14 Former Skeptics Who Turned Into Paranormal Believers After A Freaky Experience
A lot of strange and inexplicable things happen in the world, but that doesn't make everyone a believer. However, sometimes it just takes one truly wild experience to change someone's opinion.
Fox
So, when we asked the former skeptics of the BuzzFeed Community if they ever had a weird experience that made them believers in the paranormal, they responded with some truly chilling stories. Check it out...
1.The shadowy figure that peered, then quickly disappeared.
"I got into Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures, but always felt like everything they 'saw' was bullshit. Around 2006/2007 I moved into my grandparents' house to help my grandfather care for my cousins and grandmother. My family has been the only ones to ever live in that house, but my mom, aunts, and uncles used to tell us about having strange experiences there when they were younger. My aunt would tell me that she hates to be in the house alone at night. My sister and I use to say it was because there is a cemetery down the block, but it was always sort of a joke between us."
"One day, I was alone downstairs. The house is old so you always hear when people are moving around. I heard nothing, but the faint sound of my grandmother's TV upstairs. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow of a head and shoulder look into the rec room and then lean back out. My heart was pounding. I sat still waiting for anything, but nothing else happened.
I was unable to write this off, but I eventually forgot about it. Cut to Christmas time after my grandmother had died. My cousins had moved to a different city with my uncle and my mom and sister came to visit for the holidays. My mom was out with her friend, my grandfather was upstairs, and my sister and I were in the rec room talking. All of a sudden, my sister gets this funny look on her face, and she's looking over my shoulder. I asked her what was up. She said nothing, but she was still looking at the door. Again, I asked her what. She told me that she saw a shadow lean in the room and then lean back out. I knew I hadn't been seeing things."
—Anonymous
2.The ghostly woman in the graveyard.
"I lived, for two years, overlooking a very infamous graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland. I never saw anything weird, day or night."
"Then, one night, I stayed up stupidly late watching a show. As I finally went to bed, I reached to pull the living room blinds when I saw the undeniable figure of a woman walking alongside the church. Cliché as it is, she looked ‘misty’, almost see-through. I watched her move slowly, until she suddenly, just wasn’t there. I’ve never seen anything like it, and up till then believed in black and white. Having no explanation for that, changed my outlook forever."
3.The mysterious attic door that swung back open by itself.
"So, I get home one day and all the lights in the house are on. I’m a kid at the time, maybe about 15, and because my mother used to yell about the electric bill, I assume people are home but the house is silent. I shut the lights off downstairs and head upstairs."
"I see that all the room doors were open, I shut my room light off, and head to the bathroom. I use it and shut the light off. I head to my sister's room and shut that light off. Then I head down the hall to my parents' room, I shut the light off and close the door. I turn around and see that the attic door is also open and the light on so I tell whoever may be on the third floor that I am going to shut the light off and close the door. I get no answer so I shut the light off and proceed to close the door. The door doesn’t want to close. I try again and the door still will not close.
Finally, frustrated, I use my shoulder to shove the door shut, it closes. In the exact moment I turn to walk away, some type of force kicked the door from the inside. The attic door swung open, slammed against the wall, and then slammed shut. Now the most interesting thing about this occurrence is that the moment the door swung open the light from the hallway was shining on the steps of the attic. But nothing was there. Just the steps. And behind that light was total darkness. There were three bangs: the initial kick from inside, the door hitting the wall, and the door slamming shut. I was so in shock I didn’t run until the door slammed shut.
I’ve had experiences after this but this was the first that made me say there are things we can’t explain. No windows were open and the attic was then thoroughly checked."
—Anonymous
4.The creepy apparition near the cemetery.
"I grew up in a small town and one time I was coming home from the local bar. The fastest path to home was by the city cemetery. It was like 1 or 2 a.m. and I was walking with my cousin (he lived right next to me)."
"We were chatting and then I started to feel very cold and got goosebumps. I looked to the right and saw something white standing there. All I can describe was a man with a hat, hands in pockets, looking at me, but he had no facial features. It was just all white and translucent. I suddenly stopped and asked my cousin if he saw the same thing. He nodded and we started to run as fast as we could. At the end of the road I looked back and that 'thing' was in the middle of the road. I arrived home hyperventilating, scared my parents, and didn't sleep that night. The next day my dad went there to see if something made sense and then he told me what was there: a circle of stones and a cross in the middle."
5.The door that locked itself...and a child in the house.
"I always kinda wanted to believe but couldn't get myself to fully commit since I had never seen anything I couldn't explain. That all changed a couple of years ago when my husband and our two young kids moved into this cute little A-frame house."
"My oldest child, who was three at the time, started talking about all the people in the kitchen. My husband and I couldn't see anything. Then weird little things started happening; like the TV would come back on after I was positive I had turned it off. Also, there was this strange tapping or clicking sound that we could hear only at night. But the scariest event happened shortly before we moved.
My husband, two kids, my brother-in-law, and I were all outside, no one was inside. My 4-year-old needed to use the bathroom so he went inside and closed the door behind him so the cat didn't get out. Some time went by and I was getting concerned that he wasn't back outside yet so I went to go in and check on him but the door was locked. I could hear him inside crying because he couldn't get out. The only lock on the door was the ancient deadbolt and to get it to lock you have to put all your weight on the door and turn the lock at the same time. There is no way my son could have done it; he could hardly even reach it. This was the only entrance to the house, so my husband crawled through the bathroom window to get to him. My son was hysterical and said he heard the lock while he was in the bathroom but didn't see anything. Freaked me out."
6.The "possessed" guy who knew information he couldn't have.
"A few years ago I went to a 'haunted' church with a few people that I was friends with. One of the guys was big into the pagan belief system and did all kinds of rituals."
"Anyways, once we parked on the church property he suddenly became 'possessed' by a female spirit that started talking to me and one of my other friends. That part didn't really bother me because I thought he was just faking it but then he called out to me specifically and said something about my past that I had never told anyone. He eventually snapped out of it and we went to leave but the vehicle wouldn't start and we had to push it off the property before it would start. To this day I can't explain how he knew that info and I doubt I will ever know. Sadly, I won't be able to ask the guy how he knew that info because about a year later he stabbed a girl in the bathroom at a local mall and is now in jail. So yeah, that experience kinda changed my belief in the paranormal."
—Anonymous
7.The spirit that communicated through a light.
"I was talking to my friend about my aunt who died the previous year the morning of her senior prom."
"We were standing by one of those old touch lamps and I said I wished I knew if she was still with us. Light came on (we didn't touch it!). We laughed and I said, 'It was probably a short.' Then the light dimmed. We looked at each other and I said somewhat jokingly like, 'Beth is that you?' The light went NUTS going low, medium, high, and off over and over. I said, 'Please stop!' It stopped! I unplugged the lamp (never to be plugged in again) and my friend who was supposed to spend the night was so freaked out she had her mom come pick her up. She never wanted to speak about it again. Been a believer ever since!"
8.The strange shadows floating around a dorm.
"I've always been a very scientifically-minded person in terms of belief in things that cannot be proven. Ghosts and spirits and whatnot fit into that category for me."
"However, when I was in college, I saw what I can best describe as shadow balls floating around near the ceiling and going into and out of my dorm closet. They were each about the size of a softball, but completely silent, moving lazily in the dim light. It was so startling that I completely freaked out once I'd eliminated all possible sources of the shadows. They were free-moving through the air, not being cast on the wall. I never saw them again after that instance despite living in that dorm for the remainder of the year. Still looking for an explanation."
9.The mysterious and inexplicable bright light.
"I have always loved reading scary stories and watching horror movies. So when it came to the supernatural, I thought of it as nothing more than people telling stories. I never experienced anything myself so it was easy to dismiss the possibility of paranormal happenings and find a logical explanation."
"But when I was a junior in college, I lived in this old house. One night, my roommate was spending the night at her boyfriend’s so I was alone.
I had the lights off and I was laying in bed. I saw a streak of bright white light out of the corner of my eye. Figured it was my mind playing tricks on me so I ignored it. Then it happened again. Two, three more times. It was a streak of white light going from a few feet to my right, over my bed, and then to the wall before vanishing. It was as if someone was moving a flashlight quickly enough that the light looked like a line. I was moving my head this way and that, thinking there was something wrong with my vision.
Nope. It was definitely something that was moving through the air and casting light on my blankets. Thoroughly freaked out, I threw the covers over my head and fell asleep that way. I listed all the possible explanations but none of them fit: no roommate in the room, no hanging lights, blinds were shut so it wasn’t the headlights from passing cars, and my phone’s flashlight was off. I still can’t explain what I saw."
10.The skeptic who captured electronic voice phenomenon.
"I had been a hardcore skeptic of the paranormal for years, in fact, I had even mocked the subject when people brought it up."
"However, I heard several stories from people I trusted and decided if I was to stand firm on my conviction that the paranormal was all hoaxes and superstition, I should at least give an honest effort to try and capture any evidence on my own.
So I went out to a local cemetery in an effort to capture Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP). To my amazement, I captured disembodied voices answering me in real-time. These instances were all recorded by ME using my phone, so I can attest to the authenticity. Now I have come to know that there is a curtain to our reality and there is something behind it. I cannot say I know WHAT the paranormal is, but I can say with 100% certainty that I have captured evidence of 'it' on many occasions. At this point, any time I begin to doubt myself or think I imagined all these instances, I can easily play them back on my phone to be 'WOW'd' all over again."
—Anonymous
11.The massive UFO sighting.
"In the summer of 2022, while I was driving, I saw a green streak go from the ground up like a shooting star in reverse from what must've been many miles away."
"Then a bright light traveled toward me as I continued driving. It came closer and dropped in altitude. As it passed over the top (directly overtop) it looked like a saucer with green and red lights. At first, I thought, could this be a drone, but as it passed over it was at least 25 yards wide. There was other traffic on the road, but none of the others seemed phased by the ufo. I now wish I would have pulled over and videotaped it with my phone. Never seen anything like it prior and have never seen anything like it since."
—Anonymous
12.The new home that seemed to be haunted.
"When my daughter bought her new home, I helped her move in but told her I could never be alone in her home."
"She asked why, but I didn’t have an answer. I just felt it. That night we went to bed and something hit me in my chest. The next night something crawled up my leg. I kicked out and it slapped me. Cleaning her foyer I put all the shoes on the rack with the summer shoes stacked in the back. I went to the store and came back and a pair of women’s sandals were on the floor in the middle of the walkway. I asked my daughter why she did that. She started crying and said she didn’t do that. Many wild things happened in the home before they moved out."
—Anonymous
13.The baby who interacted with unseen forces.
"My husband and I moved into an older townhouse in Washington, D.C. Didn’t notice anything strange until our daughter was a few months old."
We’d hear her on the baby monitor happily babbling away in her crib, while in an otherwise empty room. Any parent knows the difference in their kid’s sounds, and she was clearly directing her babbles to someone/something. As she got older, we saw her on the video baby monitor reach out to be picked up from her crib (despite being alone). The final incident happened one night while I was getting ready to go out. I caught a figure out of the corner of my eye and turned to see the figure of a woman coming from my daughter’s bedroom down the hall. The figure was gone as soon as I registered it."
—Anonymous
14.Finally, the ghostly apparition of a recently deceased relative.
"My story begins around 2018. I did not believe in ghosts back then but I do now after this experience. One night, when I went to my grandma's house, I went to the back porch where she was talking to my uncle drinking coffee. I came over, said hello, and sat down on a lounge chair to join the conversation."
"They had been talking about a relative who had passed away recently, who lived not so far from there. She mentioned he was a good man and always helped her around her house by taking care of the animals on her land, and keeping her company since she lived alone. She explained he died from a heart attack.
As we were talking about him and how good of a man he was I got the sudden feeling someone was staring at me. I turned my head to my right to look inside her patio and I noticed she had the fire pit turned on. And there was a tall man standing there, but I could only see his lower body because his face was covered with the smoke from the fireplace. He was tall and looking at us with his hands to his sides in an abnormal position with his fingers opened. He was wearing a white long sleeve t-shirt and light blue jean shorts and sandals. I only saw him for a little bit, probably 10 or so seconds. My heart started racing and I asked my grandma if there was someone else here with her, and she said no.
I told her what I saw and she got a frightened look on her face. My description of the apparition I saw matched what her relative was wearing when he died. My uncle went into the house to double-check but found no one. While driving back home that night, I felt scared, and officially became a believer in the paranormal."
—Anonymous
Note some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
