Note: This post contains mentions of animal violence and cruelty.
There's something extra terrifying about creepy encounters that happen during the day since we assume that's when we're most safe. That's why I was on the edge of my seat when u/dcarp1231 asked people, "What’s the creepiest or most unexplained thing you’ve seen in broad daylight?"
Here are some of the responses that gave me goosebumps:
1. "My high school girlfriend and her family all talked about this ghost in their house and always said that it sounded like a man wearing boots walking down the hallway. We were all very close, so one day when they weren't home, I just walked in and went to my girlfriend's room and laid on her bed while I waited for them to get back. Then, a man in boots walked slowly right down the hall, right outside the door to of room where I was laying. I did the next logical thing thing: Climbed out of her bedroom window."
2. "I used to live on a farm and one morning there was a full horse leg on our driveway. Like still had part of the hip attached and was fresh. We sprinted down to our horse paddock to find all our horses completely fine. We disposed of the leg and never got an explanation."
3. "When I was about 8 years old, my family and I were hiking somewhere in Austria when we came across the ruins of a medieval castle on a hilltop. A sign said that there was a cafe near the ruins, so we went up. The cafe was deserted. All the tables and chairs were toppled, and next to the building stood a brand new big Mercedes with a lot of bullet holes in the trunk and the rear window. The car was heavily armored. the rear window was so thick that the bullets hadn't even penetrated it. We turned around on the spot and got out of there as fast as we could."
"Once we were back at the hotel, my dad reported it to the police but they dismissed it. We never knew what came of it." —u/ronin668
4. "I was crossing at a busy intersection and saw my perfect double walk towards me. We basically locked eyes until we passed each other — a total mind-fuck. Even more disturbing: Instead of stopping and chatting and being amused by the entire biological coincidence, my immediate subconscious reaction was a massive rising internal rage that someone, somehow had ‘stolen my face.' Very, very weird."
5. "I saw a zombie. I was working in Kingston, Jamaica at the time in the late '80s when I saw it that day — naked man, ashy dirty skin, eyes rolled up in his head, and stiff limbs just sort of lurching through traffic in Jamaica. I asked my Jamaican crew and they said yes, it was a 'zombie,' but it's because of a drug not magic. They said people do this to people for revenge. And a few weeks later I saw another one. It was an old woman that time."
6. "I was walking down the street on my way to the store when a large dog jumped through a glass window from the second story of a house and landed on the front lawn. I tried knocking on the door and got no answer from them, or any of their neighbors, so I called animal control and stayed with the the dog who other then a few scratches was okay. Once animal control arrived, they called the police to investigate because even the animal control lady had no clue what would cause a dog to do that."
7. "When I was young, me and my cousins found a bloody shirt in our woods. My cousins and their parents hunted so we thought maybe it was from that. But then we found a Ziploc bag with shoes and shorts. It all had to be from an extremely petite woman or an older kid. When we told our uncle about it, we got punished and weren’t allowed to talk about it."
8. "It was 1984. I was 15 years old and was alone at my older sister's house. It was late morning, and I had just got out of the shower. I was still wrapped in a towel when I heard a noise outside. I looked out a window and watched a complete stranger tying the doorknob of the front door to the railing of the deck, with a rope I used to walk the dog with. He then leaned a mop, that was on the deck, against the door. I called my sister, told her what happened, got dressed, got the heck out of the house through a different door, and hid in the bushes until police arrived. The house was somewhat remote with no close neighbors, and I found out later the door he tied up was unlocked."
9. "My dad, brother, and I went to a movie theater one day in Florida. It was around 4 p.m. so it was getting darker but still light out. We went up to the front where you buy tickets and when we looked around, there was absolutely no one in the movie theater at all. No employees, no other guests. We simply walked in, looking all around to try to find anyone we could to purchase a movie ticket, but could find no one else. All the movies in each of the theaters we checked were running but with no one else inside. So we just sat down and watched a movie, then left without seeing anyone else the whole time. It was very surreal."
10. "A man with freshly exposed bone on his arm and missing a substantial amount of skin and muscle walked up to me in a parking lot, asking me calmly for cigarettes. It really freaked me out, so I told him I was calling 911 for him. There wasn't much blood but the guy clearly needed immediate medical attention. He immediately ran off and I gave his description to 911. This was in San Jose on an afternoon about five years ago. The image still gives me nightmares to this day."
11. "A few years ago, I was smoking a cigarette in front of my apartment on the front steps in the middle of the day, around noon or so. I got up to head back, but for a few fleeting seconds while I was looking at the building, it looked totally unfamiliar. I knew I lived there. I knew it was my home. I knew I had just stepped outside only five minutes previously...but my brain was giving me some kind of indication that I had never seen this place before and that there was danger inherent. I violently wagged my head back and forth — like an aggressive 'no' gesture — and was immediately back to normal."
12. "I once had a dream I was walking solo down a dirt path that felt familiar, even though I had never been down that path before. As I walked toward a wooded area, the feeling of familiarity changed and the path ended at an abandoned cemetery. I was drawn in towards a specific grave. There was an old stone bench next to a sunken grave. The headstone had an angel on top with one wing, and a pine needle dangling from it by a cobweb. It drifted in the breeze. Then I woke up. I immediately felt like the dream was calling me back. The jolt from waking up was so startling I decided to write the dream down. Years later, I was looking at houses with my girlfriend. At one showing, the realtor called and said she was running late. Behind the house, we noticed a path past the overgrown grass going into some woods. We decided to walk it to kill time. As we were walking and I was enjoying the sun on my face, I was hit with an intense feeling of deja vu: I knew this place."
13. "In the '80s, my dad was in the Peace Corps and lived in Sierra Leone for three years. He had a motorbike and would ride around the roads when he had free time. One day, he was riding a dirt road that snakes around a small hillside past some construction works. About half a mile after the roadwork, he sees a man on the side of this dirt road on the hillside, just laughing his butt off. And he was blue. Not like painted blue, but blue. At first my dad rode on, thinking nothing of it. And then it sunk in...that he saw a blue dude sitting on the side of a dirt road, laughing wildly. He turned around and rode back to where he saw the blue dude and there was no one there."
"He kept retracing his path beyond the roadwork and never saw the blue guy again. Later that day, he went back to the village he was living in at the time and told the locals about what he had seen. The locals all laughed and said, 'No you didn't. White men can't see devils.'" —u/WhyAmINotClever
14. "It happened on Jan 28, 1986, when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. My family was watching the live coverage of the launch. At the same time, we heard a loud sound from my room. We went to see what the sound was: A poster of a space shuttle fell off the wall."
15. "An older man was watching me at a gas station and then literally followed me for miles around town. Like if I turned into a parking lot and started driving another road, he still followed me. I got on a four-lane road in the left lane and got beside someone, then sped up and merged while taking an exit. The guy was blocked by a pickup truck in the right lane, and I got away. That’s probably the scariest thing I’ve ever had happen in broad daylight."
16. "I was walking past a church one day when I was about 15 years old and standing in front of one of the graves was a cowboy dressed head to toe in pure white. He looked straight out of a movie. His hat, shirt, waistcoat, trousers and boots were all so white, like an incredibly clean white as if he’d only just put them on. He was white, had short brown hair, stubble and was an average-looking guy. I kept staring at him, blinked, and then he was just fucking gone."
"I live in the UK so it was weird to see anyone resembling a cowboy anyway. I don’t know if it was my mind playing tricks on me but I could swear he was there. He looked so real." —u/AnswerConsistent680
17. "It was around the time of planking craze. I had no idea what it was and hadn't heard anything about it. I hailed a taxi into town and was walking around the city centre. Life was normal. Then, I took a turn into the town square and there were around 200 people planking everywhere on everything. I didn't know what was going on. I thought there may have been gunshots or a bomb. Or maybe the world was ending. I then asked someone next to me, they explained it, and we laughed it off. But for that brief moment of time I'll never forget that uneasy feeling."
18. "On a trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama, I stopped to gas up at some run down gas station and truck stop in Mississippi. I went to the bathroom and as I was standing at the urinal, I had the strangest feeling that something was off. This strange feeling overwhelmed the entire left side of my body. I got up on my tippy toes to look to my left, where the stalls were located. There was this deranged looking man with nasty, greasy-ass hair and a fucked up scowl on his face, staring directly at me — the most typical looking psycho killer you could imagine. He had to have been standing on the toilet because I could see his whole face and the upper part of his shoulders."
"I immediately zipped up and got the fuck out of dodge. Didn't even wash my hands." —u/Luney_Tuner
19. "In college, I lived on the 11th floor in an apartment with no balcony and it was about 4:30 in the afternoon. I was walking through the hall and saw a man walk into my apartment about 10 seconds before I walked in. I was living with three roommates at the time, so I just figured they were having guests over, no biggie. I habitually bolted the door behind me, even though it locked automatically on the outside. I put my stuff on the couch and went towards the back bedroom to say hi to whoever came over. Only my roommates were there, and they had no idea who I was talking about."
20. "My dad is a paramedic and one call took him to an SUV that had to be towed out of a river. The car was obviously not working and the two guys trapped inside were already dead. As they pulled the dead guys out of the car, suddenly all the lights flashed on. The windshield wipers started going on full speed, and the car radio blasted at max volume."
"It was creepy, but explainable. And it freaked everyone right out." —u/hamaharg
21. "My family had the car packed up for a road trip because we were moving across the country from the Pacific Northwest to the Rustbelt. We were heading to the highway to get out of town and had to take some weird access road to get there. On the way, there was some man holding a long-barrel rifle to a woman’s head, walking through a vegetable garden. He was holding it with one hand, and had a cigarette in his mouth. The woman was crying. My mom didn’t believe me. I was 14. But I know what I saw."
22. "I was a manager at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center for three years. My office was on the main floor of an 1872 carriage house with lots of history. I mostly hung at the front desk next to the gift shop. This particular day, we had no visitors come in because of rain and sleet. A bit before 5 p.m. I sent the two guides to close up the Stowe house and I was alone. Suddenly, I heard stomping above me in the guide break room. Someone big was stomping around and moving heavy things. At first, I assumed someone broke in. But that didn’t make sense. I could see the main staircase from my desk, and the door to the other one was always locked. I called up to the guide break room where the noise was coming from since it was a two-way phone speaker. The room should have been empty, but I could very clearly hear someone up there. And they sounded angry or upset. I heard them stop at the desk, panting and moving papers frantically. I radioed security."
23. "When I was a teenager, I was at a friend's house when his parents and family were not home. At around 5 p.m., I was outside on his back porch tying my shoes before going back into his house. It was like a 20-second action. But when I walked inside, his entire family was back home, sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner. They were staring at me freaked out, asking why I'd just walked into their house. I asked for the time and they told me it was 6:30 p.m. — I'd lost an entire hour doing a 20-second action. To this day I still have no clue what happened or where the time went."
24. "It was in the winter like 10 years ago or more. We went out to the near hillside to have some fun with our sleds. There were tons of people because it's a really popular spot, so we chose a more isolated part of the hillside. I slid down, then headed all the way back up. As I was pulling my sled behind me, I saw this darkish, centipede-like creature about 20 meters ahead of me, and it was the size of my forearm. It lifted its front part where its head was, took a look around, then quickly retreated into a ditch and disappeared."
"To this day, I haven't told anyone about it because it felt very real to me, but it's so random that I might have just been imagining it. It feels too specific. I was like 14 years old at the time and completely sober." —u/EchoPrivate
25. "When I was a little girl, I was playing in my room one morning with my sister. I looked out my window and saw a man staring in at us. I told my sister to leave my room and ran to get my father. He didn't believe me and thought I was imagining things. I had an awful hard time sleeping that night. Throughout my childhood, I'd hear what sounded like footsteps outside at night, or my parents' car doors opening long after they had went to sleep. Several years later, I looked at our house on Google Maps. I always assumed we lived by ourselves in the woods, far from anyone else. It turns out there was a small house that looked like it was being lived in only a few hundred yards in the woods from us."
26. "Years ago, I was at Walmart picking up some things around noon or so. I noticed a ridiculously dude over 6'6" holding a baby carrier with a blanket over the baby at the end of the aisle, talking on the phone. He knelt down to look for something from the bottom shelf and put down the baby carrier on his left. Then, a woman with bright blue lipstick walked past me, stopped next to him, and grabbed the baby carrier while the dad was juggling the phone call, the baby, and whatever he was looking for. I thought to myself 'Wow, that's weird. I wonder if she's his wife or something.' The guy found whatever he was looking for, reached to pick up the baby, only to realize the baby wasn't there anymore. He froze for a second, then calmly said 'Honey, I'll call you back in a second. I need to locate our child.'"
"I looked at him and he looked me straight in the eyes and asked if I saw a woman with black hair and blue lipstick nearby. I was weirded out and said she was right behind him less than 10 seconds ago. He thanked me and bolted to the front doors.
The woman had tried to leave through the front doors, but was stopped when the man yelled out that she was kidnapping his child. I learned she was a serial stalker from a previous failed relationship. The fact that she was so brazen to go as far as stealing an infant child in public was wild. And it was creepy how calm she looked while he was yelling at her for her actions." —u/Sickmonkey3
27. "It was 2008 during a mountain bike race in the Midwest. It was 100°F. It was such a hot day, and it felt like there was no oxygen in the woods. Three of us were well ahead of the pack. We were about to lap another racer, when he just rode off the trail and down a steep ravine. All three of us stopped. The ravine was steep and very deep. We found his bike half way down, but not the racer. They sent search party and found nothing. To this day he’s never been found."
28. "A tooth just materialized on my kitchen counter one day. Asked around all my family and nobody lost any teeth, no kids lost any teeth, I never lost any teeth, no clue where this tooth came from, it just appeared on afternoon."
29. "When I was 15 years old, my family and I camped in the Grand Canyon during the summer. We went to a ranger lecture around 6 p.m. so it was still pretty light when we were walking back. We went off the trail as a shortcut and came across a light ahead. As we drew closer, there was a man sitting at an office-sized desk with a lantern, in the middle of the woods. I remember he had long sideburns and was dressed like a man from the 1800s. The man never made a peep or looked up or acknowledged us. My dad backed us down towards the trail and we went on our way. I don't believe in ghosts or spirits but have no explanation for what I saw."
30. "I was about 7 or 8 years old at the time. I was with my Mom who was house sitting for my aunt. We were waiting for my stepdad to pick us up. I heard a car door close outside, so I ran to the large viewing window by the front door. I called my mom over saying he was here to pick us up. She thought it was a bit early, so she came to look. He was wearing a purple shirt with a green collar, and a black hat. We both saw him walking to the garage area from the driveway, instead of walking to the front door. Strange. He never came inside so we looked outside and his car wasn't there. My stepdad is a very tall man at 6'7, so it's hard to mistake for someone. She called his cell phone and his work — no answer. After 15 minutes, she called his parents' house. He was over there helping them with their computer. But his parents' house was on the other side of town, at least an hour away. There was no way he could've made it over there in 15 minutes."
"He didn't believe us that we saw him. We described what he was wearing and he couldn't comprehend how we knew. He said that purple shirt with a green collar was a new work shirt he received that day. We had never seen that shirt before. I have no idea what transpired that day but I can't explain it for the life of me." —u/SteveAndHisScooter
31. "Back in primary school, I remember clearly that while waiting to go into the actual school building one day, a lot of students were gathered around a poster taped to the library on the opposite side of our school. I went there to see what they were looking at. I still remember the poster: It was different pictures of cats cut apart, like a picture of a cat's head next to its body and its feet cut off. Many of us were disgusted and frightened. There were like six or so different pictures on the poster. In the middle was a warning: 'Keep your cats inside.' Our teachers noticed because a few kids cried and they had that poster taken down immediately."
"I seriously would like to know what sick person put that up next to a primary school. I remember our parents telling us to not play in the woods because there was a person actively mutilating cats. We knew this, we'd seen the pictures." —u/JoleneGoFuckYourself
32. "When I was 4 years old and my brother was 10, he stayed home from school and my mom left him to babysit me. She left numbers on the fridge for him, stuff for us, and headed off to work. After she left, we heard our dog barking viciously which was completely out of character for her. At this point, my brother and I were in the kitchen waiting for our biscuits in the oven. The sound of Fluffy's barking was getting incredibly louder and she'd moved near the kitchen entrance. My brother opened the kitchen curtains to see if he could get a view as to what’s going on. Right as he opened the curtains, there was a man looking right down at us. The doorknob began to rattle. My brother took me with him, ran to the living room, and grabbed the phone. As soon as he got on the phone, the rattle stopped. My mom came home and at the same time the police showed up for a statement. They never found the guy."
33. "It was our end-of-8th-grade field trip, and we were on a campground owned by a church. We were free to explore the land. There was a small river with a wide pebble beach and there were lizards running over the pebbles to different areas of brush growing on the beach. I liked trying to catch lizards, so I started chasing them. With my hands extended almost touching the lizard, I followed one until it crawled across something that wasn’t pebbles or branches — it was short fur. I recoiled in an instant, and stepped back. The lizard had crawled onto a goat carcass that was half-buried in the sand. There was a pentagram carved into its forehead, and its eyes were milky white."
"There were a lot of partially burned sticks nearby, but weirdly the goat carcass hadn’t started to stink yet. It was probably some teenagers messing around, trying to summon satan or whatever, but it was an incredible moment of shock. I only realized what was happening when my hands were inches away from the dead carcass." —u/momunist
34. "When I was a teenager, I saw an old man who looked about 70 years old open up a sewer grate, and just hop in."
35. "Not me, but my Dad. He was outside at the far end of the yard and saw me standing on the stairs, whistling for him to come back to the house. When he got back inside he asked what was up and why I changed my shirt. I hadn't been outside, didn't hear any whistling, and was wearing the same black shirt I'd been wearing all day, not the white shirt he saw 'me' wearing when he saw me outside a few minutes earlier."
36. "When I was about 9 years old, my mother was driving us four kids home past a school. Suddenly, there was a screech in the opposite lane. I looked and school kid my age was flying in the air, then landed in the middle of the road. My mother stopped to see if she could help. The injured kid was facing our direction about 10 feet away from me. I leaned out the car window to see him. His shocked grey eyes opened wider as he looked straight at me, mouth slowly opening as if trying to speak. It was like he was trying to tell me something urgent. He didn’t show pain and there was no blood, but his head was twisted the other way from his body. The kid kept staring at me and I could not stop looking back at him. I felt like if I blinked, I would let him down. I had to keep meeting his eyes and hear what he wanted to say. My mother realized she had 4 kids watching and we heard an ambulance on the way, so she drove off. She wouldn’t listen to my plea to stay."
37. "I was about 11 or 12 years old and walking to my friends house a few blocks away, when randomly a dime hit me right in between my eyes so hard that it bruised. There were no tall buildings around. No car drove past and, to my knowledge, there were no planes above. It was probably the weirdest thing that’s happened to me."
38. "As I was walking through the grocery store one day, I looked down an aisle and clear as day, my great uncle was at the end. He looked straight at me and waved. I walked by the aisle before my brain registered what happened: My great uncle died 22 years ago. I took a step backwards, and he was gone."
39. "My father and I are window cleaners. We were working a vacant home from the 'Roaring 20s' era — giant chandelier, wrap around spiral staircase, checkerboard flooring with fancy carved golden trim. I could write paragraphs on this home. It was big, bold, and beautiful. My father was upstairs cleaning the main bedroom windows and listening to music through a speaker. It was a track from the '70s. I was coming upstairs and the sun outside hit the chandelier, momentarily blinding me. It was like a flash bang, and I was stunned for a second. When I recovered, there was no more music and the whole house felt different. It was almost the same, but it felt like there was one small thing that I could't identify that had changed. I asked my dad if he was listening to music, and he told me 'No, but that's a great idea,' and started playing music from his phone. It was the same song I heard when coming up the stairs, but from the beginning."
What's a creepy or unexplained counter that happened to you in broad daylight? Let me know in the comments, if you dare.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.