People Are Sharing Their Inexplicable Paranormal Experiences, And I'm Never Sleeping With The Lights Off Again
Sometimes, things happen in life that are just...unexplainable. Recently, Redditor u/Darren793 asked Reddit community members to share the paranormal encounters they've had, and the stories are bone-chilling:
1."I was at the hospital when I bumped into my grandma in the elevator. I asked her why she was there alone and where she was going, but she just smiled. We walked to her hospital room together. When I opened the door, I saw my parents crying. My grandma had already passed away. At that moment, I didn't know how to feel. It was a mix of sadness and fear."
2."Years ago, I was working in my office with a young client. At one point, she jumped up suddenly and announced the presence of my deceased parent by his (rather antiquated) name. It was his birthday that day. I'm not one for believing in the paranormal, but I wasted a couple of hours that day trying to find some explanation. I found nothing."
3."I don't believe in paranormal activity, but my grandparents' house is considered by many to be extremely haunted (it's even part of a haunted houses tour in the Los Angeles area). There are many stories, but the one I experienced myself was when I was living there as a child. I was about six; my sister was 12, and we shared a room. My mom had decorated our bedside table with an antique telephone that didn’t work and was not plugged in. One night, my sister and I were asleep, and for some reason, we both woke up at the same time and turned to face each other."
"I remember feeling an extreme feeling of dread. Then the phone rang. We locked eyes and hid under our blankets until it stopped ringing. We both thought it was a dream because we hadn’t said anything for years about it. Then, one day, she was talking about it, and we realized we had had the exact same experience. There are so many more stories, but that’s the only one I have experienced directly."
4."One day, I was just about to drive out of my apartment parking when I got a call from an unknown number. I answered, but no one was on the line. Then, an accident happened in the street I was just about to go on. Divine intervention? Or maybe just blind luck."
5."My family lived in a house built before 1865 in Western Massachusetts. My bedroom had a door that led into another sibling's room. One night, I woke up to go to the bathroom. When I sat up, I saw a figure standing at the end of my sister's bed. My first thought was that I was seeing things — that there was crap in my eyes, or it was all in my head. I calmly closed my eyes and rubbed them, thinking, I'll open my eyes and look up, and whatever I thought I saw will be gone. So, I finished rubbing my eyes...and there it was, still there. I stood up and said, 'Hey.'"
"Whatever was there turned around, and I swear its expression was surprised. It moved out of view toward the upstairs hallway. I went into my sister's room, and it was gone. I went out into the hallway, and there was our dog. It was looking down the hallway, tilting its head the way confused dogs do. I never saw the figure again."
6."Not sure if this is considered paranormal, but when I got fevers as a child, I would always, in my fugue and pain-infused state, hear a man counting in a very deep voice. He would count from one and up. As the numbers got larger, the voice got louder and more intense. It started to get less frequent as I grew older, and now I do not experience it anymore. I’ve brushed it aside as a recurring nightmare until only recently when I learned that my sister experienced the exact same thing when she was younger as well. It’s not the scariest thing, but it does send shivers down my spine."
7."A few paranormal things have happened to me throughout my life, but the one that's talked about in the family still is when I saw this little boy as a kid. When I was really little, when I was five or something, we visited my grandparents for a huge dinner with family and friends. I was the only kid there. My grandparents had this walk-in pantry in their apartment with a window. I kept getting shooed out of the kitchen by my grandmother, so I decided to stay in the pantry and try and look out the window. I liked leaning out of it so I could see more. In the complex of apartments my grandparents stayed in, there was a sandbox for the kids to play in. While leaning out the window, I saw this kid playing in the sandbox with a wooden truck. Apparently, I kept staring at this kid enough that my mom asked me what I was doing. I pointed at the kid and said I wanted to play with him."
"According to my mom, I got everyone's attention by saying that. She asked a few more questions, which I answered like she couldn't see him from where she stood. She asked me questions about what he was wearing and then sent me to the living room. My mom returned later and told me I could play with him tomorrow, and I agreed, but I never saw the kid again. Years later, my mom told me that the kid I saw was the deceased child of one of the family friends at that dinner who died in a car accident a few years before I was born."
8."One time, I was camping in the woods with my friends. It was already dark, and we were sitting around the fire, telling scary stories. Out of nowhere, we heard this strange whispering coming from deeper in the forest. It sounded like multiple voices speaking at once, but we couldn’t make out any words. At first, we thought it was someone messing with us, but the more we listened, the creepier it felt — like it wasn’t... human. When we shined our flashlights toward the sound, everything went dead silent. And then, one of my friends, who was sitting closest to the trees, swore he saw something — a tall figure with unnaturally long arms moving between the trees. We didn’t stick around to find out what it was; we packed up and went straight to our cars. Haven’t been back to that spot since."
9."This actually happened a few weeks ago. My wife was out of town for work, and I was in bed. Around 1 a.m., my son came down to bed; I barely woke up. Later on in the night, I heard the bedroom door open and close. I woke up and saw a young girl wearing a red sweater with shoulder-length brown hair walk across the end of my bed. I specifically remember seeing her reflection in the mirror. I thought my daughter was also coming down to get in our bed. She sometimes sleepwalks, too. I looked at the clock; it was about 3 a.m. I watched the girl walk across the end of my bed and start walking to our bathroom. She then stood in the doorway. I called out my daughter's name — no response. The girl then started slowly lifting her arms up from her side until they were sticking straight out to the sides. I said my daughter's name again because, at this point, I figured she was sleepwalking."
"But the girl just stood there motionless with her arms out to her sides. So I yelled my daughter's name again, loud enough that my son woke up. He jumped up and saw the girl as well. I got up, flicked on the light, and there was nothing there. I walked upstairs and saw my daughter was still in her bed. I came back downstairs to look around and stood where the girl I saw was standing, and the floor was noticeably warm. I got back in bed and laid there for a good 45 minutes before I fell back asleep. The next morning, I asked my son about what happened last night to see if he remembered or if it was all a dream. He said he remembered waking up and seeing his sister standing in the doorway wearing a red sweater. It was super weird and freaked me out; I have goosebumps just thinking about it again."
10."I heard someone whisper in my ears as I was sleeping in a hospital bed. I could feel the breath in my ear; it felt so real. I jolted awake. My mother, who was dozing in a chair nearby, also woke up and said she felt someone step over her legs to get to my bed. No one was there. I hope it was just me hallucinating, but I've never liked hospitals since."
11."I lived in a haunted house for eight years. The number of events we had three was astounding. Most spectacular were the times of hearing glass and dishes break from the kitchen, yet nothing would be out of place. That was especially fun when we had guests over. I once saw a small boy and a cat in one room. Another person later saw the boy, and another later saw the cat. Mind you, I hadn't told ANYONE what I'd seen because I didn't fully believe I'd seen it. As much as we experienced stuff in that house, it wasn't scary."
12."I saw one of my friends standing outside my front door. The thing was, they were supposed to be out-of-state at the time. I called over my sister, and she saw him before he turned around and bolted down the street before disappearing entirely. I texted my friend, and he confirmed he was out-of-state. I would've chalked it up to hallucination if my sister hadn't seen him, too."
13."I had bunk beds at one point growing up. I made a fort by putting a blanket under the top mattress and pulling it down. I used to lie at the foot of the bed because it was closer to the hallways, which allowed me to read with the ambient light while still in my little fort. One day, I looked up to the foot of the top bunk, and I saw feet kicking — like someone was lying on their stomach on the top bunk. I told my parents, and they dismantled the bunk beds."
"Whatever was there turned around, and I swear its expression was surprised. It moved out of view toward the upstairs hallway. I went into my sister's room, and it was gone. I went out into the hallway, and there was our dog. It was looking down the hallway, tilting its head the way confused dogs do. I never saw the figure again."
14."I got back from the hospital after being told to say goodbye to my grandfather. I went to my room and made a joint, put a DVD in, and opened my window to smoke. Then the power cut. I looked out my window and saw we were the only house without electricity. I checked, and nothing had tripped out in the fuse box. Two minutes later, everything turned back on. At that exact moment, the landline rang. It was my nan, telling me that my granddad had passed. He was an electrician."
15."We used to live in a very old house where my dad's great-grandparents had raised their kids. Out of nine children, only four lived to adulthood. The others, including my dad's great-grandfather, died in the house. Needless to say, the place was creepy as hell. My grandma said that her dad would always look out the window facing east with his coffee in the morning, so one day, my mom and I were alone in the house and decided to do an experiment."
"We closed all the curtains in the upstairs rooms and went outside to look at them. All the curtains were closed EXCEPT for the ones in the east window. It was open about six inches in the middle — enough for someone to look out of. I'm not saying that the house was haunted, but that thing was TOTALLY haunted."
16.Lastly: "During high school, I spent summer vacation with my best friend and his grandparents, who live in the countryside in Japan. I stayed in his mom’s old room, which has a small wall closet. Just above this closet was a smaller closet door (a foot-and-a-half tall and about three feet wide). It was a weird design, but their house is old. I was pretty jet lagged the first couple of weeks, and Japan is hot and humid, so I didn’t really sleep at night. If my light was off at night, though, I always felt uneasy about that small closet space. Something about it just felt darker than the rest of the room. Toward the end of the second week, I started to adjust to the time difference. One morning, I woke up, and that small door was open. It was unsettling, but I closed it, thinking it might have come loose. A couple of nights later, I woke up feeling uneasy. It was dark, but I could kinda see, and I saw that the small door was open. It was pitch black in there."
"This was the first and only time I experienced 'paralysis.' I was too scared to move, say, or do anything. I just felt this darkness coming from there. I don’t remember sleeping that night, but I must’ve because I remember waking up the next morning. I told my friend about it, and he said his mom told him about something like that, too. When we got back home, I talked to his parents about it, and his mom said, 'So, I heard you met the ghost.'"
Um, yeah, I will NOT be getting any sleep tonight. If you've experienced a spooky and inexplicable phenomenon, share with us in the comments, or you can anonymously submit your story using this form!
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
