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stories. Okay storytime... [SERIOUS] People of Reddit, what was the creepiest
thing you experienced that you thought was paranormal, but was actually much scarier
when you found out what really caused it? As a young kid, I had "nightmares" of waking
up to see my mother hovering over my bed by the window. She just blankly stared down at me and my
sister. I'd get so scared yelling Mom! Mom! and she never responded. It knew it was not "my mom." When I was older I told my Aunt about it and
she told me they weren't dreams. It was real. My mom would go into our rooms randomly to
check on us. She had serious mental health issues that
got worse over the years. Occasionally she would have episodes of anxiety
of something happening to us and "guard" us at night. Due to the traumatic death of her 1st child
it apparently triggered obsessive anxiety when we were younger. I now know the whole ducked up backstory and
can sympathize with why it would make any parent get to that mental state but I still
shudder when I think of the blank face stare. I still tend to associate the "nightmare mom"
as not being "my mom." I was 24 and working at a startup dotcom. I spent a weekend at my parents house, came
back to my apartment and went into my bedroom where I saw my bed was made. Felt my heart stutter as I stood frozen in
the doorway because I never ever made my bed, it was something I consciously refused to
do. After the initial shock, I went through the
apartment examining the closets, under the bed, etcetera I calmed down after awhile, convincing myself
that I must have made the bed before I left for my parents and just forgotten about it. Deep down, I knew it wasn't true but I couldn't
think of any other explanation.I later found out it was the woman I was dating at the time
who did it. She was the person who hired me. We'd been in a relationship less than a month
but she managed to somehow get a copy of my key. She used to visit my place and snoop through
my things when I was gone. She also slept in my bed overnight several
times when I was away for the weekend. If she hadn't made my bed, I never would have
known anything was going on. About 7 years ago, my family rented a one
story house. It was originally one bigger house that was
split off into two, and there was another family that lived in the other part that we
didn't really talk with. During the night, I would hear what sounded
like knocks above the ceiling, but any entrance to the small "crawlspace" between the ceiling
and the roof was patched up when the house was divided. For a while, I thought there was a ghost who
lived in the "attic", and I would have trouble going to sleep without a light on. After we moved out, I heard through the grapevine
that the neighbor's kid was caught spying on the new people that moved in. Turns out that he had broken a hole in the
ceiling of his closet to get into the crawlspace and had been looking through holes that he
had bored in the ceiling overlooking the other part of the house. The noises I heard was him moving around on
him arms and knees up there. When I was 8 we were on a long holiday, staying
with some family in a town called Surat it's in country Queensland, Australia. I was staying in their son's room who had
moved to Brisbane for university. Each night I had the same recurring nightmare
of an alien tentacle trying to grab me. After a week I was terrified of going to sleep
but my parents kept telling me that it was okay, I was just frightened because we were
staying somewhere new and that it would be okay. Well I couldn't get to sleep, I kept watching
the clock, waiting for the sun to come up and terrified of the alien. It was just after 2:00AM when a large tentacle
landed on the bed, I screamed in terror as I felt the tentacle wriggling, I jumped out
of bed and kept screaming. My parents, aunt, uncle, and sister run into
the room, to find me huddled in the corner screaming. Turns out it was an adult carpet python over
2 meters long (6.5ft). Each night it worked its way under a ceiling
tile, and onto the bed. I still have an Indiana Jones fee er of snakes,
why'd it have to be snakes. I had a blind dog growing up and she barked
at things that were there, and things that weren’t. One night, around midnight, she woke up my
mom and I (my dad’s too heavy of a sleeper) by barking at the wall next to the back door. I woke up but I was maybe 9 so I went right
back to sleep. My mom got up and ushered her back to bed.That
same night, an arsonist hit my neighborhood. “He” set fire to a luckily vacant house
for sale and it burned to the ground. Following his footsteps in the snow, he then
passed between my bedroom and our garage and nearly lit our garage. Then our dog and my mom woke up, and we think
that scared him away, and he went across the street and burned the neighbors’ garage
instead. Then he stood in their front yard and watched
it burn. He walked out onto the street and they lost
his footsteps. They never caught him.RIP Oreo, I miss you. You were a very good pup. Love you, be good... Didn’t think this was paranormal, but definitely
thought it was creepy and ended up being more than I bargained for.When I was 13, I had
a small jewelry box my mom gave me that had cushions for rings. I had six rings that I kept in it (nothing
of value, think mood rings and silver rings). I was somewhat neurotic as a kid and had spent
an afternoon arranging my room, and I’d put the six rings in a specific order.I opened
the box one day and noticed that two of the rings were out of order. I thought someone in my family had moved them
because there was zero explanationfor this. I asked my family if anyone had touched them,
and they all insisted no one had opened the box, but I was convinced someone had to have
gone through it.My dad ended up going through our entire house checking for missing stuff
and the only missing things were an old bottle of hydrocodone from the medicine cabinet and
some of my mom’s gold jewelry from a bathroom drawer.Turns out there had been strings of
robberies in the neighborhood where thieves had broken in but only taken prescription
drugas and small gold items. None of the robberies had indications that
the homes had been broken into, and things like laptops, diamond jewelry and other valuables
had been left alone. My family wouldn’t have known anything was
amiss aside from the fact I was so convinced something was off. This did not happen to me, but it happened
in my city when I was in high school. A family thought that their house was "haunted"
because things like furniture and objects would randomly move or go missing. This went on for several months. They even reached out to their pastor to "bless"
the house. Well, the house wasn't haunted. It turned out that a drifterhad wandered in
at some point and had been living in their attic. He would come out when the family was at work
and eat their food and go through their things for cash and stuff to sell. One day, one of the family members came home
unexpectedly and caught them. Called police for an "active break in." The cops quickly discovered what had been
going on.ETA:Wow, this blew up. I hadn't even thought of the Parasite connection. This was 20+ years ago (before people had
cameras in their home).For all of those who think this was a pseudo-Oscar copy, this happens
more than you would think. Just google "man lives in family's attic"
and "man lives in family's walls" and you will get plenty of stories. Here's a couple of them from recently: I was seven years old, home alone. My parents went for dinner at around 9 PM. They left me in bed for me to sleep, hours
passed and still couldn't sleep. Went downstairs to get some milk and cookies
to watch tv in my parent's bedroom. While I was getting my snacks, I felt like
someone grabbed my shoulder hardly, I was so scared I couldn't even turn around to check
who did it. I stayed there, frozen, for at least one minute
straight; I had the balls to run and went to my parent's bedroom. I locked myself in there and didn't get out
until my parents came home. It was three AM and heard my parent's car
park outside the window. I was never so happy for them to come home. As soon my parents get in the house my mom
screamed and called 9 1 1. The thing I thought was a ghost that grabbed
me was actually a druga addict who secretly lived in our basement and that night thought
nobody was home so went grab some snacks from the fridge too and confused my shoulder with
the fridge's door and then passed out. Still freaks me out to this day Towards my second half of high school, everything
started feeling like it was all going downhill. It felt like to me, there was some unseen
outside force making my life hell. TURNS OUT that I actually have Type 1 diabetes,
and in that time of my second half of high school was when I was first experiencing the
symptoms of the condition..... I had a friend who was staying at a ski lodge,
and he went outside at night to smoke a cigarette. While he was out there he said it seemed like
an invisible monster was coming right at him. He heard it stomping, even smelled it, felt
it’s breath as it charged him, and then it passed through him and it was gone.Turns
out it was a grizzly bear, stomping it’s way around on the floor directly underneath
where he was. So sometimes I get sleep paralysis, I've accepted
that if I wake up and weird things are happening, I should just ignore them. Well, one time I woke up in the middle of
the night to two male voices arguing, nothing unusual. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep,
when I heard my dog start barking/growling, and then heard my parents talking in concerned
voices. I realized it was not sleep paralysis at all,
and got up to find a very drunk father and son duo arguing outside our front window (started
swearing at us when my dad yelled at them to move along, cops were called). Another time, same situation only it was a
Vole tunneling into my room very noisily and eating through the drywall. A little after I graduated high school some
friends and I were hanging out at a local park after dark. Decided to go walk through the woods for the
spookiness of it. About 20 minutes in we hear this loud screaming
from behind us and barely see this dark figure rushing towards us at what we would describe
as supernatural speed, so we hauled ats and didn't stop until we were out of the wooded
area and didn't see it. A couple of friends claimed it appeared to
be floating towards us as it howled like a banshee.We later found out that area of the
woods is popular for homeless people to hang out in and shoot up. So instead of some sort of evil wood spirit,
it was most likely a homeless Mojo jo jo addict running at us at full speed and screaming. Literally my earliest memory!I was five years
old and playing in a pile of leaves in our backyard. The yard had a brick wall at the far end;
on the opposite side was a highway. There were a few openings along the bottom
of the wall, for drainage, I guess.So I'm playing in the leaves and suddenly I hear
this SUPER weird noise. It was a like a high-pitched yowl, and then
I see this weird thing emerge from one of those holes at the bottom of the wall. It was moving slowly and really weird, and
I froze in the leaf pile and just watched. (I distinctively remember whispering to myself,
"A monster," because I 100% thought it was a monster.) It staggered up to the leaf pile and I realized
it was just a cat. I knew what cats were, because my dad loved
cats and we had several pets. This cat was enormous and he was also very
fluffy. (Think Crookshanks from Harry Potter.) So I grabbed this cat and draggedhim into
the house to show my parents.Here's the scarier/sadder part, that I didn't realize until I was older:Apparently
someone had thrown the cat against the brick wall from their car. That was the noise I heard. And the reason the cat was walking so weird
was because his spine was broken.There was a real monster that day. It just wasn't the cat.EDIT: I forgot how
Reddit is with cats and I have a lot of people asking what happened to the cat. My family adopted the cat; my father was obsessed
with cats and I had already named the cat, so there you go. "Furball" (or Furby, for short) needed a lot
of surgeries, never regained full use of his back end, and couldn't control his bladder. But he was very affectionate. He loved sitting on people's laps and cuddling. He survived maybe 2 or 3 more years before
he passed away during another surgery. But he had the best and most comfortable life
we could provide him. Not sure if this really counts, but about
5 years ago I got a phone call from my brother and he just kept mumbling into the phone,
He kept muttering random words and because I was younger, stupid me thought he was possessed
or something but he had just had a seizure and had just woken up (my brother gets really
woozy and panicky after he has a seizure. Scared the living hell out of me. There was one time when I was younger that
I was home alone in mine and my mother's old townhouse. I'd been downstairs in the living room and
suddenly felt uncomfortable being down there alone, so I decided to go to my room. I get about half way up the stairs when I
feel this horrible sense of dread and panic and I look back and see this complete silhouette
of a man, complete from head to toe, standing in the corner at the bottom of the steps. I could feel him looking at me even though
there were no eyes. I ran up the stairs and locked myself in my
room until my mother got home.Wasn't until years later that I was diagnosed with schizophrenia,
which explained that happening and a lot of other things I was going through, seeing/hearing. I've gotten more used to the things I've seen
and heard over the years, and the medication helps IMMENSELY. But I remember that moment SO clearly because
it scared me so deeply. I'll never forget it. Going to tell the short version of this story.A
previous owner had died in one of my childhood homes. Strange things happened there that drove us
(and my dog) absolutely nuts, but it became exceptionally creepy when my sister, who was
sleeping in the basement apartment, began insisting that somebody was watching her at
night.We later found an old camera hidden in the walls and learned that said previous
owner was arrested for spying on the girl who rented his basement apartment ... When I was 12ish something, I came home to
find the bedroom's lights on. If it was just my bedroom, then it wouldn't
have been a problem. But my brother's room lights were also on
and we never leave those lights on. Could have been my brother or my mom, but
one was in the army while the other was at work.I was a little freaked out, but tried
to tone it down by saying that I might have left them on before going out. Then I turn and see a couple of wooden spoons
on top of our Kitchen's cabinet.I knew for a fact that I hadn't left any spoon sitting
there. I also didn't recognize those two spoons. That was when I realized that someone had
been inside our house.Long story short, I had lost my keys a few days prior and my neighbor,
who was the same age as I, found them. Instead of giving it back, he kept them with
himself. Days later, his mom asked him to, I don't
know, deliver something to my mom? But there was no one at home, so he used his
keys to enter our house. He forgot his mom's wooden spoons there, and
if it wasn't for this, we would never have found out that he entered our house. I think he stole money from us as well. My uncle bought an old house (150ish years
old) as a fix-up project. If you went up the stairs you had an option
to turn right or left. Left led to a series of bedrooms and right
had a landing and one bedroom past it. If you took the dog upstairs she would cry
and run away if you tried to take her right. My cousin insisted that the bedroom to the
right was haunted, thus the frightened dog. Later we worked on the house and found that
the landing to the right was structurally unsafe. To this day we wonder, did the dog know the
landing was unsafe somehow or was there something more sinister at play? When my friends and I initially entered college,
we used to chill a lot at my friend's dad's house, who lived out in the country. Late at night, when scanning the horizon,
you could see the all of the stars. It wasn't like the city. But you could also see a radio tower, perhaps
a few miles away.One late Fall night, maybe one or two in the morning, we decided to drive
out to this radio tower, just out of curiosity. It was in the middle of a large field with
one entrance which happened to be open. We entered from there and drove about 1/4
mile in towards the radio tower. When we got there, we noticed, underneath
the radio tower, a rusty beat up car. The thing looked like it hadn't been driven
in years. We pulled to the other side of the tower and
just chilled for a little bit, talking about whatever and listening to music. Then one of my friends pointed towards the
beat up car. "Does it look like there's a light in there?"
he said. We all stared at the car and sure enough,
emanating behind the dust covered windows of the car was a dim light.We pretty quickly
put our car in drive and started moving out of there. It was a field though so of course we moved
relatively slow. The same friend who pointed out the light
noticed that the car started moving along with us, following slowly. It didn't put on its headlights, but the light
inside the car seemed to glow brighter. That wasthe moment that my friend driving
screamed, "duck it!" and hightailed it faster than I'd ever seen. We left the junk car in the dust, literally
in this case, and from that day we had always referred to this story as "The Ghost Car"
Story. Did we really believe in ghosts? Probably not, but paranormal is better than
whatever else it could have been.Come to find out, a few years later, that field was regularly
being monitored by the local sheriff's office for big druga deals that apparently went down
there. Had we stuck around any longer that night
than we did, we could have legitimately been hilled. This was also in the era that we watched a
lot of Breaking Bad so in retrospect it seemed to us like that could've very much been a
likely outcome from that night. Luckily we're all good and nothing bad ever
came of it for any of us. For several months during my senior year of
high school and all through the summer before I left for college, I kept hearing noises
coming from the attic above my bedroom. I would only hear it at night, and I told
my parents and brothers that it sounded like someone walking in the attic and dragging
a chain on the ground. My dad even had me go sleep on the couch one
night so he could sleep in my room to try to hear it. My older brother went up into the attic. Nothing. I left for college and didn’t really think
much of it. When I returned for my first visit home, my
dad revealed he’d found a slow leak in one of the pipes that rotted a hole in the ceiling
above my bed! The drip of water had been ricocheting around
the pipes, sounding like chains dragging! My friend lived up in these pitch black windy
hills about 20 minutes from any ambient city lights. No traffic stoplights, street lights - nothing. One night when driving up to visit him I reached
a stop sign. I looked left, no one there, looked right,
no one there, then proceeded to make a left turn. From the time it took for me to look left,
then right, a man stepped into the street about 10 feet in front of my car. I immediately slammed on my brakes and he
just stood there, my car lights hitting him, not moving. I slowly just drove around him and he kept
facing forward as I passed (didn’t turn his head at all to look at me/make eye contact).I
get to my friends house convinced I had seen a ghost and was freaking out about it. My friend asked me to describe the man I saw,
and when I did, he tells me it was a large brown bearphile that moved in down the street
with his (the large brown bearphile’s) parents after getting out of jeel.TL DR: a man stepped
in front of my car in the middle of nowhere. Thought it was a ghost but it ended up being
a convicted (and recently released from jeel) large brown bearfile.
