Sometimes people come across creepy and terrifying things that don’t quite fit the mold. They aren’t paranormal necessarily and sometimes they’re not spooky in the traditional sense but they’re occurrences that seem to defy reality and possibility nonetheless. More importantly, they stick with a person. Below are twenty-one such stories.

1. Woman In The Field

This happened when I was living in Indonesia to set the scene. If anyone on the minute off chance knows this woman or someone has told you this happened to them please do pipe up. It’s obsessed me since it happened and I think about this woman every day.

So, we had a house for a while that was a bit like a wedding cake, on top was a little snug/nook room a bit like a ships crows nest, you could see for ages around. We were in the middle of an empty, square patch of land and it backed on to an unused field, big, flat, open, nowhere to hide. No trees lining it, just more flat fields and then a tall back wall. A wall of about 4 foot high separated the field and my house.

One day, late afternoon kind of time, I’m up there just relaxing and I hear these blood curdling screams “help me, help me” all of that, a woman, probably Australian/Kiwi screaming in English, I’ve never heard anything like it.

From my nest, I can see her running across the field at the back, kind of limping, pretty sure she was bloodied, fucked up either way, she was about halfway through it when I saw her (big field). I run down to the ground floor and towards the field and she was gone, no sign of her at all. It took me all of about a minute, if that, I was gunning it down there to get to the field but she had just vanished.

Nowhere to be seen. Unless Usain Bolt was pursuing her it is incredibly, incredibly unlikely someone came in to the field, grabbed her and pulled her back out without me having seen them. Pretty much impossible really.

I sent my house security out to look for her, I stayed in the field looking and they went towards where she came from and over the wall she had to have come over to get into the field. It was an un used holiday villa and they found a sandal and a bit of blood, nothing else, there was blood on the wall where she climbed over but nothing going the other way, so I know I didn’t imagine it or make it up.

We called the police and they came and had a look and they also found nothing. Posters went up and stuff, nobody got back to us or anything.

Fuck only knows what happened when I was coming downstairs but I know it can’t have been good. Still freaks me the fuck out.

2. Whispering In The Dark

A few years back I was falling asleep with my wife cuddled up to me on my left side. I’m at that point where I’m just starting to fall asleep but still very slightly lucid. Suddenly the hair on my body sorta stands up, I feel this chill, and then I hear this weird almost “whisper” in my right ear. It sounded almost like someone talking backwards (think Spirit Healer from WoW.) My eyes snapped opened and nothing is out of the ordinary so I go back to sleep and just brush it off as my imagination.

The next morning my wife says she had this weird dream. She says she dreamed she was in bed and her old childhood friend was standing at the foot of the bed. He climbed onto the bed and began whispering in my right ear. She said she thought it was kinda a weird dream, since her friend had recently committed suicide.

3. Locked Out

About 10 years ago, I was at a relative’s house, a cottage in a small Michigan coastal town, for my summer vacation. She was almost completely deaf (without hearing aids she was completely deaf). Because of her impairment, she had a security system that flashed lights and called her home phone (which also had a light) in addition to a sound alarm. This is important later.

I had gone out to see the 4th of July carnival and arrived home at 11:00. My relative went to sleep at 8:00 every night at the latest. When I came in, I turned off the alarm (essentially signed myself in) and turned it back on again, like I did every time I came home late. I poured myself a glass of water and walked upstairs.

Now, upstairs there was a long hallway. At the end of it was the door to a patio overlooking the backyard. We never used it because it wasn’t up to code (the house was built in the late 1800s, and many aspects weren’t worth the money it would cost to fix them). So there was a decorative antique chair that was propped against the door to the back patio. When I walked in that night, the chair was propped against my bedroom door instead, leaned underneath the doorknob as if to keep someone from exiting. I bolted for my relative’s room to find her fast asleep. Her guard dog was also asleep. I woke my relative up and she put in her hearing aids.

She called the alarm company and they had no record of anything besides her setting the alarm at 6:30 and my entrance at 11:00. They called the police anyway. When the cops arrived, they moved the chair and attempted to open my bedroom door. It was locked. The doorknob was original to the house, and there was no key for it. So the cops and I walked out on the front balcony and used my key to open the sliding doors. Everything was as it should have been, and when we opened the door from the inside, it wasn’t even locked.

The cops searched the entire house and found nobody, and nothing was missing. I have no idea why there was a chair barricading my bedroom door, and why it appeared locked when the lock wasn’t even turned. The police sent for a fingerprinting kit and they found NO fingerprints on the chair, not even my relative’s. Nobody knew why. I had trouble sleeping in that room after that.

4. A Voice Calling For John

My boyfriend lives in a huge plantation home on a 350 acre farm thats surrounded by other large farms.

Very historic, very beautiful, very creepy.

Animals won’t come upstairs, his siblings who also grew up in the house won’t stay the night, my boyfriend has specific rooms in the house he refuses to go in.

Anyway, one night we were in bed probably around 2am. He was asleep, I was just about to fall asleep when I heard something outside. I brushed it off at first because the woods behind the house are full of coyotes and I thought that was what I was hearing.

The second time (2-3 seconds after the first) I heard it I completely woke up. It was definitely not coyotes. It was a woman outside calling for John. She sounded really distressed. I heard her call for John for another 10-15 seconds and it stopped. It was such an eerie experience.

Her voice was clear as day and I was wide awake after I heard her the first time.

I mentioned something to my boyfriend about it the next morning. He said that was a new one. Then one morning, exactly a month later, he asks what name I heard a woman yelling outside. I told him ‘John’ and he said he heard the same thing the night before.

5. A Message At The Birthday Party

About two years after my uncle killed himself, we had a big sixtieth birthday party for my grandmother. We brought the helium balloons home to her condo after the party. One of them started following her – including going down under door frames and bulkheads, then going back up to the ceiling. We never saw it, it would just turn up.

It was printed “I love you, Mom”.

6. Vacation Homes On Haunted Grounds

One night, my neighbors and I were out on a pontoon sharing stories about the area and our homes. Our houses were on a stretch of land bought out by professionals in Detroit and Minneapolis who decided to all build vacation homes together. My relative’s house was built by a doctor from Detroit. One night after the family had finished supper, the mother couldn’t find their youngest daughter. They sent out a search party and found nothing. Two nights later they found her body washed up on the nearby Indian reservation island. The kicker was that the island was upstream from the house. Almost everyone who lived on our street has claimed to see her, this four year old in a long petticoat, wandering down the street. One woman claimed to see her trying to open our front door, about twenty years before she told me. Very creepy.

I had a healthy fear of a few parts of the house. There was a dumbwaiter that had been sealed up, and later opened and turned into a laundry chute. Once my cousin looked down jokingly during a midnight game of hide and seek and saw a face looking up at her. There was a back bedroom that was originally servants quarters. We turned it into a guest room, and nobody liked to sleep there. We had cable installed in every room, and in that room the channel would switch every half hour to static and then back again. Everyone the cable company sent out was equally baffled. One of them joked that our house was marked as haunted on the service notes. Eventually we just took the television out of the room.

The weirdest thing was in my bedroom. In the late 1990s, my relative bought the home from the daughter of the family who had lived there for the previous fifty-odd years. Her uncle was schizophrenic, and in the 1970s he lived in my room. When my relative moved in, she had the cedar paneling in the closets removed and replaced. When the old paneling was removed, it was covered in newspaper clippings. Mostly local, some national, all featuring disappearances and murders, and some interviews with celebrities and photographs of celebrities. We assumed this was normal, a form of insulation or prep for panelling, but of course not in this weird ass house. It turns out that collage was once an art therapy favored for schizophrenia and other disorders, and the uncle was encouraged to paste pictures on the closet walls (but not on his bedroom walls, which to this day feature wallpaper installed in the 1920s). When a piece of the wallpaper started peeling, my relative had her handyman paste it back up. In order to make it look clean, he peeled it off further to reapply it. Underneath the wallpaper strip was writing. A lot of it. Things that make sense when associated with schizophrenia, but terrifying otherwise (get out, they can hear me, etc.). I was understandably terrified of it in combination with the chair episode in my first comment.

There were also lots of hidden nooks and crannies. A corner of my closet slid out to reveal a hiding spot. There was a tiny door in the kitchen that led to absolutely nothing. We turned it into a pantry, but once we put shelving in the door wouldn’t open anymore. We sealed it with caulk and paint and ignored it. The garage in the backyard had a cellar below that had concrete poured in sometime during the 1950s. The dogs would stand near the cellar door and bark if the garage door was open to them.

This is as much as I can remember right now. I hope you feel as creeped out as I do when I think of that house!

7. Something Angry Deep In The Canadian Woods

This happened about 6 years ago. A couple friends and I have decided to go out into the woods and build a “base camp”. We brought axes , machetes , fuel and a tent. We walked deep into the woods and spent all day cutting down trees and building a makeshift fence. Being idiots as it became dark we realized we had no way to see. We started a fire and I realized if we pour some fuel into a small can we can light the fumes at the top and create a torch. We made several torches and placed them in the surrounding woods. It got very dark we needed more logs for the fire so I was out about 20 meters from our camp I could hear my friends talking. I was swinging at the tree when I felt something hit my back. I froze and turned out around staring into the dark forest right at the edge of lights from our torches. I saw nothing and I assumed something had fallen off the tree and hit my shoulder. Right as I was about the swing something hits me in the back of the head and it hurt enough to make me swing around again. I saw a rock at my feet and I was terrified now. Turning back to walk towards camp I could hear my friends and see the light from the fire I kept turning my head looking into the darkness about halfway to camp a rock flew by me, missing my head by inches. I ran back to camp and told everyone and they saw the terror in my face. We sat for awhile before more rocks came , we couldn’t see anyone or anything just rocks flying into camp. Needless to say we didn’t sleep, just chilled in the tent holding machetes and keeping a big fire. There were so many rocks in the morning, the thought still terrifies me. We were deep in the woods no one else should have been out there, I want to say it was a person but we didn’t hear anything or see anything. Just so many rocks.

8. It Arrived At The Perfect Time…Too Perfect

I moved out of my mom’s house at 17. Among other shitty things my mom said “anything you don’t take with you I’m throwing away”. So I loaded everything I owned into a backpack and 4 large garbage bags. I couldn’t call anybody to pick me up so I had to carry everything over 5 miles to my girlfriend’s house. The bags were huge so I had to pick up one while pushing another a little ways then set them down and go back to carry and push the other two. This became more difficult the more I went. It wasn’t even a quarter of a mile before I was screaming, crying and breaking down from it. Then I hear a strange sound. I look over to see a shopping cart rolling in my direction and it stops very close to me. I was overjoyed but also very confused. I was not anywhere where’d you expect a shopping cart and I didn’t see anybody around to push it toward me. I felt overwhelmed by the joy but also by a uncomfortable feeling like a higher being watching and influencing my life. I yelled “Thank you” a lot, loaded the cart and was able to get to my girlfriend’s place much faster. I still get goosebumps thinking about how the cart came out of nowhere right to me at the perfect time I needed it.

9. A True Guardian Angel

My mother has told myself and anyone of the night my life was saved by an “Angel” when I was two. I don’t remember any of this, but this incident caused my mom to continue to be as religious as she can be today. Around 10 pm on this night when I was two, the babysitter my mom got me had fallen asleep on the couch, and my mom opened the garage door and walked inside the house expecting me to be upstairs asleep. The door was left open and i crawled out because I guess the street lights and steady rain seemed attractive to me. My mom explains that after freaking out that she couldn’t find me she ran outside to crawl to the edge of the sidewalk, look forwards and stop right as a large truck began to speed up the street. Sitting across the street in the pouring rain was a teenage boy in a light hoodie and sweatpants staring directly at me shaking his head as in “no”. My mom ran forwards, picked me up and began to come back up the driveway when she turned around and the boy was no where to be found.

To this day she believes that the kid was my guardian angel and that if he wasn’t there I would have kept on going right in front of the truck. To whoever that was, thanks.

10. A Girl Singing During A Storm

Last year, my family went camping at the same park we go to every year. Usually, we also get the same site which is close to the bathroom and showers. This year, we booked a bit late, and we were placed waaay out in the back of the park which is a fairly secluded area surrounded by woods. It was a nice change, but a bit of a hassle (lots of walking to go fishing, go to the bathroom, etc). The first night we were there, my nephew woke up in the middle of the night, woke up my sister, and told her there was someone outside the tent. She said something then leaned up on the tent, he got scared and pushed back. She got outside, and there was nothing to be seen. We just dismissed it as a trash panda, even though my sister didn’t think that was it.

The second night, we had a few friends over. They brought their dog who is the most well behaved dog I have ever met both with humans and other animals. We were all sitting around the fire when the dog started barking like crazy (she was tied to a picnic table sort of away from the fire/people). This was a super rare occurrence, so the owner got up to see what was going on. When he took the leash off the table, she went crazy and pulled him toward the forest (she actually pulled him a good 10 feet, he obviously wasn’t expecting her to do that, she has never acted that way before). I decided to grab a flashlight and check out the forest in the direction she was pulling. There was nothing. She has seen squirrels, raccoons, cats, etc and never had she acted this way. Everyone took note of how odd that was, but again we just dismissed it as nothing (it did spark up a conversation about the “thing” outside the tent from the previous night though).

The third and final night we were there, we could see a storm coming in. The sky was lighting up, the thunder was loud, and the wind was crazy (obviously unrelated to the eerie events, but relevant to the story). We spent a good hour setting up tarps, covering the chairs, etc. Everyone crawling into their tents for the night, knowing that the storm was going to hit any second. I was the last to get in because I had to pee. I was at the edge of the site, facing the forest, pissing in the wind. The storm and the forest were spooky enough, but what happened next will forever be burned in my memory. From the forest, I hear the sound of a little girl singing. Not like a fast paced pop song, but a song with the tempo of a nursery rhyme. I couldn’t make out any words, but I was certain I was hearing the voice of a small girl. There were no other voices. I pushed that pee out faster than a laser. The second I finished, I turned toward my tent, a loud bang of thunder sounded, and I jumped into my tent JUST as it started to rain. My heart was pounding. I was sweaty and possibly a bit covered in pee (didn’t get to shake the last drop). In the morning I told my family…I feel like really no one believed me, but it happened and it was terrifying.

11. He Had White Eyes

About 14 years ago, I was driving through Texas on my way to Denver in a car I had loaded up with my possessions. At around 1 AM somewhere just north of Amarillo, my car started to overheat and I pulled into the only gas station remotely close. It was also closed but I thought I’d bide some time and limp my car somewhere down the road.

Other than this gas station, there was nothing and no one for as far as I could tell. No cars on the highway. It was just really dark out with the lights all turned off, and really quiet. After a while, the headlights of a car appeared and as it came by it slowed down and pulled into the station. The driver was a young guy, blonde hair. He rolled down his window and without looking directly at me, he asked if I needed help, or even a ride. Right away I had a really eerie feeling. Also, the solitude didn’t help. I was really polite and told him I was cool. My car had a problem but I had something figured out and I’d be fine. The kid said, “Sounds good take it easy” and drove off while still not making eye contact.

My car was still really hot, so I continued to wait it out. After awhile the guy came back and asked me again. I gave him a little more detail about my plan because I didn’t want him thinking I was trying to mess with the station, just buying time and I’d be on my way. Again, no eye contact and he pulled away.

After about another 20 minutes or so, and just as I was gonna get ready to move on, the kid drives back in. This time he asked me again if I needed help, but after I said thanks but no thanks, I noticed he was really getting agitated. Also, at this point the kid turned towards me. I could see this guy had no iris or pupils. His eyes were both solid white. Also, I had this sense of dread / fear that I can’t say I’ve ever felt in my life. At the same time he turned to me too, he was in the middle of telling me I deserved this for driving a Japanese car, and that I was some kind of asshole for not letting him help me. At this point, I got in my car and noped out of there. He followed me for a bit out of the station, but turned around after about a mile.

12. Not So Much Deja Vu As Literally Seeing The Future

I was pretty young, in about 1st grade maybe, I was sleeping over at my best friend’s house. I had a dream that my entire family was driving in my mom’s white mini van. My parents were in the front two seats. I was sitting in one of the middle seats, and my two brothers (8 and 11 years older than me) were in the back together.

It was the middle of the night, incredibly dark, but you could see some stars in the sky here and there and I could hear crickets. We were just driving over grass, no road. The grass was a deep emerald green, and it was wet and slick, as if it had just rained. In the distance, I could see the silhouette of a pointed iron fence, and as I looked around out the windows, I saw that there were gray headstones scattered across the landscape. We were driving through a graveyard.

It was incredibly quiet, all noises muffled except the even chirping of the crickets. My mom stopped the van, and hit the button that opened the side door to my left, on the opposite side of the van from me. In the back, the younger of my two brothers, the one that was 8 years older than I, started unbuckling.

Through the open door, I saw that we had pulled up beside an empty grave. There was no gravestone, just a deep, freshly-dug rectangle of empty earth. As my brother started moving up from the back seat, towards the door, I realized what was happening and I started crying.

I begged him not to go. He stopped, crouched between me and the door, and looked at me really tenderly. “I have to go. It’s okay.” I appealed to my parents, in the front seats, but they only agreed with him.

“Don’t worry, honey. Everything will be okay. He has to go, though.”

Despite my tears, my brother turned away and exited the van. He laid down in the unmarked grave, and we all drove away.

I woke up sobbing. It was around midnight, and I could hear my best friend’s dad pacing in the hallway. I got up and begged him to take me home, but he wouldn’t. He told me to go back to bed, that it was just a bad dream, and he’d take me home in the morning.

Nothing much unusual happened after that. I still felt a bit uneasy when I woke up in the morning, but I wasn’t nearly as upset as I’d been the night before. I just still felt this sort of empty feeling, wondering why my brother (whom I was closer to than anyone else in the family) would just leave me to go die.

I forgot about the dream after awhile. I went on with my life, it was whatever. Then, almost 7 years later, my brother called our house from university. I picked up the phone. He told me that I needed to give the phone to Mom or Dad. Before I passed it off, he said “Hey, I love you little sis.”

He told my parents he would be going away, and not to look for him. We never found him, but the case is presumed to be suicide.

Whenever I think of him now, I can’t get that dream out of my head. It’s like even when I was so young, I knew that he was sad, that something was wrong. I just didn’t understand it.

13. Strange Children At The Door

I was at home during the week, it was just me and my kid (he was 2 at the time), somebody knocked at the door so i went to answer it. At the door were two kids, one was a girl around 5yrs old and the other looked to be around 9. I know the faces of pretty much every kid in the area but I didn’t recognize these 2. The oldest girl asked me if I could help them because they were lost, obviously I turned gushing mum on them. They were about to walk in but stopped when my son walked out of the living room. The youngest one said “Never mind ma’am, we have to go” and they both just ran off, I turned around, picked up my son and gave chase but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Its weird because I live right in the middle of my street so I’m pretty sure 2 little girls couldn’t have gotten out of sight that quickly.

14. A Tiny Door Hidden In The Wall

Company I worked for years ago bought a piece of property with an old barn and a house on it. It dates from the early 1900’s. We wanted the barn and subdivided the lot to sell the house. The owners decided to renovate it first. So we’ve been working on the house for a few weeks and knocked out a few walls upstairs to add a master bedroom.

So after that we start measuring the new area we’ve created for a new wood floor and one of the guys keeps a detailed drawing and realizes something isn’t adding up. Somehow the rooms don’t add up and we’re missing about 3 feet. So my coworker starts measuring the rooms again. We were going to add a door from the new Master Bedroom into the bath but it turns out they don’t share a wall.

There was a 3′ gap between the two rooms. We had no idea what was in that missing space. The walls are all plaster and we’ve finished all the demo work at this point. No one wants to go knocking out plaster and having to clean it all up but fuck if our curiosity isn’t killing us. That’s when one of the guys notices that out in the hallway there’s a section of wall where the gap would be that’s clearly been patched over. See the whole house was plaster but this small section was definitely Sheetrock. It’s only about 2′ wide and maybe 20″ high.

We decide to cut it open and peak inside the wall there. So we try to cut it with a Sheetrock knife but the knife is hitting something hard. I think it’s the wood slats for the plaster and just decide to get violent and smash it with a claw hammer. Turns out there’s wood behind the Sheetrock but it seems to have some give to it like it’s not totally solid. Someone pushes and the Sheetrock cracks and crumbles when suddenly the 20″ section pushes in and .. swings inwards. It was a tiny door that had been covered over.

Inside this 3′ wide room is a small wooden chair. It’s upright, sitting dead center, facing the exterior wall of the house. The walls inside were also plaster and it became obvious later that it was part of the original house. The floor was original wood but it was covered in big dark circular stains of different sizes and overlapping areas. The kind of stains you’d see if an animal urinated repeatedly on it. At least we hope it was urine.

After we pried the Sheetrock off the door we found a groove in the mini door and a slot in the wall. It looked like you could have put a bar in it to prevent it from being pulled open from the inside.

Did some Google foo and found out the house was built in 1920. The house sits next to a Church that was built in 1825 and has a small graveyard that’s pretty much the side yard of the house.

I can only assume someone was kept in there and relieved themselves on the floor. Daily. For a very long time.

15. A Vision The Whole family Shared

My family travels to the hills of Kentucky every year for family reunions, this particular reunion was in 95 or 96. We had all planned on building a fire down on the riverbank to sit around, catch up and roast marshmallows. The family starts heading out and my mom and cousin stay back a bit to put some food away and gather up stuff to bring to the fire. They finished up and leave the house from the back end which faces the river and head towards the trail that takes them down to the bank. They see the shadow from the fire and hear everyone having a good time. People talking and laughing. As the reach the trail and look down they see nothing. No fire, no people just darkness. They start to freak out and both heard and saw the same thing. They start walking back up to the house and at this time hear voices. They walk around to the front of the house to see everyone sitting on the front porch hanging out. They question everyone but no one had been down to start the fire, we had all been waiting for them on the porch. Still scares the crap out of her to this day when she talks about it.

16. A Little Girl Foresees Disaster

This is actually something I’ve only thought about recently. I was really young when it happened and I guess never really connected the dots with the two events until recently. When I was like 6 or 7, my mum was really late picking me up from school one afternoon. I don’t remember there being many kids, so it must’ve been late, and I noticed this girl from my grade sitting by herself, looking really sad. I didn’t know her to well, she had never been in the same class as me, but I went over and asked if she was okay. Then she just started crying, like so fucking hard it rattled me. So I asked her what was wrong but she couldn’t really respond, she was just crying so hard, but I did hear her say “planes” a couple of times. Obviously, as a 6 yr old, I didn’t know how to fucking handle the situation (I probably thought she just had a fear of planes or something, idk), so I just sat there for a while with her until a teacher noticed us and took her to the office. Then my mum arrived and I just never really thought about it again.

The next day the planes hit the World Trade Center over in America.

I was too young to really comprehend what happened, let alone connect that to what happened with the girl. And it could 100% just be a coincidence, but man, the way she was crying…it just makes the whole thing really eerie.

I don’t think I ever checked up on her after. I wish I had of.

17. The House That Attacked Women

Long story, but stay with me:

A few years back my brother (and his family – wife and toddler daughter) and I both moved to Florida about the same time. I was in a work-study program so I was in program housing, but he rented a house in a nice little subdivision in the Orlando suburb of Davenport.

The house itself was nothing special, your standard cookie-cutter ranch made to look a little more ritzy with high ceilings and whatnot. The front hall was huge and had two arches going into separate corridors. One led to a smaller hallway with a bathroom and two bedrooms, and the other to another small hallway with the laundry room and the master bed/bath. The front hall itself fed into the living room and then the kitchen.

The two of us started some kind of family stampede for Florida, and not long after we got there, our aunt moved down. She didn’t have housing set up, so she and her husband stayed in the spare bedroom off the first small hallway; my brother’s daughter was going to be in the other but was still sleeping in her crib in the master bedroom.

While my aunt and her husband are living there, my aunt gets miserably sick. Like over and over. Blood pressure, pneumonia, arthritis, all of this stuff cropping up. Eventually they find their own place and move out, and she stops getting sick. No one thinks anything of it.

Then my brother’s mother in law moves down and occupies the same bedroom. Cue the sickness. Random little bugs over and over, and one point where she was hospitalized and her stats are all over the map, and they have no idea why. She then moves to her own place, and everything clears up.

So by then my program ends and I move in to the spare room while looking for a place of my own. And then I start getting sick. High blood pressure for the first time in my life, recurrent throat infections where I keep losing my voice, migraines, arthritis developing in my ankle, etc.

During this time, my brother and his family go on a couple short vacations, little weekend getaways, and I start noticing shadows out of the corner of my eye whenever I am in the living room or kitchen, always moving in the front hall and passing between the two small hallways. I keep this to myself cos I don’t want to freak out my niece or have my brother think I’m losing it. Now my sister in law has been having back and leg pain all of this time. They thought it was something to do with a badly placed epidural during my niece’s birth but the problem didn’t show up until they moved to Florida. Finally I can’t stand it anymore and I ask her if she’s seen anything weird in the house, and she says the exact thing I’ve seen: shadows moving in the front hall, back and forth between the two small hallways.

Now the niece is more than old enough for her own room and it’s finally painted and her new bedroom assembled, and she moves in. For all of a week. She’ll play in there during the day if someone is with her but she refuses to sleep in there. Says her toys talk to her when no one else is around and keeps mentioning someone named Robert. She’s young and has a fairly small circle up to this point, so we can say without question that she doesn’t even know anyone by that name.

Then in preschool she starts referring to other girls by kind of racist terms that did not come from anyone else in the house — for example, there is an Asian girl in her class and she calls her a China Doll, and that is the most tame of what she said. Completely horrifying and we have no idea where it came from.

Eventually the sister in law and I are seeing more shadows and now hearing noises, bumps and crashes and whatnot, always when we are alone.

Somewhere around this time, my brother finds a little black kitten and brings it home. Because there are two large dogs in the house, the kitten sleeps in the laundry room (so she doesn’t get stepped on accidentally — the dogs are mastiffs) and one morning we wake up to find her dead. Just laying there like she’s asleep, in her little bed, dead, after having gotten a 100% healthy review from the vet just weeks before.

The sister in law leans on my brother to start looking for someplace else, just as one of the dogs, the female, is struck suddenly blind and starts having seizures. She’s four years old and has never been anything but healthy.

The day we move out, the dog has another seizure and dies.

The property went back up for rent and because we were friendly with the across the street neighbors, we got an earful when about two months after we moved out, the family that had moved in after us packed up everything and bolted in the middle of the night, rent already paid in full.

The sister-in-law and I are of the mind that there was something in that house that specifically did not like women. Every woman who stayed there became ill, even the female animals, and the kid was being influenced badly by nothing we could explain. My brother, my aunt’s husband? Never saw or heard anything.

18. Being Chased In The Woods

I was hanging around with some friends around a fire in an open area of a small forest near a beach. Lots of my friends were getting drunk or high but I avoided it, I disliked the taste of the beer they were drinking and I also didn’t want to smoke it. At around 11:30, I had to go home and my friend went with me. We were all alone and started walking down a path out of the woods and it was pitch black, only the lights of our cellphones were used to help guide us. At one point my friend said “Hold it, stop! Turn out your light!” and I did.

I could faintly see his own outline right next to me and he was pointing to somewhere in the woods off the path. The moon came out behind the cloud and I could see what he was pointing at. There was a man standing next to a tree, define head and shoulders and torso. I thought he was taking a piss but it felt odd and I was ready to get out of there. My friend shined his cellphone in that direction but the light wasn’t exactly far enough to see but I swear it looked like the guy was facing us, staring. My friend whispered “Alright, let’s back off, come on.” and suddenly there was the snap of a branch and this guy was charging towards us through the foliage and tree branches. We sprinted as fast as we could and didn’t look back. My friend later noted when we got back to my house he thought the dude looked like he had no legs and was sort of floating through the the air straight for us. I didn’t get a good enough look, I just saw him jolt towards us fast and moving quick.

19. Saw Himself As A Middle Schooler

When I was in high school, I was walking home after school, same way I go every day, and because I walk past a middle school on my way home, there’s lots of kids still around at that time. So I get close to the end of the block, to where there’s a gate for cars to go into the school, and I see the craziest thing. Myself. I literally saw myself, as a middle schooler, in uniform and everything, just standing by the gate, waiting for his parents. I knew it was me because the coat he was wearing was exactly the same as one I used to have in middle school. As I walk past him, I can’t help but stare, cause what the fuck? Am I going crazy here? The icing on the cake was when he spoke to someone who was waiting with him, same voice. I still don’t know what the truth of the matter was, because I never saw that kid there ever again, just once.

20. Spanish Dog Man

About 2 years ago I was driving with my cousin on a paved road along the northern coast of Colombia, it was early in the evening and we were listening to music while chatting. On our right was the Caribbean sea about 100 feet from us and on our left there were miles and miles of jungle and swamps. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a dog-like creature jumps in the middle of the road, I slam the brakes but I still manage to hit it. As I’m about to get out of the car my cousin grabs my arm very hard and tells me to look at what’s in front of us. The thing I had just hit gets up, says “Hijueputa” (son of a bitch in spanish), stands on its two feet and sprints to the jungle. The creature looked like a large Border collie and had a fanny pack strapped to its abdomen. I drove way above the speed limit until we got to the next toll booth. A lot of people have told me it might have been a witch. To this day my cousin and I have no clue what the hell we hit.

21. “Hi, My Name Is Ally”

Probably a month or two ago, I was playing Xbox in the basement when my 3 year old niece came down to talk to me and play with my old Legos. About ten minutes of us building some kind of house or something, she looks over to the other side of the basement where there’s a pool table and the bathroom connecting to my brothers old room. She stares over there for a few minutes and says in her 3 year old voice, “What was that?”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard something. Over there,” she says and starts to slowly make her way to hide behind a leg of the pool table and peer around the edge.

“What’re you lookin at, little one?”

“That, Alex (not my real name). That right there,” she says quietly, pointing to the corner by the bathroom door.

“There’s nothing there, child.”

“Yes! There’s another human. Another human,” she points again to the corner, “Right there.” She then starts to tentatively walk further towards the bathroom and curiously says, “Hi, my name’s Ally (again, not her really name). Where you going?” She starts to walk further into the bathroom, apparently following something .

Now I don’t really believe in the paranormal but I’m really weirded out at this point and we are the only two people in the basement. I’m not about to let my niece follow some ghost into the dark so I’m right behind her, looking for any rational explanation.

She says again into the dark, “Hello? What’s your name?”

Right after she says that, the lights in the bathroom and my brothers room turn on. And I don’t mean the lights just turned on because of a wiring mistake or something, I mean that I saw and heard the lights switches flip. So I picked my niece up, grabbed our Legos and we went upstairs where our dogs could protect us.

I still don’t know what the fuck that was or why she thought she saw someone but it hasn’t happened since.