I’ve never seen a ghost or had a particularly paranormal experience. I’m not even sure I believe in ghosts. These Askreddit tales though…they’re almost enough to make me reevaluate…
1. A vacation ghost
My parents were on their honeymoon to key west. When they arrived at the hotel to check in, they were told that the room would be non-smoking. With my dad being a smoker they requested a different room. They got the room switch and went to their room. As they got off the elevator the smell of fresh paint was overwhelming, down the hall their was a painter with all necessary supplies laid out around him and was painting the wall. As my parents walked passed him they casually greeted him and the painter had absolutely no acknowledgement of their presence. Whatever.
When they got to their room the smell of paint was even worse in there, so bad it wasn’t even bearable so they decide to go to the front desk to change rooms. When they explained the situation the attendant looked very confused and informed them that there wasn’t a scheduled paint job on that floor for that day but agreed to change their room. My parents go back to their floor to grab their luggage and the painter is completely gone. All supplies cleaned up and gone within 10 minutes-and the smell of paint was completely gone.
At this point my parents were freaked out but didn’t think much of it and go to their new room. The next morning on their way to breakfast they overhear a tour guide talking to a group. My parents tuned in when the guide mentioned the floor that they were originally supposed to stay on. Apparently a long time ago there was a painter on that floor painting and fell down the elevator shaft to his death.
Now my parents don’t normally believe in the paranormal but after an event like this that they had no explanation for it freaked them out a good bit.
2. The rocking horse
One night when I was maybe 10-12 I had trouble falling asleep. My bedroom was the entire top floor of our house with my bed and such being on the left side and storage closets and a play area being on the right. I was lying in bed when I heard a noise from the other side of the room and see a rocking horse begin to rock. It was sitting just outside one of the storage closet doors.
It proceeded to rock its way halfway across the room and stopped dead under the ceiling light.
At this point I was freaking out and just buried my head under blankets and never peeked out again until morning.
3. Almost abducted
My mother (who doesn’t believe in any sort of hokey nonsense) once told me a story where one night her and a couple of friends were driving home one night after hanging out, no drugs or alcohol involved. They were crossing a bridge when suddenly their car died, and then all the streetlights cut off. Then they heard a throbbing sound, like a large engine idling, and saw a flash of lights cross overhead rapidly. A few moments later, all of the lights came back on, and then car started back up immediately. A bit unnerved they continued home.
A few days later, the Pascagoula Abduction story was on the news. Apparently they encountered the same craft that supposedly took those two men.
4. Worst apartment ever
Before I was born my father and mother had a small apartment together. My mother told me once she went in the basement and saw a woman standing at the base of the steps just staring up at her and then she just vanished. Then my father was in the shower (one with a sliding glass door that you can barely make out what’s on the other side) when a large figure walked up to the other side of the glass and banged on it making it blow out, my mother found him in the fetal position in the shower covered in glass and no one was around. That last one made them move out. He confirmed it happened but doesn’t like to talk about it, he’s a relatively tough dude so for something to scare him that much means a lot. Somewhere in between those two occurrences they came home to find absolutely everything moved over about an inch, they realized this cause they’re not very good at dusting.
5. “There was a little boy named Charlie who lived in our house.”
My nephew lives with me in an old farmhouse built in the 1840’s. When he was about four (maybe five) he told me that there was a little boy named Charlie who lived in our house. He said Charlie had never heard of video games and that Charlie’s dad left him home all by himself. This was around the same time that he had an imaginary friend named Mr. Cat (who was an anthropomorphic cat) so I wrote it off.
A couple weeks later I was shaving with the bathroom door open and thought I could see my nephew kind of looking in at me out of the corner of my eye. I stuck my head around and could see him from behind messing with an old china cabinet we keep important stuff in and just as I walked into the room I could see my nephew sitting in the living room watching tv. He couldn’t have crossed that much distance that fast or silently.
I asked him about it and he said “Oh yeah, that was Charlie. He says there’s a really book in there from when you were a little boy.” And at the bottom of a stack of old documents and stuff in the china cabinet is a book I got as a gift when I was a kid. I didn’t even know it was there, it was under two boxes of documents and couldn’t been seen until the boxes were lifted out.
The little boy didn’t look like you think of ghosts; he wasn’t transparent, he didn’t float, he didn’t look spooky. He just looked like a kid. Now I’m convinced that people see ghosts (or whatever they are) every day and don’t realize it because they look just as real as we do.
6. The hand
I was 14 and sitting by myself in my living room playing some Halo, when I noticed that the room around me seemed oddly quiet. I paused the game and tried to “listen” for the difference. It was strange, my house is over 100 years old and usually there’s an odd creak audible from somewhere nearby. Not now though, it was dead quiet. I felt strange, but not threatened. There was nothing sinister about the silence.
I sat for a few more minutes just listening, it almost felt peaceful actually.
Then suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, very lightly and briefly, but even today I still remember the distinct feeling of a hand on my shoulder. It didn’t scare me, nor did I jump up in surprise, I actually felt a familiar presence. Like family.
I mentioned the experience to my Mom, and she told me shed experienced the same thing, only one room over. She says she felt her fathers presence with the “hand”
7. Posses me…
My now ex wife and I had just gotten married and moved into a new neighborhood. we moved in, in the winter. as spring came we noticed there were multiple dead animals (birds, squirrels, raccoon ) in the yard. we cleaned em all up and started to do improvements to the outside of the house and painting on the inside.
I started to notice strange things going on. keys not where I left em, stuff like that small. I thought I was just being forgetful. then things slowly started to escalate. while in bed I could swear I could hear a bareley audible conversation, like a radio in a far room. as soon as I would try to focus on it, it would go away. I started to hear footsteps at the other end of the house. one night while laying in bed, i hear a huge crash, woke me up out of dead sleep. I went into the kitchen and saw my kids hamster cage on the floor about 15 feet from where it was. (we would put it on the fridge at night, because we had a cat and didnt want it getting to it. now I know what you are thinking, cat knocked it off. but this cage had to fly over a breakfast bar and a kitchen table to get to its resting place.
Then things got ugly. I would be sitting at home watching tv and I would have this uncontrollable thought. “what would it be like to be possessed?” or “I want to be possessed.” I couldn’t get this thought out of my head. couldnt concentrate on anything but that. I would literally have to say in my head “I love god, I love jesus” over and over to get off the original thought. I need to add, that I am not a religious person.
As soon as I would leave the house, I would be fine. Not one thought. But as soon as I pulled in my driveway it would start up again. Uncontrollable.
I thought I was going crazy. I sat down with my wife and looked her dear in the eyes and said “I think I am going crazy, I’ve been having weird thoughts..” She turned white and before I could say anymore she said “that you want to be possessed?!?” Come to find out for the past month she had been having the exact same thoughts. Then we started to compare stories.
She told me that she was laying in bed without me (I worked seconds at the time) and she could hear a man whispering through the baby monitor while our child was fussing.
Needless to say we moved out within the month. Ate the deposit. Her oldest daughter was still in school and we had moved across town. I had to pick her up at that house on my days off when she got dropped off by the bus. As soon as I turned the corner. I would get those thoughts. I would sit in my car in the driveway and not even go inside and wait.
8. A legit sock demon
It was like 2 am, I took my clothes off and went to sleep. A minute later something hit me at my head. It was one of my socks. When I take them off I throw them in a corner of my room, so someone threw it back at me.
But there was no one in my room, was alone 100%. May not sound so scary, but it was for me!
9. It’s still there, waiting
When I was 17, I went to my mates house for some beers for his Birthday, I probably only had about five drinks. Come the early hours of the morning, probably around 2/3am, I head out to the kitchen for a drink. I pour a drink of water and turn around and take a sip, and as I’m swallowing I swear I hear footsteps (the ground in the entire room is all made up of tiles), so I hold my drink down and listen for a few seconds.
Next thing I know, I hear fast footsteps in front of me running towards me, and suddenly a huge cold breeze blew right through me. At that point, I just freaked out and ran back for the bedroom. I ended up waking my friend up and telling him what happened and we listened and could hear odd bangs and bumps from out there, but nothing out of the ordinary after that ever happened.
I’ll still always remember it though, gives me goosebumps writing this.
10. A warning
Me and some friends had just graduated high school and wanted to do something fun now that we had some free time. We end up going camping on this native american land in California.
Well we spent like 2 days there and then packed up to go home. On our way out of the land, me and my friends started to joke around about the natives and said things like “drive faster before the shoot their arrows at us” and bullshit like that. Then out of nowhere, our car hits a bump as if we had ran something over.
We stop and try to see if we hit an animal and then we see it. It was like some fucked up skinny, long legged coyote. We start looking at each other debating on what we should do and then, the coyote starts getting up and we see its real size.
That. Shit. Was. Massive.
So me and my friends are already shitting our pants at this moment so we decide to get the flying fuck out of there, then, we saw what we still don’t bring up today. While leaving the scene, me and the driver here our 2 friends in the back scream and shout “OH MY FUCKING GOD GET US OUT NOW!!!” me and the driver check our mirrors and the coyote was fucking walking off into the distance ON ITS FUCKING HIND LEGS. We jammed faster out of that creepy ass land and didn’t say a word til we got back on the freeway.
To this day I still think we might have being just seeing things but it looked so real. This is the worst thing I can remember when it comes to shit like this.
11. Lessons learned in Montana
I’ve learned some things since moving to Montana.
1. Don’t fuck with Coyote.
2. Steer clear of Skin Walkers.
3. Do NOT camp or hike near burial grounds.
12. The tall man
I once worked on an Indian reservation and it’s late at night in South Dakota. Some friends and I are driving, one of them is native and we are discussing folk tales of the area. Suddenly I see the white light running towards the road across the plains and my friend steps on the breaks. “you’re doing that because you saw it too right?” “yup”
We pull up to the area and there is nothing there. I have goosebumps all the way back to where I’m staying. That night I have awful dreams about native warriors trying to destroy new York city and then I wake up with something breathing in my ear, whispering to me. I scream my friends name and he looks over at me and tells me it’s okay. I fall back into the same dream over and over again. I keep trying to change the outcome.
The next day my friend told me when he woke up and saw me screaming a massive shadow was above me. The tall man. Not slender man- this guy is different. My friend didn’t want to tell me he saw it since he knew it would freak me out even more.
Was afraid to sleep for weeks, smudged the crap out of my room, put sage on the window sill and hung up mad dream catchers. Shit was scary but also kinda funny. I think they had fun messing with the white girl.
13. NEVER use a Ouija board
In started when I got my Ouija board and I never read the ‘rules’. My friends were too chicken shit so I did it alone. I talked to two people that day by myself. One was a little boy named Tim who was disowned by his parents and died in the forest. The other presence was much darker and for 2 questions I asked, IT would reply “death” which was not a valid answer. I got angry with the 2nd one and yelled at IT to prove it’s malicious nature to me. Nothing happened. I packed the board away, feeling as if maybe it was me the whole time which is the common notion for disbelievers.
But then the next two months happened. Between 3-4 AM, I consistently woke up with terror sweats and felt as if I was being watched. About 50 days in, I awoke to the most horrid screaming and a thud so loud I thought someone was breaking in. I jumped up and felt again like someone was in front of me wanting me to die, and yet no sounds from my upstairs housemates.
I got so scared that I quit sleeping at night. I would stay up until 6 AM at least to make sure that ghost hour wouldn’t effect me. But it came anyways. I’ll always remember what happened at two months. I was playing CoD as typical for the past two weeks and all of a sudden, I got this cold chill on my back. And it went to my left shoulder and then also onto the left side of my head. And I shit you not, I heard breathing in my ear. The pressure on my upper left side was if someone or something was leaning its head on my shoulder. I was frightened to death but I decided fuck this. I got up, swung my fists and screamed “fuck off, and go away” and after that night, IT seemed to stay away.
I don’t know how all this happened, especially when I was such a non believer. Those months feel like a dream. But I do believe now that certain energies do manifest around us, and it’s best to stay away from the evil, hurtful ones.
