r/TrueScaryStories

To anyone out there reading this, I hope you had a great Independence day and got to watch some great fireworks! I will be talking about my Fourth of July experience from yesterday, and some of the supernatural things that happened.

Basically, I don't have a great home life so I spent the fourth of july with my best friend. If you drive out of town a bit, there are these woods along a dirt road that has a great view of the sky and the town, so we thought it would be a perfect place to drive there and watch the fireworks while sitting in the back of her pickup with blankets and chips.

These woods are always a little creepy at night and we kind of joke about the paranormal creatures (aka skinwalkers) that might be there due to the number of deer around, and driving in the woods we saw a lot more deer then normal, like an abnormal amount that immediately raised some red flags.

The deer also seemed to be in a pack almost running away from something all together, almost like they knew something was wrong (we thought maybe they were scared of the fireworks but where we were the fireworks werent super loud).

The wifi is also kind of spotty and its away from a majority of civilization (minus this "haunted" cabin that is kind of a local urban legend, but thats for another story) but at the time, before everything (the skinwalker shit) happened, we thought it would be a perfect location to watch fireworks and that paranormal stuff didnt actually happen. Oh boy we were wrong.

Sorry for the long background, time to get into what happened; basically we were watching the fireworks but both me and my friend had this weird, eery feeling, like the forest got super cold all of a sudden and the wind was so creepy. we also were hearing human screaming in the distance, we thought it was a coyote or smth but it really sounded like a human.

its possible someone else was out there but i doubt it and we didnt see any other people. we were getting kind of freaked out and it was getting late so we decided that maybe we should drive back, but as we got out of the truck bed to go into the car, there were these two glowing dots kind of in the distance from behind a tree.

i thought i was going crazy and just got in the car. as we were driving away cuz we turned the other direction, my friend looked into the car mirror and said that she saw those eyes from behind the tree cuz we were turned around and when i looked at the passenger car mirror from my side i saw it too, except it was closer this time. she started speeding cuz we were both getting really really bad vibes and like the sinking gut feeling like dread and death and i glanced at the passenger side window and the glowing eyes were gone.

thats when i started to hear weird scratching sounds and the car was slowing down like something was holding it back, my friend had her foot completely on the gas and was confused and trying to book it, the gas also started draining even thought she had a 3/4 tank and the car's engine was making weird sounds. the scratching continued and I started praying so hard for it to stop and me and my frined were panicking and thought we were going to die.

then, suddenly the intense scratching stopped and the forest just got completely quiet, i glanced again in the passender mirror and saw a deer running away. i was so confused but grateful and even though my friend had barely any gas left we made it back to town. when we were filling up gas and checked the back of teh car, it was covered in dents and scratches, and the back ligths were broken. there were also long scratche dmarks on the truck bed like someone was trying to climb in, but we were kind of confused at this cuz we ddint see anything on the truck bed that we couldve seen in the mirrors, but we also couldnt see anything that well cuz it waws so dark.

also, this forest area is also close to many Native American lands so thats why I am idenitifying this entity as a skinwalker taking the form of a deer, as they are a part of their culture and it has always been what i have been told. However, I may be incorrect so feel free to correct me. anyways, i just wanted to share this story from yesterday because me and my friend are both extremely shocked and scared about it and couldnt sleep all of last ngiht. please comment any thoughts down below!

So this is a long one , please read and it is 100% real and it just happened to me today morning like at around 1-2 a.m .
So I was just playing Bgmi with my headphones on at around 12:50 am , so while playing I had to start a new match and matchmaking takes almost 2-3 min , so I decided to remove my headphones and just scroll some reels .
My elder brother on the other hand was watching TV and my mother was sleeping right next to the bed to my table . My father is out of town 🙏🏽
Suddenly I heard a screeching sound , like the sound our main door makes when it is opened , my brother said it is nothing but I always check these things out .
So I just went out to the other door that separates the main door and our bedroom door and there is a window next to our bedroom door and boooom I see a man TALL , THIN , BLACK COLOUR ( no offence )
And had a somewhat of a knife or idk what in his back tucked into his jeans peeping through the door .
Now he didn’t see me cause of the curtains and it being dark in the room so I quickly told my brother and my mom without alerting the man 🫣
I was peeking through the window while my mom and brother called the neighbours and then I just looked back just for a sec and again boom 😭 he’s coming towards our bedroom door . That was scary af . Then all of us again went downstairs and closed the staircase door ( yes in India everything has a door ) .
While he was still figuring out the bedroom door mechanism ( where all our valuables like my phone , iPad etc were placed ) but I guess he couldn’t .
And I suddenly heard a shout at our main door ( yes we have two main doors because of some personal reasons ) this time they were our neighbours with just anything they could grab ( like a bat , stick etc )
I quickly opened the door and we all went outside and suddenly we saw the same man 😭 climbing on top of our roof with the help of nothing but just a small ah plastic pipe 🙏🏽😭 I don’t how he did it , but we still managed to throw some pebbles and sticks at him which I think injured him a bit .
Then everyone near us were alarmed .. our neighbours are like family so I called them again and they came out . Like around 10-15 men .
Idk if this made the burglar panic or what but he started running in a hurry . Mind u he was still on the roofs and was jumping here and there from the roofs only 🫣
It was dark af and he also had worn dark clothes so it was almost impossible to see him
We still searched for him for about an hour but couldn’t find him
One of my neighbours saw his face and told us that they could identify him is shown a photo .
We went back up to see how he got in but couldn’t find any evidence and I’m 1000% that I had closed the door just like an hour before and there is no chance he was in the house all that time 😭
We checked the other room where he had the access to after entering the main door
There were only 100-200 rs kept in-front of the gods in the room which he stole and he was also about to steal my brothers laptop that was also in the room 😭 but luckily he couldn’t I think becus of the amt of people he heard in the street which made him panic . The laptop was left behind at the main door and Nothing else was stolen 🙏🏽 .

HE WAS IN OUR HOUSE FOR MORE THAN 30 minutes 😭 one of my neighbours saw him standing there back and couldn’t say anything becuz they didn’t have our number …..

I COULNDT SLEEEPP ALL NIGHT 😭
Stared hearing random ahh noises which sacred the fuck outtaa me .
The point when I saw him the first time in my main door is my worst nightmare now 😭

Thankfully it’s morning now and everybody’s safe .
Still don’t know anything about the person
But will inform u if possible 👍🏿
This was horrifying even to explain 😭

I was chatting with my parents tonight and the conversation got… dark. I can’t remember why. Something to do with my mum making a comment to my dad about ”your mum’s stalkers”, so I had to ask. I sort of wish I didn’t. When my dad was about 10, that’s the age he estimates, so my Nan was in her early thirties, she was being harassed. My dad didn’t specify what this meant, or how serious, just that it lasted a while, even after the police got involved. Officers showing up at her house every day, and she began to grow quite friendly with them. Quite personal. They’d park their police cars outside and just… observe. It felt odd, so I was told. The harassment got worse. Their cat had been kidnapped, stabbed to death, and left on the doormat. On a separate occasion, though I’m not sure which came first, a rabbit was hung from a noose outside the front door. Except my Nan stopped seeing the man harassing her, she hadn’t seen him for a while. The police car became more frequent. Officers would let themselves in and out of the house freely. One officer. The peak of this story comes when my dad’s family left for holiday and returned to what I can only describe as a horror movie scene. A mini dress of my Nan’s, along with her underwear, laid out on her bed, surrounded by photos of the family taken from all over the house with my grandads face torn out. Of course my grandad tried to do stuff. He’d follow the car as he saw it leaving their house and once even chased the man out of their house with a baseball bat. Unfortunately I have no closure on this as my dad doesn’t know why it stopped, only that it did, and that it lasted years, and that everything that he knows is only the tip of the iceberg.

Tell me some stories from your life's that will send shivers down my spine.

Hi all,

I'm facing a complete mystery and I'm hoping the community might have a logical explanation for a really bizarre scenario. The following story is based on what my father and sister told me. I initially thought it was a joke, but they're absolutely serious.

At the beginning of June, my father, sister, wife, and I left my father's apartment together. My father and sister went on vacation immediately, while my wife and I went home and then on vacation a few weeks later. So the apartment was completely empty for several weeks. Our mother passed away a few months ago.

When my father and sister returned from their vacation and opened the apartment door, they couldn't believe their eyes:

The floor: A transparent, sticky liquid was spread throughout the hallway and kitchen. Countless dead flies were stuck to it.

The kitchen: A brown liquid was splashed on the walls, the window, and the dishes (which were lying openly on the counter).

The stench: An unbearable, bitter, "toxic" stench permeated the entire apartment, seemingly from the liquid on the floor. My father compared it to insecticide or rust remover.

The bathroom and bedrooms were clean. However, my late mother's closet also smelled - albeit fainter - of exactly this toxic chemical stench (even though everything in there was clean).

The other rooms (bedrooms, toilet) are all accessible from the affected hallway. However, they remained completely clean.

My sister was so shocked by the mess that she immediately cleaned everything. She even cut off a piece of the kitchen window blind because it was so dirty.

What I have already ruled out:

1. Exploded food: I initially thought it might have been a sauce or cola that exploded due to the summer heat. The kitchen was completely tidy before our departure; there were no containers lying around.
2. Technical defect: I checked the old gas heater, the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the drain. There are no leaks or residue anywhere. Furthermore, the layout of the rooms makes no sense: the kitchen and hallway are perpendicular to each other - a spilled liquid wouldn't have spread around the corner into both rooms on its own.
3. Break-in: There are absolutely no signs of forced entry. Nothing is missing - even money was untouched. The door was locked. The landlady (according to her own statement) doesn't have a key. The apartment is on the second floor; entry through the window is unlikely.
4. Flies: My wife remembers that there was a fly in the apartment when we left. But a single fly doesn't multiply that drastically in just a few weeks.

My father was initially absolutely certain that my wife and I must have been in the apartment. When I denied it, I could see from his face and his surprise that he was absolutely stunned. He fully expected us to be responsible.

This is going to be a long one, so thanks to anyone who actually reads it. There's a TL;DR at the end.

I don't even know where to begin, so I'll just write everything exactly as I remember it.
I lived in the same apartment for 19 years. I grew up there. Even as a little kid, I had strange dreams about it before I was old enough to understand why.
It was a three story apartment filled with Persian rugs, black steel railings and a balcony. Years ago one wall in the living room was painted dark red. The third floor always felt different. I can’t even begin to describe the feeling. Everything about this apartment just had this eerie feeling to it. It was home, but I never truly felt alone.
My family and I joke that it was haunted. The truth is, it doesn't really feel like a joke. Every single one of us experienced paranormal activities.

Things that happened to me
Objects disappeared all the time. Sometimes forever. Sometimes they came back in places they simply couldn't have been.
The best example is a striped summer dress.
I hadn't seen it in months and decided to finally look for it. A friend came over and helped me. We literally emptied my entire wardrobe, sorted everything, folded clothes and put them back. The dress wasn't there.
Later that evening we were getting ready for a party while FaceTiming. I was still annoyed that I couldn't find it and chose something else to wear.
My friend went home to have dinner, then came back to my place so we could pregame. While we were talking, I opened my wardrobe one last time and the dress literally fell into my arms.
I heard scratching and knocking on doors.
Strange noises all over the apartment.
Almost every day I had this overwhelming feeling that someone was watching me. Not occasionally. Constantly. I never truly felt alone.
I heard footsteps when nobody else was home.
Several times I clearly heard my mom call my name. Sometimes she wasn't even in the apartment. Other times I'd walk downstairs asking what she wanted, only for her to tell me she never called me.
I had recurring nightmares for years.
One night I woke up because something was pushing me deep into my mattress. I was only half awake but desperately tried to fight back. I couldn't move. I felt like something was assaulting me. It had done things to me. The next morning I had scratches exactly where I remembered being touched.
I constantly heard tiny, quick footsteps running up and down the stairs. The metal railing would shake as if someone was grabbing it while running.
I saw shadow figures more than once.
One afternoon I was upstairs in my mom's room singing Bohemian Rhapsody because the acoustics were amazing in there. When I stopped singing, someone outside the room kept humming the melody.
It sounded like a child.
I slowly opened the door.
At the other end of the hallway the dish towel hanging on the drying rack was moving by itself.
Then I heard small footsteps running downstairs.

One night my brother stormed into my room furious, telling me to stop knocking on his door.
I had been asleep the entire time.

Another time a friend was visiting. She was in the bathroom while I was lying in bed. Through the gap in the door I thought I saw her walk upstairs, so I didn't think much of it.
A minute later she walked back into my room and asked,
"So... if you're here... who did I just see walking upstairs in the bathroom mirror?"
She was an atheist. She didn't believe in ghosts, spirits or anything paranormal.

My ex boyfriend once cried because he became so terrified inside that apartment.
Several friends refused to stay overnight after visiting. Others told me they felt uncomfortable for reasons they couldn't explain. Some even started dreaming about the apartment after they had been there.
Even years later, I still dream about it.
The staircase leading to the apartment appears over and over again.
It reminds me of the Backrooms. It was a light yellow paint all over the walls, the same railings as in our apartment.
I dream about hidden rooms, secret elevators, endless hallways that lead nowhere or extremely underground or liminal spaces.
Sometimes I dream about the outside walkway collapsing beneath my feet while I fall into darkness.

One nightmare has stayed with me for years. I had only had it once but I still think about it from time to time.
I'm sitting at the end of the staircase in complete darkness. The front door is slightly open. My brother tells me to wait while he walks upstairs.
Then a three meter tall black figure with glowing red eyes and a huge black hole where its mouth should be suddenly charges toward me.
I woke up drenched in sweat, extremely scared.
One random morning, I was 15 or so, I woke up, grabbed my phone and found a photo of myself sleeping in my gallery.
Both of my arms were visible in the picture, so I wasnt the one that took it. I still have no explanation to this day.

Things that happened to my family
My mom has always been unusually sensitive to things she can't explain.
When she was two years old she almost died from an infection and spent time in a coma. Ever since then she's claimed to perceive things differently. As a child she reportedly dreamed about relatives dying before they actually passed away.
Several people have witnessed strange things happen around her during moments of intense anger.
My dad once mocked her spiritual beliefs. She became furious and, according to both of them, the blinds suddenly slammed shut on their own.
My parents have been divorced for more than fifteen years. My dad still tells that story.
My mom was deeply unhappy because my father was abusive. One day she became so overwhelmed that she started chanting words I still can't remember.
Later, while she and my father were together, she looked over his shoulder into the hallway and saw a tall man with long black hair standing at the end of the staircase.
She described him as wearing a suit with an incredibly intense stare. Then he disappeared.
Another day she was ironing when she watched a small child casually walk around the ironing board before vanishing.
She also experienced the same thing I did, waking up unable to move while something pressed her into the bed.
She once lost her Bluetooth headset.
She searched everywhere.
A year later she found two identical headsets sitting together at the end of the staircase.

My brother
He also experienced the mysterious knocking.
He heard strange noises.
He heard people calling his name when nobody had.
Things eventually became so overwhelming that we decided to cleanse the apartment with incense.
Every single window was open.
There was a strong cross breeze.
The smoke refused to leave through the windows.
He also suffered from severe sleep paralysis, sleepwalking, night terrors and chronic sleep problems.
One of his Muslim friends visited us.
When they walked past my sister's room on the third floor, a drinking glass suddenly shot off her desk.
It couldn't have simply fallen because it had been placed far back on the desk.
His friend immediately said,
"There's Shaytan living here."
He never came back.

My sister
My sister has always considered herself the skeptic of the family.
She's a science based agnostic and says she isn't sensitive to paranormal things.
Yet even she has stories.
One night she woke up because her blanket was pulled off her body.
Not slowly.
It was lifted upward first and then violently ripped away.
She also talks about the constant strange noises and the feeling of being watched.
She says that feeling disappeared completely after she moved out.
We fought constantly in that apartment.
The place always felt flooded with negative emotions, old wounds and heavy energy.
I don't know what was there.
I wish I did.
So many strange things seemed connected to the bottom of the staircase near the apartment entrance.
A very spiritual friend of my mom once visited and told her she believed there were two entities there.
A child.
And something much darker.
I've often wondered...
Did my mom unknowingly invite something into that apartment?
Was it simply years of trauma affecting everyone?
Or was there actually something there?
Can something like that follow you after you leave?
Because I still dream about that place.
It still feels like it's haunting me.
After my ex and I broke up, I wanted to move back into the same district where I grew up.
Without really planning it, I ended up living only a few blocks away from that apartment.
It's still there.
Every time I walk past it I get goosebumps and the same eerie feeling, I had felt all my life.

What the hell was that?

TL;DR: I lived in the same apartment for 19 years. My entire family experienced unexplained events including footsteps, knocking, voices calling our names, objects disappearing and reappearing, shadow figures, terrifying dreams, sleep paralysis, physical scratches, and multiple shared experiences. Friends, my ex, and visitors also reported feeling watched or witnessing strange things. Even years after moving out, I still have recurring nightmares about the apartment and get chills whenever I walk past it.

Note: Reading back over this, the lore I have for this guy is so crazy that it seems fake but I have screenshots of some of the texts he sent me. Please look up the title of the news story named below for authenticity of this crime.

Back in 2021, I (F) moved to Central Texas about an hour and a half outside of Austin. Being a new adult with a new sense of adventure in a new state after a sheltered childhood, I hopped on dating apps pretty regularly to meet and chat with all sorts of people.

Admittedly, at the time I didn't have very good standards for who I swiped right on, lol. One day, I swiped right on this guy who had maybe 3 pictures, all kinda blurry and didn't really show his face too well. Like I said, I really didn't have the best judgement. He was a year or two older than me. We matched, chatted for a bit, and agreed to meet later that week at a park in Austin.

He didn't really look anything like I expected (I mean, what could I possibly be expecting. I had hardly seen his face), meaning he wasn't really my usual "type". His head was shaved (all the pictures on his profile were of him with longer hair), he wore boring clothes, he was pretty unsubstantial if I'm being honest. It was a long drive, so I just decided to put all my thoughts aside and entertain the date. We walked around the pond at the park, chatting about our interests and normal small talk you do on a date. The thing is, he seemed really smart and aware to me. I was mostly into fiction books, but he was into political theory, racial history and injustice. Of course, any guy could say they read such "smarty-pants" theory to try to win some points with a girl, but he legitimately had page numbers and excerpts from these books committed to memory. I'd never met someone like that. I was super intrigued. We discussed the book "Women, Race and Class", he rattled off some points from it. I'd never read it before and scribbled down the book recommendation in my notes. (I remember later on finishing that book in a week and having something of a "book club" with him.)

Our date goes on and goes well, all things considered! I find out he doesn't have a car, but he says he's just gonna take a bus back home. I offer to drop him off back at his house, he's a little hesitant but accepts and asks if I want to check out his place. I accept. Dumb.

He lived in these "motel-style" apartments, think the hotel from "The Florida Project" but blue. I grew up under the poverty line, I've seen much worse and don't really think anything of it. He brought me up to his apartment, unlocked the door and invited me in.

It was grooossssss in there.

Despite having a one bedroom, his bare mattress was in the corner of the living room on the floor, across from it is a small unplugged TV ontop of black milkcrate with a PlayStation next to it. A small DIY table next to his bed functioning as both a desk and a nightstand. That was it. Nothing else on the walls, no other furniture. I asked if he recently moved in, he says he did about 4/5 months ago. I ask why his bed is in the living room, why not your bedroom? He stutters out a response, "The neighborhood is bad. If someone breaks in, I don't want them sneaking up on me." I shrug. He offers me a cup of water and I follow him into the kitchen to be nosy and look through his cabinets and fridge. The only things in his cabinets are cans of mixed beans and bags of rice. All in his fridge is a few bottles of Jumex and leftover rice. I comment on his shitty bachelor-style eating habits and ask to use the restroom before I go. His bathroom is even worse. A sink covered in old, rusted razors and facial hair. Mold and mildew covered shower walls, curtain, and tub. As I hovered over his toilet to pee, I could smell his towel across from me on the towel bar, reeking of mildew. As I wash my hands, a roach skitters across the sink. I am utterly repulsed and any romantic interest I once had in this man is now obliterated. Despite washing my hands, I don't feel clean in this apartment. After leaving the bathroom, I thank him for his time and leave.

Now, here is where I will take some responsibility and say, I made a mistake by not leaving it there. I knew I was not interested in the slightest romantically to this dude based on his living environment, but I have to admit; I really, really enjoyed picking his brain on things. He was genuinely interesting to listen to and talk about theory, hence why I read the books he recommended and discussed them with him. Looking back, that would definitely be something a girl would do if she wanted to pursue something further. I was not smart about that stuff.

We would text and call and such over a month and a half or so, with things being truly platonic on my side. I just really wanted to talk about books and catch up.

One day he texted me in a panic and asking to see me. Worried about him, I try to call and figure out what was going on. His voice is different, it sounds strained and tired. He asks for me to come to his apartment, that what he needs to talk about "can't be talked about on the phone". I'm annoyed being that it's an hour-long drive from my house to his apartment. He begs and pleads with me to come, so begrudgingly I hop in my car and head to Austin.

By the time I park in front of his apartment building he's already outside, pacing back and forth. He hops in the passenger of my car and I finally get a good look at him. His eyes are bloodshot red, wide and he looked as if he hadn't slept in days. He gives me a long, strong hug then starts rattling on about nothing in particular. I stop him and ask,

"Dude, why am I here. What's going on?"

He pauses and brings his voice down to a whisper.

"I want to tell you everything. But first, you need to turn your phone to airplane mode, open up your glove box, and leave it in the car."

Before this point, I had never really had any reason to fear for my safety around this guy. He didn't seem like the type to do anything dangerous, but as he said that I felt a pit growing in my stomach.

Eager to just get this settled, I do what he asks but request to go on a walk around the neighborhood and talk, as the building was right next to an extremely busy street and I wanted to be around more people just incase something went wrong. We go for a slow walk around, and he lets me in on his problem.

He's been seeing people surveilling him and he's sure of it. Big black Escalades with pitch-black windows staking out his apartment, his job, anywhere he goes. He's being gangstalked.

Confused, I asked who he thought was following him.

"The Rap Industry," he says. "Those people want me dead."

What I didn't mention about this guy is that he loved to write raps. He had a little notebook he kept with him at all times, full of little cyphers. I didn't mention this fact, because his raps honestly sucked. They were terrible and pseudo-intellectual. I never said this outloud because, I mean, I don't want to hinder any person's creative expression. Another point to make is; this dude never posted any of his stuff online ANYWHERE. He kept all of his stuff to himself or would show it to the people immediately around him, but never publicized them anywhere, as far as I knew. So, who; if anyone, cared enough about this one sorry Italian dude's raps locked away in a notebook?

The answer is no one. And I knew that. At that moment I realized I was stuck with an individual having a mental health episode and I was completely alone.

He rattled on about how he was "saying the things they were too scared to expose," and that "what I'm writing is going to change the world, they want to kill me for it," and "I wanted to tell you to keep you safe and so you can decide if you want to be involved or not,". As I took it all in, I guided him over to a spot, a basketball court with a few picnic tables next to his apartment and sit down. When I finally got a moment of silence and to think, I leveled with him.

I told him that I was inequipped to handle this, he needed to seek some help, and that I was leaving. He yelled and screamed and cried after me, saying I was the only one he trusted but I was so scared that I ignored his cries, hustled back to my car and sped away.

I didn't talk to him for months after that. I didn't know what to say. I wasn't scared of him, but I was scared for him. I had no idea what to do, I just knew I couldn't do anything for him.

Months later, I moved to Houston for college. I had my first apartment to myself and was feeling amazing. Bored one random day, I was looking up the names of some people I had previously dated, mainly being nosy again and wanting to see if any of them had gotten into any trouble. I finally get around to looking up this guy, and up pops a link for his LinkedIn. I click it and browse, but don't really see anything interesting, so I move on.

The next day, I get a notification of a DM on LinkedIn. It's from him. I had no idea that LinkedIn notifies you when someone looks at your profile, but in this case it let him know that I was snooping. He sent a little sly message, something like "caught ya peeking". I apologize for being nosy and we exchange some small talk. Later on I get a message on my phone, an actual text message from him asking if it's okay to text me.

We catch up, I let him know I moved and stuff, and then I ask how he's been up to and if he's doing better.

Boy, the whiplash I got when I found out what this dude had gone through in the months we hadn't spoken.

He told me that a couple weeks after I stopped talking to him, he was "in a bad way". By this time he had gotten his car (which had been left at his mother's house in Lubbock, Texas) back and had relapsed with the drinking problem that I didn't know he had.

One day, he hopped into his car after drinking in excess, got on a freeway and was driving his car at upwards of 80 MPH. He says he blacked out at some point, then woke up to his car crashed into a bridge support beam, and his legs trapped under the dash.

His car was absolutely obliterated. He wasn't in good shape in the slightest either. I can't remember which side it happened on, but he told me that he had to have everything from his thigh down amputated.

In a matter of months of not talking to this guy, he lost a foot. After the accident, he moved back to Lubbock to live with his mom.

I remember crying, instantly coming to the conclusion that it was my fault that happened. I mean, I had cut communication with him right before. He said I was the closest friend he had, and I left him. I felt so, so terrible. I apologized to him, though realistically I knew I had nothing to do with it. He rejected my apology, insisting it was all his fault (obviously) and that he was doing much better since. I couldn't shake the feeling of guilt though.

Later, I brought up that I was going to the Denzel Curry show coming up in a few weeks. He mentioned that since his injury, he hadn't felt comfortable leaving the house much and hadn't been to a concert in some time. He really enjoyed Denzel's music, though.

"If you find yourself in Houston at some point soon, you should come with me!" I said.

Conveniently, he mentioned he had another friend in Houston that he'd been wanting to go see. It was decided, he bought a ticket days after to fly from Lubbock to Houston. Still feeling like he was some sort of sad puppy that I had brutally wounded, I offered to let him sleep on my couch. He'd planned to only be there for 2 or 3 days. I guess I just wanted to allow him an opportunity to get out of the house and experience something different.

Weeks later, once he actually arrives in Houston, I find myself sobbing when I pick him up from the airport. He really was missing a leg. I couldn't believe it. Staring at his prosthetic leg was such a mind-altering experience for me. I'd really wished that for some messed up reason he had lied about it.

When we arrive at my place, I realize him staying at my apartment is a feat easier said than done. I lived in an apartment up a flight of stairs. Each time he needed to get in or out, I had to give him a shoulder of support to make it up and down the stairs. But we get it done. We finally make it inside, he takes off his shoes and settles on the couch. I sit on the floor parallel to him. I ask if I can see his leg. He pops the prosthetic off and I start sobbing all over again.

The days that he stays with me, for the most part, go smoothly. We go to the Denzel show one day and have a good time, and while I'm working on college assignments, he goes to visit his friend. Then he decides to stay for a couple more days, which I don't mind at the time. He decides to turn three days into six days. When he's at my house, he helps me with my classwork and accompanies me on errands. It's not too bad!

One day, we're sitting in my living room watching TV or something while I'm working on an assignment. I feel him staring at me and ask, "What?"

With a huge smile he says, "What would stop me from getting you pregnant and staying here with you forever?"

Man, when I say my heart dropped to my feet, I mean it. I start laughing awkwardly as if to say, "Yeah..okay..anyway." But from the moment he said that, in my mind he became a threat.

I wasn't too worried though. This man is in my house and I have some big advantages despite him being taller than me. There had been numerous instances that week of me easily (but accidentally) knocking him over and sending him to the floor. I knew if worse came to worse and blows came to blows, I could send him flying down my flight of stairs, as awful a thought that is.

Thankfully, his stay was coming to an end, expedited by me insisting that he needed to go home after he hinted that maybe he could stay a couple days longer. I can't remember if I gave him the grace of bringing him to the airport or making him get an uber, but soon he was gone and I never saw him in person ever again.

I whittled down contact with him, but he would still send me text messages like "Miss you!" and "I wanna come back. Do you want me to come back?"

He loved getting into stupid, little arguments. One day he texted me a link to a J. Cole music video, asking my opinion on it. The storyline was Django adjacent. I just responded, "Pretty cool!" And that sent him down into a tirade against me, preaching that the video was "sexualizing" and "downplaying" racism and slavery and that I should be ashamed of myself for thinking the video was okay. He even called me racist! Me, a mixed race black woman, was surprised to learn such a fact about myself from this Italian man!

I ended the conversation, told him he was being, frankly, quite fucking ridiculous and demanded for the final time that he not contact me anymore. I was tired of this. This dude was weird, intense, and highkey predatory. He fired off every insult in the book, saying how he'd kick my ass for being a "fake woke racist" now that he knew where I lived. I didn't block his number in the case I wanted to file for a restraining order and wanted to collect evidence. But, really, I wish I had blocked him. From that day forth, he relentlessly sent me messages every single day, nearly every hour. When it finally got to a point where I felt I had collected enough evidence against him, I blocked him.

I never pursued the restraining order because really, I wasn't intimidated by him. I had it in mind that even if he wanted to come back for me, he more than likely couldn't.

Well, a year or so goes by after that. One failed long-term relationship with another guy later, and I end up moving to a new state to be closer to family.

It's probably 2 AM or something close, I'm up doing my nosy thing and looking up people again. I look up this guy yet again, though this time, his LinkedIn wasn't the first link to pop up.

"Lubbock man indicted, accused of stabbing and killing mother," the link reads. It was posted two months before I moved to my new state. His mugshot is attached to the link. I click it and I can hear my heart in my ears as I read.

He had stabbed and killed his mother outside on her lawn in the middle of the day. He dragged her body to the back of the house and sprayed her corpse down with a hose. Once police arrived, somehow he was able to run away but they soon caught him. The news caught his arrest on camera. You can see him sitting on the sidewalk, shirtless next to the police cruiser.

I sat there in my bedroom in absolute shock. His mother was a loved member of the community, she was a Child Psychologist crazily enough. Memories of her calling his phone while I was around him started flooding me, him telling me how awful of a mother she was but "so loved. No one knows who she really is". Yet, after reading all of the comments from the community, people who truly knew and loved her, I knew that wasn't true. I remember nearly passing out.

Never in a million years would I have ever thought that he would do that to her. I can't believe he was in my home while I slept, feet away from my kitchen and all of my knives. I kept a baseball bat next to my bedroom door for protection, could he have come in and bashed me with it if he really wanted to?

May she rest in peace, such a horrifying end to her story.

He's still in prison now, he's been moved all over due to overcrowding. I look him up every so often, but there aren't any updates on the case as of recent. The last I saw, his bail was half a million dollars.

I'm scared what he'll do if he ever gets out, God forbid. He needs mental help, but he really needs to stay in there. I know I'm in danger if he is freed.

Edited for formatting. I'm on mobile.

[removed]

I’ll keep this relatively short and any details that could identify people or locations vague.

So I work a job that involves dealing with people who are at varying stages of life and aim to help them stay in their own homes for as long as possible, we have one individual who we see regular, they’re fairly elderly, friendly and chatty enough but often very emotional about the passing of their spouse, they often say they wake at night and imagine they’re standing at the bottom of the bed, they say it brings them great comfort.

So today I arrive at the house, there are lights on but no signs of life, after knocking on the doors and windows for several minutes I decide to call a colleague to find me the access code for their key safe (a small box by the door which can be used in situations such as this), I unlock the door and ring the bell once more, I enter and call their name out loud, no response, I walk further in, the house is a bungalow so set across a single storey but is fairly large in size, huge open rooms. I do a fairly thorough walk around of the entire property, calling out at all times, again no response, I stand at the door preparing to leave and lock up when I hear what i strongly believe to be a voice saying “in here” from one of the bedrooms at the bottom of the hall this startled me at first but decided to go back and have a look incase I’d somehow missed this person, when I get down the room is completely empty and the tap in the en-suite is running, I give one last quick call out and wait for a response, when I confirm the house is empty i run as fast as I can for the front door, lock up and don’t look back.

When I returned to my base I was able to confirm that the person had been taken to hospital in the early hours of the morning and that they were safe and well, the house was most definitely empty.

This happened back in August 2024 when my now fiancé, his mother and I went to Nova Scotia for a wedding.

We had stayed in various hotels, Air BnB’s along the way and while staying in Nova Scotia.

After the wedding we wanted to get out of Antigonish and I decided to look up fun places to stay.

I came across this listing for a cottage on a hobby farm in a place called Christmas Island. It sounded extremely interesting and the photos seemed amazing!

It was a rustic, quirky cottage that was home to ducks, geese, chickens and one massive singular pig.

It was available for last minute booking and I showed my fiancé and his mother the pictures and we all were super interested!

I booked it and we headed on our way.

We had to cross a bridge and I am telling you, the second we crossed the bridge, I felt very unsettled.

I brushed it off and kept it to myself.

We couldn’t check in until after 3:00 P.M so we decided to grab an early dinner.

It’s a very small island so there was not many restaurants but we found one by the water.

I’m not kidding when I say the restaurant seemed fake, it looked like a set on a movie. Very strange.

We got our food and ate it on the patio. It was next to the water and had what should be beautiful views of the water and mountains but it just gave me creepy vibes and I later would find out my fiancé and his mother felt the same way but we all kept it to ourselves.

Finding the air bnb was almost impossible. It was in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have a real road. The address he gave us led to a completely different house so he had to manually give us directions.. should have been a red flag.

We get there and everything looks the same as the photos but it also doesn’t.. I hope that makes sense.

This guy comes out and there wasn’t anything inherently strange about him but something seemed off.

He mentioned that his girlfriend was in the house and kept mentioning it but the way he said it, I truly don’t think anyone but him was there.

He showed us around the farm and brought us to the cottage that was next to his house. He had one key for the cottage and didn’t even give it to us, he kept it.

He left us to get settled and my fiancé wanted to check out the beach that’s about a 10 minute drive away and his mom decided to stay.

We left and on the drive to the beach my fiancé and I didn’t say a word and that is not like us.

We got to the beach and it felt extremely off.

Everything just felt off. Do you know in shows where the characters realizes the background is fake and pushes over the painted backdrop… that is how everything felt. The restaurant, the cottage, the beach.

My fiancé and I were standing in the water and not saying a word and he finally says “I don’t like this place” and after that we started to talk about how something felt off and scary and we wanted to leave.

My fiancé is very level headed and this was and the only time I have seen him be genuinely terrified.

We rushed back to the air bnb and thankfully the owner was not outside.

We walked back into the cottage normally to not alert him and when we walked in his mom was sitting on the couch and we said “we want to leave” and she said “I am glad you said something. I don’t feel safe here and I don’t think I could sleep a wink”

We packed up everything so fast and raced to the car. We were terrified that when loading the car with our luggage.

At this point it was becoming dark outside and as I said, there was no real road.

The entire way back to the bridge we were all terrified. We all had a sense of impending doom and felt sick to our stomach.

We got an hour away from Christmas Island and rented a motel room.

We stayed in the same room that night and discussed how we all felt scared and creeped out as soon as we crossed the bridge.

We don’t know what caused it but we have all never felt that way again.

Just recently I went to my grandparents cabin with them in Montana. One of the first things we noticed was bird poop in random spots, so a bird got in somehow but there was no single possibly way a bird could have gotten in. There is an upstairs and a downstairs along with a middle floor of the cabin. The bird never seemed to get up star because the door was closed, and that’s all for the bird. Another thing noticed was my grandfathers tools were not missing but appeared to have been moved and in different spot. This was downstairs in the garage of the cabin and I think the tools moving could be explained by my grandfather just being dumb and forgetting where he put them. But the most obvious evidence of a break in was in the upstair. In one of the trash cans upstairs there was a baby diaper in it. My uncle and aunt have a baby and can visit the cabin on their own and have before, but my aunt would never leave a diaper in the trash as she always want to keep everything nice and clean. But this still could have been caused by someone forgetting the diaper on there but still. In another trash can there were masks, the type of masks that you wear when you’re sick and no one has been sick or had a mask in the cabin. Finally there was a bed in the corner of the upstairs. The bed was left unorganized with a quilt on it. My grandmother went to tidy up the bed when she saw a huge black area on the sheets. She said it either looked like oreo crumbs and also looked very ashy. My grandfather took the blanket and sheets outside and got all of the ashy stuff off, and it was NOT mold because my grandmother said she could vacuum it. My grandparents also noticed what appeared to be crushed flies in the sheets, likely indicating someone slept on top of the sheets and crushed flies that were on in the sheets and never cleaned them up. There was no evidence of force entry and nothing appeared to be stolen and the whole place was in intact and in good shape. We still don’t know what happened like how the bird got in. My grandparents are going to install a camera system for the cabin soon since they finally have internet up there. But could anyone explain what the black substance on the bed was, and how someone could have gotten in because when we got there the doors to the cabin were locked. One final thing, my grandfather had visited the cabin a little over a week before we went there and he left the doors locked. But he could have left them unlocked the time before the last time he went up there. This is all so weird and if anyone knows anything that could have happened or know anyone who could have stayed at my grandparents cabin in Montana possibly for shelter.

EDIT: There is the slight possibility my grandfathers brother could have gotten in. He used to have a key to the cabin but there is no way he could have gotten in because my grandparents changed the key. My grandfathers brother has a rough history with the family.

I still think about this sometimes, and the older I get, the more convinced I am that I had a very close call.

I was probably somewhere between 10 and 12 years old. This would have been in the late 1990s, back when kids disappeared for hours with nothing but the instruction to be home before dark.

No cell phones. No GPS. No way for your parents to know where you were. Just packs of neighborhood kids wandering until someone got hungry or thirsty enough to knock on a friend’s door.

We lived in a tiny neighborhood at the end of a two-lane road. You didn’t accidentally drive through it because there was nowhere to go. The road literally ended in our neighborhood. It was quiet, tucked away, and everyone knew everyone. I knew almost every family’s car by sight because I’d lived there most of my life.
It was probably summertime because I remember wearing shorts. I had gotten bored and was wandering the neighborhood alone, hoping to find another kid outside. No luck.

I was walking down one of the back streets when an old car rolled slowly past me.

It was faded, almost puke green, the kind of dull color that had obviously spent years baking in the sun. Inside were an elderly man and woman. Both were thin with graying hair. They looked over at me as they drove by but kept going.

I noticed them because I didn’t recognize the car.
That wasn’t necessarily strange. People had visitors all the time, and since none of our streets had street signs back then, I figured they were probably looking for someone’s house.

A minute or two later, though, they came back.
The same car rounded the corner and crawled up behind me even slower than before.

That was enough to make my stomach tighten.

I stepped farther off the road into the tall ditch grass. Stranger danger had been drilled into us, and in my kid brain I figured that if someone was acting weird around a car, the smartest thing to do was make it obvious you saw them and move far enough away that they’d have to actually drive off the road to reach you.

The car stopped beside me.

The man asked if I knew how to get somewhere. I honestly can’t remember where. My ears were ringing so loudly by then that I barely remember the conversation at all. I knew my town really well, though, so I’m sure I started giving him directions.

Then the woman spoke from the passenger seat.
I couldn’t understand what she said.

The man smiled and asked me to come a little closer so I could hear her.

Every alarm bell in my body went off.

I didn’t walk up to the window, but I did take a couple hesitant steps closer. I was still standing in the grass.

They said they didn’t understand my directions.
I remember pointing down the road, trying to explain it again.

Then the man said something that made my blood run cold.

“Why don’t you just get in and show us? I’m sure it isn’t far.”

I answered exactly the way every kid in the ’90s had been taught.

“My daddy told me I can’t get in the car with strangers.”

He nodded. “I understand.”

Then he opened his car door and I immediately backed away. He stopped halfway out of the car.

“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I just want you to show me where it is.”

I remember looking around and realizing how alone I was.

This was the back side of the neighborhood. There were houses only on one side of the street. On my side there was nothing but grass, a fence, and a ditch. Nobody was outside.

I apologized and said I couldn’t help them because I had to go.

Then, somehow, my terrified little brain came up with what I still think was the smartest decision I could have made.

Instead of running past the front of their car, I turned around and ran back the way I had come, toward my house, which meant I was running behind them.

In my 10-or-12-year-old brain, that mattered. If he wanted to follow me immediately, he’d have to throw the car in reverse and back down the street after me. I figured that would look strange enough that someone might notice if they happened to look out a window.

Whether that logic was actually right or not, I’ll never know. But it worked.
He got back into the car and went forward around a corner instead.

The second I realized he wasn’t chasing me on foot, I sprinted.

It was about three blocks before I turned onto another street, then another couple of uphill blocks to my house. My legs burned the entire way.

The scary part is that if they’d wanted to, they only had to drive one block around the neighborhood to intercept me.

But, I knew every shortcut in that neighborhood. I knew exactly which corners let me peek down the next street before crossing them. I remember slowing just enough to look around every corner before taking off running again, terrified I’d see that faded green car waiting for me.

Thankfully, I never did.

When I got home, my parents commented on how red-faced I was. I made up some excuse, and that was the end of it.

Or at least I thought it was.

For the next several hours, I stood at my bedroom window, peeking through the blinds.

I watched that same faded green car circle our neighborhood again.

And again.

And again.

Maybe they were really lost. Maybe they really couldn’t find wherever they were trying to go.

Or maybe they were looking for the kid who had refused to get in.

I’ll never know.

What I do know is that I didn’t feel safe walking around my own neighborhood for weeks afterward.

Eventually life went back to normal. I started riding my bike again, wandering with friends again, being a kid again.

But every now and then I think about that afternoon.
And I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d taken just a few more steps toward that passenger window.

Hii y’all so first time posting and just wanted to share something super strange and eerie happened to me about 2-3 years ago and just wanted to know what y’all think and your opinion on it..

keep in mind what’s really weird about this story is i literally heard of this happening but it was a creepy pasta and not real which makes it weirder and creepier it happened to me but maybe it’s my brain convincing itself?

So it was late at night I live in south florida fort lauderdale plantation area for reference i would say about past 9:00 pm some time before ross closes and I was out with my mom running errands but last min she had stuff to return stuff from ross.

typical mom stuff, so we go and I remember i didn’t wanna go in and just stay in the car but my mom insisted i go in since she didn’t want me to be alone at night in the car.

I realize she’s right so i go in with her there’s probably one employee at the front and there is some people in line maybe 4 people but each person had a lot of stuff in their shopping carts.

I kind of don’t feel like standing and waiting i also had my 🍃 pen and decide i wanna just go in the bathroom and hit it, as you know idk about all ross bathrooms but mine is where the dressing rooms are and you have to wait for someone to unlock it and mine gives u a code.

I’m standing there and there’s an employee organizing the racks seems like they are about to clock out or leave then i ask to unlock the bathroom they click the button i hear the buzzer go off i go in.

I walk down the hall and go to the women’s bathroom I go in put the code, I remember there was no one in there, in my head I was like “yess all to myself”.

I didn’t go to the big stall bc i wanted to sit down and just chill so I go to the one next to it im on my phone just scrolling, I do have to use the bathroom so i do and i hit my 🍃 once (keep in mind at this time i would 🍃 everyday so 1 or 2 hits was like nothing to me made me just relaxed at that point.) I continue scrolling texting people whatever, mins go by i knew i probably had only sm time bc my mom would of called me that she’s at the register any min now.

Now for me personally maybe other smokers out there as well know time goes by really quick u just don’t notice it, I notice 25 mins have gone by i text my mom if she’s at the register she says no and i just sigh that it will be awhile, maybe 5 or more mins go by at this point and im about to just go back bc i don’t really want to stay in a bathroom so I get that thought.

I see something in the corner of my eye down to the stall next to me..and i kid you not I see a pair of pointy black boots FACING MY STALL.

My heart dropped and i got goosebumps idk felt human instinct flood my body , the pointy part is under my stall.

It isn’t really common like at all to see Floridians wear boots like at all it is very hot in Florida to do all of that.

This sobered me up and freaked me out so out of instinct and i love horror even as a kid i look up expecting to see a ghost or something.

Nothings there thank god but I look back down and the boots are still there just facing me

what’s creepy is how still they are to the floor and I start thinking rationally maybe it’s a employee but i only saw like 2 in this whole store.

I stay still for some mins trying to listen for literally any sign of life a sniff audio from a phone something, it’s dead silent i can only here the fluorescent lights in the bathroom.

This whole time im rationalizing the boots are still facing my way the same position very still, I gather up some courage and say “hello?” “…” zero response i look at the time and i see 40 mins or more has passed.

that’s when i start freaking out because i then realize.. how long has that person been in here?

The boots in it self just seems so odd to me just stuck out and i remember being frozen just staring at them.

I came in i didn’t feel a presence
a toilet flush nothing when i first came in.

So how long has this person been in the bathroom for if they were here before me this whole time?

I decide im gonna run out of here and i indeed did that as im about to i take one final look the boots are still in the same spot ugh so weird.

so i just open my door and speed walkout of there didn’t even wash my hands.

the employee that was there was gone i knew that that person in the bathroom definitely wasn’t them it was the shoes that just stuck out like a sore thumb.

I go to my mom she was about to go to the register and i went to her looked freaked out, im searching to see if maybe if someone will come with those shoes and nothing the store is just empty.

and i explain to her in the car she kind of brushed it off.

but i still remember that to this day every detail and i wanna know what yall think bc it was the strangest thing that happened to me since.

This happened about 15 years ago, when I was 16 (I'm 31 now).

At the time, I spent most of my time at my girlfriend's house because things weren't great at home. She lived with her parents and her younger sister in an old presbytery that had been converted into a house.

One day, my girlfriend had gone to take her driving test. Her parents were both at work, but they told me I could stay at the house since I had nowhere else to go.

I was sitting in my girlfriend's bedroom doing homework when I suddenly heard an incredibly loud BANG from upstairs, followed by what sounded like something heavy scraping across the floor in her parents' bedroom.

My first thought was, "The dog's probably knocked something over."

I walked out of the bedroom and immediately saw both the dog and the cat asleep together in the living room.

That instantly made me uneasy.

Trying not to be a complete coward, I called the dog to come upstairs with me. He walked over to the staircase, sat down at the bottom... and flat-out refused to go any farther.

That was unusual because his bed was in the parents' bedroom, so he normally went upstairs all the time.

After standing there for what felt like forever, I finally forced myself to go up alone.

The entrance to the attic was through the parents' bedroom. Normally, that attic door was always closed.

This time, it was standing wide open.

I remember my legs literally shaking as I walked into the room.

I kept telling myself there had to be a logical explanation.

So I searched the attic.

Every corner.

Nothing.

Not a person. Not an animal. Nothing had fallen over. Nothing looked disturbed.

I figured maybe I'd imagined the noise, or maybe the old house had simply shifted like old wooden buildings sometimes do.

Feeling a little ridiculous, I turned around and headed back downstairs, leaving the attic door open behind me.

As I reached the bedroom door and was just about to leave...

SLAM!

The attic door behind me slammed shut with incredible force.

Not slowly.

Not as if it had drifted closed.

It sounded like someone had violently slammed it.

I didn't stick around to investigate.

I ran downstairs as fast as I could and stayed in the living room with the dog and the cat until my girlfriend came home.

I never told her what had happened because she was terrified of anything paranormal, and I didn't want to make it worse.

Later that evening, though, I told her mother.

She looked at me completely seriously and said that a lot of strange things had happened in that house over the years.

She also confirmed something that made the whole experience even stranger:

The attic door was normally kept locked.

Over the time I spent in that house, I experienced several things I found difficult to explain.

But this is the one event that has stayed with me all these years.

Even today, I still try to find a rational explanation for it.

For context, my girlfriend and I eventually broke up when we both left for university. We simply wanted to experience life independently. About a year later, her family moved out of the house.

I've never claimed this was paranormal.

Maybe there's a perfectly ordinary explanation that I just haven't thought of.

But after fifteen years...

I still don't know what happened that day.

I would like to get peoples opinions on what happened today so basically I work from 6 to 2 and I live with my family and my little cousin said he seen my go from my room to the bathroom at 8 am!!! And I was at work he said he was me my hair and just me he said it was ME can anyone explain this???

I have lived in apartment 6B for four years.

It is not a large place. One bedroom, one bathroom, a narrow kitchen, and a living room with windows that look out over the back alley. I know every crack in the paint, every sound the pipes make at night, every place where the floorboards complain when you step on them.

That is why I noticed the door immediately.

It was in the hallway between my bedroom and the bathroom, where there had always been a blank wall.

A white wooden door.

Plain. Old. Perfectly ordinary.

Except it had not been there the night before.

At first, I thought I was still dreaming. I stood in the hallway in my T-shirt and sweatpants, holding a mug of coffee I could not remember pouring, staring at the brass doorknob.

There was no frame damage. No dust. No smell of fresh paint. It looked like it had always belonged there.

I touched the wall around it.

Solid.

I touched the door.

Cold.

Not cool like wood in the morning, but cold like something kept underground.

I called my landlord.

“Very funny,” he said.

“I’m not joking.”

There was a pause.

“What kind of door?”

“What do you mean, what kind of door? A normal door.”

Another pause.

“Don’t open it.”

I almost laughed.

But his voice stopped me.

He did not sound annoyed.

He sounded afraid.

“Mr. Keller,” I said slowly, “why would there be a door in my hallway?”

“I’ll come over,” he said. “Do not open it. Do not touch it again.”

Then he hung up.

I stood there for a long time, looking at the door.

The apartment was silent.

Too silent.

Usually, I could hear traffic from the street, my neighbor’s TV, the old radiator clicking. But in that moment, everything had gone quiet, as if the whole building were holding its breath.

Then someone knocked from the other side.

Three slow knocks.

I dropped my coffee.

It shattered on the floor, hot liquid spreading around my bare feet.

The knocks came again.

Three times.

Not loud. Not desperate.

Polite.

Like someone waiting to be invited in.

I backed away into the living room and grabbed the heaviest thing I could find: a cast iron pan from the kitchen. Then I waited.

Nothing happened.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

The door stood there, white and still.

At 9:17, my landlord arrived.

He was usually a cheerful man. Round face, red cheeks, always smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and peppermint gum. That morning, he looked twenty years older.

He pushed past me without saying hello and stopped in the hallway.

When he saw the door, all the color left his face.

“No,” he whispered.

“You know what this is?”

He did not answer.

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. His hands were shaking so badly that the keys jingled like tiny bells.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Locking it.”

“From this side?”

He ignored me and tried key after key in the brass lock. None fit.

Then the knocking started again.

Three slow knocks.

Mr. Keller froze.

A voice came from behind the door.

Soft.

Female.

“Martin?”

My landlord stepped back as if he had been slapped.

“Martin,” the voice repeated. “I know you’re there.”

I looked at him.

“Who is that?”

His mouth opened, but no words came out.

The voice behind the door sighed.

It was a sad sound. Almost human.

“Martin, please. It’s so dark.”

My landlord grabbed my arm hard enough to hurt.

“You need to leave,” he said.

“What?”

“Now. Pack a bag. Stay somewhere else.”

“Are you insane? What is behind that door?”

He looked at me then, and I understood something horrible.

He did not know.

Not exactly.

Before I could ask anything else, the doorknob turned.

Very slowly.

Left.

Right.

Left again.

Mr. Keller whispered something in German I did not understand and pulled me toward the front door.

That was when the voice changed.

It became my mother’s.

“Daniel?”

I stopped moving.

My mother died when I was sixteen.

Cancer took her slowly, then all at once. I had forgotten many things about her over the years, but not her voice. Never her voice.

“Daniel,” she said again from behind the door. “Honey, please help me.”

My landlord tightened his grip.

“Do not listen.”

I could not breathe.

“Mom?”

The door creaked.

Just a little.

A thin black line appeared between the door and the frame.

From inside came a smell I remembered instantly.

Lavender soap.

Hospital sheets.

Rain on the day of her funeral.

My eyes filled with tears before I could stop them.

“Daniel,” my mother whispered. “I waited so long.”

I pulled away from Mr. Keller.

He slapped me.

Hard.

The sound cracked through the apartment.

I stumbled back, stunned.

“Listen to me,” he hissed. “That is not your mother.”

The door opened another inch.

Behind it there was no room.

No closet.

No hallway.

Only darkness.

Not the kind of darkness you see when the lights are off.

This was thicker. Deeper. It seemed to move slightly, like black water.

And from inside it, my mother began to cry.

I hated my landlord in that moment.

I hated him because part of me knew he was right.

And I hated him more because another part of me still wanted to open the door.

He dragged me out of the apartment.

The second we crossed the threshold into the stairwell, all the sound came rushing back. Cars outside. Someone coughing below us. A dog barking in another unit.

Normal life.

Behind my apartment door, something slammed.

Once.

Twice.

Then came my mother’s voice, muffled now but screaming.

“Daniel! Don’t leave me again!”

I spent that night in a hotel.

Mr. Keller refused to explain everything. He only told me that apartment 6B had been renovated in 1998 after a fire. Three people had died in the building before the fire department arrived.

One of them was his wife.

Her name had been Anna.

The next morning, he called a priest.

Then a locksmith.

Then two men I had never seen before, who arrived in a van with no company name on it.

They went into my apartment together.

Only one of them came back out.

The priest was pale and shaking. The locksmith had blood on his shirt. Mr. Keller would not look at me.

“What happened?” I asked.

The locksmith pushed past me and left without his tools.

Mr. Keller handed me an envelope.

Inside was cash. A lot of it.

“Move,” he said.

“What about my things?”

“Leave them.”

“Are you serious?”

He finally looked at me.

His eyes were wet.

“The door is gone,” he said. “But now there’s a window.”

I did not go back.

Not for my clothes. Not for my laptop. Not for the box of photographs under my bed.

I found another apartment across town. I changed my number. I tried to forget the whole thing.

For a while, I almost did.

Until tonight.

At 2:13 in the morning, I woke to the sound of knocking.

Three slow knocks.

Not from my front door.

Not from the hallway.

From behind my bedroom wall.

Then my mother’s voice whispered:

“Daniel, I found another way in.”

It started a week ago maybe a little bit more. I have been barely sleeping. The most sleep I get is 3 hours a night and I have been only able to after 5 in the morning. I live alone in my house so it’s not often I hear noises but lately I keep hearing something. The first time I scared myself so bad I had to call my sister. I was in the kitchen and I was packing up some things I was going to take to a friend’s when I heard what sounded like foot steps. Even after calling my sister I was uneasy after the situation and I stayed in my living room until 3 in the morning. Then I once heard something shift or something when I was in my hallway. This only happens at night btw. The noises are so clear it makes me paranoid of someone breaking into my house so I can’t sleep. It’s gotten to the point that I feel like I’m being watched in my own house. And I’m mostly only home near dark or when it’s dark because of work so it’s what I’ve been dealing with for days now. I’m so tempted to go stay at my sister’s. I’m not sure what to do. My head hurts and I think maybe lack of sleep is making it worse. I can’t tell if it’s me being messed up or if I’m really hearing things. I can’t even turnover in bed without wanting to check and turn back around because it feels like someone is coming up on me.

this all happened 2 years ago. i was on a trip to the appalachian mountains with my bsf and it was my first time there but my friend was pretty familiar with the area. you hear all sorts of stories about how scary it is and all the urban legends and you dont think it will happen to you. well i was wrong. everyone knows the basic rules of the forest, or at least my friend taught me, for example, if you hear your name called dont respond, dont scream back to any noises you hear... anyways me and my friend were hiking on a trail and decided to set up our camp in a remote area. we had a fire and prepared hot dogs and smores. we were having a rlly fun time but got tired and decided to go to our own tents. i had been asleep for a couple hours but in the middle of the night i woke up to a sound it sounded like my friend was calling my name, i was about to reply but then i remembered the rules but lowk thought i was going crazy and delusional. i was getting scared cuz the sound sounded like it was coming right outside of my tent. thats when i heard weird rustling against the tent like right on it on the fabric and my friends voice echoed asking if she could come inside but i was getting hella weird vibes and stood still and just ddint say anything. i stayed completely still and tried to fall back asleep so it would go away cuz that wasnt my friend but i was shaking and crying from fear and just compleely still in fear. i eventually fell asleep cuz i was so exsausted and asked my friend abt it in the morning, and she had no idea what i was talking about and said she ddint go to my tent. this story still actually confuses the shit out of me and sends shivers down my spine. if anyone knows who this entity is who was pretending to be my friends pls tell me and share your experience cuz idk who or what that was but this genuinly still haunts me to this day