Last year, Reddit user HalfOfABraincell asked the CreepyAsk Reddit community this question: "What is a supernatural event that happened in your life that just can not be explained?"
The thread quickly went viral with thousands of people sharing their own personal ~unsolved mysteries~. Here are some of the top-voted and best stories:
1. "Woke up to a weird feeling, and saw an opaque silhouette of a little boy standing on the other side of the apartment facing me. I turned on my light and it was gone, when I turned my light off I saw it again. Flipped the light back on and went over there to make sure there was nothing that could be causing a weird shadow, etc. There was nothing there that could have created that specific shape and it was standing in the pathway between my couch and wall so it couldn’t have been a shadow. I turned my light off again and it was there, flipped it back on, and slept with the light on for the rest of the night. Couldn’t sleep without the light on for days, LOL."
2. "I had a phase in my mid-teens when I would read the obituaries in the local newspaper. I saw a name that was familiar as it was the same as a family friend. It had his full first, middle, and last names. I didn't say anything to my parents since I figured they already knew."
"A few days later my mom told me he died and I said I knew since I saw his obit. She said, 'He died last night in his sleep.' I went back through the newspapers (my mom kept them for a week before throwing them out) but the obit wasn't there. When the real obit came out it had his first and last name, but just his middle initial. This was almost 40 years ago and I still think about it."
3. "This didn't happen to me, but a very nice old man and his wife used to live a few streets over from us. Well, she got very sick and his son flew in to help watch and care for her. A few weeks later she moved to hospice and later died. The night she died her husband and son drove home and they were talking about what to do for the funeral and the husband asked, 'Do you think she'd want (some person) to attend?' and they both said they heard the dead mom/wife in the back seat say, 'No thank you.'"
4. "I don't know if I'd call it supernatural, but it was freaky and I still don't understand it. I was in the kitchen cleaning up waiting for my kid's bus. I saw it pull up, and saw him get off. He didn't come in, but he'd started playing around by hiding under the window to jump out at me and say boo — or so I thought that's what he was doing. But I walked out and he wasn't there. I called his name and looked around the house thinking he was hiding from me, but I couldn't find him. I circled the house calling for him, and the parent panic set in. It probably only lasted 90 seconds, but it felt a lot longer. Then his bus pulled up and he got off."
5. "There's this place in my hometown called 'Old Town' which is an area they had to evacuate because a mine was there and it made the area unsafe due to sink holes and what not. I was in a class in middle school called Environmental Adventures where you did outdoor stuff and we went to Old Town to do some geocaching. While the class was walking we saw an old lady on a rocking chair on a concrete foundation where a house used to be. She was dressed like an old-timey old lady; like Muriel from Courage the Cowardly Dog."
"She was rocking back and forth, talking to herself while she stared into the woods; not looking at us once. We found the geocache a little down the road, turned around, and her and the rocking chair disappeared. There was no way that she could've of gotten away that fast totting a rocking chair without us seeing her. We were only at the geocache for like five minutes. Confused everybody. Weirdest shit ever."
6. "Woke up one in the middle of the night to a man standing next to the bed staring at my SO. He was slightly translucent and I figured it was just another sleep paralysis episode (had them before so knew the drill), and rolled over and went to go back to sleep. Normally being able to move isn't part of sleep paralysis, so immediately my heart began to race as I realized I need to roll over and check what I saw. Person was still standing there, staring at my SO, then he made eye contact with me. Stared at me for a while before turning around and walking to the wall, slowly fading away with each step."
"Next morning my SO wakes up looking like shit and said she had the worst night's sleep because she kept having the feeling that someone was watching her. Glad we no longer live in that house."
—hmfiddlesworth
7. "One night I had a dream about my Grandpa (who had died almost 20 years prior). We were in his home, and he kept telling me 'We need to clean the house, we need to get the house ready.' When I asked him why, he just said, 'She’s coming home.' My Grandma, his wife of 50 years, died the next day."
8. "Early into my now-wife and I's relationship I had a dream about her in childbirth. Very vivid and long. Like, I spent days in the hospital with her and everything was in a strange twilight. When it came time to deliver things went very wrong and she and our baby ended up passing away. I woke up quite shook, naturally, but brushed it off. I am a nurse and have had to deal with traumatic OB situations before, and I chalked it up to me dealing with that stress through a dream."
"Six years later and my wife is pregnant, I have forgotten the dream by now. I get a call late into the third trimester while I am on shift. Wife is going to the ER for a bad blood pressure. I get off my shift and go to meet her.
As soon as I step into the room I remember my dream. It's the same damn room. Which is extra spooky because the hospital we were at wasn't even built when I had the dream.
This happened right when lockdown started, my wife is admitted and they want to wait a week to deliver if possible, meanwhile, she will be kept in a twilight state until that time. So it's me in this room eerily isolated as the world around us is frozen and my wife is incoherent mere feet away. Lingering for days in this room I brushed off my dream, trying to manage my anxiety and stress.
Come show time my wife gets ready to begin pushing and it's exactly the same scenario as my dream. Things start going poorly, but the doctor thinks delivery is still possible, but at this point, I finally freak out into full panic and demand a C-section for my wife. I can tell the doctor wants to argue but I think my outburst made her step back and reassess the situation, and she made the call for an emergency C-section.
Took 10 minutes for me to get taken back and as I'm in the OR I see my baby come out lifeless. They do everything they can and manage to resuscitate her. In the meantime, my wife is doing poorly and they are scrambling to control her bleeding.
I follow the baby out knowing there's really nothing I can do. Baby gets life-flighted to another hospital, but before we go I see my wife stable and headed to the ICU.
Both my wife and baby are critical but alive.
Today they are both thriving and my baby is 16 months and just a tornado of energy.
I don't know that they would be alive if not for that dream and it causes me to freakout and demand a change in plan."
9. "I was biking down a country road I used to live on, I think I was eight or nine, and on my way home I saw this small humanoid looking being run across the road, from one crop field into a corn field. The only details I could make out, and I still vividly remember, was that it was completely covered in yellow, from neck to feet, and I think it has green on its head. I told my mom about it and all she could come up with was something about Cabbage Patch Kids. Never saw that thing again, but I still think about it from time to time."
10. "Many years ago, my parents had separated and my father was planning on taking a trip across the country to California. He was pretty excited about it. I talk to him the day before he's leaving, wish him well, and tell him I'll talk to him after he gets to California. The day of his trip, he calls me and tells me he decided last minute not to go. Refuses to really get into why. Just says he changed his mind. Seemed really odd for something that he had been planning for a couple months."
"That night I'm sitting at my girlfriend's house and we're watching the news, and they report that USAir Flight 1493 — the flight my dad was supposed to be on — collided with another aircraft while landing in Los Angeles. About 25% of the people on the flight were killed. Hard to know how my Dad would have made out, because it really depended on where you were sitting (front vs. back of the plane).
It was several months before he finally told me that night before he was supposed to leave, he had an extremely vivid dream that he died in a fiery plane crash. So vivid that it scared him out of flying that day.
My dad is a Marine Corps and Vietnam veteran who saw combat. I can only imagine how vivid the dream must have been to scare him out of getting on that plane that morning."
11. "I was very young when all this happened so I don’t have the clearest memories of it. But in the room I grew up in, apparently, I used to scream bloody murder all night because of the 'thing' watching me in the room. I have very hazy memories of being comforted by my parents and I can also remember the feeling I had of knowing I was being watched. Well, when my dad finally paid off the mortgage to the house and received the deed we found out the last owner had died in that room. No idea if these events are connected, but whenever my husband has stayed in that house he’s always actively avoided that room and I prefer to stay well away from it."
12. "Back in 2010, my family and I lived in a really nice home out in the woods and there was always weird things that happened in that home that was unexplainable. One day I was coming up the stairs from my basement and as I rounded the corner I saw a shadowy figure running up the stairs from the main floor to the top floor. I only saw it from the corner of my eye and the figure was gone in an instant."
"Fast-forward a couple years, I have moved on to college and my parents decided they were going to sell the home to downsize. They had just got done repainting most of the walls and I asked my cousin if she could take a picture so I could see how the new walls looked. She took the picture in the back of our living room facing the front of the house — which just so happened to have the staircase to the right — and in the picture was that same shadow I had seen a year prior. She was the only one in the home when the picture was taken and it looks like the shadow is looking right at you."
13. "I was out with my parents and we were late coming back home. At around 2:30 a.m. we were at a traffic signal, a homeless guy comes and knocks on the window of the seat where my mother was sitting. As she rolled down the window to give him money, he said, 'Check what is happening at your brother's house' he then proceeded to take the money and walked away. Probably thinking that he was a bit crazy in the head, we didn't bother and went home. Next morning mom gets a call from her brother's wife. He had had a heart attack — at 2:30 a.m."
14. "When I was a kid (about 10–12-ish) I was carrying a load of laundry upstairs — home alone while mom was out doing errands. We have this weird carpet runner over our hardwood stairs that's only really attached at the top of the flight and otherwise not fitted or secured to each individual stair. With my vision obscured by the laundry, this led me to step on an air bubble on the carpet, which caused me to fall backward while bear-hugging a bunch of blankets."
"I specifically remember thinking Welp, guess I'm about to die while almost airborne (with just my big toe left on the carpet) when I felt two hands, one on either side of my shoulder blades, give me a firm shove that launched me back up on the step and diagonally against the stair rail. I assumed my mom somehow silently came back early without announcing herself, so I turned around to thank her while still clinging to the railing, but no one was there. I scurried upstairs to put my things down while calling her name and walked the house afterward to check if any doors were unlocked or if her car was there. I finally resorted to calling her cell where she told me she was hitting up a few more stores. It still feels like there's a presence on that stairwell — like someone's watching but in a protective way rather than sinisterly."
15. "I was home alone in high school. It looked like car headlights were shining through our kitchen door which didn’t make sense because it was next to a field. I looked out the kitchen door and the lights were coming from about 50 feet off the ground. It was a row of three white lights and one red light. I opened the door and there was complete silence and the whole field was lit up. I closed the door quickly, turned around and it was gone."
16. "Had a premonition I'd be involved in a car accident one morning on the way to work as I got out of bed. It was a very strange thought and I considered taking an alternate route but did not. As I got onto the highway it was raining and a car flew past me, hydroplaned, and slammed into my car."
17. "Well, when I was around six years old I was walking down the stairs no one was behind me, and all of a sudden I remember getting chills then feeling a faint hand on my shoulder before I got basically pushed down the stairs. I was alright, just a few cuts and bruises, nothing serious, but I still remember the feeling of the invisible hand on my shoulder and it haunts me."
18. "As my great-grandfather passed away, my aunt and uncle had an unopened voicemail on their landline answering machine. When they listened to the voicemail, it sounded exactly like my great-grandpa saying, 'God help me' before it faded off. The thing that trips me out the most is how my aunt and uncle requested a log of their incoming/outgoing calls, and there were no calls logged in that time frame. I’ve heard the voicemail. So bananas."
And lastly...
19. "I grew up in a very rural area. Mostly crop farms everywhere. About a mile from my parent’s house there was this old abandoned farm house that all the area kids said was haunted. They would sneak into the house after dark, all the typical stupid kid crap, but I believe there are things in this world better left alone and never went."
"Years pass, the house fell into disrepair and was eventually torn down, leaving just an old weathered barn. Well, I make a little side money selling photos of abandoned places, so I wanted to take a picture of the barn. I parked on the road and was walking up the drive, I made it about 10 feet before I just could not walk any further. My feet wouldn’t move forward, my adrenaline spiked and I burst into tears. So I turned back and ran to my car. I didn’t feel safe until I got past a nearby creek you have to cross to get there.
I let it go, but a few months later we had to drive past the property after having Christmas dinner with my parents and there was a creature standing in the driveway. It reminded me of the Faun from Pan’s Labyrinth, just super tall with a wide head and horns or antlers, but the eyes were more on the side of the head.
Again, adrenaline kicked in and I burst into tears, but I was trying to keep it together because I didn’t want to freak out my kids. My husband asked if I was okay, I just said, 'You saw that, right?'
'Yep'
'Was it human?'
'Nope'
I refuse to drive down that road ever again."
You can read the full thread of responses on Reddit.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.