My parents worked on various committees and programs at the local church while I was growing up; this often meant we were the last ones in the church/surrounding offices as we cleaned up and locked up whenever the event finished. I will certainly agree with you that there's something quite unsettling about being in a church by yourself at night - Probably a combination of the wide-open space with the stern religious images, for one. Our churches were both quite old (the one we went to mass at was built in 1880) too.

Though, there's a bit of a difference between "these statues are fucking eerie" and "OH GOD THERE ARE FOOTSTEPS BEHIND ME".

I saw my grandmother naked once. I almost hung myself.

Quite mature, that's not creepy, dude.

I reeeeeally would appreciate a comeback of the "creepy things" thread guys, please keep 'em coming...!!!
Both of these threads have been some of the most entertaining read ever since i've been here...

How about I steer away from the mundane dead body stuff I have to see at work all the time... A few friends and I used to try looking for ghosts and stuff. We took a road trip to York, PA to a place everyone called "seven gates of hell". It used to be a mental institution, I believe. Anyways, the story went that as you passed the different gates something new would happen. Like gate one, noises, gate two see things in the trees, gate three see apparitions, etc, etc. We started driving through, already spooked just from the stories we'd heard. We get to around the fourth gate and my buddy's car just shuts off. So we ended up having to push the car about three quarters of a mile, then boom, car starts back up.

Aside from seeing things in the distance and hearing things, nothing else really happened on that trip!

I've had a few creepy things happen in my life but the most recent events have mostly been mundane things that have occurred in the house that I've lived in for the last year. For starters, there are a ton of windows through the house and it always creeped me out to be in it alone when there weren't any blinds covering them. Other than that, the main things occurring have been my bedroom door closing by itself (Probably just the way the hinges were built) and occasional bouts of sleep paralysis. There was also an incident a few weeks ago where my stereo turned the volume up by itself. My ex thought the house was haunted when she was living with me but I'm a little skeptical. The sleep paralysis freaks me out more than anything else as it has made me think that there was someone in front of and/or next to me in bed.

Crap, I have work in the morning...

I've been told that we have a "family ghost", more specifically a poltergeist... not the type like in that movie that just fucks shit up and causes you to move out or whatever, like an old germanic folklore poltergeist, the type that's just a pain in the ass and hides shit from you when you need it most. Everyone in my family has at least 2 specific instances where stuffs gone missing on it's own and will show up in the most bizarre places a couple days later. Yesterday I thought I lost $400 from my room... turns out it somehow got underneath my bed of all places. No idea how it woulda got there, but somehow it did. It's not really "creepy" after the first few times it happens, but it's still something I can't really explain. If it ever does show up in spectral form though, I'm gonna kick it's ass. Playing with my money is like playing with my emotions...

I read this tale in a book of WWI anecdotes.

A soldier is stationed on the western front. He goes to sleep one night and is awakened in the middle of the night by his brother, who's stationed a few miles further down the trench. His brother drags him out of bed, telling him he has to show him something outside and it's urgent. Groggily this soldier makes his way outside, following his brother. Not long after leaving where he was sleeping, the place is hit by an artillery shell, as part of an enemy artillery bombardment, killing everyone inside. His brother vanishes. In the morning he discovers that his brother died that same night at his post miles away when the bombardment began.

One time I couldn't sleep so I was walking around in the small hours of the morning. It was raining a bit. While coming back, about a block away from my house, a car stopped right where I was walking by. I kept walking and the car started backing up. I start walking faster. Now there is a bit of a distance between us. I look back and this huge, towering muscular mulatto guy has gotten out of the car and is just staring at me. I keep walking. He gets back in the car and starts following me. I book it and manage to get home. That was probably the creepiest moment of my life.

makes you think if he was just fucking with you or if he really intended something

I'll contribute with something I saw that was kind of creepy, and something that I heard/experienced, but was all the more legitimately creepy because of what I didn't see.

Around this time last year, a couple friends and I decided to, just for pre-Halloween kicks, check out the urban legend and nexus of creepiness known as Bunnyman Bridge. For those of you who can't state with pride that you come from Northern Virginia, Bunnyman Bridge (it's more of a tunnel, actually) is our local variation of the classic "axe-murderer escapes from mental asylum and sustains himself with livestock/roadkill and lives for over eight years and can teleport and..." trope. The bridge itself is where the fiend makes his occasional killings, and to the Bunnyman's credit is a very creepy place in and of itself, even during the day, possessing the distinct and intangible sense that this place is just... wrong. Like it shouldn't be there. Like if I ever returned (I haven't), there'd be a good chance I wouldn't be able to find it, and the suspicious local townfolk would look at me funny if I even thought to ask.

Anyways, we made the drive over to the site of the bridge/tunnel, which was creepy. Creepy because it was a small two-lane road completely surrounded by unusually dense forest, and the fact that that road was covered with mist. I was driving through every horror movie, ever. After ten minutes of the drive, we finally got to the bridge/tunnel. We inched the car through, and stopped in the middle, per the legend. Turned off the car, flicked the lights on three times and waited (also per the legend). Surprisingly, we weren't brutally murdered. We left, slightly dejected, but still satisfied that we were able to experience an unquestionably aesthetically creepy drive.

After driving through for munchies, we made our way back to my house. My parents were gone for the weekend, so the house was mostly still. We set up sleeping bags and snacks and such in my basement, then, thanks to my sharp senses, things started to get weird. My basement is situated right under the front hallway, which leads to the front door, and soon I heard my dog sharply trotting across the extent of the front hallway, towards the door. This wouldn't be strange, if it wasn't close to 2 AM. My friends stopped talking and we listened. A few seconds of silence. Then, from either a point right outside or right inside the door, I heard a voice- it was faint, but distinctly that of an old woman's. She said "Hello?" and then either "Is someone there?" or "Who's there?". We all looked at each other, not knowing what to make of it. All I know is that my entire back was standing on end and I was tearing up, because something about the situation just hit a strangely metaphysical nerve in me. Something about the way she said it, in addition to fact it was at 2 AM. We stood pretty much frozen for a minute or two, and then I started to climb the basement stairs. I inched around towards the front hallway and slowly walked to the door and looked outside. Of course, nothing. My dog was lying down in the kitchen.

I'm still not sure what the make of the event, and there's a good chance that it was something completely benign, such as an old woman just being lost, or thought she saw/heard something coming from my house, or that we all just collectively imagined it. All I know is that it didn't feel right, and I definitely felt that my level of control thin at that point.

Followed in the dead of night by a strange car? This takes on a whole new level of creepy in light of the whole Trayvon Martin fiasco down in the States. Years ago, a friend of mine was mugged in twilight, right in front of the mailbox that I get my mail from every day. Kind of shakes your belief in the whole "safe neighborhood" rhetoric.

On a different note:

One of my oldest friends, I don't really hang out with any more. We still live around the same area, but it was just one of those "mutual falling-away" type deals, nothing that would drive a wedge between us, we just don't really talk any more. But he (and his family) swear that their house was haunted.

Let me back up. His house was more like a mansion, easily twice the size of mine (and a freaking tennis court), built around 1900. Now, I've been into paranormal stuff ever since I was a little kid, so the 12 year old me chomped at the bit to check it out. The first floor is just fine. What can I say, it's a house. It does what houses do. The second floor is where things get...dicey.

First of all (and I didn't know this at the time), the second floor is where all their stories occur. Going up into the second-floor hallway after the stairs, you immediately feel like you're being watched. The Edwardian portraits they have hanging on the walls (IE, the Creepy-Ass Staring Heads era of portraiture) seriously didn't help. It's an oppressive feeling, like you immediately feel you're not welcome there. I also felt erratic drops in temperature throughout that hallway. Call me yellow if you want, but even though it was broad daylight, I wanted to get out of that hallway, and quick.

Those in themselves are hardly evidence of a haunting; certain excesses of electrical output can cause feelings of uneasiness that are identical to that "being watched" tingle, and cold spots are hardly definitive. That hallway is/was creepy as hell, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm living in a King Diamond album.

That said, I really wish that I had experienced what him and his family reported to have experienced: footsteps, doors opening on their own, "whooshing shadows", the whole nine yards. They said that the experiences just suddenly stopped, some years later. If you believe that they had some kind of genuine presence, maybe whatever it was found its peace and moved on.

Conjecture? Yeah, all of it. But it makes for a cool story no matter what you believe.

I remember the creepypasta thread. I got a few stories of my own, one I probably shared before.

Alright, anyone here familiar with the story of Centralia? Well, this story has almost nothing to do with Centralia except that I'm using that town as a landmark. I don't remember where exactly this was, but it was along PA Route 61 heading westward past Centralia. It was in a populated town, for certain, either Mt. Carmel or Shamokin. There was this icecream parlor decorated with clowns that looked absolutely creepy. It was definitely abandoned and weeds were overgrown. Didn't see any ghosts, but something about that place just caused me to shudder. I have a feeling something dark happened there.

That's nothing compared to the hell of an encounter I had. I was driving home from a show in Allentown and I was on Interstate 78 when I saw a deer. That's nothing unusual in Pennsylvania, since there is a lot of deer around here and you'll probably see at least one (dead or alive) while driving. However, the deer I saw had a visible strand of intestines hanging from its underbelly. The deer was standing on the left-hand side of the road and it looked at me. I could only see one eye reflect light, while the one side of the face seemed to be all bloody. Either this was a fucking zombie deer, or it was struck and the collision didn't kill it.

A related story, but not involving a live animal, was a cat I saw on the side of the road with its head smashed and eyeballs were popped out.

I got as far as "standing" and did a double-take. I think we have a winner for bone-chilling image of the night.

I while back I had to make a delivery to a customer and he answered the door in a tigger suit, had a tail and everything. I thought oh that's nice it's his kids birthday, but there was only him and his cats, he dressed like that every night he said

Didn't get any bad vibes from him and he clearly loved his pets, it was just the initial shock someone opening the door like that, I immediately thought of the Shining.

Not all of us want to jump around their room dressed like Rob Darken I guess.

Just remembered a time when I may have stumbled across a murder site at back behind a bike trail... Me and some friends used to hang out at this local park and smoke alotta dope and explore the bits of untouched wilderness out there, we found a really boss clearing underneath a 50 foot tall bridge which was perfect for camping and shit, technically it was right under a bike trail but nobody besides us (as far as we knew) even knew it existed. One day while we were out exploring some of the shit out there one of us found a dirt-encrusted woman's shoe... kinda creepy but we didn't think too much of it at the moment, fast forward a few minutes later and we stumbled across a torn skirt and some more clothes that probly belonged to the same person who lost the shoe.. I think we got the hell outta there pretty quick after that. I'm pretty sure we stumbled upon someone's murder site that day.

This thread is already gold.

I'm pretty sure that's right near Shamokin. I used to live a few miles from there. And as for seeing roadkill on I-78, that's like the roadkill capital of PA. I still think the exploding/vaporizing deer trick is the coolest thing ever. I need to learn that for parties.

As a person who has lived in the "north woods" of the USA for many years, I can tell you that deer do all sorts of weird things after they are hit by cars. Including walking around bloody, in a daze, with internal organs hanging out.

It's a creepy story, but I think this sort of thing happens quite a bit.

Had quite a scare at home the other day. My roommate is convinced there's something in our apartment that likes to traipse around and cause a ruckus and otherwise be a little douchey. HE said all of this was going on before I moved in (I guess at one point the guitarist in my band saw a pan get smacked across the stove and onto the floor when he was literally the only one up there), but I've noticed a few odd things here and there. One painting of mine in particular always gets turned sideways even though it's hung correctly and weighted properly. Well, the other night me, my guitarist, my roommate, and two other were over watching a production of Phantom of the Opera, and we paused it for some reason. We were all talking about random stuff when we heard a noise come from the bookshelf next to the couch we were on. This bookshelf is where I keep my beloved templar helmet, and it sounded like someone with the most muscular forearms ever just walked up to it and flicked it. We heard a crisp and very clear "thwack," and we all just stopped talking and looked at each other. Upon investigation, nothing had happened. Nothing fell off the other shelves, nothing fell over and hit it, it just thwacked at us for no damn reason. So needless to say, we're all a bit spooked and start talking about the weird shit that goes on in our place. One of the girls there reminded me the other night how me, her, and her sister all saw a shadow of a person bounce across the walls (which I'd forgotten about since I was shitfaced when that happened) 36 hours before that. Apparently they'd both seen it, looked at each other, and I'd said "hey, did you guys just see that? 'hic.'"
So, I tell them all about the time I saw that weird thing in my backyard a few years back so we all crowd around my computer and decide to research it. So we’re all huddled close, engrossed in youtube, and we all hear this amazingly loud crash from downstairs (we live above a pizza place) followed by some more crashes of shit getting knocked over, and then another, louder bang than the first. So we all look at each other and just about soil ourselves. We go outside to find a huge branch from the massive tree out back hand fallen, landed on our deck, and had broken/scattered everywhere.
So, given the situation, definitely scared the hell out of me. Never gonna forget the sound of that branch falling.

I've got two scary stories about trees. Where I live, there is a stand of maple trees behind my house. They are tall and many of them lean over the house. We've had people trim some of the scariest ones so they don't have large branches hovering over the house. My mom has considered hiring professional tree cutters to fell them entirely but I disliked the idea. Man shouldn't mess with nature just for the sake of convenience.

Well, the first story involving these maple trees was around 2002 or 2003. My dad and I went to the local grocery store to pick up a few things. It was a sunny day, though it might have been a little windy. When we come back, we see what looks like to be an entire tree that fell right next to our house. It was so big, it damaged the picnic table we have in those woods and the top part landed right in the driveway where our car was parked. Turns out that was just a branch, but a major one - the tree it came from was just half the tree it used to be. The cause was a freak occurrence of straight-line winds. They can be as strong as a minor tornado, only instead of moving in a circle they go in more or less a straight line. They are usually accompanied by thunderstorms but I don't remember any storms happening that day. Or the wind could have originated from a thunderstorm that didn't directly pass over us.

The next one was in December of 2007. This was during an epic icestorm that covered everything outside with up to an inch thick layer of ice. It was not a night I will forget because I could not sleep, there was constant banging and thundering from the branches falling on the house. A couple considerably large branches fell off to the side, and once again the picnic table was damaged. Power was out for three days and it was fucking cold - the temperature in my room dipped to 45 degrees.

Last October there was a freaky snow storm that caused a power outage and branches falling, but the power was back on that night and only one of the branches was considerably sized.

I remember watching a story on TV about a deer that had been hit, yet she had a fawn that was just about ready to be born. The fawn survived and was taken care of by a local family until it was ready to go out into the wild and probably get hit by a car.

This story reminds me of around a decade ago when I was at a house sited next to a road that was surrounded by woods when a storm struck, large established trees were falling across the road right outside.
I'd never experienced anything like it before or since, I saw up close how powerful mother nature can be, and if the TARDIS had arrived shortly after, the scene couldn't have been any more surreal. October winds can be fiercest here

I was the only one in my building at work late last night a few weeks ago. I stepped outside, and a light in a room upstairs was on. That floor had already been shut down, and locked up. Went up the stairs, and the door was locked, and the light was off. The building is very old, and supposedly haunted. I had my doubts until that happened. I still have my doubts, until I see it happen a second time.

I was listening to King Diamonds Fatal Portrait a few weeks ago and while doing so, my stereo turned the volume down by itself. It was quite creepy Hasn't happened since then.

I have tons of creepy moments! Btw, I was going to be one of those internet/fan nerds who wanted to yell slenderman regarding those tree stories. In good conscious I decided not to ruin the moment. A lot of these submissions should belong on creepypasta. I admit, some of these creeped me out.

I'm not sure if it's just me, paranoia, or something but each time I'm surrounded by a group of people (say in a subway, public library,etc) I have this raging suspicion someone is planning on attacking. BTW, It doesn't help the fact that I have been followed by creepy strangers before. So perhaps this is normal? Either way, I tend to keep my guard up when I'm alone. Is this creepy? Don't know, is it scary? Of course it is.

I've visited my aunts place a couple of times. I swear there's something there. I've heard foot steps, things falling, and felt the bed move on its own once. Sometimes regarding ghosts or something paranormal, my head will start hurting. it's really strange considering I never had an issue with headaches or migranes before and it just so happens to hurt when I feel off about something (usually a place.)

One of my closest friends said he saw big red eyes once (I think it was his home. I know I mentioned my another close friend seeing big red eyes as well but thats a different incident.) This same guy once told me I should believe the impossible, which in all honesty scares me. To think that spirits/entities/apparitions/etc can come into our world and do what they please or expose us to true horror does frighten me.

Ehhhh it depends on what side of town you live on. Depending on who it is they might think your an apparition of some kind too.

I live in the city, which can be a scary place at times. Funny you mention it, I tend to look all moody for no reason either.

I forgot another creepy moment. This incident, i did not experience but it's scary to think of the possibilities.

Another good friend of mine had told me he stayed down south for a couple of years. I forgot where but what I do remember is how much he HATES that place, and with good reason. The people were rude, ignorant, hard to deal with, just basically the worst bunch you'd encounter (I wish his words were enough to tell you how awful that place was. He could write a whole book on that chapter on his life alone.)

Anyway, I'm not sure if he was alone or with someone but he discovered a dead body somewhere in a wooded area. He tells his cousin(s) and all he's told is "don't mention it to anyone what you just saw." It was also subtly hinted that if he did talk about it, there would have been consequences. According to what he heard from his cousin, a lot of people knew of the body but no one talked about it or reported it. To this day he still doesn't know whatever happened or if something was done to pick up the body.

Again, it's a scary thought. It leaves a lot of unanswered questions

Not to go off topic but the Ice cream place by shamokin used to be called Cluckers & Cream

It's Jimmy Hoffa.

I saw a man falling out of a third floor window...his head just split open. That was sick shit.

Christ. Was it just an accident, do you know?

I guess it was an accident...he leaned out of the window to talk to some bitch who was on the balcony, and whooops, a nice smack! His feet went all blue

I have experienced a couple of weird sightings, UFO and paranormal, but since I can't explain them or necessarily feel that they were in fact genuine, I won't elaborate on them and they were not necessarily scary.

However, something that petrified me, has been my own mind malfunctioning three times now since 2006. I have done some research on this and found it to be something called Derealiztion.

Each time this has happened I have been under a fair amount of stress. The very first time I recall it happening was when my Grandfather died in January 2006 and I was the only one of my family to be able to travel to Germany from the U.S. to his funeral. (I had family scattered all over the globe and my mom had been in the hospital) I arrived in Germany and went and stayed with a relative, all day I was fighting jet lag and went wandering around the city of Stuttgart to stay awake. That night I went to sleep relatively quickly and awoke out of a solid sleep within 10 - 15 minutes after going down.

Then I didn't know where I was upon waking for at least a minute, then sheer unexplained terror ran all over my body and everything felt strange and otherworldly. I kept seeing a dead tree with empty dead branches on the back of my eyelids. It took me 2 hours to talk myself out of this state of mind. Everything was very very desolate and alien. My heart raced and I thought I was going to die. I ended up breathing into a bag to relieve the stress of hyperventilating (something I learned later was not even the correct procedure) The feeling of terror and general feelings of out of place hung with me the rest of the next day. I was not in full control of mind for at least 2 hours that night. I never talked about this before now. No drugs nor alcohol were involved and I am other wise healthy and non depressed, with a pretty positive outlook on things.

Then it happened to me two other times, both times I was ill, once with a bad flu later in 2006 and one time with Mosquito born encephalitis in the summer of 2011. Each time the onset was awaking out of the early stages of sleep. It's the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. The last time it happened I called a good friend of mine to help me talk myself out of this mental state. I didn’t want to wake my GF or our son and freak them out. Each time there is this dark illusion of dead branches and a veil of darkness across everything and repeating phrases ran through my mind. It literally takes me a couple of days to fully recover back to a positive state of mind after it happens. I hope that it doesn’t ever happen again. I know it sounds mundane, but it was truely terrifying especially the thought of not being able to get back to reality.

Check it out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derealization

Jesus fuck, I never knew such a thing even existed. Just reading about it gave me the chills.

To me, recurrent nightmares about body paralysis or oppressive energies that do not let you breathe are creepy....
The nightmare that I remember most happened on a trip to England years ago ... I fell asleep from exhaustion and suddenly when I tried to wake my body was motionless, and from the roof came out many ghostly figures in smoke ... while a voice told me that if I could not get to the door that night was going to die in my sleep .... later more than 4 hours (that time on my dream) i could to get to the door after so much effort ....
when I woke up and I asked my friends how much i had slept, they said ... like 30 minutes .....!

Not a creepy story to most and not a paranormal one, but it scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.
My family used to go camping near a lake waaaayyyy back. There was a bog nearby and of course small rivers and streams coming in and out of the lake. Anyway, one day we were walking around in the woods near the lake, and I happened to be a bit ahead, along on of the rivers. Looking down, I saw what looked like a log in the water, but something was kind of jarring; the log wasn't moving with the cover, but still I sort of guessed it was caught in the undergrowth on the other side. I guess, I could tell something was a bit off, I stopped, and moved closer and suddenly the thin moved and recoiled disappearing into the undergrowth and I shot back,one of the few adrenaline burst in my life. It was some kind of fucking snake, and it was big too, certainly big enough to have killed me back then. My guess is an escaped python or a boa of some kind. Now we don't have any species of snake in Ireland (our wildlife in general is pretty boring, largely due to farmers killing off anything even remotely interesting years ago), so you might understand why seeing a whopper of one in the wild here may come as a shock.

Apart from that, I've had some really terrifying false awakenings, where I was essentially trapped waking up briefly, only to almost instantly fall into another nightmare that blended seamlessly between reality and dream.

I hate to be a bit of a cunt, but is it possible with the helmet thing that rising heat might have caused it to buckle in some way?

Not since St. Patty kicked them out I guess...