25 Terrorized People Reveal The Story That Still Makes Them Shiver Today

Don’t read these stories from Ask Reddit before bed — unless you want to wake up screaming.

A terrorized girl
Unsplash / Melanie Wasser

1. A stranger from Snapchat found out where I lived and stood outside my house

“A bloke added me on snapchat a while back. (Some random. Thought he was from school). He starts messaging me on Snapchat flirting with me, which made me feel really uncomfortable since I’m straight. I then told him I wasn’t interested in guys where he loses his shit rages at me saying he wasn’t gay. When he was calling me “cute” and stuff before. I then proceed to ignore him and stop replying to his messages just leaving him on read. Later on probably a few days later at around 2am he messages me and says check snapmaps I check and see his bitmoji standing outside my house, needless to say I lose my shit and called the cops. By the time the cops came his bitmoji was off the maps and he had deleted me, what really scares me is he still knows where I live meaning he could be out my house at any time. I honestly don’t know how he found out where I lived since I wasn’t on Snapmaps. Moral of the story don’t add randoms.” — Conmaan

2. I saw a 3D shadow of a man without any facial features

“I was 12 years old, and we were three kids sharing 2 bedrooms. So my dad decided to put up a half wall to make a third. If I stood on my bed I could see into my brothers room. We were young and used to throw a ball over before falling asleep. One night I was just drifting off when my mom taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Psssst. What are you doing?’ I thought, that’s a very weird question, obviously I’m sleeping. So I turn around to answer her, only it’s not my mom. It’s not a person. It looked like a 3D shadow of a man. Just black. I screamed while my eyes were closed , the figure disappeared. My mom and dad came running into my room, I tell them everything, they think it’s just my imagination, but tell me if I’m scared to go sleep in the room with my brother. I tried to sleep but I was shook. My brother woke up once to go use the bathroom upstairs and I pretended I was asleep. I didn’t want him to know I was still afraid. I hear him go into my room, right next door, climb on the bed (springs) and then just stopped. I thought he was trying to purposefully scare me so I look up to show him I’m awake, and see the figure again. Arms crossed with its head resting on his hands. Even though it had no facial features whatsoever, I knew it was looking at me. I try to convince myself it’s just dark, it’s my brother playing a prank and I’m seeing things… then I heard the toilet flush upstairs.

It was just that one night. I never saw anything like it again, or even close. But yeeeaarsss later, in my 20’s. I was living alone and felt the tap on my shoulder. ‘Pssst. What are you doing?’ I’ll stop there cause you’ll think I’m crazy. But that was the last time I heard it. And I’m 31 now. It’s not a ghost story. I will remember that day until I die.” — bottomsup4pups

3. I found a dead body when I was only a teenager

“Found a body when I was 14. Me and my family were hiking Easter morning along the Grand river and me and my sister wanted to explore the riverbank so we each went our separate ways. I saw a backpack hanging from a small tree so I went over but when I got closer I saw a manikin. The manikins hand was holding onto a branch and it was laying face down in the mud wearing jeans and a hoodie with the hood up, there was a gun on the ground (I thought it was fake) and an empty pack of scooby doo fruit gummies. I decided to kick the thing but when my foot connected with its thigh I instantly knew it was a person. Bolted out of there and I told my dad. I thought I kicked some sleeping homeless dude and I was super paranoid sprinting back towards my parents. My father went to investigate and said it was a body so we called 911.

Later found out the guy had killed himself (bullet to the roof of the mouth) but he slightly misfired and probably lived for around 30 seconds after the shot. The police were very surprised we didn’t hear a gunshot because it was that recent. The reason why I thought it was a manikin was because his hand was elevated, this caused all of the blood drain out and pool in his body which made his hand look snow white like a manikins hand would.

Never saw any blood and never got to find out what was in the bag. Thank god I didn’t see his face.” — Sockmonkey33

4. We saw an inhuman creature on the side of the road

“This was roughly about 3 years ago. Now to preface this story, I am not a believer in the supernatural/occult/magic/etc. My best friend, however, does. This is not fake, I did not make this up.

Where I grew up, there’s a road called Indian Cabin Road. It’s a loooooong road that intersects several other roads, eventually going from pavement to dirt after a bit. You eventually end up near a river and another town, but for a while you drive through the woods with no guidance except for the dirt road since no phones get signal out there. Now being from a small town, every kid knows about it. It’s almost a rite of passage. I 100% know that if I were to walk up to any local at a Wawa and ask about Indian Cabin road, they’d immediately say “yeah that place is haunted” and leave it at that.

So anyway, my best friend and I decided to find it and drive down it the night of Halloween. After searching our maps and finding the street it forked off of, we drove down in her Caprice thinking all the while why the fuck did we choose the worst car in the world to go off-roading. She’s a firm believer in the supernatural, so the whole time she’s playing up the fact that it’s Halloween and we’re driving down the most haunted road in our town. I’m rolling my eyes, trying not to laugh, because fuck it, it is Halloween and I might as well enjoy the supposed spookiness of it all. We end up driving most of it without realizing it until we reach the part where the road is essentially a dirt pathway. Not even 10 minutes later, my friend inexplicably stops her car and says that she doesn’t want to drive down anymore because her car can’t handle it. Before I can even reply, I hear her say what the fuck is that in the most bone chilling, terrified voice I have ever heard in my life. In the treeline there’s what only I can describe as this spinal, skeleton thing staring at us with glowing red eyes. It was on all fours, but it’s body was stretched out so that it’s back legs were bigger than its front. It was pitch black outside at this point, but both her highbeams and headlights were on so I am 100% certain it was not a human in a morphsuit or an animal or anything in between. It stared, this inky black creature, and started to move towards us. Now in high stress situations, I usually end up laughing to calm my fears and at this point I started chuckling, telling her it was just a wolf that’s it nothing to be afraid of. My friend immediately booked it out there, repeatedly asking me what it was and what was happening. All I kept saying, all I could say really was, it’s just a wolf it’s just a wolf. I was legitimately scared, and to this day I have no idea what the fuck we saw.

We haven’t drove down there since and my friend repeatedly brings it up whenever I mention I don’t believe in the supernatural.” — horse-opera 

5. A spacecraft followed us down the country road

“This happened back in 2008, just after my family had moved to a rural town in Oregon. I was 12 at the time and my family and I were driving home after visiting my step-grandparents that evening. It was late, around 11pm, and my Mom had decided to take the unlit country backroad home. I was in the backseat with my younger brother, trying to tune out my parents incessant arguing up front while my brother was zoning out and looking out the back window.

Very suddenly he nudges me and points out the back window, insisting I turn around and look. I’m very tired and irritated with my parents who at this point who wont stop yelling at one another so I shrug him off. He becomes more insistent and I can hear fear creeping into his voice. I pull up my hoodie and ignore him. Now he’s frantically trying to get my parent’s attention and they’re screaming at him to shut up.

This goes on for a while but eventually he calms down, although I can hear him turn around in his seat every once in a while to look out the back window. The next day I ask him what had him all worked up in the car. He describes to me in a shaky voice that something had been following behind the car the night before. He detailed seeing three dim points of blue-white light arranged in a black triangle shape following closely behind the car and when my Mom would break the tail lights lit it dimly so he could see a dome-shape in the middle of the black mass. He said it didn’t jostle around like a car would when my Mom drove over the potholes in the road, and it was following us closely, so he thought maybe it was hovering off the ground. It sounds ridiculous, but he told me this with such conviction and fear in his voice I know he must have seen something that night. We drove that road many times after and never experience anything like that again.” — Chyroso72 

6. We saw a woman buried from the waist down and wailing

“I was 12 years old, this was back in 1985, a few of the streets near where I lived were still dirt roads. We lived near a catholic church and there is a fair every year come January. Me and an older friend were walking towards the fair at around 7 Pm, it was already quite dark. All of the sudden, as we crossed the corner and started walking in the dirt road my friend just freezes… What is it? I asked. He got so pale and stammered. In front of us a couple of feet away there was something, hard to describe really… it was dark but this was darker than the darkness, which is the only way I can find to describe it. It was a woman, buried from the waist down and wailing. Her wailing somehow, though near us, was heard in the distance. Both my friend and I immediately thought about ‘La Llorona’ which is a ghost or apparition that usually haunts places with water nearby. It is said that her wailing can be heard far when she is near, and near when she is far. We both started running towards the church which must have been half a mile away or so. As I turned back I could see her slowly crawling out of the ground. I stumbled but regained my footing and kept running behind my friend. We were both shaken up and were unwilling to walk back home until my parents showed up. Since then, a couples of times at night, even as the roads are now paved and there is street lighting, sometimes when I visit the folks I hear the dogs howl a couple of times in the middle of the night, some friends that still live in the old neighborhood say they still can hear her sometimes.” — Lord_Sesshoumaru77

7. A boy was decapitated by the boat cable while out camping

“My friend’s friend was out camping with his dad and his dad’s friend and son. (Sorry if that’s confusing. There are four people; two fathers, two sons). I’m not sure the exact details but they had a winch attached to their truck and they were pulling their boat out of the water. Suddenly and without warning, the cable on the winch snaps and flies through the air decapitating the dad’s friend’s son. Everyone sat still until the father picked up his son’s head and wailed in grief.

I think about this every once it a while. It truly horrifies me. And to think, the father had to break the news to the kid’s mother. I couldn’t imagine telling that to a loved one after what was supposed to be a simple camping trip.” — nibninbin

8. I suffered from demonic oppression

“Over ten years ago I was in a bad place mentally. I am a firm believer in the occult and believe in God, ghosts and the supernatural. At the time I had collected a few Quija boards and was really into trying to speak to the dead. After several months of feeling like I was a medium I was starting to feel.. off. I was having horrendous thoughts that were very out of character for me. Thoughts of suicide, rape, murder and torture to name some of the tamer imaginings I was having.

It got so bad that my hands were bleeding because I could not stop washing them. The guilt I felt from these thoughts was taking me over and I thought I was going insane. It was around this point that I knew I needed to have a conversation with my Mom about what was happening. So I told her everything and she told me I needed to see a doctor. I began researching OCD and the effects of it.

A week or so after confiding in my Mom I went and saw our family doctor. At 16 I was terrified of the idea of being mentally ill. I nervously told the doctor everything that I had been feeling and he fills out a prescription for Prozac and recommends I see a shrink. I take the papers he gives me and shrug home.

I tell my mom what he said and start to plan my road to recovery.

A few days later, while researching some stuff about ouia boards, trying to take my mind off of things I come across an article about something called Demonic Oppression. Ho-lee-fuck. This was me. This was the definition of that was happening to me. My symptoms were all on par with what the article was referencing. Basically it is the idea of not being possessed and having a demon in you but the idea of one being around you trying to bring you down as much as possible. It can lead to demonic possession. The number one route cause believed to entice a negative energy to harass you? Playing with ouija boards.

I then began researching how to be rid of this hypothetical oppression. Get rid of you boards and make sure to dispose of them correctly. I began to do so. Breaking the board and separating the pieces making sure the pieces never touch when disposed of and to seperate the planchettes as well.

I put it all in seperate bags and it sat in our garbage for a day or too.

Garbage day rolls around and I hear the truck outside around the corner making its stops. Shit! I forgot I had kitty litter stuff to throw out so I run down stairs and head to the front door. My Dad stops me at the bottom of the stairs and proceeds to mock me for having to clean up cat shit. I ignore him, not making eye contact as he was annoying me and full on laughing at me at this point. I dart past and throw the shit into our bin to see the ouija board bags being put into the garbage truck.

When I enter the house it’s quiet. I yell to my Dad and no one answers. 15 seconds go by and my mom comes in from work. She says hi and I ask he where Dad went. She tells me he hasn’t been home yet from work and that he had to pick something up from the grocery store. I tell her he must have forgot to stop on the way home because I just spoke to him in person like 2 minutes ago. She said that’s impossible because she was just talking to him on the phone.

I RUN to a phone and call him. Sure enough he’s still at the A&P and he totally confused with what I am talking about. I hang up in complete shock. No one else was home and it 100% looked and sounded like my Dad. I know that was the last hooray for the thing that so much enjoyed making me feel like the devil’s toilet paper.

After the boards were taken away all my symtoms stopped. Like over night stopped.

To this day I am scared to think of what I might have seen had I looked my father in the eyes that day.” — Saethryd

9. I saw bloodstains from a recent murder

“There was a time lapse of around 2 months after my Internship was over and the beginning of Residency. I was looking for a temporary job for that period. Some showed me a temporary assignment for 6 weeks at a very small town, since the local doc was visiting Europe . I am talking of 1984, the era of snail mail, and places instead of people having phones.

I applied, and a few days later I got called for an interview . On due date I started off earlier, since I had to drive 200 miles. I reached the town, and had no difficulty in locating doctor’s office. It was just on the main road. As I pulled into parking area, a middle aged fellow emerged from the ‘office’ area, walked up to me, as I was emerging from the car, and asked, ‘Are you Dr Entropyx1?’ I replied ‘Yes.’

‘Dr X is expecting you, but a little problem emerged, and he had to leave earlier. He asked me to bring you at his house. Is that O.K with you?’

‘No problem,’ I replied. I was asked to follow the man.

We drove for some 30-40 minutes on country roads, and after a stretch of unpaved road, arrived at a large house, surrounded by corn fields on three sides and woods at the back. Whole place was fenced.

I was seated in a room and told to wait for Dr X.

After I had sat down, I began to look around. A 30 X 40 room,approximately, with sofa chairs, coffee tables, nothing else, not even the carpet.

Then my eyes drifted to the floor. And then I noticed some thing. If there is a blood stain on the wall or the floor, and it has been scrubbed almost clean, but not entirely so, you might notice the edges of the stain. Some times they are hard to notice but look hard enough and you will notice them. I was not new to blood and blood stains, I knew one as I saw one.There was a large stain and smaller ones. Then I got up and looked around. The back of my sofa chair had a hole, and as I peeped behind the sofa chair and looked at the wall, there was a clear impact mark of a bullet. Something evil had taken place in that very room and fairly recently. The floor had been cleaned but not very professionally.

I grabbed my file, and hastened out. I ran towards my car, fired the engine before I could close the door, and floored the pedal. I did not look back, but I did hear some shouting ” He is running away”.

Seldom have I driven that fast. Did not stop until I had arrived at my apartment.

Years later, I was discharging a patient and her husband wanted to speak to me about his wife. As we talked, I asked him that I knew he was a Sheriff, but where? He named that very town. I narrated him my story about that place and he went quiet. After a pause he said, ‘You have no idea how lucky have you been. Was that date X of the year Y?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘The blood stain that alerted you belonged to the Dr you had gone to see. He was killed in that room. His wife was murdered in her bedroom. Another Dr was killed two hours later, after you had managed to escape. He too, had come over for an interview. The third candidate was even luckier. By the time he arrived, the culprits had gone. He waited at Dr’s office and finding it closed turned back. They were captured some weeks later and tried.'” — entropyx1 

10. A man in a hooded cape sat on my bed

“This was an experience I had around 2010. I lived in a 2 bedroom condo, but my roommate wasn’t home. I woke up to someone or something in a black hooded cape sitting on the edge of my bed. It turned around and it’s cape was full of millions of stars. It had an extremely low voice and told me that something bad will happen to me in the next two weeks. It then evaporated into the painting in front of my bed. My sister died shortly after this.” — lunahighwind 

11. Two men had a bloody cooler filled with organs

“So near where I live is this little place called Concrete City. It’s just this circle of empty concrete buildings that used to be homes to coal miners or something like that, but it is totally abandoned now and some of the structures are crumbling. It’s like a giant, concrete playground for young adults to smoke up, tag the walls, and play paintball.

So me and a couple others are wandering around the place, and we start coming up on this parked car. I could two people in the front shuffling around and I was just thinking, ‘Oh great, we’re about to walk up on two people screwing.’ Nobody else in the group seemed to pay it any mind, so I keep walking.

Then I notice its not a couple. Two big dudes are in the front, staring us the fuck down, sitting stock still and looking shady as fuck. Still, we all just keep going and at this point, I’m just glad we’re in a group of five and still kind of worried we’re about to get fucked. As in, chopped to bits and spread around in piles.

And then I see why I get this exact feeling. We’re all right up alongside the car now, and I can’t help but glance in the back window. An open cooler filled with bloody ice, a second, closed cooler, probably filled with the same, and a pile of clear plastic bags.

I keep my mouth shut and keep walking. When we’re just passed the car, the engine revs up and those two dudes tear out of there like hell’s behind them.

So it could be a couple of poachers, or maybe organ theft and somewhere in concrete city lay a man with a missing kidney. I dunno, but it was shady as fuck.” — MyBrassPiece

12. We were smoking in a graveyard when a man with a gun appeared

“In highschool me and a buddy made the dumbass decision to smoke weed in a graveyard around 8-9 at night (summertime so it was just now getting dark). I smoked to the point of being totally out of it. We were just chilling next to a tree when I see a man walking down the graveyard. I got a little nervous immediately but blew it off. I then see the man pull out a hand gun and aim towards something (he didn’t notice us at this point and I couldn’t see who or what he was aiming it at). I was so terrified I thought I was mildly hallucinating, I couldn’t even move. My friend hit my side and said, ‘Dude this guy has a fucking gun out we gotta get the fuck out of here.’ We both slowly got up but like the stoned idiots we were, we hit a rock trying to get up and the man finally noticed us. He was a good 200 feet away from us, but the second he saw it he slowly moved towards us with the gun in his hand. We started running at this point, I looked behind my shoulder once and saw him start to run towards us as well. We booked it out of the graveyard and were finally back in my neighborhood. I was terrified for days after that.” — DueyCoyne

13. A stranger stalked us until someone put a gun on him

“I was on a backpacking trip on the Appalachian trail, and my dad and I stopped at one of the many public cabins. We set our bags down, and join the campfire. It was just us and a middle-aged Asian couple. We begin talking and the sun sets, so we don’t expect anyone else to come. Nevertheless, this huge guy with long silver hair sets his small pack down under the awning, and joins us at the fire. He was no less than 6’8, extremely muscular, and had his hair tied back into a ponytail. Imagine a more muscular Geralt from the Witcher. We start talking and he seems very friendly. Then, my dad asks the man: ‘So, where are you from?’ No response. My dad repeats the question, thinking the guy didn’t hear him. No response. The Asian guy asks the question, and suddenly, the big guy explodes yelling, ‘I DON’T KNOW! I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!’ He, then, takes a out a huge bowie knife and a whet stone, and starts sharpening it. All of us decide to pack our stuff and book it to the next cabin, which was about 7 miles away. It was a walk, but we eventually made it there, and there was a dirty hippy dude already there. He stunk like hell, but was harmless. We stop at the campfire hang out for a bit, then I see a reflection out of the corner of my eye. I turn around and see the big, silver haired guy standing in the treeline, spying on us. At that moment, I nearly shat my pants, because there was no way all of us could take this guy on. He was built like a WWE wrestler, and we were all under 6 ft. I let the other people know, and the Asian guy took out a revolver, and told the man to ‘go the fuck off.’ Big guy stands there for a moment, and silently walks off into the woods without making any sound. After that incident, we agreed to have someone keep watch. Since the Asian guy had a gun, he volunteered while we slept. In the morning, I was so glad big guy didn’t come back, because Asian man fell asleep. That shit still gives me chills.” — IlikeFOODmeLikeFOOD

14. A man stared through our window in the middle of the night

“A few years ago I went to the kitchen around 2am to get a glass of water. I figured why put the lights on if I’m gonna be done in 5 seconds, right? So, 10 year old me was in complete darkness when I noticed someone staring through our window, with their hands pressed against the glass (we had see through curtains.) I screamed at the top of my lungs and froze, mom woke up and came running to the kitchen to me crying like a baby in my pajamas. He was already gone but I told her what happened, so she went outside with a knife to look for him but never found him. And that’s why we don’t have see through curtains anymore. I still have an irrational fear of the dark.” — RICE_WITH_YOGHURT

15. My friend appeared bloodied in a hotel room with no memory of how she got there

“Late one night I got a call rom a friend I knew was out of town for a conference. My wife and I were in bed, just about ready to turn out the light. My friend was speaking gibberish, but absolutely panicked. She said she was bleeding, she had no idea where she was, then more gibberish. She asked me and my wife to pick her up from the airport. Her flight was cut short or something and she was on her way back. Never got details on why. Bad phone reception along with all the other confusion. So we hopped into the car to go pick her up. This was about 11 pm.

Halfway to the airport, she calls again. More absolute panic. She’s sobbing over and over “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!!” and I… there was nothing to be sorry about. I had no idea why she was so panicked. I told her it’s ok, but she was phasing between sobbing and just gibberish. Also, she wasn’t flying back. She was in a hotel. We drove next to a mountain and lost the cell signal. But she sounded sure wasn’t flying back tonight. The airport wouldn’t let her fly. They thought she was drunk.

So we turned around and tried calling her for an hour or so. She finally called us. She was in a dark hotel room two time zones away, not where her flight was headed, but the layover location. She didn’t know if someone was with her in the room. Or maybe they had left the room and were coming back. She had no idea why she was there or what hotel it was. Normally, she’s a very sharp woman. I had to walk her through the steps of looking on hotel stationary to get the name of the hotel. Maybe the address. I had to tell her to look on the phone for the phone number. She’s still sobbing and speaking gibberish. She said she was bleeding from her head and her glasses were broken. It was absolutely shocking and grim and so, so creepy to hear it coming from her, and not be able to take any kind of command of the situation.

I called the police in the city where the hotel was located to get the cops to do a wellness check on her. They took her to the hospital. She had been roofied on the airplane and couldn’t tell us anything else about what had happened to her. We picked her up from the airport the next day. She remembered very, very little of it and seemed to be in complete denial, despite wearing the same clothes she left in and having blood smeared on her forehead and busted glasses. But I remembered the panicked calls and the helplessness. It bothered me for weeks, maybe months. It’s still one of the creepiest things I’ve experienced.” — Moni3

16. My stepfather tried to murder my mother in front of me

“I witnessed an argument between my mom and step dad about some green Heinz ketchup my mom had bought.

His response was to drag my mother by her hair to the bedroom where he loaded a shotgun, then pressed his head against hers and tried to force her to pull the trigger. All the while I’m standing in the doorway watching in complete silence.

She ended up saving herself by putting her finger behind the trigger and was left with a blood blister, from him trying to pull it regardless. She eventually wriggled free and he says, ‘I’m just going to kill myself then!’ To which my mom responds with, ‘Well do it outside… because I really don’t feel like cleaning up the mess.’ That took balls. He could have just shot her right there…

What’s crazy is at the time it all seemed so normal to me.” — Tramm

17. There was a mysterious television in the middle of a clearing

“I was walking home from a party about a year or so ago. I live on a bumpy, unpaved hill. So I’m walking up, and I hear someone talking. I wasn’t sure who was talking, but all I know was that it got louder the further up the hill I got. Then I realized, it wasn’t coming from a house, it was coming from this grown-in patch of land. So, being the ignorant little turd I am, I walk into the bushes. I’ve never been in there, so I was freaking out. Then I came to a clearing. In the middle was a lone black/white television playing an old tv show. Then, I heard rustling coming to my left. I ran home as fast as I could.” — i_am_baked420

18. I was saved from the reaper at the last second

“When I was about 12 I loved to climb trees, and at my daycare I was the only one who knew how, so me and all my friends were trying to find the biggest tree in the area surrounding the playground, and we did. Tall and wide, no branches at the bottom, one really long thin branch about 8 feet up. Decided I should climb it, so I wrapped my arms and legs around it and somehow managed to shimmy my way up to that branch. Got up there and my muscles were tanked to the point of shaking. Felt amazing though, all my friends were oohing and aahing. Then suddenly I lose my balance and fall backwards off the thin branch. I remember seeing all of my friends faces scared I was about to drop 8 feet to the ground and onto my head, when suddenly I feel a hand against my back. Not a force or a push, but literally the feeling of a hand pressed against the middle of my back, and it slowly pushes me up and I regain my balance. When I felt that hand, I was completely vertical, and my friends were all very confused at what they just saw. Still don’t know how to explain it.” — Daltonsroar

19. My father’s ghost haunted our house

“My dad committed suicide in my parents’ shower when I was 7. Occasionally, my sister and I would hear the shower door slamming shut and drawers open and close in their bedroom when no one else was home.

One day when the drawer slamming was pretty loud, I walked into the room and said, ‘Dad, please stop because this is scaring me.’ It never happened again.

In high school, I invited a friend over to hang out. As soon as he walked in the door he looked at me and matter-of-factly said, ‘Someone died in here.’ He didn’t know about my dad.” — opkc

20. A dark, slender figure walked through our rooms

“Back in 2008 I was 15, and I lived on a 300 acer ranch in a small town in Idaho. I lived in a 5 bedroom 3 bath 1980’s cheaply built home with my parents and sister. (My 6 older brothers had already grown up, and moved out. Yes I know, big family) My sister and I slept in the bedrooms upstairs, just down the hall from my parents room. Her room was directly across from mine. That year I started having nightmares about dark figures, and then I would wake up around same time every night, 3am. Well one night I wake up, look out into the hallway and a dark figure walks past my door. I blinked a few times, decided I was dreaming, and went back to sleep. The next day I moved my bed so when I woke up I wouldn’t look out the door into the hallway, thus making it harder to imagine things walking by in the night. So 3 a.m. comes around again, and I wake up to a woman’s voice singing this high pitched erie song right next to my ear. There was this dark heavy feeling in the air, and I stopped breathing. The singing continued and then ever so softly I felt someone or something playing with my hair. Softly running it’s hands down my red hair. I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer, because I was too terrified to speak a word out loud. As soon as I finished praying the song stopped and I heard a scream fade away… The next day I told my mom about the experience, and she dismissed it for a dream. I forced myself to believe her. It had to be a dream because if it was real I wouldn’t ever be able to sleep again. Dream or not I moved my bed back to where it had been the night before. 3 a.m. came around again, and suddenly I found myself awake staring at the dark hallway between mine and my sister’s rooms. That’s when a dark slender figure walked in between our rooms, and stood in the hallway. It turned it’s head and looked into my sister’s room, and then into my room. Back into my sister’s room and then turned to look back into my room again. My heart was pounding through my chest and all I wanted to do was scream, but I couldn’t I was so scared that I froze. The figure paused and almost smiled… it wasn’t a smile because I couldn’t make out it’s face, but it was like it knew it had me. Then just as I was gathering the courage to scream, the figure got down on it’s hands and knees and started CRAWLING into my room!! I screamed the most pathetic scream of my life, and yelled there is something in my room! My parents flipped on the lights and come running into my room to find nothing. To this day my parents say I was dreaming, i switched rooms after that, and even now refuse to sleep in that room when I visit my folks. I don’t know what I saw or what happened all I know is that it did happen.” — arhmtp27

21. My old bedroom was haunted

“Background: My old room in my old house is basically a pseudo-attic. It’s on the same level as the attic and has doors that lead to it.

One weekday, I’m playing video games like I always do when I’m truant. I start to hear banging against one of the doors. Not like knocking banging, like, ‘let me into your fucking room so I can kill you’ kind of banging. Something was REALLY fucking mad at me. I thought it was some angry animal that got into my attic through the roof. Called my Mom (I was 15 I think) to call my brother (who never answers my phone calls) to come home while describing the situation. He was busy, so she decided to come home to look in the attic. Nothing in there.

I thought for a while that something made me hallucinate, I never did drugs and didn’t have any illnesses that made me hallucinate (PTSD, but not in that manner). We moved out, and later my Mom talked with the current house owner while she was out walking. They asked her if there was anything unusual about upstairs (my room), and he basically told her that dogs go to that same door and scratch and stare up at it. It’s creepy.” — [deleted] 

22. Someone tried to kidnap me and my girlfriend

“My girlfriend and I went to Wal-mart one night at about 11:30. We park close with only one spot open to us on our left. As we were slowly making our ways down the grocery aisles I happened to notice a guy out of the corner of my eye with no buggy or cart. When I looked over he grabbed a box of something and stared intently at it, you know not the kind of absent minded “i am shopping” kind of look.

I make a side note of it, and we continue down a few more aisles. After seeing the man in our aisles and vicinity a few more time I tell my girlfriend let’s go aimlessly wonder around other parts of the store for a bit so I can gauge if my suspicions are correct.

About 30 minutes later we end up at the self checkout, guess who is sitting on the bench in front of the self check out with no bags? I think to myself, maybe coincidence maybe not.

As we leave the Wal-mart, all of a sudden I get this feeling and tell my girlfriend to stop and I stop abruptly as well. When I turn around this guy has almost run into us he was following so closely and we had stopped so abruptly. He stared at me like a deer in headlights, and so did I because I couldn’t really mentally process the implications of what he (presumably) intended to do.

After a brief deer in headlights, he keeps walking like nothing happens then gets into a windowless white van that is now occupying the empty left parking spot next to my car.

This was a few years ago, and I still think about it a lot and what could have happened. There were too many coincidences for that to merely be my anxiety interpreting the situation as something it wasn’t.” — ayydance

23. A strange car followed me back to my own home

“It was the last couple days of summer vacation, and I was going into either 8th or 9th grade. I decided to take an evening walk, just drinking a soda and walking around, enjoying the weather. I was walking behind some store buildings and tossing some rocks, when a car drove through. I stepped out of the way, let them pass, and I left. I went across the street to a different parking lot, under some lights ’cause it was getting dark. I look back and see the same car had actually turned around in a 15-20 foot wide back alley; Basically, it’s hard to turn in that area. I’m still walking, and it’s matching my speed. After a couple minutes, I get fed up that I was being followed. I stop, turn to face the car (it had breaked when I stopped) and stared straight at the driver-side window. As soon as I did that, this dipshit stepped on it, and disappeared. A while later, I saw the same car in the same apartment complex where I lived. I haven’t seen the car since.” — TheRealCrafting

24. A man drove around our neighborhood, snatching children from the streets

“Recently a friend and I were swapping our favorite horror movies. We were childhood friends that grew up in the same Detroit suburb. I was thinking about an incident that had happened when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade (30 years ago) and she says out of the blue, ‘I don’t know if you remember this but the police started patrolling our neighborhood when we were in 2nd or 3rd grade because when I was walking home from school two men in a blue pickup truck rolled down the window next to me and said ‘hey girl you need a ride home’ and one tried to grab me. I took of running tearing through yards and I told my Mom who called the cops and walked with me to the bus stop after that.’

I confessed that I was thinking about a time when my cousin Sean (recently passed away so he’s been on my mind, also he was really smart, much smarter than I) and I were wandering around the neighborhood like kids did in the 80s. This blue pickup truck pulled up to us and one of the two guys asked us to ‘hop in for a ride’ Sean said ‘no thanks’ and instructed me to sneak into a neighbor’s back porch (luckily unlocked) and stay down. I whispered I was afraid we would get in trouble for not asking the neighbor for permission (not the brightest kid–I would rather die than break the rules I guess) and Sean goes ‘stay here and hide. Act like we went inside because we live here.’ One of the two guys GOT OUT OF THE TRUCK and went into the yard to look for us. We laid low. About 15 minutes later he left. I look back on it now and think ‘what a close call.’

We lived near the area of the Oakland County Child Killer (though in a much poorer neighbor than he targeted) and I’ve spent the last few nights reading about the case and thinking about that blue truck.” — StaceyMS

25. The woman next door has been stalking me

“My neighbor is an old lady. She comes outside everyone once in a while to chat with passersby and garden. The first conversation she had with my dad, she complimented the painting he has hanging in his bedroom. No big deal, she probably saw us moving it in, or glimpsed it at some point before we got curtains. But then she meets our dog and says ‘Well, he’s much scarier through the window, isn’t he?’ Again, NBD, we know he has a habit of pushing aside blinds to stare outside. She comments on things like this often, asking us why we didn’t walk our dog that morning or when we got a new sofa, but she’s just an old lady, right? She’s probably bored and outside a lot. Then she meets me. She swears she’s already met me, but I had never seen her before in my life. She asks me how I like my room and tells me about the girls who had it before me. Weird, but okay… she rubbed me the wrong way but I don’t really mind–she’s fairly easy to avoid.

Or so I thought.

As I was taking the dog outside, I happened to glance over and see her staring at me through the window. She lowers the blinds when she sees that I saw her, but is peeking through them watching me. Later, I go to the kitchen and see her again watching me very intently through the window (our blinds were slightly open to let light in). Then upstairs in my parents room (there’s a window in their bathroom), I see her again as I’m replacing the towels, watching. The more I looked for her, the more I saw: she was watching basically all the time. Not only from her window- she sits in her car and watches us from the street. She sits on her porch and watches. She slowly walks down the street and watches us- literally all hours of the day. And she does it to her other neighbors, and she did it to the people who had our house before us- everyone knew to keep your blinds and curtains shut at all times, otherwise you can guarantee she watches you. It freaked me the hell out.” — QueenSkunky Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Holly is the author of Severe(d): A Creepy Poetry Collection.

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