43 Horrifying Things People Have Woken Up To That Still Haunt Them

My almost 4 year old standing at my bedside staring right at me. Once my eyes were open she said “I brought the monsters in here” then went back to bed. Thanks kid, I had you so they’d go in your room.

I woke up to my mom panicking and locking my door and asking me to call the cops. it was around 3am and someone was trying to choke her and possibly do worse. she said that she heard someone open her bedroom door and lay on the corner of the bed. she called my name out multiple names thinking it was me, but then someone tried choking her and cutting her with something.

she managed to kick them off and ran downstairs into my room to protect me. once the police came, they did a search outside our home and found nothing. they asked if anyone else lived with us, and we said the only other person that lived with us was a man who rented the downstairs basement, but he was never a problematic person. this man went to church every sunday and kept to himself-honestly he was barely there half the time because he was always working. they decided to speak with him anyways and they found him in his room bleeding heavily because he had accidentally cut himself when my mom kicked him off.

yeah, that was scary. after that event, i had horrible sleep paralysis for several nights. i kept dreaming that a black shadow would crawl into bed right next to me and strangle me.

I once woke up to see a helicopter crashing through my ceiling. I dove from my bed face first into my bedroom door to get away. It was the ceiling fan.

My daughter had a Ring Around the Rosie doll when she was little. You put the doll's hands together and it would sing the song. Anyway, she left it out outside one night apparently and the dew in the grass shorted it out. I woke up in the middle of the night to this faint Ring Around the Rosie song playing over and over.

It was creepy and we didn't have an outdoor light in the back yard so I had to go by myself with a flashlight and search the yard for this creepy doll.

The clear and obvious sounds of an animal in the bedroom. We had no pets. I'm in the UK so my sleepy brain at first thought it was a rat, or several rats fighting for their lives. After some minor panicking it turned out to be a pigeon trapped behind the boarded up fireplace. Slept on the sofa that night.

My heart racing so fast, I couldn't breathe. I was in the middle of a supraventricular tachycardia episode. My BPM was 210.

Had to go to the ER. I was absolutely terrified I was going to have a heart attack that night. Scary stuff.

Woke up in the middle of the night to what I thought was my blanket all crammed up between me and the wall. It was uncomfortable so I went to move it but instead of a blanket I touched human skin.


Of course I immediately freak out and am now wide awake wondering what to do as I lay in the dark with this...thing laying next to me.


So I gather up my courage, reach over and grab it and yank it up so I can see what it is. It was storming and lightning flashed very dramatically at the same moment while I realize I'm holding my own arm.


I guess I'd been sleeping on my arm and it went so numb that I couldn't even tell I was touching it. Haven't laughed that hard in a while.

My ceilingfan pulling off my ceiling and hanging a few inches from my face.

After the tornado in Joplin, Missouri in 2011, we were left without power for several days. Our home was only slightly damaged, so we were able to stay there. My daughter had just turned 11 at the time and was sleeping on a pallet next to our bed because she didn't want to sleep in her room by herself with no electricity. She had been in a bathroom of her aunts house during the tornado and that bathroom was literally(and I mean literally how it's meant to be used) the only place in the house left "standing". Anyway, this was two night later. The three of us and our three dogs were all asleep in the room and I woke up to my daughter screaming that the house was on fire. Sure enough flames were coming from the master bathroom. Small flames, but flames. I got up and ran to the garage to get our fire extinguisher, but it was pitch black with no power. I had to go back in, get my phone and go back out to find it. By this time my wife and daughter had gathered up our two french bulldogs and gone outside but we couldn't find the pit bull puppy my daughter had gotten from us for her birthday. We couldn't find the cat either. So I went back into the bathroom but the flames were too much already for our fire extinguisher so I decided it wasn't worth it to die of smoke inhalation so I bailed. We called 911 about six times but emergency personnel was so spread thin with the tornado that it took about 20 minutes for anyone to get there. We sat in the road and watched our house burn. Total loss. My daughter was in the heart of the Joplin tornado and two days later watched her house burn.

TL;DR Woke up at 2AM to flames from our master bathroom. Watched house burn.

Edit: Thanks for the kind words everyone. Unfortunately the puppy and the cat both were lost in the fire due to smoke inhalation. The cat was found whole, but the dog surely passed before she felt any pain. And my family has had better luck since then. We had good insurance, so we were able to get back on our feet pretty quickly.

Edit 2: We had a candle burning in the bathroom for light. We think the cat pushed open the door and there were towels hanging on the backside. Insurance deemed it a negligent fire, which it was. But they still paid in full. They dropped us like a bad habit right afterward though.

My dinkus neighbor was drunk and thought my apartment was his. He broke the lock on my door. He then opened up the door to my bedroom and scared the [hell] out of me at 1am. I screamed and he apologized profusely and asked if I wanted to drink Modelo with him and his wife at their house. There had been a baptism so everyone was partying it up across the way. I went because they're nice, and they had tamales.

Edit: Holy cow this got really popular. I'm female, so I was terrified for a ton of different reasons. My neighbors are from Guatemala, so these were the kind with banana leaves. The broken lock was worth the tamales yes. We're still on good terms. My neighbors are harmless unless you're a lock, or a tamale.

I stepped out of my bathroom to find my entire house lit up, 2 EMT's and a sheriffs deputy in my living room.

They proceeded to try to tell me to come sit down, stay calm, relax and let them help me.

I was like "[WTH] is going on, why are you in my house?"

Apparently I had suffered a grand mal seizure in my sleep, never having this happen before, My wife called 911.

I must have come out of the seizure, got up walked into the bathroom and had no idea it even happened. While I was in the bathroom, they arrived, came in and my wife had turned all the lights on and I was oblivious to everything.

Weirdest feeling ever...would not do again.

Part of my ceiling collapsed on me.

We knew there were leaks from the roof and were in the process of fixing those ourselves without really looking into any of the structural damage. After that, we hired professionals.

Someone standing in the bedroom doorway.

He flipped on the light then flipped it off.

I woke my husband up and this guy walked out of the apartment. My husband ran out after him in his underwear, I went to the kitchen and got a knife and ran after my husband.

Turns out, the woman who lived there before us had broken up with her boyfriend and moved without telling him or getting back his key. I guess he came back to see her...at 3 in the morning.

I awoke once to a strange, high pitched trilling sound and bright lights beaming through my window. For a second I seriously thought I was about to be abducted by aliens. Then I realized it was a toad doing its mating call in the front yard and car parked on the street with the headlights on.

Sleep paralysis! I could not move and there were gigantic spiders trying to eat me.

Somebody trying to break in.

I was living alone at the time in a little studio flat in the city centre. It was about 3am and I was woken up by some crashing sounds in the hallway, and then somebody started kicking hard at my bedroom door. Fortunately my door at the time was a pretty hefty fire door with a good strong lock, so I had enough time to call the police before he did any damage to it. I was living pretty close to the police station so they turned up fast, with dogs, and caught him still inside the building.

As it turned out the guy was absolutely wasted and looking for somewhere to sleep, and from the outside my place still looked like the empty nightclub it used to be before it was converted into flats. So my guess is he thought it would be empty, rather than actually attempting to rob/attack anyone living there. I was still very shaken up by it at the time.

I once farted myself awake, which was pretty startling.

I had music box on a shelf, around midnight it started playing all own after not being touched for more than 5 years. It's why i believe i hold the record for fastest land animal.

I was raised in the country on a cattle farm. No matter what we did we always would have to deal with something getting in the house or getting loose.

One night, when I was about 17, I went to a party with friends and came back home a little intoxicated. So I marched straight to my bedroom and passed out. I completely forgot, or didn't care that the light in my room was still on and fell asleep. At approximately 3 in the morning I get woken up to something hitting the wall above my headboard and my eyes shoot open, but I don't see anything. Then out of nowhere a small white alien with big black eyes staring directly at me jumps from the end of my bed directly onto my chest. At this point I am freaking out and even though I am a manly man, I let out the most girlish scream imaginable and punched the thing right in the face. It screams and runs off out of my room on both legs and proceeds down the hall. I get out of bed still terrified, but it's headed for my little sisters room. I grab a baseball bat and go after it. As soon as I exit my room the alien is flying through the air directly at my face. I never hit the ground so hard in my life. It flew directly above me and hit another wall. That's when I realized it was a gigantic barn owl that somehow found its way into my house. The feeling of relief when I put that together was amazing. I ended up getting a fishing net and catching him and released him outside.

A loud BANG downstairs and then my dog zooming to the front door and snarling. By the time I had grabbed my gun and got downstairs whoever it was was already peeling out of the driveway. I guess they assumed the house we had just moved into was still unoccupied and got the scare of their lives. Looks like they were trying to kick the door down to gain access.

My good boy got some steak the next day as a reward.