50+ ‘Scary Stories’ That Are Actually 100% Real

He had been living in the attic.

By

50+ 'Scary Stories' That Are Actually 100% Real
God & Man

***

“There was a young girl kidnapped in the middle of the day on a neighborhood street in a Springfield, MO. Someone in the street witnessed the event and tried chasing the car on foot to at least get the plate number and call the police. They sent out an amber alert after a few hours, identified the owner of the vehicle and his residence but by the time they got to his house, they found her undressed body in a plastic tub in his basement and she had been raped and shot dead.

The most fucked up thing was that this guy was a middle school coach and he had child pornography in his house as well as photos of young girls from his middle school. We found out at my catholic high school that the murderer was the son of our theology teacher. Our teacher left school for over a week I’m sure trying to fathom how his own son could commit such a heinous crime.

The murderer was sentenced to death this year for the death of the girl, Hailey Owens. Her family, as well as the family of the murderer, lobbied to change amber alert laws so they can be issued faster after a kidnapping is reported.”

***


“A guy I know is a boat mechanic. So one Saturday he’s on his own doing some work on a boat and suddenly he comes too and he’s on the ground. He knew there was water under the boat he’d been working on so he assumes he’s been electrocuted and he’s vaguely aware of someone behind him. So he starts yelling “help help I’ve been electrocuted” and he hears whoever is behind him leave. He keeps yelling and eventually a guy in a neighbouring business hears him and comes to his aid. When he’s at the hospital he finds out he wasn’t electrocuted, someone had hit him on the back of the head with his own mallet. Nothing was stolen from the shop.

Meaning someone (who was never caught) was just walking by and spontaneously decided to hit him on the back of the head for no reason.”

***


“There was a segment in the news not too long ago about a girl who walked home late at night (from a nightclub I do believe) and was raped 3 times by 3 different people at 3 different points along the way. They have CCTV of her between each of these points. Scary shit.”

***


“A woman was abducted and raped by 2 men and then stabbed over 30 times. Her neck muscle completely removed, her guts spilling out. She crawled to the hospital WITH HER HEAD ALMOST DETACHED and survived. She wrote a book and now is a motivational speaker with 2 kids, despite the fact that she was disemboweled.”

***


“My great aunt was buried alive when she was only in her 20s. The casket was brought up when the cemetery had to be relocated. The casket had broken, and she was upside down. Claw marks everywhere inside the casket.”

***


“A friend of a friend was travelling in the UK and had to hitch-hike. He dropped her off at home. The next day police came knocking and proceeded to take her to the station and demand how she knows this man, what is their relationship etc. She finds out that the man had killed another female hitch-hiker that same day and had her in the trunk at the same time he was driving her (the friend). For some unknown reason he hadn’t killed her. She couldn’t sleep and cried for days and her home was placed on watch.”

***

“Back in the 90s, my mom was on the highway heading home from a friends house late at night. She was driving a really nice thunderbird. After a while this big white van drove next to her and the driver started performing some very rude gestures and being young and dumb, my mom reciprocated the gestures. Then the dude pulled up a big Bowie knife to the window. My mom started panicking and sped up to get away and the van was following right along. Then the guy tried to run her off the road. Keep in mind they’re probably going about 100 miles per hour. She gets on the exit to get home and he’s still following her. When she does get back to her house, which she shared with my grandparents, she pulled into the drive way honking the horn and screaming trying to wake someone up. The van pulls into the driveway just as my grandfather comes out in his underwear with a gun. The dude got scared and drove off. My mom wouldn’t leave her house for month except for school, but never at night.”

***


“That Netflix documentary about the pizza guy in Erie, Pennsylvania who had a bomb collar put around his neck then was forced to rob a bank. As a former delivery driver I was scared shitless the entire time, but also super intrigued by the investigation and the people involved.”

***

“The 2011 San Fernando massacre. Mexican cartel members(Los Zetas) abducted people from buses in Mexico. They executed the old and weak, raped and tortured the women, threw the children in acid, and separated the men. The men were then forced into gladiatorial combat to the death, all in some kind of game to find new cartel recruits. They even forced the bus driver to run the bus over living people. It still blows my mind that this happened right there in Mexico, just a few years ago.

2011 San Fernando Massacre.”

***

“This is a incident that happened to me about 10 years ago. I live in Melbourne, Australia.

I was driving home from work one night around 9pm midweek so the roads were quiet. As I was driving downhill I heard a sound that was like a jet engine roaring behind me. The next thing I know a car goes flying past me going twice the speed limit. It looked like a fairly old crappy car. The car started to get the speed wobbles and then one of the tyres came flying off and rolled at speeds downhill whilst the car spun out and crashed. I stopped my car to make sure whoever inside was ok. A guy got out of the car and looked over at me then started moving extremely quickly towards me. I dont know why but I hit my internal locks on the car which was fortunate because no more then 2 seconds later the guy started grabbing at the drivers side door and smashing on my windscreen with his fists trying to get in, ill never forget the crazy look he had in his eyes. I put my foot down on the accelerator and drove off back home.

I decided to swap cars once I got home and drove back to see what was going on. I saw 2 fire trucks and about 4 police close to where the incident happened. When I got back to the crash site the guy was no longer there so I decided to head home.

The next day at work I was online bored reading the news when I saw an article that shocked me. The article was about a guy who had been in a police chase for 1 hour and the police stopped chasing him because it was becoming to dangerous. Turns out the guy was high on meth, had stolen a car an hours drive away and had been in a hot pursuit since. After crashing the car the guy apparently crossed to the other side of the road and hailed the first car that appeared which was a taxi. He got into the taxi and stole it, in the process he pushed the driver out of the driver side door and the driver got stuck and dragged at speeds. The driver died from the incident. I called the police and had a detectiive assigned to me. He fingerprint checked my car and got a statement.

I had to testify in the supreme court as a key witness in a murder trial. The guy got 30 years and they told me that my testimony was one of the main factors in convicting him.

I often think back to that night and wonder if I hadn’t locked my doors would I have been the one who got murdered.”

***

“Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal who admitted he still fantasizes about killing and eating women (after killing and eating a woman in Paris) walks free unmedicated and unmonitored in Japan to this day. Pretty creepy to know people like that walk around freely.”

***

“Fatal Familial Insomnia. The whole story is batshit and perhaps the most terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole I’ve ever gone down. Only a few families have this genetic disorder, iirc, and once you develop it, that’s it, you die an agonizing death from an inability to sleep. It starts off like regular insomnia, but progresses over a few years until you legit go insane and finally shut down. NOTHING, not even the most potent drug, can induce sleep. Even when they tried to put them in comas, the brain remained completely active.”

***

“Last summer in my city a 14-year old girl was raped near a train station. After her abuser left her she tried to get help and flagged down a vehicle and was raped a second time in the car of the man who stopped. Two complete strangers raped her on the same day, it happened only a few miles away from my house and I still think about it from time to time.”

***

“This is second hand from my mom so I dont remember everything, but when I was younger (like 3 or 4) and she was home alone with me some guy came up to the door. This was before cellphones and people were nicer so she answered it even tho it was like 8 or 9 at night. Well the guy was asking if he could come in and use her phone but she said no. He asked a couple more times before walking in and immediately got stop by the family dog grabbing his hand and holding it tightly. He started to get nervous and my dads dog led him back to the door (he had walked further in at this point) my mom was able to push him out and lock the door before running upstairs and calling the police. The cops picked him up a little while later and they found out he had been in a bar fight and stabbed a guy a bunch of times. Without my “older brother” my mom and I could’ve been seriously hurt. He was the best dog ever and lived till the ripe age of 15.”

***

“I lived in an apartment in Marina del Rey, California. 9 years ago, just before Halloween, a third-floor balcony was decorated with a prop of a dead man slumped over in a chair. For a few days, every time I’d come home I’d look up and think how cool looking it was and wondering why they didn’t have lights shining on it at night. After a few days, people realized it was actually the resident of the apartment who killed himself. I was looking at a corpse thinking how cool it was.”

***

“Not the scariest thing that I know about, but the scariest thing that ever happened to ME: I worked at a pretty well known record store in Los Angeles in the 90s. A guy in his early twenties used to come in and ask me about records a lot, and one day in conversation he let a weird detail about my life slip that I hadn’t told him (my dad is not American). I brushed it off, thinking my co-workers has mentioned it to him since he was such a regular. About a week later I was driving home and my car broke down. It was incredibly hot and I had to walk several miles to get to a payphone, which was outside an elementary school. I called a cab and hung up the phone, and after sitting a moment, it started ringing, so I picked it up. The person on the other end said, “bad luck about your car- talk to me until your ride gets there. “ I hung up the phone, but it was definitely that guy. He had to have followed me from home, trailed me from the car, called the school to ask for the payphone number, and found a way to call me at that number. There weren’t really cellphones at that time, but there was a gas station and a grocery store across the street so who knows. I immediately quit my job and moved back in with my parents within 48 hours. I went in to visit old friends from work a few months later and they told me the guy was arrested for kidnapping.”

***

“This is from the days when I used to live back home (I used to live in Karachi, Pakistan but now moved to UK).

We used live very close to a CID (Police Investigation Department aka Pakistani FBI) building which we all were unaware of and always thought it was just an ordinary government building till on 11th, Nov 2010. On that day I around evening time coming home from work I thought I better hit the gym (because they had a sauna and after being tired from all day work that sounded like a good idea) which was hardly 0.3 miles away so I decided to walk to the gym. I change quickly and leave for the gym and start walking towards the gym.

This is almost I’ve hardly walked like 10 minutes and I’m 0.1 miles away roughly and all of a sudden for a nano second I feel that ground is shaking and the next thing I hear is a loudest bang I’ve ever heard followed by a pressure kick into my chest. Now to let you guys know, my both the ear started bleeding because the bang was so loud and for the reference the kick in the chest was as bad as Big Show wearing military boots and kicking you in the chest straight with full force.

Next thing? I’m on the ground covering my ears because they are in agony and covered in dirt trying to figure out what’s happening. As I am trying to figure out I can see all the cars alarms have gone off. Anything made up of glass has been shattered in roughly 1-2 miles area. I’m still trying to figure out what has happened and I start smelling gun powder and as if someone is making a BBQ and is being burnt. I will always remember that smell which was something unsettling. Next things rock and dust particle starts landing on me and the surrounding areas which had 1-1.5 inches long of pieces of human skin and flesh. I am not believing that I have another human skin piece stuck to my arm. I brush up my clothes and arms getting up and covering my ear recovering from that pressure kick.

As I move closer to a spot in a street where I am hearing loads of people screaming and crying I see a few 3-5ft cracks between some walls of the building which have been destroyed by the shockwave of the bang. I see the gap between a wall and move into the area where I see these scenes straight from a Hollywood movie where people are crying, cars on fire and dead bodies on the ground. By this time I’m thinking its a bomb blast and that’s what has happened. As I move closer I see a 10ft and 30ft wide crater which has been filled with the water and the building which was a CID building is no longer there. There are hundreds of people lying on the ground crying for help as some of them don’t even have legs or limbs or some don’t have their complete bottom. I am still in a state of shock looking around and I see a woman crying and hitting herself because she had her husband dead who’s legs and torso was missing. I seen that later. I see several people without legs, brains out and no hands. One thing, which haunted me for sure was a 18-20yr old guy who was dead and lying on the floor towards his chest on the floor with his neck turned towards me. I can still remember him looking straight into my eyes. His feet were flipped the other way around. After the police arrived and media arrived I came back home after it got crowded. After I came home after the dusk everyday, I would see that 18-20yr old boy standing and starring into my eyes. I would wake up screaming through out the night and see that guy standing at the door way just staring at me. For two to three weeks I would see this guy regularly during midnight standing in my hallway staring through my soul. I still remember that guy’s face and the shockwave and the sound of the blast.

According to BBC it said “Eyewitnesses said the blast left a crater 12 metres (40ft) wide in front of the gutted building in Pakistan’s financial and commercial capital.'”

***


“I once received a random phone call from a girl who found my number from a google search of my address listed on a resume.

She was freaking out and wanted me to check up on her father who lived a few doors down in an apartment complex I resided in. While she was still on the phone with me I walked over to his door and knocked on it, no answer. She pleaded for me to enter the unit and I got nervous and refused, instead reporting the incident to the building manager. The manager said she would call the police to perform a wellness check. The father had killed himself.”

***

“Back in 2000 I believe, I was in fifth grade living in California and it was late at night. My family was just at the house and suddenly there was a huge banging on the door that just kept going like someone was scared. My dad went to answer it and it was a lady that just came in. I was pretty young and don’t remember the details but apparently she was saying there was a guy on a horse chasing her trying to either kill her or something. My family was being nice but skeptical, until they saw a man on a horse outside the house. Horses arent exactly that common to see out and about even though there are a few places that have them. I could only imagine what the lady was going through. She even came back a few days later and thanked my dad with flowers and said he saved her life.”

***

“My grandmother used to work at a mental illness facility when I was little, it was a place prisoners went after committing crimes that were so horrific they were deemed very mentally unstable and not suitable for a prison. One of her patients (who was VERY fond of her) was put into this place because he had strangled his mum and dad one night, hid their bodies under the floor boards, and every now and then brought his mother’s body up to have sex with. He was caught after a few months because the smell of rotting corpses had reached the neighbours, and they were cornered that they hadn’t seen them in a while.

My grandmother lived within walking distance from this facility and so the prisoners that were deemed well enough to roam around the grounds were able to see her walking home. One of the other patients most have told him about where she lived because one night he escaped and went straight to my grandmother’s house, knocking on the door and begging to come in.

Safe to say he was caught very quickly and my grandparents later moved house. Still scary to imagine though.”

***

“The guy who died in nutty putty cave. He basically crawled into narrower and narrower passageways thinking it would eventually open up. He was trapped for many hours unable to get a full breath. After he died, they decided it would be too difficult to get him out so they closed the cave and left him in there. I can’t think of anything worse than dealing with that kind of claustrophobia. He was trapped upside down.”

***

“My mom stayed in a hospital for a week at the same time that a serial killer worked there that was killing patients. The scariest part is I didn’t even realize how close of a call she could have had until 20 years later when I was researching famous serial killers.”

***


“The murder of Yvonne Pearson, she was targeted by Peter Sutcliffe (A serial killer known as The Yorkshire Ripper) for being a prostitute.

He hit her on the back of her head with a hammer several times, He then noticed that there was a taxi nearby so he dragged her behind an old sofa and to stop her from making noise, he shoved horse hair down her throat while pinching her nose shut. When the taxi left she was still alive, so he kicked her and even jumped on her chest with all his body weight and eventually she died.

She had two young children which makes the story even worse.”

***


“Ronald Stoecker picked up an underage teen(Jean Marie Humble) near Peoria, IL. He then drove her several miles out to the country, proceeded to rape her with a knife in a very old and unused farm shed. She crawled her way at least 500 yards to nearest house and got help. That was my house. She ended up dying a week or so later. Parents never liked talking about it and still don’t, really. He fled to Costa Rica and eventually was caught. What a piece of garbage. Happened around ’97 or ’98”

***


“A year or two ago, I was living in the suburbs. I would walk the 20 minutes to the cheap grocery store and walk back if I didn’t have that much stuff. Otherwise I would call a cab. I was a 21/22 year old boney female

Anyway, I noticed this man following me through the parking lot as I made my way across the parking lot to the store. He’s huge. Probably late 30’s or early 40’s. Starts asking me questions, like what my name is, what my plans are and the like. I brush him off and keep walking. He’s tailing me now. Follows me into the store. As I’m walking around, I notice him handling things in the produce section but not really paying attention to them.

I go to the cracker isle, and he’s doing the same thing. As I go towards the till go pay, he leaves the store. I call my dad and he comes to get me. We see the man standing in a corner, where I would have had to walk through to get home. The man was waiting for me to leave.”

***


“Serial rapist Marc O’Leary was caught in 2011 and charged with several raped. Now, none of these women’s stories are particularly pretty, but there’s one woman whose story takes the cake. In 2008, an 18 years old woman went to police claiming she was raped. They didn’t believe her and ended up charging her with filing a false report. She had to pay a fine, have a crime on her record, and get this: to stay in subsidized housing, they made her confess that she made the whole thing up. Her photo was later found among his belongings.”

***

“Hometown friend was tripping on mushrooms and saw a couple going at it in the back seat of a neighbors car. Went in for a closer look and noticed he was actually witnessing a murder. Next day the house was flooded with cop cars but never heard anything more of it.”

***


“I just found out about the Circleville letters, those are fucking nuts.

Just the broadstrokes, because it gets nuts fast: In the late-70s a bunch of people in a tiny Ohio suburb named Circleville started receiving weird, creepy, anonymous letters. The letters all had the same chunky, overly-blocky handwriting, and would often include threats & intimate details about the peoples’ lives.

But they were just letters, so most of the town chocked it up to a crazy person and moved on.

The person who seemed to get the most venom in the letters was a school bus driver named Mary Gillespie. Whoever wrote these letters fucking HATED Mary, alleged she was having an affair, and threatened to expose her affair to her husband. Mary told her husband, Ron Gillespie, about the letter straight away and swore she wasn’t having an affair, and he believed her.

One night Ron was home with the kids, just watching TV, when he received a phone call. Nobody knows who was on the other end (this is just from the kids’ reporting) but Ron gets FURIOUS, grabs his shotgun, and tells the kids to stay put while he goes to take care of something.

A few hours later Ron’s car is found smashed into a tree, seemingly having crashed, with Ron dead inside. His blood alcohol level is .16, he’s covered in gunpowder residue, and his shotgun had recently been fired. No bullet was ever found.

Time goes on and one day, a year or so later, Mary was driving along when she spotted a sign on the side of the road with same chunky, blocky writing as the letters. It said, “MARY GILLESPIE SUCKS.” Exasperated, Mary stopped and tore the sign down, revealing this weird little cardboard box mounted to the pole behind the scene, with a handgun taped inside and crudely rigged to go off if the sign was disturbed (it was straight up a string tied to the trigger, really dumb). It was just dumb luck that the gun didn’t go off, Mary had tugged the sign off the “wrong” way or something.

So now everybody is freaked out. The local sheriff gets involved and manages to trace the gun to Mary’s brother in law, Paul Freshour. Paul claims the gun was stolen, but it looks bad for him. Now here’s where the sheriff’s department shits the bed: They claim Paul confessed to sending the letters (which they have no record of, and which Paul disputed for the rest of his life), Paul is imprisoned… then the letters immediately start back up. Even Paul is getting them now, delivered to him in jail.

Paul wasn’t paroled until 1994, when an investigative reporter took an interest in the story and found the sheriff’s department basically had zero evidence that Paul had actually done anything. The only thing that tied Paul to the so-called Circleville writer was the gun, which Paul claimed had been stolen from his garage.

Unsolved Mysteries takes an interest in this weird clusterfuck of a case, but before they even arrive they get a letter from the Circleville Writer too, threatening them to stay away and to not do anything to make the sheriff look bad.

To this day nobody knows who was behind the Circleville letters.”

***


“I just watched a documentary about Colleen Stan, who survived being kidnapped by a sexual sadist, who kept her in a coffin-sized box he built under his bed, 22 hours a day, for seven years while he raped and tortured her.

The survivor is the primary interviewee in the documentary and tells her story, on camera, for most of the documentary. The cops made mention of her bravery and ability withstand her torture, and manipulate her kidnapper to increase her safety.”

***


“A relative of mine (distant, like 5th or 6th cousin i think) was a professional diver for an oil company, he would dive to check things below the surface at depths great enough to require mixed gas air tanks. He had a suit malfunction, and had to be kept in one of those pressure chambers to slowly let the gasses out of his body.

While he was breathing through a sealed face mask, someone changed the tank at the end out, and a safety device meant to keep the air from being pulled back through the (from inside the chamber to the outside) failed and literally pulled his lungs and stomach out through his mouth, killing instantly.

My mother has the news article somewhere, this was in the late 8os i think, and happened off the coast of Louisianan in the Gulf of Mexico.”

***


“I work at a pizza place in St. Louis called IMO’s. About 10 years ago, there was a guy who was a manager at our store named Michael Devlin. He abducted 2 children in total but quickly got caught a few days after abducting the second child. The terrifying thing is that he had held the first child (who was 11 when abducted) captive for over 4 years and pretended that he was his son. The kid even went by the last name Devlin after the whole charade was over! He abducted the second kid by following a school bus to somewhere in buttfuck Missouri, somewhere where hardly anyone would be able to see him. When he pulled up in his truck, a kid in the back of the bus noticed how it was weird that there was a car in the area other than the usual one’s he saw on most commutes. Next thing he knew, the kid they dropped off went missing, so he gave the police a description of it. A few days later, after reading the paper, my pizza shop owner, Mike, recognized the description and ended up filing a report on his own manager. Devlin is serving like 70 life sentences or some crazy shit. Also, I work with some people who worked with him- most I’ve heard them say about him is that he was a dick 😂”

***


“My aunt was on a flight with the killer/cannibal Luka Magnotta, who sent body pieces of his victims to members of parliament. He was apparently throwing up chunks of human during the flight. This was his escape flight out of the country, he was arrested in Europe soon after.”

***


“A bunch of people were outside, middle of the day, and a guy on a moped just pulled up and grabbed a little girl right in front of everyone. Some of the adults chased the moped out to the main road, but he got away. I actually passed the guy myself driving home, but no Amber Alerts had been issued and no one knew about it until he was long gone. He drove her out to this area that is just trees and swamp, but it’s still kind of a moderately busy road since people use it to avoid traffic. A school bus driver had been late leaving the school that day and just happened to see a man park his moped and walk off into the woods with a little girl, but again, the Amber Alert still hadn’t been issued, so she had no idea what was going on. She went home, made dinner and went to bed and watched the news that morning before leaving and realized she may have seen the kidnapper. She called the police and they went out to the area with search and rescue dogs and found the little girl chained to a tree. He had sexually assaulted her, kissed her on the forehead and left her in the woods to die, but thanks to the bus driver, she was found in time. I can’t imagine being out in those woods all night, and I’m an adult. There are bears, coyotes, snakes and millions of biting bugs. It had even stormed that night because I remembered being worried for her when it started raining. The real fucked up thing is that this wasn’t his first offense and he’d just gotten out of jail from his last sex crime when he took this little girl. It’s just so fucked up.”

***


“The United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons, a plane carrying 1 fell off an aircraft carrier 80 miles off the coast of Japan. A bomber was carrying 2 over the Mediterranean sea and was lost to a storm. A plane crashed over North Carolina and 1 was found in a tree and the other was 50 meters underground. It was never found and the government bought the land around the area. A plane crashed over Greenland and dropped 4, 3 were found but 1 buried itself in the ice. The worst is when a bomber crashed over Georgia and dropped a bomb into the Atlantic ocean less than half a mile from the state. If that’s not bad enough Russia has also lost about 40.”

***

“When I was a kid I was riding my bike in a nearby road and a van pulled up, 2 men got out and picked up a kid who was riding his bike. Tore him off it while he screamed and put him in the back. When they saw me frozen still standing there in the road they looked angry and started to walk towards me. To this day I’ve never moved so fast, You know in movies when cars don’t start at scary moments, I couldn’t get my feet on the pedals for what felt like forever. Pulled away and sped round the corner, up my garden path and ran to my mum. She didn’t believe me. Wouldn’t call the police.

I also have a memory of us looking for a missing boy as a community in nearby fields and helicopters saying his description.

That was the last I remember.

No news stories I can find about a missing boy in any year where it happened. Nobody remembers it, not even Mum.”

***

“The Spider-Man of Denver.

Mrs Peters was an elderly woman who broke her hip in a fall, leaving her husband alone in their house while she stayed in the hospital. He was found bludgeoned to death in their home, which was obviously a shock to poor Mrs Peters, especially as their wasn’t a sign of forced entry. But a few weeks later she moved back into the home with a housekeeper. Not for long though, since both women heard noises, saw “Mr Peter’s ghost” walking the halls, and found objects and food moved or missing. They left the house in terror.

The neighbourhood rumour of the haunted house spread. People saw movement in the now-empty house and police were put on patrol. Then one night they chased the suspected intruder in the house right into one of the houses closets and up through the entrance to the “coffin sized” attic, an entrance that the officers saw and didn’t enter in investigating Mr Peters death as they believed it was only large enough to allow spiders inside.

He had been living in the attic before Mrs Peters accident and assumed the house was empty when he came down to surprise Mr Peters and in the ensuing confrontation beat him to death, just to return to his attic hideaway and live there while his widow lived downstairs.”

***

“When I was in 7th grade I was walking home from school and this creepy, disheveled guy was waiting for me in a parking lot in an old, beat up car. He tried to get me to come over to the car, but I could tell the dude was no good. He said he was a friend of my fathers and that he would drive me home. I told him no and stayed about twenty feet away from the car. When he realized I wouldn’t do it he threw a piece of paper out his window and drove off, all pissed off. I went over and picked up the little paper – it was my father’s business card.

My father was a professor and it turns out the man had taken a class from him….”

***

“My friend and I used to play in a creek as a kid. It had a tunnel that went under a road. We used to go in the tunnel to make noises and hear the echo, little kid stuff like that. Also just to preface, the part of the creek we played at was maybe 25-50 yards away from a relatively popular park. So one day we went into the tunnel and there were two grown men in there. Being the innocent children we were, we thought they were just playing or trying to catch some minos. Then they started a conversation, I don’t remember what it was about, but they got us to follow them quite a ways away from the park and any houses. Now, at the very end of the creek, there was a deep pocket with some fish right before it drained out to some unknown location. Anyway, some people fished down there. So they got us back to this pool, all alone when out of no where a dad and his son came out of the woods onto the sand bed with fishing poles. The men looked very frightened and said that we were their kids, my friend and I said something along the lines of “we aren’t your kids!” Then the dad told brought us back to the park, asked my friend (who was older than me) what his mom’s number is and told us to go play on the playground with his son. Next thing I know, both of our moms show up. His was livid with us and mine was just happy to see us. Then the cops showed up, asked us to describe the men, said they would check it out, and then we were instructed never to go back there ever again. Being the dumb kids we were, we went right back as soon as we could, thankfully though, we never saw those two men again.”

***

“This serial killer named Todd Kohlhepp lived 5 minutes away from me before he got caught in 2016. He confessed to 4 murders done in 2003 and he kidnapped this girl and her boyfriend, killed the boyfriend infront of her and buried him on his large property. Chained the girl up for months inside a trailer and raped her. Another scary part is that he was a well respected realtor.”

***

“There is a a rural cemetery outside the small town where I live and grew up where something that sounds like a scene from a horror film took place. In the late 80s/early 90s there was a rash of serial rapes/murders around the area. One of the victims, a young woman, escaped from the car of the rapist and found herself running away from the car and into the cemetery. She saw lights on a farmhouse in the distance and hope for survival flickered in her eyes. Unbeknownst to her, the darkness hid the fence surrounding the perimeter of the cemetery. She ran blindingly into it and was knocked down allowing the rapist to catch up to her. He then beat her to death with a toppled headstone.

Terrifying.”

***


“I was told this one recently which has made me feel uneasy for the last few days.

Here’s the facts of what happened:

A woman was beaten to death in her bed with a blunt object and was left there for her 8 year old son to find in the morning.

What everybody believes but there was no evidence for a conviction

It was the child’s dad who had made the mother’s life hell after she broke up with him. She’d reported him multiple times to the police but there was “nothing they could do”.

This happened in early 90’s London”

***

“I remember back when I was 7 my family and I had moved into a new house. We had only been there for a few months and our next door neighbors were constantly fighting. Our houses were fairly close, almost a full arms length away from one of our windows. Anyways, one night as me and my sisters were getting ready for bed we heard the usual arguing and thought nothing of it. The next day after I had finished getting dressed from school I walked outside my front door and as I was walking up to our front gate I noticed something to my left in the neighbor’s front yard. It was the young woman just laying there on the floor on her back. I vividly remember the way she looked, she was wearing a pink shirt and her right arm was stretched out towards our fence. My mom came out next and saw her right away, she quickly rushed me and my sisters into her car and dropped us off at school. When I got home that day there was police tape blocking off the neighbor’s house and that’s when I realized that she was dead. I honestly thought she had passed out from drinking but she’d been murdered by her lover, stabbed in the stomach multiple times”

***

“This is ongoing. Maybe too late to get noticed. I live in a modest house on a quiet street. 9 years ago, someone bought the house next to me to basically shelve their 18yo schizophrenic son. They pay the rent and utilities and occasionally drop off cash. He has done about as well as an unmanaged schizophrenic can do on his own. To paint an image, he is a muscular black guy with telltale crazy eyes. He stands on his balcony around 3am most nights screaming and threatening… someone (voices, me, I can’t tell). The first major incident was when he shot a deer from his second-story balcony. It was standing across the street about 4ft from a neighbor’s bedroom. The police came and left when he didn’t answer. I woke up to swat in my bushes the next morning with some serious scoped weapons. He left with them but returned in a few weeks. Astonishingly, I discovered that he incurred no charges for this. Aside from this, it has been general weirdness: running down the street yelling, wearing winter clothing in the summer/sometimes boxers in the winter, collecting shopping carts, breaking windows, etc.

Over the last 2 years, he has become focused more on me. I first noticed when he told me to stop contacting him. As in, I had become one of the voices. I had always been neighborly to him and helped how I could, but it is becoming clear that he is directing his paranoia at me (40ish dude). He is becoming more aggressive. Slashed tires, trampled plants, things missing. I call the police, they take a record and say there is nothing they can do. I call his father and he tells me he is an adult and can’t make him check into a facility. He won’t sell the house or move him. For reference, they are from somewhere in the world that attempting an exorcism is a reasonable course of action.

Last week, he began banging on my door at 3am nightly. He thinks I am stealing his rap lyrics (like I am going to publish an album about killing and raping white people). My family is terrified and he runs by the time I make it outside. I report it every time, but he doesn’t answer the door and the cops/crisis team just leave. I really feel like the system is dropping the ball here, and it is going to take an incident for something to be done. Maybe not the scariest thing in the world to you, dear reader, but it is in mine.”

***


“That guy on Japan that was exposed to so much radiation his skin fell off and they kept him alive to monitor him.”

***

“Less than a decade ago, a millitary plane flew across the us, when they landed they realized they had nukes on board.

They weren’t supposed to have nukes on board.”

***


“During some cave exploring or spelunking (don’t know the difference between them) my family and some friends were in some deep caves and as we were heading out, we found a slit about knee high in the rock. Getting on your stomach, there was a tight squeeze you could get into and it lead to a small crawlspace in the rock, with quartz growing on the ceiling making a beautiful crystal ceiling display. We went in one by one, and if you were claustrophobic this place was your living nightmare. Most times you could feel the ceiling on your back and the floor on your stomach every time you took a breath. We went deep in and it was just incredible, like a small world tucked away within solid rock. I had made it as deep in as it could go, before the path waned to the left and covered with stalagmites and stalactites of sediment. Everyone was having a grand time when we started feeling some trickles of water on our backs. It turns out, it was raining outside and with the way the crawlspace dipped down before flattening out, this whole place would fill up with rainwater pretty damn quickly with the only way for it to drain out was the way we came in. It started as trickles before it went into streams and began to pool up. Being the furthest away from the exit and you can only just crawl flat on your stomach with jagged crystal pointing down from the ceiling, I started to panic a bit. Everyone crawled out as fast as they could as the water kept coming in, the streams growing larger and larger. We left one at a time as fast as we could, but it wasn’t fast enough. I could feel the water coming up to my chin as I crawled behind my brother. Each inch I took forward felt so painfully slow that I could feel the walls compress around me, and the water was unrelenting, now splashing against my panicked squirms.

I got out just as the water was up to my lips, and everyone got out safely.”

***


“I lived an apartment with 4 units. The guy across from us (2 on each side) never talked us but we’d see him come and go. One day I was sitting at home when a cop knocked on the door. I answered and he asked if I had seen the guy lately and I said no but I never really did. He had me call the landlord and ask for a key. Once the owner got there he tried to open only to find out the guy had changed the locks. They had to break the glass door and the wooden door to get in. The cop went in to find the guy had killed himself probably around a month before. No one knew because he never talked to anyone.”

***


“If you climb Everest, you are basically guaranteed to see at least one dead, frozen carcass on your way up.”

***

“This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away.

Judy Kirby murdered six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit suicide. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband’s brother and was by some reports involved in drug trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest.

She picked up her sister’s son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a high rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride.

The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. There were pieces of children all over the highway. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.”

***

“There was a serial killer known as the Weepy Voiced Killer. He would kill people then call 911 from a payphone, crying and begging them to catch and stop him. You can find the recordings of his 911 calls on YouTube.”

***


“My great-aunt and her husband owned a successful horse farm and found out that their son was stealing money from them. After he found out he went into their house while they were asleep and shot them to death, first my great-uncle while he sleeping and my great-aunt was found shot in her back laying across the front porch steps. He’s currently in jail for a long time.” Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

Chrissy Stockton