15 Creepy Childhood Events That People Never Forgot Even as Adults

Childhood brings intense emotions, and fear is no exception. Sometimes, that fear is justified, just like in these chilling childhood encounters that left marks so deep, they stayed vivid and unsettling well into adulthood, enough to give us goosebumps.

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• Laying in bed one night, it’s pitch black apart from the light creeping under the door from the landing. My mum was actually with me in the same room as we had only just moved in, and she was sleeping on the floor. I look up and the door slowly creeks open and slowly an oldish women peers around the door looks at me and goes away.
  I just thought I was in a nightmare and turned around real fast and went under the covers, hoping I would wake up. Then I will never forget my mum whispering to me, “Did you just see someone peer round the door?”. Safe to say, we didn’t sleep a wink that night. © PM-ME-YOUR-POEM / Reddit

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• My sister and I were having a prank war for like a week straight. Well, we agreed to a cease fire since my birthday was in two days. I just turned 11, and later that night I hear my closet door open. Oh, so my sister wants to prank me on my special day, eh? I’ll show her, I thought. So I know she snuck in and forgot my door squeaks. So I had an idea, I would get up and push her!
  I slowly get up, and she steps out of the closet. Wasn’t my sister, because my sister doesn’t have long black hair and scars on her face, and isn’t as tall as a grown woman. I wanted to scream, but instead I just froze and silently started whimpering and crying.
  She puts her finger up to her lips and lets out a “Shh,” and opens my window and crawls out, slowly closed my window, never to be seen again. At first, I thought it was a ghost. Now I’m convinced it was a thief or something. © PM_ME_FOR_SMALLTALK / Reddit

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• I sleep on my chest, often with my arms under my pillow, when I was young I woke up in the middle of the night and felt like I had been pinned to my bed at my left shoulder... I swiped around with my right hand and grabbed... something. It was cold and clammy, about the circumference of a human arm. It wasn’t my arm.
  I leapt out of bed, hit the lights. Alone, look under the bed, nothing. Under the pillow, again, nothing. I lived with that memory haunting me for almost twenty years, then it happened again.
  And I realized I had fallen asleep on my own arm, and it had gone cold and numb. Because I was laying on it, I felt pinned at the shoulder to my own bed. I have never felt so much relief from anything as from solving that mystery. © Controlled01 / Reddit

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• I was around 14, and my older sister loved taking family photos. She was 19 then. At a dinner, she insisted on taking just one more picture. She grinned, said “cheese,” and then collapsed. The doctors said it was a massive cardiac arrest. She passed instantly, and there was nothing we could do. I think I was too shocked to even grieve.
  I opened her phone to send funeral invites to her friends, some of whom I knew, and was shocked to see the last picture that she had taken. She had clearly collapsed, perhaps a microsecond after she clicked the photo, so it was blurry. In the background, right behind her, was a white flash, in the shape of an angel ornament, the kind you put in Christmas trees.
  It could be a fluke of light, sure, but I believe it was my sister, and that she still looks out for me.
  © Tamara D’Mello / Bright Side
  

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• Apparently, when I was very little, I asked my aunt, “What is going to happen to your leg?” She was a perfectly healthy woman in her late 30s, and replied, “Nothing is happening with my leg.
  It’s perfectly fine.”
  A few days later, we heard that she had been in a massive accident. Her leg was mangled beyond saving, and had to be amputated right below the hip bone. She still is distant with me, like I had something to do with it. © Rebecca Parsons / Bright Side

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If you liked these creepy tales, try these camping stories that turned from pleasant break into scary encounters, in the blink of an eye.