Many people have at least a few scary stories stored in their heads, in case they’re ever in a position to tell one; for instance, when friends decide to share spooky stories sitting around a bonfire or at a Halloween party, where, just like the costumes, each story is more creative than the last one. But some horror stories are not the fruit of someone’s creativity; they are real accounts of real things that happened to real people, making them all the more spine-chilling.
One netizen became curious about such real stories, so they turned to the Reddit community, asking netizens to share the scariest stories they know to be completely true. And share they did. On the list below, you can find their answers, some of which are firsthand accounts; so if you’re interested in terrifying stories, too, continue scrolling to browse them, but please be aware that some of them can get pretty upsetting.
#1
A Soviet officer saw on his computer that America had launched nuclear weapons against his nation.
Instead of ending the world he went, "Must be a faulty computer, I will check."
How there isn't a statue of him in bronze in every city on the planet I'll never know.
His name was Colonel Stanislav Petrov.
Image credits: Lizzy_Of_Galtar
#2
A guy I used to work with, who was in his early 30s, in great shape, didn’t drink or smoke, and always showed up to work with a smile and an almost annoyingly positive outlook on life, got diagnosed with a rare and aggressive hard to cure form cancer. He was very open about his lifestyle, proud to not smoke and not drink, was really into music, worked out every day. I’m talking this guy was the exact poster child for someone who would live a long life. The chemo reduced him down to a bald husk of his former self for several months, but he still came into work a handful of times in a wheelchair to fill us in on the details.
Finally it went into remission, he told everyone. He was still pale and skinny but he gained strength back and was able to walk. Facebook posts about his recovery and thankfulness to be alive, able to enjoy food again and play music like he wanted. One year after remission the cancer came back aggressively and k**led him. This man was as innocent as they come, just a happy go lucky dude. He was brave. and gave cancer a run for its money for a couple years though. F**k cancer you f*****g absolute f*****g f**k.
Image credits: rlm236
#3
My cousin picked up a hitchhiker about 20 years ago. Nice enough guy. Cousin was hungry so stopped at McDonald's, grabbed the hitchhiker some breakfast, too. Dropped him off where the guy had said he was headed. No big deal.
Next morning, my cousin's watching the morning news and sees that hitchhiker's face. Dude was a serial k*ller and had k*lled someone that picked him up. Cousin calls the cops and they have him come in. Turns out the hitcher had k*lled the very *next* person after my cousin that had given him a ride. He'd k*lled a few people that had given him rides, that was his MO.
They asked the hitcher why he didn't k*ll my cousin. He said "eh, I'd planned to, but he was a really nice young man, he bought me breakfast. I couldn't k*ll someone that bought me breakfast."
Image credits: TrailMomKat
#4
This is a personal one, and I find it terrifying on a couple levels, but the main one I'll elaborate on at the end.
In early 2007 my father seemed to be in otherwise good health. He'd been working with his PCP to get his cholesterol under control, his heart seemed healthy from EKGs and whatnot. The outlook seemed good.
He catches a nasty strain of the flu during a business trip to South Korea and is still dealing with it 2 weeks after he gets home. Like a jacka*s, he takes no time off from work, even working longer hours. His coworker finds him one morning dead at his desk from a massive heart attack.
The coroner opens him up and there's a huge amount of damage to his heart that she claims would normally take years to occur.
My family is devastated. His PCP attends the memorial service and is completely beside himself trying to logic out what could have gone wrong, because all tests and scans showed that my father's heart health wasn't at risk. He'd specifically dedicated a lot of time and energy to working with my father to ensure that, due to a family risk of heart disease.
We eventually learned that the influenza virus increases your risk of a heart attack exponentially. My father further increased his chances by constantly working to the point of physical exhaustion, and making it harder for his body to fight off the virus. The damage to his heart was caused by the virus itself getting into it and directly attacking the tissue.
A lot of people seem to think the flu is just a minor cold that you get over in a week, but in reality it's a deadly virus that *will* k*ll you if you don't take the proper precautions. That, to me, was terrifying to learn.
This is also why when people were like "Oh, it's just like a flu" about COVID-19, I could feel the bile building up in my gullett. It can k*ll you, and it definitely will if you indulge in the same buffoonery people did for COVID.
Image credits: bloomingfireweed
#5
Outside of batombong town, in Cambodia, there is a cave, the floor of the cave is I think 20-30 feet below the entrance. The khmer rouge used it as an open air grave. They would shoot people then throw the body into the cave.
But sometimes they didn't want to use bullets, so they would beat the person with rifle stocks, and then throw them into the cave, if they were lucky they were dead by the time they landed. Sometimes the khmer rouge just threw people into the cave, and maybe they broke some bones when they fell.
People spent their last days on earth dehydrating in a cave full of bodies in various states of decomposition, in near pitch black, very likely being able to hear other people who were also dying. There is also a decent chance that a person would be on top of a corpse. And, because it is Cambodia, it would have been hot, humid, and full of mosquitoes that can transmit malaria and dengue fever.
I have seen the cave, when I was there the bodies were all undisturbed. Just piles of skeletons. They have since collected the remains and made a monument in the cave. The knowledge that so many people ended their time on earth with such barbarity, fear, and pain still haunts me.
Image credits: ndraiay
#6
That during covid and other crises many political leaders would happily sacrifice your life (and probably any but their own) for gain.
Image credits: Heavy_Direction1547
#7
There’s an extremely high number of child ab*sers that apply to be foster carers. I lived in over 60+ homes growing up and in all apart from one I experienced either physical, emotional or sexual abuse. There’s not a single person I know that was in foster care that hasn’t been abused.
One foster family in particular used to really creep me out, and they always made me take a ‘night drink’ before bed. One night I didn’t drink it and I was woken up by my foster father getting into my bed in the middle of the night. I told social services but they didn’t believe me, I kept crying about it at school and telling everyone and all they done was move me to a family that after a few months started physically abusing me instead.
Image credits: anonymous21123
#8
My great grandfather came home from world war 2 with shell shock and my great grandma refused to sleep in the same bed as him because he would keep repeating “no don’t k*ll Tom!!” Which was what he said before he witnessed his childhood friend getting k*lled.
He luckily managed to get therapy, and was ok, but wheelchair bound up until I was about 11 where at Christmas dinner he sat while we all ate, completely frozen, my granddad asked “you ok dad?” to which he started crying and suddenly let out a very loud and hurt filled “don’t k*ll Tommy” and started crying.
Ik it’s not “scary” but it freaked me out :(.
#9
My friend got kidnapped and drugged when she was 13 and the only reason she didn’t end up a victim is because they happened to get pulled over while the police were looking for a totally different guy with the same car.
They basically realized something was up right away and yolked him out of the car. F*****g wild to think about what have happened to her otherwise.
Image credits: bashbishcrawls
#10
Bayer knowingly sold HIV contaminated medication to South Americans in order to not lose profit.
They were caught and fined but their profit was far higher than the fine, so literally infecting and k*lling hundreds of thousands of innocent people was lucrative.
Image credits: anon
#11
My uncle and his girlfriend were hitchhiking down the mountains of colorado and were picked up by a man. A little ways down the road, he stops the car and asks my uncle if he can check the tire, he thinks he ran something over.
My uncle gets out and the man drives away with his girlfriend and pulled a weapon on her. She immediately opens the door and jumps out while he’s driving.
My uncle and his gf reconvene and were okay, just were trying to process what happened. At a later time on the news they saw a story about a serial k*ller and it ended up being the man who picked them up. It was Ted Bundy.
#12
Robert Pickton a serial k*ller who operated a pig farm in the Vancouver area and would feed his prey to his pigs and his bacon was the best in the area! Many people grew up eating his pork products.
Image credits: richglassphoto
#13
The guy who died in the Nutty Putty Cave.
Image credits: blue_taco_tree
#14
The story of a continuous days-long shark attack following a US navy ship sinking as told in Jaws was real.
Image credits: Broomstick73
#15
The m*rder of Junko Furuta. A handful of her classmates abducted her, tortured her in repulsive ways for almost two months and then disposed of her body when she died.
#16
Western capitalist countries will never move to effectively address human caused climate change because the changes necessary will force corporations to take losses. It will never matter what the human cost has already been or will be. The rich will not accept the costs to their earnings or lifestyles.
#17
When I was a kid, there was a peeping tom in the neighborhood. But the weird part is we all knew who he was, a little older guy named Ralph who lived a couple streets over and smoked like a chimney. We knew because he was caught once early on by a neighbor while on their roof, watching them through the skylight (the neighbor had left a ladder against the house when doing work earlier that day) but after that he was like a ghost, impossible to catch.
People would find footprints and cigarette butts outside windows, smell cigarette smoke, and occasionally see the red cherry on the cigarette glow in the woods. Occasionally angry dads and teenagers who spotted him out in the darkness would give chase, but he moved like a deer through the woods and no one could put hands on him. The cops were involved a few times and they dragged him in, but it was never for long (partially I think because he had a disabled wife for whom he was the sole carer.) He was sorta a neighborhood boogie man, though thankfully seemed mostly harmless if terribly creepy.
Many years later, there were a rash of break-ins around the neighborhood. People even joked at the time that it must not be Ralph, because we all figured he had copies of everyone's hide-a-keys already if he wanted to go inside (sidenote: we later learned that he definitely DID have keys to some houses.) Anyway, everyone's guard was up.
One night, one of the neighbors heard a commotion outside, and ran outside to find a stranger laid out in his driveway, beat to s**t. They called 911 and when the police arrived, they were able to identify the guy as someone who had previous arrests for B&E and found items from the previous break-ins in his vehicle nearby and later at his apartment. As for how he ended up taking a bloody nap in the driveway? He said he was jumped from behind in the dark and never got a good look at the guy. All he remembered for certain was that the guy stunk of cigarette smoke.
#18
When I was 13-14 I got into play-by-post role-playing. It was on the forum section of the official Harry Potter website lmao. Not that we would RP as students or anything, it was all made-up characters and took place in a bar. The "leader" of the group was a very talented writer. We got to talking OOC and eventually linked up on MSN Messenger.
He was the first internet friend I made. We found out we both were from Minnesota and not too far from each other, but never met in person. I got to know him very well over two-some years. He was a year older than me, but was an extremely talented guy. Very well spoken, well read on topics I wasn't even thinking about at that age, and made very impressive Flash animations. Stick Death was big around then, so it was stuff like that.
He lived with his grandmother, 'cause his mom was a drunk and his dad was dead. He talked about being bullied at school, his s**t home life, etc. I remember once he said he told his grandma that he wanted to k*ll himself and that her only response was to do it outside so he doesn't make a mess of the house...
We talked a lot and got to know each other really well over our friendship. He'd disappear occasionally a week or two at a time 'cause of his depression, but would always pop back up. Until he didn't.
Breaking news was all over the TV one afternoon. There was a school shooting in the town he lived in. I immediately knew who the shooter was, well before the news announced it.
He k*lled his grandpa and his grandpa's girlfriend, fellow students, teachers and then himself.
The FBI came to my house the weeks following and questioned me, but I didn't know his plans to do that. They took my computer to examine our interactions.
I grieved him privately, but he's forever going to be a school shooter. That's the scariest thing I've ever been involved in.
#19
I’ll tell a very personally scary one.
Good friend of mine from high school. Was driving his perfectly normal family in their perfectly normal minivan, on the highway. They were on vacation, headed to Disney World.
A pickup coming the other way crossed the center line and hit them head on. He and his two sons were k*lled instantly. His wife and daughter (the youngest child) were critically injured but survived.
He was literally one of the two or three genuinely kindest people I ever met. Got up that morning all set for a fun family adventure. Cruising along the highway, and then lights out. In an instant. And his wife/daughter left behind to go it alone.
Bad things happen to good people. To anyone. And you don’t see them coming. As a parent, that’s scary.
#20
My childhood friends took over a gas plant in Algeria, held the workers hostage and then k*lled 37 people and themselves.
Image credits: CWB2208
#21
Close friend of the family. Single young woman.
Back in the 80's. Bought her first house. Small house in a quiet neighborhood (They all were in my town).
So ya know she's moving in her one small U-Haul worth of stuff. Nice summer day. Most neighbors see this and come up and introduce themselves.
Anyway, as the story goes, it was warm, summer, no AC (you could get houses with no AC back then) so she has the windows all open to try and let some breeze through.
Now it's night. She's absolutely exhausted from the move, so she walks into her back bedroom, and flops on her bed. All the lights were on in the front living room / kitchen part of the house, but she didn't turn them on in the bedroom. She said she was just gonna rest for a few minutes and get back to putting stuff away, but she fell asleep.
She said she didn't know how long it was, but she woke up to a sound. And then she realized what it was once she got her bearings. Someone was slowly and trying to quietly, cut the screen out of that window with a razorblade. After the fact we assumed the idea was they would secretly enter the dark part of the house assuming she was still up in the lit part and lie in wait for her.
She sat up in the bed and yelled "I have my magnum right here next to me, and if you don't GTFO i'll shoot!" or something to that effect. She said she heard the footfalls of whoever it was hauling a*s away.
Which was lucky for her. Because she had no gun. She didn't even have phone service hooked up to the house yet. (no cell phones in the 80's for most people). She had successfully bluffed her way out of God knows what...
I've heard a lot of scary true stories in my life - but this one has stuck with me ever since I was a teenager. In that moment, she shot her shot and it worked.
#22
The guy who volunteered to be eaten by a cannibal has got to be up there.
Image credits: JBoozehound
#23
People have not enjoyed me telling them that my neighbour was dead in his flat for at least 2 weeks and was only discovered when I called the police to request a welfare check as he hadn't been seen and there was a weird bin juice smell in the hallway.
I know this happens a lot, I've heard many stories worse, even but I know this one happened coz it was the guy next door.
Image credits: Unihornella
#24
My dad got into a car crash head on with a convertible with a young couple in it and the top part of the convertible window decapitated them instantly. He ended up falling into something red (berries,blood). And when the cops and medics showed up they were freaking out and telling him to lay down, he was actually fine, witnessing that screwed him up though.
Image credits: fandasti
#25
My brother in law roomed with Jeffrey Dahmer at Ohio State freshman year.
Image credits: copper8061
#26
My wife's neighbor completely lost his s**t. He k*lled his whole family, the dogs, and he even shot the houseplants and the fishtank.
Image credits: O51ArchAng3L
#27
My father's ship sank in the North Atlantic. Most of his shipmates(including the friend he enlisted with) died of exposure while awaiting rescue.
The bodies remained in the lifeboat.
Image credits: blarg-zilla
#28
One of my friend's neighbors had a secret basement dungeon where he used to keep kidnapped women.
Image credits: SixicusTheSixth
#29
Slid under an 18 wheeler on the highway in a blizzard bc of road conditions. Poor guy thought he k*lled me as thetrailer dragged my car half a mile before he could stop and I shot out into the median. Car totaled and saved my life but insurance still tried to double rates even after being deemed not at fault. Classic.
#30
My high school gf called late one night after I was home and in bed. She said that something had happened and asked if I could come over. She was clearly shaken and not full of details. So I told my parents and drove over towards her house.
At the top of her subdivision I was met by a cop with lights on. He asked where I was going and I told him about the call from my gf. He lets me go by and I come over the hill to the cul de sac where she lives and I see multiple cop cars around the circle. They watch me pull up and get out of my car. My gf comes running out of her house and meets me in the street. She explains that someone had broken into her neighbor’s house and started beating her with something heavy. The neighbor managed to get out of the house and headed to my gf’s house where she started banging furiously on the front door. My gf’s dad was out of town, so her mom answered the door and the neighbor just fell into the foyer bleeding profusely from the head. Her mom looks up to see the attacker headed up the walkway towards the front door. She pulls the neighbor into the house and closes the door hitting the attacker with it before it fully closed. He then took the heavy tool he had used to beat the neighbor and smashed the little window at the top of the door. Her mom started screaming and the attacker just turned around and walked up the street into the darkness.
I spent the night there that night (along with two or three cops outside in their cars) and in the morning we could see blood still pooled on the floor in the foyer and splattered blood above the front door from where the attacker had swung the bloody tool to smash the window.
No one was ever caught or even identified. It was just completely random.
The neighbor survived and to my knowledge had no permanent physical injuries beyond scarring from having her scalp stapled shut. She moved away shortly after the incident.
TLDR: gf’s neighbor was brutally attacked in her home. She ran to my gf’s house and the attacker fled after nearly getting into their house too. No one was ever caught.
#31
The Cuban missile crisis. It was “almost” the end of the world.
Image credits: okguy57
#32
A friend of mine drives 18 wheeler tanker trucks, and he was on some highway in Ohio or Illinois or somewhere in the winter that was infamous for icing over. He was northbound and one of the cars from the southbound side lost control on the ice and went across the median and right in front of him. He had no chance to get out of the way or slow down.
It was a woman driving and her 18 month old daughter in the back, the impact k*lled them both instantly. The worst part is that the husband/father was in another car following them, and had to watch his wife and daughter die without being able to do anything about it.
My friend had to go to therapy for a while after that and I'm still not sure he's ever gotten past it.
#33
I gave Aileen Wuornos a ride a couple days before Christmas in 1990.
For context, she was a serial k*ller in the central Florida.
In hindsight, it's kind of a funny story. When I was 16 I hung out with a rougher crowd, they let me hang out at one of the bars they owned in Daytona, these bars were generally in rougher areas of town. One night I was leaving at the same time she was, she was pretty drunk, and I offered her a ride because the neighborhood was dangerous. I dropped her off at the hotel she was staying at (cheap, by the week hotel) and headed home. A couple weeks later, I saw her on the news.
#34
My mother-in-law, and husband, saw a motorcyclist lose control and fly off over a hedge into some trees. They pulled over and went to help him. What they found was a full leather suit without a head on the ground, and a head, still wearing a helmet, stuck between two branches in a tree.
#35
Worked at a pizza place in a small town, had this lady come in every Friday and get two pizzas for her family, two kids. One Friday she comes in like normal, seems normal, chit chat is normal, grabs the pizzas and heads out. Less then an hour later she stabbed her two kids and husband to death, decapitated them, and when the police arrived tried to decapitate herself. In jail she somehow was able to get something sharp and stabbed herself several times but still survived. Not sure what came of the trial and whatnot after as I had moved, but yeah it was wild, super nice lady I saw every week, just snapped I guess.
#36
A friend's father just dropped dead while brushing his teeth with his youngest daughter (6y/o), they never found out what happened, so they figured he had a brain hemorrhage.
Image credits: vanishing_vision90
#37
My Grandmother inlaw's house burned down with her parents and two children inside while giving birth at the hospital, to my wife's father. In Unionville CT. The fire department drove by and said it was out of their district, once the other fire department arrived they said it wasn't their district either. Only thing left was a foundation.
#38
I was in the house alone with a corpse for hours.
My brother OD’d about two weeks ago in the bedroom across from me and I or my mom didn’t know. The next morning, very weird and sort of scary, my mom texted (she was at work since 6:30 AM) me and told me to check on him saying she had a dream he was dead. I went to his door to check(10:30 AM), calling his name, and getting no response. I manually had to unlock the door since it was locked. I walked in and didn’t see him at first but eventually walked inside enough to see him hunched in the corner, purple and bent over. One of the most traumatic experiences of my life.
#39
My brother and I were racing on rollerblades outside our apartment complex down the alley to the street. He beat me there and when I arrived he was talking to a stranger who was walking on the sidewalk. My brother looks at me and says “let’s go ask mom, come on!” and rushes inside to which I quickly follow. My brother begins to beg my mom to go help this guy find his lost puppy. We follow our mom outside and this guy is nowhere to be seen.
A week later, the neighbor kid at the house just across the street was abducted. His litter brother was playing in the front yard. A car drove up and got the little boy to come up to window to talk. The guy tried to grab the little boy and pull him in the car. The older brother ran up and fought off the attacker only to be pulled into the car himself. He was only 10 years old. The kidnapper was Joseph Edward Duncan, a convicted serial k*ller.
Chilling to think it could’ve been my brother instead.
Teach your kids not to talk to strangers! And if they do to always come get you before going anywhere with them. The chances are slim but it’s a sick world and it could quite possibly save their life.
#40
I was hiking down from doing two weeks of trail work in Colorado a few summers ago. A guy hiking up stopped to chat with us about our work and asked if we had seen anyone make the summit while we were up there. We told him that the first summit of the season had been done a few days prior and wished him luck. A friend of mine hiked in that area the next day and there was a helicopter circling around. The guy had taken the wrong gulley back down and died. It’s still crazy to me to think about.
#41
This one is personal.
My family and I are staying in a rental house for a few months because my dad was s**t with money. This particular house was owned by a fairly wealthy friend of his who was going through a divorce because his wife had developed a long and nasty d**g problem. So, we're staying there pretty cheap.
One night near Christmas, I groggily wake up and see a woman wearing white going through drawers on the other side of the room. I must have made a sound because she turned and rushed over to me and gently said, "shhh, go back to sleep little boy." Weirdly, I did. She looked like Liza Minelli, if that's at all relevant.
Next morning I wake up to my parents acting weird and I hear one of them make a comment like, "I can't tell what's gone and what's not." For some reason, I didn't connect the dots until I was older and never told them what I saw (I thought it was a dream).
So, yeah, the former cr*ckhead owner of our rental house broke in (probably had a key) and I saw her but didn't do or say s**t. I was probably 9 or so.
#42
Anything cult related. Especially mass s*icides like Jonestown where people k*lled their spouses, children, and themselves by the hundreds with poisoned koolaid. Makes my stomach turn to think about it.
Image credits: Itsme_annab
#43
Vet friend was lightly kicked by a horse (happens in ag, not usually a big deal at all) with a bottle of ketamine in his pocket. It shattered. He did not survive.
Image credits: rhinestonecowf-ckboi
#44
Someone at my school vanished for a week with no leads other than a video of him on a security camera at a McDonald’s 2 towns over. A week later his body turned up in the lake in a Bay. They never figured out what happened to him.
Image credits: james-HIMself
#45
Someone rang our doorbell and my mom answered the door. A man was standing there and he asked if he could come in and use our phone. She didn't like the look of him and he gave off some bad vibes. She said he also didn't smell very well. She told him to wait and he could talk to her husband. He mumbled something and just walked off.
A few years later she saw him on TV. He was Henry Lee Lucas.
