30 Real-Life Stories So Creepy, You’ll Probably Want To Sleep With The Lights On

We’re used to finding our scares in horror movies, thrillers, and ghost stories. But sometimes, real life doesn’t need a script to terrify us. Whether it’s a chilling coincidence, an unexplained presence, or a brush with genuine danger, reality has a way of being far more unsettling than anything Hollywood could dream up.

We dove deep into the Reddit thread where someone asked, "What is the most scariest but still unexplained thing that you have experienced?, and found terrifying true stories from people who lived through them. These stories don’t involve jump scares or CGI monsters, just real people caught in moments where something felt very wrong. Here are some moments when reality proved to be far scarier than fiction.

#1

Image source: Falconfairy42, EyeEm / freepik (not the actual photo) This wasn't scary but it is unexplained. My first husband and I were separated at the time. I dreamed one night he arrived at our home and knocked on the door. When I opened the door he looked extremely tired and a sunken version of himself. Even though he didn't say it, he was asking forgiveness with his eyes. Of course I forgave him and welcomed him inside. Our favorite thing to do was to lay in bed and talk for hours so we laid in the bed and began our conversation about nonsense stuff. As we were talking, the window at the foot of our bed was glowing a bright, warm light (not blinding but comforting) as we continued to talk the light became brighter and brighter until it engulfed us both in it's warmth. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. About an hour later, my husband's mother called me hysterical and told me that my husband had been m******d an hour before. I realized then, that he had come to see me to ask for forgiveness before he passed over. He was a d**g a****t and hid it from me for years, which caused our separation. He was in a bad location and a person there took his life. But I take comfort knowing I was with him when he passed.

#2

Image source: beardedsawyer, Sebastian Huxley / Unsplash (not the actual photo) In 1989 I was driving on a familiar rural highway in broad daylight. I was rounding an easy bend and shocked to see a small town on the right side of the road. There’s a sign: St. Vincent. A few of the things immediately noticeable were a shop called Webster Welding, an old fashioned horse drawn water pump for fire fighting, several large poplars with dead tops, and black and white painted rocks along the street that faced the highway. I kept watching in the rear view mirror and it stayed visible. I drive a few miles and there is a gentleman waving at me from beside his car. He’s obviously broken down and I pulled over. A quick chat and I learn he’s blown a tire and wrecked his rim. He asks if I’ll drive him back to the town. No problem. In he gets and off we go. The town is not there. It’s a dusty Alberta crossroad. This fellow and I just sat in my truck in silence. I raised an arm and my hair was standing on end. His too. He said “All the trees were dead. Are we dead?” Eventually I drove him to a nearby town. He simply got out of the truck and walked away. I remember it like it was yesterday. I could tell you what that town looked like in perfect detail.

#3

Image source: _sekwekwi, Joshua Earle / Unsplash (not the actual photo) I moved to a different city for university at the peak of the pandemic. I lived off campus in a suite with a couple of my friends from my hometown. Life happened, and they both ended up moving out by the end of the first semester. So I was now living alone in a very quiet neighbourhood. I got off of work late one night, and crawled into bed around 12am. I woke up about an hour later to the sound of footsteps shuffling around in my bedroom. I opened my eyes to see a very tall man in my doorway, backlit by the streetlights, with his cellphone upright in his hand as if he was recording. When the person registered I was awake, they backed their way out of the room and started running. I followed them outside, and watched them hop into the drivers seat of an empty car that had been left running before speeding down the street. I had no information to give to the police when they arrived. To this day I have no idea who that person could have been, or what they were doing in my bedroom at 1am.

#4

Image source: perpulstuph, Curated Lifestyle / Unsplash (not the actual photo) Okay, so, this one still gives me chills just thinking about it. I will say that, to a point, I believe in paranormal stuff, I have had too many creepy and unexplained things that I can confirm with others happen, however, I try to be very skeptical and always try to find the most reasonable explanations. This happened about 25 years ago. I was 7 or 8 years old. I was laying in the top bunk of the bunkbed I shared with my twin brother. We had an attached bathroom, and the only light coming in the room was the light emanating from under the bathroom door. I was laying in bed, listening to my brother cry as my dad tried to remove a splinter from my brother's finger. I looked at the foot of my bed, and I saw a man about 5'10 tall, long hair about shoulder length, short beard, and what looked like a flannel shirt and possibly overalls or suspenders standing there, and his pupils where glowing, kind of green like if you see an animals eyes in the dark. I started screaming "Daddy, daddy, there is a man in here, standing at the foot of my bed!". I looked back and he was gone, and I just kept screaming, I was terrified. This apartment had a front and back door, but they were absolutely locked as we lived in a bad neighborhood in a very old part of the city. 10 years later, I recounted the story to my dad, and he had honestly forgotten about it. He did say, and he did not tell me when I was younger, that he did from time to time swear he saw a man who matched that description, minus the glowing eyes, in the apartment late at night. My dad had searched the apartment a few times after seeing him, but there was no trace of a way he came in, and often, he would follow the man to a closet and he just sort of disappeared.

#5

Image source: ConversationMore8863, Shovan Datta / Pexels (not the actual photo) The house I live in is pretty old (one of the old mill owners houses in the uk) and we have heard a lot of strange things here. Bangs, crashes and things moving/falling are fairly normal but one night I awoke to find myself in the middle of a bad case of sleep-paralysis, I was laid flat on my back and there was a huge shadow person leaning over me and pushing down on my chest. I tried to scream but no sound would come out and I couldn’t move anything except my eyes to wake my husband. It was terrifying but once I broke the spell and “woke up” I realised it was simply a nightmare and felt better. In the morning when my husband woke up, he said to me while wide-eyed “I know how this is gonna sound but last night I woke up to a huge shadow person looming over your side of the bed, I could see it’s hands gripping the bottom of the frame on your side, it took me a couple of seconds to realise what I was looking at and when I shot up in bed it just disappeared”. I had not at that moment told him about my experience. We still talk about that 10 years later from time to time it was so profoundly strange.

#6

Image source: Imperfectyourenot, freestocks / Unsplash (not the actual photo) This happened to me when I was about 14. No one believes me, and I obviously can’t prove it, but I know. I was babysitting 2 girls, one 5 and the a baby in a crib. They were in the same room. This was a small town, and the house had been abandoned but kept up,for about 30 years. This couple bought it and renovated it. It was a Victorian style house with a third floor for the mains’s room. I was watching TV and heard the baby crying. I waited and didn’t hear her again, so I figured she went baby to sleep. A bit later I heard her again, and I went up stairs to check on her. She was sound asleep and I remember being surprised cause I figured she would be restless. I was standing over the crib, and i heard the baby crying again, from the third floor. I was terrified, ran downstairs and sat really really close to the TV so I couldn’t hear anything but the TV. It was summer, no wind, they had no pets, which is what everyone told me that was what I heard. Nope. I heard a baby crying. From an empty floor.

#7

Image source: dirtybirdsriseup, freepik (not the actual photo) My father is very religious. He does not believe in ghosts, aliens, anything supernatural, or out of the ordinary. To this day, if this story is brought up, he will quickly find something else to talk about.. My dad, younger brother, and I were at my family's hunting camp sleeping in the small trailer together on bunk beds. It was the day after Christmas, and it was chilly outside, so we got to bed early to wake up for hunting. In the middle of the night, my Dad wakes up and starts screaming like he's being attacked. He then immediately began sobbing. This is the only time I've seen or heard my father cry. When he calmed down, his terrified sons asked what happened. He said he'd had a terrible nightmare about an endless surge of water that was sweeping families away and drowning children. I recall he said those words specifically. To have my Dad tell me about a dream was strange in and of itself. You must understand all of this was completely out of character. Finally, I asked if we drowned in his dream because, at this point, I was sure there was some meaning to this vision. He said no and that all of the people looked Chinese. Now let me preface by saying we did not have internet access on our cell phones at this time, and we did not have any access to TV or news at our hunting property. Well, this was the morning of December 26th, 2004. The very day, a massive earthquake struck Asia, which caused a tsunami, which in turn took the lives of nearly 228.000 people. I still believe in some kind of collective consciencness because of this event. How could I not?

#8

Image source: Chevy_Cheyenne, Mikita Karasiou / Unsplash (not the actual photo) I’ve told other unexplained stories on Reddit but I’m not sure I’ve told the one about the thing my friend and I saw on the side of the road. I’ll try and remember it to the best of my ability, it was about 12 ish years ago. If anyone else saw something similar let me know. It’s around 3 in the morning in rural North-Central Alberta. My friend and I are driving home from a high school party in which neither of us drank or took any d***s. It’s the middle of winter. In Alberta, this means it’s *cold* outside. This night it was below -30 degrees Celsius (below -22 degrees Fahrenheit; edited to fix temperature). The whole way home, my friend and I are chatting about the usual things: what happened at the party, the boys we liked, etc. While most teenage girls are chatty, this friend in particular was a chatter box. Mostly I would listen and just react to whatever she said (love friends like that). So, because she would do most of the talking and didn’t require much input, I’d zone out sometimes looking out the window. We are about 5-7 minutes outside of town at this point taking the highway, probably going 75-90 km/hour. Using an online calculator that puts us around 6-7ish km outside of town in a sparsely wooded area with no services open in town. As we round a corner, I’m zoning out listening to my friend talk, when through the windshield, I notice glowing eyes off the side of the road, the headlights not fully hitting whatever it was. The eyes were green/yellowish. This would be normal but these eyes are about 7-8 feet above the ground. At first, I think it’s a hiker or someone walking back to town, but their eyes wouldn’t glow and no one is going to be walking that far from town or any houses when it’s *that* cold and late outside (this was a town of less than 1000 ppl). As we drive closer, this thing appears to have goat-like legs, is very heavy set, and stands on two feet. Its arms drop down by its side like a person’s and it appears to even have some kind of dark clothing on the top half. It had something like goat-like horns that curved but went upwards. At this point, my blood runs completely cold and I have a full-fledged instinctual freeze response, hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I remember hearing my own disembodied voice think “I shouldn’t be seeing this. This is wrong.” I even teared up. We pass by it relatively quickly and I can’t stop thinking about what that was. My perception of time was kind of weird after that due to panic. But now the lights of town are in front of us, and I realize my friend isn’t talking anymore. I turn to my friend and sheepishly said with tears still in my eyes, “sorry, what were you saying? I must be going crazy but I thought I saw something back there.” She said “no, no it’s fine. I saw it too. Did it kind of look like a goat?” So, she saw it too. We had no idea what it was. We both come from hunting families and I know the easiest critique is that it was an elk or moose standing on hind legs. But the arms of an elk or deer don’t just fall beside the body, they buckle outwards a bit. Regardless, it seemed human-like in its stance and it was very heavy set. Then, you’d think, oh it was a bear. But it had horns and curved back legs. I assume moose would be the same as an elk or deer but I’ve never really seen a moose standing ambiently, typically just when they fight. Even our responses were odd. You’d think, given scary movies, you’d immediately flip out and react. Both of us kind of just got entranced and terrified for awhile, blood running cold. While the friend and I don’t talk anymore, we talked about it a few times in the next years we were still in contact. She continued to refer to it as the goat thing.

#9

Image source: no_addiction, ginkoveyka / freepik (not the actual photo) I think I was in college (about 20 years ago) and I was staying at my parents for the weekend. They live in an apartment building. It was in the middle of the night, around 1-2 AM, when suddenly we heard loud scratches and bangs on the entrance door. They were so loud that we all got up and gathered on the hallway to see what's happening. My father looked through door sight and there was nothing there. He then started to beat loudly on the door to make it stop. After a few seconds more everything went silent. No footsteps, no sound and when looking through the door sight there was nothing there. Of course we didn't opened the door because we all where very shocked by everything that happened. In the morning, when we got up, we almost believed it was all a dream until we opened the door and saw some deep, big scratches on the outside part of the door (the door was made of wood). To this day I still don't know what that was. There are no dogs in the building and even if it was, it should've been a very large dog to leave those marks on the door. Also, such a big dog would bark or at least you would here its paws when walking outside your door.

#10

Image source: Yugan-Dali, Martin Jernberg / Unsplash (not the actual photo) The night before my birthday in 1996, I dreamed that I was walking around near the peak of Everest. It was snowing hard, but I was quite comfortable. There was a tent. To announce my presence, I sang Goober Peas. The two men inside were frightened, and I tried to calm and cheer them. I stayed with them a while and comforted them. A few years later, I read about the Everest disaster in which mountaineers had to pitch a tent too high on Everest and died there, the night before my birthday in 1996. I can’t explain it, but I hope I comforted them.

#11

Image source: TheScarletPimple, louis magnotti / Unsplash (not the actual photo) The flight accident that didn't happen to me and several others in the Army. I was flying Hueys for the Army supporting the Ranger School in the N Georgia mountains in Fall of 1978. At the end of a morning mission, I was on the controls flying down from the mountains to Camp Frank D Merrill LZ northwest of Dahlonega GA. I was relaxed and looking forward to re-fueling and returning to Ft. Benning (now Ft Moore) that afternoon. Something started bothering me, and I couldn't put my finger on it. After about a minute, I knew something was badly wrong with the aircraft and that we needed to land. The instruments were all normal. There was no unusual sound or vibration. The controls all handled normally, with no binding or sticking or play. As I had only about 450 hours of flight time, I alerted the other pilot (~3000 hours, Warrant Officer) and asked him to take the controls to check things out. I thought that I might be imagining things, especially as a trained engineer I couldn't identify anything that would lead to my feeling. He didn't believe me when I said something was wrong with the helicopter. He played around with it for a minutes or so, said "the bird is good', and handed the controls back to me. As soon as I got back on the controls, the feeling that the aircraft was bad came back, that something was really wrong. I declared an emergency landing and told the other pilot to call Ft. Benning Flight Ops on our UHF radio and give them the coordinates of this little two helicopter clearing I could see on a gentle slope ("We're putting down right there..."), and to contact the Camp Merrill aviation liaison on the local VHF in case something went bad during the landing. We landed, and after the rotors stopped turning, I immediately climbed up top and looked at the rotor hub. The longitudinal bearing that transmitted pitch information to the blades had failed, instead of having less than few thousands of an inch of play, it had over 1/4 inch. The other pilot blanched when I asked him to take a look. A maintenance bird that arrived about 5-6 hours later with a test pilot and TI. The test pilot took a look, blanched, and asked the other pilot how he knew there was a problem. He pointed at me and said, "I didn't find it. I thought the bird was good. Lieutenant MyLastName said the bird was bad and we needed to land immediately." The Maintenance Test Pilot asked me how I knew. I told him the truth: "I have no idea. I just knew that we needed to land right away." He didn't believe me, insisting I must have heard or seen or felt something. The other pilot said, "No, he's telling the truth - I couldn't feel anything either." The crew chief also said he didn't detect anything. The Maintenance Test Pilot said "You are the luckiest guys alive - you should have been dead already. That bearing should have flown apart. You should have lost the rotor blades, all control of the aircraft, and been a ball of torn metal on the sides of a mountain." To this day, I still have no idea why or how I knew. It wasn't a little voice whispering in my ear or anything like that. It was just a feeling of really bad badness (the best I can describe it). And yeah, we both inspected that same bearing during the mission pre-flight - it was completely normal then. Myself, the other pilot, the crew-chief and possibly some of the Ranger cadre we'd ferried about should have died on that day. We didn't for no reason that I can put my finger on. Even now.

#12

Image source: dirtybirdsriseup, Ty Rethy / Unsplash (not the actual photo) I lived briefly in a rental home, which was owned by a church in a small Florida town, and which was built in 1908. Every night around 8 o'clock, I heard dragging, shuffling footsteps coming from the kitchen. If I walked into the kitchen, they would stop, and if I turned my head to look into the kitchen from the den, they would pause and continue the very moment I looked away again. This lasted for 5 minutes or so each and every night.

#13

Image source: KipBoutaDip, Mohammad Alizade / Unsplash (not the actual photo) I was out with my ex roommate on a night drive. We liked to go driving and get lost in the country sometimes and just jam out to music and talk. We lived in central IL at the time, so it was pretty much just open land and cornfields. It was super dark, though, so we couldn't see too much beyond the sides of the road and what was in front of us. My roomie was driving, and at this point we had the music off. She suddenly stopped mid sentence. I had been looking at my phone so I Iooked up at her when she got quiet. Her eyes were wide and her brow furrowed. I looked up at the road. On the left side, there was a man just ominously staring into the darkness. Not even half a block later there was another, doing the same thing. And another. About 10 seconds pass and we see another man, facing the road but still on the left side, staring into our headlights with this blank, almost psychotic expression. My blood ran cold and I couldn't explain why. It was so unsettling even though they were just people standing out there. After passing all of them, my roommate suddenly says, "What the F**K was *that??*" I said I had no idea but I wanted to go home. I'm sure there's some plausible explanation, but that night still makes me shudder for some unforseen reason. My roomie was creeped out too. There weren't any houses out there, just fields with a few patches of trees. No farm equipment, no mail boxes, cars, or driveways. Just empty darkness and fields. Twilight zone s**t I swear.

#14

Image source: Banpitbullspronto, DC Studio / freepik (not the actual photo) It was around 1am and I was still up watching TV. I couldn't sleep. I got really into watching some sort of history documentary about the shroud of Turin. When they zoomed up closely to the shroud my TV started to glitch and the picture was stuck on the shroud. The audio froze and then I heard a man's voice saying "Don't look" in a really unnatural deep voice. It felt like it was right behind me. I whipped my head around and there was nobody there. I live alone since my wife passed. My daughter and Grandchild comes over on occasion but this night I was alone. I live in rural Ireland and whilst not my first rodeo with ghosts etc this experience felt unnatural. I don't know why. The TV went back to normal a couple of seconds after I heard "Don't Look". I managed to hunt down the documentary and combed it for these words. Still don't know where it came from. For some reason it really frightened me. I went to bed a little shaken up if I'm honest. If I see anything about the shroud of Turin advertised or in news articles I get a shiver. The voice sounded extremely deep. I've never heard a voice like it. Big baritone voice. I don't know. I'm getting the shivers typing this and I've seen some stuff in my lifetime on this earth. I've been here on this earth seven decades. I know it doesn't sound scary but it was the deepness of the voice that I didn't like. Especially the TV sticking and jumping on the analysis of the Turin. Yikes.

#15

Image source: slyzard94, Behnam Mohsenzadeh / Unsplash (not the actual photo) When I was a teen I was in the living room right around 3 a.m. Just chilling on my laptop on the couch. 2 years before, my uncle had passed away in the room above the living room I was currently sitting in. I swear it was like all of the sudden every window upstairs had been opened from the way the wind suddenly blew around and sounded. And then I remember hearing one loud THUD directly above me in the room upstairs. It sounded like a chair was picked up and then slammed back down or something. I was frozen for a solid minute before I booked it up the stairs and into my room on the opposite end of the house. My uncle passed away in a not so peaceful way, it felt like he was having one last bout of anger before he finally left the house for ever.

#16

Image source: noahthequeerfish, Annie Spratt / Unsplash (not the actual photo) This isn't my story, it's my grandmother's. When my gran was 10 her dad died in a train accident, leaving her and her mother to care for her much younger brother. A few years later her brother had come out of his bedroom in the middle of the night terrified. He said that there was a man at the end of his bed. My gran and her mum checked his room thoroughly and didn't find anything there. They all went back to bed. A few minutes later he complained again, saying that the man was still there. Once more they checked the room and found nothing. My gran's mum asked him what the man was doing. He said he was just smiling. She asked him to describe what the man looked like. Keep in mind that he was very little, around 2 or 3 I think, when his dad died and he would have forgotten what he looked like by this point. As he was describing the man my gran and her mum were beginning to get scared. He was describing his dad. I didn't believe in anything supernatural before I heard her story, now I'm not so sure.

#17

Image source: crispyc00kie, Jeremy Bishop / Unsplash (not the actual photo) When I was around 13 or 14 years old, I was spending the summer at my grandparents' home in rural Guatemala. I guess my grandfather was going through something and was dealing with it the only way he knew- getting drunk. It was my first time seeing him like that, so I followed my mom's lead in dealing with him. She gave me his stash of mostly empty bottles and told me to pour them out in the little grove between my grandparents' home and my uncle's home. I go as far in as possible and start pouring them out, when I suddenly heard some shuffling. I looked up and to my right, there was a beaten and bloodied man, dressed in rags, sitting against a tree. There was a swarm of flies on him and he smelled like dead fish, but all he said in a quiet voice was "help." Of course, I stumbled back and was scared. I dropped the bottles because at that point, it didn't matter anymore. I ran to the house and told my mom. She didn't believe me at first, but I guess I looked scared enough that she sent her brother and a few other men to go check. My uncle came back and said they didn't find anyone, and I went with him a second time to the same spot, but it was empty. The ground that man sat on was the only patch of dirt that looked fresh, but the only thing that was proof it was the same spot was the stash of bottles I had dropped there. No explanation to this day.

#18

Image source: Membershipinfamous0, Fausto Sandoval / Unsplash (not the actual photo) This is something that happened to me quite recently and it creeped me out so so much. I live alone in my apartment and I’m a horror gaming fan and thus I was scouring Steam looking for a cool horror game. I put on my headphones and I watched multiple trailers and eventually came to a game called ‘horror in da hood’. Looked at the page and watched the trailer - here is where the creepy part begins.. Near the end of the trailer there’s a very creepy voice saying something like “Can you help me please?”. One second, literally one second after I watched it I could clearly hear (from outside my headphones so it was muffled) an old male voice saying “I can help haha” from my hallway behind me. Especially the laugh was creepy. Needless to say I through off my headphone and immediately looked behind me, only to be greeted by the dark hallway. I stared into it, slowly grabbing my ruler that was on my desk. After moments that felt like an eternity I was able to stand up. Slowly moved towards the hallway while grabbing a tiny flashlight I have on my nightstand. I flashed the hallway from a distance but there was nothing. To give light to the hallway I have to go into it and turn the switch there, which was very creepy to do. Of course, there was nothing there at all, but it creeps me out still. I left the light on everywhere that night and still keep on the light in the hallway when I am on my computer now. Two days after this happened I went back to watch the horror in da hood trailer to make sure that the “I can help haha” was not in the trailer and I just made a mistake… it’s not in the trailer. It gives me the creeps just typing this.

#19

Image source: archameidus, Ivana Cajina / Unspalsh (not the actual photo) My friends and I went exploring in the caves in lilydale as teenagers, they were and still are rumored to be haunted. But no one knew it at that time. We were about half way in, when this happened about 25 years ago. We we telling stories and laughing and we could hear this faint clinking noise up ahead. My friends were curious so we decided go further, as we went deeper and deeper in the cave, we saw a light up ahead and could not make out where it was coming from. We started to see a figure but it wasnt moving. We slowly approached the figure and it appeared to be a old man mining wearing dirty overalls and a dirty white shirt and a dirty yellowish hat. His sleeves were rolled u0 and he had a lobg beard. One of my friends yelled out Boo and he turned towards us and started running after us. It appeared he was in about 50 t0 60 years of age but he didnt move like a man. It took us a good 10 mins to get back to the car and we sped our way home. About a mile past the caves, we saw the same man on the side of the road. We were all screaming trying to figure out how he got ahead of us without a vehicle. We have only talked about that night a couple of times, but we are all convinced we saw a ghost or supernatural being.

#20

When I was a kid maybe 9 or 10 so around 1992 I saw a giant walking along the top of some fells in the Lake District near the town of Keswick. At first I thought it was some machinery moving behind the hill like maybe a crane, but then it stepped up and looked like Roal Dahls BFG walking along the top of the fell. It was a bright clear day absolute blazing sunshine and blue skies. So I don’t think it was some sort of reverse Brocken spectre, it looked nothing like that anyway it was fully in perspective although too far to see details. I told everyone else in the car and we actually got out and stared at this thing. The only half reasonable explanation would be that someone was manipulating an absolutely giant puppet. It dissapeared down the other side of the fell To this day I have absolutely no explanation for that. Image source: Bennjoon

#21

Not me but my dad. He's not the type who believe in ghost, also stone cold, I've never seen him flinch even once in the 33 years of being his son. About 10 years ago, he was on this business trip (we live in Thailand for context). He ended up staying in this old sketchy looking hotel but it was late and he didn't have much choice. He got his room, it was the furthest room from elevator on the 4th floor. He took a shower, drink 1 can of beer, and feel asleep. it was around 9 pm. 12am on the dot. My mother received a phone call on her mobile phone, it was my dad. She picks up, but my dad didn't say anything. She got worried so she hung up and called him back, he picks up, he said he was sound asleep and didn't call her, he even check the phone history and there was no record of this out going call. Weird. but they think nothing of it and both went back to sleep. 2am, in my dad's hotel room. He woke up to a TV turning itself on. He just turn it off. Few minutes later, there's a sound coming from bathroom, sound of water tap turning on. He check it out, it was dry. This paranormal activity continues and he was getting sick of it. He unplug the TV and just ignore everything and go back to sleep till morning. I'd say that was the most classic move on the ghost part. It's basically the most basic s**t ghost do in every story. But the funniest thing is, it doesn't click to my dad at all that it was paranormal. He told my mom the day after like 'that night was strange' (coming from a full on haunted hotel room surviver). I believe him, he gain nothing out of making that story up and how he told it was completely unaware of how 'ghosty' it sounds. We never get a conclusion of the story but it makes me chuckle every time to think that that ghost must have been really frustrated. "I'm doing everything right! WHY ARE YOU NOT SCARED OF ME!" lol. Image source: anp_fj

#22

Image source: Occupiedlock I was talking to my roommate while her bf was on the balcony smoking. my back was to the tv. mid sentence she stopped talking and began to stammer. I thought she was having a stroke at first. she pointed behind me and I turned. an orb of blueish white energy was rising above the tv(she says it was goldish white). I stared at it for maybe 3 seconds before it erupted in a bunch of lines tracing along my living room wall. me and her ran out of our apartment with haste. her boyfriend was still on the balcony and we were trying to tell him to jump or climb down. he refused and walked into the living room and said nothing was wrong. I still have no idea what happened.

#23

Image source: CamoMeatball, Minimalism Life® / Unspalsh (not the actual photo) In my last house, I used to hear someone whispering my name at night upstairs. I never noticed for a while because I would have a headset on, but when I took it off I would hear it every now and then. The sound was so close it felt like it was inside my head. Then I started hearing it in my son's room when I would feed him at night. It freaked me out for a while, but chalked it up to lack of sleep as a new dad. One night, my wife came downstairs from feeding our son and asked, "Were you calling me? I thought I heard you whispering from the stairs." I never said a word about it to her prior to this. It continued for both of us until we moved out. It never escalated, so we just called it our little ghost.

#24

Image source: JAbremovic, Pixabay / Pexels (not the actual photo) It's not quite unexplained. I slept with a radio on low as a kid because I was afraid of train whistles in the nearby rail yard. As I aged, it turned into reading books with the light and radio on until I fell asleep( I am autistic and have a f****d up sleep schedule, my parents were fine as long as I did something quiet if I couldn't sleep.) One day, I spilled water on the radio. The radio broke in an odd way. It got all kinds of odd traffic, including radio stations that were definitely not from my home country. I was too young to quite understand it all. Then, a very strange sound started. It was a slow sound like someone grooving on a keyboard, but the notes were very random. It was super loud, and the longer it went on, the more I realized it wasn't a song. It wasn't a song, and it wasn't anything I was supposed to hear. It sounded very forbidden, and being a child with too much of an imagination, I wondered if it was aliens. I got my mum to wake up and look at it. She was baffled and said I should either try to tune to a different station or turn the radio off. I did, and I got a lot of strange interference the next night and so on, but not that specific sound. I got a new radio for Christmas that year. The incident stayed in my mind. In 2012ish, I read a C*****d article about unexplained sounds. I read something that seemed similar to what I heard. It wasn't aliens. It was a Russian number station for communicating with spies. Specifically, a type called a slow Polytone. Each note I heard was part of a coded message. Edit: this station, exactly https://youtu.be/FS-wdL0eDxc?si=bBD8Ldy6R47KjEtl Now I listen for these regularly as a major hobby, and have a lot of journals and knowledge gathered on it over the years.

#25

Image source: GorganzolaVsKong, Joshua Earle / Unsplash (not the actual photo) We were playing team tag at night back in middle school - a friend and I were hiding near a bush around a tree. Suddenly something in the bush moved and we assumed it was an animal. We threw a stick into the bush and it came flying back out and a dark figure about 4 feet tall ran across the field into the woods. We freaked out and ran back to our house about a 1/2 mile away.

#26

I’ve posted about this before, but about 6 years ago, my fiance and I were driving home. It was a 5 hour drive, and we were just about home. It was October, so it was pretty cold out, 9 pm, and it was raining. This stretch of road is in the middle of the woods, and there’s no lights out there. Just dark woods. We were in the middle of a conversation, and we went silent at the same time. We both saw something on the side of the road, peering out of the woods. We drove down that road often, so we have a pretty good idea of the scale of this thing. It was around 7 or 8 feet tall. Completely hairless. Humanoid, and white. It looked completely emaciated. And its arm and hand was so extremely long and skinny. It peered out and looked at us, illuminated by our headlights. We just sat there silently after we passed it. I eventually asked “…did you see…” and my fiance interrupted “oh thank god you saw it too?” A few days later we were hanging out with a couple friends who live near by. We hadn’t told them about what we saw. They end up telling us that they saw something near by. When they saw it, it was at a distance, at the opposite end of a recently harvested cornfield. They said it galloped on all fours. Almost like a baboon. Completely hairless, n**e, emaciated, and impossibly tall and lanky. Several years passed, and I made a post on Facebook about it. Another friend messaged me, saying her mom and sister saw one on the side of a road, on the outskirts of this same town. I did some research and found that about 20 minutes away, someone described seeing the same thing, and posted about it online. Apparently they’re seen fairly often, and people have started calling them crawlers. And it sucks because I can’t expect anyone to believe it. If someone came us to me and said all of this, I probably wouldn’t believe it. But we saw it clear as day. In fact, my fiance grew up in a house in the woods outside this town, and he thinks he saw one when he was a kid. And I believe him because one time we camped outside that house, when nobody was living there. In the woods, we heard a baby crying. There’s no way a baby would be in those woods. Image source: Urupindi

#27

Back in 2015 I lived alone in a studio that was in a not so great neighborhood. It always had an eerie vibe to it, like something was moving in the corner of your eye or breathing down your neck when you got up to get a midnight snack. I was having a rough time with depression then, so I completely chalked those feelings up to my own mind being strange and playing tricks on me. A friend needed a place to stay temporarily, so I told her the couch was hers as long as she needed it. I had been away for a few nights and when I returned, she said she wanted to talk about the apartment. She said something about it was just downright spooky. That it felt like something was always behind her, and that she would keep music playing or someone on the phone to not feel so uncomfortable. Ugh I get the most sickening goosebumps thinking back to this and if she hadn’t been there to witness it all, I simply wouldn’t have even believed my own eyes. In the midst of our very conversation, as we were standing in the kitchen area (which was on one side of the apartment, the “bedroom” was on the opposite side less than 50 feet away) we saw the full length mirror, which was leaning against the wall, do a sort of teetering walk and flop flat on top of the bed. We froze and looked at each other, then marched straight over to it. We picked up the mirror and for about 5 minutes, we tried to recreate how the mirror could have done that. With the angle it was set at against the wall, it should have shattered on the floor as it was too far from the bed to land on it. How did it teeter like that? As we were trying to come up with a reasonable explanation, both of our eyes were drawn to a framed photo of my family on top of my dresser. THE F*****G PHOTO TEETERED FORWARD LEFT, RIGHT, THEN SLAMMED FACE DOWN. Exact same way the mirror had except it felt aggressive, it felt personal. I set it back in its rightful place and we ran out of there as fast as humanly possible. We moved into her family’s home within that week and neither of us have ever experienced anything like that before or afterwards. Image source: lizard_mamba

#28

When my uncle died suddenly, the family was in so much grief because they weren’t able to say their goodbyes and such. A family friend brought her niece (around 17 or 18 y/o) to the funeral who she claims to be “gifted.” Just to give a disclaimer, this woman was in no way related to the family and has never seen my uncle before. I was skeptical at first until she asked the family if my uncle was wearing a plain shirt and shorts when he died. He was, and she told all of us who were there that my uncle was there with us. She said she was looking at the person inside the coffin when she felt someone beside her, looking at the man inside. She tried to play it cool until he said, “You can see me, can’t you?” She told us that he initially didn’t know he was dead and was lurking around in their house until one of my cousins shouted to nobody in particular as she was locking up the house “Pa, we’re just going to the funeral home” and that’s how he knew he should follow. She also told each of his children very specific details like “that business venture you were hesitant with that you talked to your father about, he says you should pursue it.” Or, “that bracelet you’ve always been asking him about, he says it’s yours and it’s in the 2nd drawer of his night stand.” In the end we were all left amazed by this but it was such a relief for the family members because they somehow felt like they were able to say goodbye peacefully. Towards the end of that day, the woman said, “he said you should put his glasses inside the coffin because he wants to wear them.” They brought out his glasses which were kept in a bag, and put it inside the coffin. The woman told us that when she saw him again, he had his glasses on and a bit later, that he was saying goodbye because he can see the light. It was a sobering moment and even though we could not believe what had just happened we were at least happy the family got some closure. Image source: darcydidwhat

#29

Image source: LadyMelmo, Nicholas Szewczyk / Unsplash (not the actual photo) I lived in a small 1 bedroom under house flat and as my cat walked past the bedroom door she looked at the wall above my head, froze, fluffed up and hissed. She started moving to the side really slowly, still fluffed up and staring that spot above my head. I looked up, but there was nothing. When she got near the side of the door frame, she bolted. I got up to see if she was OK, and as I walked past the TV it went off channel to static. My cat wanted out badly, and I went out with her! The TV went back to normal and chastising myself I opened the door to go back in, and as I took one step in the TV went back to static. I stayed outside with my cat until she calmed down, and nothing like that ever happened again. I still think about it sometimes.

#30

Image source: Prior_Equipment, Jeffry S.S. / Pexels (not the actual photo) My partner and I had some guy decide he was going to try to intentionally ram our car in a parking lot. We thankfully escaped unharmed after a terrifying chase, but we never figured out why he zeroed in on us. We were just minding our own business, trying to leave the lot. We still occasionally rehash it years later but it makes no sense at all.