CHILLING: 30 People Reveal The Spookiest, Most Unexplained Thing That Happened To Them As Kids

25. I watched, wide-eyed and frozen in fear as a man I’d never seen looked straight at me through my window.

“I was a weird kid and slept with my bedroom lights on all night long. So from the outside I guess my second-floor bedroom was lit up like a display case. I wasn’t scared of the dark, just preferred it that way. One night I awoke to a metal scraping sound outside, like something heavy being dragged. I heard a hard ‘thunking’ noise against the wall outside my window and then someone climbing up a ladder. I watched, wide-eyed and frozen in fear as a man I’d never seen looked straight at me through my window. Our eyes met and we just looked at each other for a moment. Then I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, but I was really squinting and watching him. He just stared at me for a few minutes, then I saw a bright camera flash. He climbed back down the ladder and dragged it away. I never saw him again.

A year or two later I was on a road trip with my dad. I think we were in San Diego, a few states away from home. We were staying high up in a hotel room with a balcony on probably the 20th floor or so. My dad and I had our own beds, mine was nearest the balcony. At some point during the night a bright flash woke me up, so I opened my eyes and sat up in bed and looked out. Didn’t see anything. Then another flash hit me full-on and that’s when I saw the outline of a person holding something (a camera, apparently) duck down beyond the edge of the balcony to somewhere below. Again I was frozen in fear, laid awake most of the night just terrified and staring out at the balcony.

Never told anyone and nothing like that ever happened again. But after the second time I had very vivid recurring nightmares about being abducted and forced into a child sex ring and never seeing my family again…which in itself is really fucked up since I must have been 8 years old at the time, was never abused and generally had a great childhood. How did I even know that child sex rings were a thing? But I had these dreams, sometimes every week, of being forced to have sex with other children while men watched and recorded us. I don’t think my little kid brain even knew how awful that was at the time, the most terrifying thing was that these dreams were only hours long but they seemed to last for weeks or months at a time and I could remember the other kids’ names and faces and everything.”