I moved to my dad's when I was 10, and I didn't know anyone in the area except for the family my dad was friends with: a single mom with three kids. Luckily, there was a girl a couple of years older than me; she was 12 at the time I met her. We got to know each other a little over a couple of years.
We weren't close, but we ended up having the same friends. One night, my friend Rob was hanging out with her and her younger brother. They happened to be in the house alone because my friend's mom was at work; her mother had been helping this one lady through her work and got to know her fairly well.
She found out her sister was in a mental institution and had been let out recently. The night Rob was hanging out with my friend, they got a knock on the door. My friend thought it was just their mom since she knocks a certain way when coming in, and he answered it without thinking.
Rob wasn't supposed to be there, and he took off through the window to his house down the road. He never thought twice about it. It wasn't her mom; it was the sister of the lady her mom was helping, and she figured out from talking to her sister where her family lived and her mom's working schedule.
She came in. This is where I don't know the details, and I'm glad I don't. My friend's younger brother got away to the neighbor's house to call the police.
Delaney brutally murdered my friend a week before Christmas, decapitated her, and left her body naked in a bathtub. She even hid her head; they had to look through the presents. I don't know where they found it, but they did.
I wasn't allowed to go to her funeral. [Music] It happened to my wife's grandmother about 15 years ago while we were still dating. Her husband had just passed away about a year previously, but she'd been going down to the library and volunteering.
He was exercising socialization. This was in the winter, so her walk back was while it was getting dark. The library closed at 5:00, and there was some extra stuff to do before everyone actually left.
On this particular night, she turned down a ride from another volunteer because she needed to stay in shape. The house was about a mile away through some lightly wooded area in South Texas, and as she was about halfway home, she noticed someone behind her. He was walking the same direction and gaining on her, which in itself is not all that particular; she's old and thus not particularly fast.
But in this case, he seemed vaguely sinister. They kept walking. Pretty soon, he was right behind her, then he fell into pace, just staying behind her.
Now she knows something's up, but she's almost home. She can see the top of her driveway coming up, and she leaves her lights on so it'll look like someone's home. When she's walking in, she just needs to make it another 150 yards.
Around that time, she said he was so close that she could feel his breath on her neck. At around maybe 50 yards, it happened: a strong hand on her shoulder. "Okay," he said, "don't turn around and hand over your purse, or I'll cut you.
" She stops for a second, then takes one big step forward, turns, and shoots the guy in the neck with the . 38 she keeps in her purse. The guy spent the next five years in a prison hospital before he died of complications.
My wife's grandmother passed last year, but up to the end, she lamented that she pulled the trigger too soon. When I was young, I'd say eight to eleven-ish, my sister, who is seven years older, would babysit when my parents were out. At the time, she smoked a lot, and my parents made her smoke outside, of course.
So I'd follow her outside, play around, annoy her, and such. One day, my sister notices a car at the end of the driveway, just sitting in the road. It's a white SUV with a bike rack on top; it has the most tinted windows I've ever seen, and you could not see inside from the side.
It sat there until she went inside, then would drive to the end of the road and sit in the church parking lot and wait—wait until she'd come out again for another smoke, and it would repeat this. Oddly enough, my sister is a brave lady and just kind of ignored it—that is until the next day, while my parents were out again, and it showed up again. It would sit at the end of the driveway and just watch.
I don't know what the driver was doing, but he was watching my sister. I know because if I didn't go out, I'd watch from the front window, and it would just sit there and watch my sister. She told my father, who was a sheriff's deputy at the time, and he called the cops and made a complaint.
They showed up, looked around, but the SUV was nowhere to be seen. Months went by with nothing. Then one day, a good nine months after this had all started, and around four months since the last sighting, it was back.
It became a regular occurrence. Another day, my sister was outside doing her nasty habit, and sure enough, here it comes. This time, we were all alone, as usual, and she decides she's had enough.
She tells me to stay in the carport, and she's going to go confront them. She starts walking toward the SUV, and halfway down the driveway, she would later remark to us, "I felt a tingle like I knew if I went any further, I was dead. " I was paralyzed by fear.
the bed and saw something. I thought I would just come out to get some food to make sure I wasn't dreaming or imagining things. Minji, feeling a mix of confusion and concern, asks him what he saw.
The boy hesitates for a moment, then says, "I saw a woman under your bed. " Minji's heart drops. She quickly remembers that her apartment is old and has a reputation for odd happenings, but she tried to dismiss those thoughts.
Deciding it was best to head back inside, they walked back to her apartment in silence. As they entered, the atmosphere felt heavy, and Minji could swear she felt a cold breeze brush past her. She locked the door behind them, feeling a sense of safety return.
But when she glanced toward the bed, her heart raced again as she thought about what the boy had said. To dispel her fear, she joked, "Maybe it was just the ghost of a former tenant grabbing a midnight snack! " They both laughed nervously, but inside, she wasn't so sure.
That night, she stayed wide awake, listening to every creak and whisper of the old building around her, haunted by the image of what might be lurking just out of sight. Your bed, there's a man sleeping there. They called the police and discovered that a homeless man had been living in Min-ji's apartment, sleeping under the bed for two months.
The boy only saw him because he was lying on the floor, so he had a clear view under the bed. I was driving a shortcut from Twentynine Palms, California, to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Twentynine Palms is located in the desolate high desert east of LA.
The shortcut was all two-lane road through total nothingness, except for passing through Amboy. Amboy is a nearly abandoned town, nearly as far below sea level as Death Valley. So, I was driving by myself in the afternoon and proceeded to drive up into the mountain range between Amboy and I-40.
Once I reached the top, I'm driving north through a canyon with high grass on both sides of the road. Up ahead, I see some stuff in the middle of the road. As I approached, I slowed down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, a suitcase open with clothes scattered everywhere, and two bodies laying face down in the road—a man and a woman.
I stopped a hundred feet or so away, and the hair on the back of my neck was standing up. Being a Marine, I reached under the seat and pulled out a 9-millimeter pistol and chambered a round. Something seemed very wrong.
It looked too perfect, as if it were staged in an ambush. Something was just wrong. As I scanned the road, I saw a line I could drive past; the guy in the road on his left swerved to the right of the woman behind the Fiero, and I'd be on the other side.
I dropped it into first gear, punched it down, and drove the line I planned. I passed the back of the Fiero without hitting it or either of the bodies in the road. I continued forward a couple of hundred feet and slowed down so I could breathe and let my heart slow down.
As I looked up into the rearview mirror, I saw that the two bodies had gotten to their knees, and twenty or so people emerged from the tall grass on either side of the road by the car and bodies. At that moment, my right foot smashed the gas pedal to the floor and did not let up until I had to slow down for the I-40 East on-ramp. I will never know what would have happened to me had I gotten out of the car to check on the bodies or stopped my car closer to them.
Some friends and I were doing some night fishing on the James River. We were sitting along the shoreline with a nice fire going, accompanied by the usual idle talk and a few beers, when suddenly everyone just stopped talking, like a switch was flipped off. We were all staring across the river and felt as if something or someone was staring back.
It was a very uneasy feeling, to which some of the group tried to shake off with typical macho humor, when a blood-curdling sound erupted from the other shore that froze everyone in their tracks. The sound was unlike any other that I had ever heard, and it made every hair on my body vibrate and tingle. The only way I could describe it is that it sounded like a wild person with no language skills being gutted alive—no words, just this high-pitched, blood-curdling scream.
Nobody moved or said a word; we all just sat there, fixed in our stare, when just as suddenly a second scream was let loose with even more force than the first. By this time, several of us were sprinting to our trucks that were parked a few yards away, retrieving various firearms. When we got back, we all sat there quietly with our eyes fixed, staring toward the opposite shore, watching the light from our fire reflecting off the rocks.
We sat there waiting for another scream or something to move on the other side of the river. Finally, a third scream came just as suddenly, but this time it was on our side of the river, coming from the bushes about a yard away. We all hightailed out of there, leaving most of our stuff behind.
When we got to our trucks, we heard the scream one more time just beyond the tree line. We all floored it the hell away from there and never found out what was making the sounds. It was a Friday night, and my friend was picking me up in his car from my house.
I was in a hurry since we were running late for the hockey game in the city. The whole car ride there, we were having such a good time that I hadn't even noticed that I didn't have my phone. I searched the car seat, the floor, but it wasn't in the car.
I was sure that I had just forgotten it. During the hockey game, I couldn't stop worrying that maybe I had dropped my phone somewhere, so I borrowed my friend's phone and ran to the bathroom. I dialed my number and hoped someone at my house would pick up.
It took three rings before somebody picked up, but they remained silent on the other end. I yelled into the phone that I was just checking if I'd left my phone at home; they didn't answer. I assumed it was my little brother just messing with me, so I hung up.
I got home late that night to see that my parents weren't home. I got inside my house and called them to see where they were. They told me that they had gone out to eat and see a concert at the park with my little brother.
They said they left soon after I had for the game, and they should— Be home in around half an hour, so I hung up and proceeded to look for my cell phone. But then I realized, how could somebody in my family have picked up my phone if they hadn't been home? I felt a pain in my stomach as fear swept over me.
It was at that moment that I heard the back door to my house open and close. I immediately jolted out the front door to the neighbors and called the police. Apparently, the back door was left open, and somebody had simply walked into our house.
Nothing was stolen, but the scariest thing is the thought that we could have fallen asleep with a stranger in the house. A while back, there was a family that moved in next door to my family. They had a son who was just twisted.
He was obsessive over slasher movies and always wanted me to talk about [ __ ] that happened during my time serving in Vietnam that no normal person would want to hear. He also loved tormenting stray animals. This guy was a whack job; he was 19 at the time, and my daughter was seven.
But he always wanted to talk to her. He'd strike up conversations with her when she walked home from school, and he would talk over the fence at her when she was playing in the back. But what really set me off was when he called our house looking to speak to her.
That was it. I went over and flipped [ __ ] at him, and his parents told him to stay the hell away from her and that I'd better not ever see him again. That's when things got weird.
My daughter was always a little imaginative and paranoid. She would think there were monsters under her bed and whatnot. So when she told me there was something living in her closet and she was too scared to get up and tell us at night, but it wasn't there in the daytime, we blew it off as no big deal.
A few weeks went by, and one night my wife and daughter were staying at my mother's for a girls' night, so I turned the key on the HBO box and watched me some movies, eventually falling asleep downstairs. At around 2 a. m.
, I get a call from my neighbor with the creepy son telling me something along the lines of, "We saw that you were up, so we called. Our son is missing. I went by his room to use the bathroom, and his door was open, which is unusual, and there was no sign of him.
We need help looking for him. " The phone call woke me up, though I wasn't up, so I asked why they thought I was. "Oh, he saw you walking around upstairs, and the light is on.
" My blood ran cold; I had been passed out on the couch, and I know no one turned any lights on. I hung up on them, ran outside to my truck to grab my shotgun, but noticed the sheriff pulling up to my neighbor's house. By this point, I booked it over and told them there was someone in my house, and now I could see the lights in my daughter's room were on, and there was a silhouette pacing back and forth.
When the deputies went in, they found the neighbor boy there, waiting in my daughter's room with a nice little setup in her closet. He said he likes to watch her sleep in the moonlight.
