23 Eerie, Paranormal Stories That Honestly Scared The Dickens Out Of Me

Reddit user Exotic_Thing_2850 recently asked, “What’s the creepiest, most unexplainable thing you’ve ever seen with your own eyes that still haunts you to this day?” Read the responses, if you dare! And good luck sleeping tonight…or ever again!

1.“I live in a rural area of my state. Think ‘driving 30 minutes to get to a store’ type of rural. This actually happened recently. I was outside with my dogs at around 3:00 a.m. (a story all on its own). Our house backs up to the woods, but a clearing is a few yards in. So the dogs and I are near the edge of the woods when I hear war drums. I called my dog to come inside with me and turned to walk away, but he was firmly planted, looking in the direction of the noise, and would not move. After about a minute, the sound of the drums stopped, and there was a roaring noise. It was like the sound of thousands of people rushing into battle. It wasn’t windy that night, but we were hit with a heavy gust of wind, and all the noise stopped. It thoroughly freaked out my dog…and me. I haven’t heard it since.”

—vixiecat

2.“When my sister and I were very young, we had a sandbox in our backyard. One day, we were playing in it, and a hand came up from the sand, grabbed my sister, and pulled her down. My sister was screaming and crying. I grabbed her and pulled her back up. We both ran to get our mom. She didn’t believe us. To this day, we both still talk about that and can’t explain what happened. So creepy!”

—Appropriate_Music_24

3.“On multiple occasions, in 2004, when I was around 15, I’d suddenly wake up around 3:00 a.m. to find every single light on in the house. My mom worked nights, dad didn’t live with us, and my brother and sister were still out cold when I checked. On one of those nights, all the lights were turned on, the bathtub faucet was blasting, the tub was nearly overflowing, and the bathroom sink and kitchen faucets were also running full blast. The water and lights at night terrified me so much that I ran and shook my older sister awake, yelling, ‘Did you do this?!’ She shrugged me off and had no idea what I was talking about. Same with my younger brother. After a couple of nights of it, I started yelling for whoever was there to please stop. I said I acknowledged their presence and now needed them to leave. It never happened again.”

—Curiousiwonder

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4.“My sister and I moved in together in our mid-20s. She had the ensuite upstairs, while I had a room down the hall from the open-plan kitchen/lounge/dining room. One night, shortly after heading to bed, we both heard a noise in the kitchen and immediately texted each other, ‘Was that you?’ Nope. Then we both heard giggling. Fucking GIGGLING. We met in the kitchen, turned all the lights on, and there was…nothing. We spent about three hours sitting on the patio, chain-smoking cigarettes (we had long stopped smoking at that point) to calm ourselves. We were too scared to go back inside.”

“A couple of nights later, we were watching TV on the couch. We had a fan on in the center of the kitchen counter, not remotely close to the edge, and it suddenly flew off, the plug pulled out of the socket, and it landed on the floor. Neither of us was even close to it. There was no breeze, nothing. It was a heavy metal fan.”

—Born-Guard3733

5.“I have a brother who is eight years older than I am. My mom used to talk about a creepy, grinning version of my brother that she and a babysitter saw when he was little. It seemed to age with him, and my mom saw him multiple times. The babysitter saw him once and freaked the fuck out. I saw him when I was in high school. My brother worked multiple jobs and was gone a lot. To help him make some extra cash, I would clean his room and do his laundry each week. I usually stayed up late Saturday nights to watch Mad TV and SNL while folding laundry. I started feeling like I was being watched, but my brother was at work and everyone else was asleep. When I turned to look, my brother was peeking around the hallway wall at me with a super creepy grin on his face. All I could see were his hands holding the wall and his head sticking out around the corner, but that grin was freaky.”

“I instantly thought my brother was messing with me, so I said something along the lines of, ‘Ugh. Fuck off,’ and looked back at the TV. Then I remembered that he wasn’t even home, and the hairs on my arms stood up. I looked back, and he was gone. But the next morning, I told my mom what I had seen, and she just nodded in understanding.”

—Katemonster89

6.“More cool than creepy, but when I was younger, we would always play hide and seek in the dark, but in the woods. One time, I was hiding in a tree, and I saw two kids walking on the path holding hands — a little girl and a boy about the same age. They were both dressed in early 1920s-style clothes and just walking super calmly as if they had nowhere to go. When I told my mom and described them, she mentioned seeing the same little boy multiple times as a child in her room. He would come from her antique armoire and just sit at the end of her bed. Not sure about the little girl, but it was so fascinating and trippy, even as a child. Just writing this gave me chills, but not in a bad way. They seemed to be very relaxed and not worried about me at all. Never saw them again.”

—cottoncandyskylines4

7.“I was driving home from work and got struck by another car. I have no memory of the crash itself; I just recall waking up on the side of the road. As I was lying there, I noticed movement in a stand of trees a ways off from the road. I couldn’t make out anything initially, except movement, until it stepped into the beams of my vehicle’s headlights. Picture a werewolf with black fur, no visible ears, and a wolf’s skull for a head, and that’s about what I saw. The thing walked over to the other car and seemed to snoop around like it was looking for something, but it didn’t find it, so it made its way over to my vehicle. And when it saw me, I could see its eyes light up. But all it ended up doing was standing over me and looking down at me as I stared up at it, too scared to so much as blink.”

“But after what felt like hours, the thing finally blinked, and next thing I know, I’m being loaded into the back of an ambulance.”

—Strange_Stage1311

8.“I once saw a ‘man’ in my closet. I was around 9 or 10, and always had a vivid imagination. I was also terrified of the dark and had problems with nightmares and insomnia my whole life (I still do at 24, tbh). One night, I woke up and there was a man in my closet. He was tall, wearing a black suit and a blank white face, and had symbols on his cheeks (think Jigsaw’s markings, but not swirls; they were symbols). I ran into my parents’ room, sobbing. I didn’t sleep in my own bed for weeks. I still don’t 100% think it was a dream, but I’m not sure what else it could have been.”

—minimalisticbrothel

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9.“My mom passed several months prior. I woke up around 3:00 a.m. with the lights on in the living room, and the TV was on at full volume. I walked out of my room into the living room, and my mom was sitting in my rocker/swivel chair, knitting with her back to me, the TV at full blast, and all the lights on. I turned to look at the clock, and it was 3:44 a.m. I looked back; it was dark, the TV was off, and nothing was in the chair but an afghan my mom knitted for me. I lost it.”

—Got_Bent

10.“When my son was 5 (he is now 20), he, my now ex-wife, my infant daughter, and I were traveling back from my parents’ house after dark. They live about two hours away. My aunt ‘R’ had recently passed away, maybe two months earlier. My son randomly said, ‘I see Aunt R!’ We asked him where, and he said she was up on the hill watching us. There was a hill at this particular location, but there weren’t any lights on it for him to see a person on it. Then, a couple of months ago, I was visiting my mom, and she mentioned that around this time, she was watching my son at their house, and he was playing in the backyard. She heard him talking to someone, carrying on a conversation, and when she asked whom he was taking to, he said it was Aunt R.”

—Kahless-1

11.“When I was in high school, my mom had a nightmare and we shared the experience. The way our house was set up, my bedroom was the first in the hallway, then my brother’s, the bathroom, the laundry room, and my mom was at the end of the hallway. While we were all in bed (I sleep with my door open because of the pets), I heard her gasp, but didn’t really think anything of it. A few moments later, a shadow as tall as my doorframe walked past my door. I got up and immediately started flicking on lights and asking if she had walked up the hallway. Of course, my mom saw since she was awake, and we walked through the house. I went to get into bed with her after we found nothing, and she was telling me about her nightmare, which was that a tall man in a wife-beater was at the end of her bed with an axe, swinging it towards her (which is why she gasped awake in the first place).”

“While lying there, we heard and felt knocking on the bed’s footboard. We just sat there in silence, holding each other’s hands, until it stopped, and asked one another if we both heard it. My brother stayed asleep throughout the entire thing, and nothing else ever happened, but boy, that was a scary ass night. I definitely don’t look at my doorway for too long at nighttime if I can help it, and I have fairy lights in my room, so it’s never completely dark.”

—chickpeadawg

12.“My sister and I were walking, and I said, ‘Hey, let’s take a detour through the woods for a change.’ We get about one-third of the way through, and I hear someone shouting my name deep into the woods to my right. I freak out for a second and look at my sister, who is to my left. She is looking behind her, incredibly terrified. I look behind us but see nothing. I decide to distract my sister by talking about my day. We leave the woods, and I lie on the grass. She looks at me and tells me in a scared voice, ‘I heard someone shout my name behind me and it sounded like our older brother, but as if he was young.’ We both heard a voice of our older brother saying our names, but separately, in different places. For me, to my right, for my sister, it was behind her. We speculated for fun, said we went through some portal or something, and lightly laughed. But we are scarred for life. Since then, I know I will never ever take that route again.”

—NatzoXavier

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13.“I had a very overactive imagination as a child, and it would often lead to either hallucinations or daydreams that blurred the line between real and not. One day, I blinked, and the white flowered bathroom wallpaper was replaced with a yellow and brown striped wallpaper. The vinyl floor was replaced with a lush brown carpet, and the vanity was replaced with a half-decomposed corpse that was somehow still alive enough to stare at me until I blinked again, and it disappeared.”

—loverslittledagger

14.“I saw a lady in a white dress jump off a bridge into the river below. It was dark and there were no lights about. I got out of the car and rushed over, but there was no sign of her or anything that looked white, and there were no ripples in the water. Freaked me the fuck out.”

—Vanriel

15.“My sister and I saw Santa Claus in the living room in our house. What should’ve been a magical experience was actually terrifying. I was 3 and my sister was 5. We awoke to loud, hard shuffling and thumping noises on our roof. We wondered what it was, then we noticed someone was in our living room. Our room was down a skinny hall, and from our room, we looked into the living room and saw him. We saw a robust man dressed in red with his back turned to us in front of our Christmas tree. He wasn’t putting the presents down; he was sprinkling gold, shimmering dust onto them. Santa Claus, dressed in his red and white velvet suit, hat, white beard, everything. It was very obvious who it was. It was weird, though; he looked like an old school movie projection with fuzzy edges and static. Like a ghost.”

“We immediately looked in our parents’ room. Our parents were asleep, and we could see them sleeping in bed from our room down the hall because they had the door open. We even heard our dad snoring, so it wasn’t him. Santa Claus stood up straight, turned around, looked right at us, and with a twinkle in his eye, went ‘shhhh’ 🤫. He disintegrated into that fine, shimmering gold dust as he did that gesture. That was when we screamed bloody murder, ran into our parents’ room, and woke them up.

My dad saw how terrified we were and ran into the living room. The door was open. Eerily enough, wet snow was on the living room floor and fine gold glitter everywhere. There were footprints in the snow. My dad, suspecting my uncle was playing a trick on us, angrily called him on the phone and demanded to know why he would do such a thing to scare us. My dad’s phone call woke my uncle up; he was still asleep at his house. He had no idea what my dad was talking about.

My parents called the cops and everything. I still remember the red and blue lights flooding our living room when they filed a police report. The cops didn’t take my sister and me seriously until my dad showed them the snow on the ground, the footprints, and the weird gold glitter all over the room.

I’m 32 now, and my sister is 34, and we still remember the morning we saw Santa Claus. It was downright chilling, and I can’t believe that happened to us. Nothing this overtly paranormal has ever happened to me since then.”

—2short4-a-hihorse

16.“I used to have weird and creepy experiences at home when I was a kid. It was across the street from an open field with a church on the far right of the lot. It was a big church with a loud bell that you would hear every day at noon. It had an energy that I can’t explain as an adult. When I was little, my bed was along the far wall in the room. Depending on which way I was facing, I would be looking at the wall or down the hallway all the way to the other side of the house. I remember constantly forcing myself to face the wall because I often saw a figure at the other side of the house in the middle of the night. It was tall, masculine, had red eyes, and wore a top hat. I swear to god. No features could be made out other than the bright red eyes and the shape of the top hat.”

“It would never enter my room or make a sound. It would just stand at the other side of the house and slowly make its way down the hallway until it stopped at my door. I could feel it staring at me even when I wasn’t facing the door. I remember many nights just lying in bed facing the white wall in my room, waiting until I was too tired to stay awake.

There were other times when I remember hearing family members calling out from throughout the house or basement when they weren’t there. They were always saying ‘help!’ or ‘come here!’ I was told to never listen unless they responded, which they never did, or at least I don’t remember. My sisters and mom said they heard the same thing as adults.

My parents divorced when I wasn’t much older, so I never got to investigate it. The whole family talks about it now, as we’re all older and have all had strange experiences. But those weird memories never left, and thinking back as a 28-year-old, they still give me the chills.”

—SlippyMcDibbons

17.“When I was around 4 years old, I remember looking out of my bedroom window and seeing cars driving through our side yard. Instead of looking like our yard, it looked like an actual road, and the cars looked old-fashioned, like they were from the 1940s (this was in the 1970s). Our house was in a plan of homes with pretty large lots, and the through street ran in a completely different area. Naturally, I was frightened by what I saw and ran to tell my mother and older sister. They dismissed it and said I was either dreaming or making things up. I guess I can’t really blame them for that. My sister occasionally would tease me about it over the years, and for some reason, every time I was in that part of the yard, I would get a creepy feeling that I shouldn’t be there.”

“I must have been about 12 or 13, and my grandmother was visiting. She told my sister and me that when she was a young girl, our neighborhood was part of a farm, and the main road used to run right through our side yard. The road was moved when the farm was broken up into housing lots. My sister and I looked at each other. All I could say was, ‘Yes, I know…’ Years later, I found aerials and maps online that proved the road was there until the 1940s.”

—Dull-State-2457

18.“One night, when I was a kid, I woke up in the middle of the night. I would leave my bedroom door open as a kid, and my parents’ room was to the right of mine, down the hallway. Suddenly, a figure appeared in the dark doorway, and it looked like my mom. I was just looking at her from my bed, confused why she was just standing there. Then out of nowhere, she screamed as loud as she could and stepped back out of my doorway. I remember just lying in bed, freaked out, for a long while before I finally fell back asleep. I’ve mentioned it to her several times since then, but she knows nothing about it. A few creepy things happened in that house, but that is the one that sticks out the most in my head.”

—Flat-Success9471

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19.“I didn’t see it; I felt it. I was at an ex-friend’s house, and she started telling me that she had a demon in the house. I immediately got annoyed because I figured this was just another lie coming out of her mouth. And as I was about to tell her that, something grabbed my ankle. I was immediately pulled from the couch to the floor, and then my friend and I just stared at each other. It made no sense at all. I thought the friend was playing a trick on me, but she was a good 10 feet away from me. And the only other person in the house was in the bathroom. It ended with all three of us leaving the house for a while.”

—nopeasantsallowed

20.“I live in a decently sized city in western Indiana surrounded by farm land. One evening, as the sun had begun to set, my brother and I were driving back home on the southern side of town, where it turns from your average outlet shopping areas into cornfields. It had started to get dark enough that the car’s headlights turned on, but you could still see the scenery fairly well. We approached the crossroad that we lived on and started to turn right. As we turned, the headlights illuminated this tall humanoid creature resembling a deer standing on its hind legs, full-on sprinting away into the cornfield. The stalks were only about shin height at the time, so I could see it for maybe three seconds. Judging by the distance it travelled across the field in that time, it had to have been moving faster than any regular person could run.”

“Immediately, I was disturbed by what I had seen, but I thought it was just some sort of trick of the light. I didn’t say anything. My brother, however, confirmed my fears by asking if I had just witnessed what he had. Every time I see the field, I’m reminded of whatever it was. The worst part is knowing it was less than a few hundred feet from my house.”

—Nurkk

21.“When my son was 2 years old, we lived in a house with interior doors (living room, dining room, kitchen, etc.). The doors also had handles rather than knobs. My son was napping, and I was sitting at my desk in the living room with the door closed. The desk was directly next to the door. While sitting there, I watched the door handle completely depress, as if someone was about to open it. Then the handle went back up, slowly, and the door never opened. I figured my son was being cheeky, and got up to open the door myself. No one was on the other side. I checked on my son immediately, and he was sound asleep in bed. His room was on the opposite end of the house and on a different floor.”

—timewasty

22.“I was 20 years old and lived at home with my parents. I woke up one night to see what I thought was my dad sitting on a chair at the foot of the bed. He was facing me, but I couldn’t make out any features as it was dark. I said, ‘What are you doing?’ and got no response. I got up and walked past this figure, who was still sitting and looking at the bed. I was about six feet away from it when I turned on the light, and then he faded away. Yep, I haven’t slept in darkness for the last 20 years, and if a chair is in the room, I have to turn it away from the bed.”

—Kindly_Tutor_5320

23.And: “My husband left to run errands, so I started cleaning the house while he was gone. I was washing dishes at the sink and saw him walk down the hall. I asked if he forgot something, but he didn’t answer. I watched him walk into our son’s room and followed him to see what was happening. When I walked into the room, no one was there. That was over 10 years ago, and I still can’t make sense of it.”

—SamhainWitch87

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