AskReaders: What is the creepiest thing that has ever actually happened to you?

We asked our regular contributors through e-mail, What is the creepiest thing that has ever actually happened to you? We got many interesting responses. Here are some of them. We have just copied and pasted their responses, not editing them in any way and most of the respondents have requested to stay anonymous, so no names will be published.

1-5 Creepiest Real Stories

1. I went on a guided cemetery tour at night. About six or seven of us were standing around a tomb listening to the story of how the inhabitant had killed himself with a gun when all of a sudden there was a big flash and the whole sky lit up green with smaller flashes. We found out later that we had witnessed a meteor breaking up. So the tour guide takes a moment, recovers from the surprise, and continues his story about how some decades after the poor chap had killed himself someone broke into his tomb and stole his skull.

We then moved on, and walked further into the cemetery when we were startled by a loud bang. We shrugged it off as a car backfiring, laughed nervously at how on edge we were and continued the tour. Shortly after we hear a couple more bangs in quick succession, and one of the tour party commented that they were pretty sure they were gunshots. There was another bang, closer. Definitely a gunshot. Then we saw a light inbetween some of the headstones and I kid you not, we saw the figure of a man carrying a shotgun, slowly coming from the direction of the tomb we had just been at. We froze. I looked over to the tour guide, thinking it was some prank he plays on all his customers, but he was completely white and was backing away. It was a man with a shotgun and he was walking towards us. He lifted a flashlight and pointed it directly at us. Several of us ducked behind the headstones as he yelled, “Get out of here! What the hell are you doing in this place!?” Turns out the city council pays some guy to shoot possums in the cemetery and they forgot to warn the tour company.

2. On a spring break trip, a friend and I got dropped off at the front gate to our condo. A security guard saw us and kept insisting on walking us up to the room. We kept saying no and he seemed kinda weird. He followed us into the elevator and I stood as close as I could to the buttons. He kept making weird comments and telling us how hot we were. We kept bringing up how all of our boyfriends and our guy friends were in the room waiting on us and how there were like 10 people staying there. When the elevator hit our floor, we took off running as fast as we could.

Two weeks later after we came home, there was a news story about the same security guard. He followed a girl onto the elevator and made her perform sexual favors before he’d let her go.

3. Note: this is true in my experience BUT I am not saying something paranormal happened. When I used to go to college, I had to cut through a particular cemetery. The one attached to this church. Lack of space meant very few people had been buried there since the 1900s.

Anyway, under this one tree was the grave of a very young girl, just on its own. Said her name and the date she died (1885, age 12). I don’t know why, but I always got a solemn feeling as I walked past that grave, every single day. Eventually, it consumed me. I had no idea why I was getting that feeling walking past the grave, so I googled her name. Within about a week I had found out who she was and why she was buried there. She was buried there after suffering from a lung complaint.

According to the Family Bible she died “most peaceably” in her mother’s arms. Shortly after she died, her family left Brighton and founded a private school close to London. From what I can tell, the family never once returned to Brighton to visit her grave. I worked with the family biographer for a while digging up as much as we could about this girl, because he had barely heard of her save the death certificate and the mention in the Family Bible. It is like they erased her from the last fifty years of their life. After a while, the trail went cold.

I still had thoughts of how sad it was that this girl never had her family visit her after she died, and, once again, those thoughts consumed me. I fell asleep once night and dreamed of her and her dad. She told me she was fine now. I never dreamed of her once after that point and the uneasy feeling went as I walked past her grave. A couple of months later, the guy I was working with emailed me a picture. He had found a photograph of her. The problem? It was death photography (because that is what they did in that day and age, as it was too expensive to regularly hire a photographer). So, the only existing picture of her is from the day she died. The kicker? The girl in that photograph looked EXACTLY like the girl that I saw in my dream, the one that told me she was fine now. Up until I left England, I left flowers by her grave. This was the only grave in the whole cemetery which ever had flowers by it. My friends do it to this day, because nobody deserves to be forgotten, even in death.

4. Kinda creepy at the time, but scary afterwards. Long time ago driving from Bowral to Berrima in New South Wales (a State in Australia), my wife and I were flagged down by a guy asking to borrow a car jack because his van (which he said was his sisters, and yes it was white) had a flat and his jack didn’t work.

Guy was creepy and we just said nah mate and took off. A while later we saw the photo of the serial killer Ivan Milat (who had been caught by then). Pretty sure it was him and the van fitted.

5. I work in a pub, it’s about 2 miles away in the next village. I usually finish work late (1-2am) and I have to cycle home. The only route is a small road that goes through somewhat large woods. There’s a 1 mile stretch that has absolutely no street lights, it’s pitch black.

As I was cycling through the woods I start hearing this screeching sound, similar to a small animal dying. It scared the sh*t out of me, so I started pedaling fast. I continued to hear it, and it seemed as it was progressing towards me. I use my phone’s camera light to navigate, although it isn’t impossible to see without it. I point my phone behind me and I swear I caught sight of some fu*king humanoid creature on all 4s running at me, call it mind games but this was pretty vivid. I continue to cycle as fast as I can (I’ve been cycling long distances from a young age, I’d like to say I’m quite fast), yet I continue to hear the screeching and the light patting of the footsteps of whatever is chasing me. I try to turn my phone light off, and after a few seconds I manage to do so. The patting becomes quieter, and I hear one last screech from whatever it was. I have never been so scared in all my life.

6-10 Creepiest Real Stories

6. I had just got a job as a nanny looking after 2 kids for a family. I worked, the same hours every week, one the shifts being from 3pm until around 10 on Friday nights. Across the road from the families home was a construction site which I walked past everyday. The builders would wave and say hello to me in the mornings and evenings, but one took a particular interest in me. He was at least 20 years older than me and often said comments that would make me feel uncomfortable. Every morning on my way to work he would yell out “compliments” to me and in the evenings he would offer me a lift home in his van. I always declined. Although I felt uncomfortable, I never really felt unsafe until one day he approached me on the street. When I turned to walk away after he said something particularly vulgar he grabbed my arm harshly and said “don’t you dare walk away from me”. From then on I was a little more wary of him.

The house that the family live in is a two storey home with all the bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs and the living area and kitchen downstairs. The downstairs area is surrounded by floor to ceiling glass windows.

So one night after the kids were in bed I was upstairs. Now, I admit I was having a bit of a snoop in the parents room so I was listening carefully for any signs of them arriving home, as they were due back early tonight. While upstairs I heard a noise, which sounded like the gate. I peeked out a window that over looked the front yard, just in time to see a black sports bag be thrown over the high fence. After the sports bag came a bat and then a man. It took me a couple of seconds to register what was happening, until I realized that the man was the builder. I completely froze. I watched him walk across the yard and down the side of the house and then the lights cut out. I had no idea what to do. My phone was downstairs and due to all the windows there was no way I could go get it without being seen. The only way out of the house was downstairs. I could hear him walking around the house and rattling windows and trying door handles. I was trying to figure what to do when I heard a car come down the driveway. The parents had arrived home. I hid upstairs with the baby until I heard them come inside and call my name. I ran downstairs hysterically and the police were called. The guy was never found and I never saw him again. They tried to track him down through the building site but they were very tight lipped about who worked there. Looks like they were dealing with a lot of shady and unlicensed people coming in and out of there. The thing I learned from this experience is the importance of breaking up your routine whenever you can. I would catch the same bus, at the same time everyday. Get off at the same stop, go to the same grocery store every morning and walk the same way to work. I believe this helped this man figure out where I would be at what time. I don’t let myself think what might have happened if they didn’t not arrive home when they did.

7. I was an EMT working the 4am-4pm shift. We pick up our rig and get told to post (hang out and wait for a call) in a really sh*tty part of town.

I parked behind this shopping center where all of the businesses had closed down due to the lack of people around that general area. It was a lot of trailer parks, really run-down apartments, and whatnot. I picked this place because the sun was going to rise in an hour or so and my partner and I both wanted to take a nap until a call came through the radio to us.

My partner has no problem sleeping while sitting straight up in the front of the ambulance. I absolutely cannot do this, so I went in the back and laid down on the bench to try and nap. The thing about our old ambulance was that you couldn’t open the side door from the inside. So I had to get out, go through the side door (not the very back double doors) and lay down. I left the side door a little bit cracked open for when a call came though so I could jump into the front to respond.
About 5 minutes of me laying there and my I hear my partner call me. “Hey dude. You awake?” “Yeah.. what’s up?”

“That person over there has been staring at us for a while.” Across the street there was a sidewalk along the side of a park. I could make out a faint shadow of a person. I knew it was someone because their cigarette butt flickered every time they took a puff. The streetlight was super dim but I could tell that they were there, just fu*king staring at us. It was super weird so we watched them for a bit. After about 5 more minutes of us just watching, the person walks away. We joke about how weird people are, being up at 5am roaming around some sketchy park. I lay back down and start to doze off. I wake up to my partner saying “HOLY SH*T DUDE!” So I pop my head up into the front cabin. The person was standing like 20 feet from our ambulance, dressed in all black, staring at him. Eyes locked. I look at her face and I sh*t you not, she looks like the girl from The Ring. She had pitch black straight hair, wearing all black, very light skinned, the street light made her look like she was white as paper.

My partner is absolutely terrified as they’ve entered some weird sort of staring match. I told him to hop over into the driver seat and get the fu*k out of there. He says “I can’t. I’m too scared to move.” Sh*t, well I guess I have to squeeze from the back though this little space to get into the driver’s seat. I jump up and try to get back into the front cabin. It’s a tight squeeze because I’m a bigger guy, but I make it through. She apparently takes notice of me moving and starts power walking straight to us. I’ve never been so freaked out in my life. As she gets super close, I realize she’s looking at the side door that I left a little bit cracked open! I’m thinking “I forgot to close it!”

I get a good look at her face. She’s noticed that door and I know she’s gonna try to get in. Maybe she’s going try to kill me? I don’t know but I have to get out. Her whole body is shaking as she gets closer and closer, still staring at my partner. She gets up right next to his window and just stares at us both in the eyes. I get into the front about with about 1 second to spare, start the ambulance, and peel out. We never posted there again.

8. I’ve been waiting a long time to tell the full story of The Whistler. This story requires many details, but it is unexplainable, creepy, and 100% true. I also have video evidence.

When I was about 8 years old I was taking my dog for a walk through the neighborhood with my mom. It was maybe 11 p.m. We live next to a swamp/woods area on the edge of our neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. I remember it being very silent and slightly windy. From down in the swamp we heard somebody whistling at us. It sounded sort of like a bird, but each whistle was different enough where the lack of consistency made it human-like. The whistle sounded higher, then lower. I can’t really describe it. My mom had a concerned, slightly terrified look on her face and grabbed my hand and said that we should go inside quickly. I didn’t understand because I was too young, but seeing my mom freak out made me freak out too. After a while, though, I kind of forgot about it.

Two years later, I was taking my dog out again, late at night. There is a large bush that could easily obscure a person behind it just next to the front door. As I was finishing the walk, the whistling noise started again, same pitches, same inconsistent, human-like tones. As soon as I heard it, a chill went down my spine as I remembered exactly the feeling of seeing my mom, terrified, looking down into the swamp at something I couldn’t see (maybe she couldn’t either). I ran inside as fast as possible.

Years went by and I thought about it less and less. I told only a handful of people, and eventually it slipped from my mind. Fast forward to last summer: I’m 24, started dating my girl Sarah. We moved out to South Dakota for work. For Independence day, we decided to go to Pierre, SD and watch the fireworks along the bank of the Missouri river. There was a free camping spot behind a hospital where you could pitch your tent, hang out, and see the fireworks up the river. We were near the end of the campground and there were very few people around us. As it was getting dark, the fireworks began. They were pretty far away, so the illumination they brought was very little. Thus, we had to sit right at the edge of the river to be able to see them. A huge thunderhead was moving in and a storm was imminent, so the air seemed electric and the wind was picking up. The atmosphere was eerie to say the least.

The police boats herded all the other boats off of the river and had left our area to do that elsewhere. Most of the other campers walked up the river to have a better view of the fireworks, but Sarah and I stayed back and were drinking PBR tallboys and kicking it. Suddenly, we heard the sound of a paddle methodically dipping into the water. We saw a figure steering a canoe about 20m off shore. Sarah decided to go get more beers from the car, leaving me alone to stare at this mystery person. And then, of course, they whistled at me. My entire body was frozen and covered in goosebumps. It was the exact same whistler from my childhood, more than a decade earlier. I looked at the figure, but it was much too dark to discern who it could be. They were wearing a hat. When they were perpendicular to the shore from me, they stopped paddling, turned the canoe to face directly at me, and whistled right at me. I was so frightened I stood up and shouted at them “who are you?!?” They didn’t say anything, just whistled a couple more times, turned the canoe 180 degrees, and paddled out of sight.

I’m a videographer, so I already had my camera by my side and was taking video of the fireworks. As the canoe was almost out of sight, I grabbed my camera and got a shot of them whistling as they went away. When Sarah came back from getting beers, she was very confused as to why I was so freaked out. When I explained, she was freaked out a bit too. I was convinced we would both be murdered that night. How did this whistling person follow me, after 14 years, all the way to South Dakota? Was it a coincidence? Why was it the same whistling noise?! Who was that person and where did they go?!?! So many questions still unanswered. To this day I’m more afraid of being outside in the dark where I might hear that whistling again.

I’m open to any explanations. I spent all afternoon uploading this video. Here is the link.

9. I was seventeen, still living in my parents’ house. Everyone was away on a Friday night so I had a few friends over. We smoked a little, and were chilling in the basement playing video games. Two of my friends ran upstairs to get some snacks out of the pantry. After a few seconds they came running down the steps yelling my name. They say somebody just pulled into my driveway. I hear the dog start freaking out. I panic, thinking my parents are home, and I scramble to hide the weed and pipe we had sitting next to the back door.

I walked up the steps and looked out the window. There was no car in the driveway but my dog was still freaking out. I went outside to see if anyone was out there. It was late, almost midnight, and cold. I was barefoot and poorly dressed. I walked around my house, shivering and nervous, and found nothing. I went back inside, took my dog down to the basement with me and tried to relax.

Maybe twenty minutes later, we hear a huge crashing sound. It sounded like something had exploded right in front of the house. We ran outside through the back door and saw a car wrapped around a tree right by the road in my neighbor’s front yard. My dog starts freaking out again. It was my brother’s car. My brother had gone with my parents to my aunt’s and left his car in the garage. I ran to look inside and there was nobody in it.

I immediately called my brother, freaking out. When he answered the phone I was both relieved and confused. He instructed me to call the police. He came home. The police came and looked around. They took statements from everybody (we hid the fact that we were high pretty well). As the tow truck was pulling my brother’s car out of the front yard, the police received a call about a break in down the street. They left an officer with us and the rest left to respond to the call.

It turns out that a group of people were going through my neighborhood, breaking into houses and stealing cars out of garages. I was in the house when the burglar stole my brother’s car. I may have even walked right past him at one point. When they caught the group, one of the guys was injured as if he had been in a car wreck. He was the one who had broken into my house. I knew him. He had graduated from my high-school when I was a freshmen. He had house-sat for us. He knew where we kept the spare keys, he knew that if one of us was home that the doors would be unlocked and he waited until it was just me, alone in the house.

It wasn’t paranormal, but it still creeps me out to this day that the guy had waited for myself, or any of my other family members, to be alone in the house and had broken in. It scares me that I was so completely unaware of my surroundings back then that I would have let that guy get the drop on me if he had hostile intentions. It makes me sick that somebody we had trusted to stay in our house while we were gone would come back a couple years later and do something like that.

10. I was previously diagnosed with OCD, but it’s now a retracted diagnosis in that I don’t experience compulsions now but still obsessions. About two years ago, it was still compulsive too, and I was going through treatment for it, trying to resist those compulsions. My obsessions generally surrounded my family and friends dying or getting really ill, and I was constantly getting intrusive thoughts that if I didn’t do a certain thing RIGHT NOW, my mum/dad/brother would die. Naturally, I would just go along along with the compulsions.

First time in the treatment program I fully manage to resist a compulsion is after several intrusive thoughts about my grandad dying. I don’t do the compulsion, feel really ace, everything goes okay. The next day, my grandad is diagnosed with colon-rectal cancer with a low survival rate.

Rationally, I know that I didn’t cause that just because I didn’t touch a door handle in time or whatever, but in the OCD mindset I was in then, I was convinced and it was very creepy for me.

11-15 Creepiest Real Stories

11. For my 5th birthday my uncle got me a puppet almost identical to the one above. I was a big Pee Wee fan and loved it at first. In my room I had bunk beds, and I slept on the bottom bunk and on the top I kept all of my favorite toys and stuffed animals. I’d often leave them in really weird formations after having ‘battles’ and the like, but I always remembered to leave certain ones in certain places because they were my favorites. Namely my Ninja Turtles and Pee Wee. A few months after getting this toy though, I started to have some really terrible nightmares about it. Not the ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ kind of early 90s nightmares for kids, but truly graphic and horrible dreams where someone had broken into our house and made me watch him torture my sisters and my parents while the doll just laughed. Scarring sh*t.

So, I told my parents and they immediately ‘got rid’ of it. This apparently just meant they hid it in the garage since I couldn’t see the stuff stored up high anyways. A couple weeks later I woke up and all my Ninja Turtles were on the floor. Confusing, but maybe I shook the bed a bunch in my sleep. A few days after this my older sister woke my parents up, screaming, about a dream she’d just had. It was nearly identical to the dream I had told them about but I know she’d never heard about it. My parents knew as well and my mother looked genuinely horrified. I got screamed at for telling my sister about such horrible things, but once it became clear that I really hadn’t told her, my mom looked even more worried.

I watched her go into the garage, grab Pee Wee, put him in a trash bag and put him in the dumpster. For years I’d wake up and my stuffed animals would be in really odd places; in places I know I hadn’t left them. In places I never would have left them. I was obsessed. When I was 12 I found the Pee Wee toy in a box in the garage. My mom said my dad must have come home, seen it in the trash and pulled it out. He doesn’t remember ever doing that. He swears he didn’t even know she threw it away, let alone try to pull it out.

12. I used to be a cop in a small town (less than 5000 people). I was working a Saturday afternoon, late summer, only cop on shift at the time. Dispatcher calls me on the radio to ask if I can call her back on a land line. That usually means that something interesting is going on. WARNING: This may get somewhat graphic. This happened over 10 years ago and I still see it clear as day, every day. I really don’t think I can tell it properly if I leave out the details.

I call her up and she tells me that they just had a report of a body with no head, in a car near the river. A dad and his kid were walking home after tubing down the river and noticed a car parked at the end of the road where there used to be a bridge. As they walked past the car they noticed something in the back seat, which upon a closer look, appeared to be a headless body.

My first thought was that it must be a prank of some sort, someone left a mannequin in their car while they went to the river, something like that. I said some sort of joke to the dispatcher, we laughed, then I got in my car and drove to the scene. As I said, it was at the end of a dead end road at the bottom of a hill. The road was easily wide enough for cars to do U-turns there. The car was parked in the very centre of the road, facing the river. It was a fairly rural area, several well-treed acreages, but none had a clear view to where the car was sitting. As I parked a short distance away (don’t want to damage a possible crime scene), the car appeared to be empty.

As I got closer to the car, I could see something in the back seat on the drivers side. I slowly circled the car, and as I looked in the back passenger side window, it became clear to me what I was seeing: a body, wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans, with a rifle between the legs pointed barrel-up. It appeared to be the a very slim female adult. However, there was no head. There was a only a jagged mess of torn flesh where the neck should have been.

I stood there in the warm summer breeze, listening to the birds chirping, dogs barking, adults and kids yelling and laughing while floating by on the river, totally oblivious to what I was looking at less than 50 yards away. After calling in a supervisor, coroner, and body removal people, I took a better look in the car. There are bodily fluids and grey matter spread throughout the car. The keys are in the ignition. There is a piece of brain the size of a baseball sitting on the dash in front of the passenger seat. The drivers seat appears to be as far forward as it will go. There is nothing else in the car, just the rifle, and the various parts of the body. The car looks familiar to me, as does the build of the person in it, but I could not figure out why. I did not want to have the dispatchers run the plate and give me the owners details over the radio as half the town listened to police scanners, so I decided to wait until the supervisor showed up to open the car and look for vehicle registration inside.

When he arrived, he walked up, laughing and joking, asking what the hell was going on because what the dispatchers had told him didn’t make sense. Then he saw it. The laughter stopped. The good mood disappeared. There was quiet, broken only by his dropping of a very emphatic f-bomb. After taking a moment to come to terms with what he was seeing, he repeated what I had already done, doing a full visual exam of the area around the car, the outside of the car, and the interior, through the windows. After confirming that he was seeing the same things that I had, we took some photos, opened the doors, him photographing and securing the rifle, while I went for the glovebox to find the owner of the car. I read the name, read her address, and it all clicked.

I knew her. Several months earlier, I had spent a couple hours sitting in her living room talking to her, first about a very petty complaint she had about one of her neighbors, then about life in general. She was obviously lonely, didn’t have many (or any) friends, and made no mention of a boyfriend, spouse, or partner of any kind. I thought it seemed odd because there was a picture on her wall by the entrance that looked to be her standing with her arms around a man in a typical husband / wife pose. I decided at the time that she must be divorced and just didn’t talk about him anymore.

I explain to my supervisor that based on my past meeting with her, comparing the build of the body, the style of clothing, that I am pretty sure that is who it is. He is satisfied with that, the coroner and body removal guy show up. We remove the body from the car, along with as many of the large pieces of brain as we car. We call the tow truck to haul the car away, then head over to her home.

She lived in a small mobile home park in a single wide trailer. As part of the investigation, we went to search her home. Once again, I noticed the picture that appeared to be her with a husband hanging on the wall. However, the only information we could find for next of kin in her house was for some family out of province. We did not find a suicide note, or a diary or anything else to indicate that she was the one that pulled the trigger. However, we conclude that based on my prior dealings with her and the other evidence that we have collected, that this was a suicide due to depression. I honestly felt bad for not recognizing more symptoms and doing more to help her when I spoke with her before.

Sunday afternoon, while working again, the coroner called me to ask if I would be able to help identify the body since I had spoken with her previously and knew who she was. I started to explain that without the head, it was pretty hard for me to positively id her, when he interrupted to say that the mortician had found the skin from her face to be intact. As the bullet blew everything out from behind it, her face simply fell forwards. He was able to recreate her skull, put some stuffing in, and roll her face back into place. I agreed to go take a look.

While alive, she was extremely skinny, including her face. Since he hadn’t been given any pictures to go off of, the mortician did not know that so rebuilt her fuller than her face was before. However, it was her. My brain kept jumping through mental pictures of her alive, her dead with no head, and now dead with a rebuilt face. i figured it would take quite some time to get over these memories. Little did I know…

Forward to Tuesday evening. I was now working night shifts and writing up the final report. I am told that there is a female at the front door asking to speak with me. No problem, I go to the door, open it, and… she is standing there, wearing a black sundress with pink flower print, smiling through sadness. I froze. It was her. The her that I spoke to months earlier in her living room. The her that I saw a few days earlier without a head, and then with a rebuilt head. The first words she spoke? “I’m _________’s twin sister.” The next afternoon, I was on the couch in the psychologists office. Turns out the picture on the wall was the (still living) twin and her husband.

13.  I used to work tables in a restaurant. One day, this guy I’ve never interacted with before comes to me and hands me a framed picture, smiling nervously. I look at it, and it’s a picture of me, at the staff table. I was done eating, and staring at nothing, probably thinking about… Something deep and clever. (yeah, unlikely though). I look at the guy, he explains timidly that he found me so pretty that he took my picture, and framed it so I would see how pretty I was and hold onto it forever. Sweet gesture, but kinda creepy.

Five seconds later, the manager walks by, hears the story, bursts out laughing and decides this is perfect, just perfect, and hangs up the frame in the back. On the wall, next to the work schedules, in a place where EVERYONE that works here looks at practically everyday. He thought it was hilarious. Everybody had a laugh, then we…. kinda forgot about it. The picture became a part of the wall.

It’s been 8 years since I’ve worked there. The staff changed, the managers changed, over the years everybody I knew changed jobs and everything. But my best-work-friend still remains. You know, the ONE person that could probably do another job better for her, but stays in this place by pure force of habit? The one person that will always be there and still work there, 20 years after you’ve moved on?

She decided to keep the picture. She told the new managers that the “girl on the wall” was a waitress that worked here and died in an accident and that the whole staff decided to frame her picture and honor her or whatever to keep her memory alive because she loved this place so much. Yep. 8 years later, when I occasionally visit the restaurant to say hello to my friend, I have a quick glance above the schedules. The picture’s still there.

14. I had just gotten home from the gym and was exhausted. I badly needed to shower/sleep so I began to head upstairs. As soon as my bedroom door came in to view, what I can only describe as a dark and humanoid looking silhouette creeped out of view from the side of my door frame. I knew 100% that I had seen something and wasn’t too keen on investigating it. I grabbed a knife from my kitchen, convinced myself that I was a grown man, counted down from 5, kicked my halfway closed bedroom door all the way open and started yelling like a maniac (I was home alone).

I didn’t find anything or anyone. I checked each closet thoroughly, under the bed, etc. Etc. The usual ‘fu*k that’ places. I closed my door out of habit and began to get undressed when the only light in my room burned out.

It was absolutely pitch black. Considering how positive I was that I had seen something earlier, I promptly began to freak out. I had this sense of dread and absolute impending doom. I felt like there was a hand about 2 inches away from the back of my neck, it was such a vivid and terrifying feeling. I bolted in the direction of my door after about 5-10 seconds of being too afraid to act and got out of my house until the rest of my family came home.

Pretty anti-climactic, I know. But to this day I’ve never felt that convinced of another (unwelcome) presence in my house.

15. I used to work as a 911 operator in a relatively large metro area. One night at about 3 am or so I answered a call from an elderly lady who said she didn’t feel good. I tried to get more info about what was wrong, chest pain, trouble breathing, headache, is she diabetic etc. I got her address and age, she said no one else was home but the door was unlocked so they could go in. No matter what else I asked about what was wrong, all she would say is “I don’t feel good, can you please send someone to help me?”

After a few min she said “I’m gonna put the phone down for a minute, I need to go to the bathroom.” I tried to get her to stay on the line with me, told her she can do whatever she needs to get ready but I’d like to be able to stay in contact unless there’s a problem. She said “I’m gonna put the phone down, I’ll just be a minute.”

A couple minutes passed, then the fire department called on scene so I just disconnected and didn’t think much about it. Told them the patient advised front door is unlocked and she was in the bathroom. A couple more min and the one of the firefighters called over the air with a weird tone and said “Fire alarm (which is how they addressed dispatch)…uh how exactly was this call received?” I told them call was first party from the patient’s home phone approx 8 min ago. He didn’t respond over the air, but called the desk from his cell phone, which usually only happens when something weird is going on that they don’t want broadcasted since anyone can listen to the radios.

On the phone he said “are you sure this wasn’t a third party call from a family member or something?” I said “negative, caller advised ‘I don’t feel good’ and said no one else was home, so to the best of my knowledge, the caller is the patient…have you made contact?” He said “yea, she was in the bathroom like you said, but she’s been dead for about 12 hours. Cold to the touch, fully livid, full rigor, we’re gonna need a deputy out here.”

Afterwards we pulled the tapes of the radio and phone calls and checked the timestamps, address, phone number, and went over everything a few times to see if I missed something. I called them back in the morning after the shift to see if they had anymore info, but they were just as weirded out as we were. The phone was in the living room and the patient was in the bathroom, but the call was definitely from that phone. I still have no idea what the most likely explanation is.

16-20 Creepiest Real Stories

16. I was sleeping in a bed at my friends dads place, it was just her and I there. The bedroom door was open and she was maybe twenty feet away, within eyesight working on a project. Eventually I heard her walk around the bed and whisper in my ear to wake up. When I sat up she was still in the other room but she was staring at me like a deer in the head lights. She insisted immediately that we leave and later she told me she thought she saw my shadow as I was walking around the bedroom until I sat up and saw I had been sleeping the entire time. That place was haunted, but that was the scariest thing that happened to me there. Although once a book flew across the room at us.

17. One of my worst sleep paralysis stories involve someone whispering into my ear saying: “You think I’m your friend but you have no idea how prepared I am to destroy you.”” I couldn’t see whoever was saying it; I could only hear it. And as sleep paralysis usually goes for me; I was convinced I was in reality; lying in my bed and all.

18. When I was 8 my parents were going through a rough patch in their marriage and my dad was briefly living in a broken down old RV parked in a friend’s front yard that wasn’t hooked up to anything (classy right?). No electricity no water no nothing. We had to stay there overnight on the weekends we were with him and it always made me nervous. The RV couldn’t even be locked.

Well one night I woke up in the middle of night, pitch black with nothing but a tiny flashlight, and I had to pee worse than I have ever had to pee. I was already scared to death of the dark so I woke my dad up and pleaded to let me pee in the bathroom or maybe even the sink but he was grumpy and said no just pee outside there’s nothing out there. I made my way to the door, stepped out into the grass, lowered by pajamas, and started going but as soon as I did some creepy voice said to me “hey kid come here” along with some rustling in the bushes. I bolted back inside peeing all over myself crying in fear and grabbed the door handle to hold it shut. I heard more rustling outside but then it stopped so I let go and with my little dinky flashlight went over to the window, pulled down the blinds just a bit, and shined my light right into a smiling set of teeth. I didn’t see the rest of the face as I jumped back into my little bed throwing the blanket over my head and cried until the sun came up. People act like I’m being a pussy when I say I’m not too fond of the dark but I still can’t handle pitch black nights.

19. My mother called me. “Did you use me as a job reference?” she asked. “You have to let me know if you do that.” She had mentioned once that since we had different last names she’d be happy to lie to any employers. I have never taken her up on this. But sure enough, someone had called her to ask about me. I discounted it.

A few days later my stepmother, Linda, calls with a similar story. She said the woman on the phone was really sweet and just wanted to check references that I obviously must have given her. Linda and I have different names and aside from her marriage license to my father, nothing connects us. Somebody was calling around to check up on me. Linda gave me the caller id number, but when you call it went straight to a voicemail with a default message. A week later I got a call on my band’s booking number. It’s a google voice number for just this purpose. “Hello,” she said. “I found your band online and want to book you. Do you have a show coming up where we could see you?” The caller id matched. It was her! I panicked. I should’ve named a place and waited for her there. Instead I asked “why did you call my family?” She flusteredly denied it and made a quick excuse to hang up. Calling back, straight to voicemail. I never got an answer about it to this day.

20. I got into a car accident, very minor, 5 years ago. I rolled into the back of someone’s car. We exchanged numbers and I went on my way. It was my brothers graduation party from the Marine Corps boot camp that night so I proceeded to get sh*t faced with him and his friends at my house that night. My phone died and I had slept in until around 4PM. My brother woke me up and said that some guy I got into an accident with had called his phone and left a message looking for me. Weird, I couldn’t figure out how the guy got my brothers phone number but it was only 1 digit off from mine so maybe he hit the wrong button and somehow called my brothers phone thinking it was me. Then I got a call from my girlfriends step mother saying that she also received a phone call from a man looking for me saying I got into an accident with him the previous day. I started to get a little creeped out because I didn’t even have my girlfriends stepmom’s phone number so I had no idea how he got it. Then my uncle in Michigan called me with the same story. My uncle and I have different last names and I was living in California at the time. I legitimately started to freak out at this point, I had no fu*king clue how this guy got all their phone numbers. My grandmother messaged me on facebook saying she got a weird phone call from some guy looking for me but he hung up when she started to ask how he got her phone number. I called the police and told them what happened and said I would like them to contact him and tell him to stop harassing my family members. I’m not sure if they ever did contact him but I told my insurance company about it and told them I wanted absolutely no contact with him.

For a few months after it happened I kept getting weird phone calls from different numbers where they wouldn’t say anything they would just listen for 30-45 seconds and hang up. It was always a different number and always happened around 10pm at night. I never figured out if it was connected at all but it was the first time in my life I was very uneasy

21-25 Creepiest Real Stories

21. It’s fairly long so I’m sorry about the wall of text, but when I wrote it I tried to be as thorough as possible.

Back in the early 1990’s I was a kid, around 13 at the time of this incident, and I used to stay at my grandparents house a lot out in a very rural area in SE Arkansas. When I say very rural, I mean it was a series of networked dirt roads to get out to their house. The closest neighbors besides my aunt and uncle who lived about a quarter of a mile up the road was over a mile and a half away. This was very backwoods and isolated from most civilization. The closest town was a 10 mile trip. It’s in the middle of farmland and mostly woods. They had lived in this house since my mother was a child. And had both grown up just a ways down the road.

Anyways, there was a general store roughly 3-4 miles down the network of dirt roads. This was your typical country general store ran by an old lady and her husband and it’s only customers really only consisted of the people who lived out there in BFE. One day my grandmother asked me if I wanted to walk to the general store and get her some milk, eggs a few other miscellaneous items and I told her I would. She gave me some money and I headed on my way. It’s was fairly early in the day and I had plenty of time to get back before dark, which I always made sure to do when I was out roaming about. Things can get mighty creepy out in the backwoods of Arkansas after nightfall. It’s a darkness unlike most people who have lived primarily in cities or towns have ever experienced. Me being a 13 year old, had poor time management skills. I stopped at the bottom of a hill next to this small wooden bridge you have to cross and messed around at the creek catching crawdads and such and I kinda just messed around the whole way to the store.

By the time I left the store I realized it was quickly approaching dark. This was fall and darkness set upon the land pretty early in the day. I didn’t want to be walking those lonely, secluded roads through the woods alone in the dark so I hurried as fast as I could. Running and sprinting as much as possible. But it wasn’t enough. By the time I had made it back to the bottom of the hill near the bridge, it was almost completely dark, and there was an eerie sort of glow brought about by a very bright nearly full moon that was rising. At the top of the hill the road was perfectly straight and flat, with woods on the left side and a large field on the right. About a half a mile up from the top of the hill is my grandparents house and you can see it from there. As I top the hill I can see the faint glow of the lights at their house, and I feel a sense of relief because I was kinda freaking out a little bit, but knowing I was so close and could see the house offered a little bit of comfort. The field on the right was somewhat illuminated by the glow of the moon and my eyes had adjusted to the darkness rather well at this point.

As I walked up the road, I hear something from the left, behind me on the wooded side of the road. It sounded like leaves being rustled. I turned to look and see nothing at first, but then as my eyes begin to focus I see something in the ditch, a black shadowy shape slowly moving towards me. At first I thought it was a dog, but then realized it was much to large to be a dog, and then I realized it wasn’t actually walking on 4 legs, it was crawling, like a person would. I stared for a moment, out of sheer confusion trying to figure out what I was seeing and then a jolt of fear shot through me as it dawned on me, that whatever this thing was, it had been trying to sneak up on me. At that exact moment this thing stood upright out of the ditch on two legs, like a person. It had the shape of a human, long arms, legs and was proportioned as such. It stood roughly 7-8 feet in height and was completely covered in black or maybe dark brown hair. It’s face was dark in color, and I can’t recall seeing much in the way of features do to it being night. It was no bear for certain, or any other kind of animal I have ever seen for that matter. I immediately dropped the bag of stuff I had been carrying and bolted as fast as my legs could take me towards my grandparents house. I heard a heavy breathing/guttural growling kind of sound behind me and heard this things foot steps running behind me on the gravel as it gave chase. I did not turn around and was certain that it would grab me at any moment. I then heard it crash off into the woods, and let out an earth shattering and ungodly scream unlike anything I had ever heard before or since. I’m positive this thing could have easily caught me, had it wanted to, but for some reason it let me go.

By the time I reached my grandparents my heart felt as if it would explode from the combination of the adrenaline rush I had from being scared beyond any type of fear I had ever felt before or since, and full on sprinting as hard and fast as possible for about a half straight mile. I flew into the house and in an incoherent mess of hyperactive gibberish tried to explain to my grandparents what had just happened. My grandmother didn’t really seem to believe me, but did believe SOMETHING had scared me and acted rather weird about the whole thing. She tried to convince me it was just a dog or some other animal.

The next morning I woke up and found my grandpa sitting outside whittling wood underneath the shade tree in the front yard, as he often liked to do. I went and sat down beside him in one of the old metal lawn chairs. He was a very rational man, down to earth, and had grown up in and hunted that area his entire life. He knew every square inch of it, mapped into his mind. He knew every type of critter and creature that lived in those woods, what noise they made, where to find them, how to catch them, etc. I had only been hunting with him for a couple of years, but had been going out into those woods with him since a pretty young age on walks and such. He had passed a lot of his knowledge down to me during those adventures.

I spoke to him about what had happened to me the night before, and told him that I knew what I saw. It wasn’t my overactive imagination, I wasn’t making it up, and it definitely wasn’t a dog. He knew that I wasn’t just some dumb 13 year old kid, and he knew that I knew the things he’d taught me. He stopped whittling, looked me right in the eyes and said, “I know what you saw. I’ve seen it before too. There’s things out in them woods that people don’t understand, and that a person ought not go foolin with.” I remember those words clearly to this day, because it gave me affirmation, but at the same time made me realize that whatever I’d seen was very real in existence, and beyond my understanding.

My grandpa then went on to tell me that far back in the woods, there are some cliffs and at the bottom of those cliffs is a cave. He told me that the cave is where the creature lived. He had once stumbled upon it a long time ago when he was hunting. He said he was standing on the top of the cliff looking at it when a creature fitting the same description emerged and began screaming wildly at him and throwing rocks. He said he took a shot at it, missed and then this thing gave chase to him. But my grandpa was on top of the cliff, so in order to get to him this thing had to go around a pretty good distance and then up , which he said it quickly began to do, so he hightailed it out of there in a hurry.

He said the whole way back home he felt as if he were being watched and kept hearing twigs snap behind him and he was certain that it was following him. Stalking him. He made it home and as he reached his front porch he turned and looked back at the woods from where he’d came and saw it peeking out at him from behind a tree.

Later that night he said that he and my grandmother awoke in the early morning hours to large rocks being thrown at the house and ungodly howling noises from outside and this thing trying to get into the house. He said he could hear it walking around on the front porch, rattling the doorknobs, banging on Windows and it sounded like it was muttering to itself, in a low deep garbled voice, but it didn’t sound like a language, just a bunch of gibberish. After a while the thing went back to throwing some more rocks and howling, so my grandpa grabbed his shotgun and fired it out the front door a few times into the darkness and the direction of the howling and said he heard it run back into the woods. He didn’t know if he’d hit it or not. He said that was the last he’d ever seen or heard from it, but over the years an occasional farmers cow would be mutilated, or someone’s hunting dog would go unexplainably missing, or someone would have a story about some strange creature they’d seen. He also said it scared my grandmother beyond words and she absolutely has refused to ever talk about it or even acknowledge that it happened. Which explains her acting weird about it when I told her what happened to me.

I know it’s a pretty far fetched story, and you can believe it or not. It makes no difference to me. I know what I saw and my grandpa knew what he saw, and neither of us had ever felt the need to convince anyone else of it. In fact, until today I have never actually spoken of it to anyone other than my grandpa and he passed away roughly 10 years ago.

22. I’ve been waiting for a question like this so I could contribute my story! I also want to see if anyone in the area heard or saw what happened. This is more scary than creepy, sorry. This happened in the past 2 years.

This happened in Ohio, about 10-15 miles north of Delaware(a town in Ohio). Rural-ish area. I’m being vague cause I don’t want to give to many personal details away. It was summer, and my family was having a cookout. All the adults (including me) are inside talking while the kids were playing outside. We all heard a huge BOOM, to this day the loudest sound I think I’ve heard, and about three seconds later (we all kinda froze when we heard the boom) felt the wavelength or whatever from it go through the house. This kicked us out of our shock and we ran outside to see if the kids were okay and what happened. It honestly sounded like what I would imagine a nuke or bomb would sound like. The kids were fine, some were scared, some “didn’t hear it” (wtf?) and we didn’t see anything in the sky or around the land that looked off. My boyfriend and I drove around, like 2 miles out in each direction, and saw nothing. I’’ve checked news reports off and on and nothing’s been said about it since then. It was so scary and the fact that nothing was said about it in the news is just so weird. There is no way it was just a gunshot (some of my family tried to say it was after we all calmed down) or anything like that. It was something BIG and its gonna drive me nuts for a long time if I don’t figure out what it was.

23. Alright, a few people that were involved know this story but I warn you good denizens of the internet, this is a tough one to believe and it’s a long one!

Sometime in 2002 I hear this ungodly noise outside my front door, sounds like a cross between a barking dog and a cat being strangled. It must be said that I live in town that is bang in the middle of a large forest so wildlife is the norm. So I head outside and find a very small deer stuck in the metal fence, it was one of those fences with large square sections and this little guy got his head in there but his horns acted as barbs and he was going nowhere. Later learned it was a male Muntjac, quite a terrifying looking little sh*t, horns, tusks… but utterly harmless. Well I decide it can’t stay there and if I simply free it there is a real risk it will get hit by a car. I’m maybe half a mile from the deep forest edge so I free it, pick it up and start carrying it to the forest. For a start, that little deer was heavy as hell and I didn’t notice at the time but he had cut himself up pretty bad trying to get out of that fence. He fought almost the entire way, kicking and bucking his head back to the point I figured the authorities would eventually find me with a deer’s horns stuck in my forehead but I carried on. By the time I get to the forest, I am exhausted and covered in blood. Walking into the forest I notice this deer is fu*ked, it can barely move, it isn’t fighting anymore. I put him down and he doesn’t even attempt to run and I figure if I just leave him he’s going to be something’s dinner by the end of the night and I’ll be damned if I have just CARRIED a deer half a mile to deliver it to predators. So I ran back home, grab a couple bottles of water then ran back and there he is, still there and gasping. I sat next to that deer and starting giving him sips of water from my hand and cleaning the wound on his neck. His fur was falling off in my hands to the extent his entire neck was almost bald and red raw where he had been trying to get out of that fence but I cleaned it pretty good. After about 2 hours of me sitting there with that deer’s head in my lap and giving him water, he straight leaped up and started to run off. Now I’d love to say he stopped a few yards away and turned to nod at me or some other bullsh*t but he just pegged it without looking back deeper into the forest. I kinda shrugged, got up, brushed myself off and walked home feeling quite good about myself to be honest.

Where’s the creepy bit!? It’s coming. About 18 months later I’m walking in the forest as part of my daily after work routine. I walk the same route every evening for about 4 miles before dinner and when I get back home, have quite the appetite! At no point in the years I have been walking that route have I come across anything other than the odd roe deer, a badger running away, or maybe a fox running across the trail. I come around a corner onto my homeward bound trail and disturb the biggest badger I have ever seen, this thing was huge. Normally, they leg it as soon as they see a person but this fella was having none of it and started running towards me making the most awful huffing noise. I’m thinking, “Honestly, killed by a poxy badger!?,” when I hear this rustle in the forest in front of me and something I thought was a dog comes out of nowhere, runs past me at a good rate of knots. I stop to turn around and this weird dog plows this badger straight in the face, hits it so hard it ends up knocked off the trail. By this point I am honestly in a “WTF” state. The badger that was just chasing me is now running down the trail being chased and randomly rammed by the weirdest dog in history. Eventually it runs into the woods and this dog gallops back towards me and stops about 20 meters away. Clearly not a dog. A very odd looking little deer with a somewhat bald patch still around his neck…

24. Please bear with me since English wasn’t my primary language. This started out when I was 14 year old and during that time, I grew deeply afraid of being alone in the dark, mainly because I scare that there might be “something lurking in it”. So being a young and stupid me, I always play a religious music ( Buddhism) before I went to bed as for some reason it nurture the feeling of being afraid. Up upon one night when my mum suddenly woken up from her dream and noticing the music I was playing, she immediately walk out from her room and came to mine and woken me up and told that this kind of music attracts “ghost”. Upon hearing to her reason, I closed the music and she went to bed in her room. After one hour, I woke up from my slumber and started hearing a scratching sound, I looked out through my window and there it is, a mother fu*king “shadow fiend” lookalike flying pass my window. Being a fourteen year old me, I acted like I saw nothing and immediately close my eye for four hours until my other family member woken up and comes knocking.

25. I’ve got lots of stories but this is the only one that still freaks me out. I used to work as a slot repair tech in an Indian casino that was super haunted. It was a community center thing where they held viewings and wakes or whatever before it was a casino. When I was first hired there was confusion on when the employee I was replacing was going to officially retire so I had to spend a month working in the kitchen. I had a radio that was on at all times that I used to tell employees when their lunches were ready. I had only been working there for about 3 weeks and a few little odd things had happened like finding a freezer door open I knew I’d shut or the sink being on with no employees seemingly around to do it.

On that day it was incredibly slow and I decided to close the order window and take my lunch a little early. I tried calling over the radio to my manager to let them know 3 or 4 times but every time I would key up the radio would buzz and whine loudly. I eventually gave up and just picked up the phone to call a manager but the line was completely dead. So I finally just leaned out the window and waved a supervisor down and let her know. I locked up the kitchen and took my break which was about 20 minutes long. When I came back to the kitchen everything was super quiet. Usually there would be customers waiting for me, but since there weren’t I decided to stock the bread shelves. I walked across the kitchen toward the storage hall and I heard as clear as day the voice of the supervisor I had told about my break say “You shouldn’t have gone.”

I turned and said “What?” but I didn’t see her. So I walked around the corner to see if she was standing on the other side of the kitchen but she wasn’t there. As soon as I realized I was alone in the kitchen the radio keyed up with the buzzing whine and let out a shrill sound like if you key two radios up too close to each other. I ran over and shut the radio off and looked out the order window and there was no one around.

I immediately went to the door to try and find someone nearby and the large walk in freezer door in the storage hall across the kitchen swung wide open. I don’t know if you have ever been in a walk in freezer, but those doors are super heavy! I immediately left the kitchen and told my supervisor I wasn’t going back in there. I ended up serving drinks on the floor for the rest of the day and the kitchen stayed close until the next shift came in. All of my managers were super convinced of the ghost in the casino. The ceiling had a ton of those black dome security cameras and they swore that they had all at one time or another looked up and seen the ghost behind them in the reflection. Some members of the pull team had actually quit over the lady in the cameras.

I was happy to get out of the kitchen a week later!!!