25 Real "Unsolved Mysteries" That People Genuinely Can't Come Up With An Explanation For
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Recently, I asked BuzzFeeders to share some of the wildest "unsolved mysteries" they've experienced firsthand. From ghosts to glitches in the matrix and everything in between, here are 25 real-life spooky stories people can't find an explanation for:
1."I was staying at a friend's place once, and his room had an ensuite. When we went to sleep, he was in his bed, and I was on the floor next to it. In the middle of the night, I was suddenly woken up. I saw him walk from the bed into the ensuite, turn on the light, and start the extractor fan. Then, I heard him say, 'If you're gonna turn the light on, at least close the fucking door,' from his bed. I bolted up, which made him get up, too. We both stared at each other and then at the ensuite. There was no one in the bathroom. We turned off the light, closed the door, and just tried to get back to sleep. I have no idea who I saw and heard that night, but it wasn't either of us."
2."I have one, I guess, but I hesitate to share because I'm a skeptic, and there's probably a logical explanation for it. So, my house is 158 years old, and the floors creak a lot. A few times, one of us thought we heard someone walking toward us, and it turned out nobody was there. We have kids and cats, so it's nothing too freaky and totally explainable."
"One day, I was working on my laptop at the kitchen table, and I heard someone walking around upstairs. I looked over my shoulder to see my husband's truck in the driveway. I thought, 'Oh, he came home (for whatever reason).' He worked nearby, so he dropped in all the time. I keep on working, and I hear the walking around upstairs some more. Then, my husband walked into the house from his truck through the kitchen door. Turns out, he was sitting in his truck the whole time talking on the phone. What. The. Fuck?
Again, my brain thinks there's an explanation for this because I don't believe in that kind of crap. But it happened...and I don't know what the reason is."
3."In elementary school, my mom was our small rural school's bus driver. So, I had to wake up stupid early to go with her to get the bus and start the long pickup route. The morning routine usually consisted of her parking our van down by the gate to the gravel parking lot while she walked up and did the safety check and any route updates. Then, she would honk for me to open the gate, and I'd climb into the bus when she drove it down. Half asleep one morning, I was waiting for her to honk, watching the trees in the little garden area swaying in the wind. As I slowly started to wake up, I realized that only one tree was moving. Then, I was able to make out that there was a person standing there in the shadows, staring at me and slowly shaking this little sapling (maybe 8-foot-tall) tree."
"By the time I was finally awake enough to register this all as a bizarre event, my mom honked the bus horn, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Looking back at the tree, no one was there, and it wasn't moving. I chalked it up to a weird waking dream and went to open the gate.
When we got back to the school about an hour and a half later, the top of the tree was broken and dangling right at shoulder height. I told this story to some classmates a few days later. Almost every other kid in my class had a similar story. I'm sure a lot of them made it up, but several were deadly serious, and we were all spooked for weeks. Each story had the same basic elements — a guy was staring at you from shadows or in all black somewhere he wasn't supposed to be, something would distract you or scare you into looking away, and when you looked back, he would be impossibly gone but leaving some weird physical evidence behind."
—Anonymous
4."I was in the laundry room of my house in Northridge, California. I was about to change the bottle on my Sparkletts Water dispenser when a voice in my head said, 'Don’t change the water bottle in your bare feet.' It was very clear and adamant. I was in a weird mood and — looking up as if someone was above me — I defiantly responded out loud, 'Don’t tell me what to do!' Then, as I was lowering the five-gallon glass bottle onto the dispenser, I suddenly felt the bottle fall straight down out of my hands, as if it had been pushed down. I watched it fall in slow motion onto the knuckle of my big toe on my right foot. I watched the glass bottle shatter on impact and five gallons of water splash out onto the floor."
"The laundry room had a door to the garage, and the other side was open into the kitchen, which was carpeted. The laundry room floor had linoleum tile, and there was a small metal strip which separated the floor of the laundry room from the carpeted kitchen floor. The water filled the floor of the laundry room right up to the top of the metal strip, which worked as a dam. I had started to bleed and had to hop out, hoping I wouldn’t step on any broken glass invisible in the water. I never felt a thing until my roommate drove me to the emergency room, and they gave me a shot right in the open gash on my foot so they could stitch me up.
Here’s the weird part: After about an hour at the hospital, I went home worrying about the mess I had to clean up. This thin metal strip certainly wouldn’t keep five gallons of water from seeping into the carpet, and the whole rest of the house was one continuous carpet. I was worried it might all have to be replaced. But when we got home, the water was gone. Not one drop was on the floor. The baseboards were dry.
I thought maybe it all ran under the garage door, but that hadn’t happened. I tore up part of the kitchen carpet to see if the carpet pad soaked it all up since the carpet was dry, but the pad was dry, too. All the broken glass was still on the floor, undisturbed. Even if our other roommate had come home, which he hadn’t, and cleaned up all the water, which he wouldn’t, the glass shards wouldn’t still be where they had fallen. But they were.
The only thing I can think of is that it was the empty bottle I had dropped rather than the full one, but why would I have such a vivid memory of having all the water spill onto the floor? Why worry about water damage to the carpet all the time at the hospital? And would an empty bottle shatter like that if dropped on my soft foot, if I would have dropped it at all? I had a lot of experience changing water bottles, and I was completely sober. It was all very weird."
—Anonymous
5."I had a ring that my mom had given me as a teenager, before she died. Unfortunately, one day I lost it. I tore the house apart looking for it and was very upset. Though she'd already passed, I asked my mom out loud to please help me find it. The next morning, I opened my jewelry box, and the ring was sitting on top of the rest of the jewelry. I had dumped out the jewelry box and looked through everything in it at least four times the day before, and I know it wasn't there."
6."I bought the house I live in from family. My grandfather originally bought the house as an investment, and some of my grandmother's cousins rented it and lived there for 20+ years until the older couple died/their children moved elsewhere. The house was trashed, and I needed a project (and a place to call my own), so I bought it, fixed it up, and my daughter and I lived there for 15 years. She and I both noticed after moving in that we would each occasionally catch a glimpse of someone in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. It never did anything else, so we started jokingly calling it 'Uncle Bill' after my grandmother's cousin."
"Fast-forward a few years. I'd met and married my second husband by that point, and one day (about six months into our marriage, without my daughter and I ever telling him about our experience), he came to me and said, 'I keep seeing someone standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.' My daughter walked in at that same moment and casually replied, 'Oh, that's just Uncle Bill.' He looked at us like we we had three heads, but he eventually started calling it Uncle Bill, too.
Fast-forward another 10 years. My husband and I had divorced, and I'd moved a few states away to go to graduate school. In the meantime, I rented the house to a friend. She and her family lived there about six months before she called me and said, 'We keep seeing someone standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen.' I told her about Uncle Bill, but considering this was the third set of people who'd seen the phenom, I decided to do a little research into my cousins.
I discovered that Bill had died of a heart attack when he was home alone. And, you guessed it, they found him laying in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.
I sold the house a few years later. I periodically think about calling the guy who bought it to see if he has an Uncle Bill story now, too. ;-)"
7."I’ve had a lot of strange experiences growing up. The strangest was when I was in high school, and my grandpa was in hospice with cancer. At the time, I didn’t know he was even in hospice because I was in a theater competition, and my parents didn’t want me to worry while we were traveling for state finals. The day we went north for regionals, I was super sad for no explainable reason, and I kept having 'visions' of my family crying all day. I chalked it up to performance anxiety and went on with my day. I was planning on going to a movie when we got home with my friends, but on the bus ride back, my mom called and said I had to come home immediately. It turns out, my grandpa was taking his final breaths, and we had to drive down to be with my grandma so we could help plan the funeral. In that moment, I felt like a fortune teller."
8."Over the last 10 or so years, I have noticed that things I need at a certain moment seem to go missing right when I need them. For instance: textbooks for classes, sweatshirts, various writing or makeup implements, and even a mini laptop for over a year. Without fail and no matter where I lived, these items all reappeared in the same general place: neatly in or on top of something in my closet. It happened in a house I lived in in college, my parents’s house, and a house I rented after I moved out. The laptop is actually the most peculiar occurrence. I had moved, and it was not an easy or organized one. You would think, 'Well duh, Chef, you misplaced it during your move.' Nope. My mom found it in a random suitcase that wasn’t part of the move in, you guessed it, my childhood bedroom closet."
9."When my dad retired, my parents moved to a new house. The elderly lady who lived there previously had died, but we didn’t think she’d died in the house. When they moved in, my dad got to work repainting the walls white. The elderly lady had painted everything a deep blue, including inside closets and cabinets. Strangely, though, she painted around pictures hung on the wall. She’d also put chain-style locks on all the inside doors."
"Two weeks after the move, my dad had a massive stroke that left him paralyzed on one side. When he came home from the hospital, I came to stay for a few days and help my mom care for him. I begged her to leave any housework for me to do, but expected her to ignore that request as she always did.
I went into Dad’s room to visit him, then back down the hall, looking for Mom to get some housework done. In doing so, I passed the door to the cellar, where Mom had told me the washer and dryer were. I heard her coming up the cellar stairs and assumed she must have been carrying a pile of laundry in her basket, as she was coming up the stairs so slowly. I saw the doorknob rattle and could picture her struggling to get the door open over the pile of laundry. I grabbed the knob and opened the door while saying, 'Mom! I told you I would…' but there was no one there.
I felt a huge chill. I shut the door and faintly called out for my mom. She sang out, 'I’m in the kitchen!' I went in the kitchen and asked her if she’d ever had the same experience I’d had, and she said, 'Oh that! Oh, I think something happens when the furnace goes on. It creates a draft that makes those noises.' Hmmmm, I don’t think so! My siblings came to visit over the course of the next few years and had the same experience I’d had."
—Anonymous
10."When I was about 7, I became very, very ill. My grandmother, who was raising me, took me to the doctor, and they had me taken to the emergency room. I was changed into one of the ugly, starch-hardened hospital gowns with the open backside, given a bed, and just had to lie there. I had an incredibly high fever, and my body felt like it had been steam rolled. I vividly remember how terrified my grandma was — she stayed close, held my hand, wiped my damp hair from my sweaty face, and just kept telling me I was going to be OK."
"After a time, a doctor and nurse came in and explained to my grandma that I had Scarlet Fever. This was the late '80s, so this was very unusual. They went over what that meant and what they were going to do. By this point, I was slipping in and out because I was so sleepy. I do recall a very unpleasant experience with a waxy pill thing going where things shouldn’t go, so that was less than awesome. Anyway, it was sincerely awful. I remember thinking I was going to die and I would be so sad because I didn’t get to see my mom.
Eventually, I recovered, but I got very sick like that again when I was 9. It was pretty much the same ordeal, just a new town, and this time, my 'dad' (step-grandpa) was there, too, and they were both scared out of their minds. I remember a little less of that time, just that I was violently ill and couldn’t lift my head.
Fast-forward 20-odd years, and my grandma and I were talking about my childhood while I was visiting her. We got on the topic of the town we lived in the first time I got sick, because the only hospital there was about to be closed. I asked if I really had Scarlet Fever since I know how incredibly rare that would have been in the US in the '80s. She looked at me like I had sprouted wings. She said I never had it, and the sickest I had ever been was chicken pox and strep throat. I thought maybe I only remembered the name of the illness wrong and walked her through my memories of both instances. She was flabbergasted. She said I had never been in the hospital until I was 14 and had my tonsils out. She swore I had never been that sick and never had that form of treatment. I told her the doctor’s name from the first hospital and everything. I remember all of it.
She had no memory of it, of any of it. My mom, biological father, aunts…nobody remembers this. I do, though. I remember it clearly to this day at 39 years old. IDK…maybe there’s something to this quantum jumping thing."
—Anonymous
11."I went to South Africa for a mission trip in 2019. I had two other roommates — we stayed in these condos in Ballito, and each had our own room. On our first night, I went to sleep facing the wall in my room. When I was almost asleep, I had this really weird feeling that someone came up behind me and wrapped their arms around me. All I wanted to do was call out for my roommates, but I wasn't able to say anything. After a few minutes, I was able to throw my arm out, waking myself up and getting rid of whoever or whatever was behind me. I didn't tell anyone the next day, but before bed the next night, I was talking with my roommates, debating if I wanted to tell them what happened. When I finally did, they both looked at each other with surprise. It turns out the girl in the room across the hall had the exact same experience. I don't really believe in paranormal activity, but I surely can't explain this any other way."
—Anonymous
12."At the time, the school district for my area had recently got this ginormous grant to build a new high school, as there had been a lot of changes in the town's population and a need for a new high school building. At the time, I was going to the middle school in the next town over, yet it was all in the same district, so everyone was very excited about this new high school and all its features. I'd always wondered where the high school was being built, and no one ever told me."
"I lived by the old town reservoir, so I would frequently walk up to the lake and just chill there. The lake/reservoir had this small clearing that had a public bathroom and a tornado siren. When you walked into this clearing, you could see a little bit of the neighborhood across the highway that went through the town. I remember walking up to the lake one day and just walking around, relaxing, and looking through that clearing for a while because I was bored. I saw nothing but houses and road there.
The next day, I went on a walk around that lake with my mom. When we got to that area with the clearing, there was this ginormous building behind all those houses that I had never seen before. So I asked my mom about it, and she said, 'That’s the new high school!' I have no recollection of EVER seeing this new high school building in my life before then. While we were still walking, I asked my mom why I had never seen it before, and she said, 'Yes you have, I’ve shown you where it is!' I spent the next five days trying to wrap my head around why I had these lapses in memory, or how I had never seen this gigantic high school building on my walks."
—Anonymous
13."An out-of-state friend and I met up for a four-day weekend back in 2017 and rented an Airbnb in a rural area. The house was built in the '70s on a somewhat secluded, dead-end street surrounded by wooded areas on both sides. After we'd settled in that evening, we were having some wine and catching up when we heard footsteps coming up the basement stairs. We knew the house had a basement, but hadn’t gone down there yet and certainly hadn’t thought to verify if the door to it was locked. We both looked at the door as if someone was about to walk in. I quietly asked, 'Is there an outside door to the basement?' My friend booked the place and was fairly certain there wasn’t based on the pictures of the property. The footsteps continued with a normal gait, but there couldn’t have been that many stairs. It takes a few seconds to walk up a set of stairs; whoever it was should've been at the top by now."
"Someone was walking up, getting closer, but seemingly never reached the top, as if they were walking up an escalator that was going down. We were SO confused. After 30 or 45 seconds, the sound stopped. We waited a bit, then opened the basement door.
The owner was in the beginning stages of having the basement finished. It had a concrete floor and no interior framing or walls yet. The only thing down there was the laundry area, a handful of boxes, and fixtures for the would-be bathroom. The staircase was a normal set of wooden stairs going straight down. There was no door to the outside, just three small egress windows that were locked. That’s it. The snow hadn’t been disturbed in the yard or around any of the windows. Regardless, we made sure the basement door was locked.
The next day, we were eating lunch, and we heard it again. The same exact thing, start to finish. So, we looked up the address and the neighborhood to see if anything had occurred on the property. We didn’t come across anything weird. The owner said she’s never heard any footsteps. Her grandparents were the home’s original owners, and she inherited it from them. It was so bizarre — the footsteps were so clear, and we both heard them! To this day, we have no explanation for it."
—Anonymous
14."About 15 years ago when I was in college, my roommate and I were sitting in the living room of our house watching a show about exorcisms that happened in real life. I had a flip phone back then, which doesn’t sound like an important detail, but it strangely is. If you’re not familiar with a flip phone, you could only make calls when the phone was flipped open, or you could redial the last number by hitting one of the side buttons on this particular model, from what I remember. Anyway, the two of us were watching this show about exorcisms and demons when I heard the dial tone from my phone in my pocket. I think to myself, 'Huh, I must have accidentally hit a side button,' so I pulled the phone out to see who got butt-dialed. It shows that I’m calling 999-666-0000."
"I shrug it off as a glitch, end the call, close the phone, and set it on the coffee table. We continue watching the show, but approximately three minutes later, my phone lights up again. I pick it up, and it’s calling the same number. No one touched the phone; it was sitting there on its own on the coffee table. My roommate and I just stared at each other, terrified. Immediately, we shut the TV off, turned off my phone, and ran out of the house. That was the only time my phone ever did that. I have no idea what could have caused that, and I really don’t want to know. It still makes me feel uneasy thinking about it."
—Anonymous
15."One day, my aged mother — who was infirm — called me into the living room because her TV remote had fallen behind her recliner, which was up against the wall. She had to get up so I could climb over the chair to retrieve it, but it was too far back for me to reach. I went to get something to pull it forward, and I'd had my back turned for no more than 10 seconds when she said, 'That's OK, I've got it.' I turned around, and she was standing in the middle of the room holding the remote. I have no idea how she ended up with the thing, because there was no way she could have gotten it herself. I was too stunned to ask her how she got it. The remote somehow went from behind the chair and into her hand, and I have no explanation how it got there."
—G. T. Vincent
16."Several years ago, my sister was living with me. She had a cat named Whisper who was born with a deformed paw. The cat always made a thumping sound when it walked. One afternoon, I was walking down the hallway to the bathroom, and the cat was trotting down the hall in front of me. Suddenly, it dawned on me that she wasn't thumping. The cat turned into the bathroom ahead of me, and I was curious to follow and see why she hadn't been making her usual noise when walking, but I stopped and looked into my sister's bedroom. Whisper was curled up in her bed, sleeping. I went in the bathroom and noticed the shower curtain was askew. I looked in the shower, but the strange cat was nowhere to be found. So now, I'm left wondering — can cats have ghost doppelgängers?"
—Anonymous
17."I live in a Murder House. We’ve had a few strange occurrences here to say the least. A man named Frank was murdered in his (now our) bedroom in the early '70s. His murder was never solved. He was supposedly a mean drunk so the community didn’t exactly mourn his loss. The police had a theory that one of two young family members probably killed him, and it wasn’t worth screwing up their lives, so they didn’t look into it beyond clearing his wife who had a rock solid alibi with many witnesses. The wife continued living here until she also died in the house from cancer 30 some odd years later."
"When we came to look at the house, I told my husband, 'It feels like someone died here.' He looked surprised and said he felt the same. We shrugged it off and bought the house. The neighbor told me about the two deaths after we moved in. Awesome! I love a good story!
I was on the verge of falling asleep one night, and I heard, clear as day, a man’s voice say, 'Hello? My name is Frank. I’m stuck here, and I need help.' I immediately snapped back to consciousness, but didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t react. I pretended to be asleep. Surely, it was in my head, or the cats would’ve reacted. They sleep in the bed with us, and I didn’t feel any movement from them. His voice was 5’ from me (coming from the area where Frank was murdered), but still soft and sounded far away. It’s hard to describe. That’s all he said, but I sure as heck didn’t sleep well that night.
Another time, something we couldn’t see scared my cat half to death. I was petting him, and something across the room caught his eye. He looked a little harder, got wide-eyed and did some crazy gymnastics jump up in the air, twisting, legs flailing, cartoon-style running in place to get away. He ran downstairs and hid. I followed him. His head was poking out of his hiding place, frantically looking for something behind me. He saw it and scrunched back further into his hiding hole. There was nothing there. His eyes followed 'it' to a spot on the other side of the room. His eyes wouldn’t deviate no matter what I did. He would react when I would walk closer to the spot. The area he was fixated on was about the height of a person. After a couple minutes of trying to coax him out without any luck and seeing how clearly terrified he was, I finally said, 'Look…whoever is scaring my cat, please stop. He’s a good boy, and he doesn’t deserve this. Please stop doing whatever you’re doing.' He looked at the spot for another couple seconds, his face changed to a confused look, then he started looking around as if 'it' disappeared, and he didn’t know where it went. He slowly came out from hiding and cautiously continued looking all over the downstairs for quite a while, then moved upstairs where he first saw 'it.' No idea what that was about, but asking 'it' nicely seems to have worked.
Once, a friend who claims to be sensitive to spirits stayed the night after a party. He said he woke up and could see a figure on our stairs at about 4 a.m. It definitely wasn’t a person. It was standing a few stairs from the top, not moving. He asked, 'Are you going to come down?' It supposedly stood there for a couple seconds, then turned and came back upstairs. He said it didn’t feel like it was a man; he thinks it may have been the wife that died here.
A couple weeks later, we were woken up at 4 a.m. because our dog barked. Our dog doesn’t bark. That one bark was enough to wake us all up. My head, my husband’s head, and the cats’s heads all popped up in unison from our deep sleeps. She was standing outside our bedroom door, then walked forward crouched down as if she was herding something to the stairs. She’s a herding breed, so I’ve seen her do this many times. I came out of the room, and she was standing at the top of the stairs staring straight into the air very intently at something, like she was eye level with a person who was standing four stairs down from the top. She was standing still in her 'power pose' letting the thing know this is where it stays. I called her name several times. She didn’t move or blink. I called her again, and she looked over at me. She looked back into the air, stood for a second, then came over to me. She didn’t want to come into the bedroom at first. She finally did and went to her bed, but we were both awake for a while.
Our house is over 100 years old and in one of the oldest cities in the US. This house has a lot of weird noises: popping sounds, sounds of things falling/being dropped, then finding nothing out of place, etc. I feel like I’m being watched sometimes. I get random cold shivers that radiate through my whole body. We experience that weird sixth sense of 'Get out of this room as fast as possible.' My husband and I are both atheists, but some weird things have happened. Not bad or scary, just weird."
—Anonymous
18."When I was about 22, I lived in a college apartment complex with my first dog, who was about 2 years old. We had been in this apartment complex for a year and were very familiar with every corner of it. This is important to note, because my dog is a hound and had to smell EVERYTHING, so it was not uncommon for us to spend an hour wandering around just so he could get his olfactory fix. One day, we were in a patch of grass in between a group of apartment buildings, and he had a bowel movement. I bent over to bag it up, and when I got back up, I looked around me and did not recognize ANYTHING. Nothing around me had physically changed; I just didn’t recognize anything and didn’t know where I was. I still remember that feeling of panic and feeling completely lost. After a couple seconds, however, it all looked familiar again. I don’t know if there is a physiological explanation for this or not. I have never had any similar issue before then and haven’t since."
19."One night during a severe thunderstorm, my cellphone rang, and the caller ID said it was my husband calling. My husband was sleeping in bed next to me, so I woke him up and showed him. We looked all over for his phone, and he realized he must have left it by the pool before the storm. We went down there, and it was on the side of the pool, soaking wet, and calling me again! We brought it in, and it worked for many years after that strange call to save its life."
—Anonymous
20."When I was 19 or 20, I was commuting to college and living with my mother. My mom had a job where she dealt with a lot of elderly people, and she’s also extremely likable, and over the years, a lot of her clients gave her gifts for birthdays and holidays. They also would give her gifts for me, being that I was an only child and she was a single mother, and most of her clients were extremely wealthy. Anyway, one of her favorite clients had given her a music box-type statue, but it was for me. I played it once when she gave it to me, but I’m not really into that sort of thing, so I put it on top of my headboard and forgot about it."
"My bed at the time had a massive bookshelf-like headboard, so there were a ton of shelves, and the top of it basically reached my ceiling. One day, I got home from class and was feeling a little frisky, so I decided to have some one on one time. I had turned the statue thing toward the wall (so it was backwards) a few months earlier just because I felt like it was weird to have it watching me all the time. TBH, I don't know why I didn't just get rid of it. As I was getting on with my business, the music started playing and the FIGURE STARTED TURNING AND STOPPED as it was facing forward/toward me! Needless to say I was no longer in the mood and promptly threw that thing out. Someone definitely was not approving of my behavior in the spirit world."
—Anonymous
21."I'd just moved into my first apartment — it was a house that had the attic converted into its own one-bedroom unit. When I stepped through the back door, I got chills from head to toe. I liked the place, though, so I moved in. About two weeks after I moved in, there was a knock on my bedroom door. Thinking my landlord had come in due to an emergency, I opened the door. There stood a man with dark hair and a checkered shirt. I asked him what he wanted, and he said I was in his apartment."
"I told him that he didn't live here anymore and that this was my place now. I went back to bed and forgot about it until the next morning.
The next day, I went downstairs and told the landlord that he may have a ghost in his house. I asked him and his wife if they had any photo albums, and halfway through the first album, I spotted the man I saw the night before. He was younger when I saw him, but the man in the photo was definitely him. The wife just froze. The landlord said it was his father-in-law. He was the reason the apartment was built, as he was sick and his wife was taking care of him. Sadly, he passed away there. They asked if I was going to leave, and I said no, I would have a talk with him and let him know he can stay, but he must stay at the opposite end of the apartment as me and that he was not allowed to move any of my belongings. I moved out a couple years later and never had any trouble with him again."
—Anonymous
22."In 1990, I was dating my future husband. One late Friday night, we drove up to a reservoir about 30 minutes from my home because one of my friends said she experienced something paranormal there. She did not tell me what she experienced, but instead wrote it down while I was there, folded the paper, and placed it in her desk. She asked me to write down any experiences I or my boyfriend had. We thought she was acting pretty flakey, but agreed."
We arrived at the reservoir around 11:30 p.m. I was driving my little Honda CRX — it was a stick shift, and I kept the car on and the gear on neutral and pulled up the emergency break. I don’t know why I didn't turn the car off and get out and walk around, but I had a really odd feeling full of dread, bordering on panic.
I started to speak to my boyfriend, a very sensible ROTC cadet and engineering student. In other words, he had a lot of common sense and did not believe in the paranormal at all. As I looked over at him in the passenger seat, the full moonlight lighting up the car’s interior, I could tell he was pale white and barely breathing. He held his right index finger up to his lips to shush me. We sat for what seemed like hours, but was really no more than five minutes, in complete silence. I kept playing with the gear shift, pushing it back and forth in neutral. I had a bizarre but silent urge to throw the car into reverse to light up anything behind us, and suddenly, my boyfriend said, in a commanding voice, 'NO, put it in gear and get out of here…now.'
Shocked that he felt as uncomfortable and fearful as I did, I jammed the gearshift into first gear, took off the e-brake and took off out of the area as fast as I could. Neither one of us spoke all the way back to my apartment. We got inside, and we were both shaking. I ran to the desk drawer and got out two pens and two pieces of paper. We each noted down what we experienced and then traded notes. We both had written one word. When I called my friend later that night and asked her what she had written, it was the same for all three of us...WEREWOLF."
—Anonymous
23."We had just moved back to Port Jefferson, New York from Scottsdale, Arizona and were renting an old Victorian house built in the early 1900s. We had no furniture and were waiting for the moving van to arrive in three days. We spent the time until then on the first floor. Since it had a bathroom, we had no reason to go to the upstairs bedrooms. We had been there for a day already and made a sleeping area on the living room floor. Around 8 p.m., I heard a noise from upstairs and went to investigate. I swore I could hear water running in the tub. When I went into the bathroom, the tub was full, and the hot water was running fully open. The tub drain was open, but not draining. The knob was turned on so tightly that it took a bit of force to turn it off."
"The water must have been running for some time, as the walls were dripping from the condensation. It wasn’t draining out but was going down the overflow drain. When I reached into the very hot tub water and rubbed the drain area, the water finally started draining out. Since no one had been upstairs, it was hard to explain how that water had been turned on while we were all downstairs in the house.
A year later, while we were watching TV in the den, my wife went through the kitchen on her way to the bathroom and found that all four gas burners on the stove were on high. We were a bit concerned about that.
A month later, my wife and I were in bed and heard five district footsteps in the attic directly above our heads. We tried to not show fear, as I read that may encourage more 'spooky' experiences.
We still talk about the time we lived in that haunted house. When I tell people the stories and they say they don’t believe in ghosts, I tell them that no one believes in ghosts until you experience them yourself! I never had a ghost experience again, and I'm really glad that whatever it was didn’t follow us."
—Anonymous
24."When my grandma passed away, I was just coming home for spring break in college. I went to visit her grave twice the week after her funeral, and both times I came home and walked into my room, her music box was playing. No one had been near my room when this happened, but I still thought maybe it was my sibling playing a trick on me. The next few days, I played the music box until it stopped working. I put it on my bookshelf and didn’t touch it again. Fast-forward a few months later, my then-boyfriend had stayed over my house for the first time. In the middle of the night, the music box started playing, and when I turned on the light, no one was in my room besides the two of us, fast asleep in bed."
—Anonymous
25.And finally, "I had many experiences like this as a kid and young adult, from deja-vu’s where I could call the next event before it happened to straight up unexplainable phenomenon. But three experiences stand out as the weirdest or most poignant:"
"1. One time when I was about 13 or 14, I was in my childhood room and had misplaced an old notebook. I checked in my backpack, but it wasn’t there. As I stood up to continue looking for it, things got weird. It’s tough to describe, but my vision went into slow motion, so I stopped moving and stood still. But...while standing still, as if it were a movie, I watched myself continue to walk around my room and look in three separate places for my notebook. In my vision, it wasn’t in the first two places, but I found it in the third place, under some papers in a drawer. When I saw myself find the notebook, the slow motion stopped, and I was back in real time in my physical body, almost like I had woken up or come to. So, I decided to skip the first two places I looked in my vision, and walked right to the third place. And boop — there it was, just as I had seen it in my vision. It really freaked me out, but I felt like I had superpowers! That was the first and last time it ever happened. I’ve never had another sensation that has even come close to that.
2. Once when I was 19, I was with my friend in her car in San Francisco. We had parked in a spot on a street, waiting for some food for takeout, both on our phones and whatnot. The car was parked parallel to the street, and people were walking by. I looked up and saw a woman walking down the street with who I assumed to be her son (they looked similar, and he was looking up at her) who was around 6 or 7 years old. She was dressed as though coming from work, and he was wearing an old-school 1940s-looking Boy Scouts outfit, which I thought was an interesting fashion choice. He was going on and on talking to his mom, and she was absolutely paying him no mind. He repeatedly tried to get her attention, to no response, which I thought was so weird and rude of her. I said to my friend, 'Do you see this mom totally ignoring her kid?' My friend looked from her phone and said, 'Where?' I said, 'That little kid wearing that vintage Boy Scout uniform and his mom — they just walked past the car.' She looked up, then looked at me as if I had three heads. She said, 'What kid are you talking about?' I looked back up, and the woman was walking down the street all the same, but the boy was nowhere to be seen. It definitely made me question my sanity, because that boy was THERE. I watched him try to get her attention for at least 10 seconds before turning to my friend. It still freaks me out a bit.
3. I met my best friend in high school, and a year or so after we started hanging out outside of school, I went to her grandma’s house for the first time. As I walked in the door, I met her grandma, and we headed to the kitchen which passed by the stairs. As soon as we hit the threshold of the stairs, I did a dead stop. This is hard to explain, but in a millisecond of time, I heard a man’s voice say, 'Oh, man! Go to the closet upstairs! They’re going to get a kick out of this!' Mind you, I didn’t hear this in real time. It was almost like…I could recall a conversation that I’d had with someone in the past and was going over it again in my mind. But it was instantly placed in my head. And, not only that, I could feel his energy, I could almost see him in my mind’s eye. And he was laughing about this! He thought it was going to be hilarious.
My friend and her grandma asked me if I was okay since I had stopped so suddenly. I turned and said, 'Um, so I know this is weird, and I normally would never ask or say this, but someone thinks it’s going to be funny if I go upstairs to open the closet? I don’t even know what that means.' They both looked at each other. Her grandma reluctantly agreed and led me up the stairs. When we got up there and opened the door, it was full of model trains on the top two shelves. I instantly knew that’s what he was talking about, whoever’s voice I heard, and I said, 'Whoever those trains belong to thinks this is super funny that he was able to do this right now.' Her grandma got a little flush and so did my bestie. Turns out, the trains were collectors items of my best friend’s uncle who passed away in the home. He was known for his model train collection and love of practical jokes. But it doesn’t stop there. The experience was so strong in my mind that I felt like I could nearly see him. They asked if I’d be able to identify him in a photo, and I said I would try. Her grandma brought back an old photo album of a family reunion with over 20 people in it. In an instant, I knew which one he was. I pointed him out, and sure enough, it was him. I’m so so grateful it was a relatively lighthearted experience because if that was negative energy or something purposefully scary, I think I would have been scarred for life. It was so visceral and intense! I can still hear his happy laugh and voice in my ear. It was the absolute creepiest practical joke ever."
—Anonymous
If you enjoyed these stories, you can read more of them here, here, and here. Do you have one of your own? Have you experienced something paranormal, a glitch in the matrix, or something else just as strange that you can't for the life of you explain? If so, tell us about it in the comments below or via this anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
