There are some things in this world that no amount of science can ever explain. Is it a ghost? Is it a psychic vision? The answer is unclear, but these people encountered some of the most frightening unexplainable events possible. Cue the X-Files theme song. Content has been edited for clarity.
There’s No Rational Explanation
“I’m the oldest of 4. When I was a senior in high school, my parents went with my younger siblings to a baseball tournament for their travel teams. This tournament was 4 hours out of state and I couldn’t go because I had work that weekend. So I worked all weekend and slept over my friend’s house at night, who lived across the street from where I worked. So Sunday night comes, I get off work at 10 p.m., and go back to my house. I sit in the kitchen on the first floor and eat my salad I took home from work. About 10 minutes later, my parents and 3 dirty children walk in in baseball uniforms. My mom said her signature line. ‘Okay guys, upstairs and shower all that baseball dirt off.’
So all the little kids run upstairs and shower. My mom follows the kids upstairs to take her contacts out. My dad and I are hanging out in the kitchen eating and talking. My dad then gets up and does what he always does when we get home. He always checks all the locks on the doors and windows to make sure no one broke in. He confirmed everything on the second and first floor, then came the basement. He walked downstairs, got to the bottom stair, and he screamed, ‘WHAT THE HECK?!’
I run downstairs to see that all the furniture from our entire finished basement is crammed into the small room to the side of the staircase: a room we definitely left completely empty on Friday. ‘WHAT HAPPENED?!’ he yelled at me.
‘I DON’T KNOW! I GOT HOME 5 MINUTES BEFORE YOU!’
As completely insane as that was, the most horrifying part (and I swear on my life that this is 100% true) was what I saw next. I looked under the coffee table, which was stuffed into the room with all the other furniture. Under the coffee table sat a crucifix. Not just ANY crucifix though, this crucifix had been nailed to my bedroom wall on the top floor of the house. I stared at the crucifix, silent for a minute, then ran as fast as I could up to my bedroom. No crucifix on the wall, with the nail laying 10 FEET FROM THE WALL on the other side of the room, sharp side facing up. This was insane and quite frankly impossible. Our house had a security system, cameras on all the doors, and a camera that watched the outside of the house. No one had come in or out of the house the whole weekend. No broken locks, no broken windows, and nothing missing from the house. I left cash and expensive jewelry in my room which was still there, so there’s no way there was a robbery.
So we went upstairs, and the consensus between all 6 family members was that no one knew what happened. My mother swears up and down that she vacuumed Friday morning, hours before they left, and all the furniture was in the correct spot when we left. I have no explanation for this and I’m honestly just so happy we don’t live in a haunted house anymore.”
The Woman In White
“I’ve got one from when I was 14 that is still deeply ingrained in my brain. I was walking home from the local library one night down a narrow street, where there was only a footpath on one side (the other side was a railway track). It was already pitch black, and there were very few streetlights along the long, curved road. As I’m walking down the street, in the far distance I see a white blur. At first, I didn’t think too much of it, I just assumed that it was someone dressed in white or perhaps some sort of trick of the light (I’m also a little bit short-sighted). As I get closer, I start to get a little bit more nervous, the white figure started getting bigger and bigger, and it seemed a lot larger than the average person.
As I finally get within distance to get a clearer look at this figure, my heart basically stops. It’s a lady wearing a full wedding dress, including a veil that covered the entirety of her face. Now I’ve seen enough horror movies to know this was the time to turn around and run, but I was literally entranced. I just kept walking forward towards her, trying my best not to look at her until we eventually approached each other. As I was walking past her, I gave a quick glance, which I immediately regretted. I could not see her face at all through the veil. She was very tall (easily over 6 foot) and had a large, intimidating frame. Furthermore, I could not see her legs or feet either which was fine as it was covered, but the way she was walking seemed way too smooth (there was no natural walking movement). She did not look at me, nor did she react to me whatsoever. She just kept gliding forwards, looking directly ahead with no head movement. I also don’t recall her making any sounds whatsoever, in fact I don’t even remember if I heard her footsteps.
As soon as I was past her, I quickly accelerated my walking speed to get as much distance from her as possible. After about 15 seconds of this, I finally mustered the courage to take a quick look back, and what do you know, it’s a literal horror cliché. She had completely vanished. There were no side streets at all, so I rationalized that she must have gone into one of the houses. I proceeded to sprint down the rest of the road until I reached the main street with a lot more lighting. Even from there, I still jogged the rest of my way home. To this day, I still have no idea what I witnessed, and I have never had any other ‘supernatural’ or spooky experiences like that since. I still try to avoid this stretch of road late at night whenever I visit my parents’ house.”
“We’ve Decided To Give Her More Time”
“My maternal great grandmother passed away (quite suddenly, despite her age) around ten years ago, when I was a high school junior. A few hours before she passed away, she called and asked if I wanted to visit her. I wasn’t at home, but it was quite late and I was worried that by the time I went to her house, she’d be tired but feel obliged to stay up to see me. I told her I would drive up to see her the next day. I woke up to the news that she’d passed away and felt incredibly guilty. If I had gone, I probably would’ve been with her while she was passing.
I loved her a lot and wish I had said goodbye properly. About a year later, I dreamt that I found myself in a garden, and that all my deceased relatives were there. I had often dreamt of them before, but it was the first time that she was there. She was seated on a wicker chair. I ran to her, fell to her feet, and started sobbing and apologizing for not visiting when she asked me to. She took me into her arms and comforted me, saying, ‘We can talk about it when you get here, you’ll be joining us soon.’
My maternal grandfather, her son-in-law, interjected and said, ‘No, we’ve decided to give her more time — she still has things to do.’
The next day, I decided to go get some groceries. My mother begged me not to go, and I didn’t understand why and went anyway. Walking back to my car from the store, one of the bags ripped in the middle of the street. It wasn’t crowded, and I didn’t see any cars around, so I knelt to the ground and started picking them up. Suddenly, I felt someone push me backwards extremely forcefully, to the point where I ended up several meters from where I was kneeling. As soon as I looked up, a car sped through exactly where I was and over my groceries. Even ignoring that I didn’t see anyone push me, there was no one close enough to do so. Several onlookers came by to help me up, and every single one said they didn’t understand how I fell back so far and so quickly.
I went back home in a daze and told my mom what had just happened, and she burst into tears and told me she’d dreamt that I was going to die that day.”
“My Heart In My Throat And My Mind Fuzzy”
“I’ve got two instances that come to mind right away that I don’t have explanations for. The first is during Halloween a couple years ago. I took my brother and a few of his friends around our neighborhood and then started making our way to the more well-to-do neighborhood some blocks over. Well, where I live, we have this tunnel that runs underneath a very busy and unlit road that goes directly to this well-to-do neighborhood. I’ve taken this path many times with no issues, but this night, as we were walking along the path, I stop as if I’ve hit a wall. No matter how much I want to move forward and cash in on the king-size candy bars on the other side, my body will not cooperate. My brother and his friends are now a few feet in front of me, and they realize that I’m not with them. They turn around to ask what’s wrong and this feeling of deep dread suddenly pools in my stomach. I tell them that we have to turn around and that we can’t use the tunnel. Understandably, they’re a bit upset and only give a few weak protests, but they double back and we rush home. I don’t know what that moment was or what it was supposed to mean, but it freaked me out and I haven’t been to the tunnel since.
The other time, I was taking a shortcut home to avoid the traffic on the main roads. Well, I have to cross in front of a little back alley near a strip mall and there’s no way to actually see the alley until you’re already passing in front of it (there’s a huge dumpster for one of the businesses blocking the view). Anyways, I always make sure to stop in line with the dumpster and then crawl forward until I can see the alleyway before continuing forward. On this particular day, I was coming up the dumpster and before I could even start slowing down, there was this thought in my head that a car was going to come flying down the alleyway and then swing around and go down one of the connecting side roads.
I still don’t really remember what happened, and it was kind of like an out-of-body experience, but I slammed on the breaks just as a car came barreling from behind the dumpster, hopped part of the curb, and then turned right. I sat there for a moment with my heart in my throat and my mind kinda fuzzy. Had I crept up like I always do, I would have gotten T-Boned and maybe even ended up in the hospital.
I took my time going home and just sat on the couch for a bit thinking over what happened. I’m not sure if it was some part of my mind telling me to be extra careful based on something I had unconsciously picked up on, or maybe someone was watching out for me as my guardian angel. Since that incident, I’ve always paid attention to any intuitions or unusual feelings I get.”
What Did They Release?
“When I was around 12, I was supposed to join some friends and play with an ouija board. Luckily, I was running late, so when I finally arrived, I was let in by my mom. My four other friends had already begun playing. We placed a glass upside-down with smoke inside it. We placed our fingers on top of the glass, and the spirit would supposedly move the glass. The second I entered the room and closed the door, one of my friends blew the smoke out of the glass. As soon as he did that, the window burst open, like it almost fell out of the wall. One of the friends sitting in bed rushed to close the window, but she couldn’t do it. The other two just screamed and threw themselves at the bed, closing their eyes.
The next thing I witness is a dark, shadow-like figure. I could easily see the form of a head and shoulders stretching from underneath the table and extending to the wall. It grew and ‘escaped’ out of the window. As soon as the entity was out of the window, the wind stopped blowing, and my friend could close the window. This entire thing lasted for only ten seconds, but it really felt live several minutes. I ‘noped’ out of there, and when I got outside, I walked over to where the entity had escaped. There was a tree right next to that window, but none of the leaves were moving. None whatsoever. I really tried to make sense of the whole thing, but I’m sure that whatever I witnessed was something extremely paranormal.”
What Are The Odds?
“One incident happened in the late 90s. I had been laid off months prior and was having a hard time finding another job. I was super depressed and extremely broke. One day I remembered that I had to print off a resume to fax for a job posting, with a cut-off date that was either that day or the next, but just minutes after turning on the computer, the monitor died. I was totally demoralized, as I did not even have enough money to buy a used monitor (even used monitors were really pricey back then). I was emotionally numb. All I could think of doing was grab my coat and go outside which would not be something I would normally do if I was extremely stressed. Normally I would have just crashed in front of the TV, but that day, I just couldn’t stay in my apartment. I just had to get out of there.
The apartment building has three elevators. When an elevator came to my floor and the door opened, there was a computer monitor sitting on the floor inside the elevator. I thought I was hallucinating, then thought it must be broken, but I jumped in, grabbed the monitor and dragged it back to my apartment. It worked. I was now so shaken I went outside and just walked. I couldn’t believe everything that happened in the space of 10-12 minutes, and how if another elevator had come first I would have missed it, or if I hadn’t left exactly when I did, someone else would have gotten it.
Years later, a statistician worked out the odds of this happening, and he said the odds were so astronomical it would have to regarded being a highly anomalous occurrence, or words to that effect.”
Good Luck Getting Sleep After This!
So one night I’m getting ready for bed. I brushed my teeth, got in my pajamas, put my phone on the charger, and climbed up my bunk bed (got one for me and my sister, but my sister was still a baby, so I had it all to myself).
The second I set my head on the pillow and closed my eyes, I hear an adult man’s voice, directly in my ear, whisper, ‘Psst, it’s me!’
I was terrified. I just laid still with my eyes closed, beyond tense, not knowing what to do. I was like that for like ten minutes before I sat up and looked around my room. Nobody was there. I tried to play it off as my imagination, but it felt so real. I tried justifying it. But there are multiple things that didn’t make sense. The windows were all closed and far away from where my bed was, so there was no way someone could’ve been loud enough from outside to sound like they were right beside me. My door was always closed and locked at night. Plus, I was on the top bunk, on a small single bed, so there was no way someone would be able to so directly speak into my ear. And the voice was unrecognizable. The only people I lived with at the time were my mom, sister, and grandparents, and the voice sounded nothing like my grandpa. I thought maybe I was just dreaming it, but I wasn’t even that tired that night. It usually takes me awhile after laying down for me to get to sleep. I couldn’t have dreamed it a second after resting my head. I can’t really explain what happened, but I do know I had a had time getting back to sleep that night.”
Yep, It Was Definitely Ghosts
“I was 11. I went to my dad’s house for the weekend. Dad and stepmom go to bed in their room. My two little sisters go to sleep in their room. It’s around 1:30 in the morning, give or take. I’m alone in the living room, with SpongeBob playing on the TV, but the TV is muted. I’m playing Minecraft on my tablet, and my tablet is also muted. I hear singing. It was definitely a small boy singing. I pause, look around, and turn to look behind me. I see nothing. The singing stops and something inside me screams at me to go wake my dad up. I quickly check my sisters’ room, and they’re both sound asleep. I wake up my dad and tell him I heard something in the living room and that I’m scared. He shoots out of bed and we go to the living room together.
The TV is off, and my tablet is off. I tell him they were on when I went to go find him. As soon as I say it, a shelf full of glass cups falls in the kitchen. He grabs me, takes me to his room, wakes up my stepmom, and tells us to sit there and wait. He went to get both of my little sisters and we slept in his room for the night. He locked the door to the hallway and put the door stopper at the bottom.
The next day, my dad sat me down and explained that this wasn’t a rare occurrence, and that if I ever felt scared he should go to me immediately. Whatever was in that house wasn’t friendly, but seemed to be afraid of my dad. My sisters frequently had nightmares of a small girl around their age, who stared at them from the hallway. My stepmom had shelves collapse on her various times. My dad had books thrown his direction. Thinking about it makes me feel scared, even during broad daylight.”
The Horrors Of Arizona
“It’s tie between two things that happen while living in Arizona. There was this place sorta like a local YMCA that my family went to all the time, it had a fake beach that was basically just sand around a giant pool. My brother and I went up the path that looped around the back, and we found a strange looking bird that was hiding in a bush watching its nest. It didn’t have a beak, it was more like a bill, and the thing was multicolored like a parrot but with yellow spots all over it. It looked like something from a Dr. Seuss book. It’s leg was hurt, so we went to get an employee to help us with it, because we thought it was an endangered species of flamingo or something. The employee basically brushed it off as two kids making up a story, and when we went back it was just gone, extremely confusing.
The second event was with my whole family. We were outside at night swimming in our pool, when the sky was acting weird. I kid you not, it was some sort of weird triangle with lights around the base, just floating there. My mom started to freak out and call the neighbors while everyone just stared up in awe. I remember feeling amazed, but also I had a horrible sense of dread in my stomach. It was surreal. Although from looking at the pictures of the lights online, it seems like it was a ‘v’ shape, while the thing we saw was a triangle, still could have been it though. That doesn’t explain the electrical malfunctions when it showed up, but that could have been coincidence. I’m very skeptical but do believe in aliens, just not ones that fly around the galaxy and visit earth. Everything about that night was horrifying, it was dead quite except for the sounds of my mom panicking, and the hum of the lights going off and on, and this giant triangle floating in the sky. Man, just thinking about it sends chills down my spine. I really hope it was the Phoenix lights. Moral of the story, stay away from Arizona, that place is terrifying.
She Found An Unknown Fan Base
When I was about 8 or 9, my mom took me and my sister to the playground. We ran off and climbed around separately. Now, we had just moved to a new state less than one year before this happened, so we didn’t know many people yet. So imagine my surprise when this girl runs up to me and goes, ‘Why are you ignoring us? We’ve been calling your name, come play!’
I did not recognize this girl. I didn’t recognize her friends. I half expected it to be a weird prank, like they were trying to see how far along they could string me. But no, they all knew my namem and we played nicely together for the afternoon. I convinced myself that the error was on my part and pretended to remember them too, paying close attention to names so that I could call them by name too and hide my embarrassment. After a while, my mom told us it was time to go home. I said goodbye to my new friends, still a little weirded out. On the way to the car, my mom asked me who I was playing with. I asked if she recognized them, and she said no, so I just told her we met that day on the playground.
I still can’t figure it out. My sister was in a different area of the playground, so the girls couldn’t have heard her call me by name, and my mom hadn’t called my name the whole time. No one knew who they were, but if I recall correctly, they also knew a few things about me in addition to my name (like hobbies and interests). I don’t remember ever seeing them again.”
Send In The Ghost Hunters
“My parents struggled with this for two years before I experienced anything personally. I was around 8 or 9, and I had no idea that this wasn’t normal. We had a live-in maid, Sharon. This thing laid on her at night, and she would wake up suffocating. The same thing happened to my mom. Door knobs would not open. My dad noticed sounds, like someone was taking a baseball bat to our metal pipes. Chandeliers would shake. The TVs would turn off and on all the time. There would be loud pops throughout the day and night. My dad would yell at this Thing a few times, but that only seemed to make the Thing more angry.
My only experience with this entity was getting a feeling that something wanted to play, so I looked in our living room. In the corner was a shadow of what seemed to be a wolf with horns. I told my dad about this, and he immediately knew something was wrong. So he called Ed and Lorraine Warren, two professional esteemed ghost hunters. They had an entire system to determine if a client was making things up or staging events, but they concluded that we needed to leave the house for the weekend, so we did. Apparently once we returned, the house was remarkably quiet. Apparently, the Warrens’ efforts worked. I still can’t sleep without some background noise or light on, but I’ll gladly take that. My family is only allowed to talk about these events on road trips, because my dad is beyond paranoid about bringing some sort of entity back to his house. Once I was old enough to comprehend all of this, it was beyond wild.”
The House Unleahsed Something In Her
“I took my best friend on vacation to the mountains about 3 years ago. I had recently lost my dad, stepmom, and stepdad all extremely close together. I had moved in with my mom to help take care of her, but I needed a little break from reality. The first day we were up there, we just explored nature and hiked waterfalls. The second day, we went to the famed Biltmore Estate. When we arrived at the grounds, we started arguing. I could feel this tension that was so strong, but it didn’t really make much sense because we were being angry about something stupid and we both knew it. We got inside and I was showing her some of the neat details I had seen on previous trips. We walked into the great hall and I had this feeling of nausea hit me. I didn’t say anything about it, and it went away quickly. I still felt uneasy, but why? We went further through the house and were taking pictures and videos. We got to the library and we were standing on opposite sides of the room. We looked around, and she took a quick one-minute video. I was doing a final scan of the amazing room and my eyes caught hers. She looked horrified!
I saw tears forming and she walked toward me pretty fast. She said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here and I don’t want to talk about it.’
I almost got upset because I paid $150 for us to tour, but her face kept that from happening. I didn’t ask her anything, but we continued on to another room. We made it to the swimming pool. Like I said, this was not my first trip to Biltmore. However, this was my first ‘experience’ there. As soon as I walked in, I got really nauseated. I was about to puke, and started running for the hallway. On my way out, the pool tiles just blared out at me. It’s all I could see. I made it to the hall and to a trashcan, and my friend was right on my heels. When I reached the trashcan, my nausea vanished and I was fine. I turned to my friend and said, ‘People have died in this room,’ and I started tearing up. I don’t know how I knew this info, but I just knew it was true, and it was horrible.
We left the house and began touring the grounds. I remember walking through one of the gardens and I started getting angry at her again, but this time I KNEW something was off. I had no reason to be mad at her. We didn’t talk much the rest of the day, and the car ride back to the house was eerie and silent. The next day, we made a decision that I would go back home, and she would stay up there a few more days. We met up at her house a week later and started talking about the trip for the first time. She said that the reason we had to leave the library was because when she turned her video off, she heard her name whispered in her ear. She even felt the wind off of it. There was no one around her when it happened. We knew it was a long shot, but decided to look through our pictures and videos to see if for some miraculous reason there was something that we caught on film. Well, we did. We caught a lot. The fourth picture we looked at, in of one of the bedrooms and you can clearly see a man in the middle of the room and a woman walking past a doorway on the left side. These rooms are roped off, you can’t cross the ropes. You couldn’t go where these people were standing in the pics. Also, they were completely gray. I mean everything was gray, even their clothes. You could see every detail plain as day, too. Well, we kept looking.
She started playing the video she took in the library that day. She was watching it, trying to see something, but I couldn’t see her screen. All I could do was listen, and I heard something. I didn’t know what it was, you couldn’t make it out. I pointed it out to her and she finally heard it, too. It was a voice whispering something, but we couldn’t make it out. What we both did know was that voice wasn’t human. We decided to stop trying to figure it out, and she put her phone down. We were both fairly quiet for the next few minutes. She reached for her phone and as soon as she grabbed it, she threw it across the room. She screamed, ‘It said my name!’ as it hit the bedroom wall. I looked up, already knowing the voice said her name, and my friend was crying. Tears began falling down my cheeks too, except I wasn’t crying. I knew I wasn’t. She said she wasn’t crying either, but we both had tears streaming down our cheeks. It was wild! Neither of us bothered listening to the video again that night. We knew what it said. We didn’t have to double check. The next day, my curiosity was high again, so I started listening to it again. We have now counted 13 different voices whispering her name in that 56-second video. One of the voices growls when it says Edith. One voice sounds like two different voices saying her name simultaneously.
Over the next two weeks, strange things happened in my home. My mom left town a few days into this, and I was petrified to stay at my own house alone. I’m 40 years old. I convinced two friends to come stay with me so I didn’t have to leave my house. Things didn’t stop happening, but I now had two witnesses to everything that happened during this time. We left to go get food the first afternoon, and when we got back, the door to my house was wide open. Our doors have deadbolt locks that only open with a key. I locked the door when we left. We were only gone for 5 minutes. We stood there kinda freaked out. I went inside and sat my keys and wallet on the foyer table, then walked right back outside. A few minutes later, we decided to leave and go talk to someone about what was happening. I went inside to grab my wallet and keys, and my keys weren’t on the table. I knew I had not gone any further into the house, but decided to check the kitchen, bathroom, and my bedroom just in case. No keys. I decided to leave my house unlocked. I went to walk out, and something caught my eye on the living room floor.
In the middle of the room was a megaphone my brother had bought my stepfather for Christmas, as a joke, right before he passed away. That megaphone had been packed up in a box in the back bedroom. Now, it was on the living room floor with my keys hanging from the handle. I had seen enough! I never wanted to come back home again. It was a week before I did go back into my house. When I did, I turned every light on and grabbed my Bible. I sat in the living room and read the book of Proverbs, and only Proverbs, for nearly 6 hours straight. Then I had to leave when the sun started going down. I was too scared. I returned the next morning, and also a third morning too, and read only Proverbs until the sun started setting. At the end of the third evening of doing this, I saw the sun start setting. I knew I was leaving again, but I was ok. I wasn’t emotional at all. All of a sudden, I burst into tears and started squalling. I was crying loud and uncontrollably, but inside I felt no emotion. I slipped from the couch and fell onto the floor, when I landed I was hugged. It was the most loving embrace I have ever felt. Then, I heard these words. I didn’t hear them out loud, I heard them in my mind. I was told, ‘I love you so much, and I’m so proud of you!’
I began crying harder, and this time I was really crying. My eyes were closed during all of this, but the embrace felt so real that I embraced the hug back. I kinda felt stupid for doing it, but it also felt “right.” Then in my mind I saw these shadows like shapes of people, but only shapes of shadows, but I knew who each shadow was immediately. I saw my father, my stepmom, my stepdad, my grandparents, my grandfather that I had never met before, until I was surrounded by like thousand of ‘shadows’, knowing full well each one was a family member. I stopped crying and just sat on the floor for a few minutes. I felt such a peace come over me that I’ve never experienced before or since. It was so peaceful that when it stopped, I wanted that peace back. It felt as though my heart had been ripped out when that peace went away because it was just so unbelievable. But I managed to get up, and dry my eyes. And from that moment on, I’ve not experienced anything in my house again.”