One day, everything seems fine and dandy, but then you turn down the wrong corner or bump into the wrong person and your day instantly darkens. These people share the most scarring and terrifying experiences they encountered in their everyday lives.
It’s A Good Thing He Never Answered The Door
“Our old house was on a corner, and in lieu of a backyard, we had a side yard with a small deck that wrapped around the back. The dining room had patio doors that led out to the back and we would have BBQs and such back there.
When I was about 14 years old, we only had one desktop computer and one laptop for the family. My brother and I would fight over the desktop, so I would use the laptop to write music.
On one particular night, my brother had a friend over and they were downstairs doing whatever and I was at the dining room table on the laptop.
As I was wrapped up in my writing, I didn’t pay much attention to my surroundings.
I heard a knock on the patio door, which startled me. I looked up, expecting my brother or his friend.
Standing at the door, and waving was a person wearing a Halloween pig mask.
Thinking it was my brother or his friend, I mouthed ‘good one’ and gave the person the finger and they walked away.
As soon as they left I went downstairs to give them crap, and to my surprise and dismay, they were both sitting on the couch playing PlayStation. They swore up and down it wasn’t either of them, and there was no way one of them would have had time to get downstairs and unmask before getting on the couch.
To this day, I have no idea who it was that knocked and waved.”
This Student-Teacher Relationship Was Closer Than This Teacher Liked
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“I am a teacher of adult students, and one student of mine is creepy and intense. She’s based at another school but specifically started attending classes at my school after meeting me. When I first started, she kept giving me ‘welcome presents’ as I was new to the country. Just simple things like food, postcards, and books, which was a nice idea but it seemed a little excessive. She added me on social media and then got upset when I didn’t reply to her.
I didn’t see her for a few months and figured she’d just gone back to her own school or stopped studying or whatever, and was relieved that she’d clearly got bored of me. But then last week she comes in and gives me an envelope full of photos of me during lessons that she’d taken without me knowing. I was weirded out, to say the least.”
They’d Never Eat Outside After This Terrifying Incident
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“I was out at lunch in midtown Atlanta with some coworkers. We sat out on the patio. There are some high rise condos right across the street. Some guy jumped from his 40th-floor balcony and splattered all over the roof of someone’s Jetta. Everything went everywhere. The noise was pretty memorable. We got out of there before ordering. It was a silent ride back to work. One of my coworkers won’t sit out on patios anymore when eating.”
This Was The Day He Learned To Keep His Cool In Life-Threatening Situations
“I used to manage a small family-owned retail store. It was the Fourth of July and the owners, of course, took the day off and dropped the responsibility on me. We had two stock boys bringing up some items on the forklift when I heard a banshee scream coming from outside the storefront. One of the stockers comes flying through the front door on one leg spewing profanity before collapsing on the ground. I look down and see his actual ankle. Like the bone. Blood is going everywhere.
Dude was riding tandem on the forklift when the driver took a hard turn and sent the kid off the side, running over his foot. The driver screeched to a halt, he thought he stopped on the kid’s foot, so he popped the forklift in reverse and ran over the foot again.
I learned that day that I keep my cool in emergency situations. I grabbed and elevated the kid’s foot, instructed someone to call 911, and another person to get towels to try and stop the bleeding. I held his foot up until the EMTs came. They managed to save the kid’s foot but he had a battle ahead of him. His foot went necrotic and he went septic at one point, but he survived.
I don’t work there anymore. There were a lot of unsafe practices going on and the owners didn’t treat their employees well. I left about three years ago, and surprise surprise, they shut down about a year and a half later.”
This Was The Worst Way He Could’ve Found His Missing Co-Worker
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“I once found the corpse of a dead co-worker.
My co-worker didn’t come into work one day. He didn’t call. He was very reliable, lived alone, didn’t have many friends outside of work.
So I went over to his place and convinced his landlady to let me in. I found his dead body in his armchair in front of the TV.
Heart attack. He’d been dead about 12 hours at that point.
It’s been 25 years and I still remember the grimace of pain permanently etched on his dead face like it was yesterday.”
He Never Expected He Was The Reason Why His Friend Killed His Aunt
“New Year’s Day, 1995. I was in the middle of my third year in college, and a bunch of friends had come down to visit me and my roommate for the festivities. We were all hungover from drinking the night before, and went out for the usual ‘nice day out, a bit chilly, I don’t feel so good’ post-greasy-breakfast hungover stroll around the neighborhood.
Two of these friends were twin brothers. One of them, we hung out with all the time. The other we’d just met for the first time. He was normal the night before, joining in the fun, but on this day, we were all hanging around a local basketball court shooting hoops with an old basketball we’d found in the grass, and this twin brother kept following me around all over the place with the creepiest grin I’d ever seen in my life. Staring right into the nether regions of my soul, the whole time.
I’d back away and join the group again, and he’d keep following me around. When we were walking back to the apartment, it was just the two of us walking down the sidewalk behind the group, and he moved over in front of me, stared at me with that creepy look again, and fell down to his knees as if to worship me or something. I didn’t know what to do. ‘Hey, buddy? You all right? We’re heading back now, right?’ And so on. He wouldn’t say anything – he’d just be there on his knees, looking up at me with a clenched face and squinted eyes, as if he were looking directly into the sun or something.
Later that day, my roomie said he was tripping, so I thought nothing of it and moved on with my life. A few weeks later, we got a phone call from the twin brother we usually hung out with, and it turned out that this other twin brother went over to his aunt’s place with a knife and stabbed her 14 times. She didn’t die. He had even called the police before going because he knew he was going to do it but he couldn’t stop himself from doing it because you know, ‘the voices’ and so on.
The ensuing court case was covered in the media as this was a small community where this sort of thing doesn’t happen on a regular basis. I was reading one of the articles and one of the testimonies was that this twin brother was severely schizophrenic and was hearing voices in his head. He believed to his bones that his aunt was the devil and that he had been commanded by God to go and kill her.
So, who was this ‘God’ that told him to go kill her? Well, as the newspaper article described, it was a guy in a group he hung out with on New Year’s Day. Didn’t take me long to realize that he was talking about me.
This was 22 years ago. I know for a fact it was a mental illness, but just knowing that I had somehow ‘commanded’ him to go kill his aunt stays with me to this day.”
Ignoring This Man Might’ve Saved His Life
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“I was walking down the street when I saw a rusty nail in the road. I picked it up and threw it into an empty house’s yard. After I threw the nail, a man came out of what I thought was an empty house and shouted at me. I freaked out and kept walking towards my house. The guy didn’t sound mad, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He started following me to the street and gesturing me to come over but my gut told me to keep on walking. I get home and see from my house the empty house is now surrounded by cops. After a while, it gets worse and men in full SWAT gear show up.
I found out later that the house was indeed empty, but the men inside were known criminals, and I almost ended up a hostage. I dodged that bullet.”
Curiosity Killed The Cat(s)?
“Years ago when I was a senior in high school, I had a day where I wasn’t feeling great. I decided to skip out on my last two classes and head home. That meant no school buses obviously so I would just walk the three miles home. Before the age of computers and cell phones, this was a pretty long, boring hike to take, so I decided to take a shortcut through some small wooded trail along the creek.
Eventually, I came across a dead cat lying in the middle of the trail. As I walked around it I noticed another dead cat to my left. Looked to my right and sure enough, there was another. Creeped out, I looked back and noticed two more and yet another two in front of me. They were all laid out in a giant circle, with one in the middle. Almost like a half pentagram.
I sped up the pace and got out of there. Never took that trail again. Thinking back, a weird thing is that there was no visible damage to any of the cats, no blood or cuts, just dead.”
No Matter Where They Turned, Those Headlights Were Right Behind Them
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“The summer after I graduated from high school, I left work early and went up to my parent’s cabin in northern Michigan. Spent that night at the beach watching the sunset. Once the sun went down and it became pitch black (no light pollution), I got to my car and started driving down the highway. After about 10 seconds of being at speed, there was an older Tahoe (late ’90s) that started riding my tail and flashing its high beams. So, I got up to about 60 mph in a 45 mph zone. They were still on my tail.
I pulled off to the side road that my parent’s cabin is off of and they took the same turn. I thought this seemed weird because there were only about 30 to 40 houses on the road. So I went all the way to the end, which is usually a dead end but leads to a maintenance area for the golf course nearby. The truck was still following me. At this point, I was freaking out because if I pulled into the house they’d know where we lived and they were still following close by.
I took a ton of random turns and the truck kept following every single turn for about 15 minutes. I finally had a chance to make a turn with traffic going through the intersection that gave me a few seconds of a head start. Pulled down a side street, went up 100 yards, turned off all of my lights and waited. The truck slowly drove by the perpendicular street and kept going. Booked it home, pulled my car around the side away from the main road, and pulled every curtain. For an 18-year-old, I was scared that night.”
If Only They Caught This Peeping Tom
“This happened quite a few years ago when I was in college. My friends and I were living in a ground-floor flat, and my room was at the front of the building. Outside my window was the front garden.
My boyfriend (at the time) and I had just finished fooling around and I put my head on the pillow and glanced towards the window. There was a gap between the curtain and the window, and I was met with a pair eyes watching me.
We both (the peeper and I) had the instinct to look away and then quickly look back. At this point, I shouted to my ex that there was someone watching us. He jumped, opened the window and shouted various amusing warnings. He could see that the grass was disturbed so that someone had been there and by the looks of it more than once.
From further inspection the next morning, we found out that he had jumped the small hedge and exited through my neighbor’s garden.
I told my friends and was freaked out by the whole event. However, my lovely friends decided to walk by my flat late the next night and bang on the window and make intimate noises. I almost shat myself.”
He Couldn’t Believe What He Found When He Opened This College Student’s Door
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“I once worked as a live-in staff member in a college dormitory.
During the summer we housed the few summer school students who remained on campus (nearly 30). It may be significant to point out these students tended towards the highly academically-motivated, often times high-stress students, if quiet.
One warm day in late June, my office received a call from a concerned sibling that she and her family was unable to reach her brother who lived by himself in a room on the summer school floor. This wasn’t unusual as our office frequently dealt with students avoiding their kith and kin due to frayed nerves or general social awkwardness.
Our normal protocol to check on a student is to try to reach them by our emergency contact information, failing that – go check their room to verify they’re living in the building and perhaps available then and there, then have them call their family to verify we followed up on the original request. Also – we are to only enter a room with another staff member present to ensure the personal safety of staff and students. I failed to reach this student in his room and on a mobile phone and was working short-staffed so since I was on my own I decided to pop up to his room and check on him. I arrived on his floor around 2 p.m., and the floor seemed deserted as I had expected. I found his room number and noticed the sound of a movie playing on a TV or computer from behind the door. I knocked three times and announced that I was a staff member checking on his health and safety.
No answer.
I didn’t think this was that remarkable, college students are notorious for leaving electronics running while not in the room. I checked the floor showers and bathrooms and found them deserted.
I returned to his door and knocked three more times, waiting about 20 seconds between each knock.
No answer.
I was by myself, so I probably let myself get more worked up than if I was with someone else. A deserted dorm floor, even in the afternoon, oftentimes evokes Kubrickian memories of the Overlook Hotel.
I decided that for some sense of closure or sanity, I needed the resolution of keying into this student’s room, even though I was by myself and not technically supposed to do so.
I knocked on the door one more time for good measure, again announced myself as the hall director. I keyed into the room and my spider sense went off even stronger: The room appeared relatively vacant; the student appeared to be living out of a suitcase. The bedding tussled like someone had been sleeping in it and all the lights in the room were on. And as I had suspected, there was an open laptop on a desk running on battery power playing The Matrix. But no student. I began to start rationalizing to keep from feeling unsettled; surely this student and I had crossed paths on my way to his room and perhaps he was just down in the lobby picking up delivery food for a late lunch.
Sure, that’s it.
Then I turned to leave, planning on trying to reach the student later in the afternoon or that night. As I turned to leave I noticed another odd piece of evidence; the accordion closet doors (which are removed in most rooms due to disuse, particularly single rooms like his) were still in this room. And they were closed.
Odd. I couldn’t remember the last time I actually saw someone use those cranky, dysfunctional doors. Then my intuition spiked higher than ever. CRAP CRAP CRAP. I realized I was alone in a room with a potentially suicidal student who may, in fact, have completed just that. And I am about to be ‘that guy’ who discovers the body and then has a crap ton of paperwork and undesirable tasks, not the least of which would be calling the family back to break the news.
I felt like I was talking to myself when my voice cracked as I spoke to the closed doors and announced my name and title and that I would be opening those accordion doors in three seconds.
I fumbled with the latch on the doors, and finally managed to get them disengaged, and as I slid the doors apart, I was unprepared. I don’t know what I expected, a hanging?
I’ll tell you what I didn’t expect: a tall dark-skinned Indian man staring at me embarrassingly as though I had found his secret hangout. We stared at each other for a good 15 seconds without blinking, breathing or speaking. I finally realized what was going on and my natural emotion was disbelief. All I could think to say was, ‘Um, are you in here hiding from me?’
He looked at me and said, ‘Yah.’
My heart was still racing, I turned to leave and before I shut his door I turned back to him and said, ‘Call your sister, she’s worried about you, and, frankly, I am too.'”
His Masculine Looks Might’ve Saved Him From This Predator
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“I am fairly small for a guy. I stand at around five feet five inches and the most I’ve ever weighed was around 150 lbs. About six or seven years ago, I didn’t have my license despite being far old enough to drive, but a good buddy of mine wanted to hang out. He too did not have a way of transport, so we decided to both walk towards one another and meet in the middle. We would both be walking around five miles. It was 3 a.m. on a cold winter night, and I was wearing a black jacket with my hood up.
About two miles into my hike along the main road, a car pulled into a parking spot of a home I was passing, just a few feet behind me. He wasn’t entirely into the driveway, almost halfway hanging out in the road. I half expected it was just a kind stranger wanting to give me a ride, but I wasn’t about to take any rides from anybody. I kept pacing forward and ignored the car behind me, expecting them to roll down a window and shout at me. It didn’t happen. The car just sat at the edge of that driveway, running but completely dark inside to the point that I could only barely make out the figure of a large man.
I don’t typically get frightened by much, but something in the air made me tense up and my heart kind of dropped to my stomach. I stopped and turned to look at the car. I had a feeling that the person driving was watching me intently.
The figure in the car was definitely facing me; I could see the reflection from his dash bouncing off of his eyes. I stared back. I figured he was about to yell out to me, but he just sat quietly in a strangely menacing way that I have only ever seen scenes in movies play out. I kind of did a wave toward the figure, letting him know I saw him and waited for some type of communication in return. He didn’t budge, just stared intently. I returned to pacing away, slightly brisker.
After just a few moments I could hear the car slowly roll in reverse, so I turned to face it but kept pacing backward. The car kept creeping, slowly. I pulled down my hood and stood still again, waiting for him to pass me, but instead, the man slowed to a stop beside me. The passenger side window rolled down, and the man and I met eyes.
No words were exchanged at all, and before I could even let out a ‘hello?’ the man grimaced and accelerated away at a decent pace; almost as if he was disappointed by what he had seen.”
This Creepy Old Man Had Some Strange Requests For This Cashier
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“When I was 17 and worked in retail as a cashier, I had an old couple come through my line buying a wok. The husband who was at least 85 years old started making conversation with me about a wok and asked if I liked Chinese food.
‘Yeah, I like Chinese.’
‘Do you want to go out with me to get some Chinese?’ He winks at me.
‘N-no sir.’
‘Oh. Well.’ He looks a bit disappointed and turns to look at his wife who is on the phone with someone. ‘Would you at least like to come home with me and live in my basement?’
‘No.’
The rest of the transaction took place in terrified silence. His wife never said a word. I wonder to this day if he was trying to joke because he sounded so sincere, or if he was suffering from dementia or something else that made him not realize how creepy that sounds to someone young enough to be your great-grandchild.”