12 Strangers Share Their True Accounts Of The Most Terrifying Moments Of Their Lives
I said, "we need to leave" and got back to the path. We were walking pretty quickly, but then we heard DISTINCT footsteps behind us.
By Eric Redding
1. Hunted On The Road
I use to sneak out of my house as a teenager to go spend time with my girlfriend who lived three miles away. I would normally ride my bike but decided against it that night for some reason. After I leave my girlfriends house I head home when I see a pair of headlights coming down the road opposite of me. As soon as the car passed me I could see the surrounding area light up red from their taillights, they were slowing down. The car turned into a side road, I didn’t think much of it, probably someone coming home from a bar or something. About a minute passes and I see headlights coming from behind me, it was the same car.
As it got closer to me it slowed down, I calmly reached for my pocket knife in case anything funky happened, I wasn’t ready for what I was about to see. The car pulls up beside me, I looked inside and it was a man dressed as a clown. He smiled at me, not a friendly smile either, it was a smile that could induce nightmares, a lowered brow and showing his pearly whites. I could feel my legs go numb and I couldn’t look away. After about fifteen seconds of driving by me at walking speed he sped off over the hill. A veil of relief fell over me as I thought I was home free, but nope, there they were, the same distinct headlights roaring over the hill. I knew it was him as I gripped my blade as hard as I could preparing to defend myself.
He slowed down as he approached me, this time his smiling face was gone. He was dead faced, what I had thought was some cruel joke quickly erupted to the realization that this clown had something sinister planned. He drove past me and turned into a side road once again, and while he was turning around I knew I had to act fast. I took off running into the woods, knowing my house was only a mile away I stayed in the shadows praying I wouldn’t be spotted. Thankfully I got home safely that night, I still wonder what would have happened if I would have kept walking the road.
2. Paramedic Responds To Exorcism
I work as a paramedic, got a call to a church, the retired nun who still lived at the church was having some issues. The priest was attempting an exorcism when the family got a state order to get her into a psych facility. We got her into the back of our ambulance and all was fine. Then this 92-year-old, 90-pound woman ripped out of her leather restraints and started speaking in a voice no human could produce. She then told me that her commander in the war had burned and buried her alive during the war when defending France against the Germans. The whole presence was terrifying and gave me nightmares for years to come. I told my partner to use the lights and sirens so I could get out of there as fast as possible. During the whole transport, she was speaking in weird tongues.
3. “Need Help Little Girl?”
I was around 10-12 (can’t remember exactly. It’s past midnight and I’m alone at home because my parents fought and left. I was already so scared and angry so I decided to go find them. I got out of the house and started to look for them (even though they had taken their cars) then suddenly, a man starts walking towards me. I stop, thinking I could ask for help. As he approaches, I see several men behing him grinning. He smelled like cheap whiskey. He comes to me and says “Little girl, what are you doing all alone here, want me to help you?” At this point, I was shaking because I realized he was drunk and his friends were not looking friendly as I say “no thank you” he grabs me and starts saying that he WANTS to help me. Idk how I did it but I managed to get out of this grip and run. He starts running, they all do. I wasn’t far from my house. I manage to get in and close the gate. They were about to get in until they saw my 3 dogs barking and showing their teeth.
I still get chills from walking alone at night sometimes.
4. Grandmother Calls Out From The Grave
My grandmother lived her last years in my house and she would scream for us whenever she needed something… 3 months after she died we were all in different rooms of the house, upstairs my brother in his room, me in my parents room, and my parents in the living room downstairs and suddenly very clearly hear my grandmother calling for my mother… Just as I hear it I jump and run to the hall before my late grandmother’s room, finding my brother and my parents, no one says anything for a minute and then my father just asks “Did you heard it?”, my brother and I just nod… Again no one says anything… Then my mother just tells us “Do we pretend this never happened?” And we all nod… We went back to what we were doing and never talked about again…
5. A Possessed Mother
So this is in Peshawar, Pakistan.I had this friend who claimed his mom was possessed. He would tell me the scariest shit about his mom. He would say that some nights they would receive calls on a disconnected cordless phone that they had at home. His younger sister would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and scream at the window saying “he is here again.” And worst of all, his mom’s voice would change and she would speak in this foreign language that no one understood and she would act as if she was someone else during those episodes. And it appeared that that “someone” else angrily wanted them to understand what she/he had to say.
This one day. I was hanging out with this kid in the street in front of their house and suddenly his younger brother ran out of their house and yelled “hurry! it’s mom”. my friend rushed inside and left the door open behind him. I was about a few meters away from that open door. And, out of curiosity, I positioned myself such that I got a glance inside. his father had pinned his mom to the floor and she desperately tried to free herself. My friend joined his father and now both of them were trying to stop her from moving. Once both her hands were tightly secured she started banging her head on the floor as she twisted and turned her body. She turned her head around and as she looked up, she saw me. She fucking stopped moving and was staring at me. Dark rings around her eyes and her face was colorless and pale. She looked like she was going through a chemotherapy. It probably took me 2 seconds to realize what I had seen, I looked away, and fucking bolted.
I spent that day walking around in this weird daze. But, it was that night that i was scared shitless.
It was sometime around mid-August. The heat in Peshawar is probably the worst kind of heat I have experienced anywhere. It gets really humid and it feels like the air has less oxygen molecules in it. Kinda like the steam room, it gets hard to breathe at times. Back in the 90’s air conditioning was a luxury that many couldn’t afford. So it was a common thing for people to take a rotating fan and sleep on their rooftops.
I was laying down with my family spread around at different corners of the roof. I couldn’t fall asleep for a while and each time I closed my eyes I would see her eyes looking at me. Just a blank look. A poker face. And finally, as I got sleepier, I closed my eyes. I felt a hand with a couple dozen fingers sliding up my body starting from my feet. It got to my knees and thigh and chest and before I could do anything, it went away.
I sleep face down. And at that time I knew something was touching me and the fear was so overwhelming that I didn’t dare look back. I felt if I moved a finger the thing will do whatever it wanted to do. And it didn’t take long when once again the same thing started touching me again. Starting at my feet, to my knees, thighs …. and right when I thought it was going to choke me I jumped onto my bed.
It turned out it was the fan. Apparently, I was so scared of what had happened that day that It kinda had occupied all my senses. when the fan turned towards me I created the many fingers in my imagination and as the fan kept turning, the wind would hit me on my feet, my knees and chest and the fan would turn away.
I know the end of this story doesn’t make this as paranormal as it began to sound like, but honestly, that was the scariest thing I have experienced ever. Something inside my chest felt like expanding to its limits and had it continued any longer I would have had a cardiac arrest.
6. Ghost Child Playing With The Lights
I have a few stories of paranormal type stuff but I’ll tell the two that stood out to me the most. (Copied from where I posted in a similar thread)
One day I was home alone watching TV, it was late afternoon. I was about 13 or 14. In our living room there was a window to the kitchen over the TV. The light in the kitchen was on, so I went to shut it off as it was bugging my eyes watching TV.
As I came around the corner of the kitchen the light was on again. I went to shut it off, but there switch was in the off position. I returned to the couch a bit creeped out but assumed there was a logical explanation.
The lights started flickering intensely as if someone was frantically flicking the light switch. I doubled checked to make sure it was off, and as I was doing so the front door and the back door blew open at the same time.
Again trying to convince myself there was a logical explanation, I closed and locked both doors, and brought my dog to my bed with me and watched TV in there.
The second story happened around the same time, maybe months a part. I was babysitting my little brothers, so we were the only ones home. I was having trouble sleeping, rolled over to check my phone and it was 3:00 am. I heard footsteps in the hallway, they ran to the bathroom and flicked the lights on, then ran back.
I assumed it was my littlest brother, so, frustrated I got up and flicked the lights off and went back to bed. This happened about four or five more times. I was getting irritated but they were always scared so I assumed they just didn’t wanna shut the lights off on the way back to bed.
My younger brother text me and said “Sarah I’m scared.” I asked if littlest brother was sleeping and he said yeah. Trying to play brave big sister I just told him it was me so he didn’t panic, but needless to say I did not sleep that night. When my boyfriend heard these stories he couldn’t imagine how I didn’t freak out, but I’ve always had a very logical brain and assume even though I don’t have a scientific explanation right now, there is one I don’t know yet.
7. Listen To Your Gut
I was walking home from a friend’s house at 2 AM. He lived less than a mile away from my house, took about 10 minutes. I could either take a shortcut through the woods and save 5 minutes or go over the bridge which took a bit longer. Since it was darkish outside (it was summer), I didn’t want to go through the woods so I was on my way and I see a man coming towards me with a dog. I have never told anyone this before, but the feeling I got from that man was one of dread. Something inside me told me to get as far away as possible. Till this day I have never felt anything like it. As he was approaching me I could either walk towards him or go through the woods on my right side. I was 16 year old, thought it shouldn’t be a problem since I am a guy and what’s the worse an older man (40ish) could do. Like I said I had a terrible feeling, I thought I’ll walk on the other side of the road to avoid him when he was 20 meters away from me. When I made the move he did the same. I thought maybe it’s a coincidence. I walked back to the other side and he did the same. I could see his eyes watching me. I trusted the gut feeling and said fuck it. I sprinted down in the woods to my right side and even lost my iPod there. I could hear him screaming something at me and I just kept running until I got home and thought what the fuck did just happen? I wasn’t as scared of the guy as I was of the feeling I got from him. It was the first time I felt anything like that and it hasn’t happened since. I wonder what happened to me that day. Why did every instinct of my body tell me to get the fuck out of there and get away from that guy?
8. Damn!
Was on the football field practicing with the marching band when an F3 tornado dropped out of the sky 100yards away.
9. Childhood Friend Attempts Murder
Not the worst thing to happen, but probably the scariest incident was with a friend I had as a kid. I went to his house and went downstairs. He had two potted plants beside the door and hid some gold scissors. The scissors were sharp as hell, and he grabbed them behind me. Got downstairs, grabbed a guitar to play Guitar Hero since I assumed that’s what we’d do. He pulls out the scissors and he keeps telling me to put the guitar down. I do, he lunges at me and I had kept the guitar close enough to pull it up and block it from going straight into my chest.
Well, the idiot forgot he was literally holding the other side, so when it hit plastic it cut his finger. Guitar had a cut on the back and he ran up to his mom and told him I had cut him. His mom didn’t do anything and then I left and started avoiding him.
He had attacked me several other times, but it was never something that could hurt me like that.
10. Ghost Hunting In Missouri
Two of my friends and I went to Hannibal, MO for a day just to wander around. We wanted to take a ghost tour, but they closed before we got there. So we looked up some ghost stories, and we went to this cemetery that’s kind of hidden away. It wasn’t the one on the ghost tour, but it seemed more mysterious. And I really enjoy looking at old Graves. This cemetery was awesome. Lots of civil war Graves from both sides. And there was a mass grave of slaves. We got there at about 11pm, and started walking around with flashlights. It was pretty normal until we saw this weird stone structure.
My friends are pretty timid, and they didn’t want to go off the path to investigate. But I have a penchant for doing risky things, and truthfully I didn’t believe in ghosts. I went up this little hill that the structure was built into to investigate. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but when I turned to go back down I saw something.
My friend later said that at the same time, she began to feel a heartbeat that was out of sync with hers coming from what seemed like the ground. When I turned I saw a dark figure at the top of the hill, watching me. He was essentially a silhouette, but he looked like he had a rifle up against his shoulder. I froze, thinking we had been caught by a security guard or a serial killer. He then moved THROUGH the hill as if he was walking backward and away but it was more smooth. I said, “we need to leave” and got back to the path. We were walking pretty quickly, but then we heard DISTINCT footsteps behind us.
We fuckin RAN back to the car and jumped in. The cemetery was up a hill that was hard to navigate by car, but I must’ve been doing 50 getting out of there.
11. Spooky Happenings At Summer Camp
When I was younger a would go to a summer sleep away camp for a few weeks every year. The camp site had its fair share of paranormal stories. Even an Indy horror movie based on it. Most of the stories were untrue but there were a fair amount of sketchy things that have happened in the years that I went to that camp.
One year there were a bunch of loud noises coming from the woods one night. The next morning a few counselors and camp runners went to investigate the woods to see what was going on and they found a large stack of animal bones (foxes, squirrels, rabbits, etc) and many ouija boards scattered around.
Another year I was a counselor for 3-4th grade boys. They were all sleeping and the other two counselors and I were hanging out right outside the cabin. We heard a weird noise from inside the cabin so we stepped in. Everything was normal until, all in unison, each one of the campers sits up for about 5 seconds then lies back down like nothing ever happened. The other counselors and I nearly shit ourselves. No one else at the camp believed us.
But the scariest thing that happened to me at this camp was when I was a camper in late elementary school/early middle school. All the other campers in my cabin were talking about if anyone had any paranormal experiences. Some of their stories (which were probably all fake) scared the shit out of the little bitch I was when I was younger. We all went to sleep after that. Or at least I tried to but I wasn’t able to. The stories were all in my head then all of a sudden I feel something touching my leg. Scared the shit out of me even more. Then it happens again and I am literally about to have a heart attack. I throw off my sleeping bag and it was my other foot grazing my leg.
12. Dog Attacks And A Dorm Room Haunting
Non-paranormal?
A dog mauling me.
I was 18 and a boxer breed ran towards me and knocked me into a ditch. He bit into my leg and wouldn’t let go. When I fell into the ditch, I was lucky enough to put my arm up and block him from going into my neck.
I had to kick him in the face multiple times (I’m a huge animal lover so this killed me inside), but I climbed out and dove into a car that stopped. Inside was a group of Jehovah witnesses.
Have a scar on both sides of one leg where the teeth sunk in. Used to have bunches of scratches on my arm but thankfully no serious scarring.
Dog’s name was Hannibal. Found out the owner bred dogs for fighting for someone in New York. We had a small town so no one would’ve known. Had maybe 10 boxers in the space of a small room.
Paranormal: Probably my friend’s ghost haunting the dorms I was an RA at after he committed suicide.
