22 Stories That Wouldn’t Be As Scary If They Weren’t 100% Real, As Shared By People Online

When I was learning to drive, my instructor advised me to always lock my car doors, as soon as I get into my car. I asked her why & she told me her personal experience.

This happened almost a year after she passed her test. She finished work about 3am. She just gotten into her car & gotten her keys in the ignition, when 3 guys jumped into her car. She had a knife to her neck & was told to drive. They give her directions to an alleyway. They dragged her out of the car & [violated] her. After they were done with her, they left her in the alleyway and stole her car & purse. It took her awhile to get help. Police did find her car a few days later, abandoned & on fire, on the outskirts of the city. But the guys were not caught.

The reason she started to teach driving, was her way to protect other women & make sure no one else goes through, what she went through. So she advised all her female students to lock their car doors, as soon as they get in.

Edit to add - I’m still in contact with my instructor, via social media. I sent her screenshots of this comment & the other comments. She is happy that her advice/warning is out there, before she retires for health reasons. She wants me clear a misunderstanding, that she saw in the comments. She does give the same advice to her male students & she does tell them her experience, but leave out the [violation] part.

She does get messages from her past students (including me), saying “thank you for the advice/warning” & we tell her about our close calls.

A message of her “Thank you for sharing your experience & advice, so that others can be safe & they don’t go through the same experience.”

RottweilerBridesmaid , Beyza Kaplan Report

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So when I was around 18 I went to town to drink something with my friends. We went all in and by 2 am I was completely wasted. Couldn't see, walk or think straight.

One of my mates remained sober to drive us back home. We went to the parking lot and I could hear a voice whimmering somewhere in the dark. I turned around and saw 2 guys carrying a girl to a car. I got closer and now I could hear her voice. She obviously was drunk but she repeated ,,no,, and ,,I don't want,, over and over. Adrenaline kicked in and I became sober instantly. I screamed at them and immediately called the police. I wasn't fast enough so they could get in the car and drive off. But I saw the license plate, gave it to the woman I talked to at the police station and they informed me about 10 minutes later that they arrested the two guys. The whole scene was so terrifying. This was in Germany.

JamesJameson420 , Alan Alves Report

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My college girlfriend called me one night. "The Baton Rouge Serial Killer" had been active a while and she was being followed - all over town and even after going in circles - by a while truck, which the killer supposedly drove. She fit the victim profile, she was brunette living in (house sitting for her aunt) a wealthy neighborhood. My roommate and I drove over and we filed in line behind her and the triuck. She lived essentially ON the LSU grounds so I assumed it was a stupid student prank or something. She parks at her aunt's house, truck stops one house short of her aunt's and we pull in behind her. I explain I'm going to go diffuse the situation. Walk over to the truck, the FBI says the killer is a white guy, this man is African American. Explain no one is upset but he's freaking out my girlfriend, he needs to leave. He looks side eyed at me and drives off. I see the guy again a few months later, on the cover of the Baton Rouge paper, he's been arrested. He was the killer.

Flailing_Aimlessly , Steven Cordes Report

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Sad, true, and societally scary: While I was on life support, there was this other girl on a ventilator, just down the hall. Like me, she’d had all of the right symptoms: headaches upon waking, vomiting without nausea, and getting lost in the house where she’d lived for years. Like me, she researched them extensively. Unlike me, she reached the right conclusion, and asked her parents for a scan. But they had a bunch of other kids, and money was tight, and she was at the right age to see symptoms as unduly catastrophic. So they said no. Meanwhile, I was treating my symptoms with the gym. My mother had begged me to get a scan, and I’d said no. Until I had health insurance of my own, I couldn’t afford it, as it would show a preexisting condition that would destroy my future insurability. The other patient took up three jobs to save the money for a scan. She made the rounds of several neurologists, begging. Each responded dismissively: she was too young, and looked so well that she had to be a hypochondriac. Finally, one took pity on her, and gave her a scan, telling her outright that it was only so that she’d stop asking, and that she’d hear results in some weeks. I kept going to the gym until the day that I collapsed, vomiting blood, bursting a pupil. She went in for her first craniotomy walking, talking, fine. My parents and boyfriend would sit beside me through my coma, holding my hand, telling me how much they loved me. She’d have her own such trio, doing the same. I’d wake. I’d meet her parents, her boyfriend. I’d visit the ICU. I’d see them growing more gaunt, more desperate, each time, until the trip when I learned that she’d gone to long-term coma care. I’d recover. She’d die. Brain cancer is that kind of a b***h. Since then, I’ve taken the survivor’s guilt to do everything that I can with my life… but that so easily could’ve—should’ve—been her outcome instead. That’s the outcome for so many. It’s terrifying because it demonstrates how we, as a society, often dismiss the health complaints of all but a narrow slice of the population, without even registering that we’re doing it. How many lives do we, unthinkingly, throw away?

Starshapedsand , Tima Miroshnichenko Report

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My great grandpa was a combat medic in the army. He was climbing the cliffs on D-Day at Omaha beach without a gun, having to stop and remove bullets, bandage wounds, and other things all while people with machine guns shot down at him. The fact that he got to sit in his favorite leather recliner and tell me that story some 70 years later is a miracle.

alaklamacazama , Expert Infantry Report

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My grandfather was a British FEPOW in Japan in WW2. He did something to piss off the guards of his camp one evening and they beat him badly and tied him up on a fence with the promise to kill him the next day. Another young prisoner died during the night so they switched my granddad and the dead lad so the guards assumed he’d died from his injuries. Luckily he survived and came home in 1945

bakedNdelicious , National Library of Scotland Report

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My uncle was in a bar one night and started talking to this random guy. He described him as "a really nice guy." He met him a few other times in the same bar. They drank and talked about random stuff. Soon after, my uncle stopped seeing the guy at the bar. Idk how long after, but my uncle got notified that he had jury duty. He showed up and found out what it was for. A serial killer and the killer was his friend from the bar. Derrick Todd Lee. My uncle was promptly dismissed from jury duty for obvious reasons.

I_am_dean , Adrien Olichon Report

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In the 1990s, a nurse in New Jersey killed hundreds of hospital patients. Sometimes he would sneak into patient's rooms at night and inject them with fatal medication doses. Other times, he would put the medication into IV bags in the supply room, so they would kill whatever random patient they were given to later. He was accused several times. Some patients pointed him out before they died. Some staff thought he was creepy and dangerous, and refused to work with him. He kept getting fired from hospitals. But the hospital managers knew that if he got arrested, they would be sued by the families of the patients he murdered. So they just fired him, and didn't call the police. That happened at 12 different hospitals over the course of 16 years. Investigators believe he killed as many as 400 people. After he was arrested, he confessed to 40 murders. In 29 of them he gave enough detail to be charged and plead guilty. He is linked to 300+ more deaths than that, but details of those will probably never be known, because so much information was lost over time or destroyed by the hospitals.

auraseer , Anna Shvets Report

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I work midnight shift at a gas station and I have for quite awhile at various stations in different areas with varying levels of criminal activity. I have regulars, of course. I’m a small-statured woman (as is my partner the other half of the week, and we’ve always been partners) so these regulars often worry about us and keep watch on creepy occurrences when they can. I had one man who worked in the metro an hour away who would stop in every morning for his cigarettes. He never smiled or seemed friendly, and as I often do, I tried to think of what I could do that might make him smile one day. It took many months but I finally pulled it off by having his cigarettes ready on the counter and already scanned for him to pay for as he walked in. He smiled, and then asked me “Do you ever get scared on the night shift? You small girl, is not safe.” I said I sometimes did but we could lock the doors and hide if we had to, and that the provincial police (think state troopers, if you’re American) had a station close by and came in often to get their highway vehicles washed. I had a good rapport with those police. He nodded and then told me a story about when he first moved to our country from Eastern Europe with his wife and child back in the late 80’s, early 90’s. He fell asleep at work one night at the gas station he worked midnights at. When he woke up, the phone had been ringing for hours and his manager was shaking him violently asking if he was alright. He was fine, he said, what was the problem? He was sorry he fell asleep. His manager screamed that it was fine he fell asleep, to look outside. All of their motor oil was missing and the outside of the place was a mess. The thieves had come and swiped all the oil and left him be because he slept through the entire thing, and then moved down the road to the next station for an encore. At that station, the clerk was awake and fought back, so the thieves stabbed him to death and left him to bleed out. When he finished telling me this, he concluded with “If you ever feel sleepy just lock the door and do it, it might save your life” I don’t work at that station anymore but I think about that guy all the time and wonder how his grandkids are. Here is a link to an article talking about how that poor other clerk’s killers were finally found 25 years later: https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/mobile/arrest-made-in-1990-murder-of-gas-station-attendant-1.2650933

IgnorethisIamstupid , Ramiro Garcia Quiroga Report

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One of my friends family growing up had a beach house and I'd get invited every now and then. They had $ and the house was massive, pretty cool place too. They even had a full time maid who had her own 'flat' at the back. One day they go there for a long weekend and when they opened the door, the place had been ransacked. It was all a mess, missing TVs, furniture, broken stuff... you get the picture. They went to check on the maid and her flat was empty, all her belongings were gone. They called the cops who came over and had a brief look (not interested from what they said) and left saying the maid probably had something to do with. And that's what everyone believed for week. Until the dad returned the following weekend to try and change the locks and etc and he brought their dogs along with him. Yep, you know it... one of the dogs started digging and found the maid buried in the backyard under a tarp they had close to the pool. So the theory now is that whoever came in probably knew her and she recognized them and 'she had to go' Edit: I added the *gruesome* details on a post below. I don't recommend reading them but it's there for those who are curious.

Overall_Draft_9416 , Liliana Drew Report

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One of my many experiences with night terrors/sleep paralysis left me with memory loss and now I have to live with the fact that my body kinda operated without me for a week. I was about 7 years old and woke in the middle of the night to find this smoke creature crawling up the bottom of my bed. It was terrifying, as you can imagine, and I booked it for the landing, which is weird for me because looking back I would have expected it to be sleep paralysis (I still get these occurrences often) but I could move perfectly well on this occasion. I reached the top of the stairs outside my bedroom and another one was slowly making its way up, step by step out of the darkness of the floor below. I froze and looked around for somewhere else to run to, but I was pinned because the first one was making its way through my bedroom doorway toward me. Both of these smoke demon things were advancing on little 7 year old me, so I did the only thing I could thing of: screamed the house down. Mum comes running just as I start to go blind with smoke creeping into my vision. Blood pressure was wonking out - it was the same smoke I get when I stand up fast. Mum ends up soothing me, taking me back to bed, and at some point she leaves and lets me go back to sleep. Next morning, I apologise for waking her up last night. She has no idea what I mean and we’re both confused. I tell her “I woke you up on the stairs. I was having a nightmare.” She informs me that that happened over a week ago, not last night. I have no memory of that week occurring, not a single shred, but apparently I had gone to school every day, played with my friends, eaten my dinner, done my homework, had my baths - all without knowing that I had done it. Apparently I’d been kinda quiet during that week, and my mum assumed I was having trouble at school, which was not an uncommon experience for me. But I still, to this day, don’t remember anything after that night and it gives me the creeps to imagine that my body has done things - gone through the motions of every day life - without me having any knowledge of doing it.

early_onset_villainy , Claudia Mañas Report

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Well, it's my story. When I was a little kid, 5-6? we had this neighbor like Grandma to me. I'd go over and have snacks, and she had a Mr. Potato head I played with that was her (now adult) son's toy. Weird core memories! He came home, in his twenties, from the army I think. I don't remember much about him, but he asked about taking my older brothers camping, but my mom said no, she had a weird feeling about him. (Side note, we lived out in in the country, not even a town, just a place). There were no locked doors, everyone trusted each other. My mom saw him at our little store with bee stings all over and was concerned . He said he got them at the creek. She thought that was weird, because that's just not a thing where we went all the time, but okay? A little while later (not sure how long), the news said there was a murder of some campers out past where we lived, no leads. People were shocked - this doesn't happen here! My mom remembered her weird feeling and the bee stings that didn't make sense. She called the police to say, hey, probably nothing, but here's what I got. I remember detectives coming to our house to talk to her. They had some other evidence that matched, but not enough to link him to the murder (a couple with their child). It's unsolved to this day, though the detective said he knew it was him. A few years later, the guy went to prison for an abduction/attempted murder of a woman who ran out of gas and he offered her a ride. She lived, thank god.

gottabkdngme , Uriel Mont Report

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The other night, my wife took our child out for several hours. In that time I wrapped up work, then left to get dinner around 4:30pm. Got home around 6:30, played with our dog and did a few chores,. Then, when my wife got home about 7:30, we relaxed a bit and I headed for bed about 9:00pm (usually up early with our kid). Maybe two minutes after crawling into bed I get a text from my wife with a picture of our dry-erase menu board on our fridge. See, usually at the start of the week, my wife will fill out a rough menu for dinners that week. I remembered seeing it earlier in the day and it was filled out as expected. The picture she sent was of the menu all scrambled up, like the letters were all moved everywhere, with random words and squiggles throughout. Some of it was her writing, but others were incomplete words, or rewritten words in handwriting that wasn't hers or mine. This freaked us out, as our one year old certainly didn't do it. The county Sheriff showed up and swept the house and found nothing. Nothing was out of place or missing either. He was spooked by it a bit too. He said they never get a call out in the country where we are and recommended we change our locks (we hadn't as the couple we bought our home from were elderly). So, we did that night.

Thesearchoftheshite , Sydney Moore Report

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A chimpanzee named Travis attacking his owner's friend. Travis attacked and mauled his owner's friend, blinding her, severing several body parts, and lacerating her face, before he was shot and killed by a cop. The owner called 911 during the attack. Travis' screams can be heard in the background at the start of the tape as the owner pleads for the police. Initially they believed the call to be a hoax until she said, "He's eating her!"

SuvenPan , Francesco Ungaro Report

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My high school gf called late one night after I was home and in bed. She said that something had happened and asked if I could come over. She was clearly shaken and not full of details. So I told my parents and drove over towards her house. At the top of her subdivision I was met by a cop with lights on. He asked where I was going and I told him about the call from my gf. He lets me go by and I come over the hill to the cul de sac where she lives and I see multiple cop cars around the circle. They watch me pull up and get out of my car. My gf comes running out of her house and meets me in the street. She explains that someone had broken into her neighbor’s house and started beating her with something heavy. The neighbor managed to get out of the house and headed to my gf’s house where she started banging furiously on the front door. My gf’s dad was out of town, so her mom answered the door and the neighbor just fell into the foyer bleeding profusely from the head. Her mom looks up to see the attacker headed up the walkway towards the front door. She pulls the neighbor into the house and closes the door hitting the attacker with it before it fully closed. He then took the heavy tool he had used to beat the neighbor and smashed the little window at the top of the door. Her mom started screaming and the attacker just turned around and walked up the street into the darkness. I spent the night there that night (along with two or three cops outside in their cars) and in the morning we could see blood still pooled on the floor in the foyer and splattered blood above the front door from where the attacker had swung the bloody tool to smash the window. No one was ever caught or even identified. It was just completely random. The neighbor survived and to my knowledge had no permanent physical injuries beyond scarring from having her scalp stapled shut. She moved away shortly after the incident. Edit : Update on victim’s status and paragraphing, though probably not correctly. TLDR: gf’s neighbor was brutally attacked in her home. She ran to my gf’s house and the attacker fled after nearly getting into their house too. No one was ever caught.

LurksNoMoreToo , Paul Garaizar Report

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Up to this day, I'm still looking for a logical explanation to this. This happened in 2003.

So I and an ex were checked in, in a coastal resort where the cottages were far apart, like 200m away.

Around 11-1130pm while we're both drinking beer with the lights turned off and only the TV on, the door knob suddenly rattled violently, like someone was forcibly trying to get it open.

There was no double lock on the door so my first reaction was to jump from the bed and block the door with my weight. The force of my landing must have been heard from the other side but the twisting of the doorknob continued.

By this time I was already pressing my face to the floor, trying to look/estimate how many people were outside the door via the small gap between the floor and the bottom of the door.

There was nothing. Not one pair of feet or anything. But the door knob just kept rattling.

I should point out that the gap between the floor and the door was enough for me to see the outside, or at the very least notice any change in shadow/light caused by movement, but there was nothing.

The turning of the door knob then stopped. But I never heard any footsteps or any other noise.

Waited a few minutes and opened the door. Everything was quiet. No foot prints outside or on the sand surrounding the cottage.

We just noped out of there immediately.

AdBlockerExtreme , Julian Hochgesang Report

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World War II, the Pacific theater. My great uncle on my mother's side fought at Okinawa. While taking cover behind a rock, he was shot through the foot by a Japanese sniper and evacuated to a hospital for recovery. He was the only member of his platoon to make it off the island alive.

SgtSharki , Pixabay Report

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I was around 10 years old. I was at school but my mum told me she was thinking of taking me to the doctors in the afternoon (recurring eye issue). Lunchtime and I'm in the dining hall when the office woman told me there was a taxi outside for me and I needed to go. I assumed my mum booked it for me as she can't drive. I cleared up my stuff and got my bag. Just about to leave when I remembered my jacket in my classroom. I rush to get and head out for the taxi. Office woman tells me I'm too late and the taxi had gone without me. I just went back to class but panicking my mum would be angry at me. School finishes and my mum is waiting for me at the gates. I burst into tears apologising for missing the taxi and thinking I was in big trouble. She never ordered a taxi and had no clue what I was talking about. She ended up not making the doctor appointment. No-one ever found out who ordered the taxi, or who driver was. My mum doesn't like to think what would've happened if I hadn't forgotten my jacket and got in that taxi. TLDR missed a taxi I thought my mum booked for me, only to find out it could have been an attempted kidnapping.

funkster80 , NEOSiAM 2021 Report

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So far I’ve personally seen two people who were so obese and so stationary that they sat on their couches without moving for extended periods of time. They stayed there eating, urinating, and defecating on their cloth couches long enough that their skin broke down and the fabric meshed with their flesh. To be removed they had to have the couch cut apart and at the hospital we had to cut parts off their buttocks, thighs, and back to remove the couch fabric and the infected flesh. Both of them eventually died from systemic infections related to the wounds.

svrgnctzn Report

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One of my parents' neighbors had shingles so bad that he [ended his life].

Peemster99 , John Loo Report

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The case of the Clutter family murders, told expertly by Truman Capote in his book, *In Cold Blood*. What really gets me about the case is that **all it took was one person knowing the family to make the connection that ultimately ended their lives.**

Floyd Wells, a former employee of the father, told his cellmate about the Clutters and that inmate (Richard Hickock) became convinced the family had a fortune stored in a safe at their house. Upon his release, Hickock contacted another former cellmate, Perry Smith, and they planned to rob the family.

There was no safe and no fortune. Instead, the pair left with a small radio, a pair of binoculars, and less than $50 cash, along with the lives of Herb, Bonnie, Kenyon, and Nancy Clutter.

A quote from Hickock talking about Herb has especially stuck with me: "I thought he was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat."

EmCWolf13 , Elisa Calvet B. Report

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A robbery at my place but the way in which it happened. I lived in a basement suite with my younger brother of a quiet neighborhood. The entire front of the house is exposed to the sidewalk but the sides and the back are covered with fenced and trees. The only way to see if anyone is in the basement is through this small window in my bedroom that’s about 5 feet from my bed. I got word while I was out that my place had been robbed. The robbers went through the basement suite door through the back, kicked it open, then made themselves upstairs after robbing the basement suite. They just so happened to rob the place in a 30 minute window when myself, my brother and the people upstairs were out. This means they were watching us for a couple days and monitoring our patterns. What scared me was not really the robbery, but the image of me sleeping while a robber presses his face against the window 5 feet from away from my bed just watching me.

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thedreaminggoose , MART PRODUCTION Report

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