Haunted houses, looming ghosts in darkened corners, and unexplained sights and sounds of fallen loved ones are all usually the fodder of movies and books.
And yet they populate real life from time to time.
Thanks to the internet, a wide net can be cast to find all those people out there with their own stories of paranormal activity. Those palpable rarities are just begging to be shared to all who will listen.
A recent Reddit post rounded up those folks sitting on stories of their own.
One theme carried through nearly all of the posts: an experience like that sticks with you.
SalzyJ asked, "What was YOUR paranormal experience?"
Meeting Grandpa
"I was at work one night and my mom was visiting my newborn son and wife."
"I get home and my mom tells me she heard my dad talking to my son. My dad died 8 years prior but she swears up and down it was his voice."
"My wife heard it too but never met my dad, so she couldn't say much about it. Just that it was a man's voice."
"Then it happened again when my daughter was born."
"I really want to believe my dad is watching the kids grow up but I'll never know."
Confirmation
"I was visiting family and staying in a hotel with my boyfriend (husband now). The first night there we went to bed and I woke up in the middle of the night facing the window."
"I noticed there was a dark shadow in the corner of the room that looked human shaped."
"After staring a while I realized it must have been a floor lamp since that corner was kind of bare and that's the logical choice."
"I rolled over and went back to bed."
"The following morning I remembered this and turned to look into the corner where the lamp was and... There isn't a floor lamp there. The corner is bare."
"I mentioned it to my boyfriend and he went white."
"He told me that he woke up in the middle of the night because he felt like he was being watched and had to get up out of bed to go to the bathroom (I vaguely remember him getting up) to try and shake the feeling."
"It still sticks with me in dark rooms."
-- Lexocracy
Help From Beyond
"My father died less than 6 months after my daughter was born. She was not a good sleeper for her first year or so. Waking up screaming and crying at all hours of the night."
"My wife and I would trade times getting up to soothe her."
"One evening not too long after my father past I was having a dream that my daughter was screaming in her bedroom."
"In the dream I got up and went to her room, but before I got there my dad came out of the room and just said, she'll be ok' and kept walking away and the crying stopped."
"I shot up and and saw the baby monitor screen was on. It was on sound activated mode, so the screen only comes on when a sound it's over 60dB and goes off after 3mins of quiet. I get up and check and she's fine and sleeping."
"A little shaken, it took me a bit to get back to sleep."
"I tell my wife about the dream in the morning. She told me she heard her crying, but thought I'd gotten up to calm her."
"Still a vivid memory in my mind nearly 3 years later seeing my younger looking Dad coming out of her room."
-- Midtenn86
Truth in Dreams
"I had a friend who was very sick at the hospital this past Spring."
"I went to bed, and in that in-between stage where you're not awake and not quite asleep, I could sense him standing by the side of my bed. We said a few words to each other, and then he hugged me."
"When I woke up the next morning, I found out that he'd passed not long after I'd gone to bed."
"Many people would say it was just a dream, but I know better in my heart. I felt that he was actually there, and I felt the hug."
"He was one of the most caring and inspiring people that I'd known, and it was just like him to say goodbye to the people who loved him."
Former Residents
"Back when I lived in my very first apartment I would hear what sounded like a little child calling for their parent."
"Now at first I thought it was genuinely some kid who was lost because the complex was big enough for a kid to wander off from their parents."
"But the voice seemed to always be right next to me. It wasn't until I moved out that I found out a little girl was killed by her abusive father in the 80s."
Culinary Spooks
"I don't know if this qualifies as paranormal per se, but I was home alone one weekend, and decided to make myself scrambled eggs for breakfast."
"Took a full carton out of the fridge. Grabbed an egg, cracked it. Went to a grab a second egg, only to notice the carton was...fulI. Again."
"I just stood there and stared at the full carton for a few seconds (expecting one to disappear maybe? Idk), then I just threw them all out. Wasn't gonna f**k around with phantom eggs."
"There is probably a rational explanation but I know what I saw."
What Was Out There
"I once was laying in my bed with my dog at the foot of it. I was on the cusp of sleep when suddenly my dogs pop her head up and locks on to something in the middle of my room. Her head then slowly turns and follows something I can't see."
"Her head stops again and my backpack gets knocked over, after having been in the same spot for hours."
"Then all of the sudden a loud BANG on my bedroom window (I was on the second floor of the house). I ran out of that room so quick without daring to look at that window."
-- SalzyJ
A Tough Sell
"I am a real estate broker and flip houses. We buy old beat up houses, some of them are the worst of the worst as you could imagine."
"Anyway we bought one and went to see it today. It had been vacant for 10 years and when we went inside there was a blood stain on the floor."
"Come to find out that somebody killed someone in that house 10 years ago. Pretty creepy."
"My partner and I were taking walk through videos to share with our contractors and get rehab estimates."
"Both of us independently took videos, and both of our phones shut off when we panned over the area with the blood stain where the man died. This is going to be a weird rehab.."
The Fuzzy Middle Ground
"I was asleep and experiencing sleep paralysis so dreaming/hallucinating. A boy at the end of the bed was taunting me with poking my foot he hadn't quite touched my foot yet but was going to."
"It carried on for a while I couldn't move then he hit my foot and at that exact moment my partner kicked me in the foot in her sleep."
"I've never been able to figure out how my hallucinating matched up with a real life real time moment."
"I consider it to be paranormal."
-- Zkn0t
Was it a Casper?
"Got a second hand mattress when I turned 5/6, started having the same dream every night of a lady coming out of a house in the woods and screaming at some kids playing in a sandpit out the front."
"For two years I had the same dream and could even hear the woman screaming while I was awake."
"Mum ended up giving the mattress away to her skeptic friend who needed it for her son. I stop having the dreams and the friend's son started waking up with night terrors."
-- Aquadire
Parting Wisdom
"My grandma fell very sick with cancer. She fought and fought but it was too much for her. For the last few months she was bedridden in my room. I was about 14 at the time."
"One night she had passed. I woke up at about 1 am with a strange feeling. I felt a weird presence and at that moment I heard somebody speak. She said 'stay true' which was what she always told me."
"I didn't know it at the time but she has passed away and had spoken to me, her last few ghostly words before she left to go to heaven. To this day I still cry about it. Even while writing it."
-- nic24_ryan
Visionary Glimpses
"I can see the future sometimes. It's f***ing weird as shit. Not like deja vu, but also exactly like deja vu at the same time."
"I'll have a dream and not think much about it except 'oh that was pretty realistic' then what happened in the dream will actually happen. It's usually like 10 seconds."
"I don't really talk about it though because people will think I'm insane or exaggerating. It's f***ing weird. Happens like once or twice a month."
Just Taking a Look
"I was hanging out on a friend's back porch in a suburban neighborhood with a few people, maybe three other people, it was about dusk. This was during high school so before 2005."
"The back porch faced our over a small creek valley of open space. A blue green ball of light came zooming in over the open space from the left and stopped about 100 feet away, maybe 40 feet off the ground. It was maybe the size of a soft ball."
"Then it zoomed over to about 15 feet away and 15 feet up in the air and stopped for about two breaths. Then it shot straight up in to the sky and was gone in less than a second."
"The way it moved was weird too, it didn't hover or drift at all it just went from one point in space to another and then stopped. Not like it vanished and reappeared, I mean it moved so fast it kind of looked like that."
"But there was not slowing down or speeding up it just went. All four of us saw it, we talked about it a little bit not much, just kind of sat with the realization we'd been inspected by aliens."
-- Ahnamal
Ghost's Can't Handle Zippers
"I was hiking on a mountain that is supposedly sacred and haunted(Its in Indonesia). One of the rules there are no swearing on the way up and nothing we wear can be colored green."
"I didn't believe any of it so I just wore a green hiking bag and my friend swore all the way from bottom to top."
"During our first night camping, we started to hear unintelligible human whispering from around our tent. Afterwards something that looks like a human hand pressed against the tent and repeatedly tried to claw its way into the tent."
"It continued for hours and we could not sleep. The next morning, all of our shoes which were supposed to be neatly are arranged are everywhere around our tent."
"Never going there again."
-- jakartaboi18
Roadside Assistance
"I often question in my head if this was a dream or not, keep in mind I'm not a religious person. When I was about 3 or 4 years old my mom had fallen asleep at the wheel on a major highway and, being a toddler, I had no idea that was a bad thing."
"I didn't scream, or shout, or anything, but I remember looking out the window to my right and I saw the strangest thing: a school bus I think? filled with what looked like angels..."
"...but not angels like you see in paintings, glowing, skeletal figures with large wings, and they were staring back at me and I remember getting very happy and pointing and telling my mom what I saw."
"We made it home safely that day."
-- jakemistakes
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