21 Of The Absolute Creepiest Things People Have Actually Experienced (And Won't Soon Forget)
Every month, I ask BuzzFeed readers like you to share the creepiest experiences they've ever had. From run-ins with serial killers to dreams that predict the future and everything in between, I've read it all! So, without further ado, here are 21 of the creepiest stories people shared this month:
1."I was pregnant with my second child and due in two weeks. My father-in-law offered to watch our oldest, then 5, and have her spend the night while my husband and I had one last date night before the baby. When we dropped her off at her granddad's, she announced, 'I'm spending the night because mommy is going to the hospital to have the baby.' We corrected her that the baby wasn't due for another two weeks. Overnight, my water broke, and I went into labor. We were at the hospital checking in when we remembered what she said. Another time, when I had just found out I was pregnant with my third and had told only my husband, she walked into our room the morning after the positive test and asked me, 'Mommy, do you have another baby in your belly?' We call her The Baby Whisperer."
—Anonymous
2."I was about 20 years old and driving a friend home one day. We took a road that I frequently drove on, and still do. It’s in a relatively busy area and neighborhood. Nothing out of the ordinary about it, really. As I was driving down the road and about to cross over a paved bridge, I noticed a woman in all-black clothing with some sort of head dressing on. I could only see her face, as her body was facing away from the street and her head turned to look at us. She made direct eye contact with me. She had a round face with big, puffy cheeks. Her brow was furrowed like she was angry, and her eyes were so dark and wide. It was like she was making sure I knew she saw me. She was standing near the guard rail on the side of the road, which I thought was a bizarre place to stand and spectate. I found it so bizarre that as we passed her, I pointed her out to my friend and said, 'Why is that woman standing there?' My friend looked and immediately said, 'What woman?'"
"The woman was on the right side of the street, which was directly next to the passenger side door where my friend sat. When I looked in my rearview mirror to explain, she was completely gone. It freaked me out so badly that I started crying, so overwhelmed with emotion. It happened so fast that there was no way for her to run or walk away. The whole interaction lasted mere seconds, but to this day 12 years later, I can still vividly see the woman’s face. It gives me the creeps. Every time I drive down that road (which is every day on the way home from work), I wonder if I’ll see her again."
—Anonymous
3."I was alone in the dorm suite I shared with three roommates when I caught someone trying to sneak into our place through the windows on our roof. Our dorm's common room had a vaulted ceiling with windows about 16 feet off the ground. They were the only windows in the suite that opened and could be accessed without a ladder from the roof. They were supposed to be locked. I was working on homework in the common area when I looked up and spotted a leg hanging through the window. I asked loudly what the heck they were doing, and whoever it was took off. I called maintenance and the RA, and they came with some ladders to lock the windows and check and see if they could find anyone out on the roof."
"Turned out that some guys in another suite had figured out that while the windows were supposed to be locked, a lot of them weren't. So, they'd been sneaking into the girl's suites and stealing things. The front doors locked automatically when you left the suite, so they didn't have to climb back out and could just walk out the front door. As far as I know, it didn't go any further than that, and the guys were expelled."
—Anonymous
4."My parents attend a church that meets in a building with a long and colorful history, including being a tuberculosis hospital in the early 20th century and later, a nursing home. I usually go to church with them on Easter, and this building has bad vibes. For instance, my mom volunteered to clean the toys in the nursery one weekend and brought my nephew, who was about 5 at the time. While my mom was working, my nephew kept looking down the hallway. He told my mom that there was a creepy man in the hall. My mom checked but didn’t see anyone. This happened a few times before my nephew asked my mom if they could leave because he was scared. On their way out, my mom saw another guy from the church doing some work outside. This guy does a lot of maintenance work in the building when there’s no one else around. She asked if he’d been in the building, and he said no. She said jokingly, 'I guess my grandson saw a ghost then!' The guy replied, 'Which one?'"
—Anonymous
5."I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I swear it's real, and my sisters are witnesses to this experience! For context, I'm most comfortable sleeping facedown. In the house that my family used to live in, I shared a room with my sister. She sleeps like the dead and snores super loud. Well, one day I fell asleep wearing jean shorts and my noise-canceling headphones. Around 1 or 2 in the morning, I was awoken by a slap on my butt. I'm also a very deep sleeper, so it had to be a hard slap to have woken me up like that. I instantly woke up angry at whoever hit me."
"I took off my headphones and realized my sister was snoring loudly. I shook her, and she did not wake up. I heard giggling and stormed over to my other sisters' room, thinking it was them. I barged in, asking why they hit me, convinced that was why they were laughing. They said they had just been watching TikToks, but mentioned they'd heard a loud sound coming from my room. I asked where our rabbit was, as he has a habit of jumping off our bodies onto the next bed, so it could've been him. They said that he was in the living room. I checked, and he was, sitting in his litter box chewing hay. The only other potential suspects were our parents, who were asleep in their room. So, who or what hit me?
I felt chills run down my body at the idea that something supernatural hit me. I was terrified to go back to sleep that night and the following days. It got so bad that I was falling asleep at my desk at work. We held a prayer night in my room, and I could sleep again. However, for a week after the incident, I still felt sore on my buttcheek. My mom said, 'Well, let me see what's bothering you.' When she saw it, she gasped. Where I felt the slap, I had a bruise the size of a handprint. People laugh whenever I share this story, and I can laugh about it now, too, but it was the most terrifying thing to ever happen to me."
—Anonymous
6."When I was around 12 years old, I dreamt that a car pulled into our long gravel driveway and drove up to our house. It was an old, junky yellow car filled with old newspapers and boxes. An older woman was driving it. When she got up to our house, she got out and let out two dogs: a brown hound dog and a white mutt with a gray head. She said, 'You're going to take care of him for a while.' Then, she got back in the car with the brown dog and drove away, leaving the white dog with me. The very next day, my mom picked me and my sister up from school and told us she had a surprise for us at home. I asked, 'Is it a dog?' She looked shocked and said, 'How did you know?' We got home, and it was the white dog with a gray head from my dream. He had just shown up at our house. He lived with us for a few months, then one day he disappeared, and we never saw him again."
—Anonymous
7."Out of pure boredom when I was about 13 or so, my 12-year-old sister and I would run really fast up and down the fire escape for fun. I now realize that's dangerous, but back then, we were young and, yes, clearly foolish! On one particularly rainy and gloomy day, we were running really fast up and down our tenement fire escape. I was always the first on the fire escape to eagerly navigate our outdoor adventures, and my sister was close behind. All of a sudden, I slipped and was quickly falling off the five-story building. For reasons unbeknownst till this very day, I did not fall to my death."
"After my initial shock wore off, I attributed my good fortune to my sister's quick thinking. After all, if she hadn't been just below me on the fire escape, I wouldn't be here today. I concluded that it was her powerful upward thrust toward the handrails that prevented me from falling. When I thanked her for her quick thinking, she yelled back, 'What did you say?' That's when I realized that my sister was nowhere near me when I slipped."
—Anonymous
8."I was riding on the bus after a basketball game in Tiverton, Rhode Island. It was my birthday, and we were riding over the Fall River Bridge. I was sitting by myself in the middle of the bus when I heard a whisper saying, 'Bad breaks,' over and over again. I thought it was weird, but forgot about it. It wasn’t till three days later when my dad told me that when my mom was eight months pregnant with me, her breaks failed on the exact same bridge."
—Anonymous
9."My childhood friend's house was haunted by the previous occupant, a man named Henry. Henry in general was a kind ghost — mostly, he would rock in the rocking chair or audibly walk up and down the stairs. There are two stories that her mom told me that stick with me to this day. The first story requires some backstory: Henry lost an eye in WWII and used a glass eye that he could pop in and out, and he would occasionally lose the eye. One day, my friend's mom was digging in the garden and found a glass eye. She took it inside, washed it off, and placed it into a highball glass to dry so it wouldn't roll away or break. When she returned an hour later, the glass was sitting there untouched and unmoved...but there was no eye."
"The other story they always told was about the garage. See, Ghost Henry loved tinkering in his little shed — it seemed to be his happy place. My friend's dad was a mechanic, and when they moved in, they knocked down the shed to build a large three-car garage that he could work out of. That night, Henry pulled my friend's dad out of bed (He's 6'7" and 300 lbs) and started choking him. They pleaded with the Ghost, explaining everything. He stopped choking him, but the dad had bruises around his neck. They still have pictures of the bruises to this day."
—Anonymous
10."I had a vivid dream about my work acquaintance, Brandon. He was annoyed with me because I kept calling him Brandon, and not Louis. I would immediately forget, and call him Brandon again. He grew more and more frustrated with me. A couple of days later, we had a work BBQ. I hadn't even thought of the dream since it happened, but Brandon was leaving early, and it suddenly popped back into my head. I had a strong urge to tell him about it, which was strange. We didn’t know each other well, but I just had to share the dream. I did, and he looked shocked and had goosebumps. He told me that his middle name was Louis, and he had a family member named Louis who passed away when he was young. After his death, Brandon insisted that he wanted to go by the name Louis. His family continued calling him Brandon anyway, which he — like in my dream — was very angry about."
—Anonymous
11."In high school, I was the only kid in my neighborhood who rode the school bus, so I would get on and off alone. One day, I got off the bus after school and started walking toward my house. I sensed someone exiting the bus after me and following behind me, but I was really shy, so I didn’t turn around to see who it was until I reached the end of the block. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a teenage boy walking a few steps behind me. He was white with dark hair and a dark-colored sweatshirt. I had never seen him before — maybe he was new to the neighborhood? When I glanced over my shoulder again a few seconds later, he had disappeared."
"We had been walking on a sidewalk with a road on one side and a chain-link fence on the other, so there was nowhere he could've gone. I stopped and looked around — he wasn’t in the road or on the other side of the fence. The bus had already left, so I knew he hadn’t gotten back on it. There weren’t any bushes or trees that he could have been hiding behind. I don’t know how to explain it — he was just gone. In the following weeks, I looked for him in the hallways at school and on the bus, but I never saw him again."
—Anonymous
12."When I was 15, my friends and I were huge Beatles fans. I dreamt one night that we were all walking to school and crying. A guy outside our local convenience store was reading a newspaper with the headlines about John Lennon's death. I told the guy that we were huge Beatles fans and asked if we could have the newspaper headline. He gave it to me. The next morning, I told my friends about that dream. That night, John Lennon was shot. As we walked to school crying the next day, that same guy was at the store reading the newspaper with the headline from the dream. I asked him for it, and he gave it to me."
—Anonymous
13."I don’t believe in the paranormal or psychics/mediums or any of that stuff, but I did have a psychic chat with me as I worked at a bar late one night in 2014. It was a really quiet night, so we talked for a few hours. My coworker said she'd been a regular for eight years, and had never heard her bring her ‘work’ up with customers before that day. But, for whatever reason, she felt compelled to start telling me things. She started by telling me, in incredible detail, about my deceased Grandmother who died in the '60s in another country."
"I know a good two dozen things about my grandmother, because my mother was so young when she died. I’ve never talked about her to friends, ever. The place I was working was in a different city than my mother lived in, too. I had no family there, and I had no social media trail with this info. Nonetheless, this woman dropped my grandmother's actual first name, her unusual nickname, my deceased aunt's name — who is also someone I never really talk about, and if I do, I don’t use her name. She continued to reveal things she had no way of knowing, like my aunt and grandmother's medical conditions, in absurd detail.
My little non-believer ass thought I'd caught her when she mentioned that my grandmother was pregnant when she died. After hours of being spooked, I was like, 'Aha! Gotcha. No she wasn’t!' Internally, of course, because I didn’t want to be rude to the spooky lady.
Well, I called my mom later that day and told her about it. To my surprise, she confirmed that, yes, my grandmother had been about eight weeks pregnant when she died."
14."In college, I had a friend who claimed to be a ghost magnet. One night, we made a plan to explore the attic in one of the campus buildings — an old Victorian mansion — that I had found accidentally unlocked. To get to the attic, you had to go up two flights of servant's stairs, then another smaller set of stairs to a landing with a doorway on either side of it. When we got there and looked up at the landing, I saw a shadow figure standing right above us, leaning over the railing, looking down at us. My friend and I looked at each other and — without a word — BOLTED back down to the main floor. Once we caught our breath, I distinctly remember my friend saying, 'I don't think that man was alive.'"
15."My father was on his deathbed in the hospital, and the end was very close. His sister and I were the only ones in the room with him. She put her head on the bed to get a little rest. All of a sudden, the room started getting dark, and I started seeing shadows coming through the room's sole window. The shadows were transforming into people my dad had known who had passed away. They went to the bed, and my dad went with them out the same window they all came through! He passed away right after they all left. My aunt woke up and asked who was talking so low. She said she recognized some of the voices, but it couldn't be any of those people, because they'd all passed away years ago!"
—Anonymous
16."When I was about 7 or 8, my cousins and I were home alone because our parents were out buying lunch. We were playing in my room, which was on the second floor. We got bored after playing for a while, so we decided to go down and see if there was anything to do in the living room. When we made it down the stairs, we saw something unforgettable. There were pools of blood everywhere, like the ones you would see in a crime scene in a movie. There were handprints and footprints on the walls and ceiling. We screamed and ran upstairs. When we heard our parents pull up to the driveway, we quickly ran down to them. I was the first down the stairs; my cousins were behind me. When I made it to the bottom, the blood on the walls and ceiling was gone, and I watched the massive pool of blood that'd been on the floor get smaller and smaller before my eyes, until it was completely gone right before our parents walked in."
"I try not to think much about it now, but it was something out of this world. Honestly, I still get goosebumps when I think about it."
—Anonymous
17."Back in the mid-'70s, my family moved to a relative's farm that had been empty for years. I was about 14 at the time and helped out on the family's farming operations. Soon after moving in, we witnessed a lot of ghostly sightings. One reoccurring apparition was that of a little girl who looked out the window. She was always looking toward the grove of trees by a nearby building. We told our landlord about it, and he said, 'That was my sister, she died from diphtheria. Her toys were in the building! I think she wants them back.' So, he went to the building, removed her items, and we never saw her again!"
18."My friend’s husband passed away suddenly after lying down one summer. I volunteered to stay at the house during the funeral and burial to get things ready for the reception being held at the house afterward. It was a hot day with no breeze. My then-husband called me to say they were going to the cemetery. I put the coffee on and returned to the kitchen sink to get back to work. Without thinking I said out loud, 'Well [insert name], it’s time to go to the cemetery.' All of a sudden, I heard a door slam. It scared the bejesus out of me because I was alone. I walked down the hallway and found the door to the master bedroom shut. I knew for a fact that, before the slamming sound, it had been open."
"The kitchen sink I was working at was in front of a window on the same side of the house as the bedroom. I felt no breezes or sudden gusts of wind that could've caused it. Soon after, people came to the house, and I got busy, forgetting about the occurrence. I talked to one woman who had been at the house the evening before while the family was at the wake. She claimed to have heard strange noises and stomping around while she was there. I never told the family what happened that day."
—Anonymous
19."I had a creepy encounter with my high school boyfriend that I will never forget. It happened on an average weekday evening in the fall of 1989. My boyfriend picked me up in his car and drove us to a popular nearby park. We were just talking and listening to music. I was sitting in the passenger seat and had my body turned toward him in the driver’s seat. We were laughing and chatting away when suddenly I saw the look of sheer terror cross his face. He quickly reached over me to lock my car door."
"I looked over my right shoulder, and there was what I can only describe as a human-monkey hybrid. He stood oddly hunched over on all fours, only feet from my door handle. My boyfriend started the car in a panic and sped off as fast as possible. We were in hysterics trying to comprehend what we just saw while also freaking out about how close this 'creature' was to the car. It was definitely making its way toward us. What would've ensued if he had reached us keeps me awake some nights.
I remember going home, calling my older sister on the phone, and crying uncontrollably while describing the human/ape hybrid. It was sparsely covered in black body hair and crouched down on all fours in a very unnatural, awkward stance. He was staring intently, looking 'caught,' like a deer in headlights and unlike any animal we had ever known existed.
Occasionally, my high school boyfriend and I chat on social media about the night we witnessed the most terrifying, unexplainable thing ever. We share a horrifying memory that bonds us forever. Even now, neither of us knows what it was, but I'm grateful he saw it before it got any closer. Seeing that has made me more open-minded and apprehensive to what lurks in the darkness."
—Anonymous
20."I was 15, and I had just woken up from a nap. I lived with my parents and three brothers at the time. I went to go lay down on the couch and watch TV when all of the sudden, I heard someone start vacuuming downstairs. I was in the middle of a really good show, so I yelled for them to stop, assuming it was one of my brothers. It stopped for a minute but then continued again. I shouted a second time to stop, and it did. A couple minutes later, I heard my mom drive up, and all my brothers walked in the door with her. Really confused, I asked if my dad was downstairs, but she said he was still at work. I was alone by myself the entire time, and still have no idea who, or what, was vacuuming."
21.And finally, "My brother passed away unexpectedly in 2001. We were devastated, to say the least. My brother and his girlfriend had a ringtone ('leaving on a jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again') that only rang when one of them called the other. Well, his girlfriend called me in a frenzy a couple of days after he passed because her phone rang playing their special ringtone. When she answered the phone, it was the last voicemail my brother had left her before he passed, telling her how much he loved her."
—Anonymous
If you enjoyed these stories, you can read a ton more like them here.
Now, dear reader, it's your turn. Do you have a creepy real-life experience like these? If so, tell us about them in the comments below or via this completely anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.