14 Chilling Stories That Could Give Stephen King Nightmares

We often think that chilling and gut-wrenching situations only happen in movies, but real life can bring even more thrilling scenarios than any work of fiction. While some of these creepy events can have closure, many remain unexplained forever, making them all the more astonishing. In this compilation, we share a mix of thrilling and spine-tingling stories that will make your heart beat much faster.

• The night before my best friend, 16, vanished, she handed me $5 and said, “I owe you money. Take this bill!” It felt random, but I put it in my jar without looking twice. 3 weeks later, I suddenly remembered and opened the jar. When I examined the bill, my blood ran cold. She had marked it with a tiny handwritten message. I looked closely to read it and I froze: there was a message in blue ink that said: “No matter what happens, you will stay in my heart.”
  
  Chills ran down my spine. It could’ve been a simple note between friends, but the timing felt eerie. I rushed to the police station to show them, but it didn’t go anywhere. It’s been 10 years, and though my friend was never found, not a single day goes by without me thinking about that bill, wondering if it held a deeper meaning.

• When I was a kid (about 13), we lived in a two-story house. I don’t remember what I was doing, but I heard my dad calling me from the room upstairs. I called back and received no answer. As I walked to the stairway, I happened to look out into our driveway and saw that the truck was gone and my dad wasn’t home.
  I still don’t know what called for me that day, but it wasn’t my father.
  © destrycampbell / Reddit

• This wasn’t eerie; it was terrifying. I was 13 or 14 and had a couple of my baseball team friends over to spend the night. We kept hearing this thud. After a few more times, we decided to check it out. We grabbed three baseball bats from my laundry room, looked all over the entire house, and made sure it wasn’t my dad. The last room we checked, I looked out and saw a man trying to climb through the window. He saw us and got out of there as fast as he could. No sleep was had that night. © Gr***deNation / Reddit

• A few years ago, when I was in my early teens, I had a dream of a man on a beach flying a kite with two dogs running around him. A month later, while on holiday in France, we were on a beach, and I looked up to see the same man flying the same kite with the same dogs. Everything went cold, even though it was 30 degrees. It was one of the weirdest experiences ever.
  © piratemonkey22 / Reddit

• Our apartment has high ceilings, so we got an eight-foot, bright neon yellow pole to change lightbulbs. Last week, the pole disappeared.
  Seriously, we cannot find an eight-foot, bright yellow pole in our tiny apartment. We are deeply disturbed by this. © rogueleaderr / Reddit

• I stayed in a hotel alone during a business trip. I hung a towel on my right hand as I proceeded to wash my face at the sink. When I finished, my left hand reached out to grab the towel, only to touch the skin. I wheeled around and saw that the towel was hung behind the door instead.
  © thepredestrian / Reddit

• I was visiting my grandfather’s grave for the first time, and as I approached it, a golden retriever appeared out of nowhere. He sat with me as I sat next to the grave, his head resting on my knee. As I was leaving, I turned around, and the dog had disappeared.
  Rationally speaking, I know that it was just a dog, not connected to my grandfather at all, but part of me still likes to think that he came to say goodbye to me that day.
  © objetdel / Reddit

• A couple of years ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to go downstairs to get a drink. I found my eight-year-old brother staring down the sink drain, and when I asked him what he was doing, he just said, “They’re coming.” He was sleepwalking, so I took him back up to bed.
  © IAmA_Zombie / Reddit

• I had what I thought was a lucid dream where I basically watched some figure in my dark room look through my bookshelf, pat me on the head, and leave. I woke up to the news from my flatmates that someone had entered our house through the unlocked back door during the night... That’s the day I decided to invest in a lock for my bedroom. © Unknown author / Reddit

• My phone is a Droid, and to unlock it from sleep mode, you must push the power button and slide the lock across the screen. I put my phone in sleep mode, placed it on my bed, and went to brush my teeth. While brushing, I decided to determine my top five drummers of all time for some reason. I was trying to decide which position to rank John Bonham. My thought process was, “Well, the drum part in ’Good Times Bad Times’ is awesome.”
  After brushing, I went back to my room, and my phone was blaring “Good Times Bad Times” on Pandora. I can’t explain it. © Notmychairnotmyprobz / Reddit

• Once, I went to phone my grandparents but couldn’t remember whether the last digit in the number was 7 or 8. I figured, what the heck, and guessed. Anyway, I picked the wrong one, and some guy who wasn’t my grandpa picked up. I apologized and said I had the wrong number. He said, “Is that (my name)?” A bit creeped out, I replied, “...yes? Who is this?” He just laughed and said, “You don’t recognize my voice, do you?” I froze for about a minute before saying goodbye and hanging up. To this day, I have no idea who he was or how he knew me.
  © Mightyfineshindig / Reddit

• Once, I was driving on a motorway at midday during the holiday season. I expected a lot of traffic, but it was deserted. A few kilometers ahead of me, I spotted heavy traffic. I looked in the mirror and saw that there was heavy traffic a few kilometers behind me as well. That was a strange feeling—I had about five kilometers of empty highway to myself.
  
  It felt like something was about to happen to me, and me only. Final Destination-like.
  © Modeopfa / Reddit

• Once, when I was home alone, I woke up in the middle of the night with a bloody nose. I walked over to the tissues and garbage and ended up filling the entire bin with bloody tissues before returning to bed. In the morning, I woke up to find the bin empty. I figured it must have just been a dream and that I hadn’t had a nosebleed. The catch? As I walked into the bathroom and began to wash my face...
  ...my nose started bleeding. © Unknown author / Reddit

• I was changing in my room when I was 16 and saw a flash in my window. Thought nothing of it until I realized it wasn’t raining. A week or so later, I woke up to the unmistakable sound of breathing at my window. When I called out, I could hear them running and jumping over my gate. Thought maybe I was just crazy until my mom confirmed she had also heard weird noises from the backyard. We moved a month later. To this day, I am not sure who it was.
  © Maxwelpet / Reddit

Unsettling and stomach-churning moments can also send shivers down your spine. In this article, we’ve gathered a series of genuinely revolting experiences that are so shocking, that they’re sure to leave you speechless.