45 Creepy True Stories That Prove Real Life Can Be Scarier Than Fiction

That my beautiful sweet 14 year old son went to bed one night and never woke up. Seizure, took him. 400 people showed up to his funeral, some standing for hours to say goodbye. A testament to the affect he had on people in his short 14 years. He was the most positive and happy person I've ever known. Always looking for a way to compliment someone, and make it a better day. Brightside was his nickname.

Sleep paralysis. Waking up, unable to move, and feeling like someone is in the room. It’s a real brain thing and it still messes you up.

No idea if this counts. My wife and I recently moved to a new city. We live in a big apartment building in an area with other apartments and lots of bars and restaurants.


You know how sometimes you're out driving and the person in front of you winds up making all the turns you do, and you kinda worry that they think you're following them, but it's really just a coincidence you're going to the same place? That happens a lot walking around this neighborhood.

So one night we were on our way home walking the dog. We were waiting for the light to cross the street when a lady approached us. She looked a little scared of my dog so I said, "hi, he's super friendly if you wanted to say hi." She pet him a bunch and he was loving life. It happens all the time when waiting to cross a street.

She kinda awkwardly followed behind us for a couple blocks. We got to the apartment and we all walked in as folks were walking out. No alarm bells were ringing in my head. I've accidentally walked behind folks heading into our building like this before, so that's what it felt like.

I hold the elevator for open, she hops on, and I ask which floor she's heading to.

It takes her a moment to respond and she says "whatever one you're going to"

That scared me. We got off on a different floor than our normal one and she followed us off. I said I'm sorry, but that's not happening, I don't know you, and you can't just follow people into their homes. While I'm saying this, my wife is already heading for the stairs with our dog.

This woman freaks out. She just wants some help, can she borrow my phone. I start walking backwards saying I'm sorry, I can't help you. You can go downstairs and the front desk will let you use their phone, or you can do to the bar across the street.

I got to the stairwell and she just sprints at me. So I just book it up the stairs. We got to our apartment and I haven't seen her again. She was probably just as afraid as we were. She probably had absolutely no idea where she was. In her mind we invited her to our apartment but we didn't say a word to each other besides when I let her pet my dog.

I still get chills thinking about it.

Which floor? Whatever one you're going to. OMG.

The Nepal Flood earlier this year is just horrifying to think about. Global warming is becoming so catastrophic.

I lived in Houston when Katrina hit New Orleans. Half that city wound up living in makeshift shelters in Houston. I was volunteering one night at one of the shelters in Houston (George R Brown Convention center) when the Superdome was evacuated. I was doing intake. We were getting people's names, finding out what medication they needed, see if they needed medical assistance etc. One guy came up with a bandaged arm. I asked him if a doctor had looked at it, and he said no, so I escorted him to the medical area, and he told me the story of how he hurt his arm.

When the water started rising, he went to the second floor of his home. When it rose further, he went into the attic. And the water kept coming. He had no way out of the attic. He had no tools, but he found a plank of wood, so he started attacking the inside of the roof with that as the water kept rising around him in the dark. He finally made a hole big enough to squirm through, and he tore up his arm getting out. He then spent that night on his roof, surrounded by water, waiting for rescue.

Then he went to the Superdome, which was another kind of hell. People saw he was injured, so they'd force him to give up his blankets, shoes, clothes, and meals. He hadn't had a proper meal in days. We swung by the kitch on the way to the clinic.

I've been in two major floods in my life, one before that and another after. I can't imagine being in the situation he was in. That had to be absolutely terrifying.

A woman who was friends with my mom had an adult son who died for no apparent reason. Quite literally went to sleep and didn't wake up. I think he was 19 or early 20s. No deaths in his system, no injuries, no signs of trauma or suffocation, no known or unknown pre-existing illnesses, nothing. As far as I know, the only answer she ever got was "like SIDS but in an adult". The thought that you can be young, perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, and still randomly die in your sleep, is terrifying to me.

Mine is always the people that go missing from cruise ships. like one minute you're on vacation and the next you're just gone in the middle of the ocean at night and nobody even notices till morning. That freaks me out.

The Nutty Putty Cave incident. Getting trapped upside down in a passage so narrow that rescuers couldn’t get you out is nightmare fuel.

I don’t usually tell people this because it sounds stupid when I say it out loud, but this happened a few years ago and I still think about it sometimes.
I was home alone one night. My parents had gone out and my brother was staying at a friend’s house. Around 1am, I heard what sounded like someone walking down the hallway. I honestly didn’t think much of it at first because our house makes a lot of noises at night.
Then I heard someone stop outside my bedroom.
I didn’t move. I just sat there listening.
After maybe 20 seconds, I heard three really quiet knocks on my door.
I called out, thinking it might be my brother, but nobody answered.
I checked my phone and called him. He picked up almost immediately and said he was still at his friend’s house.
I locked my door and stayed in my room until my parents got home.
The next morning I checked the hallway and there was nothing unusual. My parents thought I’d probably heard the house settling or something.
The part that still bothers me is that when I told my brother about the knocks, he said he had actually tried calling me around 1am but my phone showed no missed call.
I know there are probably normal explanations for everything, but I still don’t like being alone in that house at night.

It's a tie between the Sept. 26, 1983 nuclear false alarm and Able Archer, which happened less than two months later. Both incidents brought the world terrifyingly close to global thermonuclear war.

Aokigahara Forest. The more I investigate it, the scarier it becomes for me. Getting lost, the suicides, the whole idea of a Sea of Trees is spooky.

Because I personally witnessed the cleanup of this truck (I worked a gas station that overlooks this bridge), Roberto Alvarado’s death during Ivan was/is upsetting. Terrifying winds and rain, and to have the cabin of your truck detach and fall into the bay? To this day, I still think of him every time I cross this bridge.

Ivan also allowed/forced me to listen to people calling the local radio stations, while climbing into attics and roofs to get out of rising waters, knowing no one could get to them or help during the storm itself. That night hasn’t left me even if my personal impacts were less.

The largest accidental man made explosion. Halifax is a town in Nova Scotia. December 7 1917 the ammo ship Mont Blonc was carrying tons of volatile explosives towards Germany. A fire started on board and the detonation leveled the nearby town. 2000 died 9000 injured.

The pressure wave wiped out everything in an 800m radius and created a tsunami that killed an indigenous community of Mi’kmaq people who had lived in that cove for generations.

Vince Coleman was a railway dispatcher in the town and successfully warned an incoming passenger train to stay away from the explosion and give them just enough time to not be caught in the blast.

Bhopal. To many details for me to get wrong by memory but it was a huge nightmare. Methyl isocyanate IIRC.

Driving up the 5 from the Bay Area to Oregon. Four of us in the car, two in the back are asleep, so just me and my friend on aux/nav duty

It’s around 1-2am so it’s pitch dark save for our headlights. We get off near somewhere near Ashland for gas when we see what looks like a huge, black, human sized pelican just squatting on the side on the shoulder.

As we get close, the thing opened up its bat-like wings and lifted off in our direction before flying over our car.

I screamed and swerved to try and dodge it. My bud also saw the f*****g thing and freaked out. The guys in the back woke up during this but didn’t see s**t so it was just us two witnesses by the time we got to our hotel.

Its wings were thin and fleshy with holes and no feathers, and the thing itself looked like a starving human in a hood with atrophied legs. It flew clumsily like a bat too, hobbling up and down in the air and it kicked up dirt when it took off.

Googled every single type of bird in Oregon and California to figure out what the f**k we just saw but no bueno. Tried to google spooky legends around the area and nothing came up either.

I try to justify that it was just a very large bird with mange that we happened to see at a horrifyiny angle or something, but whenever I confirm the details with my friend, we both say the same thing. Fleshy wings and hooded person.

It has an uncanny resemblance to the Samca from Resident Evil. It even flies the same way. But the wings are different, no monstrous tongue, and no human legs.

No one believes us or think we’re just trying to scare them so we only get to tell this story when the request for spooky stories pop up lol.

My parents' escape from a tropical storm in 1994. It was the middle of the night, the floodwaters were coming up fast, and my maternal grandmother was too drunk to drive her own car, so in pouring rain in pitch-black dark, my parents had to leapfrog driving three vehicles until my paternal grandparents arrived to help. My brother and I were a toddler and infant, respectively.

By the time the sun came up, the bridge we used to get out was closed due to flooding and the entire city was cut in half. We lost our house, all the belongings we couldn't grab in time, and many of our pets to flooding.

When I was younger, someone broke into our house while we were asleep.
I remember waking up because I heard a noise downstairs. I thought it was my parents at first, but then I heard drawers opening and closing.
I was too scared to leave my room, so I just stayed in bed and listened. After a few minutes, I heard the front door open and close.
The next morning, my parents realized someone had taken a few things from downstairs.
But the part that still bothers me happened when we checked my bedroom.
My door had been left slightly open.
I know I had closed it before going to sleep.

There is good evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion and experienced the fall to the ocean.

The orbiter broke apart about 73 seconds into the flight. The reinforced crew cabin separated mostly intact and was covered in heat shielding, protecting the occupants from the fiery explosion..and it continued upward to roughly 65,000 feet, then fell for about two minutes and forty-five seconds.

Three of the four recovered Personal Egress Air Packs had been activated. Those were not automatic, they had to be turned on. What's more, Michael Smith's pack was on the back of his seat, out of his own reach, so someone else would have switched it on. Also, some switches on Smith's side of the flight deck had been moved from their launch positions, and investigators concluded impact forces could not account for this. That points to deliberate action after the breakup. This means the cabin remained pressurized. Their suits had air, but were not pressurized, meaning if the cabin depressurized they'd have gone unconscious immediately. But given the evidence of actions having been taken, it indicates that this was not the case. The compartment was intact and pressurized after the break up.

This suggests that for those 2 minutes and 45 seconds, they were alive and conscious. Knowing they were going to die. Almost 3 minutes to think about it on the way down. The compartment was tumbling and spinning so it was likely a very rough ride.

The impact with the water killed them, not the explosion.

I worked at a major hospital / trauma center - a coworker was on their way to work, they were struck head-on by another vehicle and came in as a trauma patient. They did not survive.

It was probably around 11pm when we started hearing someone walking through the trees. Not running or anything, just slow footsteps. We figured it was an animal at first.
Then it stopped.
A few minutes later, we heard the footsteps again, but this time they were coming from behind our tent.
One of my friends whispered, “Is someone out there?”
Nothing.
Then whoever was outside said my friend’s name.
Not loudly. Just a normal voice, like they were standing a few feet away.
We all went quiet because none of us had told anyone where we were camping.
We stayed inside the tent for maybe ten minutes without saying anything. Eventually the footsteps moved away.
The next morning we found footprints around the campsite. They weren’t really clear enough to tell what kind of shoes they came from, but there were footprints going around the tent.
What bothered me most was that there were no footprints leading into the campsite.
Only ones going away.