Amanda Sedlak-Hevener

While many people find the paranormal difficult to believe in, there are those who do believe in it, and many of them can provide proof to back up those beliefs. Appearing as guardian angels, playful children, or only to the eyes of man’s best friend, the spectres detailed in these posts defy all logic and may spook you into reconsidering the supernatural. After all, the creepiest thing about these tales is that they’re all written by real people.

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• Getting ‘Tagged’ From The Other Side

A few years ago a group of friends and I learned about an abandoned local cemetery.

We go during the day to check it out. There are about 30 or so grave stones, ranging from 80-years-old all the way down to a five-year-old girl. The newest grave is at least 70-years-old. Living in a young town, I realize many suburbs bear the names of these same gravestones. We decide to return later on at night, and play hide-and-seek.

When we arrive after dark my perception of the area totally changes; what was scenic and sort of sad earlier now feels scary. All the graves are partially hidden by long grass, and large dead trees surround the area.

We pick someone to be ‘it’ and proceed to hide. I don’t hide particularly well, but I remain unfound for some time, so I lie near a fence in the long grass, playing on my phone. After about ten minutes, I hear some grass around me move. This is Australia, so there’s a chance it is (who am I kidding it definitely is) something that could kill me, so I move into a more defendable position yet stay hidden. This new position puts my back to a gravestone (on the other side from where the body lays).

Another few minutes pass. As the wind picks up and the temperature drops by a few degrees, I swear to God I feel someone touch my shoulder. The voice of a five-year-old girl whispers right next to my ear “you’re it”.

Needless to say, I freak and scream like a girl, which also freaks my friends out. After a brief explanation of what happened, we quickly relocate to the entrance of the area to make sure everyone got out. Detail: the gate is downhill of the graves, so looking up they’re silhouetted. When we confirm everyone is there, one of the other guys grabs my arm and points up the hill, and I kid you not we see the outline of a little girl in 20’s style kids’ clothing skipping around the headstones.

Fastest I have ever run in my life.

• • My Imaginary Friend Was Not Imaginary

Like a lot of kids, I had an imaginary friend until I was about nine or 10. While I don’t remember playing with him, I do vaguely recall going to see a psychiatrist about him. I described him as looking like me (red hair, glasses) and having the same birthday as I do, and I called him G because my first name starts with a G, according to my mother. As I grew up, G faded away.

Fast forward to my 20th birthday. I come home from college for a dinner with my parents and younger siblings. We joke around about our childhoods when my sister mentions G. My dad gets quiet and my mom goes pale. She demands we drop the subject. The next day, after my siblings leave, my parents sit me down and explain that I had a twin brother who died when we were about a year old; he had a congenital heart problem and passed away during surgery. They elected not to tell me, although they couldn’t really explain why. My mom kept the letters G and I wrote to each other (mostly scribbles) and all the pictures I drew of him and I playing. She thinks I was with my brother.

• • Charged By The Ghost Of A Horse

I grew up in a large suburb outside of Houston, during the early 90s when a lot of farmland settled by the original German immigrants was being bought up by developers and turned into new homes. My family lived at the very end of our subdivision, and past my house was a great expanse of farmland, flanked by thick woods and old decaying shacks from the 1800s.

Every day on my walk home from school, I passed by a particularly overgrown old shack, which I conjecture must have at some point been a house. It leaned like it would fall over at any minute on its tired old foundation, and just beyond it lay a long row of fence. While commuting to-and-from elementary school, and I always walked by it, picking up interesting rocks and things, and I never thought much of it. There was always construction while the subdivision was expanding, so developers dug long trenches for sewage and erected electrical lines through the farmland.

Beyond the fence was a small lake, which I often snuck into to explore and catch frogs. After an encounter with a water moccasin, a species of pit viper, I decided to stay clear of it. The farm also had cows meandering through the meadow, and one large black horse.

A storm rolled in the previous night, and I remember the clouds being so thick and black that it felt like night when arriving at school the next day. Once it hit full-force, the power went out at the school, so our teacher decided to have us all sit together on the floor and read to us for the rest of the day.

The storm passes, but the darkness lingers when I got out of school. Walking the muddy path past the crooked house and the aging fence in the darkness, each step becomes more and more difficult as the mud collects on my shoes. That’s when I hear a thrashing. The cows are gone, but I recall the old black horse, thinking it may be sick or injured.

Steam rises from the horse’s sleek, black coat, as it kicks its back legs wildly and violently slams its face into the muck. Looking at its face, it appear to not be panicked, but rather calm. Again-and-again, it plows its head into the mud and kicks out its legs, then shakes its head from side to side furiously. I stop to watch it; looking back I wish I had just kept walking. After after a minute or two, it stops to look up at me, the grime sliding off of its face.

Giving me no time to react, the horse begins charging towards me. Instead of jumping over the fence, it lowers its massive head and tears through the gap between the fence boards.

The wood cracks and splinters as the horse’s muscled body strains and its long neck extends through the gap, and it begins snapping at me. With its entire body covered in huge, swollen muscles it repeatedly recoils and slams all of its weight back into the fence, attempting to break the boards, again and again. Its enormous, broad teeth come inches from me, and I fall out of my shoes backwards, leaving them stuck in the mud. It’s a miracle that the fence holds it back.

Seeing it up close, I realize the horse is burned, badly. The skin around its mouth is seared, and tendrils of pink, bloody skin snake its way over its face like a spider web. The absence of skin makes its teeth seem even larger, its black gums exposed and frothing with spit I feel hitting me in the face. At this moment I am absolutely terrified this horse will kill me. I want to get up, but the thick mud traps me.

And the smell. It is like sulfur—a mixture of wet animal, burned meat, and singed hair. But what sticks with me the most are its eyes, which are clouded over like black ink poured into milk. As it struggles to reach me through the fence, its nostrils flared, covering me in its hot breath. The sound of its heavy teeth snapping shut over and over deafens me.

I leave my shoes and run home, and cause my mother to scream at me about the mud when I burst inside. I tell her about the horse that nearly killed me, and that I left my shoes there in the mud.

She grabs me by the arm and plans to make me take her back there to get them, but I cry and scream not to go, so she goes alone.

When she comes back she is holding my muddy old sneakers in her hands, and she tells me she saw the horse. It was dead. A farmhand dragged its body behind a tractor, telling my mom that the horse died earlier that day. One of the power new power lines running through the meadow knocked over during the storm, and the horse must have been near the lake, because it had been electrocuted and killed. He said it had died instantly beside the lake when the power went out hours ago.

• • Human Teeth And Nightmares

This isn’t something that happened to me, but rather something that happened to my father.

My father grew up in a haunted house: creaking floors when no one was there, doors closing by themselves with no impetus, and weirdest of all, my father’s sister (my aunt) was strongly plagued with nightmares once they moved into the house, and she was only about five at the time.

She would scream in her sleep, and wouldn’t wake up whenever she was having one of her screaming fits. Her parents tried to wake her up, much of the time with ill success. When she would finally wake up, she would start crying and say “the man was getting closer to my bed again.” She described the man as only having half of a face because part of his head was missing. My father’s mother felt disturbed by this, as her child was only five at the time, and so she could have gotten these images from any sort of media, as this was long ago.

Fast forward to few months later: the nightmares get worse. At this point, her parents attempted therapy, which results in no change whatsoever, but they’re getting desperate. A little time later, her mother vacuumed her room, and while doing so heard some larger objects get lodged within the vacuum. She opened the vacuum cleaner bag to see what the objects were. Turns out that the vacuum cleaner sucked up human teeth.

A few calls later, they discovered the previous owner of the house shot himself in that very room. I guess they weren’t thorough with the cleaning. Needless to say, they moved out as quickly as they could after that. My aunt never experienced nightmares to that extent again.

• • Afraid Of The Room

Starting from about age five, I have always been afraid of my bedroom. I especially feared the fireplace in the corner, covered in a black metal grate that seemed to disappear when the lights went out. In the dark, I saw people come out of the “opening.” Though they never looked at me, I think they knew I was there. One figure always came slinking out of the fireplace — a young woman. My family has always been skeptical when it comes to theism/paranormal/etc., so they decided it was just me being a scared kid with an overactive imagination and the “dreams” would go away.

Eventually, every night I became so terrified to go to sleep I fought them, kicking and screaming while saying I didn’t want to go to sleep and refused to go until threatened by my parents. I finally convinced them to paint over the metal grate of the fireplace, and to this day it is painted bright white. I continued to be terrified of the room, and eventually, at 14 years old, started sleeping on the floor because the nightmares wouldn’t stop, despite therapy and medication (I was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder at age 12 because of hallucinating that same woman — red hair, petite, lots of makeup, dark eyeshadow, and bruises all over her face, so swollen it was hard to see her eyes).

Last week, my mom finally told me something she avoided telling me for years. While I was still a kid, the fighting over bedtime got so bad that a neighbor heard the screaming (we live in NYC so she was across the wall). She is about 70-years-old and has liveed in her apartment long before we moved in, was worried by the screaming because of previous events that took place here.

Apparently, a drug dealer lived in our house before we moved in, and committed a murder committed inside the house, in my room. He beat her to death and stuffed the body in the fireplace.

• • Ghostly Girl In The Haunted House

This will probably never be seen because the post is already at 2,400 comments but I swear on my life that it is absolutely true.

One of my close friends lived next to a house that was always vacant. It would sell, people would move in, only to up-and-leave shortly thereafter, and the house would be up for sale again. One summer, when the house is listed again and the last family had moved out, we decide to go take a tour, bringing along Jack in the Box we had picked up. In a demonstration of poor judgment, I think it would be cool to play chicken with whatever was haunting this house. My friend is quite skinny, and they crawled through the dog door into the kitchen, opening the back door for me to come through.

We explore the rooms and find them rather nondescript, just a typical 50s style bungalow house with a similar layout to my friend’s home, lots of fine woodwork and built-ins. After we determine the house really isn’t that creepy after all, we sit down in the dining area on the floor, across from a little horseshoe shaped nook with a kitchen table and built-in bench. It’s dusk, but the windows don’t have curtains and it never gets dark in our city. At this point, we’ve been in the house for maybe 25 minutes and after we eat, we stay seated to digest and hang out.

All of a sudden, mid-sentence, completely out of nowhere, my vision goes black and I feel this eerie coldness wash all over me , a feeling so thick I felt like it penetrated my through my body down to my bones (I’m getting chills thinking about it). At the very same moment this happens, my friend screams. I cannot see anything and grope around trying to find something to grab onto while the feeling of unease and cold remains, though such adjectives barely scratch the surface.

After what feels like hours, I feel my friend’s hands in mine and he pulls me to my feet to drag me through the house to the back door. He keeps pulling on my arm and I still can’t see anything. As soon as I am outside, I feel my entire body shiver, starting at the tip of my toes going all the way up to my scalp; unexpectedly and suddenly I could see again.

My friend is as pale as a sheet and looks absolutely terrified. I feel off and a bit gross, for lack of a better term, and am otherwise in shock. I tell my friend that I couldn’t see at all until I got outside, that it felt like utter darkness enveloped me. He just stares at me and I finally ask him why he screamed. He hugs me and says he pulled me out of the house as soon as I went blind because a little girl, who was completely black and yet see through, crawled out from under the table we were across from and sat on top of me.

• • The Ghost Folded The Clothes

Alone at home in my apartment, I decide to take a shower. I lock the door out of habit, and it can only be locked and unlocked from the inside. My clean and dirty clothes litter the floor of the bathroom in two separate piles.

When I finish my shower, I find my clothes, both dirty and clean, neatly folded in two separate stacks on the floor. The door is still locked and I take very quick showers, so this happened in the span of five minutes. I have no explanation and I get goose bumps just thinking about it.

This happened about a week ago and nothing like it has happened prior or since.

• • Shower Was On And The Window Was Open

My parents work long hours, so growing up it wasn’t uncommon for them to leave my sister and me by ourselves.

One such night while downstairs watching TV, we hear banging from upstairs. We assume our cats are fighting, so we head up to sort them out. However when we reach the upstairs, we realizes the shower is on and the door is locked. We go back downstairs and huddled together, convinced we are about to die. After hearing more banging, my sister decides to brave it and gets the spare key to the bathroom. She opens the door to find the bathroom window wide open and the shower on full-blast. We still don’t know what happened that night, but I get shivers thinking about it.

• • Man’s Best Friend Has Invisible Friends Of His Own

As a puppy, my dog made some pretty freaky “imaginary friends.”

I began noticing how he just stared at this spot in the corner of the kitchen above the cabinets. One moment he’s dead asleep, only to suddenly shoot up and run straight for it. Once there, he simply looked confused for a few minutes, then start barking at it. I would drag him away and calm him down before he stopped and moved on. Then he started to do the same thing with a messenger desk my dad brought home after his mother passed away. He would run into the sun room, crouch right in front of it and just start barking away at something “sitting” on top of it until you pulled him away back in another room.

The last and freakiest one he had was 100 times freakier. He walked around the house, taking different paths every time, happily following something that seemed six feet in the air in front of him.

He looked right at it, wagging his tail like someone was playing with him; then he’d randomly stop, sit, look up at face height and start wagging his tail as if about to get a treat then get back up and continue his “quest.”

The worst happened when he was doing this and I was home alone, which I was used to by then, except when he went upstairs this time and stopped right in the middle of the balcony that overlooks the tv room. He sits, waiting patiently for whatever he expected and I call his name. His name doesn’t register, and he just waits there cocking his head from side-to-side. As I realize he appears to be “playing” with someone, he jumps like he would on a person if they wouldn’t give him a toy. When he lands back down, he looks right at me and sprints down the stairs to my side,, where he stays for the rest of the night. Might not sound that scary, but he clearly saw and responded to things that weren’t there, and was interacting like he would with a human.

• • His Name Written In Dust

I am in Italy staying in a friend’s house, and wake up in the morning to find my husband’s name written in dust on the top of a dresser. Alone in the room, only I could have done this, and sleep-walking isn’t a trait I possess. I immediately phone my husband to check up on him – he is fine – but months later I will find out he started an affair that day which eventually breaks up our marriage.

• Creepy Beings Dancing Around The Fire

I grew up in a small town in central Pennsylvania. With nothing to do, nowhere to go, my best friend and I hung out constantly. We were inseparable.

One night, while my parents are out of town we decide to have a bonfire late on a dark and foggy night. We head out to start the fire, about an hour before anyone showed up. Once the fire is lit, my friend goes back inside to grab some booze from my room while I am in the bathroom.

After I finish, my friend is nowhere to be found, having up and left. After that night he never looks me in the eye, avoids me as much as possible, and never comes over again. A few years later I see his sister at the supermarket, and we start talking. The conversation turns to my friend, and eventually I ask why he stopped talking to me. Her response chills me to the bone: “He told me when he was at your house he looked out the window and saw things dancing around your fire. Evil things.”

• • She Waters The Garden At Night

While staying at my friend’s place I notice a person out watering their flowers. I ask my friend’s mom why there some girl was out watering her flowers at 2AM . The color drains out of her face and she tells me her mom used to work weird shifts, and so would upkeep her garden when she could, which was often in the middle of the night. The mom lived in that house until she died, which was a couple of years prior.

I concluded that the dimensions of time aren’t as separate as we like to think.

• • A House Full Of Creepy Experiences

The house I grew up in felt very strange. My friends hated to spend the night, saying they had weird dreams there. At night it often sounded like someone was moving furniture around in the living room. My mom and I would randomly smell cigars when no one in my house smoked. Other times we would catch movement out of the side of our eyes, and nothing was there. Even our dogs would suddenly leap up and follow something with their eyes, or would start wagging their tails for no apparent reason.

I once dreamt about a man wearing a red plaid shirt with black hair and a mustache, leaning on the fence in the backyard. It was so striking that it just stuck with me for about a week before I mentioned it to my mom. She also experienced a dream about the man in the past, and we concurred that might explain the cigar smell.

Another time, while home alone, I am washing dishes when I heard the wood floor creaking behind me like someone is walking on it. I spin around to find no one there, so I go back to the dishes.

Again, there comes a few more creaks, even closer than before. I turn around, demand whatever “it” is to stop, and it does.

The most unexplainable thing happened one night when I woke up to a scratching and rustling noise in my room. For about 10 minutes, I remain silent in bed listening to the noises, convinced there’s been a break-in. Then music from the music box on my shelf starts playing. I flip over in bed and no one is there. My bedroom door is closed, and my dog is standing at the other side of the room staring at the bookcase where my music box sits. As I get out of bed, I see the drawer has been pulled out, hence the slow scraping noise, which triggered the music. It lies on a flat surface so it can’t slowly slip open, and it is too high for my dog to reach even if he wanted to.

My mom told me later the people she bought the house from were a widowed father with a young daughter. His wife died from cancer in a home hospice in the house. She said when I was a baby she would hear me laughing and babbling by myself in my crib, and when she would check on me in the nursery I would be looking up at something. For some reason she felt like it was connected to the woman.

• • Locked In The Basement By A Ghost

I am doing laundry in my ex’s old Civil War-era home, which, at one point, was used as a makeshift hospital to house the fatally wounded, the basement acting as a morgue.

The basement always creeped me out, turning the hairs up on my body sending my heart racing every time. I’m not easily scared, so for me to feel this was unusual.

So, as I am quietly doing my laundry, I hear the door shut behind me. I think nothing of it, brushing it off as a draft. As I go to grab the doorknob, it refuses budge, as if someone is holding it on the other side. I throw all my weight against the door and it still won’t budge. I start banging and screaming, in hopes that someone would hear me.

In the midst of that noise, the dryer shoots open, all my laundry spilling onto the floor and evening hitting the wall across from the dryer. Not exactly a manufacturing malfunction.

So, I am almost sh*tt*ng my pants, eyes welling with tears, and I feel a fear I have never felt before. Not being able to see anything, but be able to feel it is the most terrifying feeling. I feel something in the room with me.

Long story short, the door opens after about 20 minutes of me sobbing on the floor, all too casual. It slowly creaks open and I dash out, never to do laundry in that house again.

• • The TV Turns Off On Command

When I read, I can’t stop, devouring the entire book even if it means being awake for two days.

Around ten years ago (I was in high school at the time), I am up late finishing Steven King’s Bag of Bones. I complete it a little after 3 am, so naturally I am the only person awake. The book, in typical Steven King fashion, leaves me feeling creeped out, so I leave the television on for background noise. A big old television with a solid wood frame, it reminds me of my grandfather’s own TV before he died. There is no remote for it (given its age) so the only way to turn it off is to get up and press the off button on the front.

I am lying on the couch looking directly at the TV, exhausted and planning on just crashing on the couch, too tired butt to turn off the screen off. So for some reason I say to the empty room, “Can you please turn off the TV?”

The television instantly turns off!

I fly off the couch and down the hall into my bed, completely terrified. Though it may have over heated from being on for so long or something, I feel totally freaked out because my baby sister had been having “paranormal” experiences in that house already.

She would see men digging in the back yard or standing in her room. Occasionally, she saw glowing orbs near the ceiling and spoke about a girl she sometimes caught a glimpse of, though the sightings stopped as she got older.

One time I fell asleep in the messy room I shared with her. Our beds face each other but I am the only one in there in the mid-afternoon, her’s is littered with laundry. I wake up and her bed is cleared off, and a girl is lying on her mattress. After a long conversation with her, I fall back asleep. When I wake, my sister’s bed is covered in the same laundry, and I can’t remember any of the conversation. Perhaps it was a “dream within a dream,” but still, it felt weird.

• • It Was The Work Of The Elves

My family owns a large farm in South America. It has been in our family for many generations and the main house is about 150 years old, massive and typical of colonial times, located in a rural town. Our neighbors are also family and our distant neighbors descend from the original laborers on the farm.

Anyway, many legends surround our farm, ranging from hidden treasures to relatives long dead haunting the avocado orchards. My mother even claims to have seen dwarves in the surrounding mountains as a child; said mountains, it turns out, host a number of ghost towns I used to play in as a child. The place is pretty creepy, and up until recently only limited electricity reach the house, so it got dark and quiet quickly. None of this scares me too much, but a heavy feeling always hangs in the air. Regardless of the various legends surrounding our farm, there is one event that happened to me I can’t explain and freaks me out to this day.

When I am 11 or so, I head out to the stables after seeing a large group gathered there. Inside past the commotion, I find all the horses have their manes and tails braided into dozens if not hundreds of tiny braids. We own multiple horses, and these seriously tiny braids would require hours and many hands. One of the workers in the stable starts shouting about how this is a warning from the duendes (elves) who live in the mountains. The workers spend hours of the day trying to unbraid the horses but barely get through 10% of them. The very next morning all the horses are unbraided and appear as though nothing had happened. With no explanation given other than elvish warnings, my 11-year-old self walks away from this incident rather disturbed.

• • He Said To Wear A Helmet

It’s my 12th birthday, and I am on the way to the bike shop to get a new bike, accompanied by my dad, his girlfriend and my brother. While still about 10 minutes away from the bike shop and town center, an old, creepy guy comes up to us, looks down at me and said; “You buying a bike?”

I look at my dad, confused and a little scared.

We tell him that we were on our way to buy a bike. Once he hears this, the man goes on about how I must get a helmet and wear it all the time! We are freaked out, but we end up assuming he’s a weirdo and forget about it.

A few hours later I am riding through the park on my new bike and I fall off, luckily landing on a patch of soft grass. As I get up to brush myself off, I look up and that old man is just standing there, looking disappointed and shaking his head. He shakes his index finger at me and says; “I told you to wear a helmet.”

At this point I just about crap myself and ride as fast as I can home. What is even weirder is the fact that I have since moved about 40-50 miles away, but I still see him every once in a while.

Though I don’t believe in guardian angels, this just creeps me out.

• • The Footsteps On The Stairs

I’ll try to keep it short, but this is by far the scariest thing I have ever experienced.

Okay, my girlfriend and I are on a trip to Italy for the summer. We rent a beautiful old house on the side of a mountain, way out in the country side with a gorgeous view over a valley. The owner tells us during his little tour the house dates back to before the first world war, so it is very old. We settle in and spend the day in the tiny swimming pool and eating delicious gelato on the porch.

Anyways when we go to bed that night, we hear a weird sound from downstairs, kind of sounded like a chair being pulled across the floor. As the only ones in the house, we do find it creepy, but we don’t think much of it.

But the next night the weird sounds begin again, this time it as if someone is playing with a ping pong ball, throwing it against a wall and catching it after it hits the ground. It happens over and over right until the second we go downstairs, then dead silence again.

There’s also this cruddy staircase made out of flimsy metal, probably an addition from when they added the second floor, but this thing made noise when you walked on it. Of course the following night when lying in bed, we both hear loud footsteps on the stairs. They come very slowly, but heavily, further-and-further up the stairs but as soon we open the door they cease. I stay up all night waiting for my GF to fall asleep after that.

By now we do not feel very comfortable in the house. We are renting it for a week, so we are reluctant to leave and during the day it looks so beautiful. The next night while reading in bed an hour after my GF fell asleep, the sound starts again, slow but heavy footsteps coming up the metal staircase. I listen and with every step up the stairs I sweat more and more, my whole body rushed with adrenaline. Suddenly the steps become much faster, like someone is running up the stairs, and then it stops, leaving me totally drenched in sweat after no more than 30 seconds. I’ve never been as scared as I was that night. Haunted house, 0/10 would not recommend.

• • Might Be Followed By A Demon

One night, while at my grandparents house, my grandmother comes into my room at 3:30 am and tells me, “Your grandfather needs your help. Get up.” This startles me because she never does anything like this, but I still go out to my grandfather, who is standing right outside the door leading to the garage.

“The garage door just went up and down 6 or 7 times we need to check it out,” he says.

We head into the garage and the find the string prevents the door from opening is pulled out, something that can only be done from inside. He looks at me and says, “We have to go outside to fix it so no one can get in.”

We then head outside and when we round the corner to look at the garage. The motion lights activate and illuminate scratches on the door. He and I fix the door and go back to bed.

About two weeks after this, I am staying there again and wake up at around 2:30 am to hearing stomping in the kitchen, which is very close to my room. I get up and hear the stomps come closer to my door and stop. I figure that my grandfather was adjusting the thermostat, but I open my door to see what is going on. I find that everyone in the house is asleep and all the lights are off.

Needless to say, I sleep poorly that night.

A few weeks pass and I go over there on a weekend, staying up rather late and falling asleep watching TV on my bed, my door opened wide. It was about 1:30 am and, again, I wake up without any reason. I look around and realize that I fell asleep with the TV on. I look at my door and at that instant I see a man-sized figure step out of my doorway and walk down the hall towards the kitchen.

I slam the door and stay up all night. By this time, I am convinced a demon or ghost or something inhabits my grandparents house, but am relieved that whatever is in their house wasn’t following me.

Maybe a month after the last incident happened, I am at my dad’s house about to go to sleep. At my dad’s my room lies on the other side of the house away from everyone. At 10:30 pm, I lay down, turn my TV off, and prepare to sleep. Just then, outside of my door, I hear a combination of stomping and a low sound. This honestly scares the hell out of me. I, in all of my infinite wisdom, decide to see what it was. When I open my door, I see the same thing I observed at my grandparents house. I tear up from fear and leave the light on and fitfully attempt to sleep; it doesn’t work well.

Maybe a month-and-a-half passes after the last incident, and I am now at a friends house. He and I clean out his shed to hang out in there and smoke his hookah. While he usually hosts many people at his house, tonight it is just him and me smoking and listening to music. In the middle of a song, all of the sudden a black flash darts underneath my legs but I feel nothing. I start to look around to see if one of his cats came in with us. As look around, I realize that there is no cat in the shed. I start to become afraid but try to keep myself outwardly calm. I look up at my friend, who appears to be close to panic.

All he says to me is, “I think something just ran underneath your legs.”

At this point, I freak out because though I didn’t say anything about it, he also saw it as well. We run out of the shed and into his house, watching TV until we calm down and fall asleep.

• • Saved By A Woman Who Disappeared

When I was about 10, I went on summer vacation to the Black Sea with my mom. I couldn’t swim back then, and never learned after what happened there.

It iss our first day there and we head out for a swim. My mom puts me in those inflatable wings you slide onto your arms. We plan to enjoy the day and I am thrilled to learn how to swim. Though weather isn’t too great, the water feels okay.

But, it all changes very fast. As a storm begins to form, a rip current pulls us from the shore. The waves tower over us and no matter how hard we fight to get back on sand, the sea only drags us further and further away towards a concrete wave breaker.

My mom begins to tire and I see sparks of panic in her eyes. We hold on to the concrete, but there is no way to get away from the water and on top of the pier. All the people from the beach have left, and our cries of “help” barely carry over the din of the sea.

Suddenly, a lady appears in the water next to us, with no indication where she came from. She tells us of a ladder on the other side of the pier and, while we’re doing our best to hold on to the metal on the side of the pier, she disappears. Again, we don’t see see where she goes.

The waves are at their hardest, and the only way for us to survive is to swim underneath the pier where the waves are hitting the concrete. With just one chance at it, we patiently wait for a few-second window between the waves, swim under the pier to the other side and find a ladder. To this day we don’t know who the woman was, but she saved our lives, and that day I decided to make sure my life was worth saving.

I have no idea how old she was, and I’ve always been horrible at guessing ages. Off the top of my head, I’d say in her thirties. But given the circumstances, I can’t be sure. It was ridiculously odd for her to be there, and then just disappear. She could’ve just gone to another side of the pier as she suggested to us. I will ask my mother about it, but the last time I talked to her about this incident, she too recalled how odd it was for the woman to appear/disappear.

• Someone Got Into The Jeep

In high school, I lived in a mountain town outside of Denver, and took a fairly long and dark road to get home. I drove a Jeep Wrangler when I was 16-17 and rode with the top down at pretty much all times during the summer.

One night I am driving home rather late, between one and two in the morning, top down and listening to some music. Being on the side of a mountainous canyon, the road is dark and dangerous.

On one side is a river, on the other just a sheer cliff. Multiple people have died in the canyon over the years, whether they take a corner too wide, go off into the river, get hit on their motorcycle, etc.

During that drive home heading home my headlights suddenly go out in the middle of this curvy canyon road. I immediately feel a presence in the back seat of my Jeep. I just know that if I turned around there would be a person sitting in the middle of the bench seat staring directly at me. Something has climbed into my open-top Jeep in the middle of the night, and I know it isn’t a benevolent being.

I get cold, but try to focus as my hair stands up on the back of my neck and sheer panic builds inside of me. Never have I felt anything like it. Every alarm in my body is going off, an entirely new feeling, and I have seen some sketchy places in my travels. But this feels different different. Nothing feels right, everything feels wrong, my entire being disturbed.

As quickly as they went off my headlights turn back on. I whirl around and of course no one is there. But I spend the rest of the ride home absolutely terrified, wondering if someone, or something, joined me in my car.

I don’t believe in the supernatural, and I never felt anything like that before or since. But that night I was convinced there was something in my car.

My parents moved out of that house while I was away in college, but every time I would drive that road for those couple of years I was terrified.

• • Dragged Across The Room In A Sleeping Bag

I remember a time my family spent time at my grandparents’ house.

My grandpa built the entire house from scratch, even the basement, though it was unfinished, cheap carpets covering a dirt floor. There were two bedrooms on the right side of the room and an open space for watching television or simply lounging. It was a pretty plain room with concrete block walls and plain wooden doors. There was a significant gap from the bottom of the door and the floor, at least a three inch height difference (Though I am unsure because as a child I thought it was huge since we could fit a leg or two under).

My family and I are staying in one of the bedrooms for the night, all in sleeping bags except my mother, who is sleeping on the only mattress in the room.

I wake up in the middle of the night feeling someone tugging at my sleeping bag, as if I was heavier than they thought. Thinking it’s my sister playing a prank, I tell her to stop. My family wakes up to see me dragged from one side of the room towards the door. I fully awake and jump out of my sleeping bag only to watch it quickly be taken under the door into the other room.

I can’t sleep alone and sleep next my sister. The next morning I find the sleeping bag on the opposite side of the room, tossed aside.

• • Time Vanishes At The Stop Sign

When I was 16 and learning how to drive, something happened to me that still creeps me out a bit to this day.

I’m out in a driving school vehicle with the driving instructor, about an hour into the two-hour session. It’s not my first drive, so I am cool and collected.

Anyway, we head down this road and approach a stop sign, still visible in the remaining daylight. I am going maybe 35-40 mph on the edge of a residential area, with no homes along either the road I was traveling or down the cross-street at the stop sign. As we approach the sign, I see people stopped on the cross-street waiting.

Maybe 200-300 yards away from the Stop sign, the driving instructor says to me “Make sure you stop at the sign ahead.” I think to myself “Why would just remind me to Stop at the sign?”, and then say out loud “Yep!” just to humor her and be nice. The sign is still pretty far away, so it feels like an odd reminder.

The next thing I remember is being on the road, but 200-300 yards past the stop sign, with no recollection of stopping. I don’t even know if I did or not.

Just as my conscious mind picks up and realizes that we’ve passed the stop sign, the driving instructor turns to me and says “Did we stop at the sign?” I look over at her, and we both know without saying.

Neither of us can recall if we stopped at that stop sign. We don’t know what happened for those 2-3 minutes.

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