What is the creepiest thing to have ever happened to you?

In My Humble Opinion
21

A few years ago I woke with a big jolt, my heart racing, and sitting slumped on the floor in the middle of the room. I felt like I’d just been hit by something big, and had a faint foggy memory of recently being scared, but no terror, just bewilderment. I felt very much like I’d just dropped out of the sky and landed there.

My wife, who was still up after a late shift, ran into the room in a panic, asking what all the screaming was about. As best as I can tell, I’d screamed bloody murder, leapt out of bed, and landed on my backside four feet from the end of the bed. All without any memory of a nightmare, and just a faint sensation of having been scared of something.

22

I saw a UFO once.

Way back when, I was a deputy sheriff. One night about 0200, I needed to whiz. I was way out in the boonies, no one around, so I pulled over to water the drainage ditch. As I was, I noticed a very bright red light in the sky, moving incredibly fast towards me. It got nearly overhead, then suddenly made an almost 180 degree and headed back in pretty much the same direction it went.

From in sight over the horizon to back out of sight again, maybe 10 seconds. No aircraft flies that fast, nor can one make that sharp a turn.

I got the shivers thinking…they really are out there.

23

I lived in a fraternity house in college (late 80s.) One day I got a lot of envelopes in my mailbox. I don’t recall the exact number but it was more than 20. Each one had my name and address hand-written. Each one had a stamp and a postmark from my hometown (which was about an hour or so away from the college.) Inside each envelope was a single index card with a letter of the alphabet. On the back of each card was a number. When I put the cards in numerical order it spelled out a message: I AM WATCHING YOU! YOU KNOW WHY.

Well, I most certainly did not know why. Somebody went through an awful lot of trouble to write and send those cards and to this day I have no idea who did it or why. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out and the best explanation I have is it was just an elaborate prank. It had to be someone who knew where I lived at college, which wasn’t too many people.

24

I was so scared once I tried to talk and/or scream and nothing came out. I think I’ve told this story on here somewhere before, but one night during college I awoke and the sounds from the adjoining room informed me that my then-boyfriend (later husband) was peeing in the bathroom. It was way deep into the dark, dark night, like 3 or 4 am. I got up and walked in thinking I would just chat with him or something while he finished up and go myself. But what happened was, I ended up scaring the everliving shit out of him. He was half asleep and I just walked into the dimly lit bathroom and he started screaming.

He was looking straight at me and staring at me, unable to comprehend it was me (as he later explained) and was so terrified he started yelling. This in turn terrified me, and I opened my mouth to speak and I was so sure that I had, in the night, turned into some hideous creature out of Twilight Zone that I couldn’t speak. I turned to look in the mirror, scared shitless at what I must appear like, to cause him to shriek so. I kept moving my mouth to say “It’s me!” and nothing came out but “yuh yuh yuh” which further scared him, and me even more.

Heh. I guess we were both young and easily spooked.

25

Cool.

26

I was mopping a club I owned in Tennessee back in 1988. I put a cd on of the Eagles while I mopped away. After one of the songs there was a kinda skip sound and the next song was Hotel California, then the CD stopped and I went to get another one. I remembered that song way earlier in the CD but figured I must have hit random songs or something. When I checked the CD, this one DID NOT HAVE Hotel California on it at all!!! That CD was still in the rack.

The only logical explanation I ever came up with was the music system somehow changed to FM and that song just happened to be playing. Still can’t determine how all music stopped at the end of that song though.

My nephew came in later to help out and I told him what happened. He looked scared and said, “The Devil is here!” I guess he was joking but at that exact moment a 12’ foot light fixture fell on him. Big cut and bruise on his back and he refused to come back for weeks.

27

UFOs seem to prefer lone people in the boonies, don’t know why.

28

So did you actually think you were being watched and did you try to discover the watcher?

29

I was lying in bed one night still awake, listening to the tv in the living room, when I felt one of the cats get up on the bed. As any cat owner will tell you, there’s no mistaking a cat getting up on the bed. I felt the weight of it as it jumped up, even the sensation and sound of it walking up the bedclothes to where I lay.

I reached out to pet, expecting to feel fur under my fingers - and there was nothing. I sat up, looked around, still nothing. Nothing under the bed, in the closet or the bathroom. I hotfooted it out to the living room where the Divemaster was sitting on the couch. All four of our cats were either on the couch or in his lap, snoozing away, comfy, motionless lumps of fur.

He did a doubletake when he took in my odd expression. I bet my face was a study. I asked him if any of the cats had been out of his sight since I went to bed and none had. In fact, none had left the couch.

I quizzed him some more and he answered all of my admittedly peculiar questions then asked me what was wrong. I told him he wouldn’t believe it and went back to bed.

Provided he wasn’t mistaken or pulling a joke on me (which I highly doubt. he doesn’t have that kind of a sense of humor), I have always had a strong suspicion that my visitor was my recently-deceased little gray cat Peggy, who just stopped in to say goodbye.

30

When I was 16, my high school choir took a bus trip from Illinois to California and back in the summer. We stopped in towns and cities, staying with families, performing concerts. Along the way, the bus stopped at famous/interesting locations.

We stopped in Taos, New Mexico - a quaint little place at the time (still?) with Old West flavor and charm, including wooden sidewalks, etc.
I went with my friends to walk around and in about 10 minutes I just had this horrible feeling of fear and dread, as if I was being told to get the hell out of there.
I went back to the bus on my own.
Inside the bus was another girl from my choir (we were not particularly good friends) and she looked upset and said, “Did you get that feeling that too?”
We both sat in silence until everyone came back and we left, but of all the places I have ever visited in my life, Taos was severely creepy.

One slightly similar occurrence was my first big trip through Europe. With some friends I met along the way, we took a short cut through a small cemetery in Vienna. We paused to respectfully look at a few of the graves and ornate stones/monuments at the graves. I got to one and I don’t remember the name or anything about it, but chills just ran down my body. I left and went to wait on the sidewalk for my friends to come shortly afterwards. The odd thing is that I still feel like that grave must have been somehow important/relevant to me as every once in awhile, that moment just pops up in my mind - as if I am remembering someone from my past, although to the best of my knowledge, nobody in either side of our family ever lived or died in Austria.

31

When we still lived in Jacksonville, I was assigned to a project that required me to work occasionally at night. To set the scene, this was at Naval Air Station, Jacksonville, and the engineering building (since razed) was originally the chow hall, built in 1940, and it was across the street from the hangar where the regular night shift was working. I was all alone, futzing with some engineering drawings, praying for my shift to be over.

All of a sudden, I got a whiff of cinnamon buns. The building was dark except for the row of lights over my corner of the cubicle farm. It was quiet - not even the HVAC was running. My logical mind was melting down - yeah, I know this was the chow hall 50+ years ago, but there’s no way anyone or anything is in here baking cinnamon buns. It really creeped me out.

Until I figured out it was the cinnamon gum in my sightly ajar center desk drawer. :smack: Yet another reason I hated working nights…

32

When I was a teenager, we had some inexplicable “poltergeist-style” activity in our home. We heard stuff happen and saw the aftermath, but never saw the actual incidents take place. Some shelves full of books emptied themselves all over a room. Some over-sized puzzles that one stuck directly to a wall to make a poster “blew off” the wall and were scattered everywhere. Some cupboards would open themselves. This was a new house that had been built in what had been agricultural land; sometimes a cornfield, sometimes a pasture. It continued, on and off, for a few months after we moved in and then stopped completely. I don’t know what it was, but I see no compelling reason to assume ghosts, haints, boogers, or other paranormal entities.

33

I have to admit I spent a day or two looking over my shoulder when I went in and out if buildings, yeah. I really thought it was a friend playing a practical joke, but no one ever confessed or mentioned it to me.

34

I was getting some stuff out of my front seat, Some of it had dropped under the seat, so I was hunched down to get it.

So I see a movement out of the corner of my eye, and I look over, and there’s a HAND reaching out at me!

My heart stopped, and it took me a second or two to realize that since my rear-view mirror fell off, I’ve been storing it under the arm rest in the middle of the bench seat…

that was creepy.

35

See, this is what normally happens! Which is why the screaming episode was so weird. The only other time that’s ever happened was when I was five years old and I dreamed that I was being chased by a giant lizard.

But now that I think about it, my sleep pattern is never very consistent. Sometimes I won’t be able to move at all (not really sleep paralysis, per se, I just find myself moving really sluggishly in the dream), other times I’ll be flailing like a squirmy toddler. How my poor boyfriend puts up with it I’ll never know.

Another scary dream, while I’m here:

When I was in high school, I watched a lot of forensic science documentaries. They were fascinating to me, but they had the tendency to give me really horrible nightmares. This one was in the format of one such show, with a really brutal serial killer stalking, raping, torturing, killing, and cannibalizing women. As per usual for one of these shows, they were interviewing the investigators involved in that particular case, though they were talking about the killings in really graphic detail, more graphic than is usually disclosed in the actual shows.

I woke up then, thinking “wow, that was pretty creepy.” I was a bit shaken, but not particularly frightened. Then I went back to sleep.

In the second part of the dream, the interview style had gone…and this same serial killer was now after ME. This wasn’t explicitly explained in the dream, but I knew it was the same guy. He was sitting in his car across the street from my house, watching me. I could see him there, and I knew he was watching me, and I think he knew that I knew he was watching me. And I also knew there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

The dream then went off in a completely different direction, but I woke up with my fight-or-flight reaction tightened like a coiled spring. Just when I thought I couldn’t get any more terrified, a car drove really slowly past my house :eek:. (Now I’m fairly certain it was the paper delivery person, but hindsight, 20/20, etc.)

Needless to say I spent the rest of the night with the lights on.

36

When I was 14 I was on a bus tour with my mom and her then-boyfriend and we stopped at a buffet restaurant for dinner, I think it was around the Windsor/Detroit area. As soon as the bus pulled into the parking lot I got this really creeped-out feeling - like I’d been there before - I knew I hadn’t - and I was scared. There was a fountain out front that I “recognized” and I remember the Rembrandt painting “The Man in the Helmet” on the wall. The whole decor of the place (very dark and medieval, I guess) for some reason scared the bejeezus out of me.

37

Fell in love with a woman with an attachment disorder.

38

This happened about a year ago. I like to walk after dark - its a safe suburban neighborhood in central Iowa, so no big deal. A few blocks from my house near an empty lot I encountered my semi-feral cat, a big bruiser of a (former) tom, the sort of cat who chases dogs for fun. He is being very affectionate as he normally is when encountering me in his territory.

Suddenly he freezes up. I bend done to ask him what’s wrong, and he makes this flying leap onto my shoulder, digging in his claws and shaking like a leaf. I look over at where his eyes are fixated and see some sort of animal, large and dog-like, but thin as a rail with legs way too long for a dog and no tail. It paused briefly and looked at us. My cat lost it even more and crapped & peed down my back. I was deeply freaked out by this mutant dog-thing, but it just turned and moved off into the shadows after a few seconds.

As soon as it moved out of sight, my cat relaxed, jumped down, and followed me home like nothing had happened. I’ve never seen it since, but if I were a person who believed in woo I would have sworn it was a werewolf, or chupacabra or something. It certainly felt unnatural, and the cat has never remotely reacted like that before or since.

39

A month or so ago I was sitting having breakfast, holding the television remote control when suddenly, with no warning, I dropped the remote. That seemed a bit weird, and when I tried to pick it up, my fingers didn’t respond right, and then they started twitching, totally out of my control. This may not sound too creepy, as there are plenty of people who are paralyzed or have various diseases which make this all too commonplace, but if it’s something you’re not expecting, it is VERY freaky. It went away after a minute or so, and I spent all day worried that I was developing Parkinson’s (or something along those lines), but the next day I noticed that I had a tendency to sit with that arm pressed up against the coffee table in a way that compressed the nerves in my arm, which is almost certainly what caused it (and it hasn’t happened since). It’s still very odd to me that it resulted in twitching rather than the normal pins-and-needles “falling asleep” that I’m used to, but I see no reason to suspect anything other than the obvious cause.

40

Maned Wolf? Would have to be an escapee for you to have seen it in North America, but it fits your description.