“I Thought I Died”: 46 Times People Didn’t Have To Leave Their Home To Be Scared To The Bone

My girlfriend and I both travel a lot for work (pre-covid) so it’s not unusual for only one of us to be home on any given week.

Last fall she was in San Francisco and I was home alone for a few days. We live in an apartment on the top floor of a building. Above us is a roof with a deck available to everyone.

Middle of the night I get up to use the bathroom and on the walk back to bed I look over to the study. There’s a sliding door in the study leading to a balcony.

I immediately stop dead in my tracks. I see the outline of a person standing on my balcony — facing me.

I run over, hit the lights, grab a knife from the knife block and start dialing 911.

The person is a kid — no more than 16. He sees me hit the lights, grab a knife and my phone and he **immediately** grabs the railing on my balcony and flings himself over.

I run over — assuming I just watched someone k**l themselves — only to see him safe and sound on the balcony below me. He then hurdles off that balcony. He’s jumping from floor to floor. He hits the parking lot in the back of our building safely and then sprints off.

Cops finally come and break up a party on the roof. Turns out he was just a drunk friend of someone on the second floor and got dared to do it.

Also shout out to my dog for being asleep 15 feet from the balcony and not doing anything.

Not sure if this counts. Was working on a farm in northern ca. It was a start up and I was the only person (at nights) on an isolated 650 acres. After dinner, was walking from the lodge to my cabin (100 yards +-) it’s dark so all I can see is what my flash light illuminates plus a little on the periphery of the main beam.

Any way, walking back and in the periphery I see red f*****g eyes staring at me unblinkingly. I turn the light on it and all I see is a pale white mass behind the still red eyes. I freak, takes a little bit to get me jumpy but this sure as hell did. Picture a 6’5” 260lb man. Now picture him letting out an unbelievably high pitch scream and straight sprinting into his cabin, 50 yards or so. The next day I was talking to one of the guys that come up to help out during the day told him what happened and he about fell over laughing. I think the sincere terror in my voice as I described the pale monster really drove the funny nail home for him. Well, turns out there’s such a thing as albino deer and just so happens one frequents this property. Nobody thought to warn me before hand.

The lights turned off all at once while I was in the kitchen. It was pitch black. I heard the door open. For some reason instead of thinking power outage my brain went to "someone has cut the power and is coming to k**l me".

I grabbed the landline, the knife and was crouched behind the kitchen counter hearing steps come through the house, trying to breath as quietly as possible.

Then I hear my mom go "Hello? Anyone home?"

The power went out by chance at the exact moment she came in the door. That would have been an awkward hospital trip.

I was watching some sort of ghost tv show about demons or something in my basement, home alone when I was probably 14 or 15...

A f*****g turkey walked up to the sliding door and started tapping on the glass. I noped the f**k out of that basement so fast. I don't think I ever watched that show again either.

It was spooky movie night at a friends and we were three movies deep, just finished watching dark skies. I was hungry so I was like alright getting my leftovers, so I went downstairs by myself. When I closed the fridge I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and when I turned to see what it was there was a ghostly white, skeletal.. thing just staring at me from outside the patio, with shimmering hazy lights pulsing behind it. I f*****g freaked, dropped my food and run up the stairs nearly in tears babbling about someone or thing in the back yard.

Turns out it was just my own reflection mixed with the lights and steam from the hot tub outside but I’ve never been so scared in my life.

Well my house was sort of out farther away from town. We had neighbors, but they were few and far between. There was a hiking trail opening across the street from our driveway, which was VERY long, and cant be seen from the trail. My room had a large window facing out to the driveway.

Anyway, I was home alone, cleaning my room, and singing 'We Are The Champions' extremely loudly (as well as playing it on my tv). Looked up, and suddenly see a man power-walking up my driveway VERY quickly. It's obvious no one is home but me since there aren't any cars in the driveway. So I ran to the front door (which was open because it was hot af outside), and locked it, and closed and locked my window.

Turns out bro-friend did not like that. I called 911 because he was still approaching my house, and I was getting scared by his demeanor, and while on the phone with the 911 operator, he started banging on my front window by the door, and then the door itself. He tried kicking in the door, and tried breaking the window. I went and hid in my moms closet (because it locked from the inside only) with a knife until the cops showed up.

By the time they showed up he was gone, and there were hand and shoes prints all over the door and front window, and some hand prints on my bedroom window. They found him about an hour later walking up and down my street. He told them that he 'heard my pretty singing voice and just wanted to say hi'. He was also drunk, but admitted to being sober at the time of the incident and started drinking 'after I rejected him'. He also told them that he planned to come in and 'have some fun' with me after he found that I was home alone. And that he was waiting for nighttime to come back.

So yeah. Had a lot of nightmares about that one.

TLDR: Man tried to break in because he heard me singing, couldnt get in, gave up, then went and got drunk. Police found and arrested him an hour later. Then he admitted to them that he wanted to r**e me.

There had been a scratching in my ceiling for awhile, and my landlady was dragging her feet over having it looked into.

One night, around 2am, the scratching became so bad it woke me up from a dead sleep. I tried to reassure myself that whatever it was couldn’t really get through to me, and I would be fine until I could call my landlady the next day and really press the issue.

Then some debris fell from my ceiling- whatever was up there had managed to dig a small hole into my room. I screamed, and heard some scurrying away from my approximate location. Grabbed any stuff I needed for the next day, got the f**k out of there, shut the door tight behind me, and slept on the couch.

I called my landlady first thing in the morning, and she had someone come while I was at work that day to check it out. A mama raccoon had managed to get her way into the space between the roof and my ceiling and had given birth to a litter of kits. The guy speculated that the kits were getting old enough to start wrestling around, and that was likely what led to the hole in my ceiling. Luckily it was just small (the size of a quarter), so there weren’t any angry raccoons hanging out in my room when I got home.

They were able to safely trap and release the whole little family, but I still started hunting for new apartments ASAP. I move into my new place on May 1st!

I heard gunshots when I was home alone for the first time as a twelve year old. Turns out my neighbor was a m******r. At least twelve cop cars and like two fire trucks showed up and I thought it was the end of the world.

I was in my basement where the computer was playing some game, probably Runescape, and heard someone pull into the driveway, naturally assuming it was my mother who was coming home from work. I heard the screen door open but when no one opened the lock on the actual door I started to go upstairs and I saw a pair of legs go by the window (while the basement was underground, there was about a foot that popped up above ground level and had two windows). I go upstairs and see two dudes in my backyard looking at the windows and talking about the door was locked. It was an attempted home robbery, we had been broken into a few times at that point and had everything locked, but 10 year old me was terrified.

edit: because you guys keep asking, they just left, nothing happened. No Home Alone s**t, I did not get k**led, I am very much alive.

Just me and my mom. She got drunk and fell down the stairs. She knocked herself out cold and i had to admininster CPR while the paramedics came. She has no recollection of this incident, denies it, and no one else in my family can relate to how scary it is seeing someone almost die and having their life in your hands. I don't know how first responders do it.

One evening my dog (who sadly passed away this year) used to like standing on the stairs and looking out the window to watch the world go by. One evening my parents went out and my dog was on his usual spot when I hear a very low growl. I come out of my room to see to him and he growls again and shifts slightly but he’s focused on the window and he doesn’t budge. His heckles are up and his body language is stiff. I’m thinking it’s a fox or cat that’s triggered him but I’m concerned as it was the first time I had ever heard him growl. I take a look out of a different window and I can’t see anything. I knew enough not to try to move any dog on whilst in that state (a risk of dogs redirecting etc) so I left him to it and eventually he comes and settles outside my room after pacing along the hallway for a bit, but he won’t come into my room when I call him. He’s just fixed in my doorway. After an hour a police helicopter flies over and circles around the area but that’s normal for that part of town and I don’t make a connection, I just figure something has spooked my boy.

The next day at around the afternoon we get a knock on the door from the police. The evening before a young girl got followed off a bus and r***d on a nearby green and the dirty b*****d ran off and hid in peoples gardens after he was done & had tried a few people’s doors and windows to see if they were open & the police wanted to know if we’d seen anything unusual that evening. My dad answered in the negative as he was out with my mum, however I wasn’t in when the police knocked and only heard about it later when my dad told me about the police. The guy was eventually caught and charged as they traced the card he used to board the bus he followed the girl off from. It wasn’t his first offence either, it was all over the local news.

I suspect the guy was hiding in our garden and my dog had spotted him and knew the guy was dodgy so went into guard dog mode, which was unusual as he was a big soppy baby who loved everyone.

I miss him!

It was a hot summer and my parents went to a wedding. I had a project to do and it was like 1am and silent until a random drunk dude crawled in through my window with a bottle and blush face. I was 20ft away at my desk from the window and we both just stared at each other. He was flustered and said "oh sorry there kid wrong house" and attempts to leave the way he came. He was drunk n dizzy so I helped him by pushing him out the window. I thoroughly shut it and stared at it for 2 hours until my parents came home.

It was about 8:30 at night and I heard the front door open. I called out from my room asking why my mom and dad were home only a half hour after they left for dinner. I almost s**t my pants and straight up jumped out of my bedroom window when a random male voice replied, “What? There’s somebody in here?”. Turns out it was somebody who got hired to check on one of our neighbor’s dog when they were on vacation and he got the wrong house address, but the raw fear that gripped me when I heard his voice still gives me nightmares.

Late at night when I was a teenager. Must’ve been around 1 am and I was watching YouTube and I my phones has an alert. My phone is connected to the security system and whenever something happens it gives an alert for a few seconds before ringing so that you can cancel if you want to. I’m home alone and I decide to cancel the alarm. I slowly get out of my room and creep down with a Renaissance fair knife I bought a couple weeks ago and I head a thud. It sounded like someone trying to quietly jump down from a higher place without making much noise. Then some footsteps and creaking, now coming from my kitchen. I slowly inch towards my kitchen, adrenaline pumping. Knife in one hand, I turn the light on with the other, prepared to fight for my life. Yeah turns out it was my cat that I forgot had existed because I was so scared.

My grandparents paid me to house sit for them and take care of their animals(2 dogs, 2 goats and like 3 or 4 horses) for two weeks. One of the dogs was really clingy so I closed the door on him when I went to bed one night. I woke up in the middle of the night but I was too tired to move but I saw a black figure with a white face standing right beside the bed. It was making this horrific growling noise and leaned into me and pressed down on my chest. It pressed harder and harder and then I was able to move my fingers and then I was eventually able to move my body but after that, I let the dog sleep in the room and I slept with the lights on. That was the first time I experienced sleep paralysis and thankfully the times after that one weren’t freaky.

I started choking on a clump of Mike/Ikes. Only survived because I tripped and fell on the couch in such a way that it dislodged the candy. I was nearly k**led then saved by being a klutz.

Someone tried to break into my neighbors house while I was babysitting their kids. I was 15 and I used to baby sit for my neighbors down the block. They had a really nice house, 3 floors with a built-in garage under the house, that connected to the basement. It was the family's most used entrance of the house and they rarely locked the basement door as long as the garage was closed. They also had the type of security system where anytime a door opens you heard "beep beep beep".

After the parents left one night I was putting the kids to bed and I heard the "beep beep beep". I yelled out, thinking it was the parents coming back for something but no one answered. The system on the wall kept reading "basement door open". I was freaked out so I called my Dad and asked him to come by since he was only a few houses away. When he arrived, he told me to stay in the kitchen while he checked the house but before he could, we heard the "beep beep beep" again and then the garage door opened - when we ran to the window to see if the parents were pulling into the driveway, they weren't. Instead someone in a hoodie was running out of the garage door and into the woods behind the house. My Dad ended up calling the cops. I'm still creeped out by it.

When I was around 8 or 9, my mum commuted to a major city about an hour/hour and a half away, so I would bring myself home from school (about 100m away), lock the door and watch cartoons or play neopets until she got home.

We lived in apartment blocks, and one day one of the older male people in the apartment lost his wallet, and he figured it must have been me. Keep in mind, I've never stolen anything in my life or had any trouble with the law, and I had no clue what he was talking about. He came and banged on the door so aggressively that I jumped out of my skin, and was belligerent demanding I open the door. I rang mum crying and she jumped on a train to come home but she was an hour and a half away. She called some friends and they came and got me, and at that stage he had taken a break and gone back to his apartment, but left his dry cleaning there.

When mum got back, she stormed straight to his door and pounded on it like he had done to our door. He came to the door, all shocked, and she demanded to know why he thought it was appropriate to bang on the door for AN HOUR to scare a little girl. He replied that he thought I stole his wallet. Mum asked him if he still thought I did, and he said no I found it in the carpark.??? She looked like she wanted to k**l him, and forced him to apologise.

Also, in that same apartment block, there was a hairline fracture on the sliding door that we didn't know about. A strong wind blew and shattered the entire window inwards. I was home alone then too, that was scary as f**k.

This just happened last week, I woke up to someone in my house. Walking up the stairs to my bedroom, it was about 1pm, and I work third shift, so I was sleeping. In my haste, I didn't grab my bat. I whip open my door and it's my ex bestfriend, whom I've blocked on every social media site... she starts yelling at me for not responding to her and how she misses me.... idk what scared me more, the split second I realized there was an intruder. Or that someone I knew would just take it upon themselves to force me to talk to them, by trespassing.

I have always had hallucinations, primarily audio and visual ones.
When I turned about 9 I started to be able to tell when it wasnt real.

Just imagine up until then, when I was home alone at night the walls would breath and people stomped around the house.
I would carefully search the house for other people.
But the walls breathing always scared me.
Still see it every now and then, still creeps me out.