To ask what is the strangest/creepiest thing that has ever happened to you?

[JudgeyHotPants]

I have two strange/creepy unexplained events that stick in my head.

The first happened when I was teenager, my DF ran his business from our family home and we had a phone/fax machine in the living room. Whenever we picked up the phone we could always hear a radio station playing very distantly on the other end. I'll never forget the time I picked up the phone to ring a friend and could hear Penny Lane playing!

The other is slightly more sinister. My DM and I were at home alone one evening, it was summer and still warm and I had the bedroom window open. I can remember hearing a loud crash in the garden, thought maybe the cat had knocked something over and thought little of it. Then my mum suddenly popped her head around the door told me that she was going to bed and that she'd "locked all of the doors". Thought it was an odd thing to say, but thought little of it. That night I was kept awake by the next door neighbours security light going on and off, and when I got up the next morning my DM pointed out that the garden ornaments and solar lights from next to the fence had been smashed.

That's when she told me that she to and heard the crashing sound the night before, and got up to investigate and when she looked through the kitchen window she was convinced she could see a person peering through the window, as as if they were standing next to it with their back against the wall and peeing in from the side, but wasn't sure if she was seeing things or not! She was scared enough to lock all of the doors, but not to ring he police it seems! Still freaks me out now! I'm sure someone was in our garden for whatever reason!

My DD had one of those books when she was a toddler where you could record your child's voice and play back the cute wafflings by pressing a button on the front. We were playing with it one night and she recorded something sweet like "love you mummy" so I left it on that recording, put book back on shelf.

A few days later, went into her room to tidy up, make bed etc. took one step into her room and this awful blood curdling scream emits from the bookcase! Took the book from the shelf and pressed play, awful scream again! The scream sounded nothing like my daughter, there is no way she could have got hold of the book anyway and I don't think I have ever exited a room so fast in my life.

Book was subsequently recorded over with silence and sold at the next available boot fair.

Fixit I feel like screaming book nightmares are in my near future.

I don't believe in anything otherworldly but I did go through a phase of seeing things that weren't there, and it was no fun. I was about 21 and was quite unwell with depression and anxiety, to the point that I had to leave university and move home because I wasn't coping, and I'm sure it was the stress of this that made me hallucinate a little bit. The worst of it happened in a holiday cottage in Keswick - my parents were meant to be having a holiday to celebrate their anniversary but they didn't want me to be left at home alone so they made me come with them. This was when my anxiety was at its worst and I was basically constantly on the verge of a panic attack for weeks at a time, which was exhausting and did strange things to my perception.

I was constantly seeing dark flashes out of the corner of my eyes, like a black animal darting out of view. One night I went to the kitchen for a drink. The window had no blinds or curtains, but because it was dark outside and the kitchen was brightly lit, it was impossible to see anything outside past the reflection of the room. That's how I know it was only my imagination when I saw a wild-eyed man with a knife throw himself against the window.

Another time I was in bed trying to sleep, with the bedroom in darkness and the dim glow of distant streetlights behind the curtains. One moment there was nothing there, I looked away for a second and when I glanced back there was the black silhouette of something sitting on the windowsill. I was getting used to the shadows flitting in my peripheral vision, so I reasoned that if I stared directly at the silhouette it would probably disappear too. I fixed my eyes on it and studied every detail. It seemed to be some kind of goblin, maybe 3 feet tall, crouching on the edge of the inner windowsill and grinning at me. Its ears were big and pointy like bat ears, its limbs were scrawny, its face was wrinkled like a Pug. When I had stared right at it for several seconds and it still just sat there without fading away, I got scared and closed my eyes. I didn't look again until daylight, when it was gone.

As I said, I am 100% sure this was a result of my mental health being a bit dodgy at the time - I'm much better now but I still see black dogs out of the corner of my eyes when I'm stressed and over-tired - and I don't think the cottage was haunted at all, but I definitely wouldn't want to go back and spend another night there if only because I'd rather not revisit that period of my life.

Oh dear, how scary.
Your experience really reminds me, almost identically when I left home to move to university halls I also had a sort of breakdown.

I took an abusive relationship with me which dragged what should have been a great time in my life down the shitter.

Anyway. One night I finally had enough, we'd been arguing and it was the last straw, he was refusing to leave my accommodation so I packed a small bag and went out to sleep on the streets in London.

I was sat on these steps, head in a mess, and I kept seeing something lurking behind my shoulder, but when I actually turned my head there was nothing there.

I saw this tall black lurking thing almost a dozen times behind my shoulder, without catching what it was.

I finally spun myself round and confronted a malevolent person all in black, with a black hood over his face. The grim reaper I think. I said "let me get away" or some incoherent gibberish and he revealed his face and that was the scary part, the face was like a twisted child all teeth and grimacing, and wrinkled up.

I ran to get away, but ran directly into oncoming traffic in the road. I got shouted at but wasn't hurt. I was so shook up though I walked to A&E just to speak to someone sane.

Mine is not dramatic at all, but wierd. Several years ago my df passed away. The date was 13th November. As the first anniversary approached me and dm were very sad, bereft. My dm always bought the tv guide magazine. In the guide for that week, on Monday 13th November there was a film showing. It starred an act of with my dad's full name. Our surname is very unusual, there used to be 5 entries in the phone book with the same name - and 3 of them were my uncles! Never heard of that actor before or since.

Although I am openminded about the possibility of the supernatural, I'm not normally superstitious. Anyway - my family were on holiday in Scotland last Christmas in an old hunting lodge on the coast. Our very first night there, I went upstairs with my daughter to settle her into her room at bedtime. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, all the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I had an overwhelming urge to flee the room, run out of the house - almost like a panic attack. I was just convinced that there was some kind of being or presence in that house. Of course I hid what I was feeling, and my daughter and I chatted as she got into her pyjamas and settled into bed. Suddenly, in the middle of our conversation, she looked at me and said, "Mummy, do you think this house is haunted?" I couldn't believe it. Not until after we left the house at the end of our holiday did I tell her about how I was feeling, too. We had had exactly the same experience.

I have loved this thread and have read it avidly over a few evenings. I’d like to share a story which my grandmother told me – it was corroborated at the time by my uncle, although his memory now is hazy and he seems less clear.

My uncle, then in his twenties I think, shared a terraced house with several young men. My grandparents lived a little while away and in those days (uncle is now in his 80s) men weren’t supposed to be able to fend for themselves, so Nanna wanted to go and check out his house.

They arrived and sat in the front parlour – which opened straight onto the street. They had been there a little while having a cup of tea when someone knocked on the door. “Don’t worry” said one of the lads “it’s only Mary”. Nanna was waiting for this Mary to come in, but they didn’t open the door and she presumed it was a child playing knock and run.

She then decided to wash up the tea things in the kitchen whilst the men (sigh – different times!) listened to the radio. Someone came and knocked on the internal kitchen door. She opened it but they were just sitting and listening and said they hadn’t heard anything. Then, scarily, there was a knocking on the back external door – even though she had seen nobody walk through the gate into the yard.

She went to the bathroom and someone knocked on the door – she rushed out presuming that someone must be desperate, but, you’ve guessed it – nobody.

During the night, someone knocked persistently on the wall adjoining the house next door. They got a very broken night’s sleep, and to cap it all, someone knocked on the bathroom door when she was in there again next morning.

Eventually, she had had enough and demanded to know who was doing all the knocking and why.

All the young men looked at each other and then came clean and told the story.

Years before the two adjoining houses were inhabited by a mother and her grown-up son. The mother was very possessive of her son and didn’t like him having lady friends. If she found out he had invited a woman home she used to hammer on the door and tell him to get that floozy out of the house – and she would go to both the front and back doors and hammer and shout to make her point.

Eventually the mother died, but still made her disapproval known until the son moved away - but the mother's ghost had now decided to express her disapproval towards every female who dared enter the house.

I still remember Nan's affronted face at the cheeky ghost knocking on the toilet door!

When I was about 20 I went out drinking in central London & got horribly drunk.
Got the night bus and ended up falling asleep. I woke up about 4 am on a Sunday in the outer reached of London.
Had I been sensible I would have just stayed on the bus as there was no way I was going to be getting home from wherever I was.
However, I panicked, pressed the button & jumped off the bus.

As the bus drove off I realised how stupid I had been. I had no idea where I was, it was very very cold and I had no way of getting home.
As I started to panic I prayed really loudly for help and at that moment 2 black cabs with their lights on approached me.

There was no other traffic around and I was in zone 6. Luck or divine intervention??

Just reading through this thread as im stuck at home as my daughter has chicken pox. On page 4 of this thread there are two people saying how they bumped into people they hadn't seen in Exeter.

We were on holiday camping in Devon. The weather was poor so we decided to go into Exeter City shopping. We had been there for an hour or two when we walked outside Waterstone's book shop and sat on a bench right in front of us was my partners father. We were so shocked to see him as we all live in Wales. They were on a coach trip - going to Cornwall I think, but the coach had stopped off on the way. We were so shocked to bump into each other.

When I read the threads on page 4 I thought - I wonder if that was in Exeter and then as I got further down he page I was shocked to see that it was!

Creepy things happen in the most extraordinary places. I was visiting my DH's family in Arkansas, US two months ago. We stayed locally at a well-known chain hotel, on the 5th floor. During the night I felt the need to visit the toilet and made my way to the bathroom door. When I opened it (very quietly so as not to wake my DH, I was horrified to see in the dim light, a man in pyjamas sitting on the toilet! I backed out quickly saying "sorry, sorry!" Which woke my DH. He was asleep in bed. Who the hell was that? Someone who had died there in the last few months? I still go into toilets very gingerly!

Sorry for the late contribution. I am feeling quite on edge reading these, and I have only finished page 2, but wanted to share a some of mine. I've had loads of strange experiences/feelings over the years, so here's a few I can remember.

Back in 80's, was driving along motorway near airport and saw plane nose diving, definitely not landing. I tuned into news to see what had happened. Later that day, roughly the same time in US time, a plane crashed in New York.
I had a premonition that a famous racing personality would die - someone I never gave a thought about - they didn't, but had a life changing accident.
I have really good accuracy in predicting unborn babies sex - so much so my friend wouldn't let me discuss when she was expecting her twins (she said I was a witch!) and I was correct btw! When my SIL was expecting her first baby, by mum asked what I thought she was having and I said I just didn't know. This really upset my mum, and she said she hoped nothing went wrong. Sadly, my SIL had complications and her baby died shortly after delivery.

When my daughter was a little girl, she got me up one night while she went to the toilet. As she ran into the her room, she got to the middle and whole room lit up, like a light had been put on
I was watching the news on TV the night before Princess Diana's funeral. There was live coverage of her body being moved to Kensington Palace, and people in the crowd were shouting "Diana, Diana". I was thinking "what's the point, when something like this can happen to someone who had such a protected life" and a voice came into my head "if you see three stars then you will know"! I rushed to my front door expecting to see something, and saw nothing only the usual night sky. The next morning I was lying in bed, the sun was shining in through a gap in the curtains perhaps, and on the wall in front of me were three orbs of light. I was so scared, I pulled the duvet over my head and stayed there for a while.
I often have feelings where I know what's going to happen, and I am normally right. Maybe this is normal human instinct... Anyway, apologies for the late and rambling tale!

I'd got down to the bottom of the first page of this thread when some books shifted on the shelf beside me- nearly died of fright!

Just wanted to open this up to add a story which happened to my mum.
In the early 70s when she was a little girl, a neighbour pulled into the yard one morning with a woman, asking if she wanted to come to the shop with them and get sweeties. The woman had some chocolate and was feeding it to their dog (which was also in the car). My mum found this extremely strange, as it was a shocking waste of chocolate.

Anyway the man said, "You can come with us but you're not allowed to let your dad know you're leaving". She ran back into the house and relayed all this to her dad, who told her to steer clear of him.

The man was jailed for child abuse a few years later. He's out now, and living in Canada I believe.

I honestly think my mum just escaped a nasty fate through her weird feeling about the chocolate.

Love this thread!

Ive been reading this thread from my creepy lonely new office when all of a sudden my work phone started talking to me from my handbag! Its never done that before.

I've got a few - and they're potentially outing if anyone knows me, but ehhh, entertainment!
DH and I went on a ghost tour in Edinburgh. This tour ended up in the vaults. There was a corridor that Burke and Hare used. So, we're standing in one of the rooms, and the corridor is off to the right. Now, I thought the next tour was coming down, and that's what the shuffling noises were. Couldn't work out why the tour guide was getting faster and faster, and my DH was looking decidedly freaked out! Apparently, as I found out when left, we were the last tour of the night.
Another one - we lived in a house in the midlands, and had all sorts of weird things happen there. I was in the early stages of pregnancy and working nights as a nurse, so was pretty knackered. I was woken from sleep with the feeling someone was there watching me (DH was at work) and DH was woken one night with someone (not me!) screaming in his ear 'GET OUT!' OK, just feelings, all very explainable. BUT, there was a sun porch at the back of the house and DH saw a foot reflected in the glass (impossible to have been his or mine with the angle) and when putting out the bins, he felt someone grab his leg. He turned round laughing to tell me off, and realised I was out in the garden having a chat with our neighbours....
It was a rental as we were just down there working for a year, and it had definitely been abandoned by the previous tenants - they'd left bank cards, shoes, money, cigarettes - they left in a hurry I'd say.
I'd lose things, nothing huge, make up, toiletries, spare change I'd left around, my keys (which turned up somewhere else) and for a while we were convinced the other was doing it, or our neighbours had a key. They didn't, and I know I wasn't hiding DH's stuff. He swears blind he wasn't moving my stuff, and I believe him. Since moving to our current house, we've had no issues. We had our carbon monoxide detectors checked to make sure we had no leaks (know that can make some people a bit funny) and we're both the most practical, down to earth, not easily spooked people - we were spooked by that house!!

This is one I can only just remember but have been reminded of many times over the years by my DM.

My family lived in an early Victorian house and my parents' bedroom was at the very top of the stairs. The bed faced the door, which looked out on the top of the stairs.

I was about five years old and one morning I got up early to wake my mum up and give her a cuddle in bed. My dad had already left for the day and my baby brother was asleep in another room so there was nobody else in the house. According to my DM I suddenly pulled the bedcovers over my head and lay there shaking with terror. My DM asked if I was okay and I vividly recall the following conversation -

DM - 'What's wrong?'

Me - 'I don't like her mummy.'

DM - 'Who?'

Me - 'The woman at the top of the stairs.'

My DM, being the only adult in the house was understandably terrified at this and ended up scared to even leave her bed that day as I then described in great detail the large black Victorian dress she was wearing. She seems to think I have a 'thing' for seeing ghosts since I was born on Halloween!

In the summer of 1999 we all stayed in a cottage in Anglesey for a week, my mum, dad, brother and two sisters who were babies at the time. The cottage didn't look unusual from the outside but inside it had a dark, weird atmosohere. The bathroom floor was a marble type effect and you could make out faces if you looked closely enough. There were spooky paintings of people and animals on the walls. All the bedrooms were downstairs, apart from one which was upstairs that I slept in. My little sister who was four years old wanted to sleep in with me and a few times woke in the night asking for milk and I always felt like I was being watched as I went downstairs to get it. On our last morning there, my mum said she had heard someone walking round the house and called out" who's there?" She heard someone swear and footsteps leading away. When she went to check on all us kids, she noticed the front door was wide open..

My dad died nearly two years following a long illness. He always said to me that he'd send me a sign to let me know he was ok and that there was another side. On the day he died we came home all upset, we put TV on and it suddenly went kaput. Nothing. We looked and behind the screen a connecting wire had come out. It hadn't been moved or pulled and it had never happened before and has never happened since. I think it was my dad letting me know he was ok. He liked his tv and used to joke about televisions with my husband.

I woke myself up by growling like a dog in the early hours of this morning and I'm blaming this thread

Ooh I've got loads. No, really, I have!
Number 1 - my wedding flowers. Went to (central London) florist who did corporate stuff at my work. 3 weeks before my wedding I got made redundant so instead of c/o my work address, I told her she needed to contact me at my home address in West London. She - random florist - used to live in my flat, in my spare room, renting the spare room from the bloke from whom I bought the flat 2 years earlier. WTF.
Number 2 - my new husbands best friend's new girlfriend (who is now godmother to our first daughter) bought a flat in West London ; number 38 on the same street as my number 37 that the wedding florist also lived in. Whaaat??
Number 3 - when I first moved to London ( from a Celtic land😳) I arranged to meet an old university friend on Marylebone High Street. En route, getting the tube, I walked into a packed carriage and another mutual uni friend yelled OI ! ( or similar ...) . Again, so weird.

Ive never told anyone in real life this.
A few days after my son died I'd been packing up all of his clothes, bottles , dummies, basically anything that reminded me of him. I put them all in bin bags and kept them upstairs until my mum could collect them and store them at her house.
Afterwards I did a few sweeps of the house to make sure I hasn't left anything, went out , came back in and went to bed.
At about 2 am I suddenly woke up and had an urge to check downstairs. I can't explain why it was just an instinctive feeling.
I walked downstairs and switched on the light and the first thing I saw was my son's donald duck sock slap bang in the middle of the rug in the front room. It really stuck a chord with me as he had a donald duck teddy that he loved.
I've never been a believer in woo and perhaps there is a good explanation as to how it got there but it gave me some comfort when I needed it the most.

@Quadrophonic
Yikes! Your story of the cacophony of sounds outside your house reminded me of a very scary dream I had. In the dream, I was in a school hallway with other students and I could hear this cacophony of sound behind me. I was too scared to look behind me as I knew it was evil. Somehow I knew it was the 4 horsemen!! I really wonder what that sound was that you heard!

WhiskeyQueen

I've been reading this thread over the last few days and loving it, but freaking myself out.
Tonight, I've got caffeine induced insomnia and am watching TV sleeping on the sofa, all of a sudden DS5 sits up in bed and shouts 'Stop it! Stop it please!'. I go to him, turning all the lights on as I go, asked if he had a bad dream, no, asked who he was talking to, no-one. He goes back to sleep as if nothing has happened.
Look in on 'D'H to see if he's awake and ask if he heard DS, couldn't quite make out if he was awake so stood there a while trying to decide when he suddenly jumps up and shouts 'argh'! Bloody jumped out of my skin, the git! Def won't be sleeping now, even when the caffeine does wear off!

Lurker coming forward to share some creepy things as this thread is golden...

1. When my husband and I were looking for venues to get married in, we came across a church in Suffolk, in the middle of an isolated village. Looked lovely and old, Norman maybe. When we got to the front door we both paused at the same time and looked at each other - we both felt this weird bad feeling at the door. I am pretty woo but my husband is super practical and doesn't believe in spirits etc. When we went in I felt terrified all of a sudden - I stayed for 10 secs and then legged it back to car. To my surprise my husband followed me, and once we got in the car he said 'something didn't want us in there'. Took us a good hour to recover, still gives me goosebumps!

2. When I was 21 I lived with my parents, and my bedroom was in the attic - there were two bedrooms upstairs. Not a particularly old house. I used to wake in the night suddenly and felt like I could see a black shape in the top right corner of my room, and used to get a 'bad' feeling - I used to close my eyes and try to sleep but I felt there was something there, specifically manifesting from the spare room and 'seeping' into my room. My husband was due to move in with us and I told him about it - he agreed but reassured me he didn't feel it was malevolent. After he moved in we both used to wake up at the same time due to the same feeling most nights. When we moved out we spoke about it again and he very matter of factly told me ' oh yeah whatever that was was bad news but if I'd told you that you would never have slept again'(?!!).

3. Strange things always happen when we visit my PILs, they live in a very old house which has been built on over the years. I told my husband about hearing a child singing a lullaby when I went to loo one night - it wasn't scary, I hummed it to him. he said 4 other people (unrelated, never met) had heard the same thing at the same point in the house. His family also regularly talk about the 'grey lady' who they have all seen (apart from FIL) in the front room, she just stands in the bay window dressed in grey. There are often footsteps etc. to the point where I regularly turn around to ask if someone wants a cuppa and no one is there. I also have nightmares most of the times we visit but that could be subconscious and due to the above!

...and our current house is 1900s. My husband burst into the bathroom as I was showering the other day as he heard a woman scream and thought it was me in the bathroom (neighbour had already left for work). We have also heard kids giggling whilst in the living room seperately but always at 3pm. Bit weird.