People Are Sharing The Most Terrifying Things They've Witnessed In Real Life (40 Posts)

I would call it creepy more than scary, but my mom's friend had a small house and lived alone. She noticed weird things: a batch of soup depleting faster than usual, missing eggs, damp towels in the hamper when she hadn't used any, extra dishes in the dishwasher, etc... This went on for months, she thought she was just being forgetful. One day she heard some thumping around in her attic and went to investigate. She found some make shift living quarters. Small radio, hot plate, sleeping bag, pillow, food wrappers, etc... She called the cops who came to keep an eye on the place. They ended up catching a homeless man climbing a tree, trying to sneak into her attic window. He had been doing this almost daily. He would wait for her to go to work, then go down stairs and help himself to food and amenities. The funny part about this story is they got to know each other throughout the ordeal, and the guy was actually very respectful, just down on his luck. She didn't press charges, instead, let him move in, helped him get a job, and he lived in the attic until he got back on his feet. Creepy s**t with a happy ending.

Two off duty US soldiers were on a train in France. When walking past a toilet they recognised the loading noises of rifles coming from inside. They waited outside and jumped the guy when he came out. He was a terrorist who was about to go through the train killing people.

When my aunt was about 16 she was working at a grocery store and had a boss in his mid twenties. One day he called the house and was begging her to sneak out and hang out with him. She was considering it because it was her boss and she didn’t want to say no. My mom, who is two years younger than her, always gets these incredibly spot on “gut feelings”. She had one that night and begged my aunt not to go out with him.

Thankfully she listened to my mom and told him no which made him really angry. He ended up going out that night and meeting another girl. He took her out to some cliffs and r*ped her and pushed her off. Somehow she lived through this and was able to get him sent to prison. I feel so sorry for that girl and so thankful for my mom and her gut feelings.

Always trust your gut.

I spent my first 10 years in New Delhi. Back then, we would find dead women (burnt with acid or set on fire) and it used to be so "normal". Like oh look, another one of those dowry cases where her family didn't pay the husband enough money so they killed her.

Many years later i revisited those memories and realised how insane that actually was! I'd totally forgotten about all that.

Was working the evening shift at a gas station. Man comes in all disoriented. I go to help him out. he has a gash on his head and doesn't know where he was. I couldn't see any crashes around so assumed he had fallen or something. Normally we are supposed to stay inside the glass shielded register area whenever anyone is in the store. I, being a nice human being, went to help while calling the police/EMS. They got there and checked him out. They thought his head may have been fractured. Took him to the ER. I went back to work. Cops stopped back by for some coffee a few hours later. They told me the guy got hit by a baseball bat trying to break into a little girl's bedroom and was wanted for r*pe and murder in two other states. I never left the register area at night again.

The story of Mary Vincent always stands out to me.

In 1978, 15 year old Mary was hitchhiking. A man named Lawrence Singleton picked her up.

He brutally r*ped her, and eventually made her get out of the car. She planned to run, but he noticed, and cut both her arms off. He threw her into a ditch/ravine and left her to die.

She packed her stumps with mud to stop the bleeding and spent all night crawling out.

She eventually makes it to the highway and starts walking, naked and covered in blood. The first car that saw her sped away in fear. The second car was a couple on their honeymoon. They picked her up and she survived.

Alright, so my pre-school teacher who also ended up somehow changing jobs and becoming my 11th grade english teacher had a super interesting life. Her mother had some super famous book, her father worked high up in the government, but enough about her family. First, let me describe her to you, she had dark hair and blue eyes (you'll see why this matters in a minute). She told this story every single year to the new students in her class...when she was younger, she was driving through Arizona on a two-way road while her boyfriend at the time was following behind her on his motorcycle. For those who don't live in Arizona, certain stretches of it can be quite isolated and deserted. She said that they were on a long drive (it's been about 6 years since I was in her class so details are fuzzy), but basically her and her boyfriend both knew the destination where they were heading by memory and eventually got separated by a few miles. A man who was behind her in a Volkswagen beetle kept pulling up beside her into the other lane (no one was coming) and motioning at her to pull over. She somewhat ignored him the first few times, but he kept doing it and began getting more frantic each time. She said that she believed that he spotted something wrong with her car, so she saw a parking lot off the road for a deserted gas station and pulled over. Once pulled over, she said that she instantly got an eerie feeling. The man was suspicious and kept telling her that he saw something wrong with her headlight and insisted she get out of the car so he could show her what he meant. Her boyfriend who was a few miles behind her, eventually caught up and spotted her car at the sketchy gas station. Right as she was out of the car, her boyfriend began to pull in. As he did that, this man got into his car and SPED off like his life depended on it.

They later were able to identify that the man was Ted Bundy. She said she cannot imagine what would have happened to her if her boyfriend had been even another 3 miles behind her on the road.

An acquaintance of mine sent his son to triathlon camp in Texas.

A week later, his son came back from camp. The next day, the son was complaining of a headache. Four days later, he was dead. Healthy, happy, fit 12 year old one week, dead the next.

Turns out the lake had [Naegleria fowleri], the brain-eating amoeba. Nothing scares me as irrationally as already being dead and waiting for your body to catch on.

From when I was delivering pizza

I walked up to a trailer park house and knocked, dude answers the door wearing a swastika armband and he’s bald, I tell him the total and he invites me inside while he gets the money there’s 10 more dudes all bald all wearing arm bands, sitting in a circle in metal chairs guy gives me the money, I go to leave, he grabs my arm and gets in my face and asks “do you like n****rs?” I don’t want to be murdered so I respond “nope not at all hate those f*****s” and leave as quick as possible.

The scary part is every other delivery driver but me that night was black and they might have never been seen again if I didn’t take the delivery.

My friend's boss bought an Audi A4 convertible, back when they were new and interesting. One of the talking points was the pop-up roll hoops that were hidden unless you rolled it.

A few months after buying it he got to test those roll hoops out, as he lost control and skidded down a steep bank about 10m (~35ft) deep.

The roll hoops did their job, and he survived with just cuts and scratches from the bushes he'd plowed through. The car ended up the right way up and he got out, walked back up the bank to the side of the road, then got on the phone to the police to report the accident. While he was standing there a driver from a car that had seen the accident came over to speak to him.

Approaching from behind the other driver asked if he was okay. My friend's boss turned around to reply and dropped dead. His neck had been fractured, but was in one piece right up until he turned his head, when it severed his spinal cord.

A female friend in college disappeared from a party at another university in the city town 25ish miles north of our school. She had arrived with another friend who I believe had driven. At some point she split off to play corn hole or something and was later inexplicably gone. Phone calls went to voicemail, police were called, but she was simply missing.

About 10 days later she was found by a homeless man who witnessed her crawling up to a bus stop in the city, begging for help. She had broken a leg and an arm, and was in very bad shape.

At the (quite large party) she had her drink secretly drugged and was then led off by a group of men into their vehicle. She was taken to an apartment where she was drugged, repeatedly r*ped, and locked in a small room in between with a bucket to use as a bathroom. At one point after being injected with heroin and r*ped, she somehow managed to convince one of her captors to allow her to use the actual bathroom to clean herself up. This bathroom had a small window to the outside, and with the shower running, she managed to squeeze out and fell from the third story into a large hedge/bush. From there she crawled from the apartment complex to the road and bus stop, where the homeless man saw her and called police. Many cars stopped upon seeing her, making her captives unable to recapture her.

Three men were later arrested for the crime after surveillance cameras allowed police to locate the apartment which she jumped from. She returned to our university almost two years later, graduated, and became a nurse. She was obviously traumatised, never "partied" again, carried a gun everywhere she could, and somehow moved on with life. It was a terrifying tale none of us ever forgot. She was an 18 year old freshman when the incident happened.

There was a woman who worked in a science lab who spilled two drops of organic mercury on the back of her gloved hand. Those two drops destroyed her entire nervous system and brain.

My mom was driving, and a guy ran out in the road, so she stopped so she couldn’t hit him.

It was night time, so it was pretty dark out, and 3 other men emerged from the forest around, all trying to use the door handles of her car to get in. She locked them luckily, and gassed it to the nearest town.

Remember to always lock your car after you start it, because if it wasn’t unlocked who knows what would’ve happened to her.

This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away.

Judy Kirby murdered six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit suicide. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband's brother and was by some reports involved in drug trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest.

She picked up her sister's son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a high rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride.

The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. There were pieces of children all over the highway. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.

Artimus Pyle the drummer from Lynard Skynard survived a plane crash and walked to a nearby house only to be shot by the homeowner. The homeowner saw a bloody long-haired man and winged him. Pyle survived that as well and made a full recovery.

Years ago when I was 8 my family lived in this big weird house kind of on the edge of a small town. The school district was in the middle of a big restructuring so even though we were only a couple grades apart my brother and I went to different schools and took different buses. This left me as the last person to leave in the morning and the first person to get home in the afternoon, which meant it was my job to make sure all the lights were off and the door was locked.

One morning I noticed the basement door was open and the light was on so before I left I turned off the light and closed the door. When I got home that afternoon the light was on and the door was open again. I just assumed that I’d forgotten to actually take care of it when I noticed it in the morning so I went over to turn off the light and close the door. When I got to the top of the basement stairs I looked and there was a big shadowy male figure towards the bottom of the staircase. I freaked out, slammed the door and pushed a bunch of boxes against it and then went and hid in my closet. For months I didn’t tell my family because I was positive what I had seen was a ghost and didn’t think anyone would believe me.

Then about a year after that incident my mom and her boyfriend realized that small amounts of money had been going missing for months (totaling around $800-900, but never more than $60 at once). So we all walked around the house with flashlights trying to figure out how they could have gotten in. Turns out some creep was climbing in through a small hole in the outside of the house, shimmying through a crawl space, then coming up into the house through the basement. Realizing I had been alone in the house with him on at least one occasion was one of the worst, most terrifying moments I’ve ever had.

One of my friends had someone following her home, hiding in the bushes so they couldn't be seen. She booked it to her house, got inside, and he was watching the house from the outside. She called the cops. They come along quietly and got the jump on him. He had condoms, handcuffs, and a knife. When they got his DNA, it turned out that he was linked to a half dozen r*pes in the area. She credits her regimen of running sprints to outrunning him that night and firmly believes she would have been r*ped if she couldn't outrun him then.

Nutty Putty Cave in Utah was sealed up in 2009 after John Jones was trapped upside-down in a small crevice while spelunking. When rescue teams finally arrived he had been upside-down for so long that his legs were drained of blood.

The only possible way to have gotten him out was to break his legs, which would’ve sent him into fatal shock. He died after being trapped for 28 hours. His body’s still in the cave.

My wife arrived at her Parents house that she was currently living in due to health issues of her Fathers. She got into the house (no one else was there at the time) and instead of going further in, stopped in the first room that held the computers which was right by the door. She went into the room and was messing around on the internet when one of the cats came into the room. Her cat to be precise.

Well this cat was super laid back. Loved everyone and never picked fights or got aggressive. He would literally lay down and let squirrels throw pecans at him from trees and do nothing but take it. Not tonight however, tonight he was growling and hissing intermittently while standing between my Wife and the entrance to the rest of the house. A laid back sweet old cat was acting like he was going to rip out a throat.

Turns out they found the back door wide open (super bad, her parents and her NEVER leave the door unlocked much less open). She came to find out later from those cops that they were hunting down a serial rapist that had been spotted in the area and that was why there were rolling down a safe (normally) residential street. Super spooky.

Life pro tip? Always trust the cat.

My friend tripped and fell onto the tracks, landing his face onto the 3rd rail. We kinda stood there in absolute shock because we thought he was dead, but then he said, "can I move? Will I be electrocuted?" We told him to move instantly and he did, we got him off the tracks, and no less than 2 minutes later a train went zipping by. I think the 3rd rail turned on seconds after his face came off of it. I know that's not scary to a lot of people, but to me it was because I would have lost a close friend back when I was about 12.