23 Spine-Chilling Paranormal Experiences That Even Had Skeptics Shaking In Their Boots And Wetting Their Pants
Reddit user Kendexx posed this question in the r/AskReddit community: "What is the scariest thing you've ever seen in your life that you can't explain?" As someone who loves a good ghost story, I couldn't resist. Here are some of the eeriest encounters people recalled:
1."I once woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my bedroom door creaking open. I could see the outline of someone standing there, but when I turned on the light, there was no one. The door started slowly closing as if whoever or whatever had been there was leaving. Even creepier, my Nest fire alarm had illuminated in the corridor, sensing movement, but nobody was there. Still gives me chills thinking about it."
2."One night, when I was 14 years old, I heard the shower turn on around midnight or some ungodly hour. I assumed it was just my mom. I tried to go back to sleep for ages and couldn't. I just lay there waiting and waiting. Ages went by. I went to check to ensure she hadn't fallen or something. No one was in there, and the shower was on full blast. I was terrified. I had to turn it off, and in doing so, I felt a wave of dread wash over me. I ran back to my room and hid."
3."My grandparents own a very old, large mansion where my three siblings and I spent a lot of time. We each had our own bedrooms, and one night, my sister begged me to sleep in her room because she was scared. We were both watching TV when suddenly, I saw a woman with long dark hair dressed in a sundress walk from the library, past my sister's doorframe, and down the hall. I jumped up to look down the hall just in time for the woman to look back at me, round the corner, and disappear. My sister raced over, slamming the door in front of my face. She was almost in tears, blubbering, 'She'll be back. Please don't open the door! I don't want to see her again!'"
"The door had a large square hole where a metal grate sat for proper ventilation, but it was removed for cleaning at the time. I saw the woman's legs walk past the door through that hole several times during the night. To this day, my sister won't talk about it, and she kicked me out of her room once the metal grate was put back on the door."
4."When my grandpa died, almost all of the family was around his bed. We put some candles on the nightstand. A few seconds after he died, the flames of the candles started burning so intensely that the height grew about 10 times bigger. They stayed like that for about 10 seconds before returning to their normal size. I don't know if my grandpa's soul leaving his body caused some kind of combustion, but it was weird, and we had no explanation for it. All my uncles saw it, but no one has talked about it since."
5."My best friend and I would always talk about our wild dreams. He told me about one where he got hit by a car and died. We were about 15 or 16 when he told me about the dream (we were into things like aliens, the paranormal, and lucid dreaming, so we'd talk about stuff like that a lot), and he died right before he would've turned 20. In the dream, he said he was riding a skateboard wearing all black when this car hit him. He said he could see everyone at his funeral (he even said his crush was at his funeral and laughed about it). He just kept going on about how it was so real, and it shook me up until I eventually forgot about it. Then, a few years later, after I'd long forgotten about the dream, it happened for real."
"He did get hit by a car and die. His crush was at his funeral. He was wearing all black like in the dream (his work clothes) and riding my skateboard. It was all true, and I still don't know what to make of it. Every detail I remember from his dream came true, and I'm sure there are parts he told me that I don't remember. I felt like I was losing my mind. I didn't tell anyone about it. I just don't know why or how he saw it happen in his dream. I have so many questions, but I guess now I have proof, at least for myself, that our souls go on after we die. I just wish I knew why he experienced that dream and told me about it; there must be some reason. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't experienced it myself. Has anyone ever experienced anything similar?"
6."I grew up in an old farmhouse in Alabama. A lot of weird stuff happened there, but the memory that sticks out the most was the night when everyone in my immediate family saw the same thing. We were watching TV in the living room (five of us), and from the living room, you could see directly into the dining room. We first noticed a sound in the dining room, like paper crunching. I don't remember who heard it first, but one of us asked if anyone else heard it. Then it happened again. We all turned and looked into the dining room, and the blinds on the window raised all the way up, hung there for about three seconds, and then crashed back down. No one else was in the house. We still talk about it today. No explanation, just scary."
7."The day before my grandfather died, he told my brother and me that he'd be waiting at the bar to buy us a beer in the future. Skip ahead to about a month after his passing. I had a very short, VERY vivid dream where I walked into a bar I didn't recognize, and my grandpa was there. He spun his chair around and had a beer in each hand. He said, 'You guys ready for that beer?' I looked to the right, and my brother was standing next to me. I SNAPPED awake so fast I scared the crap out of my wife and dog. I was panting and totally freaked out. I went to check my phone to see what time it was, and as I picked it up, I got a text from my brother saying, "Hey, I just had a fucked up dream.' Yeah. Same dream."
8."I was biking home one evening when I was 9. We lived in the countryside up a small mountain. The road from the village started uphill, then had a flat section, and then went uphill again. The street lights only stretched to the end of the flat section. I was afraid of the dark, so I stopped at the end of the street lights at the bottom of the last hill to gather the courage to bike the final section home. It was a partial moon, so it wasn't pitch black, and at the end of the final hill, I saw a figure walking down towards me. I thought I'd wait until they got closer because I'd feel less afraid to bike in the dark if someone else was close. But, about halfway down the hill, the 'person' walked into a thin shadow of a tree on the road and never returned. They just disappeared."
"I stood there for a while and tried to figure out what I'd just seen. Then I panicked, biked down to the village, and decided to stay there until my parents drove down, wondering why I had never come home. They tried rationalizing it by saying the person might've gone into the woods. They didn't disclose, though, out of fear that I'd never dare to bike home again, that my father had seen the same thing walking home from work. He had seen her clear as day, walking down the hill for a while. When he looked down for a moment and looked up, she was gone, and there were no footsteps in the fresh snow.
I later read a book about local legends, and apparently, for at least a century, many people have seen her walking down the hill and disappearing halfway down. My youngest daughter loved this story, so we've been on ghost stakeouts where we buy pizzas and snacks and hang out at the bottom of the hill, listening to the Ghostbusters theme song and trying to see the ghost."
9."I had a sleepover with my best friend (we were in our 20s), and I slept on the couch. The couch had a direct line of sight all the way down her hallway to the bedrooms. I woke up from a dead sleep around 4:00 a.m., sat up, and looked down the hallway. At the end was a woman. She looked at me for a second, then turned and walked through one of the bedroom doors. I heard the door open and close, even though it never moved. The next day, I told my friend about it. She said, 'Oh, so you saw the woman! My mom and I see the woman. Dad and my brother always see a little girl.' As far as I know, the woman and/or little girl still hang around the house. Her family still sees them sometimes."
10."I studied in the UK during college and lived in a house with other American students. They all had stories about the ghost of a girl who passed away while living there. I never believed in any of it, but it was fun to play along. The kitchen had one way in and out, and right after you entered the kitchen, to your right was a padlocked door to the cellar where the ghost allegedly lived. I had the only key. We were all a little homesick near Thanksgiving, so we decided to do a meal together. This required some creative cooking schedules due to small appliances in the kitchen, so one girl who didn't have class the following day offered to stay up late to get the turkey going. We went into the cellar the first (and only) time that evening to get larger cooking tools."
"At 2:04 a.m., I woke up to my door rattling like someone was pushing against it. I assumed it was a housemate who just went to the wrong door. About 30 seconds later, I heard a scratchy female voice softly say, 'Hello?' which repeated every five seconds or so. My window was open, and it sounded like the voice was coming from outside, so I got up to close it. I assumed it was some drunk girl walking back from the pub. I went to the window, and there was no one there. I heard 'Hello?' again behind me, clear as a bell, then my door rattled again, then fell silent.
I've had night terrors before and hallucinate when I have even a mild fever, so I assumed I was still asleep and laid back down. The following day at 7:00 a.m., the girl who was cooking told me, 'I had the creepiest night. At 1:50, I heard footsteps coming up the cellar stairs, then the door rattled. Then, at 2:10, the door rattled again, and I heard footsteps coming down.' She told me this before I had said anything to anyone about what I'd experienced."
11."I went to college in Providence, Rhode Island. My dorm room housed my roommate and me, and we had our beds on opposite sides of the room, with our desks by the foot of each bed. Anyway, my boyfriend and I were hanging out in my room one day, and he was lying on my bed. I was up next to the bed and bent over to grab something. I heard him scream, and he covered his eyes (not exaggerating), but he wouldn't tell me why. Eventually, he told me that when I bent over, he saw a shadow behind me that actually kind of looked like him, and it freaked him out. He had an afro, so the silhouette would've been pretty distinctive. We didn't really talk about it afterward, and I never told my roommate (she wasn't in the room at the time)."
"A few weeks later, I was asleep in bed with my boyfriend. I woke up in the middle of the night to my roommate packing a bag, clearly panicked. She rushed out of the room and didn't see me wake up, so I didn't say anything. The following day, I saw her and asked her why she had rushed out of the room in the middle of the night. She told me she woke up in the middle of the night and saw my boyfriend sitting at my desk. She asked him why he was up, then saw my boyfriend sleeping beside me! She believed in ghosts, so she freaked and left.
It freaked me out because we hadn't mentioned the 'lookalike' my boyfriend saw to her, and it sounded like she saw the same figure."
12."I was on a cruise with a friend, and we shared a cabin. My friend was a really loud snorer. He would usually stay awake until I'd fallen asleep; otherwise, I'd find it impossible to sleep with the racket he was making. That night, he'd had a few drinks and passed out drunk, snoring loudly. It didn't bother me, as I had my book to read. It was about 2:00 a.m., and I was wide awake, reading my book in bed. I got this feeling there was something at the foot of the bed. I glanced up, and there was this' thing.' It looked like a person but translucent and gray, and the features were blurry. It was a bit like if a person was made of television static. I felt like it was being inquisitive, like how a young child would watch you do something."
"In my head, I asked what it wanted, and as I did, it turned and walked across the room to the door. As it did, it disappeared. I didn't feel scared or threatened by it. No idea what it was. I don't drink or take drugs, so it wasn't that, and I was wide awake. Odd. Really odd."
13."About 25 years ago, my now ex-wife and I were caretakers of a house. We had been there for several weeks and noticed that we always had a funny feeling coming up the cellar stairs. It felt like something was going to grab us as soon as we turned the light switch off. Everything else about the house was normal. We slept with an analog windup alarm clock next to the bed — the kind that actually ticks. To set the alarm, you had to move a tiny third hand to the location on the clock face for the desired time. For example, you'd put the hand halfway between 6:00 and 7:00 to awaken at 6:30 a.m. It's a physical process, and it's difficult to get wrong."
"We always had the clock set to wake us up at 6:00 a.m. It was not something we fiddled with daily. One night, the alarm clock went off at about 2:00 a.m., playing old-school ringing bells. Both my ex-wife and I woke up absolutely terrified. I saw a small figure, maybe two feet tall, run out of the room. I thought I must've been imagining it until my ex-wife screamed, 'Did you just see that thing?' We both described it as some sort of small gremlin. When we looked at the alarm clock, we saw that the alarm hand had been moved from 6:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. It scared the crap out of me. I have no explanation for it. Nothing else ever happened there, but the cellar feeling persisted."
14."When I was a kid, my grandpa was the night shift custodian of a big old-school church building. My sister and I used to go with him some nights because they had a big gymnasium-type room with a ton of big exercise balls and stuff, and it was fun to run around. One night, while my grandpa was locking a room up, my sister and I heard a noise down the stairs behind us. We looked, and an old lady was leaving the building. She turned, looked at us, and made the 'shhh' motion with her finger to her lips, then she left. We didn't think too much of it at the time. We asked our grandpa if anyone else was in the building tonight (like for any meetings, classes, etc.), and he said no, it was just us in the entire building. We asked him where the door down the stairs led, and he said, 'Oh, that goes out to the cemetery.' My sister and I FREAKED out. We still talk about it today and have the same memory of it."
15."Back in college, my girlfriend and I would go back to her parents' old farmhouse and fool around after class. There was never anybody home. One afternoon, I was standing in her kitchen, thirstily guzzling a post-sex Gatorade. Behind me was a back staircase leading to the house's second floor. When I finished my drink and turned to leave the room, I noticed a little girl between 7 and 10 years old standing on the bottom step. My first thought was, 'Oh crap. Why didn't my girlfriend tell me a little girl was in the house? I really hope she didn't hear what we were up to!' But before I could speak, I realized something was off. She was semi-transparent and oddly two-dimensional in a way I can't articulate. Slowly, I realized that I was staring at a ghost."
"There was nothing inherently frightening about the experience. Knowing I was in the presence of something unexplainable, I did everything in my power not to blink. I stared at her for 10 to 15 seconds, taking in every detail I could. She was wearing a red and yellow summer dress. Her long blonde hair was tied into two old-timey braids at the end. She wore black strapped shoes. Overall, her look gave me a 1940s—1970s vibe.
Fortunately for her, she seemed to have no idea I existed. She stood on the bottom step, looking out the back window towards the driveway like she was waiting for someone to arrive. I never took my eyes off her, but she was eventually gone. I never believed in ghosts before that. I still don't believe in intelligent hauntings, but I'll certainly entertain the idea of residual energy and echoes of the past."
16."My grandfather had died a few days earlier, and my mom was crying in our kitchen. I hugged her. We had a lot of my grandfather's belongings, but there was this broken radio that didn't even have working batteries on the table, along with other things like photos and clothes he previously owned. This is the only unexplainable thing I've ever experienced, but while my mom was bawling, the radio made a very loud static noise for about one second. We both stared in silence at it. It was eerie! She stopped crying when she heard it. We both went to bed after that and haven't spoken of it since. If it were something paranormal, I'd imagine it was my grandfather letting us know he was there."
17."The basement in my dad's house is finished except for the storage room. It's really dark and creepy and is around the corner from the basement's main room. There's an elliptical down there, and when standing on the elliptical, if you look over your shoulder, you can see half of the door to the storage room. I was working out on said elliptical, and I felt like someone was standing behind me, so I looked over my shoulder. In that half doorway, a dark figure with light gray eyes stood there looking at me. I was house-sitting, so I knew there wasn't anyone else home. I slowly got off the elliptical and went into the bathroom to hide; a while later, I decided to be bold and rush past the storage room and back upstairs. It was not my first time seeing that gray-eyed figure either."
18."I used to work for a company where I would go into foreclosed homes. I went into this one house with a coworker, and from the moment I stepped into the yard, I felt I was being watched. We went inside, and I felt I was being watched the entire time. And I kept seeing black, swirling shadows standing in the corner of every room. I saw them out of the corner of my eye, and when I'd look directly at them, they'd be gone. At one point, we heard the basement door SLAM shut. My coworker and I said, 'OK, I think we're done for the day.' When we were leaving, I asked the coworker if that house was weird, and he said yeah, he kept seeing black shadows in the corners. I remember getting chills. I refused to ever go back to that house."
19."I saw a completely identical 'copy' of me at a beach in California. They were wearing different clothes than I was at the time, but they were still wearing clothes I owned. As soon as I tried approaching him to get a picture, he started to run away down the shoreline at full speed. A strange experience for sure."
20."I was around 10 years old, and my grandma had just died. I didn't really know her because she had spent most of my young life in a nursing home and often didn't remember who I was when I went to visit. But, when I visited, she would always rub my back. It was like an instinctual way to comfort someone. She did it to all her kids and grandkids. For about a year after she died, I would be sitting in my room at night, alone, and start to feel someone rubbing my back like she used to. It freaked me out until I acknowledged it one night and said, 'Thank you, grandma.' It stopped after that, and I never felt it again."
21."I grew up in a haunted house in Canada. From ages 7 to 18, I saw and experienced a lot that I cannot and will not attempt to explain. The house was obviously haunted. We had doors slamming, orbs, shadows, and electronic phenomena. You name it, and this house had it. Whatever resided there was never malicious to any of us — it was maybe even playful when we were kids. I was not afraid of it, just a little confused. I feel like this background will give a little context to what happened last week. Last week, my wife and I flew to York, England. It is a lovely town made even more special by the people who live in, curate, and care for it. We spent three days wandering around, shopping, and drinking pints with the locals. Part of that shopping involved going into a four-story antique store by The Minster."
"The first floor was really cool and had lots of houseware from a bygone era. The second floor was all records, and the third floor was curiosities gathered from a life of travel. The fourth floor was messed up. As my wife and I rounded the banister, it felt like I walked into the saddest, angriest place I have ever been. On one wall were WW1 medals, on the other were WW2 medals, and in the middle was a rocking horse.
I felt like I had to run for my life. The darkness that saturated every inch of that room was indescribably terrifying. I abandoned my beautiful wife in a room with the darkest presence I have ever experienced. I sprinted from the building and sat on the front steps, waiting for my wife to come down and ask what was wrong with me.
She eventually meandered down and said, 'Yeah, you felt that too, huh? The rocking horse started rocking when you ran.' And this, folks, is why I will not be going back there."
22."Roughly 15 years ago, I was in upstate New York with my uncle at our family house. It's pretty quiet; not a lot of people are up there. My uncle and I were outside when it started to downpour, so we went inside. We were looking out the front door together, and my uncle commented on how hard it was raining. It's also pretty rural, so it was mostly pitch-black out, with only our front house light illuminating the area. We saw someone speed-walking on the road as we looked out the door. It was so dark, but their skin was so pale we could see their hands swaying as they walked and then their face as they turned towards our house. All I remember was the face had no eyes. My uncle quickly shut the door and said not to worry. It was probably someone who got stuck in the rain. I was scared, but he calmed me down. I was little, so I don't remember too much after that other than my uncle keeping watch for a while."
"I forgot about this story until years later, when I brought it up with my uncle because I thought maybe it was a dream. His attitude changed when I brought it up, and he just said he remembered but didn't want to talk about it. I have never brought it back up to him, and to this day, when I think about it, I feel really eerie."
23.And: "When I was in second grade, I woke up one night and saw a glowing ball about the size of a volleyball floating out of my bedroom closet. It was pale green and hovered in the middle of the room. I remember pulling the covers over my head and being overwhelmed with this sense of fear/dread. I tried to yell out for my parents, but I was so terrified I could barely whisper. Years later (I was in my early 20s), we were at a family gathering, and somehow, the conversation turned to spooky things, and I told everyone at the table about the orb. My uncle (mom's brother) got this look on his face and said, 'You saw it too?!' He and my mom had lived in that house for a few years as kids (my grandfather owned it and sold it to my parents when they got married), and my old room had been his room. Apparently, the same exact thing had happened to him when he was roughly the same age."
Have you ever experienced something truly scary and unexplainable? Tell us your story in the comments or share anonymously using this form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
