“Moved Out The Very Next Day”: 66 People Reveal Terrifying Childhood Memories Their Families Keep Under The Rug

My grandparents had a twisting staircase in their house. I was walking upstairs one day, misstepped, and started to fall backwards. Suddenly, it felt as if a hand had pushed at my back while another unseen hand grabbed my wrist and yanked me forward. There was no one else in the stairwell. When I told my grandma about it, she said that her house would never let one of her grandkids get hurt. Then the kitchen light flickered over us like the house was agreeing with her. Grandma just smiled.

When I was teen my bedroom was on the ground floor. My cats used to sleep with me on my bed. One night Wilbur, my tabby boy, woke up and stood up on his haunches like a prairie dog. He was looking straight at the window. I was lying in bed reading so I turned off the light so I could see outside the window better, and the moment I did I saw a man standing outside looking in at me. I screamed and my dad came rushing into the room, the man outside bolted, we could hear him running away.

I think I was 12 or 13. I got into a fight with my mom & I took off on my scooter down Ventura Blvd. A young man with curly blonde hair & an eyebrow ring almost hit me in his old blue mustang in the Petco parking lot. He got out & apologized profusely. I said it was okay, and he asked me if I needed a ride somewhere. I said no & started to leave but he drove beside me asking again, getting pushy, & I got scared. Ended up going into a Rite Aid to get away from him. It irked me to my bones and I can still picture his face. He was probably in his early 20s and I do recall his eyes being glassy but I didn’t register at that age that he was likely under the influence of something. For a long time eyebrow rings freaked me out. Just the correlation made my skin crawl. Something was not right with that guy.

Sister had an imaginary friend, would always tell me at night that he was sitting at the foot of my bed. I thought she just did it to scare me. One day we’re driving past a cemetery by our house (all flat gravestones so to a 4 year old looked like a park), and said, “oh that’s where (imaginary friend) lives!”. We all looked at each other like wtH. My mom goes to the cemetery office one day to look up her friend’s full name. Surprise, there’s a kid buried there w the exact same first/ last name.

I was very young, maybe 5ish? I heard my sister say, “I’m in the closet, come find me!” So I checked the closet, she wasn’t there. Then, “I’m under the bed..” she wasn’t there. I went to multiple places before I got frustrated and told my mom that my sister was being mean and sending me all over. My mom got a confused look on her face & said that my sister wasn’t home and was at a friends house. Who or what I played hide & seek with I still don’t know.

At 12 ish I woke up to my great uncle sitting on the foot of my Bed. He quietly told me " I love you, and wanted to say goodbye" this sounds so normalish, but he was supposed to be in a quadruple bypass in another city. I screamed, terrified and confused. My parents came in, and as they did the phone rang. My uncle had just passed during surgery...

I have a distinct memory of an old woman scratching my back as I fell asleep, telling me a story of a witch who had a long spear fingernail and would eat the livers of children. No one in my family knows who this woman was, or the story, but the story is an old Cherokee legend called spear finger. I still have my liver so that’s good I guess.

When i was seven, i was playing hide and seek with my older sister in our sprawling backyard. i hid inside an old, hollowed-out tree trunk. a few minutes later, my sister peered around the bark, smiled a really wide smile, and whispered, "found you." i followed her out, but she started walking silently toward the dense woods behind our property line instead of back to the house.

i trailed a few steps behind her until i heard my mom frantically screaming my name from the back porch. i turned around and saw my mom standing there... tightly holding my actual sister's hand. when i whipped my head back around toward the woods, the girl i had been following was completely gone, leaving only a set of bare footprints in the mud that abruptly stopped at the edge of the grass.

I was about 7, my parents used to leave me home alone while they were working downtown (early 2000's brazil so totally normal). It was part of my routine to wait for my dad to come home for lunch and i loved watching him arrive, by the 3rd floor bedroom window. This particular day, I didn't see him coming but somehow he just opened the front door and as I ran to see him, he walked right past me into the bathroom, just locked himself there. He was shirtless and barefoot. That was strange, but I thought "maybe something happened and he doesn't want to talk about it?" Okay...
So I go back to watching through that same window, not thinking about anything specific, but this is where it gets weird: I just see my dad, walking down the usual road where i could always get a vision of. He's wearing his normal clothes, his work backpack, it all seemed normal.
But who was that man locked in our bathroom? I was so scared that for a moment, I actually couldn't move
Some minutes passed, my actual dad walked up the stairs, got inside and found me in the bedroom, where he saw me standing by the window, paralized!
He touched my shoulder to see if everything was fine, but I started crying and shaking. Later I told him what happened, then he looked inside the bathroom and didn't find anything so just thought I had a dream about it or whatever but till this day, I'm SURE that it was real!

When I was maybe 6? I was holding the hand of a "friend" and woke my Mom up to meet him. She jolted awake and blinked at me and then gasped and looked up way above my head and scrambled to get up. By the time she did, my "friend" was gone and my Mom was in a panic.

I once lived in a rental with a very active ghost as a teen. Two story rental, gorgeous old house. He would borrow things, but always return them, and unlock the door if I left my keys at home. I'm talking an old, heavy lock, not something you could jiggle open.
One night, Charlie wouldn't let me turn off the lights. I'd turn one off, and a light in another room came on. Finally every light in the house came on...15 year old me said fine, screw it, he could have the lights on. My mom came home from work in the early morning and asked why every light was on. I explained that Charlie wouldn't let me turn them off. Only when she checked every door and window could we turn them off.
Turned out some neighborhood older teens had intended mischief while she wasn't home. Charlie's light show freaked them out so much they went to the police station themselves.

My friends and I used to play with an ouija board all the time. One night 4 of us were playing at my house. The board was insanely active, the planchette was flying with barely a finger on it, but it all seemed like complete gibberish.
Then it suddenly stopped and slowly spelled: TELL YOUR MOM.
We called my mom over. The second she was in the room, it started whipping around the board again. More gibberish. Then my mom got super angry and upset She looked at us and said, “Why would you girls do this? This isn’t funny” None of us had any idea what she was talking about. Turns out it wasn’t gibberish at all. It was Hungarian, my mom’s first language. I didn’t speak it at the time. It was saying things like: “I’m going to hurt them”. This was 30 years ago and last time it was brought up, my mom still thought we were pranking her. I’m still in contact with the friends & we still all agree we didn’t know what it was saying.

When I was around 5, my backyard had a creek, my older brother and older cousins and I lined up at the ledge before the creek to race, as soon as my brother finished the countdown and they took off running, I was yanked back by my elbow, and dragged down into the creek, I screamed and when I looked up I saw what I could only describe as the Hat Man. He held me really tight and I screamed some more, I looked back up the creek to see my brother& cousins standing above me, but when I looked back to the hat man, he was gone. I was laying upside down on the ledge into the creek, my screams got the attention of the adults and my uncle was pulling me back up,I was crying about the scary man that pulled me down, which prompted my uncle and grandpa to go looking in the creek for the man. Didn’t find anyone, the cops were called and they did a bigger search and also didn’t find anyone. They did find what looked like a homeless camp with random stuff lying about. But never what I described. Later that night in an attempt to console the still freaked out me, my mom took us to the nearest gas station for snacks. I stayed in the car with my oldest brother. And in the street light across the lot, i saw him AGAIN! Standing under the light and staring right at me. I panicked and felt like I was nauseous, and when my mom came out and saw me in absolute terror, she looked in the direction I was and said she saw no one.
Never saw him again after that.

I have so many stories, because I grew up in a haunted house. But this one was from when I stayed at my friend's place. She had a baby doll that we both were getting creeped out from. It had batteries in it and talked, and the eyes moved. We both agreed to take the batteries out so we could sleep. So keep in mind they were out by now! A few mins later it started laughing (it honestly sounded like dozens of kids laughing tbh), and a voice that just kept saying "we're gonna get you". We screamed and threw it in a bag, tied it up a secure to the closet bar, and blocked the door while we tried to sleep. We must have dozed off at some point, bc we woke up to the closet no longer blocked, the door open, and the doll on the floor. I never slept over at Mel's place again. My family still refuses to believe me. Mel and I know what happened though.

I had a dream I went to a really bright hospital to talk to my great aunt and she was hooked up to a bunch of machines. I told my mom about it and all the details and she said "How do you know that? You didn't go with us to see her there"
I also think she got creeped out when she found me sitting in front of my great aunt's empty recliner talking like someone was there after she had passed.

I HATED my bedroom as a kid. I always kind of *felt* like someone was there, but never really saw anything to confirm that feeling. Then one night when I was probably 5, I sat up around 2:30 in the morning and saw a VERY tall man in a union uniform just standing in the hallway staring at me. I told my older sister about it the next day, and she dismissed it. I brought it up a few months ago (we’re now 37 and 40), and she said she saw him too but was just too afraid to admit it.

My childhood room was upstairs. One summer in my teenage years at about 1am I heard my mother scream my name. I pop out the bed and as I’m running to the stairs my phone rings and it’s the ringtone for my mom. I run back in my room to grab it and answer. She in a panicked voice says “Don’t come downstairs I heard that too it wasn’t me.” I turned every light on upstairs and locked my door. My mom wakes my aunt up and they search the entire house and found nothing.

My mom told me that when I was a toddler I was having a conversation with “ someone” but there was no one there. When she asked me who I was talking to, I pointed to the picture of my deceased grandmother and told her I was talking to “ mama”. I was born in 96 and she passed away in 95.

When I was about 11 we rescued a German Shephard cross. She was clearly treated poorly before she came to us, and she was terrified of men. She slept in my room every night. One night, I woke up and the room felt wrong. I slowly sat up, reached for the switch and turned the light on. That dog was nose to nose with me. Not growling, but not calm. A few moments of intense eye contact, then she moved away. I did not sleep easy that night.

My childhood home was haunted. We frequently heard footsteps on our upper level when no one was up there. One night when I was about 5, I woke up in my bed to a young girl walking across my room. She seemed to be wearing old fashioned clothes, like maybe from the 1930s. She sat on the foot of my bed and started to read a book. When I tried to talk to her, she stood up, walked away, and disappeared. I went and woke up my mom to ask “who was that little girl in my room” and she was freaked out.