These 36 Folks Reveal The Most Abnormal Experiences That Left Them Shaking In Fear

When I was 11, my family moved to a very old house (built in the 1890s, I think) in a different state. The first night there, I didn't have many of my things unpacked yet and the TV wasn't hooked up, so I drag out my keyboard and start to play. As I'm playing some terrible song I learned in music class, a chill goes down my neck. I look over to the window on the other side of the room and see my reflection -- and an old woman standing over me, her hands clasped in front of her. I booked it downstairs, screaming to my mom, but of course it was dismissed since I was a dumb kid.

Over the 7 years I lived in that house, I saw her three more times: once on the stairs, slowly descending and staring at me, and twice in the spare room catty-corner to mine, hiding in a rack of clothes in the corner. Every single night, I would hear the threshold creak, then footsteps going around my bed, to the dressing room (it was, once again, an old house, so there was a tiny dressing room attached to the main room), and then back out. A few nights I woke up to a cold breath on my face.

Come to find out a woman died in that room in the 1960s of some sort of illness, but the room she usually stayed in was mine. I don't really believe in ghosts anymore, but d**n if I can't explain the lady in that house.

Re-posting this from before. I generally don't believe in ghosts but d**n I have no way to explain this.

EDIT: TL;DR: Had a ghost that would visit me on command.

Okay. I haven't told anyone this story since I was a child, because when I told my cousins what was happening it scared them really bad and I got my second-only whooping with a belt by my Dad. As an adult I don't mention it because...I just don't know what it was and I don't want other adults to think I'm nuts.

When I was in second grade I woke up one summer night, dead of night, to a woman floating through my window into my bedroom. Oddly, I wasn't scared. I just sat up and asked "What are you doing here?" I remember she answered me, but oddly enough the next morning I couldn't remember what she said or even what her voice sounded like. I couldn't even remember what she looked like. So next I said to her, in true 8-year old fashion, "Well, you better get going because my Dad might wake up and then he'll be mad." She slipped out of my already cracked open bedroom door and I went back to sleep.

Sounds like sleep paralysis right? Wrong. The next day I was really excited that I had my own fairy godmother and I named her Crystal. And I thought in my head - Please come back! Come back and wake me up at dawn so we can talk!

I s**t you not, the next morning, just as it was getting light outside, I hear someone whispering my name. I realized that this s**t was real, and she was a ghost, and I froze. I stayed as still as I could, not even able to breathe, and just prayed as hard as I could 'Go away go away go away." I could FEEL her right by my head. As I'm typing this tears are coming to my eyes.

Okay, happened once, coincidence, right? Nope. Every time I would get brave and say out loud to her, before going to bed in my room, "Okay, come this time I swear I won't get scared." She would come, whispering my name, and I would almost s**t my pants in fear and never open my eyes.

So at this point I'm thinking, still could be night terrors, right? I mean, our eyes have receptors sensitive to light that wake us up, thus causing me to wake up at dawn and hallucinate this s**t.
Here's where s**t gets real. Next summer I tell a friend that this is going on while we were camping together. She doesn't believe me, says to me, okay, ask her to come tonight. We're sleeping in same tent and my friend wants to see for herself. So I do. And at dawn, I hear her, calling my name AND MY FRIEND'S NAME. We don't move, she leaves, and we both sit up and my FRIEND HEARD HER TOO. She freaks out, tells her parents later that day sobbing, I get in trouble for scaring the s**t out of kids with ghost stories.

Later that summer I told my cousin this story, and before that night, she freaks out, tells her Mom, and I get my a*s beat for telling ghost stories.

I got pissed about said beating, and angrily said out loud - I got in trouble because of you, and I never want to see you ever again!

And I haven't. Ever.

Thank f*****g god. And I just don't think about it anymore, and never when I'm alone at night.


EDIT: So, decided to try tonight to 'summon' my little ghost friend. Mostly 'cause I've had a few. Probably won't end up being anything (I've tried before). Will update tomorrow am. :)


EDIT 2: Holy f**k my inbox - and my highest rated comment is about a ghost?! Sorry to disappoint Reddit - but nothing. No ghost. But because of you I STILL woke at dawn paranoid as f**k and couldn't sleep.

When I was growing up my family moved to a cul-de-sac when I was around 8 and my brother was in the ballpark of 9. We immediately befriended two girls who lived next door to us who were basically our exact same age and we hung out with them every day. We would frequently go down to a bike path located behind the circle of houses that occupied our street to ride around on our skateboards, walk to the nearby shopping center it eventually led to (it was very long), and basically just hang out. The bike path went through the woods and went in both directions for a long time and we would often wander into the woods and play in the creek and catch crawfish and frogs and all that huckleberry finn kind of stuff. Well the first or second week we lived there my brother and I and these two girls were playing around in the creek a good ways down from our house and we went exploring into a short sewage pipe. It was barely 20 feet in total and you could easily see both ends, which drained into a collection of large rocks. Well after we had sufficiently crawled around in this sketchy rainwater runoff pipe, we started climbing up the rocks to leave. My brother noticed something in the rocks and picked it up to discover that it was a small, wallet-sized, and relatively recent portrait of himself that had been taken at our school for the yearbook the prior year. It had signs of aging and water damage, and seemed to have been there for a while. I think our initial reaction was to laugh at my brother for looking goofy or something, but looking back I can't believe I didn't see how sinister it seemed. Kept going back for a long time and it was not the last creepy thing to happen on that bike path or in that neighborhood.

EDIT: I have a few people asking for more stories from the path, so here is another:

We continued to hang out on the same bike path on a regular basis for the next two years or so. It would have a lot of snakes during the summer/spring months and we would run over alot of them when we were riding our bikes down there, which would scare the s**t out of us. The snakes were usually garden snakes, or some such similar harmless snake. One time, with the same group of people (my brother and these two girls) I ran over a HUGE black snake (at least 4 feet long). It writhed around in pain and started lunging defensively at us, which we decided to think was dangerous because we were kids looking for a thrill. I'm definitely not proud of this, and I regret it now, but we proceeded to chase the snake down the bike path and eventually cornered against a tree. My brother ended up throwing a stone, k*****g the snake. We poked it a while and my brother was actually ballsy enough to pick it up and try and freak us out with it and all that childish stuff. We ended up getting called into dinner at some point and said we would meet up after and head up to the local shopping center after we were done eating. When we reconvened, we we started to head back down the bike path. When we got a little ways down, we noticed something ahead of us barely 3 feet off the paved path. It was a cross made of bound together sticks with the snake draped over the horizontal arms of the cross. We stared at it for a long time, or at least it seemed like a while, without saying much. A runner eventually came and tore it down hastily, reprimanding us and calling us delinquents and mumbling about blasphemy. At this point we started getting cautious about going down there at night.

I lived in a haunted apartment. It was two rooms, but one of the rooms was locked, and I didn't have the key. So I only had one small room as kitchen, dining room and bedroom, and a screened in porch.There were two especially freaky events. One night, my girlfriend slept over, and she woke up in the middle of the night and said she saw the bathroom door open and a shadowy figure standing in the bathroom, staring at her. The bathroom was right across from the locked room. Another time, I was jerked awake by the fire alarm going off, just *blaring*, but when I went to unplug it the alarm stopped and no other alarm in the building was going off.

A lot of the things that happened *could have* been just my neighbors, but the way they happened was, well, weird. I would hear knocking - it sounded like someone tapping a spoon on a counter - coming from the downstairs apartment. It could have been my neighbor, but I'm not sure why she would do that every couple of minutes for hours on end, or in the middle of the night. I would also hear knocking on the walls, it sounded like someone tapping their way up the wall, like they were looking for a stud. I would also hear this weird moaning/howling that I couldn't trace the source of, again, could have been a neighbor's dog, but it didn't sound like it was coming from her apartment. The apartment across from me had three tenants in a year, I think because it was just as or more haunted than mine.

I had, I think, a unique way of coping - I named the ghost Pete, after a previous tenant's mail I would get from time to time, and I tried talking to him, basically treating him like a roommate I wasn't friends with. My girlfriend was much more freaked out by the situation than me and basically stopped coming over after a few months, so I wasn't there much anyway. When I was, I felt that talking to Pete made the atmosphere of the whole place much more friendly. I also left out a sheet of paper with "Pete's Notes" written on it, and told him if he had any problems, just write them down.

I still don't know if I quite believe in ghosts, though I find the supernatural fascinating, but that experience did push me closer to the "science doesn't know everything about the universe" camp.

Just told this story to a coworker:

Was around 7 years old and it was near the holidays. The house I grew up in has a downstairs and a basement. So I left my pillow downstairs after a day long movie binge and went to grab it later that evening.

Grab the pillow and look up, see a man on the other side of the room dressed to the nines just looking around paying no attention to me. Weird thing was he was entirely grey. Head-to-toe, skin color and everything, grey.

I'm staring, jaw wide open, completely petrified with fright. He looks up at me, notices I'm able to see him, and drops his jaw lower than humanly normal almost as if he was screaming at me, but without sound. He then ran through the wall and disappeared .

I wasn't able to go downstairs if the lights were off until I was a teenager.

This didn't happen to me, but it happened to my dad. We used to live in a home that was part of the Underground Railroad. It a few hidden crawl spaces around the house that was being used a storage in the present. While we lived there my brother started sleep walking and talking. One night while my parents were sleeping they heard my little brother scream from my bedroom even though he slept downstairs. My dad ran up there but my bedroom door was closed like something was blocking it, so he kicked the door open. But when he kicked it open, a shadow ran past him and my room was ice cold. My brother was laying on my bed (sound asleep) pointing at the closet screaming "get her daddy, get her!" My dad looked but saw nothing but darkness, quickly picked up my brother who was stiff as a bored, covered in sweat, and ran out. When my brother finally woke up that morning he remembered nothing that happened. After we moved out he stopped sleep walking.

My friend's aunts were playing with a Ouija board when they were in high school. They asked it who their little brother would marry and the board spelled Julie James then the lights shut off. 18 years later their little brother married Julie James.

A few years back while I was sleeping I had a nightmare of an old lady that was attacking me. she looked like one of though typical horror movie old witches with accented wrinkles and what not. Anyways after that night I woke up to use the bathroom and on my way there my grandfather stopped me.

He told me to turn around so he could have a better look at my back, I would sleep without a shirt on and called my parents over to see a big hand print on the left side of my back as if someone slapped really hard and asked them if they were hitting me. Of course they weren't and I assured my grandfather it wasn't them.

Later that day I also noticed three scratch marks, very lightly, barley noticeable on my chest. To this day I have no idea what it was. By the way the mark cleared up after about three days.

This creeped me out and I can't explain it, but I can't say it's paranormal. Long story short: left my house for about half an hour one morning, locking the door with the same key I'd had for more than a year. Came back and found my key wouldn't fit in the door. On closer inspection, turned out that my house key seemed to have vanished from my keyring and had been replaced by a completely different key that I'd never seen before. It was weird as f**k. Had to wait for my roommate to come home and let me back in. Neither of us could figure out what had happened. I'd been out in a supermarket with my keys in my jacket pocket. My keyring was very distinctive (a handmade thing I bought from a stall in Corsica years before) so doubt that anyone else would've had another one like it that could have been substituted for mine. I'm sure there's an explanation somewhere - possibly in some detail that I have forgotten. Nevertheless, there you go!

When I was about 16 years old I encountered something that still bugs me to this day. I woke up around 6AM on a normal week day and went downstairs to get ready to school. No one else in my family had woken up at this point. I got in the shower, still sleepy and could barely hold my eyes open. After a few minutes of showering someone tried to get it and I told who ever it was that I was in the shower. The 'person' then proceeded to aggressively open the door, I saw the door handle going up and down like crazy and he/she/whatever knocked on the door harder and harder. And then it suddenly stopped.
Didn't think that much about it, but when I got out of the shower I realized that nobody was up yet. I proceeded with eating breakfast. And after a while my dad came down the stairs, so I asked him if it was he who had wanted to use the bathroom earlier. He said no, and that both my mom and younger brother was still asleep, so it could've not been them either.

And even if it had been any family member, they would not have tried to open the door so aggressively at 6 in the morning.

First post, don't hate me. /Scared Swede.

When I was a kid, I lived in a house that was haunted with all sorts of paranormal beings.

One of my first memories was actually an experience with one of these beings.
I was about 4 years old, standing in the entryway in our house, facing the door. I stop and notice there are two people standing in front of the door, staring at me. One was a tall, middle-aged man, dressed in an black 1900s-era suit. The other was a boy, wearing what I figure now was a red baseball uniform.
The boy looked up at the man and said, "Why is he staring at us?" And the man replied, "It's okay. He can't see us."

I still remember that experience clear as day, almost 14 years later.

We also had multiple incidents of poltergeist activity. Stuff like baskets literally flying 10 ft. off the wall and aimed at me and my family, pictures falling daily, etc.
My sister also used to see priests and some of our deceased relatives from her crib.

TL;DR: I lived in a haunted house.

I was watching TV one night when I was twelve. The TV kept turning off by itself. It was the late seventies and it had a push/pull on off switch. It happened three times and I never could figure out how or why. I've had other things happen, but that was the most unexplainable. Everytime I post it I get down voted.

This one is short and sweet.

I was 23 at the time, living about 7-8 hours away from my family while doing university. One night I abruptly woke up in the middle of the night from a force physically moving me off my bed, towards the foot of the bed. What was even more weird, I was already covered in sweat and felt like I was mid-anxiety attack. Needless to say I was extremely disturbed and had trouble sleeping the remainder of the night.

Fast forward to the morning, I finally dozed off, but get woken up to my phone ringing. On the other side is my Dad telling me that my Grandmother passed away last night.

After hearing that it is not something that scares me, in fact I find it rather soothing that possibly she was just coming to say goodbye and as a new spirit was unaware of how she could still affect me in the physical plane.

In 1985 we moved in with my grandma because grandpa just died, and she couldn't care for the property herself.

Anyway, grandpa would keep his watch on the night stand every night when he went to sleep. After he died, grandma put it in the drawer of the table. His watch would routinely (once a week?) show up on top of the stand in the morning, right where he would put it.

I have tons of stories especially since I attended a 140+ year old Native American boarding school. A lot them happened to other people. But I only had one personal experience. When I was maybe 8 years old I had a puppy that stayed outside (this is the rez. All dogs are outside dogs). While I was asleep one night I heard the pup crying and I tried to get up to see what was going on. But I couldn't. I felt like there was two huge hands holding me down by the shoulder. I could move my legs but not my upper half. I opened my eyes but saw nothing. I started lose my breath because as I was pushing up I was choking myself. My puppy got louder and louder. Then it all stopped. I took a big gasp as I popped up and ran to the front door. I opened it up to see my puppy dead on the porch. No blood, no other animals. I went to bed and the next morning we noticed two eye looking goggle marks high up on the door. We thought it was dirt but it never could come off. This was on the reservation in middle of nowhere so skinwalker was a possibility. Otherwise, I really don't know.

I grew up in a Victorian house built in 1887 so I've experienced some things, mostly explainable by drafty wooden floorboards or the heating system making noises. I can't, however, explain what happened to me when I was about ten years old. I was bringing a snack back from the kitchen to the living room where my Mom and I were watching TV together. When I walked through the dining room I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and I froze.
We had these wood-turning salt and pepper shakers that you had to turn to crunch the sea salt to come out of. It was floating, in the air above the table, crunching salt onto the floor. I remember like it was yesterday.