17 Of The Most Chill-Inducing, Inexplicable Events That People Have Actually Lived Through
To the absolute detriment of my sleep schedule, I love reading about creepy mysteries in people's lives. Recently, redditor u/Sean-Witheniand asked the r/AskReddit community to share the most unexplainable event that has happened to them. I scrolled for a while, and here are some of the most terrifying and baffling stories I found.
1."This happened just under six months ago, but I had intense dreams for about two weeks straight of the same man that I had never seen before in my life, and every single instance that I saw him, he was trying to hurt/kill me. Literally, every time I slept, he was suffocating me with a bag, slipping something in a drink, finding my house, stalking me, etc. After dreaming about him for two weeks or so, I met this man in real life at a gas station. We didn't talk to each other. I knew nothing about him, but he was there, and I could immediately tell it was him."
"I finished pumping my gas and got in my car, and this man came up in front of it, put his hands on the hood, and stared at me through the windshield. It was extremely creepy, and I couldn't leave.
It was late at night, so there weren't many people nearby, and I just got this horrible, gut-wrenching feeling of wanting to puke because something was very wrong. I honked my horn super loud, and he flinched and pulled away from my hood, so I took the opportunity to drive away.
I had no idea who he was and had never seen him before in my life, but for some reason, I saw him harming me in my dreams. I genuinely think that my fight-or-flight response at that moment and honking at him saved me from whatever he was going to do while camping out in front of my car."
2."I had sleep paralysis about seven years ago. I had just had surgery and was sore, so I slept on the couch the first night. I opened my eyes and could not move. What I'd guess was a demon or some kind of dark entity was standing over me. Then suddenly, I looked at myself in the mirror and had red glowing eyes. I woke up, and I was so terrified. I didn't give a shit how sore I was; I got into bed with my husband at the time."
3."There was a huge earthquake in San Francisco in the '80s. My dad was there for a conference. We felt the quake where we were, and I suddenly started screaming, 'Dad! Dad! Look out for the chandelier!' My mom and siblings were understandably freaked out. When we finally got ahold of him, he told us he'd been in a ballroom when the quake hit and had a sudden urge to jump to the side. A chandelier fell right where he was previously standing. My family never talks about it. It freaked everyone out severely."
4."Both of my parents (who were divorced) essentially died on the same day this past December. My dad was in a hospital in Detroit for a double bypass after his fifth heart attack and died from complications late on a Monday. Earlier that same day, around 4 p.m., I found out my mom had unexpectedly died in her home in a tiny town in upstate Michigan, four hours from Detroit. It's about as shitty a situation as you could imagine."
5."I was working in a lab with skeletal remains, many of which were Native American ancestral remains. I was used to working with skeletons, cataloging and measuring bones, and whatnot, and I had never experienced anything that felt supernatural. This lab was created to repatriate the Native American remains that had been excavated locally and had been severely mishandled by the university for decades. I had a box that contained only a skull, and when I opened the box, I felt anger resonating from this skull."
"While it was out of the box, it felt like someone was screaming inside my head. I finished as quickly as I could and returned the skull to its place. I had nightmares for several nights and eventually told the professor in charge about it.
She was a descendant of the tribe to which these remains belonged and took me very seriously. She added extra offerings to the altar in the lab and smudged the place (burned white sage), and the nightmares stopped. Never before nor after have I had such a visceral experience."
6."I was in high school at a friend's birthday party. Her parents booked us a suite at a resort hotel, the kind with a mini water park you can use free if you’re staying in the hotel. It was a pool party/sleepover, and we got the whole suite to ourselves, though her mom was in an adjoining room. We were staying up late watching movies, one was a horror movie about a murderer, and we were doing what teenage girls do: getting scared of nothing. Somehow we got it in our heads there was a killer outside waiting to break in and murder us."
"Me, having to be the brave little skeptic, decided I would prove to my friends we were safe by opening the curtains. There was a man standing right outside looking in through the window.
I closed the curtains quickly, and we were all screaming. Her mom came rushing in. We told her what happened, and she checked outside, but there was no man. To this day, I wonder what that man was doing.
Was he really a murderer who got scared away by our screaming? Was he some guy passing by that happened to look over at the exact moment the curtains opened? Did we just imagine the whole thing from sitting up and talking about how scared we were? Was he a peeping Tom trying to catch a glimpse of 14-year-old girls in pajamas? Did he overhear our conversation and think it would be funny to play a prank on us? Spooky."
7."I was at home after hanging out with my family all day. It was about 11 p.m. when I came in. I heard a low, creepy voice say, 'Fire, there is going to be danger.' I was so scared I thought my dad was messing with me, but no one was in the house, absolutely no one. The next day, we hung out again. It was midnight when we came in to get more drinks. We all smelled this horrible stench of smoke."
"We checked every usual place: microwave, oven, fireplace — nothing. We ran downstairs and could not find the fire. The smell was getting worse and was in the basement by the density of smoke.
We called the fire department, and they found an electrical fire in our wall. It would have burned our house down if we went to bed and thought it was fine. Yeah, $12,000 in damages, and it's all fixed. Never heard the voice again."
8."I used to visit my grandmother every couple of months or so — it wasn't a far drive, about 30 minutes. One day, I was at Walmart and randomly thought of her. Walmart was about halfway to her house, and I didn't buy perishables, so I figured, why not stop and see her? As I pull into her driveway, she is sitting on her front porch; she looks up at me and looks back down. I immediately knew something was wrong because she always jumped up to greet me. As I approached, I noticed her lips were blue, and I started calling 911. Her lungs were 80% filled with fluid, and she had two collapsed heart valves. The paramedics told me if I got caught at a red light, she'd probably be dead. She was around 80 years old at the time. She passed away at 95 a year ago."
9."I have no idea how I got home from a bar one night. I was living on my own and went out with some childhood friends and my brother. The next thing I remember was waking up in my childhood bedroom in my parents' house. My brother and friends were freaking out because they had no idea what happened to me. They didn't really understand what happened. They said I had two, maybe three drinks that got me really drunk, then started making plans to leave when I disappeared. I drove to the bar that night, and they went outside to see if my car was still there, which it was. My parents said four guys they had never seen carried me to the door and helped take me upstairs. My parents knew the people I was out with, but these were different people."
"About an hour later, I woke up at my parents' house. I got a message from one of the bartenders there with whom I was friendly. She told me she thought I was drugged. She said I had like two or maybe three drinks when I suddenly looked like I was black-out drunk. The next thing she knew, four guys she didn't know were helping me out the door.
The weird part was that the bar and my apartment were a solid 45 minutes from my parents' house. I have no idea who the guys were, what (if anything) was given to me, why something would have been given to me, or how they even knew where my parents lived.
I don't believe anything was stolen, nor was I injured in any way. My mom said the guys who took me to the door were normal-looking guys about my age and perfectly polite to her. In the years since that's happened, nobody has said, 'Bro, you were wasted that night we took you home.'
I just have no idea what happened."
10."When I was 21, my boyfriend (now my husband) had moved to the outskirts of Pittsburgh. I was in the process of preparing to move there myself and came down for a visit. When we were sleeping the first night, I was grabbed by the arm and pulled out of bed by a black figure. I screamed and fought, and when I came to or woke up, or whatever you call it, I was standing out of the bed right where I had been dragged to. Everyone convinced me it was a nightmare, and I put it out of my mind until I moved into the house."
"I lived there for about a year, and in that year, I had this same black figure come to me in my sleep multiple times. Sometimes, they would stand on the other side of the room, standing right over or grabbing me.
Once, they spoke and told me they wanted to bring me to hell. Eventually, we did move, and once we did, I never had those 'nightmares' again. No matter how illogical, I cannot figure out how I would have only night terrors in one house without some supernatural explanation."
11."I was still living at my parents' house, and at around 2:30 a.m., our Rottweiler was sitting at the back door barking, wanting to go out to use the bathroom. I threw on a hoodie and sweatpants and walked to the back door, where I found her growling and staring out the window. It was a little unnerving, but because of the dog, I felt safe enough to step out with her for a minute or two. As soon as I opened the door, she bolted to the corner of our property. On the side of the lawn she chose, we had one standalone lamp post that provided just enough light to get a rough idea of the landscape."
"I started making my way over to the dog, thinking that she didn't need to use the bathroom at all and just had the zoomies or something like that, so my plan was just to grab her and go back inside.
Suddenly, the dog does a complete 180 and hauls ass down our property line in the direction opposite of what I was facing. I turned around to follow her again and stopped dead in my tracks. This tall, thin, white figure was levitating probably five or six feet off the ground in our yard.
The fear flooded my body instantly. It didn't appear to have any limbs (from what I saw in a panic), and it almost looked like it was moving in the wind. The dog was following it, jumping and barking aggressively.
The adrenaline and fear coursing through my body gave me the strength to sprint over, scoop up this 80–90 lb dog, and sprint to the back door. I told my family the next morning, and they seemed pretty spooked, but they also weren't taking it super seriously. I have no idea what I saw."
12."I was sitting on the couch with my then-girlfriend, and an adjacent wall covered the stairs to the second floor. Suddenly, we hear what sounds like someone stomping/running down the stairs. Naturally, I jumped up, assuming someone had broken in, but there was nobody there. We checked every room upstairs, every closet, under every bed — nothing. We then went on to have a bunch of other weird and unexplained shit happen during the three years we lived in that house."
13."When I was a teenager, I almost died. I was on a cross-country team. I was running through a forest and suddenly got a cramp, which made me stop moving for a second. At that exact moment, I stopped running, and a tree landed exactly where I would've been. That cramp saved my life."
14."This isn't exactly easy to talk about, and people don't always believe me when I tell them, but here it is: I died. I got drunk and decided to go for a drive to clear my head (don't do that). It was a cool night, just perfect to have the windows down, and I wanted to hear the turbo whistle. It was about 11 p.m., so not too many people out in my area. I took a sharp turn in a 25mph zone at about 60mph about a mile from my house and rolled my truck. It was noisy; I was bloody almost instantly from hitting my nose/head, and I rolled, I'd say, probably four to five times."
"At the end of the rolls, I was stopped by a loud crashing sound that was very metallic. The path I took was through someone's driveway and into their garage. I was hanging out of the passenger window with broken bones, blood everywhere, and missing extremities; you can imagine the scene at this point.
Some part of the door, or fender, or something had pierced my chest. All I know is it was metal. I looked down at it, heard the people in the house scream to call an ambulance, and everything went black.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed, wearing the same clothes, and immediately running outside to see my truck parked in the driveway, completely intact. I walked up to it and touched the hood, and it was warm.
I hadn't driven since that morning around 8 a.m. It scared me shitless, and I ran back inside and checked my phone, then proceeded to sit in silence and stare at the floor for about three hours. No police reports, no newspaper articles, nothing.
I felt it, I saw it, I heard it. It wasn't a dream, and I don't do drugs or have any kind of condition where I hallucinate. I talked to a shaman about it, and she pretty much told me I died but got a second chance in another dimension/universe because it wasn't my time yet. I've had chills the whole time typing this; it really freaks me out."
15."It's not so much unexplainable, but by far the freakiest interaction I've had with a stranger. It was 2001. I was 14. I walked to McDonald's since it was five minutes from my house. I waited in line, got my bag of food, and walked over to the soda machine to fill my cup, and I realized they didn't give me a lid (this was one of those plastic souvenir cups, so I couldn't use a lid in the dispenser near the machine). I walked back to the counter and waited for the worker to turn and help me when a guy waiting in line next to me said, 'You better do something tomorrow.'"
"He was fair-haired, cleanly dressed, and wearing a T-shirt and shorts. He wore a Mets baseball hat and big, thick eyeglasses. He was a young guy, probably in his mid-30s or early 40s.
The McDonald's was crowded, so I didn't feel so isolated that if I had to, I would make a scene either verbally or physically. I was jarred because he was speaking forward but clearly talking to me. I said, 'Excuse me? Do what?'
He then turned to me and said, 'He's on the way out.' I was now creeped out because, like, who the fuck was he talking about? I then said, 'What the fuck are you saying? Who?'
I'll never forget the seriousness on his face before he said, 'Run.' Well, I left that cup on the counter, turned around very calmly, walked out of McDonald's, and proceeded to sprint home.
I lived in that town for another four years and never saw this guy again. (It was a big but small town, so I'm surprised.)
The only thing I can think of is that he just decided to mess with some random kid that day, and it ended up being me."
16."Many years ago, I woke up sick and couldn't go to school. It was the only time I had ever been sick for school. Anyway, I had a small black-and-white TV in my bedroom, and I turned it on and watched live as a space shuttle took off and then suddenly blew up. Many years later, I phoned in sick from work, something I had never done before. I turned on the TV just in time to watch live as an airplane flew into a tower."
17."This happened 25 years ago before everyone had access to cell phones and you couldn't find personal information online. My friend and I were driving when she decided to take a shortcut through an alley. Suddenly, I heard my cellphone ring, which I had just bought the week before. There was a lot of static, and a woman on the other end said, 'You need to get out of there, turn around, and go the other way.'"
"I just looked at my friend, confused, when all of a sudden, we saw a man standing in the middle of the alley with a knife in his hands.
My friend and I panicked and started screaming as she put the car in reverse and got out of there. To this day, I have no clue who called me or how they knew my number since I hadn't given it to anyone besides my friend."
Did you ever have an inexplicable event happen in your life? Let us know in the comments, or you can fill out this anonymous form.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
