39 Unnerving Encounters That People Say Will Stay With Them Forever

When I was 16 I had a sleepover at a friends house and in the night I woke up, I was awake for some minutes and went to the bathroom. When I stood up I looked in the mirror, then I turned around to close the bathroom door. In front of me were stairs leading to the bedroom.
For a couple of seconds a ghost stood in front of me, so close that I could not see the fave or feet.
It was a young woman with long wavy blonde hair wearing a white dress. The hair and dress were both really dirty with brown spots and earth/dirt on her. It was maby 3 Seconds then she was gone.

I allways wondered if that was a ghost or something else. I thought if it could be my friend or her sister because both had long blonde hair but bith were sleeping. And the bathroom and the staircase was empty.

It felt really scary because now I can't look into mirrors at night when it's dark. I allways fear of seeing something when I turn.
I didn't see anything afterwards though.

But at the time I posted in an online forum but sadly didn't get replies. And most threads just talked about banshees wearing white dresses.

My wife and I were visiting Atlanta and staying at a Sheraton downtown. It was a nice hotel and we were in a nice room. Nothing creepy about it when we arrived. We went out to dinner and then came back to the hotel and went to bed. Totally normal night. The next thing I know my wife is shaking me, yelling that "It's flashing, It's flashing!". I am a deep sleeper and when I wake up it takes me a few minutes to come to so I am super confused and I ask her "What's flashing, what are you talking about?" All of a sudden the light that is on the table right next to my head flashes and goes POP! That certainly woke me up because it was right next to me and I hopped up and stodd next to my wife at the foot of the bed. We turned the lights on in the room and stared at the light. It proceeds to flash and pop about 4 more times and my wife and I are both getting the heebie jeebies. We have goosebumps.

But I am naturally not one to freak out about things and assume that there is an explanation for almost anything, so once I come to and wake up a bit more I think that clearly something is wrong with the lamp, so I walk over and unplug it from the wall and think that will solve the problem. Oh boy was I wrong. After unpluggin the lamp, it starts flashing and popping at a rate of about 5 pops a minute. It was unplugged and was getting no electricity! How was this happening? Meanwhile, a few books over near the couch fall off a table and we are really starting to freak out.

So I call the front desk and, not wanting to sound crazy, tell them that we are having an electrical problem with one of our lights and ask them to take a look. About 5 minutes and another 20-30 light pops later, we hear a knock at the door and open it. For some reason, probably because it was around 2:00am, the hotel sent the security guard and not an electrician. This security guard looked terrified and did not want to come into the room, but we explained what was going on and he agreed to look at the light.

This is where it gets even stranger. From the minute we opened the door, the light stopped flashing and popping. Before the door opened it was popping about 10 times a minute. When the security guard was in the room, it did absolutely nothing. He stayed for about 5 minutes and the light did not pop at all. The security guard said to call the front desk if anything happened, but that the light was unplugged and it should be ok.

The second the door closed and the guard was gone, the light started furiously popping and flashing. Probably about once every second. We both felt this intense anger in our bodies like something was furious at us. That was the last straw for us. We grabbed our stuff and left the room. We went downstairs and requested another room that was not close to that one at all.

The next room we stayed in was fine, and we were able to eventually fall back asleep after calming down. I am sure that whatever was happening was something electrical, but to this day I can't explain it. The thing that really convinced me that this was more than an electrical issue is that the light was flashing and popping about 5 times a minute for about 5-10 minutes until someone from the hotel came and then it stopped completely while they were in the room. Then the minute they left it started popping about once every second without stopping and my wife and I both felt so much anger in our bodies. It felt like something was angry we were there, angry that we had someone come into the room and wanted us to get out.

Back in 2012, my friends boyfriend whom I became good friends With as well died in a drowning incident. I was super supportive of my friend (we used to be super close in middle school and that was back in 2006-2007 days). Well I went with her to the funeral and rode with her and her other friends 3 hours away for his burial. They brought me back home to my grandparents house after everything was finished. Grandparents & my momma kept my oldest daughter for me ( she was 2 at the time ) so when I returned home, they all left cause they had plans. I’m sitting with my daughter and I get up to walk into the kitchen from the family room- right next to each other. I hear this far away type of voice say “thankkkk youuuu nickiii”. I jumped so hard cus I was so scared. I believe that was my friends bf forsure.

When I was 17, was visiting my mom for the summer in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She lived with my stepdad in an old house that used to belong to my great grandparents.

One day listening from another room I could hear my mom and stepdad in the living room arguing over her practicing “wicca”magic. He claimed this was why strange incidents in the house kept increasing. I came out to the living room and as they argued I started to notice little noises happening from everywhere around the house. A knock from one room then a bump from another room. At one point we could clearly hear footsteps walking from the room above us. The kind of old floorboards that creaked loudly with every step.

At the time I didn’t believe in the paranormal. I didn’t have any experience with it. But I couldn’t help feeling scared and filled with anxiety as I heard these sounds all around us growing louder and more frequent as the argument escalated. They noticed the sounds too but my stepdad just blamed my mom for the strange activity and the yelling just grew more intense. As the situation hit its peak I spoke up yelling for them to stop. In that moment when we were all yelling at the same time, there was a loud explosion sound from the other side of the house. We all immediately got quiet and looked at each other wondering what it could be. After about ten minutes of all of us looking I finally found the source of the explosion when I opened the kitchen cabinet.

My great grandmother used to keep these old crystal drinking glasses that still sat in the hanging cabinet next to the stove. When I opened it I noticed they were all sitting there in place as usual, except for one. One of the glasses in the front row was completely shattered to tiny pieces as if a bomb had gone off inside it. (Mind you these are large, thick and heavy crystal glass cups) Yet none of the other glasses in the same cabinet had so much as a crack in it. We were all in shock. That was the day I started believing in the paranormal.

My family and I stayed in a nondescript beach house in Florida several years ago. After the first night my then 8-year-old daughter said that she felt scared in the bedroom she was staying, so I volunteered to sleep in there the next night and let her sleep with her Mom. She didn’t specify why she was scared - I chalked it up to just sleeping in a strange place.

I’m not given to remembering my dreams and don’t have many nightmares that I recall, but that night I had a terrifying dream in which an old h*g of a woman - really scary looking - had me tied down on the bed in that room. She was speaking in a raspy but eerily sweet voice, telling me not to worry, but that she was going to cut out my eyes to add to her collection. It was very intense and I woke up gasping and sweaty.

The next morning at breakfast I asked my daughter what bothered her about the room and she said that it was actually her dreams that bothered her. She dreamt she was tied to the bed in that room and an old woman was telling her that she was going to cut out her eyes.

I just about did a very cliche spit take, I was so shocked. I still have no explanation for how we both had the exact same nightmare. We hadn’t watched any horror movies (she was too young at the time) and I’ve never seen or read anything like that in any horror novels or films (and I’ve read and watched countless). I’m still weirded out by it.

I was on holiday in the middle east in our three story house. Mainline electricity had just come back on and l was asked to turn the generator off, which was on the roof. To access the roof you go through the second floor balcony up a metal stairwell.

I turn the generator off and proceed to walk back down when I catch something out of the corner of my eye, towards the entrance back into the house on the second floor. I turn and Isee it standing there; not looking at me but looking in front of it (which was just the wall to the house behind us). I remember very vividly telling myself not to take my eyes off it as this was either the worlds best hallucination or proof of something else.

As soon as this thought computed, my legs turn into jelly and I lose balance, falling down the stairs and regaining balance by holding onto the railing. I look back and see it had disappeared. It was very tall, about 2 metres, slightly taller than the average door. it's body was covered with a black robe or cloth. It's face and skin were pink and white, like its flesh had melted . It had piercing red eyes (think bloodshot enough to see mostly red at 3 metres distance but with white still visible) that were looking directly in front of it rather than me.

From what I remember, I couldn't sleep for the next few days and would literally pass out from exhaustion as I tried to stay up through the night. There have been a few occasions where I had dreams that came true, a year after this I dreamt I was in the back of my fathers car, my cousin being in the front passenger and my dad in the driver seats, parked in front of a mosque; the following day my grandmother died, and I found myself in that exact noment again, planning her funeral.

I cannot for the life of me shake this experience off and it is the only reason I am not atheist.

Oh this reminds me of something with my own mother, one time when I was younger my sister and I were scared so we went to wake up our mom (we experienced many things so often we'd be trying to wake up our parents) we lived in a small condo and our rooms were on opposite ends, we went to our parents room and opened the door and crouched on the end of the bed in the darkness with glowing eyes was our mother? She leapt at us and growled and we went screaming to our room and our mom was there soon after completely normal, asking us what was wrong and everytime we've asked her since she's said that she woke up to us screaming and thought we were being kidnapped or m******d or something.

Another time, same place I was on the couch 7 am and I saw a woman come up from the floor and walk into the bathroom and disappear I still remember what she looked like and she looked nothing like my mom but I still said "Mom?" before realizing my mother was at her computer.

A lot of things happened when I was a kid and a lot of them were shared experiences with my sisters, for instance my sister and I every night dealt with something slowly pulling the covers off of us. We both slept with them tucked under our heads but whatever it was would give a yank and then slowly resume pulling the covers off. (We had bunk beds) we told our father who dismissed it as the cord from my keyboard?? Even though it had been happening since before I had it and the keyboard wasn't anywhere near touching the beds.

I also got slapped by a doll, one we had lost, I don't know if anyone remembers those spaghetti haired dolls but the blonde one is the one who hit me and I was terrified but also upset since she was my favorite.

1.) When I was really young I slept in the same bedroom as my parents, my bed was sideways pressed against the bottom of their bed with my dad sleeping on the left and my mom on the right. I still remember every detail like it happened yesterday.

I woke up in the dead of night and looked over at the wall and there were three perfect shadows, a man in the middle and two kids, one on either side of them all holding hands. The man let go of one of the hands and started waving to me, making a motion like he was beckoning me to come over. There were no details to the figures, no faces, just perfect shadows.

I walked over to my mom's side of the bed and woke her up crying saying the shadow people were trying to make me go with them, she flicked a lamp on and they were gone.

2.) When i was in middle school my bedroom was upstairs in the front of the house and faced the street, across which were a row of houses. At night when I couldn't sleep I would just stare out the window. Sometimes when I looked there was a really old man in one of the driveways, he had a walking cane and would use it to batt the chestnuts that fell out of his driveway. He just did it endlessly and always in the wee hours of the morning, out there silently hitting these chestnuts and sending them rolling into the street. There were thousands of them so he wasn't even making a dent. I never once saw him in the daytime.

Came to find out from the neighbors that the house had been empty for a very long time and nobody lived there.

I had one of those karaoke/stereo combo things in my room when I was a kid. About 6 months into owning it, it would start randomly kicking on between 2 and 3 in the morning. No music, just the multi-colored LED lights would dance and the CD changer would start spinning. I was maybe 12 and smart enough to figure out it was probably some kind of glitch or electrical surge. And it would turn off when I hit the button and not come alive again.

Night 3 or 4, it happened again and I was sick of my sleep being interrupted, so I unplugged it before I went to bed. 2:45am…I wake up to flashing colors and whirring. I was sleepy so I forgot I had unplugged it…so I went to pull it out of the wall and it wasn’t connected.

I made my parents sell it on eBay the next day. I wonder if it was the machine that was haunted, or if it was my poltergeist messing with me, but none of my other electronics ever glitched out like that. My poltergeist would usually just rearrange my desk and occasionally throw things on the floor, she didn’t bother me and was kinda like an imaginary friend. But man, that karaoke machine….

I worked in a men's prison that was built in 1848, every 16 weeks or so staff were required to work a week on nights 7, 12 hour shifts followed by a whole week off, some staff would outright refuse to do nights and trade their shifts. I would often pick up night shifts as they were fairly easy, you'd sit in an office watching Netflix, keeping an eye on the cameras and doing safety checks at regular intervals, and could then use the week off to relax, work overtime on a really good hourly rate or have a last minute holiday.

Growing up I'd always believed in the paranormal due to having very open minded parents who were believers in the paranormal, and through having my own experiences, so I weren't really phased at the potential of paranormal encounters. In the two years I worked there, I had many paranormal experiences, but the one that always stands out to me is this one.

I would start at about 9pm and would be locked on a wing without keys, where i wouldn't be unlocked until the morning. Often times by 9:30pm I would see anomalies on the security cameras and the motion sensors would often pick up on things that weren't visible on the camera, this was a common occurrence and often persisted regularly throughout the whole night.

One night I'd been watching the cameras for hours, it was about 3am and I hadn't seen a single thing on the camera, jokingly I said aloud "is no one going to say hello to me tonight?" as I was finishing my coffee, before doing my round of safety checks. I left the office and walked up to the third floor of the wing to do a safety check, when I heard a soft spoken female voice say hello to me. I turned around expecting to see a night nurse doing her rounds, but there was nobody there.

I'm not often freaked out by this kinda stuff, as stated earlier I had many experiences while there including full bodied apparitions of spirits I was later able to identify, being touched and pushed, disembodied voices, footsteps without a source and seeing electronic items function without intact wiring or a power source, but that one by far freaked me out the most, it was an intelligent response and I got exactly what I asked for.

I have had several experiences so as I remember, I may post more than once:

I have had an experience of a voice clearly saying my name in my ear from over my shoulder. I turned my head to see who it was and when I realized there was no one there, I froze. I did not recognize the voice. It was neither male nor female….

30 years ago I had recurring experiences in a house I rented on Henry St in Mt Horeb, Wisconsin with several different witnesses. I kept smelling this horrible smell coming from the closet in the hallway, which I can only say (having never smelled anything like it) smelled like rotting flesh. I emptied the closet looking for an animal and figured it must be in the walls. The smell got worse over time (several days or more). One day I was sitting at my kitchen table with a friend, and we saw a heavy haze moving toward us from the closet. The smell came back and became stronger as the haze moved toward us. It felt like very negative energy.

Several days later, in the same house, after sensing a “presence” in my bedroom for weeks, a friend and I decided to nicely “ask it to leave.” Suddenly, as we were sitting on the bed, with our eyes closed talking to “it,” we both felt something like a tornado swirling around us. We could feel something “touching” our skin as it swirled. It felt imposing and evil. We both yelled and bolted out of the room. We confirmed that we had felt the exact same thing at the exact same moment. I moved shortly after….

North of Tucson, around 2001, I was watching my parents house while they were on vacation. No pets. No one else with a key. I stopped by every few days. One day when I arrived, the stereo was on and blasting music very loudly. Deafening. It took me a long time to figure out how to make it stop. No CD’s in the player. No radio on. I don’t remember what was playing…

As a child, in Northern Michigan, about 8-9??) I have a very lucid memory of laying in bed on my back and seeing a huge female head floating above me. I can still see it to this day. Short sandy, curly hair. Very angry. Yelling indistinguishable words at me with her finger pointed at me like I was being scolded. She was very loud and I was terrified. I don’t think I could move. I don’t remember if I had been sleeping but it wasn’t dark in the room. I’ve never told anyone.

Got a couple. First was experienced by my wife and 3 of our boys. We took a vacation to Land Between the Lakes for 4th of July. We had a cabin at a campground right on the lake. Boys were fishing from the shore, and my wife was out there with them. It's 4th of July, so boats are all out, and music is playing around the area, and I came outside, and my wife asked me if I heard someone yell. I thought she had just heard the music playing, but I went to the shore and listened a little closer. We could all hear someone screaming for help. My immediate thought was someone fell off a boat and was hanging onto a buoy someone on the water. We couldn't see anything, and we kept hearing every few minutes someone yelling "Help me, please! Someone help!" We called 911 and got ahold of management at the campground. Yelling kept happening every couple of minutes for the next 15 minutes or so. Sheriff finally came out after 30-45 minutes. Nothing had been called in, just nothing. We are almost certain at this point, we just heard someone the last cries of someone who drowned. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We kept checking the new around that area for the next few weeks, no reports of missing people or anyone drowning. I still check from time to time and still nothing. We also didn't know the paranormal history of the area, so we're almost certain we heard ghostly screams.

The 2nd one happened back in 2011 after I graduated. I moved into my old childhood single wide trailer right beside my dad's house. We lived out in the woods in southern Indiana so super private area, anyway. It's late at night and my now ex is asleep on the couch by the hallways and I'm sitting on the floor just kicking around on my laptop. I hear walking from the hallway and think it might be my dad. Wouldn't be the first time he came over for whatever reason a little late at night. I look over and there's nothing there. Weird, but it's an old trailer so I'm like whatever. Couple minutes later I just hear "Hey" right in my ear. My blood ran cold and hair on the back of my neck stood up. Eyes get teary just typing this out. I immediately get up and got to the otherside of the living room and leave my ex asleep on the couch cause f**k that. Had some other weird things happen in that place and just that general area but that was the creepiest of all the things that happened to myself at least.

I was living in a trap house in my twenties. We had just gotten bedbugs, and I threw my bed out, so I was sleeping on couch 1, and we had a friend who slept on couch 2.

He had just gotten news that his father died, so he was distraught. Sobbing, deep grief type stuff. I had also been practicing astral projection every night.

So, I started falling asleep, and did my AP routine. I felt myself rise out of my body, still in my living room. I looked over at my friend. There was a hunched thing curled up on his chest. It had either a long nose or a beak, flabby, loose skin and huge eyes like car headlights. It made eye contact with me and I was overwhelmed by the white light coming from its eyes. Then I woke up the next morning. No dreams, lucid or otherwise. Just vivid memories of what had happened.

I have had many experiences, but here is one I have never shared.

Backstory: when my father was a child, he would see things. Two examples: once he saw Toucan Sam peeking around his bedroom door and another time he got on his tiptoes and was looking out the window and he said he saw the cookie monster sitting in a dark hole and when he looked at it, it turned around and opened its mouth (like a puppet would). In all these encounters what he saw had solid black eyes. He had these sorts of encounters throughout his childhood and teen years, many also encountered by others at the same time. But that is the backstory for this.

The place where this happened was in deep backwoods Kentucky. Such a small rural place it couldn't even be called a town. In the mid 90s when this story happened, everyone out there still had outhouses.

So anyway, it was the mid 90s and my younger sister was a toddler, just at the age of talking. She was much younger than my older sister and I, about 7 and 9 years younger. Our father had told my older sister and I the cookie monster story, but of course not my little sister.

We had went out to visit one of my father's childhood friends who lived out there still. Sisters and I had never been before. We stayed late and left after dark and were navigating down an old dirt road and my little sister was fast asleep in her carseat. We crossed this small concrete bridge and just as we did, my little sister woke up and said "The cookie monster is dead" and fell right back to sleep.

Now I have to say we were more of a cartoon household and less of a puppet household, so I never even remember her watching Sesame Street, but even if she did, it was very weird timing and a strange thing for a toddler to say. Never said anything about the cookie monster or death before or after that. We were all freaked out the rest of the night and it still gives me chills 3 decades later.

Maybe not as creepy as others' stories, but here we go.


I live in Europe, and about a decade ago, I and my family (my older sister & my mum) went on a trip to the U.S., to meet up with some distant relatives.


One day, I, my family and the mentioned distant relatives visited their friend's house. This was in Wisconsin.


Their friend greeted us along with her husband and 2 kids.


Right from the start, for a completely unknown reason, I have been feeling very uneasy. When they greeted us, the husband was mowing the lawn, and my first instinctive thought was, "Why does this man remind me of Dexter". As for the woman, there was something creepy about her, too, but I could not put my finger on it. She seemed almost... too perfect to be true? Like she was hiding some dark s**t behind the wax sculpture facade.


Anyways, as soon as we entered the house, the bad feeling intensified, and I had a sudden urge to get the f out of there. I am one of those people who find it really hard to act fake, so it was difficult for me to hide the discomfort - I remember feeling very reluctant when they asked to take group pictures, and I refused to interact with the woman, as I was scared of her (I was a teenager back then) - again, for an unknown reason.


Before we left the house, I and my sister both needed to use the bathroom. So I went first.


Now this is where it starts to get even creepier - upon entering the bathroom, a wave of dread overcame me, and the dread culminated the moment I sat down on the toilet. I suddenly had this image in my head of a person who unalived themselves by hanging. In that spot where I was sitting. I saw lots of blood, too? It freaked me out. So I did my business as quickly as possible and bolted out of that bathroom.


My sister used the bathroom next, and then we finally left that house.


When we arrived home, I and my sister talked about the visit, and here's the kicker: She had the EXACT SAME feelings and thoughts as me when we were in that house and interacting with those people. She had the same feeling of dread and a deadly vision when using the bathroom.


To this day, we have no idea what it meant. We asked around to see if anyone had violently died in that house in the past, but apparently nothing like that happened (that people know of).

Edit: To specify, this happened in a Wisconsin city called Oconomowoc. If anyone knows of any stories related to this city/its history, that would be cool.

When I was little around 11 years old, was staying at my aunt house with my cousins playing games and have a fun summer vacation. That night it was hot and humid inside, I couldn’t sleep well so I was tossing and turning on the bed. I wanted to open the window on the side wall to let in cooled air from outside but for some odd reason my mind told me don’t do it. Instead of tossing around I was fixated to staring that window as to see if something was gonna happen. Within few minutes of staring, I saw a what look like head with long hair glides past the entire window from right to left. I’m on the second floor so that immediately scared me so I turned to the other side and tried to fall asleep. Woke up next morning still confused as to what I saw, thinking it was from next house over.. I walked up to the window and finally open it all the way. To my surprise, the next house is 20 feet away down the street and what’s facing our side doesn’t have windows it’s all cement wall. Till this day I still don’t know what would I saw had the window been opened and that “thing” glide inside instead!

When I was a kid I was staying with my nan and we were watching big brother in the living room with my uncle and sister.


I went into the room next to the living room where the fridge is and in there I saw a man standing on a ladder tinkering with something, he looked at me and looked away. I didn't say anything to him and grabbed some 7 up. I remember thinking it was weird because my nan's dog was there and she was usually very on guard with strangers but she unusually totally chill.


When I went back I asked my nan why is there a man in the utility room at this time of night and her and my uncle just kept telling me to stop winding them up, I was trying to scare them etc. 


One of the most bizzare experiences ever, I know I must have imagined it or there is some logical explanation but it just felt so real and I didn't feel sleepy or anything. .

Seen the grim reaper as a child in prekindergarten/kindergarten school and that s**t shook my core. It was me and another student we both said “you seen that?” We had to be all of 7,8 when this occurred. I’m 22 now.

I’ve always been able to see stuff or know when something will happen later on cause of dreams. 2 weeks before my aunt died last year I had a dream she did. 2 weeks to the day she passed away. On the anniversary of her death this year I was in my room working on some nails and I had my door open and I felt a breeze and felt like I was been watched, I looked down the hallway and she was standing there. This sent me into a manic episode for a month after. She was the closest thing I had to a mom and I never got to say my finally I love you cause she lived in a different state.