Most people have memories of things that happened to them during their childhood that totally freaked them out. It’s natural, as children develop the ability to use their imaginations, for those to run a bit wild.
That said, a majority of those memories will eventually be explained away or refuted by the adults in their lives – these 17 people’s creepiest recollections, though, actually happened.
17. The house had its own plans.
My grandmother was a real estate agent in Rhode Island. I was staying with her one summer and she had to take me along to see a potential listing. It was a very strange house because it was circular. All the rooms went along the outside and connected to each other and there was a center part with a little garden and open to the sky. She went up to the second story and I stayed downstairs because I wanted to walk around the loop one time.
The problem started when I had walked a full loop and I didn’t see the stairs. I thought I must be confused so I kept going to the next room and still couldn’t find them. I started to panic so I began running around the house as fast as possible checking every room for stairs and there wasn’t any.
Finally, I sat down by the front door and started crying. A little while later my grandmother ran into the entryway room looking just as panicked as I had been and asking where I was hiding and why I was hiding and and not answering her calling out to me. I never heard her calling out to me at all.
Actually, the house seemed so still and quiet while I was sitting there that I was sure she had forgotten and left me there. We went home and didn’t talk about it really.
Like 15 years later I brought it up to my mom and asked if she knew anything or was this a crazy childhood nightmare I’m remembering? She told me she remembered it clearly because my grandmother had called her and was absolutely spooked because she couldn’t explain what had happened and she thought she lost me or I had been taken by someone while she was distracted. She had apparently been looking for me for awhile.
I still don’t understand what happened really because the house wasn’t even large or confusing to navigate. I still get chills when I think about it.
16. I have so many questions.
Was looking for a Halloween costume with my mom to wear to elementary school, which was a big deal to me because I was homeschooled at first. We spent a couple of hours going to several stores and couldn’t find anything that I liked.
It was getting dark outside so we were going to have to find something and go home soon. There was an old Halloween costume store, one of those really weird places that somehow is open year round, that we decide to go to as a last ditch effort to find something.
We got out of the car and walked through the front doors and get three steps into this place and I instantly have all the hair on my body stand on end. I felt huge oppressive pressure on my whole body, like the physical feeling of being hated by something, combined with it wanting to hurt me and wanting me to leave.
My little third grade, (I think that’s when it happened), self turned to look at my mom and in the same instant she turned to look at me. We didn’t say a thing to each other, just turned around, after only walking three steps into the store and went back to the car.
I remember getting inside and asking my mom if she felt the same thing and she said that she had had essentially the same experience as me. We prayed together in the car and left.
For perspective, I as an elementary school kid who desperately wanted to fit in with the other kids that I had recently joined in public school, willingly left our literal last chance to find a costume that I thought would help me fit in, because of a physical feeling of being hated that I got when we walked into the store. As an adult I can still remember how bad it was and am getting tensed up just writing about it.
I did end up with a costume that year though. We went home and she stayed up late with me working to cobble together a cowboy costume from things we had at home. I had a cowboy hat from my grandpa, some cowboy boots from somewhere, a button down shirt that we ripped a bit to make it rugged, a bright red bandana to tie around my neck, and a swanky “leather” vest we made from a brown grocery bag that we cut some super cool tassel fringe onto.
15. This is an actual nightmare.
Something very similar happened to me at my great-aunts place in Canada. It was me (13 at the time), my parents, grandparents and my 3 siblings staying in her 5 bedroom home. She was there too but was working majority of the time, the house was HUUUUGE. 3 floors, the basement was its own 2 bedroom apartment huge.
The basement was creepy because it was pitch black, she never went down there so there was no furniture or any signs of life. The center of the house was connected by these spiral stairs that were wide and huge. Her whole house was littered with antique porcelain dolls which absolutely did not help the creepy cold feel at all.
One day everyone went to get some coffee and donuts while my brother (17) and I stayed back in the house. I was wandering through the ground floor and eventually I went looking for my brother. I went to every room, looking behind the couches and upstairs yelling and eventually screaming for him. I ran around the outside of the house, and eventually I looked down the big spiral stairs that led into the pitch black basement and went down there while yelling for my brother.
As soon as my foot touched the bottom of the stairs to the basement, this absolute feeling of dread and despair hit me like a freight train. I ran upstairs but just like my nightmares, the stairs kept getting longer and longer. Eventually I made it to the ground floor where my brother looked sweaty and scared to see me. He yelled at me “WHERE WERE YOU?!” almost the same time I yelled that too. Apparently he went everywhere looking for me, he was sitting on the couch in the living room which I swore I looked at- then he and decided he hasn’t seen or heard me for awhile so he went to look around the house for me. He never heard me yell or scream his name, never saw anyone outside or heard any frantic footsteps anywhere. Just pure silence. He got panicked and the same time he looked at the stairs he sees me running up frantically.
I haven’t been back to that house but that memory still freaks me out
14. So they were definitely UFOs.
One time my brother, his friend, and I saw lights in the sky that darted around like UFOs. We went to get my mom and she was totally nonchalant about it. “Yep, those are UFOs” she said, and went back in the house.
Her response was so subdued that we figured she was humoring us and they weren’t actually UFOs. Years later I asked her about it and she said she had to force herself to act calmly because she was terrified.
13. Why would she bring that in the house?
About 5 years ago my parents were sitting out on the back porch on a summer night. Out of the corner of her eye my mom saw a person-sized white translucent figure float by a tree. She asked my dad if he saw it too and he said yes. He is a tough guy but he was really freaked out and so was she so they both went inside.
The next morning my mom was walking by the tree where they saw the figure and she noticed a very old looking earring sitting on top of the dirt. She doesn’t wear earrings and it wasn’t the kind of earring I would wear. It looked like it belonged to an old lady and it was just dropped there. My mom brought it inside and put it in her jewelry box.
The next day it was sitting in the middle of the basement floor. From then on I started hearing footsteps and whispering in my room at least once a week until I moved out.
12. This is the most amazing power.
When I was young, I apparently had a few odd interactions with animals. I would know a person had animals before we went in the house, they tended to come over to me before my parents, mostly just little things that were probably explainable by me a fairly observant little kid.
The one that sticks out to my parents though (telling it the way they do) is we went to a new car garage to have them work on our car. As we pull up, the owner has a big old black lab laying in the middle of the lobby.
The guy informs us the dog is comfortable with people, we can pet him if we want. I shake my head and say “He sad though.” Dad looks at me asks why I think that. I reply “He lost his ball, he sad now.”
Dad said the owner went pale, stared at me for a minute, and then looked at dad said “He’s had a favorite ball for ten years that just went down the sewage drain yesterday and I couldn’t get it back out.”
11. I believe them.
I woke up one night when I was 12 because I dreamt that my older brother got into a car accident. I got out of bed and wandered downstairs to the kitchen to get something to drink. My mother was sitting there and asking me why I was awake. I told her “Had a bad dream and need something to drink”. I got a glass of water when it ringed at our door. My mother went to look who is there in the middle of the night.
Two police officers that asked if they could come inside for a moment. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about because I was still in the kitchen and they were in the hallway. After the two officers left my mother came back to the kitchen completely pale and told me that I should go to bed now. I asked her whats wrong when she informed me that my brother was in a car accident and she needs to wake up my dad and go to the hospital now.
When I pointed out, that this was the bad dream I had before waking up, she only looked at me for a couple of seconds. I prepared myself for comments like “Don’t be silly and go to bed now” but instead she said “Me too”.
So basically. We both had the same fucking dream of my brother having a car accident. And we both woke up minutes before the police came over to tell us it really happened. My brother survived with some minor injuries and we’ve seen the photos of the accident in the newspaper the next day. It looked 100% like in my dream. To the smallest detail. The way he lost control over the car, where it flipped the first time and the tree it came to a stop.
Even today my mother and I talk about this. Nobody else believes us when we tell the story.
10. Well that would have given me nightmares.
I’m not 100% sure this fits because my mom confirmed it years ago, then denied it when I asked her again a couple months ago, but here it is.
When I was little, my dresser (it was long but pretty short) sat against the wall with one of the ends pointed to my door. That dresser is heavy, an old wood one with all sorts of kid crap neatly arranged on top. Since it was in my bedroom, the floor was carpet. I always slept with the door closed.
One night, with no explanation, the dresser tipped over. But instead falling forward, it fell 180 degrees to the side, falling in front of my door, all the kid crAP spilling to the side. My mom ran to get me, but couldn’t open the door as it was being blocked by the dresser. Eventually, with her pushing and me pulling on the dresser, she was able to slip in and move the dresser out of the way. Nothing was damaged, not even the glass figurines I had. My dad helped put it upright the next day and we moved on.
Years later, I remembered the incident and asked my mom about it, expecting to learn that I blew it out of proportion and it only fell forward or something like that. Nope, she remembered that night as well.
However, she added one detail that I could never figure out. She thought she heard me jumping on the bed that night, and that was why she thought the dresser tipped over. I had been asleep, I have no idea where she heard that noise coming from.
9. Not cool, dad!
When my family went to the Georgian mountain region, we rented a cottage. 2 bedrooms, so my brother and I took one and our dad took the other with his gf.
I woke up in the middle of the night to three figures in the room, all standing in various places, none of which were visible from the entrance of the room. I woke my brother up and we screamed for our dad, but when he came into the room, he refused to look at the figures and just told us to hide under the covers.
Wasn’t exactly confirmed, but his refusal to look where they were standing after begging him was telling. Sh%t still scares my brother and I.
8. This one gave me chills.
When I was a kid my family lived in a blue house that was oddly shaped. One year the house got completed gutted and nearly destroyed by a flood and they had to knock down a wall between the living room and kitchen. So after the flood, you could see all the way down the hall to my parent’s bedroom door. This house is/was… strange for lack of a better term.
I was a terrible sleeper as a kid and would routinely wake up and just go into the living room and watch cartoons on low volume if I couldn’t go back to sleep. One morning I’m out in the living room sitting across the chair with my feet up on a window. Don’t ask me why, I was a stupid eight or nine year old.
From where the chair was, I could see just over the kitchen counter down that hall to my parents room. A movement caught my eye. I looked up and saw the shadowy outline of a man walking towards me, kind of near to my parents door. Thinking it was my dad I said something like, “hey dad sorry if the tv was too loud” (dad is a notoriously light sleeper and would wake up from anything).
Except there was no response. Within seconds my foot ends up going through the window (again not sure if this is related or I was a dumb kid – likely the latter) and I scream, and my parents actually wake up to figure out what’s going on at 430 in the morning. At this point I’m preoccupied, but realize much later that I DEFINITELY saw the outline of a man, but there was no way it was my dad because A. he came bounding out of their bedroom after my scream and B. I realized the shoulders of that outline were MUCH higher than what my dad’s would’ve been.
Fast forward to a few years ago, we’ve moved far away from the blue house, and my mom and I are hanging out and catching up. For some reason the blue house comes up and I tell mom that the place still gave me creeps and weird stuff happened there when I was a kid.
Moms response? Oh! You must’ve saw the shadow man too.
7. Lighthouse stories are always creepy.
In Mom’s seaside hometown, there was an offshore decommissioned lighthouse.
Even though utilities to it had long been shut off and the lighthouse was locked, it would randomly light up – clearly visible in all directions.
No one could explain it. It happened so infrequently and at odd hours of the night that by the time officials examined the structure, there were no signs of activity.
To this day, as I’ve mentioned here once before, the lighthouse remains mysterious and a bit creepy.
6. He sees dead people.
I’m a parent of toddlers and kids now, and I have a creepy story from last year.
We were driving with my then three year old son in the car, and stopped at a red light next to a cemetery. Out of nowhere, my son looked over at the cemetery and said “There are people laying down there, and they can’t get up.”
My wife asked my son what he was talking about and he pointed to the cemetery and said “All of the people laying down in the park are stuck.”
My wife and I just looked at each other in silence completely freaked out. At this point in our son’s life, there had been no deaths in the family and we had never discussed death with him.
I’m still creeped out when I think about it.
5. My heart.
When I was 3 years old my grandmother died. She lived in our house with us and we were VERY close, she had told my mom many times that she would do her best to make her passing easy on me since I was so young.
The night that she died, my mom was laying in bed with her and heard her take her last breath. My mom laid there and cried for about 30 minutes before coming into my room to check on me. It was about 5am and there was no reason for me to be awake, but I was sitting in up in my crib playing and when my mom asked why I was awake I said:
“Grandma Flo just came in to give me a kiss goodbye!”
4. Wait, this is a thing?
I was very young when this happened so what i remember and what i was told is the main scariness for this story.
So my family was driving around the backwoods on NH ME area in the autumn to watch the leaves fall. We were staying at some cottage and my family came to this area pretty frequently. We were coming back from somewhere when my mother started screaming at my father for stopping abruptly. In front of us, on a unkept back road in the deep woods of New England at a pretty late hour was a traffic jam of quite a few cars stopped in all directions. I remember a lot of bright headlights. I also remember seeing my dad’s face as he turned around so he could see where he was reversing the car. My mom went completely silent through this whole thing. I just remember my dad saying eerily calmly “Ughh, i hate traffic.”
He turned around and started driving back up the road we came down and we started seeing cars going past us flashing their headlights. My dad just kept driving, the whole atmosphere went from “Wasn’t that a fun day!” to “Lets leave.” even as a kid i went from annoying to quiet. Just a thickness in the air. Cars started coming up from behind honking and flashing lights and eventually they just turned off the road and we drove back to the cottage.
Years later, i mean decades later my dad and me were having a beer together. He says “Remember up in the woods up north? We were driving around and we came to a weird traffic jam?” i was like “Yeah. Why?” I honestly hadn’t thought of it since that night. My dad goes “Well, your mother and I were pretty sure that was one of those Ambushes where they block the road and try to rob you and leave you in the woods or worse. You dont remember the cars coming up the road after us, trying to block us in? Or the cars chasing us and beeping at us until we hit (random route)?” “Well Kinda, but i just figured it was traffic or people being weird.” he just kinda stopped talking about it after that and went on about how we should plant more trees in the backyard, but ones that don’t drop leaves, because leaves suck.
3. How could he have imagined that?
When I was 9 or 10 my dad took me to visit with an older hunting buddy friend of his. My parents were divorced and my dad lived in another part of the country, so while I had known this guy since I was a toddler I didn’t share the same common interests as either of them.
The older friend was a gun dealer and had lots of catalogs (this was before the internet was in wide use) to order bullets, magazines, guns, etc and they often spent hours going through listings to determine what they wanted to order. We got there fairly early and my dad said that after an hour or two we’d all go to Hardees for breakfast before going to shoot clay birds.
Now I’m a youngin, I don’t care much about guns or hunting for sport and am just incredibly bored so I start wandering around the house, reading my video game magazines that I brought with me and very quickly that hour or two has passed and they’re still down there. I ask if they’re going to leave any time soon and the friend suggests I check the refrigerator in the kitchen and see if there’s anything I want to eat.
I look through the fridge and find nothing… however on the kitchen table I see an apple and decide that will be appetizing enough to hold me over. As I pick up the apple and prepare to take a bite, at that point his wife steps in and tells me “don’t eat that. everything in the bowl is wax!” I tell her thank you for warning me and continue to wander around the house burning time until we can get going.
Maybe another 30 minutes later I go back to the basement where they’re going through catalogs and ask when we are going to Hardee’s. My dads friend asks if I’m still hungry after going through their fridge. I tell him that I was going to eat an apple but his wife told me it was wax before I made the mistake. Both of them give me a blank stare and after about 20 seconds of shock my dad explains that his wife recently passed away.
I then go back through the house to try to find her to show that they were just joking with me but sure enough she was nowhere to be found. Roughly 30 years later before he passed away my dad still insisted that I must have imagined it. But I didn’t, she told me not to eat the wax fruit.
2. It was just normal.
In the house I grew up in every night at around midnight these big loud footsteps would go stomping up and down the hallway a few times.
I’d often think it was my dad getting up in the night so sometimes I would stick my head out in the hall to see him but there was no one there and I’d hear him snoring in his room.
This isn’t a particularly creepy story but it’s just strange that everyone confirms they heard these footsteps and no one was ever that bothered by it, it’s like it happened for as long as we could remember so we just accepted it.
1. Nope. Don’t like that.
At my parents house I used to hear my mom calling out to me when she didn’t, and she confirmed she’d hear me call out to her when I didn’t. That was a common occurrence.
Also, whenever I’d be alone for a little while if my mom was late from work or at the grocery store, I’d usually be in the main living room playing n64. I would often times hear loud banging sounds from upstairs as if a heavy piece of furniture tipped over. I’d go check and nothing was out of place. Both my mother and grandmother have confirmed similar experiences when they’re alone in he house.
There was also the time I was downstairs on my laptop, everyone else was in bed, it was after midnight and I didn’t realize just how dark everything had gotten without the lights on. I’m zoned out when I begin to hear what sounds like a murmuring from behind me. Like the low rumble you’d hear at a gathering when people are talking and you can’t make out conversation. The hairs on my neck immediately stoood up and my body locked up from fear. Tears ran down my face from the physical reaction my body was having. I refused to acknowledge it and kept staring at my laptop screen in silence. It took forever for my body to go back to normal. Some time later I told my mother what happened and it freaked her out because she said she’s heard the murmuring as well.
I’ve always hated that house
I’m so glad nothing like this happened to me as a kid!
If you’ve got a story to add to the heap, please do so in the comments!
