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Ilona Baliūnaitė

“Will The Man In The Attic Come With Us?”: 60 Of The Most Unsettling Things Kids Said

Listening to kids speak their mind can be a very fun thing to do, especially when it comes to the little ones. Having recently learned to put syllables together to express themselves—but without a filter yet that would stop them from saying how they actually feel about dad minus his beard, for instance—they never cease to amaze those around them with their remarks.

Granted, not all of their commentary is equally amusing. Some things they say can seriously upset or shock their parents and make them wonder where their child could have possibly picked that up. The moms and dads on this list probably did. Redditor u/JrlTan asked them what was the scariest thing their offspring has ever said to anyone, and they shared stories ranging from weird to terrifying, and beyond. Scroll down to find their answers below and see for yourself how alarming certain kids’ messages can get.

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“Will the man in the attic come with us when we move?”My adorably innocence 3 year old lovingly told me, “Mommy, when you die I’m going to keep your body so I can pet your hair.” He was petting my hair at that moment. "Mummy, the invisible man wants to come in your bedroom." ABSOLUTELY NOT.I'm not a parent. But I was putting my 2yo niece to bed, while babysitting one night, when she looked over my shoulder and said "who's that?" I looked behind me and asked "who?" She said **"the man behind you. He was with you in the kitchen too."** We were the only ones in the house. I spent the rest of the evening in the living room, on the one chair with its back to the wall, glancing around nervously.My son told me he had thoughts of ending himself when he was about 16. Scared the hell out of me for months while we got him professional help. He is doing much better now at 18 but I am still worried that one day I will lose my son.When my daughter was three she came home from preschool one day and her demeanor changed the minute we came home. She became very withdrawn and looked very upset. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “The angel on the roof is angry with us.” ?Not my kid, but my friend's. They were across the country visiting family and out for a drive. Her 4 year old points down an old overgrown road (more of a dirt track) and said "that was where I used to go to school". She told him he didn't even go to school yet. Mentioned it to her brother when they drove by another day, and he told her that well down that track used to be a schoolhouse in the 1800s. Same kid was on a walk with Mom in our town around a fairly wooded pond. He asked his Mom if they could go another way. She said there was only only path and asked why? He responded "I don't like that man hanging from the tree". Needless to say, they moved away from that area very quickly!Woke up one night and my 3 year old isn't in his bed. It's about 3 am. The house is dark and quiet. I go downstairs and a nightlight is on, and my son is just sitting on the couch staring into space. Doesn't say a word. The hair on my neck was standing up. I said quietly "what's going on?" He looked a me strangely and said "I just have to wait until everyone is asleep" Goosebumps all over my body, and I felt like I was in a horror film. Kept a very close eye on him for a few weeks. Kid is a doctor today and did not grow up to be a criminal. At least yet.A few weeks after my son turned 2 yo he told me “Look, the smoke dissipates”. This is not a word in our daily vernacular so I asked him what that means and he said “It disappears “ Impressed, I asked him where did you learn that word and he replied “When I was an adult” I laughed and asked him when were you an adult and without missing a beat answered”Before I was born”?"The man in the closet! He won't stop staring!" Moved just last year, my 4 year old said she saw an old man walking around in our shared closet and would stare at us. Did some research and the man that lived here before us died in that closet.Not my child, but my nephew, (from a very Christian family) one day said “if we all go to heaven when we die, why don’t I k**l everyone, then we can all be in heaven “. He was 5 and meant it in the most positive way. He just wants to get everyone into heaven fastDoes pointing and laughing at the empty corner of the room count? Might need to go burn some sage…My son told a cop my husband was lying about his name. Tbf it only lasted a minute because then he immediately said “your name is dad!”My kid and my niece have such an uncanny connection they live in different countries. When my kiddo was 4/5 we went for pizza and this little random spot they had seen us drive past, whatever seemed cool. Kiddo hits me with the ‘me and niece always wanted to open up a pizza shop here when I was in a wheelchair and niece was my little girl…we lived across the street in that house.’ Okay what a cute little story they’re a kid whatever. Time passes and we are parked and see a man having a hard time getting his wheelchair out of his van bc the parking space wasn’t quite wide enough, ‘we should help him I remember how annoying that used to be for me and niece’ instantly took me back to our pizza afternoon. (Yes we helped the gentleman) we chat a bit about the previous life and kiddo has things to say that are repeated. Time passes again and we are visiting my niece they haven’t physically seen each other in months, but on video chat and through photos. My niece learning to talk now and get her words out clearly keeps calling my kid nana (mothers father) and she gets so excited whenever my kid gets up and walks. I tell my sil about what my kiddo’s told me and she tells me that my niece always wants to go up to elderly ppl she sees in wheelchairs trying to push them/help them with their mobility. My niece and my kiddo get ready for bed while we stay with them and they insist of sleeping together bc they missed each other bc my kiddo said ‘it’s been so many lives’ Not creepy per se but just always so interesting.A few months after my mom passed, my daughter was sitting in the tv room. She looked down the hall and I could tell something caught her eye. She got up and said "Yaya is in her room", and proceeded to go in my mom's room and shut the door. I could hear my daughter talking and laughing through the door. I was equal parts scared of and hoping to hear my mom too, but I didn't.My daughter is 3 and is working on performing her own nighttime routines. We asked her how she gets ready for bathtime and gave her her stuffed bunny to demonstrate on. She takes the bunny and begins explaining the steps of her routine, mimicking the actions on the doll. “First you take off your pants.” * she wiggles Rabbit’s legs* “Then you take off your shirt.” *she wiggles Rabbit’s arms* “Then you take off your underwear.” *wiggles the legs again* “Then you take off your hands.” *she pulls on Rabbit’s arm in a plucking motion* “Then you take off your arms.” *Rabbit’s arms are wrenched immediately* “Then you take off your legs, your hair, your tummy, your face!” *she gleefully laughs as she mimes ripping each part off of Rabbit* “All done!” *she looks up at us with a smile. We are aghast.*One night tucking my kids in: My then 4 year old: “Mummy, when you die I’m going to keep your bones.”. My then 6 year old: “Ooh - we could make a wind chime!”. The creepiest and also the sweetest thing my kids have ever said to me.My three year old: *Poop is like a fart cake.*Woke up to my 1.5yo standing on the bed saying “daddy” repeatedly while looking at the door. Daddy is on the run for almost unaliving me ? needless to say I didn’t sleepI cut my foot on a piece of broken glass. My kid (about 5 at the time) said, "Don't clean it up! I can use your blood for painting!"My daughter at nursery (Aged 3) came home and said “Mammy there was a lady on the roof eating cats “.. Poor bugger had a raging temperature.3 year old daughter whispered, "No one is coming to help you."Driving by a cemetery when my kid was about 3 years old. “Who are all those people standing around there?” There was no one standing anywhere in the cemetery.My mum told me a story about me years ago….. When I was about 2 I was sitting in my high chair in the kitchen with my parents and grandparents and suddenly started speaking Welsh- I am Welsh, but I’ve never spoken it fluently, and we exclusively spoke English at home. I basically said that I was from x (a small market town about 20 miles from where we lived), that I used to work on a farm with my brothers and sisters and I didn’t have any shoes. Apparently I also said that I preferred ‘this house’. I certainly have no memory of this other life but it freaked my parents and grandparents out at the time!When my son was about 3, he told my friends pregnant wife that her baby was dead. A couple weeks later I was informed that she had a miscarriage.At 5 years old, "Mommy, Danny put his hand under my skirt today." Still don't know how I didn't wreck the car (we were on our way home).My little friend went through a phase of telling “dark stories” when she was 3-4. She was also really Into playing games about taking her toys to the doctor. We were playing and she said “this toy is really scared of the doctor!“ and I said “why? Doctors are there to help us!” Or something like that. She said “he is scared because this is the bad nurse. She gives him medicine so he can’t move or scream and then cuts him open and takes his insides out.” I was just like “yeah. That’s a good reason to be scared!” We have no idea where she came up with that stuff. She’s 6 now and all her stories are about fairies and princesses. I kind of miss her dark stories- they were more creative, even though some kept me up at night!”One day she told me she spends her whole period week imagining cutting out her uterus. She described it in great detail.Teacher here. 3 yr old stopped playing to say, unprompted, “Humans are just meat you know.” Then returned to playingDad, I took an overdose. I'm not sorry. We have been with them 24 hours/day ever since. We are exhausted and burnt out but on the weekend they dyed their hair and was kind to their brother, and I think (hope) that we have turned a cornerMy toddler (2.5yo) recently shared a ghost sighting with us. She has done it before but usually not so confidently. We try very hard not to show her how interested we are because we don't want her to start making things up (more than she already is, hopefully speaking, lol) Anyway, she stopped mid-play with my husband and I the other day and completely had a mood shift. We had been all making playdough ice cream and laughing and talking. She stopped, looked to her right, and set down her ice cream to wave. She said, "Hi ghost!" Pleasantly and just smiled. Was suddenly much more quiet and observant, more calm, not as lost in the playing. Similar to how we'd be if someone passed by us in public or interrupted for a brief moment. You're still in a good mood, but not going to rudely keep playing instead of saying hello.... if that makes sense. It was an open spot of floor above our basement stairs. She was looking slightly up, so it'd have been about the height of an older kid, or taller and standing on the stairs. We both slowed what we were doing and made eye contact and said, "There's a ghost?" And she says, "Yes! Right there!" All smiles. We nonchalantly went, "Oh, there you are! Hey ghost!" She didn't even incorporate it into her game or make any more of a deal about it. She just started up her ice cream making again and let it be. I think the scary part comes from not knowing what's going on in her little mind, not even the ghost part. Because clearly, it's quite peaceful. ?‍♀️My daughter was performing at one of her school events when she told me she saw my grandmother. She was dead and we missed her funeral that day.We found him in the unfinished basement with the lights off in the middle of the night. Standing in the corner whispering. And he told the therapist, the devil comes to my window at night My daughter asked why we can't cure world hunger by eating the dead people...My four year old told me a few weeks ago that she “remembers her Popo from a long time ago. He was a really smart guy.” She was conceived about a week after my husbands father passed. A couple of nights ago she was sleeping in my bed while my husband was working out of town and she sat up from a dead sleep and said “Popo is here” laid down and went right to back to sleep. We never call him by that name. My husband says my Dad or I call him by his actual name. The name she said was given by his other grandchildren that we very rarely see.I was driving my son to daycare. It was just the two of us as I already dropped my other son off at school. My then three-year old said to me, "Mommy, I love you more than my first mommy." I said, "Your first mommy?" He said, "Yes, my first mommy in California" (we live in the US, but about as far from California as you can get). I said, "You lived in California?" He said, "Yes, up until Jason stabbed me and then I came to you!" I said, "Who is Jason?" and then he just started talking about something else. I tried to get more info from him on it, but he never talked about it again. So weird and I can't imagine where he would have gotten the fodder for it to make it up in his imagination. The only Jason we knew was someone he saw only occasionally and my son liked him. There was no fear or bad feelings associated with him. The only media he saw at that point was various kids' TV. Still kind of freaks me out almost 10 years later!I think babies and toddlers are so close to the other side, whatever that is or whatever that even means… While I don’t have kids, I trust my mom regarding my sister. Two unusual things happened when she was around two and a half ~~months~~ years old. She spoke early and at an advanced level very young. One day my sister tells my mom that she misses the place before this one. My mom doesn’t understand and she asks what she means. “I was with the light. Before here.” My sister offered helpfully. Not really understanding still, my mom asks if she means before like yesterday or last week? Her bed? My sister shakes her head and says, “before everything. The light! It’s very comfortable there.” Mom was weirded out by it, but kids say weird stuff, so she chalked it up to that. Until Christmas. My sister is now in her early forties. The internet was not a thing when we were babies in the early eighties. She was not in daycare as my mom stayed home with us for a few years. I say this to preface the lack of exposure for what’s coming. The day before Christmas Eve when my sister was two years ten months old, she tells my mom, “I really want a camel for Christmas!” My mom is kinda shaken. She’s never exposed her to camels. She has no idea where my sister got the word or even if she really understood what a camel was. Buuut, just in case, my mom took her s****y sewing skills into them laundry room where her old sewing machine is. She cuts out a dromedary camel using two pieces of brown fabric and sews them together with some cotton balls. She gives the crappy nearly 2D camel a couple button eyes and a mouth made of uneven black stitching. Christmas morning comes, and my sister opens up this stupid looking homemade camel. But without missing a beat she giggles and exclaims, “oh good! It’s Omar, my camel!” If my parents didn’t expose her to camels, they absolutely didn’t expose her to Middle Eastern names. Yet, that’s what my sister decided her camel would be called. Now the last odd factor. My sister and I are not biologically related. We’re both adopted. I’m a Hispanic guy of Mexican ancestry (though really, my genetics trace back to old imperial Spain). But my sister? Yeah, my sister is Syrian and East Indian… Later, I asked my mom if I had said anything weird. Maybe I asked for churros or really wanted a chihuahua or something. But no… my mom shook her head and told me I was essentially silent as a baby. I didn’t really cry and didn’t really fuss (I was in foster care for a while before the adoption, and apparently my first foster home wasn’t great). And though I spoke fairly early as well, I didn’t say much. But I understood plenty. Yet I didn’t make any creepy requests or have any otherworldly insights like my sister. And so my journey of disappointing my parents began!My two year old never stops talking and has said some really weird and freaky things lately. The creepiest one was when we were putting her to bed and she said goodnight to the "closet man" and when we asked her who she meant she told us it was the little man that lived in the small access hatch she has in the back of her closet. Scary thing is she has never seen that hatch open and i'm pretty sure she has never seen it before because there has been a big storage tote in front of it since before she was born! You bet I checked the hatch the next morning when she was downstairs and found nothing but dust and spiderwebs in there so that made me a bit happier!I was at a silent auction and there was a really creepy 100 year old doll that I bid on as a joke. Turns out nobody else wanted it, so I won. My wife and I are talking the whole time about how creepy this doll was. As I stood in line to pay for it, my daughter asked to hold the doll, so I gave it to her. A few older ladies starting coming up to her and saying things like “That doll is older than I am.” and “You’re so lucky to have such a pretty doll.” I guess because my daughter had been listening to us talking, she would respond with things like “Did you hear that? She’s laughing at you.” I tried so hard not to laugh at the look on their faces, but the last one got me. My daughter put her ear down to the dolls face and with a very serious look said to a lady “I think the doll just said the ‘F-word’.”My daughter was 4 when she said "you know I died in a jail when someone hit my head then I came to you" My first born daughter, when she was around 5 or 6 years old. She use to take her dolls and place pennies on their eyes so "Sam" can play with them.....don't know a Sam.... I hid the pennies...nope, big ol'nope.My daughter told me there was a fire in the kitchen. It was a lit candle ?I told my father and grand father that I remembered dying in WWII.He drew something and asked me what it was. As clues, he told me it was at the stairs (we were in the family area on the second floor of our house at the time, facing said stairs), but sometimes it was at the bedroom door (also on said floor), and it didnt have any legs. The answer is ghost.So I have a 16 year old young man and one time he woke me up dead of my sleep at 2am and said (they are coming) and gave me that odd freaking stair! Turns out he was fully asleep!My 4 year old son asked me if i prefer death or labour very loudly in public Took me a sec to realise that those are the names of two songs that i’d been playing quite frequently in the house lolAt 3 am in the morning, I was a single mum and lived alone with my 3-year old at the time: “Mum, there’s someone over there at our window”.My eldest had an imaginary friend he claimed to be the ghost of a child that died in our house. He would sit in his room having conversations with him. It was f*****g creepy. His imaginary friend was quickly forgotten a couple of weeks after he started preschool and we all breathed a sigh of relief.Not my child, but a friends child was sitting in bed with their mother and said the red eyed people were coming down from the roof, they also hid in the wardrobe, in the evening they would come into the house from the forest, she said she would watch them walk out of the forest into the house.My then 2 year old: You'll be scared. There's a ghost coming for you. Now run."Daddy, there's a caveman in your kitchen!" It was a sticker she put on the floorI ask the kid, “whatcha drawing?” Kid: “oh, a land of infinite darkness where darkness reigns.” Cue me going through the whole video collection thinking I must have missed something.Neighbor kid walked up to me one day, just said "I learned how to start a fire today" and walked off.My two year old, who was just beginning to understand the world, was standing next to me in the kitchen and talking/giggling to himself "horses don't have eyes, horses don't need eyes" followed by laughter.We were staying on an island and waiting for the last barge back to mainland . It was just after dark and we drove through a small old cemetery to kill time. It was empty and no one around, but my 1.5 year old daughter was waving hello and giggling like she was seeing someone.My 5 year old said he sees an old man on the stairs, i asked him to show me where exactly and he keeps pointing to the ceiling above the stairs (as if the man he refers to would be hanging..). Very odd.My two and a half year old at the doctor this past Friday when they were going to take some blood from me “Mommy, I want your blood!”Daddy who is that behind you? * we were alone in a room at the children’s hospital -*My younger sister was about two or three and ended up waking up in the middle of the night screaming and crying. She wouldn't stop saying that something was in the corner. She was inconsolable for at least an hour. I assume it was a night terror but it lasted much longer than night terrors I've seen from others (my own kid today suffered from them when younger).I learned to play that chess game when I lived in the castle with my other mommy and daddy.
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