People Who've Witnessed Unexplainably Strange And Bizarre Phenomena Are Sharing Their Experiences

Have you ever experienced something so surreal, you couldn't quite find an explanation for why or how it happened? Redditor u/I_Use_Games took to r/AskReddit and asked people to share the freaky, creepy, and straight-up bizarre things that have happened to them, and now I'll be sleeping with the lights on for the next couple of days.

Netflix / Via giphy.com

Here are some of the most bone-chilling and goosebump-erupting responses:

1."I was talking on the phone to my dad in the garden, about 15 years ago. I saw an orange light slowly come up over some trees behind my house, then take off straight up at a ridiculous speed. I stood there in silence, and so did he. I explained to him what I’d just seen, and he said he’d just seen the exact same thing. He was over 100 miles away in Manchester at the time."

2."I was 13 at the time and was about to go to bed. I was brushing my teeth in front of my bedroom window, staring into the dark, when I suddenly heard someone screaming outside. I stopped brushing so I could hear it better. Someone was screaming out my name. I sort of froze and kept listening. More voices joined, all screaming my name and laughing loudly. It was kind of like an audience at a sports game. It went on for about five minutes. When it stopped, I (in shock) went downstairs to my parents to ask them if they’d heard anything. It was impossible not to hear as it was very loud. They had not heard anything. I assume it was some sort of a hallucination. I still feel weird when I’m alone in my room late at night."

—u/Sorry_Connection8303

3."In my early 20s, I was home alone. I woke up to my cellphone ringing but missed the call. The number I missed the call from was my landline home phone number. I got up and found the cordless phone on the kitchen counter. I looked everywhere, but no one was in the house, and the doors were all locked."

4."When I was at university in my second year; we lived in a terraced house. I have a history of vivid/lucid dreams and had just recently at this time experienced a couple episodes of sleep paralysis. One night, I woke up (I think, anyway), and I remember staring at the doorway completely frozen and seeing the shadows of two men there. They were whispering about taking me and discussing whether I was asleep. I remember hearing, 'Shh, go back to sleep.'"

"It was completely fuzzy and dark, and I was in that very much blurred reality stage of not being able to tell if I was awake properly or not. I couldn't move at all and chalked it up to sleep paralysis and went back to sleep. I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except the police knocked on our door that afternoon (I wasn't in, my housemates told me) and said our neighbor had had their house broken into that same night. The real kicker is that at the time, our front door lock was broken — anyone could have come in and left without us knowing. To this day, I will truly never know if it was a coincidentally bad day to have a nightmare or a lucky escape. 🤷‍♀️"

—u/Status_Ad_1146

5."When I was 18 years old, I was driving home from a friend’s house with another friend. We were on the highway doing about 70 mph and made this trip often. It’s a big highway between two towns, so there are just fields on either side. Something on two legs ran alongside my car. I saw it in the rearview mirror and out my side window. It was not a kangaroo — it was human-like. It had long arms and was obviously extremely fast. My friend saw it, too, and then it just went off the road back into the grass. Neither of us could explain it."

6."I worked as an under-butler in a large Scottish castle in the early 2000s. One night, I was the only person in the house and decided to throw a load of laundry in before bed. I walked down the service hallway, into the ironing room, and from there to the washing machine room. I got my laundry in and then started to leave. I turned the lights off in the washing machine room, and suddenly everything was black. The lights weren’t on in the ironing room..."

"My first thought was, 'It’s weird that I didn’t turn the lights on in here when I came in, but they aren’t on, so obviously I didn’t.' The ironing room had huge ironing tables the size of snooker tables, and as I started to walk through, I kept bumping into them. After a couple of times of bumping into them, I was suddenly filled with a terrible, spine-tingling feeling that something was there, and not to look toward the sewing room (another room that came off the ironing room). I fumbled my way through the ironing room, back to the service hall in a panic. The hall lights were on, and everything was fine. That is the whole story. I didn’t see anything. However, there are some problems..."

"To this day, I am confident that I turned the lights on in the ironing room when I went in. It wasn’t possible to move through the room without bumping into things a bunch of times, as my exit demonstrated. The light in the ironing room was controlled by a very large switch that made a loud clicking noise. I didn’t hear it click off when I was in the washing room. In the days that followed, the family and the butler returned home, and I had forgotten about the entire incident. A week or so later, I suddenly remembered it happening, and said to the butler, 'I’ve never heard of any ghost stories about the castle. Are there any?' He kind of dismissively said, 'Oh, they say there is a white lady in the ballroom, and [room name redacted] is apparently haunted, but that’s it. Oh, and they say the sewing room is haunted.'”

7."In Eastern Kentucky, when I was around 14, a friend and I were on a walk in the middle of the day when we realized there were two moons in the sky. We watched for around 15 minutes as one of the 'moons' slowly shrunk until it disappeared. 17 years later, and my friend and I still talk about it."

8."I fly helicopters for a living. I was working on a power line one year and was going back to our landing zone, and noticed an opening in the trees where I saw what appeared to be a leg. I came back and tried to get as low as I could into the clearing, thinking it was a person. It was a full-grown cow that had been completely skinned. There were no farms around, and the animal didn’t appear to be cut up in any way. I went back to the landing zone, picked up one of my ground crew members, and flew back with him just so he could verify that I wasn’t crazy. During the flight back, we were both kind of in awe because we had no idea how that animal got to where it was, and why it had no skin on its entire body. It looked like a perfect cow, sans skin."

—u/Machismo0311

9."A few years ago, I was staying in Alabama with a friend. One day, I was driving down a steep road in the rain and fog. It wasn’t quite night yet, but it was getting dark. Within the blink of an eye, there was a little girl on the side of the road walking toward my car. I thought I was about to hit her head-on, but then she disappeared. I panicked and turned around, but there was no one. I’ll never forget it because my brain just can’t make sense of it."

10."This has happened many times in my life, but usually years apart. People sometimes see a 'ghost' of me. I don’t know what else to call it. I’ve never seen it. This first happened when I was a kid. My stepdad saw me in the kitchen — I was just standing still. He approached and called at me slightly angrily, as it was late and I should have been in bed. As he got near me, I vanished. He freaked out and told my mom, but when they came to my room, I was fast asleep in bed. They told me the next day, and he was still shaken up by it."

"Many years later, an old girlfriend would enter my room and find me kneeling down behind the bed, just staring blankly. She started talking to me, and I didn’t answer. She asked me if I was okay, and when I didn’t respond, she walked over and around the bed, but I suddenly wasn’t kneeling. I was standing straight, sticking out of the floor, and then I disappeared. She lost her shit — ran out of the room, down the stairs, out of the kitchen, and into the garden, which is where I actually was, just relaxing in a chair. She was terrified. I calmed her down, but she wouldn’t go inside that house by herself for ages, especially not into our room. We are still friends, and she still brings this up every now and then, still really unsettled by it."

—u/formicational

11."Imagine the situation: me, a 13-year-old girl, walking with my dog in fresh snow. Really fresh, with five centimeters of snow. No one around. I see a big (really, really big) black dog. I look at my dog, who's terrified and trying to get home. We run home. I wait for 10 minutes and go check on that dog (I was stupid, yes). There are no dog footprints. None at all. On fresh, fresh snow. Only footprints of me and my dog. I checked all areas — nope, nothing. It wasn't a hallucination. My dog nearly peed when he saw that giant black dog."

12."I traveled a few minutes back in time. I had to take my sister to her appointment. She was late, because it was six and her appointment was at six. She had seen her phone and came running. I saw my phone to confirm she was late, and there was a clock on the way out of the house — it showed the same time. The place was only 15 minutes away, but on the way there, I made a wrong turn, so we had to go around half a neighborhood until we finally got there. She was about to get out of the car and dash to the door, but one last look at her phone stopped her. We were 10 minutes early. We were so confused! It was unexplainable."

—u/Ponchotm

13."I live outside city limits. There are very few houses near my home and many tall bushes and trees around the house, with a small mountain in the distance. The nights are very quiet, and there are no streetlights, so after dark, the only lights are the lights from my house and the moonlight. There are two trees a little away from my house that stand close to one another. One night, while I was outside my house, I realized there was only one of those trees."

14."I used to work at a place where I’d fix car parts. While I was in the shop, a customer was coming over to me at the register. My manager was behind me. All of a sudden, the lights went out for probably just a second. When they came back on, the customer was gone. I asked my manager where the customer was and why the lights went out. He had no idea what I was talking about, and that there was no customer. I described what the customer was wearing, and he maintained there was no one there. I asked the other guys why the lights went out and if they saw where the customer was, but I was met with the same response. That was three years ago, and I still have no explanation for what happened."

—u/PatSHIELD

15."When I was a kid, around 4, I used to wake up every night with the feeling that I was being tickled. It wasn't a fun type of being tickled, but the type that's gone on for too long and starts to hurt. I would run from my bed into my parents' room, and then it would instantly stop. In the house, this occurred where the floor was carpeted, and in the door frames, there were small bars that kept the carpet down between the rooms. Every time I crossed the bars to get to my parents, the tickling would stop. One night, the tickling started again, and I ran to my parents' room. But just before crossing the bars, I stopped, turned, and yelled, 'Go away!' It never happened again."

16."One night, years after high school ended and I'd already gotten married, I had a vivid and very sad dream about the first boyfriend I ever really loved. We were 15 and 16, and had broken up about three years later because he got really into drugs. I had this dream maybe nine years after that. I dreamed I was walking down a crowded sidewalk in some big city, and I bumped into him. He was crying, and he asked me for help. I can't remember if the dream changed then or if I woke up, but it was just that little snippet of seeing his face. It was so clear. I still remember how his beautiful blue eyes looked."

"I don't know why I waited a couple more years to call his mother and ask about him, but I did call her. It turns out he had died in a freak accident around the time I had that dream. He had a car in his garage that he was working on. He had climbed on the hood for some reason, and he fell. He broke his neck, and it was fatal. Now, I'm always sad and a little creeped out every time I think of that dream. Probably always will be."

—u/Produkt921

17."I was in Ghana, West Africa, and two people were arguing about family land or something like that. One of them removed his pants, sat down on his bare ass, and said, 'If I'm lying, may I be struck by lightning,' and he was immediately struck by lightning. We all started running. I guess he was lying; it was the most bizarre thing I'd ever witnessed. When I came back home, I researched the occult, but I still don't know or understand what that was. Shit still gives me nightmares."

18."I was 7 or 8 years old. My mom put me to bed and went to my sister's room to do the same for her. I was tucked in with my head on my two pillows. Both my hands were wrapped up in the blankets because it was a cold night, and we didn't have too much money to heat the home. Then, without warning, one of the pillows flew out from under my head and toward the wall with an insane force, as if someone had violently pulled it out from under me."

"I turned over, and there was nobody there! There's no way someone could have pushed it, and I was facing the direction it would have been pulled from. I ran to my sister's room to hug my mom and ask her what on earth happened. She dismissed it and told me to go back to bed. Naturally, I stayed up the whole rest of the night. I still can't work out the physics of what happened to this day."

—u/LateNightMoo

19."I think I was 14 at the time, living in a nice part of a very busy city. I woke up, had breakfast, and waited for my parents to come downstairs. They didn’t come. I looked for them but couldn’t find them, and couldn’t find my sisters either. I went outside, and there was no one. Literally zero people in an incredibly busy area on a weekend. I panicked fully. I looked everywhere for people, but they just weren’t there. I fully freaked out thinking everyone disappeared."

20."When I was a student in chemistry class, I heard a beaker break behind me. I jumped, but nobody else reacted. A few people were looking at me weird. It turns out that nothing broke, and I was just hearing things. 30 seconds later, someone dropped and shattered a beaker behind me. I spent a year wondering if I had some weird undiscovered superpower."

—u/someguywithahat

21."When I was 4, I got 'lost' in my great aunt’s house. I used a bathroom I didn’t normally use, and when I exited the hallway that led to the rest of her house, there was a dead end. I wandered around between the two rooms I could get to and the hallway for what felt like several minutes. Eventually, when I exited one of the rooms, the hallway was back open to the rest of her house. It was over 30 years ago, so while I’m not certain, I can’t imagine I didn’t shout for help. I have no idea what caused this — whether I imagined it or it was a dream, or a false memory, but I have thought about it a lot through the years, and it always felt incredibly real."

22."I was in the sixth grade and going through the stored stuff (looking for old books, letters, and scrapbooks) in the dilapidated part of my ancestral home. I swear I could see my great-great-grandfather's brother (whom I had seen only in old photos and who'd died very young) from outside the window yelling at me to get out. I got scared and ran out, and the whole roof came crashing down."

—u/JolarPet

23."This is my wife's story before I met her. She swears by the details provided. My wife was home with her 2- and 5-year-old daughters as well as her 6-year-old niece. My wife was playing with the kids when she happened to look up from the kids' room and saw a six-foot-tall tan figure pass by the door frame. She claims that this 'tan man' had no eyes, was completely hairless, and also had translucent skin, as if she could see partly through it in some areas. It walked 'flowy,' as if its torso was leading it instead of head and shoulders. She claims it made no noise when it passed, but looked directly at everyone in the room."

24."My mom passed away in February 2021 in Missouri. I live in Florida. I flew up there for the funeral with my husband and daughter, stayed for a couple of days to handle her belongings, and then came home. Life goes on. I grieved. About a month or two later, I'm lying in my bed in the morning, but I'm wide awake. My phone rings, and I answer it. It says 'mom' on the caller ID. When I click it on, I can clear-as-day hear her voice: 'Well, hiii there! [chuckle] Did I wake you up?' Now, I'm just sitting there, upright on my bed. All I can think to say is, 'Mom?' And as soon as I said that, the phone clicked a couple of times and then went dead. It did show on the caller history that her phone had called mine. Either her boyfriend or my brother kept her phone for whatever reason, but they wouldn't have done a prank like that. I did try to call the phone back, but it went straight to her voicemail."

—u/floridianreader

25."I went to a friend who was a psychic. Yeah, yeah, I know. I joked about her 'skills' with her all the time. But when my birth father passed away, I went to her. I had not spoken much about my father, posted about him, nor had she met him. He didn't live nearby; his obituary was simple with bare details, and he did not have an online presence. What she said to me were details no one knew. And I mean details. She said phrases only he would use in anger. She said it in the same tone, too, and it was frighteningly eerie. It made me a believer in her."

26."Shortly after my mother passed away, I was going through and organizing her belongings in her room. I was talking out loud as if I were talking to her. There were some boxes with family photo albums I’d been looking for that I hadn’t been able to find, and it was really worrying me. I was sitting on the floor and said aloud, 'Where did you leave those albums, mom?' Very slowly, her closet door opened on its own. A slow, creaking movement from nearly totally closed to halfway open."

"I was as terrified as I’d ever been in my life. I froze and didn’t move, but I looked at exactly eye level and there was a cardboard box labeled 'Albums' in my mother's handwriting on the lower shelf of the closet. I am not a religious or even spiritual person, and I thought that there might be some imbalance in the hanging of the closet door. I went back to the door many times and tested it by wiggling it back and forth and leaving it in different positions, but it’s never moved that way since."

—u/Virtual-Elderberry31

27."Not me, but my dad. When I was younger, my biological mom and her husband kidnapped me and took off to another state. My dad said that he was finally starting to accept that he may never see me again after nearly a year of searching, and then one day when he was on a walk, this little girl came up to him and asked, 'Are you looking for a little girl?' He looked at her, confused, and she just turned around and pointed up the block at a group of kids playing, and said, 'She's right there!' He walked closer, passed the girl to try to get a better look, and saw me in the group. He turned around to figure out what the little girl's deal was, and she was just gone, without a trace."

28."When I was a child, I was brushing my teeth with my mom in the bathroom with me (supervising, because I was at that age where I was learning to do it myself, but she wanted to be there if I needed help). I bent down to spit into the sink, and when I stood back up, my reflection was still bent down. I watched it as it stood back up and caught up with me, but it looked absolutely dead behind the eyes. I'm 20 now, and fucking petrified of mirrors."

—u/Longjumping-Buy-706

29.And finally: "A few years ago, my wife and I lost our infant son at birth. Fast-forward to the day before what would have been his second birthday. My wife and I were home alone, in mid-November. We were sitting on the couch; I was playing Xbox, and my wife was working. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a balloon that was upstairs in my daughter's room started to float down the stairs. I figured it was just losing helium. The balloon floated down the stairs, around the staircase, then floated up onto the middle of the ottoman in front of us. No windows were open, there was no heat, no A/C, no fans were on…and it just floated up and down in front of us for about a minute or so. BUT THEN, the balloon floated BACK UP the fucking stairs. What did the balloon say, you ask? 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY.' I still, to this day, get the chills when I think of it."

Have you ever experienced something that you couldn't believe yourself, or couldn't find any logical reasoning behind how it could have happened? Let me know in the comments, and we can be spooked together.

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.