So, the one truly terrifying thing to ever happen to me happened when I was 4

I was home with my brother and I wanted to ask my dad for something, so I asked my brother where our dad was. My brother told me that he was up in our attic, so I wandered up there looking for him

Of course, this was a trap, and as soon as I got up there, my brother slammed the door shut and locked it, leaving me alone in the attic.

The attic itself wasn't creepy, it had several windows and was very well lit, plus there was a box of toys up there, which I started to play with

Everything was fine for a while, until I noticed that there was an old armoire in a back corner. It had been up there as long as I could remember, but it didn't belong to us, it came with the house. For some reason, I couldn't take my eyes off of it, I just had a feeling that I shouldn't stop looking at it

After a few minutes of staring at it, it started to creak. Painfully slow, and dreadfully loud it began to open. When I saw the thin gray fingers emerge from around the door, I lost it

I sprinted for the door, screaming as loud as I could, hoping that the door would have be unlocked

It wasn't

I kept screaming for someone, anyone to unlock the door, beating on it as hard as I could

I was making so much noise, I couldn't hear anything else, I couldn't think about anything else, I had to get out before whatever was in that armoire made it to the stairs and got me

After what felt like an eternity, but couldn't have been more than maybe 30 seconds, the door swung open and my dad was there to pick me up and hold me

I was inconsolable for hours, aside from immediately telling my dad that my brother locked me in the attic, I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone what I saw up there. I had seen plenty of movies where someone wasn't taken seriously and then people got hurt trying to prove to them that there wasn't a monster.

Never went up to the attic again, nobody blamed me for it either, except for my brother, who kept making fun of me about it. Nobody else ever mentioned seeing or hearing anything weird up there.

We moved out of that house a year later. Before I left to get in the car to drive to our new house (which thankfully didn't have an attic), I made a little note for the next people to move in.

With a bright red crayon I wrote

Monster up there ⬆️

And left it taped to the attic door

I really hope whoever moved in took it seriously

Once when I was a teenager I was high and walking back home alone from a party in the middle of the night (I lived in the middle of nowhere). I saw a duck walk across the empty road under the dim streetlamps and laughed at the cute duck and I shit you not it turned into a traffic cone as I got closer.

I chalked it up to being dumb and high, but the next weekend my friend and I were walking home from another party in the middle of the night (same deal, no one around but us) and we saw a traffic cone in the middle of the road, we both were wondering out loud why a traffic cone was in the middle of the road as we got closer to it, and suddenly it turned into a cat and walked away!

One morning when I was a teenager (maybe freshman or sophomore year) I woke up and left my room to get some breakfast. In the kitchen there was a man I'd never seen before standing in front of our fridge inspecting its contents. He noticed me, and asked if we had any beer.

I said "No," and lingered for a second, more bewildered than anything else. Then my brain started working, and I realized how Not Very Safe the situation was. I turned around and walked around the corner, then to my mom's room, which was the furthest I could get while putting a door between me and the man. I closed and locked the door before typing out a message on my school iPad to my brother, who I could hear in the shower the next room over. I could also hear the sound of paper tearing from the direction of the kitchen, but then it went quiet. The problem was that I'd forgotten the latch bolt in that door was a bit quirky, and that it needed a little extra force to make sure the door was shut properly. So when the man tried the door, it swung open.

The first thing he did was apologize. I had been in nothing but my boxers this whole time, and for whatever reason this was the moment he detected some impropriety in the scene. Still, he approached me, and started asking me to swear by the Hippocratic Oath. I saw he had some pieces of paper in his hands, which turned out to be from my mom's physical therapy textbooks. I played along and said yes as earnestly as I could, still not sure if it was some kind of weird game that I could play and win to stay unharmed. It seemed to satisfy him.

This is where things get fuzzy. I think he left at that point, just as my brother was leaving the shower. I talked to my brother, but he didn't seem super concerned about the whole thing. I guess that lead to me matching that energy, because I went about the rest of my morning routine, typing out a recollection of what had happened to my mom while eating cereal. I actually left for school and got halfway there before I got a call from a friend of a friend saying he saw police pulling up to my house, and then got a call from my mom telling me to come back home. I got there and gave a statement to the police (i wasn't based yet). Turns out the man was my mentally unwell next door neighbor. He lived with his parents, but I guess he slipped out and found his way into our backyard, where my brother had left the back door open. He'd had incidents like this in the past, but was never violent. My brother was aware of this, which is why he was so nonchalant earlier, but nobody had told me!

Ultimately nothing happened, no charges or anything, which I glad for since ultimately no harm was done, I guess. I stayed home from school and was shaken up for a while but now I look back at it as a weird thing. Still, there was a brief stretch of time that morning when I thought there was a serial killer or something of that ilk in our house, and that asking for beer or the hippocratic oath stuff was part of his M.O., like that axe murderer in New Orleans who only killed people when they didn't have jazz playing. i hope this counts for your prompt, i have a hard time judging how scary this is because of how strange it was

will also prob rewrite this tomorrow since it's kinda doodoo but it's late and im tired

This isn’t really spooky. More of one of those “glitch in the matrix” experiences that I still can’t explain.

When I was a teenager I was really into making music with my older brother. He was musically a lot more talented than I ever was in pretty much every way, except producing. I loved equalizing, mixing, mastering, all that forgettable minutia. I loved the criticism I got to throw at my sibling for bad harmonies. I loved the reprieve from being a little brother. Most of all I loved long summer days and homeworkless school nights ruining our eardrums together.

It started out with me recording his band with a cassette recorder, to running sound for their live gigs, to eventually joining the band and, over the course of a couple years, saving up enough to get a mixer with a built in CD burner. It was a Roland VS-2400CD Mixer, and it was honestly the most unnecessary expense of my entire life. But such a slick piece equipment needed to be used properly. So my brother and I set about turning the downstairs storage room that we had initially commandeered from our parents many, many summers ago to house our sprawling Lego-opolis into a professional recording studio.

We actually did a pretty good job. The finished product was probably not up to code, but it didn’t look like two teenagers slapped some boards together. Our dad and uncle helped a lot. Especially with framing the dividing wall between the mixing room and the recording room and putting in a window. When it was done we quickly realized an oversight. In order to plug in mic/sound cables into the mixer, we’d have to snake them under the door or drill a hole in the wall. I didn’t want either of those things. So bought some audio cable wall plates that we could plug into on the recording side and route into the mixer on the mixing side.

This is where the unexplainable shit happens. I’m going to try to simplify this in text format, but forgive me if it doesn’t make much sense now. I’ll explain later. I wired the wall plates like this:

[recording room side]

Input 1 Input 2 Input 3

[wall]

Output 1 Output 2 Output 3

[mixing room side]

Basically I wired the inputs and outputs straight through the wall. Input 1 in the recording room was on the rightmost side of that plate and was routed to output 1 in the mixing room which was on the leftmost side. I explicitly remember doing it this way because I didn’t want to bother crossing wires behind the drywall. I just wanted to do it straightforward. I did it myself and I was proud.

When it came time to record with the new set up I was dumbfounded. No sound. Troubleshooting time. I checked to make sure the inputs were routed to the correct tracks, that the tracks were on, that headphone volume was up, that the gains were all up. Nothing out of place. My brother was getting a little impatient. I get a lump in my throat because I know that it’s probably something to do with the wall plate. We unplugged the instruments and mics from the wall plate and ran the cables under the door again. Everything worked now. Uh oh. My brother could tell I was getting worked up. “I’ll go get Tack Bell,” he says.

While he’s gone I get frustrated. I reboot the mixer twice. Repeat all the same troubleshooting steps I did before, swap all the sound cables for other ones. I just can’t get sound to go through the wall plate. I could hear my brother open to the door upstairs. Suddenly I remember. It was so obvious. I didn’t wire the wall plate this way:

[recording room side]

Input 1 Input 2 Input 3

[wall]

Output 1 Output 2 Output 3

[mixing room side]

I wired it this way:

[recording room side]

Input 3 Input 2 Input 1

[wall]

Output 1 Output 2 Output 3

[mixing room side]

Just before my brother comes downstairs I switch the cables around to the correct orientation. Lo and behold everything’s working again. We have Taco Bell and spend the night recording covers of Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.

…Did you catch it? Did you catch what’s been unsettling me all these years? It wasn’t me not remembering I actually did cross the wires behind the drywall. It was the fact input 2 always went to output 2. That track should have worked no matter what. What the fuck.

We had a local folktale similar to a lot of towns near swamps. Ghost lights, sunken treasures, evil creatures wandering the swamps. Well I grew up near a terrifying forest full of all sorts of actual real dangers. So one time some of the local parents decided to have a hay ride through a swamp road. Kind of standard thing to do for kids. Drag a wagon full of hay behind a truck and let the kids see the swamp lights.

Well one time we did it, something felt weird the whole night. Something around 6 kids, mostly my cousins, and me. Riding through this dead silent swamp road. I remember the truck stopping suddenly and the adults were saying something. We looked around the side to see a man in the middle of the road with a lit torch. He looked like a meth addict cult leader. Long scraggly white beard, long black robe. He approached the truck and started shouting for us to turn around that "there's nothing for you out here." Really thick southern accent. As we sat there in the middle of this dirt road, I looked around, noticing that there were glints and movements around the trees. There were a bunch of people surrounding us in the darkness, at least a dozen.

I still have no idea what that was. My best guess is we stumbled into a Klan rally, or an offshoot. Still the scariest encounter I've ever had. It still doesn't feel real.

Not my spookiest, but here you go.

Ok, so there's a lot of abandoned buildings in and around the town I grew up (most've them've been knocked down by now). Consequently urb-exing was a popular hobby for the local youth. A typical rite of passage was to break into the old bomb shelter, y'know try'n scare yourself and your mates, get yourself to believe there was something spooky in there with you.

My story isn't about that though.

My story is about the time I broke the prime directive of urb-exing.

I went alone.

There was this old inn a couple of towns over, can't tell the name because it'd give away too much about where this went down. It'd been abandoned long as I could remember, and none of the other kids had broken in yet. Last exploration I did, I was with some mates and we'd accidentally run into a couple who were enjoying themselves and the awkwardness of that'd put me in the mood for exploring somewhere I wasn't likely to run into someone else.

I did the usual safety checks, y'know made sure it wasn't in use by the local canabis dealers (some of the local gangs made use of vacant buildings because the property companies that were holding the lots hadn't thought to cut off power so it was relatively cheap to set up UVs and some hydroponics and just have a guy squat there to look out for anyone snooping around) shit like that, building wasn't in use by any humans far as I could tell. Then when I was sure I wasn't gonna run into anyone else, I borrowed my dad's crowbar and once the family was all asleep, I'd snuck out.

Getting in'd been easy, one of the back windows'd been broken years ago and in its place was a sheet of plywood. I didn't even need the crowbar to dislodge it.

In the dark, alone, with only the torch-light to see where you are, your mind makes up tricks. Turning the tall blotches of mould into humanoid figures as they passed the periphery of my light, the creak of the of boards on the dancefloor echoing into footsteps behind me. Sitting on a decaying barstool, I was already a bundle of nerves and was considering legging it. But I still hadn't had a look around at the bedrooms upstairs.

Now your average abandoned inn is a haunted place at the best of times, not with ghosts, but with a sense of emptiness. This is a place designed to be full of people and the isolation of my endeavour was all the more glaring as I walked down a nicotine stained hall and arrived at the stairs.

Now this was a long time ago so my memory's a bit hazy on the finer details, but I recall what happened next as going a little like this:

I'd tried every door in the hall but the last couple, they'd all been locked (this was before I'd learnt to pick locks so I didn't really have a plan B for opening them). The wind was picking up outside, and through was making a banshee scream as it blew through the window. Ahead of me and to my left a door slowly slipped open a tad. "Mustn't've been closed properly." I muttered to myself, "probably moves like that all the time." By now my torch is growing dim, so I decide I'll take a quick peek then go home, bring some mates 'round tomorrow night, maybe work up the courage to go behind the bar and into the cellar whose door I saw as I'd passed.

I tried to push the door the rest of the way open, but it was stuck on something. I shone my torch in there to try and get a look, but couldn't make out much more than dim shapes. One final shove and I heard a crack, found myself lurching into the room as the torch slipped from my fingers and the glasses fell off my face. I didn't get much of a look of the room, between the my torch rolling back out and my eyesight being shit. Peeks of dim light from the streets outside as I groped around for my glasses gave me a sense of something slowly moving towards me. Furniture dislodged by my shoving the door, a squatter whose sleep I'd disturbed, the tortured ghosts of my own imagination, I don't know I just grabbed my glasses, stooped for my torch and ran.

I put my foot through a rotten floorboard while fleeing and almost tripped. The muted snapping may as well've been deafening to my nervous ears.

I never did go back with my mates.

Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.

—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx's Capital

I can't think of anything irl thats that spooky other than my houses resident ghost that makes lightswitch noises in random rooms when you're alone. Other residents have also noted this happens when they are alone. Was spooky at first but now just a fun feature of living here.

I also have this recurring house in my dreams, no matter what the theme or location of the dream the house is always there, i own it, I've never walked any further inside than the front door. It's a very unnerving place so I leave. Comes back again in the next dream sometimes in a completely different location. But same house same eeriness and same lack of interest in going any further than the front door. It's been going on for months maybe even a whole year and I don't know why.

Oh and my cat jump scares me all the time and is causing everyone in the house to see shifting shadows out the corner of their eyes even when she's asleep in a know position.

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one time i had a dream and i was cis in it

Something that happened to me but wasn't spooky:

I was having lunch while watching a horror movie, and so I had the lights off for maximum effect. Lunch this day? KFC. So I'm munching on some fries when I get to something very bizarrely chewy and definitely not a fry, nor is it chicken. I switch on the lights and take a look and it's....a heavily chewed up green and white thing thing. I have zero idea what I was chewing because I chewed it up too much. I can't even remember what it tasted like, I primarily spit it up because of its texture.

That wasn't pleasant; didn't stop me eating from KFC though.

When I was in 3rd grade my mom and I lived with my grandma in her old Millhouse. This thing was built in the 30s and they had bought it through the mill my late grandpa worked at. I had tons of minor spooky things happen, but three that stand out and I still remember today.

One night, I was laying in my bed trying to go to sleep. It was completely dark in the house and my bedroom door was open, i could see out of my door and through the central connecting room/hallway into the kitchen where the only light existed in the form of starlight out the kitchen windows. I'm trying to go to bed when I hear these heavy and quick booming footsteps starting in the kitchen and end at my bedroom door. This couldn't have been my mom because she was maybe 130lbs soaking wet and definitely wasn't my grandma because she had bad knees that loudly clicked when she walked. I remember holding my breath and staring into the doorway for what seemed like an eternity until I worked up the courage to get out of bed and take a look around. I peaked into the other rooms and saw my mom and grandma both asleep.

The next happened when I was very sick and home from school with strep throat and was laying in bed. I closed my eyes started to doze off when I heard someone walk into my room and sit on the edge of my bed. They started whispering what sounded like a prayer and I thought it was my mom. I felt them sorta touch me on the cheek and forehead like they were checking my temperature. Then the realization came to me when that this couldn't be my mom because she was at work. I opened my eyes and no one was there. I got up and went into my grandma's rooms and there she was dozed off in her t.v chair.

The final story involved me sleeping in a recliner opposite my mom who was on the couch. The previous stories and other spooky shit made it where I couldn't sleep well in my bedroom any more. I woke up to some disturbance, the only light being the porch light coming through the blinds of the window right beside me. I look at the window and I see shadows on the blinds and hear footsteps of people walking on our porch. I start silently freaking out when I hear them try the front door. At this point I'm trying to whisper/scream to my mom on the couch but can't wake her. After what has to be about 30 minutes I hear them for the last time. In the morning my mom wakes me up to tell me our car had been broken into and I fill her in on the rest.

Had a short period of time last year where I thought I kept seeing shadows out the corner of my eye, but they disappeared after like two weeks, so idk what that was about. I'm a jumpy person, so I kept getting spooked by them.

Also my childhood home is constantly making strange unexplainable noises, most noticeable during times I was alone there. Things like creaking floorboards, rushing water, a cracking noise, a sudden thud, etc. It unsettled me, and I would get more scared the longer I was alone, often dragging the bb gun out of the broom closet and laying it at the foot of my bed. But really, I had nothing to be scared about, it's an old wooden house, old houses just do that, make weird unexplainable sounds.

I used to work on attachment to the MOD having volunteered whilst in an elite regiment with the British Army. It was our job to lock down and secure suspected UFO interaction sites throughout Europe until the Americans arrived. This all seemed like a joke at first until my first call out was to the Scottish Highlands to a deceased teenage couple still seated in their little camper van but having been mutilated in a sickening and yet precise manner. (Perfectly Skinned, eyes removed, no blood anywhere etc) ...In total we secured 15 sites over a 5 year period. Cattle mutilations are common knowledge....human mutilations? Can't be causing panic now can they?? If I saw unexplained lights in the sky, I wouldn't stare in wonderment. I'd be heading fast in the other direction. That's my advice."

The real best evidence we have are thousands of images of corpses. Not just skinned and drained like the cattle mutilations, but contorted, warped, transformed into impossible concoctions of flesh and organs. Weird metallic devices plugged into open wounds and mouths.

We have video of a completely mangled headless corpse found in the woods, next to a brain and its attached eyes resting on a 4 foot metallurgic tub of some goo. It had needle-like objects stuck into it that were automatically injecting the goo into the brain. The brain and eyes had no decomposition. An electroencephalography showed the brain was somehow still alive. We have no idea how long it was out there, or what, if anything, it was feeling or seeing.

Some photos that this anonymous commenter mentions can be viewed here after scrolling past the content warnings.

So I've definitely experienced stuff, whether it was creepy ghosts or a creepy neighbor I once had. The neighbor was likely a little not well in the head, but she didn't help by wearing a plain white dress and always just kinda staring from weird angles in the hall. I hope she's doing well, but she gave me a few too many starts. My nighttime jogs also yielded some weird shit.

But ultimately I think what really qualifies as a story was when I was chilling out in the ditch by my house as a teen, climbing trees, sometimes reading or writing like a shitty version of Walden. One day I saw someone staring out from the cattails at me, kinda greyish and angry. I immediately bolted home, hearing some lion-like roar behind me. My family took me at my word on that one, cause some creep in the cattails is more believable than some of my other experiences like faces in windows or a ghost heavily breathing at me.

I kinda hope most of these experiences are real, if only to suggest I'm not totally off my rocker. I guess I could chalk up some of the oldest stories as Adderall withdrawal, idk.