56 Of The Creepiest Things People Actually Experienced In Real Life

10 years ago. I was 18 years old. As I was taking a shower and washed my hair, with every washing motion I pulled out more and more of my own hair until I was bald. No reason, no warning, nothing, just the pure horror of pulling out hands full of hair. The drain clogged with my hair as I silently stared in the mirror across the room at my own bald head. It felt like i was falling apart. Mentally and physically. I honestly thought I would die that day.

It was sudden auto-immune disease. Alopecia over night. It was scary as hell. The weeks after I lost all my body hair as well. My hair never returned and I am very okay with it now, but I can never ever forget that moment in the shower...

Didn't realize until years later that I was almost snatched.

Grew up in a small town. Out playing in the yard with my 2 younger siblings like every other summer day. Guy pulls up alongside the yard in a truck, calls me over. Asks my name, if I'm having a good summer. He says he could really use my help, he's out looking for his lost puppy. He can show me a photo of the puppy if I come closer. No, closer. The picture is small, can I please help him? I yelled to my brother on the other side of the yard "Daaaaaan, come help us find a puppy!"

I have to assume he thought I yelled 'dad' because he noped / screeched out of there without another word.

I remember being really worried about that puppy...until we had an assembly at our primary school about things strangers might say to lure you into their vehicles.

Here's something creepy I ended up doing.

Some context: my senior year of HS a bunch of the senior class decided to play a game, the name of which escapes me right now. Basically, everyone (around 30 people) starts at point A on one side of town. Roughly half of those people have to move on foot to point B on the other side of town. The other half of the people wait 10 minutes. Then they pair up and get in cars, driving around looking for people who left on foot and the passenger gets out to "tag" them.

I was one of the passengers in this game. Me and the person driving spotted a girl. We drove a little ahead of her and I sprinted out of the car, chasing this girl for about half a block before I realized she was easily out running me.

Fast forward about 20 minutes, and I'm at point B looking for this girl to give her props. Looking around, I can't seem to find her. I ask the person who I was in the car with who she was but my friend didn't recognize her either. "I thought you knew who she was."

From that girls perspective: she was out jogging when a random car stopped ahead of her. An unfamiliar guy runs out of the passenger seat and chases her for a bit.

I was the creep.

When I was a child I was always stricken by this irrational fear that when I went outside at night, I had to walk STRAIGHT into the house without looking back, because if I looked back, someone would be following me.

One day after dinner I went out to the car to get my bookbag, and I was continuing my ritual of walking straight inside without looking back, adrenaline pumping, anxiety going full force, and I just stopped and said to myself "this is stupid." I made myself look back.

When I looked back I saw what appeared to be someone crouched down behind my mom's car and was peeking their head around. They were just staring at me and smiling. It appeared to be a woman in her mid 30s, maybe 40 with curly short blonde hair. We made eye contact for a second and then she ducked back behind the car where I couldn't see her.

I stood frozen for a second and then ran inside. I told my mom, we went outside to check, no one was there. My mom didn't exactly not believe me, but she wasn't very concerned either.

Posted this before, also my top comment of all time...

Rented a cabin for a week with my SO - first night there we had spent the day visiting her family (the actual reason for our trip), had dinner, she got pretty wasted. Get back to the cabin, carry my SO inside - to find all our bags opened/dumped onto the floor. This set me into panic mode.

I hadn't been drinking and I routinely carry, so I pull out my g*n and sweep the house - I check every room, closets, even under the bed - nothing. My SO is still fast asleep, so I check our stuff over and there's nothing missing. It had just been dumped onto the floor. So I look around some more, all the windows are locked, the backdoor was even d**d bolted.

It just really bothered me that there was no sign of break in. I know I locked the place before I left, so either someone else had a key to my cabin, or whoever it was was still inside the cabin. Either way, I didn't think I'd do much sleeping.

It was too late to make other arrangements, and considering that most likely there wasn't anything to worry about really. We had been gone all day, from 9am - midnight. So odds whoever it was did it was probably way earlier. But still... I couldn't shake it. I went in and covered up my SO, used the bathroom, set up a rocking chair facing the front door - my hand on my g*n on my lap, I started watch.

I felt pretty silly sitting there, but I couldn't not sit there either. And some time around 3-4am, I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning around 7am, sun shining through. I actually half scared myself because I hadn't meant to fall asleep - which then scared me again because I wasn't holding my g*n. I start looking around, and on the couch is my g*n. I'm like What... then I look - the front door is wide open. I'm like.. NO F*****G WAY. I jump up and start running to check on my SO - thank God she was still there, untouched. I go back out into the living room and pick up my g*n, all my bullets are missing.

I go outside and look around, car and everything is still there - no signs of anybody. I walk back inside, look in the far corner of the living room and I see the corner of the main living room rug lifted up. I investigate - it's covering the opening to the crawlspace.

That means this guy was IN MY CABIN THE ENTIRE TIME. I must have pulled up and caught the guy in the act, he thought fast and hid in the crawlspace. Then some time during the night, crawled out, DISARMED ME, and walked right out the front door.

TL:DR Rented a cabin, came back for the night found our stuff dumped on the floor. Put my SO to bed, stayed in the living room with my g*n incase they came back. Fell asleep. Woke up the next morning to my g*n on the couch, a hidden crawlspace door open, and the front door open. The person was hiding in the crawlspace the entire time - and worse, came out while I was sleeping and disarmed me.

I'd just moved into a basement suite. Everytime I went out I would lock the deadbolt but not the door handle but when I came home a lot of the time the deadbolt would be unlocked and the door handle would be locked.

At first I thought I was just confused about which one I had locked so I started paying more attention. It kept happening and I realized someone must be going in when I went out. I assumed it was the landlady and was annoyed but didn't say anything at first.

Then one day I came home and found the wrong lock locked again. I went in p***ed off and opened the fridge to get something to eat. There was a book in the fridge that I had never seen before. I collected old books and this one was published in the early 1900s which creeped me out completely because it was like it had been left for me.

I finally called my landlady and asked if she was going into my apartment and told her what had happened. She freaked right out, said the last person who lived there was a really creepy guy with mental health and d**g problems. She got all the locks changed that day and it never happened again.

Me and my fiancé saw a guy on the side of the road asking for a ride. I told her there was no way I'd pick up a male hitchhiker. She told me it was the right thing to do but I convinced her that we shouldn't. Three days later he was arrested for m**dering the couple that picked him up.

Im 52. When I was about 8 years old, 5 other 8-10 year olds were in a kids bedroom playing. This one boy and me were wrestling around when someone turned off the lights. When the light went off there was a loud pop. Another kid had found a pistol and fired it. I was laying on the bedroom floor. The bullet missed my head by 2 inches. It was a straight down sh*t that narrowly missed.

When I was 15-16, my mom put me on “diet pills” (still don’t know what they are) that let me get away with just eating a tiny cup of soup the whole day and be ok with sleeping less than 3h daily. I got hooked on them because I could study way more.

I guess the sleep deprivation finally caught up one night, and I started having auditory hallucinations. It started with white noise, then morphed into what sounded like a garbled shouting argument between a bunch of people and started echoing until it became a man with a deep, sinister laugh laughing hysterically.

The rational part of me figured it’s auditory hallucinations but holy c**p it was petrifying and I could feel every hair standing up.

Then another part of me just thought, “Well, if it’s not a hallucination and I’m actually going to get m**dered by bloodthirsty ghosts, at least I don’t have to take the test tomorrow.”

I continued studying.

Asian schools were tough.

My mom and her friend were out and about late at night, heading to a party. Their car broke down, and being a rural town with a small population, they had to walk about a mile to the nearest house for help. They got to the front door, and of all people to answer the door, it was one of their high school teachers. He was horrified to see them out late at night, alone. He let them use his phone but scolded them saying it was not safe- the location, time and circumstances, he let them know they were absolute fools and heeded a somewhat vague warning. My mom called my grandfather to come bring gas and/or possibly tow their vehicle.

When the girls got back to their car, there was a severed cow head on the hood, blood everywhere! This was near Hermiston, OR, apparently well known for devil worshippers.

Have posted this before, but for anyone interested: I used to live in a rented house that sat across the street from a fairly bustling city park. At night, when the park was deserted, I would walk out my front door and sit on my porch and look at the trees and the stars. One night, around 1am, I opened the front door and started to sit down. That's when I saw a man standing in the deserted park. He was directly in front of my house. The man was dressed all in black and was wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask seemed fairly intricate but was most definitely a store bought cheapo. The sight of this guy sent a chill down my spine. He didn't move at all--although I know he saw me. The entire neighborhood was silent and still and we just paused there holding our ground. We watched each other for a long time and then he sauntered away. I ended up calling the cops because I figured this guy was casing the neighborhood. Cops came, took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. Couple of months later, I'm doing some yard work around the side of my house. I'm pulling a huge tangle of weeds out from a thicket underneath my kitchen window. I see something that looks like trash, pick it up: it's the mask I saw that night

EDIT: Again, sorry to anyone who has read this before! So many good ones on here I'd hate to waste your time. And no I didn't keep the mask, I don't have any pictures either. By the time I saw the mask in my yard it was pretty much destroyed from weather, etc. I eventually moved within the year and never saw the guy again.

This happened to a friend of mine.

It's a Sunday. She comes home to her apartment from running errands around 1 pm. She was in med school at this time, so she pretty much parked herself at the kitchen table and studied for the next 5-6 hrs. She's sitting there and looks up to see a dude casually stroll out of her bedroom. No other entrances, she's sitting by the front door, so he's been there the entire time she has been home. He pauses at the doorway to her kitchen, between her and the door. She basically froze. Then her phone rang and kind of startled both of them. She ran to get the phone, he ran out the door. She moved and got an enormous dog.

HE WAS IN HER APARTMENT THE WHOLE TIME. This is one of my biggest fears.

When I was about 9 or 10, my older brother and I had a few friends over to stay the night. My Dad had to work the next day so we were all left at the house by ourselves for the day. We were excited to play playstation all day on our Saturday off. Well my Dad worked late that night (until probably 8 or 9). As soon as the sun went down we went into one of the rooms upstairs to play Uno.

Fast forward 30 minutes and we start hearing footsteps slowing walking up the wooden stairs. My dad wasn't going to be home for another 2 hours so we didn't know who it was. There were four of us, me, my brother, my friend, and his friend. We would take turns walking out of the room to see what it was but before we could look down the dark stairs we would hear what sounded like someone running down the stairs as fast as they could so they couldn't be seen. This continued for probably 2 hours ending with all of us huddled in the room upstairs with the door wedged shut with a chair until my Dad got home.

None of us were really believers in anything paranormal but a child's imagination is a crazy thing. Now 15 years later, I still don't know what to make of it but every one of us heard those footsteps walking up those dark stairs. I bring it up to my friend who I'm still friends with and he remembers it just as vividly as I do. It kind of creeps me out just thinking about it.

When I was around 14 years old, I really liked to go for runs with my shepherd x lab. I lived in a fairly quiet, clean suburban neighborhood that was situated beside a broad expanse of pasture used by about ten horses (I would say it was roughly 40 acres). Anyway, a bike path ran between the pasture and my neighborhood and I generally ran down the path. One night I decided to go with my pup around 10:00 pm. May not seem like the smartest decision, but I had spent many nights with my group of friends biking/rollerblading around the neighborhood so I thought nothing of the late hour. I was running down the bike path with my dog, who is a a big pup yet the friendliest guy you'll meet. As we ran I noticed a dark lump a little ways ahead, and because it was nearly pitch black I could barely see it. I dismissed it as a garbage bag. As we drew closer, my dog perked up his ears and his hackles went up and he started to growl...which he rarely ever does. He loves basically everything. I stopped running and stared as the 'garbage bag' started to move. 14 year old me still didn't really know what the heck I was looking at, and it wasn't until the supposed garbage stood up that I realized it was a man...who then started to run towards us! My dog then turned around and, I kid you not, started to run and yanked me along behind him. We reached a street, he darted down it, then pulled me into a dark alley, onto another street, then another alley, then another street, until we somehow lost the guy. My dog saved my life, I'm pretty sure. The guy may not have been an axe m******r but it turns out some creepy ex felon was arrested in our neighborhood about two days later. I love my dog.

Back in the 70s my grandfather dropped my grandmother, mom, and her 2 sisters off to do some shopping on his way to work. Since he wasn't able to pick them up, they hitch hiked home.

My mom at the time was only around 10 or 11, middle sister would've been about 7 or 8 and the youngest was about a year old.

They get picked up by a guy in pick up truck, who has them all sit in the back row with one of them holding the baby. My grandmother was giving directions to their home from the highway, but the guy ignored her and went by their exit claiming he had to make a stop first. Didn't really say much else to them during the drive, my mom remembers my grandmother being very quiet and very nervous.

Eventually they come up to a farm, driver tells them to wait in the car and goes inside the house. While he's gone they just sit there terrified, they're in the middle of nowhere and know they couldn't make it out on foot. A few minutes later the driver comes out with a second guy who looks into truck and sees my mom's youngest sister. He starts flipping out, screaming at the driver that he shouldn't have brought the baby back, they aren't going to do anything with her and some other things I can't remember, ends up telling him to get them away from the farm.

Driver gets back into the truck, apologizes, and they get back on the highway and drive again in silence. My grandmother, normally a very smart woman, had him drive directly to their house (although I suspect her reasoning was she'd already given him the address before anything seemed off). They lived at that house for several years and luckily never saw either of them a second time.

This story certainly felt creepy when it was happening. I was in the orthopedic surgery wing of the hospital after getting my torn Achilles tendon repaired. It was a fairly long procedure and I was pretty groggy from the anesthesia after-effects combined with the morphine for the pain, but I did notice that I had a roommate that had both of his hands and feet wrapped in bandages. I could hear him talking to his father, but didn't pay much attention because of how out of it I was at the time. I did remember hearing something about "Why did you stop taking your medication?"

I don't know how morphine affects anyone else, but it gives me a very restless sleep combined with vivid dreams (almost nightmares; something I never have). So in the middle of the night, while turning over for the 100th time I spied someone standing beside my bed in the dark.

"Do you have any smokes?"

My roommate apparently was standing there watching me sleep, waiting for me to wake up to ask for a cigarette. It could be considered being very polite or very creepy, but when you are in a morphine induced haze it was definitely creepy. Later that day I heard the details of why he was there. He had gone off his meds and decided to quit smoking hard core. I mean liquid nitrogen cold turkey.

First he nailed his feet to the floor so he couldn't go out for smokes. Then he took a butcher knife from the kitchen and cut off the fingers of his left hand so he couldn't hold a cigarette. That's where his plan kind of fell apart, because he had a lot of trouble cutting off the right fingers with no left fingers to hold the knife. He only got though three of them. I put this together between the conversations I overheard between family, nurses and doctors.

I was supposed to be in there for another day, but they told me I could go home early if I was OK with taking Tylenol 3 for the pain. I would have to stay if I needed the stronger morphine pain-k**ler so the staff could administer it. I said I would go home with aspirin if it meant getting out of that room. The head nurse at the nursing station was sympathetic, she said the guy really needed to be in a different kind of hospital but he had orthopedic issues that had to be dealt with and that's why he was there.

It wasn't supernatural, just a mentally disturbed individual who had hurt himself. He probably couldn't even have hurt anyone else considering his injuries, but in my morphine fog it was creepy as hell to me to have someone that disturbed 10 feet away while I was sleeping.

My family were driving on the rural main road of Poland (we're Polish) and next to our car was this truck delivering large concrete pipes. We drove next to this truck for maybe an hour, maybe two. I was a teenager so I didn't really care.

My dad figures we stop at the next gas station for a quick toilet break. As I exit the car, a pair of bikes drive past the gas station. I noticed because it was loud as f**k.

Pee pee over and we go back on the road. About a mile or so down the road there's an accident. The bikes had caught up with the truck and as they were about to drive past it the large concrete pipes fell off the truck and smushed the bikers. Maybe they weren't fastened properly, or the truck swerved. I'm not sure but they were d**d. Blood everywhere. I still have a hard time thinking of what could've happened.

Tl;dr survived some real final destination s**t.

My wife and I rented an old townhouse in Birmingham, AL about 10 years ago. It was spooky for no other reason other than it was old and in the woods. (We are both suburban Californians so this was enough to freak us out a little)

We used to joke that there was a "presence" in the house, but after a while we started experiencing strange things. When you would leave the kitchen after grabbing a snack, all the cabinets would be closed, but if you returned a few minutes later, all of the cabinets would be wide open. Freaky, but just annoying.

Later on things escalated. My wife would come home late after roller derby practice and we had very steep steps that led up to our door, being the consider husband that I was I would be sure to turn on the porch light so she wouldn't trip. Something often would turn the light back off (old style breaker switch on the wall, had to put some force behind flipping it). This caused my wife to once seriously trip coming to the door late at night.

My wife complained often that she felt unsafe when I was working late and she was alone, and we began to realize whatever was in the house didn't like her specifically. Walking to the bathroom late at night and passing the hall mirror, we both spotted a disfigured woman in the reflection. I thought I was hallucinating when I first saw it, but after a few times of it occurring I mentioned it to my wife, who freaked out and told me she had seen the same thing too in the past.

Over the next year or so I would sometimes have nightmares about the woman I had seen and would wake up next to my wife and would jostle around, a few times this would wake my wife too and she would respond "go back to sleep, it's just a dream, I saw her too."

The pinnacle of the event was late one night my wife came home and started screaming at me for no apparent reason, leveling nonsensical accusations and just being mean. I was in the middle a writing a paper due the next morning so I told her I was not going to deal with and she should go to bed. She turned off all the lights except in the downstairs den where I was working and went upstairs to bed. An hour later I finished my paper and went to bed. When I got to the bottom of the stairwell leading to our bedroom, I turned on the light and was shocked to see my wife sitting at the top of the stairs (in what had been the complete dark). She just stared down at me and I swear to God her eyes were completely black and her strawberry blond hair had been bleached completely white. I was scared more than I've ever been in my life but slowly walked up the stairs to her. When I got to the top her eyes and hair turned normal and she began sobbing, saying that something was attacking her and she was filled with hate. We held each other through the night. And talked about it several times after. My wife is convinced she was possessed. I believe she was as well.

We live in California again and have been married for 8 1/2 years, nothing has ever happened like that again.

TL;DR: haunted house/possession.

It was 2001 and my friend and I were 17 (both female) and driving back from a late movie to my house one night. I lived in a pretty rural area in Maine, about 20 minutes from the nearest town.

As we were driving down the highway through the woods, we passed a median with a car sitting in it, facing in the oncoming direction, with all its lights off. Right after we drove past it, it flashed its lights, did a 3 point turn and started driving behind us. We giggled that "oh, it must be a gang initiation, we're gonna get m******d!" because this was Maine and that was obviously not what was happening.

The turnoff for my road was a few miles away and this car stayed behind us the whole time. We made the left turn and the car kept going down the highway. Phew! But 30 seconds later we realized that the car must have backed up on the highway and made the turn after us. Now we were getting a little worried. There was still one more road to turn down before we got to my house (this is way in the woods) and the car did the same thing...backed up and made the left after us. Now we were legit freaked.

I had a long driveway and the car followed us right into the driveway and almost up to my house, which had all the lights on because my mom was home. We ran into my house, just in time to see the mystery car reverse back down the driveway and drive away.

To this day we still have no idea why that car was following us - if they thought we were someone else or if they actually had bad intentions and only changed their mind when they saw that my houselights were on. Since we only ever saw the front of the car, we didn't get a license plate or a better description than "a blue car".

When my wife was in college, she took a philosophy class or something. On the first day everyone announced who they were etc. turns out she was sitting next to a police officer who was taking the class for continuing education or a promotion (can't remember, but he was actively a police officer). This was really great for her because she's small and it was a night time class.

They became friends ish (as much as two people sitting next to each other for a few classes are) he agreed to walk her to her car after class since the school wasn't in the best area and it made her feel safe.

Around mid terms he stops showing up. She's kind of confused, but figured life happens and something else probably came up.

A few weeks later we're at her parents house and her mom asks if we had heard about the police officer that had been arrested. We hadn't so she begins to fill us in on this police officer that had been pulling women over and raping them in their cars.

We live in a small town, but it gets super rural super fast if you leave, so nobody is passing these scenes as they're happening.

Anyway, turns out that the officer r***ng women was the same guy that was walking her to her car after class every week and the reason he wasn't in class was because he had been arrested.