12 Disturbing Stories That Will Haunt Even the Strongest Minds

The scariest moments are often the ones we can’t make sense of and they stay with us, creeping into our thoughts long after. Whether it’s an unexplained event or a strange feeling that something isn’t right, these real stories will leave you with an unsettling sense of mystery.

• 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.
• “I was about 16, in the car with my mom, and we were just chatting while she was driving. Afterward, 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
• “At 2:30 AM, I just made the turn into my neighborhood to get home. A guy in a white suit and comically large white cowboy hat had one hand wrapped around a sign and the other pointing at me while I drove by, making eye contact the entire way.” Unknown author / 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

• “In college, I took a local history course. Part of the course required us to dig into the local museum’s archives and read the journals, notes, etc that had been collected over the years and write an essay about a certain subject. Once I had narrowed down my topic I spent several nights digging through the 100-year-old field journals of this local surveyor... Mostly dull, uninteresting notes about the local geography, survey coordinates, and other mundane details. While delicately going through probably the 15th straight book (had to wear these special archive gloves) I turned a page and wrote in pencil in the middle of the page in the surveyor’s handwriting was my name. First and last names are spelled the same with nothing else written down around it. Just ordinarily written down like when someone quickly jots down the name of a contact. Really creeped me out since the notebooks were probably close to 90-100 years old and as far as I know nobody had opened them since they had been donated to the museum. Now the combination of my first and last name isn’t exactly rare but to see it spelled the same way in the author’s writing was odd, to say the least.” weaboodreams / 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 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 nowhere it could have gone, but it did.” GameVoid / Reddit
• “When I was nineteen, I was walking home from the library and a cop pulled up to the curb, asking to see my ID. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I showed it to him.
  After a moment of verifying that I was who my ID claimed I was, he apologized and handed me a printout of a missing teen, a couple of years younger than me. She could’ve been my identical twin. I told him that I didn’t blame him for thinking I was her.
  I don’t remember her name, I was too shaken up by the picture. But I still wonder what she’s doing and if she’s okay. It was nearly twenty years ago.” lydsbane / 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.
• “I was hanging out at a friend’s house in their basement with my friend, his girlfriend, and mine. We were all playing an RPG. It was the middle of the day. We hear the door open upstairs, footsteps on the floor, hear the cellar door open and my friend’s dad calls downstairs, ‘Pete, you home?’ My friend answers affirmatively and then we hear, ‘Come upstairs a minute I need your help.’ We all head upstairs. There is no one there. No car in the driveway, no one in the house at all but the four of us. All four of us heard the same thing. My friend’s dad found the story funny, but unbelievable when he eventually came home later that day.” Galaxy_Ranger_Bob / 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
• My dad went missing when my son was 5 months old. When he started talking, he always said that a man stood by his bed at night. We brushed it off as childhood imagination.
  A few years later, I hung a photo of my dad, the last one I had of him. My son pointed to it and said that was the man in his room. It gave us chills, especially since my dad never reappeared after going missing.
  He suffered from deep depression for decades and had gone missing in the past but always came back, unlike that last time. It’s been almost 20 years now, and we’re sure that he is dead. My son is a young man now and doesn’t recall it.

If you think Hollywood thrillers are scary, these 15 stories will give you even bigger chills.