Recently, u/GiGiAnne13 asked the people of r/AskReddit, "What is the scariest story you know to be completely true?". So, we thought we'd share the spookiest responses:
1. "I was hiking down from doing two weeks of trail work in Colorado a few summers ago. A guy hiking up stopped to chat with us about our work and asked if we had seen anyone make the summit while we were up there."
"We told him that the first summit of the season had been done a few days prior and wished him luck. A friend of mine hiked in that area the next day and there was a helicopter circling around. The guy had taken the wrong gulley back down and died. It’s still crazy to me to think about."
2. "My cousin picked up a hitchhiker about 20 years ago. Nice enough guy. My cousin was hungry, so they stopped at McDonald's and grabbed the hitchhiker some breakfast, too. Then, they dropped him off where he said he was headed. No big deal."
"The next morning, my cousin's watching the morning news and sees that hitchhiker's face. Dude was a serial killer and had killed someone that picked him up. Cousin calls the cops and they have him come in. Turns out the hitcher had killed the very next person after my cousin who had given him a ride. He'd killed a few people who had given him rides, that was his MO.
They asked the hitcher why he didn't kill my cousin. He said 'Eh, I'd planned to, but he was a really nice young man, he bought me breakfast. I couldn't kill someone that bought me breakfast.'"
3. "I had something similar happening to me. When I was younger I was in Colombia (the country) and at some point I was drunk and took a taxi back to my hotel."
"I was hungry so I asked the driver to drive by McDonald's first. And I got a bunch of food and invited the taxi driver as well. We had a good conversation and later on, he dropped me off. Just before he dropped me off he told me that I should never just get a random taxi and that he actually intended to rob me with his buddies who were waiting a little further down the road at said McDonald's. But because I bought him food he didn't go through with it. Spooky."
"So the moral of all these stories is, I should always buy food for every person I meet. Done and done."
4. "When I was a kid, there was a peeping tom in the neighborhood. But the weird part is we all knew who he was, a little older guy named Ralph who lived a couple streets over and smoked like a chimney."
"People would find footprints and cigarette butts outside windows, smell cigarette smoke, and occasionally see the red cherry on the cigarette glow in the woods. Occasionally angry dads and teenagers who spotted him out in the darkness would give chase, but he moved like a deer through the woods and no one could put their hands on him. He was sort of a neighborhood boogie man, though thankfully seemed mostly harmless if terribly creepy.
Many years later, there was a rash of break-ins around the neighborhood. People even joked at the time that it must not be Ralph because we all figured he had copies of everyone's hide-a-keys already if he wanted to go inside (sidenote: we later learned that he definitely DID have keys to some houses.) Anyway, everyone's guard was up.
One night, one of the neighbours heard a commotion outside, and ran outside to find a stranger laid out in his driveway, beat to sh*t.
They called 911 and when the police arrived, they were able to identify the guy as someone who had previous arrests for breaking and entering and found items from the previous break-ins in his vehicle nearby and later at his apartment.
As for how he ended up taking a bloody nap in the driveway? He said he was jumped from behind in the dark and never got a good look at the guy. All he remembered for certain was that the guy stunk of cigarette smoke."
5. "My family and I were staying in a rental house for a few months. This particular house was owned by a fairly wealthy friend of his who was going through a divorce. So, we're staying there pretty cheap."
"One night near Christmas, I groggily wake up and see a woman wearing white going through drawers on the other side of the room. I must have made a sound because she turned and rushed over to me and gently said, 'shhh, go back to sleep, little boy.' Weirdly, I did. She looked like Liza Minelli if that's at all relevant.
The next morning I woke up to my parents acting weird and I heard one of them make a comment like, 'I can't tell what's gone and what's not.' For some reason, I didn't connect the dots until I was older and never told them what I saw (I thought it was a dream).
So, yeah, the former owner of our rental house broke in (probably had a key) and I saw her but didn't do or say sh*t. I was probably nine or so."
6. "The story of a continuous, days-long shark attack following a US navy ship sinking as told in Jaws was real."
7. "I gave Aileen Wuornos a ride a couple days before Christmas in 1990."
"For context, she was a serial killer in central Florida. In hindsight, it's kind of a funny story. When I was 16 I hung out with a rougher crowd. They let me hang out at one of the bars they owned in Daytona; these bars were generally in rougher areas of town.
One night I was leaving at the same time she was, she was pretty drunk, and I offered her a ride because the neighborhood was dangerous. I dropped her off at the hotel she was staying at (cheap, by-the-week hotel) and headed home. A couple of weeks later, I saw her on the news."
8. "My family literally had a party to die for."
"We hosted a super late Christmas party in March and invited a few neighbours over, including an older couple. Beyond a few weird comments from the old husband like 'I'm so glad I could have one last good meal' we all had a good time, and everyone kept telling us how great the party and food was
Eventually, the old couple went home a bit earlier than the rest of the guests and we didn't think anything of it. About an hour later as another guest was about to leave they came rushing back into the house yelling about police and medics on our street. Turns out the husband of the old couple simply dropped dead about 30 minutes after they got home.
I guess to be fair a big talking point at the party was how he was already basically on his last leg thanks to health conditions and it was only a matter of time, but we didn't think it'd be that soon."
9. "My brother-in-law roomed with Jeffrey Dahmer at Ohio State freshman year."
10. "I was walking my dog in Philadelphia and the light turned red. The car in front of it slowed down, and then it turned green and I entered the intersection. The car sped up and the dog and I almost got hit."
"I yelled 'ASSHOLE' at him, and he slammed on his brakes and pulled into a parking lot ahead of me. I can see at this time the car had Illinois plates and as I walked up he said very calmly, 'I wouldn’t call me an asshole. I’ve killed people.' I just kept walking.
The next day I saw serial killer Andrew Cunanan had killed somebody in New Jersey and stolen his truck, leaving behind the car he took from Chicago after he killed the owner.
That's 100% who I called an asshole."
11. "My uncle and his girlfriend were hitchhiking down the mountains of Colorado and were picked up by a man. A little way down the road, he stopped the car and asked my uncle if he could check the tire, saying he thought he ran something over."
"My uncle got out and the man drove away with his girlfriend and pulled a weapon on her. She immediately opened the door and jumped out while he was driving.
My uncle and his girlfriend reconvened and were okay, but were trying to process what happened. At a later time, they saw a story on the news about a serial killer and it ended up being the man who picked them up. It was Ted Bundy."
12. "When I was really young, my mom and I would go to a laundrette near where we lived. But we stopped going because the other one was close to a shop my mom liked to go, and I liked it because I got a treat."
"Turns out some man was killed and placed into one of the laundry dryers."
13. "My wife and I moved out of state for her to go to school. We didn't know a single person in the area. My wife befriended a young lady at her part-time job, and my wife invited the new friend and her boyfriend to our place for dinner. They were the first guests we had over."
"Great food and drink, great conversations, great night.
They asked if we ever watched Unsolved Mysteries, because the show was re-airing an episode that involved an unsolved murder. The murder had happened very close to where each of them lived.
So we watched it, and it was pretty much what the couple had told us.
The murder remained unsolved for five or six years, until a woman went to the police and said that her ex-boyfriend, years before, had confessed to her that he was the one who did it.
The woman and her boyfriend were our first dinner guests in our new town.
I guess the scary part is that they seemed so nice and normal, and how easily my wife and I were charmed by them. How unguarded we were."
14. "My uncle kept finding half-eaten animals on his property so he set up trail cams and caught a person catching and eating a live possum before walking away. Never happened again after that."
"Don't know how he still lives there."
Shout out to u/GiGiAnne13 and r/AskReddit for having this discussion.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Thumbnail credits: Getty Images / PBS