28 Of The Creepiest Yet True Stories About The Most Daunting Sounds Ever Heard By Folks At Night

A few days ago, netizen u/Stlouizsin asked the question of the AskReddit community: "What is the scariest sound you’ve ever heard in the middle of the night?", and the resulting thread has already collected almost two thousand different stories, scary and not so, as well as a lively discussion about them all. And today we, Bored Panda, are making a selection of the most interesting of them, especially for you.

Well, of course, we are all adults, and we understand perfectly well that literally behind every strange sound in the night there’s something extremely simple and real (even if very dangerous - like a bear prowling through the night forest). But our subconscious (and at this level many of us still remain little frightened kids) sometimes doesn’t let us believe it.

Once upon a time, many thousands of years ago, our distant ancestors, sitting in cold wet caves and hearing the howling of the wind and other terrible sounds outside, came up with legends for themselves.

This is how spirits and gods appeared, mighty heroes, who split the sky with stone axes in wrath, and terrible half-beasts, half-monsters, thirsting for hot human blood outside the cave. For the night, as you may know, is dark and full of terrors.

Today, after thousands of years, we are no longer such believers, as our brain has come a long way with evolution - but the body, its physiological reactions in many ways remain the same as they were during the Stone Age. As one writer reasonably noted, "The human psyche is nothing more than a random plaque on the endocrine glands..."

So now, having heard some incomprehensible sound in the middle of the night, instead of calmly getting up, turning on the light and going to figure out what the hell is going on, we sometimes just curl up in horror under the blanket, wanting only one thing - for this horror to end or go away as soon as possible.

And then it turns out, of course, that it was just a showdown between raccoons outside the window...

Alfred Hitchcock, the great master of horror movies, understood the nature of horror perfectly well, and therefore very rarely did any zombies, ghouls or other undead appear on his screen. Because horror isn't really about some scary creature willing to devour you. Real horror is when your subconscious hears a sound and paints the pictures in your head.

Just take the maestro's most famous film, "The Birds." Why did those seagulls suddenly go crazy and start attacking a simple house en masse? The original story by Daphne du Maurier at least hints at the reasons (even if it's very vague), but in the movie the birds just attack. Silently and for no reason, making everything that happens even more eerie.

The same thing happens in many of the stories in this list. Yes, it could be a dog, a coyote, a fox, a drunken neighbor, or the aforementioned raccoons. But hey, what does that matter when we wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night?

Okay, now how about sharing your own scary auditory memories? Because I'll never believe that you haven't had anything like that in your entire life. In the end, we are all human and no matter how fearless we are, we’re still afraid of something and somewhere deep down inside.

So now, please feel free to share your own chilling stories in the comments below, or just read these tales of ours - and don't forget to check the locks in the evening before you go to bed. Just in case, because you know, anything can actually happen...