23 Nightmare-Inducing Paranormal Stories That Just Might Make You A Believer

Every month, I ask BuzzFeed readers like you to share the creepiest experiences they've ever had. Of course, I picked the best, most horrifying ones to share with you all. From ghosts to premonitions, here are 23 of the most unsettling tales people shared:

1."One day, I dropped my daughter off at school. Afterward, my preschooler son and I were sitting on the floor in the living room. Suddenly, he said, 'Poor sister.' I asked, 'Why poor sister?' He said, 'She dropped her donut, and it rolled all the way across the playground.' Later that day, we picked my daughter up from school, and I asked her how her day was. She said, 'Good, but I dropped my donut, and it rolled all the way across the playground.'"

—Brooke, Glendale, USA

2."I'm a doll collector. I don't seek out haunted dolls, but when you're just grabbing random dolls at thrift stores, it's almost inevitable you'll find some inhabited by spirits. The most interesting story I have is when I found a kinda creepy-looking doll at Goodwill. She had blonde hair, completely white skin, a seemingly homemade all-red dress, and a face painted very distinctively with heart-shaped lips. Obviously, I took her home. A few weeks later, I was out with my sister thrifting in a different city an hour away, and I found a nearly identical doll, right down to the same style of handmade clothes, except this one had brown hair. So obviously, I brought her home, too."

"That night, I had a strange dream. A blonde woman and a brunette woman, resembling the dolls, stood before me and told me, 'Bring us all together.' I had that dream at least once a week for another two years. Finally, one night, I dreamt something different — the dolls themselves, not the women, brought me through a store and led me to a display with a third doll that looked just like the other two but with red hair. They've been quiet ever since. I still wonder what would happened if I ever found that red-haired doll and brought her home, too."

—AJ, 23, USA

3."My sister once told me that I walked into her room, asking her for help. When she looked over, I was dripping with water. She turned the light on, and I disappeared. She went to my room to make sure I was OK, but found me sound asleep and dry. I remember that night very clearly, because it was the night I dreamt that I was murdered by a man who drowned me in a small lake in the middle of the woods."

—Anonymous

4."When my sister and I were in our early teens, she was into the occult and supernatural things. She would always get books from the library on these subjects and then want to experiment with what she had learned. Like most teenage girls, we would have sleepovers. This is when we would experiment and play with her newfound knowledge. We often brought out the Ouija board. When you're using one, you always wonder if someone is pushing the planchette to cheat and spell out something on their own. One time, we specifically set the Ouija board on a specific letter and wrote it down, then left the room to get something to eat. My sister, wanting to scare the rest of us, moved the planchette to a different letter. When we came back, we were all excited that it had moved on its own! But my sister was really freaked out because it wasn’t where she had secretly moved it to."

"My mother struggled with alcoholism, and she and my sister didn’t get along. My sister had a small lump of clay that she stuck a few strands of my mother’s hair into. She called it 'mom' and put it on her bookcase. Some time later, the bookcase fell over and 'mom' got squashed. That night, my mother was in a car accident. Fortunately, she was not injured.

Another thing that freaked us out was when my sister decided she could hypnotize us. At one of our sleepovers, she hypnotized two of our friends, both named Debbie. She told one she was going to stick her with a pin and that it would not hurt or bleed. She stuck her leg with a stick pin about an inch deep. She didn’t feel it and she didn’t bleed. Then, she told Debbie 1 that she was actually Debbie 2 and proceeded to ask them questions. I wrote down the answers. They didn’t know each other well, as one was my friend and the other was my sister's friend, yet while under hypnosis, they were able to correctly answer questions about each other’s families.

Once, she was unable to get one of her friends out of the hypnotic trance. We were freaking out. She finally woke her up, and we never did that again."

—Tami, Lake Havasu, AZ

5."This is a family member's story. It was the 1990s, and she was relatively young at the time, maybe 5 or 6. She had been vacationing in Florida with her grandparents. They were getting ready to board a flight back home, but she told them that her tummy hurt really bad when she thought of getting on the plane. She refused to go, saying her tummy hurt too bad and she was staying there. She hadn’t ever had problems flying before. They tried bribing and begging, basically everything short of picking her up and forcing her to get on the plane."

"Her mother was back home, watching the news on break at work, when she heard that a Florida flight had gone down roughly 10 minutes after take-off and crashed in the Everglades. At such a low altitude, there was a small possibility of survivors, but the authorities determined that if they had made it, they were not likely to survive almost certain wildlife encounters shortly after the crash. They opted not to even attempt a rescue mission to avoid losing more lives. When they released the flight number, it was THEIR flight. She freaked, but there were no cell phones, and the airport wouldn’t tell her anything about whether or not they were on the flight. She left work in shock and grieved all evening.

The grandfather FINALLY called around midnight, casually telling her they were boarding a much later flight home after her daughter flat-out refused to get on their plane. She sobbed, saying she was so happy to hear from him and that she was glad she did that, because their flight went down right after take off. He had no idea! The airport kept it very hush-hush, presumably so no other passengers would panic and/or cancel their flights.

The mother didn’t tell the girl until she was much older, two decades after her grandparents passed. She was in disbelief. She went through her whole life thinking it was a dream or something she’d seen on television, not that it was real life. She looked it up and read all the details, and was shook to learn that they would have been alligator food on the off chance they had somehow survived the crash. The instincts of children prevail."

—Anonymous

If you're skeptical or even just a bit curious, these details all point toward this being ValuJet Flight 592, which crashed in May of 1996.

6."I had never really thought much about the paranormal until I moved into my first apartment. I got there a few days before my roommate and set up the basics. As I was sitting on my counter the first night, I watched my swinging trash can's lid moving on its own out of the corner of my eye. I shrugged it off, but things just escalated from there. My hanging blinds would move one panel at a time. There would be knocking up and down my bedroom wall, the other side of which was the living room. My TV would turn on at full volume in the middle of the night to an older black-and-white show. Eventually, I worked up the courage to ask my roommate about it, but she beat me to it at lunch one day. She casually asked if I was having any weird experiences, and we started sharing stories."

"After talking about it, things seemed to get more frequent, and I was having a hard time sleeping at night. Eventually, I sat up and yelled, 'I’m not going anywhere for the next two years, so you can either let me sleep for work or, believe me, I’ll find a way to get you out of here!' Suddenly, the wall knocks went silent, my TV stopped turning on at night, and the paranormal activity seemed confined to the kitchen.

Months later, my best friend and I tested positive for COVID and quarantined in my room for two weeks. Our ghost must have realized we weren’t working at the time, because the TV began turning on at night again to the same old TV show, leaving my friend speechless. One night, I was sitting in front of my full-body mirror with my friend right next to me. I looked up to see a tall, thin man in overalls standing behind us. He looked as surprised as we were, and we immediately turned to look behind us, but he was gone. Long story short, we named him Charles and would have to warn anyone staying over about his antics. I’ve never had an object physically move in front of me since."

—Kena, Flagstaff, USA

7."We had another couple stay over at our house on New Year’s Eve. We were up very late, hanging out. While alone in the kitchen cleaning up, I thought, 'This has been really fun. We’ll always remember what a good time we had the year Don (our friend) died.' I actually jumped when I realized what I had just thought. As it turns out, the pain in Don’s leg — which he thought was a pinched nerve from riding his motorbike — turned out to be a metastasized tumor. He died five months later."

—Anonymous

8."When I was about 13 years old, we lived in a relatively new house, which was about three years old. We had been living there for about two years at the time, so I was pretty comfortable there. The house was out in the woods, where we had goats and chickens. The only thing out of the ordinary about it was a strange shack on the edge of the property. It was small and much older than the house we lived in. It even looked older than the neighbor's house. My sister and I were always creeped out by it, so we kept our distance. One day, though, we felt a little brave."

"We went out to the shack, which was actually pretty far away. It took a few minutes because our property was so big. As we approached, we thought we heard whispering. Just as we stepped up to it, a huge piece of wood fell inside. We turned and fled to the house and went inside.

That night, I woke up and froze. I saw a face staring at me beside my bed. The face stared at me for what seemed like an eternity and said, 'GO THE SHACK,' then disappeared. The next morning, I told my sister about it, and she said the same thing had happened to her! So, we decided to go check out the shack one more time. As we entered the woods, the usual feeling of fear we had was gone. We approached where the shack was...and it was gone, as if it had never been there at all."

—Anonymous

9."Several decades ago, we were spring cleaning my friend's house and we found a Ouija board in their closet. Naturally, we decided to take an immediate break and play with it. After several rounds of 'interesting' responses from the board — along with the customary accusations bouncing back and forth between us of 'You moved it!' and 'No, you did!' — I decided to take a scientific approach to the 'who did it' issue since I knew it wasn't me. My friend was blindfolded. There was no way she could see or peek. I then turned the Ouija board upside down and rotated it into different positions between the questions."

"Six questions were asked. Only my friend's hands were on the planchette. Each time it stopped moving after a question was asked, I placed my fingers on the selected position and matched it with the letter on the other side of the board so I could decipher the message. I read the results from underneath the board and wrote them on a piece of paper that was behind me, out of sight of my friend. I also did not tell her the selected answers or characters.

Two of the questions were yes or no, and the remainder required spelled-out answers. The results were as follows:

1. All movements of the planchette stopped exactly upon either a yes/no or a character.2. Answers that required spelling were spelled correctly with no 'fudging' on my part.3. Finally, the proof that the Ouija worked: I asked for my friend's mom's birthday. This was to test my 'honesty' in matching up the selection device's positions, as I had no idea what her mother's birthdate was. The board gave us a date that had the correct month and day but the wrong year, according to my friend. It was off by a couple of years. BUT! When we told her dad about what we did and how the board got it wrong, he chuckled and told us that the board did, in fact, get her mother's birth year correct. As it turns out, mom had always 'adjusted' her birth year so people would not know she was older than her husband. Her mom had passed a few years before, and he had all her legal documents in a drawer. Her dad pulled her birth certificate out of the drawer to show us her actual birth date.

The Ouija board got it ALL correct, even when neither she nor I knew the correct answer. She freaked. The board went back into the closet and is still there decades later. I have absolutely no doubt that her hand movements were guided not by her but by some other unexplainable force. I don't know who, but I DO know what I saw."

—Anonymous

10."My house is haunted, and I mean extremely haunted. There’s a room that we simply don’t go into because we’ve all had really horrible nightmares about it and always get a bad feeling when we walk in. Once, I sat in the hallway because a disembodied voice told me not to go into the kitchen yet...a few seconds before a greasy towel caught fire. Our dog growls at one specific spot on the couch so much that we all just avoid sitting there. That’s the level of haunted it is. We’ve had everything checked for mold, pests, carbon monoxide, leaks, etc., and nothing in this house can explain half the stuff that’s happened."

"One of the creepiest things I’ve experienced while living there is having random visions. They're extremely detailed, specific snapshots of moments. I’d been seeing a therapist when they started, and she screened me for psychotic symptoms when I told her about the episodes, but she found nothing. I’d gotten a physical for sports, and my physical health was perfect, too. I would’ve simply brushed the visions off, except for the fact that they started coming true.

I had a vision of me bent over the sink, spitting out blood, looking up at the mirror with a splatter on my nose. It came true when I got my wisdom teeth out. There was the oddly specific limited edition shirt that I envisioned myself finding at the thrift shop...and I did. My first vision — which I brushed off as deja vu — was passing by a ram's head surrounded by flowers at an art fair. It just kept happening, though. From then on, all but six of the visions have come true. They only ever happened in the entryway when I walked through the door. I blame the house. Check for my name on a 'missing persons' list in a few years if my visions are correct."

—Anonymous

11."My grandfather died when I was about 12. My brother and I were visiting my grandmother in Augusta, Georgia, a few months later. Anyone from the South whose granny made them homemade grits knows that they take a long time to cook. She would stand over the stove for upwards of an hour, occasionally stirring them and calling our names to come to the kitchen and get our toast ready or whatever. She'd been calling my name on this particular this morning, and since I was a 12-year-old asshole, I laid in bed and argued with her every time she called me. After a little while of back and forth, I muttered something very unkind about her under my breath, and immediately, a force pushed me out of the bed and onto the floor."

"I know no one was behind me because one side of the bed was pushed up against the wall, and my back was to that wall. Plus, there was no feeling of hands on my back, just a very strong force. Let me tell you...the middle of my body jutted forward from my chest down to my abdomen like I was being kicked from behind by a horse or something. I flew out of the bed and onto the floor. I looked behind me and saw nothing, but I knew exactly who it was. I ran crying to my grandmother, saying, 'Granny, granny! Grandaddy just pushed me out of the bed!' She said, 'Oooh shuga! I know it. He's mad that you won't come to breakfast,' or something like that. I remember kind of laughing too, but being very weirded out. Never heard from him again, but I was never salty to my granny after that."

—Anonymous

12."I grew up in an old house that always made creaking noises at night. I had a loft bed in my room with stairs going up from my doorway. The top stair was 5 feet from the ceiling, so as I got older, I had to duck to get to my bed. There was also a tall closet next to the stairs where my cat hung out. My senior year of high school, I was in bed reading really late one night. My cat started growling, looking out my open door into the darkness. I just heard the 'normal' house creaking noises, so I wasn't alarmed. At about 3 a.m., I turned off my lamp to go to sleep, and in the dark, I saw a man standing on the top stair at the foot of my bed. He was wearing a long, gray trench coat and black gloves. I couldn’t see his head...because it was in the ceiling."

"I sat up in bed and shrunk as far away from him as I could. At the same time, my cat jumped down onto my bed and started hissing at him. I bit the inside of my cheeks and tongue, hoping I was asleep and could wake myself up, but nothing helped. I was already awake; he was still standing there, and my cat was still hissing. We stayed that way for about 5 minutes until he slowly faded into the dark. My cat quieted down, and — somehow — I fell asleep an hour later. I was so freaked out that I never told anyone about that night until I went away to college, but I still never mentioned it to my family or anyone from my hometown.

Flash forward to my mid-twenties, and I'm in a new city. I got a call from a woman researching the house because she lived there before we did and heard noises there growing up. She’d heard tales from babysitters we’d had as kids that they’d never told us, like that all our crayons were arranged in a circle in the living room on their own, or that one babysitter was locked in the basement for an hour, all while we kids were asleep.The eeriest stories came from the people who bought the house from my parents. Not long after moving in, they started smelling cigarette smoke and hearing a man coughing in the kitchen, which was right next to my old bedroom. Then, one summer, their son’s friend stopped by to see if they were home (they weren’t). The front door has a large window, and when he looked inside, he saw an old man standing in the front hallway, staring at him. He was wearing a trench coat and smoking a cigarette. The family dog sat next to the old man, looking up at him. The man was semi-transparent.All those years later, it was both great and also spine-tingling to have my ghost story validated."

—Anonymous

13."I was 11 years old and at an all-girls summer camp. My cabinmates and I were in swim class, hanging out together in inner tubes. I was the only one without a float, so I got out and went to the float shed. The shed was shallow, so I didn't have to look hard for an inner tube. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one. Frustrated, I grabbed the only yellow pool noodle in the cabinet and tossed it in the water. 'Watch my pool noodle!' I called to my friends. They turned around and gave a thumbs-up. 'Bring my sunglasses to me, please!' one of them called. I ran to the pavilion where our belongings were and grabbed my friend's sunglasses. I ran back to the water and tossed them to her. 'Where is my pool noodle?' I asked, noticing it was missing."

"'What pool noodle?' my bunkmate replied. Confused, I ran out of the water back to the float shed. My yellow pool noodle was in the exact same spot I found before I tossed it in the creek with my friends. I never touched that pool noodle ever again."

—Anonymous

14."Me and my 4-year-old daughter live alone in a two-bedroom apartment, and we have been for about 4 years. I was washing the dishes while she was eating her cereal one morning. All of a sudden, she started laughing and saying, 'Stop touching my feet!' I told her I wasn’t touching her feet, and with a blank stare, she said, 'I’m not talking to you, mommy. I’m talking to the black monster.'"

15."My mother passed away in January of 1984. My father arranged a two-day showing. On the second day, I was standing on the opposite side of the room from her coffin when I suddenly saw a very bright flash of light and felt a strange sensation, as if something had passed through me. My first thought was that someone had taken a photograph using a flash, but then my two nieces ran toward me, saying they just saw grandma (my mother) standing at the head of the casket. They looked at me and said they saw her move across the room towards me, then disappear as she passed right through me. I then knew it was her that I felt."

—utlayolisdi

16."Several years ago, I drove up from Kentucky with three friends to see a Cubs game. I guess none of us were paying attention, because on the drive home, we went the wrong way. The next thing I knew, there was a toll booth and a sign that said, 'Welcome to Michigan.' So, now we had an even longer trip home. I pulled up, paid my toll, and asked for directions. The gentleman told me how to get back on the right road, and I thanked him. He replied, 'You're welcome, Nick.' My name actually is Nick. I was at a loss for words because there was no way this guy knew me."

"I drove a good distance and pulled over, unsettled. 'Did anyone say my name at the toll booth?' I asked. All my friends said no. Now, we are all a little freaked out. We searched the car for something he may have seen that had my name on it, and we found nothing. Either this guy kept guessing people's names as a joke, or something otherwordly happened to me at that Michigan tollbooth."

—Anonymous

17."I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. In the mid-'90s, I worked at our local video store. The store was in an old bank building built around 1900. Over the years, the building had been used as a bank, a filling station, a funeral parlor, and, finally, in the late-'80s, it became the video store. The basement housed both an old bank vault and the room where they prepped the deceased for their funerals. Needless to say, the basement was creepy but still kind of cool. Most people who've worked at the store will say they've had creepy experiences downstairs."

"We all, however, have one shared experience on the video store floor. Supposedly, in the early days of the bank, there was a violent robbery, and a young boy was among those killed. Every so often after we closed, almost all the video tapes and the few DVDs we had would fall off the shelves at the same time. It wasn't violent or anything — all the tapes would simply fall to the floor. All, that is, except the kids section and a few westerns. The building is now a second-hand store. I often wonder if they have similar experiences."

—Meg, Chicago, USA

18."It all started with a Mylar balloon. We'd bought it for our grandson's birthday, and it had been floating around the house for a couple of weeks after. My husband and I were watching TV in the living room when the balloon came down the hall and floated across the living room, stopping right in front of my husband. Now, it should have just continued through the living room — there was no reason for it to stop suddenly. Of course, my husband was a little freaked out, and we started talking about it when the balloon began to turn around, the 'Happy birthday!' side facing us. I yelled to my husband, 'My birthday is in a couple of weeks!' When I said that, the balloon moved over to me."

"I got all giggly and said, 'Someone’s here to wish me a happy birthday. Whoever you are, thank you for remembering me.' I thought it was my late husband — who had died at 39 years old — or my mom or Meme. It’s stayed with us for a bit. I looked down the hallway and said, 'It’s going back.' Then, it was gone.

Thinking it went back towards the kitchen, I got up, and my husband laughed. 'You have to see where it went, don’t you?' he asked. Of course, I did. Well, it wasn’t in the kitchen or bathroom, so I went upstairs and checked my grandson’s room and my son’s room, but it wasn't there, either. I found it in our bedroom on the floor next to my side of the bed. This made my husband a believer. I’ve always believed in this kind of thing."

—Susan, Vermont, USA

19."When my daughter was young, from the ages of 5 to 14, we lived in a haunted house. It wasn't old, but between the land it was built on and the people who lived there previously, it had some dark history. We saw shadow figures and ghosts a plenty. I will preface this by saying that my hubby and I collect all sorts of spooky objects and antiques, and now I have developed my skills to become a medium myself. I've always been a spooky bitch. Anyway, the story goes like this. My daughter was having her 8th birthday party at our home with a gaggle of cuties in princess dresses. They ran up to me, pleading to play with a Ouija board."

"We collect originals, and at that time, we probably had about eight displayed around the house. I said sure, set them up, and got ready to supervise. Well, the board went off like it never had before! The spirit they contacted decided to play 'scavenger hunt' with the little girls and would spell out what they had to find around the house. Then off they went, in search. The odd thing about this was that the items they were told to find were things not even I knew about and often were out of eyesight of the little girls. Like, black bead at the base of a lamp, a tiny top hat (which was on one of my antique dolls hidden at the back of a cabinet), etc. This went on and the planchette was flying.

Then, the messages started getting menacing. 'I want you to play with me forever.' 'If you stop, I will kill you.' 'OK,' I said, 'lets not play anymore.' My daughter and her friends didn't really understanding that the messages were getting darker and darker, as I stopped helping them read the letters after these messages started. Then, the board started to spell, 'I will get you, I will get you...' The girls were able to spell these words out easily because of the repetition and got SCARED. I yelled at the spirit to get out of my house, yanked the planchette out of their grasp, and quickly removed the board. I moved to a party game and cake, but we never played Ouija in that house again."

—Anonymous

20."I lived in a large, older rental home in Bloomington, Indiana, in 2005. As I would go to sleep at night, the shadows of a man, a woman, and a young girl — about 10 or so — would appear indistinctly in the dark in my bedroom. I could see them only if I didn't look directly at them. They'd be doing typical household events, like chores, talking, looking at books, sewing, etc. Nothing malicious or creepy. I'd blink and shake my head, but they'd still be there. Since they were just messing about among themselves and not bothering me, I simply ignored them. They wouldn't always be there, but it was quite frequent. I didn't believe in ghosts, but I decided then to be undecided."

"I told absolutely no one. I detest and thus avoid such sensationalism. Some months later, a friend and I came back from a late-night party, and I was making food in the kitchen while he was messing with the music and other things in the living room with only low lighting. After about 20 minutes, he rushed into the kitchen with a surprised look and said, 'Do you know there is a family of ghosts in this house?' I asked him to describe them, and he did to a tee, including their ambivalent behavior and activities. I said, 'Oh yeah, I see them all the time! No worries, I think they just like being a family.' He was floored and busted out laughing, saying, 'You're kidding me?!' I told him to go back; they'd still be there. He did, and they were. We had lively discussion as we ate, I'll tell you that!"

—Russ, Unknown

21."One night at my dad's house when I was 10 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night to my grandfather sitting at the desk where I did my homework. I was surprised to see him and exclaimed, 'Grandpa! What are you doing here?' I don't remember word for word, but he told me he loved me and would see me tomorrow. In the morning, I woke up excited and looked for him. I couldn't find him anywhere. I went to my dad's room, where he was making his bed. I asked where Grandpa was, and he said Grandpa wasn't there; he was sick and at home in Arizona. I was insistent that he visited last night and told my dad what he had said. Around 9 that morning, my grandmother called to tell us that grandpa had passed away that night, ending his battle with lung cancer."

—Tyler, California, USA

22."One time, when I was about 11, my mom and I were on a road trip along the west coast. That day, we stopped for lunch in a small town because my mom needed new sunglasses. We decided to drive to a nearby Target, and as we did, we passed a cemetery. In the cemetery, there was an elderly groundskeeper holding a weed whacker, and he was dressed head-to-toe in grey. He made eye contact and waved at us, which my mom and I found strange. We looked behind us to see if he did this to anyone else, but he wasn't there anymore. We drove by the cemetery multiple times that day, and we never saw him again. It’s very unlikely that he ran away from us because 1) he would have had no reason to do so, and 2) he looked around 75 or 80 years old. Both my mom and I insist we saw a ghost that day."

23.Finally, "I have never heard of a space rather than a building being haunted, but I have experienced this. In junior high school, I often went to my friend's house after school so we could do our homework together. Their house faced a busy state highway. When you entered the house, you faced the hall, which contained a stairway with a closet under the upper portion of the stairs. At first, we did our homework in the living room just off the hallway until we noticed that the closet door would randomly open and close without anybody being near it."

"My friend's mother told us it was due to the vibration of the heavy trucks on the highway. But after a few months, we got to the physics section of our general science textbook and realized that the door should only swing one way if it were being caused by the trucks, which is to the lowest point. In other words, it should either swing open and stay open, or swing shut and stay shut, not go both ways, which was what we had repeatedly observed. This freaked me out so much that I stopped going to her house after school, and she said she no longer stayed alone in their living room.

Fast forward, and I'm grown and married. My friend's house was torn down, and — being on one of the town's main roads — my father and brother bought the lot and built an office building for our family's business on it. My husband was also a partner and brought me in to do secretarial work since I knew the filing system from having helped my dad's secretary when I was a child. I felt uncomfortable working alone in the evenings or over the weekend, as if someone or something was also in the building.

I was not the only one to feel this way. Another secretary told me she hated being the first one in the office in the mornings because of the sounds and that she had even gone so far as to go room-by-room, scissors in hand as a weapon, to try to find whoever was there. One of the men — a former Marine — who worked there reported hearing 'sounds' on a Saturday morning. There were also unexplainable 'cold spots' that moved through the building, and the feeling of a presence, complete with the sensation of being watched by ghostly white eyeballs, in the darkened front office that was directly over where the understairs closet had been.

Some of my scariest experiences are as follows: One day, my computer printer suddenly switched on and printed out a telephone number (no, I did NOT call it!), followed by a page of gibberish. Another time, I heard a filing cabinet on the other side of my office slam shut. This filing cabinet had to have a lever depressed in order to open it. When I tried it immediately after hearing it slam, it required opening the drawer about a foot to replicate the loudness of the sound. Another time, I repeatedly heard the alarm that was triggered whenever someone opened the front door, although the front door was securely locked the whole time.

Perhaps the most frightening thing occurred when the suspended ceiling in my office was being replaced, and I could see directly up into the cross beams that supported the roof. I was finishing up my typing when I heard footsteps going from beam to beam, heading toward me from the front office. I stopped and looked up to see whatever was coming, and I admit, I had my own pair of scissors in hand as a makeshift weapon. The footsteps passed directly overhead, then stopped. As calmly as I could, I said, 'I've just finished up, and I'm leaving now.' I turned off the typewriter and practically ran to get out the back door, as I had the feeling that something was swooping after me.

The family business closed down after my husband retired, and the building was sold and remodeled into a medical office. I wonder if the new owners have experienced anything, but I've never dared ask."

—Marilyn, Ohio, USA

If you enjoyed these stories, you can read a ton more like them here.

Now, dear reader, it's your turn. Do you have a creepy real-life experience like these? If so, tell us about them in the comments below or via this completely anonymous Google form.

Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.