Recently, I shared stories from people who had some bizarre unexplained events happen in their lives. They were so bone-chilling that it actually prompted more of you to share the terrifying, heartbreaking, and creepy things that have happened to you (or someone you know) that you can't explain. Here are just a handful of the 150 responses:
1. "I worked the evening shift at a hospital, and my drive home included a straight, flat road lined by tall trees. Suddenly, a ball of fire came streaming vertically out of the sky dead center ahead of me. It was about the size of a basketball followed by a very long flame. It looked like it was about 20 feet away. It was August, and I assumed it was kids with leftover 4th of July fireworks. I quickly checked the rear-view mirror to see if any cars were behind me as I stepped on the brake pedal. No cars."
2. "My mother, brother, and I had just moved to a new place. It was an old World War II house that had been extensively renovated (except the intensely dreadful basement). About a week or two after settling in, we started to notice things like the TV turning on and off or the radio flipping on and blaring static. One day I was in the shower. No one else was home. I closed and locked the door, as always, and had a shower. I felt a bit of a breeze and turned to look out the shower door — the bathroom door was wide open."
"I gasped, stepped out, shut and locked the door, AND jiggled the handle to be sure it was tightly locked, not able to ‘blow open’ by itself. I step in the shower again and again feel the draft. I looked over my shoulder, and the bathroom door was wide open again, and right in front of me was a figure in the shower steam, an actual human figure almost mimicking what I had been doing: washing my hair.
I stood stunned, slammed the shower door shut, wrenched open the window to the city outside, and tried to calm myself by looking at all the cars, people, and normality outside. Still say that house was haunted."
—Ella, 40, Canada
3. "I was 35 years old and commuting on the Tube near London. The doors opened, and a girl walked in and sat directly across from me. The strange thing is I knew her. She was my 5-year-old self. I was dumbstruck and quickly glanced around to see who she was traveling with. No one seemed to be with her. I turned back to look at her again, and she was gone. Vanished. There wasn’t a stop in the seconds that I looked away, and if she was walking away, I would have been able to see her. If that wasn’t freaky enough, I heard my young 5-year-old voice say, 'Look around.' When I did, I saw the name of a station that I had not been to, but I knew it led to a mission I kept wanting to visit. I signed up as a volunteer for that mission the very next day."
4. "Eight years ago, my husband died without warning in the middle of the night. I heard him cry out, and l jumped up and turned on the light, asking him if he was okay. He didn’t answer and didn’t seem to be breathing. l called 9-1-1 and did CPR until the EMTs got there, but they were unable to resuscitate him. I called my sons and told them their father had passed, and they came over right away. By then it was getting close to sunrise. As the sky got lighter, we sat there in shock."
"It was very quiet, then suddenly, my husband’s PC turned on and started playing music all by itself. No one had touched it or was near it. Not only that, it was playing three different Beatles songs at the same time! l don’t think that’s even possible, not with the software we had. My husband and l were huge Beatles fans from childhood, and he was a professional musician.
The three songs playing simultaneously were his three favorite harmony works of theirs. He used to practice singing those harmony parts. l feel that he was in shock at having passed over and was desperately trying to let me know he was still there."
—Anonymous
5. "When I was a kid, we were returning at night from a vacation and driving through a rural area near our town. I was half dozed off but noticed us slowing down and a whole bunch of vehicles pulled over on either side of the road, some with people standing next to their vehicles staring at something. I look to the top of a nearby hill, and there is a huge oblong ball of orange light floating above the hill. My parents refused to stop and insisted that I was just dreaming, doing what they could to encourage me to go back to sleep."
6. "When I was 16, my older sister and I were visiting cousins out in the countryside. On our way home, she decided it was a good time to teach me to drive without me having any prior experience. She pressured me into doing it, and it was clearly not a good idea. She told me to take an upcoming exit on a downhill ramp but failed to mention to use the brake to slow down. We went 70 mph air born off the ramp, rolled down the hill, and wrapped around a tree."
"Miraculously, we survived, but I ended up in the back passenger seat and the entire driver's side was crushed around tree. Then I heard a voice asking me if I could kick open the back passenger door. I tried briefly but passed out. Next thing I knew, we were outside the car, but because of us rolling, the metal doors were pressed shut, so I have no idea how we got out. I then see an ambulance arrive, and they had no idea either — all that was left from that voice was a bloody handprint."
7. "I was 16 years old when my mom died. I was devastated to say the least. At 21, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a city two hours from where I grew up. One morning, I was feeling really down and made it worse by suddenly thinking about the horrors of my mom’s three-year battle with cancer. I began to cry and was just really missing her at that moment. Suddenly, the phone on my nightstand rang. When I picked up the receiver and said, 'Hello?' a woman asked, 'Is Lois there?'"
8. "Several years ago, I was walking toward my train station around 5:45 a.m. It was pitch black except for some street lights. I noticed something flying above the train platform and land on it. It was a giant beetle with wings, like a foot long. I live in Canada, and there is no way we have any insects that big here. No one else was around to see it, but I know what I saw."
—Anonymous
9. "When my husband and I lived in Houston, I would go the few miles east to Memorial City Mall to walk on weekend mornings. I spent my expected time walking and, feeling quietly relaxed, headed west on Memorial Drive toward home. Although the four-lane street was usually heavily traveled, only a few cars were out this early. I was traveling in the left lane with two cars ahead. Suddenly I heard a voice say, 'Get behind the green car.'"
10. "Once when I was very little, before school age, my mom lost something very valuable. It was missing for a few days, and after the second or third day, I had a dream that I found it on a shelf in the garage. The next day, when my mom was lamenting about her missing item, I told her that I knew where it was, and I went out to the garage to find it exactly where it had been in my dream. She demanded to know how I knew where it was and didn't believe that it was a dream. Thirty years later, I asked if she remembered the incident because I couldn't recall what the missing thing was, but she doesn't remember the situation at all."
—Anonymous, 34, Missouri
11. "When I was younger (around 10-ish), I woke up one night and saw a black figure with red eyes in the corner of my bedroom. I turned on the lights and ran downstairs to my parents' bedroom. The house we lived in at the time was the one my dad had grown up in and repurchased as an adult. He told me he used to see things as well. I always had intense and what felt like irrational fears growing up. I'd see things and even hear voices."
12. "I was a teenager when I had a dream about a woman who looked a lot like my mother. In the dream, the woman told me that she was my mom’s sister and that her name was Ida. The woman appeared to be in her 50s. This occurred in the early 1960s. After I woke up, I remembered the dream and thought it was strange because I didn’t have an aunt named Ida. I told my mother about the dream, and she said, 'I did have a sister named Ida. She died when she was 9 years old.' As an adult, I did some family research. I found Ida’s death certificate. She died in 1921 at the age of 11 years old."
—Lenora, 75, California
13. "When my grandma was 30, she needed surgery. While under anesthesia during the surgery, she had a dream about her father. In this dream her dad came to her, gave her a big hug, and said how much he loved her and that everything would be OK. She always talks about how she remembered how the dream gave her such peace and felt so real. When she woke up in recovery, her husband, my granddad, told her he had bad news: Her father passed away while she was in surgery. She then said, 'I know, he came to me while I was sleeping.' Crazy thing is I’m a nurse and know the meds they give you for anesthesia make it impossible to dream or remember. Still gives me chills to this day."
—Amy, 41, Colorado
14. "One year, my brother, who lives just outside the city, asked me to watch his house while he and his wife were on vacation. I was woken around 3 a.m. by a spectacular thunderstorm so I went downstairs to watch it for a while out the big picture window. While I was standing there, lightning struck something probably a couple of kilometers away. I don't know what it hit, but when it did, a BRIGHT blue dome, that was easily the size of a freaking football field and tall enough to encase those tall grain silos, lit up for about three seconds, and then it was gone. Unfortunately, there was no one to see it but me and the dogs."
15. "My father had come home for his final time as he was entering hospice. As I helped move him back, I was situated on the sidewalk facing my parents' home. Turning east I could see down my parents street. Through a school yard I could see a portion of my aunt’s home. I saw what appeared to be two flames framing each side of her steps. Initially I thought they were the glare off rear taillights of a car, however that was impossible as there was no driveway for a car to enter. I looked again, and the flames were gone."
"This was about 5 p.m. in April and still daylight. After settling my father in, two of my cousins visited after seeing their mother, my aunt, who had been frying food. My cousins left just before 10 p.m. to go back and see their mother.
A few minutes later, my parents' phone rang, and someone told me that my aunt’s home was on fire. I fled back to the same spot I had stood earlier on the sidewalk and could see the flames. She perished in that house fire. The initial moment seeing those two flames remains a vivid and startling memory."
—John, 65
16. "Several years ago, I was crossing the street in front of my apartment building on my way home from work. I was on the crosswalk and had the green light, so not jaywalking or doing anything wrong. Where I live you can make a right turn on a red light, but you're supposed to come to a full stop first. I was almost across the street when the driver of a car in the right turn lane decided she was NOT going to stop. It happened so fast that I was sure she was going to run me over. The car was inches away when suddenly I felt some force pushing me backwards and out of harm's way. Someone or something was definitely watching out for me that day."
17. "I am from Hawaii. We had had a huge party one night and had gone to bed around 1 a.m. I woke up at 3 a.m. with an immense thirst, so I went to the kitchen for water. I happened to look out the window to the carport, which was conjoined with the house behind us. We never used the carport for cars, and neither did the neighbors. Instead, we had picnic tables out there and used it for parties. But when I looked out the window, there was an elderly couple sitting at one of the tables, dressed in all white."
"I figured they were visiting the neighbors. As is Hawaiian custom of 'Aloha,' I asked them if they would like a plate of food. They both said that they would. Still not thinking anything strange, I made them each a plate of food.
I was starting down the four steps from our door to the carport floor with a plate of food in each hand. I started to say something, but they both started fading away. By the time I had gone the four steps, they had completely disappeared into thin air! The food in each hand hit the floor. I ran back into my house and dead-bolted the door! Nothing ever scared me like that."
—Anonymous
If you've had similar inexplicable events happen in your life, let us know in the comments or fill out this anonymous form.
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.