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“Chilling Realities”: 28 Eerie & Unforgettable Real-Life Encounters Shared Online
I remember when I was little, I went to the toilet after watching an episode of The X-Files and while I was sitting on it, I was convinced a monster might emerge from the pipe, grab my bottom, and take me with it.
One reason we consume horror is to invigorate ourselves. Exposure to terrifying acts, or even the anticipation of those acts, can stimulate us both mentally and physically in opposing ways: negatively (in the form of fear or anxiety) or positively (in the form of excitement or joy). Watching a scary TV series can simultaneously activate both types of stimulation, with the most pleasure experienced at the most fearful moment. The biochemical level inside our bodies changes; fright can trigger the release of adrenaline, resulting in heightened sensations and surging energy.
But sometimes it's the horror that finds us. Interested in these cases, Reddit user Noahs_25 made a post on the platform, asking everyone "What is the scariest story you know that is 100% true?" And the replies came pouring in.
Continue scrolling to read some of the most chilling ones, and don't miss the talk we had with photographer Alicia Rius, who loves exploring abandoned places.
Discover more in People Are Sharing The Most Terrifying Things They've Witnessed In Real Life (40 Posts)
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#1
I would call it creepy more than scary, but my mom's friend had a small house and lived alone. She noticed weird things: a batch of soup depleting faster than usual, missing eggs, damp towels in the hamper when she hadn't used any, extra dishes in the dishwasher, etc... This went on for months, she thought she was just being forgetful. One day she heard some thumping around in her attic and went to investigate. She found some make shift living quarters. Small radio, hot plate, sleeping bag, pillow, food wrappers, etc... She called the cops who came to keep an eye on the place. They ended up catching a homeless man climbing a tree, trying to sneak into her attic window. He had been doing this almost daily. He would wait for her to go to work, then go down stairs and help himself to food and amenities. The funny part about this story is they got to know each other throughout the ordeal, and the guy was actually very respectful, just down on his luck. She didn't press charges, instead, let him move in, helped him get a job, and he lived in the attic until he got back on his feet. Creepy s**t with a happy ending.
You could say Rius got attracted to the unknown during her childhood, when her curiosity pushed her to see other people's houses. Now, she enjoys visiting everything from deserted medical facilities to closed places of worship; sites that some of us would dread even from a distance.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the photographer feels at home in those places. "A few things creep me out [during these trips]," Rius told Bored Panda. "The first is the fear that someone is already in the building. Someone that can hurt me."
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#2
Two off duty US soldiers were on a train in France. When walking past a toilet they recognised the loading noises of rifles coming from inside. They waited outside and jumped the guy when he came out. He was a terrorist who was about to go through the train killing people.
Then, there's the environment itself. "The state of some of the places I've been is really decayed. They are very dangerous to go into. From falling ceilings to holes in the ground," Rius continued.
"And last, the feeling that there are spirits or energies floating around. I get a feeling of weight in my chest when I photograph abandoned homes that are still full of personal objects. It feels like I'm not alone. I never get this sensation if I take pictures of an empty factory, for example."
#3
When my aunt was about 16 she was working at a grocery store and had a boss in his mid twenties. One day he called the house and was begging her to sneak out and hang out with him. She was considering it because it was her boss and she didn’t want to say no. My mom, who is two years younger than her, always gets these incredibly spot on “gut feelings”. She had one that night and begged my aunt not to go out with him. Thankfully she listened to my mom and told him no which made him really angry. He ended up going out that night and meeting another girl. He took her out to some cliffs and r***d her and pushed her off. Somehow she lived through this and was able to get him sent to prison. I feel so sorry for that girl and so thankful for my mom and her gut feelings. Always trust your gut.
But these difficulties make Rius's explorations and the shots that she brings from them all the more worth it. She sees abandoned places as time capsules, waiting to tell forgotten stories about our past to anyone who dares to step inside.
And that's the thing with fear. We can fight it. With gradual, controlled exposure to the thing we're afraid of through repeated and prolonged contact (maybe with the guidance of a professional as well), we can develop an ability to cope and even get past our petrifying experiences.
#4
Was working the evening shift at a gas station. Man comes in all disoriented. I go to help him out. he has a gash on his head and doesn't know where he was. I couldn't see any crashes around so assumed he had fallen or something. Normally we are supposed to stay inside the glass shielded register area whenever anyone is in the store. I, being a nice human being, went to help while calling the police/EMS. They got there and checked him out. They thought his head may have been fractured. Took him to the ER. I went back to work. Cops stopped back by for some coffee a few hours later. They told me the guy got hit by a baseball bat trying to break into a little girl's bedroom and was wanted for r**e and m****r in two other states. I never left the register area at night again.
#5
From when I was delivering pizza I walked up to a trailer park house and knocked, dude answers the door wearing a s******a armband and he’s bald, I tell him the total and he invites me inside while he gets the money there’s 10 more dudes all bald all wearing arm bands, sitting in a circle in metal chairs guy gives me the money, I go to leave, he grabs my arm and gets in my face and asks “do you like n*****s?” I don’t want to be murdered so I respond “nope not at all hate those f*****s” and leave as quick as possible. The scary part is every other delivery driver but me that night was black and they might have never been seen again if I didn’t take the delivery.
#6
A female friend in college disappeared from a party at another university in the city town 25ish miles north of our school. She had arrived with another friend who I believe had driven. At some point she split off to play corn hole or something and was later inexplicably gone. Phone calls went to voicemail, police were called, but she was simply missing. About 10 days later she was found by a homeless man who witnessed her crawling up to a bus stop in the city, begging for help. She had broken a leg and an arm, and was in very bad shape. At the (quite large party) she had her drink secretly drugged and was then led off by a group of men into their vehicle. She was taken to an apartment where she was drugged, repeatedly r***d, and locked in a small room in between with a bucket to use as a bathroom. At one point after being injected with heroin and r***d, she somehow managed to convince one of her captors to allow her to use the actual bathroom to clean herself up. This bathroom had a small window to the outside, and with the shower running, she managed to squeeze out and fell from the third story into a large hedge/bush. From there she crawled from the apartment complex to the road and bus stop, where the homeless man saw her and called police. Many cars stopped upon seeing her, making her captives unable to recapture her. Three men were later arrested for the crime after surveillance cameras allowed police to locate the apartment which she jumped from. She returned to our university almost two years later, graduated, and became a nurse. She was obviously traumatised, never "partied" again, carried a gun everywhere she could, and somehow moved on with life. It was a terrifying tale none of us ever forgot. She was an 18 year old freshman when the incident happened.
#7
There was a woman who worked in a science lab who spilled two drops of organic mercury on the back of her gloved hand. Those two drops destroyed her entire nervous system and brain.
#8
My mom was driving, and a guy ran out in the road, so she stopped so she couldn’t hit him. It was night time, so it was pretty dark out, and 3 other men emerged from the forest around, all trying to use the door handles of her car to get in. She locked them luckily, and gassed it to the nearest town. Remember to always lock your car after you start it, because if it wasn’t unlocked who knows what would’ve happened to her.
#9
This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away. Judy Kirby murdered six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit suicide. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband's brother and was by some reports involved in drug trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest. She picked up her sister's son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a high rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride. The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. There were pieces of children all over the highway. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.
#10
Artimus Pyle the drummer from Lynard Skynard survived a plane crash and walked to a nearby house only to be shot by the homeowner. The homeowner saw a b****y long-haired man and winged him. Pyle survived that as well and made a full recovery.
#11
Years ago when I was 8 my family lived in this big weird house kind of on the edge of a small town. The school district was in the middle of a big restructuring so even though we were only a couple grades apart my brother and I went to different schools and took different buses. This left me as the last person to leave in the morning and the first person to get home in the afternoon, which meant it was my job to make sure all the lights were off and the door was locked. One morning I noticed the basement door was open and the light was on so before I left I turned off the light and closed the door. When I got home that afternoon the light was on and the door was open again. I just assumed that I’d forgotten to actually take care of it when I noticed it in the morning so I went over to turn off the light and close the door. When I got to the top of the basement stairs I looked and there was a big shadowy male figure towards the bottom of the staircase. I freaked out, slammed the door and pushed a bunch of boxes against it and then went and hid in my closet. For months I didn’t tell my family because I was positive what I had seen was a ghost and didn’t think anyone would believe me. Then about a year after that incident my mom and her boyfriend realized that small amounts of money had been going missing for months (totaling around $800-900, but never more than $60 at once). So we all walked around the house with flashlights trying to figure out how they could have gotten in. Turns out some creep was climbing in through a small hole in the outside of the house, shimmying through a crawl space, then coming up into the house through the basement. Realizing I had been alone in the house with him on at least one occasion was one of the worst, most terrifying moments I’ve ever had.
#12
One of my friends had someone following her home, hiding in the bushes so they couldn't be seen. She booked it to her house, got inside, and he was watching the house from the outside. She called the cops. They come along quietly and got the jump on him. He had condoms, handcuffs, and a knife. When they got his DNA, it turned out that he was linked to a half dozen r***s in the area. She credits her regimen of running sprints to outrunning him that night and firmly believes she would have been r***d if she couldn't outrun him then.
#13
Nutty Putty Cave in Utah was sealed up in 2009 after John Jones was trapped upside-down in a small crevice while spelunking. When rescue teams finally arrived he had been upside-down for so long that his legs were drained of blood. The only possible way to have gotten him out was to break his legs, which would’ve sent him into fatal shock. He died after being trapped for 28 hours. His body’s still in the cave.
#14
My wife arrived at her Parents house that she was currently living in due to health issues of her Fathers. She got into the house (no one else was there at the time) and instead of going further in, stopped in the first room that held the computers which was right by the door. She went into the room and was messing around on the internet when one of the cats came into the room. Her cat to be precise. Well this cat was super laid back. Loved everyone and never picked fights or got aggressive. He would literally lay down and let squirrels throw pecans at him from trees and do nothing but take it. Not tonight however, tonight he was growling and hissing intermittently while standing between my Wife and the entrance to the rest of the house. A laid back sweet old cat was acting like he was going to rip out a throat. Turns out they found the back door wide open (super bad, her parents and her NEVER leave the door unlocked much less open). She came to find out later from those cops that they were hunting down a serial r****t that had been spotted in the area and that was why there were rolling down a safe (normally) residential street. Super spooky. Life pro tip? Always trust the cat.
#15
A guy i worked with was riding his dirt-bike through the woods and somebody hung a cable between two trees. My buddy caught his throat on it and saw the dude steal his dirt-bike. Woke up in the hospital with a lacerated throat and a broken larynx. Pretty crazy what somebody will do for something so cheap.
#16
Happened to me, have posted about it before. I was around 11 years old and I woke up in the middle of the night to a man straddled on top of me with his hand over my mouth and nose. He told me to roll over and not scream. I rolled onto the floor and tried to scream b****y m****r ( I say tried cause when you are truly terrified it can take a second to find your voice) my mom heard me screaming and came in and fought with the guy, he was at least 6' she was 5'3" and scared him enough with the fighting and screaming that he took off out the window he had come in through. Never did catch him.
#17
The Lake Nyos Disaster. The lake periodically belches a cloud of invisible carbon dioxide gas that suffocates everything within a 16 mile radius. In 1986, over 1700 people and all their livestock died without even understanding what was happening to them.
#18
This may just horrify me more than others: Dude was working on a tuna steamer and they closed him in and steamed him. I can't help but imagine that as anything but a truly terrifying and painful way to die. One of the main reasons I never could bring myself to do real factory labor is because I don't trust people enough to not tuna steam me. EDIT: Thanks for the gold. RIP Jose Melena.
#19
The 1904 Cincinnati Privy Disaster. In 1904, nine schoolgirls drowned in an outhouse after the floor collapsed. They literally drowned in human waste.
#20
i was in a c****y motel. the room had bedbugs. i was too exhausted to go to the front desk. i just needed to make it until the morning. i slept in the tub. hours later i hear someone breaking through the window. i had a big knife with me and ran out into the room to find a man halfway through my window. we stared for awhile at each other in shock. i think we both were scared. then he says," is this your room?" im like," yes, this is my room man!" more staring. then he slowly starts backing out while cursing me for leaving my window unlocked and not expecting him to break in. motel on watt ave, sacramento.
#21
My long-term partner decided to end his life suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago. He was the happiest person I knew and even with 20/20 hindsight, videos, poring through old messages etc I wouldn't be able to identify any warning signs.
#22
In my town in the early 90's there was a notorious killer that had all of BC, Canada on watch. My wifes mother (years and years before I knew them) had been home alone while her Husband was in England doing tree surgeon work (arborist) She was in her laundry room when a man walked up from her basement, completely scaring her, she freaked out and said what the h**l are you doing here? He said he was friends with her husband and was just coming to see if he was here, apparently he told him he could just walk in. Which she knew was b******t. She was smart enough to tell him that he was just at the store and would be back any minute. He said he would wait outside for him, as soon as he left she called the police, but he was long gone by the time they got here. Two weeks later, the killer was caught, his mugshot put on TV and it was the guy in her house.
#23
My dad and some friends got drunk and went for a drive on some back roads and were going as fast as the truck would go as teenagers. My dad was slightly less drunk than the others and eventually demanded they let him get out. They pulled over and he and one other girl got out. He and the girl started walking to town while the other three sped off in the opposite direction. Well less than a mile up the road from where they got out is an extremely sharp turn, which they missed and hit a tree going pretty close to triple digits (miles per hour). Two of them died on impact and the only reason the third survived is because they crashed in front of a house that two doctors lived in. The survivor was paralyzed and lost his leg and part of his arm and was in the hospital for eight months before dying. This was in the ‘60s so medical care wasn’t what it is today. When I first got my permit my dad took me to that corner to explain the importance of safe driving. It gave me goosebumps about how close he was to being in the truck. He said that the dad of the driver got what remained of the truck to be hung up in the center of town for months after to be a warning to all.
#24
Amateur rugby. Guy gets hit pretty hard and dislocates his hip. While waiting for the ambulance, a guy runs up saying he's a physio and can at least relocate the joint. He cracks the hip back into its socket and the guy SCREAMS. One of his testicles had been jolted out of place in the accident - and had been chilling out in the empty hip socket. Squish.
#25
[The Toy Box Killer] and his [transcripts.] If you absolutely want to have your day ruined, this has to be one of the most disturbing, creepeiest things ever. Serial killer David Parker Ray would play these tapes for his victims, so they had an idea of what was coming and to also mentally break them. Here the start of one tape to give you an idea: >"Hello there, b***h. Are you comfortable right now? I doubt it. Wrists and ankles chained. Gagged. Probably blind folded. You are disoriented and scared, too, I would imagine. Perfectly normal, under the circumstances. For a little while, at least, you need to get your s**t together and listen to this tape. It is very relevant to your situation. I’m going to tell you, in detail, why you have been kidnapped, what’s going to happen to you and how long you’ll be here. I don’t know the details of your capture, because this tape is being created July 23rd,1993 as a general advisory tape for future female captives. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be to wake up in a place you didn't know and have someone play these tapes for you telling you what horrible things were going to happen to you before you died?
#26
That there's a guy casing the bar that I work at literally right now, and I can't do anything to stop him. He's been in asking what time/days we're open, and what days we have security. Caught him feeling the corners of our windows and doors too. Unfortunately, until he breaks in and robs us, the police won't do a thing.
#27
On September 20th, 1987 in Bellingham Washington, a Georgia Pacific paper mill worker was sent to inspect a heat exchanger system in the steam plant. Inside the base of the stack, he spotted a charred skeleton. To this day, no one is certain who the victim was, how they wound up in such a horrible place, nor why.
#28
I'll tell you one that happened to me, or rather, I was witness to. One night, I was out at a bar with a friend I was visiting in New Rochelle, NY. We went outside for a cigarette, and a car came flying past the bar. The car burned through a red light, and started going up this hill that was on a curve. We watched as he veered over the double yellow, and smashed head on with another car coming from the other direction. Both car's hind ends lifted up, then slammed down. The car that was driving correctly burst into flames. I ran inside and grabbed the fire extinguisher, then yelled to the bartender to call 911 and say there has been an accident. My friend, a few other patrons, and me ran to the cars. Now, I used to think this was a fictional trope, but I was pretty drunk before this happened, and I swear it sobered me up instantly. I tried spraying the fire, but it did nothing. The fumes and heat were awful, and all we could do was stand back. The worst part was, and this will haunt me forever, was that the woman in the burning car was screaming as she died. My God, it was the worst sound ever. The fire department came and put the fire out. The police took us back to the bar and took statements. I found out the next day in the news, that the car that was not speeding was being driven by a young woman coming home late from work. She was a block away from home, and I think she was either newly married or a new mother. The rotten m**********r driving the other car was some rich drunk c********r. He lost a leg, but otherwise was physically unharmed. I have no clue if he did time, as I left to go back home a day or so later. I'm trying to find a link for the news story, but I can't, as this was maybe 6 or 7 years back. I remember it being reported on Lo-Hud and Channel 12 News.
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