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    17 Spine-Chilling Ghost Stories As Told By The People Who Experienced Them

    Read...if you dare.

    If you're anything like me, you loooove a good spooky story. Lucky for us, this week u/andrebotelho asked the good people of Reddit, "What is your best ghost/paranormal experience story?"

    I am equal parts delighted and horrified to tell you that they had some truly terrifying stories to share. Here are 17 of the best and scariest ones:

    1. This creepy camping trip:

    "I was camping at a friend's family property with a group of friends. They had a huge, creepy shop. We stayed up late drinking by the fire and I was the last one awake. Went to go pee on the side of the shop and stood about five feet away, looking inside through the window. I noticed what looked like a piece of paper floating around. I thought it was a moth at first but it was moving in a very rhythmic figure 8 pattern. Then it quickly floated back to the corner of the shop where it was dark.

    I sat back down by the fire to finish my beer and have a smoke. No one else was awake so I played Robot Unicorn Attack 2 on my phone for a while. I noticed my friend Mark pop out of his tent to pee, then go back in to go to sleep. The next morning, we were having breakfast and Mark said," I saw you guys sitting by the fire super late, how late did you stay up?" I told him it was probably 2 or 3 AM. When he asked who was up with me, I told him I was alone. He said, "I got up to pee and saw you on your phone and two people over your shoulder watching you play." He said one person looked bigger so he thought it was one of our friends, who was a bigger dude. He said the other person was taller and skinny, but none of us are noticeably tall, or skinny."

    u/Pork_9

    2. This imposter brother:

    "My brother's bedroom was next to mine growing up. One afternoon, he asked me what I was doing the previous night that made me laugh so much. Confused, I pressed him for details. He said that at 3 a.m. that night, my laughter woke him up. It sounded like I was pacing the room, too. His face went pale when I told him I'd been at a friend's house that night. To this day, he swears blind that it was my laugh."

    u/Pugnator48

    3. This sweet-scented goodbye:

    "My grandmother suffered a major stroke in 2012, resulting in hospice in her home. One night, I was sitting at home in my office catching up on some work when all of a sudden the room filled with the scent of perfume. I'm not talking about a faint smell, I'm saying it was very distinctive and strong throughout the entire room. I stopped everything I was doing and said out loud, 'Something is wrong, that is Gram!' I had not spoken to my family that day, but felt an urgent need to send a text message to my uncle who was staying with her. This was at 11:20 p.m. I got a response right away saying, 'might want to come say goodbye. Not OK.' I quickly rushed over.

    Without saying anything I walked straight to my grandmother and kissed her on the forehead, saying I love her. She was still warm, but no longer breathing. I told my uncle that I was there because grandma had brought me there. I asked when she passed and he replied saying five minutes before I sent my text. This puts the perfume in my office at nearly the exact same moment."

    u/Gr1ml0ck

    4. This creepy childhood house:

    "The house I grew up in was haunted. Late at night, I would hear someone pacing circles in the living room but I was the only one awake and we didn’t have pets. I never said anything because I didn’t want my family to think I was nuts. Eventually I moved out and went to college. After I graduated, I was in a rough spot financially. My parents had bought a new house and offered to let me stay in our old one for a while while they considered renters. When I said no, my Mom asked why. I finally gave in and told her what I'd heard. My mom FROZE and turned to look at me. Turns out she had also heard it for years and didn’t say anything for the same reason."

    u/human-foie-gras

    5. This vanishing miner:

    "When I was 14, my friend and I rode mountain bikes way out in the woods. We must've been two miles from any houses, and decided to turn back and go home for the day. Walking up the hill we'd just ridden down, we saw this old guy with miner clothes from the 1800s carrying a bucket. He was walking up the hill with his back towards us, but only for a few seconds before he disappeared. We were both silent until I said I thought I saw something. He did too, and perfectly described the guy. We got out of there very quickly. This was in northern Arizona, where they used to mine gold. About a mile away, there was an old miner's cabin."

    u/vickt

    6. This tale of lost time:

    "When I was seven or eight, I was at my grandmother’s house for Christmas and played hide and seek with some of my cousins. Most of us were staying the night, but for some reason no one ever stayed in the fourth bedroom. It was around 8 p.m. and my turn to count, so I went into the fourth room to do so. I sat on the bed, closed my eyes and counted to twenty. When I opened my eyes it was light out. I’d closed my eyes at night, counted to 20, and somehow 12 hours had passed.

    Of course, the immediate thought was that maybe I just fell asleep. I’ll refute that with three points. First, why didn’t my cousins come get me when I failed to seek them out? Second, it was cold in that house. We would sleep multiple people to a bed under several blankets, at least one of which was usually electric. I can’t imagine sleeping through the night in that kind of cold without some kid of covering. And third, there’s no way my parents wouldn’t have bothered to come find me before they went to sleep. And when they did find me, they wouldn’t have left me there, especially without a blanket.

    I can’t tell you what happened. Maybe I had some sort of strange memory lapse that just happened to begin and end in the same location. Maybe the simulation lagged. Maybe I really did skip twelve hours. All I can say for sure is that something happened that night, and I’ve never been able to explain it."

    u/clandestinebirch

    7. This scary blue lady:

    "When my middle child was about three, we lived in an old house with a lot of poorly-done self renovations. It had an under house storage/workshop area accessible from one of the bedrooms. This workshop has a hatch door to the dirt under the house. My daughter always used to complain about the blue lady that lived under the house. We moved and I never heard about it again."

    u/lord-stryker117

    8. This grandpa's ghost:

    "When I was like three or four, my mom said I used to talk to something or someone in the corner of my room. I would sit down and hold a conversation for hours. Mom would ask me who I was talking to, then one day I said 'grandpa.' I then mentioned something very specific about him, I think it was his mustache and something about a joke he used to tell. There was no way for me to know any of this, because he died three years earlier and I hadn't been told about him yet nor seen his picture."

    u/martinH1

    9. This grandma's secret diary:

    "When my mom retired, she got very into family history. At some point, she obtained the diary of my dad’s mother, Nan. Nan was an intensely private person and never wanted anyone knowing her business.

    One night my dad was away, so my mother sat down to read the diary. It started raining — nothing unusual since they lived on the coast. She got up and closed a few windows before going back to the diary. The rain turned into a storm, so she got up to shut the windows in the other room, too, before returning to her reading. Suddenly, the intercom to her right turned on. They lived in a house originally built by an electrician, so every room had one. Every intercom in the house was on. When she went to turn the others off, she noticed all the pictures on the walls were askew. All at similar angles, not random. Meanwhile, the storm worsened. As she stood there taking it all in, an intense gust of wind rattled the windows from one end of the house to the other, as if a speeding train went past on the balcony outside. She walked calmly upstairs, shut the diary, put it in a cupboard, and said, 'Sorry, Nan.' to the empty room. The storm died down. She fixed all the pictures. That’s that.

    Here’s the kicker: someone from her work lived in the same street. When she saw him the next day, she mention the storm. The guy looks at her funny and asked what storm she was talking about. He had dinner on the balcony that night and there hadn't been a storm at any point."

    u/RageReset

    10. This life-saving premonition:

    "Several years ago, I had a recurring dream about burning alive in a hotel. It was so realistic, I could feel the pain and hear screams. Each dream would be more and more detailed. In my last one, I could even make out the exact details of the building. When my family went on vacation, we stopped in a small city and looked for a place to stay. We stopped at the exact hotel in my dream. I just froze and repeatedly asked if we could go somewhere else. After continuously pestering my parents about it, we went to a different hotel. It burned down the night we were supposed to stay there and killed 14 people."

    u/ThatOneFamiliarPlate

    11. This creepy conversation:

    "When I was a kid, I lived with just my mom. Every few nights after she went to bed and turned off the TVs, I’d hear a man and woman casually having a quiet conversation in our kitchen. I always had to concentrate really hard to make sure I was actually hearing something, because it was so faint I couldn’t make out words. This continued for years, and I thought my mom wouldn’t believe me if I told her. After we moved out, I finally mentioned it — she said she’d always experienced the same thing."

    u/OmaPretty

    12. This baby's best friend:

    "Back in 2001, my wife and I were watching the first ever episode of The Amazing Race while my son played on the floor. I thought that my mom, who passed away a year prior, would have loved this. As soon as I had that thought, a cold chill ran up through my body. At the same time, my wife said 'this is something you and your mom would have done, and probably won.' Right then, my son — who was about a year and a half old — started waving at the ceiling saying bye-bye. He often talked to the 'ceiling,' so we started asking who was there and what were they saying, just kind of playing along with his game. He wasn't saying real words yet but we wanted to encourage talking. When I asked him, the closest I can spell of what it sounded like was 'annel' or 'anyul.'

    A few months later, I was laying on the floor looking through an old photo album. My son came 'walking' over saying hi and laughing. I said hi back, but he wasn't talking to me. He started chatting with a picture in the album and was waving and 'talking' to it. It was my mom's graduation picture from nursing school. He had first met my mom when he was six months old and only a couple of times between then and when she passed. I asked if he knew who that was, and he put his finger right in the middle of the picture and said 'Anyul... ANYUL!' He knew what angels were...is that what he was saying? I don't know."

    u/DancesWithElk

    13. This haunted hotel:

    "My brother was working as a night porter at an old hotel from the 18th century in the Northern English countryside. One night, a woman came down to reception as white as a sheet saying she couldn't sleep and didn't want to stay there. When my brother inquired as to why, she said she could hear children laughing all night and that a child had entered her room with a candle, stood at the foot of the bed, and wouldn't leave. My brother mentioned it to his manager the following morning and was told that it was a regular occurrence. Before it was a hotel, over 100 years ago it was a school."

    u/NJW_90

    14. This inexplicable bathroom encounter:

    "I had just started a new job in a really old building. I had to stay a bit later than I normally would and by the time I was packing up to leave, my floor was pretty empty. I needed to use the restroom and as I approached the door I saw someone else open it and go in. I remember vividly that they were wearing a pink shirt and khakis, because that's what I was wearing, too. I was also mildly annoyed, because I don't like being in the bathroom when someone else is in there. After deciding I still definitely needed to pee before the commute home, I went in. The bathroom was completely empty. I don't know how to describe the energy in the room, but it was very tense. Completely silent. I remember being able to hear my heartbeat. After standing completely frozen for what felt like ten minutes (it was probably like 15 seconds), I turned right around and left.

    I had nightmares about that bathroom for weeks."

    u/assasameal

    15. This unexpected houseguest:

    "I was housesitting for my biological mom and stepdad back in June, and was on a video call with my best friend. I was the only LIVING person in that house, but my best friend said that there was a woman standing behind me in the kitchen while I was sitting on the couch with my laptop on my lap."

    u/brittany8671

    16. This ghostly game of ding dong ditch:

    "I used to work night shift in group homes. One night, I was watching TV in the living room after all the residents had fallen asleep. Around 3 AM, the doorbell started ringing like someone was frantically pushing it. I answered, but no one was there. This entry way was very hard to ding dong ditch. The walkway to the front door is a 20-30ft corridor with a 12ft brick wall on either side, so you’d have to run back that entire length and duck around a corner. I still figured I was being pranked by one of our more mischievous residents though, so I checked on them. They were all fast asleep. As soon as I finished shutting the last resident's door, the doorbell started frantically ringing again. Still nobody.

    This time I was determined to catch them, so I turned all the lights off and hid right beside the door. After 20 minutes the doorbell started going insane again, so I jumped out and turned on the walkway lights, but nobody was there. I opened the door, thinking maybe they were hiding to the side of the door like I was. After seeing nobody there, my stomach dropped and I got a feeling of dread. I slowly started closing the door, but when it was almost closed all the way the doorbell started going nuts again and stayed that way for at least 15 minutes.

    It was almost as if whatever it was took great pleasure in mocking and taunting me. I locked the door and ran my ass to the couch, turning on all the lights I could. Another disturbing thing about this is it seemed to read my mind — whenever I got the urge to go outside and smoke, it would start with the doorbell again. It’s like it didn’t want me to forget it’s there and that it was a threat.

    u/bobcatfisher

    17. And finally, this vacation visitor:

    "Me and my family went on a holiday to Indonesia in 2019 and I shared a room with my sister. The first morning, she mentioned that in the night she’d seen someone walk across our room and stare out the window. She’d even heard the floorboards creek as they moved. My sister gets sleep paralysis pretty regularly, so we shrugged it off. Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night to see someone sat at the end of my bed, hands cupping their face as they cried. I thought it was my sister and asked if she was OK. I froze as I realized I could see my sister tucked up in her bed out the corner of my eye. The figure, which was like a living silhouette, was clearly female with long hair tied back in a ponytail. I just kinda slowly laid back down, took out my phone, and started watching YouTube videos. I know that sounds stupid, but I figured there wasn’t much else I could do! Every now and then I’d look up and see the figure still there and then went back to watching my videos. This lasted about half an hour until I looked up and the woman was just gone."

    u/Neverland443

    Have you ever had a real life paranormal experience as spooky as these? Tell us about it in the comments below!

    Some entries have been edited for length and/or clarity. h/t r/askreddit.