Erin Maxwell

Police officers and friends and family of police officers are sharing creepy and unnerving tales of invisible assailants, hidden intruders, suspicious circumstances, and things that go bump in the night. From kids reporting zombie attacks to ghostly phone calls, these stories will have you double-checking your locks in the middle of the night.

________________________________________

• ‘A Real Life Ghostbuster’

Posted by Redditor u/ryan0g_:

I do remember an odd job from last year. I was driving back to the station to end my shift, and the operator shouted up and asked for a unit to attend a “sus circs” job; basically suspicious circumstances reported via a emergency call. The operator said that the emergency caller had stated that “the man won’t leave his house and his head is missing.” Naturally, I had to see what that was all about and I postponed the end of my shift to assist with the call.

Upon arrival, I invited myself into the property, and I walked into the living room – which was in complete darkness – to find an elderly male sat in an armchair, only visible with my torch. You could see how terrified he was, he couldn’t even move to look at me or speak to acknowledge me. He was transfixed on the armchair that was opposite his. I walked (more stumbled ungraciously) over to him and tried to make contact. His eyes slowly moved from the chair to make contact with me, and then he spoke. He told me basically what we already knew; that he could see a person sitting in the armchair opposite and that the person had no head. He said, “Please just take him away.”

Being the quick-thinking neighborhood police officer that I am, I asked the ghost to please leave the premises and stated that I would arrest “him” if “he” failed to comply. Needless to say, I didn’t have any trouble from the suspect.

I assumed that the man had some kind of mental health issue and called an ambulance, only to find out that this was his first episode and that he was otherwise in perfect health.

Basically, I’m one of the few cops that have apprehended a ghost. I’m a real life Ghostbuster.

• • ‘I Expected Her Head To Spin’

Posted by Redditor u/asso412:

We got a call for a mentally ill female at a house. Fairly common in our area. The girl’s brother called it in.

We get there and see the brother outside. He says that his sister has been acting… weird for the last week or so, and that we just “can’t go through the front door.” So we go in through the garage entrance to find all the lights in the house off and none of the light switches work.

We take out the flashlights and start searching. We find the girl bent down facing the corner of the living room, naked as the day she was born. We call her name and hear her muttering some sort of incantation to herself. She stops and slowly turns her head toward us then stands and faces us. More muttering, then a loud scream as she runs straight at us. Stops halfway between us, then slowly turns, and walks back to her corner.

I swear I expected her head to spin and see her crab walk backwards up the wall.

• • ‘Do You Want To Play?’

Posted by Redditor u/BionicCatLady5K:

Military police have the best creep factor stories. I used to be stationed at MCAS Miramar, and one time, I was coming through and had an opportunity to ask for their quickest, creepiest story.

Miramar had several abandoned vistas, cemeteries (I had only been in one), and an abandoned schoolhouse.

Basically, they get a call and go out to the schoolhouse because they thought some kids were messing around. They went to tell them to get out and find somewhere else to go. Well, they go in, and first floor, nothing. No one. Nothing out of the ordinary. Second floor. Nothing. They head back down to the first floor and someone/thing wrote on the chalkboard: “Do you want to play?”

• • ‘The Kid Was Telling The Truth!’

Posted by Redditor u/Tower-Unicorn:

My cousin is on in a major city, apparently 911 got a call from a six-year-old claiming VEHEMENTLY that there was a zombie outside of his house on the street. So a patrol car swings around to see what’s up.

Turns out a tweaker on meth gouged out his own eyes and was stumbling around blindly with his hands stretched out in front of him.

Goddamn, turns out the kid was telling the truth!

• • ‘Swears He Saw Someone…’

Posted by Redditor u/obscureposter:

Not me, but my friend is a cop in a major Canadian metropolitan, and one night that we were supposed to go out after his shift, he decided to pick me up in his cop car, since he was almost finished his shift and was just going to drop the car back at the depot. On the way, though, he got a call that someone was complaining about noises coming from their basement that sounded like a person, so he decided to make that his last stop. I was told to wait in the car, while he talked with the homeowner and checked it out. He was gone for about half an hour before he came back and had this terrified/amazed face on him.

Apparently, the homeowner was hearing loud thuds from his basement for a couple of weeks but on the day of the call, they were really loud and scaring him. He had a walk-in basement, so he thought maybe someone had broken in. My friend goes to the basement to check it out with the homeowner. Basement is all dark, and the lights need to be turned on from the electrical panel. So they get to the panel, and my friend says he saw something in the corner of his eye. He turns around, and at an end of a hallway (which leads to a cold storage), he sees a guy facing the door of the cold storage just standing there.

He yells at the guy to turn around, but he doesn’t. Homeowner sees him, too, and is really scared. Friend asks the guy to turn around once more before hitting the switch for the lights, and the guy/ghost at the cold storage just disappears when the lights come on.

My friend swore that he searched every inch of that basement and could not find anyone else there. Homeowner is shook up and says he’s gonna stay with a friend for a night, and my friend calls another cop to survey the house to see if anyone tries to enter the main house or basement. Not sure what happened after, but my friend swears he saw someone in that basement.

• • ‘I Took A Call From A Ghost’

Posted by Redditor u/SmoakyBonaparte:

Received a call from an elderly lady who had trouble breathing. I had taken several calls from her and her husband in the past, so I recognized her voice. I dispatched an ambulance to her residence and held her on the line trying to keep her calm while the ambulance was responding. Ambulance advise that they have a 15-minute ETA (She lived in a very rural part of WV). I’m talking to her, asking about her husband and how he was doing and just making small talk with her. The ambulance calls in and advises they are on scene and I let them know that she is in severe respiratory distress and I still had her on the line. I let her know the ambulance is coming to the door… and she says, “Okay,” and hangs up the phone.

Pretty normal, yeah? Well, here’s where it gets weird. The EMT and paramedic on scene call back about a minute later and advise no one is answering the door. We have a Sheriff Unit who was in the area pulling on scene about that time. The Sheriff Unit confirmed the address and advised he is breaching the door to make access to the PT. Five minutes go by and the paramedic on scene radios in asking who the caller was. I advise it was the elderly female who lived at the residence. He tells me that he’s going to call in and needs to speak with the supervisor on shift. We get him over to the supervisor, and the supervisor confirms the information that I gave him and asks what’s going on.

Apparently, the elderly female had been deceased for a while and was in full rigor mortis. They thought I was wrong on the caller, but the other dispatchers played it back and confirmed that it was the female who called. The ambulance transferred the hospital, and we got the same calls and disbelief from the doctors.

So… I took a call from a ghost!

• • ‘They Are In Here!’

Posted by a Redditor:

I was new on the force and sent to a home invasion in progress late in the night. I noticed my training officer didn’t seem to be too concerned and responded slowly, as opposed to the normal emergency response for crimes in progress. Upon arrival, he asked me if I had been to the home before. After I said no, he told me to go handle the call…

As I walked toward the home, the garage opened, and an elderly lady who was bent at a 90-degree angle at her waist hobbled out. Without looking at me, she said to hurry, due to the fact that the two male suspects were still in the home. I noted that she couldn’t straighten her back and realized she was a bit off mentally.

I then walked into the home with her behind me. While my eyes adjusted to the interior, I heard a click. I turned to find the lady locking two padlocks on the interior of the door. I then noted, as we were within the kitchen, that every cabinet and pantry also had a secured padlock on their doors. I looked down the hallway and found that every interior door of the small home was shut and secured with padlocks.

I followed the elderly woman down the hall to the second door on the left. She began to unlock the padlock to the door and shouted, “They are in here!” To my surprise, within the room, there was an older white guy sitting at a table using a desktop computer. He looked at me, greeted me, identified himself as the woman’s husband, and then went back to whatever he was doing. The woman then pointed at an empty chair and began to yell, “They are under the chair! Oh, no! They just ran outside right there!”

The woman was pointing at a wall.

After waiting for the woman to lock her husband back into the room, and then waiting for her to let me out of the kitchen door, I cursed my training officer and hightailed it out of there. That was my first exposure to mental illness, and it was creepy.

• • ‘She Had Been There For Five Years’

Posted by Redditor u/Iamthebestbatman:

Not me but my grandfather. There was a robbery in a house near Stanford. He went there to check up on the neighbors. Just to get statements and to see if everyone was safe. One of the neighbors was really jittery and nervous.

My grandpa asked to come in because he smelled something strange, and the man eventually let him in… While he was in the man’s house, he felt like he needed to check the bathroom. He kinda forced himself in there but once he got in, he found a young girl in the bathtub. She had been there for five years! The man was a professor at Stanford and lived in a well-off neighborhood.

Just goes to show there’s strange people everywhere.

• • ‘There Were Approximately 40 Dolls Hanging From Nooses’

Posted by Redditor u/blake_gibson:

Arrive on scene because the woman who lived in the house was “cursing” her neighbors and the sheriff had received complaints from them. Her first name, no joke, was Pocahontas.

Roll up and there were approximately 40 dolls (about 12″ tall) hanging from nooses in the tree in the front yard. All around the perimeter fence, there were mannequin heads on spikes with bullet holes in the foreheads. There were multiple mannequin bodies propped around the property, and the grass was overgrown so as you walked, you would step on what looked like a person hiding in the grass. On the garage door, there was a giant cock and balls drawn in latex paint.

Never could find the woman. Tried a couple times a day for quite a while. Like she disappeared off the face of the earth. No lights, no vehicles, nothing. Just poof.

House is still set up the same way to this day, and we always take the rookies by there to creep them out.

• • ‘It Was Like He Was Looking Through Me’

Posted by Redditor u/cop1152:

One cold October night, we got a call to assist the sheriff’s office on a burglary-in-progress out in the county. Because our radios couldn’t talk to the county radios, the county dispatch telephoned our dispatch, and our dispatch radio relayed the info to us. We basically had no info and didn’t know where we were going, and I had a lonely, eerie, creepy feeling in my bones while driving at crazy speeds to help this family.

It took us probably twenty-five minutes to arrive on the scene. The house was dark. It turned out that the suspect had cut the power days before and had been living in the house while the family-of-four was on vacation. Walking through the yard to the front door, I could hear a man yelling, “Get out of my house, please!” Politely, but firm and loud.

I walked in and found an obviously mentally-unstable young man, dirty, bearded, wild eyes. [He said], “I was sent. I am supposed to be here. This is the place. This is the place. I was sent here. You will be sorry.” He didn’t respond at all to verbal commands, but he also didn’t resist at all when I put the cuffs on him. It was like he was looking through me while I was questioning him and searching his backpack.

I was honestly freaked out, even though I was significantly bigger than him. It was just unsettling. I didn’t even want to put the guy in the back of my car… didn’t want to have my back to that tricky bastard. His backpack was full of miscellaneous items: a notebook full of drawn monsters and rambling writing, a hunting knife, clothes that couldn’t have been his, mail from different addresses and names, kids’ school math book. It was just weird. Eventually, a county deputy arrived and took him away. I never did hear anything else about it.

• ‘Just Imagining What She Was Seeing Gives Me The Creeps’

Posted by Redditor u/uhguys:

Small town cop. One time, we had an elderly women with dementia call at like 3:00 am and say there was a baby hanging in her grandfather clock. I got there and it was a pretty big house, and she had a single light on in the living room, making it even creepier. When she points out the clock, it’s quite obvious she is hallucinating, but just imagining what she was seeing gives me the creeps.

Ever since starting this job, I have extreme sympathy for those with dementia or schizophrenia. I never knew what they went through before I started working as a cop. Them seeing or hearing people in their house in the middle of the night, I couldn’t imagine.

• • ‘I Found Her Slowly Walking Down A Side Street…’

Posted by Redditor u/tallfescue1983:

It was a stormy night on the Oregon Coast. A lady was driving drunk and ran into the back of a parked school bus. When she did, her car caught on fire, but she was able to escape. When I found her slowly walking down a side street, I was telling her to stop and turn around. When she turned around, her lower jaw was gone, and she was totally dazed.

She ended up surviving but needed tons of plastic surgery.

• • ‘We Walk Into One Of The Rooms And See A Body On The Table’

Posted by Redditor u/hadrian217:

We responded to a burglary alarm at a mortuary and found that one of the rear doors was left open. Policy now dictates that the entire building needs to be cleared (searched) to confirm that it was a false alarm (which most are). It’s the middle of the night and totally dark. We use flashlights and never turn on lights. We walk into one of the rooms and see a body on a table. It appeared that it was waiting to be processed (possibly embalmed) by the mortician. It smelled like a mildly decomposing body. Suddenly, I see a shadow to my right, and I shine my light there and find nothing out of the ordinary. I immediately smell a really strong whiff of perfume blow by me. The search was completed more expeditiously than normal after that… nothing was found.

• • ‘Did You Hear A Female Crying?’

Posted by Redditor u/C***uggetz:

So it was 2008… I was about 10 weeks into our 12-week field training after coming out of the academy. My primary field trainer was a patrol veteran – grizzled Black guy, squared away, late ’30s, named Adams. Mean as s**t and not afraid of anything.

So we were going through my “task book” and realized we had not done a security check on a church or place of business. Deputies routinely check doors and windows of businesses in the late night/early morning to make sure all was okay. We were deep on the west side of Wake County in the still-rural backwoods area, so we decided to stop at a church nearby and check it.

The church was really old, and had a HUGE graveyard beside it. I’m talking three or four acres worth of grounds, some of the graves dating back to the Civil War era. There was little-to-no security lighting, so we grabbed our flashlights and began to make the rounds, pulling on doors, and checking ground-level windows.

After about 20 minutes, we were done with the rounds and walking back up a gravel drive from the rear of the building right beside the graveyard, when I heard what can only be described as a woman softly weeping coming from within the graveyard. My field trainer stopped. He didn’t say anything at first but swept the gravestones with his light. I spoke first and whispered, “Did you hear a female crying?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “I was really hoping I imagined it.”

So into the pitch-black graveyard we went, walking about six feet apart, sweeping between the stones toward the sound which we both could still clearly hear. In fact, it was getting louder as we approached where we thought she must be. About the time we came to the far side of the graveyard, the sound changed.

It was all around us. Amplified is the only way to describe it, like surround sound. And then, it completely stopped, and all we could hear were the crickets. I looked at him, he looked at me, and we turned around and headed back to the car. We did not run, but I think we both wanted to.

We did not include that information in our informational case report for the security check.

• • ‘We Never Learned The Actual Cause Of Death’

Posted by Redditor u/ach1no:

Former paramedic responded with police and fire to a report of a man down on the side of the railroad tracks in a wooded area about 500 yards from the nearest access road. A railroad employee riding the tracks during a safety check noticed the man…

We all parked and walked with all the equipment the 500 or so yards to where the patient was. He had no signs of life, flatline on the EKG, along with fixed and dilated pupils. Do a little more checking, and he has no visible signs of any type of trauma, the body is not cold yet, and there isn’t rigor mortis yet, so he hasn’t been dead too long. We don’t see any track marks where he would have shot up and overdosed and feel no broken bones. The guy from the railroad said a train hadn’t passed in the last eight hours.

We search the area and find a makeshift tent/campsite where the guy apparently was living and find no medications or anything out the ordinary. We are not too far from an area where everyone believes is haunted and Satanic worshipping takes place. Even though all of us on the scene knew about the rumors, none of us had actually seen it or had proof.

It’s dark, and we were all waiting around for the funeral home to show up and bring the body to the morgue for an autopsy. Then the spooky s**t started, a few of us heard what sounded like people whispering but it wasn’t from any specific direction. A couple of the guys didn’t hear it and thought we were trying to f*ck with them. Then the whispering noises stopped, and the people on scene that hadn’t heard the whispering started hearing what they all described as children laughing wickedly, but it was all over, not from any specific direction. Those of us that had heard the whispering never heard the new noise. This went on for about 10-15 minutes while we’re standing next to the corpse.

Police officers on the scene told the dispatcher to tell the funeral home to step it up and get out there ASAP. We helped them load the body and got the f*ck outta there.

The next afternoon, we went to the morgue to speak with the corner and find out the cause of death. The first thing the corner asked us was why did we clean the body? Me and my partner looked at him kinda strange and asked what he was talking about. He said it must of been a very bloody scene, so we told him there was no blood anywhere around the scene, and then he turned a little pale and said that just added to the confusion, because the body had absolutely no blood in it whatsoever. And there were no marks anywhere on him where blood could have been drained out. He also said he had a weird experience while doing the autopsy but refused to tell us what happened.

To this day, we have still never learned the actual cause of death.

Ranker.com