It’s October, guys! Or as we like to call it, the annual spend a month planning a Halloween party only for no-one to show up, let alone dress up, even after you made some cute biscuits in the shape of ghosts that actually look more like goats.
This year, forget about the party (the pressure of entertaining is far too great when friends are as useless as yours) and get back to the true meaning of Halloween. Nope, not dressing up like a scary but slutty Playboy bunny like you once did when you were 16, instead, settle down to the business of spending this ancient holiday of All Hallows Eve terrifying the living crap out of yourself.
Luckily the folks of Reddit are always in the mood for a good freaky story. Last week this thread popped up after a guy decided the whole Creepy Pasta thing was a pile of rubbish and put the call out for IRL stories of horror. And obviously the No Sleep subreddit is always an ongoing mess of self-penned horror stories, guaranteed to give you the heebie-jeebies at any time of year, although it does particularly good business in this the month of October. Anyways, we’ve selected the best stories that purport to be true posted on the site (by best we mean, the ones that brought us closest to soiling our knickers at our desks) and brought them together here for your reading pleasure. Turn off the light, turn on the Are You Afraid of the Dark theme music and settle in for some terrifying reads...
This one about teenagers whose stupid hobby came back to bite them in the ass
‘I was born and raised in North Dakota. Back when I was in HS, a group of us would research murders that occurred out in the county. We would then go out to find the scenes and film the exploration at night (this was about two years before Blair Witch) It was something to do while we got wasted on shitty beer and teenage bullshit. Eventually we ran out of places to go (ND = few people, few murders) and got really good at finding abandoned rural farmsteads by driving dirt roads and looking for the signs. Rut roads, deliberate tree groves, and old mailbox posts were common markers. We were out looking when we spotted a tree grove that was out of place (sure sign) and drove through the field and discovered an old (but not too old) house. It had padlocks on the outside doors that were knocked off pretty easily, we dispatched of them and entered the kitchen. There were six of us, all with flashlights, and we lit up the kitchen/dining area fairly easily. The table was the initial thing you noticed and it was strange because of how normal it looked. It was set for a meal and not a bowl was out of place. Only thing was, we’d been in dozens of these houses and place setttings were a first. Especially unbroken ones. As we investigated the area we found the fridge had the disgusting remnants of a full stock, and the cupboards were full of canned and dry foods. This was also a first. One guy found mail on the counter from early June 1978 and another found a creepy ass TV guide in the living room with UFOs on the cover. All the family photos were hanging up. Mom, Dad, Bro and Sis in their 1970s glory. Furniture was dusty, but in good condition. Closets were full. Everything was totally normal. Which was super abnormal. As we dug around the house, we all started to realize that this house had not been moved out of, it had been straight up abandoned. Imagine locking the door to your house and never coming back. That’s the state this house was in. Complete unplanned departure. We went upstairs and split into three pairs to check out the three rooms. Ours was the closest and obviously it was the younger boys room, I can’t describe what it looked like too well because almost right away from the hall, we heard the most fucking terrifying scream I’ve ever had the misfortune of hearing. We went running into the hallway and were all yelling questions at each other at the same time. After a few (really long) seconds the two screamers caught their breath and said “you have to go in and see.” Walking down the hall and through the doorway, I prayed I wouldn’t act like a pussy in front of my friends. I shouldn’t have been concerned because the others were as scared as I was. The room itself opened up to the left of the doorframe and centered on the right side of the room was a queenish sized bed. Propped up on pillows, with the blanket drawn to the waist, arms on top of the blanket, and worst of all, head turned slightly so it was looking you straight in the eyes when you entered the room was a life sized porcelain doll. Snow white skin, jet black hair, cold dead eyes. The dead eyes lit up with our flashlights. Like she was waiting for us. If the head hadn’t been turned I could excuse it, but it was turned. Ready for when we walked in. Ready for 20 years. Hasty fucking exits were made down the stairs and into the car. It was during the ride we started to get even more creeped out when we realized that even though the house had been abandoned, someone had taken the time to set up that goddamn doll. Not packing food, clothes, or family photos. Setting up the doll was one of the last things done in this house. We researched their names, but got nothing. No tragic car accident. No grisly massacre. No extended family. Just a tacky time-capsule in the middle of nowhere. We found out that the county had taken possession of the land for nonpayment of taxes, explaining the locks, but never tracked down anymore information on what happened to them. Or why they left that fucking doll.’ – SuicideSquad
Oh, FYI, some guy found the exact TV Guide cover SuicideSquad was on about.
This one that'll knock Korea off your ‘places to visit’ list
This happened to a friend of mine – she told me about it a year or so ago. We’ll call her Minji.
Minji is in her late 20s, and works as an English tutor in South Korea. One evening, a few years ago, she was tutoring a high school boy. They were up studying pretty late, and the buses stopped running. Being a long way from his house, the boy asked if he could crash on her floor overnight and get the first bus the next morning.
Minji was very reluctant, because inviting a teenage male student to stay the night didn’t sound like a great idea, but he was begging her and eventually she relented. They went back to her one room apartment, and she got into the bed, while he laid a blanket out on the floor, and they both fell asleep.
A few hours later, at maybe 2am, the boy wakes Minji up. “I'm really hungry,” he says, “let's go get some food”. Minji opens her eyes and looks up at him in disbelief. “Food? Now? It’s 2am, go back to bed.” But the student insists, “no, I’m so hungry, let’s eat something now.” She tells him that there’s some ramen in the kitchen, and he can fix himself some. This doesn’t satisfy him – he doesn't want ramen, there’s a 24 hour place just down the road, let’s go there.
Eventually, after several minutes of persuasion, the boy gets Minji to come with him to the restaurant. They leave the apartment and head out. As soon as they’re on the street, the boy turns to Minji, and says, “I'm not hungry. I woke up in the middle of the night, and looked under your bed. There's a man sleeping there.”
They call the police, and discover that a homeless man had been living in Minji's apartment, sleeping under her bed, for over two months. The boy only saw him because he was lying on her floor, so had a clear view under the bed.
The police arrested the man, and thankfully there were no other issues, but that’s by far the creepiest thing that’s ever happened to anyone I know. – Adacore
This one that’ll make you think twice about kids’ imaginary friends
When I was younger, I had an imaginary friend who lived in this massive antique dresser. We’d chill out and I vividly remember him telling me stories, although I have absolutely no recollection of what they actually were.
I remember one day talking to my parents about it (Dad traveled quite a bit so he wasn’t up to date with what I was into) and when I started telling him about my dresser buddy, he wanted to know his name. It was something innocent like Peter or Patrick but I can still see him going white in the face.
I drew Peter/Patrick out for him and the very next day him and my uncle took out that dresser and burned it. It wasn’t until a few years later when I found out my Dad’s little brother (my uncle) also had the same friend with the same name who lived in the same antique dresser. After a few months of the typical imaginary friend shit, my uncle started having night terrors and couldn’t sleep because of Peter/Patrick. It got so bad that they had to move him out of his room before he managed to get back to normal. – TonyFX
Oh and just for lols, TonyFX later described what he thought Peter/Patrick looked like: ‘I remember a tiny old man. Not like old man tiny, but kid sized tiny. He had very large hands, long fingers. Which in turn led to how I draw people even today, hands always come out longer and larger than what they would normally be. Smelled of wood, mothballs, old cloths, and what I now know is mold.’
This one with a familiar theme
True story time. I was about four or five years old and my parents had just separated. My mom was living in a two bedroom apartment, I had my own room but I preferred to sleep in her bed whenever I was staying with her. Our two bedrooms were at the end of a hallway, directly across from each other. Our apartment was on the first floor and I remember that it was in the middle of the summer and my mom had a window open her room, which was directly behind the bed (above the headboard).
Anyways, I woke up in the middle of the night and remember sitting up and seeing that our cat was sitting in the door frame of my mom’s room (her door was open and you could partially see into my bedroom), this was strange because our cat was typically always in bed with us. As I was watching him he walked into my bedroom and meowed. I turned to face my mom and wake her up. In the three/four seconds it took her to wake up and ask me what was wrong we both looked back up in the door frame and there was a man standing by my open door, making his way out of my bedroom. I still don't know how she managed to do it so quickly, but my mother proceeded to pick me up and literally throw me out of the screen window (again, we were on the first floor and it was maybe a three foot drop to the ground). She quickly followed and we were able to start screaming for help and someone called 911.
The police came but didn’t see any signs of forced entry. Only that our front door was unlocked, which led them to believe the man must have exited that way. The strange thing was that my mom swore up and down that she had locked the door that night, with the deadbolt and chain lock. About a week later she was cleaning the kitchen and opened up our water heater closet and found a notebook with names and drawings, as well as a pair of gloves and some gum wrappers. The police were called again but all they could do was speculate that the man had been in our house and hid until we were asleep. – Momsaysimpretty*
This one that’ll teach you not to mess with the homeless
*A few summers ago I went for a bike ride around midnight with a friend. We went our separate ways at the end of the evening and I had about two blocks to ride back by myself. *
*Because of construction I had to ride on the sidewalk but the streets were dead but it wasn’t a problem until right where I was about to turn left onto my street. There was this man walking by himself, maybe 40s, a little scruffy but not homeless. *
*The sidewalk was narrow and I didn't want to freak him out so when I got about six feet behind him I said “hey behind you!” And he turned around and gave me this super angry look. *
I turned down me street and he started to follow me, literally screaming about how I was a fucking c**t and he was going to kill me and all that. I live right off the corner and I didn’t want him to figure that out so I decided to do another loop around the block. That’s not the scary part.
The scary part is that when I looped back around and looked down the street I saw him standing on my fucking front stoop staring out at the street like the motherfucker KNEW I lived there. He saw me ride by again but he didn’t say anything.
*I ended up going back to the friends, but my bike got stolen from the alleyway by the house two days later. *
Edit: the guy in question was definitely not actually homeless. We have a large population of mentally ill in that area unfortunately (downtown of a medium sized city), so if I didn’t think the sidewalk was too narrow to pass otherwise I wouldn’t have disturbed him. Half the scary part was that he looked pretty much completely normal for my area. That being said I ended up texting my mom and she made the decision not to notify law enforcement until my bike was stolen.** – Ari_You_Serious
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.