People who enjoy horror movies are mostly in it for the adrenaline rush. They get to experience an increased heart rate while satisfying their morbid curiosities in a safe place away from danger. 

But what if these frightening stories happened in real life? For these people, it was realizing their worst fears, as they shared in a recent Reddit thread. Some of them told tales that never left their minds, while others revealed personal accounts that continue to haunt them to this day. 

If you’re looking for a hair-raising jolt, this list may just do that for you.

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#1

It’s not a ghost story. It’s not a campfire tale. It’s something that really happened, in daylight, with cameras rolling and crowds cheering.

A man who had been accused of r**e, who had bragged about sexual a*****t, who faced multiple felony charges (convicted of 34 felony counts), and who was openly admired by violent extremists ran for president. Not only did he run, but millions of people rallied behind him. They waved flags with his name on them. They wore hats like uniforms. They repeated his lies until they became their truth.

Courts convicted him. Judges warned him. Women came forward with stories of abuse. Yet, his supporters doubled down, calling it all “fake,” as if repeating the word could erase reality. His crimes did not scare them, they excused them. His cruelty did not repel them. It attracted them.

And then came the worst part. He won. He held the highest office in the land, the nuclear codes in his pocket, and the power to shape laws that would outlast his presidency. People who once whispered their disgust now spoke their loyalty, because power makes monsters look like kings.

That’s the scariest story I know to be true-not that monsters exist, but that so many people saw one standing in the light and chose to follow him  anyway.

#2

You can wake up blind. Happened to me in ’22. In short, I have a super rare disease called AZOOR. Best they can guess, my body’s immune system attacked my eyes’ immune system (yes, they’re separate!) and ate chunks of my retinas. It’s still doing so, but not quite as vigorously as it did before I started seeing the results, which manifested as a sudden inability to see through my contacts or glasses. Anyways, I can still see a little bit out of half of one eye at a strength of -11.00, but I woke up like that after 38 years of seeing 20/10 with contacts or glasses. It was definitely hard to adjust to. Oh, and since autoimmune LOVES to travel in packs, I now also have RA and psoriatic arthritis, and my diabetes is getting worse! Yay! I’m the Queen of Autoimmune!

© Photo: TrailMomKat

#3

I think the H*******t does is it for me. The industrialized [end] of several million innocent men, women and children perpetrated by a government out of pure hatred. I struggle to think of anything scarier than that.

#4

A different kind of horror story, but I had a post-traumatic manic episode about a year ago, and it is *terrifying* how quickly and severely your brain can turn on you.

The episode manifested when I left my a*****e ex-wife, was r***d, and lost my job within 3 1/2 months of each other.

For several months, my brain was in a constant state of either dissociation, sheer panic, suicidality, or an irresistible need to engage in risk-taking behaviors – mostly related to substance use.

The alcohol was the worst part of it. I’d drink so I could stop feeling my [abuser], and it would work – at first. But then, my brain would tell me drinking more would make me stop thinking about it, too, so I’d drink more, and then I’d think about it more. And then my brain would tell me that more would actually make it go away, and so and so forth in the cycle.

I isolated myself from almost everyone I loved, and it wasn’t even intentional – I just couldn’t pick up my phone, and getting notifications from it literally made me panic. I went through all of my savings in a matter of months, and almost all of it went to alcohol, weed, and c*****e.

I knew, logically, during this time that I was absolutely destroying my life, but no matter how hard I tried, I *couldn’t* stop. And my brain was just sick enough to remind me that it didn’t matter how recklessly I was behaving, because ultimately I wasn’t going to survive this.

I very nearly became homeless and had to sell an expensive piece of artwork I’d inherited to rent a U-Haul and move back in with my dad in my home state. Removing myself from an environment where I knew how to get the things that were destroying me and having family look out for me is what finally pulled me out of that state, but a huge chunk of my memory during that time is just gone.

To add one more piece to this before I leave it: I have 3 cats. One is very elderly and obsessed with me, one was abandoned by my ex-wife and clearly affected by it (she was supposed to keep her, but asked a friend to babysit her while she went on vacation and never returned for her), and my third one developed such serious separation anxiety when I left my wife that if I left for even a night, she’d over groom until she was missing fur and had sores on her body. I was driving to do an odd job for someone, and considered driving off the cliff side in front of me. I thought of my cats and how terrified and sad and confused they’d be if I never came home, and the moment I realized I couldn’t k**l myself because of it was the single most horrific experience I’d ever had. Not that I wanted to k**l myself, but that I couldn’t.

Again, not a traditional scary story, but I can think of few things more horrifying.

#5

In the 1930s, near my hometown, a man k****d his wife, his MIL, and his three step-children, dismembered their bodies, and hid them in the root cellar.

My great-uncle and his father (my great-grandpa) were out hunting when their dog ran off barking. Uncle followed the dog and found a burlap bag. He opened it and found the head of one of the children.

When he told us the story, he said he looked up, and the man was standing right in front of him, another burlap bag in his hands.

His dad arrived, scared the guy away, and they reported the head to the local cops, who found the rest of the victims and arrested the k****r, who was executed (hanged) a couple of months later.

My uncle only told us the story once, but after he died, we found all the newspaper clippings about the m*****s in a trunk under his bed. I think it must have haunted him his entire life, especially since one of the kids was his age.

It’s a bit of local history I grew up hearing about, but didn’t realize my great-uncle was the one who found the bodies until I was a teenager, because he simply never talked about it except that one time.

© Photo: the_owl_syndicate

#6

In my early 20s, my wife and I had a goal of climbing all of the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. We would typically hike up a decent portion of the peak the night before, set up a tent, and camp out and summit the next day. We were climbing Crestone Needle in August 2014 and set up camp before the tree line ended. We were in a remote wooded area near a creek that was raging pretty good at the time. No other campers were around, and no hikers were seen going up or down. It was super quiet and peaceful. We cooked dinner over the fire and went to bed early. I woke up around 1am with the hair standing up on the back of my neck. The only thing I could hear was the creek roaring and the wind blowing. I remember feeling really uneasy, which was unusual because we camped out a lot and we’re very used to being out in the wilderness. I decided to get up and exit the tent. Immediately upon stepping out of the tent, I saw the outline of a man about 50 yards from our campsite. He was just standing still, staring down at our camp. I yelled up at him, but didn’t get a response. I poked my head into the tent to wake my wife up, and when I looked back for the man, he was gone. My wife and I talked about it and agreed that it was probably an early hiker who was starting their Summit push early. Both of us felt uneasy, and neither of us was able to go back to sleep. I lay in the tent for about another 45 minutes wide awake. I decided to get back out of the tent to have a look around. I stepped out of the tent and walked around, still feeling a little uneasy. Didn’t see anything and still couldn’t hear s**t. Started going back towards my tent, and when I turned to my left, I saw the guy again; this time, he was very close. Maybe 20ft or so from our tent, behind some brush. I yelled at him again and started running in his direction. He took off, and I lost sight of him. I got my wife out of the tent, we got all of our stuff packed up, and we left. The 2-hour walk back to the car in the pitch black was honestly the most terrifying part of it all.

© Photo: PowderHound40

#7

My mother wanted to sell the old family station wagon back in the mid-1970s. She had a phone call from an interested buyer, but something about him seemed off. She told my dad that she wanted him there when the guy came to look at it, and my dad was the one who went with him when he took it out for a test drive. They ended up selling it to him.

Turns out later, the guy m******d someone and used the station wagon to take the body somewhere. I don’t recall if he was a serial killer, but that was a very uncomfortable brush with danger. My mom’s intuition might have saved her life.

#8

My cousin died unexpectedly in 2016 of what we assume was an extremely aggressive cancer. He left behind his wife and two boys, aged two and a newborn. A couple years later, the wife entered a relationship with another guy who, by all accounts, was a stand-up charachter for both her and the boys. 

In 2021, the wife died of what everyone assumed was COVID. The boyfriend had her cremated extremely quickly and offered to take full custody of her sons. It soon came out that he had been ab*sing the boys, physically and s*xually. He skipped town.

The boys were adopted by my cousin’s relative, who brought them to see a child psychologist. When the therapist built enough rapport to ask the boys about the day their mother died, the boys proceeded to play act one person smothering another with a pillow.

Meanwhile, the boyfriend was charged with the r**e of a minor relative, but the trial was delayed on a technicality, and then dropped when the victim recanted. Last I heard (late 2021) he’s an assistant pastor at church in New Hampshire.

UPDATE: His full name is Marshall Corrado. Possible middle name of Neal. It appears that he is now living in Southington, Connecticut; previous associated address includes Laconia, NH where all this originally happened. There is no current association with a church that I can find. Someone with the same name was scheduled to appear at the Belknap County Superior Court in January of this year but no updates on legal status since that time.

UPDATE 2: Here’s a YouTube video featuring him and his ex-wife on some religious podcast. Had it confirmed by a relative willing to talk about it.

© Photo: oortcloudview

#9

The CIA helped bring d***s into the U.S., turned a blind eye while they spread through communities, and then the government turned around and criminalized the very people using them. Imagine your government fueling an epidemic for profit and power, then punishing the victims. That’s one of the biggest betrayals of public trust I can think of.

#10

There was this guy who kept noticing little things around his apartment felt off. But one night, he set up a hidden camera, just to prove to himself he wasn’t going crazy. When he checked the footage the next day, he saw this woman, an actual stranger, crawling out of a crawlspace in his ceiling in the middle of the night. She’d been living up there for months, sneaking down when he was asleep or at work to eat and use his stuff.

© Photo: drmazzaro

#11

This happened to me.

While in college I was working **alone** at a retail store in a shopping mall. I had closed shop for the day and I was the only person in the store. I took some stuff to the stock/back room, which also had a small card table with 4 chairs around it for meal breaks.

I returned to the front of the store to continue closing up. I was out there for like 10 minutes, then went to the back room to get my coat. When I stepped into the back room, all 4 of the chairs were facing the door in a perfectly straight line, several feet from where they should be at the table. These f*****g chairs had moved and changed direction silently with no one else but me there.

I noped the [darn] out, called mall security. They searched the store and found it empty. They said I probably moved the chairs and forgot.

I never worked there alone again.

#12

Back in 2006, when my older sister was moving to a new city for work, my parents and I helped apartment-hunt for her. My sister found a really nice apartment in a nice locality, which was absolutely perfect on paper. The residents were all working women, the landlady seemed super nice to my sister, and the location and rent were ideal. The only thing left to do was for my parents to meet the landlady and finalize the documents. However, after my mom met the landlady for the first time, she told us that she had a weird feeling about her, and asked us to keep apartment-hunting. So that’s what we did.

Anyway, fast forward a year or so, and we find out from the local newspaper that the landlady was into black magic and she had allegedly m******d some of the residents to use as sacrifices for her rituals. I wish I were lying. It is one of the most terrifying things I’ve read.

Edit: So this incident happened in Bangalore in the year 2006-2007. I’m assuming the news coverage would have taken place in 2008-2009? I’m 100% sure this happened, but I’m unable to find a news article that talks about it, partially because there was another m****r in a PG in 2024, and I can only find articles pertaining to that incident. I will keep looking for this but if anyone else comes across this article, I’d like to see it as well! Apologies for not coming up with a source at the moment.

© Photo: NervousSeagull

#13

This happened 3 months ago, but a friend of mine bought a small house in a housing complex at the start of the year. She often heard her neighbour and his girlfriend arguing loudly, as did the other homes around them.

One afternoon, she comes home from work to police and an ambulance in her cul-de-sac. She comes to find out that this neighbor had m******d his girlfriend. She tells the police she still heard him yelling two days prior. However, when the investigator came to officially interview her, he told her that the girlfriend had advanced decomposition to the extent that they couldn’t get fingerprints from her (keep in mind this was in the wintertime). Which means he had been yelling at a corpse for a while…

Scary part is the police still didn’t arrest him and he lived in the house until the girlfriend’s brother evicted him since the home was in her name.

© Photo: Angry_unicorns

#14

The case of Clive Wearing. He’s a musician who contracted a virus that destroyed the part of his brain that forms new memories. He has anterograde amnesia, meaning his memory only lasts for about 7-30 seconds.

He is constantly “waking up” for the first time, every single moment of his life. He keeps a diary, and it’s filled with entries minutes apart, each one saying something like “10:45 AM: I am now awake” with all the previous entries crossed out because he has no memory of writing them. It’s the true story of a man trapped in a never-ending moment, and the thought of that is scarier to me than any ghost story.

#15

I live not far from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. We had a serial k*ller who would pick up pr*stitutes and bring them back to his farm to “party”. Then he would k**l them and feed them to his pigs. He would also give/sell the pork to friends/neighbours.

#16

A student in the dorm next to mine had his throat slit in the night, some students got to see the victim gag for air. After the killer was jailed, he and his father filed around 200 appeals (Or tried to, at least) for his innocence, even though he was literally caught red handed.

#17

When I was 9, my grandma died of cancer. While she was on hospice at home, my grandpa was having an affair with another woman, probably months before she actually passed. Once she passed, he expected a large life insurance policy, but at some point before my grandma got really sick, her twin sister took her to get the beneficiaries changed to their three children. At some point his girlfriend decided she didn’t want anything to do with him and left him. Shortly after he found out that he wasn’t a beneficiary on the life insurance and he snapped. According to my grandma’s twin sister, the girlfriend was in the process of getting a restraining order against him when he went to her house. Her three children, two nephews and mom were home, and he went on a [end] spree. He killed the mom, her two youngest children and her nephews. Her oldest son was able to get away and run to a neighbor’s house to call the police. The article I read when I was older said the responding officers described it as one of the most horrific scenes they’d walked in on. My grandpa left and went on the run.

I remember seeing pictures flashing of my family on the news, my grandma’s twin sister, my family, and my aunt and uncles family all had police stationed outside for a week while a nationwide manhunt for my grandpa ensued. No one knew where he’d go or what he’d do. Eventually he went to my grandma’s grave and proceeded to call his three children. I answered the phone when he called my mom, she talked to him for a few minutes and was crying on the floor when she hung up. She never told me what he said. He called my uncle last and spoke to him while he died. At my grandmas grave, a passerby called the police and swat came to capture him. While he was on the phone with my uncle, swat surrounding him, he slit his own throat on top of my grandma’s grave. He’d told my uncle that he’d buried a few things of his at her grave, and my uncle eventually went back to find his wallet and a knife.

I was really young when this all happened, but my family still doesn’t talk about it. I see his picture in my mom’s house and it makes me shudder every time thinking how this man could just snap and take away so many lives, including children, similar ages to his own grandchildren. It’s incredibly scary to think that some people are just a break up or disappointment away from destroying so many lives.

#18

Hinterkaifeck. In 1922 a Bavarian family was m******d on their farm after footprints were found leading in from the woods with none leading out. The killer stayed for days feeding the animals and using the stove, then vanished.

#19

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (the system that includes the Gulf Stream) is reaching its breaking point and could collapse sometime between 2037–2064, with the average estimate around 2050.

If it did happen, the impacts would be massive: Europe would cool dramatically, sea levels along the U.S. East Coast could jump by a meter, tropical rainfall belts would shift (causing Amazon droughts and monsoon disruption), and the whole climate system would get more unstable. It would also be essentially irreversible on human timescales.

#20

The genocide & ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that has been taking place for over 7 decades by Israeli occupation forces.

#21

In the 2000s I worked for a residents’ organisation on a council estate in South London (housing project for US readers). It was poor as you would expect, with high crime but a good community.

The estate consisted of five high rise tower blocks, with our office in the basement of one. The other basements were used for storage, and it was part of my job to check them regularly. They were big basements (the blocks were oblongs on their sides rather than slim “point” blocks). The basements were dark with minimal lighting, dark corners, echoing and creepy, you get the picture.

One of the residents of the estate told me they used to use the basements for their own storage, but back in the 80s a 6-year old child had gone missing on the estate, and after a frantic search her body was found in the basement of one of the blocks. She’d been s****************d and m******d. A homeless man was arrested and convicted, I can’t remember if he’d been living down there or not.

The man who told me was an elderly, long time resident who was well respected. He said he could still remember the screams of her mother. I worked there for years and it would be mentioned every now and again by various older residents, who always talked about the mother’s screams.

Obviously this made checking that particular basement a bit creepy to say the least. Some staff wouldn’t go down there at all. I had to leave hurriedly a few times after getting the fear, but never saw anything supernatural.

I searched the internet at various points looking for evidence of the story, but could never found anything. Then a few years ago suddenly there it was. Probably the result of a newspaper putting their archives online. It was exactly how I’d been told, and pretty horrifying.

#22

I’m assuming you mean ones we are kinda connected to in some way. So I’ll go with one of those.

I worked for a year or two at a chemical type company a long time ago (90s I think?) and they had a big announcement. The company wasn’t doing quite as well as they’d hoped financially. One of the guys in the crowd was muttering how “they’d better not be talking about layoffs.” And, of course, that’s exactly what they did.

So the guy who was muttering apparently went straight out to the parking lot where his truck was and got his rifle out and was immediately swarmed by police, because they had always seen him as a bit of a concern so they prepared for exactly that.

Big thank you to whomever thought ahead that far, rather than just assuming it would be ok. (This was before mass shootings were quite as popular as today).

© Photo: limbodog

#23

Ukrainian Famine, Holodomor.

People ate their own Children.

#24

Co-worker was almost a victim of [end]-s*****e. Her husband was holding a gun to her head, telling her he was killing her for her sake as “the world is so terrible. ” Stand off with police lasted long enough for her to get a chance to shove him away. He shot himself in the head before she even got far enough away to avoid the splatter. She had to quit her job after due to the ptsd and the fact that she was a nurse in a mental health ward. She also needed a police guard around her house for the next month due to writers (read news jockeys) kept trying to break in to get the story. After that, she changed her name in order to avoid talking about it. The only reason she told me is because she had to take a call at the call center we work in (not even remotely related to health care) where the woman on the other line was s******l and couldn’t get through to the s*****e hotline. I was just trying to calm her down enough to drive home.

#25

The scariest story I know would be the Villisca ax murders. Happened in Villisca, Iowa in 1912. A husband, wife, their 4 children, and 2 neighbor children came home from a church service, had cookies and milk, and went to bed. That night they were all m******d in their beds with an ax.
The next morning their neighbor noted that it was pretty late and nobody had done the chores. All the doors were locked so she got a hold of the husband’s brother to check on the family. That when they were discovered.
What made it so heinous were a lot of people trampled through the house, destroying any evidence.
They never found out who did it.

#26

Dominique Pelicot. That story really makes you question just how evil everyday people can be.

#27

Many years ago, on a road trip from L.A. to San Francisco,  husband and i stopped at a rest stop.  We slept there for a couple of hours and then when the sun rose, i went to use the restroom.  Stepping inside i noticed papers were taped to the mirror.  I had to use the toilet really bad so i just stepped into the stall. Washing my hands after, i looked up and read the paper on the mirror before me.  It said” If you want a good time, call “[intimacy]-xxxx”. Then it describes what he was capable of doing and how and his extrodinary god given “attributes” that would be used in the process. Then at the bottom of the paper, it said”but if you don’t want to call, i will be right outside the door, by the big tree, waiting for you. ” My heart just went cold and i froze.  I don’t want to move and i am looking around to see if he is in the restroom, feeling stupid for not reading that paper before or checking the stalls.  I just stood there and waited for what seemed a eternity for my husband to notice that i was gone to long and come get me.  It wasn’t that long, but it felt that way. I ran out grabbed my husband and went to the car.  I looked back and sure enough, there was a guy by the tree, just outside the door. Exactly the way he described himself, (the exterior part anyway), and he looked at me, then quickly looked away.  This was way before cell phones so there was no way for me to call police. Never again have i gone into a public bathroom and NOT checked. .

#28

Someone I know has met Jeffrey Dahmer irl. He thankfully wasn’t his type but this person is so nice and to think they were near a serial killer makes me so sad.

#29

My mother went to a recruitment meeting with Heavens Gate founders Do and Ti. She wanted to join but they wouldn’t take children. Years later, when they “transitioned” she dug out the pamphlet they were giving out and told me the story.

#30

My grandparents lived in Monterey Park, Los Angeles when my mom was a kid. They lived there during the [end] sprees committed by Richard Ramirez aka “the Night Stalker”

My Grandpa was a trucker who often found himself coming home late at night. He would typically crack himself a beer and watch tv at night before going to sleep. The living room was right in front of the front door.

My Grandpa says that late at night, he noticed the door jiggling like someone was trying to break in. He and my family were well aware of his spree at the time and my grandpa didn’t hesitate to grab his mystery mouska tool from the closet (a 12g shotgun) and proceeded to chamber a round.

Everyone knows the distinct sound of a shotgun being loaded. My grandpa locked and loaded one time and said the jiggling suddenly stopped and after a while he was able to go bed. I don’t remember if he reported it to the police but I think he did. It’s crazy to think I may not exist had it not been for my Grandpa.

A few days later The Nightstalker went after someone in Monterey park. I know it could’ve been anyone trying to break in but I truly think he was targeting my family and thought there were no men home as there are only daughters and mom, no sons.

#31

In 1991, my brother’s best friend (B) witnessed the [end] of his family. B lived on an acreage with his grandparents, his cousin, and his uncle. It was during summer break and the uncle shot the grandparents and cousin, put the bodies on a brush pile to burn them, and then took B into town for ice cream.

B was only 7 years old. We never saw him again, and it really tore my brother up. We lived in a very rural, boring area so it was a huge shock , nothing like that had ever happened before.

Until 2022, when a woman I’d gone to school with was m******d by her husband in an attempt to get her life insurance and also free himself up for the other secret relationship he had going. He tried to stage it as an accident, that she had been crushed by a round hay bale that fell off the tractor forks, but the investigators noted she had blunt force trauma to the head inconsistent with his story. Even more f****d up is that they had a house fire a year prior that he claimed started when he was deep frying perogies at 3 am, but most people now suspect was his first attempt at murdering her.

#32

Before my wedding, my father-in-law (to be) warned me about stag night shenanigans. When he was a lad, he and a bunch of mates were on a stag night, and having got a bit [angry] they handcuffed the stag to a streetlamp and went for a drive laughing. When they got back they found that a drunk driver had crashed into the lamppost and killed the stag.

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