These Spooky Stories Will Put You In The Halloween Spirit

These Spooky Stories Will Put You In The Halloween Spirit

These stories from Ask Reddit are perfect for October!

1. Sometimes, in the house we presently live in, someone/something climbs into bed with me and pulls in close. And it’s not my husband, the only other human occupant of the house, nor is it the dog or cat. First time it kind of freaked me out, not so much since. Whatever it may be, it seems harmless.

2. Was a producer in a cheap music studio. Had on headphones and was running the board while the talent was in the other room recording vocal tracks. He finishes, I rewind the tape, play back, and hear a bloodcurdling scream coming into my ears. I switch off the tape and talk into the mic to the talent, “Did you hear that?” “No, what?” I rewind the tape and play again and it’s the normal expected music. Never happened again.

3. When I was 11 years old, I was in my home alone in my childhood house in the middle of the day (dad was out, mom was outside) and I saw a full body, all black shadow silhouette of a man wearing a top hat (like Abe Lincoln’s, but not as tall) walk across the hallway wall. The house was built in 1900 so I chalked it up to it being an old house but semi-recently I learned this is a fairly common phenomenon called The Hat Man, mostly seen by young girls and women, associated with domestic abuse and negative “energy” in the home.

Weird things happened in that house often. Objects would suddenly fly across the room, untouched.

Another crazy one: my bedroom in particular was super creepy. I wouldn’t sleep in it, and my dad (who was the biggest skeptic) would tease me and tell me ghosts weren’t real. One night he told me he would sleep in there alone and prove to me it wasn’t scary. The next morning I woke up to him sleeping on the couch and an array of Jesus portraits and holy crosses on the walls of my bedroom. I asked him what happened and he refused to tell me. But he became a big believer in ghosts after that. A total 180.

He didn’t tell me what happened until many years after we moved out of the house. He woke up in the middle of the night to what felt like one of our cats crawling up his leg, only to find no cat. Next the blanket was slowly pulled off the bed from one of the corners at the end and dropped onto the floor. He noped the fuck out of there. I always suspected this may have been an episode of sleep paralysis. But other creepy things happened in that room/house while we were wide awake as well.

After we moved out, my parents sold the house to a single woman. A few months later, the woman called up my mom and asked if we had a problem with it being haunted. The woman said she had set up her bedroom in my old bedroom but found it so creepy, she was sleeping in her guest bedroom instead.

I am not spiritual and I consider myself generally skeptical but some of these things were unexplainable and it was validating that it wasn’t only me who experienced them.

4. A LOT of things. The most amazing was a full body, clear as day apparition of a little girl walking into my parents’ room through the closed door. The thing that creeps me out is the fact that it didn’t. My family has experienced a little girl spirit in this house since before I was born. It had been quite a few years since anyone experienced her (usually disembodied voice as well as pulling sheets or clothes), and when I saw her, it was just a, “Oh, there she is. That’s nice.”

5. I worked for a morgue bagging and tagging dead people and bringing them back to the mortuaries. One night I brought in a body and put it in the freezer. While I was signing the sheet listing the body and the items I brought in, the radio in the other room turned on randomly. This was at Queen of heaven a very Christian mortuary. So it started playing gospel music. This was at 3 a.m. and no one else was around so I have no idea how that radio turned on but I booked it out of there real quick.

6. Between the ages of 5 and 7, I’d occasionally see shadows walking across my bedroom wall at night. Imagine someone making shadow animals but instead its these things that seem human-shaped but something is off about them.

The room my brother and I slept in was always darker than the rest of the place because the streetlights where blocked by an angle and a thick hedge outside of the window. However, I’d still see these things because they would always be outlined in a faint glowing yellow or blue light.

The yellow ones ignored me like they were just passing through. The blue ones liked to fuck with me, though. Usually they’d turn their head towards me and gave off this feeling of menace or travel around the walls towards me laying in my bed as if they were coming for me. They’d move in this eerie way that looked like someone slowing progressing a film frame by frame.

The night when they did get me was last night I ever saw any of them. I never noticed if they had facial feature prior to one extending it’s head from the wall above me and then contorting so it could lean over to grin in my face. It’s looked like a child’s drawing of a monster face but every line of its features had the same blue glow that outlined its body. I didn’t scream I just ran. I ran to my father sleeping in the living room and he basically told me to fuck off. With no other option, I snuck into my grandmothers room and hid in her closet among the mothballed blankets and sheets until morning.

7. I’m a firm believer in “bad energy” because of the summer I spent at my grandma’s house.

My brother and I loved our grandparents and had no notion that there was anything wrong with them. We thought they loved us even more than our own parents. However, I could never shake the uneasy feeling I always had in that house. I just chalked it up to being away from home and in a new place.

One summer, the feeling of dread became more intense. The best way I could describe it was that the house was somehow placed in a surreal nightmare, it didn’t feel real and I could swear there was this heavy sort of “darkness” looming over us at all times. I’d constantly look behind me because I was certain someone was there. I couldn’t take showers and lost sleep that whole time.

And somehow my grandparents didn’t seem normal to me anymore. They were the sweetest and still very loving but in the weirdest way seemed so sinister.

I later found out that my grandmother practiced santeria, used a ouji board to call upon the dead and would routinely curse people she didn’t like. More than that, my mom finally told me that her parents abused her her whole life and that grandpa was a horrible drunk.

8. So anyone who rides horses regularly will know being the last one at the barn SUCKS So I was the last person, so I had to shut off the lights. I had to take my horse back to the barn but where he was kept was not in the main barn. so I shut off the lights and started walking down the path to the other barn. I didn’t have my phone on me so I just used the moonlight

mind you, this horse is BOMBPROOF, he never spooks

I’m walking down a path when he suddenly stops and throws his head back and rears. he has whites in his eyes. I look at what he could possibly be spooking at (I assumed it was an oddly placed shadow) but I couldn’t see much

except eyes

I saw human eyes in the shadows

I’m about to scream when my vision goes blank for a second and I come to. I’m still standing and my horse has calmed down. I shake it off and continue to the barn and put him away with no problem

9. I used to work for a cleaning company and one of the places they had me go to was a restaurant/church. It was surrounded by a graveyard… though to be fair I live 5 minutes away from that graveyard walking. Most of the time I’m cleaning in the very early morning, we’re talking around 4am-7am, I’m cleaning all by my self and no one who works there comes in until 9am. For the first three months it was fine and I wasn’t feeling spooked or anything though one day in early august I’m just going downstairs to put some supplies away when I’m hit with this sudden and intense feeling of danger as if something was telling me I wasn’t welcomed there. It took every fiber of my being to not abandon my supplies and get the hell out of there. I completed my work but I was very close to tears the whole time since the unexplained fear just wouldn’t leave until I was out of that building. From that point on I would get random attacks of fear and eventually I started seeing a shadowy figure that would cause the motion detecting doors to open and close randomly and turn on the stereo in the kitchen at random hours for random intervals. I was able to find a better job and peace out as quick as I could only training my replacement for one day and refused to step foot in that place again.

10. I don’t remember this happening but my mom told me when I was small I used to talk to an imaginary friend in the corner of the bathroom. I apparently also gave them a name. Sure imaginary friends are creepy but most children have them. What’s creepy though, is a few years later when my younger brother was able to talk, he stood in that EXACT corner and had a conversation with an imaginary friend he called “butterfly boy” it might be a coincidence, not sure. I’m happy I have no recollection of this.

11. Back in 2011 we moved into a new home. I actually had a couple of experiences since living there. The first account was a couple of months after we moved in. Every day after school I would go into my room and I noticed my TV was unplugged it was one of those thick glass big plastic rear box ones. I assumed it was just the cat running around and pulling it out. This happened literally everyday I was at school. One night I wake up in the middle of the night with just a tiny amount of moonlight illuminating my room and I saw this red headed lady in a pink floral night gown smiling at me standing next to my TV, I passed it off as just my mom. I woke up the next morning to my TV unplugged and the socket melted and burnt.

Never seen her again and never had my TV unplugged after.

Fast forward a couple years.

I came home from school, my mom and I were binging desperate housewives and she fell asleep.

I had a little remote control Mario Kart car specifically donkey Kong. They haven’t been used for about 7years if not longer, the controllers didn’t have batteries neither did the cart itself.

While I was watching the show, one of them just went full throttle in a box that it was in for about 10 seconds. I walked over to it and seen it was switched off and shouldn’t have been working. I woke my mom up and set it on the floor, we were watching it and then it drove into the wall. We were the only ones in the house and there was no reason the car should have been moving in the first place.

She had multiple experiences with toys being turned on and stuff after that I didn’t. She believed it was a ghostly child or 2. I didn’t experience anything after.

She has also had many creepier stories that my siblings can vouch for, like a cowboy looking man gurgling and coughing in the bathroom at night who she thought was my brother.

12. Lived in a old house in college and our roommate who did Wicca told us our house was haunted and described and named the ghost. My mom believed she saw ghosts too so I called her and asked. Not only did she say yes but she called the ghost by the same name. She had only met my roommate once and did t line her so it’s not like they could have done this together. A week prior I thought I saw a man staring at me in the doorway. The Wicca roommate was constantly standing there in the middle of the night because her cat liked me better than her and would sleep with me and my dog at night and she would get jealous and try to get the cat to come back with her while I was sleeping. I allowed my denial to assume it was her even though she was short and wide set and the person I saw was tall and skinny. Once I heard their stories I freaked out. That next week I started noticing the dog and the cat would walk around air or stop and back up when there was nothing there. The Friday after I was at home alone doing dishes and somehow the guard covering the garbage disposal was gone and a fork fell in. I had just finished reaching in to retrieve the fork when the garbage disposal turned on and off by itself. I moved as soon as possible.

13. Ooh not me but my fiance went to Fallsvale Elementary, and he told me a few stories. Like how children would show up at recess to play, then seem to disappear, and once when he went to the bathroom and there was loud banging on the stall door even though there was no one in there. My favorite is when he and his friends visited this old lady every day after school for nearly a year. She was always nice to them, and her house was always kept very clean and tidy. One day, when they were on their way to her house after school, a man stopped them and asked where they were heading, and when they told him, he said that lady was his grandma. She died in a house fire a decade earlier. My now fiance and his friends went to her house anyway, and found all the furniture old and covered in dust and cobwebs.

14. So, when I was 7 my mom lived up a small hill in a trailer than was right in front of the woods, with my grandparents’ house at the bottom of the hill about 100 yards away.

One night it started raining really badly and my grandmother got really nervous and started telling my grandfather that he needed to go get me and my mother out of the trailer. He, of course, kept saying she was over reacting and there was no way in hell he was going out in that rain.

After about 30 minutes of my grandmother begging, their phone started ringing. He answered and it was my Mom saying she needed him to come get me because the trailer was shaking.

My grandpa went up the 100 yards to the trailer and knocked on the door. My mom answered and was surprised to see him.

Grandpa: I’m here to get ya.

Mom: What do you mean?

Grandpa: You called me to come get ya so I’m here.

Mom: … My phone got turned off last week. Remember?

Grandpa paused and sputtered then said Grandma was freaking out and to just grab me and come to their house for the night.

We we’re halfway down the hill when lightning struck the woods and a large tree came crashing down through the roof of my bedroom. It would have killed me. My grandpa insists to this day it was my mother’s voice on the phone.

15. It happened a lot when I was a very small kid like 5 – 10, and I hardly remember any of this but, my mom would always tell me I used to talk to an imaginary friend called Pearl. Like I would full on converse and my mom would tell me I always whined that Pearl was muttering to herself and wouldn’t talk to me.

My mom said she asked me one time when I was 7 what pearl looked like and I said, “She looks like a flower person!” When I said this my mom told me she was relieved that it “Wasn’t no white family demon shit” bc she didn’t want a literal demon in her house. Turns out a florist died there a year before we moved in there.

16. When I was about 13, I slept over at my friend’s house. I slept on the floor facing the doorway, which was left open. At around 3 am, I woke up and swear I saw a ghastly apparition of a sobbing woman in a wedding dress floating down the hallway towards me, disappearing just before she reached the doorway. I eventually got back to sleep and chalked it up to a weird dream. A few days later, this same friend casually mentions seeing the same ghost or spirit or whatever. I had never told him about my experience. I slept at his house innumerable times over the next few years, but never in that same room, and I never saw her again.

17. Had dream that I got into a car accident. Woke up super disoriented, I literally had to tell myself that it did not happen and that my car was fine.

About a week later on my way home from school I got into the exact accident I had in my dream.

This alone is creeps me out, but right before the accident there was a voice in my head that was telling me to go straight instead of turning right, which is my normal route. After turning right I got into the accident.

18. Night shift in a hospital.

Went to the toilet, both cubicles empty, sat down to do the business and someone started crying in the next cubicle, bolted out of there, the other toilet was empty.

Different night, soon after I started working on this particular ward. Sat at the bottom of the ward so me and another nurse could get a good view of everyone. Without looking up from her notes she said “footsteps are back again.”

I said, “What footsteps?” She just said to listen.

Heard footsteps come from the top of the ward to where we were, then go back to the top end. She didn’t even flinch, just said, “You get used to it.”

There were some other issues with that particular unit, eventually a priest came to bless it, and crashed his car on the way home. It has been decommissioned now.

19. I was working at small start up as an inter, business was slow so I was tasked with automating video recording of the security cameras when movement was detected to save on disc usage, I configured the software and left the camera pointing at my desk.

The next day I arrived at work at checked the videos, the first couple of videos where just people leaving for the day, but the I saw a video at 3am, my screen was on and my chair was spinning.

My desk was right on a floor to ceiling window right next to the garden, and that garden shared the back wall with a funeral home.

20. I used to hear a woman calling my name in my bedroom when I was a child. The house was extremely old, and could have possibly had previous deceased owners, but I never looked into it. Anyway, I could hear her voice coming from the same exact corner of the bedroom every time, and it was the corner my bed would sit in. I would also see the silhouette of a man standing in my backyard by our fence every single night. I never told anyone because the one single time I tried to tell my dad he genuinely thought something was mentally wrong with me and almost threw me in an institution.

21. My mom was driving me to school my senior year about 2 years ago (I didn’t have a license, don’t judge me). Anyways, a block before I reach the school, my mom’s phone starts ringing. She looks on her phone to see who it was and it was my grandpa WHO HAS BEEN DEAD SINCE 2015. My mom decided to answer the phone and she heard nothing on the other end. After that, my grandpa’s number proceeded to call her until after 3 days of this we decided to visit him in the cemetery. We have not received a call from him since visiting him.

22. Probably the most paranormal thing that’s ever happened to me was the time that I had a nightmare where in I was someone else living in a wooded area and there was a black bear that mauled me to death. After I woke up, I want about the day, and at some point I saw on the local news that a woman had been mauled to death by a black bear that very morning outside her home. That freaked me out and I’ll never forget it.

23. Actually a few nights ago. Every night I lock my front door both knob and the top lock. It was like any other night. Closed the door locked up and made sure it was sealed and closed all the way. I have a bathroom right at the entrance so I also open the bathroom door as a sort of last resort door stop. Well I wake up at 3 am hearing rain louder than normal. I woke up fast because I thought we had a roof leak or something because it was so loud. I go down stairs and my front door is wide open and my bathroom door is moved out of the way. Both the locks were still locked on the door. I know for a fact I closed the door all the way. So unless someone tried to break in and locked the locks after they got the door open i don’t know what it is or was.

24. My sophomore year of college I lived in a brand new dorm building on campus. It was nice, clean, all the fixtures were new and the layout wasn’t convoluted or confusing. Right near my dorm room was a series of bathrooms including a special bathroom for people with wheelchairs. It even had a shower that was three times bigger than a normal college shower and a seat built into it. There wasn’t a single handicapped person in the building that year, but needless to say that shower stall immediately became the favorite of everyone on the floor because it was nice to have a shower that wasn’t clogged with hair and that wasn’t only 2 feet wide so your naked butt would bump into freezing cold tile every time you moved.

About a month into the semester though shit started. For reasons no one (including building management) understood, the door would just lock on its own. We’d be sitting in the lounge watching tv or studying and we’d just hear an audible click as the door locked itself despite no one going in. It’d stay locked for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours all on its own. Then there were the weird noises that sounded like a screaming animal that would come out of the vent right above the shower. And the fact that the toilet would occasionally start shaking violently for no reason. Or the sink that did the same thing.

After a few months they closed the bathroom to figure out what was going on (and if it was a plumbing issue or something was wrong with the door). They gave up after three weeks and everyone just assumes that restroom is haunted now.

25. My mum and I, and some other members of the family were doing a blessing at the local cemetery for my deceased uncle and Grandfather. They died before I was born, so I never knew them, I’m not even close to my mother’s side of the family.

During this blessing, I felt something come up behind me and wrap themselves around me, just as if they were hugging me. While it didn’t feel malicious, it did freak me out that I decided to leave. It wasn’t until later I told my mum that she said that her brother used to hug people from behind, so he was probably greeting me.

Another one was that I used to hate sleeping in my bedroom as there was this sad presence in the room that scared young me. Even some nights our dogs used to sit there barking at the corner. Some time after found out from our neighbors that the previous tenant committed suicide in that room /:

Not sure if I believe in the afterlife or anything… I’m still skeptical and can’t really explain logically about what happened, could just be an active imagination.

26. A long time ago in high school I was laying on a blanket in a field on a starry night with my then crush/soon-to-be girlfriend.

We were looking up at the stars and we notice maybe three or four little stars kind of dancing around. They weren’t moving in straight lines like you’d expect a satellite to be doing. We kind of froze, watching them dance around. We were bewildered. Then they just sort of faded away.

My date became sort of freaked out so she got very close to me. I later used this closeness to start making out.

Thank you, alien bros

27. I woke up to find my grandfather sitting at the edge of my bed, smiling kindly at me (not creepy or anything like that).

My grandfather had been dead for several years at that point, but everyone said I was his favorite grandson.

28. Several years ago I was staying at my uncle’s house in a room next to their garage. My uncle and I were supposed to go fishing early the next morning. I woke up and it was pretty dark out but I saw the silhouette of a guy leaning on the wall looking at me. I assumed it was my uncle and started talking to him. “Yeah, I’m getting up let’s go,” I said. I walked right passed him to turn the lights on. Turned around and there was no one there. Wtf, “I might be dreaming,” I thought. Turned the lights back off and went back to sleep.

I didn’t think about this again for a couple months. I was over at my uncles house again for dinner when his wife says, “I gotta take uncle Bennys ashes to the mountain and spread them. He’s been here for a while.” I was like who’s uncle Benny and what are you talking about.

Apparently uncle Benny is my aunts uncle who had died several months before I went to my uncle’s house. His ashes were in the garage next to where I was sleeping. I wonder if he was looking at me thinking who the fuck is this guy.

29. I’ve had a few dreams that came true. Unfortunately never anything useful like lottery number but once in high school had a dream I was walking down the empty halls of my school except there was a woman in front of me who stopped and dipped her back backwards to where she was looking at me upside down. At the time I just thought it was weird until a couple of days later I get called to the office to pick something up. Halls are empty and then a woman rounds a corner carrying a large box. She starts to lose her grip on it so she contorts herself in the same fashion as in my dream to gain leverage. she was a small woman so she bent way back to where she was almost looking right back at me. Very weird never seen anyone do that before or since but it definitely made sense in the moment

30. My house growing up was a two-family with a pretty big basement. We lived on the top floor, and the basement was used as storage and as a laundry room.

The basement was pretty terrifying. It was super dark, all the lights were in the center of the room, so you had to go into a completely pitch black room, reach your hand up and pull on a string to turn the light on. I dont think I ever went into the basement without a weapon of some sort.

When I was 10, my mom left me a note to move the clothes in the wash to the dryer. So I went to the basement, picked up a wiffleball bat and preceded into total darkness. I’ve literally been preparing to turn that light on and see some kind of monster for years.

I pull the string, take a step and look up to see a man. He was breathing heavily and looked disheveled. I completely froze. I’m literally shaking to a point that the whiffle bat is sliding out of my hand. Before I can do or say anything, I hear a gun being cocked and my father from behind me say, “If you take one step toward my son, I will blow your fucking head off.” The man standing before me, takes a few steps back, turns and runs out of the door that leads to the backyard.

Long story short. I went downstairs, at the exact same time, my dad watched from the kitchen window as two guys were being chased by the police through the backyards on my street. He saw one of the men hop the fence into my backyard and check the door to the basement. He realized after a few seconds that I was in the basement.

I still struggle to go into the basement. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.