Many people can recall a time they encountered something they found genuinely terrifying, like it was out of a horror movie. Be it a full scare, an eerie encounter, or an unexplained event, these things can linger in the back of our minds forever.
Someone on Reddit asked people to share unexplained, spooky stories, and people were happy to deliver. Here's a selection of those stories.
While on a road trip with their kids and their parents, their dad decided to take a short cut down a dirty road off the main highway.
"About 5 minutes down this road, things go eerily quiet. We should be able to hear birds, the trees rustling, cicadas, yet nothing. It was too quiet. Dad starts slowing down. I am busy looking at the map. I know where we turned off and there was no designated road on our map. I’m worried that I can’t find it."
"There are little stick people and stick designs hanging from the trees. Some are just shapes and others are more intricately made. Dangling, swaying slowly. Between this and the fact that it was dead quiet, I made an instant decision and told dad to turn around and leave as quickly as possible.
"I felt a huge pressure in my ears, like they needed to be popped. Mom had goosebumps and my dad said we were just being silly. He obliged and got us out of there."
"When I was 14 I was riding driving home with my family one night through the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nothing but a lot of trees and rock faces lining the road. We came around a curve and face to face with a large tunnel/ archway.
"It was daylight on the other side and there were visible buildings. Big ones. We weren’t going fast and all had time to get a good look at it as we drove by, so I know it wasn’t a hallucination. Also, my father has no imagination and he saw it too."
"[...] it was clearly a tunnel, or maybe an archway. The perspective moved parallax as we passed. We turned around to investigate the area again, but when we did there was nothing there but a rock face.
"My dad said not to tell anybody about it or they would haul us away. It’s done a good job of sticking in my head for 24 years though."
"A music store seemed to just show up in my town. I'd lived here three years and never saw it. Went in, and the guy had one bass guitar in the store. Me, being a bassist, played it and fell in love. Bought it, and then the next week when I was in town, the store was totally empty, and looked like it [hadn't] been open in a long time.
"Got a new bass out of it though, so I'm cool with it being a spooky ghost store."
He and his crew at work were carpooling home after a day at work. It was pretty late when they got off-site, but they weren't a far drive from their shared town.
"They were going along one fairly straight bit of road when they passed through a fairly unremarkable village. It had the usual things like a pub and a corner shop, but little more else than cottages."
"He suggested that they turn around and go back to the village. They turn around, drive back and there was no village there. It was just fields. There wasn't any turn offs, so they couldn't have been mistaken. It was just one straight road."
This story begins with the author saying it took place when they were in 7th grade at a beach on the bay of Lake Michigan. On a warm day in May, the author and two of their friends went to the beach for a day out. When they arrived, they were surprised to find the water was a lot warmer than they had been expecting.
"As we dunked each other and swam with abandon I started to feel sick. Bad headache, nausea, wobbly. Just then, my other two friends mentioned that they also felt sick. We headed back to shore, nearly crawling by the time we got out.
"The three of us collapsed under a tree and fell asleep for 2ish hours. When we woke up we talked about how weird it was. I dipped my toe back in the water and it was freezing cold."
"To this day I have no idea what was in there. I do know that there is a chemical plant in town that used to manufacture things like agent orange, and that their practices were known to be less [than] environmentally conscious. I have never touched that water since."
The two were driving because the author's friend was trying to scope out this one girl's house prior to his upcoming date with her so he wouldn't get lost on the way there.
However, they made a wrong turn, and drive some way looking for somewhere to turn around when they come across a "fence about 20 feet tall made from wood pillars about the size around of telephone poles." There was an open gate, so they drove on in.
They describe it as, "[...] a single loop that winds through the whole complex. Only wide enough for one car. One way in, one way out. In the middle sits a large dome/church. The houses that surround it are all square two-story homes painted brightly in strange colors."
"It was strangely quiet and as we drove passed the homes, residents would step outside and watch us. The loop isn't too large, and we eventually made our way around and exited through the gate and some people walked closer watching us leave."
Though they tried to find any information about this place, there was next to nothing about it. They have a website that's password protected and a private Facebook group, that's all.
"There's this old abandoned hotel a couple hours away from me. It's not like a modern hotel, but like an old Victorian house that was turned into a B&B," they explain, "It's totally boarded up, big fence around it with barbed wire. Apparently it's pretty damn haunted."
"In high school me and some friends went to go check it out. It's in the middle of this a circular road [...]. It takes about ninety seconds to go around this circle. Anyway, the first time we drive through all the shades on the windows are drawn.
"We drive around again, only half of the shades are drawn. The next time we drive by all the shades are open. We drove around one last time and all the shades were drawn again. We freaked out and drove the hell out of there."
But one user and his friends had a strange encounter while doing so on a road trip. While driving through Illinois, the group stopped at a Taco Bell.
"The first thing we noticed was that the workers were acting very odd. Everything they said was monotone and rehearsed. [...] we realized that none of the conversations happening around us made any sense. The people were speaking, and it was English, but the sentences weren't logical. They were just saying words at each other."
"We didn't say much about it until we got outside, at which point we all freaked out and confirmed each others' experiences at once, and got the fuck out of there. We jokingly refer to that place as the 'NPC Training Center' since the people didn't seem to be real, or they were learning how to be human or something. Still freaks me out."
Apparently they got their order right, though, so at least there's that.
This is the story of one user and their brother, and the time they gave their mother quite the fright.
"When my brother and I were 10 and 12 respectively our family went on a hike through the cemetery and into the woods not far from our house. (My brothers and I would explore these woods every day. Even camped in em before. We knew it like the back of our hands.)," the story begins.
"We came across a very large hill we had never seen before. It was littered with what looked like someone's worldly possessions. As if they turned a house upside down, shook out the contents, took the house and left. [...]
"We poked around for a few when we thought we heard our mom hollering at us. So we turned tail and walked maybe 20 feet back down the hill to where our parents were. The entire encounter was maybe 45 minutes long....on our end."
Their mother scolded them, saying they'd been gone for almost four hours as their family shouted for them throughout the forest.
"We pleaded our case and even tried showing her the hill. Surely she was messing with us. So we stomped up to the turn off for the hill and....it was gone. No where to be seen.
"For YEARS we explored the woods determined to find that [expletive] hill. We covered miles and miles of off path woods. [...] We never found it again."
