If there's one thing The Omen, The Exorcist, and The Ring have taught me is that kids can be really scary. Damien, Regan, Samara—terrifying. All of them.
I know what you might be saying. Made-up characters aren't good indicators of real life. But there's one Reddit thread I'd like you to see before telling me that.
Created by a now-deleted user, it asked parents the question: "What is the creepiest thing your kid has ever said or done?" Turns out, real children can give you the spooks just as much as fictional ones.
#1
My daughter Madison told me, at around age 3, about "Kellum" the man with brown pants and a yellow shirt that played with her. I assumed it was an imaginary friend because... well that's what kids do. Then one day, she starts singing a song I'd never heard before. "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo. I'm half crazy all for the love of youuuuu" then she'd mumble a few words and pick back up with "a bicycle built for twooo" I assumed she'd heard it from her babysitter, as she didn't go to daycare and that's the only other person who interacted with her, so I asked the babysitter what the actual words were so I could help her sing it better. Babysitter tells me she thought my husband and I taught her the song because she didn't know it either. So I asked my daughter where she'd heard the song and she tells me "Kellum taught it to me. He sings it to his baby." Eventually, Kellum faded away. Fast forward to about 5 years ago, I'm telling the story to a co worker who recognized the song as an old Nat King Cole tune called "Bicycle Built fot Two". That prompted us to start looking on ancestry.com at my property address history. I start following rabbit holes and find that in the 40s, the Beasley family owned the property adjacent to ours, which is a (now defunct) diary farm until it was sold in the 90s. Deeded owner at the time it was purchased in 1941: Callum Beasley. Father of 5 children, youngest died at age 3, her name was Madeline.
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305points
It's easy to think that kids make up creepy stories because they "live in fantasy lands" but Emily Hopkins, a psychologist who studies how small children distinguish between fiction and reality, said that “generally they're pretty good at telling real from pretend" although "they can get tripped up in certain situations and circumstances."
"Even when kids start to pretend at about 18 months or so, they seem to understand the difference; if they're pretending that a block is a chocolate chip cookie, they don't try to take a bite out of the wooden block," Hopkins explained.
Kids can usually say whether impossible things happening in a book are real before they're 5, 4, or sometimes even 3 years old. "If there's magic, or things that violate what they know about the real world, that's what helps them to understand that those characters are probably not real. If a character in the book flies, or something, they’ll say, 'That person can't really exist in real life,'" Hopkins said. But if an adult tries to deliberately confuse them—for example, that Santa Claus is bringing them presents—they can be misled.
Kids use information from adults to find out if things are real: Hopkins mentioned studies that show that kids do believe in things they can't see, like germs, when they have been told they are there. Plus, kids use play to think through things that are difficult or scary. That way kids can "work through it in a low-risk way, process it without having to actually experience it themselves." There may be something inside the little ones telling these stories that they just haven't been able to express yet and are just trying to make sense of the world.
#2
My sister got hit by a drunk driver in April and it totalled her car. She had my 4 year old nephew and my infant niece with her. When my mom arrived at the hospital my nephew asked her if he would thank the big guys. What big guys Kaiden? Grammy, the big guys that were in the car with me when it got loud and scary and they hugged me with their arms and kept me safe. Even the insurance adjuster cannot explain how either child escaped with not a scratch.
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274points
Luckily, kids can also crack us up. Talya Stone, a former public relations specialist turned blogger and the woman behind online journals Motherhood: The Real Deal and 40 Now What who has produced plenty of insightful texts on parenting, told Bored Panda that her little ones have definitely brought more laughter to her life.
"Of course, sometimes kids are just good old-fashioned fun," she said. "At younger ages, they have no inhibitions and will say and do all sorts of things that if they were adults would have them branded insane. They can also be incredibly witty at times. But then there are the times when they are just completely inappropriate and you can't help but fall about laughing. Children have an incredible sense of humor and their giggles can be wonderfully infectious."
Stone thinks that one of the perks of parenting is that when they're little, you can even laugh at your pranksters. Not just with them. "Children are only young once, and have limited time to act like juveniles and your laughter is often the sweetest gift you can give them. That changes as they get older so that's something to be mindful of. Laughing at your kids can also sometimes diffuse a situation but has to be done with a bit of flair so as not to offend them. And incredibly, laughing at your kids can also boost their self-esteem and sense of confidence. It can show that you appreciate their humor and actions, especially if they are being legitimately funny.
"At the end of the day, children can really love to see the cheerful effect they have on people, so there is no harm in giving in and having a laugh if it's appropriate," the mother added.
However, if you're going to laugh at your children, Stone believes you need to let them laugh at you too and not take yourself too seriously. "Laughter should be a two-way street. Find ways of making a joke out of bad situations but avoid adult humor because children really don't need this in their lives."
So at least kids can balance out their dark site with some lighter undertones!
#3
My husband is a farmer. One night he asked me to pick him up after working ground and it was pretty late, around 10 o'clock. So I loaded our two girls up-then 4 & 2 and headed to the field.
We get to the field and C is finishing up his last round so we had to wait for a minute. I rolled the windows down in the van and shut the engine off. After a few minutes my two year old says, "Mommy, who dat man outside?" I said, "I don't see a man, is your ken doll on the floor?" my 4 year old then piped up, "He's right outside your door and staring at you. He's scary. He has blood on his face."
That's when I turned the key, rolled the windows up, locked the doors and called my husband and told him to hurry the hell up because the girls are terrified and there's apparently a scary man outside my door that I can't see but both girls are describing him and what he's doing.
That's when I turned the key, rolled the windows up, locked the doors and called my husband and told him to hurry the hell up because the girls are terrified and there's apparently a scary man outside my door that I can't see but both girls are describing him and what he's doing.
Thankfully C was done and heading up to the van at that moment and we left. My girls are now 5 and 7 and they both still remember that man and refuse to go to that particular field. I have to ask my MIL to watch them when I need to pick their daddy up from there.
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231points
#4
When my cousin was 2 years old or so, her mom got pregnant again. One day she went to hug her mom's belly and said "little brother sick".
A few days later she had a miscarriage...
A few days later she had a miscarriage...
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226points
#5
My niece and nephew were 13 and 15 at the time and we were watching them for my brother in law while he was out of town. At about 3am i get shaken and awake to two visibly upset teens who start sobbing about a dead woman trying to get in my nieces bedroom window. This jolts my husband out of bed in a hurry, he grabs his handgun and tells me to stay with the kids. They live in a mobile home that sits on risers, so this window is roughly 9 feet at its base.
He goes down the hallway and i hear him shout, "WHAT THE F*K?!" and run back to the front door and outside. Now the niece and nephew are losing their minds, not wanting their uncle getting hurt so i call the cops and walk to the door to see whats going on.
The dead woman was in fact a woman hopped out of her mind on who-knows-what, naked, and she did very much look like a corpse. She had been standing on the roof of my truck, trying to see in the windows.
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221points
#6
Posted this before
My 4 year old son had a habit of announcing when he had to use the bathroom. He would say "I gotta go potty". One time he makes his business known and heads off toward the bathroom. He returns seconds later and says "There's already someone in the bathroom". Now I do know for a fact that it's just the two of us home so the hair stands up on my neck. I ask him, "what do you mean". He repeats, "There's already someone in the bathroom".
Now I'm thinking, is it someone "I see dead people" or someone in a hockey goalie mask.
So I grab the biggest knife from my knife block and tell him to stay here. I walk to the bathroom, take a wide angle to see in, nobody. Slowly and quietly walk toward the shower and pull back the curtain.
Nothing.
By now my son has walked around the corner and I ask him "where did you see the person?" He points to an un-flushed toilet and says "See, someone’s already here".
His big brother didn't flush the toilet...
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198points
#7
I caught my son who was 3 yrs old at the time with my cell phone. He had recently discovered Siri. He was screaming at the phone “are you blood or are you wires?!?!?!”
197points
#8
My son was probably 4 at the time, he’s in the car with my mom and step dad and starts talking about my stepdads father dying. Mind you, I didn’t know how he died and my stepdad has never talked about. My son goes into full detail how he was driving through the mountains and it was a really windy road and it was slippery and he went off the side of the mountain and there was blood all over his face and car. At the end of this in depth explanation he looks at my step dad and goes “it must of have been really scary for him”
Well my stepdad is super freaked out by it because his dad did die in fact because he drove off the side of a mountain while it was raining.
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181points
#9
I was tucking in my two year old. He said "Good bye dad". I said, "No, we say good night". He said "I know. But this time its good bye"
Had to check on him a few times to make sure he was still here.
Had to check on him a few times to make sure he was still here.
178points
#10
About 8 years ago, my daughter (who was 5 at the time) woke up in the middle of the night, crying and yelling, almost screaming, around 3am. I went in, bleary eyed, and sat on the side of her bed. My daughter is an eloquent and linguistically advanced little thing, but she was pretty much reduced to a blubbering, quivering mass of terror. She was clearly horrified by something, and just put her head down on my leg and sobbed. She did so for several minutes, with me just patting her back and holding her.
When she eventually calmed down, I asked her if she had a bad dream. She told me that she didn't think that she had been dreaming, but that there had been someone looking in her window, and it had really frightened her.
I got a little spark of anger; we had had some teenagers messing around in our back yard a few times at night, and if they had worked up the balls to climb the wall and look in, that was bad. My daughter's window is about 9 feet off the ground, and it's a sheer brick wall leading up to it, but you can climb it with a bit of effort (a run and then a grab on the bottom of the window will get you started). I thought that I had frightened off this group of teenagers by stepping out on the back porch with a large gurkha knife a few weeks before, but apparently I had not.
She went on, dispelling my assumption. "Daddy, it wasn't those boys. He was just standing on the ground, looking in." As I mentioned - her window is 9 feet off the ground. "And there was something wrong with his hands. His hands were really..." she paused, looking for a word. Then she frowned, and started crying again. "Long. Long and strange." She cried hard again for a second, then kind of stuttered out, "His face was long and wrong too."
I held up my hand and asked if the long hands were like mine. She said no, and put her one hand on the base of my hand, and the other about 3 or 4 inches from the tips of my fingers. "This long," she said. "But not as wide. Daddy, I'm scared."
So to recap: my daughter woke me up by screaming and crying, then informed that she saw f**king slenderman in the backyard, and that she was scared and he was strange and long. I was sleepy, and had suddently become convinced that there was a monster in the backyard. It's a lot easier to believe in things at 3am. So I did the hardest thing I've ever had to do as a dad. I smiled and said, "Kiddo, I think it was all a dream. I will look in the backyard though, okay." Internal voice: THIS IS HOW HORROR MOVIES START. Don't do it. She said, "Okay" because there's nothing bigger or stronger than Daddy. She actually managed to smile at me, and laid back down in her bed, secure in the knowledge that everything was fine.
I got out the same huge gurkha knife and went to the kitchen, which has an exit onto the back porch. I turned on the back lights. In the backyard there was... nothing. Nothing was there, because it was all just a dream. She had a creepy, distressing dream, and she has a gift with language and she made me think that it was real and it scared the bejesus out of me.
I went back to her room, and told her that everything was okay and that I would keep her safe. I held her until she slept, and then I went back to bed. I lay awake, staring at the window until my other daughter woke up at 6 for the morning.
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169points
#11
I overheard a girl tell her mom, "Her eyes are pretty," referring to the new daycare employee, "I wanna wear them on my charm bracelet."
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161points
#12
Not a parent, but a sister
A couple years ago, me and my sister (me 11 and her 14) Were watching my 4 year old sister. she was always a little weird and said weird stuff but nothing to bad, anyway, me and my sister were watching a movie and fell asleep by accident and when my mom got home she started screaming and shaking us to wake up
When we were asleep my mom must have called checking in on us and my little sister picked up and said "I had to do it mommy had to kill them, I cut sissy's throat" And hung up, it still scares me sometimes
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159points
#13
Not a parent but a good story about my sister
She was about 3 years old and we were getting ready to go to our uncle's house for dinner. She was being really fussy and didn't want to get changed so my dad asks her "Don't you want to go to uncle Dan's house?". She then responded saying "No, I don't like the man in the ceiling." We though it was an odd thing to say but didn't give much thought.
A few years later we were helping my uncle sell the house and it came out that someone had killed them self in the attic back in the 90's.
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155points
#14
"Mommy, when I was big and you were little, we used to dance like this!"
He was three.
When I was little, I danced with my grandfather in the kitchen, with my feet on his as he moved through the steps. When my son said these words, we were dancing in our living room, with his feet on mine as I moved through the steps.
It was a little bit weird.
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148points
#15
Why are you crying?
"Bad man"
What bad man?
"There." Points behind me at a dark corner of the room.
Lamp on bookshelf next to said darkened corner falls off as soon as I turn to look.
She slept in our bed that night.
"Bad man"
What bad man?
"There." Points behind me at a dark corner of the room.
Lamp on bookshelf next to said darkened corner falls off as soon as I turn to look.
She slept in our bed that night.
148points
#16
So, my son and I stood watching his then 2 yr old daughter as she stood looking, laughing, and chatting away in toddler jibberish at... nothing... in a completely empty hallway. We just watched her and looked at each other with a WTF look on our faces.
Same granddaughter, some years later, still sleeps with me when she visits because "that girl" scares her. That's all she'll say because evidently the girl told her not to tell anyone about her.
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144points
#17
I've posted this here before, but it's honestly still the freakiest thing that's ever happened to me. I was vacationing at a big cabin in the mountains for a week for a family reunion. (It was a girl scout cabin, so it was HUGE)
My two year old niece was there. Fearless little thing. I'd seriously never seen here scared before. She was the kind of kid that would happily toddle into the forest after a bear if you let her. At the time she was just learning how to talk, so her sentences were one or two words.
About three or four days into the stay, I was in the kitchen helping out with lunch when she came in. I gave her a snack and a drink and sent her out. Not a minute later I heard the most bloodcurdling scream. It was horrible. I've never heard a sound quite like it since. It sounded like an animal caught in a trap...but it was human. It was my niece. I raced out into the hallway to see my niece running towards me, face contorted in horror. There were tears streaming down her face as she leaped into my arms and screamed. 'Run. Baby. Eyes. EYES. RUN!'
She was shaking like a leaf, but clawing my neck and and clothes trying to get me to run. At one point she pointed down the empty hallway, still screaming about eyes. There were no windows, just a locked door. A blank hallway.
By then the rest of the family had come crowding around to see what was going on. I couldn't explain it and neither could she. Just 'baby. Eyes. Baby' and then she'd melt down all over again.
This happened two more times during our stay. Once I was holding her upstairs and tried to sit on a couch when she began to scream again, pointing at the couch and telling me to run. Her finger followed 'something' down the hallway and into the empty bunk room.
Another time she was running around playing with her cousins when I heard her screaming my name. I found her in the empty bunkroom inconsolable.
After that she kept trying to leave. Thankfully we were close to the end of our stay, but all doors needed to be locked to keep her from escaping. She wanted out of there.
For a long time after that you could not mention the incident without her falling apart, crying about the 'ghost baby' again. It became taboo to mention it around her.
Eventually the family came up with their own explanation, that she must have seen one of her cousins sleeping upstairs and gotten scared by the blanket moving. They treat it like a joke now.
I was the only real witness all three times though...and I can tell you that that is NOT what freaked her out. I'm not sure what it was, but it wasn't another child.
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144points
#18
My 4-year-old likes to play this make-believe game where she is having a baby and needs it "cut out" of her (we have never explained to her what a C-section is). Then the baby always has some sort of deformity, like no eyes or arms or something, and she needs to try again to have a better baby and she is just going to throw the bad one out.
My wife and I have refused to play this game with her once we noticed the pattern, but now she is drafting her younger sister into it and they love it. I'm torn between making them stop or just being happy they're playing so nicely together.
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139points
#19
I was the kid in this story— unsure of the age, my grandfather still recalls it. We were driving through the blue ridge parkway, me, mom, & grandparents- at some random point I just said out loud “this would be a good place to dump a dead body”. Less than a week later, on the news police found a dead woman outside of the woods far enough from the road you could see her. Spooked my grandfather like crazy.
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139points
#20
I was with my sister, her husband, and their two year old daughter. We were talking about loved ones that had recently passed (my father had died sometime recently). My brother in law went and grabbed a picture of his mother, who had died in a car crash when he was six, to show me.
When my niece saw the picture though she started laughing. We asked her what was so funny and she looked at us and said "that's my special friend who sings to me".
I still shiver a bit just thinking about it.
When my niece saw the picture though she started laughing. We asked her what was so funny and she looked at us and said "that's my special friend who sings to me".
I still shiver a bit just thinking about it.
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138points