Rural folk, What is the most creepy thing you've seen or experienced?

Story one.

I live in rural Wisconsin, surrounded by cornfields, marshland, and everything you'd expect.

I remember being in my teens outside at dusk with my parents.

Though we were all doing our own thing.

Suddenly a woman's voice yelled help me from the woods beside our house.

It was just loud enough to hear, but quiet enough for me to second guess what i'd heard.

My mom and dad both turned to look at me, like, you heard that too, right.

Mom started yelling, do you need help?

Where are you?

By now it had gone from dusk to pitch black, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck because it got too quiet.

Mom wanted to keep yelling, but Dad just got up from his chair and said inside.

I think that's one of the only times I've seen her actually listen to him.

Story two.

When I was a child, two of my friends and I decided to explore an abandoned house down the road from us.

It had the typical abandoned look, paint peeling everywhere, with exposed wood in some places, overgrown plants and vines, broken windows, and missing roof tiles.

We walked inside and it matched.

The outside cupboards were broken, floorboards were splintered and cracked.

Other than the place being extremely empty, we didn't really get any scary vibes.

Nothing stood out as paranormal like we'd hoped, so we left the house a little disappointed.

We were walking alongside one of the windows when this very well dressed, well groomed man, maybe in his sixties, wearing a black dress coat, white shirt, and black tie, came into view.

We hadn't seen him inside and never heard a sound yet there he was just staring blankly at us through the window.

My friends and I bolted out of there as fast as we ever had and ran back home.

It probably was just one of the property owners who happened to be there the same day.

There were a few rooms we didn't go into, but it seriously scared us.

A few years later, the local fire department burned the place down in a controlled burn.

So if it was paranormal, well it's gone now.

Story three.

I was in northern Wisconsin with my family as a kid.

While we were there, I went on a short hike with my brother and dad, just wandering through the woods.

We ended up emerging onto someone's property, and the man there saw us, came up with his kid and asked the obvious, Uh, what are you doing on my property?

My dad apologized and said we were hiking and shouldn't have been so careless.

We went back quickly, and while the encounter was a bit odd, it didn't feel tense.

My brother and I also learned a good lesson about respecting private property.

However, the man we encountered apparently wasn't satisfied.

I get it to some degree.

If I lived outside the city, I'd be wary too if someone emerged from the forest onto my land.

But things got weird.

The guy actually got someone who either worked for him or was related to him to track us back to our cabin.

About five minutes after we returned and started making lunch, this guy literally walked into our cabin and started talking about how we'd been caught trespassing.

He wasn't yelling or angry, but it was still incredibly jarring to have some camo wearing stranger just barge into our grandparents house.

He didn't have time to say much because our grandparents owned a few guns, mostly antiques, though, and sure enough one got pulled on him.

Our grandma held the guy at gunpoint and actually apologized again for the earlier trespassing, but then she started yelling at him for following us, trespassing on our property and barging in uninvited.

Then he left.

It was a really weird encounter.

I've talked to my dad and brother about it occasionally, so it wasn't a dream or my imagination.

Either way, the lesson is clear.

Don't trespass.

Story four.

My uncle used to live way out in the country on a plot he said was just under eight acres.

His closest neighbors weren't terribly far, within a quick driving distance, but also just far enough that walking wasn't really practical.

I spent my eighth grade summer there, and he told me a story that scared me pretty badly.

Back then, he had a lot of animals on the farm, three hunting dogs, pigeons, dozens of chickens, various other birds, a few goats, and one lone horse.

Every night he'd make his rounds to check that all the animals were safe and everything was locked up.

One night, as he was walking back to the house, the dogs started going wild.

At first, he didn't think much of it and kept walking, but the dogs were barking NonStop.

He shined his flashlight around and didn't see anything.

As he reached the back door, the dogs were still barking, so he turned around one last time.

Way out in the fields, he saw what looked like a moving shadow.

He figured it was a coyote or some wild animal and went inside.

The next night, while making his rounds, he said he immediately spotted a shadowy figure just a short distance from the barn.

He didn't say anything, but pulled out his gun again.

He thought maybe it was a coyote trying to get to the chickens, but as he stepped forward, the figure suddenly stood upright, almost humanlike, and ran off into the darkness.

He was so startled that he froze for a moment before yelling out Hey.

He didn't give chase for about a week after that.

The dogs would go ballistic at night, but he never saw the figure again.

When he told me the story, he said it was probably just a transient, but I'm not sure.

He lived in the middle of nowhere and had to drive about forty minutes just to shop.

It seems incredibly unlikely for a random homeless person to even be in that area.

He also said it might have been a black bear, but again I'm not convinced.

He wasn't near mountains or deep forest, just a rural farming area.

Story five.

My grandparents' cottage is in the Turkish Mediterranean region, nestled among lemon and orange trees.

We have two close neighbors, but other settlements are quite far.

Since it was summer, those neighbors had moved to cooler uplands, so the area was basically deserted.

The cottage itself is really old.

It was built on a large rock and doesn't have indoor plumbing.

The toilet is about twenty meters outside in the south, kind of like Shrek's outhouse.

Well, I had to use it in the middle of the night and there was no light.

I had to navigate by moonlight, and the toilet itself had no light either.

You wouldn't know what was inside until your eyes adjusted to the dark.

While I was in there, I heard footsteps or maybe something crawling outside because the dry grass was rustling.

Whatever it was approached the door and stood there for a solid twenty minutes.

The cottage was in a very secluded area with the closest town over an hour's drive away.

We had seen wild boars, snakes, and wild dogs in the fields before.

I stayed inside for an hour after whatever it was left, then rushed back to the house, but my legs were asleep.

I had to crawl until I could walk again.

I was twelve or thirteen at the time.

Story six.

My brother and I were home alone watching TV.

He had an inflatable life size stone Cold wrestler in the basement.

When you punched it, it would pop back up and say things like cause stone Cold says so.

So we're watching TV and we know it's just us at home, when suddenly we hear cause stone Cold says so, coming from the basement.

Very creepy.

Since the thing wouldn't talk on its own, something had to have moved it and we were home alone.

We both just looked at each other and ran downstairs to see what was happening.

My dog had stone Cold horizontal by the waist, and poor stone Cold was rapidly deflating, water from the bottom weight dripping into the carpet like clear white blood.

My dog's eyes were glazed over from the glory of the kill, and he'd periodically give stone Cold another shake for good measure.

You see, my brother had been chasing my dog with stone Cold for about two weeks, and my dog was very afraid of this inflatable man.

I only wish I'd seen him working up the nerve to approach and take him down.

Story seven.

I used to live in the desert for a year, and on nights when the moon isn't out or there are clouds blocking the stars and moon, it's almost pitch black.

You can't see more than ten yards ahead of you.

One night, I was driving down the highway going home, and then suddenly in my headlights I see a guy running on the side of the highway, full on sprinting.

I'm going seventy miles per hour, so it's only for a second or two, but I'm like, what the heck was he running from?

I hope he's okay, because I'm not pulling over.

But then maybe a minute later, I see another guy in my headlights, only he's walking on the side of the highway, and I swear to god, it looked like the same guy.

Two separate guys in the dark walking or running on the side of the highway.

What possible reason could explain that I didn't see any cars on the side of the road that might have broken down.

I was so weirded out.

I just had an uncomfortable feeling.

The entire ride home story eid.

I lived way out in the country when I was fifteen years old, So far out it would take us an hour to get to the closest grocery store, and it would take the cops forty five minutes to reach our house.

No neighbors close by.

If something happened, no one would hear you scream.

One night, I got a gut feeling in my stomach that something wasn't right.

I ignored it and went to sleep, thinking it was just anxiety.

Then I woke up to a blood curdling scream at two in the morning.

I was absolutely terrified.

These screams were demonic, switching between the high pitched screech of a woman in the growl of a man.

My entire family woke up, and my stepdad got his shotgun.

My stepdad went outside.

Mind you, this is the country and there are no street lights.

It is pitch black except for the porch light above us.

The screaming and screeching continued, It sounded like two people.

My sister had gone out with her boyfriend earlier that day and still hadn't returned.

Based on the screaming, my mom thought my sister was being attacked in the woods by her then boyfriend.

She started yelling, Jason, fake name, Jason, you let go of her, Get your hands off her.

Where are you?

Then it went absolutely silent.

We were so scared, thinking she was dead and he was coming for us.

Next then another noise began, and it was the voice of a man or something else.

He yelled, I am Jacob, I am the son of God.

I am chosen to find the baby.

Only I can make this passage.

Only I can find this baby in Veleen.

Now we were really scared, thinking my sister's boyfriend was part of a cult and planning to harm us.

My mom finally called the police.

All while this person was screeching and howling, creeping closer and closer to our house.

After about thirty minutes of this, we finally saw the outline of a person in our field of vision, right next to our car.

Stepdad fired a warning shot and yelled, don't you get any closer now.

The person crept closer.

My stepdad fired a second shot even closer.

Now, don't make me do it, he yelled.

With that second shot.

We heard the person run back into the woods, and we waited for the police to arrive.

Finally, after forty five minutes, a police car pulled in and shone its lights on the perpetrator.

We couldn't believe what we saw.

It was a skinny, completely naked man with a shaved head, crawling on all fours like a gorilla, or like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, if that helps you picture it.

The police grabbed him while he screeched and howled the entire time.

The cops didn't even come down to explain anything to us.

They just took off and we had to go back to sleep like nothing had happened.

The next day, we called the police to find out what had happened and who the man was.

Apparently it was one of our neighbors, a repeat drug offender.

He had mixed a bunch of substances and had a severe reaction.

It was unfortunate to hear that he passed away a few years later due to his addiction.

He was very young.

It was a terrifying night and for those who don't live in the country, this is the kind of horror we sometimes face.

Substance abuse, unemployment, and domestic violence often go unchecked in rural areas.

I just hope things improve for places like ours.

Story nine, depending on who you ask, this is either a bold or foolish story.

To add to the mix of close animal encounters.

I lived out of a camper shell I built on the back of a small Japanese pickup truck.

I did this interspersed with some couch surfing for about eight point five months, traveling from coast to coast and a lot of places in between.

I was doing some work on a guy's house in Sonora, California.

He and his family were some of the kindest people I'd ever met.

They were Mormon, and they offered to let me park anywhere I liked on their eight acre property while I helped get their house ready to put on the market.

Since I had a stable place to camp, I changed things up and started sleeping in my hammock next to the truck.

The weather was perfect.

The guy's wife saw me in the hammock that first morning and mentioned they'd lost two goats to a mountain lion the year before.

A few days later, at dusk, she and her son caught the Mountain lion on video walking up their driveway.

It had come back.

I knew the risk, but I figured it was scared of human smells, lights, and sounds, like most wildcats are.

Just be noisy before bed and you're good at night.

I'd sit in the cab of my truck, browsing the web and charging my electronics from the inverter.

Since I wasn't done getting in and out of the camper shell, I left both the tailgate and hatch open.

It was well into the night.

I was reading when suddenly my entire truck lurched.

The rear dipped down hard.

Something was in the back.

I've owned this truck forever, and I know exactly what the rear springs feel like.

It felt like a nearly two hundred pound person had sat on the tailgate.

Oh no, first thought a person, but then I realized, no crunching gravel, no sound.

A person would have made noise unless they were actively sneaking, and no one sneaks and then jumps onto your tailgate.

A quick useless glance in the mirrors confirmed nothing.

I wasn't getting out.

I manually locked both doors old truck, and since my keys were already turned to accessory mode for charging.

All it took was a slight twist and the truck roared to life.

I revved it, matching my heart rate.

I didn't hit the horn.

I didn't want to wake the family or their five kids.

My plan worked.

The truck popped back up as whatever it was jumped off.

I had scared it, but a mountain lion had pounced into the back of my truck.

I turned the engine off and waited, eventually feeling safe again.

Here's the part people might call ballsy or stupid.

I was twenty one.

This was the adventure I had dreamed of as a kid.

I'm not reckless, but I come alive in the face of adversity.

That's how I've always been.

I didn't want to back down.

I was also a bit dehydrated, so my urine smelt stronger That night and every night after I marked the trees, I tied my hammock to I even made a little perimeter circle around the hammock.

I did that every night for two weeks.

Nothing ever came back, and we finished the job.

It felt brave then, It feels foolish now.

But the truth is, if you've ever slept outside in the wilderness, even once, you've likely done it in a mountain lion's territory, maybe even right beneath one on a hillside.

They see you, you don't see them.

I could have told this story a lot shorter, but it's true, and storytelling is half the fun.

Story ten so, a long time ago, I was at a friend's ranch style house on a bit of land, and it was time for me to head home.

I walked outside and it was close to midnight, but the moon was almost full, so it was really bright.

I was parked back in the sticks a little, so it took me a second to get there.

As I neared my truck, I heard a low growl, snort, and this pounding of feet against the ground, super loud, but not as loud or steady as a horse.

It just kept getting louder and louder.

I got a little freaked out, so I ran to my truck and fumbled my keys, trying to get them out of my pocket, and of course they fell to the ground, just like in a horror movie.

I bent over to grab them and That's when I saw something about as tall as my waist rounding the end of my pickup bed.

I immediately thought it was a werewolf, and that was it for me.

This beast slammed into me, knocked me to the ground, and jacked up my elbow.

Ah, and that's how I met Cookie the Great Dane.

Apparently she belonged to an elderly couple about forty acres over and would get bored and escape the fence.

I ran in to grab my friends and we ended up playing with her for another hour before I headed home.

Cookie became a staple around the ranch house and would always wait for us when we pulled up side note.

Has anyone else ever had interactions with unknown creatures and for just a split second thought that's a monster.

I'm doomed.

I feel like I've had a bunch of those.

Story eleven.

My little brother and I were tossing a baseball around near dusk at the bottom of our property thirty wooded mountain acres way in the middle of nowhere.

It had gotten dark enough that we were just about to call it quits when we heard the single most horrifying scream we've ever heard from the trees just beyond the edge of the clearing.

Imagine a woman screaming in mortal agony, writhing in the most wretched torment imaginable.

Every tortured scream from horror movies, war movies, anything you've ever heard, none of it compared to this.

Even now, decades later, the hair on my arms and neck stands up just thinking about it, and it's made even worse by the realization of what it actually was.

A mountain lion, full grown female mountain lion scream loudly when they're in heat, and it sounds like a human woman being torn to pieces by something otherworldly.

To hear that two kids alone in the dark in the middle of nowhere was about as terrifying as it gets.

Story twelve.

I was walking home from my friends one evening.

The path took me downhill through a forest.

It was quite late, so it was really dark, but there was just enough moonlight shining through the trees to make it possible to walk without a flashlight.

Just as I was about halfway through the path, I started hearing twigs snapping and dried leaves cracking under footsteps.

On my immediate right.

I froze and looked to see if anyone was there.

Nobody.

Then the grumbling started, like a big creature grumbling right next to me.

It was loud.

I set a frightened hello, but the grumbling and cracking kept going.

I was terrified.

I'd never heard anything like it before.

To make it worse, there had been mornings about brown bears in the nearby woods.

I was trembling.

I somehow pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it a head.

What I saw was nothing, but the grumbling continued.

So I pointed the light at the ground, and that's when I saw it.

A hedgehog.

Just a hedgehog about a meter away, burrowing for worms or who knows what.

But the sounds it was making, man, it made it seem like there was something one hundred times bigger.

I honestly wanted to punt that little thing into the valley.

So yeah, that was the one time I almost had a heart attack in the forest over a hedgehog.

Story thirteen.

I used to live in a town with only two hundred twelve people.

Very rural people hunted in their backyards.

Three short stories.

One night I heard my ex husband's dog completely losing it outside.

He never acted like that, and since it was around midnight, it was even scarier.

My ex worked third shift, so it was on me to figure out what was going on.

I didn't want anything to happen to our dog.

I walked out with a flashlight and a bear came around the corner of our shed.

It was only about two hundred feet from me.

Maybe that's not close to some, but I was twenty one living in a trailer basically made of aluminum foil.

I freaked out my second Christmas living in that trailer.

I got a call one night from the local prison that there had been an escape.

The inmate was thought to be heading into our area.

Be alert, don't answer the door, don't go outside, call the cops if anything seems off.

At first, I thought it was a prank, but my neighbors got the same call.

I looked it up, and yeah, it was real.

I didn't sleep that night.

My ex husband's car didn't start, so I drove him to work at a twenty four to seven grocery store.

I did some shopping while I was there.

When I got home, I opened the front door to unload groceries and stopped a neighborhood dog from coming in with me.

I shut the door, locked it, and started putting things away.

Then I heard scratching in the living room.

There was the same dog inside.

I thought maybe our trailer had a hole in the wall or something.

I stared at the dog for a few seconds, trying to figure it out.

When I heard the back door always locked slam.

Now I was really freaked out.

I grabbed a kitchen knife and checked it out.

The door was wide open, the wind slamming it into the wall.

I closed it and called my ex.

He brushed it off, said it was probably a loose lock.

When we looked at it in the morning, someone had nearly broken the doorknob off.

Someone had tried to break in.

Maybe they were already inside when I got home.

It scared the life out of me.

Story fourteen.

I had just turned sixteen and was driving home at night on a back road in the middle of nowhere, with trees lining both sides.

There's one part of the road where the tree line on the left briefly clears.

When I reached that section, I saw five large, almost perfect circles of fiery yellowish orange light hovering high in the sky.

Two were close together more to the left, and the other three were aligned more to the right, but all were relatively close.

No movement, no sound, just glowing circles.

They didn't look anything like distant lights from aircraft.

After about fifteen seconds of driving, the trees blocked my view again.

I was about thirty seconds from the end of the road, and as I reached the clearing at the end, I had about ten more seconds of view before the light suddenly got slightly brighter and then disappeared instantly, all at once.

To this day, I have no idea what I saw.

This was deep in the countryside, hours from any major city, no military bases or anything like that nearby.

I've considered every possible explanation fireworks, meteors, aircraft, military testing.

Nothing fits.

The experience was eerie, and the fact that it still unexplained bothers me to this day.

Story behind my house used to be miles of woods until they chopped it down for a neighborhood.

Twenty feet behind our place is a steep drop off into a valley with a creek very steep on both sides, so that valley remained forested between neighborhoods.

When I was little, we'd see all kinds of wildlife.

But after the new development, the deer and turkey stopped coming around.

We even saw more rabies cases.

Big animals stopped showing up.

That's the backstory.

I only let one dog out on a leash because she escapes from everything.

The other was on a runner leash across the yard and she never needed supervision.

But even so, taking the dogs out at night always felt creepy.

Last summer, my sister and I kept hearing something over the hill and felt like we were being watched.

The motion sensor light would always be on when we stepped outside.

We didn't tell each other how we felt, thought it was just paranoia.

Eventually I broke down and said I thought we were being watched.

She said she felt the same.

We both agreed the presence felt angry.

We started going outside with bats, knives and pepper spray.

We couldn't figure out what it was, but it was getting bolder.

We started hearing it more often.

It sounded big, maybe the size of a large dog.

Sometimes we'd hear a grunt only ever at night.

The dogs would freeze and stare, which was weird because usually they bark at anything.

I was glad, though one is twelve with a leg brace and the other is a tiny Chihuahua mix.

This went on for weeks.

Eventually we started feeling watched during the day too.

We even started hearing sounds in daylight.

We never once thought it was human.

There are coyotes in the area.

There are bears, but they're rare and make the news when spotted.

Mountain Lions are supposed to be extinct in our region, so maybe one wandered back, but it seemed unlikely.

One day, I let the dogs out and wasn't too cautious since daytime sightings were rare.

Then I heard something large move through the brush and a grunt.

My stomach dropped.

That was the closest I had ever heard it.

I slowly picked up the dog and started to turn back when I saw a herd of five or six deer at the cliff edge, just staring at me.

They looked angry.

I've seen deer all my life, but never with that kind of expression.

It had made the news a year earlier that someone was killed nearby by a deer they provoked.

So yeah, my house was stalked by a herd of deer for weeks.

We had been tossing old produce over the hill from our kitchen.

No compost bin, so we just toss it out to avoid landfilling it.

That became a buffet for the deer.

Once we stopped, they left after a few days.

It might sound silly that we didn't make the connection, but we'd done it for years and totally forgot.

The result was funny, but the build up was terrifying.

Story sixteen.

I live in the countryside in the UK, just about as far away from any city or town as you can get.

It's all very flat farmland.

I go for a lot of walks through all the fields.

Last summer I went for a long walk and was about three miles from my house.

It was super hot that day, around thirty three degrees celsius ninety one degrees fahrenheit.

I was walking past one field full of crops ready to harvest.

No idea what kind of crop it was, but it was about waist high, bright yellow, and looked amazing, so I stopped and got out my phone to take some pictures.

I stood there for about five minutes messing around, trying to get some cool picks and videos for Instagram.

Then carried on walking.

About thirty seconds later, I looked back across the field and saw what looked like a person dressed in black standing in the middle of the yellow At first I thought it was a scarecrow I just didn't notice earlier, maybe blending in with the trees in the background.

I got my phone out and started looking through the pictures, zooming in to see if I had caught it, but of course I hadn't.

I kept walking with the field to the right of me, and as I took a right turn with the field still to my right, what I thought was a scarecrow started walking.

So now this figure was a person, a person dressed in all black on a really hot summer day, hot for the uklo They started walking toward the spot where I had originally stopped to take pictures.

Eventually they got there and just stood in that exact spot.

I kept walking until I was far enough away that I couldn't see them anymore.

It just freaked me out, as there was no reason for someone to be walking through that field, only the farmers usually do that, and it was full of crops.

I was walking on the tractor roads between each field.

Part of me thinks This person had to have been lying down in the field while I was taking the pictures, because there's no way they got to the middle in just thirty seconds.

I couldn't tell if they were looking at me, but I really felt like they were.

They just stood there.

I don't know.

It was just a weird thing to see, considering I was three miles from the nearest house with no other people nearby.

I've never seen a single person randomly walking through a farmer's field before.

Since it just felt like a scene from Jeeper's Creepers story.

Seventeen, I was getting over a two year relationship breakup and drove out east into the country.

My plan was to sit quietly away from the light pollution of the city and taken a grand star escape in the dark, just to chill out well.

A moment after I found a spot to park up on the north side of the road on a grassy patch and shut off my car, the weirdest, creepiest thing to ever happen to me took place.

I rolled down the window and looked up at the sky in anticipation of a beautiful, clear night's starry vista, when all of a sudden, the rear of my car felt like something grabbed onto it and shook the whole vehicle.

I quickly put the keys back into the ignition, started the car, and frantically rolled up the window.

Before I drove away.

I paused for half a second and second guessed myself, wondering if it had just been a ground tremor or something harmless.

But the feeling in my gut, like when you're in the presence of something supernatural and malevolent, was sharp, so I drove away fast.

Story eighteen.

So I live in the city, but I'd call myself quite an accomplished outdoorsman when I can get away from the urban life.

A few years ago, I loaded a bunch of camping gear onto my bicycle and spent the better part of the next seven months riding five three hundred miles eight thoy five hundred kilometers around the US At night, I most often preferred to wild camp, just finding somewhere to disappear into the woods, somewhere people were unlikely to find me and even less likely to care that I was there.

It ended up being one of my favorite parts of the whole trip, finding a secluded spot in the forest to get some much needed rest.

But the forest, I quickly learned, is not a quiet place at night.

There's always some form of noise.

The chirping of thousands of crickets becomes a constant drone throughout the night, accompanied by many toads.

There's always at least a a slight breeze through the trees, or the babbling of a nearby creek.

It was always a highlight of my nights, though not particularly rare, to hear the distant yips and howls of coyotes, and I fondly looked back on the one night when two owls, one on either end of my tent, called back and forth for hours.

After a month or so of this, I became quite used to the nighttime sounds of the forest, and it became very comforting.

So it was a real shock to my system when one night in rural Montana, I realized I was struggling to sleep because of the exact opposite of what keeps most people up.

That night, it wasn't noise keeping me awake.

It was the complete absence of it.

It was dead silent, and that was incredibly unnerving.

I can only describe it as the loudest silence i've ever heard.

It felt like the entire forest was hiding from an equally silent predator.

Suddenly, the occasional snapping of a twig, a sound that would normally get lost in the background, sounded like a gun shot.

I slept terribly that night, and morning couldn't come soon enough.

Story nineteen.

I'm from smalltown, Appalachia, and my grandpa lived out in the relative Boonies.

I was home from college once in mid autumn and went down to visit him.

I ended up staying longer than expected, and it was already dark when I planned to head back to my mom's house.

He walked me to the back door that had a little eight x ten porch in a set of stairs leading down to a concrete stoop with a single bulb light fixture just enough light to see by.

The driveway was maybe fifteen yards away, and since I had parked behind his car, it was about twenty yards total to my jeep, with another fifteen beyond that to the woods.

As soon as I hit the bottom step and took two steps forward, something stopped me cold.

It was almost a physical sensation.

The hair on my arm stood up, my breathing went shallow, my heart rates spiked, and my feet felt like they were saying nope, not going for ward ward.

Being a born and raised hillbilly, the first thing I did was draw my concealed handgun and pointed toward the driveway and woods beyond.

Slowly backing toward the porch, I glanced behind me and saw my grandpa had already stepped out on the porch, shot gun in hand, pointed in the same direction.

I backed up the steps.

He covered me, and once I got inside, we shut and bolted the door.

I called my mom and told her I'd be staying the night.

We stayed up for hours trying to figure out what had set off both of our internal alarms at the exact same time, but we could never come up with a solid answer.

Neither of us consciously saw or heard anything strange, and we're not the type to scare easily.

He was a World War II marine who fought across the Pacific, and I'd been hunting and camping with him since I could walk.

He said the only other times he'd ever had that same feeling were on Iwo Jima, right before a late night banzai charge or just before a sniper and a palm tree open fire story twe.

I grew up in Ruralish Illinois, but when I was sixteen, I was house sitting for my aunt and uncle in the middle of nowhere, Illinois, about an hour and a half away from anyone I knew, which was probably a bad idea, considering I was an anxious kid, but they were paying me three hundred dollars.

I had all of the blinds and curtains tightly closed so I wouldn't be creeped out by the desolate location corn.

As far as the eye could see around dusk, I was almost certain I heard the back door jiggle, but I convinced myself I had imagined it I was popping popcorn, so I blamed it on that.

An hour or so later, I heard very distinct whimpering outside.

At first I thought it was one of their cats, but then I realized it sounded more human, almost childlike.

I started peeking through the blinds and didn't see anything.

At that point, I called my dad to try to get him to come stay with me.

When I took the job, he warned me he wouldn't come to my rescue when I got scared, so he told me I was just psyching myself out and that I was safe.

It wasn't long though, before the whimpers turned into full on human cries.

To me, it sounded like a little kid.

I put on my brave face and opened the sliding glass door blinds.

I saw a girl lying on the patio furniture crying.

I quickly unlocked the door and flung it open, But as soon as she heard me, she jumped up and started screaming loud, piercing screams while looking me dead in the eye.

It turned out she wasn't a girl at all.

It was a groan but petite woman, maybe in her fifties, just standing there screaming at the top of her lungs.

I slammed the door shut again, locked it, and sprinted into the kitchen to call the cops.

This was before teenagers had cell phones, so I was relying on the landline.

During the call, she began violently banging on the sliding glass door.

I decided to hide in a lower kitchen cabinet dumb hiding spot I know in case she got in.

It was going to be a wait.

Since the police station was about thirty minutes out.

I had what felt like a million anxiety attacks during that time.

After a few minutes, the banging stopped and everything went dead quiet.

I also called my dad back and had him on the line while he drove.

He was an early adopter of the cell phone, thank goodness, because the nine one one operator told me I couldn't tie up their lines and wouldn't let me stay on the call until the police arrived.

Eventually, a very lazy, disinterested police officer showed up, did a five minute sweep of the property and said there was no threat.

Keep in mind, this was a massive farm with several outbuildings, sheds, acres of corn, and endless places to hide.

He took a single lap around the house, half heartedly shining his flashlight.

At least he agreed to stay until my dad arrived.

My dad showed up and told me to go to sleep, then sat on the patio with a shotgun until sunrise.

The next day, my dad and I and his shotgun poked around and found evidence that someone had been staying in a storage shed, but no sign of the woman, and there was never any sign of her again.

If it weren't for that little heidie hole in the shed, I think people would have thought I imagined it.

This incident caused a huge falling out between my dad and his sister.

They told me they needed a house sitter to feed the cats and wash the chickens, but it later came out they had suspected someone had been nosing around their home and that's why they wanted someone there.

They never found the woman.

There was no evidence she had been doing drugs on the property.

That was our assumption, and she could have been, but there was nothing in the shed to prove it.

She was about four miles from the nearest home and thirty miles from town Akam a gas station grocery store in Church, so no one could figure out how she even got there.

She absolutely terrified me.

I had real trauma afterward and couldn't be alone.

But I still feel horrible for her because I can't imagine what circumstances led her there that night, and I still worry about where she went afterward.

Story twenty one.

I live in a small neighborhood in Iowa, but in this instance, I was staying at a cousin's house who lives pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

Like the closest neighbor was an hour away.

I was around thirteen when this happened.

It was getting really late.

My aunt and uncle had gone to bed, and I was sitting on the porch with my cousin.

We were on the back porch, which looks out into the woods after quite a bit of open field.

The woods were close enough that we could see things moving in and out, so we were watching deer and other critters while talking about a movie we were excited to see the next day.

Suddenly it got completely silent, like dead silent.

The cricket stopped chirping, and even the breeze disappeared.

My cousin grabbed onto my arm and I looked over at her.

She was just staring into the trees.

So I looked too.

There was a guy just standing there.

It was hard to make out the details of his face, but his jacket was all torn up.

He was holding something I think it was a rock or some heavy object, and just staring dead eyed at us.

Naturally, we sprinted back into the house and hid in her bed.

The next morning we went to check it out, and there was no sign anyone had been there.

The grass wasn't flattened, and there were no disturbances around to this day, It's the second creepiest, unexplainable thing I've ever witnessed.

Story twenty two.

My grandparents live in a very rural part of Romania, so rural we didn't get flushing toilets until like two thousand and seven.

My parents were born there and I was raised there as a child, so English isn't my first language.

Sorry for any mistakes.

My family isn't very superstitious.

We rely more on common sense than anything.

So when I'd go out to see my friends in the village, I'd be told try not to come home too late.

There are a lot of dangerous dogs around.

I pride myself on not being afraid of day to day things like dogs, so I would usually just wave those warnings off.

Summer of twenty seventeen, I was sixteen years old and visiting my grandparents.

It was a very hot day and everyone stayed out later than usual at the village park, maybe until around two am.

The way home was either the main road and pathway or a shortcut across the school grounds, which would save me two minutes.

I took the shortcut.

In the summer of the school yard is sometimes used to store lumber piles, that year, neighbors near the school were building or fixing something, so there were several large piles of wood, creating a weird zigzag maze.

In the daytime, it's easy to walk through, but in a village where not all the street lights work and there are no tall buildings to reflect light, it's pitch black, like being blind in a maze.

I was midway through, trying to decide whether to hop the school fence or cut through the piles, when suddenly everything went still.

No breeze, no crickets, frogs, or barking dogs, just silence.

My hair stood on end.

It felt wrong.

I got a strong urge to turn around.

I did.

In the path I had just taken stood the biggest dog or hound I had ever seen.

It was the size of a small pony.

It looked unnatural, light colored, with darker snout and paws.

I hadn't heard it approach.

That alone was terrifying.

In our village, dogs are loud, small to mid size, and bark at everything.

This thing was dead, silent.

I started sweating and my stomach filled with dread.

It just stared at me.

I turned around, clenched everything I could, and walked home.

Very uncomfortably, but I made it.

The next day I asked my grandmother about it.

She looked worried and said she had no idea what I saw.

The shepherds don't use large dogs anymore, and those are usually chained.

Story twenty three.

I have a lot of creepy stories from the woods of Spain and near my granddad's village, some normal, some paranormal.

Since the thread is serious, I'll stay to the normal ones.

After a day of hiking, I started heading home.

It was almost dark, but we have a clear path marked with stones that reflect light as markers.

Halfway there, the foxes apparently had no better thing to do than start mating, so the woods were filled with sounds that honestly resembled women screaming, like someone being attacked.

It was unsettling.

Suddenly everything became quiet, which normally indicates that wolves or bears are hunting.

I stopped to take a drink, since they usually avoid people, and even if they see you, they generally don't care.

That's when I noticed the breath of something almost touching my neck.

I was so scared, only thinking how stupid I was and how I probably just found the only man eating bear in the country.

I slowly turned around, careful not to expose my back, and that's when I saw it, an adult bear, sniffing me.

Thankfully, after a few seconds, it stopped sniffing and walked back into the dense woods.

It was terrifying.

I was probably as safe as someone swimming with sharks.

But the creepiest part was how a two hundred kilo animal managed to sneak up on me so easily.

Story twenty four.

Driving down a nowhere road hill commonly called the shortcut by locals.

It's called that because it goes straight up and down a massive set of hills carved out by locals to avoid taking the long route in extra thirty minutes.

Depending on construction, logging, or the local gravel company traffic, this route takes about ten minutes if you're doing the usual fifty miles per hour.

But I felt weird about the road that night.

It was around one am.

I was heading home from a long trip with some friends, and I was alone.

I hadn't taken the route often, but I was tired and didn't want to waste time.

So I'm driving about thirty miles per hour and I noticed this slight orange bronze haze above the trees on my left.

I figured it was a car, but the road curved to the right and went straight from there, so no headlights could become from that direction.

I slowed down, thinking maybe someone had gone off road, but I couldn't see the source.

Deciding not to be the curious guy in a low budget horror movie, I pulled my handgun from the holster and placed it on the center console just in case.

I came to a full stop at the curve, not wanting to lose sight of the light.

That's when I realized the lights were moving slowly at first, then gaining speed, moving diagonally toward me like they were going to pass by.

Then I saw it peak through the trees.

Hard to describe, like a miniature electrical sun.

The closest thing I've seen in media was the electrical anomaly in Metro twenty thirty three.

Imagine that, but orange and more fire plasma like than electric.

It moved through the trees and occasionally stuck out what looked like a little lightning arm to touch them.

It would start a small fire every time, but since these were giant live pines in a wet valley.

The flames died quickly on their own.

Then it hit some dead trees and those lit up fast.

That seemed to energize it more.

It sped up, avoiding a few more trees before hitting a large oak.

It exploded like a grenade, disappeared and left the oak side burning.

I called the fire department because there was no way that fire would go out on its own fast forward.

They put it out quickly.

It hadn't spread.

They had one of those giant off road brush trucks.

The police showed up and questioned me.

They thought I started the fire, that I had committed arson.

During questioning, a fire department guy stepped in and said there was lightning scarring on the trees and in the dirt, and that the fire followed a path inconsistent with typical ignition.

Eventually they concluded it was ball lightning, a rare destructive event.

That's the only time I've experienced it, and I'm glad I haven't seen it again.

That was terrifying.

Story twenty five late to the party, but here it goes.

I'm not from a super rural part of my country, but it still just villages with a few dozen houses and about a one kilometer stretch of road between them.

I also live on the edge of a big forest.

Anyway, my cousin and I were around sixteen to eighteen years old and standing on the road in front of my house.

It was about three am in winter.

We were just getting home from who knows where, and my house was the first stop.

We usually stood and chatted for a bit before I went inside.

Also important to note we were stone cold, sober.

Suddenly we heard a weird sound in the distance, which was especially strange since snow tends to deaden all noise.

It was like this high pitched, regular pulsing sound, almost like a seagull cry, but extremely rhythmic, unnaturally so like a squeaky car or some kind of tool.

It started getting louder and closer, not directly at us, but moving across the sky.

It got so loud it was almost physically uncomfortable.

It seemed to pass over my house about fifty meters away from us, and then slowly faded into the distance.

We couldn't see anything.

The street lights there are designed to reduce light pollution, so anything behind them is basically pitch black.

We were both freaked out.

I offered for my cousin to stay over, since he had a twenty minute walk home.

He declined, but we stayed there, talking nervously about what it could have been.

It didn't sound like any bird I knew, especially not at night during the winter.

It wasn't a seagull.

We're nowhere near water, and it wasn't a hawk.

I know how they sound.

They nest above my house.

Then a car rolled up, a civilian car.

A guy in his mid forties got out and pulled a badge.

Apparently he was a detective from the local police.

He asked for our IDs and wrote our info in a notepad, which already had names written on it.

He was acting weird, asking what we were doing and whether we'd seen or heard anything strange.

We just said no, because we were kids and not about to tell some detective we heard what sounded like an alien robot bird.

He left after a while, heading in the direction of the sound.

My cousin eventually got the courage to walk home.

That was it.

Over a decade past, but a few months ago, while reminiscing with friends, we brought up that night.

Turns out we weren't the only ones who heard it.

A few friends in the area had also heard it, and one said he was questioned by police too.

Apparently it wasn't a one time event.

It happened multiple times that year then stopped.

We still have no clue what it was, but I like to believe it was an alien robot bird story twenty six.

There are a couple of times that come to mind.

We own about nine acres and the shape is a little odd.

It's kind of long and slanted, with a ravine and creek in the middle.

The house is at the front half and the pastures are at the back.

So there's a dirt sure clay gravel road through the dense forest, down the ravine, over the creek, and back up to where the horses are.

I usually walk because the more I drive on the road, the more maintenance it needs, and I'm sort of lazy.

The first creepy experience was when I was walking down to feed the horses and it was getting close to dusk.

I was by myself, but the forest was pretty quiet and peaceful.

I sneezed and in a thicket to my left something made a similar noise, but it was not human.

It was a deeper, pitched snortier sneeze sound.

I didn't like that at all in the moment, but I assume now that I startled a deer or something.

The other time, I was walking in the same area with my husband, but it was nighttime.

At night, it gets super dark in a rural forest, so we had flashlights.

As we're walking along and talking, we hear the weirdest noise way up in the tops of the tulip poplars above our heads.

It sounded like some strange monkey laughing, but deeper and slower than any monkey I've ever heard.

You could also hear the sound of something big jumping from branch to branch.

We tried shining the flashlights up there, but we couldn't see that high in the trees.

We left pretty quickly and have never heard it again.

I tell myself that we startled a flock of wild turkeys, but that was definitely the creepiest experience.

Story twenty seven.

I grew up on a large farm, one hundred acres of farmland and an additional forty acres of woods.

When I turned seventeen, I decided I was going to join the military the day after graduation, but I wanted to be prepared, so I started getting up at four thirty in the morning and running the perimeter of the property.

I did this every day from June through mid October.

I was getting lean, strong and ready.

I felt like I could do the run twice without exhaustion.

October seventeenth, all that changed.

I started my run at four thirty like normal.

I got to the rear corner of the lot, literally the furthest point from home, and turned the corner.

My right foot came down in a dugout hole.

I felt my ankle break and my hip popped in a weird way that still made makes me nauseous to think about.

I collapsed in a heap, falling onto something sharp that cuts straight through my sweatpants and into my leg.

My orbital bone hit a rock and knocked me out.

I woke up some time later.

The only thing I can tell you is that it was still dark.

I did a self inventory, physically touching all my injuries hip, ankle, cut, leg, smashed face.

My vision in my right eye was blurry but still functioning.

I quickly realized that standing wasn't an option.

Waiting for someone wasn't an option either, Because long story short, I had never told my parents what I was doing.

The only option I had was to crawl.

So crawl I did.

It was easily one hundred yards of crawling through hard, frozen, uneven fields with the remaining stalks of I want to say, but I'm not sure corn after harvest.

Every inch was excruciating.

I was about halfway through the crawl when I saw the coyotes, first one, then two.

They kept a good distance but were clearly curious.

I remembered what my grandpa said about wild animals.

They don't want to fight, they just want food.

I couldn't make myself look big, so I decided to be loud.

Every pull forward, I would growl loudly, and that kept them at bay.

By the time I got to the driveway, it was fully light.

I saw that my parents' car was gone.

They hadn't even realized.

I didn't get up and leave for school.

I crawled the rest of the way to the house.

Somehow I got the door open, crawled into the kitchen, used a broom to knock the phone down, and called nine to one one.

I woke up at least a day later in the hospital.

My ankle was held together with a metal plate and screws.

My hip had to be surgically placed back in the socket.

My face was black and blue, and I now have a permanent crease where the stone hit my orbital bone.

And my hopes of escaping to the military were gone.

Story twenty eight.

We were off roading a couple of years ago near the Canadian border.

We followed some power line for a while and decided to stop to check out a giant bird's nest atop one of the junction towers.

We heard a noise behind us and noticed a group of ATV riders on the next hill, not unusual for that area.

What was unusual were the guns strapped to their backs, not hunting rifles but something more like military style weapons, and they were staring back at us through binoculars.

We jumped back into the jeep and started heading back to our family cabin.

We checked behind us, and yes, they were following us and trying to catch up.

The kid driving just floored it.

Our cell phones were useless in that area and we had no protection, only speed on our side.

We sped down dirt roads that had never been maintained and somehow managed to get the jeep parked far enough into our driveway, we pulled enough brush in front to cover it and hit ourselves.

When they roared past, we noticed they were all dressed in green, covered in weird insignia patches that we didn't recognize, and carrying weapons like they were prepared for serious combat.

We have no idea what they were doing or what they were training for.

Story twenty nine.

Deer will sometimes follow people through the woods.

They stay hidden, but you can hear their feet barely rustling things behind you, keeping pace with you humans being slow walkers and animal terms.

Eventually the deer will decide, now make a bit more noise and step out behind you into whatever path you've been walking and show themselves becoming very still.

They want you to see them at just this distance, far enough that they have time to run if you attack, but close enough for a good look.

It's eerie to hear them following.

It's sort of like, is there something back there or not.

Then when they decide it's time for you to get a look.

Now you know something is behind you.

There's a sense of dread that now you have to turn around and see what it is.

It's unnerving the first few times.

It is amazing to see a full grown deer maybe thirty feet behind you, very still just looking at you, unafraid.

Ironically, the deer is now controlling the situation, not what you'd expect.

You look at the deer, the deer looks at you, and then the deer kind of decides that you aren't worth their time and stalks off into the woods.

The first few times this happens, it is creepy as anything.

After that, you know what you're most likely hearing, and it's kind of fun.

You do have to have good hearing to be aware of it and know when to look back.

Some people never hear them and just miss the whole show.

It is an interesting instinct that many larger prey animals will follow predators who are not in hunting mode and are moving away from them.

It's well documented in several prey species.

It may be their way of better identifying individual predators and understanding their movements.

Story thirty.

I was driving home not so long ago from working the Pitch Black and my usual route was blocked by a cop car, so I turned around and went down a country lane street lights.

I just crawled out of work and needed to pee.

But it's only twenty five minutes to home, so I figured it'd be fine.

I was driving ten miles an hour down this lane i'd never driven before, ditches on either side of a lane through a field straight out of a horror film.

When my neck started prickling.

Something was watching me, and it was close.

I ignored it because I'm thirty seven and really brave, until I couldn't ignore it anymore.

I looked out the window into the eyes of the devil, who opened its mouth and made a god awful noise.

I screamed, nearly wet myself, and then realized it was a field full of sheep.

Another time, I was in bed around midnight when I heard something rustling around my garden.

I lived in a bungalow at the time, so I looked out the window, thinking the rabbit had let herself out of the hutch, until she started thumping at something that had disturbed her.

I couldn't see anything at first.

Then two bright yellow eyes and jaws of death opened at me.

I fell off the bed, squealing and actually did pee a little.

That time, it turned out to be one of my jet black cats who had snuck out when I went for my bedtime cigarette.

She wanted to come back.

In Animals Will Be the Death of Me Story thirty one.

I used to live in rural Tennessee for a while.

I had a house at the end of a two mile long driveway, and my closest neighbor was halfway down that same driveway.

We weren't close, but we helped each other out here and there when needed.

One night, I heard someone driving up the driveway.

It was probably eleven PM, and nobody lived past me.

I had no idea who it could be.

I walked over to the front windows and looked outside.

Some guy in an SUV was parked in front of my porch.

He saw me in the window, waved, then got out and came up to talk to me.

I opened my front door, locked the screen, and asked what he needed.

He said something about looking for his dog, So I asked who he was and where he lived.

This guy looked me dead in the face and said, oh, I live just past you there, and pointed to the densely packed trees surrounding my house.

I told him I hadn't seen his dog and apologized for it.

He replied, okay, whatever.

His tracker just led me here.

So I figured you would have seen him.

I had not, in fact seen his dog, the one that supposedly had a tracker on it.

He turned around and walked back down the driveway.

I washed him until he got into his car and drove off far enough that I couldn't hear the tires anymore.

The next day, my neighbors came by to collect trash for me.

They owned a dump truck and would often save me the forty minute trip to town.

They asked me if someone had come to my property the night before.

I said yes, and they asked if I knew him.

I said no.

Apparently this guy told my neighbors he lived at the top of a hill across town.

Only problem is that hill had one house on it and it was destroyed by a tornado about four years earlier.

He had used the same excuse about looking for his dog, but claimed it was in their yard.

My neighbors had no idea how he got in because they, unlike me, always kept their gate latched and had a no trespassing or I'll shoot signposted.

Needless to say, I started keeping my gate latch after that and bought a master lock for it.

I moved about four months later.

Story thirty two.

When I grew up, I lived in a neighborhood that had a giant cemetery across from it, and I spent many many nights drinking and smoking in the graveyard.

Since this cemetery hadn't had anyone buried in it in over fifty years, no one ever visited, but the city maintained it.

One night, I was doing my usual thing, drinking, smoking and playing on my phone when I heard someone say, do you like hanging out with a dead young man?

I turned around and saw a man in his sixties, a black man wearing jeans, a checkered flannel shirt, and a gold crossed necklace.

I told him, yeah, I do.

Actually they don't talk much.

He said, you'd be surprised how often they do and asked my name.

I told him and asked his.

He said, I'm passing Troy.

My wife is buried here and I'd like to see her.

I asked if he'd like his privacy, and he said, I'm actually leaving.

You have a good night, young man.

Then he walked away.

When I got home and told my mom that I met a guy named pastor Troy, she looked at me really strangely and said, are you sure.

Pastor Troy died a couple of years before you were born son.

She asked me what he looked like, and after I described him, she said I was really freaking her out because I had described the man she knew who was definitely deceased perfectly.

It freaked me out for a while.