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Here’s something that’s sad but true – if you get to live a few years, you’ll have more than one memory of a time when you were really and truly scared. That’s just life, my friends, and we all learn how to cope with it in our own ways.
If one of the ways you cope is to listen to other people’s harrowing moments, we’ve got you covered – here are 28 moments you’ll be super glad you didn’t experience yourself.
28. Scary and funny is a rare combo.
“Scariest and funniest at the same time.
I was working at a restaurant as a cook. We did full menu till 11:00 PM, then apps and burgers till 1:00 AM. I tended to pull the solo night shift, because I would walk out the door at 1:05 AM and the kitchen was stocked, clean, and perfect.
It was a long night. Stupid FoH kept sending back food orders after 1:00 AM, I didn’t leave till 2:00 AM. 30 minute drive home, and I was exceptionally tired.
I lived in the boonies of Wisconsin, at the time. A good 5km outside of town, which was 500 people, 2 churches, and 9 bars. I hit the little 24/7 truckstop just at the edge of that town for some munchies and smokes, and made the final trek home.
Encountering deer was not uncommon out there, so I was going slow. When what appeared before me, to my tired eyes, was a monster.
It had a huge, round body. This crazy long neck, a pointy head, and only 2 legs. Right in the middle of the road. Scared the ever loving f**k out of me in that state.
Thankfully, it stood there for a second. Brain re-engaged. It’s an ostrich. Ok, not a monster, heh, just… an…
What the heck is an ostrich doing wandering around in Central Wisconsin?!?
I looked at it, it looked at me. I blinked. Nope, still there. Pretty sure it’s real. Finally, it trundled off into the forest.
What.
I grabbed my cellphone, and called the tiny little station in town (non-emergency number).
“So… I’m really tired, so please laugh at me and tell me to go home and sleep and ignore the call… but I’m pretty sure I just saw an ostrich on Highway xx just outside $town.”
She started laughing hysterically, then assured me that:
No, I’m not hallucinating.
There’s an ostrich and emu farm on the other side of town, guy raises them for the kitch places in town for meat.
Some inebriated driver felt that “turns are for pussies”, went up, over the berm, through the fence, and through most of the barn.
There’s still 4 animals, including the one I just spotted, unaccounted for.
Where are you exactly, and which way did it go so we can round it up?
I gave her the info, finished the last few miles home, and passed in bed. Wild night, man.”
27. Believe in ghosts.
I don’t believe in ghosts but my dad has told me about a couple of his own experiences. I can’t think of a single reason why he would lie to me about it. But the craziest one he told me was from when he was about 16. He was staying the night at his best friend’s house as he had done many times before.
Everyone had already gone to bed and he was watching TV alone in the living room. Then, the TV shut off on its own and he heard the floor creek like it does when someone walks down the hall. But nobody was there, and then he saw the seat next to him on the couch become depressed, and the TV turned back on, but instead of playing his show it started playing some old black and white cartoons with subtitles.
He said at this point he was petrified and couldn’t even move. Then the TV shut back off, the seat inflated, he heard steps back down the hall, and his original show he was watching came back on.
26. At least he wasn’t alone.
“Someone I knew locally came across a jeep that had just crashed into the ditch on a highway at night, flipped on it’s top, wheels still turning kind of thing.
He was the first on scene so called emergency and ran down into the ditch. The driver, who was badly mangled, had been tossed from the car and was dying. This guy held him and the driver passed in his arms.
The weirdest part of it all was that he found out the next day that it was his cousin, but he hadn’t been able to recognize him.”
25. Watch out for pirates.
My uncle, never had a chance to meet him, hired a small yacht with a small group of friends and were going to use it to do sailing holidays as a business. Anyway. They radioed in very early one morning saying they were out of petrol off the coast, and were told they would receive petrol in the morning.
They went to deliver petrol and never found the boat. They have only ever found one life doughnut thing and that’s it. They think the boat was pirated, and we have reports that they’re still alive in different countries but they’ve never been substantiated. They also have a sneaking suspicion that the yacht owner had something to do with it, as he acted SO dodgy after it all went down.
They literally have absolutely no idea what happened. There were no other ships in the area at the time (they thought they could have been run over and sunk by a large ship).
Anyway. It is called the Patanela. There is still a huge reward out for any info.
24. So much nope.
“15 years old…I’m in the middle of undressing when I look to my bedroom window to catch my reflection…and I see a man’s face.
I dropped to the floor and turned off the lights, scrambling to get dressed, still watching the window.
The face is gone, but I’m still watching, then…
A f**king camera. No face, just a camera pointed at me sitting on the floor.
I bolt from my room and tell my mom and brother. My brother went outside, and our ladder from the backyard was lying there.
But nobody around.
Couldn’t sleep for a year after that, just stared at that window…”
23. Good thing he’d already peed.
When I was younger I used to sleep over my best friend’s house a lot. He has an enormous, old house which is also quite beautiful. One night, I woke up and went up this long stairs to the bathroom while it was all really dark and I cant start to describe the noises I heard while I was in the bathroom.
I heard steps right outside the door, heard someone scratching the door and I thought “This must be my friend pranking me”, so I went and opened the door. Nothing, absolutely nothing. the noises stopped suddenly as soon as I opened it.
I slept in the bathroom that night and recently told my friend now that we are older what happened and he told me they had their house “purged” a year ago due to weird things happening specially with his little sister.
To be honest, I dont believe in ghosts nor anything of that kind but that event was a complete horror.
22. It’s always the ones you never expect.
“When I was a teen I worked at a cable access studio and made mini movies. My neighbors gave me their father’s old video camera. They told me he never used it, but it didn’t seem to work anymore and had a tape jammed in it.
I fixed it up, and on the tape was hours of him driving around at night and filming people through their windows.
Nothing overly icky was on it but there is something unsettling about seeing peeping tom footage of a guy eating dinner with his family, or over 20 minutes of some girls dancing around in their room.”
21. Sort of frozen.
Was about 17 and learning to drive. Mom and I had just been to the grocery and running a few errands. It was almost dark out and we were heading home. Was first in line at a left-turn stoplight in a large intersection. The turn arrow light turned green, and I just sat there. It was a very odd sensation…
I knew the light was green and needed to pull through, but couldn’t. It was like all motivation to move was gone… almost like when you’re staring off into space, but I was fully conscious that the light had changed and turning was what I was supposed to be doing. Mom didn’t say a word either, just stared at the light.
About 5 seconds later, a full size Suburban came barreling through the red light. The speed limit on the road was 45, but he had to have been doing 65-75. The car shook hard when he passed us. After he ran the light, I turned like normal and mom and I both kind of “woke up.”
Afterward, we both described the same feeling coming over us at the light. If we hadn’t both been tranced-out or what have you, the Suburban would have struck us broadside. A Suburban vs a Saturn at 60-70 mph wouldn’t have been pretty. Mom would have probably been taken on impact, and I highly doubt I would have survived as well.
We still talk about it every now and then. Just a weird experience.
20. I would have peed myself, too.
“When I was around 16 my rapidly growing family finally moved from the house I had spent my entire life in…
At some point I decided to go into the downstairs closet with a flashlight and read, something I used to do when I was younger to get some peace and quiet…
About an hour in, I shift a little to get comfortable and I hear a low, slow, warped, hoarse voice say “you always make me happy”.
I flipped my lid, hit my head on the low ceiling, and practically broke the door down getting out. After hyperventilating and explaining to my family why there was no color left on my face, I went back to see what it was.
It was my stuffed Little Bear from when I was 3 or 4 years old that I happened to lean on juuuuust right to press his belly.
When I pressed his stomach again though, nothing.
This poor bear I hadn’t played with since I was a toddler used the last of it’s power, used it’s dying breath to tell me I made it happy.
You make me happy too little bear.
When you’re not making me pee myself.”
19. Connected to Mom.
When I was pretty young my mom would always go for runs around the neighborhood during the summer. One afternoon after she had been home from a run for a while I asked her “hey mom can you take me to see that cool car you saw on your run this morning?” and I described it in really great detail, based on how she had supposedly described it to me (it was a Plymouth Prowler.)
She said she had no idea what I was talking about and probably had heard about it on tv or something, and not from her.
Well the very next morning she gets back from her run and is super excited and kind of freaked out, because down the street is the exact car I had described. We went and saw it, it was cool.
That was like 13 years ago and we still don’t really know how/why that happened.
18. An evil father.
“My brother and I were probably about 7 and 5, respectively. We used to wake up every weekend and play computer games before my parents woke up.
One day, we turned on the computer, and got an eerie message that was directed to us:
‘Hello Kid A and Kid B, this is your computer talking and I. AM. ALIVEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Do not run and tell your parents, they cannot help you now!!!’
Turns out my dad had programmed the computer to say that upon startup.
17. Maybe it was him.
I used to have a clock radio that would tune to a weather frequency when my alarm went off. The day after my dad passed, I woke up to the alarm, and after listening to the broadcast, I realized that it was in Danish. And it was a station in Aalborg, Denmark, where my dad had grown up.
There was no way I could have reached the frequency since I was in California. I still can’t explain what happened, but I really hope it was him.
16. I hope this story has a happy ending.
“I was visiting my hometown and decided to pick up my old high school friend from his house and take him to dinner and a drink to catch up. He is kinda stressed and tells me that his ex, with whom he had broken up with over 2 years prior, has been stalking him and harassing him.
I drive him home afterwards, and it starts to drizzle. As I drop him off at his house (the neighborhood was dark and quiet by now), we both notice a bag tied to my side view mirror…it was likely attached when we were at the restaurant.
We open it to see a poorly taken photo of a tree taken at night with flash. There was a brief letter, obviously written from his ex, that said:
‘I buried our first love letter under this tree years ago. This tree is growing from our love.’
I made sure my friend got into his house all right and got the heck out of there.”
15. Let’s just pretend.
It was back in high school. We were in the middle of class listening to a lesson when my vision went pitch black for a second. I assumed the lights went off but we had windows. Turns out everyone saw the same thing.
Finally the teacher just bursted out saying “ok…. let’s just pretend we all blinked at the same time.” Yep… a very memorable unexplained moment for me.
14. The scariest moment ever.
“…around 1 AM, I hear the sound of a door rattling and a slight whisper saying my name…
I sit up a bit and realize it’s coming from my parents’ room, becoming fainter with the passing time. After 10 minutes or so, I gather up the courage to see what the heck is going on.
Puny folding knife in hand, I peak out into the hallway and don’t see anything. The noise is still coming from the room next door, the rattling becoming more rushed as I approach. Cautiously, I open the door and sneak inside. It’s pitch black and I can’t see anything.
My eyes are taking entirely too long to adjust to the darkness. I’m shuffling forward, and all of the sudden, something grabs and pulls on my leg. At this point I was so freaked out I jumped back.
As the whispers continued, I recognized my dad’s voice. He was asking me for help.
He had a stroke while walking to use the bathroom around 1 AM that night. After he fell, he was able to use his left foot to rattle the door to his bathroom…
That was the scariest night of my life…
Fast forward 10 months and my old man is cognitively the same, just paralyzed on his right side…
He was my best friend before the incident, and my hero after.”
13. A bit of missing time.
When I was in middle school, cell phones weren’t widespread yet, and I also didn’t carry a watch, so I would often do things without knowing the time.
I used to walk a mile or so to a bus stop, and I was usually the only kid that rode the bus at this time. Our schools started at staggered times, and I was the only middle schooler who rode this bus at this particular time.
I would leave my house at 6:50 and get to the bus stop by 7:20ish. I had gone with a watch before, so I knew the timing, and the bus would always arrive by 7:35, so I always had a bit of extra time.
On this particular day, it was the dead of winter and it was overcast out, so it was quite dark. I left the house at the same time I always did, my family was doing the same things at that time they always were and there was no indication of anything being weird.
I swear, I got to the bus stop, and time froze for a long time. Everything about my walk was normal, but while waiting on the usually busy street for my bus, no cars drove by, no pedestrians walked by, and my bus didn’t come for what felt like hours. The sky did get a little brighter as the day went on, but something felt really weird.
I swear I stood there for hours before, suddenly, things returned to normal and there were cars driving by and a few people walked by. My bus pulled up, and I walked on feeling very strange. I looked at the time – it said 7:33am.
I don’t get what happened.
12. Oh my GOD.
“Was sitting in my room at like 11:30 pm, heard lots of noise downstairs, assumed it was my mum. Heard her walk up the stairs to my room, stop, I called out to her, she didn’t say anything and walked downstairs.
I went down about a half hour later to find a piece of paper with the words ‘You’re lucky I’m scared too’ on it, and a whole bunch of stuff was missing.
Called mum, she still hadn’t arrived home from a dinner she was at with her friends.
I called the authorities and locked myself in the bathroom, but I think they left when they realized I was still home, probably the most scared I’ve ever been when I was hiding in the bathroom.”
11. He wasn’t joking.
My dad has told me this story a few times – sometime in the 50s or 60s some of his cousins had gathered together at their parent’s house after their mother unexpectedly passed in that same house just days prior. One of the cousins, upon crossing the threshold entering into that house, suddenly had a heart attack and passed.
Of course this was incredibly shocking and tragic, considering that not only the mother but now one of her sons had passed in the same week. The family then has ANOTHER gathering at the same house. After a few hours of having the family together in the living room, one of the brothers of the recently deceased cousin clutches his hands to his chest, pretending to have a heart attack.
Apparently this cousin was known for his morbid sense of humor so this, while in bad taste, wasn’t out of the ordinary for him. But he wasn’t joking.
That cousin ALSO had a heart attack and passed in the exact same room that his brother had in, in the same house that his mother did, all in roughly a week’s span.
10. Look a little closer.
“Back when I worked night-shift as a Security guard, I would experience mild hallucinations due to my poor sleep schedule.
I was doing my patrol and I was feeling particularly out of it, so I kept getting those flashes of movement in the corner of my eye, but I was convinced it was just my brain f**king up.
As I’m going along, I see a pale shape on the ground and quickly recognize it as a body.
My adrenaline spikes and I nearly pass out.
Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a CPR dummy the workers left out for training.”
9. She just knew.
When my sister and I were kids, we were out front of our home, playing near the mailbox. Mom and Dad were there by the window watching, and according to them, my mother turned to my father and asked him to bring us inside. He shrugged her off, but she became more urgent.
He asked why it was a problem, and she suddenly panicked and actually started heading towards the front door despite being less than a week away from giving birth to our youngest sister. He stopped her and stepped outside to call us in, and we complied.
Less than a minute later, a car came barreling down the street at high speed and struck our mailbox, destroying it. We would have both been done in instantly.
My parents have never felt entirely comfortable talking about it.
8. Always listen to Dad.
“…When I was about 8 or 9, I woke up to my dad calmly but firmly telling me to get up, go in the bathroom, and shut the door.
I was annoyed because I was half asleep, but I listened. Apparently I was more tired than I realized, because I feel asleep on the bathroom floor.
The next morning I asked my mom what happened. She seemed oblivious and confused. I looked at my dad like she was crazy, and I asked him why he had woken me up. He denied doing it. I was becoming frustrated to the point of tears, but I ultimately let it go.
Fast forward to college. I was home one break, and I decided to ask again.
…This time, my dad goes, ‘Ha! I was wondering if you even remembered that.’
Turns out that a lot of houses on our block were being vandalized and robbed all those years ago. Someone had broken into the garage and was inside the house. My room was partially over the garage. My dad heard it happen and quietly got me to safety.
Authorities were called, the guy ran. He was never caught, however, and my parents didn’t want a terrified kid on their hands, so for years they pretended like nothing had ever happened.”
7. Two glowing red orbs.
“A f**king owl standing on the carcass of a large buck in the mountains at 3-5am.
All you see as you approach are two glowing red orbs, then slowly a becomes huge dark form standing on the edge of the road with eyes of fire. Then you get close enough and this massive owl just gives you the hard stare as you go past. You realize it was just a large owl standing on the remains of fresh road kill.
Freaked me out for the rest of the dark part of the drive.”
6. Nightmares for years.
“When I was a kid, I sneaked down to my parents’ bedroom to tell my mother something. I had to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake my dad up.
I kept whispering, “mom! mom!” in the dark and all of a sudden he sat up and started yelling.
My mother came out of her room and told me that I was lucky because my father thought I was an intruder and almost got me.
I had nightmares about that for years, thinking of my brush with the ether.
About 30 years later, I brought it up at some family get together. And, my mother said, ‘Oh Sapphyrre, you really believed that? He didn’t have a weapon. We were just having s^x.’”
5. No one wants to see that.
“I was following a grey Toyota Tundra in a massive blizzard through Montana on McDonald pass. He was going pretty quick most of the way but must have been unfamiliar with how steep the final few miles are.
He got away from me as I slowed down to about 35. Not 5 min later I passed his tire marks in the fresh snow that went off the side of the mountain. Pulled over and looked down to see his truck upside down and on fire about 300 yards down.
Called emergency. He didn’t die but was burnt up pretty bad. Sad and scary and don’t go 50 in the snow just because you have a truck or 4wd!!!”
4. The officers are always unlucky.
Got dispatched to a suspicious conditions call.
Picture an abandoned single-wide trailer in an empty field in the middle of a trailer park.
The trailer had a single light on inside.
…Partner and I figure it’s hobos or junkies squatting. We walk up to the trailer and the light goes out.
We’re ready, because someone is def inside. Throw open the door, identify ourselves and begin to sweep the trailer. Back door is shut and locked from the inside. Trash everywhere, but nothing recent. No lanterns or candles.
Nothing.
Feeling real weird now, we leave to go back to the caller…As we walk back across the field, we look back…the light is back on in the trailer.
Partner is trying to be professional, but I do not screw with the paranormal.
Officers die first in scary movies. High tail it out of there, never been back.
Clarification.
There was zero power running to the trailer. Nothing behind the trailer but field. NOBODY was in the trailer and no one could have come out except the door we went in.
Trust me peeps, I wanted it to be just a hobo or some kids.”
3. A lifeless body.
“I had just finished driving for Uber and was driving down the access road to my home around 3am when I saw a body lying completely lifeless next to one of those motorized scooters.
I pulled over and flagged down his buddies who were wasted and kept going without realizing their friend was lying on the ground. Ambulance arrived and took the kid away, but I never came to find out if he made it.
F*ck those scooters man.”
2. Gone, just like that.
“My parents were on a cruise with my older brother and since I shared a room with my little brother, I decided to sleep in my older brother’s room who had his room to himself.
One night I woke up feeling incredibly nauseous. There was a painful ringing in my ears and I tossed and turned for a bit trying to fall back asleep.
When I decided to open my eyes to check the time, I saw a dark figure standing over me.
I didn’t move, just kind of staring into what looked like a head. It confused me because I couldn’t make out any details, just shadow. Until it cocked it’s head at me like a dog does when it’s puzzled.
I immediately jumped out of bed to turn on the lights but it was gone just like that.
Fast forward a couple weeks; one night I was with my older brother and told him I didn’t want to freak him out, but saw something in his room.
He immediately when from joking to very serious, asking what it was. When I told him, all he said was ‘Please tell me you’re f**king with me. I’ve seen that thing before.’
Turns out he had two similar experiences where he had woken up and he saw it watching him sleep, but he convinced himself it was just his eyes playing tricks on him in the dark.”
1. Lock your doors.
After dropping me off at my house around 2 am, my friend calls me and tells me to lock my doors.
He said he saw a man standing in the middle of the road and that as he passed him the man kept staring through him.
Not at him really, but like there was something behind him in his back seat. He also said he could barely make out anything about the man other than his large eyes and trench coat.
What really terrified me is that this happened on a street that only my family lives on and no one would have been out that night. Also we’re a solid mile and a half from the nearest neighbor. Freaked me the heck out.”
Hats off to these folks, because they sure do recall these moments in vivid detail!
If you’re up for it, our comments are open – we’re all ears!
