25 True Stories So Creepy They’ll Make You Sleep With The Lights On This Halloween

One night, about ten months ago, there was a pretty heavy snow storm in my area. All of the roads were closed and a curfew was issued for everybody except emergency medical personnel.

I had been shoveling snow for most of the day and was dead tired come nightfall. Didn't have the energy to do much of anything besides eat dinner and lay down. I fire up some OG Star Trek and begin to doze off.

A couple of hours later, around 1AM, I hear the sound of a door rattling and a slight whisper saying my name, "vladimir_pwnin". I sit up a bit and realize it's coming from my parents' room, becoming fainter with the passing time. After 10 minutes or so, I gather up the courage to see what the h**l is going on.

S****y folding knife in hand, I peak out into the hallway and don't see anything. The noise is still coming from the room next door, the rattling becoming more rushed as I approach. Cautiously, I open the door and sneak inside. It's pitch black and I can't see anything.

My eyes are taking entirely too long to adjust to the darkness. I'm shuffling forward, and all of the sudden, something grabs and pulls on my leg. At this point I was so freaked out I jumped back. As the whispers continued, I recognized my dad's voice. He was asking me for help.

He had a stroke while walking to use the bathroom around 1AM that night. After he fell, he was able to use his left foot to rattle the door to his bathroom. My mom fell asleep on the couch in the living room and wasn't around to help or hear. I was able to grab the house phone and call 911, and despite the weather, the police and an ambulance arrived within 10 minutes.

That was the scariest night of my life. The doctors told us there wasn't much hope for my dad before going into surgery, since he had a hemorrhagic stroke and there was a massive amount of bleeding.

Fast forward 10 months and my old man is cognitively the same, just paralyzed on his right side. He had every infection under the sun while in the hospital, but he staved them off and is still with us today. He was my best friend before the incident, and my hero after.

Tl;dr: heard some rattling and whispers, freaked out, found my dad lying on the ground after a massive stroke.

Edit: Well, this got way more attention than I had thought it would. Thanks for all of the kind replies!

When I was around 16 my rapidly growing family finally moved from the house I had spent my entire life in. As you would expect, we spent a lot of time fondly remembering things we used to do in the house as we were packing everything up. At some point I decided to go into the downstairs closet with a flashlight and read, something I used to do when I was younger to get some peace and quiet.

Now, this is one of those deep closets that goes under the stairs; it went back around 8 feet and then had a left turn into a very low maybe 3 foot h**h space. This space was largely occupied by a mountain of old blankets and stuffed animals. Of course, this is the most fluffy spot to sit and read.

About an hour in I shift a little to get comfortable and I hear a low, slow, warped, hoarse voice say "you always make me happy". I flipped my s**t, hit my head on the low ceiling, and practically broke the door down getting out. After hyperventilating and explaining to my family why there was no color left on my face I went back to see what it was. It was my stuffed Little Bear from when I was 3 or 4 years old that I happened to lean on juuuuust right to press his belly. When I pressed his stomach again though, nothing. This poor bear I hadn't played with since I was a toddler used the last of it's power, used it's *dying breath* to tell me I made it happy.

You make me happy too little bear.

When you're not making me p**s myself.

Grandma's great aunt and her two kids died on the Titanic, went to a Titanic artifact exhibit where replica tickets were being given out, I got my grandma's great aunt.

When I was 16 in the mid 90s, aka the "I know everything, I'm invincible and you can't stop me" age, I got in a fight with an acquaintance while a whole bunch of us were hanging out at his house. Stupid fight, can't remember what about, but I decided f**k it, I was going home. I lived about 5 miles away, but I didn't have a car, and since it was 2am, there were no buses. I was going to walk home.

In the middle of the night, though a not-as-safe-as-it-seem neighborhood, as a tiny 16 year old girl.

So I did. I think, in hindsight, my friends either didn't believe I was going to do it, or were too startled by the sudden argument to realize what I was doing. I left the house and started hoofing it. About a mile out, the suburban housing neighborhood melted into a main street, with highway access. I started to notice a greyish minivan following me. It would follow me, pass me, turn a corner, and about 3 blocks later, it would do the same thing. I mean, really really obvious what it was doing. I crossed over to the other side of the street so I was walking the opposite of traffic flow, and thus no car could come up behind me. It kept doing it, on the other side of the street. About a mile later, there was a 24-hour Fred Meyer (west coast USA chain grocery/all-purpose store), lights bright, but parking lot emptyish. I immediately crossed the parking lot and went to head inside.

Just before I got to the doors, the minivan that had been following me, pulled up into one of the parking spots. A guy called out from the driver side and said:

"I don't want you to walk over here, just stay there and listen. I just wanted to let you know what I was doing. I saw you walking a while back, but I also saw a dark car that was following you. A couple of times you went to turn around, or stopped, so it started following you down a parallel side street. When I saw it, I started to follow you both, just to make sure you were safe. Go inside the store, and call someone to come pick you up, please. I haven't seen the car since you headed across the lot."

He waited until I was inside the store, and then pulled away. I didn't have anyone to call, so I just let the night cashier know what was going on, and hung out with her for about an hour and a half. Then I finished the walk home. I've never forgotten the incident, or that man, whoever he was. During the walk, I never saw the dark car he mentioned, but I've always been convinced he saved my life that night.

Not to me, but to my sister.

Her husband and her had just had their first child a few months prior. My brother in law was working the graveyard shift at his job as my sister stayed home taking care of my nephew. Around 2am, she heard loud knocking on her back door. She went to go check it out and saw a lady banging on the door asking for my sister to let her in. The lady told my sister that her husband had just beat her down the street and was looking for her. My sister was hesitant to let her in since she had a newborn in the house and didn't want to interfere. She told the lady that the best she could do was call the police for her. The lady told my sister to not call the police and to let her in. This is where my sister got suspicious. She went to get her phone and called 911. When she went back to the door, the lady was gone. The police arrived a few minutes later and they told my sister that the same situation happened a few streets down. Apparently the couple would do this act to get into peoples homes.

I'm sure this is very common but having it almost happen to my sister and my nephew just creeps me out. Some real Clockwork Orange s**t.

I've posted this story before, so here's a cheap copy/paste:

*TL;DR* Suddenly dead grandfather watching my back making sure I'm safe.

Back when my grandfather died, his children and some of the grandchildren took turns in staying over at grandma's house. We'd spend the night and help her out around the house, while also having some time alone in the house we all love and spending some final moments with grandpa, his (embalmed...?) body in the living room where his big old desk used to be.

The house was on a pretty big plot of land with a nice big barn, and while grandma loved her gardening, grandpa used to take care of the lawn. One day he had felt a bit weezy while mowing the lawn, so he went inside and eventually ended up calling the doctor and going to the hospital. He unceremoniously died three weeks later, unwilling to fight the cancer that had formed in his gut over the past few years.

As one of the older grandkids, I stayed over one night as well. Bluntly speaking, I was a bit on edge with just having a dead body in the house, but nothing really eventful happened that night. Said goodnight to my grandfather (ya, felt weird) and went upstairs to rest.

The next morning my grandmother was already preparing dinner for all the people that would be coming by to pay their respects. She, quite sternly, told me she wanted to do this particular thing alone, so I decided to start the day by mowing the stretch of lawn my grandfather never got to finish. I knew how big he and grandmother have always been on having the garden in top shape whenever there were people over and I didn't want to let him down. It wasn't a small patch of grass, but I figured the electric push-mower should be more than enough. I hooked it up using a long, orange extension cord and got to work.

Now, you have to know, my grandfather was a skilled, but supersafe, handyman. He was an electrical engineer by trade and always working on the house or tinkering in the barn, doing the bigger gardening projects my grandmother couldn't do, making us toys or fixing our bikes, etc. We always got to help him out, but he always kept an eye on us with whatever we were doing, making sure we were using the tools in the correct way, weren't running around with screwdrivers in our pockets, *teaching us how to work with the electric mower and how to handle the long extension cord to not run over it with the mower*.

When I was mowing the lawn, I was thinking about all of that instead of actually minding the extension cord. I f****d up. I ran over a coil of it, slightly damaging the cable down to the copper, but not c*****g it in half completely.

The safest way to proceed would be to unplug the cord, roll it back up and get another, not-damaged one. What I did puzzles me to this day;
I was nearing completion anyway and decided to continue a bit longer, (now...) carefully avoiding the cord. After finishing up, I went to roll up the cord around my arm, as I always did, as my grandfather taught me. I was thinking about him, how hard this was on grandma, and I stopped minding where I grabbed the cord. I grabbed straight into the exposed copper. I felt a short, sharp jolt in the palm of my hand and immediately realised what happened. I tried to let go but my hand and arm cramped up. At the time, naively, I thought I was gonna die, and I thought how stupid I had been, and how this would impact my already grieving family.

It must've only been a split second, but it felt like I had stood there for ten minutes. Suddenly the reflexes in my arm kicked in and I threw the cable to the floor. I took a moment to breathe and stood there, dazed out of my mind, listening to the wind in the trees and trying to figure out what had happened. I made my way into the barn to unplug the cord from the wall.

*It wasn't plugged in*.

I figured I must've yanked it out of the wall with my (not-so)Ninja reflexes, but quickly realised the angle for me to be able to do that were all wrong, and besides, there was a tonne of slack in the cable.

I checked in and around the barn, but there was noone on the property. I could see my grandmother through the kitchen window, still working on preparing meals for the tens of people that would come around later. The dog was still in his own enclosed section of the garden on the other side of the house, ears pointed, tail in the air, eyes fixated on me and the barn behind me, nervously whimpering and pacing back and forth.

I had never believed in something of a spirit world, an afterlife, souls or 'energy' staying behind in the physical world, any of that. But as silly as it sounds, on that day I did.

On that day, I was convinced my grandfather was watching my back to make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid.

Alright so it turned out to be quite long, and I'm sure this will be buried (as opposed to my grandfather; wrapped in cloth and cremated on nothing but woodboard, his choosing) but it felt good to write this out.

I work in law enforcement (prosecution side of things). Domestic violence 911 recordings tend to be the scariest, creepiest, and most unsettling things. You really don't know what fear sounds like until you hear someone scrambling to get away from someone who is, quite literally, hunting them, often in their own homes. Hearing the doors getting knocked in. Hollywood can't (and really shouldn't try) to reproduce the fear you hear then. It's... well... primal I guess is the best word.

The worst, however, is when those cries suddenly cut off. That silence is deafening.

When I was a kid my mum was driving me to school one morning and we were stopped at the lights. Light goes green, mum doesn't move. After a second or two I tell her the light went green. She goes, "yeah. I know, the car won't move." I could see her pressing down but the car wouldn't go.

As she says that a truck flies through he intersection, nearly hitting the car in the other lane. Then my mum presses the gas again after a few seconds and mysteriously the car goes again.

My brother and I were probably about 7 and 5, respectively. We used to wake up every weekend and play computer games before my parents woke up. One day, we turned on the computer, and got an eerie message that was directed to us, it said:

"Hello Kid A and Kid B, this is your computer talking and I. AM. ALIVEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Do not run and tell your parents, they cannot help you now!!!"

Turns out my dad had programmed the computer to say that upon start up.

This was mid 90s.

Growing up, my bedroom was the only one that faced the front of the house/street. When I was about 8 or 9, I woke up to my dad calmly but firmly telling me to get up, go in the bathroom, and shut the door. I was annoyed because I was half asleep, but I listened. Apparently I was more tired than I realized, because I feel asleep on the bathroom floor. The next morning I asked my mom what happened. She seemed oblivious and confused. I looked at my dad like she was crazy, and I asked him why he had woken me up. He denied doing it. I was becoming frustrated to the point of tears, but I ultimately let it go.

Fast forward to college. I was home one break, and I decided to ask again. I had thought of that night off and on for years, and it still bothered me. This time, my dad goes, "Ha! I was wondering if you even remembered that." Turns out that a lot of houses on our block were being vandalized and robbed all those years ago. Someone had broken into the garage and was inside the house. My room was partially over the garage. My dad heard it happen and quietly got me to safety. Police were called, the guy ran. He was never caught, however, and my parents didn't want a terrified kid on their hands, so for years they pretended like nothing had ever happened. It wasn't supernatural, but it was unsettling for sure.

When I was a kid, I woke up in the middle of the night to my bed shaking. Normally that would scare the c**p out of me, but instead I was just kind of annoyed. I rolled over and muttered, "Stop it."

The shaking stopped immediately. Then a male voice speaks right beside me, saying, "Sorry." That's when I freaked out. I'm pretty sure my childhood house was haunted.

When I was 10 or 11 I had pneumonia. Towards the end of my week off from school my mom started leaving me alone at home so she can go to work. So Id wake up and the first thing I did is turn on my n64 and play no mercy. I use to sit on the edge of the bed right in front of the tv. One hour into playing I clearly feel someone sit next to me. I freaked out and ran out of the room to call my mom on the phone. Later that night I learned my grandmother had passed away in the morning.

This is not paranormal, but was immensely creepy at the time:

I was visiting my hometown and decided to pick up my old h**h school friend from his house and take him to dinner and a drink to catch up. He is kinda stressed and tells me that his ex, with whom he had broken up with over 2 years prior, has been stalking him and harassing him.

I drive him home afterwards, and it starts to drizzle. As I drop him off at his house (the neighborhood was dark and quiet by now), we both notice a bag tied to my side view mirror...it was likely attached when we were at the restaurant. We open it to see a poorly taken photo of a tree taken at night with flash. There was a brief letter, obviously written from his ex, that said: "I buried our first love letter under this tree years ago. This tree is growing from our love." I made sure my friend got into his house all right and got the heck out of there.

We rented a house that never felt like home. You always felt creeped out walking in there like you were being watched. My bf and our roommate both worked nights so I would be there by myself a lot.

One night I was doing my usual stuff and watching some TV before bed. I had this overwhelming feeling all night that I should avoid the hallway and not look directly down it, it was creepy. The feeling of being watched and terrified lasted or about 2 hours before I decided to suck it up and make my way to my room. I left the hallway lights on and went to bed. Just as I turned of the side table light I heard a drawer being pulled out and hitting the stopper. I turned on the light and nothing was out of place. This went on about 6 times before I decided I was sleeping with the light on. I curled up under the covers and waited for the bf to get home.


He comes rolling in about 3am. He's laughing at me for being such a p***y gets into bed and turned the light off and that's when all h**l broke loose. All the doors down the hallway slammed shut 1 by 1 then our closet doors started rattling. The sound coming from inside could only be described at total destruction, it sounded like the shelves the pole and everything in there was being tossed around. The bf joined me under the covers and we were both terrified. After it stopped it took 5-10 min to convince him to go check around the house. Nothing was out of place and our roommate had drove 3 hours back home that night to be with his family so we knew it wasn't him. We slept with the light on the rest of the night and moved out soon after. I still can't drive by that house without being creeped out.

A few years ago I partook in a group meditation session. For one of the activities we had to partner up; one of us sat in a chair while the other stood behind & used their hands to guide energy around various parts of the body. I don't know much about it, but a little reiki-ish, I guess?

Not long into my session on the chair, I noticed a strange pain in my lower back. It wasn't a physical pain though... it's hard to describe it but it was more of an 'internal' pain right at the base of my spine as if my mind was making it up as part of the meditation process. Over 5 minutes or so it gradually got worse, to the point where it became throbbingly uncomfortable. In my mind I said something like 'I need this pain to stop now!' and it did. The rest of the session went by without a hitch.

Afterwards we discussed our experiences. As I told my story about my lower back pain, the woman who had been using her hands on me became visibly emotional and started to cry. I thought it was a strange reaction but didn't look too deeply into it.

A few weeks later the organiser of the meditation group emailed me to let me know the woman who assisted me at the session had passed away overnight. She'd been battling cancer of the lower spine for years and it got the better of her.

I've never felt so creeped out like I did that day when it clicked that I may have somehow been channeling her pain.

My friend died in a car accident and they towed the car pretty early in the day. We were teens so we thought we should go collect all her things that were ejected from the car when she hit the tree.

After about a half hour, I was overwhelmed and just sat down and started crying. I had my two friends with me cleaning stuff up, and they just let me get it out for a bit.

Someone started rubbing my shoulders in the deepest massage I have ever had, and it was really helping me get control of myself and relaxing me. I let them rub for a few minutes and then I put my hand on theirs to let them know I was appreciative.

There was no hand, just my shoulder. I turned around to say thank you to whoever it was, and there was nobody. I looked up at the car and my two friends were standing there talking about something.

SOMETHING had been TOUCHING me!!

I ran to the car and asked my friends if it was them. They looked at me like I was crazy. I made everyone get in the car super fast and we left.

I think a spirit was comforting me in my loss, and I am grateful and freaked out for it. I can still remember how it felt, and it's been 22 years.

I preface this by saying that I am not religious and I do not believe in the paranormal. That said:

It was the month of November and I was visiting Edinburgh, Scotland. It was cold and I was layered in a long sleeved shirt, sweatshirt, and winter jacket. In the evening, my friends and I decided to go on one of the haunted walking tours that takes you through the vaults beneath the city. They are, of course, rumored to be haunted by the poor, destitute, and deplorable people who died gruesome deaths therein. One underground vault is said to house a particularly demonic spirit. It is said to be trapped within the confines of a circle of stone built by wiccans to protect the living from its unfettered evil.

While standing alongside the stone circle, my friend, who herself is wiccan, began chanting barely intelligibly under her breath.

I suddenly felt a flurry of wind at my neck. Then, nails dug deeply into the flesh of my back and dragged down my body from my shoulders to my waist. I was completely frozen in fear, too shocked to scream although I was filled with white hot pain.

I spent the rest of the tour petrified and when we emerged from the tunnels I ran over to the bathroom of a pub where I pulled off all my clothes (which themselves were perfectly intact) only to see bright red marks lining the naked skin of my back.

I've told my friends and family this story and they think it should be enough for me to cave and believe in the supernatural. I still don't...but I also can't explain what happened in those tunnels underground.

I've had multiple times when i've woken up in the middle of the night and was sure I could see a figure in my room until I turned on my bedside light.

Usually this scares me a bit but my most memorable one was waking up thinking I saw some short figure at the end of my bloody bed and saying "f off I'm trying to sleep" then returning to burying my face into the comfort of my pillow.

Seems like it worked.

I was home alone once when my parents were out of town. We had just moved into our house, so there was an empty lot next to our house, with a house half built. My parents were the types to leave the outdoor side garage door unlocked, dumbasses, I know. Well, while they were gone I was watching tv, and all of a sudden the door that leads into my garage from the inside starts to wiggle. I put my TV on mute and I listen again, I see it actually move that time.

I start freaking out and I'm kind of in shock looking for the phone, can't find the house phone, so I search for my cell. Remembered I left my charger in my parents car so I'm frantically looking for the house phone. Our house was so new, my mom hadn't even put blinds or drapes up in the kitchen or living room. Well, whoever was wiggling my garage door k**b starts banging on the windows in my living room. Again no blinds or phone, and at that moment I realize this guy is seeing my every move, so I shoot upstairs. Again looking frantically for the phone and also trying to figure out how and where I'd jump out of my house to get away from the m****c that's outside my house if I needed to.

He then starts pounding on my front door. I can tell at that point, he's using something metal or plastic by the sound of the thumps. I really thought he was going to shoot my door open. I remember at that moment I was pissed at myself for being a d*****s teenager that frequently talked on the phone because I always just left it lying around, never putting it back on the base. I wanted so badly to push the the button the detects where my house phone is, but I thought if he heard where it was, he'd break the window nearest to it and take it.

I then remembered I left the phone in my moms room, and as I pass the hallway to her room I see two people pacing in front of my house. I'm freaking out trying to find my dads gun in my parents bedroom. I find the phone and call 911. As I'm on the phone, the window breaks. I'm upstairs and am scared to death. Suddenly everything goes silent. I'm waiting in my parents pitch black closet for what seems like an eternity, then I hear the sirens.

Cops show up but there is no one to be found. I figured that they hadn't gone too far since it had just occurred. Cops never found my tormenters. On the plus side, the company building the house next door, same company that built ours, hired over night security to stay on our street until the house was built which was definitely refreshing.


EDIT: Wow, I did not think this story would blow up. It was definitely a scary experience, I was 17 at the time.

I did suffer from night terrors for about a month, then recovered.

TL;DR: Two guys try to break into my house while I'm home alone. Torment me for was seems to be eternity, call cops, don't catch the perpetrators, gain overnight security because of experience.

On my previous job when our building was still under construction, the only floors that were occupied were the 1st,2nd,5th,6th and 7th. One time I was alone inside the elevator going from 1st to the 6th floor when suddenly it stopped and opened on the 3rd floor. Normally I would just disregard it but rumors where all over that a ghost child was playing around on the vacant floors. So I pressed the closed button as I fast as I could. When it closed I heard noises like someone was tapping their fingers on the walls of elevator.