Spooky Stories To Read In The Dark

October 30, 2017 4:47 PM

It’s that time of year again! Jezebel asks readers to share thier scariest (mostly) true stories to keep you up all night this Halloween Eve. 8 more. 2016 winners (bonus) (previously).
posted by The Whelk (26 comments total)

Mod note: One deleted. Preemptively: please skip the jokes about 2016 election, current political horrorshow, etc.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 5:13 PM on October 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

Oh some of these are really good. My favorite so far is the very, very short one about the sleepwalking kids. I won't be forgetting that one for a long time.
posted by treepour at 5:32 PM on October 30, 2017

The one with the big black dog is heart wrenching.

Thank you for posting this! I look forward to reading these every year. I really appreciate that they tend to choose ones that are relatively plausible and require only a slight suspension of disbelief as opposed to the over the top ones.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 5:38 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

This was two scary stories and eight horrifying stories of terrible things men do.
posted by annathea at 5:41 PM on October 30, 2017 [17 favorites]

Yeah, content warnings for other readers: this isn't just ghost stories, which I find pleasurably scary, it's also stalking stories, escaping-a-probable-murderer stories, a story of one (natural) fetus death, and the most horrifying version of voyeurism ever. I like true crime so I was down but man did I go in expecting fun hauntings and hoo boy was it more like a listener write-in episode of My Favorite Murder.
posted by WidgetAlley at 5:44 PM on October 30, 2017 [11 favorites]

Writing as someone who has had hallucinatory nightmares, the story about Natalie's dad and mom sounds like classic night terrors. They're an extremely strange and terrible thing to experience.
posted by Emily's Fist at 5:52 PM on October 30, 2017 [15 favorites]

That was my thought, too, Emily's Fist. I wish I had known about this thing. I could have submitted the story about the time my dad heard a loud crash coming from my room when I was three years old. He bolted upstairs to see if I had fallen out of bed (the crib had been set up and moved to the room soon to be occupied by the occupant of my mother's belly.) My new full-sized bed was out in the middle of the room and I was standing in the middle of it. He turned on the light and asked, "What's wrong? Are you ok?" I said, in a voice that he describes as perfectly matter-of-fact, "Gramma Mulvie says she's sad that she didn't live to see my brother being born." This disturbed my dad because his mother, the aforementioned Gramma Mulvie, had been dead for several months. And also because my parents had elected not to learn the sex of my future sibling. My brother was born two months later.

(I personally don't believe in ghosts or the supernatural, so my theory is that I slid between the bed and the wall as I fell out of bed after a dream or a nightmare of some kind, pushing the bed out into the room. I'm sure my parents had discussed the possible sex of the baby and I was just repeating scraps of conversation I had cobbled together in my toddler brain. Pretty sure that's what happened. Mostly.)

Anyway, these were good! Thanks for posting. I love Halloween.
posted by xyzzy at 6:14 PM on October 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

I did find most of these less scary than previous year's (and ... for the most part, less fake, truthfully) but I do miss the ones that are more supernatural than the "men are creepy!" ones. I have enough "men are creepy!" in my life. Give me some ghost stories!

I don't really believe in ghosts, but I've had some weird things happen at the same time. I'm happy to shrug them off as weird quirks of the brain and sleep disorders (of which I have many*). But who the hell knows? I still like ghost stories and I'd never discredit the experiences people have had.

*My favorite recently was when, half asleep in the early morning hours, I felt someone get into bed with me and say my name out loud. Let's be clear I have no pets and I live alone. It was enough for me to say "WHAT?" out loud and turn on the light. Of course no one was there. Clearly just a sleep hallucination (and the voice was friendly and one I recognized so that wasn't too weird). I went back to sleep.
posted by darksong at 6:26 PM on October 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

My fifth/sixth form read "The Amityville Horror." Scared the skepticism right into us.
posted by clavdivs at 7:04 PM on October 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

for some IRL chills, nothing beats the tragic true story of elisa lam.
posted by j_curiouser at 7:52 PM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

mmm yeah my scariest story for jezebel is the time they posted a story about that anon askme where the OP was like "was this rape or not" and then refused to take down their story even after the anonymous asker contacted them begging them to stop making her personal trauma into their own page hit profits.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:30 PM on October 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Well, hey, I was just reading these on my phone a little after midnight when my house randomly lost power, so now I’m lying here in complete darkness except for this phone. I’ve just read about three terrifying stories of home intruders and suddenly this is not as much fun as it was when the lights worked.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:24 PM on October 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

My favorite recently was when, half asleep in the early morning hours, I felt someone get into bed with me and say my name out loud. Let's be clear I have no pets and I live alone. It was enough for me to say "WHAT?" out loud and turn on the light. Of course no one was there. Clearly just a sleep hallucination (and the voice was friendly and one I recognized so that wasn't too weird). I went back to sleep.

Yeah, I have auditory sleep hallucinations on the cusp of sleep often, and there's no getting around the fact that they can be quite creepy except I've been having them for years and years and am yet to go on a murderous rampage.

Nothing could be as scary as the pumpkin seeds story

This, and the horrifying Look at me story on this page (Ctrl+F for 'Look at me') are the two scariest things I've ever read on the internet, both courtesy Jezebel. Thanks Jezebel... I think.

I don't have any scary true stories, for which I am grateful. My friend told me about something that happened to her once. She and her friend were travelling and staying in an Airbnb in separate rooms - my friend T left her door ajar and the other left her door closed. At 4:03 am according to the desk clock, T had your typical 'night terror' experience, a crushing presence on her chest and a sense of being paralysed, together with a sense of great dread. The next morning her travelling companion said that at 4:03 am according to the desk clock in her room, she'd woken up to a series of loud, angry-sounding knocks on her door, but had lain in bed terrified until the knocking ceased.
posted by Ziggy500 at 6:02 AM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

It's daylight now, and I survived! I even slept a little.

This is my one story of the supernatural in a life which has been mostly normal otherwise. I was agnostic / atheistic then, and still am. I've always wondered how many normal, rational, non-believing people like myself, with no history of hallucinations or delusions, have at least one story like this.

That reminds me of the opening lines of C.S. Lewis's Miracles: A Preliminary Study.

In all my life I have only met one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or trick of the mind. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing. For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And the senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this always shall be what we say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:18 AM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

My toddler has been very taken with the Kate Beaton storybooks ("King Baby" "Princess and the Pony"). For a while he loved looking at the author illustration Kate did of herself for the book jacket and we always told him, "That's Kate."

Soon after, he started calling women who vaguely kind of resembled the illustration (long wavy brown hair, young-ish) Kate. A lady at the grocery store or an advertisement for Wonder Woman got him pointing and saying "Kate!" That sort of thing.

Later he began saying "hi" to everyone and everything. It was adorable. "Hi door. Hi kitty. Hi toaster. Hi Daddy. Hi bread." And so on. He especially liked to do this before bed, lights out, sitting in my lap while we rocked in the rocking chair. "Hi crib. Hi water. Hi blankie. Hi nightlight. Hi Mommy. Hi Kate." He pointed at the bedroom door, which was slightly cracked open. Nothing else was there for him to look at. "Hi Kate. Hi Kate! HI KATE!" He was really excited. Finally I said "Uhh...Kate says hi," and he stopped.

Anyways, little kids are creepy.
posted by castlebravo at 7:24 AM on October 31, 2017 [9 favorites]

Anyways, little kids are creepy.

My 3-year-old was talking to me about dreams the other day (not creepy in itself, although in one dream we both got eaten by a dragon and had to fight our way out from the inside, which is apparently hilarious if you're 3). I was telling her about some of my dreams, and she nodded along for a while and then said "Who brings your dreams?" Wasn't sure what she meant and couldn't manage to ask her in a way that made sense to her, so eventually I said "well, who brings your dreams?" and she explained it was a little boy, who comes to her room most nights but not every night, and is a boy but has hair like a girl, and won't tell her his name. He only brings good dreams, though, so that's okay!

We were walking home in the dark along a tree-lined path at the time, with I kid you not owls hooting in the distance. I swear they do this on purpose.
posted by Catseye at 8:10 AM on October 31, 2017 [9 favorites]

The closest thing to a real-life haunting type experience I've had was this motel my partner and I stayed in near Mt. Shasta. It was kind of a dreary, half-empty place, but nothing particularly creepy about it, and nothing odd happened until we went to bed.

It turns out we both had incredibly troubling nightmares that were very similar. I don't remember the content now but we both were left with the distinct impression from our dreams that we were in some kind of danger, as if the place itself meant us harm. It was one of those "holy shit, YOU TOO?" moments. We got out of there fast.

Who knows, maybe we'd both had The Shining on our minds, or something like that. But I've never felt that way about a place before, and haven't since.
posted by treepour at 8:34 AM on October 31, 2017

Back before my son was born we lived in the second floor apartment of a converted house, and my desk was set against the living room wall that looked down through hall and across from the first room door. We had always used it as a storage room when we first moved with the intention of making it a nursery when we were finished unpacking. So until then we usually had the light off and paid little attention to it.

Fast forward two months and I finished painting it all sunny with pictures on the wall, set up furniture, and had the light on because I would forget it when leaving the room.

I was sitting at my desk and movement out of the corner of my eye got my attention. I looked down because we have cats, but no cat. So I kinda turned and looking down and spot a shadow move across the bottom door of the nursery. My immediate thought was I locked one of the cats in there. Got up and opened the door, but no cat. No cat anywhere in the room. Think it's odd and turn off the light and go back to my desk.

I started to regularly see this pacing shadow along the bottom of the door and mentioned it to my mom and husband. Mom is blind at the time and shrugs it off because she can't see it, and my husband insisted it's car headlights through the window. That makes sense, so I don't worry about it.

Then comes my baby shower at work. I was teaching at a private school and the nuns had gotten a laundry basket and jointly filled it with blankets, onesies, etc. I drag it upstairs after work, open the nursery door and shove it in. Then I closed the door and sat at my desk to answer emails.

I noticed a shadow appear at one end of the door and start to cross and suddenly there was the sound of someone tripping and falling. Mom yelled from her bedroom thinking it was me, "Are you all right?"

I yanked open the door and the room was empty. Later my husband said it was probably the neighbor downstairs falling at the same time as the headlights passed, but I just knew the pacing ghost tripped. My son never slept in that room. He refused and if left alone, screamed until someone fetched him. We got one of those three sided boxes and co-slept.

In the same house I would wake up some mornings to a rapid knock on my second floor window next to the bed. We couldn't find a good explanation for the knocking.

Then the other big story was the spilled pills. There was a gate across the kitchen entrance. I straddled it and grabbed mom's pills, opening the bottle as I drew my back leg up and over. I snagged my foot and spilled the pills out in front of me. I collected them up but knew I was missing one after counting twice. The baby was crying so I told mom not to try getting in the kitchen until I got back. I needed to crawl around the floor and find the missing pill so neither the cats or the baby found it.

Took care of my son and went back to the kitchen and the last pill was lined up neatly waiting for me across the top of the baby gate. Had I not spotted it, my son surely would have.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 8:56 AM on October 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

If we are sharing stories about kids being creepy, last year I moved into a new house with my two sons who were 3 & 4 at the time. They were in the living room and I was just outside on the back deck sweeping and trimming weeds. I heard the screen door slam and they ran out to me and I could see immediately that both were IRATE. I assumed they were fighting with each other and had run outside to tattle. However:

The youngest shouted "She took our toy! THAT LITTLE GIRL TOOK OUR TOY!"

The oldest stomped his foot and said "She took our toy AND SHE DIDN'T EVEN HAVE A FACE!"

I have to admit my blood ran cold when he said it, because he wasn't scared or perturbed in the least, just mad. I asked gentle questions and got a pretty good description of her and the story that she'd taken one of their toys (that I had seen them playing with that morning and have never seen since). She apparently had brown hair and was wearing a dress and was standing at the top of the basement stairs. The boys were not in the least scared, just very mad.

Nearly a year later, I had a houseguest staying with us who greeted me one morning with "You have a little girl here! She was standing at the foot of my bed when I woke up this morning" and I noped my way out of the room until I'd had some coffee. Houseguest is not afraid of ghosts and claims to have seen many, but since they described the same little girl my sons did I admit I've done some salting and saging since.

The other creepy thing here is that on the day my sons reported losing their toy to a faceless little girl, I both texted and emailed the incident to a friend of mine who is collecting ghost stories for a book. I remember her response about it being neat to get a report basically of an incident in progress.

When my houseguest made her report, I texted my friend again to say that I'd had another sighting. Except she had no memory of my original report. And the emails and texts I clearly remembered sending were gone. I asked the boys if they remembered the little girl who took their toy and they had no idea what I was talking about.
posted by annathea at 8:58 AM on October 31, 2017 [12 favorites]

The closest I ever come to the supernatural is musical audio hallucinations. The first was when I was in hospital with a burst appendix and peritonitis, with accompanying high fever. At night I thought I could faintly hear "The Monster Mash" being played over and over. It was around Halloween, so I guessed there was a pediatric ward on another floor and they were playing it for the kids to cheer them up. Nope. Turned out that the steady "click...click..." of my antibiotic drip's pump was laying down a beat and my brain was constructing the rest of the music around it.

I suppose I'm lucky that a) I'm skeptical by nature and b) who the hell is haunted by "The Monster Mash"? so ghosts or whatever never really entered my mind.

The fever messed up something in my brain, though, because since then whenever I'm in a quiet place with a repetitive noise like a fan I still hear faint rock music, vocals and all -- and often original even though I've never written a song in my life.
posted by Quindar Beep at 10:45 AM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

"In the same house I would wake up some mornings to a rapid knock on my second floor window next to the bed. We couldn't find a good explanation for the knocking."

Almost always a woodpecker.

One of my toddlers kept telling me he wanted to kill me so he could have my hair, which was very creepy, only it turned out he thought "kill" meant "make bald" and he just wanted all my hair to fall out. (Also, he thought baldness was caused by caterpillars crawling on your head.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:36 AM on October 31, 2017 [3 favorites]

My daughter has night terrors. They are terrible. We used to go in and comfort her until I convinced my husband that that made them worse (it does). So, now I just listen for if she gets out of bed to sleepwalk as she has in the past went sleep running which seems a bit dangerous. But, what if she's just being haunted and I don't know?! Modern parenting is so confusing....
posted by amanda at 11:40 AM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

I used to live in a house that was... interesting. As far as I know, no one lived there other than my grandparents. My grandfather built the house in 1940 before he took a government sponsored trip through Europe and the Pacific. He made it back unscathed, but with a bit a military courts martial record which is another story all together... He started a nursery for exotic plants and lived there with my grandmother and his kids until the dawn of the 21st century, when he died happy, if not all there, of Alzheimer's in a nursing home, one hundred miles away. Some years previous to this, I moved in to take care of the 8 acres and unupdated house. It was always weird.

I'm a staunch athiest, and less prone to the romantic than someone who wishes to make a living and an artist should be. So take these stories as you will.

I saw my grandfather many times in the yard, inspecting his plants, after his death. He never said or even made any move to notice me, but he was there nonetheless. It was the smell of the aftershave. I saw a young woman sitting in my bedroom once, but she looked up at me, locked eyes, and disappeared. She was not my grandmother, so I have no idea what was going on there. And finally, one cold January night, I felt someone squeeze my hand, right after I had gotten into bed, and turned out the light. I immediately, jumped up and turned it back on, but saw nothing other than my old dog, asleep on the rug.

I did have a few odd-ball friends who claimed to be psychic, so I humored them and let them "feel" for things, but again, the house was built in 1940, no one ever died there, and the land used to be an open field until the early 20th century, so tales of Civil War widows and murdered slaves mostly just made my eyes roll. Digging into the history, it tunred out the Goat man of the Southeast (a famous iternerant preacher, not a real, half-goat, half-man, sorry) had camped there once in the early 1950's, and there were a few Cherokee trade camps there in the early 19th century. But no other incidents of note had ever happened on this sandy patch of Lexington County soil.

Still. Now when I return to that town and talk to my old friends, they tell me stories of weirdnesses they experienced during one of my many parties. Figures in the bushes, children's laughter on the trails, footsteps in the attic. My father and my uncle both swear they saw a stooped, hunch back hag walk on the water and disapper at an old pond. My cousin said he saw a kangaroo once. Not the same, but it's a good story, so I'll allow it. I dunno. The best I can come up with is some sort of super-low frequency effect from the nearby high-tension lines, but again, I dunno. One thing haunts me still, maybe, just maybe, I am way more of a Gothic Romantic than I care to admit. *shudders*
posted by 1f2frfbf at 2:22 PM on October 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

Sleepwalking kids story will stick in my mind for some time.
posted by cakecrumbs at 3:53 PM on October 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

If you're comforting yourself about that last one, "A Little Hole in the Wall," with the thought that it's only a story, don't listen to the Criminal podcast episode 71, "A Bump in the Night."
posted by nicebookrack at 7:27 PM on October 31, 2017

When my houseguest made her report, I texted my friend again to say that I'd had another sighting. Except she had no memory of my original report. And the emails and texts I clearly remembered sending were gone. I asked the boys if they remembered the little girl who took their toy and they had no idea what I was talking about.

I had better not come back to this thread in a few days and find your post gone, too.
posted by anderjen at 7:31 PM on October 31, 2017 [4 favorites]