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

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.

My dad used to have a Jesus painting in a room we had that wasn't used anymore. The door faced the living room, and the painting was, obviously, on the wall right in front of the door.
The painting used to smile and blink at me.
I’m not kidding.
No one believed me.
The smile and the blinks weren’t peaceful or beautiful, they were evil.
He has the painting to this day, and I hate it so much.

My mom was a nurse and sometimes worked the night shift. One afternoon before her shift we were outside on the porch swing, and I was laying with my head in her lap. We were just swinging and talking. I look up and her whole face changes she has this weird, wide grin on her face and her eyes are completely black. I jump up, get right in her face, and say you are not my mom. Then hauled to my Gigi’s who was our neighbor. My mom follows me confused. I tell her I saw her eyes change and my Gigi and her are so confused. For weeks I would test her and ask her only questions my mom would know. And ask her why her eyes changed and if she was an alien would she tell me. For weeks I kept my distance until I was sure she was my mom. It was the weirdest thing.

I remember after we moved into our house (I think I was like 17 at the time) my parents went grocery shopping on a Saturday without me. I’m just chilling in my bed when I hear my dad shout my name from downstairs (They always used to come in through the basement door so they could put stuff in the storage room). I shout back “Yeah?” And get annoyed when he doesn’t respond. So I go downstairs and into the basement, thinking he needs help carrying stuff. Basement is totally quiet, back door closed and I open it to check if their car is in the driveway. No car in the driveway, no parents. I don’t know who called for me that day but it sounded exactly like my dad. I have a bunch of other weird stories regarding our house. We still live in it as well.

I sleep with a light on to this day bc growing up I was convinced something was in my room. As a child I would "have dreams" about my stuffed animals being tossed around the room or seeing something watch me from my closet. As a teen I experienced horrific nightmares and sleep paralysis. I would tell my parents this and they just wrote it off.
Then, one day, my mom says she had this re-occuring dream for years of watching something walk down the hallway to my room and then leave.

When I was a kid, my mom’s friend, who was a doctor, had brought back a real human skull from South America. This was in the early ’80s. It was missing the jaw and the top of the cranium. He let me take it home. I became obsessed with it and treated it with total reverence.
My family eventually realized I had smuggled the skull to the beach, built a giant sand fortress, and placed it at the very top.
The horror this caused among onlookers and family members.

My mom doesn’t refuse to talk about anything cus she loves to recount how creepy I was as a kid but she definitely still gets the chills telling people about when I woke up and told her the angels said a family member died. Then she got the call they passed away. Or that time when I showed her that after my nana passed if I put my music box nana got me (closed) in a sunbeam in my room it would play the music while closed. Good times.

We used to live at grandma's house. The only place you could hang your clothes after laundry is by my auntie's window.
While my mom was hanging clothes, my aunt's cabinet door was shaking violently. It's as if something wanted to come out. I was horrified and I looked at my mom who doesn't see the shaking.
She asked what's wrong upon calling her attention for the nth. But I couldn't speak from fear I just look at the cabinet. Mom kept on hanging tye clothes and the cabinet continued to shake I screamed and cried and when my mom glanced at me my nose was bleeding. The cabinet stopped shaking after that.
Now that I'm an adult. I told my mom about it. And she was stunned. She told me the cabinet wasn't shaking but she did remember my nose bled.
Days later my my cousin told me that when we were young, aunt's cabinet would also shake violently.

My mom doesn't scream, she rarely reacts, she is too well disciplined to let anyone see her slipping. One night I heard her screaming, I hear my older sister get up and she's trying to get into our mom's room. I start trying to help, we cant get the door open, there are no locks. She's still screaming and then it just stops. The door shifts open. My mom's sitting on the bed but like her head was at a weird angle and her eyes weren't really seeing. My sister starts to approach and my mom says calmly "go back to bed girls" my sister moves closer, my mom sits up and yells "go back to bed! Now!" So my sister takes me to her room and she moves her dresser in front of the door and we dont turn off the lights. Morning comes and mom's in the kitchen making breakfast like nothing happened. She keeps telling us we must have had a nightmare. Nothing happened. Its been 30 years and she still won't tell me.

Context: I was a teen, home alone in the middle of the day playing on the shared family computer. There’s a door in that room (the office) that leads to a back porch and the back porch also has a door connecting to our family room. Both doors have windows. In the family room is a staircase that leads up to my dad’s office and a set of French doors leading to my brothers room. Brother’s room is directly above the office I was in. Our house is old so everything makes very distinct noises. I’m just playing sims and enjoying having the house to myself. Brother is down the street at a neighbors going swimming but could be home any time. I hear the screen door on our back porch open and close but don’t look up because I’m expecting my parents or brother. I then hear the door to the family room open and close and someone running up the stairs and through the French doors into my brother’s room. I just assume he’s home. Mind that he also has an extremely distinct way of running up the stairs. It’s a very specific and kinda weird on all fours kind of gallop. I want to say he was maybe 12-13 at the time. But then everything goes quiet. Which is weird. Because all of our floors creak and we can hear the bathtub upstairs being turned on in every part of the house. I call out for him and get no response. I walk to the door overlooking the porch and is shoes are still gone as are his towel and other stuff. He was a pre-teen boy and usually just threw everything on the floor. Bro likes to talk too and usually starts a conversation the moment he walks thru a door but no one is responding. I end up going down the street to the neighbor with the pool. And there’s my brother, still swimming. I call my parents and they both confirm neither of them were home and suggest it was the wind.I refuse to go back into the house until they get home. Dad ends up searching the entire house, attic, and crawlspace but there’s no one there.

As a young child I would wake up and see people in my room, just sitting there watching me. And growing up in California I was a victim of many an earthquake, yes victim, because I never asked for them! Anyway, one hit in the middle of the night, I was 6, and I saw three people at the end of my bed holding my bed still for me so it wouldn’t scare me so much. I asked them to go away and they did then rushed to my parents room who didn’t feel the quake and said I imagined it. I asked them about it in the morning and my brothers had felt the earthquake so they helped plead my case that it’s as real. I asked who was holding my bed for me and my parents just looked at each other and and then me. My mom proceeded to tell me I was just dreaming and didn’t see anyone there. I went on to tell them I see people all the time. More gaslighting. I think I just scared my parents because as a child I had a gift.

I was 6 and my mom was pregnant with my sister. I had a dream that I was told my baby sister would pass away(just a voice, I couldn’t see who was talking to me). I slept walked, took the baby out of a Russian nesting doll, and threw it out my window. My parents came in as I was trying to crawl out of the window and they stopped me. My baby sister ended up passing away at two months old from a muscular dystrophy illness. Even though it would have been just outside, we never found the baby doll.

When I was 15 I was staying at my family’s lake house. I had my first sleep paralysis experience. I remember seeing a man in a black latex suit in the corner of the room staring at me, but I couldn’t move or scream. He approached me climbed on top of me and began to strangle me. Shaken, I snapped out of it and realized none of it was real. 5 years go by and my cousin brings up the same exact story I experienced at our lakehouse… the exact same figure, the same bedroom, the same situation.

It was Christmas vacation and my cousins and I, aged 5-10, were up late talking quietly in a guest room at our grandparents house. We all went silent as we watched the tin reindeer they kept next to the fireplace “walk” past the doorway down the hall. Toe to toe, barely touching the carpet, and moving by itself. We just looked at each other and stayed awake all night. Too scared to do anything else.

Back in the early 2000s it was my turn on the computer (iykyk), which was near the living room. I noticed my sister sitting on the couch near me reading, I could see the back of her head. Totally expected. But I noticed I heard my mom and sister in the kitchen talking. Confused and distracted I looked over and "my sister" on the couch laid down really quickly. When I went to check.. no sister. She was in the kitchen the whole time.

I was 14 and I had a cold. I woke up at like 2am to blow my nose and I sneezed. A man’s voice said “bless you” and I said thank you and then was like “wait a minute”.
Sometimes my parents would come check on us when we were sick so I reassured myself that it was just my dad. The next morning I told my dad that he had scared me when he said bless you.
He had no clue what I was talking about.

My mom had a vintage fairy clock. The clock was in a waterfall shaped rock, and the fairy was sitting next to it. I always hated the clock because every time i stare at it, it makes me uneasy. It wasnt a wall clock or anything, it was an alarm clock.
One day, i felt someone watching me and it was the fairy. I saw a glimpse and immediately ran to my mom with the clock in my hand trying to convince her the fairy is alive and looked at me! She wouldnt believe me. When she left I was annoyed at my failed attempt to convince her. So i just stared at the fairy, hard. Trying to see if she is alive. It didnt take long, after 2 minutes or so, the fairy did not move but, her pupils did. She was ceramic.
Her eyes, actually flickered so quick, as if she was mocking me. But i caught it. I knew what i saw because right after she did that? My heart pounded so hard, and i just drew sharpie over her eyes so she wouldnt stare at me anymore.
My mom still doesnt believe me.

When I was 6, my dad took me out for a night walk after dinner.
Then I pointed at a direction and said to him, “look Papa, there’s a dog…. But why he has a human head?”
My dad quickly took me home.

I walked into the woods one day after school with a group of neighborhood kids and it was snowing & we ended up getting lost. We tried to follow our footprints back but they were gone. It started snowing harder &Everyone else started panicking and running in different directions. I stayed still staring straight up at the sky. I remember sitting down, crying being terrified that I was lost, alone and cold. I remember the snow suddenly stopping, not feeling cold anymore and somehow someway I managed to just walk right out of the woods as if I was standing on the edge the whole time. came out on the opposite side of the apartment complex I lived in. I had been gone for hours it was dark and the snow started again when I walked through my front door,( side note: my sister was supposed to be watching me & she didn’t notice I was gone ) I still do not remember how I made it out of there tbh.

When I was little, I spent the night at my friends house. I woke up to a girl standing next to the bed…. Wearing all white with no eyes. So I pretended to be asleep and rolled back over. That was elementary school.. years later, my best friend in high school spent the night and saw the same “person” in my room. I never told her the story yikes