These are the kinds of threads I get lost in for hours on end. Scary, creepy, frightening stories that are actually true.
Be prepared to pull the covers up over your head as you read these 15 AskRedditusers’ terrifying first-hand accounts of the creepiest shit they ever experienced.
15. Don’t let people borrow your phone
When I was younger my dad was out was out of town and my mom let me have a few friends over. We lived right by a pretty busy highway and over there years had quite a few people knock on our door for help (car broke down, lost, accident, etc.). While my mom was home with us a man knocked saying he wanted to borrow the phone.
My mother told him he could sit on the porch and use her cellphone. The man kept asking to come inside and asking if my dad was home. He eventually started trying to force his way inside. My mom slammed and locked the door, called 911, and put my friends and I into a closet. It took the police department 20+ minutes to reach us. By that time my mom had called our neighbor and he came over his shotgun and made the guy lay on the ground until the police arrived.
14. David Crist
I love to ride my bike along country roads. Not far from where I live is a tiny town called Three Oaks, in Michigan. One Saturday, my wife was working and I had nothing to do, so I strapped my bike to my car and drove the hour to Three Oaks. I parked in the scenic downtown area, and then rode out of the town and into the surrounding countryside.
As I wound my way further into the remote countryside, houses and businesses and cars grew increasingly scare. Eventually, there were only an occasional house or two every 1/2 mile or mile and corn fields and small woods flanking the dirt and gravel roads that I peddled down.
It’s on one of those back roads that a minivan drove past me. Within moments of it passing, it turned around pulled up along side me. I looked over and the passenger, a woman in her mid to late twenty’, was looking at me with her window down. The driver, a man of seemingly the same age, leaned over the passenger and said to me in a slight southern drawl and with a big smile on his face, “Hey, do you know David Crist?” I thought for a brief second, but I don’t know any David Crist, so I said so. The driver said, “You don’t know of him at all?” I said that I didn’t and apologized, and then pedaled on. The van sat for a moment longer and then pulled a u-turn and drove off in the direction it was originally heading.
I thought nothing of the encounter. Maybe the driver was a friend of David Crist, and he thought we had met though David or something. I don’t know. At the time, I didn’t think I had any reason to worry.
I continued on my ride, turning down this road and heading north, and then turning down that road and heading east. I didn’t have any agenda. I was just out to enjoy the summer day and meander through the relaxing countryside.
Maybe ten minutes later, and on an entirely new road and heading an entirely different direction from the one I had first met the van, I saw the van again. We were heading toward each other, and I gave a smile and nod as I passed the driver. I remember thinking it was an odd coincidence that I should come across this van again. The driver stared as he passed and he had a big smile on his face.
At this point, I began wondering what they were doing. They might be lost, and looking for this David Crist guy, or maybe they’re just enjoying a scenic drive and thought I looked like a friend of a friend, or something. I didn’t know, but at that point I was starting to think about the situation a little more critically.
I continued taking a twisting, turning, meandering path. Taking this road, and then turning onto that, heading north, south, west, east.
Then, I came across the van again. Again, they’re heading in my direction and I pulled along side them. The driver rolled down his window and leaned out. He was a late twenties white man, with a few inches of a goatee and a baseball cap. He had a large smile plastered across his face again. I stopped my bike and looked at him, waiting for him to say something, and he just looked at me for a good thirty seconds. Now, thirty seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but you go flag down a stranger and then just look at them for thirty seconds, and you’ll realize that, in that kind of situation, thirty seconds is a lifetime. Finally, he spoke and said, “Hey, do you know David Crist?” Same damn question. This time there was no smile on his face. He stared at me, and I was thinking to myself, “Is he joking? Does he really not remember he asked me this same question twenty minutes ago? Is he just being funny? Is he high as hell?” After a moment, I told him that I still didn’t know anyone by the name of David Crist and I pedaled off down the road.
It’s at that time that I realized exactly in how remote of an area I was. I peered down the road I was on and I didn’t see a house on its entire length. I was flanked by a corn field on one side and a forest on the other. I looked over my shoulder and saw the van slowly driving down the road away from me. It couldn’t be a coincidence that I came across this van three times now, not with me taking random roads heading different directions. It made no sense why anyone driving would take that same maze of roads. The only thing they could have been doing was just driving around, maybe a pleasure drive, but why would they stop me and ask that same question twice? It was quite strange, and I was beginning to become a little concerned.
I decided to begin to head back toward the town center. I pedaled hard, and the gravel road ahead of me continued with a bend to the right, and a dirt path, for it couldn’t really be called a road, to the left. As I neared the fork, who should come around the bend but the damned van. I gripped my pocket knife, which I always take with me on rides like this — just in case — and then realized, all they would have to do is run me down with the van, and I would be in serious trouble. As the van drew closer, I was ready to jump off and run into the cornfields.
The van slowed down as it approached me and the driver rolled his window down and leaned out again, but this time I didn’t stop riding. I increased my speed, even though I knew I could never outrun the van if they gave chase. I looked over my shoulder and saw the van sitting in the middle of the road. I took the right fork and continued on the gravel road until I could no longer see the van behind the corn rows and then I stopped.
I got off my bike and crept along the cornfield until I was at its edge and I peaked down the road I had just been on. The van was in the distance driving away from me. I ran back to my bike, and then as soon as the van was entirely out of sight, I turned around and took the left fork along the dirt path. I rode as fast I could, knowing that if the people in the van had nefarious things in mind, and if they caught me on this dirt path, flanked by cornfields and far from an area that anyone would come across us, that would be the time they attacked.
My ruse worked, or perhaps the van was never after me at all, and I made it the rest of the way to the town center without seeing them again. When I got home later that day, I was still replaying the events in my head and the name David Crist kept creeping through my mind. Was David Crist someone famous, I wondered, like a musician. Should I have known David Crist? I decided to Google the name. I tried a couple of different spellings for Krist, but it the Crist spelling that revealed a terrifying result.
I came across a newspaper article from Knoxville, TN. The article explained how a man named David Crist had turned himself in after stabbing another man at a gas station in 2013. The article included a photo of this criminal David Crist, and I believe it was the same man that was driving the van. Add a baseball cap and a few inches of a goatee and the man in the van was a dead ringer for David Crist in the article. I did an inmate search of the Knox country prison and there was no David Crist in the inmate population.
Somehow David Crist had gotten out of prison, or maybe he was never convicted, as I couldn’t find any articles about sentencing, in less than two years after stabbing a guy and for some reason he had made his way to Michigan. Why was he driving along these back roads? Who was the woman in the passenger seat, and why the hell did he keep asking if I knew of him?
Do I know David Crist? Yes, I do now.
newspaper article of stabbing http://www.local8now.com/home/headlines/Knox-County-deputies-search-for-stabbing-suspect-185123191.html
13. Basement
I’d just moved into a basement suite. Every time I went out I would lock the deadbolt but not the door handle but when I came home a lot of the time the deadbolt would be unlocked and the door handle would be locked. At first I thought I was just confused about which one I had locked so I started paying more attention. It kept happening and I realized someone must be going in when I went out. I assumed it was the landlady and was annoyed but didn’t say anything at first.
Then one day I came home and found the wrong lock locked again. I went in pissed off and opened the fridge to get something to eat. There was a book in the fridge that I had never seen before. I collected old books and this one was published in the early 1900s which creeped me out completely because it was like it had been left for me. I finally called my landlady and asked if she was going into my apartment and told her what had happened. She freaked right out, said the last person who lived there was a really creepy guy with mental health and drug problems. She got all the locks changed that day and it never happened again.
12. Bathtub Terror
When I was about 14 my parents left me alone overnight for the first time. I grew up in a small farming community, so my parents really had nothing to worry about. They left and I decided to take an awesome bubble bath and paint my nails like all girls everywhere, obviously.
While I was in the bath, I heard our back door open. I thought I was hearing things, and besides, I had locked all the doors per my mom’s orders. But then I heard the kitchen floor squeaky spot. I didn’t know what to do so I just went under the bubbles and left my head out. I saw two shoes through the crack between the door and the floor. I could hear a person breathing. They stood there for about 30 seconds and then walked away.
I heard the door slam but I didn’t move, I just stayed there until the water was freezing and cried. Then I got out, called my grandma, and checked the doors. The back door was unlocked and the lock hadn’t been messed with or broken. Later that week we learned that a man was breaking into farm houses.
11. Don’t hitchhike
Back in the 70s my grandfather dropped my grandmother, mom, and her 2 sisters off to do some shopping on his way to work. Since he wasn’t able to pick them up, they hitch hiked home.
My mom at the time was only around 10 or 11, middle sister would’ve been about 7 or 8 and the youngest was about a year old.
They get picked up by a guy in pick up truck, who has them all sit in the back row with one of them holding the baby. My grandmother was giving directions to their home from the highway, but the guy ignored her and went by their exit claiming he had to make a stop first. Didn’t really say much else to them during the drive, my mom remembers my grandmother being very quiet and very nervous.
Eventually they come up to a farm, driver tells them to wait in the car and goes inside the house. While he’s gone they just sit there terrified, they’re in the middle of nowhere and know they couldn’t make it out on foot. A few minutes later the driver comes out with a second guy who looks into truck and sees my mom’s youngest sister. He starts flipping out, screaming at the driver that he shouldn’t have brought the baby back, they aren’t going to do anything with her and some other things I can’t remember, ends up telling him to get them away from the farm.
Driver gets back into the truck, apologizes, and they get back on the highway and drive again in silence. My grandmother, normally a very smart woman, had him drive directly to their house (although I suspect her reasoning was she’d already given him the address before anything seemed off). They lived at that house for several years and luckily never saw either of them a second time.
10. “Answered the door late one night…”
My (female) friend’s dad once answered the door late one night, like 11pm or so and there’s was a weird man asking for directions to the main road. Her dad usually works nights, but on this rare occasion he’d taken the night off. So, he told him the route, and the weird man thanked him and went off, but in the opposite direction. He’d seemed quite nervous and jittery, which is odd, but what’s even weirder is he’s known in the area, he’d lived there years, he wouldn’t need to ask directions to the main road.
Anyway, it was revealed in the news that on the same night, he’d broken into a house and violently raped a woman and her daughter, and later tried to sexually assault another woman in the street but a passer by managed to help her get away. This was after he called at my friend’s house, so he’d gone there then went off in that wrong direction and tried to rape someone.
Now, my friend’s family was having a lot of drama at the time, her mum is a nutcase alcoholic and the whole street knew that she’d been sent to rehab. With her dad working nights, it’s likely that the weird rapey man knew my friend would be home alone. We think she had a very close call with that one.
9. Group Therapy Session
In freshman year of middle school (6th grade) there was a once-a-week ‘group therapy’ session with developmentally delayed kids that involved them doing some crafts activity or playing with legos or watching a movie as a group. It was half normal kids, half DD kids, and the normal kids could sign up for it. I signed up pretty instantly as it meant an escape from History once a week. One of my best friends at the time had the same idea, and it basically turned into a second lunch period for us. The whole thing was overseen by a therapist named Bruce and it was generally pretty laid back. Bruce was an overweight 50-ish balding guy with the attitude and general appearance of Santa Claus. He ran most of the school’s extracurriculars and was pretty much universally liked.
The other important player in this story was a kid who I’ll call G. You know that stereotype of psychopaths being obsessed with animal torture as a kid? This was dead-on G. He’d regularly tell these long excited stories during group about how much fun he had last week tearing the leg off a squirrel he caught in his live trap, or other similar things. Most of us just sort of ignored him as it was just sort of assumed that he was all talk and just making up gross stuff to get attention.
So one week we were playing with playdough. Since it was a DD group the huge tub of playdough had long since assumed a uniform shade of turd brown and the general drive was to get people to build things and tell stories about them. Most people just built dinosaurs or threw clay at eachother. G, for whatever reason, had a huge flat square slab laid out and was building four large pillars on the corners. He eventually put a roof on it, which wouldn’t stay on due to the lack of interior supports. The normal kids would always leave a few minutes early as the group ran right into the start of the next period and we’d need time to get to class. I was no different, and walked out while Bruce and the DD kids were smashing playdough, giggling and throwing chunks of turd-dough back into the bin.
I got to my next class and the teacher wasn’t there. Nobody knew what was going on. About 10 minutes later she finally showed up looking frazzled and wouldn’t give us any information other than ‘something happened’ that needed staff attention. Being 6th graders, we went nuts with speculation.
A few hours later I ran into the friend from group, who was visibly jumpy and disturbed. He wouldn’t tell me why other than mentioning that therapy group was cancelled indefinitely. I kept prying for information and eventually got the story out of him.
So during the cleanup the playdough had to be compacted back into its tub. This involved lots of smashing playdough sculptures, a bit that the DD kids greatly enjoyed to the point where they’d try to smash other people’s stuff. G’s house was one of the last things to go. He smashed down two columns, let one of the other DD’s smash another, and finally dared Bruce to smash the last one really hard.
The last one with the pocketknife in it.
I never saw either Bruce or G ever again.
8. Kidnapped
My mom was kidnapped, blindfolded, taken to a dark place she still isn’t sure was even a man-made structure, and then tied to a chair. The guy that took her kept talking to her the entire time; she has never told me details except that the man was crazy. After a while she started talking to him, asking him questions, getting him to talk to her about less crazy stuff. She isn’t sure how long this went on, just that it was a long time. After quite some time, the man (whom she never saw directly or recognized the voice of) told her, “I don’t know why, but I need to let you go”.
My guess is that she humanized herself enough to him so that he couldn’t go through with whatever it was he had initially kidnapped her for. He loaded her back up in the car and dropped off, still blindfolded, at a convenience store up the road from where she lived, told her to count to 1000 before taking the blindfold off, then he left. After she got home and told her parents they didn’t believe her and thought she was making it up so that she wouldn’t get in trouble for being out late.