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“What Is The Scariest Story You Know That Is 100% True?” (17 Creepy Answers)
Article created by: Viktorija Ošikaitė
Imagine having to go search for the head of a family member after an accident. Or being woken in the early hours by a group of guys trying to bash down your door...
Both scenarios sound like they could come from a horror movie. But they don't. They're among dozens of true stories shared by people online. There are a few threads doing the rounds, where netizens answer questions like, "What is the scariest story you know that is 100% true?" The replies range from eye-opening to utterly terrifying.
Bored Panda has put together an epic list of the best stories, for you to read just before bedtime. So cue the creepy music and keep scrolling. Let us know which ones send shivers down your spine by upvoting them.
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#1
When I was about 8 years old our school was doing swimming lessons as part of the curriculum.. my Mum worked late, so we went to after school care and didn’t get home until after dark.
When we got home Mum asked me to take my wet togs (bathing suit) and towel out to the clothesline to dry so I could use them the next day.... I was so confident going outside to do this and had this real feeling of being a big kid.
I walked into our backyard- only for a man to be RUNNING at me. I screamed, jumped inside and instinctively locked the back door as I did so. As this was happening, my Mum told me she heard the guy jump the gate which was next to her bedroom just after she heard me scream and came running to find me.
I slept with the light on until I was 16 and I get my husband to go outside for me while it’s dark.
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#2
Lived w 3 other girls sophomore year of college. All 3 took off early for spring break, leaving me alone in the house. First night alone, I heard someone bang on my front door at 2am. Then I hear more knocks at the back door. A man yells “Boulder police, open the door!” When I didn’t, I heard body slams against both doors. Soon I hear “little girl, open the door, we know you’re alone.” At this point I’m so scared I keep accidentally dialing 611 instead of 911. When I eventually do get the police, cars roll up (thankfully) just minutes later. Officers have 4 boys from our school hockey team face down on the grass. I had to file restringing orders against them and the kicker - one lived across the street from me and we’d never spoken a single word before then.
#3
When I worked in healthcare I had a patient who got a sinus infection. He stopped taking his antibiotics after a few days because he felt better. His sinus infection came back with a vengeance. When he got to the Emergency Department he was presenting with stroke symptoms. The infection had spread to his cranial cavity. There was so much pus that it was twisting his brain. No one thought he would survive the surgery. The family was advised to expect the worst. Amazingly he actually survived. He ended up needing 3 more surgeries to wash out and spent almost 2 months in the hospital. Take your full dose of antibiotics, people!
#4
Irl account.
I used to love swimming, I'd go snorkeling, scuba diving, even jumped off a few cliffs into the water.
When I was about 18 I read the necrnomicon (the collection of Lovecraft short stories, not the real thing) had a good scare, giggled at how silly I was to be unnerved and went about my life.
Next year went to Crete on holiday, first day I jumped right into the ocean with my dad and went out deep. Lo and behold, I feel something tickling my legs. I dive under to see since its too deep for seaweed to reach this high and I wanted to see fish.
Tentacles. Everywhere. I was so shocked I lost my air and panicked hard, I started breathing in water as glowing eyes, sharp beaks and suckered tentacles flashed about me.
Thankfully, Dad got me to the shore and didn't understand what was going on, he'd seen nothing but suddenly had a really grim look on his face.
Went to the doctors. Turns out I'm the victim of a family curse, Schizoaffective disorder. My dad was horrified cause since he hadn't got it like his brother and mother, he thought I'd be safe.
They caught it early but this revelation then led to a lot of aspects of my life being thrown in the air. Entire people in my life became false, ideas I'd had were delusional, outbursts revealed to be due to mood swings.
I'm doing much better now, I still don't go in the water.
#5
I had a associate that was a Fireman. He had to go find the head of his brother in law after a car accident. Then he had to console his sister when she heard. Tough bloke.
Can you imagine that being your day?
#6
My dad has been to Antartica a few times (he’s a scientist). When he first went was about 1989 or so and when I was older he told me about a guy who fell through ice into a crevasse and couldn’t get out. His group found him but he was too far down and too tightly wedged to rescue. So they stayed and spoke with him for hours before he eventually died. That’s always stuck with me.
#7
One day as a kid I was exploring the forests near our house with my cousin. The forest was on a hill, but there were several craters there because of bombs that were dropped there during the world wars (Germany). One day we saw a backpack at the bottom of one. We tried to climb down, but it was kinda steep and slippery, so we didn’t want to risk falling. We planned on returning later with a rope, and went home. The next day news story was that there was a backpack found with the remains of a girl, in that forest. A guy walking his dog found it, after the dog wouldn’t stop barking and going crazy at the edge of the crater, while starring at the backpack. We stopped exploring the forests after.
#8
Co-worker's dad was babysitting his baby boy for him. At one point, Granddad went into the nursery to check on the baby and found that he'd somehow reached for the window blinds strap and tangled himself up in it to the point where he was choking. Baby was already blue and all of the veins in his face had popped. Grandpa frantically dialed 911. EMS was there in 2-3 minutes and they brought the little fellow back to life and he's ok now.
**Edit**: wow you guys really blew this up overnight for me. For the parents here freaking out, really, check to see how close to the crib any hanging cords like this are. When they brought the little guy to the hospital, they separated and questioned the parents and grandpa over and over like they were suspected of doing this on purpose. Of course, it got sorted out as a true accident. The child is now in his 20s and all is well with him.
#9
When I was young, I saw a documentary about a guy who got flesh eating bacteria in his nasal cavity. It ate his face and he's still alive. Eventually they removed the bacteria by removing the eaten parts of his face. He got a prosthetic face, which back in those days was basically a plastic Halloween mask that tried to look human. At the end of the documentary, he took the mask off. His face from his forehead down to his mouth was just a hole.
Edit: it was a fungus, not bacteria, apparently.
#10
My baby's crib caught fire in the middle of the night. Some people's literal worst nightmare.
Edit: My baby was in it and he was severely burnt and spent a month intubated and in a medically-induced coma. He is 5 now and is ok though!
The fire was a freak accident. His humidifier caught fire, smoldered for a little while and drained the oxygen in the room before the smoke alarm went off. When we opened the door to his room if flooded with oxygen creating a backdraft and launched a fireball at his crib.
This was his crib the next day
Edit 2: A lot of people are asking for which humidifier it was and which company etc. I am unable to elaborate any further than: I can say that a freak accident can occur with any electrical appliance you have from fridges to table lamps. This specific accident was a humidifier but the nature of the accident is not exclusive to humidifiers. Check your appliances and maintain them. Discard them if they develop any issues and follow any safety instructions that might have been included with them. Also, make sure your smoke alarms are in working order. It could save a life...
#11
Was at a bonfire where people where telling ghost stories and a friend told us this story about his aunt in Mexico.
Back when she was a little kid (6 or 7 I think), they lived on a ranch near some mountains and one day she was out playing and ended up going missing. A lot of people from the area came to help look for her, call for her, but nothing. I think he said like a week went by and the family had begun to give up hope. Then suddenly she comes from out of the trees, dirty and with her mouth sewn shut. The family takes her to the hospital immediately.
The story the little girl tells is that she was wandering around the trees and some "duende" came out and asked her to play with them. So she goes with them in the woods and when she starts to get hungry, they tell her she needs to stay so she does. But then it starts to get dark so she eventually finds her way back home. She apparently thought she was just gone for a couple of hours and not a week.
But, apparently after that the girl was never the same and she grew up to be a very quiet and reserved woman. He says she still has the scars from where her mouth was sewn shut.
So while everyone at the time was telling stories about how duende are 100% real and some people had even seen them when visiting their families in Mexico, that's definitely scary on its own.
But for this story in particular what's scary is that this 7 year old girl was taken from her family ranch and held hostage in the woods for a week where she was so tortured that she ended up blocking out what happened to her and came up with a story in order to cope. And then people who took her sewed her mouth shut probably thinking she would die before she ever made it back to her family's home.
#12
When I was about 5, woke up to my house surrounded by loud voices and bright white lights. A group of robbers broke into our house after some kind of heist and were using us as hostages with rifles. The police had our house surrounded. My parents, grandparents, and I didn't really speak English back then, so my 12 year old sister had to translate the demands to the police and instructions to us. My grandma told me to go back to sleep, which I somehow easily did.
Edit: The end of the story->
After falling asleep and waking up the next day, everything was fine. The only thing everyone kept talking about were where the robbers were standing. They decided not to have too many entrances from the house so they barricaded themselves in our kitchen. Apparently the entire kitchen floor was covered in guns.
I kept asking what happened but my family was firmly in the mindset of "Don't tell the kids anything, ever". Since little kid me was kind of dumb and nothing really happened to me directly, I forgot about the situation for years. I asked again but they still don't want to talk about it. It's still kind of scary to think that, had they wanted to, I could have died in my sleep that night.
#13
December 26th 2015, unusual tornado warnings for that time of the year but nonetheless taken serious. Family and I stayed indoors and done what we had to. Watching the news and hear a tornado touched down 10 miles away where a lot of our family live. Get a call from our cousin a few hours later crying. Her and her family arrived home, turned on the tv and news was saying the storm is about a minute away from their house, husband decides to get his family (2 toddlers and 2 dogs) into the closet. Tornado hits about 2 minutes later, they had to be rescued from the rubble but the only thing left standing of their house was that closet. Split decision that saved their lives.
I must add, not many people really go to the closet when the warnings are out but he said he had a feeling and couldn’t ignore it. It’s funny that life just continues but in that moment if they didn’t go into the closet they just simply wouldn’t be here anymore.
Edit: closet was the only room without exterior walls on the first floor. Closet located underneath the stairs.
#14
My mother never taught me to swim because when she was a teenager she saw a friend get sucked into a whirlpool at the bottom of a drainage lake that is the deepest body of water within a few hundred miles of us. They didn’t find his body for days.
#15
There was a man who got out of his car after it broke down on the highway and attempted to walk across the highway to the other side late at night. He was hit by a car and his body was driven over so many times that by the time the sun came up his body parts were scattered across 300m of highway
#16
I heard a guy shoot himself in a park bathroom at work. The bathroom was on the other side of my office wall. I was listening to music when I heard a loud thud. The toilets were really loud and had been acting up so I thought that was the cause of the noise. Went outside to investigate and was immediately greeted by the smell of gun powder. On the ground, a few feet from the bathroom door, there was what appeared to be a section of a grapefruit peel. I did not open the bathroom door to investigate further, but called the cops instead. Turns out the guy had shot himself in the head with a sawed off shotgun. The “grapefruit peel” was a section of his skull that had slid under the bathroom door. I feel really bad for the parks employees that had to clean that mess up. I’d never been around gun fire till then and haven’t since, but I can still vividly recall the smell of gunpowder mixed with cleaner.
#17
The story of the Nutty Putty cave. It's a cave in Utah where a few guys went caving one Thanksgiving day, while the rest of the family was at home. One of the guys was a doctor, I think his wife was pregnant, or had just given birth. That guy got stuck upside-down in a really tight part of the cave, basically as tight of a spot you can imagine squeezing through. Rescuers tried to get him out, but couldn't. Eventually, the guy died from being upside down for too long. They didn't recover his body because the rescuers were risking their lives just trying to get him out. So, he's still in there. They just sealed off the cave.
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