Recently, people on Reddit shared their most frightening unexplained experiences, and I made the mistake of reading them right before attempting to go to sleep. Now, I have no choice but to share these spine-tingling tales with you. Here are the stories that made me afraid to turn out the lights:

1."The night before my birthday in 1996, I dreamed that I was walking around near the peak of Everest. It was snowing hard, but I was quite comfortable. There was a tent. To announce my presence, I sang 'Goober Peas." The two men inside were frightened, and I tried to calm and cheer them. I stayed with them a while and comforted them."

"A few years later, I read about the Everest disaster in which mountaineers had to pitch a tent too high on Everest and died there, the night before my birthday in 1996. I can’t explain it, but I hope I comforted them."

2."In 1989, I was driving on a familiar rural highway in broad daylight. I was rounding an easy bend and shocked to see a small town on the right side of the road. There’s a sign: St. Vincent. A few of the things immediately noticeable were a shop called Webster Welding, an old-fashioned horse-drawn water pump for fire fighting, several large poplars with dead tops, and black and white painted rocks along the street that faced the highway. I kept watching in the rear-view mirror, and it stayed visible. I drive a few miles, and there is a gentleman waving at me from beside his car."

"He’s obviously broken down, and I pulled over. A quick chat and I learn he’s blown a tire and wrecked his rim. He asks if I’ll drive him back to the town. No problem. In he gets, and off we go.

The town is not there. It’s a dusty Alberta crossroad. This fellow and I just sat in my truck in silence. I raised an arm, and my hair was standing on end. His too. He said, 'All the trees were dead. Are we dead?'Eventually, I drove him to a nearby town. He simply got out of the truck and walked away. I remember it like it was yesterday. I could tell you what that town looked like in perfect detail."3."We were playing team tag at night back in middle school. A friend and I were hiding near a bush around a tree. Suddenly, something in the bush moved, and we assumed it was an animal. We threw a stick into the bush, and it came flying back out. A dark figure about 4 feet tall ran across the field into the woods. We freaked out and ran back to our house, about a 1/2 mile away."

4."I moved to a different city for university at the peak of the pandemic. I lived off campus in a suite with a couple of my friends from my hometown. Life happened, and they both ended up moving out by the end of the first semester. So I was now living alone in a very quiet neighbourhood. I got off of work late one night and crawled into bed around 12 a.m. I woke up about an hour later to the sound of footsteps shuffling around in my bedroom."

"I opened my eyes to see a very tall man in my doorway, backlit by the streetlights, with his cellphone upright in his hand as if he was recording. When the person registered that I was awake, they backed their way out of the room and started running. I followed them outside and watched them hop into the driver's seat of an empty car that had been left running before speeding down the street.

I had no information to give to the police when they arrived. To this day, I have no idea who that person could have been, or what they were doing in my bedroom at 1 a.m."

5."This still gives me chills just thinking about it. I was 7 or 8 years old. I was lying in the top bunk of the bunkbed I shared with my twin brother. We had an attached bathroom, and the only light coming in the room was the light emanating from under the bathroom door. I was lying in bed, listening to my brother cry as my dad tried to remove a splinter from my brother's finger. I looked at the foot of my bed, and I saw a man about 5'10" tall, long hair about shoulder length, short beard, and what looked like a flannel shirt and possibly overalls or suspenders standing there, and his pupils were glowing, kind of green, like if you see an animal's eyes in the dark."

"I started screaming, 'Daddy, daddy, there is a man in here, standing at the foot of my bed!' I looked back, and he was gone. I just kept screaming. I was terrified. This apartment had a front and back door, but they were absolutely locked as we lived in a bad neighborhood in a very old part of the city.

Ten years later, I recounted the story to my dad, and he had honestly forgotten about it. He did say, and he did not tell me when I was younger, that he did from time to time swear he saw a man who matched that description, minus the glowing eyes, in the apartment late at night. My dad had searched the apartment a few times after seeing him, but there was no trace of a way he came in, and often, he would follow the man to a closet, and he just sort of disappeared."

6."It’s around 3 in the morning in rural North-Central Alberta. My friend and I are driving home from a high school party in which neither of us drank or took any drugs. It’s the middle of winter. In Alberta, this means it’s cold outside. This night it was below -30 degrees Celsius (below -22 degrees Fahrenheit). The whole way home, my friend and I are chatting. As we round a corner, I’m zoning out listening to my friend talk, when through the windshield, I notice glowing eyes off the side of the road, the headlights not fully hitting whatever it was. The eyes were green/yellowish. This would be normal, but these eyes are about 7-8 feet above the ground."

"At first, I think it’s a hiker or someone walking back to town, but their eyes wouldn’t glow, and no one is going to be walking that far from town or any houses when it’s that cold and late outside (this was a town of less than 1,000 people).

As we drive closer, this thing appears to have goat-like legs, is very heavy-set, and stands on two feet. Its arms drop down by its side like a person’s, and it appears to even have some kind of dark clothing on the top half. It had goat-like horns that curved but went upwards. At this point, my blood runs completely cold, and I have a full-fledged instinctual freeze response, hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I remember hearing my own disembodied voice think, 'I shouldn’t be seeing this. This is wrong.' I even teared up. We pass by it relatively quickly, and I can’t stop thinking about what that was.

My perception of time was kind of weird after that due to panic. But now the lights of town are in front of us, and I realize my friend isn’t talking anymore. I turn to my friend and sheepishly said with tears still in my eyes, 'Sorry, what were you saying? I must be going crazy but I thought I saw something back there.'

She said, 'No, no, it’s fine. I saw it too. Did it kind of look like a goat?' So, she saw it too. We had no idea what it was. We both come from hunting families, and I know the easiest critique is that it was an elk or moose standing on hind legs. But the arms of an elk or deer don’t just fall beside the body; they buckle outwards a bit. Regardless, it seemed human-like in its stance, and it was very heavy-set. Then, you’d think, oh, it was a bear. But it had horns and curved back legs. I assume moose would be the same as an elk or deer but I’ve never really seen a moose standing ambiently, typically just when they fight.

Even our responses were odd. You’d think, given scary movies, you’d immediately flip out and react. Both of us kind of just got entranced and terrified for a while, blood running cold. While the friend and I don’t talk anymore, we talked about it a few times in the next years we were still in contact. She continued to refer to it as the goat thing."

7."It was around 1 a.m., and I was still up watching TV. I couldn't sleep. I got really into watching some sort of history documentary about the Shroud of Turin. When they zoomed up closely to the shroud, my TV started to glitch, and the picture was stuck on the shroud. The audio froze, and then I heard a man's voice saying, 'Don't look' in a really unnatural deep voice. It felt like it was right behind me."

"I whipped my head around, and there was nobody there.

I have lived alone since my wife passed. My daughter and grandchild come over on occasion, but this night I was alone. I live in rural Ireland, and whilst not my first rodeo with ghosts, etc, this experience felt unnatural. I don't know why. The TV went back to normal a couple of seconds after I heard 'don't look.' I managed to hunt down the documentary and combed it for these words.

Still don't know where it came from. For some reason it really frightened me. I went to bed a little shaken up, if I'm honest. If I see anything about the Shroud of Turin advertised or in news articles, I get a shiver. The voice sounded extremely deep. I've never heard a voice like it. Big baritone voice. I don't know. I'm getting the shivers typing this, and I've seen some stuff in my lifetime on this earth."

8."My first husband and I were separated. I dreamed one night he arrived at our home and knocked on the door. When I opened the door, he looked extremely tired and a sunken version of himself. Even though he didn't say it, he was asking forgiveness with his eyes. Of course, I forgave him and welcomed him inside. Our favorite thing to do was to lie in bed and talk for hours, so we lay in the bed and began our conversation about nonsense stuff. As we were talking, the window at the foot of our bed was glowing a bright, warm light (not blinding but comforting)."

"As we continued to talk, the light became brighter and brighter until it engulfed us both in its warmth. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.

About an hour later, my husband's mother called me hysterical and told me that my husband had been murdered an hour before. I realized then that he had come to see me to ask for forgiveness before he passed over. He was addicted to drugs and hid it from me for years, which caused our separation. He was in a bad location, and a person there took his life. But I take comfort knowing I was with him when he passed."

—Falconfairy42

9."I was out with my ex-roommate on a night drive. We liked to go driving and get lost in the country sometimes and just jam out to music and talk. We lived in central Illinois, so it was pretty much just open land and cornfields. It was super dark, though, so we couldn't see too much beyond the sides of the road and what was in front of us. My roomie was driving, and at this point we had the music off. She suddenly stopped mid-sentence. I had been looking at my phone, so I looked up at her when she got quiet. Her eyes were wide and her brow furrowed. I looked up at the road. On the left side, there was a man just ominously staring into the darkness."

"Not even half a block later, there was another, doing the same thing. And another. About 10 seconds pass, and we see another man, facing the road but still on the left side, staring into our headlights with this blank, almost psychotic expression.

My blood ran cold, and I couldn't explain why. It was so unsettling, even though they were just people standing out there.

After passing all of them, my roommate suddenly says, 'What the FUCK was that??' I said I had no idea, but I wanted to go home.

I'm sure there's some plausible explanation, but that night still makes me shudder for some unforeseen reason. My roomie was creeped out too. There weren't any houses out there, just fields with a few patches of trees. No farm equipment, no mailboxes, cars, or driveways. Just empty darkness and fields.

Twilight zone shit, I swear."

—KipBoutaDip

10."My friends and I went exploring in the caves in Lilydale as teenagers. They were and still are rumored to be haunted. But no one knew it at that time. We were about halfway in when this happened. We were telling stories and laughing, and could hear this faint clinking noise up ahead. My friends were curious, so we decided to go further. As we went deeper and deeper in the cave, we saw a light up ahead and could not make out where it was coming from. We started to see a figure, but it wasn't moving."

"We slowly approached the figure, and it appeared to be an old man mining wearing dirty overalls, a dirty white shirt, and a dirty yellowish hat. His sleeves were rolled up, and he had a long beard.

One of my friends yelled out, 'Boo,' and he turned towards us and started running after us. It appeared he was about 50 to 60 years old, but he didn't move like a man. It took us a good 10 minutes to get back to the car, and we sped our way home.

About a mile past the caves, we saw the same man on the side of the road. We were all screaming, trying to figure out how he got ahead of us without a vehicle. We have only talked about that night a couple of times, but we are all convinced we saw a ghost or supernatural being."

—archameidus

11."My partner and I had some guy decide he was going to try to intentionally ram our car in a parking lot. We thankfully escaped unharmed after a terrifying chase, but we never figured out why he zeroed in on us. We were just minding our own business, trying to leave the lot. We still occasionally rehash it years later, but it makes no sense at all."

12."This happened to me when I was about 14. No one believes me, and I obviously can’t prove it, but I know. I was babysitting two girls, one five and a baby in a crib. They were in the same room. It was a Victorian-style house with a third floor for the main room. I was watching TV and heard the baby crying. I waited and didn’t hear her again, so I figured she went back to sleep. A bit later, I heard her again, and I went upstairs to check on her."

"She was sound asleep, and I remember being surprised cause I figured she would be restless. I was standing over the crib, and I heard the baby crying again, from the third floor. I was terrified, ran downstairs, and sat really, really close to the TV so I couldn’t hear anything but the TV. It was summer, no wind, they had no pets, which is what everyone told me that was what I heard. Nope. I heard a baby crying. From an empty floor."

—Imperfectyourenot

13."I lived briefly in a rental home, which was owned by a church in a small Florida town, and which was built in 1908. Every night around 8 o'clock, I heard dragging, shuffling footsteps coming from the kitchen. If I walked into the kitchen, they would stop, and if I turned my head to look into the kitchen from the den, they would pause and continue the very moment I looked away again. This lasted for five minutes or so each and every night."

—dirtybirdsriseup

14."When I was a teen, I was in the living room around 3 a.m. Just chilling on my laptop on the couch. Two years before, my uncle had passed away in the room above the living room I was currently sitting in. I swear it was like all of a sudden, every window upstairs had been opened from the way the wind suddenly blew around and sounded. And then I remember hearing one loud THUD directly above me in the room upstairs."

"It sounded like a chair was picked up and then slammed back down or something. I was frozen for a solid minute before I booked it up the stairs and into my room on the opposite end of the house.

My uncle passed away in a not-so-peaceful way. It felt like he was having one last bout of anger before he finally left the house forever."

—slyzard94

15."When I was around 13 or 14 years old, I was spending the summer at my grandparents' home in rural Guatemala. I guess my grandfather was going through something and was dealing with it the only way he knew, getting drunk. It was my first time seeing him like that, so I followed my mom's lead in dealing with him. She gave me his stash of mostly empty bottles and told me to pour them out in the little grove between my grandparents' home and my uncle's home. I go as far in as possible and start pouring them out, when I suddenly hear some shuffling."

"I looked up and to my right, there was a beaten and bloodied man, dressed in rags, sitting against a tree. There was a swarm of flies on him, and he smelled like dead fish, but all he said in a quiet voice was 'help.' Of course, I stumbled back and was scared. I dropped the bottles because at that point, it didn't matter anymore. I ran to the house and told my mom. She didn't believe me at first, but I guess I looked scared enough that she sent her brother and a few other men to go check.

My uncle came back and said they didn't find anyone, and I went with him a second time to the same spot, but it was empty. The ground that man sat on was the only patch of dirt that looked fresh, but the only thing that was proof it was the same spot was the stash of bottles I had dropped there.

No explanation to this day."

—crispyc00kie

16."When my gran was 10, her dad died in a train accident, leaving her and her mother to care for her much younger brother. A few years later, her brother had come out of his bedroom in the middle of the night, terrified. He said that there was a man at the end of his bed. My gran and her mum checked his room thoroughly and didn't find anything there. They all went back to bed. A few minutes later, he complained again, saying that the man was still there."

"Once more, they checked the room and found nothing. My gran's mum asked him what the man was doing. He said he was just smiling. She asked him to describe what the man looked like. Keep in mind that he was very little, around 2 or 3, I think, when his dad died, and he would have forgotten what he looked like by this point. As he was describing the man, my gran and her mum were beginning to get scared. He was describing his dad."

—noahthequeerfish

17."The house I live in is pretty old, and we have heard a lot of strange things here. Bangs, crashes, and things moving/falling are fairly normal, but one night I awoke to find myself in the middle of a bad case of sleep paralysis. I was lying flat on my back, and there was a huge shadow person leaning over me and pushing down on my chest. I tried to scream, but no sound would come out, and I couldn’t move anything except my eyes to wake my husband. It was terrifying, but once I broke the spell and woke up, I realised it was simply a nightmare and felt better."

"In the morning, when my husband woke up, he said to me while wide-eyed, 'I know how this is gonna sound, but last night I woke up to a huge shadow person looming over your side of the bed. I could see its hands gripping the bottom of the frame on your side. It took me a couple of seconds to realise what I was looking at, and when I shot up in bed, it just disappeared.'

I had not at that moment told him about my experience. We still talk about that 10 years later, from time to time. It was so profoundly strange."

18."I had a vivid dream about running frantically along a beach promenade, screaming to other people to run and trying desperately to cling to the benches, and huge waves crashed over us and receded. Then, getting up and sprinting again to the next point of safety where we could cling to something. When I woke up, I didn’t recall the dream immediately, but walked into the living room where my parents were watching breaking news about the tsunami in Japan, and it struck me so intensely that I’d just seen something exactly like that, and the dream came rushing back."

—Kumbaynah

19."In my last house, I used to hear someone whispering my name at night upstairs. I never noticed for a while because I would have a headset on, but when I took it off, I would hear it every now and then. The sound was so close it felt like it was inside my head. Then I started hearing it in my son's room when I would feed him at night. It freaked me out for a while, but I chalked it up to lack of sleep as a new dad."

"One night, my wife came downstairs from feeding our son and asked, 'Were you calling me? I thought I heard you whispering from the stairs.' I never said a word about it to her prior to this. It continued for both of us until we moved out. It never escalated, so we just called it our little ghost."

—CamoMeatball

20."I think I was in college (about 20 years ago), and I was staying at my parents for the weekend. They live in an apartment building. It was in the middle of the night, around 1–2 a.m., when suddenly we heard loud scratches and bangs on the entrance door. They were so loud that we all got up and gathered in the hallway to see what was happening. My father looked through the door sight, and there was nothing there."

"He then started to beat loudly on the door to make it stop. After a few seconds more, everything went silent. No footsteps, no sound, and when looking through the door sight, there was nothing there. Of course, we didn't open the door because we were all very shocked by everything that happened.

In the morning, when we got up, we almost believed it was all a dream until we opened the door and saw some deep, big scratches on the outside part of the door (the door was made of wood).

To this day, I still don't know what that was. There are no dogs in the building, and even if it was, it should've been a very large dog to leave those marks on the door. Also, such a big dog would bark, or at least you would hear its paws when walking outside your door."

—no_addiction

21."I was talking to my roommate while her boyfriend was on the balcony smoking. My back was to the TV. Mid-sentence, she stopped talking and began to stammer. I thought she was having a stroke at first. She pointed behind me, and I turned. An orb of blueish white energy was rising above the TV."

"I stared at it for maybe 3 seconds before it erupted in a bunch of lines tracing along my living room wall. We ran out of our apartment with haste. Her boyfriend was still on the balcony, and we were trying to tell him to jump or climb down. He refused and walked into the living room and said nothing was wrong. I still have no idea what happened."

—Occupiedlock

22.And finally, "When I was a kid, my sister (3 years older than me) was convinced she had magical powers. Almost every week, she was telling me she had some new power. 'I have cat powers!' 'I can turn invisible!' 'I have spider powers!' When I was 5, my sister and I went to a jungle gym play place. Her power at this time was that she could 'disappear into thin air.' I didn't believe her. I asked her to prove it."

"She said, 'Oh no, you must not watch. When I disappear, I emit a very toxic form of light known as green flash. It will poison you if you see it!' I said I still didn't believe her.

She said she would go round the corner and disappear, and that I had to not watch, but that when she did, I would never be able to find her. And so she went round the corner. But here's the thing. The 'walls' were netting. I could see her perfectly through the netting, which was 99% hole. She thought I couldn't see her, but I could see her perfectly.

My eyes were locked onto her, not blinking, as she stood in the corridor around the corner.

And then... she fucking vanished.

She was there, and then she wasn't.

I RAN to where she had been, and looked high and low around the area for her, and sure enough, she was NOWHERE to be seen. The corridor was a dead end, so there's nowhere she could've run away, other than back down the corridor, which I would've seen. There were no other people in that corridor at this time, either. Nobody ran between us. I literally just saw her disappear into thin air.

I ran around the jungle gym trying to find her, and eventually found her in a COMPLETELY different part of it. When I asked her how she disappeared, she said, 'See, I told you I have powers!'

To this day, I have absolutely no fucking CLUE how this happened. I can't even begin to work out what happened or how she did this. She was totally motionless when she disappeared. She didn't appear to move up, down, left, or right before vanishing. She was there, then she was gone. And I still have no fucking clue how."

—FeelThePower999

Has anything like this ever happened to you? Tell us your unexplained story in the comments or via the anonymous form below:

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