We Asked Our Readers To Share Their Scariest Stories... And They're Terrifying

We asked our Evie readers to share strange or spooky things that have happened to them, and they did not disappoint!

Ghost Girl on the Backroads

“It was back in college. The streets had no lights, so the only thing lighting the road was my headlights. To this day I can see her figure. She was a young girl in a simple dress holding a doll. I thought it was fog, but as I drove closer I could definitely see her figure, and there wasn’t fog anywhere else. I drove through her, and the fog was IN MY CAR. It gave me chills, and I was shivering until I got to my friend’s house. It freaked me out so much that the moment I walked through his door I went to the bar and took a shot. Literally happened 20 years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday. The area I was driving through was once all farmland, and if I had to guess she was the ghost of a farmer’s daughter.” – Anonymous

Old Woman in the Hallway

“I was about 8 years old, and I saw an old woman when I got up in the middle of the night! She didn’t look malicious, but I immediately freaked out and ran to my parent’s room. I described her to them and turns out the old owner matched that description perfectly! Scary, right?!” – Anonymous

Haunted VRBO

“We stayed at a VRBO in Santa Cruz a few years back. Really cute place. One night, I completely shut and locked the front door. I leave the front room and come back a few minutes later and the front door was wide open, both locks undone with leaves in the kitchen like someone had tracked them in. Everyone else in the house was asleep. Also, the lights in the kitchen I had turned off mysteriously came back on. I swear it was a haunting!

The day before, too, the lights would mysteriously come on and then go off when no one had touched them.” – Lizzie

The front door was wide open, both locks undone with leaves in the kitchen like someone had tracked them in.

Worst Babysitting Job Ever

“I was babysitting overnight. It was a huge house, and it was storming outside. I wake up in the middle of the night to banging, and one of the little girls screaming my name and for help. I try to find her and run downstairs and see her through the glass front door. I have to find the key and UNLOCK the door to let her in… Then I called their nanny who was on vacation. She talked to the little girl (not on speakerphone so I couldn’t hear what they were saying), and then the nanny said to me, “Don’t worry. She won’t tell her parents anything. So you won’t be in trouble or anything.” Obviously, I stayed awake the remainder of the night and immediately told the parents when they got home.

What’s scarier: waking up to screaming and the little girl trapped on the other side of a locked door or the nanny?!?!” – Anonymous

Tarot Demon

“I had just quit messing around with tarot cards and crystals. A few days later, I woke up in bed to something standing over me. It put its hand on my throat and covered my mouth while speaking a language I didn’t know in my ear. I screamed, and it walked out of the room. I haven’t had something like that happen since. All I can think was it was a demon trying to get back into my life after I left the ‘metaphysical’ world.” – Anonymous

My Boarding School Was Haunted

“I went to a boarding school with a haunted floor! The fourth floor was where the students used to live a long time ago, and there were all kinds of rumors about what happened up there. At first, when I was a freshman, I thought it was just stories the seniors would tell the freshman to scare them, but then I realized that many of them were true and a couple had required exorcisms. Most were benign like hearing doors slam or lights being turned on and off (even though there wasn’t electric lighting up there), but some were more intense and involved past stories of suicide or hauntings of the ‘blue nun’ whom people would sometimes see in the windows!

I have been up there three times, but the closest I ever was to something scary was just a really eerie feeling, nothing else.” – Anonymous

Ghost Truck at the Hospital

“We were walking around in the abandoned hospital's fenced-off parking lot at like 1am, and all of the sudden, truck lights flicked on right on us. They were the old-school square kind, and we ran back towards the building. Then we heard it start up, then accelerate, so we booked it into the building. We waited until we didn't hear it anymore and went out the front. We hopped that fence so fast and left! Went back the next day and no tire marks, no holes or breaks in the fence big enough to fit a vehicle! No idea how that truck got in! It was so scary!!” – Anonymous

All of the sudden, truck lights flicked on right on us. we heard it start up, then accelerate, so we booked it.

A Haunting in Tomorrowland

“I worked in retail for Tomorrowland at Disneyland. In the stockroom upstairs above the manager’s office, there’s a white brick wall. It has the words ‘Helter Skelter’ written on it in faded black. The office sits next to the track of the people mover where a person tried to jump the carts and got stuck and died. When they went to clean it up, they did so very quickly and had to use the office/stockroom entrance to get him out. 

It’s said his ghost is who haunts the offices/stockrooms there. No one knows who painted the words on the wall. They just showed up. Maintenance has tried to cover it with more paint, but it doesn’t work. We tried to put up a Captain America poster to cover it, but that fell off. Then we put up a cardboard cutout of a Star Wars character to cover it, but that also fell down. It was a known thing around Tomorrowland people, but no one talks about it. It’s too creepy. It’s the closest I have ever been to a spooky experience.

By the way, ‘Helter Skelter’ is a Beatles song about an amusement park ride and can also mean chaos, which were both part of the cleaning up of the man’s body from the ride. That was so creepy too." – Anonymous

Monster in the Dark

“I was sitting on the back patio of my family’s farm at 1am, and it was pitch black out. I saw something kind of crawl/stalk across the lawn, but it didn’t have coyote or mountain lion legs. It had human legs and moved like an animal. It triggered one light, and it stopped behind a bush until the light turned off. Then I saw it sprint across the rest of the yard in the darkness, and my whole body froze. My body was telling me if I chased it nothing good would happen, so I waited 20 minutes then got the courage to run back inside.

It definitely scared me out of sitting back there without my dogs or someone else with me! 0/10 experience, would not recommend to a friend. I honestly still think about it and wonder what it could have been. I tried to rationalize it – ‘a neighbor kid’ – but the field light wasn’t triggered which it would’ve been if it were a neighbor. It still creeps me out to this day.” – Anonymous

I saw something kind of crawl/stalk across the lawn. It had human legs and moved like an animal.

The Old Church Was Haunted

“It's a bit of a story so bear with me! Let me preface this with: I have some spooky DNA. Both sides of my family have some weird thing with women having ‘special’ intuition and whatnot. Quite literally, one distant relative was known as the town witch, and let me tell you, the antique photo that we have of that woman is CHILLING. And then you throw in the fact that we're Catholic and it's a whole thing. Hence why I say, spooky DNA.

I’m a mining engineer, and back in 2017 while I was still in school, I interned in a company-owned town. I chose to opt out of the company's intern housing (because no thank you to 4 people per room and an 8-12 person shared bathroom), so I called around to find a rental in the closest town to the company-owned one and stumbled upon this rental that was perfect for the 12 weeks that I would be up there.

I took a day trip to the rental before I put down a deposit just to feel out the place, and my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I found out that it was actually an old church built back in the early 1900s, and this woman had converted it into her home which was now an Airbnb. This woman (now friend) is an amazing human being, and the place was clean and the price was right, so I sealed the deal and moved in a few weeks later to start my internship.

The building had two floors. The first floor had the kitchen, a few bedrooms/offices, and so on. But as a once-church, the first floor had the congregation area where the pews would be. So all of the bedrooms sort of horse-shoed around this open room. Mine was one of those bedrooms that opened up directly to that space. There was then a basement where the property owner lived full-time. Down there was a laundry room, living room, all that good stuff.

Next to the church itself was another building. This was essentially a one-room building with a bathroom and kitchen and about 5-6 contractors of the mine had rented it out and were staying there on their "on" days and went back to their full-time homes on the weekends. My room's window looked directly at the front door of that side building.

I can't recall if this was the true order that these events happened because there were just so many and trying to narrow this down to a handful of examples was rough. So strap in because here we go!

Usually, the property owner was around, but it was summer and she was retired, and so she traveled quite a lot during the time that I was there. One night, in particular, I was alone in the church, but the contractors were still on the property in the building next door. The patio that separated the church from the side building eventually got quiet as I lay in bed reading and soon everyone went to bed.

I don't remember WHAT woke me up hours later, but when I did, I heard my name being called by someone just inside the bedroom door. It was dark in the room, so while straining my eyes, I looked around, and before me next to the bed was a woman. An older woman with curly hair. I couldn't make out her face, but she had this blue glow to her, almost like mist. And she was pacing back and forth in front of the bed, and I could tell that she was trying to speak to me. But it was the middle of the night and my shift started at 5 AM, so I tried to lull myself back to sleep. 

I kind of pawed my hand at her as if to say ‘Stop it, I don't want to talk,] and in an instant, her entire demeanor changed. Suddenly, this mist-woman lunged at me with her hands reaching for my blanket. Her once blurred face was now twisted and dark. To this day, I cannot describe what I saw, it was so grotesque. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much for the rest of the night.

Suddenly, this mist-woman lunged at me with her hands reaching for my blanket.

Weeks later, my boyfriend had decided to drive up and stay the weekend. During the middle of the night, we woke up to the sound of the dog barking in the main room of the first floor. My boyfriend opened up the bedroom door and saw Gunner (the cutest wiener dog ever and the property owner's pet) standing in the middle of the open room staring up about 8-10 feet above him. Gunner was looking at SOMETHING that we could not make out, but it was clear that he was unhappy. He continued barking, growling, and backing away from this mystery something, and my boyfriend ‘noped’ right back into the bedroom.

Trying to brush it off as an odd occurrence and not scare me more, my boyfriend shut the door and we went back to sleep. The next morning, we needed to do some laundry which was, as mentioned, in the basement of the church. Because I was still on edge over the woman incident, he came with me to put laundry into the wash, and we ascended back upstairs.

We returned later to switch the clothes over to the dryer, and as we walked through the living room which led to the laundry space, the radio suddenly turned on to pure static. I immediately felt uneasy, but my boyfriend reassured me that it was just the alarm, flipped the off switch on the radio, and we went back upstairs. Mind you, it was YEARS later that he told me that there was no way that could have turned on by itself and he had full-body chills at the time.

There's more detail in the remaining stories but here are a few other snips of what went down in that church. Books slid off the center of tables, Snapchat filters would pick up faces behind you, the edges of beds would ‘sink’ like someone was sitting on it...and, oh, that window that I mentioned that looked out to the side building? When I finally got the courage to bring up these experiences with the contractors, they told me that they also had similar things happen to them in the side house and mentioned that they would occasionally see a man in the window of my bedroom!”  – Anonymous

I Barely Made It Through the Night

“I got a job working for a hostel in the Middle East, which ended up with me spending the night hiding from men trying to get into my sketchy ‘employees’ room. It was outside and around the corner in an alleyway – not attached to the hostel. I was there alone, and the floor was cobblestone, the metal gate had a huge gap at the top that someone could have climbed up and into the room, and it was exposed to the open air and was freezing. Pipes and creepy crawlers on the floor. 

At about 9pm, the 'shabab' (Arabic word for up-to-no-good young men) started banging on the door and shouting outside. I hid around the corner and hoped that they thought no one was inside, but it seemed that somehow someone had watched me enter the room during the daytime and now they were coming back. I’m a blonde, white foreigner, so I suppose I kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. When I first saw my living quarters earlier that day I thought, ‘Heck, I can do this. I’m tough, and I can stick it out and make it work.’

I kind of thought it’d be a humorous, growing experience and would be a good story later. But after dark, in my freezing bed, while a group of men was pounding on my door and shouting, mocking me, and trying to get in…things didn’t seem so funny anymore. I tried to call my boss, then my family friends who lived in the country about an hour away, then my parents who lived in a neighboring country, and then finally my brother, who lived in the USA. 

I was alone in the dark, with a group of men pounding on my door and shouting and trying to get in.

My brother was the only one who answered. It was the middle of the day in his time zone. He asked why I was up so late and I whispered the situation to him, trying to keep my voice down and not start crying. There was nothing practically he could do except pray for me to be protected by God. (We’re Christian.) He then gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten. He said, ‘Allie, are you suffering for the sake of yourself, or for the sake of Jesus? If you’re suffering for the sake of a good cause, that’s one thing. But if you’re putting yourself through this because you have some idea of how tough you are or some goal that only serves your ego, get out. So which is it?’ And I said, ‘I’m suffering for my own sake, no one else’s.’

So he said, ‘Then I’m going to spend the rest of the day praying for your protection. And first thing in the morning, you know what to do.’ Miraculously, his prayers worked and I made it through the night without the men getting in. The next morning, I told the hostel I couldn’t work for them because the living situations were not safe. (This is very common actually, women being out in unsafe positions for the sake of ‘travel’ or ‘international work.’) 

What my brother said stuck with me. I, especially as a woman, have a responsibility to myself to be smart. Ego and ‘adventure’ are no excuse to put myself in danger, and this is coming from someone who has lived and worked in three different countries outside the USA. Even women who are experienced international travelers never outgrow caution and putting our values first.” – Allie