Strange things happen to people all the time. Things we can't explain.
Sometimes, they're so scary and creepy that the memories stay with us forever.
One day I was walking to work, and all of a sudden had an 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 have 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.
I knew my uncle had died. My mom had called me and told me the news. It was very sad. She told me in the middle of work and I told one of my coworkers. He expressed his condolences on my loss. A couple of weeks later, my sister mentioned my aunt and uncle doing something. I said, “but… he’s gone.” And my sister said no, he wasn’t.
I called my mom. He was alive. To this day, I’m still not sure how much of it my brain imagined and how much was real. Did I really talk to my coworker? Was I even on the phone with my mom at all that day? It still freaks me out knowing that my mind could fabricate so complete and real a memory like that.
About a year ago, my girlfriend and I went to eat dinner at Chipotle. It’s in a smallish shopping area with a burger joint and Pei-Wei neighboring the Chipotle… one of those kinds of upper-classy type shopping areas. We pulled into the parking lot in front of the establishments at around 5 pm on a Friday evening to find an empty parking lot. There were no tables outside, there were no cars in the parking spots, not a person in sight, and even the lights inside the buildings were off. Completely confused, I took the car in a sort of loop around the building in order to leave. The only thing of interest was a single firetruck parked alongside the building, headlights on but no emergency lights, and no one in the truck.
It struck us as a little odd; maybe a fire in the building? As we pull around the backside of the building and then finish looping around, we drive past the front facade of the building… Except for this time, every parking spot is full, tables are outside with patrons at them, and food is half-eaten. There are people walking around, and the lights inside the buildings are all on. But the firetruck was gone. Mind you, it took less than 30 seconds to make a circle around the building. Easily one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced.
Me and my friend were at a Chinese Restaurant, and we ordered a general tso chicken dinner and a shrimp lo mein dish. When we sat down, we took out both boxes and set them on the table about two feet apart. My friend opens the first box, and we see a shrimp lo mein dish. It has all the things in there – noodles, shrimp, fried rice. He closes the box and opens the other box. Inside that box is another shrimp lo mein dish – shrimp, noodles, and fried rice.
“Oh,” I think, “they must have mixed the order.” I was just about to say this when my friend says out loud, “looks like they made a mistake and gave us two…” as he opens up the first box again. Inside of it is a general tso chicken dinner order. General tso chicken, white rice, and an egg roll. He froze and looked at me… I looked back at him… and we sat in silence. It took us five or so minutes to collect ourselves. I have no idea what… happened.
During a spinal tap procedure, I was put under. While under the anesthetics, I had what I can only explain as an out-of-body experience seeing as how my viewpoint was from above my body looking down on the procedure. I watched the whole thing and saw that the doctor knocked my game boy off the tabletop while walking by, batteries ejecting from the fall.
One fell in sight, and he picked it up, but the other was next to the front left wheel under the bed, out of his view… but not mine. I woke up groggy and told him where my other battery was, and he was shocked when he found it there. To this day, it still weirds me out.
I was sitting in my car with just my dad, and I distinctly heard my sister (who was at home) say, “Are you guys almost home? I’m scared” in a very specific, concerned tone of voice. Two seconds later, my dad’s phone rings. Guess who’s on the line?
My sister. She said, “Are you guys almost home? I’m scared” in the same concerned tone of voice. I was pretty freaked out.
I got in a motorcycle accident about six years ago. I’m going 45 mph through town and a woman, who didn’t see me, turns left in front of me. It could only have been a millisecond, but I remember weighing my options and thinking if I should try and go over the car or under it by laying the bike down. I put the bike down. It went straight under her car, and I went diagonally.
I slid across the pavement wearing no helmet, no jacket – just jeans and a cheap zip-up hoodie from Walmart. So I slide for 80 feet or so (not sure of the exact measurement, but it was a long way) on the pavement, and when I stop, I just stand up, and the only thing wrong is that there is a hole in my hoodie cuff about the size of a dime. Not a scratch anywhere on me. I remember looking at it, then at my mangled bike, and just screaming in my head, “PHYSICS DON’T WORK THIS WAY.”
I vividly remember this girl at my school dying in a car accident after she drove over the side of an exit ramp that was having construction done on it, and the reason she didn’t realize it is because she was texting. I remember my sister and her friends going to the funeral (she was in my sister’s grade). We lived in a small town, and I remember everybody talking about it for weeks. Fast forward almost 10 years, I’ve told my fianceé the story enough times she knows the girl’s name by heart – mainly to try to convince her not to text while driving.
My fianceé is from the other side of the country, and I never go back to my hometown, so she doesn’t know any of the people I went to high school with personally. One day she was looking at my sister’s Facebook page and said, “Hey isn’t this that girl who died?” and I come over to check it out. Turns out she’s alive, married to an old friend of mine, with a kid, and no one remembers the car accident/funeral. I’m still so confused.
The strangest glitch I've found was back when I was in high school. I was talking to a friend on the phone, describing a dream I had about an ice skating rink, and then he starts to describe the rest of the dream to me from the opposite point of view.
It was a while ago, so I don't remember everything, but we both described the scenery, what the people were doing, etc... It freaked me out when it happened.
My dad had this little toy monkey that he used to call his "favorite child" and tease me and my siblings with it. Not in a bad way, but it was really frustrating to us, and we spent hours trying to steal it from him. Well, anyways, one day, we finally got it and threw it into the garbage after drawing on it and mangling it for a bit. My dad laughed and searched for it a bit but basically figured we had thrown it out and gave up after a week or so. Anyways, a few years later (when I was about 17), I'm walking down the street in Toronto (I don't live in TO, was just visiting friends) and see this little orange object on the side of the road.
When I walk over to it, I pick it up and see that it was the EXACT SAME MONKEY. It even had the black sharpie lines on it from when we drew all over it. I honestly cannot even come up with the chances of that happening, especially considering our garbage is sent to a local dump and is nowhere near Toronto. EDIT: I actually took it with me and killed it with fire just so I knew it wouldn't come back again.
A few years ago, I made a pen pal from another state through a website for that sort of thing. We talked a lot, with very extensive and specific letters, for about a year and some months. She told me about her childhood, her high school experiences, and what she was going through at the time. Her family, her house, her city, everything. One day, she tells me that she was going on vacation and couldn’t send letters, so she sent me her Instagram handle in case of an emergency or if I wanted to talk to her. Honestly, I had tried to find her before on social media, but her name and surname were too common. We were very close, and I didn’t like talking to my pen pals on social media, but one day I wanted to tell her about an accomplishment I made. So, I go to the username she sent me, but it didn’t seem very active. She had no bio, no profile pic, and only one photo. I recognized her face because we sent pictures of each other. I open the photo and see it was from 2016. It had so many comments.
Weird, as she had almost no followers. I thought maybe this isn’t her main account anymore. But then I open the comments. All the comments were from family members and friends she had talked to me about. They were all giving their condolences and saying how much they missed her. I didn’t know what to think, so I tried to look up what happened to her. Apparently, she’d been murdered in early 2017…the year we started writing to each other. I was thinking it was a bad joke, so I kept on writing letters as if nothing happened. I asked her specifically about 2017 though, if it had been a good year or not. She told me a lot of things that happened that year, and that she went out with a creepy guy for a while. After that, I got too freaked out, and I stopped writing to her. She stopped writing to me too. But it still haunts me, and I still don’t understand what the heck happened there.
This story happened when I was only about 11 or 12 years old. It was the early 70s. Dad came home one Friday and announced that we were going to King’s Island, a fairly new amusement park. We were supposed to be going the following day. I begged him to let me invite my friend Chris to come along. He said okay, as long as Chris could pay for his own ticket.
Great! Off to the phone, I went. I pick it up, and there’s no dial tone. I say: “Hello?” Suddenly, I hear Chris’ voice say: “Hey, is that you?” I go: “Chris? I was just calling you, what’s up?” What Chris said next was so bizarre, it’s unforgettable. He told me: “I was calling to ask if you’d like to come to King’s Island tomorrow, but you have to pay your own way.” No phone ever rang, yet we both called each other at the exact same time to ask the exact same thing.
This happened in 2009 when I was 16 years old. It was the first weekend of summer, and nobody was home when I woke up at around 11 am. I grabbed a snack and went down to the basement to watch TV. I had plans to hang out with a friend at 3 pm that day. Like I said before, I started watching TV at around 11, knowing I had four hours before I was supposed to head over to my friend’s house. I had only been watching TV for about 30 minutes when my mom came down the stairs asking me where I’d been all day. I said what are you talking about, I’ve been awake for less than an hour?
I look at my watch and see that it’s well past 5 in the afternoon. I run upstairs and check my phone to see that I have several missed calls from my friend and my mom. My mom’s side of the story is what makes me nauseous when I think about this, even to this day. She was with my little brother at his baseball game from 1-3 that day. She and my brother WERE home when I “supposedly” woke up and went down to the basement, but neither of them have any memory of even seeing me that morning. When my mom got home at around 3, she checked the entire house for me, including the basement, where I had been sitting on the couch watching TV. It’s been 10 years and I still have no idea what happened on that day. It is by far the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, and although I talk about it with my family like it’s a funny little thing that happened, it genuinely chills me to my bones thinking about it.
This occurred when I was about 13 or so. My family was moving into a new home, and we were having trouble with a bookshelf that was a little too big, tall, and wide for the doorway. We eventually had to take it apart and bring it in piece by piece. The shelf went into my sister’s room, and she helped put it together. Here is where it gets creepy. She used the shelf for her books and stuffed animal collection. I left her as she was putting things onto the higher shelves, using a kitchen chair to reach that high. As soon as I stepped through the door, there was a huge, loud crash.
I’m thinking the bookshelf fell on her, or she lost her balance and fell, so I check. She is standing with her back against the wall, and she looks terrified. I peek further in…, and there is no shelf. It was completely gone. Her things were heaped on the floor in that spot. The chair somehow teleported back into the kitchen. My sister and I are the only ones that heard the crash. And worst of all? Not one person in our family remembers ever having that bookshelf.
There was this kid in my kindergarten class that I distinctly remember playing with. We were pretty much inseparable. Then, about a month after the Christmas break one year, he just disappeared. That’s not even the creepy part. Or the part that I can’t explain. I mean, he could have just moved or something, right? But then, how does that explain what happened after? When we got back from Christmas break, no one remembered him.
Not the teachers or the other kids in my class. No one. I even asked the school counselor if he was okay, and she humored me by going through the records to see if he’d transferred. She couldn’t find a thing. To this day, no one remembers him. I think about it at least once a month.
I was delivering newspapers on my paper route when a long-time customer pulled up next to me. He asked me to give him his daily newspaper right there because he was going on a long trip. I handed him his newspaper and then skipped his house as I continued my route. It seemed like a pretty harmless encounter—and then things got weird. The next day I was collecting the weekly fees. We used to have to go collect the money back then because there were no internet payments yet. I went to his house to collect the fee. His wife answered and promptly complained that I missed her house on my deliveries the day before. Even that seemed like a normal reaction.
Her husband just hadn’t told her that he had collected the paper. I explained to her that her husband had pulled up next to me the day before and that I had given him the paper. She started crying. The next thing I know, she told me that her husband had passed on a couple of weeks ago, and it was obviously not possible that I spoke with him the day before. That made my face turn white as a sheet. Despite what she told me, I know what I saw that day. Nearly 30 years later and I still think about that situation. I have no way to logically explain what happened, and it still gives me the creeps. avionchef
My mom and I were on the highway driving home, and there was a semi-truck in the lane next to us. Suddenly, the semi swerved into our lane. Luckily, my mom was able to get out of the way before it hit us—but soon after, I began feeling strange. The entire right side of my face felt hot and sticky, I tasted blood and smelled the very pungent scent of gasoline. Then my head and right arm started to ache really badly, and I couldn’t feel my legs.
Just as soon as the pain started to worsen, it went away. It was replaced with a cold, eerie chill. I told my mom about this, and she couldn’t come up with an explanation. I think I was feeling the pain from another timeline where my mom wasn’t able to avoid that semi.
My husband recently took an overnight job to help us out. He’s only been there about two weeks and works evenings/overnights, 9 pm-6 am. Last night was no different, and he left home around 8:15 pm. Our 11-year-old daughter and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11 pm, I heard keys in my backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home. I creep out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve, walks down the hall, says hi to our daughter as he passes the living room, and goes upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss, and left again. We finished our movie and went to bed.
In the morning, when he got home, I made a joking comment about him forgetting his knee sleeve. He was genuinely confused as I recalled the previous night. Our daughter confirmed everything I said, and he still was acting confused. I pulled up our security motion camera on my phone to show him when he popped in quick. That’s when I made a disturbing discovery. There was no footage from the night before, or any other night, of him coming home after he’d already left for work. My daughter and I both heard him, saw him, and I touched him. But he was never home during that time. Nothing else out of the ordinary happened that night. We seriously have no idea what happened.
I had a dream that I was back in high school at the beginning of my first year. Everything was exactly the same, except I had the memories of my life after high school. In the dream, I told all of my class that I was from the future, but no one would believe me. Only one friend who was very, very smart said that time travel is theoretically possible. This is where it gets weird. The next day, when I told my friends about it, their jaws dropped. They said that back in junior year, I was acting weird one day, asking time travel questions. They told me I said I come from the future.
They also said that I was somehow out of it, that I was there—but at the same time, I kinda wasn’t. I saw the shock in their eyes when I told them what I dreamed. They even recounted some of the details in the dream that I didn’t tell them. The weirdest thing is that I barely remember that day. I remember some of the stuff that also happened in the dream, but that day is kinda foggy to me. Maybe my friends are joking with me, but I have known them for 15 years and I know a genuine reaction when I see one.
My father died in 2008. One night before visiting his house for the last time, he appeared in my dream, where he handed to me a black camera in a plastic bag and specifically said, "Take this camera, as I won't be needing it anymore," and I took it from him. First thing in the morning, I visit his house, where most of the stuff is already moved by my uncle, and open one of his wardrobes, find a sealed cardboard box deep inside, rip it open with a knife and take out his retro black camera.
Apparently, my uncle missed that one and took off all his other electronics but the camera. All I can say is that this experience was proper communication, and it significantly eased my pain, knowing that something remains after a loved one passes.
So, I was at my friend’s house the other day, and we got some drinks from the kitchen and then went up to his room to play some video games. He put his glass of water on his bookshelf and then turned around to shut his door. In doing so, he knocked over the full glass of water, and it went all over the floor. My friend was pretty angry, as it got over quite a few of his books as well.
So we went downstairs to get some kitchen towels and came back up like 30 seconds later. When we opened his door, we noticed that the wet patch on the floor was gone, so we felt it, and it was bone dry. His books that got wet were dry too, and we couldn’t find the glass that we’d left on the floor either. It was then that we looked up and saw a full glass of water sitting on his bookshelf.
Two years ago, I went on vacation to Spain. It was a package tour for teens. I befriended a guy and a girl there who were a few rooms away from me in the hotel. Since we were over 18, we were allowed to hang out alone outside of the hotel, and so we practically spent the whole trip just walking around town together. I clearly remember adding the girl, let’s name her X, on Facebook and talking to her on Messenger. That’s how the three of us were planning our days. I even started a group conversation with X and that boy, let’s name him Y. Fast forward to today, it was her birthday, so I wanted to wish her happy birthday on Messenger, and she just wasn’t in my contacts.
I thought maybe she unfriended me, but looking her up on Facebook didn’t bring up anything. I decided to ask Y whether he’d heard from her recently, and he told me he didn’t know any girl with that name. I looked through all the people me and X both added on Facebook during our trip and even asked some of them about her. Nobody seems to recall meeting her. Y claims we were hanging out with another girl, who I do know and spoke to on the trip but never hung out with. I don’t know what to make of it, and I’m kinda freaking out. I’m thinking maybe my mental health is much worse than I thought, but honestly, there’s a huge difference between mild seasonal depression and hallucinating a person for two weeks straight…
This has been playing in my mind for years now. I had a very realistic dream about a friend of mine when we were both 19. In that dream, he passed, and we were sitting against a brick wall talking. He was telling me that sometimes our time is up and to make the most of it. I woke up the next morning and was freaked out.
I called him and told him about it. He laughed and said, “That would suck,” but reassured me that he was fine and not going anywhere. Two days later, I had a call from his parents to say he had suddenly passed in his sleep. The last time I spoke to him was when I called him after my dream.
I had a recurring nightmare of a terrible parasite sucking the life out of me. Sometimes it waited for me in dark corners to go to bed. My cats always slept on my bed during that time. For me, it was a very stressful time. I got an itch at the place of my chest, where I dreamed the parasite had latched onto me. I ended up making myself sick with worry.
I went to my doctor. As it turned out, I had male breast cancer at the age of 28. My doctor ordered a biopsy of the lump that I thought had been this parasite. After I got well again, the dream never came back, and my cats slept in their places again and not on my bed. The dream was creepy enough that it made my cats protect me.
Once when I went with my grandmother to her friend’s house, I was on the porch by myself with the grandmother’s friend’s cat. All of a sudden, the cat looked me right in the eyes and said the word “Meow.” It didn’t sound like a cat meowing at all. It sounded very convincingly like a human carefully enunciating the word “Meow.” Two syllables, in their most thoroughly unconvincing cat voice.
Like someone intentionally doing a very poor impression of a cat, as a joke. But it was perfectly in time with the movement of the cat’s mouth and there was no one else around, so it had to have been the cat saying it. So yeah, I met a cat that could talk, but the only word it knew was “meow.”
My grandma and I both saw something really creepy in our laundry room once. One afternoon, my grandma needed a hamper. So, I followed her to the laundry room. When we opened the door, we got the fright of our lives. There was this ghostly figure in there. It looked to be about my height—I was six or seven at the time—and totally black.
It was slumped near the washing machine. We only saw it for a split second, enough time to register that it was there, and then it was gone. I remember my grandma saying, “Did you see that?” and then laughing it off. She got the hamper and did her thing as if nothing happened. I avoided the kitchen for a while after that.
When I was little, I had a wooden doll crib that rocked. It was maybe about a foot and a half long. I kept it on the other side of my room from where my bed was. One night, I had one of those dreams where you feel like you’re falling, and it wakes you up. When I woke up, I made a disturbing discovery. The crib was sitting on top of me, on my chest and abdomen.
Now, I feel like this is an important detail to add. I sat straight up when I woke up from the dream, and the crib fell off of me onto the floor and made a really loud noise. Some people have proposed that it might have been sleep paralysis, but I’ve never experienced sleep paralysis before or after. And if it had been, I don’t think I would remember the crib falling onto the floor.
My daughter and I were on the couch one day when she was younger, and we heard the sound of popcorn. Like, as if it was popping in a microwave. It wasn’t a constant popping, but more like one or two pops every ten seconds or so. Then, the entire living room filled up with the smell of buttered popcorn. We both smelled it.
Yet no one was making popcorn. The microwave itself did not smell like popcorn, and the smell was only observable in the living room. I went as far as to open the heating vents to see if there was a rogue bag of popcorn in there. If it was just the smell and not the sound or vice versa, I would easily explain it away. But since it was both, this was one of the strangest events that I’ve ever experienced.
I used to work in a nursing home where I cared for dementia patients. Every patient in the hall I worked on would steal spoons from dinner. It got to the point where once a week I’d have to go through everyone’s room to take back the spoons. It was the strangest behavior, so one day, I just asked why they were taking the silverware. Apparently, the patients, all of them, took the spoons to give to “the kids” because “they like shiny things.” I asked the patients about the kids many times but never got a good answer.
I’d hear things like, They just live here,” or “They stand outside in the snow and look in the windows,” or “they’re my friends who visit.” It wouldn’t be so weird if they all didn’t do it but it was everyone—the ones who were still capable of speaking anyways. One time at three in the morning one of my patients started screaming so I ran into her room and found her lying in bed, seemingly fine. I asked what was wrong and she said, “That boy is here again and won’t get out of my closet! I’m scared!” I was like, “Yeah, me too, Dolores.”