Life is scary, and not just for the obvious reasons.
I mean scary as in "The Exorcist" scary.
We've all witnessed things that have left us SHOOK to the core.
And even though we saw it with our own two eyes, we can't explain it.
The inability to define what we've seen is part of the shock of it all.
How do you describe a ghost accurately?
Or the shadow lurking in the dark?
Is what I'm seeing actually real?
The mind does have its tricky ways.
The mystery of the darkness is a forever question.
Redditor Kendexx wanted to hear about everyone's true-life horror stories, so they asked:
"What is the scariest thing you’ve ever seen in your life that you can’t explain?"
Lookalike
"I went to college in Providence, RI. My dorm room was my roommate and I, with beds on opposite sides of the room and desks by the foot of the bed, the usual dorm setup."
"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 freak out, holding his eyes (not exaggerating) and he wouldn’t tell me why."
"Eventually he tells 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 never told my roommate (she wasn’t in the room)."
"A couple of weeks later, I’m asleep in bed with my boyfriend. I wake up in the middle of the night to my roommate packing a bag, clearly panicked. She kind of rushed out of the room and didn’t see me awake so I didn’t say anything. The next morning I see her and ask her why she rushed out of the room in the middle of the night. She then tells me she woke up in the middle of the night and saw my 'boyfriend' sitting at my desk and asked him why he was up. She then saw my boyfriend sleeping next to me! She believed in ghost stuff so she freaked and left."
"It really freaked me out because we hadn’t mentioned the 'lookalike' my boyfriend saw to her and it sounded like she saw the same figure. Living in RI made me see some weird sh*t."
- Expensive_Plant4586
the exorcist shadow GIFGiphy
A Dark Figure
"The basement in my Dad's house is finished except for the storage room, which is really dark and creepy and is around the corner from the main room of the basement. 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 and in that half doorway, a dark figure with light gray eyes was standing 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, then a while later decided to be bold and rush past the storage room and back upstairs."
"Not the first time I had seen that grey-eyed figure either. 😐."
- Conscious-Outside430
Tiny Living Situations
"I have one story, though I can explain it. I used to work as a security guard for an office building. Every once and a while, I'd do my rounds, the building would be completely empty except for me, and then I'd sit at the security desk and watch the cameras... but then the CFO would suddenly appear on the cameras, on the first floor."
"He would literally just appear in his office, even after I had checked his office was empty, he'd walk around the first floor for a bit, go back to his office, and completely disappear again."
"I'd go round the first floor, but I'd never see him in person, I'd only ever see him on the cameras. Used to scare the shit out of me.
I ended up recording the CCTV and showed the security supervisor it, which led to HR questioning him about sneaking into the office after dark."
"Turned out, behind some filing cabinets in his office there was this little hatch door which led to this vertical passageway with a ladder that was connected to the basement. Guy got divorced the month before and lost the house, he was living in that tiny passageway with a sleeping bag."
- paranoid_throwaway51
In the Corridor
"Once I 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 there. The door was still 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 there was nobody there. Still gives me chills thinking about it."
- justheway
The Spooky Place
"There was this abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, like 30 minutes of backroads to find it, and no other people for at least 10 miles in any direction. Me and some friends used to go check out this spooky house and show it off to one or two new folks at a time."
"We did this three or four times, and as we were pulling up one night, a light in the house turned on. The house didn’t have power any time we’d been there, and there were no vehicles anywhere around the house that night. Scared us all to the point none of us ever went back."
"In retrospect, it was probably being used as a hunting cabin or meth house (although there was never any indication of either that we saw) and they probably just had the breaker off when they weren’t there. A car could have been parked behind in a place we couldn’t see from the road, but as high school kids- nope. Spooky house with unexplained lights."
- tke439
Blood and Bones
"I was riding my bike down a rural road when I was 9 and found a garbage bag filled with red sludge and white sticks. I thought it was blood and bones - but I had a very PG childhood and I had never even seen pretend blood and bones, so I had nothing to compare to."
"I told myself it wasn’t what I thought it was. After all, why would there be a ripped-open garbage bag filled with blood and bones?
Two days later I thought 'Look again, and if it is what you think it is, tell a grown-up.' I biked back to the area and it was gone.
I am now old and have watched enough to confirm, it was blood and bones."
- squambish
Scared Kermit The Frog GIFGiphy
See the Ghost
"When I was 9 years old I was biking home in the evening. We lived in the countryside up a small mountain. The road from the village was an uphill, a flat section, and then another uphill. The road lights only stretched to the end of the flat section. I was a bit afraid of the dark, so I stopped at the end of the road lights just at the bottom of the last uphill to gather the courage to bike the last section home."
"It was a partial moon so it wasn't pitch black, and at the end of the uphill, I saw a figure walking down towards me. I thought I'd wait until he/she got closer as I would feel less afraid to bike in the dark if there was someone else close. But about halfway down the hill the "person" walked into a thin shadow of a tree on the road and never came back out. Just disappeared."
"I stood there for a while trying to figure out what I just saw and then panicked and biked down to the village and stayed there until my parents came driving and wondered why I never came home. They tried to explain it with stuff like the person might have gone into the woods or something. What they didn't disclose though, out of fear that I'd never dare to bike home again, was 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 just a second 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 a lot of people during at least a century 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."
- SmalandOutdoor
Did you just see the thing?
"About 25 years ago, my now former wife and I were caretaking a house. We had been there for several weeks and we both noticed that we always had that feeling coming up the stairs from the cellar that something was going to grab you as soon as you 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 move a tiny third hand to the location on the clock face for the desired time. For example, halfway between six and seven to awaken at 6:30. It's a physical process and there is very little way to get it wrong. We always had the clock set to wake us up at 6 am. It was not something we fiddled with on a daily basis. One night, the alarm clock went off at like two in the morning. Oldschool ringing bells. Both my former wife and I woke up absolutely terrified."
"I saw a small figure maybe 2 feet tall run out of the room. I thought I must've been crazy until my former 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 am to 2 am. That's the whole story. Scared the fu*k out of me. Have no explanation for it. Nothing else ever happened there but the cellar feeling persisted."
- theferalforager
It's Blurry
"I was on a cruise with a friend. 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. Didn’t bother me, as I had my book to read. It’s about 2 am and I’m wide awake. Reading my book in bed. I get this feeling that there’s ’something’ at the foot of the bed. I glance up, and there is this ‘thing’. It looks like a person, but translucent and grey, and the features are blurry."
"A bit like if a person was made of television static. I feel as if it is being inquisitive- like how a young child would watch you do something. I ‘asked’ it in my head 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."
- Ana_Phases
Supernatural
"I was about to cross the street, and a lady put her arm across my chest and said Wait. As I look at her trying to figure out what is going on, a car crash happens and one of the cars goes tumbling down the street 2 feet in front of me. If she hadn’t stopped me, I would absolutely be dead."
"I turn to look at her again, and she is no longer there. I could see for blocks in each direction, nowhere she could have gone that fast where I wouldn’t be able to see her. The only thing I can come up with is I imagined it happening in my memory due to how tragic the crash was."
"Never experienced anything even slightly 'supernatural' before or after."
Thank you, Grandma
"I was maybe 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 sort of like an instinctual comfort thing - 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 one night when I acknowledged it and said, 'Thank you, Grandma.' It stopped after that and I never felt it again."
- sillybanana2012
Scared Baby GIFGiphy
Shhhh...
"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 up a room, my sister and I heard a noise down the stairs behind us. We looked and there was an old lady leaving the building. She turns, looks at us, does the 'shhh' motion with her finger to her lips, and leaves. We don't think too much of it at the time."
"We go to my grandpa and ask him if there was anyone else here tonight (like any meetings, classes, etc) and he says nah it's just us in the entire building. We ask him where the door down the stairs leads and he says 'Oh, that goes out to the cemetery.'
My sister and I FREAKED out. We still talk about it to this day and have the same memory of it."
- ziggs4lyfe
Flying High
"It's not scary but unexplainable. When I was 10 I got into a motorcycle accident. I wasn't driving it, I was walking from school when a motorcycle hit me going full speed. I did see the motorcycle come but I froze up and couldn't move. When it had hit me I flew pretty far and remembered someone catching me when I fell down. When I got up and looked around, I didn't see anyone, and witnesses told the cops I flew at least 6 feet and fell head first on the ground. My head was fine just had a broken collarbone.
Thankfully my parents believed me when I told them."
- SafeBasil9454
Saddle Road
"My friend and I were driving from a gig we played in Kona on the big island of Hawaii. We were driving on Saddle Road one of two roads from Kona to the other side of the island to Hilo town. Saddle Road is known for being a spiritual place and lots of weird things there. This stretch of land is about 40 kilos with no lights or population… just lava rock."
"We drove over the road at about 1 am. We were talking stories and having a good time. Then we saw on the side of the road a huge white dog wearing a gold chain staring at us. We passed and asked if we saw the same thing. We were debating about stopping on the side of the road to pick it up."
"The local legend is that if you see an old lady on the road you need to pick her up …or something bad will happen. We didn’t stop… and didn’t speak until we got home. I asked another local guy what could that have been. He said it was the goddess Pele’s pet. Did some research. looks like this dog has been seen sporadically since the 1950’s."
- Natural_Towel4894
Frozen
"Working in a nursing home for years during the night and everyone always complained of weird stuff like noises on the top floor. I never believed in any of that so I was always the one going upstairs to do night checks. One night I was changing a resident on that floor with a colleague and my colleague complained he heard something like people walking."
"We were in the resident room and I had to go to the cupboard at the end of that corridor to get bedsheets and when I was coming back with the bedsheets I kept hearing steps and like if someone was touching and opening plastic bags. I was so annoyed and looked outside the room and saw a shadow passing the corridor. The issue is that the shadow was so big like if literally a person just passed by along with step noises and plastic bags. I freak out so badly and froze completely."
"I had to call another colleague to come upstairs because I was so scared of coming out of the resident room. Bear in mind that I do not believe in those things and for 2 years I was always the one doing night checks on the top floor and bottom floor on my own. Never had any problem and never saw something. Since that day I never went upstairs alone and was always very scared."
- Separate-Audience-68
I Live in Fear
"Brought home a three-foot-tall realistic doll my grandparents had, with the intention of fixing it up. I'm scared of dolls, so I put it in a box and put a heavy metal box on top of it. The next morning the doll was gone. The boxes were still in place, but the damn thing had disappeared completely. I live in fear."
- -TheLoveGiver-
Scared Horror GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsGiphy
Well, no amount of sleepytime tea is going to fix any of this.
I'll be seeing creatures and shadows at every turn.
I'm already easy to rattle with creepy sounds.
This thread just sent me over the moon.
We all live in fear.
At least we're all in it together. I suggest we stock up on holy water and sage.
Good luck y'all.
Luck may be all we've got.