When I was a kid, my family used to holiday in the Scottish Highlands. Friends of the family owned a cottage there, in the middle of nowhere, and it always felt creepy simply because it was so isolated. One day I went outside and heard the most unnatural sound I have ever experienced. It sounded like a robot demon cackling insanely while simultaneously crying in agony.
It just sounded wrong. I went inside, white as a sheet, and told my dad. He grabbed a stick, said, “Come on,” and set off to find the source. We homed in on the sound and realized it was coming from the area close to the water tank, which filled from the stream and supplied the cottage.
There was clearly something not from this world stuck inside the tank. We nervously approached and circled it. My dad suddenly let out a shout and strode confidently to the tank. A large leaf had gotten stuck in a small vent pipe and created a reed like a woodwind instrument, and the tank was acting as a giant amplifier and reverberation chamber.
The sound was channeled down the valley the stream was in, straight to the cottage. I can still hear it in my head as I type this. Absolutely demonic. And I still want to know how my dad thought he was going to tackle a slobbering hell beast with a three-foot stick.
I don’t remember exactly how young I was, but I was really young. Both my parents worked full-time, and my very old grandmother lived with us and took care of me during the day. I was an only child at that time. We lived in a flat.
Throughout the day, my grandmother would take long baths, and I’d sit in front of the television until she got out and played with me. This one time, she took much longer than usual. After calling out to her and getting no response, I went to the bathroom door and knocked. When she didn’t come out, I went in.
She was submerged up to her chin. Her body was twisted. Her face was so contorted it looked like she was in agony. Her lips were completely skewed to one side of her face, and her eyes were just blank.
I don’t remember what happened next. But whenever my parents recounted the story, they said I ran out of the flat screaming my head off. Neighbors heard me, called an ambulance, and called my parents. She had a stroke and was bedridden for the rest of her life.
She died a year or so later, I think. It’s weird. I can’t really remember what she looked like anymore, but her face that time stuck with me. My parents told me I didn’t speak for weeks afterward.
When I was ten, a new family moved in nearby and set up a shrine with a face on a tree and candles in the backyard. Irrelevant other than for context of creepiness. We became friends with the girl in the family, who began telling us that her house was haunted. We were intrigued, as any good ten-year-old would be, but given their weirdness, we thought nothing of it.
One day, playing in the yard with her, a disheveled-looking man came running out the front door, followed by the family. He proceeded to run full speed into the woods with the dad yelling at him. It turned out the guy had been living in their attic and had been keeping it locked from the inside. The dad finally pried it open, and a chase ensued.
To this day, I check under, inside, above, behind, and outside of every house I have ever lived in, and I regularly clear corners when I get home. I’ve lived in a small mountain town in Colorado for seventeen years. When my friends and I got our licenses, we’d drive around in the mountains when we got bored. One area we went to frequently is beautiful, but it’s known to be pretty sketchy.
People shoot guns in the wrong areas. There’s a lot of drug use when people party, and bodies have occasionally been found back there. We were driving around one night when we suddenly passed a man walking on the road. It was weird because we hadn’t seen him in the headlights initially.
It was more like he appeared out of nowhere as we were passing him. I thought he was walking a little oddly as I looked back at him, so I asked my friend to stop. Maybe he was hurt or something. He paused for like ten seconds after we stopped, and then he started running at the vehicle.
Not an “oh crap, let me catch up to them real quick” jog with a wave or anything like that. A full-blown sprint, like he had a personal vendetta against us. It freaked us out, and my friend hit the gas again. We did call the police just to make sure we didn’t leave him in danger, but we never heard anything else about it.
This one is more lighthearted. When the game Until Dawn first came out, I had just started living alone in my own place for the first time at twenty-two. I was petrified of the dark for weeks after watching a playthrough. I had to start sleeping with a light on because I was having nightmares and was genuinely terrified of the monsters in that game potentially busting in through my sliding door windows.
I couldn’t even bring myself to move around in my bed to get comfortable. I knew it was ridiculous, but I just couldn’t shake that fear for weeks. I was around ten years old. I used to walk an old lady’s dog, a small pug, around the block.
She was super nice and paid me one pound for it. One day, I decided to go to my local shop, only a five-minute walk from my house. Some guy came in while I was looking at the sweets and started talking to me. It was a long time ago, so I can’t remember the whole conversation, but I remember parts of the creepier bits.
He offered to buy me sweets and a few fizzy drinks. Being the gluttonous ten-year-old I was, I accepted. He spent around twenty pounds on sweets alone. He somehow knew I had a much younger sister and asked if she liked bonbons.
I replied that I didn’t know, but she probably couldn’t eat them yet. Then when we got to the drinks, he asked, “What school do you go to? ” I just pretended I didn’t know, but then he said, “My school. You go to school, right?
” My heart dropped since I’d never seen this man before in my life. I stupidly said I went to a school down the hill from my actual school. He then asked where I lived, and it sort of clicked for me. If my parents knew this man and he lived around the area, he’d probably know where I stayed.
So why did he ask? I replied, “Next to the train station opposite. ” And again, he replied with another answer that scared me. “I’ve seen you walking from my street.
”
As a ten-year-old, I was terrified. Not only because why would he spend that much money on sweets alone, but why was he asking questions to someone he didn’t know, expecting answers he already knew? I nervously laughed, and once he paid, he asked if I wanted him to walk me home since it was late. It was midsummer between seven and nine in the evening, so it was still light enough that I could see.
I declined and told him my dad was waiting for me. I walked down a street that turns to the train station but also turns to my actual street. It was also the same street where friends and other people who knew me lived, so I felt safer. He did, however, walk me to the start of the street, but before the turn, I said my dad was at the end waiting for me in his car.
I ran home and never talked about it to my mom. She did question me about where I had gotten the stuff from. I lied and said I found money. Never saw him again, ever.
So I assume he didn’t even live near me. Might not be super creepy, but creepy enough for me to wonder what the heck he was doing. When I was in elementary school, probably eight or nine, we were all on the playground with about a hundred kids throughout the outdoor areas. Basketball court, jungle gym, random field areas.
Middle of the day at recess, bright and sunny, not a cloud in the sky. I was looking across the playground, and all of a sudden there was one flash where everyone was running inside in unison, and then almost immediately another flash where everybody was freaking gone. Not a single other soul on the playground, and the sky was suddenly very dark and cloudy and stormy. At the second flash, there was an extremely loud crack of thunder that rumbled and echoed for what seemed like minutes.
It was clearly later in the day, and I was so confused. I made my way back to the classroom, and it was probably five minutes before the final dismissal bell rang. The teacher asked me where I’d been, and I got in trouble. I’m guessing I fell asleep or something, but I’ve never experienced anything like that before or since.
In my old hometown, we weren’t allowed to play outside the yard. The highway was at one end and the bayou at the other. Alligators walking down the road was a normal occurrence. There was a girl who would ride her bike up and down the road, and we’d chat.
She was maybe seven or eight. I was five or six. She would come and talk, and then we would part. Sometimes she came with other kids, sometimes not.
One day she invited me to her birthday party. I said I had to ask my mom if I could go. She said she lived a couple of houses down. No big deal.
Mom said, “No, you don’t know her. She doesn’t live on this street,” and so on. I was upset. It felt so unfair.
I never saw her again and thought she was mad at me. Years later, I went back to visit family and brought up this story with my mom and aunt, about how weird it was that I never saw her after that. They got really quiet, and my aunt told me that there was a girl by that name who was found in some guy’s house along with other kids. He did awful things to them, and they didn’t survive.
Here’s where it’s creepy. She would have been dead by the time I was talking to her. I’ve never felt so cold, and we all agreed to never talk about it again. My dad and I were driving home from something.
I was probably eight. It was a divided highway with two lanes each way, and there were a lot of tractor trailers. My dad went to pass one, but we ended up getting boxed in. And it wasn’t just a slow truck slowly passing another truck.
It went on long enough that it was clearly on purpose. One truck purposely going slow in front of us, one blocking us on the side, and our open side was against solid rock as they tried to push us off the road. I remember my dad being freaked out and trying to get the license plates of the trucks to give to the police, but he couldn’t call because we were in a cell phone dead zone. I looked up from the book I was reading and made eye contact with one of the drivers.
He had a big white beard and looked straight at me with a sinister smile that, had I not already stopped believing in Santa Claus, would have made me scared of Christmas. Eventually, we got to a town and were able to get into a parking lot where my dad called the police. We waited ten minutes or so to get some distance from the trucks, then got back on the road and thankfully didn’t run into them again. The park down the street where my mom took us to play and walk the dogs was large, with some very isolated areas that turned into the woods once you took certain paths.
We lived in a bad neighborhood, but I didn’t really understand that at the time. Lots of creepy stuff went down there, but we never stopped going, and we went almost daily. A certain isolated section was a hangout for paint sniffers. They’d lie in tall grass and get high, so you couldn’t see them unless you were basically on top of them.
They were sketchy, disheveled, really high, and usually had metallic paint on their hands and faces. Hearing spray paint cans rattle still gives me chills. There was what looked like a kid’s stick fort, but it was clearly where a homeless person was living. Obviously, homeless people aren’t inherently creepy, but my mom let us play in it among their things.
That was irresponsible, potentially dangerous, and rude. We never saw the person living there somehow, but I wonder if they saw us. We came across several kinds of traps on the paths to the fort, though. Metal wires strung across the path fastened to branches at neck height.
Sharp sticks stuck up in the ground. Stuff like that. This was in the Midwest, and there was a lake right there too. So when it iced over during the winter, we walked on it, but my mom also let us walk on it when it started to thaw.
I remember walking on it, seeing the water bubble and move underneath, and feeling how soft the thawing ice was. I was nervous, but I didn’t fully understand how incredibly dangerous it was. One year, there was a serial killer operating in the area, and that secluded woodsy place was where he was leaving the bodies of his victims. We still went there all the time.
Looking back, I low-key wonder if my mom was just completely numb to how dangerous everything was. She was in a terribly abusive relationship, and when I think about her life back then, she must have been really unhappy. Aside from what I’m describing here, she was a great mom who was incredibly loving and responsible. But this all makes me absolutely cringe and get goosebumps when I think back on it.
I grew up in apartments with a huge storm water reservoir behind them. We would often hop the wall and play in there since it was always empty. Along the wall we usually hopped was lined with thick brush, so there were few spots to easily hop back over to the apartments. One day after playing, it started getting dark, and as we were walking toward our spot to hop over, this man crept out about twenty feet in front of us on all fours, wearing some tattered shorts.
We froze. He growled and ran at us on all fours at incredible speed. I was around nine and the second fastest kid in school, and he was almost keeping up. We scattered and found some alternate routes.
I remember running and yelling, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. ” out of sheer terror. We never told our parents because they probably wouldn’t have believed us, and they would have whooped our butts for playing out there since my brother had accidentally set fire to it once.
It’s kind of funny looking back on it, but it was terrifying at the time. When I was around eleven to thirteen, my friends and I would constantly roam around our neighborhood late at night and just mess around. Right next to the entrance of our neighborhood, there was a cluster of trees that we called the forest. It wasn’t really a forest since it probably only stretched a hundred feet or so in each direction, but we called it that nonetheless.
We were riding our skateboards by the forest, and my friend stopped to pee in the bushes right outside the trees. I thought it would be funny to mess with him by throwing his skateboard into the woods since it was pitch black inside and super creepy at night. He naturally got annoyed and made me go get it, but I told him it wasn’t my board, so it wasn’t my problem. After bickering for a few minutes, we decided that the three of us would go in together to get it so we could protect each other from forest demons.
Now, even though this was a small cluster of trees, this place was creepy as heck at nighttime. Just something about it threw you off. Honestly, even in the daylight, it was creepy. We slowly crept in and shined our flashlights around looking for the skateboard.
My friend saw it about fifteen feet into the woods and made me go get it since I was the one who threw it in. I rushed over to pick it up, and as I was bending over to grab it, I heard my two friends start screaming and yelling. I looked up to see a homeless man peeing on a tree about ten feet in front of me. He had a really shocked look on his face.
I screamed too, grabbed the board, and bolted. My friends had turned and fled with the flashlight before I could turn. So I stumbled through the dark and tripped over a bunch of roots and could barely see, but I made it out in one piece. We took off and fled back to my friend’s house, all the while yelling about the serial killer in the woods.
Looking back, that poor homeless guy was probably equally as spooked as we were and just wanted to pee in peace. And us dumb kids came along and ruined his tranquility. Two stories from the same place we used to holiday every year. A tiny island half a mile wide and a mile across.
No cars allowed. It used to be inhabited by monks, so there were lots of tales of hauntings. The first was when we used to stay at the campsite. I had been to the toilets and was walking back to our tent.
I passed through a small group of people sitting in chairs in the middle of the field. Nothing unusual. People would sit out and stargaze and drink without bothering people inside their tents. As I passed through, someone said something to get my attention.
I can’t remember what was said, but I was just chatting with them when suddenly this one man pointed his finger at me. He had a cigarette in his hand, and all of a sudden all I could focus on was the lit end of that cigarette. He kept talking to me, but I don’t know what he said. All I know is I couldn’t take my eyes away from that glowing orange dot.
I felt very afraid, but I couldn’t move. It was like the whole world vanished, and it was just me, him, and that damn cigarette that I could not stop looking at. I don’t know what happened, but I’m damn sure that dude hypnotized me in an instant. I remember hearing a laugh from someone in the group, and it was like the spell was broken.
I ran back to my tent with my heart pounding while they all laughed at me. Overall, it’s the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. I don’t really believe in psychics and hypnotism, but that guy sure did something to my brain. The other incident was when we stayed in a cottage overlooking a courtyard which had a church in the corner.
It was the last thing I’d see outside when I closed the curtains at night, and it used to freak me out. It got to the point where I’d crawl under the window to close the curtains without having to look outside at that creepy old church. A few years later, some archaeologists visited the island and did some digging. What did they find under the church steps?
The skeleton of a monk buried upside down. It didn’t happen to me, but to my dad. He was walking our dogs kind of late at night, and a homeless woman who seemed high was standing at the end of a dead-end street talking to herself in Spanish. For context, we’re Puerto Rican.
She noticed my dad walking our dogs and began to say in Spanish, “Those dogs are so pretty. Let me touch them. Those dogs are so pretty. Let me touch them.
” Over and over again. He said she followed him for a few minutes, and her voice kept getting deeper the more she said it. Like she got possessed. Luckily, she was on the opposite side of the street, and she stopped following him eventually.
We don’t live in the best area, so sometimes you’re going to see some sketchy stuff that makes you feel really uncomfortable, but it’s something to keep in mind, and it makes you more aware of things. For a little context, in elementary school, I had a friend whose mom worked as a paraprofessional at our school. My own parents worked late, so instead of taking the bus home and being alone in the house for three or so hours, I usually stayed after school with my friend until his mom finished grading papers. Then we would go to his house and hang out until my mom could pick me up.
We always played army in his backyard, which backed up to a forest about a mile across and led into another neighborhood. For some reason, when we were playing army, my friend always told me that a railroad used to run diagonally through that stretch of forest. This was over fifteen years ago, so I forget exactly how he said he knew that, but it always seemed kind of odd to me. I’d lived in front of a railroad track my whole life, and there is always a ton of scrap metal and wood scattered around them.
Yet there was nothing in these woods. No tracks, no railroad spikes, no planks of wood. Nothing that would make you think a train ever ran through there. Fast forward a couple of months.
During our frequent play sessions, we started hearing whistling deep in the woods, almost like someone was whistling right into our ears, even though we were far enough that we couldn’t see his house or the neighborhood on the other side. I distinctly remember feeling like I was being watched, but for some reason, I didn’t find it absolutely terrifying. It was more of a playful fear. I’d grown up in a very Christian household, always told that ghosts and things like that weren’t real.
So I felt sure nothing bad would actually happen. I figured there had to be a logical explanation for the whistling and the feeling of being watched. And I enjoyed the excitement it gave me and my friend while exploring the creepy woods. That all changed when, along with the unexplained whistling, we started finding charred objects buried under muddy maple and oak leaves and other debris.
Teddy bears, items of clothing, toys. At first, I figured teenagers were probably back there doing what teenagers do, setting things on fire out of boredom. But it added another layer to the excitement. My friend and I decided that the next Friday night we would have a sleepover and investigate the woods at night for ghosts.
The day came, and I packed flashlights and batteries in my backpack. I made sure the night before to change every flashlight’s batteries to brand new ones fresh out of the package. We had a huge pack my mother had bought from Costco or something, and I packed extras too because I was paranoid. I went to school, stayed after with my friend and his mom, then went to their house and waited for dark.
When the sun had just gone down and the sky was that grayish blue right before full night, we set out into the woods with about five flashlights, all of them mine. We went in with the flashlights blazing, and as soon as we were far enough from the house to be out of range of the back porch light, we started hearing the whistling again. Soft, but loud enough to be clear. Once more, it sounded like someone was whistling right into my ear.
But being kids who didn’t want to be the one to chicken out, we kept going deeper until the porch light was only visible in the distance and it was pitch black beyond the reach of our flashlights. That’s when we started hearing rustling around us. It wasn’t violent enough to clearly signal danger. We were in the woods after all.
It could have been a squirrel, a deer, or a rabbit. What really started to freak us out was when both of our freshly loaded flashlights began to flicker. At that point, we were scared, but it didn’t feel completely supernatural. The flashlights were old and cheap, and I had brought a few more in my pockets, so I gave my friend a new one, grabbed one for myself, and we kept going.
It didn’t take more than another three minutes for those flashlights to start flickering too. Then came much more aggressive rustling that seemed to surround us, and the whistling came back. That awful whistling again. There was no need to say anything other than run.
We both said it at the same time, like we were reading each other’s minds, and sprinted back toward the porch light. We made it back in about five minutes and, for some reason, convinced ourselves we were just scared kids letting our minds play tricks on us. We decided we should go back. My friend went inside to grab the only flashlight his family owned, a big old sheriff-style flashlight.
While I waited on the porch, standing in the glow of the porch light that lit up the backyard to the tree line, I thought I was safe. But while my friend was inside looking for the flashlight, and I know plenty of people will call nonsense here, just like my friend did, I saw a white translucent figure float across the tree line and disappear into the darkness. I ran inside and called my mom to pick me up, telling my friend what I had seen and why I was leaving, though he didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have believed me either, but I remember it clearly.
How could I forget? Fast forward to high school. I was sitting in class on my school-issued computer, messing around on Google Earth because every game website was blocked. I happened to be looking at my old friend’s neighborhood when I noticed an information marker in the middle of the woods where all of this took place.
It marked an old railroad, one of the first in my state, built sometime in the 1800s. How he knew about it, I still don’t know. Google Earth wasn’t really a thing back then. Or at least I didn’t know about it.
I can’t help but think of a steam locomotive’s whistle when I remember what we heard out there.