WARNING: This post contains graphic content, including mentions of death, murder, and guns. Please proceed with caution.
When you think about it, lots of things can be creepy. An unexplained noise in the middle of the night is creepy. A gross, unwaranted comment from a man at a bar who won't leave you alone? Definitely creepy. A moment where something just feels off, but you can't quite put your finger on what? C to the R to the E-E-P-Y.
Redditor u/EatingPussyisHealthy asked, "What’s the creepiest thing you’ve ever witnessed?" From paranormal encounters to brushes with true crime to everything in between, here are 24 experiences they'll never forget:
1. "I experienced a real life glitch in the matrix. I passed by a woman and two children in an aisle in the store, then two seconds later, I passed the exact same woman and children again. It wasn't physically possible for them to have gotten there before me, because the second time I saw them, they were coming from the opposite direction and walking towards me. They should've been in the aisle behind me. It freaked me out pretty bad."
2. "17 years ago, I gave birth my first baby and was laying in the hospital room with her in the crib-thing next to me that night. A nurse came in and said she could take the baby to the nursery for a few hours so I could get some sleep. I said no thanks, because I wanted my baby next to me so I could look at her. The next night I was pretty tired and asked another nurse if she could take the baby to the nursery for a couple hours. That nurse said they didn't have a nursery at the hospital — all babies stay with their moms."
3. "I was staying at a hotel and decided to sleep with the balcony door open because it was hot. I had a bad dream about a guy in a red checked shirt peering into the room, coming inside, and eating an ice cream at the end of my bed. When I woke up, I discovered a half-melted banana flavored ice cream between the bed and the wall."
4. "When I was a kid, maybe about 7, my parents went on a quick store run and left me at home alone. This was pretty normal in my small country town back then. As I sat behind our living room couch, our black cat walked past me, and all its hair stood straight up as it peered into the living room. It started hissing aggressively, as if it was either super angry or scared. So naturally, I leaned over to look around the couch, and saw a large footprints pressing into the carpet, walking through the living room, down the hall, and into my parents room."
"I froze and stayed that way until my parents got home. Of course, I told them instantly. They assured me everything was okay, blah blah blah. Maybe 10 years later, I learned that two weeks prior to me seeing this, my stepdad had witnessed it as well when he was home alone. Still gives me goosebumps thinking back to it. That was the first experience of what ended up being several years of being haunted by something. Rough years, man."
5. "When I was 14, I stayed at my sister's house one night and had a horrible nightmare about being strangled by the devil. I could only see his face smiling at me, and felt a crushing sensation on my throat. I told him to fuck off, swung a punch, and I then woke up. I looked over, and it was about 1 a.m.. The next morning, my sister was complaining that she had a really horrible nightmare that the devil was strangling her. Spooked, I asked her what time this happened. She said, 'around one o'clock.'"
6. "It was the early 90s, and I was about 9 years old. One day, I answered the landline phone in our house and was met with a man I didn't recognize who knew me by name. He said he knew my mom and tried to chat with me. I didn't know him (and didn't like talking to adults), so I said, 'Let me get my mom,' and ran to get her. She answered the phone, but the man had hung up. A few weeks later, a girl in the grade ahead of me went missing. She'd apparently told her friends that a man contacted her on the phone, said he was a friend of her mom's, and told her he was going to pick her up after school to pick a present out for her mom as surprise. She was kidnapped and murdered, but they never caught the man."
"As it turns, out quite a few young girls had gotten the same phone call I had. He seemed to have been choosing his victim. The FBI came to my house to ask me questions about that phone call. It still haunts me 30 years later. I'm still hoping they catch the guy. It was absolutely heartbreaking."
7. "I was in a swamp in southern Arkansas. My uncle and I were hunting and had gotten out there pretty early. We were just sitting and waiting and then we both saw this coyote walking past. The coyote looked at us for a minute, stood up on its hind legs, then walked back into the woods just on those hind legs. I swear this happened. I've never seen anything like it before or since."
8. "I was the sole witness to a murder. I was in a jeep with the top down, waiting for two guys on the sidewalk to stop arguing. One guy pulled a shank out of his sock and stuffed it, stiff armed, into the other guy's eye. The crunch was sickening. He took off. I ran up, and blood was spurting out of the dude's face onto the sidewalk. Long story short, he was dead by the time the ambulance showed up. I was going to testify in court but the other dude plead guilty and got 20-ish years, I believe. It was a long time ago. Not long enough for me to forget that sound, though."
9. "I was a kid on Christmas Day and there was a knock on our front door. Expecting it to be family, my dad and I opened it together. There was an old man standing there, asking for directions to the train station. Our house was smack bang in the middle of suburbia, so he must have been walking in the wrong direction for hours. My dad gave him the directions and offered to drive him, but he declined, and thanked us. As he was leaving he looked down at me and said something really strange: 'Never go to that place that scares you.'"
"This man was really, really old and walked at a shuffling pace. Shrugging off his comment as well-intentioned senility, I went back to the living room. As he was walking down our path, it started to rain. My dad went to get an umbrella from under the stairs to give to him, but when he went back outside, the man was gone. My dad ran down the path and up and down the street trying to find him, but he was nowhere to be seen.
The place I was scared of was this shack in the woods I used to walk past on my way to and from school. It always gave me a bad feeling. A few years later, someone was arrested for murdering a child there."
10. "This happened when I was about 12. I was just casually walking my dog one afternoon when, suddenly, I saw some weird guy following me. At first I thought he was drunk, judging by his weird movements. But then he started hiding behind cars and trees, peeking out as though he wanted me to see him. Anyway, I ran as fast as I could and didn't walk there for a week. Mind you, this was happening while there was an actual serial killer on the loose in our town, so I honestly might've escaped a murderer."
11. "When I was in high school, one day I was home alone and mowing the backyard, leaving the garage door in the front open. When I finished mowing, I went back to the garage (which is located underneath the bedrooms of the house) to close it, and I could hear loud footsteps in my parents room overhead. I freaked out and ran inside. Assuming one of my family members was home, I yelled up the stairs for them to stop it, but I got no response."
"At this point, I grabbed my dad's pistol out of the safe in the living room and yelled upstairs that I had a weapon and to stop. I called my parents as I was freaking out, and my dad told me to NOT go upstairs. I sat there out of view of the stairwell until he got home.
He took the pistol away, and locked it up, and we went upstairs to check. My parents' bedroom had a screen door to a balcony, which overlooked the backyard. The door and screen door were open. However, nothing was stolen."
12. "I'm a dog walker. We had a client who was an extremely rich and well known coin collector that lived alone with his dog. He was a really nice guy, but he had a bit of an alcohol problem. He smelled like booze and was very disheveled every morning when we’d pick his dog up to walk her. One monday morning, I walked into his huge house and saw him asleep on the couch as he normally was, so I called his name to wake him up. I realized he was half on his couch and in a really weird position. He wasn't responding up so eventually I walked over to wake him up, and quickly realized he wasn't asleep at all: he was dead."
"I threw up on his patio and called 911. They said he’d been dead since Friday. He lived there alone and didn’t have friends or family nearby, so I was the one that found him. Really really sad, as he was very nice and not very old. But yeah still have nightmares about what I found."
13. "A girl I went to college with went on a weeklong solo hike on the Appalachian Trail. This was before phone cameras were any good so she had a few of those disposable Kodak cameras with her. When she got the film developed, there were pictures of her sleeping. Multiple pictures from different days. Someone was stalking her and wanted her to know it."
14. "When I was a kid, I remember one day I was laying on my bedroom floor with the door wide open while my parents were watching TV in the living room. I remember it was about 1 a.m.. I tried to get up to use the bathroom, but my brain would almost act out me doing it without me physically moving. It wasn’t until about the 5th time that I realized I had never actually gotten up at all. I was stuck on the floor — I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t cry for my parents. It felt like something had sucked the soul out of my body and I was pinned to the ground. It wasn’t until my dad walked in to put me in my bed that I started balling my eyes out."
15. "When I was about 13 years old, I saw my doppelgänger in my childhood home. I got up from the couch one evening and saw a duplicate version of myself staring straight back at me for a solid three or four seconds. Whatever it was, it appeared exactly like I did that night — the same clothes, haircut, etc.. It was just standing there at the end of the hallway, looking right back at me intently with a neutral expression on its face. Then, it disappeared."
"I immediately ran to my mom’s room — which was adjacent to where my doppelgänger had stood mere seconds prior — and told her what I saw. My mother had been playing music on her CD player to fall asleep to and told me that, immediately before I came in, the player started going berserk. Suddenly, it sounded like an old record player with someone’s finger moving the record around against the needle.
It never happened again. Just that one time."
16. "I lived in a rental house 10 years ago. From the backdoor, you could access a narrow enclosure adjacent to the neighbor's house (their bedroom was right next to it). I didn't use the small backyard, so I never put a bulb in the socket outside. One day, my neighbor told me they heard movement in my backyard at night, like someone jumping down from the wall on to the concrete ground. They said it happened on multiple occasions and they thought it was probably a thief. So, I bought a bulb and went to put it outside. The socket was very high and I had to stand on a tall wooden stool to reach it. That night before I went to bed, I switched it on and checked the backyard."
"The next morning, I didn't go to the backyard and just switched off the light before going to work. On the second night, I went to switch it on, but the backyard remained dark no matter how many times I tried. I thought the bulb was defective, but I was scared of the dark and the thief, so I decided to check it out in the morning.
When I went out the next day, the bulb was not in the socket. Instead, it was lying on the ground, completely undamaged. There was no way it could have survived a fall from that high and I don't know why the thief wouldn't have just taken it with them. Anyway, I took the bulb inside and it was working fine, so I put it back in and went to work.
On the third night, I switched the light on again and went to bed. Around 3 a.m., I walked to the backdoor and slightly opened it to see if the bulb was still working. It was pitch dark. I closed the door quickly and went back to my room.
The next morning, the bulb was back on the ground, undamaged. I avoided going to the backyard as much as possible from that day on and didn't attempt to put any bulb there again."
17. "One day, my sister and I went to the park near our house to play some tennis. I took my phone out of my pocket and put in in my bag, thinking I didn’t want it to overheat in the sun. My sister saw and did the same. After we finished our game, my sister checked our bag and asked me where my phone went. I checked the bag and, sure enough, my phone was not there. We looked all around the tennis court and even in the garbage, but it was nowhere to be found."
"My sister and I were so confused to the point that I thought a man walking with his baby — the only other person we saw at the park — might have taken it at some point when we weren’t looking.
On a weird hunch, I had my sister call my brother, because I had originally planned to leave my phone at home to charge. Sure enough, my brother checked my room and found my phone — that both my sister and I watched being put into the bag at the park — on my bed, charging."
18. "My house is on the side of a highway and I have windows facing the highway. It was late at night, I couldn't sleep so I decided to tire myself out by jump roping. Halfway through my session, I took a glance outside and I saw a man standing on the closest side of the highway staring, at me under the lamp post. It felt as if it was something out of a horror movie. Once I saw his creepy silhouette, I immediately just ducked to the ground. When I looked up, he was gone. To me now it's a funny situation, as he probably was just some homeless man confused as to why someone was jump roping at like midnight. But at the time, it was really, really creepy."
19. "I was driving on the interstate late at night. The road was decently foggy, so visibility was somewhat reduced. In this distance there was a light waving back and forth through the fog in the middle of the road, slowly getting more pronounced as I got closer. I got close enough to then see that it was a guy waving his phone flashlight to alert oncoming traffic. Right in the area past him was two cars that had just crashed, and bodies all over the road. No first responders there yet or anything. Just carnage and a man flashing a light."
20. "I got quite a few reports about this while working at a summer camp. It was up in the mountains, and I worked there for a couple summers as a teen. Kids attending the camp would sometimes make up stories about seeing Bigfoot or a ghost out in the forest, typical dumb kids stuff. But there was one type of story in particular that I kept hearing, from different groups over several months each summer, which had me a bit worried. The first time I heard of it was from one of the older camp employees recounting a story from many years prior. Apparently, his girlfriend at the time was unable to sleep in her cabin because she thought she was being watched by something outside her window. She said it was a very large, black crow that would just sit by the window and stare at her, but in a strange, menacing way. Even when the blinds were closed, she'd open them back up hours later and it would still be there staring."
"She would sometimes see it in the forest — even during the day — sitting between the trees not making a sound, just glaring at her. Its gaze followed her as she walked. She said it was the same crow, she was certain. Its eyes 'felt human,' according to her.
Well, those stories came up every couple weeks like clockwork. Some kid would one day become distant and quiet, not wanting to leave their cabin for activities. Sometimes they'd ask to go home early. Most wouldn't say why, I think because they knew no one would believe them. But occasionally after prodding, they would admit that they were afraid of something they were seeing in the forest and around their cabin. All of these kids described pretty much the same thing. And it wasn't just kids — some of the other staff members claimed to have seen something similar as well. It was pretty easy to tell who was bullshitting and who wasn't. The ones who I think really did see something did not want to talk about it. They were very bothered by what they had been experiencing. They'd have awful nightmares, and they wouldn't want to be outside for long.
I've seen plenty of crows up there, but they were just crows. They'd flap around, squawk and shit ,and that was it. I don't know why a crow would follow someone or stare at them for hours, that doesn't sound natural at all to me. I don't know what to make of it. It such a silly story to hear the first time, but after hearing it again and again from people who have no way of knowing about it, you start to wonder. Especially after seeing how upset these people are. They didn't seem to be faking it for attention. It ruined their entire week."
21. "I took my nephew to this park semi-surrounded by woods. While pushing him on the swings I heard rustling and turned around to see a man in a ski mask watching us. 10/10 will never go back."
22. "When I was younger (11, maybe 12) I moved into a new house. My room had a big closet with access to the attic. I was a scared little kid and was worried a monster lived up there. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to see my closet door slowlyyyyy opening. I didn’t move and screamed for my parents."
"Fortunately, we found out if the door wasn't properly closed, it would open itself. I still have never been as scared as I was as in the moment."
23. "When I was about 6 or 7, I woke up in the middle of the night to a faint sound of what seemed like someone stacking plates in the kitchen, every couple of minutes. With the location of my bedroom door giving me a direct view of the kitchen entrance and part of the kitchen, I opened it and peeked my head to see what was going on. To this day, I swear I remember just seeing some old woman — with sunken eyes, her gaping mouth completely wide open, head turned almost 90 degrees — just staring at me, not even moving. What's even more frightening, was that the sound suddenly stopped as I did this. While I'm sure it could've just been my eyes struggling to adjust, and merely shapes, the longer my eyes adjusted, the more vivid she became. I just remember staring right back and not moving from what felt like several minutes."
"I decided to make a break for my parents bedroom, which was across from my bedroom. I told them what happened and they checked and confirmed nothing was there. Fortunately, we were scheduled for an early flight to visit family, so everyone decided to get up. I'm sure it could've just been the young mind playing tricks, nevertheless, I'll never forget that face."
24. "A large black van with tinted windows followed me and the group of other kids I was with, including my little sister. It was winter, I think a no bus day, and we lived in Canada, so needless to say it was snowy. Me and some other kids (including my sister) were at our babysitter's place, but still wanted to go on a walk. So, we put on all our snow stuff and were on our way. At one point, my sister pointed out a black van slowly driving behind us (I think we were a group of five or six, and most of us were around 10 years old, save for my sister, who would've been around 7). We just assumed they were driving slow because of the road, or maybe they were looking for a house. Still, we ran the best we could (anyone who has tried to run in full winter gear knows how hard it is) until we couldn't see the van anymore."
"When it was out of sight, we started walking again. A minute later, my sister pointed out the van again and it's pretty much the exact distance behind us that it was before we ran. At this point we were a little weirded out, but thought we were just walking slow so it caught up. So we ran again, further this time, and kept looking back. I think I remember looking back and seeing nothing, then looking back a few seconds later to see the van was there again.
At this point, we were all freaked out and I remember having a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach seeing it again. We all began running like our lives depended on it because, in our minds, they did. My sister was the slowest and one of the larger and older boys had to pull her along so she didn't get left behind. I remember looking back and seeing the van speeding up a bit, still at a distance, but clearly trying to keep up with us.
It felt like we were running for ages, but we finally reached the babysitter's house, ran up the stairs, slammed the door shut, and caught our breath. We told her what happened, but I don't think she believed us
I remember me and another girl who was in the group saw the same van drive by the window at least once (I remember it being twice, though).
IDK, it might've been nothing that our brains twisted to be something, but, about a decade later, I still can't shake the feeling that the van was bad news and that we were all lucky we noticed it in time."
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.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.