10+ Real Events That Turned Into a Chapter of a Horror Story

Some stories haunt you because they don’t make sense—and that’s what makes them terrifying. These real-life encounters with the unexplainable will crawl under your skin and stay there. Dare to read them?

• We checked in, and my 5-year-old son went to the bathroom. He giggled loudly and returned with a bright red bra in his hand. "Mom, look what I found!" I snatched it from him and rushed into the bathroom. I couldn’t believe it when I saw a man's jacket there. To my horror, a voice coughed from inside the shower: "Uh… housekeeping?" I screamed, grabbed my son, and ran out of the room. Turns out, the hotel double-booked our room, and we had just walked in on another guest! The front desk profusely apologized, upgrading us to a suite.

• I was outside playing with friends one afternoon...we were around 9 or 10. We lived in a quiet area. As we were playing, we noticed a man in a truck drive by over and over again. Each time he passed my friends yard, he would drive slowly. We then realized that this man was recording us with one of those old hand held recorders. It freaked us out. We ran inside their house and called his mom. She told them they needed to stay inside and that I should go home. I tried explaining that my mom wasn’t home at the moment..but she still made me leave. I lived about a mile or two down the road. I’ve never ran so fast in my life. I was terrified that man was going to find me as I was running back home. When my mom found out what happened...she was super pissed off my friends mom hadn’t allowed me to stay at their house until she could come pick me up. © heylookitsatyler / Reddit

• One time I was coming in from seeing a movie, and my dad called me over to our computer. He said, “When did you go to Costa Rica with your school? They just posted a group picture with you in it.” I hadn’t gone on the trip with the community college I was attending and had no idea what he was talking about.
  But no joke, the guy he was referring to looked just like me, down to the white Polo that I was wearing a lot at the time. It was the most surreal experience I’ve ever had. © Capt_GingerBeard93 / Reddit

• I was alone in the house and decided to adjust the temperature on my water heater. I sat down in front of the water heater and removed the gray plate covering the thermostat. This plate is metal and about half the size of a sheet of copier paper.
  I set the plate down next to me and adjusted the thermostat. When I went to put the metal plate back on, it was gone. I never saw that metal plate again. There is literally nowhere it could have gone, but it did. © GameVoid / Reddit

• Not sure if this is considered paranormal, but when I get fevers as a child, I would always, in my fugue and pain-infused state, hear a man counting in a very deep voice. He would count from 1 and up; as the numbers get larger, the voice gets louder and more intense. It started to get less frequent as I grew older and now I do not experience it anymore. I've brushed it aside as a recurring nightmare but only recently, I've learned that my sister would experience the exact same thing when she was younger as well. © sherpaderpaderp / Reddit

• I was about 16, in the car with my mom, and we were just chatting while she was driving. Afterwards, we stopped talking, and I kind of zoned out. All of a sudden, an image came into my head, sort of like a memory of me or someone as a child getting onto the bus.
  It was so vivid that I thought my mom had said something. When I asked her, “Hey, did you say something about a bus stop?” she replied, “No, but I was just thinking that this area here is where I used to get on the bus to go to school when I was a kid.”
  SUPER strange. © CluelessCanary / Reddit

• A few years ago one night at around 3AM my wife and I were sleeping and I feel myself slowly waking up from a really deep sleep. My eyes started lifting up and as soon as they focused on the lamp on my dresser it slid off and shattered on the floor. My wife and I quickly sat up and looked at each other horrified at the startling noise. We agreed we would clean it in the morning and went back to sleep. The next morning when we woke up the lamp was at the foot of the bed (about 5 feet from where it fell) completely in tact and not broken at all. We are still trying to make sense of it. © nedflandersz / Reddit

• We were in a 150-year-old family house on Cape Cod that my sister-in-law had refurbished. She was talking about how she heard music there when she was a kid and couldn’t go to sleep. Just at that moment, a light bulb from a chandelier fell onto the kitchen table right in front of her. © sosorrynoname / Reddit

• This lasted for a year when I was 9 years old. Whenever my home telephone rang, I could always tell whether it was one of my specific friends calling or not, even though I didn’t know she was about to call that day.
  My home telephone was one of the older models that didn’t show whose number was calling. So when it rang, and I got the premonition it was her, I’d always tell the rest of my family that it was her for sure. I never guessed nor got it wrong. © Waitwhyyyyyyy / Reddit

• I’d been living alone for less than a week. I got some Chinese take-out and was eating in front of the TV. I finished my meal and cracked open the fortune cookie. It read “You will have a visitor tonight, lock your door.” There were no visitors that night, but the memory still haunts me. © captainklaus / Reddit

• I live in an apartment complex, and one day my neighbor and I took the kids to the pool to swim for a while. For whatever reason, I had the random thought about how much it would be terrible if I came home to my apartment being flooded by a leak or something.
  We left the pool, went into our own apartments, and a few minutes later, I saw her outside calling emergency maintenance because a pipe had leaked in her apartment, soaking her bedroom and bathroom. © dekuthered / Reddit

• This happened in the ’90s when my daughter was 16. She went on a road trip with her dad’s new family. On the 5th day, I got a postcard from her saying they’d be staying an extra 2 days. When she got back, she apologized for not telling me.
  I said, “But you did! I got your postcard!” She lost all color in her face and said, “We didn’t send anything. We decided not to because it would’ve taken more than 2 days to reach you anyway.” I was so confused.
  I went to grab the postcard from my closet, but I couldn’t find it. I was 100% sure I’d placed it in my pink box where I keep all my postcards, but that one wasn’t there. After all these years, I still get goosebumps whenever I think about it. I’m certain I saw the postcard and her handwriting—I can even remember the details on the card very clearly.

Shared by real people online, these stories aren’t urban legends. And they’re the kind of thing that makes you check your locks twice.