33 People Reveal Their Terrifying Encounters With The Paranormal
Found on r/AskReddit. Republished with permission from the original authors.
1. Not sure if this is considered paranormal, but when I get fevers as a child, I would always, in my fugue and pain-infused state, hear a man counting in a very deep voice. He would count from 1 and up; as the numbers get larger, the voice gets louder and more intense. It started to get less frequent as I grew older and now I do not experience it anymore. I’ve brushed it aside as a recurring nightmare until only recently, I’ve learned that my sister would experience the exact same thing when she was younger as well.
It’s not the scariest thing, but it does send shivers down my spine trying to comprehend this.
2. A few years ago one night at around 3AM my wife and I were sleeping and I feel myself slowly waking up from a really deep sleep. My eyes started lifting up and as soon as they focused on the lamp on my dresser it slid off and shattered on the floor. My wife and I quickly sat up and looked at each other horrified at the startling noise. We agreed we would clean it in the morning and went back to sleep. The next morning when we woke up the lamp was at the foot of the bed (about 5 feet from where it fell) completely in tact and not broken at all. We are still trying to make sense of it.
3. The only one I have is when I was in 4th grade. When I was little, I would always sleep with my door open. I went though a faze where I would wake up between 3:00 /4:00 AM every night, and every single night I would hear footsteps walking up my stairs, around my living room, through my dining room, across my kitchen and down my hallway. They would always stop right before my doorway, then turn around and go back into the basement. But one night they didn’t stop, what I saw was a shadow of a little girl/boy (couldn’t tell) walk right in front of my doorway, look at me for a few seconds, then it walked away, back down the stairs.
I slept with the door closed the next night.
– asds10
4. From 3 until 13 I lived in a nice home out near yosemite national park, nothing super spectacular about it, 4 bedrooms, a den, dining room, the norm. Just down a little dirt road and (if you’ve ever been around those parts you’ll know) miles away from civilization. My whole childhood I was visited by this girl in white, she never spoke, I would just wake up at night and see or feel her there. I asked my dad and his response every time was, “The men in our family can see ghosts.”
My rationale of this (I’m a skeptic, I remain that to this day but the story I’m telling made me question) was that we had some sort of mild schizophrenia running through our family. It didn’t bother me, she didn’t look like other people. There was something off about her.
After my father died my mother decided to sell the house and went through a realtor. We never once had contact with the buyers, only knew them by name. The buyers had a son who went to the same school as our old neighbors (dear friends of the family) and the son apparently came to school without sleep repeatedly, complaining that there was a girl who watched him at night and that he needed to get out.
Ugh, shivers up my spine every time I remember this.
– oiraves
5. We moved into a house and everything was really quite the first 6 months or so.
The neighbors told us that the people who lived there before had moved after their teenage son died in a motorcycle accident. Then after that first 6 months my dad died, not in the house, after that, stuff started to happen.
I would have friends sleep over and one night my friend woke me up because she said there was a young guy standing in my bathroom. So I went and checked and nothing was there.
Over the next few years just about any friends that stayed over night had said they saw the tall blonde young guy walking around the house. We did have a few other things happen like a wineglass was on the counter and it broke. No one was touching it, it just shattered on the counter.
Another time during the winter we had the heater on and my room was always the warmest in the house and it was ice cold as you walked across my bedroom to the bathroom that was connected.
The creepiest thing was when my boyfriend was sleeping on the couch in the middle of the night and he said he woke up to a young guy pushing him off on to the floor. He said the guy didn’t say anything, but my boyfriend at the time knew that he had to leave and he did. He wouldn’t stay at my place after that.
6. Well, I never had a haunted house, but the street I grew up on was cursed. Everyone on the street built their house new there, so it was a new development. It was all big properties. So probably like 10 on the street. Something really bad happened to every house on the street.
One suicide, one hit and run (death), one cancer (and death), one guy fell off a ladder and broke his neck, one kid (~18) was declared mentally insane. There were more but I can’t remember the specifics. One bad thing per house. Our house “got off light”, i.e. no one died or became paralysed. Our dad became abusive to my mum and older siblings and it destroyed our family. My mum and us kids moved away. The next people who moved into our house built a big garage/shed and then their teenage son hung himself in it about a year later.
We found out later on that an Aboriginal elder (this is in Australia) found rock markings warning to stay away from the area as there were bad spirits there.
– jb2386
7. Woke up one night to a loud screeching noise, similar to the screech the nazgul make in LOTR. The entire room was flashing rapidly in bright colors, my computer turned on for a split second, enough to get the fans rattling, and my computer screen had static on it. The entire ordeal was over in less than a second. I still don’t know if it really happened or if my brain was just playing me tricks.
8. Okay, this may take a bit of doing so bear with me.
Army base, Soest, West Germany (as was). A still, dark, autumn evening, must have been warm because it was the kind of temperature you don’t notice. Me (13) and a mate (15) just dossing around before I had to go in.
Behind the flats where we live was a green area with a play area. Only one street light so it was very dark compared to our street and the well lit main route through the camp, which was about 80-100 metres away from where walking.
No traffic, nothing. It was never busy and this was on a weekend evening so literally, no traffic and no one out and about as far as we could tell. Which suited two teenagers just fine, thanks. Bear with me, this is important.
So, we’re heading between our respective blocks of flats and into the darkened park area. And we stop dead.
On the main road, moving right to left was a figure. Vaguely person shaped, but undulating and waving like cloth under water, it glided along the middle of the road.
Based on what it obscured behind it as it moved, I’d estimate it to be between 8-10 foot. But at the very least it was larger than average man size. This shape, this thing, was not walking, there was none of the slight up and down motion of walking. It just glided, smoothly, at a fast walking pace I’d guess. And it was black. Not someone-wearing-black-clothes black. It was a hole cut into the night. No reflections, no shadows or shades. Just blackness.
It seemed like a lifetime as I soaked this detail up. In reality it couldn’t have been more than 2 or 3 seconds.
I whispered, breathed, “Do you see that?”
My friend, in a whisper, replied. “Yes.”
And the fucking thing changed direction. Towards us.
The last image I have, before we broke and ran, was of it rising up as it came over the kerb. This is what makes it real for me. This is something that had mass, that obeyed at least something of the physical world.
It moved from the brightly lit road into the same darkness in which we stood. We broke and ran for our lives.
Back onto our street and into my mate’s block. The fucker then bolted back to his own home, leaving me wondering how the hell I was going to get to my block.
After a while, the fear of the repercussions from my dad for being late in overrode my fear of what might be out there, in the night. So I ran, eyes straight ahead, the ten or so metres to my own front door. I was in too much trouble for being late to ever say anything when I got home.
Sometimes, when I’m walking and the night is warm and still and quiet, I think about it and I wonder what I’d do if I ever saw it again. Run away? Or face it down and maybe solve a 30-year-old mystery?
Honestly, I just don’t know.
9. I’ve suffered from insomnia as far back as I can remember. I was in second grade and it was really early in the morning, I think around 5 or so. I had a little TV on my nightstand and was definitely watching LOTR on VHS. I had the volume up super loud because my ceiling fan always made a ruckus throughout the night. I was super into the movie when all of the sudden all of the sound around me started to slowly fade away. I remember I became confused and reached to turn my TV up thinking it had broken, but then I realized the sound of the fan had faded with it. The only way I can describe it is comparing it to someone turning the volume down on a car radio. I was suddenly overwhelmed by an intense feeling of euphoria. I have never experienced anything like it. I absolutely cannot describe how utterly at peace I felt. I was able to comprehend what was happening, and then it clicked in my head that I was dying. Keep in mind that I’m in second grade so this is a pretty intense conclusion, but I just knew. I rolled over onto my back ready to, and excited to accept my fate.
That was when I saw it. There was a large white figure in my doorway, just hovering, and pulsating a white aura. I quickly panicked, and began calling out for my brother (his room was across the hall). The figure glided to the end of my bed and just sat there, watching. I’m not really sure how much time passed, but the figure suddenly vanished, sound came back, and the euphoria disappeared.
I jumped out of bed and ran into my brothers room where I practically flew into his bed. He woke up and when he saw how panicked I was he began to panic as well. I was hysterical and just kept telling him it was a ghost. We did what any other kids would do and his under the covers. After a while we got anxious, and I bravely made a peep hole I’m the blanket to check the time on the clock, hoping that it would be daylight soon. 5:30, the clock read 5:30 in the morning. Then the phone rang, and it rang, and rang, and rang. Me and my brother started to panic even more, then silence. Once again it began to ring, and ring, and ring. We jumped out of bed and took turns running from light switch to light switch until we had a light path to the living room (our house was 5,000+ square foot, this was not an easy task). We got to the living room and watched cartoons until my mom woke up.
She was livid, yelling at us for being up so early. I told her I saw a ghost, which only made her more upset. My brother, who was always tormenting my irrational fears, got mad at her and started telling her this wasn’t a joke and it wasn’t my imagination. I starting telling her to check the phone, because I saw the ghost around 5:30 and it must have been the ghost calling (kid logic). She went to check the phone and went to the other room for a while, suddenly she wasn’t upset anymore. When we asked if it was said ghost she said it was a telemarketer. She was so nice about it she let me sleep I’m her room the next few days. I thought maybe since it was my brother’s birthday that day that she just didn’t want to argue, but she never let me sleep in her room.
I got home from school one on the 15th, I saw the ghost in the early hours on the 13th. My mom called me to the family room and told me to sit in her lap and that she needed to tell me something, I obliged. My great grandma passed away in the hospital at 5:30 a.m. and the phone calls were my grandma calling to notify us. Me and great-grandma were extremely close.
To this day I get chills thinking about it. I know that there are a few ways to explain the occurrence, but I know for a fact that it was 100% a paranormal experience. My m and brother still back me up on it today.
– No_Bees
10. I work in a very old school. I’ve heard far off sounds (like voices and normal daily activity) in an otherwise empty school. I’ve also heard doors closing and electronic toys move and make noise when I know I am alone.
11. So I get home from my job as a server at midnight. One of my roommates was in the navy and was deployed at the time and the other one was at his girlfriends house. I cook myself dinner, and as I’m cooking my dog starts growling and barking towards the middle of the room at nothing. This is especially weird because she never, ever barks. She was a rescue and I bought her as a sense of security when I’m home alone (I’m a female) and I could never get her to bark at anyone.
I dismiss her barking as odd but I finish cooking and eat. I start to clean and turn the sink on because it takes forever to get hot, but right when I turned around the sink turned off on its own. Again, I think it’s odd, but I don’t really think it’s worth freaking out over. The hair on the back of my dog is standing up straight, but no one is home and it’s midnight so I figure I’d just tough it out, even though I was beginning to get a little spooked.
After cleaning, I go in the bathroom and sit on the sink to pluck my eyebrows. My bathroom was small, with the sink immediately to your right as you enter, with the toilet next to it, bathtub at the end, and toilet paper dispenser directly across the toilet (it was a really narrow room so you could reach the TP while sitting on the toilet). So the way I was sitting, the toilet paper dispenser was behind me. After 2-3 minutes I hear a weird noise behind me, so I turn around and I shit you not, the whole roll of toilet paper was unraveling fast as fuck, like someone was pulling it.
I nope’d the fuck out of that bathroom. The door was closed and it had no windows, so it couldn’t have been a breeze. I put a leash on my dog and ran out of that apartment faster than Ussain Bolt. By the time this happened it was already around 2 am. None of my friends were awake so I spent the night sitting outside of the door to my apartment. When I went back in the next morning, the whole roll of toilet paper was on the ground, and the roll was probably 3/4 full. I’m talking about a good 5-10 meters of toilet paper. After that day I never had an odd experience quite like that one ever again, but one of my roommates did mention that a few times he’d come home and find every door and cabinet in the place open, when he’d specifically remembered closing them and leaving them that way when he left (this was when I was on vacation out of state and our other roommate was still deployed).
12. I was about 9 or 10.
I went to my friend Allison’s house. She and her parents were at her soccer game. (Found out later).
Her house was 3 lots down the street on the other side. The house had a 6 foot fence around the property, opening up to the driveway. Whenever she wasn’t home, I would just wait for her in the back yard. Her swing set was totally bad ass. So here I am swinging, waiting for Allison, having a great time. I am watching through their kitchen window, through the living room, and out the front window. Hoping to see her or her parents walk up to the front door.
Then I saw.
A dark slowly moving object/figure thing move across the front room. The next few seconds seemed to last years. I am no longer swinging. Still sitting on my favorite swing, I am no longer happy. Deathly still I watch this figure, holding my breath as it glides. No No No. The voice in my head shrieks as the pitch black shadow stops.
Panic is starting to set in my young mind. Hold perfectly still I tell myself. Intently watching as the figure starts to turn towards me. I see no face or any detail but I feel it as it faces me. Definitely male. Definitely full of hate. Every hairs feels like its standing on my head.
Scared shitless and not able to move. I tell myself this can’t be real. It’s all some waking dream. The thing starts moving towards me. I let out a loud gasp like scream. It’s almost like I can feel it’s intention. I am frozen by the hate I can feel. I look past the door to the kitchen to the driveway. If that guy comes out of the door at me I’ll never make it past I think. I look the other way towards the fence. That side doesn’t open but I can climb it. We always did to get to the field. I have never climbed it great, but I can.
Looking back at the window. I see the shadow man slide right through the window. AAAHHHHH I scream as I run towards the field. Never looking back I climb that fence the fastest I ever did. Falling off the top of the fence, I land on my back. Jump up and run, as fast as I have in my life, back to my house.
Upon entering my house I run straight to my room and enter my closet. This is where I sat for the next 4 hours until my parents convinced me to come out and eat.
To this day I still get chills when I recall that stuff. Hee-bee jee-bees.
13. When I was around 6 or 7 years old, my uncle who had just visited from the Philippines showed us a doll that sang “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” when you pressed a button on her hand. He brought it with the intention that one of my girl cousins might want it, but in all honesty, we all thought the doll was creepy (especially since it sang the song in a slow, ominous manner). Not knowing what to do with it, we took out the batteries and threw it back in the box that my uncle had put it in. Right after we left the room, all we heard was a muffled “The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the waterspout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out.”
The doll was still singing WITHOUT FUCKING BATTERIES. No one was in the room at the time, which means no one could have replaced the batteries nor pressed the button on her hand.
And yeah, I’m now aware that residual charge is most likely the culprit. Nonetheless, I still want to give a big fuck you to capacitors for traumatizing me as a kid.
14. This was several years ago, when I was a total deadbeat and lived with my then-girlfriend’s parents. They had a tri-level house, with the basement that contained our living space and my girlfriend and my bedroom. Upstairs, was the living space for everyone else, the dining room, and kitchen. The third level had the master bedroom, and two additional bedrooms for my girlfriend’s sisters.
I was home alone one night, with her parents off with friends, my girlfriend at a friend’s, and her sisters were at an all night church thing. I elected to stay home and play WoW all night. Where my computer and desk sat, right above my head, was an AC vent. Often, I could hear her sister playing in her room from that vent. I was leveling my Paladin or something when I heard laughing and giggling coming from the vent. Nobody was supposed to be home, so my heart picked up. I glanced at the clock on my computer, and it read 1:36 AM. I remember this all very distinctly.
I went to go investigate and headed upstairs. The way the landings sits is at the top of those stairs, you can turn left and either go upstairs or go into the kitchen. I climbed the second set of stairs and opened the first door on the left which was her young sister’s room, which is directly above the basement.
Inside, I used the light of my phone to illuminate as best I could. I saw a small figure, what I assumed was a small girl wrapped in a white sheet in the center of the room. Cue pants shitting. This figure, this young girl, stops playing with the dolls and slowly looks at me.
It let out the most ear shattering scream you can imagine. My skin crawls just thinking about it and my chest tightens just remembering it.
I wish I could tell you what transpired, but I remember waking up at the bottom of the landing, right next to the door of the kitchen. I stumbled into the kitchen to get a drink of water and contemplate what the fuck just happened. I glanced at the clock on the microwave.
The clock read 4:46 AM.
We never found the sheet the next day, but the dolls the figure was playing with were sitting in the middle of the room, away from the toy chest which they were inside of that afternoon when she cleaned her room which is across the room.
– Omnus89
15. Scariest thing to happen to me involves an urban legend in my hometown, this happened around six(?) years ago.
To sum it up, it’s about a woman who hung herself from a Poinciana tree after being raped by Japanese fishermen after discovering that she was pregnant. You can read about it here. Thus, she is called the Poinciana woman.
Anyway, she is said to be situated around the army base we have here. So, late one night my eldest sister, brother and their partners decided to go to the army tunnels, break in and have a sesh. They didn’t stay for very long because once they were in they said that they had heard footsteps and ran out and left thinking it was a security guard.
They arrived home at around 11:00PM and went to sleep; my mother, little brother and I were still awake however. Mum was drunk, playing music loud from the TV, I was on the family computer in the loungeroom (ah, the 90s), and my brother was getting ready to go to bed.
Suddenly, he had ran out into the loungeroom and was screaming, “CAN YOU HEAR THAT?” Of course, we couldn’t hear what he was referring to so he muted the television and we were up against the window with our ears pressed against it trying to listen for whatever it was we were supposed to hear.
There was a light moan coming from outside the window, it sounded feminine. It wasn’t just outside the window we were at, it circled around the house, we could hear it coming from the window opposite to the one we were at and then the door on the side. It began getting louder, and louder, and louder, the wind literally picked up and was hurdling around with the sound. It got so loud and dramatic that my brother and I were on the ground with our ears covered, crying and screaming. We have spoken about this after the incident and we both recall being able to hear the sound at the exact same volume even with our ears covered, almost as if it was in our heads.
This went on for around 5-10 minutes, when it suddenly just stopped. It was silent and there was no wind outside. Mum was there with us and recalls nothing happening, she didn’t hear a thing.
It was only after we moved out of that house years later when we realized there was a Poinciana tree outside of that window.
16. The story I’m about to tell is completely true, having said that there are some disclaimers I will add at the end. About three years ago I moved to the city I’m living in now to go to school. Before I moved I was living about 1400 kilometres West, working as a pump tech. The month before I moved I had to make a few trips back and forth to finalize everything – find an apartment etcetera. Anyway, what happened took place on one of the return trips.
It was late at night, and I was almost home – about two hours away. Now, this was only my second time making this return drive – and so because I didn’t have the route perfectly worked out, I was using a GPS to supplement my knowledge of the road.
I reached an area where I knew I had to make an exit, problem was I couldn’t remember which one it was. I looked at the GPS and it told me I had about a KM before my turn. So I look at the GPS periodically and gauge my distance. When I was about 500 metres from the turn the GPS did something odd. The screen flickered momentarily, and then started changing the route. The GPS now told me to drive an extra 15 km and turn off on a different exit. Now, I was in no mood to argue with my GPS, so I figured, “Fuck it, it’s calculating for the quickest route, what’s the worst that can happen?” So I comply.
I took the turn the GPS told me to take, and drove along the road for about 45 minutes with no problem. My iPod was dead so I was listening to the radio, and smoking some cigarettes, just having the best time I could possibly have alone on a highway at 3 am after having already driven 9-10 hours. That’s around the point I began entering a dense fog. This was one of those fogs where you can barely see the road in front of you, the kind where you have to kill your high beams because they’ll just blind you.
While driving through this fog I began to notice that parts of the road felt a little weird to drive on, and when I hit sections where the fog cleared… The highway was suddenly a good 15 feet above the ditches. You literally could not see the ditches on either side of the road, just the fields they climbed towards – it looked as if the highway was a winding bridge. What was worse, however, was what had been making the odd sounds on the road. Road kill. But, not just regular run over squirrel and stuff like that. It was more like somebody fed a deer a stick dynamite and then set it off. Animals had exploded all over the road, as if a semi had been ploughing into animals at an incredible speed. It wasn’t even just one or two animals either. Every kilometre had at least two exploded looking animals on the pavement, in between the intermittent walls of fog.
I looked at the GPS again, and it said that I had about 80 km to my turn off – which was a problem, because I was only doing about 60 as the conditions were absolute shit. So I suck it up and keep going.
The radio lost its signal around this point, two stations were fighting over the only frequency that seemed to be getting any signal whatsoever. I turned it down a bit and lit up another cigarette. Then I noticed a yellow glow on the road, coming from the ditch. So instinctively slowed down in case it might’ve been a deer or something. As I passed by, going about 30, it didn’t look like a deer at all. It looked as though it had hairless skin, and sort of like a dark mustard sort of colour to it. It was right at the edge of the highway too, as if peering over from the ditch. I cannot say for certain, but it almost looked human-like. Bipedal, hairless. But it’s eyes were golden, and its skin dark yellow. What was most off putting is that when I drove by it… It hunkered down, as if it were trying hide, with only it’s eyes visible. And then as I passed, it’s head turned and got up a bit again – watching me drive off. That really freaked me out. Little did I know shit was about to get crazy.
As you can imagine, I didn’t know what to think about whatever it is I may or may not have seen by the ditch, but rest assured I just wanted to get home by this point. Fog cleared considerably and the highway eventually turned into a heavily wooded area. That didn’t seem to be populated whatsoever. I started to realize there was a problem when I was about 2 Kilometres away from the highway I was supposed to turn onto… There was no apparent highway in the distance. When I got 300 metres away, still no highway. So I get closer and closer, the GPS tells me I’ll need to turn right in 200 metres. Then 100 metres. Then 50. And then… It tells me not to turn right, but to turn left instead. And this all so confusing because there should have been a highway, but all I could see was a single, tiny, dirt road.
I really should have known better… Should have known that turning down that road was a bad idea – but what else was I supposed to do? I turn left, onto this dirt road, which was more like a path. It was so narrow. My car barely fit onto it. This where the most frightening thing that has ever happened in my life occurred… The road starts doubling back towards the direction I had come from, like a half-circle, and the road is so narrow, and the trees are so thick that I can’t actually see what I’m turning towards until I’ve already made the turn. The second the turn completed, the dirt road ended and led into a small clearing. Inside that clearing? Oh, you know, just an abandoned church and graveyard. I look up at the bell tower and saw what I was, and still am, convinced was a silhouette staring out towards me… Then I look down at my GPS, and on it’s screen, were the three most terrifying words imaginable: You Have Arrived.
Well I got the fuck out of there as fast as I could.
Now for the disclaimer: I don’t know what the hell was going on that night and I never will. I was obviously tired as hell, but to perceive thing that inaccurately? I don’t know, I might have just been seeing things… But I KNOW that GPS took me somewhere it shouldn’t have. Well, just wanted to share that – and again, it’s 100% true – to the best of my recollection… And no, I haven’t used that GPS since.
17. I live in Mississauga and I have a Hungarian Kuvasz named K2 (after the famous peak in Pakistan).
I go for daily walks every day with him, once in morning and once in night. Most nights are pretty uneventful except when K2 stops in front of a bench near a thickly wooded area and just stares at it. At first, I try to ignore it thinking k2 just sits there for rest or there are squirrels nearby.
However lately, I have been noticing K2 getting pretty aggressive at the bench like it does when its about to fight another dog. I try to ignore it, but one day, K2 starts barking really loudly and drags me to fight whatever its seeing. Now this is pretty dangerous especially during winter as its brutal in Canada and if I slip in the snow, there’s no one to help me.
I had to use all my energy to drag him away from that area and I was kinda spooked and kinda excited. I asked my dad, who believes in paranormal stuff, how to deal with this and he said, if there is paranormal stuff going around then its best that you either change the walking route or go talk to it and tell it that we mean no harm. Naturally I chose the latter because I like walking in the forest as it’s so peaceful and walking through that bench area was the only way to get to it. Me and K2 went and when we got to the bench, I said loudly, “Peace be upon you, we mean no harm, if you can walk away whenever my dog is around, I would greatly appreciate it.” I shit you not, this thing actually got up and left. I can you tell you because K2’s head was moving wherever this thing was moving. I was so scared at that point but it was worth it in the end as it made the walking that much peaceful. However, lately, whenever my dog gets fixated at something in the house, I get pretty scared.
18. One night when I was 10, I was asleep in bed and was woken up by my bedroom door opening then someone sitting on my bed. I felt the graze on my leg and the bed sink as they sat. Thinking it was my mom having something to tell me, I open my eyes only to see a pale, eyeless (just black empty sockets) boy who seemed to be my age sitting at the foot of my bed with his legs crossed “staring” at me, or facing my direction since he had no eyes. He then reached his hand toward me and he was holding what looked like a little black box. I was freaked out, but as I reached to grab it, he hesitantly pulled back. I reached out further for it and said “give it”. As I did so, I blinked, and by the time I reopened my eyes, he was gone, the spot of the bed where was sitting lifted back into place but the imprint of someone sitting there was still present. I told my mom in the morning and she was slightly freaked but assured me I was just dreaming.
Fast forward 5 years.
I had my girlfriend over to do homework. After homework she took a nap while she waited for her parents to pick her up. When they arrived, I tried waking her to let her know. I nudged her, and she opened her eyes so sudden already looking in the direction of the corner of the room where the wall meets the ceiling, lifting her finger and pointed. And as fast as she woke, she fell asleep again. I attempted to wake her again. She came to full consciousness, and I asked her what the hell that was about and explained what she just did. She said, “Oh I thought I was dreaming, but up on the wall I saw a little boy with no eyes just there in a ‘Spider-man’ pose staring at me” That’s when I freaked out and told her the story, for the first time, of when I saw what I guessed was the same kid.
Fast forward another 5 years, still with the same girlfriend, and by this time we had a 2-year-old daughter. We were living in my old bedroom at my parents house. My daughter would wake up at the same time every night and start talking. For a while we thought it was a normal baby thing, until I noticed it was almost the same conversation every night. I playfully asked her one night who she was talking to every night. She responded, “a little boy, he talks to me, he’s nice. He’s lost and looking for his mommy.” I told my mom what happened the next morning and before I got to tell her what I thought, she said “I remember when that happened to you, then your girlfriend, I have no idea what that is.” By then, neither my girlfriend or I have seen the “little boy” after our first encounter, but my daughter continued her nightly conversations until we got our own place later that year.
– kmendo4
19. When I was in 4th year (I was 13/14 years old – I have no idea what Year that is in American schools) I went to a private convent school. One of the girls there was really nice, and I was invited to her house for an over night stay. She lived in big 18th Century hall in the North East of England – miles away from anywhere. She had ponies, and I was REALLY excited at the thought of staying over, and riding out.
I didn’t know at the time, her mum and dad were divorcing and he was also a “nasty” alcoholic. My friend had an older sister, who had been in trouble at school and was generally having a hard time – smoking, fighting etc.
And the house had a real life poltergeist. No one bloody told me that before I turned up (and I suppose I wouldn’t have known what it was then).
My Mum and Granny took me in the car. We drove up to the front of the house and sat there a moment, admiring the place. I always remember this… as we all heard something with big claws scratch down the side of the car. It sounds so weird, but it’s honestly what we heard. Everyone was a bit “Oh my god!” and looked out the car window – nothing there. When we got out (I did NOT want to get out!) there were no scratches. I have NO idea what it could have been. I asked my Mum a while later what she thought and she weakly answered “badger?” but a badger wouldn’t have gone up and scratched a car surely? There were no dogs outside, and the dogs they had were shut in puppy cages in the kitchen. I have no idea…
The house did NOT have a nice feeling. It was pretty and made of a lovely grey stone with stone hounds on the gateposts, but when you walked in, it felt…ominous. As a teenager I was aware that the atmosphere was very “flat” but didn’t really think about it at the time. So we had dinner, went to see the horses etc. and generally mucked about.
They had interconnecting doors, with little spaces inside. Do you know what I mean? So you would open one door, step up a step and then straight away open the next door. The space inside wasn’t much more than a foot. Well, I opened the first door, went inside and then couldn’t open the door in front of me, or the door behind. After a bit of frantically shaking the door and giving it a good kick, it finally flew open and I shot out into the next room. It had never “stuck” before and everyone crowded round to see what had happened.
Later on that day we were in the garden, when someone started throwing pebbles at us. Thinking it was the older sister, we shouted for them to stop, but the pebbles kept going – they never hit us, just plopped around us on the front lawn. It looked as if they were being thrown from an upstairs window, but I couldn’t see anyone doing it. And yes, when we went inside to complain, the sister was in the kitchen with her Mum, and had been the whole time. I suppose she could have dashed around from the front to the back…
The house was jolly cold (although all houses were then) and they couldn’t keep their goldfish alive, the dogs wouldn’t go into the front room, and all in all it wasn’t a very nice place to sleep. My friend said that she used to see phantom dogs on the front lawn, running around and often heard footsteps in the attic.
I had a nice weekend – went out for a ride, did a bit of shopping with my friend, and then went home again. In Lower Sixth, my friend dropped out of school (she was really bright) and I lost touch. I never went back to the house, but I often wonder whether the strange things were still happening or whether they stopped when the family moved out.
20. This isn’t really scary; more of a paranormal interesting event that I swear on. When I was in first grade, I was pretty close with my Sunday school class kids. Obviously we only saw each other once a week, but we still all got along great. One morning before church, my parents asked me if I knew a kid named Greg in my class. I said yes, and they proceeded to say that he had suffocated in his sleep the night before. I didn’t really understand the concept and seriousness of death at the time, so I just said “Oh” and kind of brushed it off, although I absolutely fully understood that I wouldn’t be seeing Greg anymore.
The weekend before, Greg had made a little aluminum foil helmet that he ran around in during recess, saying that he was an astronaut. So, back to when my parents told me about his death, I looked into the sky expecting to see his angel floating up to heaven. I swear, I saw him spreading his arms and flying through the clouds, wearing his aluminum astronaut helmet. You’re all going to think it was my little kid imagination, and I don’t believe in ghosts at all, but what I saw that day has stuck with me ever since. And I think, because seeing him running around in his astronaut helmet was the last time I saw him with a smile on his face, that when I saw him in the clouds upon finding out about his death, I coped with his passing just fine.
21. When I was a child my brothers and I would hear a young girl cry in our house. my dad tried to approach the sound but then it all became silent and then he heard the same girl say “mommy” right behind him. after a while we just ignored it and it seemed to go away.
22. When I was 5 I lived with my grandparents on a farm that was built in 1912 because my mom had joined the Army while she was single and the Army won’t let you have a kid without family. The original owners had been shot, killed, and buried in unmarked graves behind the barn. Years later someone poured concrete over the graves. Over the course of the 3 Years I lived there ever single night I would hear dishes by the sink rattle and be grown against the floor. We would wake up every morning to broken dishes on the floor. I’d also been pushed multiple times. And I used to play with this small kid that I guess wasn’t real. I would play tag with him.
23. It was a few months ago and I’d just moved into my new student house with a few friends, they’d all gone home for a few days because it was summer break but I stayed there.
I was home alone and it was awesome for the first day or two, then things started to get a bit weird. For example small things had been moved like some of my notes or like the TV remote. I just assumed that it could have been the wind or something. The next few days I started to hear noises in the night, not like loud noises more like small whispers, as if someone was in the house trying to be quiet, but I just thought it was my brain playing tricks on me.
The night after that, I heard a door slam and it woke me the fuck up and I sleep like the dead! So I got up and started freaking out because the bathroom light was on (the light switch is on the inside of the bathroom). I went to try and open the door and it was locked and the light then turned off and the door unlocked. No one was there, but I screamed and hid under the covers for the rest of the night. I stayed up all night then went home to my parents for a few days until the other guys came back. When I explained it to them, they called bullshit and nothing has happened since.
– Anonymous
24. When I was a dumb kid my brother and I were playing around on the stairs. I was at the top jumping around in a pillow case. I slipped, obviously, and went tumbling down backwards. Everything went into slow motion as things sometimes do when your life is in peril. As I was flipping over and over, the back of my skull getting closer by the second to smashing into the hard concrete basement floor, I noticed a movement coming from the dark basement. Suddenly a large bag of dog food fly across the room as if hurled by an invisible hand with absurd precision, and interposed itself between my head and the floor. My skull smashes into the bag a millisecond later, spraying kibble instead of skull fragments around the room. My brother and I were both slackjawed and confused. The flying bag had traveled at least ten feet, likely saving me from death or serious injury.
I used to think this was evidence for God, or angels, or that I have some kind of purpose but I realize this is evidence for nothing in particular except that life is bizarre and unexpected things can and do happen.
25. I have a ghost that occasionally visits me in my sleep and tells me things that either are about to happen or things that people are hiding from me. It is a female, and from the looks of what she is wearing she is either from the 30’s or 40’s. A few things I can recall off the top of my head:
When I was in high school she told me that one of my friends was going to break his leg playing a sport he usually doesn’t. Next day, this happened.
She told me that a girl I had a crush on was going to give me her number, it happened two days later.
She told me when both of my dogs were going to die. She now also shows their spirits to me. They haven’t left the house, they still act the same as if they were alive.
Now the creepiest one for me is that about 3 months ago she told me that I was missing a female figure in my life. I questioned her, saying that if I should be married or something, and she laughed and said it was family and that I should ask my mother. I asked my mother about this and it turns out she had a miscarriage about 2 years before she had me. It was supposed to be a girl.
There have been a few other instances, but these are the ones I can recall at the moment.
26. I work as a press photographer. One day I was photographing a family whose house was “haunted”. I don’t believe in anything like that. Anyways, was photographing them in the living room and there was a crash and a bang from the kitchen. We went in and the cutlery drawer had flew out and emptied itself across the floor. That was fucking odd. I had a good look around for any string, mechanisms in the drawer, nothing.
27. I was having a weird dream one night and woke up and saw the dream in my room. I remember I was on my back, which is weird because I don’t sleep on my back, and I woke up. I felt a heaviness in the room and turned to my door. There was the silhouette of a man standing in my doorway. He wasn’t really threatening but my heart started to race. He just stood there. No facial features. No movement. Just a black shape. Then I hear something and shift my gaze to the foot of my bed. Its a grandfather clock. Then I hear a voice say something. Something about time. Deep voice. Calming almost. I close my eyes. When I open them again everything is normal. I run out of my bedroom. I wish I knew what it had said.
– cxwash
28. I was sitting at home with my grandma, she was doing a word search and I was browsing Reddit on my iPad. No radio, tv, or other source of noise in the house was on. Clear as day I hear my name (nickname like if my name was Michael I heard “Mike”) so I turned to my grandma and she’s already looking back at me…I ask “did you call me?” And she says “no, but I heard someone say your name”. Fuuuuuck.
29. My mom was diagnosed with late stage breast cancer in 2009. It was a struggle and the doctors didn’t expect her to pull through but she did like a champ. My mom is a fighter and as she puts it, “refused to let cancer kick her ass.”
Fast forward to 2012 and she decided to undergo reconstructive surgery. The surgery goes well and she is put into recovery. She spends a day drifting in and out of consciousness which was expected after a surgery like that. The whole time she is still hooked up to a morphine drip to help her pain. After being reassured by the doctors that everything was fine we decided to go to our homes and shower and sleep. My sister elects to stay just in case anything goes down.
Fast forward to the next morning and my sister is calling me in tears saying I needed to get to the hospital right now. I rush up to the hospital and am pulled aside by the doctors and told that my mom has suffered some complications from the surgery and is a coma. A half hour goes by and my step dad arrives (I live by myself closer to the hospital) and the doctors pull him and I into her room. They say that her lungs are filling with fluids at a fast rate. They say she is unlikely to recover and we need to make a decision to keep her on life support or pull the plug. We refused to let her go like that. Three days go by and My mom starts showing some cognitive activity. By the end of the week she fully wakes up.
The relevant part happens after she wakes up. She looks at my step dad and I and asks when we came into the room. We tell her we’ve been here all week. She seemed really dumbfounded by this and replies she has only been in the room for a day or two. She then asks where her grandmother had gone. This creeped us out. My great-grandmother passed away in early 2007. When my stepdad tried to explain this to her, she replied that she had spent the last couple of days with her talking about the family. She said that Grandma got really weird and told her that she can’t give up because she had children to take care of.
According to my mom, around the time Grandma said this, mom became aware of us being in the room and Grandma was gone. It was really weird to hear her talk about it. To this day she has no recollection of being in a coma. She knows she was now but all she can remember is spending a few days in the hospital with my Grandmother talking about the family.
30. My first home I was born and raised in always felt like something to call home during the day. But at night, it seemed like there’s always something around the corner or right behind you. I felt it, My cousins felt it, and my parents felt it, but always ignored it. Weird stuff will always happens like doors opening and slamming themselves waking me up but that wasn’t the least of my concerns.
One time at night I was reading a book while laying down on my floor with half my body in my closet (IDK why) And the power when off. Chills immediately ran down my spine. Almost a second after, I heard a deep toned growling right behind me and I ran crying to my mom knocking over a lot of stuff (it was pitch black). She yelled at me when the lights turned on and didn’t believe me. I begged her to let me sleep with her that night because I just didn’t feel safe at all in the fucking room.
I had no other choice but to just try to think it was my imagination and sleep in there anyway. I woke up to my head hitting my bed frame and my right leg being dragged into my closet. God fucking damn I’m getting chills just remembering this. I knew something, someone was in there and wanted me to look at it but I didn’t.
I screamed my lungs out and ran straight to my mom and cried all night telling her what happened. She got mad at me for waking her up and being a girl (my family is rather, tough I guess you can say). That night I slept at the foot of her bed shaking trying to only look towards my mother because I just had this haunting feeling of someone or something standing right behind me just staring. A bunch of other stuff happened in that house but that was by far the most terrifying for me.
31. Night before last, I had just finished taking a shower, it was 1:30AM. I was walking out of the bathroom, all I had was my phone for light in one hand and my pile of dirty clothes in the other. I was walking across the living room to the laundry room that’s past the kitchen. 2 steps into the living room I hear someone whisper my name loudly in my ear. I flip out and turn around, looking for whoever said it. There’s no one in the pitch black darkness, and everyone else is asleep. I NOPE straight to the laundry room, throw my clothes in there, run back to the hallway, into my room and start fucking praying. My house isn’t known for paranormal shit, but in the last few years we’ve had incidents with shadow people and disembodied voices. One event of disembodied voices was when my mom and I were cooking, my brother was out for a jog. I’m cutting the meat into strips and my mom is cutting the bacon. (Carne en su Jugo.) We hear what sounds like my brother singing in the shower hitting a high note (He liked to sing in the shower and was in choir.) I make a joking comment about how there he goes again. Three minutes later he walks in the front door from his jog. NOPE NOPE NOPE.
32. When I was a kid, down the road from us lived the sweetest elderly couple on the planet. They were kind, loving, friendly. Just all around the most awesome people on the planet. I considered them a set of grandparents.
Well, one day, I think it was 2004 or so… I was up late, bull shitting on the internet, it was just after midnight when I smelled something weird. My room smelled like Cocoa Butter lotion. I was like “Wtf?”, I sniffed around for the source, and found nothing. I brought my Mom up and she sniffed around and smelled it too.
I shrugged and went back to gaming. The smell lingered for about 4 hours before finally disappearing. I didn’t think anything of it until the next day.
The elderly woman I mentioned died in her sleep that same night, shortly after midnight. And did I mention she loved Cocoa Butter lotion? ‘Cause, she fucking LOVED Cocoa Butter lotion. …Yeah. I think I was visited by a ghost.
Well, that didn’t end there because the smell returned the next night too…
This time I knew what it was, so I started speaking to her, saying my goodbyes, thanked her for being around, etc. After a couple hours I went to bed and the smell was still there and it was REALLY starting to freak me out.
Eventually I snapped and told her to stop and go away because she was scaring me. Within a couple minutes the smell up and vanished.
And I cried because it hit me that she was gone, and she came to see me and I yelled at her…
WELL IT STILL DOESN’T END THERE.
A few years later, my uncle (Who I later found out was my real father, who didn’t want me) was dying of cancer (Throat I think), and was in the hospital. Then one day shortly after he was admitted, I “randomly” smelled cocoa butter lotion again at about 4:00 pm. It only stayed for about 2 minutes then disappeared, but I knew what it was… Half hour later they call us and tell us that he died at 4:00 pm.
1 week later, the night before the funeral, late at night I was trying to sleep and the smell came back again. I said out loud that I would “see” him again in the morning and the smell went away almost instantly.
Not sure if it’s related, but the next day my grandmother was admitted to the hospital with a possible heart attack (It wasn’t, it was really bad heartburn). That was a fun thing to get a call for right after a funeral…
About a year later, the elderly man I mentioned before, he died in his sleep, and I smelled it again that same night, it didn’t stay long though and I was confused as to “who” it might be. Got the call the next day.
He was a rather sad case… After his wife passed, it literally broke his mind… He was fine before it, but when she passed he went full blown Alzheimer’s.
So anyway, I smell when people close to me die. They smell like cocoa butter lotion.
– Endulos
33. I once got a X-Ray and saw a spooky skeley.
