25 Scary Stories That Will Destroy Your Faith In Humanity

1. The story of Jayme Closs is terrifying. In rural Wisconsin last year, a 13-14ish year old girl went missing after her parents were murdered in their home. Police arrived within 4 minutes or so, but she is just gone.

Of course, speculation is that she was kidnapped, or that she was in on it, or dead, or whatever. Nobody knows because she has completely vanished.

88 days later, in the dead of a northern Wisconsin winter, she runs out in to the street to a woman walking her dog. She had been held captive about 40 minutes from her home.

All of that is scary enough, but here’s the terrifying part…

She had never had any contact with the guy that murdered her family and abducted her. One day he was driving to a new job (at which he only lasted a day) and saw her get on the school bus. At that moment he decided that he was going to take her.

There was no warning. No grooming. There was absolutely nothing that she or her family could have done to avoid everything. A creepy young man saw her from 100’ away and decided that he would murder her family and take her for himself.

2. Well I’m into true crime so I’ve heard a lot of messed up shit but the most recent story that sticks with me as particularly horrific was a crime where a sadistic mentally ill man killed his girlfriend by spraying sealing foam into her mouth. There was so much of it that they found the foam all the way from her mouth and down into her stomach. She was alive when he did it and choked to death as the foam expanded inside her and blocked her airways completely. Honestly one of the most fucked up crimes I’ve ever hear of.

3. I was walking in the woods once when I saw a blue tent – or what had once been a tent. It was torn to shreds and the poles were snapped and it was all in a messy pile in the middle of a clearing.

From a distance, it had looked like this clearing was full of cream-colored flowers, but as I got closer I realized they were pieces of paper. Pages from Stephen King’s The Shining, to be precise. They were charred around the outside as though someone had set light to them, and the fact that they were individual made it look like someone had really wanted to destroy the book.

I shrugged it off. It was a very neat setup for whatever project the film students from the nearby school would be making, I told myself. Very well done, guys, very creepy.

It made the news shortly afterwards that a man from the next town over who had been missing for a long time had finally turned up. Dead. In his blue tent in the woods.

I don’t know if he was still in there when I walked past. I don’t want to know.

4. I was probably 11 or 12. There was a telephone pole in our backyard that stood in the middle of our back fence. An electrician was working on it and needed access to our backyard for a couple days.

One of the nights, my best friend was over for a sleepover, and we were in the fort we made in my room. I was facing toward her, away from my bedroom door, and she gets startled and lets out kind of a halfhearted scream/yelp. She said she thought for a split second she saw a man’s face peering between the sheets through the entrance to our fort. We both felt really creeped out the rest of the night but just fell asleep eventually.

The next day or so my family realized that two of our motor scooters we kept in the back were missing, and sometime later my dad recognized the “electrician” on Sacramento’s top 10 wanted.

I’m pretty sure that night was the night he stole the scooters and he must have come inside the house through the back door and left or something when he realized we were awake.

5. Former coworker of my brother put mercury (the metal) into his milkshake when no one was looking to try to kill him. He was caught, but apparently there was no motive other than it was something he wanted to do. No animosity or jealousy towards my brother.

6. I thought I had a dream of riding my bike in Las Vegas when I was 5 or 6. In the dream an old man walked up to me cut my arm and knocked me off my bike and I woke up at home. I had stitches on my arm and my parents later told me I was riding my bike and crashed but deep down I’m 100% sure that that man really had cut me and thrown off my bike. I wasn’t sure til I was 13-14 when my neighbor asked me if I remembered the time when he found me bleeding next to my bike. Out of curiosity I asked him if he remembered if anyone was around and he said there was an elderly man walking away from me about 20 yards ahead. To this day I’m still scared of what would have happened if my neighbor hadn’t seen me in the front.

7. Had a girl over for a date.

We woke up the next morning, and heard a young girl laughing hysterically in my living room.

There was no one in that fucking living room, but we both heard it.

8. My first girlfriend’s house was probably haunted.

It was a newer house build late 80’s early 90’s which used to be woods in Connecticut. This happened in 2001.

We were having an after school snack in her kitchen when she told me she had previously seen an old man with a large white beard sitting in her living room. I laughed it off since the house was so “new” and the property firmly being woods meant it couldn’t possibly be haunted.

A few weeks later similar situation with her in the kitchen and me returning from the bathroom, as I walk into the kitchen I see a man in her dining room sitting at the head of the table. I don’t see a beard, but it was an old man.

Fast forward a few months. The whole thing is basically forgotten and we didn’t have any other encounters. She had a friend visiting from Brazil. Her friend was downstairs next to the living room while my GF and I are doing our thing upstairs. All of a sudden her friend burst through the door crying. She asks in Portuguese what happened.

She goes on to explain, “I was downstairs listening to music with my headphones in when I turned the corner to go into the living room, and basically ran into this old man with a long white beard.”

I know my GF wouldn’t have told her because we both didn’t take it too serious. I know I didn’t say anything since her friend barely spoke English. To this day I still want to write the new owners of the house to see if they encountered the white bearded man.

9. When I was about 13 I was an adventure explorer wannabe. I used to pack a tent and survival gear to go camping up the hill about 4 miles from my house (elevated 1200ft). I set up my tent in this small field almost entirely surrounded by woods. I made my beans, went to sleep. I was woken up at 3am to the sound of what I thought was a wild animal approaching the tent, not unusual. Woke up at sunrise, opened the tent and found a parcel wrapped in white aged cloth, tied in straw string with a note on top ‘welcome friend’. Inside the parcel, get this, a calf leg/hoof.

Never told a soul about it to this day. Scared the soul out of me. Never went camping again, and didn’t stop thinking about it for months.

10. My uncle, when he was in his teens, witnessed a UFO event. He was at the beach in the middle of the day when he saw an oval-shaped object about half a kilometer up in the sky.

He said that everyone (there were over a hundred other people at the beach, and they all witnessed this) could see that the object was huge – big enough that if it had come down, it would’ve flattened the entire beach.

Everyone watched it for about half an hour, and during that time it didn’t move one bit. Heaps of people were just standing or sitting around, watching it. My uncle said, and this is an almost direct quote: “You know how you sometimes feel like you just have to get out of a place, like you have to take off running? Well this was different. You felt the opposite, like you had to stay.”

After half an hour, the object started moving very slowly, and then it just shot sideways extremely fast and disappeared. No plane or human-made flying object could’ve moved in that way, or looked like that, unless the government was/is developing technologies we know nothing of (a strong possibility).

11. The story of the Yuba County 5. 5 young men go missing, their car is found in working condition high on a mountain road where they had no reason to be. 3 are eventually found dead in the mountains. 1 is found dead in a ranger’s cabin, having starved to death. The 5th has never been found.

This happened in 1978. I read about it 2 summers ago and slept with my lights on for weeks. Something about this just absolutely terrifies me.

12. We were living in Sao Paulo, Brazil when I was around 4 or 5 years old. My family and I lived in a really tall building. High up enough to get a good view of the city. One night, I had a dream that I was flying over the city. As if I had stepped out of my room, onto the balcony and started flying/floating over the city lights.

Next morning, my step-father came in scolding me. Apparently he saw me come in from the balcony, and I had left the door open. He tried getting my attention, but I just kept walking back to my bed. Where I went back to sleep, and he thought I was ignoring him.

He pulled me out of bed, my mom is now up at the time from him yelling at me, and sure enough, the balcony door was wide open. I tried to tell my parents I didn’t do anything, but he said he saw me come back in from the balcony.

That night has always stuck with me. I’ve always thought that perhaps I was sleep-walking, but the thing is, it never happened again. Nor did it happen before that night. It gives me the deep chills just remembering it.

13. I had this friend that lived in a trailer park. Whenever I would go to visit, I would drive in the back gravel roads. On the way there was this old, small concrete building. Run down, no doors, some walls were crumbled. I would look at it and think I wanted to check it out.

But there was always this subtle feeling that I shouldn’t be in there. Every time, it gave me this lingering feeling that something was off.

I found it fenced off one day, and there was some ripped up yellow tape. I thought maybe some kids were hanging around when they shouldn’t have, someone threw in some complaints, and it was blocked off. But other than that I didn’t think much of it.

Some time later I’m sitting at my grandma’s house, watching one of her shows. Might have been Dateline or something similar? They tell this story about a girl a county away that disappeared after a party. No one could find her for a while. Clothes they turned up were scattered in different areas.

Then a kid found what she was wearing that night.

It was in that building.

14. When I was 11 or 12, the dreamcatcher I’d had since I was little broke. Not a big deal, I wasn’t really attached to it, but it felt weird not to have anything on hook in my ceiling. My mom took me to a market a couple days later and we found a ceiling decoration – not a dreamcatcher or anything, just some cheap crystals and beads, but it was pretty.

I hung it above my bed when we got home, and that night I was woken up somewhere around midnight by footsteps outside of my bedroom. They went past the side of the house and eventually faded out, but I never heard the gate open. I didn’t really think anything of it.

But it happened again. Every single night without fail, between 10pm and midnight, I would hear footsteps. They sounded heavy, like a guy in work boots, and they always went up the side of the house and faded without gates being opened on either side. It got to the point that I couldn’t fall asleep until I’d heard them for the night.

About a month later, I realized that they had started on the same night I hung the decoration up in my room. I took it down immediately and buried it in my closet. I never heard them again.

15. The Elisa Lam story. Woman goes missing at a hotel, they search the whole hotel… or at least, they think they do. A few days later the hotel guests start complaining of off-color, bad tasting water and low water pressure. Yep, she was decomposing in the water tank.

16. One night, about two or three years ago, I got up from my chair in the living room to use the restroom. The hallway was dark, I turned the corner to see a figure (which looked like a little girl with black hair and a white dress that almost touched the floor) for about two seconds before disappearing. I was freaked out but didn’t think much of it. “Maybe I’m just tired” I thought to myself. I turned the light on in the hall and went along with what I was doing. Never happened again. I also woke up another morning with scratch marks on my back, arms, legs, etc.

17. So my dad is a cop and he told me this story. One time he was called to a house due to a noise complaint. He went in the house and he said everyone was dressed in clown suits holding guns like they were playing Russian roulette. Turns out they were hosting a livestream for the deep web. Now you may not think it’s scary but imagine walking in and seeing a bunch of clowns with guns. As they got arrested they searched the rest of the house and found 4 girls upstairs completely naked handcuffed to each other. Who knows what could’ve happened.

He said that messed with his head and he switched departments after that. Hasn’t been the same since.

18. Jeffery Dahmer and the one victim that managed to escape. The victim was intoxicated from both drinking and some date rape drug Dahmer slipped him. The victim actually managed to run into some cops. Dahmer soon followed behind, convinced the cops that the victim was his boyfriend and the cops let Dahmer take him home. Terrifying.

19. In my last house my dog would stare down this hallway that we had for hour at a time and we took multiple pictures and found a face with just eyes on it in one of them and the others were orbs or balls of light.

One time my sister took a picture with the dog filter and another one was behind her.

We also heard laughing in our living room. We went to the city hall and we looked at the history of our house and found that a little girl died in the house and she died in my brothers room. Before we found out this information my brother would get sleep paralysis demons that “tortured” him. So yeah we were convinced that we had a little girl demon living with us but we moved and since then we haven’t crossed the demons path

20. My sister died the same date that an Ouija board made out of a pizza box predicted twice. Don’t fuck with that stuff kids.

21. When my mom was a little girl, two men broke into the house in the middle of the night. They came into my mom’s room, touched her, and left. She went to tell my grandma about it and she told her it was just a dream and to go back to bed. The next morning the contents of my grandma’s purse were scattered and all the money stolen. They came through the front door because it was unlocked. She always locked the doors at night now.

22. Waking up to a drunk crack head mistakenly entering your house at 2 in the morning, two days after your wife dies, when you have a three month old. Dude was so lucky he dropped into the fetal position as I rounded the corner with a bat and no contacts in.

23. In fourth grade, my friend brought a picture to school with her to share among our group of friends. We passed it around talking about it. It was just a picture of her family so we thought nothing of it. After school, me and her were hanging out by a tree and talking about the picture. She pointed at something that everyone in our group has brushed over. It was a very clear and visible face looking over her shoulder. And I can’t joke about this, it was a serious face in an otherwise normal family photo. When I asked who that was, she said she didn’t know and there had been no one behind her when they took the picture. Sometimes I think about it and it’s quite freaky.

24. I lived with my deadbeat mom for a little bit in an apartment paid for by somebody else. We had no furniture, and slept on the floor for the most part. I once woke up to a group of strangers wandering around our apartment in the middle of the night. They broke in while we were sleeping, looked around, took nothing of the little we had, and left. I never told my mom.

Honestly, looking back on it, they were probably people that my mom was involved with at one point or another.

25. I lived alone with my dogs in a brownstone in a gated community in uptown Dallas. I worked a few miles away but came home every day for lunch to let my dogs out. After living there for about a year I started smelling men’s cologne really strong in my entry way and up my stairs. I figured it was my neighbor next door and didn’t think anything of it. Then one day I found a dollar bill folded lengthwise on top of my purse. I never carry cash nor have I ever folded a dollar bill lengthwise. Thought it was weird. A few weeks later I came home and both my dogs were standing in front of my bedroom door wagging their tails and staring at the door. I figured they wanted to lay on my bed but I was in a hurry and walked them real fast and went back to work. When I came home that day there were 20 or so dollar bills folded lengthwise and placed neatly around various surfaces in my room. Never in my life have I been so terrified. I grabbed my dogs and noped the fuck out of that place as fast as I could. I called the cops, they came out, my locks were changed, but i could never be there alone again. I moved a month or so later. When I moved, I found dollar bills taped to the back of pictures on my walls, under furniture, and random places. I never figured out who or why or even how. I think the scariest thing of all is knowing that day when I was home, whoever had been going into my house was waiting quietly in my room, folding dollar bills, and my little dogs knew it.