaking violently. I had a daybed with a metal frame, and it felt like a fully-grown adult was standing at the end of the bed, shaking it back and forth with all of their might.

It went on for several minutes, and I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t even make any noise. It stopped suddenly, and I still couldn’t make myself move for a few minutes after that.

I finally managed to jump out of bed and run to my parents’ room and wake them up to tell them what had just happened. Of course, they came up with all sorts of alternate theories (you were just dreaming, you were shaking the bed yourself and didn’t realize it), and they didn’t believe me.

It was (and still is) so very clearly and solidly real to me…and I have no idea what it was.

happybex

15. The 200 Hundred Year Old Home

Growing up I would live with my mother during the school year and live with my dad during the summer. I would say when I was maybe 5 or 7 was when my dad ended up meetings my step-mom and they ended up living together at my step mom’s place. The house that she lived in had been (I guess) owned by their family for 196 years at the time (it’s an old house out in rural America). All I knew was that it was old as shit.

The earliest memories I can recall from the first summer I ended up staying there I just had this eerily feeling over me constantly and especially during the evening/ night. Like that of a decaying feeling. The only way I could imagine describing the feeling is that of someone being told after 20 years of a what they felt was a happy marriage suddenly their spouse is divorcing them- and it’s final. The sadness, hurt, anger and other emotions that would follow is what I felt in that house except it wasn’t a separation of marriage that caused it but of death. something or someone had died in that house a long time ago and refused to move on, regardless if time and other factors would move on without it.

That’s how it felt to me.

Anyways, fast forward a few years later, my stepmom becomes pregnant with my second sister and my dad’s first daughter. So, in preparation, they end up having an addition put on the house so they can have their own place and my future baby sister could have her own place, meanwhile my step brother and I shared a room (I didn’t live there year round so it made sense).

That’s when everything started.

I just remember when we came back to live in the house after the addition was put in, it was immediately exciting to see the big changes that had been done to the house and see how they were going to set up the room for my future baby sister and all that jazz. The first night back there, I honestly think changed me. I used to before then, was a heavy sleeper to the point I would snore and would wake everyone else up before myself. Today I am such a light sleeper, it’s disgusting. I just remember waking up one night and the room was particularly dark and instantly fear- just set over me. just to give some brief background info on me at the time, I was probably 5′ something and weighing a hardy 170 lbs probably, (I was a fatty growing up. lol) and I had a confidence that at that age that made me feel that I was strong and to be reckoned with (oh god watch out world here come’s the fat 7 yr old- he’s dangerous. lol). That was the first time that I just felt so scared and defenseless I didn’t know what to do. like something was just, there looming over me in the dark and watching me, wanting to make me feel unwanted there. Over a period of weeks, this feeling would come and go every other night and was so bothering some nights that I eventually would sprint and end up sleeping on the floor in my dad and step mom’s room. They hated that. lol

Well, sure enough, a month later I overheard my dad and step mom talking and come to find out my dad had also been having sleeping issues as well. He was telling her house he’d just have this feeling come over him like every night of someone standing right in the middle of his torso, a cold feeling, and would leave him alone. Makes sense why he suddenly started to “forget” to turn the tv off at night to give some sort of distraction from what HE knew and what I knew our minds would turn to when we would lay down at night. To top it off my step brother at this time began to have an imaginary friend that would play toys with him.

My step mom decided to ask my step brother one day about his “special friend” and wanted to know about him. I guess he was an old black man and knew my stepmom somehow?? (My stepmom and all of them are black- my dad is on the opposite side of that color spectrum) After trying to figure out who it could possibly be, my step mom’s mother said if it could have been an actual person. From the description and other random details, it could have been her mom’s grandfather. Cool.

I think the eeriest thing about his “friend” he had too was that he had one particular toy he LOVED to play with and conveniently enough it was some electronic toy that had like a person or a creature in a box that when you pressed the button it rumbled and would make noises saying “Let me out!!!” and “helpppp!!” (I actually do remember witnessing it go off on its own- even without batteries) I think the climax of this for me was one night I remember hearing a toy go off in my sister’s room (oh ya, they had the baby and she’s a couple months old at this point) and the feeling in my gut…. god help me. I thought it was soo unique that 1. only I woke up and heard this and 2. everyone was dead asleep. I figured I would ignore it and it would eventually stop and I could go back to sleep well…. it didn’t. If I could have guessed the time of which this was going off, it had to have been at least for 20 some odd minutes non-stop going off. I would quietly yell to my brother from across the room to see if he would wake- nothing. So with all the fuck it’s left in me, I got up and quickly ran into her room and I started throwing each toy out of that toy chest one after another till I got to the bottom and saw the toy that was making all the racket. When I grabbed it and tried to find the switch to turn it off it did that thing that would happen in some sort of cliche ghost movie- it turned off. I noped soo fast out of that room and into my bed and under the covers I was such a mess. Maybe 10 minutes after that my baby sister lets out a blood-curdling scream that of something I would imagine a person would make if they were having a limb cut off against their will or their life was in danger. Luckily that woke my parents up and they ran in there to get here. After this happening 3-5 nights in a row (like clockwork) they decided to sleep with her in their room.

My saving grace was that the summer was finally over and I had to go back to living back with my mother for the school year. I guess while I was living with my mother some more things had happened there to a point my stepmom ended up asking my step brother to “tell his friend to go away- he’s not welcomed here”. Apparently that pissed “him” off but ended up agreeing and leaving.

Since then, I don’t think I’ve felt anything with that house anymore. Ever since that summer though I’ve never been able o fully get over that. I am such a light sleeper now and other than my mother’s mom dealing with spiritual things/ mysticism in her youth I can’t think of any reason that why it happened particularly to me and my dad (apparently my dad had some “weird” things happen to him growing up according to my g’ma).

MrSnootybooty

16. The Hand In Grandma’s Guest Room

The most terrifying paranormal experience I had would have to be the experiences I had in my grandma’s guest room. When I was young I remember staying in that room and ever time I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sensation of someone or something running their fingers up my spine. I would be fully awake, but too petrified to move. This happened every time I stayed in that room. When I was in middle school my parents end up moving into my grandma’s house and guess what? My sister and I would share the old guest room. I thought things would be different, but every so often I would wake up and experience that sensation again. At one point I even shot up and looked around the room, only to find nothing in sight. I’d lay down again and try to sleep, but there it was again… The feeling of someone running their fingers up and down my spine. It got to the point where I was just laying in bed trying to sleep and it would just happen. You’d think something like this wouldn’t be scary, but something about that feeling made me feel terrified. As if I was getting touched inappropriately by some stranger. There was nothing I could really do to make it stop. I could only lay there and wait Until it was done. We ended up moving out of my grandma’s house for a while when I entered high school and moved back around my sophomore year of college. I’m happy to say that I don’t experience that anymore in the room.

XxGardeniaxX

17. The ‘Haunted As Fuck’ Apartment

My first apartment was haunted as fuck, I have no other explanation. It was just a little one, with four bedrooms and a living room and kitchen in the middle intended for college kids to live in. It was a bit off campus and right next to a gigantic cemetery, which is why I think it had the activity that it did.

There were two main ghosts if you want to call them that, as far as I can tell. We ended up just referring to them as “masculine” and “feminine.” The main event that kicked off the activity was one night, we were all hanging in our rooms, most with the doors closed. I remember hearing what sounded like two people talking, one voice was light and feminine and the other was lower and much more masculine, coming from the main area/kitchen. They had a long conversation from the way it sounded, at first, I thought it was a roommate and a girl he brought over but after a while realized that it wasn’t anything like his voice. I opened that door and it was like the talking stopped mid-sentence. Not long after my roommate came from his door across the hall, said he heard it too, and we just kinda looked at each other for a bit and decided to go for a walk cause it was just creepy.

This event set off a chain reaction of weird shit: Another night, it sounded like something punched the wall as hard as it could in the kitchen after some jumbled speaking. Literally, “Blah blah, BAMMMM.” It reverberated around the whole kitchen, scared the shit out of all of us because we were just about to sleep. You would hear talking from another room on occasion. Just weird mumbles and the like, sometimes there would be more than one voice. You would always see shadows moving at the periphery of your vision. More than once saw full form figures. My friend at the time and roommate moved out after he saw something dark and human shaped in his Skype window through his webcam standing in his doorway, a short while before I left. Once there was one just standing in a friend’s room while he was away, I just ignored it and went into my room and locked the door, I think I had some shock going on. You felt like you were being watched quite often. Footsteps, all the time. Ranging from hard to soft. One time I was up around 9 o’clock, and I kept hearing someone walking on the grass outside the building, back and forth, while the window was open. That unmistakable swish-swish of shoes on grass. At first, I just thought it was another tenant, but after a while, I looked and there was no one there, and yet I could still hear someone walking back and forth along the side of the building. What made it even more freaky was I was the only one living there at the time, and the units were mostly empty because it was summer.

My friend had a baking sheet thrown at him. It flew from the top of the fridge where we kept our pans right at his head while cooking. This happened after he was trying to communicate and was taunting the “ghost.” It wasn’t uncommon to have things like keys, cups, etc knocked off the counters or having things move to a different spot than where you had left it. But the greatest, and freakiest was the first Christmas of the two years I lived there. I had gone home for the break, and we had all left around the same time. We had locked the place up as we had left, and turned all the lights off and latched everything. While at home, there was this video card that I had left in my apt. that my friend was wanting to take a look at, we thought we could fix it for him. So we drove the hour-long drive back to my apartment to pick it up. When we got there the place had the fucking worst feeling I have ever experienced. Just felt oppression walking into the place. All the lights were on, and my friend’s computer was playing a movie. That part freaked me out the most because he had locked the door to his room and had shut his computer off and he had this stupid long password.

Thinking that someone had broke in, I grabbed a knife and we cleared room to room. I had to jimmy open my friend’s room that had the computer playing a movie, but there was no one there. No sign of force entry, all the windows were locked. Wanting to get the fuck out of there, I just chalked it up to the weird apartment and we decided to both use the bathroom and get the hell out with the video card. As I’m looking for the card, my friend just shouts “HOLY SHIT” from the bathroom and comes out pure white, pants still unbuttoned. He says while he was peeing, something whispered in his ear from the shower. He couldn’t make out what it was saying, but it was a feminine voice. He never believed me when I told him the place was weird, he didn’t doubt me after that and it took him a long time before he would come visit me again in that apartment.

Finally, all the weird shit came to a head. It would go through phases, where things were relatively quiet for a while to batshit crazy for a month. This particular cycle was pretty bad, and my friend/roommate was really being bothered. He went to the landlady to complain, and maybe get us out of our contract and she said and I quote: “Oh, don’t worry. We have had a lot of complaints about that in the past, but no one has ever gotten hurt!”

I was and still am an atheist, I despise religion, but that situation really forced me to change my mind on ghosts and the afterlife. It really felt like at times something was trying to talk to us, and at times something was just trying to troll us. It really messed with my friend, he had a personality change and became quite an asshole, I don’t talk to him and kinda fucking hate him. But, I think a lot of that came from this apartment we were at, and the effects it had on him mentally. As lame as the TV shows make it out to be, I really got into ghost hunting, already a passing hobby, and had some crazy experiences because of this. I think it’s something that we just can’t prove yet, death is something beyond what we can quantify to the best of our abilities.

For anyone that asks, we had a CO detector, never alarmed us to any problem. Not sure about infra-sound, but I doubt it.

zetaridley

18. The Face In The Glass Door

My 2-year-old was really sick and throwing up every half hour one night. So I stayed up with her so I could keep an eye on her. We were sitting on the couch in the family room around 11 pm. I was watching TV and she had dozed off in my lap. I thought about getting up to close the blinds on the glass double-doors that lead into the backyard but I didn’t want to disturb my daughter. I was kind of staring off, lost in my own thoughts when I realized I was actually staring at something odd. It looked like a face was peering back at me through the glass door. My heart started to race as I snapped to attention and realized to my horror that there was a face staring back at me! It looked like a man’s face but because it was so dark out, it was hard to make out any features. The face didn’t move but it looked like he/it had a small, creepy smile. The eyes also looked slightly red. Not glowing red but like swollen. I didn’t see a body, just the face. Also, it was kind of low, as if he were crouched down.

I didn’t know what to do. I was frozen with fear. I glanced to the TV and pretended to be watching it as I thought up a plan. I briefly glanced back at the face and it was gone! This scared me more than if it had still been there. Eventually, I began to relax though and started to convince myself that it was just some sort of illusion brought on by exhaustion and the way the lights in the room reflected against the glass. About fifteen minutes later I glanced at the glass doors again and saw something that made my blood run cold: something was hanging off the side of the door! It was on the outside of the door and it looked like some huge shadowy man/monkey/thing was hanging there by an arm and gently swinging to and fro, like a kid would swing on the stall doors in a public bathroom. (We used to swing on the bathroom stall doors as kids so this is the only way I could describe it.) But what really scared me was the weird smile and the red swollen eyes on the thing’s head. I didn’t care if this was an illusion, I was done!

That was it for me! I bundled up my daughter in my arms and fled the house. I had gone over to my neighbor’s and her husband offered to check around my house. He said he didn’t find anything when he returned…something I figured would happen. I never saw anything like that again but I did hear weird noises in my bedroom that night.

buttononmyback

19. The Mask At The Funeral Home

We own a house in Indiana that used to be a funeral home decades ago. My wife lives there, I’m in New York, but visit occasionally. I was laying in bed, and I remember being woken by a turn signal colored amber light in my eyes. That didn’t make sense, and I rolled over onto my back. It was then that a face appeared through the door to the bedroom, in the same amber hue as the light that woke me. Best I could describe was a tiki mask. I grabbed my wife’s arm really hard and she yelped. The face turned the slightest bit, towards her, then back through the door.

She asked why I woke her. After I explain she said, “yeah, just tell it to leave you alone, and it stops.” Apparently, it’s fairly common.

impvette

20. Peaches In The Cellar

As a kid, we played in the basement a lot. The floor was open and cement so we could roller skate around. Also, the walls were either dirt or brick so we were allowed to shoot bb guns at targets. Basically, I wasn’t scared of the basement at all as a kid. One day my sister was in a side room that had jars of peaches and pickles. Dirt cellar type room, stayed cold even in the summer. She wouldn’t let me in and I was sure she was eating peaches. I could see her feet under the crack of the door and I stuck my fingers under and she messed around with my fingers and giggled. I felt that her fingers were wet and I said: “don’t eat all the peaches, I want some.” Then she pushed down on my fingers SO HARD and it hurt and she was grunting and basically freaking out. I started screaming and tugging. Finally, I pulled my hands back and she was quiet for a moment before she hauled off and kicked the door REALLY HARD!

I ran upstairs to tell on her and there she was with my mom in the kitchen. It was pretty fuckin freaky. No one believed me. In fact, my mom just said my imagination had gotten away from me and to forget about it.

Pun-Chi

21. His Mother Lied

When I was about 11, I woke up in the middle of the night and sat STRAIGHT up immediately for whatever reason. I remember the sound I heard that woke me up was like shuffling on carpet. Anyway, I sat straight up and at the end of my bed, a man was standing there. He wasn’t facing me, he was staring at the bookshelf on the wall parallel to my bed. I just stared at him… he slowly turned to face me, leaned forward and got what I remember being like a foot away from my face, and just scowled the most evil looking scowl to this day that I’ve ever seen. His eyes were like hot coals, I described it at the time by saying “he had fire in his eyes.” So as he was just standing there, staring at me with his embers for eyes… poof, he just disappeared. So this is where the weirder stuff starts to happen. I remember laying down, trying to go back to sleep and telling myself “I didn’t see that, I didn’t see that, it was a dream,” before getting overwhelmed. I walked across the hall to my parent’s bedroom and told my mom I had a nightmare, so my dad went to sleep in my room. I tried to fall back asleep but couldn’t stop staring at the door and then I broke down and freaked out and told her what I saw. She said I was so frightened and my heart was beating so fast she was afraid I’d have a stroke or something.

Fast forward about 5 years, I was an angsty teenage atheist and used my experience as proof of how real dreams can seem, etc, until my dad pops up “you should ask your mother what she saw.” I was… confused. I’d been convinced it was just a waking dream for years now. Turns out, a couple months before I saw him, my mom woke up and saw the same man I described standing next to the ironing board. When I told her he had “fire in his eyes,” and I described his face, she knew it was the same man. She also thought it was a dream, and never told me because I’d be too afraid to stay in the house.

Everything I remember after seeing the man was not correct. I didn’t lay back down and calmly walk to my parent’s room–I reacted hysterically and ran into their room screaming “there was a man in my room!” causing my dad to jump up and search everywhere for this guy, who of course he couldn’t find. I remember sleeping in the room again after a couple months… Parents and sister say I never slept in that room again, I wouldn’t even go in there. I was so excruciatingly terrified that my memories changed to make it seem like I wasn’t that frightened I guess. I never saw him again after that night. But before I saw him, I would always feel afraid… My parent’s bathroom always gave me the creeps and I couldn’t explain it. I found out years later that he died in their room.

I guess it sounds kind of stupid compared to other stories here, but it was pretty traumatic. We lived in the house for two more years, and I do remember times when I had to walk past my bedroom… I’d pause, and then sprint. I will try to draw a sketch of what I remember him looking like. I’m 27 now, but I can still see it vividly.

BurberryCustardbath

More From Thought Catalog