As someone who constantly fills their head with tales of the macabre, I gotta say…I’m pretty excited to read these stories.
I don’t know why I’m fascinated by scary and creepy stuff, but I’ve just always been that way.
And we’re about to get a huge dose of the creepy right now.
People on AskReddit shared the scariest stories they know that also happen to be true. Let’s take a look.
1. Bad idea.
“Off the main road of a place I use to work at, a guy decided to climb under a bus to “hitch a free ride”.
Well the bus went over a speed bump and the guy fell and ended up getting caught on the back wheel. His body was dragged 5 blocks before the bus driver realized what was happening.
A police officer who came into our store regularly, told us that the guy was still alive when they got to him, but died an hour later. He said his whole back was scraped off exposing his spine. I remember driving down that road after the fact, and you could still see a deep red blood stained trail going on for those 5 blocks.
Absolutely horrifying.”
2. A nightmare.
“The story of John Edward Jones getting stuck in Nutty Putty cave in Utah.
He became wedged in the tight crawl when he took a wrong turn in the cave system. Rescuers could do nothing to get him out and he was stuck in there for 28 hours before he died from Cardiac Arrest because feet were above his head and his heart was pumping over time.
One of the rescuers even gave him a phone to call his wife and talk to his young daughter before he died.”
3. Unsolved mystery.
“My wife is from Enterprise, OR.
A kid in her school got beheaded on his way home. Was literally found with his head cut off on the side of the street and to this day no one knows who did it or how it happened.
Absolutely gives me chills.”
4. The Hammer Box.
“One of our employees fell into the “Hammer box”. This is a device filled with ultra high torque rotating “hammers” used to grind up large appliances into scrap metal.
It apparently turned 3 times before the emergency shutoff was hit pulling in half the employees body at a diagonal running from the middle of his pelvis to his shoulder. The gruesome part was that he was still alive, as the pressure from the hammers was holding the enormous wound shut.
Took 30 minutes for EMT’s to arrive while he screamed for them to simply turn the machine back on and end it. He didn’t make it.”
5. In the forest.
“One day as a kid I was exploring the forests near our house with my cousin. The forest was on a hill, but there were several craters there because of bombs that were dropped there during the world wars (Germany).
One day we saw a backpack at the bottom of one. We tried to climb down, but it was kinda steep and slippery, so we didn’t want to risk falling. We planned on returning later with a rope, and went home. The next day news story was that there was a backpack found with the remains of a girl, in that forest.
A guy walking his dog found it, after the dog wouldn’t stop barking and going crazy at the edge of the crater, while starring at the backpack. We stopped exploring the forests after.”
6. Not THAT is scary.
“Walking my dog and crossing the street with a green light and a guy blows throw the red light and almost hits me and the dog.
I yell “*SSHOLE” and he slams on his breaks and turns around and pulls into parking lot ahead of me.
I get closer and see the car has Illinois plates (I live in PA) he says “careful who call *sshole I’ve killed people” I just keep walking and he drives away.
The next day I hear spree killer Andrew Cunanan used a stolen credit card at a gas station in my town. 100% sure it was him I called an *sshole.”
7. Random attack.
“One of my dad’s friend’s wife was murdered by some crazy dude walking down the street.
This guy had just been released from a mental hospital and literally just stabbed her as she walked home. When my dads friend came back he thought she had just taken the dogs out for a walk so he walked along the normal walk route and he saw loads of blue lights.
He was stopped by a police officer and wasn’t allowed any closer until he saw that it was his wife.”
8. The deep water.
“My mother never taught me to swim because when she was a teenager she saw a friend get sucked into a whirlpool at the bottom of a drainage lake that is the deepest body of water within a few hundred miles of us.
They didn’t find his body for days.”
9. Family tragedy.
“When I was much younger we lived across the street from a big family.
The man had a wife and five sons. One night he brought his whole family out into the living room, lined them up and pulled a shotgun out from under the couch and shot himself in the head.
The kids were messed up again for the rest of their lives.”
10. Eaten alive.
“When I was young, I saw a documentary about a guy who got flesh eating bacteria in his nasal cavity. It ate his face and he’s still alive.
Eventually they removed the bacteria by removing the eaten parts of his face. He got a prosthetic face, which back in those days was basically a plastic Halloween mask that tried to look human.
At the end of the documentary, he took the mask off. His face from his forehead down to his mouth was just a hole.”
11. Tina Fey story.
“I think the story of Tina Fey getting the scar on her face is super f*cked up.
She was a kid just sitting and playing in her front yard when a random guy pulled up got out of his car and slashed her face for no reason with a razor…
Wtf?”
12. Stalked.
“My mom was stalked by a guy in her chemistry class. This was back in the late seventies, during her first semester at college.
They were lab partners, and Mom thought he seemed cute and nice, and was too shy at the time to ask him out, but she said if he’d asked her out, she would’ve went. They were friendly with each other in class, but their paths didn’t cross outside of that since they were in different majors.
As the semester wore on, however, she noticed he was often waiting for her outside of her other classes, the library, the student union, out in front where her dad picked her up and dropped her off. This continued into the spring semester. Puzzled, but not yet alarmed, she asked him how he always seemed to know where she was. He proudly said, “Oh, I asked the registrar’s office for a copy of your schedule!”
My mom went to complain to the secretary who gave out her schedule, and the secretary blew it off because “you guys are dating”. Luckily, Mom had already arranged to transfer to a different school for sophomore year, and spent the remaining time left avoiding him. She never saw him after that. But it wasn’t over.
Flash forward to grad school. Mom was at work, and Grandma gets a knock on the door. Since the man at the door was in a naval uniform, and my grandmother was a Navy nurse, she let the man in, because he looked rather sad. He starts off by saying how sorry he is for my mother’s loss, which completely mystified Grandma.
“Well, ma’am, I just got back from overseas, and I found out my friend recently killed himself. He spoke so highly of his fiancée, your daughter, and I wanted to meet her.”
My grandmother told him her daughter didn’t even have a boyfriend at the moment, let alone a fiancé. It doesn’t take too long to establish the man’s deceased friend in question was in fact Mom’s stalker. The Naval Lieutenant was pretty upset, and my grandmother even more so. She made him leave before Mom got home.
The weird thing about the stalker’s death is that it was ruled a suicide, but he hanged himself from a very high up tree branch you’d need a ladder to get to, and his hands were tied behind his back.
From what my mother later learned, he had a tendency to snoop and generally stick his nose in places they didn’t belong besides the obvious stalking thing, and this didn’t win him too many friends, so it’s anyone’s guess who he might have pissed off. My mom always concludes this story kind of nonchalantly, like, “Yeah, back in those days, they didn’t really know much about stalking. They’ve gotten a little better in terms of awareness now.”
It gives me the creeps to think what could have happened if he escalated his attempts to follow her after she left that school.”
13. Don’t go in the water.
“I used to love swimming, I’d go snorkeling, scuba diving, even jumped off a few cliffs into the water.
When I was about 18 I read the Necronomicon (the collection of Lovecraft short stories, not the real thing) had a good scare, giggled at how silly I was to be unnerved and went about my life.
Next year went to Crete on holiday, first day I jumped right into the ocean with my dad and went out deep. Lo and behold, I feel something tickling my legs. I dive under to see since its too deep for seaweed to reach this high and I wanted to see fish.
Tentacles. Everywhere. I was so shocked I lost my air and panicked hard, I started breathing in water as glowing eyes, sharp beaks and suckered tentacles flashed about me.
Thankfully, Dad got me to the shore and didn’t understand what was going on, he’d seen nothing but suddenly had a really grim look on his face.
Went to the doctors. Turns out I’m the victim of a family curse, Schizoaffective disorder. My dad was horrified cause since he hadn’t got it like his brother and mother, he thought I’d be safe.
They caught it early but this revelation then led to a lot of aspects of my life being thrown in the air. Entire people in my life became false, ideas I’d had were delusional, outbursts revealed to be due to mood swings.
I’m doing much better now, I still don’t go in the water.”
Let’s keep the creepiness going, shall we?
In the comments, please tell us about the scariest true stories that you know.
We’d love to hear from you!
