It's spooky season! To get into the spirit, we scoured Reddit to find some creepy (true!!) scary stories you can read while the wind is howling outside and you sip some soothing, hot cider. Enjoy!
1. Home Alone
By Reddit user: TylerTimoj
"I was home alone for a weekend a few years ago while I was still in highschool. After school one day I was driving home, and when I passed in front of my house I thought I saw some old lady in white clothes in my sisters room looking through the window. I thought it was stupid, so I went in the room to check out what it actually was, but I couldn't find anything. I pretty much forgot about it until later that night I got a call from a very panicked and scared neighbor saying there was some old lady pacing back and forth in my sister's room. I still have no idea what it was, and I've never seen anything like it since."
2. Creepy Walls
By Reddit user: dBasement
"My ex wife and I bought an older house, 1930's. We were renovating and had put some baseboards into the basement, painted them and left them to dry overnight. We looked at them the next morning and it looked like someone had taken a sharp knife and dug it in down the entire length of two of the baseboards, almost 8 feet each. The "blade" had gouged through the new paint, old paint, primer and right down to the wood. It was just the two of us in the house."
3. Elevator Music
By Reddit user: sizzlorr26
"On my previous job when our building was still under construction, the only floors that were occupied were the 1st,2nd,5th,6th and 7th. One time I was alone inside the elevator going from 1st to the 6th floor when suddenly it stopped and opened on the 3rd floor. Normally I would just disregard it but rumors where all over that a ghost child was playing around on the vacant floors. So I pressed the closed button as I fast as I could. When it closed I heard noises like someone was tapping their fingers on the walls of elevator."
4. Attic? NOPE
By Reddit user: nocatsonmelmac
"There was a small door that led to attic space in my bedroom (11 yrs old to 13) and it became habit that I would shut the door as I walked into my bedroom a couple times a week. I didn't think anything of it, just assumed my mom didn't close it all the way when she left it.
After a while I made the mistake of joking with her when she made a comment about me not picking up after myself, I said something like 'every night I have to close the attic door behind you, how about you shut it all the way when you're done?' She then informed me that she hasn't been in the attic in months. Asked my brother... nope. Asked my father... nope. So then I started to pay really close attention to it. Making sure it was closed in the morning, checking it after school, checking blaster dinner. Then head up to bed and... open.
After a couple months of wondering, studying, experimenting, I thought I'd see what happens if I just don't shut it. Opened the door before school and checked it after school, still ooen. Checked it after dinner, still open. Before bed, still open. Now I'm laying in bed, mind going crazy with the open door across the room. Decide to check it out so I roll over and focus on the black space into the attic... to see a face staring back at me. Bolt downstairs, wake parents, get ridiculed by brother, switch bedrooms w brother, move into new house about 6 months later (due to expanding household). New physics teacher and his wife bought our house.
I could've forgotten all about that event and chalked it up to me having an over-active mind. But then my senior year I discovered how awesome our physics teacher was. Became my favorite class and by far, my favorite teacher. End of senior year my friend and I took our VHS camcorder around town, doing mostly silly things, but then took it to my old house to see what they've done with the place. We got a very fun tour, I got to tell stories about all the projects my dad did that were still part of the house.
Then the wife leads us upstairs to show us the sewing room. I ask (jokingly), 'Notice anything strange in this room?' and her face goes blank. On camera, she asks what I mean and I try to shrug it off but end up saying something about the attic door. She confirmed that every time she comes up to sew, the attic door is open. She then tells us that the second day of being in the house, their dog (German Shepherd) had gone into the room but would not go back downstairs. He started barking and could not be consoled, and then jumped through the window, landing on the tin roof over the porch and then running off. The dog did not come back until the next day and has not stepped foot into the hallway that leads upstairs since.
I had the initial thought that I could show my parents and brother the story I had on film but I decided to just let it be."
5. Hotel Service
By Reddit user: wwantid7
"Checked into a hotel on vacation. Everything was going okay. Woke up one night to erratic movement of the door handle as if someone was trying to get in or break the door down. Always happened in the dead of the night when in deep sleep. As soon as i woke up it would stop. Spoke to a hotel manager about it and he told me it was a patient who was recently released from a mental institute who does this as he still thinks he is locked up in the institute. A combination of not taking his medication and sleepwalking makes his randomly try and kick doors down within the hotel. The family was very wealthy and connected and the manager didnt want to kick up a fuss for chucking out someone who can shut his business down very quickly. I left after a week because it got worse."
6. Let the Right One In
By Reddit user: JoshSecond
"Not to me, but to my sister.
Her husband and her had just had their first child a few months prior. My brother in law was working the graveyard shift at his job as my sister stayed home taking care of my nephew. Around 2am, she heard loud knocking on her back door. She went to go check it out and saw a lady banging on the door asking for my sister to let her in. The lady told my sister that her husband had just beat her down the street and was looking for her. My sister was hesitant to let her in since she had a newborn in the house and didn't want to interfere. She told the lady that the best she could do was call the police for her. The lady told my sister to not call the police and to let her in. This is where my sister got suspicious. She went to get her phone and called 911. When she went back to the door, the lady was gone. The police arrived a few minutes later and they told my sister that the same situation happened a few streets down. Apparently the couple would do this act to get into peoples homes."
7. Night at the Museum
Reddit account deleted
"I used to work doing maintenance at historic properties. There was a historic house museum I worked at when it wasn't open to the public. It was part of a whole landmark site, there was a visitor's center with offices and then the house was about half a mile up a dirt road in a wooded area. Sometimes I worked with a crew, but there were a lot of times I was there alone. One winter day, when it was really cloudy and dark, I was working alone to get ready to replace some electric work on the exterior of the house. I went inside and turned off the circuit to the whole property, and I tested it. It was off. I locked the doors and went outside to work. After about an hour, I got down from my ladder and started walking around the house and then one of the lights inside the house TURNED ON. I started to freak out, but thought that maybe someone was playing a joke on me... I called the visitor's center on my walkie-talkie, and confirmed that the only other person who was working that day was still there and hadn't left, and that all the keys to the house were present and accounted for. That's when I freaked out and ran the half mile up to the office. I made my coworker come back with me to check out what was going on, but when we got to the house, the light was off again- but the bulb was still warm. All the doors were still locked and the circuit was still off. Still gives me shivers to this day."
8. That's NYC for Ya
By Reddit user: varsitysmoking
"I've been waiting/wanting to post this for so long... And now I'm late to the party. Anyway.
I was driving very late at night through a pretty big park in NYC but not central park. Now this was after an all night film shoot for one of my friends in college and I had been up for a very long time. As we were driving past the rec building with the pool I see a person(?) galloping on all fours like a crab. They were moving so fast and I thought I had just been imagining it, but when I got home my boyfriend at the time who was sitting in the front seat asked me if I saw the crab person. It was super spooky and I just can't explain it."
9. Dang it, Mike!
Reddit account deleted
"Lived in an old two bedroom, three storey walkup for a time in my early 20s in Toronto. A few days after moving in my roommate Mike chides me in the morning for banging on the wall that separated our bedrooms and pacing back and forth across the apartment at night. We just agreed he must have been dreaming or it was sounds from other apartments as I had done no such thing. We agreed that it must have been nothing and left it at that but this became a regular nightly occurrence.
Shortly thereafter I started noticing at certain times in my own bedroom the cloying smell of cheap women's perfurme mixed with a damp musty smell. Imagine an old person's clothes left on a damp musty basement floor near a litterbox that wasn't being changed often enough and you get the idea. What made it even weirder is that I would be filled with a sudden horrible sense of foreboding a few moments before the smell would begin.
Mike flaked out and left only 4 months into our 1 year lease which meant I was left footing the rent for the entire place until I could find another roommate. I had decided to try and sleep in his bedroom shortly after he moved to see if things would get better. The very first night I slept in his former room I had an incredibly detailed and realistic nightmare of myself standing in the dimly-lit bathroom of the apartment and cutting my own face with a large shard of glass while staring into the broken bathroom mirror (it was only broken in the dream)
Soon after that I started to hear the loud bangs at night and the flushing of the toilet in the bathroom. Several times the hot water in the bathtub turned on full blast in the middle of the night.
One of the freakier things that happened not too long before I moved is the time I was woken up by the TV blaring Poltergeist on CityTV at about 2 in the morning. At the time that channel would always play movies late at night but the fact that the one time my analog TV (turn a knob to change the channel or the volume, pull a knob to turn it on) turned on by itself at full blast was the time a movie like Poltergeist was playing."
10. It's Always the Basement
By Reddit user: Kafoobleflats
"Just told this story to a coworker:
Was around 7 years old and it was near the holidays. The house I grew up in has a downstairs and a basement. So I left my pillow downstairs after a day long movie binge and went to grab it later that evening.
Grab the pillow and look up, see a man on the other side of the room dressed to the nines just looking around paying no attention to me. Weird thing was he was entirely grey. Head-to-toe, skin color and everything, grey.
I'm staring, jaw wide open, completely petrified with fright. He looks up at me, notices I'm able to see him, and drops his jaw lower than humanly normal almost as if he was screaming at me, but without sound. He then ran through the wall and disappeared .
I wasn't able to go downstairs if the lights were off until I was a teenager."
Happy spooky season! Let us know if you would like us to post any other creepy stories. XOXO