12 People Who Were Even More Terrified After Discovering the TRUE Causes of Eerie Events

When confronted with genuinely frightening situations, our minds instinctively seek to rationalize and find logical explanations, mitigating the intensity of our fear. Often, the actual cause of our unease proves to be far less severe than the fear it evokes. However, there are instances when the unsettling voices or mysterious shadows we encounter may conceal reasons beyond our wildest imagination, leaving us wishing we had never unveiled the truth in the first place.

• As a young kid, I had “nightmares” of waking up to see my mother hovering over my bed by the window. She just blankly stared down at me and my sister. I’d get so scared, yelling, “Mom! Mom!” and she never responded. I knew it was not “my mom.” When I was older, I told my aunt about it, and she told me they weren’t dreams; it was real because my mom would go into our rooms randomly to check on us. She had serious mental health issues that worsened over the years. Occasionally, she would have episodes of anxiety about something happening to us and would “guard” us at night.
  
  Due to the traumatic passing of her first child, it apparently triggered obsessive anxiety when we were younger. I now know the whole troubling backstory and can sympathize with why it would make any parent get to that mental state, but I still shudder when I think of the blank face stare. I still tend to associate the “nightmare mom” as not being “my mom.” © txdahlia / Reddit

• A family on my street believed their house was “haunted” because furniture and objects would randomly move or go missing over several months. However, it turned out the house wasn’t haunted; the reality was much worse. It turned out that a drifter had wandered in at some point and had been living in their attic. He would come out when the family was at work, eat their food, and go through their things for cash and items to sell. One day, a family member came home unexpectedly and caught the intruder, prompting them to call the police for an “active break-in.” The cops quickly discovered what had been going on. © apostate456 / Reddit

• Towards the second half of high school, everything started feeling like it was all going downhill. It seemed to me like there was some unseen outside force making my life unbearable. Turns out that I actually have Type 1 diabetes, and during that time in the second half of high school, I was first experiencing the symptoms of the condition. © Averaoxi / Reddit

• One night, when our parents were out, I was sleeping, and I heard a music box. It was pretty scary, so my sister and I cuddled up in my room. The music didn’t stop until about five in the morning, and that’s when we went out to check what it was. We found an old music box in the garbage bin, but it looked very old. For the next few nights, it kept playing. I went down to take the batteries out, but, and I kid you not, there were no batteries in the box. © PurpleSkinTag / Reddit

• I was at SLS (Surf Life Saving) training. We were practicing on flat water instead of the beach that day. Training hadn’t started yet, so two friends and I went paddling beforehand. We were having a competition to see who could stand on their board the longest (these aren’t surfboards and aren’t designed for standing up). I fell off, and when I resurfaced, I saw the other girls falling off too.
  
  As I climbed back onto my board, I saw something under the surface of the water, almost like sand floating when you stand on it. However, I didn’t touch the bottom, so I wasn’t sure what it was. Paddling away, I thought, “That’s abnormal.” Then, one of the other girls screamed. The ’sand’ was giant jellyfish. They were massive, and they were everywhere. I am absolutely petrified of these jellyfish because of how big they are. © LessConfidence / Reddit

• When I was around 12, I came home to find the bedroom lights on. If it was just my bedroom, it wouldn’t have been a problem, but my brother’s room lights were also on, and we never leave those lights on. It could have been my brother or my mom, but one was away while the other was at work.
  
  I was a little freaked out but tried to tone it down by suggesting that I might have left them on before going out. Then I turned and saw a couple of wooden spoons on top of our kitchen cabinet.
  I knew for a fact that I hadn’t left any spoons sitting there, and I also didn’t recognize those two spoons. That’s when I realized that someone had been inside our house.
  
  Long story short, I had lost my keys a few days prior, and my neighbor, who was the same age as I, found them. Instead of giving them back, he kept them for himself. Days later, his mom asked him to, I don’t know, deliver something to my mom? But there was no one at home, so he used his keys to enter our house. He forgot his mom’s wooden spoons there, and if it weren’t for this, we would never have found out that he entered our house. I think he stole money from us as well.
  © faaabiii / Reddit

• I stayed up late one night and went to bed around 3 in the morning. My room was pitch black, and I hopped into bed to get comfortable. All of a sudden, it felt like something jumped into bed with me. I was in disbelief. I felt around and didn’t feel anything. Then I felt it again, and this time I panicked. I hopped out of bed and turned the light on. There was nothing in my room. So, I told the unseen presence to get lost and leave me alone. I browsed Reddit until I fell asleep. I found out the next morning that it was an earthquake, which is extremely rare to happen where I live.
  © Unknown user / Reddit

• When I was younger and in bed, I could hear my dog barking in the garden. She never used to bark, so it was very odd. I had a room that overlooked the garden, so I took a peek, but couldn’t see anything. My child brain just assumed it was a ghost and hid under the covers.
  
  Later, my dad told me that she was barking at a man in our garden, and he had to call the police to come and collect the strange man. Apparently, he’d been breaking into lots of gardens, and the police had been looking all night. He just happened to get stuck in ours. © Caladrie / Reddit

• I had a friend who was staying at a ski lodge, and he went outside at night. While he was out there, he said it seemed like an invisible monster was coming right at him. He heard it stomping, even smelled it, felt its breath as it charged him, and then it passed through him, and it was gone.
  
  Turns out it was a grizzly bear, stomping its way around on the floor directly underneath where he was. © Malgayne / Reddit

• About 7 years ago, my family rented a one-story house. It was originally one larger house that had been split into two, with another family living in the other part whom we didn’t really talk to. During the night, I would hear what sounded like knocks above the ceiling, but any entrance to the small “crawlspace” between the ceiling and the roof was patched up when the house was divided. For a while, I thought there was a ghost living in the “attic,” and I would have trouble going to sleep without a light on.
  
  After we moved out, I heard through the grapevine that the neighbor’s kid was caught spying on the new people who moved in. It turns out that he had broken a hole in the ceiling of his closet to gain access to the crawlspace and had been looking through holes he had bored in the ceiling overlooking the other part of the house. The noises I heard were him moving around on his arms and knees up there. © oreo_flavored_oreo / Reddit

• When I was 3, my family and I (all 9 of us) lived in one condo. Every night when everyone was asleep, I’d go out to the living room, eat snacks, and quietly brush my doll’s hair. Every night, my imaginary friend would come out of the attic and sit with me. We’d tell each other secrets, and he’d do my hair while I did my doll’s hair.
  
  Turns out he wasn’t an imaginary friend but just an intruder living in our attic.
  © Cuteness_Overload- / Reddit

• I have almost no memory of my childhood, but one of the few things I do remember is the ghost people. For context, my parents split up when I was 2, and my mom had full custody of my brother and me until I was 10. Then, my dad got custody of us. Growing up, I was convinced that there were a bunch of ghosts living in the attic, and I thought it was a completely normal thing.
  
  My mom used to tell us about the people in the attic and how if we ever heard a weird noise, it was because of them. She would climb into the attic fairly often and have conversations with these people. She’d come back down and tell me what they talked about and how they were doing, which I always looked forward to hearing about. Sometimes they would get angry and break things in our house like mirrors and TVs, but my mom assured me they would never hurt us. This continued on a pretty regular basis the entire time I lived with her.
  
  I eventually went to live with my dad, and he explained to me when I was older that my mom had bipolar schizophrenia and some other mental illnesses. The ghost people were never real, of course, and she was the one who would break all the mirrors and TVs because she was convinced that there were hidden cameras in them. © Techn0Bagel / Reddit

Much like fear, deception is an emotion that we strongly dislike. One notable occurrence of feeling misled is when a potential romantic interest diverges from the romantic persona we had envisioned. The people in this article underwent a sudden shattering of their dreams when they unexpectedly developed a sense of unease towards their prospective partner.