The creepiest thing that happened to me had no supernatural elements to it. Just me and an overactive imagination.
I was in my early 20’s and driving cross country with just my little dog. My Mom kept telling me how brave I was and I didn’t get it. What is so brave about a few long driving days? The morning of the third day I was at a diner having breakfast and the waitress asked where I was headed. She said that I was so brave for taking the trip myself. Again I shrugged and went on my way.
That night it was getting late and I really needed to find a place to sleep for the night. I had just passed a town and there wasn’t another one for a bit so I stopped at the next motel I saw.
I went to check in and there was this old man at the counter. This is where things started to get sketchy. He told me the price of the room, and it was about a third of what I was usually paid, It was a cash only place, and all I did to sign in was sign a card. I just kept thinking that if I were to go missing, there would be no record that I was ever there. But I figured I would just put the chain on the door. No big deal.
I got to the room, and no chain. So now in my mind I am a sitting duck in Bates Motel. I had a bell that I balanced on the doorknob and slept with my pocketknife under my pillow. I didn’t really sleep much though since my dog spent the entire night growling. I must have only got a few hour of sleep and then left at sunup.
Not really creepy, but it was the most creeped out I have ever been.
Occasionally my wife goes to spend the weekend with family in Ottawa, so I have the house to myself. I live fairly rural, my neighbours are 50 meters away and fairly quiet, so mostly the house is quiet and old. When there is no-one in but me I hear laughter, talking and movement around the house.
Slightly creepier - my wife last weekend was up late and heard a sliding door open then shut quickly with no-one there. She walked through expecting to see myself or my son and we were both sound asleep.
The previous lady of the house died in it, so we assume that it is her.
I pulled into an overlook place in Yellowstone. As I was getting off my bike, a car pulled up next to me with 2 guys in it. The passenger kind of gave me a dirty look. I said to myself: “there’s something wrong with that guy.” He gets out, and he only has one hand.
20 years ago I awoke with the feeling that someone was standing over my bed watching me. I couldn’t “quite” wake up.
When I fully awoke, I shrugged it off as sleep paralysis. However, the hall light was on. I never leave lights on. I got up turn turn it off and the Kitchen and Living Room lights were on.
I went to turn them off and the front door was slightly ajar…
I still shrug it off as sleep paralysis and a weird dream, but it was freaky.
Oh, Khadaji, your story really gives me the willies. In an older thread there was one about a man watching the poster and her children through a window. That kind of thing is just the epitome of creepy to me.
Ok, I have one actually. This was like 7 or 8 years ago.
It was a couple nights before Christmas and I was leaving to visit family the next day. I was waiting for the bus on the corner of Hennepin and Franklin in Minneapolis at about midnight. It was sooooo cold, as it is sometimes in MInnesota.
A cab pulled up and asked if I wanted a ride. I said, nah, I only have a couple dollars. He said he’d take whatever I had, and I was freezing, so I said ok. The minute I got in I knew I’d made a huge mistake.
There was no fare box at all. Now, there was the name of the cab company on the side, and I remember even all these years later that it was People’s Taxi (or Cab). It wasn’t until I was in the cab that I realized that I’d never heard of that company in the Twin Cities. The driver started in asking me a lot of personal questions. The truth was that I was getting off work and going home to my boyfriend, but I told him that I was leaving a friend’s house to go meet friends at a bar around the corner from where I lived. Then I faked a phone call (my phone was dead, natch) to say to my “friends” that I was in a cab and I’d be there in 5 minutes. I think I remember the name of the cab company because I worked it into the fake conversation.
Once I got off the phone the cab driver had come up with a plan for me to pay him for the ride. He wanted a kiss. I told him I was married and couldn’t possibly. We were travelling down Franklin Ave to a bar on Franklin and I knew if he turned I was as good as raped. But he didn’t, thankfully. He stopped a half block before the bar and got out and tried to get in the back with me. I pushed past him and ran for the bar.
Now, I’m an idiot for getting in the cab in the first place and an asshole because I didn’t call the police. I really should have because I hate to think that he could have hurt another woman, and I regret that. I still shudder at how close I came to something bad there.
I’m still a little creeped out by the fact that whoever lived in my house before I bought it had a reason to put a deadbolt on the outside of my closet door. Just seems…strange.
About 20 years ago, I watching TV very late at night in my parents’ suburban house. I was the only one awake. I was sitting on the floor in the den right next to the sliding glass door. I had a strange feeling that someone was there outside the door. I turned my head and looked out. Right next to the glass door, there were two eyes staring back at me. Even more disconcerting the eyes did not seem human.
After my heart starting beating again, I realized it was just a raccoon staring at me. It ran away after we looked at each other for a second or two.
Jesus fucking Christ, Khadaji’s story is going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. I’m huddling in bed right now, telling myself that I’m safe in my room on the 14th floor, nobody can get to me, my roommate is in the next room, nobody can get to me…
Here’s my ‘very vaguely creepy’ story. My mother’s eldest sister was killed by a drunk driver back in the late 70s, before I was born. Shortly after the funeral, my mama starts having dreams that her sister is laying in her coffin but keeps trying to turn over on her side (they buried her on her back, but she always slept on her side). My mama had four or five of these dreams until she finally dreamed that her sister had turned onto her side and was resting at last. The End.
I lived in a ‘haunted’ house for 5 years. It won’t turn me off, I know exactly what you mean.
It’s not unusual for things to be more stirred up in the beginning, you’re invading each others space. Eventually you get into a routine and kind of stay out of each others way - so to speak.
I could write a book about that house and everything that went on there, witnessed by more than me. I look back on it now and think ‘what the hell was I thinking staying there?’. I was 23, divorced, just bought my first house and figured I was just scared and imagining things because I was living by myself for the first time.
Anyway, after I moved from there into an old farmhouse. It was so old that it was built before the city kept records, it was easily over 100 years old. I bought the house from bikers and right away neighbors were asking me if I wasn’t scared living there because ‘everybody knew’ the bikers had buried a body under the porch. My answer was that as long as the body stayed under the porch where it belonged we’d all get along just fine.
When I first moved in I’d come home to find some kind of toy laying in the middle of the floor. A small car, some legos, a tiny plastic doll, whatever. I figured the cats found them under the baseboard heaters or something and pulled them out. Then one day I come home and see a childs wet bare footprints across the floor. As I watched they slowly faded away. Couldn’t blame that on the cats, or the dogs.
Often at night I would hear knocking on the walls, it sounded like they were coming from the basement. It’s an old house and I had 2 cats and 3 dogs. Thumps and bumps and creaks and groans are expected. One night though I decided to knock back. I did the little ‘shave and a haircut’ knock and got knock knock back. I knocked 3 times, I got 3 knocks back. Knock 5 times, get 5 knocks back.
This went on for weeks until I finally told then to stop because they were knocking all night and waking me up. After I told the to stop I never heard the knocking again. Guess it was kind of rude of me, but I did need my sleep.
I guess this isn’t really creepy though, wasn’t scary at all.
A couple of years ago, I actually did wake up to someone standing at the foot of my bed. Big guy, seemingly lumbering up to me. I sat bolt upright and screamed, utterly in panic, adrenaline rush hitting me hard.
The big guy screamed, too, and slammed himself backwards into the wall, staring at this screaming thing that had just shot up right in front of him. Turned out to be the apartment maintenance guy sent to fix my air conditioning; he was the guy who had to fiddle with the thermostat, and he was going to my window to talk to the guy working on the AC unit. And he certainly didn’t expect someone to be sleeping in there in the middle of the day.
I actually dribbled some tea out of my mouth (at work!) from laughing at this. I was expecting a scary story of how you barely escaped with your life and the twist made me unexpectedly laugh.
My parents live in an old house with an unfinished basement. The basement’s vaguely creepy, like all unfinished basements.
Their dog has been down their once, in 2008. A couple days after he came home with them. He hated being alone, so he followed Mom down the stairs when she went to do some laundry. He took a step or two off the stairs, froze, dropped into a textbook example of threatened body language - ears back, tail between his legs, teeth bared. He growled once, then bolted back up the stairs and spent the next hour or so cowering in a corner of his crate.
Since then we’ve tried to coax him to even come to the top of the stairs - the basement’s entered through a closet off the kitchen - with zero success. Favorite toys? Extra super special treats, like whole cheeseburgers? Mom sitting at the top of the stairs ignoring him to see if the attention-hound will come close to her? Nope, nope, nope. He will not go near that stairway, and if you try for long enough, he’ll get super submissive and whimper, but will not get any closer to the stairs.
Mom has absolutely no idea what he saw or smelled or heard down there, and frankly? We’re all sort of glad we don’t know.
That’s what my wife calls him although she has never seen him. I call him ‘the man in the red flannel shit.’ I have this terrible half-nightmare that escalates over days. First, I can sense him rushing down the hallway toward the bedroom and then later I will see him standing over my wife’s side of the bed. One night I woke up screaming.
