The world is a scary place filled with all kinds of dangerous people and things…and we’re about to make it even creepier with these stories about TRUE stuff.
And you have to admit that TRUE spooky stories are the best kind, right?
Are you ready to get creeped out?
Here’s what folks on AskReddit had to say.
1. Checking in.
“My father passed away almost 11 years ago, but I’ve seen him three times since.
The first time was in middle school. I was working on a family tree project and was asking my mother about his side of the family. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walk out of the room he died in, heading towards his favorite spot on the couch.
The second time was a year or two later. I’d had an awful day, one of the worst in memory, and as I was walking across the hall to the bathroom I caught a glimpse of him sitting at his old spot at the table, reading a newspaper.
The last time was the most clear. My senior year of high school. My mother and I were sitting at that same table, talking about college plans. I mentioned I was applying to the rival school of my father’s alma mater. Just then, I saw him walk, again from the room he died in, over to the counter, where he grabbed a coffee cup and walked towards his bedroom.
I guess they just like to check up with us every now and then.”
2. Strange days.
“This was at the house we lived in for about seven years.
Many strange things happened in that house (you could hear voices murmuring from time to time, I saw a shadow person, saw someone stick their head into the room once). None of it felt hostile, but the same couldn’t be said for this pervasive feeling my mother and I both felt if we went out front at night. She and I both felt like there was something watching and it wasn’t friendly.
On this particular night, it was about midnight or so and I felt like driving to the 24/7 grocery store since I wanted some snacks. As I stepped out the front door, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and turned to look.
There was this very tall thing just floating, for lack of a better term (I’d almost describe it as hanging but there was nothing holding it up), outside of my brother’s window. It was seemingly covered in a sheet that had once been white, but was extremely dirty so it was more off-white, and got brown with mud and dirt the further down it went.
There were no visible feet, nor eyes or face, but I could tell it was staring at my brother’s window. As I stared at it, it turned to “look” at me and I remember feeling like one of those butterfly specimens, pinned to a board. It was as though its stare was physically holding me in place.
It felt like an eternity but only a second or two passed, and it looked back at the window, the pressure lifting, and then vanished. Right as it vanished, there was a fluttering of wings in the tree above, and one of our neighborhood’s owls came to perch there. In a way it felt like the owl came to my defense, as silly as that may sound.
Our cul-de-sac loved the pair of owls, they were more like neighbors to us, so maybe it was just protective of a fellow neighbor. That’s how I like to think of it, anyway.
In any event, I decided that it might be best to just…make some popcorn or something that night instead.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever told my brother about the thing. I probably should.”
3. Haunted.
“I currently live in a haunted house.
I’ve heard voices, footsteps, lights have been turned on/off, one of the ghosts has a thing for silverware (I hear it clattering in the drawer all the time, and sometimes a knife or two will end up in the wrong slot in the drawer).
But the strangest/scariest experience I had was the first night I spent in the house. I wasn’t finished moving in, there were boxes everywhere, I didn’t even have my mattress up there yet. I was bedding on an old futon mattress, watching a video on my phone, when a get the pins & needles feeling of my feet falling sleep.
Except it wasn’t on my feet, it was on the top of my head in the shape of a hand. I said, “Good night”, turned off my light and tried to sleep. When I woke up my closet door was ajar, but other than that everything was otherwise untouched.
I guess whoever my unseen roommate is, just wanted to check out who I was on my first night.”
4. Ghost orphans.
“My high school used to be a giant mansion before it was converted into an orphanage and then a high school.
One section of the school, “the third floor,” was inaccessible. The staircase which lead to the floor was blocked off with wood and painted black to match the chorus room where it was located. In 2003, during the fall school show of Les Miz, they had to remove the wood so they could replace the windows on that third floor. We even ended up using some of the removed windows for our barricade.
We had play practice most nights and, if you lived far enough away, usually you would just stay at the school and wait rather then go home just to come right back up. While waiting for practice to start one night, myself and 3 friends Ryan, Mike and Michele, decided to go up the staircase to check out the third floor.
The staircase was rotted and falling apart from years of disuse so we carefully went up one at a time to find……an unremarkable hallway with some even less remarkable rooms off to the sides. All of this lead into a big open area with old, stacked desks and folders full of test papers from like the 80’s or something.
The four of us were a bit disappointed because the rumor was that this section of the school was not converted from the orphanage that occupied the space several decades earlier and the ghosts of orphans still haunted the place. Since we didn’t get spooked, we ended up just digging through the old papers.
While Michele was looking through the papers in a side room with her back to us, Ryan pushed Mike and myself out of the room quietly and into an adjacent room to scare Michele into thinking we disappeared. Sure enough, she comes bolting out of the room screaming at us, throwing out “f*ck you guys” and “this isn’t funny.”
We had to muffle our mouths to keep from laughing, when, all of a sudden, one of the people in the room f*cking ruined the whole thing by giggling like a little girl. I turned to Ryan and Mike to see which one of them ruined the joke but both of their hands were over their mouths and their eyes were wide as dinner plates.
This room we were in, hiding behind the door, was small; maybe the side of a small, one-stall bathroom (maybe thats what it was once upon a time) and somebody in this god d*mn tiny room was giggling and it was none of us.
This whole plot played out in probably like 10 seconds between leaving Michelle and hearing the giggle. So we stood there staring at each other waiting for something to happen that explained this. It was like 4 or 5 pm and we were the only ones in the Chorus Classroom the entire day.
We would have seen someone go upstairs. We would have heard the stairs creaking as they went up there. Whoever giggled at us from inside that room was up there already. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the explanation we needed because a second set of giggles started happening, this time more than one person making them.
That was it for Ryan, a big, tough former athlete-turned-show-kid, who screamed the highest pitch scream I’ve ever seen a guy that size make (it would have been funny if we weren’t terrified.) He pushed past us, ran screaming out into the hallway, scared the daylights out of Michele on his way down and we bolted down the steps.
This time, we did not take them one by one and actual chunks of rotted wood started falling off. We explained what happened to Michele and then went somewhere that was not the Chrous Classroom until play practice started.
The maintenance team must have known we were up because we all collectively got a talking to about going up there. Safety concerns with the rotted steps. So of course, people started going up there willy nilly hoping to see a ghost. There are more stories about that third floor during that year that promptly stopped once they replaced the windows and sealed the room back up.
Now the school is closed and empty so whatever ghosts were havig a good time are now free to do so without the living getting in the way.”
5. Unnerving.
“The house I lived in from when I was about 13 til I was 24 had some darkness. I remember hearing stories from my parents that the son of the previous owner had OD’d (but not within the house, somewhere else). Still that always creeped me out a bit.
Throughout my entire time living there, I saw and heard all the classic signs of “haunted house”. We had a glass cube wall (very 80’s) that separated the living room from the dining room and I saw all sorts of shadows running past on the other side in the dead of night when I would stay up watching movies or gaming. There was never anyone awake when I’d go look.
One night when I was about 15 years old, I was sleeping in my room, when all of a sudden I wake up. I used to have this HP laptop that would let off a blue light when closed, just dim enough to check the time from my wristwatch that was laying next to it. (I don’t know why I didn’t have a regular nightstand clock). As I’m squinting to see the time, I hear something whisper my name RIGHT NEXT TO MY EAR. It was as if it was standing an inch from me.
I jumped up out of bed, scrambled out of my room knocking sh*t over in the process. I didn’t stick around to see what else I could hear. I ran to the living room and passed out on the couch til the next day. For the next few nights I couldn’t sleep well and kept waiting for it to speak again. Never did.
The house came with a camera system installed, and I remember seeing all sorts of wacky things. The back fence door opening on its own, when it had two clip locks. Granted, they’re the locks that you only need to push up to get it to unlock, so it could’ve been a strong wind, but something about the movement of the door unnerved me.
I can’t explain it, it was something I felt in my bones. I learned to live with that feeling during those years, but it was always there.”
6. The reservation.
“Growing up on an indian reservation, almost everyone has a spooky story. I’ve had a few experiences but nothing overtly spooky. But one of the best ones I’ve ever heard was from one of my uncles when he was younger.
He grew up on the Standing Rock rez, Fort Yates specifically. South of Fort Yates, on the South Dakota side, is a town called Mobridge. It’s about 30 miles away and when it’s nice out, people from Fort Yates will walk that 30 miles to Mobridge for the bars and whatnot.
Usually catching a ride part way. It’s an ugly little county road and because alcoholism is so prevalent down there, there’s been a lot of drunk driving deaths on that road.
Anyway, one morning, he’s walking back from Mobridge after a night of drinking. It’s like 6 in the morning and he said he figured he had slept and was sober enough to walk back. He said he had been walking for about an hour or so when he came over a hill and saw a girl walking from the field to meet him on the road.
He said she was native and dressed in regular jeans and whatnot, but like super pretty, so he figured she was just some girl walking down to Mobridge or up to Fort Yates.
So she meets up with him on the side of the road and she starts talking to him. He said she was asking him if he was hungry and saying he looked tired, and that he should come with her to her home so he could eat and rest.
He asked her where she lived because he didn’t see a house and she pointed to these trees about a mile away. He thought the trees probably blocked the house so he couldn’t see it. He said she just about convinced him to go with her when he looked down and saw that her feet were backwards.
He said he froze, stopped talking and turned around to start walking back toward Mobridge. She was following him, telling him that he was going to die on that road and he should just come back to her home because it’ll be warm, and that he could sleep with her. But he just ignored her and kept walking, not saying a word.
He said she must’ve followed him for about 10/15 minutes before a car coming from Fort Yates stopped and picked him up. As he was getting in the car, she kept telling him not to get in because he was going to die in that car in an accident. When he got in and they started driving, he asked the people in the car if they heard what she said, but they told him that he was walking alone.
In our culture, we have these things whose name roughly translates to “tree witch” and he was fully convinced that’s what was talking to him that morning.”
7. Ouija board.
“In high school my friends and I were messing around with a Ouija board one night. We had done it before and nothing remarkable had ever happened.
We usually did it to try and scare each other or are girlfriends. We all thought it was a joke. That night there was no one else home except the 7 of us and we were all together around the board. One of the girls there wanted to try it. She had never done it before.
This time was different. The board misspelled some of the words the same way every time. It gave answers that seemed really historically accurate for our town (things we neither knew or cared about).
Long story short, the “spirit” claimed it was a 10 year old boy who had died on the property in the 1800s and was buried there too in an unmarked grave (my friends house was on a farm in the edge of town). We were all a little freaked out because the board had never been so detailed and consistent. However, we were still skeptical and we were all assuming one of us was trying to scare the rest.
Finally, my friend asked if the spirit could do something to prove he was there with us. It went to Yes and then spelled out k-n-o-c-k. Then the planchette stopped moving. We just all stared at it silently and then there was a rap-rap-rap on the window right next to us. The lights were on outside and there was absolutely no one out there.
We never touched that f-ing board again.”
8. A message.
“Grandpa was in the police and tragically expired in my arms when he fell from the stairs.
He was very proud that I had joined the government services as well, and the quote “Behave like an officer ” was something like an inside joke between the two of us
A few years later I’m in my car and it’s freezing outside. There was a police check and I saw the cop who was inspecting the cars wasn’t wearing any jacket. Immediately made me think of grandpa, with all the cops around in their uniforms and all.
My turn comes and I roll down my window and gently remind the officer to put on his jacket. He looks in my eyes and smiles and says ” Now that’s spoken like an officer” and tells me to go.
He said it in exactly his voice, his style. It had been years since I resigned from the services and there was no way this cop could have guessed I had been an officer.”
9. This old house.
“The house I grew up in was fairly old and my dad did some serious renovations to it.
I always got the creeps from the attic, which was a full third story and eventually my dad fixed it up as a kind of 2 bedroom apartment for me and my older brother. One night when I was maybe 13, while everyone else was asleep I heard three loud bangs on the wall outside of my room, right next to my head. Important note:
The stairs were on the other side of the wall in a traditional Victorian style (some steps, then a landing, 180 degree pivot, more steps), so the point on the wall where the bangs were coming from was about 8 feet off the ground. Directly after the bangs, the touch lamp next to my bed started going crazy.
It had four settings: off, dim, bright, brightest and it cycled through them without being touched for about thirty seconds while out in the big, open living area, our stereo turned on at full volume blaring some crazy punk album I had just discovered. I quickly ran out of my room and turned the stereo off, not wanting to wake anyone else in my family and then just kind of sat in my room with a light on until I could fall back asleep.
This was probably the creepiest experience I ever had in the house, but definitely not the only one.”
10. Cursed.
“So this story is about an uncle of mine.
He was a nice man with a loving family, he worked as a Muslim missionary where he traveled the world and talked about Islam, corrected peoples misunderstandings (not an extremist, but corrected the extremists themselves) anyways.
He loved to travel as well and heard about a village in Malaysia who apparently practice a lot of black magic and curse people using demons.. I know it sounds where weird but I wouldn’t have trusted the story as well if it wasn’t in the family.
So he decided that these people are Causing problems for their neighbors and it would be better to go and talk to them about Islam. He went even after copious efforts for him not to meddle in something like that. However, he was determined to help these people from at least stop cursing others.
He went to the village and camped around for 10 days trying to convince people but it was to no worth they didn’t listen and they attempted to kill him or “sacrifice” him for the greater good of the village. So naturally he came back. This all happened roughly 2 months ago.
He came back to his normal life but would feel weird, he started hearing voices, cries and screams. According to his family he couldn’t be left alone because he would try to fight the voices and throwing things. His family was very patient with him but after 1 month exactly, he could hear someone call his name for any corner in he room and eventually hung himself.
I don’t know what happened, but we’re sure he was cursed badly.
Sorry for long post and I realize it not nearly as scary as the other posts but I still think it scary enough to know there are people who will curse you to death.”
11. Paper thin walls.
“When I was in college, freshman year, my roommate and I had a very small dorm with paper thin walls. You could hear everything, and pinpoint where it was coming from. The room to the right of us watched the OC so often that I got sick of the theme song.
So when we heard this sound, we assumed it was the people in the room upstairs.
It sounded like a ball rolling, a heavy metal ball, rolling slowly around and around, and then it would tap, as if someone dropped it from a short height and it bounced a few times. It sounded very deliberate, intentional. That’s why we thought it was the room directly above ours. We could almost walk under it and follow the sound. It was really loud.
It happened randomly. It didn’t coincide with the air conditioning being on, or water in the pipes, all of which we could hear. And it would happen at all hours. Usually in the afternoon, but sometimes in the evening or before dawn.
Also, at the time I had a speaker dock for my iPod (pre-iPhone days). We had it on all the time, and before the roll-tap would happen, my speakers would make a buzzing noise, like heavy static, and then pop and skip. We chalked that up to interference with other rooms’ electrical stuff or maybe cell phone signals messing with it. (We were biologists, not electricians. I have no idea.)
My roommate and I were both really non-confrontational, so it wasn’t until the second or third week that I finally went upstairs to ask the people up there to stop the tapping sound. It had been going on for an hour or so, and we’d had about enough. They looked genuinely shocked and said they thought that we had been making that sound, downstairs.
The sound happened the entire time we lived there. We just got used to it. This was in Galveston, which is really prone to ghost and haunting stories (from the hurricane of 1900), but my school itself was on a manmade island that wasn’t built until years later, so that’s how I told myself it wasn’t a ghost, and how I made myself shrug it off so I could sleep every night.
But we never found out what it was.”
12. What happened?
“While at uni my friends and I ran out of booze. Hardly any shops were open because it was late on, so the only option was to walk the mile or so to the nearest 24 hour supermarket.
Between the supermarket and the dorms we lived in was just row after row of suburban houses which all looked the same. As we were walking down one road we passed a field with a large camp fire and some people riding horses around it. There were people playing musical instruments, and general sounds of a good time going on – the horses and fire, and the lanterns which were dotted about, gave it a very old fashioned feel.
Maybe 5 minutes after passing the field, now walking past houses again, one of my friends commented on how weird and out of place that gathering of people had been. My other friend and I had been thinking exactly the same thing so, curious, we turned around and walked back to find out exactly what was going on. There was nothing there.
Not just no people or horses, there was no field; just more and more houses. Even though we were absolutely certain we were on the right road, as we’d simply turned around, we walked up and down the neighbouring roads too. We found nothing.
We weren’t drunk, though we’d had some drinks, and so I’ve got absolutely no idea what happened that night.”
13. The old apartment.
“I lived in an old apartment in 2002. The place was built in 1900, so it was just over 100 years old when I moved in.
The living room and kitchen were fine, but the bathroom and bedroom we’re unnerving, like I just always felt like I was being watched, especially in the bedroom if the closet door was open. Those unnerving feelings just became moderately uncomfortable as I settled in. I felt safe in the bedroom, but only if the door was locked. One night I was dead asleep when there was a loud BANG on my bedroom door.
When I got up the courage to get out of bed, I checked the apartment and all the windows were closed and locked from the inside, the door still had the chain secured, no one was in there. I mentioned the closet in the bedroom, I never liked going in there, and I never liked if the door was open. For some reason, in my head I would hear gasping noises. So for that reason, the closet stayed closed.
A month or more after I was woken to the bang on my door, I was dead asleep. But something woke me up, and it was a pressure on me like being held down. It was pitch black in my room, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew some was standing over me. When I could finally turn on a bedside lamp no one was there.
After then I couldn’t sleep in the dark, I had to sleep with a lamp on. That incident scared the life out of me. And after that the unnerving feeling of being watched intensified. Friends would come over, and comment about being uncomfortable in the bathroom like being watched. It became so uncomfortable for me, when I had the chance to move to another unit, I jumped at it. I packed up and got out.
After me, several people rented the apartment, and they would move out within months. I became friendly with the building manager, and I told him that I felt the place was haunted. He kind of laughed it off.
Years after, they were renovating the place, building manager was doing some painting in there, the building owner was there too. I went and checked out the apartment, and it looked nicer, it didn’t feel as creepy.
I got to talking with the building owner, and through the course of conversation he just throws it out there that a former tenant committed suicide in the closet by hanging themselves.
He also mentioned that the original designer of the building lived in that apartment, and died in there. I wasn’t mad when I heard that, but felt validated that what I experienced was real.”
How about you?
What’s a scary true story that YOU know?
Tell us all about it in the comments!
