"His Spirit Has Been Looking Out For Us" — Here Are 25 Paranormal Experiences That People Say Actually Happened, And I'm Low-Key Freaking Out

I am hiding under the covers.

(Spooky Narrator voice) Hello and happy October, little BuzzFeeders. Since it's spooky season, I recently asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to share their wildest experiences with the paranormal. I got some seriously scary stories in response — as well as a few heartwarming ones. Here are a few of the best; read on if you dare.

1. "Back in October 2005, when I was 15, my family and I were living in an apartment above an Esso gas station in Bostrak, Norway. One night I had a very lucid dream of a little blonde boy, probably aged eight or nine, crying in our living room. He was wearing a striped t-shirt with a silver star printed in the middle of his chest. When he saw me, he spoke in Swedish."

Southern Lightscapes / Getty Images

"I'm Norwegian, so I understood what he was saying, especially 'bus accident.' He kept pointing down to the Esso station. I woke up (it was October 31), convinced a bus was going to crash into [the station]. I told my mom and dad EVERYTHING about the dream, and my dad told me to get a grip, nightmares happen. That didn't stop my high anxiety. Every bus that stopped to deliver packages I was sure would crash. Nothing happened.

BUT, that evening, my siblings and I went down to the station to buy snacks for a horror movie marathon, and I saw a newspaper headline: 'Bus Accident in Tenerife.' It had a picture of a bus in front of a Shell gas station. Naturally, I bought it, because it was a Swedish tourist bus that went off the road in Tenerife, not too far from the airport there, with 28 people on board. A Norwegian tourist leader died. 

Front and center [in the article] was a picture of two blonde boys crying in the aftermath of the accident. One of them was young, aged 8 or 9, in a striped t-shirt with a star print in the middle. HE SURVIVED. 

I don't believe in psychics, mediums, witches, or anything paranormal. But I still have the paper to remind myself I don't know sh*t. How can a little boy appear in a dream of mine (a stranger!) to warn of an accident happening as it was happening on October 30, 2005? I haven't had anything like that ever happen to me again. I still can't explain it." 

—creepitreal

2. "My dad passed away when I was 15. On several occasions, it has seemed like his spirit has been looking out for us since."

Witthaya Prasongsin / Getty Images

"One such occurrence was when my niece was a toddler. She was upstairs in her bedroom, asleep, while my sister and I were downstairs watching TV. Since the TV was on, we couldn't hear my niece choking on her own vomit — she had been fine when she went to bed, and we had no idea that she had become sick so quickly. All of a sudden, a framed picture of my dad as a baby dropped from where it hung on the staircase, the frame shattering all over the stairs. We ran to clean up the glass when, closer to her room, we could hear my niece in distress. It has often felt to us like that was my dad getting our attention that night to save his granddaughter's life."

—padawanryan

3. "Not me, but my cousin. We were very close to our grandmother, and things got a little spooky for my cousin the year after our grandmother's passing. Our grandmother was allergic to kiwis. A couple of weeks after the funeral, my cousin was feeling really sad and having a general mopey day. She went to the fridge where she had a four pack of kiwis, and took two and ate them. The next day, she went back to her fridge for breakfast and saw that the package (still opened) had four kiwis."

George D. Lepp / Getty Images

"Around the one-year anniversary of her passing, my cousin spoke out loud to our grandmother before going to work, saying that she missed her. Upon her return home, she found a birthday card that my grandmother had written her laying on the floor. The card had been safely stored inside of a book, on a bookshelf, and there were no pets or other people living there besides my cousin. It was a very nice moment for her."

—pizzaandposies

4. "I've worked in historic houses for years. The number one question I'm always asked is if the house is haunted. I was always able to say 'no' — until one weird day. Keep in mind, I've always been respectful and remembered that this was once someone's home; people lived, loved, and died here."

Jon Lovette / Getty Images

"Anyway, one day I was closing up and had locked the only entrance. I was alone. I accidentally slammed the basement door shut after turning off the lights. It was so loud, I automatically said out loud, 'Ohhh, sorry!', like an idiot. 

Then I heard a woman on the floor above me laughing. Again, I was completely alone. At least I amused the spirit! She knew I meant no harm. I was never scared there, I stayed respectful and was left alone."

—Anonymous 

5. "I lived in a spooky dorm my freshman year of college. It was built on the site of the Confederate cannon line from the major Civil War battle that took place in our town, so it was bound to have some bad omens around. We had several things happen to us. For instance, my friends lived in the room next door. Nightly, their door would fly open. It did not matter if it was deadbolted; the door would fly open anyway. [My friends] would run into the hallway, but there was never anyone there."

Masebrothers / Via media.giphy.com

"One evening as I sat alone on my bed watching TV, a box just shot out from under my bed, all on its own. Nobody was around, as it was a Friday night and everyone had gone to dinner.

Perhaps the strangest was one weekend when things went from spooky to downright scary. My friends (next door) were both going out of town. I knew this, but as I sat at my desk, there was knocking coming through the wall. I thought they were still there, so I played along and knocked back a few times. Each time, I was met with more knocks. 

When I texted them about it, they were both confused; they'd already left campus, and no one was in their room." 

—user2250

6. "When I was 13, my family stayed at a friend's old farmhouse while traveling through the area. When I was going to bed, my mother told me that someone had once passed away in the room I was sleeping in. Then she wished me goodnight. (She has a fucked up sense of humor.) After I finally fell asleep, I was awoken to the feeling of a hand pressing onto my forehead, as if my temperature was being taken."

Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo / Getty Images

"I felt it touch my hair. When I opened my eyes, there was a shadow of a woman beside the bed leaning over me. In the dark I thought it was my mother, so I just tried to brush her away and went back to sleep. The next morning when I asked why she came into the room so late she told me that she hadn’t, she’d actually gone to bed right after me."

—synroche

7. "One night shortly after my good friend passed away, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, and suddenly, he was sitting right next to me."

10,000 Hours / Getty Images

"He told me he was okay, and that I would be okay too. I asked him what it was like to die. I don’t remember what he said, or anything else after that. I woke up the next morning normally in bed. I wasn’t tired [when it happened, and] was totally sober. He came to me. It meant everything."

—Anonymous 

8. "Little did my parents know when they purchased their 1911 dream home, their second born would be best friends with the little girl in the attic. Ever since I can remember, [I've known] things I shouldn't be able to and [have seen] things that weren't technically there. As a young child, my parents played [these things] off as 'my imaginary friends.' Time went on, I grew up, but my imaginary friends never went away. One 'friend' in particular stayed close to me for a long time. She began peering in my doorway at age 3, and she aged alongside me. Years after the little girl first appeared, my family and I were cleaning out our basement. Above the exposed rafters, my brother uncovered a stack of old photographs."

Ralf Nau / Getty Images

"On top of this pile of dusty images was my 'imaginary' best friend, and beside her face was a name. Jane. 

Jane would come into my room almost nightly. She would walk down the attic steps, stare at me through my doorway, and enter my room, sometimes playing with my things but always praying at the foot of my bed. 

Jane would finish her nightly visit by walking down the stairs to the family living area. When our alarm was set, she would set the motion sensors off — still, my parents never believed me. They said it was dust. I spent the next few years sleeping with my lights on so Jane wouldn't startle me so much, and soon, as I aged, I began to see her less and less. At 15, I stopped seeing her altogether. 

She became more of a feeling, or a voice I would hear at times of struggle: a spirit I credit with saving my life more than once. After finding her photograph, it became my most prized possession, and I stored it in a china cabinet in our kitchen. It wasn't  the most secure location; one afternoon when I was 15, our kitchen had a fire, and the stack of pictures burned. 

In adulthood, I started stretching my psychic muscles and seeing things again, which reassured me the whole thing wasn't just my imagination and made me long for Jane, who I'd last seen 20 years ago. I began to want to know if I could prove through documentation that she was really a natural person who died in childhood.

Thankfully, with time, genealogical websites became very proficient, and I researched my house and the families who've lived there. Then, in an obituary in a 1918 newspaper, I found her. Jane Hill Patrick was born on July 19, 1903, and died on July 24, 1918 of Rheumatic Fever. She died in my home; the address was listed in her obituary because her wake was held in our house. She died at 15, the same age I was when I stopped seeing her and when the picture burned. 

Thankfully, through my research, I've located her brother's child. Her now 90-year-old nephew had only ever heard stories of his aunt; however, he did have a photograph. He graciously shared with me the only known remaining image of her. The face I saw was unmistakable. It was my earliest friend and my favorite spirit, Jane."

—Anonymous 

9. "Hauntings were part of my childhood experience. My siblings and I all had our own individual encounters. My very first memory was when I was around six, and my bed started to shake, really bad. It happened regularly. I usually hid, very still and very quiet, under the heavy wool blankets of my bed. This time was too much, and instead of hiding I just started to scream as I laid there."

Artmarie / Getty Images

"I recall seeing my sisters open my bedroom door and just stand there with their big eyes and mouths agape. My mom ran in and turned the light in and my bed felt like it dropped. My sisters later said that I had screamed that there was an earthquake under my bed. 

From then on, sh*t got weird. Lights and stereos would blast on, and we'd take refuge outside until my parents came home from work, or my older siblings came back from wherever they'd been (it was the 80s). We never felt able to go down the hallway without running - it felt like a being was there, watching, waiting." 

—Anonymous 

10. "I swear my mum is still present in my dad's house. She died in 2007, and we played her favorite song, Three Times a Lady by Lionel Richie, at her funeral. Late on the night after her funeral, I was watching the music channels and that song came on. I changed channels quickly as I was obviously still emotional, and as I did all the sympathy cards on the shelves moved, as though someone had run their hand across them. I put the song back on!"

Steve Jennings / Getty Images

"Since then, every now and then she’ll make herself known: all my old posters came off the wall in the night, my very heavy CD rack has been pushed over, and sometimes my bed shifts as though someone has sat down on it. I find it comforting."

—rachelarmitage2

11. "We used to live in an old house in Virginia, and weird but easily explained or dismissed things often happened. Things like cupboards being left open, things placed in the fridge that didn’t go there, etc. Nothing convincing. But one day I was home alone and I 100% heard a child’s voice very clearly say 'Mom?'"

mikroman6 / Joshua Reynolds / Getty Images

"I looked everywhere and there was no one home, no one outside, no TVs on or anything. From then on, that became a regular occurrence. Especially if I was in the bathroom or the kitchen. It still gives me the chills. I was glad when we moved."

—Anonymous 

12. "I’ve had several paranormal experiences, but one really stands out. In 2012, I was finishing my senior year of high school. My bedroom was in the basement of our house. I woke up one night because a voice in my head was telling me I was being watched. Standing at the foot of my bed was a man. He had smoke coming off him, looked kind of like he was charred, and was wearing a long coat and cowboy hat with no clearly defined features except for the most electric blue eyes. He stared at me for what felt like hours, but was more like a few moments. That’s all I remember."

Likozor / Getty Images

"Years later, I was talking to my brother about paranormal experiences and told him that one. My brother was living in Georgia in 2012. When I told him that story, my badass West Point grad, Army Ranger brother got tears in his eyes and told me he saw the exact same apparition in the same year. Except his walls bled. That's of the weirder ones."

—Anonymous 

13. "My house had a lot going on for awhile, and it started with the kids. My youngest son was the main target: he said his bed was being shaken. Once, we were in the kitchen together and he was pouring milk for cereal when his arm went up like it had been bumped and he spilled milk all over the counter."

Chris Clor / Getty

"Another time, I had something grab me by the leg and try to pull me out of bed. My husband was next to me, but I was frozen with fear and nothing would come out of my mouth. 

I've experienced the bed shaking and and unexplained breezes around my bed in a closed room. Things have calmed down since the kids grew up and moved but I have taken videos in the house and seen orbs floating around." 

—Anonymous 

14. "I was working an opening shift at a food place in the mall. My friend worked at another food place, and I saw him walk by my store that morning to go out for a smoke break. We looked at each other and said hey. He was quiet and shy, as am I, and he went on and I continued working on opening the store."

Kim Steele / Getty Images

"Not even a few hours go by, and I got a call from our mutual friend. He told me that our friend had passed away that night. 'But how, I just saw him?' I said. There was no explanation. It was heartbreaking. 

I still to this day see that morning in my head. His other coworkers swear they saw him as well, and I never will doubt it."

—Anonymous 

15. "This isn't a ghost story, but I'll give it a shot. I was visiting a friend who had been going through a rough patch and he said he really appreciated me coming to visit him. I randomly thought of that Bible verse about showing hospitality to strangers because you may be entertaining angels unaware (it's Hebrews 13:2)."

Oliver Rossi / Getty Images

"I momentarily felt an odd sensation: I was sitting down, but I suddenly got the kind of feeling you get if you've been sitting down for a while and stand up too quickly. It passed just as quickly as it came but my friend said, 'That was weird — were you just thinking about where it says in the Bible you may invite angels in by being hospitable to strangers?'

I've heard stories before about people supposedly experiencing telepathic communication. I think these people are being sincere when they tell these stories, but most of them can be explained by coincidence, or subconsciously reading body language and getting the idea of what the person is thinking about. My experience was NOT like that. This was a very specific thought, and we weren't talking about anything similar at the time." 

—Anonymous 

16. "When I was about 9 years old, I was staying with my maternal grandmother. She lived in the country in a old farm house my grandfather had built in 1920s. My grandmother and I shared a room with 2 twin beds. It was the middle of the night and I woke up to a man standing at the foot of my bed, just nodding his head."

CBS / Paramount / Via media.giphy.com

"I was terrified and closed my eyes tight shut. When I opened them back up, he was gone. 

The following morning I told my grandma about what happened, and she went and got a picture I had never seen before. It was a picture of my late grandpa; I had never met him because he passed in 1956. He was the man I saw at the foot of my bed the night before. Thank you grandpa for such a great memory."

—Anonymous 

17. "At the end of my hometown, there’s a big, dark forest, and unsurprisingly, there are a ton of stories about it. I believe this one from firsthand experience. The story goes that decades ago, to celebrate the first day of June, a school was having a picnic in the woods when a little girl wandered off to pick flowers and was never seen again. If you go into the woods in the first of June, they say you might meet her, and that she’s not scared or sad or anything, just picking flowers peacefully."

Rudolf Vlcek / Getty Images

"When I was a dumb 13-year-old, I decided to see if that was true. I walked into the woods on the first day of June. And I heard a little girl laughing. I jumped, like, a foot in the air and turned around to see if anyone was there. There was no one, just a pile of uprooted flowers. I've never fucked around with the supernatural after that."

—Anonymous 

18. "I want to preface this by saying I was very skeptical prior to this experience. In 2011 my mom and I visited the Queen Mary, a reportedly haunted ship. We were in the pool area and I went off by myself because I figured that my best chance to experience something was to be alone. As I stood on the opposite side of the pool as everyone else, I felt this hard tug on my shirt."

Topical Press Agency / Getty Images

"I kind of brushed it off until about 1 minute later when the tour guide said that a little girl died in the pool and the main way she likes to let people know she’s still around is by tugging on their shirts. After that experience I am a firm believer in the paranormal."

—Anonymous 

19. "I work in an old courthouse that is, no question about it, haunted. Historically, the building hasn't been just the courthouse, but the building where all county offices (and the jail) were housed. My office used to be upstairs in what used to be the county clerk’s office, and when I worked up there, odd things would happen."

Catherine Mcqueen / Getty Images

"In my first encounter, I was there alone, and I heard what sounded like papers being shuffled through near my coworker’s desk. But he hadn’t left any papers there, and anyway, there wasn’t a fan or vent. I left quickly after that. 

The next time, my coworker and I were up there together and something started knocking on the walls while we were talking — and then it would stop [as soon as] we stopped. It happened a few times in a row, then we told it to stop, and it did.

My boss once said when he was up there once he stepped out to do something and when he came back one of the phones was off the receiver. We have affectionately taken to calling the ghost Judge Haunty."

—samanthae4ef54d0a6

20. "Does lucid dreaming count? I took a nap one day, and woke up within my dream to my room exactly as it was when I had fallen asleep. The only reason I knew I was still dreaming was because my deceased pets were trying to get into the bed for snuggles."

cjp / Getty Images

"Then I looked over my shoulder and saw a pale child, maybe no older than 10, dressed in dirty Edwardian style dress. He walked into my room through the already opened door with a blank expression on his face.

He didn't see me, he just walked slowly into my room directly toward the back wall. I woke up not too long after I saw him and I couldn't shake this feeling that I used to know that child, and had been visited by more than just the ghosts of cats and dogs when I slept."

—mo2758

21. "While watching TV one night, I fell asleep in the recliner in the living room of my 1835 home. I woke up once, but was too tired to go upstairs so I turned off the TV and went back to sleep. I awoke later to see a young woman leaning over me, watching me sleep."

Warner Bros. / Via media.giphy.com

"I immediately sat up, startled. She straightened up, smiled, then turned and started to walk away. I was wide awake and I knew I wasn't dreaming. She was as real as could be, with long, reddish brown, frizzy hair. She was wearing a dark, high-collar Victorian dress, with a white apron with large straps. As she started to walk away her left side vanished into the television and its stand, and then she completely disappeared. I looked at my phone and it was 2:18 a.m. It was, of course, very memorable. Not frightening, but exhilarating."

—Don A. 

22. "Once when I was a teenager and nearly finished with high school, I was alone one night at home. My mother was a single parent as my father had died a couple of years before, and she was working nights as a nurse. We had a set-up where I'd wake her up when I came home from school in the afternoons and make dinner for the both of us, and then she'd head into work as I started on my homework."

Tara Moore / Getty Images

"That particular night I'd seen my mother off to work and finished my homework and everything when I realized I'd forgotten to take out the trash when I got home for the day. It was already pretty late, and really dark outside, but the trash bin was just on the other side of the car port. We also lived in a reasonably safe neighborhood, so I didn't see a reason why I shouldn't take it out.

I flipped on the dim exterior light that really only illuminated the trash bin and single corner of the carport and walked out with the trash. When I walked outside, I realized that it was really dark, much darker than usual for that time of night, and I reasoned it was most likely due to cloud cove. I quickly disposed of the trash and closed the bin, and when I turned around to go back inside I stopped dead in my tracks. In front of me was this human-sized being of pure light. 

It struck an unnatural level of fear into me. I remember being frozen in shock, staring at it and trying to make sense of it. It stood with its glowing arm extended towards me, completely unmoving. Looking back, I have never been able to really articulate just how horrifying this thing was; it didn't move, it didn't make any sound, it simply was, and it didn't fade away or disappear when I blinked. I don't really remember how I got away from it, I just know that a few minutes later I was standing inside my house, with the door locked behind me, shaking like a leaf and crying like a toddler. I've never been able to figure out what I saw or what it wanted from me."

—Anonymous 

23. "We created a Ouija board from scratch, because we read it made them safer. My best friend and I put my rocking chair under my bedroom door knob to keep my mom out and tried for hours to get the board to work, but nothing happened. We went to sleep. I was awoken by my dog, digging at the bed and yowling."

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"Before I could grab the dog, she launched herself off the bed, crawled under it, and continued to dig and yowl. Simultaneously, the door to the bedroom flew open, sending the rocking chair across the floor. It slid directly to the end of the bed and rocked violently. 

As if on cue, my bestie sat bolt upright in bed and yelled 'George, stop it!' The chair stopped rocking, the dog stopped digging, and the bedroom door closed itself. My bestie laid back down and was sound asleep. This was 40 years ago. She doesn’t remember, but I’ll never forget! We might have failed to talk to bad spirits through the board but clearly we had invited them into the house. 

P.S., we found out YEARS later that my bestie’s house was built by a sea captain whose first name was George."

—Anonymous 

24. "At my elementary school, there were rumors that a child who went there had once murdered another child, on school grounds. I have gone out of my way to not learn details about it, because I’m a pretty sensitive person and I think it would really upset me, but at that school weird things happened."

Maskot / Getty Images

"Several times doors slammed by themselves suddenly, and lights flickered on and off. A lot of times, there would be knocking on the doors to classrooms, but when you opened the door no one would be there. Once the fire alarm was pulled and everyone thought the building was actually on fire, but it wasn’t. Someone had pulled the alarm, but the security cameras showed that there was no one in the hall when it happened. I was not sad to move on to middle school, I’ll say that much."

—Anonymous 

25. And finally, "When I was in middle school, a ton of weird stuff happened on the second floor girls’ bathroom. Doors slammed. Lights flickered a ton. Sometimes the mirror would somehow get fogged up and weird messages like “HELP” would get written in the glass. Every girl at the school knew it was haunted and we all tried our best to avoid it at all costs. But it makes me think, did someone die in a middle school bathroom? Because I literally cannot think of a worse way to go."

A24 / Via media.giphy.com

—Anonymous 

...I wanted to end on a little bit of a funny note. Some of these would literally traumatize me for life! But some of them are very sweet. I loved all of these, so if you have any spooky stories you'd like to share, seriously, leave them down below!