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A few months ago, Reddit user Ok-Bid-1179 posed the question, “What’s the scariest 100% true story you’ve heard of?” to the folks over at r/AskReddit. And, ZERO surprise here, the stories are the things nightmares are made of. Check it out:
Warning: Graphic content ahead including mentions of rape.
1.“Growing up, one of my friend’s family members had a beach house, and I’d get invited every now and then. They had money, and the house was a massive, pretty cool place. They even had a full-time maid who had her own ‘flat’ at the back. One day, they went there for a long weekend, and when they opened the door, the place was ransacked. It was all a mess — missing TVs, furniture, broken stuff… you get the picture. They went to check on the maid and her flat was empty, all her belongings were gone. They called the cops who came over and had a brief look (not interested from what they said) and left saying the maid probably had something to do with it. And that’s what everyone believed for a week…”
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“The dad returned the following weekend to try and change the locks, etc. and brought their dogs along. One of the dogs started digging and found the maid buried in the backyard under a tarp they had close to the pool. So the theory now is that whoever came in probably knew her and she recognized them and ‘she had to go.'”
2.“My aunt fell asleep on her couch one night and my uncle was asleep upstairs. She woke up around 12 a.m. to a random man staring at her while she slept. He said, ‘The guy upstairs was sound asleep.’ Meaning he came in, saw my aunt on the couch, looked around, saw my uncle asleep upstairs, and then sat there and watched. She told him to leave and somehow by the will of god HE LEFT. He slid out through the back door… We live in a relatively safe area! Craziest shit I have ever heard.”
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—[deleted]
3.“My high school girlfriend called late one night after I was home and in bed. She said that something had happened and asked if I could come over. She was clearly shaken and not full of details. So I told my parents and drove over to her house. At the top of her subdivision, I was met by a cop with lights on. He asked where I was going and I told him about the call from my girlfriend. He lets me go by and I come over the hill to the cul de sac where she lives and I see multiple cop cars around the circle. They watch me pull up and get out of my car. My girlfriend ran out of her house and met me in the street. She explained that someone had broken into her neighbor’s house and started beating her with something heavy.”
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“The neighbor managed to get out of the house and headed to my girlfriend’s house where she started banging furiously on the front door. My girlfriend’s dad was out of town, so her mom answered the door and the neighbor just fell into the foyer bleeding profusely from the head. Her mom looks up to see the attacker headed up the walkway towards the front door.
She pulls the neighbor into the house and closes the door, hitting the attacker with it before it fully closes. He then took the heavy tool he had used to beat the neighbor and smashed the little window at the top of the door. Her mom started screaming and the attacker just turned around and walked up the street into the darkness.
I spent the night there that night (along with two or three cops outside in their cars) and in the morning we could see blood still pooled on the floor in the foyer and splattered blood above the front door from where the attacker had swung the bloody tool to smash the window.
No one was ever caught or even identified. It was just completely random. The neighbor survived and to my knowledge had no permanent physical injuries beyond scarring from having her scalp stapled shut. She moved away shortly after the incident.”
4.“I work a midnight shift at a gas station, and I have worked for quite a while at various stations in different areas with varying levels of criminal activity. I have regulars, of course. I’m a small-statured woman (as is my partner the other half of the week, and we’ve always been partners), so these regulars often worry about us and keep watch on creepy occurrences when they can. I had one man who worked in the metro an hour away who would stop in every morning for his cigarettes. He never smiled or seemed friendly, and as I often do, I tried to think of what I could do to make him smile one day. It took many months but I finally pulled it off by having his cigarettes ready on the counter and already scanned for him to pay for as he walked in.”
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“He smiled, and then asked me, ‘Do you ever get scared on the night shift? You’re a small girl, not safe.’ I said I sometimes did but we could lock the doors and hide if we had to, and that the provincial police (think state troopers, if you’re American) had a station nearby and often came in to get their highway vehicles washed. I had a good rapport with those police.
He nodded and told me a story about when he first moved to our country from Eastern Europe with his wife and child in the late ’80s/early ’90s. He fell asleep one night at the gas station where he worked at midnight. When he woke up, the phone had been ringing for hours and his manager was shaking him violently asking if he was alright. He was fine, he said, what was the problem? He was sorry he fell asleep. His manager screamed that it was fine he had fallen asleep, but he had to look outside.
All of their motor oil was missing and the outside of the place was a mess. The thieves had come and swiped all the oil and left him be because he slept through the entire thing, then moved down the road to the next station for an encore.
At that station, the clerk was awake and fought back, so the thieves stabbed him to death and left him to bleed out. When he finished telling me this, he concluded with, ‘If you ever feel sleepy just lock the door and do it, it might save your life.’ I don’t work at that station anymore but I always think about that guy.”
5.“I was around 10 years old. I was at school but my mum told me she was thinking of taking me to the doctor in the afternoon (recurring eye issue). Lunchtime came around, and I was in the dining hall when the office woman told me there was a taxi outside for me and that I needed to go. I assumed my mum booked it for me as she can’t drive. I cleared up my stuff and got my bag. I was just about to leave when I remembered my jacket in my classroom. I rush to get up and head out for the taxi. The office woman told me I was too late and the taxi had gone without me. I just returned to class but panicked my mum would be angry at me. School finishes and my mum is waiting for me at the gates. I burst into tears, apologizing for missing the taxi and thinking I was in big trouble. She never ordered a taxi and had no clue what I was talking about. She ended up not making the doctor’s appointment. No one ever found out who ordered the taxi, or who the driver was.”
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6.“When I was a little kid, maybe 5 to 6, we had this neighbor who was like a grandma to me. I’d go over and have snacks, and she had a Mr. Potato Head I played with that was her (now adult) son’s toy. He came home one day, in his twenties, from the Army I think. I don’t remember much about him, but he asked about taking my older brothers camping. My mom said no, she had a weird feeling about him. Later, my mom saw him at our little store in town with bee stings all over and was concerned. He said he got them at the creek. She thought that was weird, because that’s just not a thing where we went all the time, but okay?”
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“A little while later, the news said there was a murder of some campers out past where we lived, no leads. People were shocked — this doesn’t happen here! My mom remembered her weird feeling and the bee stings that didn’t make sense. She called the police to say, hey, probably nothing, but here’s what I got. I remember detectives coming to our house to talk to her.
They had some other evidence that matched, but not enough to link him to the murder (a couple with their child). It’s unsolved to this day, though the detective said he knew it was him. A few years later, the guy went to prison for the abduction/attempted murder of a woman who ran out of gas and he offered a ride to. She lived, thank god.”
Related: People In HR Revealed Truly Unhinged Reasons Employees Got Fired, And My Jaw Is On The Floor
7.“When I was learning to drive, my instructor advised me to always lock my car doors as soon as I get into my car. I asked her why, and she told me about her personal experience. This happened almost a year after she passed her test. She finished work about 3 a.m. She had just gotten into her car and gotten her keys in the ignition when three guys jumped into her car. She had a knife to her neck and was told to drive. They gave her directions to an alleyway. They dragged her out of the car and raped her. After they were done, they left her in the alleyway and stole her car and purse. It took her a while to get help. Police did find her car a few days later, abandoned and on fire, on the outskirts of the city. But the guys were not caught. The reason she started to teach driving, was her way to protect other women and make sure no one else goes through, what she went through. So she advised all her female (and male) students to lock their car doors, as soon as they get in.”
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8.“World War II, the Pacific theater. My great uncle on my mother’s side fought at Okinawa. While taking cover behind a rock, he was shot through the foot by a Japanese sniper and evacuated to a hospital for recovery. He was the only member of his platoon to make it off the island alive.”
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9.“My grandfather was a British FEPOW in Japan in WWII. He did something to piss off the guards of his camp one evening and they beat him badly and tied him up on a fence with the promise to kill him the next day. Another young prisoner died during the night so they switched my granddad and the dead lad so the guards assumed he’d died from his injuries. Luckily he survived and came home in 1945.”
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10.“My uncle was in a bar one night and started talking to this random guy. He described him as ‘a really nice guy.’ He met him a few other times in the same bar. They drank and talked about random stuff. Soon after, my uncle stopped seeing the guy at the bar. IDK how long after that, but my uncle got notified sometime later that he had jury duty. He showed up and found out what it was for. A serial killer and the killer was his friend from the bar. Derrick Todd Lee. My uncle was promptly dismissed from jury duty for obvious reasons.”
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11.“My college girlfriend called me one night. ‘The Baton Rouge Serial Killer’ had been active for a while and she was being followed all over town by a white truck, which the killer supposedly drove. She fit the victim profile: she was a brunette living in a wealthy neighborhood (house-sitting for her aunt). So, my roommate and I drove over and filed in line behind her and the truck. She lived on the LSU campus so I assumed it was a student prank or something. She parked at her aunt’s house, and the truck stopped one house short of her aunt’s. We pulled in behind her. I explain I’m going to diffuse the situation. At this point, the FBI says the killer was a white guy, but when I walked over to the truck saw this man was Black.”
Erik S. Lesser / Getty Images
“I explained no one was upset but he was freaking out my girlfriend and he needed to leave. He looked side-eyed at me and drove off. I see the guy again a few months later, on the cover of the Baton Rouge newspaper, he’d been arrested. He was, in fact, the killer, Derrick Todd Lee.”
12.“In the 1990s, a nurse in New Jersey killed hundreds of hospital patients. Sometimes, he would sneak into patient’s rooms at night and inject them with fatal medication doses. Other times, he would put the medication into IV bags in the supply room so they would kill whatever random patient they were given to later. He was accused several times. Some patients pointed him out before they died. Some staff thought he was creepy and dangerous, and refused to work with him. He kept getting fired from hospitals. But the hospital managers knew that if he got arrested, they would be sued by the families of the patients he murdered. So they just fired him, and didn’t call the police.”
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“That happened at 12 different hospitals over 16 years. Investigators believe he killed as many as 400 people. After he was arrested, he confessed to 40 murders. In 29 of them, he provided enough details to be charged and pleaded guilty. He is linked to 300-plus more deaths than that, but details of those will probably never be known, because so much information was lost over time or destroyed by the hospitals.”
13.“My grandfather’s village was razed by the Nazis. He had nine siblings. The Nazis came to the village in retribution due to guerilla attacks and they believed the guerillas were hiding there. Most young men fled before they arrived. The men that were in the village were lined up against a wall and shot. My grandfather’s mother put half her children, the youngest, in the cellar and she took the other half with her because the Nazis were rounding up the entire village and locked them inside the church. The reason she had split her children was because she feared they would all be killed, so she wanted at least some of them to survive.”
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“The Nazis ransacked and burned nearly every house in the village, including my grandfather’s. He was in the cellar with his siblings and their house burned above them, but they were saved. The siblings in the church also survived but many others didn’t. The Nazis would come again sometime after and pretty much force all the young men and boys, including my grandfather, to help make roads and fortifications for them. Despite it all, they all survived the war, though many in the family didn’t.”
14.“So when I was around 18, I went to town to drink with my friends. We went all in and by 2 a.m. I was completely wasted. Couldn’t see, walk or think straight. One of my mates remained sober to drive us back home. We went to the parking lot and I could hear a voice whimpering in the dark. I turned around and saw two guys carrying a girl to a car. I got closer and now I could hear her voice. She obviously was drunk but she repeated, ‘No…,’ and, ‘I don’t want…’ over and over. Adrenaline kicked in and I became sober instantly. I screamed at them and immediately called the police. They got in the car and drove off. But I saw the license plate, gave it to the woman I talked to at the police station, and they informed me about 10 minutes later that they arrested the two guys. The whole scene was so terrifying. This was in Germany.”
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15.“This only happened earlier this year; a work colleague was off work for a long time, not like him at all. When he eventually returned we found out that his friend had been murdered by a group of football (soccer) wankers. They’d been in a pub watching a match for the team they supported; they were celebrating a win when a group of men from the opposing team got angry and started arguing. When my colleague and his friends left the pub, they jumped his friend and beat him so badly he ended up in hospital where he eventually succumbed to the injuries. This is one of the reasons I hate football, especially where I am (England). Riot vans, hundreds of police, etc., are always around every train station and football stadium. Sad little men willing to take a life over a bag of air getting kicked around. It’s not the first time, certainly won’t be the last, someone has died over fucking football.”
Tero Vesalainen / Getty Images/iStockphoto
16.“Up to this day, I’m still looking for a logical explanation to this. This happened in 2003. So, an ex and I were checked in at a coastal resort where the cottages were far apart, about 200m away. Around 11–11:30 p.m. while we were both drinking beer with the lights turned off and only the TV on, the door knob suddenly rattled violently, like someone was forcibly trying to get it open. There was no double lock on the door so my first reaction was to jump from the bed and block the door with my weight. The force of my landing must have been heard from the other side, but the doorknob continued to twist.”
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“By this time I was already pressing my face to the floor, trying to look/estimate how many people were outside the door via the small gap between the floor and the bottom of the door. There was nothing. Not one pair of feet or anything. But the doorknob just kept rattling. I should point out that the gap between the floor and the door was enough for me to see the outside, or, at the very least, notice any change in shadow/light caused by movement, but there was nothing. The turning of the door knob then stopped. But I never heard any footsteps or any other noise. Waited a few minutes and opened the door. Everything was quiet. No footprints were found outside or on the sand surrounding the cottage. We just noped out of there immediately.”
17.“When I was 17 I was hanging out with two friends and they wanted to smoke weed in the woods. I didn’t feel like it so I drove them and waited in the car. After a while I was getting bored and decided to meet them but there were four paths going off in different directions so I just took the biggest one. After walking for a few minutes in the pitch-black forest (this was before flashlights on phones), I come across this dip in the trail, and on the other side was a bench lightly visible due to the moonlight. Sitting on the bench was a man and another standing before him but I could only make out silhouettes.”
David Wall / Getty Images
“Being sure these were my friends, I yelled at them before walking over. If you ever walked the woods at night it’s just an uneasy feeling all around so I was cautious to begin with.
Well, it turns out, just after yelling out to my ‘friends,’ both silhouettes turned towards me. Not a word, not a sound, the guy sitting down starts sprinting FULL FUCKING SPEED towards me in complete silence. I got the absolute fuck out of there sprinting the other way and tripping over shit because I couldn’t see anything.
I finally got out and locked myself in my car, but I was really worried for my friends. Maybe a minute later I saw them both coming out of a completely different path, they also confirmed they never saw me or anyone else. My heart still sinks just thinking about that dude sprinting in silence — wtf was that shit?!”
—[deleted]
18.“The legend of Bearman. So people think of that one South Park episode with ‘ManBearPig.’ No, it’s not even close to that. So, there was this camp I used to go to during the summer. There were probably around 500 kids there for a week straight. Everyone had cabins they would stay in assigned by gender and age and an older person was in charge of one cabin. The older person was around 17–18 watching 13–16 year olds in the cabins. The staff were actual adults who had their own cabins, but they would be on night shift duties, walking around and making sure everyone was staying in their cabins. So now that you know the setting, let’s get into the legend…”
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“As it goes, in the woods, when all the kids were in the cabins and the lights were out, a bear would come out from the deep woods and wander into the campgrounds. The bear would then stand on its back legs and walk as if it were a human. It would choose to go into a cabin and if you were unlucky it would go by your bed and watch you sleep. If you made any move, it would grab you and take you into the woods, never to be seen again.
Hearing that scared the crap out of 14-year-old me. It was something the older girl told all of us. A bunch of the other girls were like, ‘Pfff it’s so we stay quiet and sleep,’ but other kids from cabins heard of it too. I never stopped thinking about it and always tried to stay as still as possible when I slept.
Flash forward a few years later, I ran into one of the staff that used to work at the camp and I told them how scared I was about Bearman, but that it was a good trick to get kids to stay quiet. Well, turns out, it’s based on a true story. I guess back in the ’80s, a man dressed in a bear costume, some sort of mascot for the camp then, would take girls out of their cabin. Soooo, as you could imagine to my horror, I was completely bewildered that Bearman actually existed at some point in time.”
19.“I lived in a basement suite with my younger brother in a quiet neighborhood. The entire front of the house was exposed to the sidewalk but the sides and the back were covered with fences and trees. The only way to see if anyone was in the basement was through this small window in my bedroom about five feet from my bed. One day, I got word while I was out that my place had been robbed. The robbers went through the basement suite door through the back, kicked it open, and then made their way upstairs after robbing the basement suite. They just so happened to rob the place in a 30-minute window when myself, my brother, and the people upstairs were out. This means they watched us for a few days and monitored our patterns. What scared me was not really the robbery itself, but the image of me sleeping while a robber presses his face against the window five feet from away from my bed just watching me.”
Westend61 / Getty Images/Westend61
20.“My mom is from El Salvador, and she lived there during the height of the civil war. She told me that one time, the terrorist group in her country found out someone in her town was part of the military. He had twin daughters with extremely long hair. They tied their hair to the trailer hitch of their trucks and proceeded to do donuts in the middle of town and drag them until they both died, they then left their bodies on his front door.”
Wathiq Khuzaie / Getty Images
21.Finally, “A chimpanzee named Travis attacking his owner’s friend. Travis attacked and mauled his owner’s friend, blinding her, severing several body parts, and lacerating her face before he was shot and killed by a cop. The owner called 911 during the attack. Travis’s screams can be heard in the background at the start of the tape as the owner pleads for the police. Initially, they believed the call to be a hoax until she said, ‘He’s eating her!'”
“The other terrifying part is that people are allowed to have wild animals as pets, and then act surprised when wild animals behave wildly.”
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 (HOPE), which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
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