If you're anything like me, you loooove a scary story. Whether it's ghosts and ghouls, true crime, or a glitch in the matrix, I am all ears, all the time.
So, naturally, I asked BuzzFeed readers like you to share the creepiest experiences they've ever had. As always, they did not disappoint, and I have the goosebumps to prove it. Get cozy, turn on a light (or two...or all of them, if I'm being honest), and let's get into their tales, shall we?
1. "My godmother was one of the girls the Night Stalker tried to carjack the day he was captured. She was on her way home from work when he came running up, trying to open her car door. She said that she had just stared at him until people started yelling at him, and then he ran away. She hadn’t known who he was, but when she got home, her mom (my grandma) was watching the news. She saw his picture on the screen. My godmother said she can still see his creepy smile so clearly to this day."
2. "When I was young, my family was driving home from a road trip. We were just outside the small town before our hometown, and there were a ton of vehicles stopped on the side of the road, with people out of their cars. On the top of the mountaintop/hilltop next to the road and sitting above power lines was a large, oblong object that was glowing orange and hovering in place. I asked my parents to stop, but they pretended that I was just imagining things because I had been sleeping. So they just kept driving."
"Years later, my parents admitted that what we saw was a full-blown UFO, but I was already having nightmares from watching The X-Files, so they reasoned that ignoring the UFO was the best call. I still wish to this day that they had stopped."
3. "In college, my roommate and I had loft beds. At 3 a.m., I woke up SO THIRSTY. I was really annoyed because I had to climb all the way down in the dark, walk to the far end of the BRIGHT hallway to the water fountain, walk back, and climb all the way back up in the dark. But I was so thirsty, so I climbed down. When I opened the door to the hallway, the light shined onto my roommate asleep in her bed. I was a little surprised because she normally slept at her boyfriend’s dorm and I hadn’t heard her come in after I went to bed. On the way back in, I opened and closed the door quickly, trying not to wake her up. She rolled over in her bed and kind of grumbled. I was a bit scared that I was unsuccessful, but I climbed back up into my bed and went to sleep."
"The next morning, she was already gone to class when I woke up. Later that afternoon when I saw her, I asked what time she got home last night. She said she hadn't been there that night at all. In fact, she wasn’t even in the STATE that night! She was visiting her mom and had just gotten back that morning. She showed me the pictures to prove it. I don’t know who or what was in her bed that night, but it certainly wasn’t my roommate!"
4. "My now-husband and I were walking to the subway. He was going to work and I had a meeting downtown with a client. As we were walking, one of my heels got caught in a street grate. As I tried to remove it, the heel strap snapped, rendering it useless to walk in. My husband went to work and I ran back to our apartment to change shoes. Fifteen minutes later, I was about to run and get on the train when something, a feeling, told me to miss it. I suffer from anxiety, so normally I’d shrug it off and tell myself my anxiety was just messing with me, but the feeling was so strong that I stopped and waited for the train to leave, all the while chastising myself, since I was already running late. I grabbed the next train, and when I emerged from the subway 30 minutes later, all hell had broken loose. It was 9/11, and had I been on time, I would've been in the tower when the first plane hit."
5. "When I was 17, I was leaving a house party very late at night with my boyfriend. As we neared the street, we heard a cellphone ringing and saw it light up on the ground on the other side of the street. We thought it might belong to one of our friends and figured we could return it to the owner, so we picked it up to see who was calling. The caller ID said 'VICTIM.'"
"We looked at each other, and right at that moment, a big pickup truck turned on its lights from down the street and started barreling toward us. We both ran as fast as we could back up the driveway and hid behind a bush. We watched the truck turn around and speed off in the direction it had come and was gone. It was like a scene from a horror movie, and we were absolutely terrified!"
—Anonymous
6. "I used to work at a funeral home and had to do a late-night transport from one of our sister mortuaries for a service the next day. I'd already had many creepy encounters, but that night had me feeling dreadful knowing I had to go through the garage alone. I called my boyfriend at the time to meet me there so I wasn’t alone. I had to get out of the van, go through the side doors, through the garage, and open it from the inside. He didn’t arrive until I had already unloaded and started pushing the woman through the hallway. I got her in the prep room and quickly locked the door behind me. He came in the way I had, and as he approached me, we both heard things moving around inside the room I'd just locked."
"Startled, we went back the way we came to lock everything up, but we had to go back in to turn the alarm on before we could leave. As we were walking toward the front, we heard things in multiple offices that lined the hallway connected to the prep room. We started running toward the double swinging doors and could hear someone CHASING us. We ran out the side door to catch our breath, and the look on my then-boyfriend's face was of absolute horror. I had to go back in to turn the alarm on, and he reluctantly went too. As we were standing there while I punched in the code, the double doors started swinging wildly. We hurried out, and as I was locking the doors, we heard a man talking and getting louder.
"I stupidly stayed at that job for another six months after that but refused night transports completely."
—Anonymous
7. "My friend — let's call her Carol — told me this story about 30 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. Carol’s husband died unexpectedly several years before, and then a few years later, her 20-year-old niece was killed in a car accident. Carol had a very good, longtime family friend who was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer before Carol's niece was killed. At the time of her niece’s passing, her friend was very ill and didn’t have much time left herself. Because of this, Carol’s family decided not to tell the friend about the niece's passing, as it would have only caused upset and they didn’t see the point."
"A day or two later, Carol went to visit her friend. As sick as she was, she immediately told Carol that she had the strangest dream. She had been walking down the street when a bus stopped in front of her, and she was told to get on. The bus driver was Carol’s deceased husband. But that wasn’t the strangest part. Carol's niece was also on the bus, telling her to get on! She told Carol that she just couldn’t figure out why it was Carol’s husband and niece together, it was just so random! Of course, Carol knew it wasn’t random at all, but kept that to herself. Her friend passed away within hours of her relaying her dream."
—Anonymous
8. About a year ago, I was working in a pizza shop. I was driving home in the dark as usual after a night shift. On the road home, there's an orchard on the left side that's blocked off with a chain-link fence and a house on the right side. As I crested the hill, something stepped onto the road from the left, took two steps out to the yellow line, and vanished when I blinked. It looked as if it was 7 or 8 feet tall with grayish skin. It had clawed feet and hands, pointed ears, and large, slanted, pitch-black eyes. It was so lanky, I could see its ribs. Still, it was weirdly humanoid. It startled me so much that I stomped on the brakes. I sped home, shaking."
—Anonymous
9. "I attended college at a university that was located in the oldest town in Texas. The theater building had been built during the Great Depression. The story goes that an 18-year-old kid lost his life while helping to dig out the storage catacombs that run under the building. Now fast-forward to the early '90s. The school was doing a play that had 12 characters total, set during the Great Depression. At the end of each play performed at this school, they always took a cast photo and hung it on the hallway walls. The photo from that show has 13 kids in it. No one knows who the 13th kid was. He wasn't there when they took the picture, but he appeared in it anyway, dressed just like the rest of the cast."
"THEN, a few years later, two other students and I stayed late to practice a scene in one of the upstairs classrooms above the giant theater. We all heard, clear as day, someone playing the grand piano that was stored on the main stage unless a play was in progress. The sound was very loud. We thought we were all alone in the building, as it was around 11 p.m., so we decided to take a break and go see who else was in the building.
"We made our way down the main stairs, talking and laughing, and then approached the main theater double doors. The whole time, we could still hear the music playing. However...the moment we opened the doors, the sound stopped. The massive theater was pitch black and empty, not a soul in sight. It was dead quiet. We were all spooked, but we went back upstairs to finish our work. About 20 minutes later, we heard it begin again.
"We assumed someone was messing with us, so we decided to quit rehearsing for the night and sneak down to the stage doors and scare whoever was on stage. We made our way silently down the back staircase and tiptoed up to the backstage doors that led directly onto the stage. The sound of the grand piano was so loud, we couldn't hear each other whispering. All three of us smiled as we opened the door and yelled, 'Gotcha!'...only to once again find a pitch-black stage, an empty piano bench, and the immediate ceasing of all music. We were the ONLY people in that building, but we had ALL heard that music as plain as day behind the closed door. The now-visible piano was only like 15 feet in front of us as we entered the stage doors, so there was NO WAY anyone would have had time to jump, much less hide. We left in a hot second, and I don't think any of us ever stayed by ourselves for rehearsal past 8 ever again."
—Anonymous
10. "This happened to me about seven years ago, when I was 22. I was on my bed playing Fallout 4 when I decided to go to sleep. It wasn't very late — like midnight or something — and I wasn't tired, I just wanted to sleep. My mattress was directly on the floor, and since I had no lamp nearby, I would usually turn on my phone's flashlight so I could see where I put the PS4 controller and the remote. As I put everything in its place, I looked at the ceiling and I saw a huge shadow hand. Logically, I thought, Well, my hand is hanging off the mattress right above my phone, so it's just my hand over the flashlight. I shook both my hands to see if the shadow moved...and it did not. I froze."
"A chill ran down my spine as my brain tried to make sense of the situation and think of a logical explanation for the shadow. I was paralyzed with fear for what seemed like an eternity, until I noticed the shadow growing bigger, as if it were getting closer to me. That's when I broke out of my paralysis and managed to get up from the floor. I was too scared to run, so I did some weird walk to my brother's bedroom, got a pillow from him, and just lay on the floor until morning came.
"I didn't sleep in my room for another two years. From then on, I was always in the living room with the TV turned on. It freaked me out then, and it still gives me the creeps thinking about it today, seven years later."
—Anonymous
11. "When I was about 11 years old, I was hanging out with some friends when we decided to go ride our bikes up and down the alley near one of our homes. As we were making our way around the block, we noticed someone hiding in the bush to the right of the alley. Being young, we didn’t think all that much of it, but when we went around again, the man started to chase us. We ran and rode our bikes as fast as we could, racing to get back to the house. The five of us were home alone, as my friend's parents had made a quick trip to Walmart. When we got upstairs, we heard footsteps coming up the stairs from the door in the basement, and the creepiest humming that I've ever heard."
"I remember crying as silently as I could and thinking I was going to die. Luckily, my friend's parents got home just in time, scaring him out the door. I’ll never forget how terrified I was."
—Anonymous
12. "When I was like 6 or 7, I had a closet door in my room that didn’t latch right and would pop open. When it did this at night, I always felt like someone was in there looking at me, so I'd run to my parents, crying that there was a man in my closet. We’d go look and find nothing, so I’d go back to bed. One night, we got home late from visiting my mom's family out of state. I had misbehaved or something, and my mom told me to go straight to bed. I went to my room and the closet door popped open. I knew Mom was already cross with me, so I decided to be brave and look in the closet myself. In the dark behind the clothes, I swore I saw a hand. I ran to my parents and cried that there was a man in my closet. My mom was still irritated and yelled that there was no man and to go look again. So I did. Yup. Still there."
"So I went back and pleaded with her. She grabbed me and dragged me back to my room. She whipped open the door and yanked back my clothes. Let's just say it was an exciting night in my little town with all the police cruisers and even a helicopter that followed her discovery. Now I'm a mom and I always check when my kids tell me there’s a monster in their room."
—Anonymous
13. "When I was in college, I lived in a dorm that used to be a seminary. Before I'd even moved in my first year, I had heard stories about it being haunted. Within one week of moving into my suite, I started noticing weird things happening. When I was alone, I would hear footsteps running outside my bedroom door. When I was in the shower, I would hear the fridge door slam shut. Decorations I had hung up on the wall would fall as if something had flung them off — including a cross that was secured on the wall and needed to be lifted in order to be removed. I kept most of these things to myself, despite being relatively uneasy when alone in the dorm."
"I remember the dread of walking in to see that none of my roommates were there. At some point, I started waking up in the middle of the night with the feeling of someone pushing on my chest. It kind of felt like I was being crushed, and I couldn't move or breathe or open my eyes. When I was finally able to come out of it, I would run to the bathroom and sit under freezing water to snap myself out of it or call my mom so she could calm me down.
"At some point I told my roommates about everything. The following day, my roommate got back from class and told me about a student she overheard wondering what students had moved into our dorm room number because she wanted to talk to us. About half an hour later, this really petite girl showed up at our dorm room asking if anything weird had been happening, all while staring intently at me. Obviously I said yes, and then she proceeded to tell me what happened the year prior.
"Apparently, the group of people who lived in our room the year before us used a Ouija board and accidentally ended up drawing a malevolent spirit to the room. She explained that she was in touch with the spirit realm and didn’t think the entity was still there, but its energy remained, along with some others that were drawn to it. Then she focused all her attention on me again and said, 'It's been picking on you, hasn’t it?'"
—Anonymous
14. "When I was younger, probably 7 or 8, I had a recurring dream that would wake me up all the time. I was riding a tricycle that was too small for me, so I couldn’t pedal very fast. A man with a rusted black truck, red/brown hair, and a leather jacket would kidnap me. I'd try to scream, but nothing would come out, and my parents just watched it happen from the window. The dreams stopped after a while, but when I was about 16, I was walking into a grocery store with my boyfriend, and the man from my dream was walking out. Same man, same red hair, same jacket. I stopped in my tracks, and he looked at me dead in the eyes, grinned with an evil type of smile, and winked."
"I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread for the rest of the day. My boyfriend even commented on how weird it was that the guy was wearing a leather jacket, because it was the dead of summer and like 100 degrees out. I never saw him again in my small town and really wonder if he was even real, or just something haunting me."
—Anonymous
15. "I was on holiday in Thailand for five weeks when, for some weird reason, I decided to bring a stray dog from the shops back to the apartment one night. When the guy I was seeing asked me why, my response was instinctively, 'The snakes.' He rolled his eyes, but lo and behold, two minutes later on route back to the apartment, the dog started loudly barking. I looked down, and next to my feet was a coiled snake. Startled by the dog, it fled. It was weird that I somehow knew that would happen, but something even weirder happened the next day."
"I was at at the pool bar and listening to a scuba lesson, where I learned that that particular species of snake — the sea snake — is one of the deadliest snakes and only comes on land to lay its eggs. That dog saved me from a deadly snake bite from a territorial mama snake with venom that would have killed me in less time than it would have taken to get aid. Phew!"
—Anonymous
16. "In 2019, my mother went in for her first colonoscopy. It was done in an outpatient setting, and she was home later that day. Something had gone wrong during the procedure and they had punctured her, but it had been fixed, so everything was fine. The creepy part of this was the dream I had that night. In the dream, I was in my bed and woke up to a very quiet and still house. I thought it was odd but got up anyway. I went downstairs to check on my mom, who had slept in our recliner (as she had in real life), because lying down was uncomfortable. I walked into the living room and found my mom dead in the recliner. I was so startled that I woke up. Still, I had this overwhelming sense of dread all day."
"Later, my mom came into my room and wanted to show me something. She was rubbing her neck, and it sounded like Rice Krispies rattling together in the box. Her doctor called a few minutes after that and told her to come in right away. Turns out, the hole in her colon was not repaired, and she was leaking air into her body. She would have very much died had that not been caught. I told her years later about the dream, and she believed me."
—Anonymous
17. "When I was 6, I witnessed something right out of Paranormal Activity. It all started when we lived in an old house in the historic part of Columbus, Georgia. Our house had been a part of the Underground Railroad, had a bomb shelter, had old hotel ruins in the backyard, and honestly was creepy as hell. So, what started as lights flickering on and off, furniture moving on its own, and things turning up in odd places turned into the most traumatic night of my life. My family never talked about the weird things happening around us. We were all scared, but it was almost as if mentioning it made things worse."
"One night, we were having TV dinners in the living room when we heard noises from the kitchen. We brushed it off. Then my brother, 5, asked to go to his room to play. Minutes later, we heard him screaming, 'It took my car! It took my car!' all while pointing at the wall. We ran to his room and looked up the same moment a Hot Wheels car came falling to the ground. My dad ushered us all back to the living room. My parents started talking about what could've happened while trying to calm my brother down. Suddenly, all the furniture in our dining room slid to the other side of the room. It happened so fast, we didn't even have time to grasp the situation.
"My dad, trying to rationalize everything, said to sit and finish our food, and we would stay at my grandparents' for the night. We tried to start eating again, but my mom started randomly laughing. It was a super-creepy, not-herself kind of laugh. She was gripping her steak knife tightly. My brother touched her arm and said, 'Mommy.' That must've woken up whatever it was.
"She looked at him with full-blown possessed eyes. She laughed and it sounded so inhuman. She lunged at him with the knife, and I somehow managed to pull him up and over the armrest the same time my dad cleared the space between the couches to stop her. I remember her shaking on the ground in almost a seizurelike manner for a moment while he held her down. Then it all stopped. We left the house shortly after she woke up and came back with a priest to bless the home. We didn't live there too long after. To this day, it is constantly put up for sale, purchased, and quickly resold. I believe it is an evil home."
—Anonymous
18. "My family and I were rafting in New Hampshire. There were eight of us spread out over six rafts, navigating a tricky section of river that had several downed trees. My younger cousin hit a current wrong and his raft got caught on one of the trees, causing him to flip and plunge underwater, into all the submerged branches. We were all downstream and started frantically fighting the current to get back to him, yet after 30 or so seconds, he popped up and out of the water with a surprising amount of force for a kid. We all went ashore at the next beach to shake off the scare, and he immediately began to ask who pulled him out. We explained that no one was near him and that we were all at least 5–10 yards downstream, but he vividly recalled hearing a voice say, 'I got you,' and felt the clear sensation of two strong hands gripping the shoulder straps of his life vest and pulling him up forcefully. It still gives me shivers to this day."
—Anonymous
19. "This is the story of our 'rainbow people.' I was woken up at about 3 a.m. to the sound of footsteps in our bedroom. They were heavy, shuffling footsteps. I opened my eyes, expecting to see my husband returning from the bathroom, but there was someone else there instead. The best way I can describe the man is that he was made of light. His body was lined with rainbow colors, almost like a hologram. He was standing at my husband's feet, with his hands on his own face, with his mouth wide open. He looked like he was screaming, but no noise was coming out. I sat up and stared. He was there for maybe 10 seconds, but it felt like forever."
"I got up and slept on the couch that night. I didn't say anything to my husband because I knew it sounded wild and unbelievable.
"A couple of weeks later, my husband was working an overnight shift. My youngest son, 4, wanted to sleep in my bed with me. His older brother, 7, who shares a room with him, didn't want to sleep alone in their room but was reluctant to sleep in my bedroom. I tucked them in, promising to come back in about an hour after I got ready for bed.
"My 7-year-old looked at me and said he didn't want to sleep in my room because he saw something when he napped in there a couple of days before. He was sick at the time and wanted to rest in my bed and watch TV. I told him that he must have been dreaming. He described seeing 'legs dancing like a ballerina that came in the door and danced to the closet.' I told him again he must have been dreaming. What he said next made my skin crawl. He said, 'I don't think I was sleeping. The legs looked like a rainbow.'
"I calmly gathered their pillows and we left the room. I really hope no one else sees it ever again."
20. "As young teens, my sister and I shared a room because she was afraid of the dark. She was so afraid that she pushed our beds together so I was close to her. One night, I woke up and saw a bearded man in a red flannel shirt, standing in our bedroom doorway. He was mouthing something but making no noise. I reached for my sister, who whispered, 'I see him.' For some reason, neither of us screamed. I reached with my left hand for the phone next to my bed. This was the '80s, so push-button phones still rotary dialed, and you could hear it on the other phones in the house. My mother used to bust us using the phone that way after lights out. I just started squeezing/pressing buttons and it woke my mother, who yelled, 'Get off the phone!' and the man disappeared."
"A few days later, I got the courage to check the spare room, which had the attic access. The attic was empty except for a folding chair that was open facing the door."
—Anonymous
21. "When I was 15, I had to be operated on for an ovarian tumor. The day I was to be admitted, my mom and best friend came along with me. We couldn't find the exact ward I was supposed to be admitted to because the hospital was really big, so we decided to look for a nurse or someone working in the hospital for help. We saw a nurse pulling one of those big carts where patients' food is kept and exiting the elevator. We were about 4 or 5 meters away from him, so we started saying 'hello' really loudly to him so he'd stop and we could ask for directions. He definitely heard us, because he looked at me and smiled, but kept moving with the cart toward the wall in front of him. I started walking really fast to meet him and ask him for directions, but when he got close to the wall, he stepped behind the cart. It was tall, and he was just slightly shorter than it. I was directly in front of him, so I followed him behind it. He was gone."
"My mom and best friend confirmed what happened. He just disappeared. There was no door behind the cart for him to go through. I even opened the cart because I couldn’t believe my eyes, but he wasn’t there anymore. It creeps us out whenever we remember it.
"Some hours after I had my operation, I was lying in a room by myself. I wasn’t sleeping, but I was in pain and just closed my eyes. I felt someone behind me, stroking my hair softly. I felt weak, so I didn’t open my eyes to see who it was, but I thought maybe a nurse had come in. Whoever it was kept stroking my hair for about two minutes, then suddenly, I felt the hand tug at my hair, hard. I immediately turned back to see who it was, and nobody else was in the room."
—Anonymous
22. And finally, "This is my husband's story, but he won't speak of it anymore. He wants to forget it completely. So I'll tell the story. My husband and two of his cousins were driving late at night, coming back from the city. All of a sudden, their car broke down in farmland just before the dirt road that brings them home to the reserve. One of his cousins stood dead still, looking into the field, and asked them to come look. My husband didn't want to, but he started walking toward her to see what she was looking at. His other cousin wouldn't get out of the car — she said there was evil all around them, and she could feel it."
"What my husband and his other cousin saw was unreal, unlike anything I've ever heard of. He came home at about 5:30 a.m. after he got the car going again. He told me he'd seen something, and when I asked what it was, he said he didn't know, but he knows he wasn't imagining things, because he wasn't the only one to see it. When I asked again what it was, he screamed at me that he didn't know. Confused and scared, I asked him to describe it. Once again, he screamed that he didn't know. I stopped talking to him. He never acts like this, and I was getting scared.
"About 10 minutes later, he came back in our bedroom and said that he'd seen human legs all connected together like a spider coming out of the ground. I was baffled. I'd never heard such a thing in my life. He said he saw a man in the ground as well, just buried in the dirt up to his waist, and a young child sitting on the side of the road, crying. He also saw shadow people running back and forth across the road and crawling in the dark. And no, none of them were on any drugs at all.
"My husband won't talk about it anymore. I've always wondered if they somehow entered another world or just saw some things that they weren't ever supposed to see. He won't walk out in the dark yet and doesn't like looking out the windows after dark. I'm terrified and I didn't even see it. I'll always wonder what in the world went on that night. I hope if anyone out there reads this and has had the same experience, they will get in contact with me somehow."
—Anonymous
Have you had a creepy, bone-chilling experience like these? If so, tell us about it in the comments below or via this 100% anonymous form. And if you enjoyed these creepy tales, you can read more of them here, here, and here.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.