"The Store We Visited Didn't Actually Exist": 22 Jaw-Dropping Paranormal Tales That People Cannot Explain
Whether or not you believe in ghosts and ghouls, sometimes something just ~happens~ that you can't fully explain.
Redditor u/Endemicbacon asked, "People who've experienced the paranormal or seen cryptids and other unknown creatures, what's your story?" From ghosts to doppelgängers to monsters, they shared some fascinating, goosebump-worthy tales I can't get enough of. Here are 23 of the very best, spookiest ones:
Note: Stories have also sourced from this similar thread.
1."Growing up, people always told me that they saw me at different places in town when I hadn't been there. When I was in high school, I took vocational classes at secondary school called the Skill Center. One day, I was waiting for the bus to leave the Skill Center after my Broadcasting class, and a teacher I never met ran up to me and said, 'Zushiba! You need to come back to class!' I didn't know her and had never been in her class. According to her, I had been missing for the last few sessions. I tried to explain, but she seemed to know who I was, so she took me to the office, thinking I was trying to ditch class. In the office, I told the clerk my name...and sure enough, I was in that Broadcasting class."
"I was registered under my stepdad's name. I do go by it sometimes, but it's a relatively unique name, so it’s not like there would have been a random person that looks just like me in her class AND had the same name. Turns out, 'I' had been in her class for the entire semester until I mysteriously stopped showing up. I had turned in work and everything. It even had my goddamn signature on it!"
2."I was about 19, and my grandmother had died less than a month prior. My family was having a gathering (unrelated to her passing). I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up late watching some old Nick-at-Nite reruns on their old TV. I drifted off on the couch around 2 a.m., partially wrapped in a rough, green and brown handmade blanket. I woke up between 3 and 4 a.m., feeling cold and groggy. When I looked up, I saw my grandmother — 'Go upstairs and sleep in a proper bed,' she said. 'Get moving.' I picked up my blanket and dragged it behind me up the steep stairs. She looked better than when I had last seen her alive, but equally as insistent and daunting. I didn't dare refuse. This was the kind of thing she would do regularly before she passed, so it didn't occur to me until the next morning that she was, in fact, still dead."
3."I know it sounds like bullshit, but this rougarou/dogman-like thing used to sit in the clearing past our driveway. I often snuck out of the house to smoke at night and stay up late — standard rebel emo teenager shit. We lived in the middle of a highway; there were no towns for miles both ways. Our only light was a massive search light, right past our garage. Being on a huge property meant just about anything from coyotes to panthers could roll out of the woods like it was nothing, but I was used to it. What I wasn't used to was the thing that would sit out in the clearing time-to-time, especially in the winter. It'd just sit under the search light the way one does when you sit on the ground with your legs straight out, holding its tail and picking at the ground."
"At first I thought we just had wolves or coyotes on roids, but eventually I made the 'stupid white man in a horror film' decision and stepped out to whistle at it. I learned my lesson when it scrambled to its bipedal feet and stared straight at me, before hopping the chain link and running out on to the deserted highway. It came back every few weeks or so in the early morning/late night, usually sitting in that clearing digging at the crawfish holes or squatting at the end of the gravel driveway. I'd say fuck it and just go smoke in our laundry room those nights. I moved away years later, and I often wonder if it's still there. I still have dreams about the way it stared at me. Nobody I ever told believed me, but my dog and I know what we saw night after night."–u/elk-jaw
4."My best friend and I found a store that didn't exist. It was full of pagan-like items, things like candles, books, and zodiac necklaces. It was downtown in our small city. We were both familiar with the area and had never seen this store before. We didn't end up buying anything because we were a couple of broke teenagers, but we did agree that we were going to return when we had more money. Except that when we did have more money, maybe two weeks later, that store was gone. It wasn't that the owner had closed up and left an empty space behind — the doorway no longer existed. It hadn't been freshly bricked over or anything; it just wasn't there."
5."I was at Butterfly Beach in Montecito, California. It was late at night, and I was walking with my girlfriend at the time. We looked at the beach from an elevated walkway and noticed a small, black humanoid creature about 4 feet tall, with a massive spherical head maybe 2 or 3 feet in diameter. The moon caught it just right, and it reflected on its head. My girlfriend screamed, and the thing jumped into the ocean and swam away. It was just hanging out on the beach and watching the moonlight, I guess. Nothing I have googled has explained this thing we saw."
FOX
6."One night when I was a teenager, I was up late reading a library book before bed. It was something really boring that I had checked out for a history project. I was tired and couldn't keep my eyes open, so I fell asleep with it on my bed. Then, this sleep paralysis-like thing happened, and I watched a shadowy figure of a man walk into my room, look around, pick up a few knickknacks, and put them back down. It was so terrifying; my entire body was screaming to move, but I couldn't — not even my fingers. I finally got enough courage to look at the man, but he wouldn't come into focus for some reason. He was just a shadow, like he wasn't fully there. He came up to the side of my bed and stood over me, looking down at me for what felt like forever. I was so terrified, but I couldn't move a muscle. Then he reached down, grabbed my library book, and turned, walking out of my room. The next morning, I couldn't find my book."
"I never found it, ever, even after tearing apart my room and the house for it. My mom said it was a coping dream for losing the book, but I distinctly remember falling asleep reading it that night. I had even sent a text to my boyfriend that night saying that I wished I had chosen a different book because this one was putting me to sleep."
7."My childhood friend encountered a textbook doppelgänger. He was about 15 and home alone over a long weekend while his parents were traveling. But on Saturday night, around 7 or 8 p.m., he was in his bedroom upstairs when he suddenly heard his mom call him to come get dinner. He popped his head out of his room, confused as fuck, but no one was there. So he called back down, 'Mom? Are you home already?' There was a long beat, but then after a few seconds, his mom walked slowly around the corner — coming from where the kitchen was — and looked straight up at him. She just smiled, then walked right back were she came from. My friend was frozen in place for a moment, but then, again, he heard her call him to come get dinner."
"He said the only reason he didn’t just walk down those stairs to see what was going on and why she was home so early was because he thought it was strange that she didn’t talk or utter a single word when she appeared. Like, why did she just smile at him and then walk away? That just didn’t sit right, the fact he never saw her open her mouth. He could hear her, and he could see her, both plain as day. But never at the same time. And that smallest of details is why he chose instead to slam his door shut, lock it, and call his mom. She answered immediately and was still several states over, hundreds of miles away. They ended up calling the police for fear of an intruder or something, but they never found anyone in the house. It was all locked up with the security system on and everything. He did not sleep there alone anymore after that."
8."My grandmother was a Cajun voodoo Black Witch. Physically, she was NOT a big woman — she was maybe 5 feet tall and 100 pounds. At her funeral, they had four men carry her casket from the funeral home to the hearse. At the church, it took six to get her out. It took eight to get her into the cemetery, as she got heavier and heavier the closer we got to the cemetery. It took a total of 10 men to get her to her actual grave. When we returned to her house after — where the rest of the family was — me and my uncle went to the kitchen. It was hot — like, opening-an-oven hot — but it was mid-February, and the house was in the country with no electricity. Inside the kitchen, we both saw my grandma, who we just buried, holding hands with four other women. I didn't know them, but my uncle recognized a couple. One was his grandma's sister, and one was grandma's mom, both of whom were dead. I have not been back in that house since. That was close to 30 years ago."
9."My first year of university, a girl I lived with had her friend over one night. He’d been shooting footage on the London Bridge at 3 a.m. to get some shots of it abandoned at night. He was really riled up about something and insisted we watch his footage and listen closely. Around the one-minute mark, I heard a low, deeply menacing voice slowly whisper, “As you walk the devil’s path...death." There was something unintelligible in the middle, but it felt so final and evil."
"He turned to us and asked what we heard. When we answered, his face went white. He — and everyone else he'd showed — heard the same thing. He hadn’t heard the voice when he was on the bridge, only when he was working on the audio."
10."I've lived out in the middle of nowhere for about 10 years. I'm a night owl who likes to smoke outside, so I've seen some strange things. But the one thing I saw that gave me chills and thoroughly baffled me was a was a black, oblong object (think cylinder/thermos) floating through the sky. It was darker than the night sky behind it, utterly silent, and (maybe I'm misremembering), but I recall the night being completely silent too. No crickets, no cicadas...just silence. This was in the middle of summer, so that was strange. I told my family, and they just shrugged their shoulders."
US National Archives
11."Several years ago, some friends and I were driving through one of the millions of small towns around the North/South Carolina border in the mountains. It was well after midnight. My friend looked behind us and saw a pair of headlights coming up on us, fast. Like, easily 60–70 mph, when the limit was 25 or so. They showed no signs of stopping, so my friend pulled over to let the car pass. What passed us was two lights. Just lights. Far too bright to be a firefly or any luminescent creature. As bright as headlights, if not brighter. Not attached to anything. No car, nothing. Just two lights booking it down the road."
Audi
12."My cousin Mike and I live less than 2 miles apart. My dad passed away over six years ago, and I now live in his house. One day, about a year after dad's passing, Mike started a fire in the wood furnace in the basement and went to bed. The 'what happened' story I tell everyone is this: I was coming home from an equipment sale across the state, stopped to see a late movie, hit a bar for a few (soft) drinks, then had a meal at a 24-hour diner. On the way home at about 3 a.m., I passed by Mike's place and saw fire coming out the chimney and smoke coming out from the basement door. I called 911 and ran into the house, yelling for them to get up. Mike and I went downstairs and found the area at the base of the chimney burning. We put it out, and the fire department put out the chimney fire. There was no real smoke damage upstairs, and the house needed minimal repairs. A few more minutes, though, and the fire would have burned up into the kitchen."
"The truth of what happened was this: I got home at about 10:30 and went to bed. Some of this I am not clear on. I am not sure if I dreamt it or if it was some sort of apparition. Close to 3 a.m., Dad opened the door to my room, turned on the light, and said, 'Get up — you have go help at Gary's.' I remember saying, 'In the morning.' He said, in his most authoritative voice, 'NO, RIGHT NOW!' I sat bolt upright in bed. My room door was open, and the hallway light was on. I tried to dismiss it as imagination, but I knew I had turned off that light and shut my door. I realized with the adrenaline rush and my lingering doubts, I would not get back to sleep. So, for peace of mind, I decided to get dressed and drive over to check on Mike's place. That's when I spotted the chimney fire."
Netflix
13."As an officer on a reservation, we kept getting reports of a 'tall man' at different places in town. One night, we caught him on our thermal camera. There were about 10 officers there. It was tall, about 8 to 9 feet, with long, dark hair, and a human-looking face. It stood on a hill overlooking the town below, but moved really quickly."
14."When my youngest son was about 3 years old, we were eating out in town, and he got a bit restless. I decided to take him for a walk, and as I held a door open, he got away from me and made a break for it. He bolted into an adjacent site, which had a ruined chapel/almshouses with info boards for tourists. I found him staring up at the Chapel ruins. ‘What are you doing, mate?’ I asked. He replied, 'A long time ago, I got married here.’ Then a switch flicked, and he was off running again. Shook me to my core."
15."It was about 10 p.m., and my wife had just gotten home. I was taking the trash to the dumpster in the alley behind our complex. It’s a very short distance from my door to the dumpster, and there was nothing to obstruct the view, so it was easy to see my wife open the gate and head up the walkway toward our apartment. I waved at her and have no idea how she didn’t see me. As I walked up, I saw the door to our apartment open. Of course I just assumed she opened it, but it was dark so I didn’t actually see her do it. Then I saw her kinda lean in and I heard her call my name, but she would not physically walk into the apartment. Confused, I came up behind her and said hi. She became frantic, asking me, 'How the fuck did you do that? How did you get back outside?' I told her I'd been here the whole time, but she interrupted me and said, 'No, you opened the door for me.'"
"She said she saw 'me' walk upstairs, and called after 'me,' but I silently turned to look at her and continued walking. I searched the apartment for another person, but found nothing. We moved about six months later to the house we live in now. One day shortly after we moved, my wife thought she saw me walk past the windows that looked into the backyard from the kitchen, but it wasn’t me. She said it looked just like me, and that it walked all the way around the house. It disappeared, and then she realized I was in the bedroom the whole time."
16."Maybe three years ago, I was working on a commercial fishing vessel in Casco Bay, Maine. It was dark out, maybe 10 at night. We had a small fleet going, just a few boats chasing fish around all day but no luck. We decided to head home and try again tomorrow, but about 20 minutes after we parted ways from the other boat, we got a call telling us that there was a UFO about 15 feet above their boat. They asked if we still had a visual on his vessel, but we did not. Before we got any more information, the radio suddenly cut out. There was only static when he tried to talk. We just brushed it off, thinking he was playing some weird prank. A minute later, I lit a cigarette and walked out to the deck. That's when it happened. About 10 to 15 feet above my head was a friggin' UFO about the size of a car."
"There were three very bright lights in triangle form on the bottom of the craft, but the light did not appear on the water or deck. I was in shock and disbelief. I called my captain, and we watched in horror as we realized the ship was mimicking the motion of our boat, bobbing up and down as our boat did on the waves. Suddenly, the boat stopped moving. We fell to the deck, and when we looked back up, the craft was nowhere to be seen. We assumed we hit an underwater ledge or rocks or something, there was no other way out boat could've stopped that quickly. According to our sonar, though, the area was about 60 feet deep – there was no way we hit anything. To this day, I have no clue what we saw that night."
17."I was working really late when I decided to take a break to take my dog out. I let them off the leash and popped a squat on the stairs. As she does with her weird little poop ritual, she stopped dead in her tracks about 20 feet in front of a tree. I was about another 30 or so feet behind her, but I could see that her hackles had come out and her body was completely rigid. I softly called her name, but it didn't break her trance. As I started getting closer to her, I noticed a change in the ever-present ringing in my ear."
"It's important to know that I suffer from Meniere's Disease, so I have constant tinnitus, ear fullness, hearing loss, and debilitating vertigo attacks. Well, I used to have vertigo. I haven't had an attack in over a decade. Remember this.
Anyway, the ringing in my ear changed in pitch and become a lot louder. Another few steps, and I start to feel a weird sensation behind my left eyeball. I took another few steps and a piercing pain shot through the left side of my head. This was the telltale sign that within the next 90 seconds, I was going to start my first vertigo attack in nearly 11 years.
I used a more stern tone, but my dog would not break her focus. She let out a deep, guttural growl I'd never heard her make before. Like clockwork, the pain behind my left eye and left side of my head abruptly ended, and I was hit with a wave of heavy vertigo. I hooked on my dog's leash and stood up. When I did, the vertigo gave off the sensation that my brain had detached from the base of my spine and was doing freeform back flips in my skull. I had to fight to stay upright, and keep my eyes from rolling back so I had enough perceived balance to make it back upstairs. To do this, I focused on the tree that my dog had been so upset about...and that's when the thing decided to step out from behind it and into our view. It was tall — taller than me, and I'm at 6'7". It was unimaginably skinny, so much so that I couldn't believe organs could fit inside its torso. Along with its odd stature, the thing's 'skin' was this deep pitch black. Due to the color, and the weird way it played with the poor lighting, it was impossible to make out any discernible facial or body features. From that impression alone, the only description I can muster up is that it looked like a poorly drawn 2D stickman that busted off the page.
My dog and I just stared at this thing as it 'looked' back at us from maybe 6 feet away. Then, the thing turned around and took off down the street, running at an astounding speed. It moved oddly though, like it was gliding. Almost what a cross-country skier might look like, but even smoother and completely silent. It covered half a block in a matter of seconds before jumping over a 6-foot fence in a single leap and vanishing into the night. A second after it vanished, my vertigo stopped, the tinnitus went down, and I was mostly fine again. I don't know if my sudden vertigo attack was related to what I saw that night, but it certainly feels that way. Vertigo attacks that are associated with Meniere's tend to last an hour at their shortest and 24 hours at their longest. My attacks always averaged in the 12–16 hour range. This attack lasted less than two minutes."
18."My dad owned rental houses. Back in the '90s, my girlfriend and I’d go in after a renter left and rehab them. There was one particular house that he’d purchased years ago with the renter already in it. When they passed away, we went in and started in the bedrooms, first painting, then cutting out the carpets. We noticed we kept losing our carpet cutters, but assumed we’d accidentally rolled them up in the carpets. So, we got fluorescent orange cutters we couldn't miss. Nope, still went missing. Whatever, we kept going. We pulled the living room carpet up, and there were several large stains that look exactly like dried blood, soaked into the cork underfloor. OK, it could've been anything. Maybe someone butchered a chicken in the living room, who knows. But then, as I was painting a living room wall, I saw a human-shaped shadow coast across it."
"I figured someone was walking around the house, maybe a meter reader. I ran outside, looking up and down the street, but no one was there. NO ONE. We finished in a big hurry and got paid. My dad called later and asked what we used to clean it, because the house was full of flies. I went back and washed every flat surface with bleach and water. Next day, it was full of flies again. It’s a house built on a concrete slab, so there was no crawl space. He decided they must be getting in through a crack in the slab, so he filled all the cracks with silica. Nope, still flies. I vacuumed up hundreds of dead flies by the end of this. My father is a strong man, but he's no fool. He doesn't believe in the supernatural, but he sold that cursed house immediately."
19."My family has seen UFOs at our old family fishing spot for nearly 100 years now. Along the southwest coast of Western Australia, they'd see weird balls of purple and green light that sped around at night, hovering and descending into the ocean. Apparently my great-great-grandfather used to talk about how people were 'driving' them around the sky back in the 1920s. I think it might be a phenomena similar to the plasma balls that have been observed elsewhere in the world. Still neat, who knows?"
20."In the '80s, a teenage girl ran away from home and was killed in a freak accident in my hometown. We heard stories for years about people seeing her — she died riding her bike and wearing a baseball cap. One night, I was coming home really late and was stopped at a red light all by myself. Out of the corner of my eye, so I turned to look. There she was, on her bike, baseball cap and all, staring at me. I looked forward for a millisecond, and by the time I looked over again, she was gone."
21."When I was 11 years old, I saw a UFO. I will swear on this until the day I die. It was around 9–9:30 at night, and it was the spring time. I was wide awake, completely sober, not on any meds. I looked out the window, and in between my house and my neighbor's house were a bunch of trees. Well, on the ground in this wooded area was a UFO. Except, the physical surroundings of it were unaffected. Not a single tree was crushed. This UFO sat there for about 10 minutes, then slowly took off into the air. It just went around in circles as it got higher, and as it got higher, the circles got wider. This lasted another five minutes or so until it vanished."
22.My friend G and I were traveling back from Winnipeg to the The Pas, Manitoba, Canada. The trip there took about six hours, as usual. I've done this trip numerous times, as The Pas is my hometown. On the way back, the first three and a half hours went by normally. I was driving the speed limit most of the time, as it was icy and snowing. So, we came up to the turn-off (where highway 6 turns off onto the 60) at about 4 p.m. At this point the conditions were ideal, the sun was just about at the horizon, and the sky was beautiful. This is where things got really fucking strange."
"After 20 minutes on the highway, a red van overtook us right before a sharp bend. When we came around the bend, the van had vanished, despite it being a long, straight highway here. I thought this was weird, but I didn't pay any mind.
The drive on this particular highway was supposed to be an hour long. After another 45 minutes of driving, my friend G said, 'Have you noticed there hasn't been any road signage?' I hadn't, but there was none at all. No signs indicating when a turn was coming up or how far we were from nearby towns. At this point, I noticed the sun hadn't moved an inch in the sky, and we hadn't seen another vehicle in a while. Unnerved, I sped up. I started having this overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. Then, I noticed the scenery. It was all wrong. The trees were the same height and densely packed together. This highway normally had a sparse tree line with small ponds and marshland along it.
We'd been on this highway for two hours now, and the sun still hadn't moved; there were still no road signs, there was no traffic, and we were not where we should have been. Out of nowhere, the sun set unnaturally fast, in about two minutes. We were enveloped in the darkness of a starless night, without a moon.
Just when this ominous, oppressive feeling started feeling unbearable, we came to the turn-off out of nowhere. Three hours we were stuck on that fucking highway that takes barely over an hour to travel. But it didn't end there. Just when I thought we were returning to normal, I glanced in the rearview mirror, thinking that for the first time in three hours, I'd seen headlights. I was wrong. In the back seat, sitting directly behind me, was a black human silhouette with glowing yellow eyes. G and I both saw it. I couldn't believe what we were experiencing. The next hour and a half were terrifying and mostly set in silence. We finally pulled into The Pas shortly before midnight, and I noticed our gas meter barely moved. We are totally lost on an explanation of what happened."
Now it's your turn! Do you have a paranormal, unexplained experience like these? If so, tell us all about them in the comments below or via this anonymous form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
