23 Chilling, Unexplainable, And Possibly Even Sinister Things People Can’t Believe They Witnessed

Reddit user u/ThisIsExxciting posed the question: “What are you absolutely 100% sure you saw, but have no proof?” Sure enough, the thread quickly filled with many bizarre stories of creepy occurrences that really rattled people. Here’s what people shared:

“Years ago, I was working as a nurse at a hospital. I had this lovely older lady who suffered from dementia. She was alone in a room. At night, when I walked by, I heard her talking and popped in. She was alone and told me she was talking to her husband while pointing to an empty chair. I told her, ‘Then tell him goodnight and go to sleep,’ which she did. An hour later, her family called. Her husband had passed away one hour prior. I’m an atheist…but I still think about that!”

—u/Volgrand

“I was driving through a small town with my husband just as it got dark. I was about to go through a green light, and a woman jetted out in front of the car. I slammed my brakes and even did the instinctual hand across my husband’s chest because of how hard we had to brake. Just as I did this, a car in the opposite direction blew the red light and would’ve T-boned us into oblivion. I said to my husband, ‘That lady just saved us.’ He said he never saw a lady.”

—u/NurseBrianna

“I used to work at a haunted house as one of the actors. I actually hate acting, and, at the time, I also hated haunted houses, but my friend wanted to do it and didn’t have the courage to do the process alone. Being the good friend I am, I signed up, too. One night, I had to work a whole section by myself. I had to sit alone in dim lighting for hours, with horror music playing to create ambiance. There were a bunch of mannequins sitting in chairs, and I would sit among them to jump-scare the passers-by. One night, there was a 30-minute lag where nobody came through. So, imagine sitting in pure, eerie darkness by yourself for that long.”

“I have absolutely no proof that this happened at all, but as I was sitting among the mannequins, one of them turned its head to look back at me, then turned its head back to the original position. We could fairly argue that I was paranoid and made this up out of such paranoia, but that felt real as all hell to me. I had to leave the set and go to the break room for a while. I saw something else peculiar in a different room a few days later. I feel like that space had bad energy, and I’m happy to say I won’t be working there ever again.”

—u/Guilty-Scale-1079

“Not long before an overseas flight, I couldn’t find my passport anywhere. I usually kept it in a very small box with other important documents, like my birth certificate and kid’s passport. I vaguely remembered my young son looking at my passport stamps months before, so I figured it was stashed behind a sofa or something. I tore the whole house apart looking for it. My partner helped, and he also checked the document box. It was just nowhere. Then, I remembered the St. Anthony prayer (a story I’d read on Reddit that people claimed worked when they lost objects), so I said it aloud three times: ‘St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around, my passport needs to be found.'”

“I went to sleep and prepared to try and get an emergency passport the next morning. Well here’s the thing: I dreamt about the prayer and the documents’ box over and over all night. So, when I woke up, I went straight to the box (which you needed a chair to reach and was kept high enough so my son couldn’t access it), and there it was. My passport. Absolutely cannot explain this. There’s no logical explanation, but when I told someone before, they said my passport must have been in there. It 100% was not in the box. My partner was probably more freaked out than me. It was also sitting right where it should have been all along, with the 10 or so other things in there. It definitely wouldn’t have been missed. Weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.”

—u/OnemoreSavBlanc

“I was driving around 1:00 a.m. when I saw, in the middle of the road, a whiteish/grayish figure jump down from a high tree branch, like 10–12 meters up. There’s no way a normal person could do that. Then, it ran across the road and disappeared. Freaking Yowies…they are real.”

—u/simonm85

“I was watching the ISS livestream late one night, about eight years ago. Looking at the big old world and feeling small and tranquil soothed my anxiety. Suddenly, this object (?) came into view of the camera. It was sort of shaped like an arrowhead or a three-sided long pyramid that was toppled over. It started small and far from the camera’s view. I assumed it was space debris or a fancy satellite. But, it just kept getting closer, and this thing was HUGE. it had tons of square-edge ridges, curved indents in symmetrical patterns, and more and more detail. It looked enormous and kept coming closer and seemingly getting bigger, but it was still so far away from the ISS camera. I can’t really express the size of it. So, I put in the stream chat, ‘What is that thing?’ A few seconds later, the feed cut to static. God, do I wish I’d pressed ‘print screen.'”

—u/umbrellajump

“A week after my dad died, I saw him sitting in his chair during the day smiling at me. I was so happy to see him, but I don’t know if I hallucinated him due to emotional stress and grief or if it was real. About six months later, I felt his presence and asked him to turn on the light, which came on straight away. Maybe there was a reason, but it felt strange…like he was there. Haven’t been afraid of death since.”

—u/Logical-Hovercraft83

“My cousin and I were looking out the window together on a bright, hot summer day, and we saw yellow lightning randomly hitting the middle of the street. The skies were clear (I don’t remember how clear, but definitely no storm clouds or anything). And yeah, I know all lightning is white, but sometimes it has that blue/violet tint around it. This one was yellow.”

—u/Slav_1

“I grew up in the north of the UK, and there were three big coal-fired power stations along the river that flowed through my town. The nearest was probably about three miles away, and it was visible from most of the town since it’s a very flat area. I was in the local park drinking with my buddy at about 1:00 a.m. one night, as we’d done many times, and suddenly, there was a huge bright light from the direction of the power station. It was a blueish, artificial light that turned half the night sky to day. We looked at the source, and it was from behind the power station, which was inexplicably WAY, WAY closer than it should be. Suddenly, it was only a few hundred yards away, towering over the park and backlit with this bright light.”

“It was so close, I remember tilting my head back to look up at the main chimneys. Neither my buddy nor I were fazed by it at the time, though. It sounds weird, but it somehow just seemed normal. The light faded after about 10 seconds, and when our eyes adjusted, everything was back to how it usually is. The red navigation lights on top of the station towers twinkled in the distance. We didn’t even talk about it that night other than casually mentioning the light. We drank a bit more and went home, and, again, everything seemed perfectly normal. The next day, we were both like, ‘DUDE, WHAT THE F HAPPENED LAST NIGHT?!?’ I’d get weird goosebumps just thinking about it for months afterward. I’ve never seen anything like that before or since.”

—u/Daedricbob

10.

“When my wife and I were dating, I spent the night at her apartment. She has commented on feeling presences there occasionally, but I didn’t think much of it. We were about to go to bed. There was a four- or five-foot-tall dresser beside the side of the bed I was on. There was a quarter on top of it, maybe an inch from the edge. We turned off the lights and lay in bed. A few seconds later, we both heard what sounded like a coin hitting wood and then the floor. A little freaked out, we got up and turned the lights on. That quarter was on the floor. But, to duplicate the sound it made, it had to have bounced off the bed frame, which was like two feet from the dresser.”

“That means that coin, which was well on top of the dresser, flew off the top shelf far enough to hit the wood bed frame a couple of feet away. Can’t say what it was or wasn’t, and maybe there was an earthly explanation, but hell if I know what it is.”

—u/sleepywan

11.

“I’m pretty sure it was August of 2021 when this happened, but I was driving the interstate to Texas and pulled over to a gas station to go to the bathroom and get some snacks. I went to the bathroom and there was some sort of organ in the urinal. I barely saw it because I jumped immediately, but I’m almost positive it was a human stomach or liver. I ran outside and just peed on the ground behind the gas station.”

—u/Any-Shelter-4322

12.

“When I was a kid, I went outside to call my brother home. He was already running like mad across the road toward home, and above him was a circular display of lights. They disappeared quickly. I don’t believe in aliens or UFOs, but it definitely happened, and I can’t explain it.”

—u/stoobydoo69

13.

“I was standing in the kitchen of my girlfriend’s house in New York, not far from Sleepy Hollow. Suddenly, I saw one of my shoes by the front door hovering in mid-air, then drop from about two feet up and fall on its side. That convinced me there was much more than there seems to this world and reality.”

—u/oodelally1

14.

“When I was little, my mom and I were looking in some of my grandma’s old photo albums. I pointed at one (a picture of a bunch of dudes around a pool table) and said something like, ‘Hey, that’s Grandpa. He tells the best stories.’ Everybody was super confused because he was killed years before I was born. There were also no other pictures of him anywhere, so this was my first time seeing him…kind of? I still remember talking to him. I don’t believe in ghosts to this day, but this has me confused AF.”

—u/tepelridder

15.

“In a remote part of northwest Australia, I’ve seen a bird about four times the size of the largest known flying bird tearing into a kangaroo on the highway. We came around a hill and slammed on the brakes, and it took off into the sky. Its wingspan was easily longer than our car.”

—u/Mr_Mojo_Risin_83

16.

“While walking through the parking lot from my office to my car one summer afternoon, I had this sudden vision that I was looking down from a height of several hundred yards over the parking lot and looking around the area from above. I could see myself walking toward my car, cars driving down the surrounding roads, and people walking through the parking lots of surrounding businesses and stores. Then, the vision disappeared as I continued walking to my car. It kind of shook me, so I looked around and saw the same people and cars I saw from above (that I could see within my field of view). This has happened twice in two different locations.”

—u/jbarr107

17.

“I was playing outside with my older brother and saw him dash across the street. I was about to do the same until someone snatched me by my shirt and a large, white Chevy van blew by in front of me. My big brother had never crossed the street, and it was him holding me by the shirt.”

—u/yasukeyamanashi

18.

“A massive orange cloud appeared over the ocean on the Oregon coast at night. I was walking and stargazing when it happened. When I say massive, I mean it lit up the sky and was a few miles out on the sea. I think it was most likely a gas tanker ship explosion, but despite the sky being lit up, I couldn’t find a report about it anywhere the next day or the following days. It was astonishing in its intensity.”

—u/nutsandboltstimestwo

19.

“When I was, like, 12, I used to sleep in the same bed as my mom. We stayed in a one-bedroom, and the bedroom was right next to the bathroom. One night, out of nowhere, I just woke up. I looked at the ceiling in complete darkness, and something just made me feel weird. I turned on my side and looked toward the bathroom, and I saw an old lady in a nightgown with a fat, little boy right next to her by the bathroom. I just got goosebumps while writing this. I closed my eyes and just lay there until I fell asleep again. I have no proof, but I know what I saw.”

—u/Important-Builder736

20.

“My husband died suddenly in 2016. I woke one night, and he was sitting on the foot of our bed watching me. I wasn’t afraid, and he looked peaceful. He faded after a while and was gone. We had been together for 46 years. Yes, I believe in spirits, and I think he was letting me know it was okay. Don’t care what naysayers claim.”

—u/Bookauthorkidlit

21.

“When I was about 14, my family had just moved to a house with a lot of open space and a huge backyard. One night, around 10:00 p.m., I opened our sliding door to take out the trash and saw two figures walking toward the house. The best way I could describe them is that they were all black, slim, and almost looked and moved like kangaroos, but I was living in New Jersey, and they don’t exist in that area. Also, they were walking on four feet, but when I opened the door and turned on the light, they stood up on two feet and began to run.”

“I turned and shut the door before I saw them run, but I got a good enough glance to know they weren’t just any regular animal, like a deer. Besides, there weren’t any deer in that neighborhood, so this was definitely something different. I don’t know what it was, but I saw it.”

—u/IDoesThis1

22.

“I lived in a house where shadows of people would move on the walls. My roommates, the dogs, and I were unable to look directly at them, or they’d move and disappear (which is not how shadows work, as far as I’m aware). This was a daily occurrence for four months. One time, in the main bedroom, the dogs were freaking out trying to chase them around the walls. That’s the only time I was kind of scared, aside from the several times we heard arguing downstairs and thought we were getting robbed. We’d go downstairs, and it would stop every time. But, the weirdest thing I saw was a cellphone charger that picked up on its own, started wiggling around like someone was shaking it, and then it dropped. My then-girlfriend and I just sat there like, ‘What was that?'”

“Another time, one of my roommates and I were sitting at a table, and a cup just started sliding from one side of the table to the other. We looked at each other like, ‘Let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.'”

—u/DiggingThisAir

23.

And: “I could only walk my dog late at night due to working late shifts. Most nights, especially during the winter, I would have to take a flashlight because it’d get dark early. Our usual walk route would take us along a path through a field. On the right, a little further up the field, was a big forest with a wall separating it and the field. As I was walking, I could hear footsteps running up toward the forest. I shined the light toward it and saw someone in a long trench coat running up toward the wall. They jumped over it, and that was it. I stood there listening for a few seconds. Nothing. I was on edge the entire walk back, but there was absolutely nothing. To this day, I have no idea what it was. The running footsteps I heard weren’t coming toward me, so I don’t think anyone was trying to attack me.”

—u/cowpool20

Okay, I’m officially sleeping with one eye open tonight, if I can fall asleep at all. 👀 Have you ever witnessed something completely chilling and unexplainable? Tell us in the comments!

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