‘The Day I Saw Death’ And 21 Other Real-Life Stories Of The Supernatural

Flickr / Illustration by Daniella Urdinlaiz.
Flickr / Illustration by Daniella Urdinlaiz.
Found on AskReddit.

1. The Ghost in Room #421

“I worked at a hotel. A guy called from #421 asking for a 6am wake-up call. I punched it in. No big deal. His name didn’t populate on my caller ID. I looked up the room.

It was empty. Being young and lazy, I decided to leave it. Twenty minutes I get a phone call from the same room! It was a woman this time. She wanted a wake up call at 6:30. I changed the wake-up time.

I was a little freaked out. But sometimes glitches happen in the computer or phone. I radioed my guest services guy. He was this 17-year-old kid who looked like a young Gabriel Iglesias or however you spell his name.

So I’m like…‘Hey, Carlos can you do a room check? I keep getting calls from #421.’

He goes into super-detective mode. He is whispering play-by-play updates over the walkie-talkie. It was pretty hilarious because I got him a little scared.

Reaches the door. Opens it. Then I hear a shriek like from that one Kanye West song.

The curtains, dude! The curtains are moving!

I’m trying so hard not to laugh over the radio. OK, well if it’s empty. Must be a glitch.

As soon as he locks that door, I get a phone call from #421. It was a different man then the first. Can I get a wake up call for 6?

I set it. OK. Whatever, Mr. Ghost.”


2. The Demon Medusa Who Left Scratch Marks on Children

“When I was about 14/15, my family took my cousins because of family complications. My cousins would always have scratch marks on them, and their mother, my aunty, was absolutely batshit in Gypsy magic stuff. Every time my cousins met, they’d always say that they’d be scratched in the middle of the night by someone, and once my grandmother heard, there was a huge legal battle to take my cousins away from my aunty because we thought she was hurting them and abusing them.

Two months pass and my aunty goes into a psychiatric jail and my cousins are living with my family. One night I wake up to my cousins out of bed crying, scratch marks on their arms, I mean deep scratch marks. I go to my parents, they treat them and stay up with them. I return to bed, get into my blankets and I feel a serious pain in my thigh, I get out of bed and I have three marks on my leg, I run down to my parents and show them, same time as I do, all of the doors start slamming upstairs.

After that, my cousins were given to their biological father, my uncle. We don’t talk.”


3. The Lady in the Red Mickey Mouse Shirt

“It’s not scary at all, but I was joking with a co-worker about how lately when i say things they come true. He said ‘maybe you’re psychic’ jokingly, to which i responded ‘oh definitely, look, the love of your life is about to walk in wearing a red Mickey Mouse shirt.’ The next person to walk in was a 50-year-oldish looking lady wearing a red Mickey Mouse shirt, I shit you not. It wasn’t the love of his life but it kind of fucked us up.”


4. The Ouija Board & Julie James

“My friend’s aunts were playing with a Ouija board when they were in high school. They asked it who their little brother would marry and the board spelled ‘Julie James,’ then the lights shut off. Eighteen years later their little brother married Julie James.”


5. Grandma & Grandma’s Memorial Roses

“Not creepy but kind of cool. My mother split and transplanted a rosebush from my grandfather’s farm about 40 years ago. It took but never bloomed. At that point she only kept it because it grew into the fence nicely and kept us kids from climbing it. My grandfather died about five years after she transplanted it and that spring it bloomed red roses. A few years after that my grandmother died and the spring after it bloomed white roses. These are the only two years it has ever bloomed.”


6. The Flying Cigarette Lighter

“When I was younger, I was sitting in my great grandmother’s living room. This house was known to have some issues in regards to paranormal activity. A lighter was casually sitting on the table (my mother smoked). The lighter literally flew across the room and went into the wall, sticking slightly out of it. This was a closed room with no wind or interference. My mother practically shit her pants and the only time we ever visited with her was when she came to us. Have not been back to this day.”


7. The Invisible Beethoven

“Growing up, my older brother had a computer program that he used to compose piano music on. I remember I was reading in the living room when I heard the most beautiful violin melody I have ever heard. I listened to the whole thing which was several minutes long. I walked down the hallway to compliment my brother on his masterpiece when I realized my brother was not using the computer, and I was home alone.”


8. The Grey Man Who Ran Through The Wall

“Was around 7 years old and it was near the holidays. The house I grew up in has a downstairs and a basement. So I left my pillow downstairs after a day-long movie binge and went to grab it later that evening.

Grab the pillow and look up, see a man on the other side of the room dressed to the nines just looking around paying no attention to me. Weird thing was he was entirely grey. Head-to-toe, skin color and everything, grey.

I’m staring, jaw wide open, completely petrified with fright. He looks up at me, notices I’m able to see him, and drops his jaw lower than humanly normal almost as if he was screaming at me, but without sound. He then ran through the wall and disappeared.

I wasn’t able to go downstairs if the lights were off until I was a teenager.”


9. The Magic Bucket of Halloween Candy

“When I was probably eight years old, I was playing with a Ouija board with my older sister (~12 probably) and our dad’s girlfriend’s son, who was maybe my sister’s age/slightly older. My sister and I both recall the same story so it wasn’t just my imagination playing tricks on me.

We had the board on the bed and were trying to contact some spirits, basic Ouija stuff, so we were all chanting, ‘Contact us, contact us, contact us’ over and over. Well, it was shortly after Halloween that this happened, so we had a bucket of candy on the dresser across from the bed. It wasn’t near the edge, no one was near it, there was no open window to create a draft or anything like that (either way, it was still a full and heavy bucket).

Right at the exact same moment, the lights flickered off so it was pitch black, and the bucket of candy just tipped right off the dresser. Again, all three of us were sitting on the bed nowhere near the dresser and I had a view of everyone, so no one was around to do it.

I ran screaming bloody murder out of that room to find my dad, accusing him of turning off the lights from the breaker, but he had no clue what I was talking about.

Still freaks me out to this day! I just can’t think of an explanation for it.”


10. The Woman Who Floated Through My Window Into My Bedroom

“I haven’t told anyone this story since I was a child, because when I told my cousins what was happening it scared them really bad and I got my second-only whooping with a belt by my dad. As an adult I don’t mention it because…I just don’t know what it was and I don’t want other adults to think I’m nuts.

When I was in second grade I woke up one summer night, dead of night, to a woman floating through my window into my bedroom. Oddly, I wasn’t scared. I just sat up and asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ I remember she answered me, but oddly enough the next morning I couldn’t remember what she said or even what her voice sounded like. I couldn’t even remember what she looked like. So next I said to her, in true eight-year old fashion, ‘Well, you better get going because my dad might wake up and then he’ll be mad.’ She slipped out of my already cracked open bedroom door and I went back to sleep.

Sounds like sleep paralysis, right? Wrong. The next day I was really excited that I had my own fairy godmother and I named her Crystal. And I thought in my head—please come back! Come back and wake me up at dawn so we can talk!

I shit you not, the next morning, just as it was getting light outside, I hear someone whispering my name. I realized that this shit was real, and she was a ghost, and I froze. I stayed as still as I could, not even able to breathe, and just prayed as hard as I could, ‘Go away go away go away.’ I could FEEL her right by my head. As I’m typing this, tears are coming to my eyes.

Okay, happened once, coincidence, right? Nope. Every time I would get brave and say out loud to her, before going to bed in my room, ‘Okay, come this time I swear I won’t get scared.’ She would come, whispering my name, and I would almost shit my pants in fear and never open my eyes.

So at this point I’m thinking, still could be night terrors, right? I mean, our eyes have receptors sensitive to light that wake us up, thus causing me to wake up at dawn and hallucinate this shit. Here’s where shit gets real. Next summer I tell a friend that this is going on while we were camping together. She doesn’t believe me, says to me, okay, ask her to come tonight. We’re sleeping in same tent and my friend wants to see for herself. So I do. And at dawn, I hear her, calling my name AND MY FRIEND’S NAME. We don’t move, she leaves, and we both sit up and my FRIEND HEARD HER, TOO. She freaks out, tells her parents later that day sobbing, I get in trouble for scaring the shit out of kids with ghost stories.

Later that summer I told my cousin this story, and before that night, she freaks out, tells her mom, and I get my ass beat for telling ghost stories.

I got pissed about said beating, and angrily said out loud—I got in trouble because of you, and I never want to see you ever again!

And I haven’t. Ever.”


11. The Pimp’s Magic Bullets

“I was a rookie cop when my brother committed suicide. He was one of my older siblings, but we were very close. He died in another state, and I had a lot of guilt then about not recognizing the signs. His remains were in bad shape by the time he was discovered, so it was a closed-coffin service.

About a week after he died, I was back at work one night, and my partner and I see a pimp pistol-whipping one of his girls. I jump out and the pimp sees me and the foot chase was on. I was running after him, gun in hand, and he cuts through a narrow corridor under a building that leads to a courtyard in the middle.

Right before I reach the courtyard, I hear ‘It’s okay’ in my dead brother’s voice. I hit the courtyard and the guy is against the side pointing a gun at my head, and squeezes the trigger twice. I froze for a millisecond and then started beating him in the head with my revolver. Till this day, I don’t know why I didn’t just shoot him. Instead I cuff him and walk him back to the street and find my partner. I tell my partner about him squeezing the trigger, but not the voice I heard. We unload the gun (.32 revolver) right there, and two bullets have strike marks on them.

Take the gun to the lab for testing. Tell the tech the story. He puts the two bullets with strike marks back in and shoots into the test tank. Both bullets fired.”


12. I Named the Ghost “Pete”

“I lived in a haunted apartment. It was two rooms, but one of the rooms was locked, and I didn’t have the key. So I only had one small room as kitchen, dining room and bedroom, and a screened-in porch.

There were two especially freaky events. One night, my girlfriend slept over, and she woke up in the middle of the night and said she saw the bathroom door open and a shadowy figure standing in the bathroom, staring at her. The bathroom was right across from the locked room. Another time, I was jerked awake by the fire alarm going off, just blaring, but when I went to unplug it the alarm stopped and no other alarm in the building was going off.

A lot of the things that happened could have been just my neighbors, but the way they happened was, well, weird. I would hear knocking—it sounded like someone tapping a spoon on a counter—coming from the downstairs apartment. It could have been my neighbor, but I’m not sure why she would do that every couple of minutes for hours on end, or in the middle of the night. I would also hear knocking on the walls; it sounded like someone tapping their way up the wall, like they were looking for a stud. I would also hear this weird moaning/howling that I couldn’t trace the source of—again, could have been a neighbor’s dog, but it didn’t sound like it was coming from her apartment. The apartment across from me had three tenants in a year, I think because it was just as or more haunted than mine.

I had, I think, a unique way of coping—I named the ghost Pete, after a previous tenant’s mail I would get from time to time, and I tried talking to him, basically treating him like a roommate I wasn’t friends with. My girlfriend was much more freaked out by the situation than me and basically stopped coming over after a few months, so I wasn’t there much anyway. When I was, I felt that talking to Pete made the atmosphere of the whole place much more friendly. I also left out a sheet of paper with ‘Pete’s Notes’ written on it, and told him if he had any problems, just write them down.

I still don’t know if I quite believe in ghosts, though I find the supernatural fascinating, but that experience did push me closer to the ‘science doesn’t know everything about the universe’ camp.”


13. We Know We Aren’t Crazy Because The Dog Saw It, Too

“When I was in elementary school, I shared a queen-size bed with my older sister and our family dog (a mutt that looked like a short-haired Lassie) would sleep at the foot of our bed every night. When I was about six years old, I woke up one night around midnight and saw a dark figure standing at the foot of the bed. The figure was entirely in black without any eyes or a face. I tried to wake my sister up, but she rolled over to go back to sleep. My sister must have accidentally kicked the dog, because the dog woke up and raised her head and started growling at the figure at the foot of the bed. The growling then woke my sister up and she saw the figure and started screaming. When my parents came into the room and turned the light on, nothing was there. To this day, both my sister and I are adamant that we saw a ghost or other demon in our room. We know we aren’t crazy because the dog saw it, too.”


14. The Murderous Gumball Machine

“Middle of the night, sleeping. I hear a sound like someone is taking a paperclip from my desk and throwing it against the wall and it bounces across the desk. I wake up to this noise, turn on the light right by my bed as I sit up. I look over and see nothing. Weird. As I’m ready to lay back down my 20lb steel gumball machine falls from the shelf over my bed directly onto my pillow where my head was resting not 30 seconds earlier. I flip out and scramble out of my bed as I’m totally taken by surprise. As I stand up I feel something under my feet… a paperclip.

I put the murderous gumball machine on the floor, the paperclip back on my desk, and crawl into the safety of my comforter. Nothing like that happened again.”


15. The Old Man Who Was Waiting for His Family

“My mum and I were drinking coffee in our kitchen when my older sister (18 at the time) came down from upstairs saying she had the weirdest dream. She said she was in our house, came down the stairs from her bedroom into the living room. An old man in a suit was standing in our couch, facing the front window. She said he was literally through the couch and was all foggy and strange.

She asked him what he wanted. He said ‘I’m just waiting for my family to visit.’ She said ‘Okay, but you need to leave after.’ She went back upstairs.

My mum confirmed that my sister did walk downstairs in the middle of the night. But we chalked it up to a dream.

Fast-forward just a few hours later and we hear a knock on our door. This doesn’t happen…ever. All three of us go out on our front deck and it’s this friendly looking man, maybe 60 years old. He tells us he is hunting down his family tree for a genealogy novel and our house used to be his grandfathers, maybe great-grandfather. I don’t remember much what he said other than explaining that back then, wakes were held in the family home.

He points through the front window, right where my sister dreamed that man was the night before.

He said according his research, the coffin of his grandfather would be right under that window on display during the wake. We laugh nervously and then the conversation ends as we give permission for him to photograph the front of the house and we head back inside.

My sister never saw the ghostly man again. But, I guess he knew his ‘family’ was coming. It was very weird stuff, and I only believe it because my sister told us about the dream before the guy came to our door.”


16. I Guess She Stopped By To See Me One Last Time

“When I was growing up, I was tight with the daughter of my dad’s cousin. So my 2nd cousin, I suppose. Her name was Lisa. We grew much closer as teenagers. Too close, really. Anyway, we wised up a little and went our separate ways when it was time for college.

A few years passed and I had moved on. One night I got up to take a piss. Didn’t bother to turn on the lights. I was washing my hands and glanced in the mirror. There she was. Lisa was standing in the doorway behind me. I heard the echo of her voice. She told me that she still loved me and always would. She then turned and walked out of sight. I stood holding onto the sink for a moment. My heart pounding in my chest. I calmed myself down and decided it had just be a dream. I tried to go back to bed. My pillow smelled like her. She could have been in the room seconds ago. I lay back down and as I drifted off to sleep I felt her warm familiar presence against my back.

The next morning the was no sign of her. No scent, no indent in the covers. I wrote it off as a dream. I got a call from my mom later that day. She told me Lisa had died a few days earlier. She had been killed by her boyfriend. He got drunk and angry and he hit her and that was that. I guess she stopped by to see me one last time. To say goodbye before she moved on.

Here’s to you, Lisa! Twenty years later and you’re still the only woman I ever truly loved.”


17. The Dead Puppy on the Porch

“I have tons of stories especially since I attended a 140+ year-old Native American boarding school. A lot them happened to other people. But I only had one personal experience. When I was maybe 8 years old I had a puppy that stayed outside (this is the rez. All dogs are outside dogs). While I was asleep one night I heard the pup crying and I tried to get up to see what was going on. But I couldn’t. I felt like there was two huge hands holding me down by the shoulder. I could move my legs but not my upper half. I opened my eyes but saw nothing. I started lose my breath because as I was pushing up I was choking myself. My puppy got louder and louder. Then it all stopped. I took a big gasp as I popped up and ran to the front door. I opened it up to see my puppy dead on the porch. No blood, no other animals. I went to bed and the next morning we noticed two eye looking goggle marks high up on the door. We thought it was dirt but it never could come off. This was on the reservation in middle of nowhere so skinwalker was a possibility. Otherwise, I really don’t know.”


18. Old Skin & The Wolves

“Not me, but a friend of mine told me about a dream she had years ago about a decrepit old man who was being chased by wolves. In the dream, he kept referring to himself in the third person as ‘Old Skin.’ (‘Old Skin’s gotta get away from the wolves…’)

Eventually, the wolves caught up to him and started ripping him to pieces in front of her, and he kept narrating the events in a monotone voice. (‘Old Skin’s being eaten alive…Old Skin’s gonna die…’)

She woke up feeling creeped out, but the weirdest part came when she started describing the dream to her brother. He stopped her mid-sentence and asked, ‘Was his name “Old Skin”? I had the EXACT SAME DREAM!’

I don’t know if that counts as paranormal, but it’s fucking creepy.”


19. Grandpa’s Watch Would Show Up Like Clockwork

“In 1985 we moved in with my grandma because grandpa just died, and she couldn’t care for the property herself. Anyway, grandpa would keep his watch on the night stand every night when he went to sleep. After he died, grandma put it in the drawer of the table. His watch would routinely (once a week?) show up on top of the stand in the morning, right where he would put it.”


20. I Saw My Deceased Ex-Husband in My Kitchen

“I saw my deceased ex-husband in my kitchen.

I was watching TV in my living room (in the middle of the day) and kept hearing this sound, like someone was jiggling their change around. And it was loud, as if it were in the room with me. I paused my TV, yet the sound persisted.

So I start to look around the room and when I got to the kitchen, I saw him standing there. He was looking around, as if taking stock of my apartment. Oh, and he was jiggling change in one hand, while flipping a quarter in between his fingers with the other hand. Something he did a lot when he was alive.

He turned his head and saw me frozen, staring at him. The expression on his face was knew I would never forget. His eyes got HUGE and he kind of tilted his head forward, with the expression like, ‘You can SEE me??!!’ I don’t how long we stared at each for, but I turned away when I started to hear my cat ripping up the fucking carpet again in the other room. When I turned back to my ex, he was gone.

It’s worth noting that he had only been dead for a couple months, too. Some Romanian women I worked with told me that the dead stick around for three months before crossing over. I don’t know about all that, but I know without a shadow of a doubt what I saw that day.”


21. Out of Nowhere Came This Piercing Scream

“Before I joined the Army, I lived in a town called Statesville, NC. There’s an old, abandoned hospital there that people call ‘Old Davis’ (as there’s now a newer Davis Hospital). During the colder months, the homeless are known to sleep there, and it’s not uncommon for people to go ghost hunting. It’s just a generally creepy building (assuming it’s still standing; I haven’t been back in years).

One night in 2009, three or four friends and I decided it would be a good idea ourselves. Now, it’s illegal to go wandering the premises, so we snuck in through the back and wandered around a bit until we found a staircase that led us to the top floor. Once we were there, we started wandering through the halls, poking our heads in abandoned rooms and the like. Farther down the hall, it had been boarded up and people before us had broken a hole in the bottom big enough to crouch through.

So, I went in first. Once my head was through, I stopped. Something beside me had laughed, like a very quiet giggle. I turned back and asked if anyone had heard that, and no one else had, so I brushed it off. Then I turned back toward the hole and finished crossing through the threshold. As soon as my entire body was through, out of nowhere came this piercing scream. I’ve never seen a group of teenagers run so fast.
None of us ever went back in there after that.”


22. The Day I Saw Death

“I still think about this at least once a week.

I was driving to my friend’s to go play a round of golf. I was 28 or 29 at the time. I got to a light at a really nice intersection with a park and a bunch of local shops. A huge black SUV pulled up in the lane next to me. (Not super relevant, I’m not a car guy, but the SUV looked to be brand spanking new off the lot)

I looked over and my skin immediately crawled. Driving the SUV was a man whose skin looked like it was 300 years old. It looked like old white paint flaking off of an abandoned house’s walls. It looked like, I don’t know, almost if someone had grated his skin off, but there was no blood. He was inhumanly pale. His teeth were shockingly white. Like, white like the background of this sub white. Easily the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. His hair was equally white. He was wearing an Olive Green military uniform with a bunch of patches or badges or whatever. It was immaculate and looked brand new. I could never even guess his age. He seemed young, but looked so so so old. I can’t really convey it.

I was in shock looking at him.

Then he looked over at me, and he smiled. This smile, I’ll never forget it. He smiled like he knew me. He smiled like he knew me for a long time. It’s not a smile you give to a stranger. It’s the smile your friend gives you when they are up to something they know you’ll love.

I am a grown man. I am an educated man. I consider myself a rational man.

I pulled over. Dialed my girlfriend. Hung up after one ring when I realized I wouldn’t know what to even say and drove back to my apartment.

I was convinced I saw Death that day.

I tried telling a close friend, but I couldn’t find the words. Heck, I still can’t. A minute into the story and I was already getting puzzled looks.

I don’t know. I don’t want to know.” Thought Catalog Logo Mark

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