46 Scary Unexplained Real-Life Events That Seriously Freaked People Out

Have you watched the most fear-inducing and gut-wrenching movie only for it to end with the words ‘based on a true story’? From demonic possessions to deeply thought-out and unsettling murders, our real world provides plenty of fuel for filmmakers to come up with films that keep us up at night. 

Tragically, not all of the scary real-life stories make it into the movies—there are more of them than we probably can count. But we’re making sure they’re not getting overlooked. Our Bored Panda team curated some of the terrifying ones for the people who can’t wait for Halloween to get here soon enough. To find them, all you have to do is scroll down.

#1

This wasn’t scary but it is unexplained. My first husband and I were separated at the time. I dreamed one night he arrived at our home and knocked on the door. When I opened the door he looked extremely tired and a sunken version of himself. Even though he didn’t say it, he was asking forgiveness with his eyes. Of course I forgave him and welcomed him inside. Our favorite thing to do was to lay in bed and talk for hours so we laid in the bed and began our conversation about nonsense stuff. As we were talking, the window at the foot of our bed was glowing a bright, warm light (not blinding but comforting) as we continued to talk the light became brighter and brighter until it engulfed us both in it’s warmth. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. About an hour later, my husband’s mother called me hysterical and told me that my husband had been m******d an hour before. I realized then, that he had come to see me to ask for forgiveness before he passed over. He was a d**g a****t and hid it from me for years, which caused our separation. He was in a bad location and a person there took his life. But I take comfort knowing I was with him when he passed.

#2

In 1989 I was driving on a familiar rural highway in broad daylight. I was rounding an easy bend and shocked to see a small town on the right side of the road. There’s a sign: St. Vincent. A few of the things immediately noticeable were a shop called Webster Welding, an old fashioned horse drawn water pump for fire fighting, several large poplars with dead tops, and black and white painted rocks along the street that faced the highway. I kept watching in the rear view mirror and it stayed visible. I drive a few miles and there is a gentleman waving at me from beside his car. He’s obviously broken down and I pulled over. A quick chat and I learn he’s blown a tire and wrecked his rim. He asks if I’ll drive him back to the town. No problem. In he gets and off we go. The town is not there. It’s a dusty Alberta crossroad. This fellow and I just sat in my truck in silence. I raised an arm and my hair was standing on end. His too. He said “All the trees were dead. Are we dead?” Eventually I drove him to a nearby town. He simply got out of the truck and walked away.
I remember it like it was yesterday. I could tell you what that town looked like in perfect detail.

#3

I moved to a different city for university at the peak of the pandemic. I lived off campus in a suite with a couple of my friends from my hometown. Life happened, and they both ended up moving out by the end of the first semester. So I was now living alone in a very quiet neighbourhood.

I got off of work late one night, and crawled into bed around 12am. I woke up about an hour later to the sound of footsteps shuffling around in my bedroom. I opened my eyes to see a very tall man in my doorway, backlit by the streetlights, with his cellphone upright in his hand as if he was recording. When the person registered I was awake, they backed their way out of the room and started running. I followed them outside, and watched them hop into the drivers seat of an empty car that had been left running before speeding down the street.

I had no information to give to the police when they arrived. To this day I have no idea who that person could have been, or what they were doing in my bedroom at 1am.

#4

The house I live in is pretty old (one of the old mill owners houses in the uk) and we have heard a lot of strange things here.
Bangs, crashes and things moving/falling are fairly normal but one night I awoke to find myself in the middle of a bad case of sleep-paralysis, I was laid flat on my back and there was a huge shadow person leaning over me and pushing down on my chest. I tried to scream but no sound would come out and I couldn’t move anything except my eyes to wake my husband. It was terrifying but once I broke the spell and “woke up” I realised it was simply a nightmare and felt better.

In the morning when my husband woke up, he said to me while wide-eyed
“I know how this is gonna sound but last night I woke up to a huge shadow person looming over your side of the bed, I could see it’s hands gripping the bottom of the frame on your side, it took me a couple of seconds to realise what I was looking at and when I shot up in bed it just disappeared”.

I had not at that moment told him about my experience.
We still talk about that 10 years later from time to time it was so profoundly strange.

#5

Okay, so, this one still gives me chills just thinking about it. I will say that, to a point, I believe in paranormal stuff, I have had too many creepy and unexplained things that I can confirm with others happen, however, I try to be very skeptical and always try to find the most reasonable explanations. This happened about 25 years ago.

I was 7 or 8 years old. I was laying in the top bunk of the bunkbed I shared with my twin brother. We had an attached bathroom, and the only light coming in the room was the light emanating from under the bathroom door. I was laying in bed, listening to my brother cry as my dad tried to remove a splinter from my brother’s finger. I looked at the foot of my bed, and I saw a man about 5’10 tall, long hair about shoulder length, short beard, and what looked like a flannel shirt and possibly overalls or suspenders standing there, and his pupils where glowing, kind of green like if you see an animals eyes in the dark. I started screaming “Daddy, daddy, there is a man in here, standing at the foot of my bed!”. I looked back and he was gone, and I just kept screaming, I was terrified. This apartment had a front and back door, but they were absolutely locked as we lived in a bad neighborhood in a very old part of the city.

10 years later, I recounted the story to my dad, and he had honestly forgotten about it. He did say, and he did not tell me when I was younger, that he did from time to time swear he saw a man who matched that description, minus the glowing eyes, in the apartment late at night. My dad had searched the apartment a few times after seeing him, but there was no trace of a way he came in, and often, he would follow the man to a closet and he just sort of disappeared.

#6

This happened to me when I was about 14. No one believes me, and I obviously can’t prove it, but I know.
I was babysitting 2 girls, one 5 and the a baby in a crib. They were in the same room. This was a small town, and the house had been abandoned but kept up,for about 30 years. This couple bought it and renovated it. It was a Victorian style house with a third floor for the mains’s room.

I was watching TV and heard the baby crying. I waited and didn’t hear her again, so I figured she went baby to sleep. A bit later I heard her again, and I went up stairs to check on her. She was sound asleep and I remember being surprised cause I figured she would be restless. I was standing over the crib, and i heard the baby crying again, from the third floor. I was terrified, ran downstairs and sat really really close to the TV so I couldn’t hear anything but the TV. It was summer, no wind, they had no pets, which is what everyone told me that was what I heard. Nope. I heard a baby crying. From an empty floor.

#7

My father is very religious. He does not believe in ghosts, aliens, anything supernatural, or out of the ordinary. To this day, if this story is brought up, he will quickly find something else to talk about..
My dad, younger brother, and I were at my family’s hunting camp sleeping in the small trailer together on bunk beds. It was the day after Christmas, and it was chilly outside, so we got to bed early to wake up for hunting. In the middle of the night, my Dad wakes up and starts screaming like he’s being attacked. He then immediately began sobbing. This is the only time I’ve seen or heard my father cry. When he calmed down, his terrified sons asked what happened. He said he’d had a terrible nightmare about an endless surge of water that was sweeping families away and drowning children. I recall he said those words specifically. To have my Dad tell me about a dream was strange in and of itself. You must understand all of this was completely out of character. Finally, I asked if we drowned in his dream because, at this point, I was sure there was some meaning to this vision. He said no and that all of the people looked Chinese. Now let me preface by saying we did not have internet access on our cell phones at this time, and we did not have any access to TV or news at our hunting property. Well, this was the morning of December 26th, 2004. The very day, a massive earthquake struck Asia, which caused a tsunami, which in turn took the lives of nearly 228.000 people. I still believe in some kind of collective consciencness because of this event. How could I not?

#8

I was out with my ex roommate on a night drive. We liked to go driving and get lost in the country sometimes and just jam out to music and talk. We lived in central IL at the time, so it was pretty much just open land and cornfields. It was super dark, though, so we couldn’t see too much beyond the sides of the road and what was in front of us.

My roomie was driving, and at this point we had the music off. She suddenly stopped mid sentence. I had been looking at my phone so I Iooked up at her when she got quiet. Her eyes were wide and her brow furrowed. I looked up at the road.

On the left side, there was a man just ominously staring into the darkness. Not even half a block later there was another, doing the same thing. And another. About 10 seconds pass and we see another man, facing the road but still on the left side, staring into our headlights with this blank, almost psychotic expression.

My blood ran cold and I couldn’t explain why. It was so unsettling even though they were just people standing out there.

After passing all of them, my roommate suddenly says, “What the F**K was *that??*” I said I had no idea but I wanted to go home.

I’m sure there’s some plausible explanation, but that night still makes me shudder for some unforseen reason. My roomie was creeped out too. There weren’t any houses out there, just fields with a few patches of trees. No farm equipment, no mail boxes, cars, or driveways. Just empty darkness and fields.

#9

I think I was in college (about 20 years ago) and I was staying at my parents for the weekend. They live in an apartment building.

It was in the middle of the night, around 1-2 AM, when suddenly we heard loud scratches and bangs on the entrance door. They were so loud that we all got up and gathered on the hallway to see what’s happening. My father looked through door sight and there was nothing there. He then started to beat loudly on the door to make it stop. After a few seconds more everything went silent. No footsteps, no sound and when looking through the door sight there was nothing there. Of course we didn’t opened the door because we all where very shocked by everything that happened.

In the morning, when we got up, we almost believed it was all a dream until we opened the door and saw some deep, big scratches on the outside part of the door (the door was made of wood).

To this day I still don’t know what that was. There are no dogs in the building and even if it was, it should’ve been a very large dog to leave those marks on the door. Also, such a big dog would bark or at least you would here its paws when walking outside your door.

#10

I’ve told other unexplained stories on Reddit but I’m not sure I’ve told the one about the thing my friend and I saw on the side of the road. I’ll try and remember it to the best of my ability, it was about 12 ish years ago. If anyone else saw something similar let me know.

It’s around 3 in the morning in rural North-Central Alberta. My friend and I are driving home from a high school party in which neither of us drank or took any d***s. It’s the middle of winter. In Alberta, this means it’s *cold* outside. This night it was below -30 degrees Celsius (below -22 degrees Fahrenheit; edited to fix temperature).

The whole way home, my friend and I are chatting about the usual things: what happened at the party, the boys we liked, etc. While most teenage girls are chatty, this friend in particular was a chatter box. Mostly I would listen and just react to whatever she said (love friends like that). So, because she would do most of the talking and didn’t require much input, I’d zone out sometimes looking out the window.

We are about 5-7 minutes outside of town at this point taking the highway, probably going 75-90 km/hour. Using an online calculator that puts us around 6-7ish km outside of town in a sparsely wooded area with no services open in town.

As we round a corner, I’m zoning out listening to my friend talk, when through the windshield, I notice glowing eyes off the side of the road, the headlights not fully hitting whatever it was. The eyes were green/yellowish. This would be normal but these eyes are about 7-8 feet above the ground. At first, I think it’s a hiker or someone walking back to town, but their eyes wouldn’t glow and no one is going to be walking that far from town or any houses when it’s *that* cold and late outside (this was a town of less than 1000 ppl).

As we drive closer, this thing appears to have goat-like legs, is very heavy set, and stands on two feet. Its arms drop down by its side like a person’s and it appears to even have some kind of dark clothing on the top half. It had something like goat-like horns that curved but went upwards. At this point, my blood runs completely cold and I have a full-fledged instinctual freeze response, hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I remember hearing my own disembodied voice think “I shouldn’t be seeing this. This is wrong.” I even teared up. We pass by it relatively quickly and I can’t stop thinking about what that was.

My perception of time was kind of weird after that due to panic. But now the lights of town are in front of us, and I realize my friend isn’t talking anymore. I turn to my friend and sheepishly said with tears still in my eyes, “sorry, what were you saying? I must be going crazy but I thought I saw something back there.”

She said “no, no it’s fine. I saw it too. Did it kind of look like a goat?” So, she saw it too. We had no idea what it was. We both come from hunting families and I know the easiest critique is that it was an elk or moose standing on hind legs. But the arms of an elk or deer don’t just fall beside the body, they buckle outwards a bit. Regardless, it seemed human-like in its stance and it was very heavy set. Then, you’d think, oh it was a bear. But it had horns and curved back legs. I assume moose would be the same as an elk or deer but I’ve never really seen a moose standing ambiently, typically just when they fight.

Even our responses were odd. You’d think, given scary movies, you’d immediately flip out and react. Both of us kind of just got entranced and terrified for awhile, blood running cold. While the friend and I don’t talk anymore, we talked about it a few times in the next years we were still in contact. She continued to refer to it as the goat thing.