5 Creepy Stories to Read in the Dark, Alone at Night

by Jancy Richardson ⋅ ⋅ Last edit on February 11th, 2015

To avoid fainting, keep repeating 'It's only a movie...It's only a movie...'

I know a lot of you horror fans are hungry for more freaky real life stories - so here are some more terrifying tales from the freaky folks at Jezebel to lose sleep over. I guess I just like giving people nightmares...

Roy

I come down to the kitchen for breakfast on a Saturday morning. My mom and my sister are already up, and they look exhausted. My mom asks, "Did you sleep alright?"

"Yeah," says I.

"Even after you woke up?"

"...I woke up?"

Sometime in the middle of night, I had started screaming. My mom rushed into my room and found me sitting up in bed, screaming, "ROY! ROY! ROY! ROY!" She did her best to calm me down while shooing away my pissed-off sister who had stormed in to find out what the fuck was going on with me.

She asked me who Roy was, but I would only say that he was "a bad man." I didn't say anything but "Roy is a bad man."

I'm shocked as they're telling me all of this. And they're surprised that I don't remember — but then again, I'm the sound sleeper of the house who can doze through lightning storms. We write it off as some weird nightmare that I don't remember.

 Years later, I'm off at my first year of college. My mom sends me a videotape in the mail; she didn't mention it before I had left, as in "Hey, keep your eye on the mailbox" or anything. I press play, and it's my mom taking a video camera through our house. She was moving, and sent the tape as one last walk through of the now-empty house before she left. It was sweet and a little tear-jerking, until she said, "So, here's something you might find interesting," when she approached a closet in her bedroom.

This closet, aside from being the hiding place for all the Xmas gifts, was also always packed full of old luggage and other odds and ends. You could only go three feet in before you would have to start climbing on things to go farther. She goes in with the camera and I see that there are purple crayon drawings on the wall, down at the height where a small child would draw. There are random scribbles, some stick figures, something that may have been a dog. I was already puzzled, because I had no memory of ever playing in this closet and I don't know how I would have drawn on the walls when they were, in my mind, always covered.

Then the camera comes to a word on the wall.

ROY

And my mom must not have remembered that night. She said on the tape, "Roy...I wonder who Roy is."

- arewemenoramidevo

Backwards And Forwards And In One Place

A few years ago, I asked my SO if he had ever seen a ghost. He got really uncomfortable and squirrelly, lots of hemming and hawing. Annoyed, I said "Just say yes or no! I won't judge if you think you have seen a ghost." (I'm a skeptic and figured he didn't want to sound like a rube or something).

Turns out he was hesitant because he believes he saw one but it was while he was deployed on a mission in the Middle East, and he was trying to think of how he could describe it without giving up any classified info. The story is this:
He was in the spooky, vague "Middle East" when there was a commotion from the soldiers watching the perimeter. Apparently, they could see a man about 100 yards away from the camp. He had appeared out of nowhere, no one saw him walking up. The man was just standing there, not doing anything threatening. But since it was a strange man in a war zone, they broke out all the high tech gear to see what was going on.

They could see his face, his clothes, his height, but he looked bizarrely distorted and was not giving off a heat signature (they have infrared jimjams and whatnot, it's the freaking military not a piddling ghosthunting troupe here). He was not the temperature of a human being, he was the temperature of the air around him. They had no idea what was going on and people were freaking out.

 At this point I said some obvious stuff- "Maybe it was a scarecrow or dummy. Or a shadow. Or the soldiers were really tired and delirious and their eyes were playing tricks on them. Or it was a hologram weapon shaped like a human".

His response: They called different people up to come look at the man, it wasn't just a few soldiers who saw this- dozens of people came to look and everyone confirmed that it was definitely a person. Eventually they decided to send out a team to check this guy out. When they got about 50 yards away, the man started walking- only it didn't look like he was walking toward or away from them, only walking in place. They froze, expecting an attack. But the man never got any closer.

Me- "So he was, uh, moonwalking? OooooOOoohh a terrorist with dance moves, scary!"

His shaky response: It looked like it was trying to walk but instead of moving like a regular person, its bones were breaking and splintering backwards and forwards at the joints. I can't think of a better way to describe it. Its head was jerking around like a puppet. When the convoy got a few yards closer, it disappeared entirely.

The team hauled ass back to camp and as soon as they returned, the man-thing reappeared in its spot. Everyone took turns watching it for an hour or so until it disappeared for good. Didn't walk away, didn't fly or melt or explode, just stood there for a looooong time then vanished.

- Gnomi Malone

Hammer Time

My mother's family lived on the second floor of a large duplex on Côte-Sainte-Catherine. The front doors to the second-floor apartments were located on the side of the buildings and faced each other from one duplex to the other. They rarely locked the front door and everyone knew their neighbours quite well. One morning, one of my uncles, who must have been about 13 at the time, says he woke up very early.

This was summertime and although it was kind of light out, the sun hadn't risen yet so it was practically in the middle of the night still. He was half awake in his bed, a bit groggy and he realized that what had woken him was the sound of someone creeping along in the corridor. For some reason, it didn't feel right to him, it didn't sound like someone from the family was going to the bathroom during the night. It was slower, much weirder.

He called out 'Hey, who's there?'. He then heard whoever was in the corridor walk back to the top of the stairs, down the stairs, out the front door. Creepy enough imho, but it gets much worse.

Within six months of this happening, a teenage girl was found dead in the duplex next door to my family's home. She had been killed during the night with a hammer by a 15-year-old boy that lived nearby. He was known by all the other kids of the neighbourhood and my mother remembers him as being very quiet and always kind of looking down or away whenever you would look at him. He was kind of an outcast, certainly because of his personality but also a bit perhaps because he went to a posh school thanks to his father being the janitor there and he got a bit snobbed out by the other kids.

In the duplex where my family lived, on the first floor there was a family with three teenage girls, in my family there were two teenage girls. I guess he knew where to look and I guess he must have been lurking around for a good while before deciding that it was time to take the hammer out. He killed himself in hospital or jail while he was still very young.

- Mimilady

Chirp

When my friend was about 11 or 12, she went to an all-inclusive resort with her family. This was one of those big places, with several pools, restaurants, kids areas etc. Her dad buys walkie talkies – one for her and her brother, and one for the adults (this was before cellphones were a big thing), so that they can stay in touch if the kids want to do their own thing.

One night, her parents and her brother go down to the restaurant for supper. My friend isn't feeling well, so she asks to stay in the hotel room and watch a movie. They agree, giving her the walkie talkie for emergencies. She's up there for an hour or so, checking in periodically with her dad (just to say hi, ask what they're eating etc).

She starts to feel really sick, and says to her dad "hey, when will you be back to the room?". Her dad answers back "We're coming up right now – sweetie, I forget the room number, could you tell me what it is?".

As soon as she's about to answer, her dads voice cuts in "Hey Chirp, we're coming up right now, we brought you some cake, see you in five".

She knows the second one is her dad, because he always calls her Chirp. She locks the door. When her parents get back, they say they haven't talked to her all night.

- 3bee

BFM

We bought a 50's bungalow a few years ago; the original owner had passed and we were the first people to live there since. My daughter's bedroom was on the far side of the house from mine, and was always colder than the rest of the house. We chalked it up to poor insulation in that room.

Every night I would hear her talking to someone; just thought it was baby-sleep babbling. She was about 2 at the time. Then she started talking to someone in the daytime too. I asked her about it, she told me it was the "Blue faced mommy".

The "mommy" wanted to play peek-a-boo with her all the time, and wouldn't leave her alone. She said she would wake her up in the night to play peek-a-boo. It freaked the shit out of me. I talked about it with one of the older ladies in the neighbourhood, who knew the original family.

Apparently their oldest daughter had suffocated herself in the house after giving birth to a still-born child. (Not sure how she "suffocated herself", the neighbour didn't have a lot of details, it happened in the early 70's.) I am certain that she was the "blue faced Mommy" my daughter was talking about.

A friend told me she had read the best way to deal with lingering spirits was to politely ask them to leave. So one night, when my girl was woken up I went to her room and politely said "Please ma'am, your family has moved away, we need you to go now." And after that, nothing. I still get chills thinking about it.

- Thanks

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