37 Stories That Wouldn’t Be As Scary If They Weren’t 100% Real, As Shared By People Online

When I was learning to drive, my instructor advised me to always lock my car doors, as soon as I get into my car. I asked her why & she told me her personal experience.

This happened almost a year after she passed her test. She finished work about 3am. She just gotten into her car & gotten her keys in the ignition, when 3 guys jumped into her car. She had a knife to her neck & was told to drive. They give her directions to an alleyway. They dragged her out of the car & [violated] her. After they were done with her, they left her in the alleyway and stole her car & purse. It took her awhile to get help. Police did find her car a few days later, abandoned & on fire, on the outskirts of the city. But the guys were not caught.

The reason she started to teach driving, was her way to protect other women & make sure no one else goes through, what she went through. So she advised all her female students to lock their car doors, as soon as they get in.

Edit to add - I’m still in contact with my instructor, via social media. I sent her screenshots of this comment & the other comments. She is happy that her advice/warning is out there, before she retires for health reasons. She wants me clear a misunderstanding, that she saw in the comments. She does give the same advice to her male students & she does tell them her experience, but leave out the [violation] part.

She does get messages from her past students (including me), saying “thank you for the advice/warning” & we tell her about our close calls.

A message of her “Thank you for sharing your experience & advice, so that others can be safe & they don’t go through the same experience.”

So when I was around 18 I went to town to drink something with my friends. We went all in and by 2 am I was completely wasted. Couldn't see, walk or think straight.

One of my mates remained sober to drive us back home. We went to the parking lot and I could hear a voice whimmering somewhere in the dark. I turned around and saw 2 guys carrying a girl to a car. I got closer and now I could hear her voice. She obviously was drunk but she repeated ,,no,, and ,,I don't want,, over and over. Adrenaline kicked in and I became sober instantly. I screamed at them and immediately called the police. I wasn't fast enough so they could get in the car and drive off. But I saw the license plate, gave it to the woman I talked to at the police station and they informed me about 10 minutes later that they arrested the two guys. The whole scene was so terrifying. This was in Germany.

This story kind of creeps me out even to this day but I have a pretty good one

I lived in mesa Arizona when I was 10 years old, we lived in a rough area but I was just a kid completely ignorant to the dangers of the world. I was walking back home from my friends house and my mother wanted me home by 9 and id always start walking back at around 8:40 to make sure I wasn't late, and its only like a couple blocks from my house so it wasn't a super long distance. it was around the time of year when the sun would set at 5:30 and be dark well before 7pm. so it was very much night time.

As I'm walking I hear a woman calling my name, I turned to look and see it was one of my moms friends, but she didn't know her too well. however I just saw that she was familiar and wont say a name, but I turned around and said hello and smiled. she walked up to me and told me my mom had called her and asked her to come get me and ride me back because something happened at my house, she said it was an emergency and that I needed to go with her and her husband whom my family was also familiar with.

I was only about 5 minutes from my house but I was told it was an emergency and I agreed to go with her. As I'm walking I get this weird feeling in my gut and this shaking in my legs that I now today realize was my instincts being on HIGH alert. I stopped for a minute and asked if we could call my mom and she said my mother was in the hospital right now and that I need to hurry. right as we were opening the door to the car i hear my mother SHOUT my name as loud as she can. and i turned on a dime and quickly walked towards my mom.

My mom asked what's going on and the woman replies and says that she was just giving me a ride home because she saw me. Was not the story she gave me so I told my mother what she told me and asked what was going on. My mom just looked at me and she could always tell when I'm lying vs when I'm telling the truth. The woman then goes to interrupt me likely to lie and my mom cuts her off and just stared back at her with the most shocked look ever and these words still send shivers down my spine. she says in the most shocked voice ever. "you were trying to take my son" and the husband looks out the window hurrying his wife in the car and as I looked back at towards him, I can see a syringe on the dashboard leaning against the windshield that he grabs right as I see it.

she gets in the car because at that point my mom was ready to kill her, and reached into her purse because she keeps a pocket knife. but they drove away and right after they did my mom looked at me and just burst into tears saying "I'm almost lost you" my mom knew full well what was happening and I was still too shaken to even say anything and just hugged her back and we went home. I was still in denial and to cope, I would convince myself that maybe i wasn't in any danger.

My family ofc never kept in contact with any of them but my step dad at the time submitted a tip to the police of the incident. when they caught up with him about 3 months later we had found out that he was arrested for having CP on his computer and found restraints in his closet as well as some containers of Propofol. They found pictures of me from my moms Facebook downloaded on his computer as well, leading them to believe that I was actually being watched for a good bit.

I never liked talking about it because to this day, if I hadn't stopped for those 10 seconds to ask the woman to call my mom, I don't know where id be or if id even be alive right now making this comment. and while it may seem like something that would have easily been forgotten, it was never the case for me. I haven't even told my closest friends this story but I might sometime soon. I asked my mom what happened that night, why she came looking for me. she described the same feeling I remembered feeling moments before I was almost abducted. just a lot sooner than I did. and just had the instinct that I was in danger.

I'm not usually a lucky person, it seems the odds are always against me but I always remember how lucky I was that night, that my mom decided to listen to her instincts when I didn't. I've never ignored my instincts since and every night after that when I finally did decide to leave my house. my mom would walk with me all the way up until I turned 13 to come back to live with my dad. And that to date is the scariest thing I think I've ever experienced. its some s**t you only hear of on the news and nobody ever assumed it will happen to them but my life was a mere 20 seconds from being completely different.

My college girlfriend called me one night. "The Baton Rouge Serial Killer" had been active a while and she was being followed - all over town and even after going in circles - by a while truck, which the killer supposedly drove. She fit the victim profile, she was brunette living in (house sitting for her aunt) a wealthy neighborhood.

My roommate and I drove over and we filed in line behind her and the triuck. She lived essentially ON the LSU grounds so I assumed it was a stupid student prank or something. She parks at her aunt's house, truck stops one house short of her aunt's and we pull in behind her.

I explain I'm going to go diffuse the situation. Walk over to the truck, the FBI says the killer is a white guy, this man is African American. Explain no one is upset but he's freaking out my girlfriend, he needs to leave. He looks side eyed at me and drives off.

I see the guy again a few months later, on the cover of the Baton Rouge paper, he's been arrested. He was the killer.

This only happened earlier this year; a work colleague was off work for a long time, not like him at all. When he eventually returned we found out that his friend had been murdered by a group of football(soccer) wankers.

They'd been in a pub watching a match for the team they supported; they were celebrating a win when a group of men from the opposing team got angry and started arguing. When my colleague and his friends left the pub, they jumped his friend and beat him so bad he ended up in hospital where he eventually succumbed to the injuries.

This is one of the reasons I hate football, especially where I am (England). Riot vans, hundreds of police etc always around every train station and football stadium. Sad little men willing to take a life over a bag of air getting kicked around. It's not the first time, certainly won't be the last, someone has died over f*****g football.

Sad, true, and societally scary:

While I was on life support, there was this other girl on a ventilator, just down the hall.

Like me, she’d had all of the right symptoms: headaches upon waking, vomiting without nausea, and getting lost in the house where she’d lived for years.

Like me, she researched them extensively.

Unlike me, she reached the right conclusion, and asked her parents for a scan. But they had a bunch of other kids, and money was tight, and she was at the right age to see symptoms as unduly catastrophic. So they said no.

Meanwhile, I was treating my symptoms with the gym. My mother had begged me to get a scan, and I’d said no. Until I had health insurance of my own, I couldn’t afford it, as it would show a preexisting condition that would destroy my future insurability.

The other patient took up three jobs to save the money for a scan. She made the rounds of several neurologists, begging. Each responded dismissively: she was too young, and looked so well that she had to be a hypochondriac. Finally, one took pity on her, and gave her a scan, telling her outright that it was only so that she’d stop asking, and that she’d hear results in some weeks.

I kept going to the gym until the day that I collapsed, vomiting blood, bursting a pupil.

She went in for her first craniotomy walking, talking, fine.

My parents and boyfriend would sit beside me through my coma, holding my hand, telling me how much they loved me.

She’d have her own such trio, doing the same.

I’d wake.

I’d meet her parents, her boyfriend.

I’d visit the ICU.

I’d see them growing more gaunt, more desperate, each time, until the trip when I learned that she’d gone to long-term coma care.

I’d recover.

She’d die.

Brain cancer is that kind of a b***h.

Since then, I’ve taken the survivor’s guilt to do everything that I can with my life… but that so easily could’ve—should’ve—been her outcome instead. That’s the outcome for so many.

It’s terrifying because it demonstrates how we, as a society, often dismiss the health complaints of all but a narrow slice of the population, without even registering that we’re doing it. How many lives do we, unthinkingly, throw away?

My great grandpa was a combat medic in the army. He was climbing the cliffs on D-Day at Omaha beach without a gun, having to stop and remove bullets, bandage wounds, and other things all while people with machine guns shot down at him.

The fact that he got to sit in his favorite leather recliner and tell me that story some 70 years later is a miracle.

My grandfather was a British FEPOW in Japan in WW2. He did something to piss off the guards of his camp one evening and they beat him badly and tied him up on a fence with the promise to kill him the next day. Another young prisoner died during the night so they switched my granddad and the dead lad so the guards assumed he’d died from his injuries. Luckily he survived and came home in 1945

My uncle was in a bar one night and started talking to this random guy. He described him as "a really nice guy."

He met him a few other times in the same bar. They drank and talked about random stuff. Soon after, my uncle stopped seeing the guy at the bar.

Idk how long after, but my uncle got notified that he had jury duty. He showed up and found out what it was for. A serial killer and the killer was his friend from the bar. Derrick Todd Lee.

My uncle was promptly dismissed from jury duty for obvious reasons.

Not as scary as some of the other stories here, but a good cautionary tale for those who never experienced a dictatorship.

My father was in his last year of high school. Brazil's dictatorship period of 1964 had started a few years before. One day, two soldiers come into the class, grab one of my father's classmate by the arm and take him out. Neither the classmate of his family were never seen again. No explanation, no warrant, no process, they just vanished.

My father and his brother told us stories of the "spies" who would appear at times on schools and universities. Random "students" who would sit in for a couple of classes, sometimes even befriending classmates if they stayed longer. When those "students" stopped coming, usually another real student would disappear too.

When the military government issued what is called Institutional Act Number Five (AI-5), it suspended basically every civil right, and the military could just enter people's houses, search whatever they wanted, take whatever and whoever they wanted, and leave, no explanations needed. People were tortured and killed to "save the country from communism" (which was never a real threat to begin with).

In the 1990s, a nurse in New Jersey killed hundreds of hospital patients.

Sometimes he would sneak into patient's rooms at night and inject them with fatal medication doses. Other times, he would put the medication into IV bags in the supply room, so they would kill whatever random patient they were given to later.

He was accused several times. Some patients pointed him out before they died. Some staff thought he was creepy and dangerous, and refused to work with him. He kept getting fired from hospitals. But the hospital managers knew that if he got arrested, they would be sued by the families of the patients he murdered. So they just fired him, and didn't call the police.

That happened at 12 different hospitals over the course of 16 years. Investigators believe he killed as many as 400 people.

After he was arrested, he confessed to 40 murders. In 29 of them he gave enough detail to be charged and plead guilty. He is linked to 300+ more deaths than that, but details of those will probably never be known, because so much information was lost over time or destroyed by the hospitals.

My brother was dating the love of his life up until a few years ago.

They met because the both worked in a restaurant, he was a piano player, she was a waitress. Things were going amazingly between them.

The only problem was, she had a jealous ex.

He knew when they left work, and what shifts they'd work since it was the same each week. He decided for whatever reason he was going to teach my brother a lesson for dating his ex, and planned to attack him with a stanley knife when he left work one evening.

That night, my brother and his partner were getting ready to leave, and he stopped for a second to talk to a colleague, meaning she left first.

As soon as she stepped out the door, he slashed her throat, and then ran. She died infront of him. That attack was meant for my brother.

He's gone through a lot of therapy, and down some very dark paths since then. But is finally coming out of the other side of it. But it's terrifying how close I came to losing my little brother, and how much he lost as a consequence, because of some f*****g deranged nutjob.

If I could get my hands on that guy, I'd get locked up myself. But he's in prison for a long time, and so far he's staying there.

My aunt fell asleep on her couch one night and my uncle was asleep upstairs. She woke up around 12am to a random man staring at her while she slept. He said “the guy upstairs was sound asleep.” Meaning he came in, saw my aunt on the couch, looked around, saw my uncle asleep upstairs, and then sat there and watched. She told him to leave and somehow by the will of god HE LEFT. He slid in through the back door……. We live in a relatively safe area! Craziest s**t I have ever heard

Something weird happened to me; more scary in a what could have been kind of way, so not on the same scale as the poor people in the comments.

I was 17 years old (male) and walking home from a night out quite drunk and stoned about 2am. I’m in a lonely part of my walk no people, few cars: just a road and some large shops: a B&Q and a carpet showroom - out of town shopping complexes that have since become ubiquitous in the UK.

Anyway, In a lay-by about 15 feet away is a silver car pulled up lights on. As I stumble past two men step out and call me over.

Something about the situation immediately sobers me up. I keep walking and one of them shouts “it’s fine we are the police: we will drive you home”

I stop for a moment and reply with some smart a**e comment along the lines of how police would never do this and that they were dodgy.

Calling them dodgy always sticks in my mind.

He insists I’m too drunk and it’s not safe for a young man like me and I should let them take me home.

I say no and he then tells me to come over here and listen to the police radio in the car to prove they are real police. It’s weird the guy is almost begging me; desperation in his voice.

I repeat a firm no, tell them I’m fine and keep walking. Minute I’m out of sight, I run as fast as I can and don’t relax until the 30 minutes later I’m home.

I can only assume they didn’t man handle me into the car because there was the very occasional taxi driving past.

Im 45 now and occasionally think about how that could have ended for me. None of the scenarios seem good.

Sadly stories like this are probably more routine for women but at the time it really shook me up.

I work midnight shift at a gas station and I have for quite awhile at various stations in different areas with varying levels of criminal activity.

I have regulars, of course. I’m a small-statured woman (as is my partner the other half of the week, and we’ve always been partners) so these regulars often worry about us and keep watch on creepy occurrences when they can.

I had one man who worked in the metro an hour away who would stop in every morning for his cigarettes. He never smiled or seemed friendly, and as I often do, I tried to think of what I could do that might make him smile one day.

It took many months but I finally pulled it off by having his cigarettes ready on the counter and already scanned for him to pay for as he walked in. He smiled, and then asked me

“Do you ever get scared on the night shift? You small girl, is not safe.”

I said I sometimes did but we could lock the doors and hide if we had to, and that the provincial police (think state troopers, if you’re American) had a station close by and came in often to get their highway vehicles washed. I had a good rapport with those police. He nodded and then told me a story about when he first moved to our country from Eastern Europe with his wife and child back in the late 80’s, early 90’s.

He fell asleep at work one night at the gas station he worked midnights at. When he woke up, the phone had been ringing for hours and his manager was shaking him violently asking if he was alright. He was fine, he said, what was the problem? He was sorry he fell asleep.

His manager screamed that it was fine he fell asleep, to look outside. All of their motor oil was missing and the outside of the place was a mess.

The thieves had come and swiped all the oil and left him be because he slept through the entire thing, and then moved down the road to the next station for an encore. At that station, the clerk was awake and fought back, so the thieves stabbed him to death and left him to bleed out.

When he finished telling me this, he concluded with

“If you ever feel sleepy just lock the door and do it, it might save your life”

I don’t work at that station anymore but I think about that guy all the time and wonder how his grandkids are.

Here is a link to an article talking about how that poor other clerk’s killers were finally found 25 years later:

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/mobile/arrest-made-in-1990-murder-of-gas-station-attendant-1.2650933

I'm the firstborn, and when I was just a wee babe, my mother put me to bed and headed off to bed herself.

Being new parents, they were all about the baby monitor. Dad was already asleep, and just as my mom was drifting off, she heard the telltale crackle,

"Don't worry, sweetheart, mommy's here."

Needless to say, my mom about s**t herself and catapulted to the nursery...to find me fast asleep and totally alone.

Turns out the neighbor had just had a baby too, and they were picking up each other's signals.

They actually picked up all kinds of things over time. Used to hear the truckers radioing to each other from the highway like a mile away.

One of my friends family growing up had a beach house and I'd get invited every now and then.

They had $ and the house was massive, pretty cool place too. They even had a full time maid who had her own 'flat' at the back.

One day they go there for a long weekend and when they opened the door, the place had been ransacked. It was all a mess, missing TVs, furniture, broken stuff... you get the picture.

They went to check on the maid and her flat was empty, all her belongings were gone.

They called the cops who came over and had a brief look (not interested from what they said) and left saying the maid probably had something to do with. And that's what everyone believed for week.

Until the dad returned the following weekend to try and change the locks and etc and he brought their dogs along with him. Yep, you know it... one of the dogs started digging and found the maid buried in the backyard under a tarp they had close to the pool. So the theory now is that whoever came in probably knew her and she recognized them and 'she had to go'

Edit: I added the *gruesome* details on a post below. I don't recommend reading them but it's there for those who are curious.

Came home to find out that someone had broken in to my appartment and a lot of my things were missing.
Ran outside to find a payphone and called the police.
When i came back to my appartment even more of my things were missing, so i guess he was hiding under my bed when i first found out.

One of my many experiences with night terrors/sleep paralysis left me with memory loss and now I have to live with the fact that my body kinda operated without me for a week.

I was about 7 years old and woke in the middle of the night to find this smoke creature crawling up the bottom of my bed. It was terrifying, as you can imagine, and I booked it for the landing, which is weird for me because looking back I would have expected it to be sleep paralysis (I still get these occurrences often) but I could move perfectly well on this occasion. I reached the top of the stairs outside my bedroom and another one was slowly making its way up, step by step out of the darkness of the floor below. I froze and looked around for somewhere else to run to, but I was pinned because the first one was making its way through my bedroom doorway toward me. Both of these smoke demon things were advancing on little 7 year old me, so I did the only thing I could thing of: screamed the house down.

Mum comes running just as I start to go blind with smoke creeping into my vision. Blood pressure was wonking out - it was the same smoke I get when I stand up fast. Mum ends up soothing me, taking me back to bed, and at some point she leaves and lets me go back to sleep.

Next morning, I apologise for waking her up last night. She has no idea what I mean and we’re both confused. I tell her “I woke you up on the stairs. I was having a nightmare.” She informs me that that happened over a week ago, not last night. I have no memory of that week occurring, not a single shred, but apparently I had gone to school every day, played with my friends, eaten my dinner, done my homework, had my baths - all without knowing that I had done it. Apparently I’d been kinda quiet during that week, and my mum assumed I was having trouble at school, which was not an uncommon experience for me. But I still, to this day, don’t remember anything after that night and it gives me the creeps to imagine that my body has done things - gone through the motions of every day life - without me having any knowledge of doing it.

Well, it's my story. When I was a little kid, 5-6? we had this neighbor like Grandma to me. I'd go over and have snacks, and she had a Mr. Potato head I played with that was her (now adult) son's toy. Weird core memories!
He came home, in his twenties, from the army I think. I don't remember much about him, but he asked about taking my older brothers camping, but my mom said no, she had a weird feeling about him. (Side note, we lived out in in the country, not even a town, just a place). There were no locked doors, everyone trusted each other.

My mom saw him at our little store with bee stings all over and was concerned . He said he got them at the creek. She thought that was weird, because that's just not a thing where we went all the time, but okay?

A little while later (not sure how long), the news said there was a murder of some campers out past where we lived, no leads. People were shocked - this doesn't happen here! My mom remembered her weird feeling and the bee stings that didn't make sense. She called the police to say, hey, probably nothing, but here's what I got. I remember detectives coming to our house to talk to her.

They had some other evidence that matched, but not enough to link him to the murder (a couple with their child). It's unsolved to this day, though the detective said he knew it was him. A few years later, the guy went to prison for an abduction/attempted murder of a woman who ran out of gas and he offered her a ride. She lived, thank god.