63 Halloween Stories That Were Much Scarier Than Anything People Had Planned

Not technically Halloween night but a few days before Halloween. I was 17-18 at the time and there usually isn't much to do in our town at the age except go to this old abandoned factory that we used to go to all the time to explore and pretty much spend time.

Well me and a couple buddies decided to go and for once it was still kinda light out when we went. We did the usual cross the road into the bushes then make a bee line to the first building. Well this day it smelled like absolute trash inside and we all commented about it and continued being a bunch of dudes climbing on things breaking bottles being loud ECT.

Then out of nowhere we started hearing loud bangs and almost whimper like sounds so we shut up and started listening and started to go towards the noise well we rounded a corner and found a homeless guy on the ground with heavy blood loss to his legs and we immediately tried to help him and he kept asking us if ITS gone or if IT is still around we immediately called 911 and I took off my belt for a tourniquet. His legs looked like they went through a meat grinder is all I can describe it.

We figured rescue would have a hell of a time getting to where we were at so we all decided to just scoop him up and carry him out to the road well in the panic and the struggle of carrying this big guy I happen to look behind us and up to my right and seen the largest hairy black creature standing in a doorway on two feet and the sun was just hitting it right and I seen the man's blood on its face and chest. We don't have bears where I'm located and the only way I can describe it as is it was big foot but I dont believe in a big foot living in a suburb of a large city. Never knew what ever happened to that guy the police never said anything never asked us questions or nothing.

When I was 17 I lived with my friend and her family who pretty much took me in let me stay there in exchange for babysitting. Well my friend, her 8-year-old little cousin, and little cousins best friend who was also 8 went walking to get some face makeup for Halloween, and to get to the Walgreens they had to cross a major Street. They didn't take the crosswalk instead they jaywalked.
Well the car in the lane closest to them stopped, but her cousin and little friend went ahead and the very next Lane the car didn't stop. Her cousin flew I think 17 ft. Ruptured her spleen concussion, tons of road rash she had to stay in the hospital for a couple weeks. Her best friend gott it way worse, she was put into a coma because of brain swelling and trauma from the accident. That was an awful Halloween. Both girls are fine and have kids of their own now.

This is harsh. And my own personal nightmare.


A phone call. Back to back. A text. And knocking. Seeing two police cars and my sisters husbands truck parked in my yard. In that moment I thought something awful happened to my nephew before Halloween trick or treating. In that moment I knew my world was about to stop. “It’s dad. Dads gone”



I hope someday I can enjoy Halloween again without the painful reminder. I hope I can find a way to separate the two.


Since my father’s passing there’s been… things. Odd things have happened. Hoping to meet with a medium soon and maybe have some answers.

I've posted this story before, possibly on another account, if it sounds familiar.

TL;DR: something mimicked my mom's voice and slapped the life out of me.

I was like 7 or 8 years old and my mom had just tucked me into bed. I fell asleep, then I woke up sometime later to my mom's voice saying "time for bed, want me to tuck you in?". I was confused by this given that she already tucked me in. I don't think I responded, because I was sleepy, but then something slapped me across the face *really hard*. I woke up, looked around, nothing was there. Weird. Obviously that freaked me out, so I hid under the covers and tried to go back to sleep. I was shaking and I had that feeling like someone else was in the room with me, standing right behind me, even though no one was there. After a minute I got slapped again, 2 or 3 more times. This was even more confusing given that I was under the blanket, so what the f**k could be slapping me? And why did it have my mom's voice? I was pretty freaked out as you can imagine.

I laid there in fear for what felt like an hour, unable to sleep, then finally I got the courage to get out of bed and go to my mom's room to find out if the voice I heard was really her. She was asleep, and when I woke her up and told her what happened she had no idea what I was talking about. It was not her who came into my room, she was asleep the whole time.

I don't know if it was paranormal or not, maybe it was sleep paralysis or something (I definitely experienced that as a child). But I know I *felt* pretty awake after being slapped in the face, so I'm not sure. If it was just the one slap that startled me awake, I would say it was probably just a dream. But the repeated slaps after I woke up make me doubt that.

The memory of this event has always stuck with me quite vividly, and the details of the story have never changed. Personally I don't think it was sleep paralysis because I know what that feels like, but I really have no idea if it was paranormal or not. I've heard similar stories and people are very quick to attribute experiences like that to "demons", but I don't believe in that kind of thing. I'm not sure I even believe in ghosts, all I know is that experience scared the life out of me and I don't have a convincing explanation for it. There were a lot of other weird things that happened in that house, but that experience was by far the most extreme.

A lot of unexplained activity in the newly built house my parents moved us to for a few years (we didn't last long in that house) but the most terrifying maybe not on paper but to me...

I was home alone that night and took a nap on the sofa when it was still light out. Woke up to a completely dark house and the sound of scratching.

Now, we had a cat but do you know how cats scratch? Quick quick quick with both paws. What I heard was a long slow scratch from one side of the sofa to the other behind me. Like someone dragging their nails sloooowly.

I was laying on my side with my back to the back of the sofa and too terrified to turn around. I heard it again, another sloooow scratch and just kept still with my eyes closed. Maybe it would stop? But after a while, I was scared something bad would happen if I didn't run so once I got the courage, I bolted for my room and locked the door behind me. Slept with the lights on all night and nothing else happened. Didn't leave my room until someone else came home the next day.

We had weird scratching noises in the basement before but never this up close and it just felt... personal.

As a side, I tried to do EVP once in the basement. Within the first 5 seconds you can hear what sounds like someone whispering "get. out ". I played it to many without telling them what it was and everyone hears the same thing I do. Never been brave enough to listen to the whole tape.

I have a pretty weird one. Around 2011, I was 19 and newly married to someone in the Navy. His first duty station was Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was such a great house, right on base. Full garage, kitchen, separate laundry room, 2 bed 2 bath. Beautiful. My husband worked a lot of late nights and would regularly be gone for the bulk of them which added to my general discomfort there. That house was crazy. I would get a little creeped out there by myself.

The first experience was when I was upstairs in the bathroom washing my face. The bathroom was at the top of the stairs directly to the right, next to our bedroom. I was washing my face one evening while my husband was home. He came walking up the stairs pretty slowly and then stood right at the doorway to the bathroom just saying nothing. I was in the middle of scrubbing my eyes so I just said “what?” And he didn’t respond, so I washed the soap off my eyes quickly and glanced up to see no one there. I yelled his name and he called down from the living room “yeah?”. That nearly made me soil my pants but it’s just the precursor to this next part.

One night I had this strange dream. I dreamt that I was running up the stairs as fast as I could. I ran past the bathroom and through the open door to our bedroom. As soon as I reached the bedroom door I woke in my bed, completely startled! I was laying on my side facing the bedroom door. I always kept a night light on in the closet because I was such a scaredy cat so the room was very lightly Illuminated. When I woke up from the dream i saw that in the doorway to the bedroom there was a jet black blob that was nearly the size of the entire doorway, like I guess what you might call an orb? But it wasn’t. It was oblong shaped and irregular. It was like a cloud and it faded fast but it faded in on itself, like shrinking into a little ball until it disappeared completely. It was there and gone within 10 seconds. The way it shrunk though was.. just odd. The edges of the blob were pixilated and it was like the pixels from the edges just pixelated out. That’s how it shrank.

It wasn’t a dream though. I sat awake for a minute wondering was the heck that was until I just closed my eyes again. I told my husband about the incident and he *really* tried to talk me out of it and didn’t want to even discuss it, that is until a few months later.

Nothing much happened after the event and life just continued on as normal and quiet. One day, out of nowhere, my husband just decided to tell me that he actually had seen something too. He worked odd hours so he was usually in bed way before me but was a light sleeper. He said he woke up one night because I had come in the room getting ready for bed. He said he saw what looked like a black orb right next to me as I dressed and he said the edges of that orb were pixelated too.

Would LOVE to know what that could have been.

Funny, I was going to post this at some point anyway. Seems trivial, but for someone who believes there's a practical explanation for everything, this is one of the only events I've never figured out, and it took place not that long ago.


I have a phone that has a stylus. I rarely use it, but sometimes it comes out of its hole on its own, which is totally normal. However, one day, it was completely gone when I actually wanted to use it. Looked everywhere and figured it finally fell out completely and maybe jumped out of my pocket when I took my wallet out at the store or something of that sort. It was just me at home, my partner had the day on and I had the day off. So, I set my phone down, annoyed that the stylus was gone when I actually wanted it. An hour later, my phone rang, I went to check it, spam call. And then I noticed the stylus was back, perfectly in place, but jammed so hard in its hole that while it's perfectly visible and I'd never confuse it for being missing, I haven't been able to remove it since that day. So now the thing is always there, but like Tantalus, I can't get it.


No idea how this occurred.

For some background, I started seeing ghosts and hearing things when I was in high school. It had been going on for a few months at this point. I wasn’t sure if it was real or if I was hallucinating, so I just kind of kept it to myself??

I would see shadow people. They didn’t feel particularly bad or evil, they just stood there and stared at me and it would really creep me out so I tried to avoid or ignore them.

One day I was laying on the couch with my best friend. I saw a shadow person slowly walk over to us and lean over my friend’s face. It just like stared at her for a few seconds and then walked back out of the room. I didn’t say anything because 1) I didn’t know if it was even real and 2) I didn’t want to scare my friend!

But then she told me that she thought that something just leaned over her and looked at her. I literally got chills. This was confirmation that all of this was real!!! I had so many questions and I was way more scared than before.

Scarier stuff happened there, like things moving on their own and me being scratched. But this was the creepiest thing I’ve ever experienced lol.

I lived in a house that we all agreed was haunted. There would be strange sounds in the night, doors opening and closing, sounds of footsteps, the typical stuff. but there was one spectre that multiple people witnessed independently, and we all had the pretty much the same description: not exactly human-like, black, thin and tall, almost like a large umbrella when it was rolled up. It would usually ambush you at the end of a hallway as you were passing by the entrance, or it would be at one end of a winding stairway.

But what got really weird was one day I was talking to my sister and her friends about our curious little interloper, as one of them had just seen him for the first time. Why do I say "him" for something that looks like an umbrella? For some reason I had just started calling him "Bob". while we were talking my sister blurts out "I've just started calling him bob" and my blood ran cold. this same situation played out later with a friend of mine who had seen him several times at this point. "I've just started calling him bob." None of us could really figure out why we had chosen that name for Bob.

Then came the weirdest moment. One night I woke up to this dreadful feeling. Bob was standing in the corner of the room. He let out this weird shriek, like someone suffocating, Gasping for breath/clearly inhaling. I turned toward the lamp on my bedside and turned it on, but he was gone when I looked back at the corner. I sat there for a moment trying to gather my thoughts when my phone rang, It was my friend who had also started calling him bob. I answered, he's panicked, "What the hell! bob just woke me up, standing in the corner of my room shrieking at me!".

When I was around 12, my friend and I saw something that I could never explain. If someone told me they saw this, I wouldn’t believe them, but I know what I saw.

The house I grew up in was on the corner of a city street. The way the house was situated, from my bedroom windows looking out (I had two large ones side by side) you could see the street and the entire side of the house across from us. A guy friend of mine lived on the second floor of that house, and him and his family were gone for the weekend.

My friend and I were in my room playing Nintendo, and I was sitting on my bed facing the windows. It was evening, but must not have been later than 6 or 7 because my friend wouldn’t have been over too late. It was her turn playing and I’m watching the screen, but something catches my eye and I look out of my window and see something in the friend who is gone for the weekend’s home.

I kid you not, it looked like what you would describe a Yeti to be. It was white, as tall as the ceiling, and covered in hair. I frantically told my friend to look and she paused the game and immediately saw the same thing. We got down on the floor and crawled to my window to watch this thing. It was destroying the house. Like, breaking chairs, breaking dishes, ripping up the sofa, etc. I remember asking my friend if she was seeing what I was seeing and she confirmed that she was. We watched this thing for a few minutes and then kinda started diverting our attention to each other in like a oh-my-god-what-the-hell way, and when we eventually looked back, it was gone.

We both kind of seemed to instinctively know that this was something that should stay between us. It wasn’t discussed, but the vibe was there. In order to get home, she would have to walk past that house so she had her dad pick her up. I tried my best to sleep, but kept waking up and looking out to see if I saw it again, but I didn’t.

The next day, I was sitting outside my house waiting for the friend who lived in the house to come home. I felt I needed to be there when they eventually came running out of their destroyed home so that I could try to explain what we saw the night before. They pulled up sometime in the afternoon and I hid behind my door in some kind of fear. Like, I knew this was going to be bad, and I was scared to be a part of it. I watch them go inside and I wait. And wait. And nothing. Eventually the friend and his dad come out to get luggage from the car and look as nonchalant as you can be. At this point, I’m confused. The house was destroyed. We saw it happen. I go across the street to my friend and he greets me. I’m kinda like, “Um…what’s up? Everything cool?” And he starts talking to me about something and it hits me that the house is fine. Everything was as they left it. At this point I’m so confused because I know what I saw. And I have a witness! Later on the friend who witnessed this event and I talk and neither of us can understand what happened. But life just kinda moves on.

It wasn’t until I was an adult and I read about so-called glitches in the matrix that I started to think that might be an explanation for what I saw. Some poor prehistoric creature got whirled into a house, freaked out, and then glitched back, returning everything to its normal state. I mean, yeah it sounds crazy, but I racked my brain for decades trying to come up with something more based in “reality” and I just can’t land on anything.

I’ve only told two people what we saw that night; my mom and my husband. Neither outright say I’m lying, because they know me and know I’m not someone who tells stories, but they don’t seem to enthusiastically believe me either. I get it. They probably think I saw something that they can logically explain, but I swear, unless you saw it, it’s impossible to know how real it was.

Sorry if this is a jumble, I tried to make it as concise as possible.

There’s a dude in the neighborhood over who’s known for every year taking the chain (the dangerous part) off his chainsaw and dressing up as some horror scarecrow and revving the chainsaw at kids as they approached his house. I avoided it for a few years until I thought I could handle it lol.

I spent a year in a Christian based military school when I was 14. We didn’t have clocks or calendars so I don’t know which day was Halloween but something horrific happened every day so I’d say that. If youve never researched some of the messed up stuff that happens in the troubled teen industry, it’s worth looking up if you want some real world horror. My facility was called Thayer learning center.

We once were dressed up and passed by a cemetary, few meters further I decided to take some pictures of my friend in her mask with my sony cybershot phone or something (that was like 2008?) - I didn't check the pictures until later. When I did I saw a huge foggy/smokey shape next to her that looked really close to a human figure. Well, or the ghost of one lol


Technically I still have the phone but it broke back then (can't turn it on) and I haven't bothered restoring any data.

One misty halloween night a couple years ago I was walking home by the cemetery and the abandoned burned-down next to it. No one had lived in it for years and no one even noticed it. A low gurgling growl from something BIG inside made me freeze. I laughed and said "good trick" and hustled home before letting myself consider I was almost ended by a werewolf.

I'd like to think there was someone with a speaker in there tricking an extremely small group of people. Firefighters tore the house down a month later.

This will get buried but if anyone who is a fan of these threads like me, I know they’ll read all the comments obsessively.

I grew up in a house in the UK built in the early 1800s. The original deed to the house was written on parchment and ink which my parents still have. It went through pockets of very bad vibes - footsteps with no source, seeing things in reflections out of the corner of your eye, sensing something in the room with you when nobody was around.

My grandma lived with us and had some rooms on the ground floor. I was in the house on my own, sat in her living room waiting for her to come home so we could go to the shops. This room is directly off of the front hallway when you walk into the house and we had this old, glass pane front door that creaked and made a very particular noise when it opened as it scrapes along the carpet. So as I’m sitting there waiting, I hear the door push open and I hear footsteps along the hallway right up to the living room. The door to the room is open so I turn my head expecting to see my nan walk into the room. But nothing. And then I hear the footsteps walk into the room, past where I’m sitting on the couch and stop on the opposite side of the room. I’m sat speechless.

My Nan had these little brass ornaments on her TV stand - 3 little monkeys doing the signs for “hear no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil.” She always kept them around since she was a child to bring her luck and safety. And one by one the little ornaments fell of the TV stand with little plops as they hit the carpet. They didn’t fall all at once. It was slowly and deliberately like someone was knocking them down in turn. I was totally frozen but when the last ornament hit the floor I bolted out of the door and outside to wait for my Nan on the front step. I wouldn’t call myself a believer in the paranormal. I think there is usually a logical explanation. But I know all of my family had weird experiences in that house.

(Unfortunately this one turned out to be explainable so the ending is disappointing)

For the longest time I was convinced I had seen a ghost, or had some sort of out of body experience. I vividly remember waking up somewhere I had never been before, and a woman with long blonde hair and an old fashioned white gown entering the room and walking toward me and calling my name. I closed my eyes in terror and kept them that way until I fell back asleep.

This was my go-to ghost story for *years*, because I could remember every single detail and was absolutely convinced it had happened. No way it was a dream. No one else had an explanation for it either.

So for over a decade I would tell people that story any time ghostly experiences came up. And then one day I was looking through an old photo album...and I found the ghost!

It was a picture of my mom's friend Laurie who lived near us. She looked differently than I was used to, because she'd always worn her hair up since I knew her, and this was an older photo. I pieced together the circumstances and learned that when my mom was pregnant with my little brother, she went into labor in the middle of the night. Before driving her to the hospital, my dad scooped me out of bed and took me to Laurie's house, to look after me. I woke up confused, and Laurie heard me moving and came to check on me. It was late so she had her hair down and was in her nightgown. I was half-asleep, confused to wake up in an unfamiliar place, and had never seen her like that so I didn't recognize her.

So yeah, for over ten years I spun the memory of being babysat by a neighbor into a terrifying ghost story.

The way my office is set up, there are a bunch of desks you have to pass before you can reach my door. Even if you skip across them, it would take you al least 3 minutes before you are out the door. So I was working in my office one afternoon. Everyone else had left already, it was Friday afternoon. I heard, clear as day, three distinct knocks on my door. I immediately went to see who it was. There was nobody. The hairs on my arm stood up. I thought it was weird, but maybe I was tired, so I moved on. About two weeks later, the same thing happened. It still happens from time to time, I just ignore it and go on. I have been told not to acknowledge spirit activity, so I guess I'm sharing an office with a knocker ghost.

I was 13 and just moved to another school. I'm terryfied of new people so talking to them was really hard and all I wanted was a friend.


I had those dreams about a guy older than me, he looked familiar and reminded me of my sister. We were talking and playing together.


In my last dream about him he asked me if I want to be with him forever and I said yes. We started walking through a dark maze, walking was becoming harder and harder with every step.


Finally I saw the light at the end of it and heard whisperes telling me it's not my time yet and I have to go back but I continued to follow him. The whisperes got louder and louder and thousands of hands came out of the walls of the maze and started dragging me away, I tried to fight but I couldn't.


Finally I got so scared I ran out of the maze and when I got out I've heard him screaming "why did you leave me?". I woke up with an asthma attack.


After a few months I learned that my mum had a misscarriage before I was born so I think it was my brother.

I’ve got a couple.

A Halloween one: my friends and I were kids trick or treating and it was getting late. We were walking the neighborhood for last minute candy and a man with an actual sword came running after us. No costume or anything. We weren’t at a house. Was not a prank. Luckily we were very fast. He chased us a few blocks until we ran into the nearby foresty area.

House is haunted. Saw a large shadow person with a tear drop shaped head just walk past my hallway at the end of my room.

Had a bad case of sleep paralysis when I was going through puberty. Kept seeing this awful thing on my ceiling crawling around and staring at me. Stuff out of nightmares. Horrible icy naked body crawling around.

I shared this elsewhere already today but it's perfect for here-
My partner and I were driving down a steep hill in my city, myself in the passenger seat. Traffic was fairly busy as usual as it was only ahout 8pm and the road is one of the main routes for commuting out of the city. I'm just kinda enjoying the journey as the car was nice and warm and I was looking forward to dinner when I got home. I noticed out of the front window and to the right that somebody was about to walk in front of oncoming traffic. I panicked and shouted out loud to my partner that someone was about to get hit and potentially thrown into our path. But at the moment they were about to be hit by a small white van, their top half disappeared but their legs were still walking into the road. It is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in my 32 years alive. The legs took a few steps forward, they weren't solid as I could see the vehicles head lights through them, yet they weren't completely transparent. So strange. I had consumed no alcohol, no nothing, not even a paracetamol and I wasn't tired or stressed either. Still to this day I won't go on that stretch of road!