25 people share the creepiest things that happened to them. There's a man in the vent.

There are some experiences in life that are truly "you had to be there" moments. Some of them are light, hilarious anecdotes about a friend humiliating themselves or a funny exchange that can't be properly told in story form.But others, are truly freaky close encounters with the supernatural, or worse yet, violent criminals, and those simultaneously functions as stories and warnings to others.In a recent Reddit thread, people shared their freakiest encounters and these will make you lock your door and sleep with your eyes open.1. ASuds_65 was stunned by the sincerity of their jerk roommate's last words. "I had a roommate who was always a complete asshole. Never was polite or kind to anyone. One night after I helped his drunk ass to bed he turned to me and said "I really appreciate you and I know you dont like seeing me like this. You've been a good roommate and friend, thank you." I found him dead the next morning due to an undiagnosed heart condition that alcohol had amplified." "Not creepy or freaky in the normal sense, but I will never forget how serious and genuine he was in his last words spoken ever. It was the first time I had ever heard him complement anyone." 2. mattyjets saw their doppelganger before a horrible fate. "In 1991 I went to a 7-11 by myself when we were at my grandmother's house. There was another kid there about my age, we looked similar, etc. I bought a Slurpee and walked back to my grandma's house and that was that. The other kid was kidnapped and murdered, pretty much right after leaving that 7-11. The only thing I can think of that kept it from being me was maybe I won some sort of cosmic coin toss. The police are pretty sure they know who did it but couldn't prove it, and to this day it still weirds me out. I'm 41 now and live in that neighborhood." 3. YOONA451 dodged a major predator. "I’ve told this story before but it is still by far the creepiest thing to happen to me. When I was 16 I had just gotten my license as well as my first after school job. Since school ended about an hour before I had to be at work, I would sometimes park in the adjacent parking lot and take a nap. This was a shopping strip with a grocery store, restaurants, and a bank on a fairly busy Friday afternoon. As I'm sitting there drifting off I see a black Denali pull up behind me blocking my car in the spot. A gentleman jumps out in a business suit and asks if I can help him. He looks nice enough, and I'm assuming he is looking for directions." "He starts to explain to me that his wife and he were supposed to be signing for a loan at the bank behind us today, so that they can purchase a boat, but she is stuck in a meeting and can't make it. He then asks if I wouldn't mind posing as her and singing the documents for her. I'm completely blown away, but super shy and feel the need to let him down easy (stupid I know). So I tell him I don't think they'll believe I am your wife. He then tells me it's fine, he has her license with him (which he shows me) and she has the same hair/eye color as me, so they won't know. At this point I'm freaking out. I start to notice how disheveled he looks, he's sweating, and surprise surprise...no wedding ring. I just want him away from my car so I start telling him I can't help him, that he needs to go ask someone else." He says it's fine, it'll be quick, just jump in my truck and I'll take you over there. Like I said this bank was in the same shopping strip...there would be no need to drive to it. Even in my gullible teenage mind I know this story is complete bull. I'm telling him no over and over, while scanning the parking lot for anyone who might be noticing, but of course no one has. He then starts getting irate telling me that I'm perfect and the only one who can do it, how beautiful I am, can he at least take me to dinner, and so on. I start trying to close my window and he REACHES through grabs my shoulder and starts trying the door handle (which was luckily locked.) I'm so frozen I don't even really react, I can't go anywhere as he's blocking me in. Suddenly and I'm not really sure why I just blurt out that I'm only 16...and for some reason THAT freaks him out. He slowly backs away, get in his truck, and leaves. "I called the police afterwards but they never followed up with me. But I just KNOW he had found that license and made up that story as a way to lure women into his truck, and it scared the hell out of me that he could have convinced someone before. Years later I spotted him on the sex offender registry for assault :/" 4. Evilrybone and their coworker got incepted. "One night I had a dream that a coworker killed me with an axe and when I got to work the next day she was telling a fellow coworker that she had a dream that she killed me with a knife. Sort of an odd coincidence, she never did try to kill me but it was a little bit creepy." 5. DJTCstatic was sadly right about their childhood paranoia. "I was about 10 and I had a huge fear of someone being in my house, to the point where I wouldn’t go to the basement because it scared me. But I am glad I had that fear, because one day during the summer I was trying to go to sleep and I heard a noise from above me, and I freaked out. I then noticed over the coming days that my room was really hot, and I thought this was strange because we just got new air vents put in. My dad was checking them out and went to get some sort of tool, when I saw the scariest image possible. There was a skinny man looking at me and my dad from the vent in my ceiling." "I froze and pretended not to notice him, and I went to get my dad, and me in my ten year old mind was instantly thinking run with him out of the house, but I have two cats and were scared to leave them, so I grabbed a paper towel and a pen and wrote in my chicken scratch handwriting “there is a man in my vent” but he couldn’t read it, and asked what it meant, and thats when we heard a thud, and he looked at it again and must have put it together, because he grabbed me and called the police, when my mom got home she got to see the man being dragged out of the house in cuffs." "Even though he was caught and I still had a somewhat happy ending, the image of looking up and seeing his face, and being so petrified I couldn’t move or scream still haunts me." 6. nospace98 almost got snatched up in a crowd. "When I was about 5 I was visiting my grandma in the city with my mum, dad and sister. We were walking towards the city centre so it was pretty crowded." "I remember letting go of my dad's hand and then feeling him grab back hold of it a few moments later. I kept walking, I don't know how far. I hear my dad shouting from behind me and grabbing my other arm. I hear him say "sorry" and I look up and I realise I was holding hands with an old man that I didn't know." "My dad assumed that I'd accidentally grabbed onto this man's hand thinking he was my dad. I remember him pulling me away all embarrassed and I was just thinking "but the man grabbed my hand?". "So basically, I think some guy tried to snatch me out of a crowded area. I still don't understand why my dad thought I grabbed onto his hand. My parents were normally quite paranoid about strangers. He must have been distracted when talking to my grandma." 7. guitarghoul almost got kidnapped by a couple. "I was probably 9 years old, in about 1995. At that time all the schools and parents were warning us of stranger danger. It seemed like a lot of kids were getting kidnapped because they were being tricked into helping the kidnappers find a lost pet. One day I was it riding my bike alone on our street (a fairly populated street lots of kids out playing and whatnot) and a green two door car pulled up with a woman driving and a guy in the passenger seat. The guy calls out the window to me “hey kid! We lost our dog can you help us find her?” "I can still remember the feeling I felt. It was like sirens were going off, and I thought for a split second that this was it I was going to be kidnapped. A rush of what felt like BURNING hot adrenaline shit through my body, I felt like I could hear everything 10x louder and see everything 10x better, I’ve never felt anything like that before. I hopped off my bike pulled the front tire up so I could turn around faster and I booked it home. I was shaking and tears were pouring down my face even though I wasn’t “crying”. I got home and told my mom what happened. She called the police, but I’m not sure if the people were ever caught. Crazy." 8. SmuckersBunny and their cousin were approached by bad scammers. "My cousin and I were probably targeted for a scam, but I still don't know how or why. We are 6 years apart, but went to the same high school at different times. Small school, graduating classes about 60. Years later, we are on a road trip together several states away, and decide to stop at a Huddle House for coffee." "We walk in, and the guy at the next table turns around and smiles and says "you went to Anytown High School, right?" When we say yes, he says he and his girlfriend (also at the table, smiling and not talking) went there too. We didn't recognize them, but smiled politely, commented it was a small world." "He starts to rapidly talk about different things from the school, just disjointed comments that were a bit odd. He talked like a salesman, almost. At first, we smile and nod, but he had weird facts wrong. So we ask what year he graduated. He claimed not to remember. So we asked follow up questions and he gets cagey." "Suddenly the girlfriend goes "this isn't working" and they suddenly pay and leave, food untouched. We since have determined they didnt go to our school, and have tried to figure out how he knew what he did, to no avail." "Edit: because I got some questions, neither my cousin nor I lived in my hometown by this point, the car wasnt bought in our hometown and didnt have any stickers etc, from there. The guy had just enough facts correct (one or two teachers names, and a diner across the street) totally off the cuff that we really questioned it afterwards." 9. sunshineflouride barely saved their dad's life. "I came downstairs to tell my grandmother that, "daddy is sleeping with his eyes open" "He is type 1 and had been drinking. He took insulin to counter the rise in blood sugar but wasn't paying attention and took too much. When the ambulance finally got there (we lived on the outskirts of a small town that didn't have a hospital) he was about five minutes away from death. If we had waited any longer, he would have died." "Please take care of your diabetic pals!! If something doesn't seem right, it probably isn't. Know what to do in the event of a high or low sugar problem." 10. Vict0r117 was haunted by Taylor Swift's voice. "I could hear a woman's voice singing almost inaudibly on my daughter's baby monitor. It happened a few nights in a row. I began thinking back over all the doors that opened on thier own, and wierd noises in the house. After a week I had almost convinced myself the house was haunted." "Then one night I heard the woman's voice singing clearly for the first time. It was taylor swift singing "bad blood." Turns out I just live in an old house and my cheap chinese baby monitor can juuuuuuust hardly pick up the local pop station if its a clear night." 11. Gustaboii still doesn't know who was on the other side of the door. "I was alone in my house with my step dad, I went to the bathroom, when I sat down on the toilet, that’s when I saw someone was trying to open the door, I pushed it and said “occupied” but whatever was at the other side kept trying to open the door, I called my step dad and I heard him from the kitchen saying “yeah?” At that point I was terrified, it suddenly stopped, I checked the whole house for anyone other than my step dad, didn’t find anybody, the. I went to the other bathroom and then used it, still don’t know what the hell was at the other side of the door." 12. skyflyer8 had a prophetic dream. "Had a dream that I was going to get into a car accident. Woke up and the feeling that I was going to get into an accident just kinda stayed with me. Later that morning, some idiot ran a red and T-boned the car I was in." 13. PepurrPotts heard their dead mom's voice. "Mom died 5 months ago, and I moved across the state- into her apartment- to be closer to family. I swear I heard her call my name one night. It felt so natural, hearing her voice in her own apartment, but she'd been dead over a month. I'm sure it was just a nearly-asleep hallucination, but it was spooky." 14. my_diet_starts_tmrw woke up in the middle of fog. "I would sleepwalk as a child. Usually I’d wake up in the living room, or I would freak myself out and wake up in the basement." "On one occasion I had wandered outside. I was 7 or 8 and I woke up standing in the middle of my backyard on a super foggy morning right around sunrise. I quickly figured out which direction my house was and ran back to bed. I never told my parents about it because I figured they would be mad at me for going outside when I should have been asleep." 15. CrosswordGuru had a premonition about a former classmate. "One evening, for some reason, I thought about a person that I had gone to college with but had not seen in more than 30 years. So I decided to google her name to see what she had done with her life." "I found her obituary. It had been posted earlier that day. If I had googled her one day earlier I would never have known that she had died." 16. mother_of_nerd had a psychic premonition about their mom. "I was home alone, laying down on my living room floor, and hardcore spacing out at the ceiling. I heard my mother scream on my front porch. I rushed out, but she wasn’t there. I ran around the outside of my house. Not a single person in sight. It 10000% sounded like my mom, and it curdled my bones because it was so raw and animalistic in its sound. I called her right away." "Mom picks up the phone and I ask her if she is alright. She responds that she is and tells me to hold on for a minute while she pulls over into the parking lot of a business. she was driving and didn’t want to talk on the phone at the same time." "Seconds later, I hear a lot of noise and my mom screamed. An eternity stretches on before mom is calm enough to say anything coherent. She goes on to tell me how the car in front of her and the one behind her (before she pulled over, the ones that continued on the same path of travel that she had been on) had been struck by a speeding semi that ran a red light at the next intersection. It was a terrible accident with extensive injuries. The semi clipped the rear of the front vehicle and front of the rear vehicle. My mom’s car would have been hit dead center." "We always joke that we are psychic, as this is not the first instance like it that we have had, but it was definitely the most freaky of the bunch! TL;DR—> I’m psychic and saved my mom’s life." 17. tvp204 and their boyfriend bonded over a shadow figure. "I used to live in a one bed room apartment with a den. In the den we had a spare bed for visitors or whatever. One night my boyfriend was super sick so I went and slept in the spare bed. In the middle of the night I had what seemed to be sleep paralysis, where I couldn’t move but was seemingly awake. In that state I saw a dark figure walk into the room and just stand over me for a while. Like the dark figure was right over my face." "The next day I was very freaked out. I told my boyfriend and he asked if I was joking. The same night he saw a dark shadowy figure in our bedroom, pacing in front of the bed. He said he slept with the light on all night. Which had explained why it was on the next morning when I went into the room." "This happened about a year ago and we haven’t talked about it since. We’d rather forget that entire night happened." 18. FizzingSlit received a terrifying warning. "I woke up at about 3am with a random mexican woman standing by my door. I angrily stood up (naked by the way) and asked her to leave, she did but 3 seconds later she poked her head in and warned me that I better relock my door." 19. InfamousDoughBoy's 20/20 adult hindsight only makes their experience worse. "I have a very vivid memory of waking up terrified in the middle of the night and running to my parents room because I saw a ghost when i was a kid. He followed me and stared at me from the doorway as I crawled into their bed and hid under the covers. We looked at each other, for a few minutes and then he left. I was so shaken that I stayed awake the rest of the night until my parents woke up in the morning. I was an adult when I realized that it was not a ghost and actually someone scoping out our house in the middle of the night." 20. spagootibooty realized they had schizophrenia in the scariest way. "I was home alone sleeping, when all of a sudden i felt a presence crawling up onto my bed. I can hear the sheets ruffling and feel the bed sinking. All while I hear a soft laughter getting louder and more intense as it gets closer to me. Finally, after what felt like it was literally next to my ear, I wake up. As I turned my head to look to see what the hell was laughing at me, I see this non-discript figure hovering over me and burst out in what I could only describe as the most aggressive laughter all while shaking my bed violently." "My head felt like it was being rattled from all the shaking. At that moment I wanted to scream as loudly as I could but I could not summon the strength to so much as turn my head away from what I was seeing. I was terrified and angry. Angry at myself for being absolutely terrified and not being able to even attempt to defend myself from this creature that had spent what felt like minutes taunting me. When I was finally able to muster the strength to fight back it had already disappeared from the room with its laughs echoing." "Turns out I have schizophrenia and this was the first of many hallucinations that plagued me throughout my late teens to my mid twenties. With therapy and the early realization that it might be mental illness I was able to keep myself relatively sane. That was almost over 15 years ago. Its gotten better and these days it doesn't happen as often but when it does it usually whenever I get severly stressed in a short period of time or moderately stressed over a prolonged period of time." 21. immyfinalrose luckily got away from their attempted captor. "Someone attempted to kidnap me in a park. Thankfully I was 13 and a little smarter then. He came up to me and grabbed my wrists and kept screaming “your coming with me”. I don’t think his grip was too hard because I was able to rip away and I ran super fast away. Gave a statement to the police and he was arrested!" 22. QueenSassyPants's child saw the ghost from a fire. "We moved into a new place. Built around 1930 and sometime in the 70s had a fire. My 3 year old (at the time) started running around the house and playing hide and seek with himself. Kids weren't allowed in our room, but our room was on the first floor and the closet was actually the underside of the stairs. He kept running in there and shouting "found you! Hide better!". "We didn't think much of it. New house. Kids have imaginary friends... Until that night when he asked if Sam could sleep in his room. He said she was lonely, but they're friends now so she can sleep with him. She doesn't want to sleep in the closet anymore." "No one else ever saw her and weird things rarely happened. We moved a year later and except for the day after we moved (he asked if she can come too) he has never spoken of her again." 23. chom_pipe is haunted by a golden grid. "Three times In my life I have awoken to see the same golden grid projected on my wall. Twice in my youth, and once more a few years ago." "It resembles a projection of light that has passed through a yellow, patterned glass. But that’s not likely, because my 1st bedroom didn’t have windows, the light didn’t move and when I placed my hand in it, the light did not project onto it. It fades after about 1 minute and I go back to sleep. Edit - made a quick sketch of it https://imgur.com/pCF1Zs8" 24. SmellsLikeGasoline lives near a road with a resident ghost. "2 friends and I got bored one summer night and decided to drive up into the mountain to a spot that overlooks the town. It's a rough dirt road and we were in a VW Rabbit. We finally make it to the little clearing on the side of the road and pull over. There are no houses on this road for miles and we didn't see any other vehicles the rest of the night." "So we get out of the car. It's pitch black except the lights of the little town at the bottom of the clearing, miles away. We're all kinda bullshitting as we get out and something gets our attention. We all turn and look at the same time and see this thing running through the woods about 30 feet from us. Now this thing looked like a person, except it was glowing. Remember those glow in the dark stars you could stick to your ceiling? It glowed at about that intensity." "So we watch this thing run, pushing branches out of its way and what not. We all get back in the car without a word and start driving off in total silence. About 30 seconds later someone finally says "What the fuck did we just see?" The best answer we could come up with, as crazy as it sounds, was that we saw a ghost. All 3 agreed we saw the exact same thing." "So a couple years go by and I'm with the older brother of one of my best friends and we're just shooting the shit. I bring this story up expecting him to laugh at me and he gets a shocked look on his face and asks if I'm serious. Apparently his teacher in high school had told them he saw the exact same thing run across that road in front of him one night. Made me feel a little less crazy." 25. fireinvestigator113's baby has relationship with an imaginary woman's voice. "This happened literally Friday night. My son is about 10 months old and absolutely hates sleep. He will sleep in his crib until about 3-4 am then wake up screaming for a bottle then spend the rest of the night in our bed." "Friday night he woke up screaming and I got up and went to the kitchen to make him a bottle. I turned towards the night light in the kitchen so I could pour the water to the right level when I heard a woman humming in a soothing way behind me. It wasn’t like a quick thing, it was a full ten seconds of “hmmmhmmmhmmMMmHmmmm”. "My son started screaming even harder as soon as the humming stopped. I dropped the bottle and booked it to our baby’s room to check him and our room to make sure it wasn’t my wife. He was fine and she was dead ass asleep with the door still closed like I left it. I had to wake her up." "He has no toys that make the humming sound I heard. I still have no idea what the fuck it was. The freakiest part was how hard he screamed when it stopped."