I was thirteen and my uncle had gone out of town, asking me to stay at his place and keep an eye on things. I invited my buddy over so I wouldn’t be alone for the weekend. Around one in the morning we were hanging out in the attached garage watching TV when I remembered I’d forgotten to turn off the pool pump. The moment we opened the garage door to the backyard, this overwhelming smell of burning meat hit us.
And with that smell came a wave of dread so strong my gut screamed at me not to step outside. I slammed the door shut. As I did, my uncle’s dog started barking and growling at the other door, the one that led into the house. She was snarling into the dark hallway like something was standing there.
We slammed that door too, and then the electric dart board went haywire. It was flashing every light and making crazy noises like the whole thing was short-circuiting. Then, out of nowhere, everything stopped. The dread lifted.
The dog went quiet. The dart board shut off. We didn’t sleep a single minute that night. My uncle came home the next day.
I still can’t rationalize all three of those things happening at the exact same time. If I smell burning meat at one in the morning and the dog starts growling at an empty hallway, that pool pump stays on until sunrise. Story two. When I was twelve, I came home from school and, as usual, I was the only one in the house.
I walked into the kitchen to grab a snack and suddenly felt this weird sensation I’d never experienced before. My stomach turned and I made my way to the dining area, collapsing into a chair. I sat there with my head hanging down, and then it hit me how silent everything was. I lifted my head and looked around the room.
About twenty seconds of pure, tense nothingness passed and I started to relax. Then, out of nowhere, a loud noise came from directly beneath my chair. It sounded exactly like paper being crumpled. I leapt out of the chair and as soon as my feet hit the floor, I heard a little girl giggle, followed by soft footsteps running down the hallway, away from the kitchen, toward the front of the house.
I backed into the wall without taking my eyes off the doorway. Then I made my way to the back door, bolted out, and ran to my friend’s house three doors down. I called my mom at work and she told me to stay put. That is still the most unexplainable thing that has ever happened to me.
Story three. I was driving along a remote stretch of road with no houses or people for hours in any direction. I wasn’t paying much attention since I didn’t expect to see a single soul out there. But I passed a woman wearing some kind of white robe.
As I went by, I noticed she was waving her hand, like she was asking for a ride. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers. My parents always advised against it. But I felt bad leaving someone out there that late, so I reversed.
I could still see her in my rearview mirror. But when I backed up to where she’d been standing, she was nowhere to be found. I could swear I’d had her in my mirror the entire time, yet there was no trace of her. Story four.
This one is mundane, but it happened at work recently. I went into the women’s bathroom and all the stalls except two were full. I went in, did my thing for about two minutes, and when I came out, every single stall was empty. I hadn’t heard any doors open, any toilets flush, any hands being washed, or anyone walking around.
Also, a cup of coffee that had been on the sink when I walked in was still sitting there. So in conclusion, ghosts are filthy and don’t wash their hands, and one of them forgot their coffee. Story five. When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I was walking home after being out with friends.
It was around nine at night in late autumn, so it was dark. My route took me down a road that was the only way into my estate. It looked sketchy, but I’d walked it a hundred times, so I wasn’t concerned. About halfway down, I felt a hand grip my right shoulder.
It wasn’t a light touch. It squeezed with real force. When I looked over my shoulder, I was greeted by nothing but thin air. I freaked out and ran the rest of the way home.
After a bit of paranoid research, I found out that someone had passed away in a house on that road not long before. I’ve always hoped it was an overactive imagination, but I’ve never fully convinced myself. Story six. It was a normal night.
The family had supper, watched a bit of TV, and went to bed. About an hour later, we all heard the tiles in the ensuite bathroom start to crack. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever heard in my life, and it lasted a full five minutes. I called out to my parents and they told me to stay in bed.
The next morning, all the tiles had pulled away from the wall, but none had fallen off. I’m sure there’s a logical explanation. I’ve hoped for one my entire life. But for ten-year-old me, it was terrifying and spooky as hell.
People have offered explanations since, and I can comprehend them now that I’m nearly thirty. But you have to remember, I was ten years old, terrified, and my parents had no experience with that kind of thing either. Story seven. I was sitting in my classroom in grade school when this overwhelming sense of despair hit me out of nowhere.
It was like that feeling when your heart drops to your feet, but magnified tenfold. I turned to the girl next to me and said, I feel like something really bad just happened. I learned later that day that my brother had passed away after a tragic incident, literally right before I told my classmate. She found out the next day why I wasn’t in class and had to be sent home.
I actually talked to her somewhat recently, and it still freaks her out. Story eight. I heard someone singing directly under my bed. There was nothing under there that could have made a sound.
No phone, no iPod, no radio, no speaker. It sounded like a woman was literally lying under my bed, singing. I jumped off and looked underneath, and there was nothing. But the room felt so much darker under that bed.
The singing stopped as soon as I jumped off. I haven’t heard it since. Story nine. My only paranormal experience happened at my friend’s really old mansion.
His parents were rich as hell, and nobody else was home in this twenty-four-room house. It was nighttime, and out of nowhere, creepy opera singing started up. We all looked at each other and bolted inside. We sat down trying to explain what happened, but none of us knew where to start.
It was just really clear opera singing, with nobody else around for half a mile. It’s my only I-can’t-explain-this moment. Story ten. Back in my teen days, I was online dating someone from another country.
I know, lame. I was deeply in love at the time. She said she was going to see a friend, and since I had nothing to do, I went to bed. I started to fall asleep, and at first I heard voices I couldn’t quite make out.
Then I saw five or six people laughing and drinking in a living room. I woke up, wondered about it, and went back to sleep. The next day she posted pictures, and it was the exact same place, with some of the same people I’d seen beside her. Story eleven.
When I was first dating my wife, something similar happened. I saw something from someone else’s point of view. They were panicking, going through a bunch of papers and clutter. I didn’t know it at the time since we’d just started dating, but her mom was a hoarder, and while I was asleep, my wife was panicking because my phone number had gotten mixed in with her mom’s stuff.
The weird thing was that when I woke up, I thought she was lying next to me and talked to her. She got up, went to the bathroom, and never came back. I got confused and called her. She said she’d never been there but was freaking out because she’d lost my number and was glad I called.
I told her about what I’d seen. I’ve had a lot of weird stuff happen to me, and she’s witnessed quite a bit of it, but nothing ever happens to her. She thinks some kind of entity has attached itself to me. I don’t know about that, and I don’t have strong beliefs in the afterlife or spirits.
But if that’s the case, the weirdness stopped a couple of years ago after I had surgery. I was under for eight hours. I wonder if that was long enough for the entity to decide to vacate the premises. Story twelve.
I was exhausted from a day at placement and lay down on my bed, facing my laptop. On my left was a chair facing me right next to the bed. I checked the time, and about five minutes later I involuntarily drifted off into an extremely vivid dream that still horrifies me to this day. I dreamed I was in class at university when a girl with long black hair and no face came to the door asking for me.
She said I’d won a prize and needed to go with her. I stood up and followed, because even though she had no face, she wasn’t threatening. She had a pleasant but strange presence. We walked down the hallway and I asked what my prize was.
She said I’d receive a great prize, but I’d have to earn it through public speaking, giving a speech in front of a large crowd. I told her I’d accept the prize but there was no way I’d do a public speech. We arrived at a store and she told me to open it. I walked through to find a red carpet with rows and rows of people, a stage at the end.
The announcer called my name and everyone turned and clapped. I said, Nope, you can keep your prize. The faceless woman was behind me and pushed me forward. I moved back and told her I didn’t want her prize.
That angered her. What happened next still haunts me. She appeared beside me and slapped me on the back. It was the biggest slap I’ve ever felt, ten rapid slaps in one.
I woke up instantly, jolting forward, with actual pain in my back. I turned around and saw the vacant chair. No one was there. I checked the mirror and there was a handprint on my back.
Only ten minutes had passed since I checked the time. If I wake up with an actual handprint from something that happened in my dream, I’m never going back to sleep. Story thirteen. I bought a foreclosed house.
The downstairs doors were missing, covered with plywood. A few weeks after I moved in, the plywood was gone and the doors were perfectly hung. Benevolent tweaker, perhaps. Months later, the old propane tank I needed to figure out how to dispose of disappeared.
I’m thinking handyman ghost. Honestly, no idea. Story fourteen. I lived what I’ve come to realize must have been a haunted apartment for seven years.
I know it sounds crazy, and you don’t have to believe me. I wouldn’t if I hadn’t lived it. But here are the highlights. Small handprints would appear in the bathroom mirror when I showered.
I moved in when I was almost thirteen, and the only other person was my mother. The handprints were the size of a child under ten, and they appeared periodically the entire time I lived there. They never got any bigger. For weeks or months at a time, the bedroom door directly across from the bathroom seemed to have a mind of its own.
We couldn’t make it stay open or closed because it would open and close itself at random. Normally it moved slowly, but once it slammed shut. It wasn’t a draft or uneven floors, because for ninety percent of the time it was a totally normal door. Things would move on their own.
A twenty-ounce can of peanuts flew across the room and scattered peanuts everywhere. The chain of the chain lock started swinging spontaneously and continued for five minutes. Both happened in the same week. I’d get scratches from nothing.
Most I could explain away, but a few were unexplainable, like the scratch on my thigh that appeared during gym class while surrounded by people who saw nothing unusual, and the cut across my wrist that showed up while I was putting shampoo in my hair. One time I photographed one of the mirror handprints. I was wearing my turquoise bathrobe, but the person reflected in the mirror appeared to be wearing a black and tan dress. I might still have a crappy printed copy somewhere at home.
Whatever it was followed me outside the apartment. That’s why I didn’t realize the apartment was haunted rather than just me, until I moved out and everything stopped. The only times I could actually see it were at camp. I was a Girl Scout until I was fourteen.
The thing I saw out in the woods glowed white, almost bluish, and was vaguely human-shaped but completely featureless. It had arms but no hands, legs but no feet, and a head but no face or hair. It could move fast enough to keep up with a tractor-pulled hayride. It didn’t seem to want to be seen.
It appeared at two unrelated camps and was seen by at least three other people. Things would disappear and reappear months later in unlikely places. Never anything big or important. Nail clippers would vanish and turn up beside the bathroom sink six weeks later.
Hair clips would appear in the middle of the living room floor after three months. Our upstairs neighbor, a nice older lady, used to tell us it sounded like someone was throwing furniture around in our apartment, specifically in the bedroom that wasn’t the rebellious one. This happened three times I can remember. Twice when no one was home, once when we were both asleep.
Nothing was ever moved, and we didn’t wake up. When the chain lock incident happened, I took pictures. The ones in the living room had orbs. Normally I don’t put faith in orb photos, since they’re usually just dust, but since I know something was there at the time, I uploaded one to PhotoBucket back in the day.
Story fifteen. One of my best friends in high school and I used to drive to every haunted spot we could find in our state. Sometimes we brought others, sometimes we went alone. Creepy stuff happened a lot, but it was usually just nerves and could be explained away.
One thing I’ll never forget and can never find a logical reason for. One night we were alone, playing our little game, but this time we stayed in our own town. We were heading to a bridge known for creepy happenings, passing through a neighborhood we’d both been in a million times. It was quiet, dark, filled with houses.
She turned onto a street I’d been on before and suddenly there was a gravel road leading into woods in front of us. I said, What the hell? I don’t remember this. She was dead silent and drove onto the gravel, into the trees.
We kept driving through turns and curves, but the gravel road and the trees were all that surrounded us. I kept saying I was confused, that this wasn’t where we were supposed to be, and she agreed. We’d been in that area countless times. There were no woods or gravel roads.
I felt so uneasy. She handed me her phone and told me to pull up Google Maps. It wouldn’t pin our location. I was crying and hyperventilating.
We drove for a long time and couldn’t find any road leading out, or the way we came in. Finally, after what felt like forever, we got out, and she silently took me home. The next day we decided to find it again. We took the exact same roads, and there was nothing there.
The neighborhood was normal. If I’d been alone, I would have chalked it up to falling asleep or losing my mind. But we were both there, and the exact same thing happened to both of us. Nothing overly scary happened in those woods, but we one hundred percent were not supposed to be there.
It still gives me goosebumps. Story sixteen. This is going to sound like nonsense, and I don’t fully understand it myself, but I promise this happened a few years back. I moved to northern Wisconsin for the summer.
Great job, friends already there, beautiful weather. One of my favorite things was to get in the car and just drive, any direction, to see the land. One day I started driving and felt I ought to go south on Highway 13. That wasn’t unusual since I routinely took it, but this time I had a stronger feeling that I really should.
I drove for miles until I came to the White River Dam. There was a small parking lot for canoers and kayakers, and I thought, I really want to park over there. So I did. I got out and looked around, overcome with an urge to walk around the edge of the lake above the dam.
I realized whatever I’d been driving toward was there. I was perplexed and a little frightened, but I felt a push moving me forward. The edge of the lake wasn’t a hard line between land and water. There was a marshy area and my feet got wet as I splashed through.
I knew I was close to something. I came to a bend in the trail and realized whatever it was, it was on the other side. Before I go on, I need to describe the feeling. When I was younger and pretty inexperienced sexually, if there was a prospect of something significant happening with a girl, I’d get this unique feeling of excitement and nervousness, mixed with the sense I was doing something that might get me in trouble.
That was the exact feeling I had walking through that marsh. Something was manipulating that part of my brain. I went around the corner and thought, there it is. There was a thick magazine stuck in the ground.
I leaned down, opened it, and it was full of nothing but lesbian adult media. I flipped through a couple of pages, looked around for anything else, and realized the feeling was gone. All the sensations from the moment I started driving had vanished. It was just me, standing in the north woods, holding a mud-soaked magazine.
I left it there and drove home. It sounds like a joke, but I swear this happened. I never had that pushed feeling before, and I never had it again. Story seventeen.
In college, I got a really strong one of those feelings. My friend had just found out his girlfriend was cheating on him with another good friend. We’d hung out since he found out, but I wanted to give him space, figuring he’d call if he needed me. One day I woke up and my whole body was screaming for Taco Bell.
So I went. I walked in to order, and I heard myself say to go when I wanted to eat there. And for no real reason, I ordered about twice what I normally would. After I paid, I decided to go to my friend’s house and split the food with him since he lived down the street and didn’t have class.
I knocked, no answer, even though his car was there. I called. He picked up and said, Go away. I told him I’d ordered way too much Taco Bell and we should eat and smoke.
He kept telling me to leave, and I started feeling weird. I told him if he didn’t open the door, I was kicking it in and he could explain to his mom what happened. He came down. We ate, and he told me he’d been minutes away from harming himself when I knocked.
So yes, I understand those random go-somewhere feelings. Story eighteen. I’m a nurse, and I have multiple experiences, mostly at the hospital. But the worst one was at a friend’s house.
We were in his back garden around two or three in the morning because another friend had just had a massive argument with his girlfriend. We were just chilling, smoking a cigar, talking about nerdy things. I was facing the pair of them on my left. There was patio furniture with an arm attached to a seat, but a huge gap of table next to me.
Something cold grabbed me and pulled me from my chair, literally pulled me by my jeans. Our friends shut up and stared, and then we all went home without saying a word to each other. I have more stories, but most happened at the hospital and didn’t affect me drastically. Story nineteen.
I have a strange one, not a ghost story. I’ve never spoken about it to anyone. Small backstory: my parents split when I was around one, and I moved out of state away from my father and large extended family around age five. I lived in about eight different houses before that move.
Because of these events, I have memories from a lot younger than the average person. I have confirmed memories from as early as two or three, and one unconfirmed memory from age one, a memory of my parents still together. When I was very young, two to four, I could see what my mom saw. I’d close my eyes and essentially see out of hers.
I don’t remember much of doing it, but I vividly remember the day it stopped. I woke up, thought, let’s see what my mom is up to, closed my eyes, and nothing. The ability was gone. I just lay there and thought to myself, Huh, it must be growing up.
And that was it. I didn’t give it a second thought. It was like I knew it was going to happen and accepted it. I’ve carried that memory my whole life.
It’s probably just an overactive imagination, but coupled with other experiences, memories, and dreams, it makes me wonder. Story twenty. When I was a new mom, shortly after my grandmother passed, we visited her family cottage several states away. My son was only four to six weeks old, and I was worried he’d keep everyone awake at night.
The inevitable happened. He wouldn’t stop fussing in the middle of the night, so I took him outside for fresh air. The cottage had burned down to the chimney a couple years earlier and been rebuilt, so I wasn’t familiar with the new layout. I went outside, and apparently the door was unlocked from the inside, but the outside lock was engaged.
There I was, in the middle of nowhere, locked out at three in the morning with a newborn. I tried the door again and again. I threw pebbles, then rocks, at my husband’s window. Nothing.
As I sat with my back against the door, about to completely lose it, I heard a click. The door had unlocked. The door I’d tried dozens of times simply unlocked. Everyone was still sound asleep.
In the morning, no one had heard a thing. The door had a window, and I could see the entire bottom floor through it. No one was there. But it unlocked for me.
Story twenty-one. One summer evening when I was about ten, I had a friend over and we were playing Frisbee in my yard until it got too dark. We sprawled out in the grass and talked, waiting for my grandmother to call my friend home. We were sitting side by side, facing down my street.
I lived in town, so streetlights illuminated parked cars and parts of front yards. We noticed a silhouette of a person, probably a man, walking toward us up the middle of the street. In this small town, the street was really wide, so a lone man in the exact center at night drew our attention. He was approaching a well-lit intersection a block from my house when a car drove past on the perpendicular street at maybe fifty miles an hour.
The man vanished. Just gone. We were both watching him, and then poof. There were no parked cars, bushes, or other objects nearby.
He couldn’t have ducked behind something that fast. We looked at each other and sprinted into the house. My grandmother insisted I take my friend home. She lived several blocks away and had ridden her bike over.
We protested but gave in, and I rode with her, said good night, and pedaled home as fast as I could. As I turned onto my street, I was scanning for anything unusual and noticed a shadow on the ground beneath a streetlight. Head, shoulders, arms, torso, legs. Clearly a person’s shadow, with legs stretching toward the lamppost.
But there was no person casting it. I had to ride past this thing, whipping my head around looking for whoever was casting it. The shadow moved slightly as I passed, as if starting a walking motion. All eyes forward, I pumped my legs wildly, focused only on my house at the end of the street.
I made it home, left my bike in the driveway, and bolted inside. I never saw anything like that again. So who knows. Maybe just my imagination.
Story twenty-two. There’s a memory I have with my mom and dad. They divorced when I was six, but this memory is from when I was a baby, literally just home from the hospital or a few weeks old. I remember my mom holding me, smiling, then passing me to my dad, who did the same.
It was just the two of them. And for some reason, I saw it from a third-person perspective. It wasn’t me, and I wasn’t seeing through either of my parents’ eyes. I might have seen it on a tape and subconsciously passed it off as a memory, but there was genuinely no one else in the room, and all three of us were in frame from whatever I was seeing out of.
Story twenty-three. Mine was a collection of things rather than one event. The house I grew up in had something paranormal going on. Typical ghostly stuff: doors opening by themselves, sinks turning on, footsteps up and down the hallway, items disappearing and reappearing.
A few incidents stood out. Around midnight, my stereo, this was the nineties, turned on at full blast. When I got up to shut it off, I realized it wasn’t plugged in. Another time I was reading in bed facing the wall when my whole body slightly rolled, like someone sat next to me on the box spring.
I asked my sister what she wanted. No reply. My mom, no reply. The hair on my neck stood up.
I was only about ten and too scared to roll over and look. I fell asleep with the light on. The most interesting thing was the time we all left the house and came back to find the kitchen chairs tilted backward, balancing on their back legs. Pure poltergeist stuff.
I ran for my camera, but my mom was so scared she immediately propped them upright and refused to talk about it. Story twenty-four. When I was around ten, my older brother, his friend, and I used to hang out in the forest near our friend’s house. One day, walking back on the dirt road connecting the forest to the house, my brother said, Look behind you, but don’t make a noise.
Something is following us. My brother loved inventing stories, so I didn’t believe him at first. But I turned around anyway. My heart froze.
At the forest edge, around thirty meters away, I saw an animal that looked a bit like a deer, but standing on its hind legs like a human, next to a tree, looking in our direction. His friend saw it too. We all freaked out. We collected rocks and branches to defend ourselves and put me in the middle of our formation.
We walked back as fast as we could, looking over our shoulders, but it didn’t follow or leave the forest. When we arrived, we nervously talked about what we’d seen, and we started exaggerating, saying it had fangs and red eyes. But I still remember what I actually saw, and it scared me for a long time. We weren’t super close to it, so it could have been a weird optical illusion with the trees, and my brother trying to scare me.
But we never went back after that. Story twenty-five. I’ll always take the chance to tell this one. My friends and I had just graduated high school and wanted to go camping.
A couple weeks before the trip, I dreamed I was driving down a hill toward a lake. I came across a curve in the road that was hidden by plant life. I was going too fast, rolled down the hillside, and landed in the lake, where me and one of my friends began to drown. I woke up in a panic and tried to write it off as anxiety.
Two weeks later, we were driving to the campground, turned in, and saw the exact road from my dream. Freaked out, I slowed down. Sure enough, there was a sharp hidden turn in the road I would have missed if I hadn’t slowed down. Story twenty-six.
I got home and saw my husband’s car parked. I thought, It’s Friday. Nice, he’s home early. I went to change, remembered I forgot to pick up something for dinner, and went to knock on the bathroom door, hearing water running.
My husband was in the shower. I asked if he wanted anything from the store. He said yes, I asked what, and he asked for a towel. I was in a hurry, and we always keep the shelf stocked, so I ignored that part and said, I’ll be right back.
I opened the front door and saw my husband pulling up in the driveway. Unbeknownst to me, he’d had a flat tire that morning and was being dropped off. We went to look in the bathroom. It was empty.
The shower and tub were dry, but the mirror was fogged. It was his voice. It sounded exactly like him. Makes me wonder if something tried to lure me in, or if it was a glitch in the matrix.
Story twenty-seven. This might get long. It’s currently happening a couple times a week. I have dreams about demons messing with me.
I’m usually a lucid dreamer, able to control what goes on. But a couple times a week I’ll have a dream where something bad happens that I have no control over. Even though I have control over everything else, I feel this super heavy sensation, and I try to scream and wake myself up, but I can’t. I see dark figures with no definitive features.
At first they’re in the distance, and as I try to get rid of them, they get closer and closer until everything takes on a red tint, like a filter. Usually I try to fly or run, but they hold me back and start screaming, this awful, deep guttural yell right in my face. Imagine the sound through a megaphone. I usually wake up, but sometimes I get sleep paralysis and can’t move or talk for twenty to thirty minutes.
I don’t hallucinate during it yet, and I hope it stays that way. It’s terrifying. Story twenty-eight. I have a twin sister, and although I don’t remember this specific story, my mom does.
When we were about two, my sister had to have her stomach pumped. My dad was with her, and I was home with my mom. She was changing my diaper when I started crying out in pain. She checked me over but couldn’t find anything wrong.
She noted the time. A few minutes later, my dad called to say the tube had been removed. My mom asked what time it had been removed. It was the exact time I started crying.
Another time in high school, I was sitting at my lunch table when my sister’s teacher approached and asked if my sister was feeling okay, since she hadn’t been in class. We never had class together, and she’d been on the bus with me that morning. I answered immediately, without thinking, She went home with a fever. I had no way of knowing that, since we never crossed paths in a school of two thousand students.
It turned out to be true. The way I said it without hesitating still unnerves me. The stomach pump timing was creepy enough, but casually knowing she went home sick, that twin connection was working overtime. Story twenty-nine.
This could have been a dream, but I’ve never had one feel so vivid and real, and I have zero explanation. It’s the only time I’ve ever felt so unnerved from a dream, like a presence was there that I couldn’t explain. I woke up staring at the ceiling, my partner sleeping beside me. Suddenly a small voice, a girl’s whisper, came from the other side of the bed.
It said very clearly, It lives in the attic. Before I could even say, What the f, several large bangs came from the ceiling above me, and it started breaking as if something was smashing through the joists and drywall, caving in. Then I really woke up. The ceiling was fine.
My partner woke up, asking if I was okay, because I’d basically jumped out of bed trying to catch my breath. It never happened again. But a few months later, my friend’s kid came over for a play date and wouldn’t stop talking about the man in the kitchen. There was no one there.
It weirded me out. Story thirty. It was about five in the morning, just before dawn. I’d fallen asleep on the couch in the den the previous night and woke up early, disoriented.
My cat was in the room, a little black cat named Mina. The den was rectangular, couch against the back wall, sliding glass door on one side, kitchen doorway on the other. The kitchen floor was about six inches higher, so there was a little step up. I was lying so I could see the kitchen doorway but not into the kitchen.
The cat got up and casually walked toward the kitchen, probably for water. She reached the step and peeked her head over. Then she stopped dead. Her tail poofed up and she pulled her head back toward the ground, backed away, turned, and ran off to hide.
I’d never seen her react that way to anything. We had a dog then, but she was upstairs sleeping in my parents’ room, and I would have heard her walking on the tile. We had another cat, but they never acted aggressively toward each other. My mind jumped to, oh my god, there’s an intruder.
After a couple seconds of terror, I grabbed a fire poker from the fireplace because I’m a paranoid idiot, and peered into the kitchen. Nothing. No cat, no dog, no insect, no ghost, no axe-wielding intruder. Freaking cats, man.
Story thirty-one. I had a friend sleeping over at a house my mom and I had just moved into. She was on the floor, I was in my bed. At some point during the night I realized she’d climbed onto my bed, but she wasn’t asleep.
She was gripping my blanket, sitting there, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. I started to ask what was wrong, then noticed what she was staring at. The ceiling fan was jerking wildly from side to side. Not spinning, just jerking, like someone had grabbed it and was trying to tear it out of the ceiling.
There was nobody there. We just watched this thing convulse until it suddenly stopped. We stayed up all night trying to figure out how it happened. We were too scared to sleep.
We knew it wasn’t spinning too fast. The switch was off, no light, no fan, and the chain was broken so the fan couldn’t run while the light was off. It wasn’t an electrical issue. We told my mom, and her first response was to have it looked at.
It never acted up again. But being eleven years old, that was terrifying.