17 Of The Scariest Stories We've Read On The Internet
Dear David will be out in theaters and digital this Friday, Oct. 13. and the viral saga that inspired the movie will still go down as one of the creepiest yet most addictive things that I have ever read.
However, let’s be honest. The sleep paralysis and other paranormal events that terrified Adam Ellis in Dear David form just one of the many terrifying stories we’ve read on the internet over the years. Here are some others people have shared that still haunt me to this day.
*WARNING* This post discusses serious topics, including mentions of death and murder. Please proceed with caution.
1."When I was about eight or nine years old, my mother worked nights and we shared a double bed. One day I felt a strange presence in the bedroom. I had my eyes closed and when I opened them, I saw hands wrapped around the bed from underneath. The hands were made of blood, bone, and hanging skin, and they tried to climb up the bed. I turned away and there was a white "shadow" lying next to me. I managed, after a loooong time, to get up and run to my grandmother's room. She didn't dare come back to the bedroom with me."
–Anonymous
2."So this was around 2010. The internet was new to me and video calls were the shit among my friends during those days. One day, one of my friends called me on Skype and we spoke about stupid things that I can't even remember. Suddenly, my friend froze for a second but the video wasn't interrupted. After some seconds, he asked, 'Who's the person behind you?'. I didn't turn to look because I thought that he was playing a lame-ass prank on me. But I asked him to describe the person and he said that it was a boy of around 10–12 years, wearing a red T-shirt. He kept on asking me to look behind me and I finally did. However, as expected, there was no one there. It has been almost 10 years and he still maintains that there was someone behind me."
"After a few days, I started feeling uneasy around the table that my computer was on. I would feel something rubbing my foot from beneath the table but I thought of rats and tangled wires as the explanation for it. After a few weeks, my mother said that she had been noticing stuff move in the kitchen by themselves. I didn't believe her until, one day, I saw a glass move by itself. It was clinking like something was stuck inside it while it was upside down. However, I didn't think of it much.
After some days I started to see some women in white around my bed at around 2 a.m. It could have been sleep paralysis. Once, my bua (aunt) told me that something had also touched her feet beneath the computer table. Finally, my grandmother decided to cleanse the house and I haven't noticed anything suspicious since then. I am not superstitious, but I saw what I saw..."
3.I was sitting in my living room one day and I heard something fall in the kitchen. I have an open floor plan so I knew my cat wasn't there. I walked over and saw a cup that had just fallen on the floor for no reason. It didn't shake me too much, I just picked it up and put it back on the counter. That evening I was again in the living room when a painting just fell off the wall. The nail was still firmly in the wall and none of the other things hung on the wall fell, just that one. I was a bit freaked out at this point so I said out loud, "You're scaring me. If you are trying to contact me please do it another way." And nothing else weird happened.
4."My cat is a psychic. One night, she woke me up by climbing onto my chest with one of my favorite necklaces — a gold chain that my best friend gave me for my sweet 16 — dangling from her mouth. Confused, I scolded her for taking the necklace, put it back on my dresser, and went back to sleep. The next morning, my best friend called me to tell me she had been robbed. She'd come home before the burglar had a chance to steal anything except a gold necklace. I told her about my cat's odd behavior, and we were both spooked."
"Another night, I was getting ready to go to sleep, and I couldn't find my cat. I looked all around and eventually found my cat sitting stiffly on a box in the garage. She was hissing, her fur standing straight up. I tried to bring her to bed with me (she generally sleeps next to me), but she scratched me when I tried to pick her up. She never scratches me. I gave up and went to bed.
Later in the night, I woke up when I heard the garage door open. I ran downstairs, freaking out. The garage door was closed, and there were no intruders. My cat was still there, hissing. There was no way she could have accidentally opened the garage because the button to open it didn't work, so I could only open it from inside the car. It's like she knew what would happen and was protecting me."
—Anonymous
5."I was visiting a friend in Sweden who is a medium and has things happen to her all the time, especially at home. Towards the end of my stay, my air mattress was getting a little deflated, so when my weight was on it, it would really dip down. Just as I was dozing off, I felt the edge of the bed dip down like someone was sitting on it. Then, it felt like they laid down to spoon me, draped an arm over me, and leaned over, almost like they were going to give me a kiss goodnight. I sat up so fast, turned the light on, and saw the door was shut and no one in the room."
—Anonymous
6."I’ve always felt that something has followed me from each place I’ve lived. Just weird little experiences. [One night I was] home alone in middle school, upstairs in my room when the power went out. In short, the power went out and I decided to sit on my bed and wait it out, when a couple minutes passed and nothing happened I got up to go downstairs and when I got to my doorway I heard a loud scratching, like claws, going across the wall of the small office that was right across from my bedroom. We didn’t have trees around the house so nothing could have made noises by brushing up against the house and never an issue with rodents. Before that when I would have friends stay over we would sleep downstairs so we could watch cable on the tv and I remember one time where we just sat and listened to footsteps walking around upstairs (everyone else’s room was downstairs and the stairs were right next to the living room, so it would have been obvious if someone went up there)."
"In my first college apartment I would always hear this clicking noise coming from the corner of the room when I was trying to fall asleep, it happened all of the time. It almost sounded like a hair straightener just being opened and closed. It would only stop if I sat up in bed suddenly. I’ve never felt super uncomfortable or uneasy anywhere, and I know noises can come from a lot of different things, but all of the weird things I’ve experienced have been, in my mind, unexplainable. But I’ve also had good experiences that I believe were signs from loved ones. When my beloved grandma passed we had a rosary ceremony at our church (she was a devout Catholic), she had gifted me one blessed by Pope John Paul II, I was determined to find it when I got home so I could use it. I had boxes everywhere at home still, yet when I went to look for it I picked a specific box and found it immediately. It could have been luck, but I’d like to think she guided me to the exact right spot."
7."This happened just a few years ago. It was late afternoon, my husband was at work, and our sons were at school. I decided to take advantage of having the house to myself and take a nice, long bath. For context, our house has a first-floor master suite. I locked both the bedroom and bathroom doors, then began filling up the tub. As I started to get in, our dogs hopped up and ran to the bathroom door. I heard the distinct sound of the door to our garage opening and footsteps heading towards the bedroom. I assumed my husband came home early and expected to hear the sound of him trying our bedroom door, only to find it locked. Instead, I heard the bedroom door open."
"I still assumed it was my husband, until I heard the dogs' slow, deep growls and saw that their hackles were raised. Our dogs don’t bark and rarely growl, so this was very unusual for them. They were staring at the space under the door with their heads lowered, growling, and backing away from the door. I could see movement on the other side of the door and — when I bent down to look — feet.
The panic really set in when I realized that I left my phone in the other room. I sat there, shaking and imagining the door being kicked in for over an hour. The only 'weapon' I had was a can of Lysol. Eventually, the dogs settled down and I stopped hearing noises. My husband came home from work and was shocked to hear the story. He checked the entire house, but there were no signs of an intruder. Every single door was locked. To this day, I don’t have an explanation for what happened."
—Anonymous
8."When I was in the ninth grade, I spent the night at one of my best friend's houses. I knew she had a lot of family in the neighborhood, so seeing family in her house was normal. We went to sleep and it was just like any other night. When I woke the next morning, I saw something — or rather, someone — in her closet, which was directly in front of her bed. There was a man looking at me through her hanging clothes. He smiled."
"I figured it was just another one of her family members — perhaps playing a prank — so I just laid down and fell back asleep. We woke up for breakfast and I told her and her dad about the man in the closet. He said no relatives had been over, and definitely not a man. Truthfully, they didn’t seem too concerned about it, but I can still to this day picture that man smiling at me. I didn’t do sleepovers again after that."
—Anonymous
9."When I was eight years old, we lived in the middle of nowhere. Literally — the closest actual town was a 30-minute ride away. I was sitting outside when all of a sudden, our guard dog started barking like crazy. I was out alone pretty late at night, so I figured it was probably a fox or something at first, but something about his bark was off. He had his tail between his legs and was barking aggressively. When I looked over at the road, I saw what I thought was a dog. Only it was not a regular dog — it had very distinct human features and no fur at all. It moved on four legs, but like a human pretending to walk like an animal, the back side being higher up than its head."
"I stared at it for a while, and it stared right back. Its eyes were very human and front facing, it was creepy. Then it took off at a speed that was way too fast for a human to be moving, especially on all fours. I still have nightmares about this encounter. I don't know what it could have been — there are zero animals that I know of that look like that. I'm still a bit scared to go into the woods now."
—Anonymous
10."When I was little, every night when the lights were turned off and I went to sleep, two dark forms would descend from the ceiling near the doorway into my room. They walked quietly up to my bed and one stood on each side of my headboard, looking at me. I would cover my head with the blanket, until one day I had the courage to tell my mother. She put a lamp in my room and told me to pray and ask them to leave. I sleep with a lamp on all night to this day."
11."I work in an old building that was built in 1929. The space was closed for at least 20 years before we moved in because the previous owner had killed his wife, and then himself. We moved in two months ago and almost every day at exactly 12:08 p.m. the bell for the front door rings, but there's never anyone there. We've looked at the security recordings and everything, and there's never anyone there."
"The other day I was alone in the office late in the evening. I was on my way out so I turned off all the lights, closed the windows, and activated the alarm. When I turned to close the door, the kitchen light was on (even though I had just turned it off). Another time, I arrived in the morning and the light in the main room turned itself off. I even heard the sound of the switch flipping. The last straw was when I saw my someone else's face next to mine in the reflection of my computer screen. There was no one there when I turned around.
I decided to talk about these things with the building manager's wife, who's lived in the building for several years. She assured me that it's actually pretty quiet in the building these days and that there used to be a lot more strange occurrences, and at least now she can take the elevator by herself. I just laughed nervously."
12."When I was six or seven, I kept having this reoccurring nightmare. It would start as a normal dream, and then whoever I was with (normally my parent or friends) would walk away, leaving me alone. A lot of what happened in the nightmares is fuzzy, but I remember this part very vividly — a doppelgänger of whoever I was with would walk towards me. I knew it wasn’t actually them, because of the big, creepy smile they would have on their face. Even writing this many years later, I still feel terror picturing the scene. They would slowly advance toward me, and I wouldn’t be able to move. They would reach out toward me, and I would feel like I couldn’t breathe. I would always wake up before they got to me, but I knew that if I stayed asleep a little longer, I would see who they really were."
"When I was too afraid to fall asleep one night, my dad — in his matter-of-fact way — told me to just wait it out and see who they really were. When I had the dream a couple days later, I didn’t try to wake myself up like usual — I just waited to see who they were. I didn’t resist, just let them reach towards me. I don’t remember this next part, but both of my parents told me the story later when I was older. They both woke up at the same time around one in the morning, with the urgent feeling they needed to check on me. When they went into my room, I was lying in the middle of the floor, dead asleep, with my mouth open like I was trying to scream. I felt hot when they picked me up, and when they took my temperature, I had a ridiculously high fever. They took me to the ER, and the nurse said if they hadn’t brought me in, I might’ve had lasting damage or even died. They said my fever was so high, if I hadn’t gotten the medical treatment when I did, the heat might’ve begun to kill my cells. Who knows what state I would’ve been in by morning. They never figured out what caused it, and they wrote it off as some medical anomaly, sending me on my way. I haven’t had the dream again since.
I wish that was the scariest part of the story, but it’s not. I strangely managed to forget all about it until very recently. My great-aunt has dementia, and so my whole family has been helping her clean out her house before she moves in with my aunt and uncle. I was talking to her one day, and she kept repeatedly asking me to grab the photo albums in the hole in the wall behind the horses. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but she seemed so distressed that I decided to follow her instructions. I went to her bedroom, where there was a big painting of horses hanging on the wall. I checked behind it, and lo and behold, there were a couple photo albums.
I brought them to her, and we started to look through them together. She started pointing at a picture of a teenage girl, calling her 'Catherine,' and then pointing at me. My grandmother is long dead (she died during childbirth, as far as I can tell she had no connection to any of this), and as far as I knew at the time my great-aunt had no other siblings. But there they were, posing for a family picture with my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. My name is not Catherine, so I had to remind her who I was. I didn’t think much of it, because she often calls people by the wrong name. But then I looked at the picture. This girl looked exactly like how I did at her age. I imagine she would’ve looked just like me at any age. I asked what happened to her, and for a minute it was like my great-aunt was fully back with me. She said she died of a fever, given to her by 'the smiling, shapeshifting devil who haunted her dreams.' I tried to ask more questions, but all she said was that 'the devil got her…he likes the blonde ones.' The girl in the picture, Catherine, and I are the only natural blondes in my whole family.
Unfortunately, my aunt had a stroke a couple of days later which left her unable to speak, so I never got to ask her any more questions. But I still wonder about Catherine sometimes, and what could’ve happened to me if my parents hadn’t woken up that night. I like to think that it was the ghost of Catherine, making sure no one else died from the dreams. But I’ll never really know anything more about the dreams, or Catherine, and I guess I’ll have to live with that."
—Anonymous
13."About a year ago, I was working in a pizza shop. I was driving home in the dark as usual after a night shift. On the road home, there's an orchard on the left side that's blocked off with a chain-link fence and a house on the right side. As I crested the hill, something stepped onto the road from the left, took two steps out to the yellow line, and vanished when I blinked. It looked as if it was 7 or 8 feet tall with grayish skin. It had clawed feet and hands, pointed ears, and large, slanted, pitch-black eyes. It was so lanky, I could see its ribs. Still, it was weirdly humanoid. It startled me so much that I stomped on the brakes. I sped home, shaking."
—Anonymous
14."I bought a house in Bristol, VA. A friend would bring his dog over, but the dog would not come in. He would stand by the door and shake. I happened to meet a 'sensitive' who told me my house was built on blood and carnage, but that nothing would hurt me. She did say I should trim the doors with metal stripping to keep anything bad out. A few months later, I visited the house with two friends. One slept in my room, one slept in the guest room, and I slept on the sofa. The friend who slept in my room said she was reading when she heard something hit the floor. She got up but didn't see anything. She was a little unsettled, so she laid on her side and pulled the covers up to her chin. Then, she felt someone rubbing her back. When she turned to look, she felt the mattress give as if someone were standing up from it. Needless to say, we were out of there like bats out of hell."
"Two of us visited about two weeks later. I slept in my room and figured I would sleep on my back so nothing could rub it. I was almost asleep when I felt myself being tucked into bed. I opened my eyes and saw the blankets being tucked under me. I felt a fear like nothing I'd ever experienced before. I grabbed the blanket and ran into the guest room. My friend wasn't asleep yet and asked me if something had happened. I told her yes. Her response was, 'I had a feeling.' I later found out that an old man who was wheelchair-bound died in that house."
—Anonymous
15."Once when I was asleep, I felt someone stroking my hair. I thought it was my boyfriend, because he does this a lot, but the petting of my hair got more aggressive to the point where my head was forcefully being pushed into the pillows. I fully woke up and turned over. I saw the figure of a man slink into my closet with a creepy smile plastered on his face. I jumped up and ran out. I came back with a knife, and nobody was there. However, in the closet, there remained this horrible smell."
16."If there's any haunted house I'd believe in, it's my dad's. I could write about the randomly closing/opening doors, the music boxes/stereos turning themselves on, etc., but I think the wildest is the shadows. Dark, semi-transparent silhouettes of 'people' in/around the house. After moving back in with my dad when I turned 19, I had some very intense experiences, one that I hope, to this day, was simply sleep paralysis. One day, I woke up around 3:00 a.m. (as it always seems to be for this stuff) to the sound of metal clanging in the front yard. So, of course, I got up to go look and noticed two problems when I got to the living room, 1) The blinds were completely open (we keep them closed) and 2) There was one of those shadows I used to see."
"I stood there for a minute, thinking I was still half asleep, and waiting for it to go away after I blinked. But, it didn't go away, which creeped me out even more. I felt like it was watching me the whole time too. So I said nope and went back to bed and tried not to think about it. A couple of days later, I fell asleep playing some games. Again, around 3:00 a.m., I woke up. This time though, I couldn't breathe, move, or scream, and it felt like I was being held down. There was this feeling that started from my feet that felt as though I was being swallowed up/pulled away. It wasn't until that feeling got up to my throat that it all went away. I got up and ran to my room. Sleep paralysis, right? Had to be...except later, I was talking to my mom about why I was always awake past 3:00 a.m., and I mentioned that the house was creepy. She stopped and asked me if I'd ever seen any shadows. She then described, on her own, not only the ones I saw as a kid, but also the one I had just seen. I haven't slept in that room ever again."
—Anonymous
17."Once when my family and I went on a trip, our car broke down in the middle of nowhere. There was only forest on either side of the road and no signs of civilization for miles ahead. My mom and I stayed in the car while my dad went to investigate what was wrong — and that's when I began to sweat and have full-on chills. Moments after my dad got back in the car, I saw a sinister-looking black figure outside my window just staring at me, and then we drove off."
Ready for more horror? Mark your calendars for the release of Dear David, the sleep paralysis demon coming to haunt us all on digital and in theaters Oct. 13. Check out the trailer here:
Note: Some stories have been edited for length and/or clarity