Real-Life Horror Stories To Give You Chills
Everyone has at least a few scary personal stories to share, and these experiences tend to get even more unsettling the more you think about them. After all, it's the fact that they're actual personal anecdotes rather than ghost stories that makes them feel so real.
These stories were compiled from the internet and run the range from unexpected creeps with unclear intentions to stuff that doesn't seem to be of this earth. Read on for some chills - but make sure to turn a light on first.
Pack up and leave
During a long holiday weekend in the 70s, some friends and I went off on a camping trip. On the drive, we decided to help out a hitchhiker who needed a ride toward Kernville. We dropped him off without giving it another thought and continued on to our campsite.
Later that evening, my girlfriend spotted something disturbing. A handwritten message had been left on her bag by the hitchhiker. It read, "I could have made all of you disappear forever." After finding that note, nobody in our group felt safe enough to sleep.
Losing a backpack
One day, my cousin and I were wandering through the woods near my house when we came across a very steep hill. At the bottom were several large crater-like holes, so we carefully looked down into one of them. That was when we noticed something odd sitting inside - a backpack.
We wanted to climb down and check it out, but the slope was muddy and dangerously steep, so we decided to come back later with a rope. The following day, a local news report revealed that a backpack containing the remains of a young girl had been discovered in those woods. According to the story, a man walking his dog found it after the dog kept barking and staring toward the edge of the crater. After hearing that, my cousin and I never went exploring in those forests again.
Twisting the brain
While working in healthcare, I once cared for a patient who developed a sinus infection. After only a few days on antibiotics, he decided to stop taking them because he thought he was improving. Not long after that, his condition suddenly became critical. He arrived at the Emergency Department showing signs that looked like a stroke.
Doctors later discovered the infection had spread into his cranial cavity. The buildup of pus was so severe that it was putting pressure on and shifting his brain. His chances of surviving surgery were considered very low, and his family was told to prepare for the worst. Somehow, he pulled through, but the recovery was brutal. He required three additional surgeries to clear out the remaining infection and spent nearly two months hospitalized afterward. Ever since then, I've never underestimated the importance of finishing antibiotics exactly as prescribed.
Are we related?
I once spoke with a man who had spent time backpacking across Australia with a few friends, mostly getting around by hitchhiking. During our conversation, he shared a story that has stayed with me ever since. At one point in their trip, one of the friends realized they were close to the home of a distant uncle he had never actually met. After getting the man's number from a relative, he gave him a call, and the uncle kindly invited the group to stay the night.
The man drove out to pick them up and brought them to an isolated property deep in the bush. According to the story, he came across as cheerful, welcoming, and completely ordinary, so nobody felt uneasy about staying there. When bedtime came, the uncle opened a closet packed with sleeping bags and bed rolls. They barely thought about it then, but later it felt deeply unsettling. The group stayed several days before he dropped them at a bus station so they could continue traveling. About a year later, police arrested the uncle after discovering he had been murdering young backpackers he picked up along the roads. The man who told me the story believed with absolute certainty that the sleeping bag he used had once belonged to one of the victims.
Listen to your gut
About a year ago, my ex and I were in the middle of a long road trip across Canada. One evening, after it started getting dark, we decided to find a hotel and stop for the night. While driving through a remote stretch of road, we suddenly spotted a stranded-looking car and a young woman trying to wave us down.
The whole situation immediately felt strange because we were deep in a rural area and hadn't passed another vehicle in quite some time. We pulled over cautiously to see whether she needed assistance. As my boyfriend lowered his window to speak with her, I glanced across the other side of the road and saw three men stepping out from the bushes carrying baseball bats. The second I noticed them, I hit the gas and sped away. To this day, I’m convinced that girl was trying to draw us into something extremely dangerous.
Unwanted guest
For about a year, I shared a house with four roommates. The place had a large backyard, motion-sensor lights, a garage, and a toolshed that nobody ever bothered using. Two of my roommates were extremely into paranormal stuff and were convinced ghosts and spirits were real. Whenever the backyard lights flicked on in the middle of the night, I assumed it was probably an animal wandering through, but they insisted something supernatural was out there. One of them even claimed she had seen the figure of a man staring through the window one evening. I thought the whole thing sounded absurd.
A few nights later, though, I had a moment that genuinely rattled me. I glanced outside and was certain I saw a man standing behind the screen door leading to the patio. I panicked, yelled for everyone to come downstairs, and we all searched the backyard, but there was nobody there by the time we looked. Months later, after I had moved back to my home country, I was talking with one of my former roommates over FaceTime when she told me the truth. The "ghost" had actually been a homeless man secretly living in our toolshed for an unknown amount of time. That realization was far creepier than any ghost story.
Restraining orders filed
When I was in college, I shared a house with three other girls. One year during spring break, all of them left town before I did, which meant I spent the first night alone. Around 2 in the morning, someone started pounding hard on the front door. A few moments later, there was banging at the back door too. Then a man shouted that he was a police officer and demanded that I open up. Something about it felt wrong, and I didn't trust him.
I locked myself in my room while panic started setting in. The pounding got louder, and I could hear people throwing themselves against both doors while one of the men yelled, "Little girl, open the door. We know you’re alone." I called 9-1-1 as fast as I could. Within minutes, police sirens filled the street. I watched real officers chase down four guys from our school’s hockey team and force them onto the lawn. Afterward, I ended up getting restraining orders against every one of them.
Mystery lady
When my son was still under three years old, he came into my bedroom late one night and kept insisting that "the lady" was inside the room he shared with his sister. I was exhausted and barely awake, so I brushed it off and told him to climb into bed with me. Even after settling down beside me, he continued waking me every few minutes to say that the lady was still there. Eventually, he whispered that she was now standing at my bedroom door.
Trying to reassure him that nothing was there, I carried him into the dark hallway to prove it. I pointed around and told him there was no lady in the apartment. His response immediately sent chills through me. He pointed straight down the hall at empty space and calmly said, “Mama, she's right there. That’s the lady. This is HER house.” There was absolutely nothing where he was pointing, not even a shadow. I tried not to let him see how unsettled I was, so I just told him she must be friendly and brought him back to bed. He fell asleep almost instantly, while I stayed awake for hours imagining someone unseen wandering through my century-old apartment and watching us sleep.
Creepy old folks
My sister and I were outside playing one day when an older couple walked past our yard. Behind our house was a small historic cemetery that often drew visitors because the property dated back to the 1800s. Many of the graves belonged to children who had died from illness long ago. As the couple passed, they kept focusing on my sister and repeatedly asked her to tell them her name.
Feeling uneasy, we both ran inside and told our mom what had just happened. A week later, I heard a disturbing news report about an elderly couple who had approached a teenage girl and then assaulted her. The description of the suspects matched the same couple who had been at our yard that day. It's something that still unsettles me to think about.
Right under their noses
When I was younger, my mom worked as the manager of our apartment building. Just before Halloween one year, she told us a spooky story about a supposed tragedy involving a mother and her two young sons in the empty unit above ours. According to her, people claimed you could sometimes hear the boys running through the upstairs hallway if you listened closely.
Right as she finished the story, we suddenly heard the sound of footsteps running above us. My mom's expression changed instantly and she looked genuinely terrified. She called a neighborhood patrol officer and a maintenance worker to check the unit upstairs. When they went in, they discovered a homeless mother and her two children who had gotten inside through an open window. After that, my mom never shared ghost stories like that again.
Good morning!
It was around 4 in the morning, and I was still awake since I'm naturally a night owl. I went downstairs to get a drink when I noticed something strange - from the corner where the kitchen meets the living room, I could see the silhouette of a person. I assumed it was just my roommate already up, so I casually figured I’d say good morning.
As I turned the corner and said, "Hey, good morning," a wave of unease hit me immediately. The kitchen was completely empty, and there was no one on the entire first floor. I searched the house quickly, then went upstairs and knocked on my roommate’s door. There was no answer, and when I opened it, he was sound asleep and hadn’t moved at all. There was no realistic way he could have gotten back upstairs without me hearing him on the creaky stairs.
Whose memories are these?
I have memories that don't feel like they belong to me. One day I described them to my mother in detail - the layout of a house I had never been to, the scenery outside the windows, what I was wearing, and even what I was doing at the time. As I spoke, she started looking at me with a kind of shock and fear I had never seen before.
She then told me those memories matched my cousin, who had drowned in a river before I was born. I had never seen any photographs of her, the house, or anything connected to her life. I still don’t have an explanation for it, and it’s something that continues to unsettle me at night.
They're watching
I was at home alone one night watching TV, something light like Mad TV or maybe Nick at Nite - nothing remotely scary. At one point I noticed the picture flicker briefly, which caught my attention. Curiosity got the better of me, so I rewound it and paused right at the moment it had glitched.
When I stopped it there, I saw what looked like a small box embedded in the image with the words "I WILL BE BACK," except the E in “BE” was reversed. It instantly creeped me out and sent chills down my spine. I tried to convince myself it was just a broadcast glitch or something similar, but I couldn't shake the feeling for the rest of the night. Thankfully, my sister came home a couple of hours later, but I’ve still always wondered what I actually saw and how it could have happened.
Good idea
A girl I knew had been drinking a bit and decided to hitchhike home afterward, since it was a fairly common thing in that area. Her destination was about a 40-minute drive from where she had been out that night.
She ended up getting picked up by a car full of men, and at first everything seemed normal. When she mentioned she could be dropped off a little farther up the road, they ignored her request and kept driving, which immediately made her feel a surge of panic and clarity. She tried to hide it by acting intoxicated and going along with their conversation. As they passed through a more wooded stretch of highway, she pretended to be sick and said she was about to vomit. They finally pulled over, and the moment the door opened, she ran into the bushes and didn't stop until she was far away and safe.
Stranger danger
When my friend got home from work, his wife wasn't there. At first, he assumed she had just taken the dogs out for their usual walk, so he went out to look along their normal route. As he got closer, he noticed flashing blue lights up ahead and an officer stepped in front of him, telling him he couldn’t proceed any further.
My friend immediately felt something was wrong. Looking past the officer, he could see a woman on the sidewalk surrounded by emergency responders, injured and bleeding. In that moment, he realized it was his wife. It was later explained that she had been walking in the neighborhood when a man suddenly attacked her without warning. The attacker had recently been released from a psychiatric institution and had crossed paths with her at random. She later died from her injuries in the hospital, a loss that still feels senseless and difficult to comprehend.
Crazy eyes
I worked as a hostess at a nightclub and kept a tip jar at the front desk. It was a busy Saturday night, so there was a decent amount of money in it. At one point, a man came up and started chatting with me. While he was talking, he subtly slid the tip jar behind my computer screen where I couldn't see it and managed to take about $120 without me noticing.
I only realized something was wrong after he walked back into the club. I told security, and they reviewed the cameras, confirmed what he had done, and chased him down until they made him return the money. As he was being escorted out, his behavior shifted and he locked eyes with me, saying he would wait for me outside. Because of that, security ended up walking me to my car that night to make sure I was safe.
Pure evil
I was driving home from work one morning and had stopped at a rural intersection, waiting to turn right. A line of cars was passing through, turning left onto the road I was on. As the last vehicle went by - a blue minivan - I made brief eye contact with the driver.
The moment I saw him, I was overwhelmed by an intense sense of fear and unease. My body reacted immediately, with my hair standing up and a wave of nausea coming over me. There was nothing physically unusual about him that I can clearly point to, but something about the encounter felt deeply wrong, as if I was looking at something that was almost human but not quite. It happened two years ago, but I still haven't forgotten it.
Followed at every turn
My friend's mother was walking home from the train station when she noticed a man following her. To try and lose him, she changed her route several times and took a number of detours, but he continued behind her the entire time. After roughly 25 minutes, she reached her house, but instead of going inside, she wisely kept walking and headed straight to the local police station.
When she finally went inside and turned around, she saw the man pass by outside. Before moving on, he paused and gave her an unsettling wave. It’s a story that has stayed with me ever since and still makes me uneasy to think about.
Who was it?
My sister's bedroom was on the second floor of our childhood home. One night, she suddenly screamed from her room, insisting she had seen a hand outside her window. We assumed she must have been dreaming or half-asleep, so we tried to calm her down and told her to go back to bed.
The next morning, after everyone woke up, we found something unsettling outside. A ladder had been left propped up against the house directly beneath her bedroom window.
An unsettling sight
I was driving my sister to get sushi in a rougher part of town one time, and we were sitting in the car just about to get out. I reached down for my wallet, and when I looked back up, there was suddenly a man pressed right up against her window.
He was the most disheveled and unsettling-looking person I had ever seen. His face was against the glass, and he was licking the window. While staying pressed against it, he pulled up his sleeve to show us scars on his forearm. After that, I stopped going back to that restaurant in that area.
Horror at the truck stop
My cousin works at a truck stop in Kansas and once told me about a strange encounter during one of her shifts. A truck pulled in and the driver got out, followed by a woman stepping out of the passenger side. It was a cold day, so the driver was dressed warmly in a coat and hat, but the woman was wearing light summer clothing, which stood out to her.
At first, my cousin didn't think much of it and went through her usual greeting as they came inside. The truck driver bought a coffee, but the woman lingered near the doorway without coming further in. My cousin eventually asked if she needed help, but the driver looked confused and asked who she was referring to. When she pointed toward the woman, she was gone. The driver’s face reportedly went pale, and he quietly said, "Oh no," before taking his coffee and leaving. My cousin never saw the woman return to the truck or anywhere else in the store, and it remains one of the most unsettling moments she’s experienced at work.
Good doggo
My family has a Bernese Mountain Dog named Ava who is normally very calm and quiet, but always seems alert to what's going on around the house. One evening, my parents went out for dinner and I stayed home alone with her. I was downstairs watching TV, and the living room is right next to the front door.
Around 8:00 PM, the doorbell rang. I opened it to find a man in plain clothes claiming he had a delivery, though he didn’t look like a delivery driver and wasn’t holding anything. As I was trying to figure that out, I saw another man moving along the side of the driveway toward the back door. I panicked when I realized what was happening, and at that moment the first man forced his way inside and shouted for the other. Ava suddenly woke up, barked loudly, and rushed forward, forcing him back out of the house while the second man ran off. I managed to keep hold of her, then called my parents and the authorities afterward, and from then on she got plenty of extra treats and I always keep her close when I’m home alone.
A good whiff
I was waiting in line at my local pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions. It's a small town, and I’m a regular there, so the staff recognize me. I was standing behind a couple of people, with a few more behind me, when I started noticing a strange sensation like someone was lightly touching or brushing the back of my hair. Every time I turned around, the man behind me was standing farther back and staring down at the floor.
By the time I reached the counter, I was called into the consultation room by the pharmacist, which already felt unusual since my medication hadn’t changed in years. Once we were inside, she explained that the man behind me had been repeatedly stepping forward, leaning in to smell my hair, then quickly stepping back and acting like nothing had happened. The staff kept me inside until they could distract him, and then a security guard escorted me to my car and waited until I drove away safely. I still go to that pharmacy today, and I’ve always appreciated how seriously they handled the situation.
Whirlpools are no joke
When my mother was young, she went swimming with a group of friends at a lake. During the outing, something went wrong, and she ended up witnessing a friend get pulled into a whirlpool near a drainage area at the bottom of the lake. She could only watch as it happened, unable to do anything in the moment.
Searchers didn't recover his body until several days later. That experience stayed with her for the rest of her life, and it ultimately shaped decisions in our family afterward. It’s also the reason I never learned how to swim.
Watching and waiting
When I used to walk home from the bus stop, I'd pass a house where a man in his 40s lived. If he happened to be outside, we would exchange a simple hello, nothing unusual. But on other days, I would notice him standing at the window, just watching as I walked by, without any wave or acknowledgement that he had seen me.
One time, my friend was with me when it happened, and she said it looked like he didn’t realize we could see him. It didn’t happen every day, only occasionally over time, maybe a dozen times in total, and nothing ever came of it. Eventually I stopped taking the bus and started driving instead. He moved away a few years later, and I left the area as well, but I still remember that uneasy feeling of seeing him standing there behind the glass, watching in silence.
Don't answer that riddle
Today, I was standing outside my dentist's office waiting for my wife, just having a smoke and minding my own business. Out of nowhere, an older man walked right up to me. He had a blank expression and looked me straight in the eye before asking, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"
At first, I thought he was joking and was about to laugh it off, but it quickly became clear he was completely serious. I awkwardly replied that a woodchuck would probably chuck as much wood as it felt like. He just stared at me in silence for a few seconds, then turned around and walked away without another word. I stood there watching him go, feeling unsettled by how strange the whole exchange was.
Real Boogeyman
I once interviewed a woman who shared something that happened to her when she was about ten years old. She said she had trouble sleeping and became convinced that the "Boogeyman" was standing in her closet at night, watching her whenever she tried to fall asleep. Night after night, she would go downstairs frightened and tell her parents, and each time her father reassured her that it wasn't real and sent her back to bed.
After several nights of this, her father became frustrated and decided to prove it to her. He took her back upstairs, turned on the light, and told her he would show her there was nothing in the closet. But when he tried to open the door, something on the other side seemed to hold it shut. He immediately sent his daughter out of the room and forced the door open, where he discovered a man hiding inside. It turned out someone had been sneaking into the house at night and watching her from the closet.
Unwanted visitor
When I was younger, my parents and I moved across the country to Maine and ended up in a very small town. We lived in an old, run-down house set on several acres of forest. The layout was unusual, with the upstairs serving as the main living area and the downstairs containing the bedrooms. My room had large windows that looked straight out into the woods.
I don't clearly remember whether there were blinds or curtains, though I assume there must have been since my mother was usually careful about those details. One night, I woke up in complete darkness and saw a faint glowing orb outside my window. It moved slowly from one window to the next, briefly pausing as if it were shining into the room, before continuing on and disappearing from view. I was terrified and woke my parents, and my stepfather went outside to check, but there was nothing there. Looking back as an adult, I realize it was likely just a flashlight moving outside, but it still left me uneasy about sleeping with open windows or uncovered blinds.
That's no deer
My dad, sister, and I all saw something on a winter night in rural Saskatchewan, Canada in 2015 that didn't look like any animal or person we could recognize. We were driving when something suddenly ran out in front of our vehicle on the road, moving so quickly that it appeared as nothing more than a dark blur.
Even in that brief moment, we all noticed it had long, gangly limbs like a deer, but with shapes that looked more like human arms and legs. We all saw it clearly enough to remember it the same way, and it still comes up in conversation between us to this day.
Lost time
I drive about five hours one way to work, and my shift ends at 11:30 pm, so I can usually make it home if I stay alert. Sometimes, though, I get too tired and have to pull over to nap. On one of those nights, I remember getting sleepy about an hour and a half before Binghamton, and I stopped at a gas station I often use roughly 15 minutes before that point. It was around 1:00 am when I filled up, grabbed some snacks, and left a note in my window that said I was okay but just needed to sleep for a short while and still had a long drive ahead. I reclined my seat, set an alarm for 20 minutes, and went to sleep.
The next thing I clearly remember is waking up at 6:30 am on an unfamiliar back road surrounded by a mix of houses and fields, driving slowly and having no idea where I was or how I got there. My phone had just enough service to pull up directions to my mom's address, which eventually guided me back toward a highway entrance in Harpursville, NY. I still don’t understand what happened during those hours - whether I was asleep the entire time or somehow driving without memory of it - but I checked my car and there was no damage, and I had somehow made the entire distance without incident.
Spooky apparition
I work for a railroad, and on some runs it's just an engineer and a conductor moving through very isolated, wooded stretches of track. Over the years, I’ve heard a few of the older guys mention strange encounters out there, usually involving someone walking along the rails where you wouldn’t expect anyone to be.
One story that comes up now and then is about a family, or sometimes a lone man carrying a suitcase, seen walking directly down the tracks with no apparent concern for the train approaching. Even with constant horn blasts and flashing lights, they reportedly just keep walking forward until they eventually disappear from sight.
Nighttime experiences
I used to work as a field technician in the oil industry, which meant a lot of driving through remote parts of Canada at strange hours. One night, while driving alone late, I saw a large dark shape appear on the road ahead of me. At first, I assumed it was a moose, so I immediately hit the brakes and came to a stop only a few feet away from it.
Even with my headlights fully on it, I couldn't properly identify what I was looking at. It had a rough outline similar to a large four-legged animal, possibly around six feet tall, but there were no clear features at all - no visible eyes, texture, or reflective surfaces. As I tried to process it, I noticed something even more unsettling: there were several similar shapes in the ditch on both sides of the road. Five or six at least, all motionless and equally undefined, like solid patches of darkness rather than anything natural or physical. After a moment of shock and unease, I carefully drove around the one in front of me and sped away.
Sneaking out
When I was in high school, I spent most of my junior year grounded and constantly in trouble with my parents. During one of those periods, a friend suggested we still meet up after they fell asleep, so I could sneak out. There was a park right beside my apartment building, and since it seemed harmless enough, I agreed.
Late that night, around 1:00 AM, I waited until I heard my stepdad asleep and then quietly left the house to meet my friend. We went to the park to hang out and ended up sitting on a jungle gym talking when we noticed another person walking around. After a few minutes, he approached us and started asking a lot of personal questions about who we were, where we lived, and what we were doing there. He seemed to be under the influence of something, so we tried to answer cautiously without giving anything away. Eventually, he invited us to come see his house, and we quickly made an excuse to leave and went back to the car. We sat there afterward realizing how easily things could have gone very differently, and it was the first and last time I ever snuck out.
Psych ward meltdown
Several years ago, I had to spend a night in a psychiatric ward, and I wasn't able to sleep at all while I was there. The environment itself already felt unfamiliar and unsettling, and that made it harder to relax or settle down.
Throughout the night, there was another patient there who repeatedly banged her head against the wall and screamed loudly for long stretches of time. The combination of the noise and the situation made the experience feel very strange and deeply distressing, and it’s something I’ve never forgotten.
Cheshire Cat grin
I've spent the past four years driving every night for work, often through remote areas. One night in Mississippi, between Clarksdale and Greenwood, I was on a long 250-mile drive home through mostly empty two-lane highways. The weather had started to turn bad as I left Clarksdale, and I called my wife to warn her about high winds and possible tornado activity, telling her I’d check in once I reached somewhere safer. After a 14-hour shift, I was already exhausted, so I ate dinner in the truck and drank coffee to stay alert. About 30 miles into the rural stretch, hail began hitting the vehicle, which in that region usually means tornado conditions. I pulled over with no other cars around and tried to assess the storm, even using a flashlight out the passenger window to scan the darkness.
I didn’t see anything, so I turned toward the driver’s side - and suddenly noticed a man with his face pressed against the window, grinning. He was tall, extremely pale, with sunken eyes and a wide, unsettling smile full of crooked teeth. I screamed, and in an instant he was gone. I immediately drove off at high speed. My company truck has cameras, and even though I checked the footage afterward, there was no sign of him on any of the recordings. I’ve always tried to rationalize it as exhaustion or stress, but I still avoid driving through that area at night unless I absolutely have to.
Bigfoot?!
I was working the overnight shift from Friday night into Saturday morning at a gas station. Around 6:00 am, a semi-truck pulled into the fuel aisle, and the driver got out in a hurry and practically ran into the store. He looked completely shaken - his face was pale, and he was visibly upset. My first thought was that he might have hit someone on the road, since people sometimes cross the nearby four-lane highway.
I asked him what was wrong, and he immediately said, "I'm not crazy." At that point I was already on edge, thinking I was alone in the store with someone panicking. He went on to say he had seen something huge on the side of the road, bigger than a bear standing on its hind legs. He described it picking up a dead buck and carrying it into the woods over its shoulder. A local customer who was there casually called it “Bigfoot,” which made both of us stare at him in disbelief. The truck driver left quickly afterward, and I still don’t know what to make of the whole exchange.
Got your number
When I was 17, my older sister took me to the mall to get a cell phone. The salesperson walked us through different options, helped us pick a plan, and even let me choose my new number. Everything seemed completely normal, and we left without thinking anything of it.
Later that evening, I got a text saying, "Hey, it's the guy who sold you your new phone." At first I wasn’t sure how to respond, but then the messages kept coming, followed by constant calls. He started telling me I was attractive and suggesting we should be together. I tried to brush it off and explained I was leaving town for the summer, but he escalated further, asking where I was going and even offering to quit his job and come with me. Despite me asking him to stop, he kept contacting me until we eventually had to file a complaint and change my number.
The wrong tree
I'm a 30-year-old woman living with my fiancé and our two huskies, who are normally extremely friendly and not at all protective. They almost never bark or react to strangers, even when people they know come into the house unexpectedly. So when this happened, it really stood out.
One evening around 8:00 PM, I was home alone with the dogs. I was in the bathroom with the door closed and had the blow dryer running, so I couldn’t hear much outside. Then I suddenly noticed one of the dogs howling, followed by faint knocking and both dogs going into a full panic - barking, howling, and throwing themselves at the windows. I stepped out to figure out what was going on and looked out my bedroom window, where I saw two men in hoodies standing at the front door. As they knocked again, one of my dogs went into a frenzy at the door, growling and slamming into it. One of the men visibly jumped back, exchanged a look with the other, and then they both walked away. I called my fiancé immediately and watched them leave down the street, and I still don’t know who they were or why they came by, since they didn’t approach any other houses.
Sleep paralysis or a ghost?
It wasn't so much what I saw as what I felt. I was traveling to Petersburg, a small island in Alaska, but the runway was too foggy to land, so I had to stay overnight in a hotel in Juneau. The next morning, I was asleep with my hand hanging down between the bed and the wall when I suddenly felt something grab it.
The grip felt like a firm handshake and it jolted me awake instantly. I actually got out of bed and checked under it, but there was nothing there. It was a strange and unsettling experience that I still think about.
Working nights
I used to work nights in a fairly simple role, mostly alone in an abandoned building acting as security. My job was mainly to stop people from entering and clear out anyone who shouldn't be there. Occasionally there would be teenagers hanging around, the odd homeless person, or people filming videos, but nothing too unusual overall.
One night, I walked into a room that looked mostly empty, but I noticed three distinct shadows on the wall that didn’t seem to match anything or anyone in the space. It immediately gave me a very uneasy feeling. When I stepped back out into the hallway, I then saw a tall, very thin figure at the far end of it that didn’t look normal or familiar. After that, I left the area and didn’t continue further.
