Some occurrences challenge our understanding, often provoking more questions than answers. Be it a peculiar tale from a trusted acquaintance or a disconcerting event we’ve personally experienced, these haunting instances tend to stay with us. When shared, they can provide relief and serve a therapeutic purpose, much like the individuals in this article did when they disclosed their stories to countless people online.

My husband disappeared when our son was just five months old. As our son grew and began to talk, he often said that a sinister figure had visited his room while we slept. We dismissed it at first.

Years later, I stumbled upon my husband’s vintage watch that had been left behind a closet in our son’s room. I panicked because my husband had worn that watch the day he vanished. When I questioned my son about it, he couldn’t recall how the watch ended up there and insisted he had never seen it before.

My husband had battled severe depression for many years, and it’s been nearly two decades since we last saw him. The thought of that watch still sends chills down my spine. When I was 14, I was home alone while my mother went grocery shopping and my brother visited a friend.

The phone rang, and it was my grandmother, frantically screaming, “WHAT’S WRONG? WHAT’S WRONG?” I reassured her that everything was fine. She revealed that my mother had just called her, repeatedly exclaiming, “HELP, THE KIDS!” After my mom returned and reassured my grandmother that nothing had happened, we visited her since she was still troubled.

She showed us our number on her caller ID, which shouldn’t have been possible. I was reading “Think and Grow Rich,” and the book implies that unusual experiences may arise as you engage with its content. In a coffee shop downtown, I read a section about a parent with a deaf child when a child sat nearby.

It caught my attention until the mother approached and started using sign language with him. During tenth grade, my sister and I experimented with a homemade Ouija board, asking typical questions, including the names of the “spirits.” We received the names Aiden and Hannah, both of which had been considered for my name before my birth. Neither of us was aware of this fact.

One evening, my sister and I were alone in the living room when we suddenly heard what sounded like a thousand plates crashing from the kitchen cabinets. We exchanged alarmed glances and rushed into the kitchen, only to find everything intact. Even after checking all the cabinets for broken dishes, everything was perfectly fine, and it still unsettles us to think about it.

Once, while sitting on the couch with my boyfriend, I distinctly heard someone say “I love you.” My boyfriend immediately echoed it back, leaving me bewildered since I hadn’t spoken. I could hear and feel the vibrations of the words being spoken, but neither of us had said them. A feminine voice seemed to come from right in front of me, yet there was no one else in the room or outside.

It was incredibly eerie, and I often reflect on that moment. As a child in a house with a grand two-story entryway and a long staircase, I had a large antique mirror facing the stairs. I was home alone, listening to music, and paused to look at my reflection.

In the mirror, I saw myself walking down the staircase. I quickly took off my headphones and turned around, but of course, no one was there—no one at all. There was a time I was in my backyard playing with my beloved toy dinosaur.

I threw it into the air, and it vanished, never to be seen again. My ex-wife and I renovated an old house from the 1930s, and after painting some baseboards in the basement, we left them to dry overnight. The next morning, we discovered what appeared to be a knife scratch running down the entire length of two of the baseboards, nearly eight feet long.

This “gouge” went through the new paint, old paint, primer, and right down to the wood. It was just the two of us in the house that night. Years ago, I lived in an older downtown house with a roommate where we both enjoyed playing guitar in the basement.

An old mirror was there when we moved in. One day, after returning home and finding my roommate absent, I headed to the basement to play. I noticed something in my peripheral vision in the mirror—a cloud rising.

When I looked around, there was no explanation for it. It terrified me so much that I put the guitar down and left the house, heading to a local café to wait for my roommate. Interestingly, I found him there, looking pale and stressed, explaining that he had seen the same “cloudy ghost” in the basement mirror a couple of hours earlier.

Uncovering a friend’s hidden, darker side can feel like a plot from a Hollywood thriller, which is precisely the sensation evoked by these unsettling accounts, sure to send shivers your spine.