We've all had moments where it's an ordinary day and we're minding our business when something extremely peculiar, super creepy, and impossible to explain happens, right? Right? OK, if nothing horror movie–esque has ever happened to you, consider yourself lucky and read about the misfortunes of others. For those who have had extremely unsettling experiences, prepare to feel seen (but not in a creepy, "somebody is watching you right now" way).
The following stories are from this AskReddit thread by LBE that asked, "What is the creepiest or most unexplained thing that’s happened to you that you still think about to this day?"
1."I was camping alone in a small one-person tent. All snug and secure, I went to sleep. I was woken by a clap of thunder at three in the morning to discover both the inner and outer tent doors wide open. That was freaky."
2."My husband took an overnight job to help us out during Covid. One night, he left home around 8:15 p.m. Our daughter and I decided to make it a movie night. Around 11, I heard keys in our backdoor and the usual sounds my husband makes when he comes home. I crept out to the kitchen to make sure it was him, and it was. He told me he needed to grab his knee compression sleeve, he walked down the hall, he said, "Hi" to our daughter as he passed the living room, and he went upstairs. He came back down, gave me a kiss, and left again...
3."I was living in Boston. I woke up at three in the morning because my cat jumped on my bed and curled between my calf. My cat would do this every night since I was 5 years old. That was his spot. The thing is, my cat was living with my parents on the West Coast, so I couldn't understand what the hell I just felt, but I knew it was my cat. I just figured I was dreaming. The following morning I got a call from my parents letting me know that my cat died around midnight the previous night, which was three in the morning my time. I guess that was my cat traveling to Boston to come see me one last time."
4."I was staying with my girlfriend and her mom. My girlfriend's room was built as an extension/add-on to their garage. So you had to walk through their garage to get to her room. One night, I wake up at around one in the morning and the room is just glowing red. I look up at the ceiling and I see this black figure crawling through the ceiling. It moved in such an inhuman way, like it was breaking every one of its bones to move. I start screaming which wakes my girlfriend up and she looks up at the ceiling and starts to scream as well. Instinctively, I grab my pillow and whip it at the figure. The next thing I knew, everything went black and I woke up a few hours later. My girlfriend was fast asleep, so I thought it was just some weird dream. At that point, I had to go to the washroom. So, I walked through the garage and tried to quietly open the garage door to get into the main house...
5."I fell asleep on the couch and got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. When I got there, I realized I didn’t have to go. I went back downstairs to the couch. When I got there, I saw my body still asleep, curled up on the sofa. I don’t remember what happened after, and I know it had to have just been a dream, but it still freaks me out to this day to think about it."
6."There was a kid in my class who no one else remembers. I distinctly recall playing with this kid in kindergarten, and we were pretty much inseparable. About a month after Christmas break he disappeared. No one remembered him. Not the teachers or my classmates. No one. I even asked the school counselor if he was okay and she humored me by going through records to see if he’d transferred. She couldn’t find a thing. I think about it at least once a month."
7."I was about 10, and I saw my grandmother standing at the front door looking outside. She was talking to my dad. I couldn’t see my dad's face because he was turned away from her, but he was shirtless. He had a very distinct mole in the middle of his back, so I knew it was him. He was mumbling something I couldn’t understand. My grandmother was telling him something along the lines of, 'If you love them so much, why did you go and do this?' My mom wasn’t there to see this, because she had left moments before after getting a call letting her know my dad had been driving drunk and hit a mule on the highway. He was in the hospital clinging to life."
8."My nana (great grandma) and mom were very close, but they lived overseas apart from each other my whole life. They talked on the phone every Sunday, but since it was an international call, it was extremely expensive, so they took turns calling every Sunday at 8:00 a.m. to make the cost equal. However, due to a four-minute difference in clocks, my nana always ended up calling at 8:04 a.m...
9."I got this voicemail out of the blue and I still think about it to this day. It was from a number I didn't recognize in Texas. They called twice, early in the morning while I was sleeping, and left this message. The entire thing is unsettling. It's an old woman, and it sounds like a coded message about some type of meeting. The weirdest part is there are two sounds of someone hanging up at the end, so I don't know if someone called me and played a recording? It's really bizarre and creeps me out. I've googled the number various times and have had no luck finding any sort of clue about who left the message or why."
10."In 2009 my wallet and BlackBerry were stolen at a gas station. I replaced my cards and moved on with my life. In 2014 I got a new-to-me truck. It had been a Comcast truck in the next state over. I drove it to my parents house and my dad and I were combing through it, finding things like the spare tire jack and stuff. We found my driver's license under the passenger seat. I figured I'd forgotten to put it away at the dealership and it fell on the floor, so I opened up my wallet to put it in. I already had a license in my wallet. The license that was under the seat was the one that was stolen in 2009. In a truck from a different state, that hadn't been built at the time of the theft, that I happened to purchase five years later."
11."I had a recurring nightmare of a black parasite sucking the life out of me. Sometimes it waited for me to go sleep in dark corners of the room. I was very stressed during that time, and my cats would come sleep in bed with me. I got an itch on my chest where I dreamt the parasite was sucking the life out of me, then I got sick, and felt a pea-sized lump. I went to my doctor and they ordered a biopsy. As it turned out, I had male breast cancer at the age of 28. After I recovered, the dream never came back, and my cats went back to sleeping in their usual places, not on my bed. The dream was creepy, but what made it for me was my cats protecting me."
12.It was just a normal Saturday night, I was home alone watching TV with my two dogs, when I heard a banging sound coming from the basement. It legit sounded like somebody was just banging something on the appliances down there. Now, there's no access into the basement from down there, only through the upstairs rooms that I was in, so I knew nobody could have come in and got past me. With this knowledge, I was not as scared as you might think — more just curious as to what the heck the noise was...
13.I had a short lucid dream and the scene happened in real life a few days later. I am 200 percent sure about it because I keep a diary of my dreams and it matched perfectly."
14."One day, I got home from work with headphones in my ears, on the phone with my mom. I went to the kitchen to grab a snack and I saw my roommate (and childhood best friend) walk out of her room and go into mine. Our rooms were right across from each other, and were very trusting, so we would freely go into each other's rooms to borrow clothes, a hair brush, perfume, etc. She looked like she just got out of the shower, hair soaking wet, wrapped in a white towel. I distinctly remember her long black hair...
