AskReaders: What’s the creepiest TRUE story that happened to you?

We asked our regular contributors through e-mail, What’s the creepiest TRUE story that happened to you or someone you know? 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 TRUE story

1. I’d just moved into a basement suite. Everytime I went out I would lock the deadbolt but not the door handle but when I came home a lot of the time the deadbolt would be unlocked and the door handle would be locked. At first I thought I was just confused about which one I had locked so I started paying more attention. It kept happening and I realized someone must be going in when I went out. I assumed it was the landlady and was annoyed but didn’t say anything at first. Then one day I came home and found the wrong lock locked again. I went in pissed off and opened the fridge to get something to eat. There was a book in the fridge that I had never seen before. I collected old books and this one was published in the early 1900s which creeped me out completely because it was like it had been left for me. I finally called my landlady and asked if she was going into my apartment and told her what had happened. She freaked right out, said the last person who lived there was a really creepy guy with mental health and drug problems. She got all the locks changed that day and it never happened again.

2. Didn’t realize until years later that I was almost snatched. Grew up in a small town. Out playing in the yard with my 2 younger siblings like every other summer day. Guy pulls up alongside the yard in a truck, calls me over. Asks my name, if I’m having a good summer. He says he could really use my help, he’s out looking for his lost puppy. He can show me a photo of the puppy if I come closer. No, closer. The picture is small, can I please help him? I yelled to my brother on the other side of the yard “Daaaaaan, come help us find a puppy!” I have to assume he thought I yelled ‘dad’ because he noped / screeched out of there without another word. I remember being really worried about that puppy…until we had an assembly at our primary school about things strangers might say to lure you into their vehicles.

3. This happened to a friend of mine. It’s a Sunday. She comes home to her apartment from running errands around 1 pm. She was in med school at this time, so she pretty much parked herself at the kitchen table and studied for the next 5-6 hrs. She’s sitting there and looks up to see a dude casually stroll out of her bedroom. No other entrances, she’s sitting by the front door, so he’s been there the entire time she has been home. He pauses at the doorway to her kitchen, between her and the door. She basically froze. Then her phone rang and kind of startled both of them. She ran to get the phone, he ran out the door. She moved and got an enormous dog.

4. My (female) friend’s dad once answered the door late one night, like 11pm or so and there’s was a weird man asking for directions to the main road. Her dad usually works nights, but on this rare occasion he’d taken the night off. So, he told him the route, and the weird man thanked him and went off, but in the opposite direction. He seemed quite nervous and jittery, which is odd, but what’s even weirder is he’s known in the area, he’d lived there years, he wouldn’t need to ask directions to the main road. Anyway, it was revealed in the news that on the same night that he’d broken into a house and violently raped a woman and her daughter, and later tried to sexually assault another woman in the street but a passerby managed to help her get away. This was after he called at my friend’s house, so he’d gone there then went off in that wrong direction and tried to rape someone. Now, my friend’s family was having a lot of drama at the time, her mum is a nutcase alcoholic and the whole street knew that she’d been sent to rehab. With her dad working nights, it’s likely that the weird rapey man knew my friend would be home alone. We think she had a very close call with that one. Here is the story on the news.

5. When I was a child I was always stricken by this irrational fear that when I went outside at night, I had to walk STRAIGHT into the house without looking back, because if I looked back, someone would be following me. One day after dinner I went out to the car to get my bookbag, and I was continuing my ritual of walking straight inside without looking back, adrenaline pumping, anxiety going full force, and I just stopped and said to myself “this is stupid.” I made myself look back. When I looked back I saw what appeared to be someone crouched down behind my mom’s car and was peeking their head around. They were just staring at me and smiling. It appeared to be a woman in her mid-30s, maybe 40 with curly short blonde hair. We made eye contact for a second and then she ducked back behind the car where I couldn’t see her. I stood frozen for a second and then ran inside. I told my mom, we went outside to check, no one was there. My mom didn’t exactly not believe me, but she wasn’t very concerned either.

6-10 creepiest TRUE story

6. When I was about 9 or 10, my older brother and I had a few friends over to stay the night. My Dad had to work the next day so we were all left at the house by ourselves for the day. We were excited to play Playstation all day on our Saturday off. Well my Dad worked late that night (until probably 8 or 9). As soon as the sun went down we went into one of the rooms upstairs to play Uno. Fast forward 30 minutes and we start hearing footsteps slowing walking up the wooden stairs. My dad wasn’t going to be home for another 2 hours so we didn’t know who it was. There were four of us, me, my brother, my friend, and his friend. We would take turns walking out of the room to see what it was but before we could look down the dark stairs we would hear what sounded like someone running down the stairs as fast as they could so they couldn’t be seen. This continued for probably 2 hours ending with all of us huddled in the room upstairs with the door wedged shut with a chair until my Dad got home. None of us were really believers in anything paranormal but a child’s imagination is a crazy thing. Now 15 years later, I still don’t know what to make of it but every one of us heard those footsteps walking up those dark stairs. I bring it up to my friend who I’m still friends with and he remembers it just as vividly as I do. It kind of creeps me out just thinking about it.

7. My family was driving on the rural main road of Poland (we’re Polish) and next to our car was this truck delivering large concrete pipes. We drove next to this truck for maybe an hour, maybe two. I was a teenager so I didn’t really care. My dad figures we stop at the next gas station for a quick toilet break. As I exit the car, pair of bikes drive past the gas station. I noticed because it was loud as f**k. Pee pee over and we go back on the road. About a mile or so down the road there’s an accident. The bikes had caught up with the truck and as they were about to drive past it the large concrete pipes fell off the truck and smushed the bikers. Maybe they weren’t fastened properly, or the truck swerved. I’m not sure but they were dead. Blood everywhere. I still have a hard time thinking of what could’ve happened.

8. My mom and her friend were out and about late at night, heading to a party. Their car broke down, and being a rural town with a small population, they had to walk about a mile to the nearest house for help. They got to the front door, and of all people to answer the door, it was one of their high school teachers. He was horrified to see them out late at night, alone. He let them use his phone but scolded them saying it was not safe- the location, time and circumstances, he let them know they were absolute fools and heeded a somewhat vague warning. My mom called my grandfather to come bring gas and/or possibly tow their vehicle. When the girls got back to their car, there was a severed cow head on the hood, blood everywhere! This was near Hermiston, OR, apparently well known for devil worshippers.

9. Rented a cabin for a week with my significant other. First night there we had spent the day visiting her family (the actual reason for our trip), had dinner, she got pretty wasted. Get back to the cabin, carry my SO inside to find all our bags opened/dumped onto the floor. This set me into panic mode. I hadn’t been drinking and I routinely carry, so I pull out my gun and sweep the house. I check every room, closets, even under the bed. Nothing. My SO is still fast asleep, so I check our stuff over and there’s nothing missing. It had just been dumped onto the floor. So I look around some more, all the windows are locked, the backdoor was even dead bolted. It just really bothered me that there was no sign of break in. I know I locked the place before I left, so either someone else had a key to my cabin, or whoever it was, was still inside the cabin. Either way, I didn’t think I’d do much sleeping. It was too late to make other arrangements, and considering that most likely there wasn’t anything to worry about really. We had been gone all day, from 9am to midnight. So odds are whoever it was did it was probably way earlier. But still I couldn’t shake it. I went in and covered up my SO, used the bathroom, set up a rocking chair facing the front door, my hand on my gun on my lap, I started watch. I felt pretty silly sitting there, but I couldn’t not sit there either and sometime around 3-4am, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning around 7am, sun shining through. I actually half scared myself because I hadn’t meant to fall asleep, which then scared me again because I wasn’t holding my gun. I start looking around, and on the couch is my gun. I’m like What? Then I look, the front door is wide open. I jump up and start running to check on my SO. Thank God she was still there, untouched. I go back out into the living room and pick up my gun, all my bullets are missing. I go outside and look around, car and everything is still there. No signs of anybody. I walk back inside, look in the far corner of the living room and I see the corner of the main living room rug lifted up. I investigate. It’s covering the opening to the crawlspace. That means this guy was IN MY CABIN THE ENTIRE TIME. I must have pulled up and caught the guy in the act, he thought fast and hid in the crawlspace. Then some time during the night, crawled out, DISARMED ME, and walked right out the front door.

10. I was walking home from the beach one day around noon and a guy driving down the street in a Ford Escape slows down and in slightly broken English asks me how much, I tell him to f**k off and he tells me $200 for an hour. At this point I’m walking faster and his car is keeping pace with me, he crosses two lanes and parks in a driveway in front of me and opens his door and a passenger door opens as well. Another guy steps out and walks towards me, I start screaming my head off and cussing them out trying to draw attention on this busy street while fishing my knife out of my bag. I walked into the street and around the car, call my boyfriend and tell them it’s the cops. I give my boyfriend their license plate number and almost run to his house because it was about a block away. They followed me for another minute and then drove past me really fast while calling me a ‘f**king c**t’. I was 16 at the time and I really wish I had called the cops because as an adult I am 100% sure I was about to be kidnapped and raped.

11-15 creepiest TRUE story

11. It was 2001 and my friend and I were 17 (both female) and driving back from a late movie to my house one night. I lived in a pretty rural area in Maine, about 20 minutes from the nearest town. As we were driving down the highway through the woods, we passed a median with a car sitting in it, facing in the oncoming direction, with all its lights off. Right after we drove past it, it flashed its lights, did a 3 point turn and started driving behind us. We giggled that “oh, it must be a gang initiation, we’re gonna get murdered!” because this was Maine and that was obviously not what was happening. The turnoff for my road was a few miles away and this car stayed behind us the whole time. We made the left turn and the car kept going down the highway. Phew! But 30 seconds later we realized that the car must have backed up on the highway and made the turn after us. Now we were getting a little worried. There was still one more road to turn down before we got to my house (this is way in the woods) and the car did the same thing…backed up and made the left after us. Now we were legit freaked. I had a long driveway and the car followed us right into the driveway and almost up to my house, which had all the lights on because my mom was home. We ran into my house, just in time to see the mystery car reverse back down the driveway and drive away. To this day we still have no idea why that car was following us – if they thought we were someone else or if they actually had bad intentions and only changed their mind when they saw that my houselights were on. Since we only ever saw the front of the car, we didn’t get a license plate or a better description than “a blue car.”

12. My wife and I rented an old townhouse in Birmingham, AL about 10 years ago. It was spooky for no other reason other than it was old and in the woods. (We are both suburban Californians so this was enough to freak us out a little). We used to joke that there was a “presence” in the house, but after a while we started experiencing strange things. When you would leave the kitchen after grabbing a snack, all the cabinets would be closed, but if you returned a few minutes later, all of the cabinets would be wide open. Freaky, but just annoying. Later on things escalated. My wife would come home late after roller derby practice and we had very steep steps that led up to our door, being a considering husband that I was I would be sure to turn on the porch light so she wouldn’t trip. Something often would turn the light back off (old style breaker switch on the wall, had to put some force behind flipping it). This caused my wife to once seriously trip coming to the door late at night. My wife complained often that she felt unsafe when I was working late and she was alone, and we began to realize whatever was in the house didn’t like her specifically. Walking to the bathroom late at night and passing the hall mirror, we both spotted a disfigured woman in the reflection. I thought I was hallucinating when I first saw it, but after a few times of it occurring I mentioned it to my wife, who freaked out and told me she had seen the same thing too in the past. Over the next year or so I would sometimes have nightmares about the woman I had seen and would wake up next to my wife and would jostle around, a few times this would wake my wife too and she would respond “go back to sleep, it’s just a dream, I saw her too.” The pinnacle of the event was late one night my wife came home and started screaming at me for no apparent reason, leveling nonsensical accusations and just being mean. I was in the middle a writing a paper due the next morning so I told her I was not going to deal with and she should go to bed. She turned off all the lights except in the downstairs den where I was working and went upstairs to bed. An hour later I finished my paper and went to bed. When I got to the bottom of the stairwell leading to our bedroom, I turned on the light and was shocked to see my wife sitting at the top of the stairs (in what had been the complete dark). She just stared down at me and I swear to God her eyes were completely black and her strawberry blond hair had been bleached completely white. I was scared more than I’ve ever been in my life but slowly walked up the stairs to her. When I got to the top her eyes and hair turned normal and she began sobbing, saying that something was attacking her and she was filled with hate. We held each other through the night. And talked about it several times after. My wife is convinced she was possessed. I believe she was as well. We live in California again and have been married for 8 1/2 years, nothing has ever happened like that again.

13. I was in a KFC carpark at about 8pm, and I had gotten out of my car to fetch something from the boot before I could go through the drive through. My car was still running, the door was wide open and the car park only had one other car in it, which was just a bit ahead of where mine was parked. I was closing the door to the boot and the other car honked their horn, however I could see no reason why, I wasn’t in their way and they could have driven past with ease. I was tired and they were being rude, so I gave them the finger before I began walking back to my door. Then the man in the passenger side of the other car jumped out, left his door wide open and began running towards my car. At this point I shat myself, because there was nobody else around and I’m a young female who at the time had no idea how to defend myself against a potential threat, so as soon as I was back in my car I locked the doors and began to drive towards the exit of the carpark. However, the man hadn’t managed to get to my car on time, so the woman who was driving their car began accelerating towards the exit of the carpark to try and block me in whilst the man ran towards my car again at the exit. I managed to get past their car by driving over the pavement, and the relentless creeps followed me for about 15 minutes before vanishing. I ended up driving around for a while in the opposite direction of where I was living at the time, and went to stay with a friend for a few hours before actually driving home.

14. There used to be billboards for anti-drunk driving campaigns that would show a picture of a happy family or whatever and then let you know they were all killed by drunk drivers. When I was about 16 I saw my own face on one of those signs. It was a picture of myself, my little brother, and my 2 childhood friends that lived next door to me when I was in first grade. So, maybe I’m dead. One of these billboards was right by my work so I had to look at it every day. After telling my mom about it, she said the father of the kids next door was a photographer.

15. When I was younger my dad was out was out of town and my mom let me have a few friends over. We lived right by a pretty busy highway and over the years we had quite a few people knock on our door for help (car broke down, lost, accident, etc.). While my mom was home with us a man knocked saying he wanted to borrow the phone. My mother told him he could sit on the porch and use her cellphone. The man kept asking to come inside and asking if my dad was home. He eventually started trying to force his way inside. My mom slammed and locked the door, called 911, and put my friends and I into a closet. It took the police department 20+ minutes to reach us. By that time my mom had called our neighbor and he came over his shotgun and made the guy lay on the ground until the police arrived.

16-20 creepiest TRUE story

16. Back in the 70s my grandfather dropped my grandmother, mom, and her 2 sisters off to do some shopping on his way to work. Since he wasn’t able to pick them up, they hitch hiked home. My mom at the time was only around 10 or 11, middle sister would’ve been about 7 or 8 and the youngest was about a year old. They get picked up by a guy in pickup truck, who has them all sit in the back row with one of them holding the baby. My grandmother was giving directions to their home from the highway, but the guy ignored her and went by their exit claiming he had to make a stop first. Didn’t really say much else to them during the drive, my mom remembers my grandmother being very quiet and very nervous. Eventually they come up to a farm, driver tells them to wait in the car and goes inside the house. While he’s gone they just sit there terrified, they’re in the middle of nowhere and know they couldn’t make it out on foot. A few minutes later the driver comes out with a second guy who looks into truck and sees my mom’s youngest sister. He starts flipping out, screaming at the driver that he shouldn’t have brought the baby back, they aren’t going to do anything with her and some other things I can’t remember, ends up telling him to get them away from the farm. Driver gets back into the truck, apologizes, and they get back on the highway and drive again in silence. My grandmother, normally a very smart woman, had him drive directly to their house (although I suspect her reasoning was she’d already given him the address before anything seemed off). They lived at that house for several years and luckily never saw either of them a second time.

17. This was happened around 1995. In freshman year of middle school (6th grade) there was a once-a-week ‘group therapy’ session with developmentally delayed kids that involved them doing some crafts activity or playing with legos or watching a movie as a group. It was half normal kids, half DD kids, and the normal kids could sign up for it. I signed up pretty instantly as it meant an escape from History once a week. One of my best friends at the time had the same idea, and it basically turned into a second lunch period for us. The whole thing was overseen by a therapist named Bruce and it was generally pretty laid back. Bruce was an overweight 50-ish balding guy with the attitude and general appearance of Santa Claus. He ran most of the school’s extracurriculars and was pretty much universally liked. The other important player in this story was a kid who I’ll call G. You know that stereotype of psychopaths being obsessed with animal torture as a kid? This was dead-on G. He’d regularly tell these long excited stories during group about how much fun he had last week tearing the leg off a squirrel he caught in his live trap, or other similar things. Most of us just sort of ignored him as it was just sort of assumed that he was all talk and just making up gross stuff to get attention. So one week we were playing with playdough. Since it was a DD group the huge tub of playdough had long since assumed a uniform shade of turd brown and the general drive was to get people to build things and tell stories about them. Most people just built dinosaurs or threw clay at eachother. G, for whatever reason, had a huge flat square slab laid out and was building four large pillars on the corners. He eventually put a roof on it, which wouldn’t stay on due to the lack of interior supports. The normal kids would always leave a few minutes early as the group ran right into the start of the next period and we’d need time to get to class. I was no different, and walked out while Bruce and the DD kids were smashing playdough, giggling and throwing chunks of turd-dough back into the bin. I got to my next class and the teacher wasn’t there. Nobody knew what was going on. About 10 minutes later she finally showed up looking frazzled and wouldn’t give us any information other than ‘something happened’ that needed staff attention. Being 6th graders, we went nuts with speculation. A few hours later I ran into the friend from group, who was visibly jumpy and disturbed. He wouldn’t tell me why other than mentioning that therapy group was cancelled indefinitely. I kept prying for information and eventually got the story out of him. So during the cleanup the playdough had to be compacted back into its tub. This involved lots of smashing playdough sculptures, a bit that the DD kids greatly enjoyed to the point where they’d try to smash other people’s stuff. G’s house was one of the last things to go. He smashed down two columns, let one of the other DD’s smash another, and finally dared Bruce to smash the last one really hard. The last one with the pocketknife in it. I never saw either Bruce or G ever again.

18. My fiancee’s friend had just bought her first house and literally within a month had some weird experiences. She’d wake up some days and her front door would be wide open. She would have really weird dreams about being touched or stared at every time this happened. Shaken, she got a dog for protection and got an alarm system for her house. The episodes stopped for a while until one day she woke up after another bad dream to her dog missing and the door wide open. The fence in the back yard was cut and the alarm system was disabled. She left immediately and sold the house. We think that someone was breaking in and drugging her to touch her/watch her sleep. Very frightening.

19. I have a really good friend who I know would never lie. And I mean it. He’s the most honest person I’ve ever met. So when he told me a story about something he had seen, it genuinely sent a chill down my spine. It happened a number of years ago, I’d bet about 7 or 8. He went to a friend’s house who lived in a secluded area surrounded by woods. He didn’t have a car, so his friend picked him up and took him over there and the two hung out, both eventually falling asleep on the couch. My friend woke up feeling really strange. He knew he was being watched. He turned around to see this bizarre figure staring at him from the end of a dark hallway. The way he describes it: bright white skin, big black eyes, sharp teeth and stick straight white hair that stuck straight up. “It reminded me of Freakazoid, but all I know is that it looked like it wanted to eat me.’ He instantly freaked out, ran over to his friend and tried his hardest to wake him up, but he remained asleep. The figure disappeared and my friend stayed wide awake on the couch until morning. When his friend finally woke up, my friend told him about what he had seen, to which the friend responded “oh yeah, I hate that thing.” My friend was not the first, and other people had seen this figure and refused to go over there after seeing it. The owner of the house had grown very violent and angry since moving in, and for his remaining friends who hadn’t seen this “thing”, he isolated himself from them with his newfound sense of anger. Because of the kind of person my friend is, I really cannot help but believe this. I’m an incredibly skeptical person who has serious doubts about the paranormal, but when he tells this story and you see the fear in his eyes…I don’t know, it’s very genuine.

20. When I was around 14 years old, I really liked to go for runs with my shepherd x lab. I lived in a fairly quiet, clean suburban neighborhood that was situated beside a broad expanse of pasture used by about ten horses (I would say it was roughly 40 acres). Anyway, a bike path ran between the pasture and my neighborhood and I generally ran down the path. One night I decided to go with my pup around 10:00 pm. May not seem like the smartest decision, but I had spent many nights with my group of friends biking/rollerblading around the neighborhood so I thought nothing of the late hour. I was running down the bike path with my dog, who is a big pup yet the friendliest guy you’ll meet. As we ran I noticed a dark lump a little ways ahead, and because it was nearly pitch black I could barely see it. I dismissed it as a garbage bag. As we drew closer, my dog perked up his ears and his hackles went up and he started to growl…which he rarely ever does. He loves basically everything. I stopped running and stared as the ‘garbage bag’ started to move. 14-year-old me still didn’t really know what the heck I was looking at, and it wasn’t until the supposed garbage stood up that I realized it was a man, who then started to run towards us! My dog then turned around and, I kid you not, started to run and yanked me along behind him. We reached a street, he darted down it, then pulled me into a dark alley, onto another street, then another alley, then another street, until we somehow lost the guy. My dog saved my life, I’m pretty sure. The guy may not have been an axe murderer but it turns out some creepy ex-felon was arrested in our neighborhood about two days later. I love my dog <3.

21-25 creepiest TRUE story

21. This happened to my friends, but its quite creepy. In 2009, a friend of mine was coming home from a different city at 11 p.m. with his father and 2-3 kms before entering the city, they suddenly saw a white horse standing in the middle of road. He tried to save the horse and severed the car into the ditch below road. As they got out of car, there was no horse to be seen anywhere. He told me this the next day and we found it creepy. Fast forward to 2015, some other friends of mine were coming home from a different city at 1:30am and doing 140km/hr. They reach the same place near the city border and suddenly see the same white horse standing in the middle of the road. Driver weighed in his options and decided its just best not try to turn. He hit brakes hard and the car just went straight through the horse, skidding. They came to a stop and realized it was a ghost horse or something and ran home. Told me about this the next day we talked. Weird thing is, either of these friends never met each other and there is 6 years difference between both occurrences.

22. Several years ago I lived in a semi-underground basement apartment. Basically the house was just enough underground that the windows were just a couple of inches off the ground on the outside. So one night I’m washing dishes in the kitchen which had a window to my left which was open. I’m almost finished when a voice whispers, “Looking good there with the dishes.” There was someone crouched down by the window on the outside who had been watching me for who knows how long. Unfortunately for creep boy I was washing the knives, and as I turned he evidently got scared by the gigantic chef’s knife I was brandishing in his general direction and he ran off. I hated that apartment. Eventually I tacked thick fabric over most of the windows to avoid having to watch people pee drunkenly on them.

23. Ok bit of back story, this is in the East End of London, pretty rough area. Me and a mate were around 13 years old and were in a park (more a patch of grass, it was like 20m x 40m), playing a bit of football after school. It was just getting dark, must’ve been about 6 o’clock; in autumn. We’re approached by a guy, probably ~50 years old, who was on crutches, face tattoos, leather skin… The whole lot. He asked me specifically “Can I use your phone to tell my friend Tom I’m at the park?”, in this really fu**ed up sort of voice. We grew up street smart and I smelt danger immediately, and replied “Oh, no…” We immediately both start running out of the park. This must’ve caught this guy out as he tried to stop us and jogged after us until we reached one of the exits. We book it till we get into a busy area, so we were running for maybe 45 seconds. We can still see the park from here (it was a straight road), and I have a look back at it. At the exit we just ran out of there’s another guy aggressively talking to this f**ked up weird guy that confronted us, who in turn is pointing at the direction we run and coincidentally no longer was leaning on his crutches. I presume that’s Tom. As weird as that is, another three guys walked over to those two. I’m certain they came from the only other exit of the park. All five of them looked the same, about 50, proper fu**ed up mad c*nts. The five of them had turned up where me and my mate were playing football in the space of a minute. F**king terrifying. The original guy was pointing in our direction still, there was shouting and s**t. At that point me and my mate just fu**ed off, scared out of our skin.

24. Once as a teenager, I was leaving a fast food drive-thru and someone in an old bronco started to follow me. At first I thought it was a road rage situation and did the “sorry” wave, and tried to let him pass but he swerved at me like he was trying to hit my car. He pulled up alongside of me and was screaming out the window, just incoherently furious, continuing to swerve at me. This was before the days of cell phones and I was in an unfamiliar area of town. I was driving a Firebird and tried to outrun him, but he would run red lights and make crazy turns to keep up with me. I eventually ran into a dead end and he pulled his truck across the road to block it. There were big ditches on either side so I was stuck. He got out and started scrambling at my door handle (doors locked) and pounding on the windows, his face inches from mine just screaming and screaming in a way that seemed like he couldn’t even quite see me. Shaking and crying, I turned on my overhead light so he could see I was just a teenage girl and not who he was looking for and he jumped on my hood and started pounding (and drooling in thick, white smears) on my windshield. I was screaming and crying and he stopped, held up one finger like “wait a minute” and scurried off to his truck. I floored the gas and ran into the ditch and drove like a crazy person for 45 minutes until I knew I had lost him. No idea what his deal was. My mom thought I made up this entire story to lie about the damage to my car, and still seems hesitant to believe me…

25. When I was 7, my mother who adopted me when I was born, as a single parent, died from breast cancer. I was adopted again by her sister (aunt and uncle). I sometimes hear knocks on the walls when I sleep. I’ve also, while playing video games, heard footsteps on the stairs late into the night. I’ve never really been afraid, because most of the time I think it’s nothing. But my mother died in the house. Maybe she watches over me. Who knows. She saved me from abortion. Maybe she’s saved me from other things too.