1. The Imaginary Hill
When my brother and I were 10 and 12 respectively our family went on a hike through the cemetery and into the woods not far from our house. My brothers and I would explore these woods every day. Even camped in em before. We knew it like the back of our hands.
Anyway, as the family hits our usual spot by the creek halfway through, brother 1 and I said we'd be back in a few, we wanted to wander off further up the creek. So we did.
We came across a very large hill we had never seen before. It was littered with what looked like someone's worldly possessions. As if they turned a house upside down, shook out the contents, took the house and left.
There were tons of painted Xs on the trees showing someone intended to cut them down at some point. We poked around for a few when we thought we heard our mom hollering at us. So we turned tail and walked maybe 20 feet back down the hill to where our parents were. The entire encounter was maybe 45 minutes long....on our end.
As soon as our mom saw us we got the beating of a lifetime. We had actually been gone for almost 4 hours. She never saw us walk up any hill and remembered seeing us meandering down the straight path by the creek, not turning up a hill that was 20 feet away.
She and her husband and our other brother combed the woods for over 4 hours screaming our names and couldn't find the hide or tail of us.
We pleaded our case and even tried showing her the hill. Surely she was messing with us. So we stomped up to the turn-off for the hill and....it was gone. Nowhere to be seen. For years we explored the woods determined to find that hill. We covered miles and miles of off-path woods. As we got older we mapped it out. To this day that hill does not exist.
We never found it again. Never found the weird furniture, toys, clothes, and other household items that were scattered across the hill. And never met anyone in the area that had a clue about the hill.
We probably just wandered way further than we meant to but I always found it weird that we never found the hill again.
RealAbstractSquidII
2. Lost Folks
Many years ago I and 2 of my best friends decided to go for a day of mountain biking at Snowshoe in southern W.Va. Now this was way before the days of GPS, so we were kinda doing this with some inadequate directions and an old map, but the point is we got very lost.
Sometime along the way we ended up in this very tiny little town and we figured we would ask for directions. It was absolutely deserted. I'm talking about not a single soul to be seen anywhere.
We parked the truck and split up looking for anyone. Now this was at around 9-10 a.m., so not exactly the crack of dawn mind you. We went into the post office, but nobody, we went into the only bar in town which was unlocked, unattended with music playing, but not a single soul was present.
We went business to business to business and walked the streets and after about 25 min finally found one old guy who just seemed to appear out of nowhere in the middle of town walking alone. The first question we asked him wasn't even for directions. It was, "Where the heck is everyone" to which he replied: "Well I guess folks around here don't get up much till around noon".
We asked him for directions to Snowshoe and he pointed to the road we came in on and said to go that way about 10 miles and make a right and we will find the interstate. We left quickly. We all had a very bad sense of unease about the whole thing.
As we left we were about 5 miles down the road and hit a lady dressed up in a state road uniform standing in the middle of a very long straightaway holding a stop sign. When we approached her she turned the sign from "slow" to "stop".
We asked what was going on. She stated that there was road construction ahead. We told her of what just happened and she just kinda laughed and said those people in that town are kinda strange, but let it slide. So we actually started talking to her waiting for a line of traffic to come by from the opposite direction.
We actually ended up talking to her for about 45 min to an hour, just shooting the time. Kinda got lost in the convo. Not one single vehicle EVER approached from the other direction or behind us.
Eventually, she said: "Well I guess it's clear now and y'all can go ahead" and slowly turned the sign from stop to slow and motioned for us to go ahead. We went straight ahead; the only direction you could possibly go for the next 30-some-odd miles and didn't see any signs of construction, state road workers, or maintenance going on at all.
She had no vehicle. We figured she was a flag woman dropped off by some crew up ahead. After the encounter with the town and this woman, we had enough and called it quits. We turned on the interstate as soon as we found it and headed north and home.
Every single one of us still remembers this whole encounter in vivid detail to this day. I asked my friend about it actually about 3 months ago at this wedding and it still freaks him out to no end.
Reconsct
3. We Couldn’t Find It Anymore
My grandparents had a big farm when I was growing up and all of the grandkids would help work it over the summer when we were out of school. Anytime we saw a rabbit we were supposed to get it with the hoe or grab the shotgun.
I was around 12 or so when I saw a little rabbit in the beans and I didn't want my grandfather to see it so I tried to chase it off.
I followed it into the brush on the land and for whatever reason I just kept following it because usually, I'd lose sight of them pretty quickly once they hit the brush. Kept following it until I found what was clearly an old barn ruin.
These are pretty normal to happen where I'm from and they're fun to look around inside, so I went in.
It was weirdly kept up really well with antique tools in great shape and fresh hay. I worried I had crossed into our neighbors’ property so I high-tailed it out of there. I asked my grandfather about it and he said our land went way far past what I had described, and I couldn’t have left our land in the short amount of time I was gone, so he followed me out there and we couldn’t find it.
I checked every summer I worked there and never found it again. Not creepy but it always drove me crazy where that stupid barn went.
literal9
4. Sick Water
In the 7th grade, I had a friend that lived near a beach on a bay of Lake Michigan. One day in early May it reached 70 degrees, nearly unheard of for that time of year in northern Wisconsin.
My two friends, including the beach friend, excitedly rode our bikes down to the beach to maybe dip our toes in, expecting still frigid waters, and then "tan" for the rest of the afternoon. The water, though, was surprisingly warm. Like bathwater warm.
In this particular area of the bay, the water was shallow for about a half mile out, and we joyously splashed around, wading deeper and deeper until we were about chest deep. As we dunked each other and swam with abandon I started to feel sick.
Bad headache, nausea, wobbly. Just then, my other two friends mentioned that they also felt sick. We headed back to shore, nearly crawling by the time we got out. The three of us collapsed under a tree and fell asleep for 2ish hours.
When we woke up we talked about how weird it was. I dipped my toe back in the water and it was freezing cold. To this day I have no idea what was in there.
I do know that there is a chemical plant in town that used to manufacture things like agent orange and that their practices were known to be less than environmentally conscious. I have never touched that water since.
seersucker
It was weirdly kept up really well with antique tools in great shape and fresh hay. I worried I had crossed into our neighbors’ property so I high-tailed it out of there. I asked my grandfather about it and he said our land went way far past what I had described, and I couldn’t have left our land in the short amount of time I was gone, so he followed me out there and we couldn’t find it.
I checked every summer I worked there and never found it again. Not creepy but it always drove me crazy where that stupid barn went.
literal9
5. Could We Be Hallucinating?
In my hometown, there was a hiking trail that people went to very infrequently. It was along the side of the Niagara Escarpment so it had some climbable cliffs and some very shallow caves that you could crawl around on.
I went with some friends when I was 19/20 and we were crawling around and found a cave that went pretty deep. We had never been in there before, had never even seen it before. So we pushed forward and decided to check it out even though we had no flashlights and this was when cell phones didn't really have a flashlight function.
We stepped into the cave and it was easily 20-30 degrees cooler than outside. Upon looking around with which light we had we noticed it was really clean inside the cave, as in it didn't have beer cans littered everywhere like all the other small caves did.
While in there we got a really eerie feeling after being in there shortly... hearing weird and strange things. Feeling like we were being touched, poked and pulled and not having any way to figure out who was doing it because it was too dark. We were just using lighters to see what was around us.
We were convinced one of us was messing with the others. Although anytime we sparked up a lighter, we were all decently far apart. We decided to high-tail it out of there after only a few minutes, convinced to come back with flashlights.
We came out to see that it was now dusk outside, when we entered it was mid-day. Somehow we had lost roughly 3 hours inside this cave.
We went back with flashlights the next week. But have never been able to find this cave again.
Economy_Cactus
6. Scary Night At a Gas Station
This story takes place in the mid 90's, a time before widely used cell phones and GPS. My two best friends and I, freshly able to drive, decided we would head out on a Saturday to a water park in Southern Missouri about a 3-hour drive from our home town in Northwest Arkansas. We had never been before and just used road maps to get there.
We had a pretty fantastic time but as the sun started to reach the tree line we thought we ought to head home. It was about 7 o'clock and we miss a turn but my friend Paul who was navigating said not to worry another turn was coming up that would get us there just as fast.
The next turn took us from detoured to completely lost. By 8 o'clock we are on a road that seemed to be lacking in informative road signs and zero lights.
We finally see a gas station and are relieved to get some directions as well as some gas. My friend Taylor and I go inside while Paul pumps the gas. We come inside and a very friendly old man in his early 60s gives us a very large grin and says "Well Hello there" It was very foghorn leghorn-esk. Looked like an extreme hillbilly but very pleasant.
We explained that we were needing gas and wanted to fill up. He explained that he was about to shut down for the night but would be happy to oblige us. He then said something I'll never forget, "You have to make haste though... tonight is buffer night."
Taylor and I looked at each other and shared an awkward look. We asked him if he could point out our location on the road map.
While he was finding it two people entered the shop from the back and called out for the old man. He said he was upfront. The two approached us, A man and a woman, and at first looked confused then as though hit with an epiphany they smiled.
They asked the old man "Are these the guests tonight?" He shot them a look and said "No these are some lost children."
The way he said "Children" caused the hairs on my neck to stand up. Not sure why. They looked at us and said, "The three of you should make haste because tonight is buffer night." Two things scared the crap out of me right then.
The first was how did they know about Paul pumping gas out front when they came from the back and the second being that they repeated the old man verbatim.
We clarified the directions to get back on a main highway and paid for the gas without waiting for change. Taylor and I booked it out of the gas station to find Paul already in the passenger seat. When we got into the car we were nearly airborne from the speed we took off.
Before we could say anything Paul told us about how three men from across the street stood under a tree just watching him. He waved but they didn't move a muscle.
We just drove as fast as we could until we got back to the highway. To this day I will still have a nightmare every so often about that gas station and what my imagination has twisted "Buffer night" into being.
Slooth849
7. An Odd Kind of Hospitality
When I was 13 years old, I bicycled the Natchez Trace Parkway from Mississippi up to Nashville TN with my dad over the course of a week. As much as I know I complained about the difficulty, it was a great trip with some amazing bonding. I still can't believe my mother let me go. This would have been in the late 90s.
The most interesting story on the journey comes from the day from Belmont, MS to Waynesboro TN. The previous day we had ridden further than we expected (92 miles!) because we couldn't find a motel room (and weren't biking and camping on this trip - probably my mom's plea). Needless to say, we were a little tired from the previous day.
It's a good 75 miles to Waynesboro - but we had a motel tour guide on the trip that said a small motor lodge would be available. The terrain was rolling hills, and they got more difficult after we crossed the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama, so we were ready to be done.
We got off the Parkway and went about 4 miles west. This little place wasn't actually in the town - it was just an old motor lodge along U.S. 64. It looked straight out of the 50s, and had 1 pickup and one semi-bobtail parked out front. It looked closed, and we were a little worried. There wasn't anything else listed in our guide, we were dead tired - and no one lives in this part of Tennessee.
But we walked in and sure enough, a couple was at the window and ready to get us a room - in fact, they even had a small diner that they were trying to get open, so we were welcome to join them for dinner. Awesome - you better believe we want to have dinner with you!
We took a room - and we were in fact the only ones there besides the trucker. We opened the door and...what a disaster. For starters, the walls were that old faux wood board and had seen better days.
The carpet was orange shag from probably the 50s or 60s. Maybe original to the building. The beds were hard. Oh, and it was about 95 in the room from the day's heat with no A/C turned on - which is perfect for after a long, hot bicycle ride. TVs had rabbit ears and got about 1.5 channels. This was 1999 mind you.
There was a huge old window unit that we turned on ASAP. Took "cold" showers to get feeling normal, while the others hung out outside (with the door open) and went to dinner to let the room cool off.
No traffic on this road. Hardly a sign for the town a few more miles up the road.
Back in the office/diner, the lights outside were now on and it was obvious we were the only ones in for dinner. Food? Not that good, but you'll eat anything after a workout of 75 miles. But the folks who ran the place were just wonderful.
A husband and wife, they had bought the motel days prior and were trying to get it running again. Would have been closed if we were there a few days before!
They were keeping the old place open while they started to redo rooms and get the diner running. They talked about the place and how they wanted to start something like this, and how they hoped it would go.
They were really interested in us as well - and probably listening to the tourist aspect of what we were doing on the bike trip.
The gentleman said that he thought they could get some folks to the diner by introducing a karaoke night. He had just bought a machine and had it hooked up to a tv - but it wasn't working and he couldn't figure it out.
I offered to give it a shot - and I don't know exactly what I did, but in a couple of tries it was fixed again and he sang a song.
And then the power went out.
The couple brought out some candles - and said that this had already happened to them twice now - but it wasn't them and they didn't know why it kept happening. We all talked in the dark for a bit - and then we said our good nights.
Went back to our room - and it was still hot. Ugh. My father and I talked about the place and he said that there was no way that their idea was going to work, but it was too bad because they were nice people. Went pretty much straight to the uncomfortable beds. The power came on at some point before midnight.
The next morning, we had a pretty good breakfast at the diner, and the couple was so apologetic. Nah, it happens. We were happy they were here. We wished each other luck and left after that.
A few days later after we got to Nashville, and took a bus back to get our minivan to go home, we stopped by again - just to say hi. The place was closed up and locked up.
No one was there. I've tried to look up the place again, but it's been long since demolished. I know the place failed under those folks, but they tried something - and they were gracious hosts.
foxhunter
8. Ghost Truck
Back in the day, my dad had a company that rented out 4x4 vehicles to foreigners who wanted to explore rural Africa. These cars were kitted out for offroading and rarely broke down. But this time one did.
My dad had to retrieve the vehicle as he's done a few times before, and since we lived in the neighboring country It wasn't more than a 20-hour drive (We live in Cape Town, South Africa and the vehicle broke down in Namibia.)
To my delight, my dad was setting off to retrieve this 4x4 in the upcoming school holiday and asked me to join him. I should add that I was about 16 at the time and ghost stories never really got to me.
So we set off on our long journey and the trip went smoothly as planned. We get to the collection point, hook up the broken-down 4x4 to ours and off we go, with no problems at all...
Until it turned dark. Now I know Namibia quite well, it has some well-known ghost stories, ghost towns and other eerie occurrences that have been reported, but in my mind that was just fantasy.
Fast forward to about 2:30 am (remember kids, nothing good ever happens after 2 am) and my dad wakes me up with noticeable uneasiness in his voice. He asked me to look in the rearview mirror and tell me what I see.
I looked in the mirror and noticed two dim headlights almost on our rear bumper that appear to be bouncing around a bit. My dad told me he wanted to make sure I see it too and that it isn't just his tired eyes playing tricks on him. I looked around and the area we were in was terrifying, to say the least.
We were surrounded by hills, but because of the lack of light, it was just pure blackness against the night sky, covered in leafless trees with pointy sharp branches all over.
I asked my dad where we were and he simply said that he doesn't know, he's just been following the GPS and asked me to look if there were any towns near. There wasn't, not for more than 300 kilometers.
He pointed back at the mirror and said "Look". He then proceeded to shift over the center of the road to the other lane and the lights followed suit without hesitation, as if they were tied to us. I asked my dad what it was and he said that he thinks it's a truck, now that in itself is not totally uncommon on these long cross-country roads but something about this just seemed off.
I mentioned to my dad that the truck may simply want to pass us, we are pulling quite a bit of weight so we are way under the speed limit at this point and he could be impatient. Dad decides to slow down to 60km/h and moves into the yellow line in an attempt to get this truck to pass.
Nope, the truck slows down too. Okay let's take it down a notch, Dad slows down to 40km/h. Nope, same result. We had to drop down to a speed of 20km/h for this truck to start overtaking us. And then it did...
We heard a groan and the grinding of gears and what seemed like an eternity till this truck started pulling up next to us. Now keep in mind these are quite windy roads with hills, so overtaking isn't recommended, especially not that slow, but this truck took its sweet time until it was right next to us.
It was one of those car-hauling trucks that has two levels that it can carry cars on. It had chains all over the sides that were slowly clinging and clanging through the night. The back of the truck where the cars get loaded appeared bent out of shape and the metal was rusted and held together by pieces of wood and loose torn pieces of fabric were blowing in the wind.
I was terrified. I shifted my attention to the cabin, black as the sky that night and no driver in sight. I'm not making this up, we saw nobody.
The truck pulled in front of us with a groan and it didn't seem like it could speed up any more. Now we were behind this terrifying mess of a vehicle and my dad started getting impatient, we started overtaking the truck and checked again for life inside the cabin as we passed. Nothing.
Once we were in front of the truck I noticed the headlights getting ever dimmer and dimmer, and when we picked up speed so did it. The lights kept dimming until there was but a spark left. This is where I got convinced something supernatural was going on.
We were driving on a hillside and a bend was coming up, not a tight one, but if missed one would go straight off the road and down the hill as there were no barriers. We go around the bend slowly, considering our heavy load and the truck just goes straight without hesitation.
We both saw it drive straight off the road and down the hill where at the bottom it finally got to a stop and all the lights died.
We stopped at a rest stop for the night and headed back there that morning to have a look if anyone was hurt or if the truck was there. It wasn't and there were no tracks or broken bushes where we saw it go off the road.
Mr-Moneybadger
9. Passing Through Strange Loops
Near where I live there is a little town called Ridgeview Park. My friend was talking to a new girl, and we were scoping out where she lived so he wouldn't get lost on his upcoming date when we took a wrong turn.
After a slight decline, the road sharply rose until we crossed some train tracks and were met with a fence about 20 feet tall made from wood pillars about the size of telephone poles. There was a gate that was open, so we drove in.
Once inside, there is a single loop that winds through the whole complex. Only wide enough for one car. One way in, one way out. In the middle sits a large dome/church. The houses that surround it are all square two-story homes painted brightly in strange colors.
There is a drained community pool off to one side with grass growing in the basin. Lined up along the very back of the loop are 50-70 single-car garage doors, all right next to each other. No house appears to have its own.
It was strangely quiet and as we drove past the homes, residents would step outside and watch us. The loop isn't too large, and we eventually made our way around and exited through the gate. Some people walked closer watching us leave.
I haven't seen anything else like it. Their website is password protected, and their Facebook page is private. The part you can see says it is a "summer community" that started out as a Methodist camp and still has religious services, and that they only sell homes to members of the family.
Such a creepy vibe to the whole place, and we try to drive through at least once a year, when the gate is open.
voluptuousTTs
10. Pizza Place At 2 AM
10 years ago, my friend and I were bored one night and were driving around. We were on a highway in NJ about 30 minutes from our houses and through the trees in the middle of nowhere we saw this beautiful freshly paved cement pathway with lampposts every 100 feet just lighting this pathway up. It was beckoning to us...and so we found the nearest exit.
We drove around for a while through darkness until the road came to a dead end and the path began. We got out and started walking on this path through the trees and these beautiful wide open fields until eventually, it ended at a little small town after a couple miles.
At this point it was like 2 am and in a small town like this nothing should be open except for this pizzeria....which is odd...so we go in. It is empty except for the older gentleman behind the counter. We order and start eating...then another older customer walks in.
The gentleman behind the counter and this customer do a double take at each other and then smile. Both of them run around the counter and embrace......"Mario!" "Stefano!" "What has it been 40 years?" "They talk the whole time about their childhood and growing up back in Italy.
We think what are the chances we would be here..at this moment....seeing friends reunited after 40 years, just plain, odd. My friend and I, we finish up and we head back down the brightly lit path and back to the car and call it a night.
Ever since that night my friend and I tried to find that brightly lit path, but to no avail, we haven't seen it since from the highway or driving down that road. In the small town, the pizzeria is there, but it closes at 10 pm, so no explanation why it would be open at 2 am.
Just plain odd and something we never could explain, experiencing an unlikely moment to watch friends be reunited after 40 years.
sichbumba
11. The Old Gas Station That Disappeared
I was relocating across Texas and, as I normally do, was driving through the night to skip traffic because it’s more serene that way. I was driving straight through central Texas going northwest, so seeing the hill country change to a desert in the full moon was super cool.
Anyways, I was driving with my (now ex) wife and we were running low on gas. Luckily, we were pulling into a tiny no-name town and we could see an old gas station come around the bend. This encounter happened at about 2 am.
Now, this town only has one road, and this station was right at the edge of town at the end of it. When I say old, I mean very old; the type that you have no option of prepaying, you simply flip up the handle on the machine and you hear the pump inside start struggling to get the gas from the reservoir. It had the old style tick readers too, not a thing electrical on it.
I, being the young man I was, had never seen one before, so I walked into the store to buy the gas before I pumped. The store only had one light in the far back, and I almost thought it was closed since it was barely brighter inside than it was out in the moonlight.
Upon entering, I saw the place was deserted; no customers, no workers, nothing. However, there was an odd tune playing on someone’s radio that I couldn’t place. An old-sounding, upbeat piano piece was playing somewhere around the corner inside, and I heard shuffling once I walked closer to the source.
This place made me feel scared. Not the “woah this is creepy” scared, but the “all hairs are on end, something is seriously wrong here but I can’t figure it out” scared. As I turned the corner, I saw a young man standing next to a large radio and... dancing. His dancing, though, was extremely off-putting and seriously didn’t match the tune at all.
Though the radio was cranking out what sounded like ragtime, this guy was running his hands up and down his body and pretty much “feeling himself” with his eyes closed in what looked like bliss. He was going far slower than the music and definitely wasn’t on tempo.
For some reason, I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even move. I was in a trance as every part of me screamed to turn and leave.
Finally, I said, “Excuse me, I just need some gas.”
The guy kept dancing.
I said it a little louder, and he finally slowed down a bit and opened his eyes, and focused on me. But it was like he was looking at a finely cooked steak. He was looking almost through me, and silently walked to the register, not saying anything.
I said, “Uh, just $20 please.” He, again, didn’t say anything and just stood behind the ancient register, so I just figured maybe he didn’t speak the language or was embarrassed I caught him dancing, so I laid the money on the counter and went outside hoping he’d turn on the pump.
I filled up, told my wife about the weird scene in there, and turned off the pump to kill the horrible grinding noise from the interior pump fighting against gravity to get the gas up.
The weird thing is, when we were leaving, I looked back in the window and the guy was still standing there behind the counter. This may sound fine, but my money was still on the counter in front of him. It was like he was a robot who just turned off once I left.
This is where it gets super weird. A couple of months later, I was driving back to San Antonio to visit family, and we figured we’d stop at that old gas station to see it in the daytime since it had become somewhat of a running joke between us.
We pulled into this tiny town, and... the thing was gone. The lot it sat on at the end of the road wasn’t even there. It was just grass. No rubble, no old pump, no lighting, nothing. It was like somebody picked it up and moved it. It looked like nothing had been there for years.
Still get freaked out thinking about it.
Sterling_-_Archer
12. The Weird Town We Never Found Again
A group of friends and I decided to take a small Saturday afternoon road trip into the backcountry of South Carolina. We figured we'd just drive around, head southwest, and see if we could find some antique shops, cemeteries, abandoned buildings and the like.
We pile into my car and start driving. It's about an hour of nothing, just some light conversation and southern pine forests.
We passed a few horse farms, some quaint old mill towns, and a few gas stations, but nothing interesting yet. 2 pm rolls around and we decide we want to get something to eat. As a rule, we always like to try local diners and restaurants, so we kept driving until we saw a faded road sign for a town.
It was about five miles down the road and we figured that's good enough.
As we're driving through the town, we notice there's no one out. No cars on the roads, no people on the streets, and no real houses. The streets are lined with abandoned and boarded-up warehouses, shops with broken windows, and a few broken-down cars from the 90s. The further we go, the worse it gets. We finally get to a diner that's right off their main street.
It looks like there are about ten people eating inside and there are a few cars in the parking lot. Seems like they're open. Here's where it starts to get weird.
We open the door and step in. As soon as we clear the threshold, everyone stares at us. It's like in movies where the record scratches on the jukebox and everyone looks, except far more uncomfortable. In the middle of the diner is a large table with six people around it, who all turn back to their food and start whisper-talking.
The waitress nervously shuffles up to us and quietly asks how many.
My friend Chris takes the lead and says "four" in just a normal speaking voice. Everyone looks at us again and the waitress (who looks barely older than 16) recoils, but takes us to our table. She sat us in a basic 4-top near the large table in the middle. She takes our drink orders and leaves.
Once she goes, we all whisper about how weird that was. While we're talking, the line cook is just staring at us with this violent look in his eyes. We all figure out what we want and wait. We sit in awkward silence for about ten minutes before the waitress comes back.
She takes our orders and disappears into the back of the diner, leaving us alone in the dining room with the people at the other table. It gives us some time to look them over.
They're a basic Southern family. Chubby, haggard-looking wife. Husband with sun-leathered skin and oil stains on his coveralls. Three children, all girls, all in nice Sunday dresses. And then her.
The other woman was dressed like the younger girls but looked very much in her forties. She wore a red, paisley patterned dress, with frilled lace at the collar and cuffs. Her hair was long and stringy and covered the bulk of her round face. To the left of her was a doll, seated in a high chair for babies.
The woman would sometimes lean in towards the doll and whisper something, then giggle.
Soon the waitress dropped food off at their table but set a meal down for the doll too. She commented on how pretty the woman's daughter was and left. About ten minutes later she came back with our food, silently left it, gave us the side eye, and walked away.
The waitress came back to refill the other table's water, where she asked everyone how the food was but asked the doll too. When she asked the doll, she spoke in a baby voice. The woman then picked up the doll, held it in front of her face, and spoke in a little girl's voice. She was the doll.
My other friend looked at me with the most terrified, wide-eyed expression. She worked with disturbed children as a therapist in a court-mandated facility. We shoveled our mediocre food down and my friend Chris just dumped forty dollars on the table and we left.
As we were leaving the town, Chris was looking for any sort of town name. I was checking to make sure we weren't being followed. This happened about six years ago and we still can't find that town.
No one remembers the name, or the road it was off of, but we remember being there and what the diner looked like.
PancakeParthenon
13. Demon-like Experience
I had just turned 22 and my parents had sold their house and purchased a place out in the country. On the property, there was a big shed not far from the house that I decided to turn into my place. Now I felt kind of uncomfortable in the shed sometimes but my dog kept me company so it wasn't so bad.
Anyway I had been in there maybe 2 weeks and one night I'm on the computer, my dog was asleep at my feet and I needed to pee so I got up and went outside to do my business. It's a beautiful clear night and the stars were incredible. Next thing I hear the shed door slam behind me.
I turn immediately and try to open it but it won't budge. Now from inside the shed, I can hear my dog start to growl, quietly at first then louder, now he's barking and I'm panicking trying to get the door open.
I must mention that I'm 6 foot 5 and well built, play sports etc but even ramming my full weight into the door won't open it and I'm really panicking now as my dog barks turned into whines, then whimpering, then silence and with all my might I slam into the door and it flies open.
The light is off inside now and it's pitch black, it won't turn back on and I'm in complete darkness. Can't see my dog anywhere and I stumble around trying to find a torch. Finally, I find it and pick it up. Turn on my torch and I wasn't prepared for what I'd see next... My dog had literally squashed itself into the furthest, darkest corner of the room, eyes closed and was shaking violently.
I don't know what happened in that shed that night but I'll never forget it.
I immediately moved towards him and as soon as I got within reach of him, he lept at me into my arms and wouldn't move. I picked him up and I swear I've never run so fast in my life. I never stepped foot in that shed ever again and my dog wouldn't even go near that part of the property.
Microthrowaway64
14. The Train Station
I was catching a skytrain in one particular city about 15 minutes from where I got off. While I wait there is a woman with glazed eyes asking people for money. She came up to me, stopped briefly, and asked "Excuse me, could you spare some money? My brother is in the hospital and I'd like some money to buy him some flowers."
That's rich I thought. Drug addicts are getting more and more obvious with their lines. "Here's $5". Gave it to her without even looking her in the face, convinced of her intentions.
Anyways, my train pulls up and I get on. I look through the glass at her walking around asking others for money as the train pulls away.
The train arrives at the station 15 minutes later, and I walk down and out to the bus stop. There is only one bus in the direction I'm going, and just my luck! It is there waiting when I get off the train. So on the bus, I hop and wait for the bus driver to finish reading his paper before the doors close and we embark down the highway.
After about 5-10 minutes of traveling, the driver pulls over for a routine stop. The doors open, and to my complete astonishment, the woman from the Skytrain walks into the bus. A dozen roses in hand. She looks me right in the eyes as she walks past to take her seat.
How in the blue skies did she get there? I took the train before her. I watched her at the train stop from inside as we pulled away. I went over a river. I caught the first and only bus going in this particular direction.
And not only did she beat me there, she had time to go to a store and buy a dozen roses.
To this day I have no idea how this happened.
your_a_moron
15. Moments In An Alley
One day I was walking to work and all of a sudden had the urge to walk a different path than usual. I work downtown in a big city. It was a strange spur-of-the-moment urge to walk a different way that changed my life forever.
I turned into an alley I had never seen before. As I remember it, I made it about fifteen feet or so when an actual "glitch" happened. Everything in my mind scrambled. I felt like I didn't have a body anymore, just that I was a semi-conscious entity floating through some weird dimension.
All of a sudden in the array of different colors and shapes a vision came to me. It was a bunch of strange-looking people that in my mind resembled businessmen in suits. They looked startled and panicked that I could see them. One of the "people" made a quick movement and everything turned to black.
When I regained normality, I was on a completely different street. It was the same street that I always use to walk to work. I felt sick, and severely disturbed/depressed.
I've never done any hard drugs, never experienced any hallucinations, and never had anything like this happen to me. The weird thing is when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled.
It still bothers me very much to this day.
A_lot_of_italics
16. My Vision Saved My Brother
I was heading home with my dad, we stopped at a drive-through. I start feeling more and more anxious for no reason, to the point where it makes me light-headed and sick to my stomach. We have to wait a little bit ahead because they gave us the order wrong. So I sit there, feeling like crap, and suddenly an urge comes to me to call my brother.
He was trying to call us, he was in a car accident. No one died, some got seriously bruised, and he was only shaken. I told him to shut up and get as far away from the car as possible. He didn't understand but followed through, trying to call some of his buddies, and I could hear them calling him a wuss, him giving up and getting far and then a loud noise, people shouting.
After the whole crap was over he told me what happened. His drunk friend tried to impress some girls in the car, hit the gas, drifted and hit the bottom of the car on some rocks, completely spoiling the engine. They stood near the car, the driver still inside trying to turn the engine back on. The hood burst into flames and the car started to burn fast, the driver managed to get away but got severely hurt.
Some of the guys and girls who stood around were hurt and burned too, but not as bad as the driver. My brother was the only one with light bruises from the whole thing. He told me that when I ordered him to get away from the car he was in front of it, inches from the hood.
I never experienced anything like this before and after, just this once. It's just a weird memory, I don't remember what I was thinking, I remember it like watching a movie and seeing myself and everything from an outside angle.
donpapillon
I've never done any hard drugs, never experienced any hallucinations, and never had anything like this happen to me. The weird thing is when the glitch was correcting itself and I could see those "people" watching me like a caged animal I had the feeling that I knew I was being controlled.
It still bothers me very much to this day.
A_lot_of_italics
17. Tracing the Strange Sound
I am from Finland, and that's also where these things I'm about to describe to you happened. This was some years ago (pre-smartphone/GPS era). It was the end of the summer, my two friends and I were on a camping trip way up in the north, in Lapland.
The mosquito season was over, and the weather was cooling down in anticipation of the coming fall. The three of us had packed food and gear for a 10-day trek. The car we arrived in had been left at the parking lot of a visitor center - this happened within the premises of the Urho Kekkonen National Park, a 985 sq. mile stretch of wilderness near the Russian border.
The terrain there varies greatly, from treeless and semi-mountainous to dense forests of spruce and pine and dwarf birch. There are lots of swamps. Seeing reindeer is not uncommon and some nights you might hear wolves in the distance.
You can run into a bear or a wolverine in this place, but of course, normally they avoid people. We mostly camped in a tent, but some nights we used shelters and simple huts provided for travelers free of charge. The trip had lasted 5 days, we were at the furthest of any kind of civilization we were going to be on that particular outing, truly in the middle of nowhere - there really is nothing there.
There are no villages, towns or industries, the place is a national park after all. Seeing other hikers happened from time to time, you'd see some people in the distance maybe, but very rarely would you come face to face with anyone.
So, in the middle of our trip, we were camped in a small clearing, woodland extending around us for a considerable distance in all directions. It was already dark, we had eaten our evening meal and all three of us were jammed in our only tent. It was a bit cramped but we fit. We took turns carrying it during the hikes.
We were just exchanging some jokes and crude humor in the dark, like guys in their twenties do, about to go to sleep in our sleeping bags. When we quieted down we began to hear it — talking. And the sound of machinery. Given our location, this was profoundly weird. We camped in a tent because there were no huts nearby.
Maybe there was another camp somewhere near us? We couldn't quite make out what was being said, but it was a human voice, no doubt about it. But nothing really could explain the sound of heavy machinery. It sounded like an excavator or a tank, something big, powerful, and really not too far away.
Combined with the sound of talking, we thought "construction yard". But at that time of night, in an unpopulated, protected nature reserve? We got out of our tent. It was cold and pitch black, the campfire had some coals still glowing. We took out our flashlights.
My two buddies have always been a lot braver than me. The sound was clearly coming from the north, maybe half a kilometer away. We thought the construction might be going on behind a small hill some distance away. We could see no lights or anything. We still could not make out what was being said.
The speaking-like voice was monotonous, and it was impossible even to say what language was being used. Still sounded a lot like a person speaking though. You may be aware of the sort of spooky phenomenon of hearing a human voice in static. Maybe you've used a blowdryer and been sure someone is talking - turn it off and it was just something the brain tried to interpret from the steady hum.
Maybe it was sort of like that, it's hard to explain. The machinery-like sound continued, not loud, but you could sort of make out the powerful engine, at times accelerating/adding power, at times at idle. My two friends resolved to go find out what was going on. We put our warm clothes back on, donned boots and I sat next to the dying fire, adding some more wood to it.
I would stay at camp while my buddies left to check out this mystery construction yard in the middle of nowhere in the Lapland woods.
So, there I sat. The guys took out their maps, took a compass heading and left and I could hear them make their way through the forest, see the light from their flashlights. Then they were gone. The weird sounds continued, unaltered. They were gone 15 minutes, then maybe 30. Then the better part of an hour.
It was odd, judging by the volume of the sound, they should have reached it, checked it out and been back already. I added more firewood and tried to make out what the person talking was saying but it was too tinny and obscure. The guys had been away for over 2 hours. I figured they had stayed for coffee with the construction guys or something.
Then the sound stopped. Just like that. It just ended, all at the same time. The engine sound and the voice both just quit. It was very silent. I waited for another 30 minutes, very worried now that something had happened, that maybe my friends were lost. Should I go and try to find them? I shouted their names several times and built the fire pretty big.
I was scared out of my mind when suddenly I saw the flashlights of my friends. Apparently, they were returning in a hurry.
The guys got back to camp, out of breath. They told me the following: They had followed the sound beyond the small ridge in the distance. There was nothing there and it seemed like they were not getting any closer to the source of the sounds.
They had to stop every now and then, be quiet and listen to it to be able to walk towards it. They walked and stopped like this for some time, then realized they were not getting any closer. The sounds did not change in volume at all. They decided to go "just a bit further" several times when suddenly the sound just stopped like someone pressed a button on a recording.
They realized they had been going on for a long time. They were in the middle of the dark woods, alone. They reversed the heading and started back at a brisk pace. Eventually, they saw my big fire from the top of a hill and found their way back.
The weird thing is, we seemed to think the sound stopped at different times. They had been gone 2.5 hours in total. They said the sounds stopped at around the 1 hour 15 minutes mark after they left, they then started to head back immediately, the return trip taking a bit longer even though they kept a good pace, they apparently wandered around a bit.
For me, the sound stopped at the 2 hour mark, just 30 minutes before they returned.
We did not sleep that night. Nothing more happened on that trip and we never found out what the weird construction yard-like sound was about. When we returned to the park's visitor center some 5 days later, we asked around but no-one knew of any ongoing construction taking place in the whole national park area.
Been bugging me ever since.
Rattus_Amicus
18. Goodbye to Grandpa
This happened when I was 11. I still remember it like it was yesterday. My grandfather was getting old and had been in and out of the hospital a few times that year. At that moment he had been in the hospital for probably 2 days. We had gone into the hospital to visit him where I gave him a big hug and told him I loved him and would see him tomorrow. That night, I went to bed and had the most beautiful dream.
My grandpa came into my room and sat in the rocking chair in the corner. He invited me into his lap and told me he was going away for a while and that someday he would see me again. I shouldn't worry, because everything was ok and he wasn't in any pain. I smiled at him and gave him a big hug and told him I understood.
I then looked over at my brother sleeping in the bunk below me and asked my grandpa if we should wake him up and tell him. When I turned back around to get a response from my grandpa he was gone. I ran to the window to look out onto the front yard.
There he was waving at me. He whispered, "Go tell your mom and dad exactly what I told you". I looked back at the door to my room and then back at the front yard and he was gone.
I immediately woke up, ran to my parent's room and turned on the light. I told them exactly what Grandpa had told me. They told me it was just a dream and to go back to bed. I told them again exactly what Grandpa told me.
Again, frustrated it was 2 am, told me to go to bed and we would talk about it in the morning. Just then the phone rang, it was the hospital, my mother started sobbing, Grandpa had passed.
At that moment she just sat there with my father staring at me. I still remember their faces. They both looked at each other, then me, then each other, and finally smiled and stopped crying. They gave me a big hug and told me they loved me and to go back to bed.
They ended up going to the hospital that night and my aunt came over to watch us. But we have never talked about that night since. In fact, I don't think I have ever written about it, which explains the tears rolling down my cheeks right now.
fannonland
19. From Dream to Reality
I was 19 and had a weird dream that stood out. My brother and I were walking into a Subway restaurant near where I live, and my head hurt, and my ear was burning. As I entered, I reached into my pocket and withdrew the cross my father gave me, which I wear every day around my neck. Then I woke up. The dream was short and made no sense.
A few months later, I get into a fight with a guy in our neighborhood. My brother was there with me. Walking away from the scene, we decide to duck into the nearby Subway so I can get cleaned up, when I realize the chain I wear my cross on is broken, dangling on either side of my neck.
The guy I was fighting had broken it during the fight. The cross is missing. We went back to the scene and search and find nothing... back to Subway.
By now a headache has started to set in, and during the fight, the guy grabbed my ear and it was burning. As I stepped into the Subway I remembered that dream, and realized that I was experiencing it at the moment now; and that this was the moment I reached into my pocket and- there it was, my cross, in the middle of my palm. I have no idea how it got there.
It couldn't have fallen in. In fact, it would make more sense to have been anywhere else. But there it was.
Creolean
20. Another Universe
It happened in early 2000 when I was working at a juvenile detention center in a small town in Oklahoma as a corrections officer. I was working nights at the time and went to work at nine p.m.
One night when I arrived for work my supervisor looked confused and asked me what I was doing there. I said, "I work tonight.". And he said, "But they said you called in a few hours ago saying that you were sick.". I was a bit confused and said "It must have been someone else and they got the message wrong."
After everyone else showed up for work that night it was a bit more weird, but we carried on as usual and assigned everyone their places for the night; I went to work in the control room where I usually work. The control room is the center of the prison that has direct control over the cameras, doors, phones and everything.
After I relieved the guard on duty and settled in for the night, I looked at the message that said I called in. It said that I had called at 6:50 and said that I had gotten sick while out cleaning up after the storm. There had been a storm the night before and it was a bit bad, but not anything that I had to go out to clean up. It was truly weird.
The supervisor came into the control room at about that time. He was also a friend of mine outside work and we started talking about it, and how odd it was. I decided to call my wife at home and tell her about it while he was still sitting there. I picked up the phone and dialed. After two rings a man picked up the phone and with a raspy voice said "Hello?".
I did not know what to say for a few seconds. I looked at the phone to make sure I dialed the right number, and I had. After a few seconds, the person said "Hello?" again in the same raspy voice. I said, "Hello. Who is this?". "This is Taylor who is this?" the person said. My head started spinning because my name is Taylor also.
I said in almost a scream "Where is Ann?". He said, "Ann's in bed. Who is this?"
I dropped the phone and told my supervisor to ring me out, I had to get home, and I took off towards the door. I could hear Dave pick up the phone behind me and say "Hello?" followed soon after by "What the heck!" rather loudly.
I ran to my car and drove home faster than what was legal, my mind racing the entire time. I busted through the door and my wife was sitting watching t.v. and was shocked at me being home. I asked her who was there and she said no one had been there. After a rather long talk with my wife, I went to call the prison to tell them what was going on, but the phone was dead.
I went back to work and when I came in Dave was acting weird and asked me "How the heck are you doing this?" He told me that when I left, he picked up the phone and the person on the other end sounded like me. He kinda freaked out and hung up the phone.
A minute later as he could see my car leaving the parking lot, I had called back from home and asked what the heck was going on. He said that I was a bit irate and said I was sick and did not feel like playing these games and was telling him to stop prank calling me and hung up.
After convincing him I had no idea what was going on we went back to work.
Later, I find out that the phone line for my area had been knocked down the night before by the storm. This is absolutely the strangest thing that has ever happened to me.
crowhorse
21. An Abandoned Camper
Scariest moment of my life happened while my friend and I were camping in eastern Canada as teenagers. We decided to sleep in this abandoned camper we found deep in a large forest that was near our town. It had been there so long that small trees had grown around it.
We'd stumbled across it when we were exploring a few months back and thought it would be cool (and brave) to sleep there for a night. So one weekend we did it.
We arrived after dark because we had gotten lost trying to find the camper. We had a really low power flashlight, so it made it even more difficult. Once we finally found it we opened the rusty door and stepped in. The sounds inside the camper were shrill and echoey. There were typical camper things strewn about; cups, empty cans, swollen pulp fiction novels.
Already tired, we holed up in one end of the camper where the bed area had originally been before the cushions had rotted away to almost nothing. A long hallway stretched the length of the camper so we could basically see from end to end.
It was a miserable night. There were several rats living there. I saw them staring at us from a chewed out part of the ceiling. When the wind blew outside the camper would shriek and groan. We even thought we heard a bear outside too, walking around.
Still, we feigned bravery and acted like we were having a good time. But we were on edge.
At some point, I woke up from an uncomfortable sleep. I sat up to adjust myself when I noticed some movement out of the corner of my eye. At the other end of the camper, there was a small window, and as I looked at it I saw a man's silhouette. He was clearly staring straight at me from outside.
At first, I thought maybe it was a weird shape of a tree or something. But when I moved a bit to get a better look the person clearly reacted and then froze. My heart was pumping and I woke up my friend immediately, saying "Someone is here" over and over and over in a whisper, not taking my eyes off his profile. He woke up immediately and I nodded towards the window.
He saw him too. We whispered frantically about who it could be and why he was staring at us. And for the next 10 minutes, no joke, we stared him down. The longer we stared at him the more frightened we got. Occasionally he would move, but always kept his eyes locked on us. Eventually, I shouted at him, "Hey!". No reaction.
My friend was braver than me and decided to shine the flashlight at him. As soon as he did, we realized our horrible mistake.
It wasn't a window at all on the other side of the camper. It was a mirror. We had been staring down at ourselves from the very start. Completely idiotic. Still, it was the most fearful, relieving and funny moment of my life that I'll never forget it. Closest to the paranormal I've ever been.
hyperboledown
22. Shadow or Ghost
I saw a 'shadow person' once. I didn't know that's what it was called until much later. I was living in a house in Laguna Beach that had been there since the 1920s. In its history, it had been a speakeasy, a brothel and a house for smuggling illegal immigrants.
One day, my new wife and I were having an argument. I can't even recall what it was about. She walked down the block to get a cup of coffee and cool off, and I was alone in the house.
The way the place was built was incredibly haphazard. There was a bedroom and living room on one side, then a bathroom with two entrances. On the other side of the bathroom was a hallway that had windows on one side and two bedrooms on the other. From my bedroom, I could look across the hall into the bathroom, then through the bathroom and down the other hall.
I was standing at my dresser, and I just noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and looked down there.
There was a black figure. It was maybe three feet tall, and it was only vaguely humanoid. It looked like black scribbles like someone had scribbled a human shape, but the scribbles moved, like electricity arcing, that's the best way to describe it. There was no sound that I could remember.
I distinctly remember when I saw it I wasn't afraid, just like, WTF? Then it noticed me looking at it. I can't say it turned around, it just focused on me I guess. I was really scared.
I didn't move, didn't scream, anything, I was just frozen, because it just came at me, it rushed down the hall towards me. I have no idea what it intended, but as soon as it entered the bathroom, the door closest to me just slammed shut on it. Then I screamed. I yelled for my wife. She wasn't home. I went outside, into the daylight, and didn't go back in until she got home about 10 minutes later.
I don't believe in ghosts. I don't believe I saw something supernatural, but I know I saw something. I don't know what it was.
makeskidskill
23. Weird Clicking Lights
I grew up in the Arctic. In the town I lived in, as long as it was a clear night, it was an extremely normal occurrence to see all sorts of strange lights move across the sky. Keep in mind that winter is long in the Arctic, which means longer amounts of time being spent under the stars. It's quite beautiful, as long as you don't mind the cold so much.
Sometimes I would drive a snowmobile a few kilometers out of town, shut it down, and just lay down on the snow looking up at the majesty of it all, the only thing disturbing the silence being the occasional breeze.
The northern lights are also a common occurrence. It doesn't happen every day, but often enough that they start getting ignored after a while, as long as they aren't too spectacular anyway.
On one particular night, without asking my parents (it was their snowmobile), I decided to go on one of my midnight drives out of town. I drove a few kilometers over the hills to find a spot devoid of light pollution from town, shut off the machine, and settled into a good spot to look up and be retrospective.
It wasn't all that interesting a scene. A few satellites passing here and there, some relatively boring activity affecting the magnetic field, etc. And then I started noticing a clicking noise...
At first, I thought it was the sound of the snow machine cooling down, as the engine expands and contracts a lot in the cold. But the source of the sound definitely wasn't coming from that direction. My next thought was there must be an animal nearby in which case I need to get out of there fast (you don't really want to mess with a wild animal).
But, the clicking is far too regular for an animal to produce it. It was fairly mechanical sounding. And again, the source of the sound isn't coming from anywhere around me laterally. It was coming from up. So naturally I look up determined to ascertain the origin of this strange noise.
I see what I always see: stars, northern lights, a lazy satellite crossing the sky...all normal stuff. But before I dismiss it altogether and begin heading home, I notice something strange in the Aurora Borealis. There were three rather strong points of light.
I ignored them at first thinking they were oddly symmetrical stars, but this proved false. They were definitely getting brighter. I kept staring in morbid fascination as they grew stronger and stronger, yet still only remaining single points in the sky. All the while the clicking noise is getting louder and louder and more pronounced, almost like someone started tapping a pen on a desk to clack billiard balls together inside my head.
Then it stops. The lights are gone, the clicking is not heard, and aside from being a little stiff, cold, and rather petrified, I'm fine.
So I jump back on the snowmobile thinking maybe I'm going crazy. The machine takes a little longer than usual to start up, and I'm beginning to worry, but soon it's running and I'm heading back to town. As I'm driving back several plausible scenarios as to what occurred are running through my head.
I'm thinking it could've been a helicopter from the mine, or some strange northern lights behavior etc. Probably not that big a deal.
I pull up to my house. Lights are all dark. Strange. It wasn't that late when I left. Open the outer door as quietly as possible, remove winter gear and enter the inner door. The house was quiet. Really quiet. My parents are teachers and are usually up late marking or watching T.V. All I'm thinking is I have to get to bed without anyone noticing. Proves to be easy as I'm soon under my covers. I go to set my alarm for the next day.
All of a sudden everything makes sense.
The engine was hard to start, stiff, and rather chilly, and nobody was up when I was gone for what felt like a relatively short period of time. It was almost 11:00 pm when I left, and now it was creeping up at 6:00 am. I stood, staring at clicking lights for almost 7 hours. I never ended up sleeping that night, and I don't go on late-night snowmachine rides anymore.
MeaninglessDebateMan
24. Message from Dad
My dad died in a motorcycle accident a few years ago and after he died weird stuff started happening at my dorm when I got back. The clock would fall off the wall and change time, batteries would separate themselves from remotes and bangs and knocks were regular. But the weirdest thing that happened was when I was back home from college.
I took a shower, got dressed, and headed back into the bathroom to finish getting ready. The mirror was just clearing off the steam and lo and behold I see smear marks faintly that looks like lettering. So I tip the mirror cause it's one of those triple pane medicine cabinet mirrors, and I see 'Hey' spelt out in his handwriting with the elven I symbol that was in The Lord of the Rings that my dad would put everywhere.
This was 6+ months after he passed and I have no idea where it came from since it was only me and my mom in the house and I know she wouldn't do that. The crazy part is that a week before that I had broken open a glow stick and it splashed on the mirror, but the writing was under the splashes and none were smeared or touched.
Still to this day, I cannot explain how it happened. We actually took the entire mirror off the wall so it wasn't ruined.
Veda_
25. Eerie Old Buildings
I was in 7th grade and we'd just moved into a "mill town" house. One of the houses was built close by a dam and textile mill that used to house the families of mill workers. The upstairs area always gave me an eerie feeling, but I shrugged it off as the discomfort of living in a new place.
From the beginning, I had trouble sleeping, and was jolted awake in the middle of the night repeatedly for no apparent reason. Then, I started hearing the thumping.
It started as occasional, soft thumps, seemingly coming from the attic. I had my dad check it out to ease my mind, but he found no explanation. Fast forward a few weeks, the occasional knocking was becoming louder and I continued to wake up in the middle of the night.
One night I was jolted awake again, but this time I heard a loud bang accompanied by the sound of breaking plastic.
I looked to my window across the room, and the blinds had been completely torn and were in disarray. My door was closed, the windows were closed, and the house was locked up tight. I don't think I've ever run so fast in my life. I made it downstairs pretty quickly and the sound woke my parents, so they went upstairs to check it out. They found no cause or explanation.
I slept on the couch downstairs until we moved shortly afterwards.
kmierek
26. I Saw the Future
When I was young, I had a recurring dream. The dream had no real story behind it, it was just odd little clips of my life so far. The dream always ended the same way. It would just kinda fade to black and I’d hear voices.
One voice said, “I just had the weirdest dream”. And a female voice would reply “What about?” The first voice would then go on talking and at that point, I’d wake up.
So about 8 months ago, at least 30 years later I had the dream again. It was the weirdest thing. I could remember all those little clips, most of which I had long since forgotten about. I felt this overwhelming joy to be recalling all those lost childhood memories.
The feeling was so intense, it was like being so happy I could cry (never felt that before). But the end of the dream was different this time. And this is the honest truth. Instead of fading to black and hearing the voices, I just woke up. I was laying there feeling confused about the dream. Was this the same dream I’d had when I was little?
I rustled my wife from her sleep and said “I just had the weirdest dream”. She replied, “What about”.
I was wide awake, playing out the ending of the childhood dream. No jokes, everything I said to her over the next minute or two to describe the dream was actually as I had heard it when having the dream back when I was 8 or 10. It was like this hardcore case of déjà vu. I have déjà vu from time to time and I think it’s cool, but this blew my mind.
The next morning after the dream I was already starting to question myself about whether I actually had those dreams when I was young, or was it something my dream invented. But if I did have them, was I somehow peering into the future?
LookMaNoHands9822
27. Ghosts By the Graveyard
It was in my first year at University, completely new to the city and its surroundings. One evening, my friend and I decided to take a trip to the mall. It was 8 pm and we got on a bus that my friend claimed would take us to the mall.
We ended up at an empty bus terminal and it was around 10 at that time. We waited and waited for another bus back and there was no one there but us. A while later, an old man walked by and told us that since it was so late, another bus wouldn't be coming for an hour or so.
He told us to turn and walk down the road and we'll find a bus stop in the middle where a bus will soon come.
We followed his instructions and entered this single-lane road with tall trees on each side. There were only a few street lamps working so the area was dimly lit. The road was sort of built on a slant - our bus stop was in the middle, so we could see all the way up the road and down the road, and it was a single-lane road.
All we could see was the road and trees on either side for at least half a km on each side.
Anyways, so we're waiting and waiting. My phone battery died and my friend had forgotten hers in her dorm room. We were starting to think there won't be any bus coming and started to panic.
Then, as we were waiting, I turned around to see two kids with backpacks walking down the road. I was relieved to see them and so was my friend. When they were close by, I asked them if they knew about any buses coming. There were two kids, maybe around 12-13, one was a boy and the other was a girl, and both had backpacks. Here is our conversation:
Me: Hey! Do you know if there are any buses coming?
Boy: Let me check takes the phone out, and walks towards the bus stop sign, (but it's empty and doesn't say the timing nor the stop number, just a picture of a bus - I knew this from before)
Me: The timings aren't there and there's no number to text either, I've looked at it before.
Boy: Still looking at the phone Oh it's okay, your bus will be here in 10 minutes I think.
Meanwhile, during this conversation, my friend started talking to the girl:
Girl: Where are you guys from?
Friend: We just started University here, what about you?
Girl: Oh, we're in school and we're just going back home from school.
Friend: Oh okay.
After the boy told me that the bus would be here in 10 minutes, I turned my head to tell my friend this, turned my head back to thank the boy and he was gone. Gone. The girl and the boy were nowhere to be seen. I literally probably looked away for a second max.
We both looked down the road, up the road, and by the trees. They had a fence around them but even if they went there, we would've seen them. I literally looked away for a second.
Needless to say, both of us were scared as hell until our bus arrived. It was the last bus and it was around 12:17 am when the bus came. I know because we asked for the time from the bus driver.
I asked my brother about the area later, but I didn't tell him what happened. He said that there's a graveyard there. And then it hit me. What the heck would two 13-year-olds be doing in the middle of nowhere coming back from school at midnight?
I didn't believe in paranormal activities, but I can't seem to find an explanation for this one.
magennnataa
28. An Unexpected Figure
I was driving through the Canadian Rockies late at night and had just passed through a small town. So I’m driving through the pitch black and I need to stop to pee and have a smoke. But because it’s so dark I miss the last rest stop for the next while. No problem, the highway is completely deserted.
So I pull to the side of the road, have my pee while staring out into the dark and then light up a cigarette and stand by my car.
As I’m standing there I see the figure of a man just walking out of the tree line. I’m miles from civilization, patchy cell service, and there isn’t a soul on the road. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me and maybe it was a deer but nope this was a man.
So I calmly walk back to the driver's door and get in, locking the doors behind me. I’m keeping my eye on this guy as I nervously smoke and have my car in drive, ready to peel out, but for some reason, I just stayed put.
The guy walks right up to my passenger door and knocks on the window. I crack the window and I ask what’s up. He replies to me in a very very serious tone “I need you to call the cops”. I cautiously ask why and he tells me he had gone out into the woods to kill himself but he couldn’t go through with it because he had thought of his daughters right before he was about to do it.
I call the cops while the guy quietly cries outside. He had a kitchen knife that he was gonna use on himself so I stayed in the car and advised him to maybe leave the knife on the ground before the cops arrived. The cops came and got him but before they left with him I gave him a solid heart-to-heart and wished him well. I still think about him, I hope he was able to turn things around.
Juicy_Thotato
29. Group Attack
I pull into a Perdue plant, drop my empty trailer into a go park where they allow bobtails to sit, right next to a nice little pond. My pick up was in 12 hours so I do my pti and lay down in the bunk. At about 3 am I hear something tapping on my passenger side door. I get up and look out the window expecting to see someone, maybe a driver asking for a lumper check but no one was there.
I thought maybe I'm hearing things. So I go back to lie down. As soon as my head hits the pillow I hear the tapping again except this time it's on my driver's side. Same thing as before, I jump up and look out my window but nothing's there. Double lock my doors just in case and open my side hatches so I can hear what's going on outside.
After about 15 minutes, I hear a very light splat splat splat going along the driver's side of the truck. I slowly get up planning to look out my window at the exact moment whoever it is knocking on my door. And then I hear a thud coming from the roof of the cab. I stop, grab my tire, thumper off its hook and ready myself for whatever the heck is going on.
Then a freaking goose falls off the top of the truck and lands on my hood. It stands up, waddles back and forth and looks at me. As we make eye contact the tapping at my door starts again. I say screw it and throw open the driver-side door and there's another goose waddling away with all the speed it can manage honking like a 5 year old who just found the horn on his new bike.
The pond I parked next to had a ton of them just messing around. Needless to say, It was hard to sleep that night because every couple minutes the geese would peck at my door or land on the cab and waddle around.
Amnial556
30. Unwanted Guests
I think the best "creepy" thing that ever happened to me was when I was heading from Tucson, AZ up into Saltlake City, UT. Well, this was a few years ago and the main highway had been taken out in a flash flood and was under construction so I had to take a weird detour through the mountains in lower Utah.
Well, it was getting late and I was getting tired so I pulled off onto the shoulder and went to sleep in my bunk. Now this was in the middle of nowhere, the closest town was like 40 miles away, so it is completely pitch black outside once I turn the lights off.
Anyway around 4 am I wake up because I'm hearing something messing with my truck, like playing with the air and power cables between my cab and the trailer, which is literally 6 inches from where my head is but on the outside of the cab.
Then I feel something climb onto the landing that's on the back of my truck and it shakes my whole truck, so I'm guessing something around 2 to 3 hundred pounds was climbing around back there, I'm thinking like a mountain lion or a bear.
At this point, I'm wide awake and I want to get this thing away from me, so I slam my hand into my cab wall trying to scare whatever is out there, slam hard enough to really make it loud.
I then hear someone, a male, scream bloody murder and I hear them fall off the back of my truck. I then hear about 15 other people all around my truck yelling. I climb up front, turn on my lights and illuminate a squad of Army Reserves doing their midnight ruck march and capture drills.
Turns out these guys were supposed to go find an "abandoned" truck and "secure" it for their midnight drills. That truck was 3 miles back down the road. They were not expecting me to be sleeping there and thought I was part of the drill.
I'm ex-military so after explaining I was not part of their test and legit was just there out of coincidence we laughed it off. They had to radio to their C.O. and tell him I was there and not have the other squads bother me.
DWL52
31. Falling Into a Trap
I used to deliver hotshot freight across the great plains/Minnesota area. One night around 2 am I was hauling across North Dakota trying to reach Montana by morning. I was delivering a particularly valuable tractor part that a farm desperately needed for the following day. I began to notice some highway hypnosis sneaking up on me, but it didn't really bother me because I'd been through it hundreds of times before.
Anyone who has driven across North Dakota knows that it is incredibly flat. Like, really flat. There also tend to be very straight and long roads. It's somewhat easy to see things on the road that are far away, even at night.
I noticed something long on the road, spanning my entire lane, approximately half a mile in front of me. I slowed down a little and prepared to move into the opposite lane, thinking it was some retread off a blown tire.
As I got closer I noticed it was two people, laying head to toe across the entire lane. I swerved into the other lane, successfully avoiding them and came to an almost complete stop. But they didn't move. Not an inch.
I was just about to back up and check on them when I remembered a story that an old greybeard colleague of mine told me. He told me that in certain remote areas, people will lie down in the middle of the road and wait for a car or truck to stop and see what's going on.
At that point, the road-layers along with whoever else is hiding in the nearby bushes will beat the crap out of the driver and steal his vehicle, leaving him in the middle of nowhere.
I decided not to back up, and when the two people in the road saw me put my truck back in gear and drive away, they both got up and walked toward the shoulder. I called the police and explained what happened, but we were so far away from civilization that I doubt anything came of it.
Thanks to that old greybeard, I got to keep my truck, my job, and my teeth.
ArronRodgersButthole
32. Spooky Cornfield
I parked off an exit ramp at about 3 am. The moon was full and high, and I spotted an unmistakably human figure in a nearby cut cornfield. A little spooky but I just wrote it off as an old timer putting up a scarecrow for the grandkids.
I started watching a few YouTube videos before turning in and out of the corner of my vision I thought I saw movement. I shut my lights off to get a good look, and saw the figure but nothing else. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like maybe it was in a different spot. Maybe a little closer even.
I was definitely feeling a bit spooked. The highway was devoid of anyone besides a car passing every ten minutes or so. I didn’t want to, but I had to jump out to pee. I considered a bottle, but I told myself I was being childish. I took a look at the figure and it was right where I figured it should be.
I hop out, walk between my truck and trailer and start leaking. Every fiber of my being wanted to look. I told myself again I was being foolish, but I couldn’t help it. I looked out, the field was empty, the figure wasn’t there. My stomach dropped, I pinched off and jumped back in. I took off down the highway, and didn’t give one crap about a violation.
I stopped 40 minutes up the road at a well-lit and very full Loves. I haven’t stopped on a ramp since.
Acanno10
33. The Lookalike
My dad drove a truck between Edinburgh and London and tells this story often. He was driving down the motorway and looked to his right, and saw a woman with a ‘miss trunchbull bun’ (as he describes it) staring at him with a terrified expression from a car next to him. Before he really knows how to react the car pulls off at the next exit and my dad, although shaken, carries on.
About half an hour later a different car with a different driver pulls alongside my dad, with the same woman in the passenger seat, with the same expression on her face. My dad thinks screw this’ and plans to pull into the next services to report as even if it’s nothing/misunderstanding, better to be safe than sorry, right?
Anyway, the car disappears before he can get any details (plates etc) and he thinks there is no point in calling the police with no details so he carries on driving.
Literally about 4 hours later, almost in London, yet another car pulls alongside him with the same woman, the same Miss Trunchbull hair, the same terrified expression, except this time she appears to be screaming at my dad through the window, so my dad pulls over into a layby and calls the police.
Apparently, they have received 3 other calls about the same woman/car in the same area in the last few minutes. It is unfortunately anticlimactic as he never heard anything more about it but he didn’t see her again and although he kept an eye on the news, didn’t see anything about it. Hopefully, it’s just a giant coincidence.
ScrewLucy
34. The Crazy Man on the Lonely Road
Around 2006 I was driving a flatbed, picked up a load of construction material in rural Tennessee. It was between Memphis and Nashville but closer to the intersection of the MS, AL, TN state lines. Tarp was required so I strapped everything down, tarped the load and left the shipper. About 5 miles down the road, in the middle of nowhere woods on a 2 lane road, I notice my tarp flapping in the wind. Found a wide shoulder and pulled over to fix it.
I realize that I just flat did a terrible job tarping this load and decide to redo it on the side of the road. Undo all the bungee straps, drag the tarps off, roll them back up, climb up on the load and start unrolling the tarps again and I see a guy walking down the same side of the road I'm on, coming towards my truck.
I don't think anything about it other than to keep an eye on him cause I'm in the middle of nowhere and continue what I'm doing. About the time I have tarps set in place and am climbing down to start hooking the bungee straps back on, this dude is getting close enough that I'm now paying more attention to him than I am to tarping my load. I grab my winch bar and set it on the trailer where I'm working just in case.
The guy gets to me and the first thing I noticed was his hair. It's like a mullet but it's patchy as heck. Like he tried to cut his own hair and had a seizure in the process and said screw it "good enough to party". The next thing I noticed was his eyes, which I can only describe as "off".
Like they were clear, I didn't think he was drunk or high or anything, but it also gave me the distinct impression that the elevator didn't go all the way up. His clothes were dirty and not well maintained, with dirty white tennis shoes, cause I remember he didn't have laces on one shoe and the tongue was noticeably out of place.
He stops by me, waits until I acknowledge him and just says "I've got a long walk". I'm like yeah man, you do, we're in the middle of nowhere. Making it clear there's no ride to be had here. He nods, starts walking by me, continues on his way, stops at about the driver’s door on my truck and turns around, comes back to me and repeats himself. "I've got a long walk".
At this point, I explain that I can't give him a ride, insurance and all that. Apologize for not being able to help him out, and he seems to accept this, turns around and leaves.
I wait for him to get a little ways away from my truck and start working on finishing the tarp job. I still keep an eye on him and he's moving away from me. As I'm putting on the last of the bungee straps I look over to check where he's at and he's turned around heading back towards me, now about 100 yards in front of my truck and coming back my way.
It looks like he's talking on a cell phone, has his hand up to his face and I can barely make out his mouth moving, his other hand waving like he's having a conversation with someone.
I finish with the straps, grab my winch bar, and am climbing into my truck as he's about 10 yards away now. As soon as I'm in the cab I lock the doors, and set the winch bar on the passenger seat just in case. I look at the guy and realize he's not talking on a phone, he's talking to his hand and now I'm nervous, cause he doesn't look like he's having a nice pleasant chat, it looks more like an angry conversation.
Crank the truck up, put it in gear and just pull out, didn't look for traffic or anything. As I pass him he's just looking at me, still holding his hand to his face with this dead look on his face just staring at me. Gave me the creeps. About the time I hit 5th or 6th gear, I look in the mirror and there's no one there.
PenBandit
35. Tiny Human-like Footprints
I was driving through eastern Washington on some state roads. There were no rest stops or cities but I had done the route enough to know there were these massive dirt areas every ~40 miles where you could park safely away from the road. I decided to call it a night and closed my blinds and laid down to watch something on my phone.
After roughly an hour I hear someone try to open the driver's side door. I haven't heard any vehicles on the road the whole time I'm parked but I get up to peek out the curtains. As I'm looking out into the blackness of the driver's side window I hear them try the passenger side door. I peek down from the top of the curtain but can't see anything so I start the truck and kick on the lights.
I'm fairly freaked out at this point so I'm still not opening the curtains but peeking through gaps. Nothing, nobody is standing near either of my doors or parked within sight line. I take a deep breath and close the sleeper curtains too, because for some reason that's going to make things better right?
After laying back down and convincing myself that something blew against the truck and it only sounded like the doors (it was fairly windy outside and a lot of flat ground). I hear what sounds like someone trying to pry open the vents on the sleeper. The door handles start clicking again and the truck starts shifting like someone is climbing on it.
I hit the little alarm button in the sleeper hoping to spook them off but it does nothing but add to the noise of door handles, fingers tapping on windows and chassis, and the hiss of air coming out of the suspension.
Then suddenly it stops. A few moments where I can only hear myself breathing and my heart pounding before I hear another truck approach and then drive by. I spent the next few hours waiting for whatever it was to come back but it never did.
In the morning I couldn't find any footprints or damage to my truck but on every window were tiny human-looking handprints, like a toddler had licked their hand and stuck it to my window over and over.
ICollectTheDead
36. They Could Have Died
I was driving a bus in the deserts of central Australia. I was over 500 km from the nearest town. So I was out on a 5-day charter to pick up a bunch of aboriginal elder women to go and get their women's business health checks done (pap smears and mammograms).
On the day I took them to get that done we went via a place called Mintabi so they could shop in the clothing and whatever store that's randomly in this little opal mining area of South Australia.
We left from there quite late to make the 3 or so hour journey back to where we were all staying overnight. The next day I'd take them back to their respective desert communities. The passengers all fell asleep as they'd had a very long day (as had I, but that's my job).
Even the nurse who was traveling with us fell asleep. So there's me, all alone in the cab of the Mercedes truck-derived bus, my 30 passengers all sleeping in the darkness of the passenger pod behind the cab and it was around 9 pm.
Up ahead in the distance I see a headlight coming towards me along the lonely desert dirt road, so I dip my lights so the spotlights go off and adjust to see only what low beam will show me, I drive down in to a slight dip of a dry creek bed expecting to see the car with only one headlight anytime shortly.
It's nothing unusual to see a car with only one headlight out there so I'm not even remotely bothered.
As I come out of the dip I put my spot lights and high beams back on and there is no car, no nothing, just the empty dirt road. There is no dust in the air and I can see a good distance in front of me and out to each side.
There was nothing there, just the empty desert, the dirt road and me alone in the cab. I keep the lights all on until we come to a stop about an hour later. I didn't see any cars or anything for the rest of the journey.
Before I let the passengers out I ask if any of them saw the light and they all go dead silent and after a short while they start talking in their own language hurriedly and then they all get off the bus. A few minutes later a couple of the ladies came up to me to ask me to tell them exactly what I saw without leaving anything out and to describe exactly where I saw it.
After I told these ladies everything from start to finish and described in minute detail exactly where it happened (I took note of exactly how far out we were when it happened) the two ladies looked at me with the whites showing in their eyes, they looked spooked, and they said, "Driver, we are so lucky that you did not stop because if you did no one would've seen any of us ever again, we'd all be gone".
I asked why and they just shook their heads and said to not talk about it because it had scared all the ladies. I only ever saw this once. I only saw it for maybe a minute and it just looked like a car headlight a couple of kilometers away up the road, but I'll tell you what, if the ladies that come from this area, and whose people have survived in this desolate, remote part of the continent for 60,000 years are worried to the point of all being scared I certainly don't want to mess with whatever it is.
_phoenix__rising_
37. Featureless Creatures
I used to work as a field technician in the oil industry, so I spent a lot of time driving through remote areas of Canada at odd hours. One very strange and eerie experience sticks with me.
I was in either northeast BC or northwest Alberta (can't remember the exact location), driving late at night, when I noticed a very large black shape on the road in front of me. Thinking it was a moose, I stepped on the brakes, coming to a stop only a few feet from it.
Despite being so close, and having my headlights shining directly on it, I still couldn't tell what I was looking at.
It was vaguely the shape of a four-legged animal, but very big, probably about 6 feet tall. Aside from that, it was completely featureless. I couldn't make out any details whatsoever, no shine from its eyes, nothing.
And then I noticed there were more of them in the ditch on both sides of the road. 5 or 6, or maybe more, all the same as the black shape on the road in front of me. None of them were moving. They didn't look like physical objects or living things.
More like just large patches of absolute darkness. After I got over my shock, dread started to set in, and I drove around the thing on the road and sped off.
I don't really believe this was a paranormal experience. I had been driving for 8+ hours through the middle of the night, and I was exhausted. Most likely, it was a hallucination caused by lack of sleep and spending too long staring straight ahead into the dark.
But it was still a very unsettling experience.
vextrud
38. The Flying Truck
As a crew guy of an off-road racing team in Baja California Mexico I got to test drive some rigs and trucks, so technically truck driver. We were driving down south along the Sea of Cortez with a buddy at night on this 4-hour dirt road to Gonzaga, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere in the desert, and we see the lights of a car behind coming down fast and now effectively tailing us and the car had bar mount headlights on top or what seemed like it, which are super bright.
It’s normal (or was) that locals and gringos get wasted in the nearest (now former due covid) spring breaker town and then go down this road super fast to “test” their rigs since there’s no police there.
So I try waving him off to get the guy to keep the lights low since he was blinding us but he isn't slowing down a bit nor turning his roof lights off and it was a dangerous super dark road.
Finally, near a curve near the shore, I found a spot to bail off the road without crashing and we see lights passing by us super fast and going straight to the curve and we were like “That’s it, he is going to crash down to the sea” but the lights didn’t fall and kept going straight into the beach and the sea and then pitched up abruptly to the night sky and disappeared.
We didn’t say a word for a minute or so and then my buddy goes “Did you see it?” and I say “The freaking flying truck?” Didn’t talk about it anymore as simply it didn't make sense to talk about it or with anyone else when we arrived.
Eratark
39. Recurring Accidents
My father told me this story maybe a thousand times. My family, as well as a couple of uncles and my oldest cousin, went on a trip from Mexico City to Acapulco when I was barely a year old. Back home in the middle of the night (Ah, the good old days when you could travel at night) the car broke down, and a police car quickly came to our help.
There were three policemen in the car, and the chief offered to take my dad to the nearest gas station, where he could find a mechanic and told the other two officers to stay with our car. My dad says they seemed absolutely not pleased with the order until the chief told them "Don't worry, there's a woman and two children". That seemed to calm the two officers.
Driving to the gas station in the police car, my dad asked the chief what was all that about. The chief told him that there had been many accidents in that part of the road (that's why they were able to find our car so quickly).
All of the accidents involved young men traveling without female or child company. Those who had survived said that they crashed because they could see a very beautiful woman next to the road, but once they came close to her, she turned out to be just a rotting corpse staring at them, and they crashed because they were paralyzed by fear.
ThePeasantKingM
40. Only In My Memories
When I was growing up, I had a friend named Adam. He was never able to come out during the day, only right before all of us kids had to go home for the evening. Adam lived a few houses over, in a house with an overgrown yard. I met his parents once. They were very strange, didn't smile, and obviously didn't want me there.
I remember Adam telling me that he was sick, that's why he couldn't play that much. He was a small boy, pale with dark hair. Eventually, Adam stopped showing up altogether.
And I eventually moved on, though I do remember going to his house a couple of times to see if he could come to play, and his dad just gave me this look before closing the door in my face.
Later in life, I asked my sister if she remembered him. She doesn't, and according to my parents - that house was empty the entire time we lived there. I don't know who Adam was, I don't know why I so vividly remember him and his parents. As far as I can tell, he wasn't real - and yet I have perfect memories of him and his parents.
Rosewhisper
41. The Creepy Door
When I was 7 or 8, I would have a recurring nightmare that one of my dolls came to life, played with me, and then would try to pull me into my closet with her. I’d follow her into the closet at first, but then she’d show me this little door at the back of the closet, and my heart would start to race.
I don’t know what it was about that door, but I knew something bad would happen if I went through it. I’d start to struggle and try to pull away, but the doll was too strong and would start pulling me through the door. At this point in the dream, I’d always wake up screaming.
The worst part was I had night terrors, so sometimes I’d wake up standing next to my closet. Every night before bed, I’d make my parents make sure there wasn’t a little door at the back of my closet.
There never was. Anyway, I was talking to my mom the other day and this dream came up. I’m laughing about it and how ridiculously paranoid I was about dolls and that closet, but my mom gets really quiet. She tells me the creepy part of that dream wasn’t the doll.
It was the fact that there used to be a little door at the back of the closet, but when I was one year old, they remodeled the house and put a wall where the door used to be. The door led into a crawl space/part of our attic. Apparently, it was really creepy and full of splinters.
There’s no way I could have remembered that door, but years later, I kept dreaming about it.
plutoaintnodwarf
42. Spiritual Warfare
About 8 years ago now I was taking a drive out to Kansas from the east coast. I was with a friend and we were going out to see her grandparents. Once we were about 2 hours from the grandparent's house my friend starts outlining standard operating procedures of “seeing things” in and around her family’s home.
She seemed a bit panicky when going over everything but I managed to calm her down. I’m skeptical of everything and assured her that the things she had seen when she was a small child were just manufactured in her imagination.
She insisted that the entire family had seen these “things” with the exception of her grandparents.
2 hours later, we arrive in Kansas and I’m ready to fall over because of the length of time the last leg of the trip took. We are welcomed and grandmother takes me to a back bedroom and just as she is about to close the door; she stops, says “Maybe you shouldn’t stay in this room” and escorts me to another room.
Ok, that was a little strange but whatever, I’m tired.
Fast forward to night #2 at the grandparent's home. It’s around 11 pm and my friend is crashed out on the couch watching tv. I’m in an adjacent bedroom from which I can see her laying on the couch. I nod off for the night and wake up to an old grey man that bared a resemblance to the grandfather but was not the grandfather standing with his back to me in the doorway looking at my friend sleeping on the couch.
I decided I was going to get up and confront the old grey man and something slammed me back into the bed. I tried to get up several more times with the same result. Each time I was slammed back into the bed a voice would repeat “put a seal on the door”
Finally, I snapped to it’s 3 am and everything was normal. I must have been sleeping. It was a dream. No old grey man and my friend was fast asleep. So I start pacing around the room trying to decide how I feel about what had just happened. I glance over to my friend, her eyes are open and she says “You have seen it”. I said, “Get in the car, I can’t be here right now.”
We spend the next 4 hours sitting in a Walmart parking lot talking about the history of her experiences in that house and comparing it to my own. Ok, my nerves are not on fire anymore and we are heading back to the grandparents home.
We arrive and they are waiting for us inside. I tell them exactly what happened to me and I get “Yeah, that’s strange. We usually do seal our doors with a prayer at night but with all the excitement we just must have forgotten. All the children have mentioned stories of things but we have never seen them. We are sorry you had to go through that”.
I’m really not sure what I seen or experienced that night but when I tell people they get that look of skepticism. It’s obvious they don’t believe me. My conclusion is that the experience was indistinguishable from reality at the moment.
I don’t know what that means but it changed the way I look at things.
ealoft
43. Ghostly Night
I spent one summer in high school living with my aunt and uncle and keeping their seven year old daughter for them during the day while they worked. I was up late one night watching tv in the living room. The living room was right off of the kitchen, separated only by an L shaped bar.
I saw my cousin, out of the corner of my eye, walk down the hallway from her room into the kitchen. It was way past her bedtime, so I told her she needed to go back to bed.
When I didn’t hear her answer, I got up and walked around the bar and into the kitchen. There was no one there. I checked under the bar to see if she was hiding from me, and there was no one there, and nowhere else she could’ve gone from the kitchen.
I walked down the hallway to her room, and she was fast asleep, snoring, so there was no way it was her. It baffled me, and freaked me out, because if I didn’t see my cousin, who was the little girl that walked into the kitchen?
Several years later, I was talking to my aunt and she nonchalantly brings up the ghost in her house. I laughed it off and she said, “No, I’m serious. We have a ghost. Your uncle and I both have seen her and heard her. We call her Giggles because we hear her giggling. We usually only see her in the hallway before she disappears.”
All of a sudden, I remembered the disappearing girl in the kitchen. I asked her what her ghost looked like. She said she had blonde hair with braids and wore a white dress. My cousin is blonde. On the night in question, I thought I’d seen my cousin in a nightgown walk down the hallway, but apparently it was the ghost that resides in my aunt’s house.
avaughan11
I don’t know what it was about that door, but I knew something bad would happen if I went through it. I’d start to struggle and try to pull away, but the doll was too strong and would start pulling me through the door. At this point in the dream, I’d always wake up screaming.
The worst part was I had night terrors, so sometimes I’d wake up standing next to my closet. Every night before bed, I’d make my parents make sure there wasn’t a little door at the back of my closet.
There never was. Anyway, I was talking to my mom the other day and this dream came up. I’m laughing about it and how ridiculously paranoid I was about dolls and that closet, but my mom gets really quiet. She tells me the creepy part of that dream wasn’t the doll.
It was the fact that there used to be a little door at the back of the closet, but when I was one year old, they remodeled the house and put a wall where the door used to be. The door led into a crawl space/part of our attic. Apparently, it was really creepy and full of splinters.
There’s no way I could have remembered that door, but years later, I kept dreaming about it.
plutoaintnodwarf
44. Graveyard Shift
As a Marine, I used to have the graveyard patrol shift at the Beirut Bombing Memorial. Part of the memorial is dedicated to a veteran's cemetery. Oddly enough I never got freaked out being completely alone in a remote cemetery, in the middle of the night, surrounded by dense woods on all sides. It was actually kind of peaceful, to be honest.
However, one night I was patrolling near the perimeter fence where some of the oldest headstones are, when I heard the sound of a woman humming. I followed the sound and noticed a light glowing through the vines and brush of a large tree.
As I approached, I could literally feel my hair beginning to lift as if there was an electric current in the air.
I pushed aside the brush and what I saw nearly took my breath away. It was an old, weathered headstone with a large cross etched into the marble. Only the cross was glowing a bright, vivid blue, like a neon bulb. The humming was also suddenly much louder and had a weird plurality to it, like it was coming from hundreds of voices at once.
Needless to say, I freaked the heck out. I screamed like a scared little girl and sprinted back to the parking lot. I radioed the guard who was supposed to relieve me and forced him to come early, then spent the rest of my shift in the cab of his truck.
I don't think he believed me, but he stayed in his truck and didn't go out on patrol until the sun was fully up.
A few days later, I worked up the nerve to return to the grave (during the day, of course). As I suspected, in the light of day it was a completely mundane headstone. There was no name, only the aforementioned cross. I ran my hands over the stone and checked to see if maybe there was some sort of hidden light source or solar panel, but no, it was just plain, solid, unremarkable stone.
The humming was gone, too.
I eventually returned to my normal shift, but never again experienced anything out of the ordinary. I never learned whose grave that was, either, but I find myself thinking about it from time to time. It certainly sounds absurd when I say it out loud, and I suppose it could have been a hallucination or a trick of my tired brain, but I don't believe it was.
I think it was real; a ghost or spirit of some sort, but I don't think it was malevolent at all.
Rainbow-Grimm
45. The Shadow
I woke up to something, it sounded like a door shutting. At first, I thought it was a dream because I could hear it in the dream as I was waking up, kinda like when someone calls your name when you’re dreaming. But then I looked at my cat, his hair was completely standing up and he was beaming at my bedroom door.
This was the moment when I got really scared because I know animals can pick up on that stuff and I thought he might know something is wrong. My cat doesn’t do this type of thing unless a dog is in the room.
So I looked over at the door and the only way I can describe it is it looked like it was swaying, slowly, like it was breathing, like someone was standing on the other side of it trying to hear if I was awake. This swaying was accompanied by a shadow.
I don’t mean a supernatural shadow, but it looked like the shadow of a person behind the door.
I was paralyzed in fear. I lay there for 5 minutes naked watching this door away. I considered yelling and trying to scare them away but I was terrified someone might respond.
I legitimately thought this was the moment where I will have to defend myself or be killed.
I don’t own a weapon but after 10 minutes or so I mustered up the courage to check every room in the house. I checked every corner too. But there was no one there.
I don’t know what happened, but my evolutionary traits kicked in and I completely believed someone was outside my door.
niftyifty