I have some very strange childhood memories that I’ve never been able to explain. I’ve also never been able to shake them from my mind for one reason or another, and they are weird.
Do you have odd memories like that? Ones you can’t seem to get rid of from your past?
AskReddit users shared their weird, unexplainable memories from childhood.
Share your own in the comments!
1. A repressed memory?
“Every year at our cabin I have a dream I fall into the lake. Was told later that I fell in when I was younger. I never have this dream at home. Idk if the repressed memory is trying to tell me not to go on the water or just don’t be stupid and fall face first.”
2. No one believes me.
“When I was 10 or 11, I woke up very early in the morning to someone driving down our long driveway. It was dark outside, but I just barely peeped out my window to watch a man look into all of our car windows, survey our flower beds, and finally peer into my bedroom window. I played asleep and when I looked out the window again, he was driving backwards out of our driveway.
In the morning, I mentioned what I saw to everyone, but no one acknowledged hearing or seeing anything, despite the man’s headlights being very bright, maybe even switched to brights, and he slammed his car doors very loudly. But I can remember how scary it was having his face pressed against the window above my head and praying he didn’t try the lock. No one believes me to this day. I swear it was not a dream.”
3. Who was this kid?
“When I was a kid I had a classmate over who claimed he was a vampire. I didn’t believe him. I told him if his eyes glow in the dark that would prove he was a vampire.
We went into the bathroom and I turned off the light. His eyes were glowing. It scared the crap out of me. I opened the door, ran outside, jumped on my bike and got as far away from my house as I thought I could.
When I eventually came back home the classmate was gone and my dad was pissed that I abandoned my friend.”
4. Sounds kinda fishy.
“Breathing underwater. Turns out a lot of people have memories of being able to do something similar. Still haven’t gotten an explanation.”
5. My jaw dropped…
“My family and I were driving out of Bellows, a campsite/beach for military families in Hawai’i. I lazily gaze out the window and something catches my eye. About 30 feet away in a clearing before a metal gate leading into the forest was a massive bird. Like 8 feet tall massive. It had a long neck, brown feathers, and very thick long legs.
My jaw dropped and I was still processing what I had seen when my dad said, “What the hell was that?” Turns out he had seen it too, and we both described it identically. No one else saw it, and by the time our brains had caught up with our eyes it was too late to turn around.
I will always regret not turning around. When we returned later in the day there was nothing there. When we asked a guard about it he laughed at us. I scoured the internet afterward, and it looked like nothing I could find. At least, nothing that isn’t extinct- it looked amazingly similar to one of the larger species of moa… but those lived in New Zealand thousands of miles away and died out hundreds of years ago.
This happened back in 2009 and to this day I wonder whether I saw a Lazarus species.”
6. The same dream.
“My sister and I apparently both had the same dream one night, a scary one. We were staying in this villa where we had to share a room and we both woke up suddenly. The window was open, when it hadn’t been before. I realised she was awake as well and told her I’d had a bad dream, and as I started to describe it, she started talking along with me, describing the same dream.
In it, this black creature that looked like a bull, only it had shiny, scaly, plastic looking skin, was standing in the open window with this weird mechanical device, and it somehow fired a projectile at the lamp in the room, which started rocking back and forth. Neither of us wanted to get up and close the window in case the thing was actually out there, so we called for our mum and she closed it, reassured us in typical mum fashion, etc. For months we would talk about that incident and we could never figure out how we both managed to have the same exact dream at the same time.”
7. “On the brink of extinction”
“My mother walked into my room, waking me up to tell me that most of the world’s population was dead. I spent the rest of the day as normal, eating breakfast, going shopping with her, going to a playground, then eating dinner (albeit, acting quite nervous throughout). The next day, she tried to make it clear that what started the previous morning wasn’t true. I asked her if she remembered, but she told me she didn’t.
I’m certain it wasn’t a dream, because I recalled the rest of what happened the previous day to her, only to be met by her confirmation that everything I remembered was correct, right down to how shaky I was and how upset I seemed. All except for the part that humanity was on the brink of extinction.”
8. Peter Pan to the rescue.
“I used to have nightmares. My dad put up a poster of Peter Pan in my room and told me that when I went to sleep, Peter would fly out of the poster and chase all of the monsters away. I never had another bad dream.”
9. Was it real?
“I was like 3-5 years old when this happened. I woke one night while camping in a cabin, and I saw a cat tail dangle from this lamp. It’d sink down, and then disappear back up into the lampshade. It also started calling for me, going like “whoo hoo!”. Unnerved the hell out of little me… I can’t remember if I just never checked to see if there was anything there, or that I did check and there was nothing there. I chalk it up to just being so tired I was hallucinating.”
10. It was so surreal.
“The whole neighborhood thought I was kidnapped. I don’t really know why and what the actual fuck is the thought process of how they think that happened but apparently the people are frantically searching me. What I remembered is that my elder cousin and her husband took me to an internet cafe to let me watch them pick their wedding outfits.
When we returned, everyone was shocked, my brother smiles because he knew I was in trouble, my mom was crying, and my dad slapped the shit out of me. It was so surreal.”
11. A lightning strike.
“I remember being at a playground with my family and seeing lightning strike right in front of me. Didn’t hear any thunder, no one else saw it, but I remember seeing it pretty vividly. Not sure if there’s something that can go on in your brain that would cause something like that to happen, but I remember pleading with my mom to believe that I had just seen a lightning bolt strike right in front of me, and she just ignored me.”
12. Good golly, Miss Molly.
“When I was six, I had a girlfriend named Molly. I moved away the next year and never saw her again. For the next 40 years, one of my earliest and most vivid memories was me watching a six year old redhead girl running away from me, up towards her house, yelling, “Mommy, mommy, Jonathan kissed me!”, and her mother’s voice coming back, “We’ll, that must mean he really likes you.”
A few years ago, I’d had a little sangria and decided to see if Molly was on Facebook (I know, I know). There she was! Right name, right age, right hometown, lovely red hair. I PM’ed her asking if she was the right red headed girl. She wrote back that she was definitely the right Molly (and was happy to hear from me) but she’d only started dyeing her hair red after college. Memory’s a trip, man.”
13. That shifty little bastard.
“I remember, very vividly, seeing a leprechaun in the hallway of my house. It freaked me out so bad that I woke my mom up yelling “someone’s in the house!” We walked from room to room with kitchen knives looking for the leprechaun, but never found that shifty little bastard.”
14. You just did that.
“When I was about four or five, I was in the foyer by my front door when I saw my father come in the house, put down his briefcase, and then walk to my mother to give her a kiss on the cheek. Then the front door opened again; it was my father (again). I looked next to me where I had seen him put his briefcase; it was gone.
I looked back at him, scared, and said, “you just did that.”
I have never hallucinated in the more than 25 years since this happened, and nothing like it has ever happened since.”
15. Is Mom lying?
“I’m like 95% sure I sort of got hit by a car when crossing the street with my mom. There was a red light and we didn’t cross at a crosswalk. A car inched forward and I remember falling onto the hood? But I was fine. I used to literally get flashbacks. For years. But my mom swears it never happened. I think she’s lying.”
