BRB, making a salt circle around us, just in case.
just like you! From paranormal encounters in the middle of the night to skeptics sharing their"what the hell???" moments that made them believers, here are 24 unsettling, puzzling, and — most important of all — inexplicable instances people just like you and me have experienced.
..and lived to tell the story of:"When I was 8 years old, and my cousin was 12, we went to stay with our grandparents in their old apartment — the same place where our mother had grown up. The building was so old that most of the flats were abandoned, but it was also where we had spent much of our childhoods. One evening, despite my father’s strict rule about not going to the terrace without his permission, we decided to sneak upstairs while he was asleep in the main bedroom." "The view from the terrace was breathtaking. The backside of the apartment overlooked a small forest, and in the distance, we could see a river and the sunset. As we wandered around, soaking in the scenery, we suddenly heard my father’s voice shouting our names angrily. 'I told you both not to go upstairs, right?' he said. The apartment’s balcony was clearly visible from the terrace, so we assumed he had seen us. Terrified, we rushed back downstairs. When we got back, we froze in shock — my father was still fast asleep. We asked our mother if he had woken up and seen us, but she insisted he hadn’t stirred at all. My cousin and I were so scared by the unexplained voice that we never dared to go up there alone again.""After my dad passed away, I was cleaning out his home, and I decided to take his miniature grandfather clock. Mind you, I hated this clock because it was loud and would chime every 15 minutes plus every hour on the hour, waking me up while I was sleeping. But it reminded me of him, so I took it home and put it in a bookshelf in my office. I didn’t want to hear it chime loudly all the time, so I took out the batteries. A few days later, while we were eating dinner, that darn clock chimed!" "I got up from the table, with my family following me, while I stated, 'I swear I took out the batteries!' Well, I opened the back of the clock, and there were NO batteries! My family kind of freaked out at that point. I just smiled and said to the air, 'Okay, Dad! Thanks for the visit and the little joke. We miss you and know you are doing okay on the other side.'Netflix"When I was younger, my family lived in a ranch-style house. All the kids were at school, but my younger sister and I hadn’t started yet. This was back in the late '70s, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom. One morning, I started freaking out and yelling from the living room to my mom in the kitchen. I started yelling, 'Mom, Mary just fell! Go help her, she needs help. Mom! Help her!' Mary was my mom’s"My mother said no, as on this particular day, Mary wasn't coming, as it was snowing and way too cold. I kept screaming, 'Mom, go help her! She’s hurt, and she fell!' My mom, who was doing the dishes, dried her hands and came into the living room. She grabbed my hand, and we walked to my brother's bedroom to look out the back window, so she could show me that Mary wasn’t even coming over. As my mom was pointing to the path that Mary would takecoming, we watched Mary get on the path, then fall. She broke her ankle and could not get up. Mary would have lain there all day in the snow-covered path if my mom hadn’t seen what happened. My mom looked at me, put on her coat and shoes, and ran out to help Mary. She did not understand how I knew it was going to happen, that she wouldn’t have been able to get up, etc. How?""My father used to exchange Christmas cards with his great aunt who lived in Liverpool. We lived in London, but one year, we drove to Blackpool to see the lights. On the way home, he decided to go stop in and see her in Liverpool. Except when we tried to find her house, it was nowhere to be found. The street existed, but the house number did not. We asked the local postman, and he told us that it simply didn't exist anymore. Apparently, that home had been bombed in the war and never rebuilt. We never received another card from her again.""This was two years ago, when we had just moved to our current home. I live near Washington D.C., and my neighborhood is very quiet. We moved into this apartment building, where most of the residents are senior citizens. Every day, I'd get home from school earlier than anyone in my family, and then I'd pick up my brother from school. One day, while I was doing my daily tasks before picking him up, I heard the front door unlock. I assumed my mom had gotten out of work early, so I didn’t really worry much about it. I was cooking at that time and called out and asked, 'Mom, what happened? Why are you so early today?' My mom answered, 'Hi, daughter.'" "This shook me off because that wasn't how she normally spoke. The response was too serious. I stopped cooking and went to the front door to check if she was okay, but she wasn't there. I could have sworn it was her voice that I heard. I checked her room, the bathrooms, my room, and even opened the front door, but she was nowhere to be found. I got really spooked and tried to come up with an explanation, but I ran out of time and had to go pick up my brother. When we got home, we ate, and my brother turned on the TV. We watched cartoons, and two hours later, my mom came home. I told her what I’d heard, and she said she never came home that afternoon. I also told her about the voice and how it spoke to me. She assured me that at that time, she was busy at work. A week later, the same thing happened again. It occurred four more times in the span of a month. I knew it was her voice every time. I didn’t have the radio on or even the TV, but every time, I heard her voice say, 'Hi daughter.' Sometimes it would even call me by my name, just the way she does. We still don’t know what that was to this day, but we still live in the same apartment, and according to some friends who also live in the same building, similar things happened to them, too.""I heard my wife when she wasn’t home. From the other room, she told me to check the oven. It was on, and I hadn't realized it. I looked for her at home, but couldn't find her. Then I called her on the phone, and she was two towns over from where we live." "She's had weird experiences at home, too. She's seen someone standing by our bed, watching me sleep at night. My"When I was in high school, my younger brother — who was around 13 at the time — had a 'walkie-talkie' that he would always use to talk to someone. It was as if he were using it as more of a cellphone than anything else, and every time he was talking in it, he would say the person he was talking to was someone named Chris. He claimed Chris had apparently lived in that house before. Chris would tell my brother things, like that he was a teenager just like us and that he died while living there before. My siblings and I thought it was a joke, that maybe my brother and one of his friends were pranking us...until we started asking him relevant questions that no one else would know, and he could answer them.""I even went as far as hiding in my closet once, and asking him how many fingers I was holding up. Each and every time, he would know the answer. When we would ask him how he knew everything we were doing, he would say things along the lines of, 'I told you, I'm standing right next to you.' At first, it was cool and freaky, but after that, my older brother decided enough was enough. He took the walkie-talkies and got rid of them because none of us could understand how this was possible. My younger brother, who has since passed, changed so much after that experience. Part of me wonders if it had anything to do with his communication with 'Chris.'""I used to play basketball in a park every Saturday, weather permitting. After our game was finished, we would go over to a bench and rest. This day, there was a girl at the entrance to the basketball court, staring at us. She walked over and asked me if I would go for a walk with her, holding out her hand. I asked her, 'What? Where to?' She said just around the park, so I agreed. I held her hand, and we walked around the park, then back to the court. She said thank you, and walked away." "Everyone asked me what that was about, and I told them that I didn’t know. This happened again the next two Saturdays, too. Each time, she would only ask me to walk with her. She never said anything else to me, not a word. She would always just say thank you, let go of my hand, and walk away across the field. It happened again for a fourth time the next weekend. This time, I asked her if she wanted to sit down on the bench with us, and she declined, saying she wasn't tired. We walked around the park, and she let go of my hand and started walking across the field. One of the guys asked me where the heck she was going, because there was nothing in that direction except a cemetery. I realized he was right, so we decided to follow her. Sure enough, she walked right into the cemetery. We both looked at each other, and when we looked back, she was gone.""When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I visited my grandmother with my sister in Arlington, Virginia, close to Washington, D.C. We had been walking into a wooded area just outside of the apartment complex where my grandmother lived, where we met a young girl. We played at her house for a couple of hours and then left to go back home. The next morning, I got up early, before anyone else was up, to go back and see if I could find the house where the little girl lived so we could play together again. I made a peanut butter sandwich to eat for breakfast, and took off to find her. The last thing I remember was walking into the wooded area near her house." "This was probably around 9 or 10 in the morning. At that point, I lost hours of time. I suddenly woke up on a sidewalk in town, with ants crawling all over me from the peanut butter sandwich, which lay uneaten beside me. Of course, I was disoriented and scared. I screamed and cried until a nice lady came out of her house to take me in and clean me up. She called the police, who came and talked to me to see if they could find out where I lived. I didn't know how to get there because I was so young — I could only try to describe the place to them. They must have figured out where to take me, and we got into the police car to leave. I remembered the woods that they drove through, but I don't remember anything about how I got from that place to town. There had to be about five hours of missing time from when I started into the woods and when I woke up on the sidewalk, screaming. It was like I was plopped down from the woods into the city. This was in the late '50s, and I am 70 years old now. In all of this time, I still have no memory of what happened during those lost hours, or how I got on that sidewalk!""One day, some years ago, my sister and I went to our friend's house for a sleepover. Since our friend's room was messy, we slept out in the living room; myself on one side of the L-shaped couch, my sister on the other, and our friend in her cot right beside the part of the couch I was sleeping on. Now, apparently, there were two experiences that happened that night — one that involved both my sister and our friend, and one that involved me. I will share my experience today." "So, naturally, at these sleepovers, I always woke up before anyone else. To pass the time, I decided to continue reading a book I was in the middle of. Maybe after ten minutes of being awake, I saw our friend's mom come out from the hallway that led to the bedrooms. She was wearing a T-shirt, her skinny jeans, and her apron, which I found normal because she cooks/bakes a lot, and I thought she was getting ready to make breakfast. I waved 'good morning' to her once I saw her, and without a word or anything in return, she turned around and went back down the hallway and toward her room — I assumed. I'd been awake for long enough that there was no way I could've been seeing things, which sometimes happens when you're in the middle of departing from sleep. Later that morning, when everyone was awake, my sister and our friend were telling her mom what happened to them last night, and while explaining, they asked me if I had heard what they were talking about. I told them no, but explained what I saw that morning. I asked our friend's mom if she remembered coming out at all earlier, as I'd mentioned, and she told me that she never did that."When my son was a toddler, I bought him this cheap little piano that took one AA battery. I forgot to buy batteries, so I took one out of my mom's tape recorder. That night, I started hearing music. I went into the living room and found the piano under the couch, playing by itself. I put it in the toy box, not thinking anything of it. After a few nights of this, I took the battery out, assuming something was hitting the keys. That night, the piano STILL played by itself, even though there was no battery in it. The next morning, I took it outside and threw it away in the bin. That thing played in the bin until garbage day. I’ve never been so happy for garbage day to get rid of that creepy thing!""I lost my grandmother in 2009. We were very close. When I was younger, she gave me a brooch. It had real jewels, but it wasn’t fancy. I loved it. I decided to wear it on my sweater to work one day. I noticed when I got to my car at the end of the day that it had fallen off. For days, I checked my car, pockets, desk area, and even asked my coworkers if they had seen it. I was so sad that I lost it, because I always felt my grandma with me when I wore it." "A week later, I was getting into my car to drive to work, and there it was in my cup holder. Just plain as day. I didn’t have a jacket on, nor anything I'd worn the day I'd worn the brooch to work. It just appeared. I swear I could hear my grandma chuckling at me. I miss her so much!""When I was 19 or 20, I was commuting to college and living with my mother. My mom had a job where she dealt with many older people. She's extremely likable, so over the years, many of her clients gave her gifts for birthdays and holidays. They also would give her gifts for me, being that I was an only child and she was a single mother, and most of her clients were extremely wealthy. Anyway, one of her favorite clients had given her a music box-type statue, but it was for me. I played it once when she gave it to me, but I'm not really into that sort of thing, so I put it on top of my headboard and forgot about it." "My bed at the time had a massive bookshelf-like headboard, so there were a ton of shelves, and the top of it basically reached my ceiling. One day, I got home from class and was feeling a little frisky, so I decided to have some one-on-one time. I had turned the statue thing toward the wall a few months earlier just because I felt like it was weird to have it watching me all the time. TBH, I don't know why I didn't just get rid of it. As I was getting on with my business, the music started playing and the FIGURE STARTED TURNING AND STOPPED as it was facing forward/toward me! Needless to say, I was no longer in the mood, so I promptly threw that thing out. Someone definitely was not approving of my behavior in the spirit world.""I’ve had weird, unexplained things happen more than once in my life, but this one probably tops them all. In 1993, I was a single mother with three teenage kids in high school. The kids were extremely responsible, and I trusted them explicitly, so when my job required me to go to Mexico for three weeks, I didn’t have a problem with leaving them home alone. My eldest drove and had her own car, and if there was an emergency she couldn’t handle, their aunt lived only about 10 miles away. The three weeks went by with no issues, and at the end, I had an opportunity to take a couple extra days of vacation there, so I asked the kids if they minded, and everyone was fine with it." "I got to fulfill a lifetime dream of visiting some Mayan monuments in the Yucatán, and I ran into a friend there. They asked me if I wanted to go with them to an island for some diving. I opened my mouth to say 'Yes!' and the word 'NO!' came out. Suddenly, I was panicking, and I didn't know why. I just knew I needed to get back home. I had to scramble all sorts of things to get back to LA, but I did. I arrived at dawn on Jan. 15, 1994, but my panic only increased. I did every bit of laundry there was, even though the kids had kept it up like pros. I stocked the kitchen with food and bottled water, and bought a ridiculous amount of briquettes for the barbecue. The entire weekend was hustle and bustle, but by Sunday night, my panic was suddenly gone. My eldest usually slept in her room, which was in what had been the detached garage in the back yard. But on Sunday night, she asked if she could sleep in my room with me. Of course, I said, yes. On Monday morning, at 4:33 a.m., the big Northridge earthquake hit. Our house was moved nearly off its foundation. Furniture was moved 18 inches out of place, including a huge cabinet that weighed hundreds of pounds. We had no electricity, no gas, no landline. But I was home, and the house was ready, all because I said NO when I meant to say yes.""Driving north in the rain on Route 9 years ago, we drove RIGHT THROUGH a man standing in the middle of the road. Looking out the back window, we saw he was STILL STANDING THERE! He wore a long black raincoat and a hat like a Canadian mountie. I'll never forget it!!!""My best friend passed away in her sleep seven years ago, right before Christmas. The day after she passed, I was haunted by her telling me to 'get the locket.' I didn't know what that meant, but I called her daughter and asked her to please look for a locket, because her Mom was driving me crazy, telling me to find it." "They were lucky enough to have found all her Christmas presents for them, so it was a special Christmas. Fast forward about two weeks after the holidays, and I was talking to my friend's daughter. She said, 'I was afraid to tell you, but my Mom gifted one of her granddaughters a Pandora charm for her bracelet. It took her daughter a good two weeks to discover that the charm was actually a locket that read 'Family is Forever.''17. "My husband is the youngest of five. His mother, siblings, nieces, and nephews all believed very strongly in haunted things. My husband is a skeptic, and I am a complete non-believer. When my mother-in-law passed, none of her kids wanted things that were hers. I was 'weird' for taking a few everyday items that would be useful, but also reminded me of her. They all insisted the beautiful hand mirror of hers I kept was 'super creepy and possessed.' One of the silly things my husband took was a small red flashlight. It worked, so we kept it on our headboard, next to his grandmother's hand mirror." "Fast forward 15 years, and my husband and his siblings had grown apart despite living in the same smallish city. One of his sisters called us out of nowhere to say that his other sister was dying of cancer. That evening, the flashlight was on. No one had touched it in years . My husband shut it off, and we went to sleep. A couple of hours later, we woke up to the flashlight being on again. So, my husband took the batteries out, and we went back to bed. That evening, the thing lit up again. No batteries. The hatch was even open, so a complete circuit was impossible. He and I shrugged it off as a weird coincidence. That thing stayed lit for two weeks straight, with the hatch open and no batteries. Then, we got the call that his sister had died. We looked in our room, and the flashlight had turned itself off. A couple of days later, I cleaned it up and put fresh batteries in it, but it never worked again. He still keeps it on the headboard, though.""When I was in university, I rented a townhouse in a brand-new subdivision with three roommates. This house was less than three years old when we moved in, and I lived in the basement bedroom for four years. The main floor was the common area , and my roommates lived on the upper floor. I was pretty nocturnal in my early 20s, so I woke up one winter evening around 5 p.m. and hopped in the shower. Almost immediately after I got out, the power went out." "Being winter in Canada, the house was completely pitch black — especially my basement bedroom. I went up to the main floor to light some candles and wait out the power outage. The house was really quiet, so I assumed my roommates were out or at their classes. I was a little scared sitting in darkness with only candlelight to see with, all alone. However, after a few minutes, I heard one of my roommates open a door upstairs, walk across the hall, and then close another door. I heard their footsteps right above my head, so I realized that they had gone from the upstairs bathroom to their bedroom. I was super relieved not to be by myself, at least, so I relaxed as I waited for the power to come back. After another hour, it did, and I stayed at the dining room table the whole time. Well, imagine my surprise when I watched all three of my roommates walk in through the front door together. No one but me had been home all day, and none of them had guests in the house. I was sitting in full view of the front door and the only stairs the entire evening. I checked all over the upstairs rooms for an intruder but never did figure out what happened. It still freaks me out to think about.""One morning, I was in the kitchen, drinking a cup of coffee. I set it down and went to another room to retrieve something. I came back, went to pick up my cup, and it was gone. I shrugged and assumed I must have absentmindedly carried it with me, so I retraced my steps to the other room. No, not there, either. Annoyed with myself, I looked all over our small house twice, even going to the basement, where I hadn’t yet been that day. Coming up the basement stairs, the cup was sitting on the counter, exactly where I first thought I had set it down, and the first place I looked. I don’t know where that cup went, but it was gone for a half hour.""My daughter was in a church van, and they all were asleep. She heard someone call her name and jumped up just as a toolbox fell right where she was sitting. After, she asked who called her name. NOBODY in the van called her name! We can't explain it.""Recently, I went on a trip to Portland, Oregon. I was born there, and I wanted to explore the city, because we moved when I was a baby. My dad and I went to a pizza place and saw they were doing ghost tours of the Shanghai Tunnels. My dad is a skeptic, and I was interested in the paranormal, so we bought tickets." "For context, I've always had strange, paranormal experiences, and my family has always believed there is something different about me. For instance, I've had very realistic dreams, and months later, they come true, just like in my dream. Anyway, on the tour, I kept looking towards the boiler room, because it felt like I was being watched. Later on, we left that space, and I felt a lot better. We had some free time to explore, so I walked around and found this room that only had this antique mirror in it that I thought was gorgeous. I took a picture of it because I wanted something like it for my house. When we resumed the tour, the guide went to that room and said that people had seen ghosts in the mirror when they'd taken pictures of it. The tour continued on, and I didn't think anything of it. We went back to the hotel, and I was clearing out my storage for the next day of taking pictures when I came across the picture I took of the mirror. In that picture, there were two humanoid beings. One of them seemed to be in the back of the room and looked like a human but with glowing eyes. Its face was distorted, and looked like it was melting. The other one was a grayish-white with empty eye sockets. It looked kind of similar to Edvard Munch’sIt really shook my dad and me, and I showed everyone I could, so they could see that this was a real experience I had.""I grew up in a house that was one of the two oldest in the city. The oldest home — which belonged to our neighbor — was over 100 years old, and just so happened to be the residence of my childhood best friend. We had many inexplicable experiences in our homes, and this is just one of them. One night, my friend and I had our typical sleepover at her house. We crashed late for a couple of 8-year-olds, but I woke up to a loud clap of thunder. As my eyelids grew heavy again, I felt something off about the room, as if something else were in the room with us. I lifted up my head and saw a tall man standing in front of me." "He wore a thick hat and jeans or overalls, and stood with his arms crossed, just staring at me. I felt my heart just about beat out of my chest, so I shook my friend, but she would not wake up. I just knew the man was not alive. So, I took a huge breath, closed my eyes, and ran through him, down the stairs, out the door, and back to my house in the middle of the night. My parents found me in my own bed the next morning. Needless to say, no one believed me. That is, until 20 years later. See, I brought this up to my friend’s family at dinner, and they all froze. My friend's older sister, 10 years our senior, was visited numerous nights by a man in a hat wearing overalls that would stand in her doorway and just stare. No one believed her either...until now.""A few weeks after my Granny died, I lost one of my earrings. It was part of a pair that was special to me, and my family and I turned my room upside down searching for it, but it was nowhere to be found. The next morning, a book had half-fallen off my shelf, which I thought was strange, as nobody had been in my room other than me, and I hadn’t moved it. I took the book out, and there was the earring. I don't know how to explain that one."And finally,"My husband and I lived in student family apartments while he was working on his degree AND working two jobs. I stayed at home with our baby, who had some extra needs. I'd been up all night with the baby and kissed the hubs goodbye when he left for work around 5:30 a.m. I finally got the baby to sleep around 6 and went to lie down myself, but couldn't fall asleep. I just lay there with my arm over my forehead, begging for sleep." "My husband came home around 6:30. I didn't think much of it — he was a server at a restaurant, so sometimes, he came home early to study if they were slow and didn't need him. The front door was always locked, so I heard when he came in and put his keys in the dish. I was awake but lying down, kind of hoping he'd go to his desk and work so I could try to sleep. He walked over to me to check if I was sleeping, then walked back to his desk to work. I was able to nap for about 30 minutes before the baby woke up again. I got up, took a quick shower, then got the baby ready for a walk. By that time, my hubs had left again, but I wasn't sure where he went as he didn't have class that morning. I tried to shrug it off, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I texted him while on our walk to see where he went. Nothing. Two hours later, he texted me back, saying he'd just gotten off work and was on his way home. I asked why he came home earlier, and he said he'd been at work the whole time, since they were really busy that morning. I called maintenance to see if they entered my apartment since they were the only other people to have a key, but they didn't. Then who the hell came into my apartment wearing my husband's clothes????"Have you had an experience like these you just can't quite explain, no matter how hard you try? Whatever it is, I want to hear it! In the comments or anonymous form below, tell us your inexplicable experience, and it just might be featured in an upcoming edition of this series!
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