I’m on a curved mountain pass I know by heart, the kind of road I’ve driven two or three times a month for ten years, three hours and four passes to reach the nearest city. It’s two in the morning, I’m cruising, no semis, just the rhythm of left curve, right curve, left curve. I know there’s a big sweeping left coming up. Then suddenly I’m on a straight road.
I don’t recognize anything. There isn’t a straight section on that highway for another thirty miles. I look around, trying to figure out where the hell I am. No highway signs.
I smack myself a few times to make sure I’m awake. My phone has no service, which is normal out here, so I can’t check my location. I glance out the window and the high desert scrub is gone. Replaced by thick, dark forest.
Headlights barely cut ten feet into it. The kind of dense, heavy woods you’d expect in the Pacific Northwest, not here. Not anywhere near here. I watch the clock.
For fifteen minutes, I drive straight through this ominous forest. I should be on a curvy mountain pass in the desert. Right about the time I’m ready to have a full panic attack, that sweeping left curve appears. I’m out of the forest, back in the scrub, back on the road I know.
I chalked it up to drowsy driving and an overactive imagination. Then it happened again, two years later, same spot. This time, my brother is in the passenger seat, and we’re making the same early airport run. All of a sudden, straight road.
It lasts about five minutes before my brother looks around and asks, “Where the heck are we? ” Then the sweeping left curve appears and we’re back in the desert. I can’t explain it, but at least I had a witness. My uncle used to have a cabin in the woods near Winter, Wisconsin, on a mostly undeveloped arm of the Chippewa Flowage.
Not so remote that you couldn’t run into town, but far enough that if you got hurt, you’d be in serious trouble. I spent summers there tearing through the woods with my two cousins. One morning when I was about ten, my uncle woke us up roughly and said it was time to go fishing. It was pitch dark and we were all confused.
Who goes fishing that early? He hustled us down to the dock, launched the little fishing boat, and got us away from the house fast. We were all getting freaked out. We thought maybe we were being punished.
The previous morning, my uncle had gone out to chop wood and couldn’t find his axe. He’d left it lodged in a stump next to the cabin and accused us of messing with it, which honestly sounded like something we would have done. He had to drive all the way into town to buy a new one. He wasn’t talking now, though.
We just sat shivering under a blanket at the bow while my uncle stared wild-eyed at the shoreline, waving a flashlight furtively ahead of us. We eventually arrived at his friend’s cabin across the lake and tumbled inside. He sent us to the loft to sleep, then he and his buddy locked the doors and left. They didn’t come back until well after sunrise.
Then my uncle showed up with the truck and trailer, already packed with all our gear, and told us it was time to go home. We all thought it was weird to leave days early, but we were kids, so we went with it. He stayed quiet for the whole long drive back to civilization. Many years later, my uncle confided in me.
He’d woken up around three in the morning to a strange thunk from outside the cabin. He went to investigate and found a massive jack pine had fallen directly across the narrow driveway, blocking us in. Startled by the noise, he swept his flashlight along the tree line just in time to see a man holding an axe slink away into the dark of the woods. He and his buddy had to take turns chainsawing the tree apart while the other stood watch with a rifle.
He never found his axe. My mother died of cancer when I was a little over thirty. She had a stroke on a day I was really busy at school. My last words to her that she could understand were, “Mom, not now.
I’ll call you later. ” Two hours later, she was admitted to the hospital and never woke up again. Half a year later, I had a minor surgery. Because of the pain, they gave me morphine.
I was lying in my hospital bed when my mom walked in, took a seat next to me, and we talked for an hour. It was so real. I felt her touch on my hand. We had a very good conversation.
I only found out about the morphine a month later when I got the bill. Until then, I was sure it wasn’t a hallucination. I started rethinking my opinion about the afterlife. I miss her so much, I’d take a shot if I knew she’d come visit me again.
This didn’t happen to me, but to a friend. He had a doctor’s appointment in another town about an hour away, and he took his dad with him. The appointment was for eleven, so they left at nine thirty to give themselves plenty of time. They pulled into the parking lot at ten thirty.
My friend remembers checking the clock in the car and telling his dad they made good time. They walked into the office, and the receptionist told them they were a little late, but that it was fine because the doctor was running behind. My friend said he had an eleven o’clock appointment and was actually half an hour early. She pointed to the clock on the waiting room wall.
It said eleven fifteen. His dad checked his watch. Same time. My friend ran back out to the car to double-check.
The car clock read eleven fifteen too. Somehow, in the few dozen steps from the car to the office, they had lost forty-five minutes. When they got home, his mom confirmed they’d left at nine thirty, and there hadn’t been traffic or delays of any kind. It’s still a mystery.
I was driving in rural New England, near the Vermont and Massachusetts border. I’m not sure which one I was in. It was late. Actually, it was early.
And there was fog. Dense, dense fog. Silent Hill levels of fog. And like an idiot who dies in the opening scene of a horror movie, I was driving on back roads.
First, my headlight went out. I couldn’t use high beams because of the fog. I hadn’t seen a house or a town in a long time. Then the car started making noise and the check engine light came on.
I pulled over. Nothing around, just a field, fog, and dark. Creepy as hell. I gamely looked at the engine.
I can fix electronics, not engines. I tightened everything I knew how to tighten. The car wouldn’t start again. So there I was, in the dark, in the middle of nowhere, on the side of the road, with no cell service.
Because of course. I wasn’t stupid enough to go wandering around in the dark, so I reclined the seat and decided to nap for a couple hours until sunrise. I wake up, the sun is coming up, the fog is clearing, and I’m parked on the main street of a tiny town, in front of what looks like the Bates Motel house. Houses everywhere.
More houses than I’d seen in hours. The creepiest part was that there wasn’t a light on in any of them all night. There was a service station about fifty yards up the road. I walked up, talked to the guy, who looked perfectly normal.
He walked over to look at my car, asked me to try to start it. It did. The darn thing turned right over. Both headlights worked.
I drove on. I never got the name of the little village, and I couldn’t find it on any map. I always felt like I was in the middle of a horror movie setup that just didn’t pan out. When I was younger, I was upstairs in my room playing games on a PlayStation.
I was home alone because my parents had gone out to see a movie. It was a normal night until I heard an extremely loud crash and what sounded like glass shattering from the kitchen. I went downstairs to find the source. All the windows looked fine.
I walked around for a while, confused, until I got to the kitchen. Apparently, the outer glass screen of our oven had just completely fallen off and shattered. I swept up all the glass and threw it away. When my parents got home, they didn’t believe me.
They grounded me for a week, convinced I broke it. To this day, I have no clue what caused the oven door glass to shatter like that. My dad and stepmother got married when I was ten, at a countryside estate that’s now a wedding venue. The other kids and I were playing hide-and-seek in this massive house.
My sister, who was twelve, was chasing my younger cousin, a girl with long blonde hair in a blue dress, down a long hallway. Halfway down, the cousin dipped into this old spiral staircase that only goes up a quarter rotation before it’s blocked off by a wall. My sister jumped around the corner and shouted, “Gotcha! ” But nobody was in the staircase.
She ran back to my dad crying, saying our cousin disappeared through a wall. Everyone laughed it off because the cousin was right next to her the whole time. Five years later, I got a job as a waiter at the same wedding venue. The estate has an orangery where they hold ceremonies, and I noticed a small stained glass window showing a blonde girl in a blue dress, with the dates 1931 to 1937 underneath.
I was dumbfounded, so I asked about it. The venue manager told me that after the original owner sold the estate, it became a boarding school for girls. A young girl fell out of a top-floor window and passed away. The hallway my sister chased my cousin down was an old servant’s hallway, and that staircase was the central staircase leading directly up to the old girls’ dormitories on the top floor.
I learned a lot about that house during the five years I worked there. Nothing else spooky, but plenty that was very interesting. When I was twelve, I woke up in the middle of the night to loud breathing under my bed. Being twelve and into fantasy and sci-fi, I was convinced there was a demon or a cryptid about to eat me.
I finally decided to risk it and ran up to my mom’s room. I made it safely and told her what happened. She thought I’d had a nightmare. The next night, I heard it again.
It was only about nine in the evening, so I called to my mom. She was ten feet away and could hear it clear as day. There was nothing under my bed. Over the next couple months, I kept hearing it, though not every night.
It slowly started to sound more like purring than breathing. When my brother came home from college, he checked under my bed and made me lift my hands to make sure I wasn’t playing a prank. We never found out what was making the sound. We suspect it might have been acoustics.
I work for a funeral company. One afternoon, I did a viewing for a man whose funeral was the next day. Usually, at the end of the day, we put the bodies back in the refrigerator. But we’d been really busy, and I was at a small branch with only a very small refrigerator, and it was already full.
So, on rare occasions, if a body has been embalmed, we leave them in the chapel with the air conditioner cranked up. We have good security, and who wants to break into a funeral home anyway? The next morning, I was the first one in. I walked into the chapel and the man was out of his coffin, lying face down on the floor.
Not sprawled. Perfectly neat. Like he’d floated up, turned face down, and floated back down to the ground. I nearly had a heart attack.
My first thought was that someone had broken in, or that a staff member was playing a prank. A very sackable prank. I can’t imagine any of our staff doing that. And we have security cameras, motion detectors, and swipe cards that track everyone coming and going.
There was nothing. According to security, no one came in or left that night. We don’t have cameras in the chapel. And if you’re thinking the guy wasn’t really dead, he was.
He’d been embalmed. You don’t tend to survive that. There was a massive investigation, and no one could explain how he ended up like that. It still gives me the creeps every time I go in there.
About ten years ago, I was sitting in my room and heard my doorknob slowly turning. I figured it was my dad checking if I was napping. I watched the knob turn, heard the springs squeak, heard the latch slide off the metal plate as the door pushed open a bit. I sat up to tell him I was awake.
The door moved again, opened more, and I clearly saw my dad sitting on the couch in the living room. No one was at the door. This was so strange that I wrote down the time and exactly what happened. I didn’t keep a diary.
I just couldn’t explain it. The door had been latched properly. The AC turning on or another door opening would have sucked it shut, like it had many times before. Around the same time, I kept seeing a shadow figure around my doorframe.
About six feet tall, solid black. My whole family is under five-eight and very white. It would peer from a gap about three inches wide between the doorframe and the wall. No one could fit there.
It would just stare at me in bed, leaning in and out of view. Back in high school, about ten years ago, I was driving my dad’s old 1988 S10 to work on a back road in my hometown. There’s a house with a bunch of chickens that run around the yard. On this day, they were all on the side of the road, and one ran into the street as I was passing.
I couldn’t stop in time. I heard the bump and crunch you never want to hear. I cringed and felt horrible. I was late, so I couldn’t stop.
But for the next five miles to work, the tire was jumping like something was stuck to it. I figured there’d be a huge mess when I got there. There wasn’t. The tire was spotless.
Not a feather in sight. There was no bump in the road that could have caused that jump or sounded like that. I was confused as hell. Here’s where it gets weird.
I forgot something at home and had to drive back by the house. As I passed the spot where I’d hit the chicken, there was a chicken on the side of the road, about fifty feet away from the others. It stood there like a statue. Didn’t look hurt.
Didn’t move. Just stared at me with little beady eyes full of hate you could feel. I drove by again ten minutes later on my way back to work. Same damn chicken.
All the other chickens were gone. This one was still standing there, staring at me like a poultry hitman. It might have just been another chicken. But either way, it freaked me out.
It was when my husband was sick and I had to travel to another city to take care of him. He traveled for work and was staying at his uncle’s condominium. He’s the type to power through everything, so when he called and said he needed me, I went. I arrived and found him asleep in the living room.
I went to gently wake him and let him know I was there. He sat up quickly, eyes still closed, and started talking. He said, “They don’t like him. They’ve been hurting him.
” I asked who. He said, “The ones that stay there. ” I asked again who they were. He said, “The ghosts.
” I said there’s no such thing as ghosts. He got excited and said they were there. Before I could ask another question, he said the lights would go off to let us know they weren’t happy with me there. Sure enough, the lights in the living room turned off.
And everywhere downstairs. I was thinking, what the heck is going on? He lay back down and went to sleep. I stayed the night.
He talked on and off, eyes closed, saying they pushed him down the stairs and made his clothes fly out of the closet. I tried to sleep but kept having weird dreams of an Asian family looking at me from the stairs. Morning came. He woke up and asked what I was doing there.
I said, “You called me and asked me to come because you didn’t feel good. ” He didn’t remember calling me. He didn’t remember any of the conversations. I asked him not to stay there anymore.
He didn’t. My grandma’s house is notoriously haunted. Lots of family members have seen and heard unexplainable things. There are two hidden rooms and a hidden compartment where the old Italian family who lived there used to make and store wine during Prohibition.
There’s also a very old cemetery in her backyard with pioneer and native graves from the 1800s. When I was about twelve, I was at my grandma’s after the weekly Wednesday family dinner. My mom took my sister and cousin to the store, so I was the only kid left. The older ladies were playing cards in the kitchen, the men were watching the news in the living room.
I walked into the old kitchen, the room with all the toys. I turned on the light and saw a girl about my age casually leaning in the doorway between the old kitchen and the dining room, which was dark and empty. I don’t remember her face, but she was maybe ten to thirteen, with thin, brassy blonde hair hanging straight to just below her shoulders. She wore a long-sleeved shirt and pants, so nothing old-timey.
She stood there for a moment. We made eye contact. Then she disappeared right in front of my eyes. I remember not feeling scared.
Just curious. When I was seventeen or eighteen, my friend Wendy and I worked the Elks Bingo Hall every Thursday night. Since my grandma lived close to both the hall and our high school, we’d spend every Thursday night at her house after work. She’d stock all our favorite snacks.
We’d get back around ten or eleven. She’d stay up to let us in, then go upstairs to bed where my grandpa and great-grandma were already asleep. Wendy and I had the whole ground floor to ourselves. One Thursday night, we’re chilling and I open the fridge to see what’s good.
Wendy is standing directly behind me. As I open the fridge, I hear a very stern female voice from the living room say, “Can I ask you a question? ” The words weren’t scary, but the tone was terrifying. We got our snacks without mentioning it.
We sat down at the kitchen table, and Wendy said, “So, when you opened the fridge a minute ago, did you hear a voice coming from the living room? ”
The television wasn’t on. Neither was the radio. Television time was after snack time.
Wendy heard an older female voice but couldn’t make out the words. I told her what I thought I heard. We agreed it was too scary to think about, so we agreed it happened and then pretended it didn’t. We still had to spend the night in the house.
My grandma has seen several full-body apparitions. My very stoic, skeptical grandpa once pulled his gun and called the cops on a man in all black running through the house, who then disappeared. My sister’s best friend Jess woke up in the middle of the night to a dark figure watching her sleep. My cousin Kim was playing with my toddler cousin Emily when Emily fell and started crying.
A calming woman’s voice said, “There, there, it will be okay,” and Emily stopped crying. The same voice said, “God bless you,” when Kim sneezed on a separate occasion. According to my grandma, the house knows when someone is going to die. If something strange happens, like a picture falling off the wall or an old broken toy train suddenly starting to work, someone in the family dies shortly after.
My great-grandma told my grandma she saw a woman in white pacing back and forth in the dining room. She passed away that week. My grandpa was a security guard who worked late, and for a week straight he complained that a lamp in the living room kept turning itself on while he showered after work. He died the next week.
There are more stories, but those are the ones I remember most. My grandma still lives in the house by herself. She says the spirits keep her company, and she can feel my grandpa still present sometimes. She says it brings her comfort.
When I was very young, maybe four or five, we had a nasty snowstorm that knocked out power for days. We lived in New England, in the middle of farmland. Neighbors were within walking distance, though it was a short hike. My mother needed to visit one neighbor to lend them something while my father got the generator running.
I wanted to go, so she put me on my snow sled and pulled me along. It was dark out, but everything under snow has this eerie blue glow. She had a flashlight. We dropped off whatever they needed, then turned around for home.
It was only about a quarter mile, but it was through the woods. At the midpoint of the walk back, we both heard this horrifying howl or scream. Like something out of a monster movie. The closest description I can give is in the movie Predator, when the Predator cauterizes its wound and screams and it echoes through the forest.
My mother picked me up out of the sled and ran home. We both described it to my father. He didn’t believe us. A week later, we found a bunch of dead deer in really bad shape, just thirty feet into a wooded path near our house.
It didn’t look like poachers or hunters had done it. I’ve been around coyotes my whole life. They definitely didn’t do this either. Coyotes pick apart their prey and run off with pieces.
This was four or five full-sized deer with large chunks missing. We asked our neighbor, who was a hunter. He said he’d heard some weird sounds but had no idea what it was either. That was it.
We never got an answer.