I Read About Creepy Unsolved Mysteries For A Living, And These 29 Might Be The Most Unsettling I've Ever Heard Of
Every month, I ask BuzzFeed readers just like you to share their spookiest real-life "unsolved mysteries." An "unsolved mystery" is basically any experience that cannot logically be explained, be it an encounter with a ghost, a glitch in the matrix, or anything of the like. I get hundreds of submissions every month, and I chose the best, creepiest, most unsettling submissions to share with you all for our collective enjoyment and horror. Without further ado, here are some of the most jaw-dropping submissions I received this month:
1."The summer after I graduated from college, I stuck around my college town for a research position and to apply to grad school while my then-boyfriend moved eight hours away to NYC for an internship. The distance sucked, and we argued a lot. On my birthday, we got into a huge fight over the phone, and I proceeded to get a little too drunk with my friends. I had a dream that night that after our fight, my boyfriend had tried to send a Facebook message to his ex but had accidentally sent it to me. The message was mostly innocuous, but it pissed me off, so I sent a snarky reply. In the morning, hungover, I wasn't sure if that had been real, so I looked at my messages and there was nothing. I chalked it up to relationship stress and alcohol."
"The next week, I was visiting him in NYC to finally celebrate my birthday together, and we talked about the fight. I told him I was so stressed about it that I'd dreamt that he tried to reconnect with his ex that night but accidentally sent the message to me. I tried to laugh it off because we were working things out. He got a weird look on his face, half suspicious, half guilty. He asked what I thought the message had said, and I told him. He brought out his computer and showed me that he HAD sent the message I thought I made up, verbatim, but had actually sent it to his ex and not to me. It freaked us both out but also started some serious trust issues that we never recovered from."
—Anonymous
2."I was 22, young, happy, and living alone in an apartment for the first time. Life was good. One day, I went to the common mailbox area to pick up my mail. Mail for all the residents was delivered to this bank of mailboxes, each dedicated to a particular apartment and accessed with a key. It was common to run into other residents there, so I didn’t think anything of it when an older woman, gray-haired and seemingly in her seventies, came to stand beside me. She was smiling, with her eyes focused only on me, and never made any attempt to access one of the other mailboxes."
"I smiled back, said hello, and turned away from the mailboxes, thinking I may have been blocking her from reaching her box. When I took the first step away, she said, in a soft, loving tone, 'Hello, (my name).' The weirdest feeling came over me. I realized she looked and sounded incredibly familiar, exactly like me but fifty years older. I knew, with every fiber of my being, that she was me.
I turned around immediately after that one step away, but no one was there."
—Anonymous
3."When I was about 12, I had two large goldfish (each about four inches long) in a 20-gallon tank. One day, one of the goldfish disappeared. I looked around on the floor, thinking it might've jumped out. I completely emptied and cleaned the tank to look for it, including the filter. I removed all the gravel and checked it thoroughly for remains. Nothing. At this point, I figured one of my cats had removed the lid somehow and eaten it. The other goldfish remained, happy and healthy. I never got another fish. About four or five months later, one morning, I went to feed the remaining goldfish...and the missing goldfish had suddenly reappeared! The top half of its back fin was missing and healed over, but otherwise, it was fine. I still have no explanation for how this fish reappeared so long after it was missing. I figure it was on some grand and dangerous adventure in an alternate reality."
4."I woke up from a nap in my dorm room one day, and my roommate/best friend was asleep in her bed. I knew she had cheer practice and never skipped it, so I wondered what was wrong with her. I got out of my bed and went over to hers to wake her up, and she disappeared before my eyes. I don't know how to explain it other than she was very much there and then suddenly wasn't when I approached her bedside. It wasn't a trick of the light or my mind playing tricks on me because of my nap. I was fully awake and moving around the room, and I could still see her until I got close. I also saw slow-moving shadow balls going in and out of her closet one day, and it was so weird and unsettling that I left the dorm and didn't come back until later that night."
5."I seem to have a mischievous ghost who has followed me to three different houses. It’s mostly just a nuisance, doing things like turning up the TV or turning on lights. One thing really shook me, though. I had a diamond necklace given to me by my husband. I could not find it for the longest time and even thought that one of my daughter’s friends had taken it. I never found it despite looking everywhere. I was devastated."
"Fast forward four years and we were living in a different city. I got out of bed one morning and stepped on something sharp in the carpet. I looked down and it was that same necklace I'd been missing for years. My husband had vacuumed that carpet the previous evening, and there was no necklace. And still, it was returned to me several years later and hundreds of miles away from where it went missing, popping up out of the blue. I am now waiting for another necklace I'm missing to be returned! Silly ghost."
—Mary, Alberta, Canada
6."25+ years ago, I was at my grandparents' house with my parents, two siblings, aunt, and uncle. We were all saying goodbye, and the goodbyes continued out onto the porch. It was nighttime, so it was dark outside. Then we all noticed the neighbor's house because you could clearly see a figure walking back and forth in the front part of her house, turning off and on the light. It would have been creepy no matter what, but the woman lived alone, was a wheelchair user, and was never really in the front part of the house. So my grandma decided to call her and ask if she had guests over. The woman was confused and said no, that she was alone at the back of the house watching TV."
"My dad and uncle decided to walk to the front door of the house to see what was going on. They got halfway there but came running back and were truly spooked. They said the closer they got, the more the moving figure didn't look human. It continued for some time, and we all just watched it, terrified, until it stopped, and the front of the house went dark. It was truly the creepiest thing, and all nine of us saw it.
When I turned 13, I got a paper route that I continued to do through high school and the first couple years of community college. The old lady no longer lived in the house, but the current owners had the paper delivered daily, and every single morning that I had to drive down their circle drive and deliver the paper to their front door was absolute torture. I still feel it inside me when I think about that day.
A lot of weird stuff happened at my grandparents' house while I was growing up besides that. One time, the curtains burst into flames for no reason. Another time, while my grandparents were traveling, the neighbor was taking care of the house and could see a fire in the basement. He ran into the house and opened the door to the basement stairs, but there was no fire. My grandpa had a woodshop in the unfinished basement, and we would constantly hear glass breaking but go downstairs and see nothing amiss."
7."For my 13th birthday, I had five friends over for a sleepover. After dinner, my parents took my little sister out to a movie to give us 'big kids' some time on our own, and we settled into our sleeping bags in the den. The house was a small ranch-style home, and my best friend and I were facing such that we could see across the den and living room and down the hall to where the bedrooms were. Most of the lights were off, but we had the TV on (I think it was MTV). I suddenly had this weird feeling and looked up to see a thin, pale young man standing in front of the hall light switch with his hand up as if to turn on the light. He was wearing white high-top sneakers, a dark trench coat, and a white t-shirt, and he had short dark hair. He looked to his left, saw me looking at him, then turned quickly to his right toward my parent's bedroom, with his long coat swirling after him."
"I was scared but didn't want my friends to think I was making things up, so I took a deep breath and looked at my best friend. She was looking straight at me, eyes wide, mouth open, shaking her head from side to side. I said, 'Oh, you didn't just see what I saw, did you?' She just nodded, still speechless. My other friends separated us, thinking we were pretending and just trying to scare them. Individually, we told them the exact same story about the tall young man in the hallway, right down to the swirling coat. We 'investigated' after arming ourselves with umbrellas and vacuum cleaner attachments but found no one in the house.
Two years later, I was in the high school marching band and met this sweet but unusual guy, and we started dating. After a few months, he told me that he practiced astral projection, where he would send his spirit/consciousness out of his body. It suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks; he was tall, thin, and pale with short dark hair. He usually wore old Navy trench coats and high-top sneakers. I said, 'I think I saw you in my house a few years ago — you were in the hallway.'Here's where it gets really spooky. He immediately said, 'I remember! There was a tiny picture frame with a hand-painted tree and a quote about friendship above the light switch, right?' My Mom had had that little picture for years hanging right there above the hall light switch. It was him."
—Lacey, Dublin, OH
8."My partner lost her bonnet one day. We looked everywhere, and I mean everywhere. We looked under the bed, in the laundry, behind things, and even took everything out of closets. For months, it went missing. Then, one night, she woke me up suddenly and pointed to her head with a weird expression on her face. There on her head was the missing bonnet. There was never any explanation as to where it came from and why it was on her head. We'd looked for months, and it was suddenly just there."
—Anonymous
9."Part of my job is to take photos of the places we're surveying for various projects. Where I am, it's required to do a historic survey before doing things like making road improvements or putting in new cell towers. Some of these places can be pretty remote. Any fieldwork is done in pairs, so that someone can spot you when you're out on the side of the highway and such. Usually, it's pretty normal. People might come out and ask what you're doing, or you might get barked at by dogs, but it's whatever. One place I was taking photos at was an abandoned one-room schoolhouse, which used to service a tiny village that later got absorbed into a larger town. It was all on its lonesome out in a bunch of cornfields. There were no farmhouses or residences in about ten miles, so the place was quiet. All you could hear was the wind blowing in the corn and the building creaking a bit."
"I got the photos I needed while my partner followed me and took notes of where I was when I took the photos. There was absolutely no one around. When we got back to the office, and I downloaded everything onto the computer, I noticed in one photo that there was a little kid's face in the window on the second floor. Now, this place has been abandoned for at least the last 40 years. It was in really poor condition, and there was certainly no way to get up to the second floor. All the glass in the windows were gone, too, so there's no way the face was a reflection.
Like I said, this was miles and miles from any houses. We had to talk to the owners of those houses as part of our job, and they were all elderly farmers in their late 70s and 80s, no kids in sight. The kid in the photo must have been about 5 or so based on their height. If they were a real kid, it would have been almost impossible to get up there on their own. The kid also only appeared in one frame. I take photos in bursts of five so that if one doesn't turn out well, we've got a few to pick from. The kid was not there, showed up, and was gone within the same burst of photos.We contacted authorities, who went out to check and ensure there wasn't a lost kid out there, but no one found anything. It's not the only weird thing I've had happen when I'm doing this job, but it is the only one I haven't been able to adequately explain."
—Anonymous
10."One night, my husband and I were asleep in our bedroom, and our 4-year-old daughter was asleep across the hall. I was awakened at about 3 a.m. by a frightening, loud scream. Assuming our little girl had a bad nightmare, I hurried to her room. The room was aglow in an odd, murky white light, but she was fast asleep in her bed. Almost immediately, I smelled a terrible odor, almost putrid. I had no idea what I was seeing or smelling. In a bit, her room returned to normal. Since she was obviously fine, I went back into my bedroom and eventually went back to sleep."
"In the morning, I told my husband what had happened, and he said he'd also heard our daughter scream, but since I got up to see what was going on, he'd stayed in bed. He told me that after the scream, he had felt a presence of great evil, so much so that he was quite unnerved and just kept his eyes closed. The evil feeling ceased, and about that time, I crawled back in bed, so he decided all was well and that he'd been dreaming. After sharing our stories that morning, we were both freaked by our experiences.
In the evening, I was giving our daughter a bath. Out of the blue, she said to me, 'Mommy, I've seen the devil.' What?? We had not discussed the devil in our house nor in the church we attended. I calmly asked her, 'When did you see the devil, sweetheart?' and she answered, 'He was in my bedroom last night.'
I have no explanation for what happened, but it still gives me the creeps when I think about it."
—Anonymous
11."Before I was born, my great-grandmother was brutally murdered in her home in Tennessee. My parents relocated to New Mexico, where I was later born. I was an only child until I was 17, so I learned to entertain myself. When I got older, my mom told me stories about how she would sometimes stand outside of my room while I played with my dolls, just to listen. She said there were times when it was clear I wasn't just acting things out with my dolls but was having full conversations as if someone was with me. My mom once came in and asked me who I was talking to. I told her I was talking to Lucy, then said, 'Can't you see her? She's sitting on my bed.'"
"My great-grandmother's name was Lucille, so my mom asked me what 'Lucy' looked like. I described my great-grandma to a T. I had never seen her at all, not in pictures or anything, as her murder was understandably a sensitive subject with my father (her son).
Fast forward to when I was a senior in high school. I had to make a family tree project for a class and included as many pictures of family members as possible. While sorting through old photos, I came across a picture of a beautiful woman with dark black hair. I asked my mom who this was, as I felt like I had seen her before but couldn't remember. She froze. Then, she went on to tell me that I had never seen her before because that was my Grandmommy, who had been murdered before I was born. She told me about the story again from when I was a child. I don't recall ever having seen her as a teenager or an adult.
The worst thing is the man who took my Grandmommy's life was released on parole the year I graduated from college. My dad, to this day, doesn't know exactly what happened to her because he wouldn't stay in the room when the detective came in. My mom has all of the information on her murder hidden in case one day my dad decides he wants to know."
—Anonymous
12."One day, I stopped to visit some friends. They lived in a townhouse, where they occupied one side, and one of my friends's grandmother lived on the other. Her grandmother was disabled and needed frequent assistance. I showed up just after Brenda had put her grandmother to bed upstairs. It was a warm summer evening, and we just stood in the backyard talking. After a bit, I mentioned that her grandmother must have wanted a drink because she was looking at us through the kitchen window, which sits just above the sink. Brenda looked at me funny and said there was no way that could be since her grandmother could not walk without assistance and was unable to work the lift controls to get downstairs. I told her, though, that someone was looking at us through the window."
"As soon as I pointed, the person looking at us backed up. It looked like they backed up into a tunnel or something, fading out strangely into blackness. It was bizarre. When they disappeared from eyesight, the darkness faded, and the refrigerator — which was on the back wall directly beyond the window — became visible again.
When I described what I saw, Brenda nodded and said that it was her grandfather, who died many years before. She said that he often came over to visit his wife. I was told that only a couple of family members had seen him, and I was the only non-relative to ever see him. To this day, the face in the window is clear and sharp in my memory, even though this was 35 years ago."
—Lance, Montana, USA
13."I frequently have very vivid, weird dreams. One that has always given me pause happened a few years back. I was visiting family and friends who lived in another state then. Me and my BFF had plans to go out to eat and do some shopping on one of the last days of my visit. She had also told me she was going to a party the night before. Our plans were almost canceled, though, because the night of the party, she told me that, after it ended, she was waiting on an Uber to go home when a guy came up to her and asked to borrow her phone. He told her a story about how his phone died, and he needed to call a friend who was supposed to pick him up. She let him borrow the phone, got it back, and went home without problem. However, something told her to check her bank account. Sure enough, she was missing around $300."
"The guy had used her Cash app and sent himself the money from her phone. Luckily, she was able to get it fixed and got her money back. I thought this was the end of it, so I didn’t think to bring it up to her again. Imagine my surprise when she calls me the morning we’re supposed to go out and tells me the SAME EXACT STORY!
I was so confused and told her that I thought the situation had been fixed, as she’d already told me everything. It wasn’t until she said, 'No, this just happened last night!' that I realized the whole thing on my end had been a dream, and she had, in fact, never told me any of this. In my dream, she had been narrating the scene I saw play out like a voice-over in a movie. I told her how I had the dream about that exact thing happening, and she made me promise that if I ever saw her in a dream again to call and tell her IMMEDIATELY. We still went out, but I covered lunch since I felt a little guilty that I might have been able to stop what had happened to her."
—Anonymous
14."At about age 12, I fixated on a surname. Nobody I knew had that name, but still, I locked on to it. Strangely enough, at age 21, this turned out to be the surname of the woman I have been married to now for over 50 years. Somehow, I knew."
—Anonymous
15."The house I grew up in was built on what was once a family farm, along with the rest of the neighborhood. I know this because the following events I'm about to describe motivated me (at 12-13 years old) to spend hours at the public library's local archive to confirm. Growing up in that house, every one of my family members would occasionally be caught off guard, thinking they had seen a little boy just in their peripherals. When my brother was the same age as the boy, a lot of us wrote it off as him wandering around the house like a 5-10-year-old would normally do. Once he was older, the sightings grew more unsettling."
"Living in this house, I always had a sense of unease, like I was being watched. Plenty of strange things happened, like my siblings all developing a fear of an old woman who would pace the hallways by their rooms at night. Or there was the time I was taking selfies with a digital camera, and it flew out of my hands. When I checked the camera upon retrieval to make sure it still worked, my eyes were rolled into the back of my head in EVERY SINGLE PICTURE.
The occurrence that stuck with me the most happened after an adjacent neighbor started building a stand-alone mother-in-law suite in their backyard. Shortly after laying the concrete foundation, I walked into the kitchen at around 2 a.m. to get to the bathroom. Standing in my kitchen was the little boy, caked in dried cement. He pointed to the neighbor's house and said, 'That's where I'm buried.' Then, he disappeared.The archives at the library confirmed that the family who owned the farmland had several children, some of which did not live to adulthood, including a son. Halfway around the block, there was an old cemetery that obviously existed before the neighborhood was built. It was practically in someone's yard, so I never was able to get close, but I'm fairly certain it had the grave markers of the original family. Add that with the unfortunate fact that a lot of times, land developers will move headstones without moving bodies, and it sort of breaks my heart that I couldn't do anything for the boy I saw in my kitchen."
—Anonymous
16."My wife and I used to vacation in Destin, Florida, when we first got married 30 years ago. On one of our many visits to the panhandle, we took my parents along for the trip. They had rarely traveled far from our home state of Iowa and absolutely fell in love with this area. In the late '90s, my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and before she passed, we were able to take one last trip to the beach in Destin she loved."
"A week or so after the funeral, my wife and I were filling up empty milk jugs with water to take to Mom's grave so we could water the grass seed they planted on her burial mound. We had filled four or five gallon milk jugs with water from the garden hose and as I walked away to go turn the hose off, my wife called out to me, confused and saying I needed to look at something.
When I came back around the corner, I saw that my wife had moved the milk jugs from the top step to where they were now, directly in the late afternoon sun. The clear tap water that we had just minutes before put in each of the jugs was now a deep ocean blue color, exactly the color of the ocean waters in the panhandle. We then took the caps off each of the jugs, and the water smelled and tasted exactly like salt water.
It gets even weirder, though. My wife rushed into the house and grabbed one of our disposable cameras and took a few pictures of the jugs in order to prove to everyone that Mom was with us that day. The next day my wife took the camera to get the photos developed. Upon receiving the finished photos, all three images of the jugs were the only photos of the 24 we'd taken on that camera that came out pure black. We had no proof, but we didn't need it, as we knew what we saw, smelled, and tasted that day. Knowing Mom wanted us to remember the good times, not the bad, brings us great peace."
—Randy & Marla, New London, USA
17."One night, years ago, I was standing on the hearth of my parent's fireplace in their living room. A friend of my mom's had been living with us temporarily while she moved back from OK and found a new home in Los Angeles. While happily warming my buns against the fire, I happened to look over at one of the living room's doorways, which led to the rest of the house and all bedrooms via a very long hallway. Standing there, clear as day, was this tall man, 6' at least, wearing a light blue-and-white checkered shirt with denim overalls. His hair was kind of strawberry blonde and cut shorter, though it still had some movement to it. I stared at him, trying to figure out who on earth he was because I didn't know him. He glanced over at me, turned, and crossed the threshold and into the hallway."
"I immediately asked my mom, who had been sitting right in front of him (unbeknownst to her because she was looking at the TV), if she had seen that man. She hadn't, and when I described him in detail, she also didn't know who he was. I went looking down the hallway to see if he was walking around elsewhere, but he was gone. I asked my mom's friend if she knew him, but she didn't, either.
To this day, that's been the clearest form an apparition has ever taken around me. I still don't know who he is/was, but I hope he's resting peacefully across the veil."
—Sara, Los Angeles, USA
18."I'd never experienced a precognitive dream until about 25 years ago. We lived in a small town and went to a quaint little church with about 75 members. Being so small, our pastors were bivocational. For a few years, we had a pastor who was also in the Army National Guard and sometimes wore his fatigues to church. Our kids went to school together, and our sons were friends throughout high school. One night, I dreamed he and I were sitting on the foot of a bed. He was in his fatigues, crying with his face in his hands and kept saying, 'How am I going to tell her? How will I tell them?' I had my arm around his shoulders, trying to comfort him. I remember telling him that his family was strong and they would understand and be okay. I was so perplexed by that dream when I woke up. It really bothered me that I’d dreamt of our PASTOR and me sitting on a BED even though I didn’t recognize the bed or the room."
"I told my husband about the dream and that I was really freaked out about it. The next Sunday, our pastor was in his fatigues and, after the sermon, asked his wife and teenage children to join him. He tearfully told us that he was being deployed for a year and would be leaving in a month for training stateside before heading to the Middle East. This was not long after 9/11. I got chills and felt the color drain from my face. I looked at my husband who had what I imagine was the same expression.
As we were in line to hug the family, my husband pulled me to the back of the line and told me that I HAD to tell him about my dream. I did, through tears and blushing. He asked when I’d had the dream, and I told him I thought it’d been the previous Thursday. He and his wife both looked surprised. That was the day he’d gotten his orders and had to tell his family. I described the room, remembering that the bedding was floral and a couple of other details. Some of my colors were off, but everything else was really close. They shared that when he told his wife, they sat on their bed and cried together, just like we had in my dream. I still get chills thinking about that experience! He returned home safely 13 months later."
—GO, Tulsa, OK
19."I grew up very close to my mom’s side of the family. My grandma was very strong-willed, and my grandpa was the easiest-going guy. I woke up one day to the smell and FEEL of Marlboro Reds cigarette smoke blowing across my face. I didn’t smoke and wasn’t sure why I could feel it on me. Not even a few minutes later, my phone rang, and it was my mom saying grandpa had just passed. He smoked Marlboro reds for 20+ years, and I knew it was him saying goodbye."
20."I went on an international trip and had my passport in my backpack. Sadly, when I arrived in Europe and tried to go through customs, I couldn’t find it anywhere. I dumped the backpack out and triple-checked, even enlisting a stranger in line to double-check my work (I was meeting up with my family later, who were on a different flight). I assumed somehow it must have fallen out into my airplane seat when I was packing up and disembarking the plane. I tried to go back on the plane for it, but the officials wouldn’t let me. It was super stressful, to say the least, and became a whole thing as I missed my connecting flight and ended up having to get a temporary passport at the US embassy for something like $500, in addition to having to rebook a last-minute flight. So, so frustrating. But I figured I learned my lesson for not being super careful and checking yet again before I left the plane."
"When I finally met up with my family later, my mom even checked my backpack again after hearing this story, confirming it was missing. When I got back home after the trip, I had to pay again to get a new permanent passport to replace the missing one.
Years later, I decided to use that backpack again for another trip. I fished it out of the closet and shook it out to clear off some dust...and the old missing passport fell out!! To this day, I am still flabbergasted and do not understand what happened or where it went."
—Anonymous
21."When I was in about second grade, I had a purple Sofia the First ring and would wear it every day. I loved it. I would take it off every day when I would eat at lunch and put it in my little tray, but would always end up remembering to put it back on. One day, I forgot to grab it out of my tray and only remembered once I had thrown it away. I was not about to grab it out of the trash can, so, being a kid, I just cried about it instead. That night, I went to sleep still crying about my ring. But when I awoke for school the next morning, my ring was set perfectly on my nightstand, with Sofia’s face staring right at me. To this day, I still have no idea how that happened. It gives me chills just thinking about it."
22."My ex and I invited his uncle, aunt, and their adult son from out-of-state to stay with us while attending a family wedding. When we returned home from the wedding, we all sat around the table to talk about the next day’s agenda. The uncle said he planned to take his family to another town about an hour away, to show them the house he grew up in. He drew a diagram for us, explaining who had lived in which rooms. My ex's mom had passed away, and this uncle was her youngest sibling. I never met his mom, but we had a photo of her on display in our place."
"We all went to sleep soon after. At about 5 a.m., I woke up to the sound of a car, as our bedroom was very close to the street. At first, I thought it was our retired neighbor, P, who usually gets up early to go to the whole sale food market to chat with his friends. For some reason, the sound of the car was a little unusual, so I got up and looked out the window. I saw a white car parked outside and the outline of a woman with lean body type and shoulder-length hair. A white light surrounded her body, and she was sitting in the driver’s seat of the car. At that moment, my ex woke up and joined me at the window. We then turned to look at each other. I asked, 'Do you see what I see?' and he immediately replied, 'YES.'
It was his Mom! She must have been very excited that her brother was going to the house she grew up in the next morning. Although I never met her, I am positive that it was her because it was the same outline of her hair and body type that I'd seen in the photos!"
—Anonymous
23."I was about 30 and had heard regularly that there was a woman close to my age in a neighboring town who could be my twin. One evening, I was at the local soccer complex to meet up with my family for my son’s game. I’d just entered the complex and was walking to his field when I saw a woman walking towards me, about 50 yards away. I had this strange, surreal feeling wash over me and I swear, it seemed everything was in slow motion as we got closer. She stared back at me with what I could only imagine was the same look I had on my face. I felt like I was in a dream walking towards myself!"
"She had the same hair color/style, same height, figure, skin tone…we really could have been twins! We watched each other and nodded as we passed, but didn’t stop or talk. I got to the bleachers and sat down by my husband. He told me he thought he’d seen me 20 minutes earlier a field over and had waved and called my name, thinking I was at the wrong field. I was like, 'Oh, thank God! You saw her, too! I thought I was hallucinating!'
When my mom got there, I told her about it. She reminded me that she started bleeding when she was 3-4 months pregnant with me and went to her doctor. This was in the late '60s, so there were no ultrasounds. After an exam, he told her she may have been pregnant with twins and lost one, but they could still hear a heartbeat (aka mine). She surmised that maybe God had given my twin to another family, since I was baby number six, and she and my dad were 'old' to be having a baby (they were 36, which wasn’t the norm for expecting parents then. Maybe that woman was my lost twin)."
—GO, Tulsa
24."I suffered a fall one evening, and the next day I was texting with my adult granddaughter. She was sympathetic and asked about the incident and my injuries. I got a text saying, 'I'm sorry,' written in cursive. Of course, I thought it was from my granddaughter, so I responded as such. She said, 'Granma, that wasn't from me!' We lost her mother, my daughter, three years prior, and the two of us decided the message was her just letting us know that she was watching over us."
—Anonymous
25."When I was 11 years old, I lived in a condo in a small village in Germany. One evening, my brother and I were home alone. As it was freezing cold and I was and still scared of the dark, I shut my door and all the windows. Every night I can remember (and still to this day), I sleep well-wrapped in my blanket, with my whole neck covered. That night I was in a half-away state when I awoke to the feeling of cold air on my neck. It felt like someone was pulling my blanket away really slowly. Wide awake and panicking, I pulled the blanket back. Starring with eyes wide open in my pitch-black bedroom, I felt it again, like someone was breathing cold air right onto my bare neck and pulling my blanket away. I panicked and didn't move for hours."
"Everything was shut, so no wind was blowing in my room. I was lying right next to the wall, too, so the air wasn't coming from a window or anything.
Now, here comes the creepiest part. Years ago, my sister bought the condo we grew up in, and my youngest niece — who looks exactly like me at that age —moved into my old bedroom a couple of weeks ago. I visited them early this month, and my niece told me that she was lying in bed playing Nintendo one night, and suddenly, something pulled her blanket away. She took it back, and the same thing happened again. No one else believes her, but I know she's telling the truth."
—Kat, Germany, EU
26."My cat loved this little terrycloth ball she had that rattled. She would throw it in the air and catch it; it was really funny to watch. One day, she was playing with it by our TV and it never came down after she threw it up. I looked everywhere for it, around the TV, in the wires of the entertainment system, etc., and could not find the ball anywhere. A few years went by, and we had the floors done, so all the furniture was moved out. I remembered the ball because she loved it and figured we'd find it then, but no. It just vanished mid-air. We like to say it went in a black hole somewhere."
27.Many, many years ago, I was staying in a house in Ireland. I know it sounds creepy, and it felt weird at the time, but the owner had motion sensor and infrared cameras positioned around the house, which I was instructed to turn on in the evenings. I could then see the security system and feed from the cameras on their iPad. I was shocked by what I saw: it was non-stop fairy-land. Apparently, they particularly liked sitting on the arm of the sofa as I was watching television, because I could see them flying all around me on the iPad as I sat there, but not IRL."
"I would watch them fly in and out of the house through the walls in the feed, and every once in a while, I would catch a quick glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye. They do have the ability to let you see them with your naked eye if they want to, but if you could see them all the time, it would be like walking through a swarm of midges, so it’s a good thing we can’t always see them. They aren’t malevolent, and there’s nothing to fear, it’s just that they live in the same space we do, simply on a different plane.
I would leave out a little bowl of liquor and some cake or cookies on the kitchen counter for them at night before going to bed, and many mornings I came out to find the liquor bowl empty."
—Bonnie, USA
28."When I was about 8 years old, my family vacationed in Acapulco, Mexico. We were at the beach, and I was out playing in the waves on a small foam boogie board. I got caught in a rip tide and was quickly swept out far from the beach. My dad was trying to reach me but couldn’t. Giant waves were crashing over my head, and I was petrified. Out of nowhere, a surfer was at my side. He put me on his board and swam us back to shallow water. I thanked him for saving me and turned to talk to my dad, who had rushed over to me. When we turned around a few seconds later, the surfer had vanished. I mean, he was absolutely nowhere to be seen in the water or on the beach, which only had a few small families on it. We have no idea how he disappeared, but I’m forever grateful to that angel who saved my life."
29.And finally, "Many years ago, my husband and I bought a small fixer-upper as our first home. It was a ranch-style house with a crawl space for an attic and an unfinished basement. The only way to get up into the attic was through a small hatch in the kitchen, and to reach it you needed two people and a ladder, with the person going up into the attic being small enough to fit through, as it was tight. I’m telling you this so you will know that it would have been impossible for someone to tamper with things."
"At the front of the house was a small window just under the roof peak. At some point before my husband and I had bought the house, someone hung a curtain at that window. Some days as I was backing out of the driveway (or pulling in) before/after work, I would notice the curtain was closed, and on other days, the curtain was open.
Now, I never said anything to my husband; it would have freaked him out. I never mentioned it to anyone else either. Many years later, after we’d moved from the house, my son asked me if I knew that the house on Briar Road (where we'd lived) was haunted. Not wanting to give anything away, I asked him what he meant, and he proceeded to tell me about the curtain in the attic window. He said he always felt he was being watched while he waited for the school bus in the mornings.
He then gave me a scare when he told me about the little old man who used to visit him in his bedroom at night. He said it was when he was very small, literally still in a crib. He said the little old man would suddenly appear in this one specific corner and would talk to him. I asked if the man had ever threatened him or scared him in any way, and he said no. He did say that he would tell me all about the man when I came into the room, but that I obviously didn’t understand what he was trying to say. I remember, just like other parents would, going in to check on him whenever I would hear him talking and chattering to himself (?) in the evenings after putting him down for the night, never knowing there was someone else there."
—Bonnie, USA
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