May 3 is celebrated as Paranormal Day, throughout the world: a day so spooky, it conjures the perfect setting to share experiences that are beyond the realm of scientific explanation. The day ‘honours’ everyone who believes in the existence of supernatural entities and those who’ve reported of appalling incidents. Here’s a Reddit thread where people have discussed paranormal experiences. Read on if you’re in for a scare!
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“One day, my new wife and I were having an argument. I can’t even recall what it was about. She walked down the block to get a cup of coffee and cool off, and I was alone in the house. The way the place was built was incredibly haphazard. There was a bedroom and living room on one side, then a bathroom with two entrances. On the other side of the bathroom was a hallway that had windows in one side and two bedrooms on the other. From my bedroom, I could look across the hall into the bathroom, then through the bathroom and down the other hall.
I was standing at my dresser, and I just noticed movement out of the corner of my eye, and looked down there. There was… and honest to god, this gives me goose bumps just typing it, a black figure. It was maybe three feet tall, and it was only vaguely humanoid. It looked like black scribbles, like someone had scribbled a human shape, but the scribbles moved, like electricity arcing, that’s the best way to describe it. There was no sound that I could remember. I distinctly remember when I saw it I wasn’t afraid, just like, WTF? Then it noticed me looking at it. I can’t say it turned around, it just, focused on me I guess. THEN I was scared.
I didn’t move, didn’t scream, nothing, I was just frozen, because it just fucking came at me, it RUSHED down the hall towards me. I have no idea what it intended, but as soon as it entered the bathroom, the door closest to me just SLAMMED shut on it. Then, I screamed. I yelled for my wife. She wasn’t home. I went the fuck outside, into the daylight, and didn’t go back in until she got home about 10 minutes later.”
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“Of all the stories my grandmother tells, the creepiest one deals with a young apprentice to a witch doctor who travelled around the country healing people. He was murdered West of Guatemala City and they had arranged to bring his body back to be buried there. They paid bottom dollar to have some poor bastard go pick up the body and bring it back in his pickup truck. The guy gets there, loads the coffin on his truck and starts heading back, but his truck breaks down on the way. He gets out and frantically tries to get the truck back on the road, as he has to be back in time for the services to start. He is completely alone in the dark hours of the early morning and a man in a nice suit comes from out of nowhere to help him out.
The man gets his truck back in working order and walks back down the road into the darkness. The guy gets the body back in time and after some prep, they begin the services. He happens to walk by the open coffin to pay his respects and sees that the dead man in the coffin is the very same man who had helped him with his truck. To this day, I get shivers thinking about it.”
4.
Two years ago I had a horrible case of the flu. I remember going to bed on the third day of my sickness and as far as I can remember went straight to sleep.
When I regained consciousness I’m sitting against a tree, 1.5 miles into my favorite hiking trail on a widows peak that overlooks the Illinois River at about 9 am.
I have no recollection of getting there, but it’s a 35 miles drive most of which is on a winding pig-tail of a road. Most of the trail is either steep, along sheer cliff, washed out(read no real trail) or a combination of all three. I don’t even know what possessed me to go out there. The only clue I have is that at around 11 pm the night before I wrote “I go to seek a great perhaps…” on Facebook which suggests that I did this at night which is even more disconcerting as my only flashlight was at home.
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“I was alone in my apartment and I decided to take a shower. I locked the door out of habit; it can only be locked and unlocked from the inside. My clean and dirty clothes are thrown on the floor of the bathroom in two separate piles.
When I finished taking the shower, my clothes, both dirty and clean, were neatly folded in two separate stacks on the floor. The door was still locked. I take very quick showers. This happened in the span of five minutes. I have no explanation and I get goosebumps just thinking about it.”
6.
One of my close friends lived next to a house that was always vacant. It would sell, people would move in, and then one day they’d be gone and the house would be up for sale again. One summer, when the house was listed again and the last family had moved out, we decided to go take a tour and eat some Jack in the Box we had picked up.
We weren’t very smart sometimes and thought it would be cool to play chicken with whatever was haunting this house. My friend was really skinny and crawled through the dog door that led straight into the kitchen, then opened the back door for me. We went through all of the rooms and it was pretty nondescript, just a typical ’50s style bungalow house with a similar layout to his home, lots of pretty woodwork and built-ins.
After we determined that the house really wasn’t that creepy after all, we sat down in the dining area, on the floor, across from a little horseshoe shaped nook with a kitchen table and built-in bench. It was dusk out but the windows didn’t have curtains and it never got that dark in our city, anyway. At this point, we had been in the house for maybe 25 minutes and after we finished eating we stayed sitting just to hang out and talk since we weren’t spooked out at all.
All of a sudden, mid-sentence, completely out of nowhere, my vision went black and I felt this eerie coldness wash all over me (I’m getting chills thinking about it), a feeling so thick I felt like it penetrated my through my body down to my bones. At the very same moment this happened, my friend screamed. I virtually could not see anything and was groping around trying to find something to grab onto and I felt so unsettled and ..cold. There’s really no other word for it. After what felt like hours, I felt my friend’s hands in mine and he pulled me to my feet and dragged me through the house to the back door. He kept pulling on my arm and I still couldn’t see anything. We got outside and slowly ..you know that feeling when you get a whole body shiver and it runs down your spine? As soon as I was outside, that’s what I felt, except this was a whole body shiver that started at the tip of my toes and went all the way up to my scalp and unexpectedly and suddenly I could see again.
My friend was as pale as a sheet and looked absolutely terrified. I felt off and sort of, gross, I guess is the best word, and in shock. I told him that I couldn’t see at all until I was outside, that it felt like I had been enveloped in blackness. He was just staring at me and I finally asked him why he had screamed. He hugged me and told me that he pulled me out of the house as soon as I started reaching around like I was blind because a little girl who was completely black, and yet see through, crawled out from under the table we were across from and sat on top of me.”
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“I grew up in a haunted house. I never want to experience any of that again….EVER. The scariest thing that I can remember is when I was about 8 or 9, I remember waking up sometime in the middle of the night and heard the noise. Our house was small and we didn’t have any fans going that made any noise so we could hear everything throughout the house. What I did hear was down the hallway on top of the washing machine. We played board games that night and left them on top of the washer. When I woke up that night I kept hearing the wheel from the game Life spinning and spinning. I put the blankets over my head and fell asleep that way.”
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“One time, at like 10 PM, I was hanging out at my best friends store. (His Dad owns the store) We were just chilling, when some random old dude comes inside. He looked pretty messed up–raggy clothes, very skinny/bony, and smelled–I assumed he was drunk.
He randomly points at my friends dad and says, “Something bad is going to happen to your family, soon. More bad things will then come in the course of three years (or something to that effect)
Later that week, my friends uncle was headed to Canada with his friends (for a visit). When he was coming home, there was an elderly man driving the wrong way on the freeway. He hits my friends uncle and his friend head-on, killing everyone.”
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“On my 12th birthday I was on the way to the bike shop to get a new bike, I was with my dad, his girlfriend and my brother. We was still about 10 minutes away from the town center, so no where near the bike shop. Some random, old, creepy looking guy came up to us, looked down at me and said; “You buying a bike?” I looked at my dad, confused and kinda scared.
We told him that we were on our way to buy a bike. He then started going on about how I MUST get a helmet and wear it ALL the time! We was a little freaked out but we just assumed he was a weirdo and just forgot about it.
A few hours later I was riding through the park on my new bike and I fell off. I didn’t fall very hard and landed on grass so it was cool. As I went to get up brush myself off, I looked up and he was just standing there, looking disappointed and shaking his head. He thing shook his index finger at me and said; “I told you to wear a helmet.”
At this point I just shit myself and rode as fast as I could home! What is even weirder though is the fact that I have moved about 40-50 miles away since then and I still see him every once in a while. I don’t believe in guardian angels but it just creeps me out.”
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“When I was 11 years old, I woke up one night and saw a man standing in my room, opening and closing my dresser drawers. He was tall, pale, and shiny, but he looked corporeal–not translucent or ghostly or anything. I couldn’t move at all, but I pissed myself instantly. I shut my eyes as tight as I could, but when I opened them, he was still there, opening and closing drawers. I kept my eyes closed for a long time, and finally, after what seemed like hours, he was gone. The next morning, a lot of my shirts and pants were tied in knots. I came to the conclusion that I had a very vivid dream, and perhaps my sister played a joke on me by tying my clothes in knots.
Flash forward 15 years. We had long since moved out of the house, and no one had lived there since. I stopped by one day with my mom and two aunts, who had lived in the same house when they were kids. When we walked into my bedroom, my mom and my older aunt start teasing my younger aunt about the “silver man” she saw one time. My jaw hit the fucking floor.”
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“My uncle died a couple of years ago of cancer. A month later, my sister told me that she was having a dream completely unrelated to him, when suddenly he appeared to her, smiled and said “Hey I’m fine now.” She woke up crying because she felt that he was finally at peace.
A week later I was having a dream and suddenly my uncle appeared and smiled at me. I looked at him and said “Phil?” He smiled and shrugged as if to say “Yeah it’s me, you can guess why I’m here because your sister already told you.” I then woke up.
In all honesty, it probably was just my subconscious reacting to what my sister told me, but it was nice nonetheless.”
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“I grew up in an a ‘haunted home.’ I’m an atheist, and don’t believe in the supernatural, so I believe that someday a valid reason will be found for my experiences, but for right now I can’t explain them. Objects would randomly move in my home. Sometimes when I came home from school, the pictures would be off the wall and stacked in the floor with none of them broken, the doors would lock and unlock themselves, and there were lights that would follow the creek behind my house and there were a lot of unexplained noises. If someone wasn’t normally in my house, such as a visitor, they would often mention being touched or shoved or just become extremely unnerved.”
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“My parents had been having trouble conceiving and had finally scheduled an appointment for fertility treatment on a Friday. The Monday before the said appointment, my dad woke up in the middle of the night to a bright blue glow, illuminating the entire room. He rolled over, and standing over my mother was this shrouded female figure, no showing face, floating, only visible from the waist up.
He wasn’t scared, only curious. He asked who it was… No answer. He asked what it wanted… It turned around and began to glide away. He jumped out out bed to follow it. When he made it to the hall, it had turned into his office. He made it to the office just in time for it to turn back to him and “shatter into sparkles”. Again, he was never scared. Just felt an overwhelming sense of calm and peace.
Dad told mum the next day. On Wednesday, mum took another pregnancy test… I think you can see where this is going. My birth was heralded by an angel. Can you guess what my name is? Haha”
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“I’m not much of a religious person and neither do I believe in the paranormal. However 2 similar experiences got me thinking. This happened in Chennai, India. I worked in a company just outside the city in a place called Siruseri that was being developed as a special economic zone with lots of corporate offices. This was back in 2009 and there were only one or two companies that had completed offices. There were lots of construction work going on and you can’t see anyone in the road after 8 PM.
Once I started from work late at about 10 PM and I was riding my motorcycle. Just as I exited my campus into the road, there was a man waving his hands asking for a ride. Since there was no public transportation there at that time, I stopped to help. He wanted to get to the nearest bus stop which was around 5 kms away. Since I was going through that route, I didn’t mind and I asked him to hop on. My motorcycle has this small back rest which makes hopping on the back seat a tad bit difficult for anyone. So I made sure he was able to get on the bike before I started. The road was empty and I was riding at about 90 kmph. I was thinking about something and I completely forgot to stop at the bus stop that the man requested for. I was about to enter the toll plaza for the highway and I just remembered that the man needed to get down.
I just turned around to say sorry and I was in for a shock as the man was not there. I couldn’t grasp the situation and I pulled over. I thought for a moment and the only possible explanation was that the man could have fallen down somewhere in the road. But then again because of the back rest, it is not easy to get down from the bike and even if the person tries to get off the bike, he couldn’t do it without shaking the bike that’s going at 90 kmph. I once thought for a moment to go back and check the roads. But I freaked out and went straight to home.
I stopped helping hitch hikers after that. But as fate would have it, in a road that’s parallel to the road I mentioned previously, a police officer who was standing by the road, waved at me to stop. I couldn’t ignore him since he was a cop and I stopped. He asked me for a ride till the Toll plaza. Having a bad experience a couple of months, this time I was double sure to confirm that he got settled in comfortably and I even confirmed it with him. Once I reached the toll plaza, to my horror the cop wasn’t there. Since then I have never stopped for anyone on that particular stretch.”
Done reading? Well, look underneath your bed now.
Design Credits: Aakansha Pushp