20 Horrifying Stories That Will Make You Second Guess Everything

Everyone has a spooky story, or even a ghost story from a seemingly paranormal event. It’s hard to decipher sometimes whether things that happen to us are paranormal, or if our brain is just playing tricks on us. But the people listed here have no second guesses, they know what they saw and live to tell the tale. Here are 20 horrifying and supernatural stories.

1. This man had a dream about the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

“My father is very religious. He does not believe in ghosts, aliens, anything supernatural, or out of the ordinary. To this day, if this story is brought up, he will quickly find something else to talk about. My dad, younger brother, and I were at my family’s hunting camp sleeping in the small trailer together on bunk beds. It was the day after Christmas, and it was chilly outside, so we got to bed early to wake up for hunting. In the middle of the night, my Dad wakes up and starts screaming like he’s being attacked. He then immediately began sobbing. This is the only time I’ve seen or heard my father cry. When he calmed down, his terrified sons asked what happened. He said he’d had a terrible nightmare about an endless surge of water that was sweeping families away and drowning children. I recall he said those words specifically. To have my Dad tell me about a dream was strange in and of itself. You must understand all of this was completely out of character. Finally, I asked if we drowned in his dream because, at this point, I was sure there was some meaning to this vision. He said no and that all of the people looked Chinese. Now let me preface by saying we did not have internet access on our cell phones at this time, and we did not have any access to TV or news at our hunting property. Well, this was the morning of December 26th, 2004. The very day, a massive earthquake struck Asia, which caused a tsunami, which in turn took the lives of nearly 228.000 people. I still believe in some kind of collective consciousness because of this event. How could I not?” – u/dirtybirdsriseup

2. This is more terrifying than any ghost story.

“I used to work for a swimming pool company and was renovating an in ground pool for a customer. Young family with kids in a fairly wealthy neighborhood. The pool had been empty and covered for some time. I took off the cover and a middle aged man was living there in the shallow end. Extremely scary looking and disturbing looking, smelled like straight up terrible. He immediately ran away and was like barking as he was running. I knocked on the door and let the man of the house know. He called the cops. Creepy thing was the man in the pool had several belongings including the children’s underwear stuffed in a pillowcase that he was using and various things from the house. There were rotisserie chicken carcasses everywhere. They had noticed things missing so he must have been going in and out of the house all the time he had a treasure trove. The other weird thing was they had a lot of windows in the back of the house with no curtains so he could probably see everything they had been doing. They thought the smell was stagnant water in the pool.” – u/WinthorpStrange

3. This husbands tantrum saved his whole family.

“My husband was 11 when that happened. He is Thai but was born and raised/still lives in America. But that year, his family had gone home to Laos for Christmas and were set to fly out to Thailand Christmas night to spend the following week there, but my husband threw a tantrum because he wasn’t ready to leave Laos, and since it was also his birthday week, the family decided to indulge him and postponed their flights until the night of the 27th. They would have been in a hotel right on the beach where the tsunami hit. Needless to say, they did not go to Thailand on that vacation after all, and their whole family was safe because my husband was being a brat.” – u/catherineconastance

4. This person saw 3 orbs on the highway.

“Seeing 3 big bright circular lights above me randomly turn off while driving on a busy highway in NJ 287. I’ve driven a lot and seen a lot of planes at night go through clouds. That was the only experience I’ve had where I felt, and still feel, unsettled because the way they randomly turned off wasn’t explained by cloud coverage or any other physical obstruction. To this day, I can’t explain it without going down a major rabbit hole.” – u/bigAmbassador22

5. This person’s radio was turned to an alien station, or so she thought.

“One day, I spilled water on my radio. The radio broke in an odd way. It got all kinds of odd traffic, including radio stations that were definitely not from my home country. I was too young to quite understand it all. Then, a very strange sound started. It was a slow sound like someone grooving on a keyboard, but the notes were very random. It was super loud, and the longer it went on, the more I realized it wasn’t a song. It wasn’t a song, and it wasn’t anything I was supposed to hear. It sounded very forbidden, and being a child with too much of an imagination, I wondered if it was aliens. I got my mum to wake up and look at it. She was baffled and said I should either try to tune to a different station or turn the radio off. I did, and I got a lot of strange interference the next night and so on, but not that specific sound. I got a new radio for Christmas that year. The incident stayed in my mind. In 2012ish, I read a Cracked article about unexplained sounds. I read something that seemed similar to what I heard. It wasn’t aliens. It was a Russian number station for communicating with spies. Specifically, a type called a slow Polytone. Each note I heard was part of a coded message.” – u/JAbremovic

6. If you walk past your tv and it turns to static, you better run.

“I lived in a small 1 bedroom under house flat and as my cat walked past the bedroom door she looked at the wall above my head, froze, fluffed up and hissed. She started moving to the side really slowly, still fluffed up and staring that spot above my head. I looked up, but there was nothing. When she got near the side of the door frame, she bolted. I got up to see if she was okay, and as I walked past the TV it went off channel to static. My cat wanted out badly, and I went out with her. The TV went back to normal and chastising myself I opened the door to go back in, and as I took one step in the TV went back to static. I stayed outside with my cat until she calmed down, and nothing like that ever happened again. I still think about it sometimes.” – u/LadyMelmo

7. You should probably switch houses.

“One of the creepiest things I ever experienced was late at night when I heard faint whispers coming from an empty room. It felt like someone was standing right behind me, breathing down my neck. I turned around, and there was absolutely no one there. The air felt heavy, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone. To this day, I have no idea what it was, and it still gives me chills just thinking about it.” – u/LisaBMaid101

8. Hearing voices in creepy hallways is terrifying.

“This is something that happened to me quite recently and it creeped me out so so much. I live alone in my apartment and I’m a horror gaming fan and thus I was scouring Steam looking for a cool horror game. I put on my headphones and I watched multiple trailers and eventually came to a game called horror in da hood. Looked at the page and watched the trailer, here is where the creepy part begins. Near the end of the trailer there’s a very creepy voice saying something like, can you help me please?. One second, literally one second after I watched it I could clearly hear, from outside my headphones so it was muffled, an old male voice saying, I can help, from my hallway behind me. Especially the laugh was creepy. Needless to say I through off my headphone and immediately looked behind me, only to be greeted by the dark hallway. I stared into it, slowly grabbing my ruler that was on my desk. After moments that felt like an eternity I was able to stand up. Slowly moved towards the hallway while grabbing a tiny flashlight I have on my nightstand. I flashed the hallway from a distance but there was nothing. To give light to the hallway I have to go into it and turn the switch there, which was very creepy to do. Of course, there was nothing there at all, but it creeps me out still. I left the light on everywhere that night and still keep on the light in the hallway when I am on my computer now. Two days after this happened I went back to watch the horror in da hood trailer to make sure that the, I can help, was not in the trailer and I just made a mistake. It’s not in the trailer. It gives me the creeps just typing this.”

9. This kid’s father has visions from the future.

“The first time the visions happened, he saw a woman leaving a hamburger joint, and he had a flash vision of her dead on the road, apparently ejected from her VW van. Beautiful red hair matted into the blood on the road. When he saw her leaving in a VW van he abandoned his food and got in his car to chase after her. When he finally caught up, there was the smashed van, and someone was placing a jacket over her face, beautiful red hair flowing out onto the street. In case this sounds appealing to some, it was not. He hid it from nearly everyone, and much of what I learned came from my mother after he died. I had heard whispers, but he never wanted to bring it up himself. Big guy, college football player, doctor.” – u/reasonablyconfused

10. What would you do if you saw an 8 foot tall goat man.

“It’s around 3 in the morning in rural North-Central Alberta. My friend and I are driving home from a high school party in which neither of us drank or took any drugs. It’s the middle of winter. In Alberta, this means it’s cold outside. This night it was below -30 degrees Celsius. We are about 5-7 minutes outside of town at this point taking the highway, probably going 75-90 km/hour. Using an online calculator that puts us around 6-7ish km outside of town in a sparsely wooded area with no services open in town. As we round a corner, I’m zoning out listening to my friend talk, when through the windshield, I notice glowing eyes off the side of the road, the headlights not fully hitting whatever it was. The eyes were green/yellowish. This would be normal but these eyes are about 7-8 feet above the ground. At first, I think it’s a hiker or someone walking back to town, but their eyes wouldn’t glow and no one is going to be walking that far from town or any houses when it’s that cold and late outside. This was a town of less than 1000 people. As we drive closer, this thing appears to have goat-like legs, is very heavy set, and stands on two feet. Its arms drop down by its side like a person’s and it appears to even have some kind of dark clothing on the top half. It had something like goat-like horns that curved but went upwards. At this point, my blood runs completely cold and I have a full-fledged instinctual freeze response, hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I remember hearing my own disembodied voice think, I shouldn’t be seeing this. This is wrong. I even teared up. We pass by it relatively quickly and I can’t stop thinking about what that was.” – u/Chevy_Cheyenne

11. This dream about Mt. Everest will blow you away.

“The night before my birthday in 1996, I dreamed that I was walking around near the peak of Everest. It was snowing hard, but I was quite comfortable. There was a tent. To announce my presence, I sang Goober Peas. The two men inside were frightened, and I tried to calm and cheer them. I stayed with them a while and comforted them. A few years later, I read about the Everest disaster in which mountaineers had to pitch a tent too high on Everest and died there, the night before my birthday in 1996. I can’t explain it, but I hope I comforted them.” – u/Yugan-Dali

12. The ghost of a chef lives in this house.

“I lived briefly in a rental home, which was owned by a church in a small Florida town, and which was built in 1908. Every night around 8 o’clock, I heard dragging, shuffling footsteps coming from the kitchen. If I walked into the kitchen, they would stop, and if I turned my head to look into the kitchen from the den, they would pause and continue the very moment I looked away again. This lasted for 5 minutes or so each and every night.” – u/dirtybirdriseup

13. Yup, it’s time to move out of that house, or have someone bless it.

“One time, I was on the couch watching TV when it suddenly went static for no reason. It had never happened before, and I got such a bad feeling that I grabbed my phone to call someone. The moment I pressed the call button, my phone froze and wouldn’t work. Then, out of nowhere, I heard a voice whisper in my ear. After a few minutes, the TV came back on, and at the same moment, my phone started working again. I was home alone and to this day I have no explanation for what happened.” – u/halfcrazyhalffunny

14. This haunted alarm clock will give you chills.

“When I was a kid in 2003 I had the Nickelodeon Time Blaster alarm clock radio, which I bought from a thrift store. It was so cool but so annoying, and I didn’t really listen to the radio much or need an alarm all the time at 10 years old, so I kept it unplugged on my dresser just as decoration. One night as I was trying to fall asleep it said, Goodnight Jimmy, clear as day but in that very distinct 90s clock radio sound. It was right beside me too, super unplugged. I wasn’t sick or over tired or anything, I’ve never experienced hearing voices or anything since. Being so young I tried to pass it off as some cute Jimmy Neutron feature and like some kind of battery malfunction, but they made those clocks in like 1996. It made a lot of annoying sounds but not like that. And my name isn’t Jimmy.”

15. A town disappeared right in front of these men.

“In 1989 I was driving on a familiar rural highway in broad daylight. I was rounding an easy bend and shocked to see a small town on the right side of the road. There’s a sign: St. Vincent. A few of the things immediately noticeable were a shop called Webster Welding, an old fashioned horse drawn water pump for fire fighting, several large poplars with dead tops, and black and white painted rocks along the street that faced the highway. I kept watching in the rear view mirror and it stayed visible. I drive a few miles and there is a gentleman waving at me from beside his car. He’s obviously broken down and I pulled over. A quick chat and I learn he’s blown a tire and wrecked his rim. He asks if I’ll drive him back to the town. No problem. In he gets and off we go. The town is not there. It’s a dusty Alberta crossroad. This fellow and I just sat in my truck in silence. I raised an arm and my hair was standing on end. His too. He said, all the trees were dead. Are we dead? Eventually I drove him to a nearby town. He simply got out of the truck and walked away. I remember it like it was yesterday. I could tell you what that town looked like in perfect detail.” – u/beardedsawyer

16. We’ll say it once, don’t mess with Ouija boards.

“In my early 20s, about 20 years ago, there was a gang off us who rented three apartments all in the same building and weekly hangouts were a thing with drinking, and occasional other substances for the party. We all got to know each other really well and after about a year and a half we were all chilling upstairs in the top floor apartment. It was midday on a Saturday and it was too early for getting into the drinking and we were just chilling and playing some original Nintendo Super Mario and PS1 games. One of the ladies was getting bored and asked if we wanted to play the Ouija board that was on the bookshelf. We all said why not and gathered around the coffee table. We played for a while asking all of the dumb stuff about what our parents are doing, what their name was, how old they were etc. One of us asked if demons were real and they responded yes. He then asked for them to prove it in a way that we could understand. Suddenly, the entire house shook violently. As if an 18 wheeler ran into the side of the building over and over. Numerous bang noises. It went on for a couple of minutes and all of us were freaking out. We immediately put everything away and went outside. I have never been as sober as we were in that moment. Like reality had been peeled back for the first time. We checked with one of the guys in the bottom floor apartment and they hadn’t heard a thing. I don’t know if it was a group delusion or if it was real. I will say I have never touched another Ouija board again.” – u/The_time_it_takes

17. This father thought he saw his daughter’s astral self.

“As I go downstairs to join my family for breakfast, everything went as normal until my mom told me and my older sister to take a seat in the living room, as there was something my dad wanted to talk to us about. Confused, we both complied and did exactly that. My sister and I sat on the sofa, and our parents sat opposite from us. It wasn’t long before my dad began speaking, sounding absolutely dumbfounded as he did. He explained that last night, he awoke to the sound of someone entering the bedroom he shared with my mom. He expected it to be either me, my sister, or one of our two dogs, but it wasn’t. Standing over him and reaching out one of its hands was what he described as a translucent white silhouette that was mist-like in texture. That wasn’t all, however, as he went on to say something about it that has stuck with me in the four years since, which was that this figure, whatever it was, had a nearly identical height and build to mine at the time. My dad continued, telling us that when he looked at it, it seemed startled and suddenly recoiled before it turned around and walked back to the doorway, collapsing in on itself and vanishing without a trace. He then claimed that after sitting there in shock for a few seconds, he quickly got up to check on me, as he feared the worst after noticing the being’s aforementioned resemblance to me, which is what led to me seeing him come into my room the night before.”

18. Dogs are ghost hunters.

“It was one of the first times I had been left home alone with no one else in it besides my dog. We were in my room lying in my bed, and then my dog lifted her head and faced my door. I was confused at first until I heard light footsteps from the den. I then got up to look under my door and when I did I saw a shadow pass by my door. I couldn’t see above the floor but knew that there was definitely the shadow and my dog also noticed the presence. I still have no idea what it was.” – u/Fishstick

19. I would need new underwear after this.

“I was sleeping on my moms couch, was waiting for my bed to be delivered, and I heard my mom and her dog start down the stairs, my eyes were closed and I heard and felt the dog come up to me and she booped my hand. Then I opened my eyes, and by the living room door way, inside the room-no door attached, saw a girl, child age, dark straight hair covering the side of their face, whitish dress. As soon a I saw it, it was gone. At first I thought, oh, my mom walked in real quick. But it was then my mom walked out from the doorway to the stairs, and her lighter brown hair shined in the kitchen light, definitely not dark hair and my mom was taller than the thing I saw. Then I thought, even though I saw long dark hair, maybe it was one of my two nephews who came down to spook me? Quickly ducked behind the coffee table so I couldn’t see them? Mom went back to bed, the dog stayed by my side. I laid there for a good 5 mins waiting for a nephew to pop up, but no noises, they definitely would have giggled by now. So I slowly stand up and what do ya know no one’s there, I ran upstairs and they were both passed out. I slept with my mom that night after I told my mom she said she brought the dog down because she was barking at something.”

20. Crawlers need to be hunted to extinction.

“My fiance and I were driving home. It was a 5 hour drive, and we were just about home. It was October, so it was pretty cold out, 9 pm, and it was raining. This stretch of road is in the middle of the woods, and there’s no lights out there. Just dark woods. We were in the middle of a conversation, and we went silent at the same time. We both saw something on the side of the road, peering out of the woods. We drove down that road often, so we have a pretty good idea of the scale of this thing. It was around 7 or 8 feet tall. Completely hairless. Humanoid, and white. It looked completely emaciated. And its arm and hand was so extremely long and skinny. It peered out and looked at us, illuminated by our headlights. We just sat there silently after we passed it. I eventually asked, did you see, and my fiance interrupted, oh thank god you saw it too? A few days later we were hanging out with a couple friends who live near by. We hadn’t told them about what we saw. They end up telling us that they saw something near by. When they saw it, it was at a distance, at the opposite end of a recently harvested cornfield. They said it galloped on all fours. Almost like a baboon. Completely hairless, emaciated, and impossibly tall and lanky. Several years passed, and I made a post on Facebook about it. Another friend messaged me, saying her mom and sister saw one on the side of a road, on the outskirts of this same town. I did some research and found that about 20 minutes away, someone described seeing the same thing, and posted about it online. Apparently they’re seen fairly often, and people have started calling them crawlers.” – u/urupindi