56 Creepy Experiences That Sound Like Horror Stories But Actually Happened

10 years ago. I was 18 years old. As I was taking a shower and washed my hair, with every washing motion I pulled out more and more of my own hair until I was bald. No reason, no warning, nothing, just the pure horror of pulling out hands full of hair. The drain clogged with my hair as I silently stared in the mirror across the room at my own bald head. It felt like i was falling apart. Mentally and physically. I honestly thought I would die that day.

It was sudden auto-immune disease. Alopecia over night. It was scary as hell. The weeks after I lost all my body hair as well. My hair never returned and I am very okay with it now, but I can never ever forget that moment in the shower...

Didn't realize until years later that I was almost snatched.

Grew up in a small town. Out playing in the yard with my 2 younger siblings like every other summer day. Guy pulls up alongside the yard in a truck, calls me over. Asks my name, if I'm having a good summer. He says he could really use my help, he's out looking for his lost puppy. He can show me a photo of the puppy if I come closer. No, closer. The picture is small, can I please help him? I yelled to my brother on the other side of the yard "Daaaaaan, come help us find a puppy!"

I have to assume he thought I yelled 'dad' because he noped / screeched out of there without another word.

I remember being really worried about that puppy...until we had an assembly at our primary school about things strangers might say to lure you into their vehicles.

Here's something creepy I ended up doing.

Some context: my senior year of HS a bunch of the senior class decided to play a game, the name of which escapes me right now. Basically, everyone (around 30 people) starts at point A on one side of town. Roughly half of those people have to move on foot to point B on the other side of town. The other half of the people wait 10 minutes. Then they pair up and get in cars, driving around looking for people who left on foot and the passenger gets out to "tag" them.

I was one of the passengers in this game. Me and the person driving spotted a girl. We drove a little ahead of her and I sprinted out of the car, chasing this girl for about half a block before I realized she was easily out running me.

Fast forward about 20 minutes, and I'm at point B looking for this girl to give her props. Looking around, I can't seem to find her. I ask the person who I was in the car with who she was but my friend didn't recognize her either. "I thought you knew who she was."

From that girls perspective: she was out jogging when a random car stopped ahead of her. An unfamiliar guy runs out of the passenger seat and chases her for a bit.

I was the creep.

Posted this before, also my top comment of all time...

Rented a cabin for a week with my SO - first night there we had spent the day visiting her family (the actual reason for our trip), had dinner, she got pretty wasted. Get back to the cabin, carry my SO inside - to find all our bags opened/dumped onto the floor. This set me into panic mode.

I hadn't been drinking and I routinely carry, so I pull out my g*n and sweep the house - I check every room, closets, even under the bed - nothing. My SO is still fast asleep, so I check our stuff over and there's nothing missing. It had just been dumped onto the floor. So I look around some more, all the windows are locked, the backdoor was even d**d bolted.

It just really bothered me that there was no sign of break in. I know I locked the place before I left, so either someone else had a key to my cabin, or whoever it was was still inside the cabin. Either way, I didn't think I'd do much sleeping.

It was too late to make other arrangements, and considering that most likely there wasn't anything to worry about really. We had been gone all day, from 9am - midnight. So odds whoever it was did it was probably way earlier. But still... I couldn't shake it. I went in and covered up my SO, used the bathroom, set up a rocking chair facing the front door - my hand on my g*n on my lap, I started watch.

I felt pretty silly sitting there, but I couldn't not sit there either. And some time around 3-4am, I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning around 7am, sun shining through. I actually half scared myself because I hadn't meant to fall asleep - which then scared me again because I wasn't holding my g*n. I start looking around, and on the couch is my g*n. I'm like What... then I look - the front door is wide open. I'm like.. NO F*****G WAY. I jump up and start running to check on my SO - thank God she was still there, untouched. I go back out into the living room and pick up my g*n, all my bullets are missing.

I go outside and look around, car and everything is still there - no signs of anybody. I walk back inside, look in the far corner of the living room and I see the corner of the main living room rug lifted up. I investigate - it's covering the opening to the crawlspace.

That means this guy was IN MY CABIN THE ENTIRE TIME. I must have pulled up and caught the guy in the act, he thought fast and hid in the crawlspace. Then some time during the night, crawled out, DISARMED ME, and walked right out the front door.

TL:DR Rented a cabin, came back for the night found our stuff dumped on the floor. Put my SO to bed, stayed in the living room with my g*n incase they came back. Fell asleep. Woke up the next morning to my g*n on the couch, a hidden crawlspace door open, and the front door open. The person was hiding in the crawlspace the entire time - and worse, came out while I was sleeping and disarmed me.

When I was around 14 years old, I really liked to go for runs with my shepherd x lab. I lived in a fairly quiet, clean suburban neighborhood that was situated beside a broad expanse of pasture used by about ten horses (I would say it was roughly 40 acres). Anyway, a bike path ran between the pasture and my neighborhood and I generally ran down the path. One night I decided to go with my pup around 10:00 pm. May not seem like the smartest decision, but I had spent many nights with my group of friends biking/rollerblading around the neighborhood so I thought nothing of the late hour. I was running down the bike path with my dog, who is a a big pup yet the friendliest guy you'll meet. As we ran I noticed a dark lump a little ways ahead, and because it was nearly pitch black I could barely see it. I dismissed it as a garbage bag. As we drew closer, my dog perked up his ears and his hackles went up and he started to growl...which he rarely ever does. He loves basically everything. I stopped running and stared as the 'garbage bag' started to move. 14 year old me still didn't really know what the heck I was looking at, and it wasn't until the supposed garbage stood up that I realized it was a man...who then started to run towards us! My dog then turned around and, I kid you not, started to run and yanked me along behind him. We reached a street, he darted down it, then pulled me into a dark alley, onto another street, then another alley, then another street, until we somehow lost the guy. My dog saved my life, I'm pretty sure. The guy may not have been an axe m******r but it turns out some creepy ex felon was arrested in our neighborhood about two days later. I love my dog.

This happened to a friend of mine.

It's a Sunday. She comes home to her apartment from running errands around 1 pm. She was in med school at this time, so she pretty much parked herself at the kitchen table and studied for the next 5-6 hrs. She's sitting there and looks up to see a dude casually stroll out of her bedroom. No other entrances, she's sitting by the front door, so he's been there the entire time she has been home. He pauses at the doorway to her kitchen, between her and the door. She basically froze. Then her phone rang and kind of startled both of them. She ran to get the phone, he ran out the door. She moved and got an enormous dog.

HE WAS IN HER APARTMENT THE WHOLE TIME. This is one of my biggest fears.

When I was a child I was always stricken by this irrational fear that when I went outside at night, I had to walk STRAIGHT into the house without looking back, because if I looked back, someone would be following me.

One day after dinner I went out to the car to get my bookbag, and I was continuing my ritual of walking straight inside without looking back, adrenaline pumping, anxiety going full force, and I just stopped and said to myself "this is stupid." I made myself look back.

When I looked back I saw what appeared to be someone crouched down behind my mom's car and was peeking their head around. They were just staring at me and smiling. It appeared to be a woman in her mid 30s, maybe 40 with curly short blonde hair. We made eye contact for a second and then she ducked back behind the car where I couldn't see her.

I stood frozen for a second and then ran inside. I told my mom, we went outside to check, no one was there. My mom didn't exactly not believe me, but she wasn't very concerned either.

Me and my fiancé saw a guy on the side of the road asking for a ride. I told her there was no way I'd pick up a male hitchhiker. She told me it was the right thing to do but I convinced her that we shouldn't. Three days later he was arrested for m**dering the couple that picked him up.

When I was 15-16, my mom put me on “diet pills” (still don’t know what they are) that let me get away with just eating a tiny cup of soup the whole day and be ok with sleeping less than 3h daily. I got hooked on them because I could study way more.

I guess the sleep deprivation finally caught up one night, and I started having auditory hallucinations. It started with white noise, then morphed into what sounded like a garbled shouting argument between a bunch of people and started echoing until it became a man with a deep, sinister laugh laughing hysterically.

The rational part of me figured it’s auditory hallucinations but holy c**p it was petrifying and I could feel every hair standing up.

Then another part of me just thought, “Well, if it’s not a hallucination and I’m actually going to get m**dered by bloodthirsty ghosts, at least I don’t have to take the test tomorrow.”

I continued studying.

Asian schools were tough.

I'd just moved into a basement suite. Everytime I went out I would lock the deadbolt but not the door handle but when I came home a lot of the time the deadbolt would be unlocked and the door handle would be locked.

At first I thought I was just confused about which one I had locked so I started paying more attention. It kept happening and I realized someone must be going in when I went out. I assumed it was the landlady and was annoyed but didn't say anything at first.

Then one day I came home and found the wrong lock locked again. I went in p***ed off and opened the fridge to get something to eat. There was a book in the fridge that I had never seen before. I collected old books and this one was published in the early 1900s which creeped me out completely because it was like it had been left for me.

I finally called my landlady and asked if she was going into my apartment and told her what had happened. She freaked right out, said the last person who lived there was a really creepy guy with mental health and d**g problems. She got all the locks changed that day and it never happened again.

Once as a teenager, I was leaving a fast food drive-thru and someone in an old bronco started to follow me. At first I thought it was a road rage situation and did the "sorry" wave, and tried to let him pass but he swerved at me like he was trying to hit my car. He pulled up alongside of me and was screaming out the window, just incoherently furious, continuing to swerve at me.

This was before the days of cell phones and I was in an unfamiliar area of town. I was driving a Firebird and tried to outrun him, but he would run red lights and make crazy turns to keep up with me. I eventually ran into a d**d end and he pulled his truck across the road to block it. There were big ditches on either side so I was stuck.

He got out and started scrambling at my door handle (doors locked) and pounding on the windows, his face inches from mine just screaming and screaming in a way that seemed like he couldn't even quite see me. Shaking and crying, I turned on my overhead light so he could see I was just a teenage girl and not who he was looking for and he jumped on my hood and started pounding (and drooling in thick, white smears) on my windshield.

I was screaming and crying and he stopped, held up one finger like "wait a minute" and scurried off to his truck. I floored the gas and ran into the ditch and drove like a crazy person for 45 minutes until I knew I had lost him.

No idea what his deal was. My mom thought I made up this entire story to lie about the damage to my car, and still seems hesitant to believe me...

When my wife was in college, she took a philosophy class or something. On the first day everyone announced who they were etc. turns out she was sitting next to a police officer who was taking the class for continuing education or a promotion (can't remember, but he was actively a police officer). This was really great for her because she's small and it was a night time class.

They became friends ish (as much as two people sitting next to each other for a few classes are) he agreed to walk her to her car after class since the school wasn't in the best area and it made her feel safe.

Around mid terms he stops showing up. She's kind of confused, but figured life happens and something else probably came up.

A few weeks later we're at her parents house and her mom asks if we had heard about the police officer that had been arrested. We hadn't so she begins to fill us in on this police officer that had been pulling women over and raping them in their cars.

We live in a small town, but it gets super rural super fast if you leave, so nobody is passing these scenes as they're happening.

Anyway, turns out that the officer r***ng women was the same guy that was walking her to her car after class every week and the reason he wasn't in class was because he had been arrested.

This story certainly felt creepy when it was happening. I was in the orthopedic surgery wing of the hospital after getting my torn Achilles tendon repaired. It was a fairly long procedure and I was pretty groggy from the anesthesia after-effects combined with the morphine for the pain, but I did notice that I had a roommate that had both of his hands and feet wrapped in bandages. I could hear him talking to his father, but didn't pay much attention because of how out of it I was at the time. I did remember hearing something about "Why did you stop taking your medication?"

I don't know how morphine affects anyone else, but it gives me a very restless sleep combined with vivid dreams (almost nightmares; something I never have). So in the middle of the night, while turning over for the 100th time I spied someone standing beside my bed in the dark.

"Do you have any smokes?"

My roommate apparently was standing there watching me sleep, waiting for me to wake up to ask for a cigarette. It could be considered being very polite or very creepy, but when you are in a morphine induced haze it was definitely creepy. Later that day I heard the details of why he was there. He had gone off his meds and decided to quit smoking hard core. I mean liquid nitrogen cold turkey.

First he nailed his feet to the floor so he couldn't go out for smokes. Then he took a butcher knife from the kitchen and cut off the fingers of his left hand so he couldn't hold a cigarette. That's where his plan kind of fell apart, because he had a lot of trouble cutting off the right fingers with no left fingers to hold the knife. He only got though three of them. I put this together between the conversations I overheard between family, nurses and doctors.

I was supposed to be in there for another day, but they told me I could go home early if I was OK with taking Tylenol 3 for the pain. I would have to stay if I needed the stronger morphine pain-k**ler so the staff could administer it. I said I would go home with aspirin if it meant getting out of that room. The head nurse at the nursing station was sympathetic, she said the guy really needed to be in a different kind of hospital but he had orthopedic issues that had to be dealt with and that's why he was there.

It wasn't supernatural, just a mentally disturbed individual who had hurt himself. He probably couldn't even have hurt anyone else considering his injuries, but in my morphine fog it was creepy as hell to me to have someone that disturbed 10 feet away while I was sleeping.

Have posted this before, but for anyone interested: I used to live in a rented house that sat across the street from a fairly bustling city park. At night, when the park was deserted, I would walk out my front door and sit on my porch and look at the trees and the stars. One night, around 1am, I opened the front door and started to sit down. That's when I saw a man standing in the deserted park. He was directly in front of my house. The man was dressed all in black and was wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask seemed fairly intricate but was most definitely a store bought cheapo. The sight of this guy sent a chill down my spine. He didn't move at all--although I know he saw me. The entire neighborhood was silent and still and we just paused there holding our ground. We watched each other for a long time and then he sauntered away. I ended up calling the cops because I figured this guy was casing the neighborhood. Cops came, took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. Couple of months later, I'm doing some yard work around the side of my house. I'm pulling a huge tangle of weeds out from a thicket underneath my kitchen window. I see something that looks like trash, pick it up: it's the mask I saw that night

EDIT: Again, sorry to anyone who has read this before! So many good ones on here I'd hate to waste your time. And no I didn't keep the mask, I don't have any pictures either. By the time I saw the mask in my yard it was pretty much destroyed from weather, etc. I eventually moved within the year and never saw the guy again.

I'm late to this post but f**k it.

When I was around 8 or 9 my friends and I were in the park a bit behind my friend's town house complex. My friend Steve and I are 8/9 but our friend Dylan is with us also and he was about three years older than us. So we're playing and then my friend's creepy uncle shows up to "check on us". Now it turns out that he has mental issues and isn't really all there, but we didn't really know about that kind of thing at this age. So we're playing tag or jailbreak or something when suddenly he picks me up and starts carrying me towards this big road in the distance. He tells the other kids that "someone has to go". They start going with it. I'm terrified as we approach the road with buzzing traffic and suddenly Dylan says, "No, let me push him". Uncle Scary says okay and begins to set me up for a push when Dylan grabs me and whispers, "run". We ran so fast out of there and I don't exactly remember what happened next but I never saw that guy again.

Im 52. When I was about 8 years old, 5 other 8-10 year olds were in a kids bedroom playing. This one boy and me were wrestling around when someone turned off the lights. When the light went off there was a loud pop. Another kid had found a pistol and fired it. I was laying on the bedroom floor. The bullet missed my head by 2 inches. It was a straight down sh*t that narrowly missed.

When I was about 9 or 10, my older brother and I had a few friends over to stay the night. My Dad had to work the next day so we were all left at the house by ourselves for the day. We were excited to play playstation all day on our Saturday off. Well my Dad worked late that night (until probably 8 or 9). As soon as the sun went down we went into one of the rooms upstairs to play Uno.

Fast forward 30 minutes and we start hearing footsteps slowing walking up the wooden stairs. My dad wasn't going to be home for another 2 hours so we didn't know who it was. There were four of us, me, my brother, my friend, and his friend. We would take turns walking out of the room to see what it was but before we could look down the dark stairs we would hear what sounded like someone running down the stairs as fast as they could so they couldn't be seen. This continued for probably 2 hours ending with all of us huddled in the room upstairs with the door wedged shut with a chair until my Dad got home.

None of us were really believers in anything paranormal but a child's imagination is a crazy thing. Now 15 years later, I still don't know what to make of it but every one of us heard those footsteps walking up those dark stairs. I bring it up to my friend who I'm still friends with and he remembers it just as vividly as I do. It kind of creeps me out just thinking about it.

I think the creepiest thing that I've ever heard is from my Grandpa. Until about the time Communism was beginning to end in my country (about [1988]) he lived on a farm with Grandma (I would say this was maybe 20 kilometers from the city). There was weird car that kept on just sitting on the road next their farm that split their property from the neighbors. There were always 2 people in the car, sitting all night long, my grandpa clearly remembered the cigarette smoke flowing from the car on cold days.

My grandpa came up to the car one day and recognized by their hats they were SB, and left without bothering them. Anyway, some weird things were happening in that whole area, animals were stolen once in awhile, and the strange car appeared around a time where some drunks were going missing in our area [3 people]. Some people thought they just fell asleep in the snow and got buried.

One night he heard creaking downstairs, when he went down no one was there but the door was open and you can see wet tracks through the kitchen [apparently the weird thing was that they had a chain on that door, and it was opened without breaking]. A few weeks later, during the night again my grandparents heard g*n s**ts coming from the next farm over, followed by a bunch of SB (Communist secret police) cars. After that the weird car stopped showing up, and apparently the farm next to my grandparents was home to some small cult that was suspected of using people for weird sacrifices and experiments [this info he got from a friend who worked in the Police, they found a small weapons cache and some remains in one of the barns that were dismembered in a "peculiar" fashion, not sure what that meant really].

My grandpa still thinking that night someone came into the house it was one of the SB making sure nothing weird was inside, OR one of the creepy cultists trying to find another victim. They sold the farm 2 years later and never looked back.

About five years ago i was at a friends house drinking about 3 am We ran out so i road my bike back to my house 5 blocks away and grabbed some and got on the bike to ride back. When i got about two blocks down i saw a car crossing the street. when whoever was driving saw me they slowed down and stopped on the side of the street as if to wait on me to ride that way. I had a horrible feeling about it for some reason so i just pulled up to the house i was in front of and pretended it was mine walked up to the front door like i was going inside. When i did that i noticed the car leave from where they were pulled over. I waited for a bit and then headed back to my buddies and forgot about it. The next day it was all over the news that a car matching the one i saw 2 streets over from where i saw them at 330am pulled out infront of another car and blocked them in and proceeded to shoot and k**l everyone in the car. Apparently it was a thrill k**l.

I was bitten on my face by a brown recluse spider while on a training mission with the US Army. It happened while I was sleeping so the poison stayed in my face, right next to my eye, for about 6 hours.

My head swelled so bad it looked like my face doubled in size.

I lost nerve feeling in my eye socket and now my eyelid uncontrollably flutters the more tired I get. Sort of like a tremor that people with tourettes get.