Thankfully, I’ve never been woken up in the middle of the night by someone in my house or a person peeping through the window or anything like that…
But it seems like a lot of people have had genuinely hair-raising experiences while being snapped out of their slumber.
It’s a big, scary world out there…and you never know what’s lurking in the darkness…
Here’s what AskReddit users had to say about scary things that have woken them up out of bed.
1. Time to panic.
“The night I watched the movie The Conjuring, I woke up to my bed shaking and all the clothes hanging in my closet rattling like crazy. Took me quite some time to realize it was an earthquake and not the devil come visiting.
When I was in my final year at high school, I had trouble sleeping at night with my final exams approaching. I think I dozed off for a bit and suddenly woke up to see a person’s face staring in through my window grill.
I was in such a panic I literally couldn’t move or scream. Luckily he saw me wake up and escaped.”
2. Eerie music.
“Once i woke up because i heard music playing from the kitchen and i thought maybe mum forgot to turn the radio off.
I went through the dark hallway to the kitchen to turn the radio off but when i was standing in the dark kitchen there was no music playing everything was as quiet as always at 3am.”
3. The neighbor.
“The worst was when the neighbor boy, 9 y/o, came banging on our door and ringing the doorbell at 1am.
His mom and stepdad were fighting, stepdad hit mom and had her on the ground with his hands around her neck trying to choke her. We’ve never had to call 9-1-1 before that night.
This poor little boy had his 2 y/o sister in his arms with a completely dazed look on his face. While my mom was on the phone with 9-1-1, I sat the boy down and made sure to tell him that he was incredibly brave and no matter what anyone tells him, he did the right thing by coming here.
Even sadder is they had just moved here from across the country that week and he knew no one.”
4. Sounds like a movie.
“When I was 18 I’d broken my leg, so I was sleepingon the sofa downstairs.
Woke up to a guy climbing in the window directly over my head. I’d obviously left the window open a crack and he’d seen an opportunity.
As scared as I was, I’m fairly sure I scared him too as he screamed and ran away after I hit him with my crutch.”
5. Clowns are terrifying.
“My sister had an all white clown doll that hung from the ceiling on a little swing. In the summertime, we slept with our doors and windows open to get the cool air in.
When I woke up one night hearing some tapping against her window down the hall. If i sat up in bed and look down the hall, and I could see into the front of her bedroom.
So I did, and I see this f*cking clown swinging back and forth against her window, back lit by the street lamp, but clearly staring directly into my soul like it was all it desired in this world.
I didn’t sleep well that summer.”
6. Who’s there?
“I heard someone quietly trying my front doorknob late at night (I wasn’t quite asleep yet).
I checked with my roommate later, and it wasn’t them. It happened once or twice more, but I never got to the door quickly enough to see who it was through the peephole.
Nothing ever came of it, and I live somewhere else now.”
7. Camping.
“Camping is so terrifying.
I went once and woke up to the sound of something EATING inside my tent. I couldn’t even move and just laid there in fear listening to a creature eating in complete darkness 5 ft away from me.
Turns out it was just a hedgehog eating our hot dogs.”
8. Whoa. That’s scary.
“My dog barking because “cops” were banging on the doors and windows of our airbnb, flashing their lights into each and every room.
Called 911 and she told us to not answer the door because she doesn’t see cops in our area.”
9. Hahaha, oh my…
“My dog decided to hop onto our piano and started walking along the keys in the middle of the night.”
10. This might take the cake.
“I had an industrial size rat dying from rat poison come thru a panel in my closet and up into bed with me at 2 am.”
11. NO WAY.
“I had a large camel spider run over my face at about 3 am.
That was not a pleasant sensation.”
12. Sleepwalking.
“I woke up with chunks of teeth in my mouth and severe abdominal pain (probably swallowed some tooth).
Then, I looked across the room and there was a pool of blood on the opposite side of the room. After quickly spitting out the rest of the teeth bits, I went to the bathroom and was shocked to see my ENTIRE face was bleeding, but from a deep cut in my chin and not from my missing tooth.
I realized that I had sleepwalked, then decided to fall asleep while standing on the other side of the room and did a belly flop straight on the floor, and then somehow after all of that, got up again and WALKED BACK INTO BED and fell asleep for a few more hours.
I had to get a new tooth from a student doctor that I’ve never gotten fixed. I also ended supergluing my busted chin together because I couldn’t afford stitches.”
13. Scary.
“On a camping trip with friends in a state park. In the middle of the night our tent is woken up by the sound of gun shots. It is illegal to go hunting in state parks, so we weren’t sure if the shooter was hunting animals or just shooting a gun randomly into the woods.
Gun shots grew louder over the next hour, so it seemed like the shooter was getting closer to our campsite. A state trooper helicopter started flying overhead with a spotlight trying to find the shooter.
We eventually heard a bunch of cop cars up the hill from our campsite, and heard the state troopers get out and order the shooters to drop their weapons, and they brought the shooters into custody.
The next morning we asked the people who ran our campsite what happened. The people who lived in the house up the hill had apparently done a lot of meth, then decided to use cars driving down the main road as target practice.
There were rvs and trees in our campsite that had bullet holes in them. Luckily none of the bullets hit any campers, or caused any of the cars to go off the road, which would have sent them hurtling down a mountain side.”
14. Dogs are our best friends.
“The sound of my front door handle jiggling and the door being opened.
My dog launched off the bed and slammed into the door while snarling. He’s never acted like that. I called him back to me because I knew it was my roommate coming home.
Roommate came out of his room and asked what was going on. Apparently he’d forgotten to lock the front door.”
15. Glad he’s okay.
“A few years ago at 6am some random night, my mom burst into me and my brothers room and says “your dad has just had a heart attack, keep the dogs in here” before she proceeded to try and direct the ambulance to our house by giving directions over the phone and turning on all the lights.
The hospital is a 45 minute drive from us so getting back to sleep wasnt gonna happen.
He survived and is pretty much completely back to normal now.”
Now we want to hear your creepy stories.
In the comments, tell us about a time when you were genuinely scared.
We’d love to hear from you!
