I was around six or seven, in Turin, Italy. My mother, my sister, and I were at the train station about to visit friends in Rome. My mom wanted to call her friend to say our train would be a few hours late, which is still common there today. She took us to a payphone and told my sister to hold her hand while she kept an eye on our suitcases.
I was supposed to hold my sister’s hand too. As my mother was on the phone, out of nowhere, a tall man grabbed my hand and started walking, or really pulling me away from my sister, asking me questions like whether I had lots of friends at school. I was too shocked, too young, too naive to understand what was happening. Panic started to set in, but for some inexplicable reason, I kept focusing on answering him.
A few feet from the main entrance of the station, my other hand was grabbed by my mother. I have never heard her scream so loud in my whole life. The man ran away as fast as he could, and I just stood there staring at him disappearing into the distance while my mother cried and begged for forgiveness, hugging me tighter than she ever had. Then I looked back and saw my sister pointing her small index finger at me, petrified, tears in her eyes, repeatedly mouthing my name because she couldn’t speak.
I don’t know if she saved my life or where I would have ended up if I had left with that man, but I owe her everything. As for my mom, after that day, whenever she hugged me, she always waited for me to let go first. She never broke the contact before I did. I love her so much, and though I can no longer see her now, I hope she knows I always did and always will.
I bought my house from an 85-year-old man who had been the only owner since it was built. He lived alone and didn’t sleep in the master bedroom on the ground floor, choosing instead to sleep upstairs, which isn’t an easy daily climb for someone his age. I had my suspicions that his wife had passed in the house, possibly in that room. The day we bought the house, I had Comcast come to install cable and internet.
The house was completely empty. My wife was starting the move at the old house, and the dogs were at my in-laws. Just me and the cable guy. He was doing his thing while I sat on my phone killing time.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow race up the stairs. I immediately wrote it off as the dogs running up, since I was only half paying attention. Then I realized the dogs weren’t there. I looked at the stairs and then at the cable guy.
He was completely frozen, staring at the same spot. We made eye contact, and I said, Did you? He cut me off. You’re good here.
The only thing left is outside. See you later. He went out the front door to get to the backyard. The back door was next to the stairs.
He gave me the remote, manuals, and receipt in the front yard and wouldn’t come back inside to even get his bag. He asked me to bring it out to him. Around 1973, I went to work. I got out of the car and walked to the entrance, and on the way I saluted Warrant Officer Fardy because he was in uniform.
He had always worn civilian clothes. He waved me on and said he’d be in in a minute. I got to my office and expected to be the first one there, since I was the lowest ranking guy and always had to make the coffee. I was surprised to find the chief, a captain, and his senior sergeant already there.
The captain asked me to sit down at my desk. I thought I was in trouble. He said he had some bad news. Warrant Officer Fardy had been killed in a head-on collision at 3:00 that morning.
I protested that I had just seen him outside in the parking lot. The captain said he and the sergeant had identified the body just an hour earlier. About 20 years ago, I lived in a super cute apartment next to a creek. The master bedroom had French doors leading to a deck that went all the way down to the creek bed.
The bedroom my daughter, who was maybe five or six, stayed in also overlooked the creek. One night, I was woken up by a super bright light and strange music that reminded me of electronic calliope music. I got out of bed and looked outside to see several little silver creatures waiting in the creek. It was the strangest thing, but somehow very peaceful.
While I was startled, this feeling of calm came over me, and I felt like they were watching me back. I stood there for a minute and then went back to sleep. When I woke up, nothing was there. No evidence anything had ever been there.
I convinced myself it was just a crazy dream and never spoke of it to anyone because it was so strange it couldn’t possibly have been real. Two years ago, my now adult daughter and I went away for the weekend and were reminiscing about different things when that apartment came up. She said, The weirdest thing happened there one night. Then she told me about the silver clowns in the creek that played merry-go-round music.
She hadn’t told me at the time because they weren’t scary. I live in a beach town, and one of my friends had just gotten back to her parents’ house for the summer, so I went over to hang out for a while. Since it wasn’t late when I left, I figured I’d take the long way home, driving along the bay to see the stars and the lights of the ships waiting to go up the river. When I got to the road that runs along the bay, I realized I wouldn’t see anything because heavy fog had rolled in, which is super common in the spring.
This road is a 25 mph road, with the beach and trails over the dunes on the left and houses on the right. The visibility was bad because of how foggy and dark it was. All of a sudden, from my left, I saw a figure coming up the dune and toward the road. I slammed on my brakes hard enough to skid a little because I thought it was someone coming off the beach to cross to a house.
It had the shape of a woman in a long dress, but I couldn’t see any facial features. When it got to the middle of the road, the figure just floated up at an angle and disappeared. There wasn’t a beach access trail where I saw it, and I couldn’t figure out any logical explanation for the way it hovered and took off. I stopped and watched until it disappeared.
It freaked me out pretty bad, and even five or six years later, I can still picture the way it moved like it was yesterday. One night, the door to my room started creaking open about half an inch at a time. If I looked right at the door, it would stop, but when I went back to reading my book and then looked up again, it would be just a bit more open. Finally, it was almost wide enough for someone to walk through, so I said, Stop it, in as commanding a voice as I could muster, and it stopped mid-creak.
It was a 160-plus-year-old house, so everything creaked. But I was almost too scared to go to sleep that night. I know for a fact no one in my family was home. Another thing was a constant occurrence in my childhood.
I grew up on a fairly isolated farm, with woods that came right up to the barn on one side and acres of fields between us and any neighbor. Every night when I finished chores, shut off the barn light, and closed the door, the only light would be from a dim porch light about 40 yards away, and if it wasn’t too overcast or foggy, the moon and stars. Anyway, every night I’d feel something staring at me from around the corner of the barn. I somehow knew it had red eyes and was about ten feet off the ground.
I could feel evil coming from it, and I’d always run to the house as fast as I could, certain it was right behind me. I didn’t know what it was, and as terrified as I was, I never told anyone because my parents had a habit of dismissing stuff like that, and even as a kid, I didn’t want to be seen as a crybaby, which is definitely what my dad would have called me. With time, I got over it and figured it was an overactive imagination combined with too many goosebumps stories. That is, until about eight years later when I was sitting around swapping spooky stories with my friend, who basically grew up on the farm.
She said that as soon as the lights were off in the barn, she felt something scary and evil staring at her from the same corner. I asked a few questions. Yes, she felt it was about ten feet off the ground, and even though she never actually saw it, she was sure it had red eyes. I was freaking out, and it got worse when I asked my siblings if they had ever been scared by anything near the barn.
I was careful not to ask leading questions, and every single one of them said the same thing. There was a scary thing that would stare from the corner of the barn when they turned off the light. I know it was just a feeling we all grew out of, but how likely is it that we all felt the same thing from the same place? I worked as a night auditor at an old hotel.
It was around 2:00 a. m. when I got a phone call from the pool room, which was supposed to be closed. I picked up and answered, and all I heard was very heavy breathing.
I hung up and checked the cameras. All the lights were on in the pool room, so I went down the hallway to kick whoever it was out. But as I got close to the glass door, it was so cold I could see my breath. The door was completely fogged over, and all the lights were out.
I opened the door, and the light above me came on because they were motion sensor lights. I looked around but didn’t see anything. Then the light across the pool from me came on, but nothing was there. Then every light in a path began to light up around one side of the pool, as if something was walking toward me.
I ran out of there so fast, locked myself in my manager’s office, and stayed until sunrise. The worst was yet to come. I had played it off in my head as bugs setting off the motion sensors. I was telling my manager about my experience so he would get a good laugh.
When I told him about the phone call from the pool, he didn’t laugh at all. He asked if I was one hundred percent positive the caller ID said the pool room, and I said yeah. Then he told me there hadn’t been a phone in the pool room for thirty years. I told him there was no way, because that would be physically impossible.
He told me to go look for myself. I looked. There was no phone. It completely messed with my head because I didn’t believe in the supernatural at all before that.
But to this day, no matter how many ways I try to rationalize it, I just can’t. It’s completely unexplainable. A couple of weeks ago, I was staying overnight in a hotel with my sister and niece. We went to bed in a king bed, my niece between me and my sister, and I woke up multiple times because it was too hot.
I don’t think any of us had blankets over us after just a couple of hours. I woke up at 1:30 a. m. to what sounded like my niece shuffling around outside the bed.
Eventually, she started eating some ice from the ice pail. While I was awake, I decided to finally get up and turn on the AC. So I got up, trudged over to the AC on my side of the bed, turned it on, and lay back down, only to realize my niece and sister were both sound asleep. I was seriously spooked.
I practically held my breath for five minutes, absolutely convinced someone was in the room with us, before I decided to get up and check the room with my flashlight. But I didn’t find anything. I want to blame it on the grogginess, but the ice munching was undeniable. I got home really late from a trip, around 2:00 a.
m. , and had to park on a dimly lit side street to get to my place. As a single woman in her late twenties, I call someone when I have to walk alone in the dark. I called my dad, who was in a different time zone, three hours behind.
He knew the drill, and we were just chatting. As I was walking up the hill to my condo building, there was a cluster of small trees and shrubs across the street where a fence ended and a bank parking lot began. Two shady-looking guys came out, one smoking. At first, I thought they were just out for a smoke.
Then they started walking toward me, not toward another building or car, me. They separated, and one was on either side of me, like I was being surrounded. As this happened, I told my dad, which they could both hear, I have two guys coming toward me. I think you need to call the police.
As soon as that happened, they made a ninety-degree turn and headed down the street. I still think about it often. I sometimes feel like I’m blowing things out of proportion, especially since there were two nearby residential buildings that would have heard screams, and the threat of someone calling the police on the other end of the phone wasn’t much of a threat because who knows what the response time would be. Then I go back to my gut feeling.
The way they came out of the cluster of trees, made a beeline to me, then surrounded me in a way I can’t explain, like they were very close on an open road. I still don’t know whether it was all in my head, but that was terrifying. Since then, I’ve parked in the well-lit bank lot. I have to get up and move my car when they open at 8:00 a.
m. , but that scared some sense into me. Scared my poor dad as well. I visited family in a small town one year, and we decided to use a Ouija board in the woods.
The area was sparsely populated, with large stretches of unlit woods. We went back to a section where there was an opening surrounded by trees and a small family plot. Five of the headstones had the same last name, and each had a pinwheel. There was little to no wind that night.
After a bit of unsuccessful Ouija boarding, illuminated by truck headlights and flashlights, my cousin started shouting for me to come over. He said he had asked if anyone was there to give a sign. The pinwheel on the largest headstone was spinning wildly and kept going for roughly another twenty seconds. The other pinwheels never moved, and then it came to a sudden stop and didn’t move again.
Even if you blow on a pinwheel as hard as you can, it spins fast for an instant and stops pretty soon after. This pinwheel was rapidly spinning without being touched for at least thirty seconds. Strange and unexplained. My uncle, who I was very close to, had died.
He had been estranged from his wife for years, living on and off the streets, and sometimes I allowed him to stay with me for weeks at a time. He was a hoot, and the kids and I loved his crazy self. After he passed, I started feeling a certain heaviness in my home. It was disconcerting, but it didn’t scare me because it didn’t feel malevolent.
But as the weeks went by, weird stuff started happening. I’d get whiffs of cigarette smoke even though no one smoked in the house, hear someone walking around. Then one night, I woke up and my chest felt constricted and tight. Once again, that same heaviness in my room, the feeling of being watched.
There was an overwhelming scent of Old Spice cologne and this really evil, awful presence. I’m not religious, but I prayed, and I slept in my kids’ room that night with a nightlight on. It took me a long time to fall asleep. I was so scared.
At the risk of sounding nutty, I do believe that was my uncle this whole time. He was a chain-smoker and wore Old Spice, even though we used to tease him about wearing old man’s cologne. But what I can’t explain is, if that was him, then why that awful, evil feeling from him, or whatever that was? I didn’t used to believe in the paranormal, but I do now.
We bought our house a few years back, a fixer-upper, old city house in what is now a bad neighborhood but was nice back in the day. Bought from the nephew who inherited it from his blind aunt. Fire sale. The same price people pay for a new car, not even a nice one.
Three bedrooms with an addition, corner lot, an absolute steal. Upstairs, there was a sealed room. When we got it open, it was the size of a very large walk-in closet with a low sloped ceiling on one side, a toilet hooked up on one end, and behind the toilet, it goes into the space behind the closet in the next room, between the closet and the wall where the ceiling slopes too low. That space is filled with a nest-looking pile of junk: newspapers, old blankets, old toys.
Next to the toilet, on a small DIY platform, is a faded blue toy dog, clearly very old, from the seventies or earlier, clearly deliberately placed facing the door. The lock to the room is on the outside. We just said, nope, and sealed it right back up. Didn’t touch a thing.
It’s right above my office. I finish up in my office and go to bed before 10:00 every night because that’s when I start hearing footsteps above me. Better than having to pay rent. I went to work and afterward was heading home in the evening on my regular bus commute.
Standing on the bus, a girl I had never met ended up next to me, on her phone. I looked up to check what stop the bus was at and ended up seeing what she was looking at out of the corner of my eye because she was shorter than me. It turned out to be a video of me on my way to work that morning. Same position on the bus, same clothes, same headphone model, everything was spot on.
It had some kind of caption I couldn’t make out, and I was barely processing it before I realized I had to get off at my stop. I wanted to bring it up to her, but it was a Snapchat, which deletes afterward, and I couldn’t think of a way to approach her about it without looking like a crazy person. Somehow, somebody took a video of me in the morning, sent it to somebody else, who ended up next to me and played the video. I thought of some potential theories, but I don’t think I’ll ever get a solid answer.
Years ago, my best friend and I were in a cafe just wasting time when we saw a man watching us through a mirror hanging on the wall across from us. Something about him was bone-chilling. Our gut immediately kicked in, and we both looked at each other, acknowledging how creepy and off he was. He kept watching us, so we left the cafe and joked about it on our walk home.
We were about sixteen and just brushed it off. About a week later, this man came into my work. His face and whole presence were unforgettable. I texted my best friend to tell her he was at my work, yet again, staring at me without ever looking away.
He was pretending to browse the store’s inventory but obviously intended not to buy anything. He just stared and stared. I told a coworker and walked away for a bit. Strange, but it was a small community and you see people everywhere.
Side note, both my best friend and I had lived in this community most of our lives and had never seen this man before. A few weeks later, we were at a store late in the evening in a completely different part of our huge city. We were browsing, and there he was, at this shop we hardly ever visited late. He walked in through the downstairs entrance and looked directly up at us as we were looking over the upstairs railing.
We nervously giggled and shouted some words in disbelief that this really off-putting man was there. We told the friends we were with and immediately left. A little later, he returned to my place of work, spooking me just as much as the first time. My coworker and manager told me to go upstairs and pretend to do something so I wouldn’t be around him.
He immediately followed me upstairs, and my manager followed him, aware of the situation and my strange sightings of this man. He hastily walked up to the desk I was behind, and before my manager could pull him away and ask him to leave, he looked right at me and said, Can I ask you something? Do I make you uncomfortable? I don’t know what it was, but something took over my body.
I filled with dread and fear and immediately started crying. I have never had anything like that happen to me. This man had never talked to me before, just looked at my friend and me really intently. My manager told him he needed to go now and never come back.
Everyone immediately picked up on the strange, creepy, uncomfortable energy he gave off. My coworker had no idea what he looked like, since I had never explained, and he immediately pointed him out when he entered our work and asked if that was him. Everyone agreed something was very, very off. Our HR woman asked that I be walked to my car if I was getting off work late from that point on.
I wish I could convey with better words what kind of feeling this man put off. My best friend and I still discuss it. It was nine years ago. I didn’t want a cat.
I am a dog person. I had a dog, but my stepbrother started feeding the stray that was hanging around my condo. He left him behind when I asked him to leave. We became best buds, moving three times and finally moving in with my now wife at her house with her two cats.
A couple of years went by and her two old cats passed away. I buried them in the yard. No drama, just nice end of life passing. Now it was just this cat, me, my wife, and my deceased mom’s old Chihuahua.
Nice neighborhood of quiet working families in South Florida. The cat starts to develop a weird cough. It persists, so I take him to the vet. They inform me they can’t help him and he should be put down.
It will only get worse. I can’t do it. He seems healthy, eats well, active. But the cough does get worse, and he starts struggling to breathe.
I try to prepare myself for the inevitable. He continues like nothing is wrong. He would sit on the armrest of any chair I sat in, sleep on the bed by my head, just stay near me all the time. The day comes and his breathing is getting bad.
Long moments of him gasping for breath. I don’t want him to suffer, so I call the vet and set the appointment. It’s getting dark. Now the crazy part.
I take him into the backyard to a favorite spot. We sit for a few minutes saying goodbye. My wife leaves us, just me and him, and a couple of shots of whiskey to settle my nerves. He jumps up and takes off.
We are looking everywhere, can’t find him. He’s gone. A couple of hours later, I’m out back still looking. I don’t want him to die alone.
My wife calls me on my cell and says a strange cat is at the front door trying to get in the house. I’m confused. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed another cat in the neighborhood. I start walking inside and see my cat lying in the flower bed in a nice little nest of leaves.
I pick him up. He’s calm, and we start to go inside when my wife, now coming out the back door to get me, yells that there’s another strange cat at the back door also trying to get in. Now, to get to the back door, you need to go through the screen room, past the pool, through the sliding glass doors to the Florida room. This strange cat somehow walked through two confined areas with doors, one with a pool, and is at the all-glass back door that goes into the house.
As I walk up holding my cat, it just watches us go by while I creep past it to get inside. My wife and I are both in our forties, common emergencies, seen-it-all kinds of people who always think there’s a logical explanation for everything. I put my cat on the couch and go out the front door, and sure enough, there is a different strange cat trying to get in the front door. As I look around, there are about three or four other cats around the yard at a distance, watching also.
I go back inside. The cat at the back door is clawing at the glass to get in. The one at the front is making strange noises, and my cat is still sitting on the couch struggling to breathe. We are seriously freaked out.
It’s been a long night. We lock the doors and go to sleep. I spring awake at about 4:00 a. m.
and look for my cat, who had a rough night. I find him in my closet, curled up on some clothes, not doing well. I get dressed and let my wife say goodbye. I take him to the emergency vet at about 5:30 a.
m. They quietly give him the needle, and he slowly stops gasping for breath while lying peacefully in my arms. I returned home. All the other cats were gone, and we picked a nice spot in the flower bed.
I dug his final resting spot. We have not seen any of those other cats before or since. A few days go by, and I mention to my neighbor that our cat passed, and sorry if she saw me searching her backyard for him. Her husband comes out and tells me that night he had noticed all the cats suddenly around their house, and their indoor cat was behaving strangely and wanted to get outside.
I have been with a number of animals and a few people when they passed. Never have I experienced anything as strange or creepy as that night of cats.