Okay. Put down whatever it is your doing or eating and go get yourself a bottle of vodka; or whatever libation or sin you need to cope. The things you will read will be some Dateline NBC/ID Discovery/20/20 drama.
The world is full of scary and crazy and these stories are living proof. We aren't safe pretty much ever. We still have to go on and live but be vigilant. **WARNING**... don't read this after dusk.
Redditor OneStarvingEli wanted to know... What's the scariest story you know that is 100% true? This is why Dateline NBC tells you... "Don't watch alone!"
Submissions have been edited for clarity, context, and profanity.
Don't read this while eating...
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A woman was abducted by 2 men who stabbed her over 30 times. Her neck muscle completely removed, her guts spilling out. She crawled to the hospital WITH HER HEAD ALMOST DETACHED and survived. She wrote a book and now is a motivational speaker with 2 kids.
Netflix, Pizza Guy & Chill.
That Netflix documentary "Evil Genius" about the pizza guy in Erie, Pennsylvania who had a bomb collar put around his neck then was forced to rob a bank. As a former delivery driver I was scared the entire time, but also super intrigued by the investigation and the people involved.
There was a young girl kidnapped in the middle of the day on a neighborhood street in a Springfield, MO. Someone in the street witnessed the event and tried chasing the car on foot to at least get the plate number and call the police. They sent out an amber alert after a few hours, identified the owner of the vehicle and his residence but by the time they got to his house, they found her body in a plastic tub in his basement and she had been shot dead.
The most messed up thing was that this guy was a middle school coach. We found out at my catholic high school that the murderer was the son of our theology teacher. Our teacher left school for over a week I'm sure trying to fathom how his own son could commit such a heinous crime.
The murderer was sentenced to death this year for the death of the girl, Hailey Owens. Her family, as well as the family of the murderer, lobbied to change amber alert laws so they can be issued faster after a kidnapping is reported.
Lord the things you can find on YouTube.
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There was a serial killer known as the Weepy Voiced Killer. He would kill people then call 911 from a payphone, crying and begging them to catch and stop him. You can find the recordings of his 911 calls on YouTube.
Why must people take others with them?
This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away.
Judy Kirby murdered six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit suicide. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband's brother and was by some reports involved in drug trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest.
She picked up her sister's son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a high rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride.
The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.
Talk about family issues...
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My great-aunt and her husband owned a successful horse farm and found out that their son was stealing money from them. After he found out he went into their house while they were asleep and shot them to death, first my great-uncle while he sleeping and my great-aunt was found shot in her back laying across the front porch steps. He's currently in jail for a long time.
Mind-boggling
The 2011 San Fernando massacre. Mexican cartel members (Los Zetas) abducted people from buses in Mexico. They executed the old and weak, tortured the women, threw the children in acid, and separated the men. The men were then forced into gladiatorial combat to the death, all in some kind of game to find new cartel recruits. They even forced the bus driver to run the bus over living people. It still blows my mind that this happened right there in Mexico, just a few years ago.
Don't be cheap... PAY FOR THE UBER!
A friend of a friend was traveling in the UK and had to hitch-hike. The guy dropped her off at home. The next day police came knocking and proceeded to take her to the station and demand how she knows this man, what is their relationship etc. She finds out that the man had killed another female hitch-hiker that same day and had her in the trunk at the same time he was driving her (the friend). For some unknown reason he hadn't killed her. She couldn't sleep and cried for days and her home was placed on watch.
Grandpa's got it!
Back in the 90's, my mom was on the highway heading home from a friends house late at night. She was driving a really nice thunderbird. After a while this big white van drove next to her and the driver started performing some very rude gestures and being young and dumb, my mom reciprocated the gestures. Then the dude pulled up a big Bowie knife to the window. My mom started panicking and sped up to get away and the van was following right along. Then the guy tried to run her off the road. Keep in mind they're probably going about 100 miles per hour. She gets on the exit to get home and he's still following her. When she does get back to her house, which she shared with my grandparents, she pulled into the drive way honking the horn and screaming trying to wake someone up. The van pulls into the driveway just as my grandfather comes out in his underwear with a gun. The dude got scared and drove off. My mom wouldn't leave her house for month except for school, but never at night.
This is a thing? I'm in trouble...
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Fatal Familial Insomnia. The whole story is crazy and perhaps the most terrifying Wikipedia rabbit hole I've ever gone down. Only a few families have this genetic disorder, iirc, and once you develop it, that's it, you die an agonizing death from an inability to sleep. It starts off like regular insomnia, but progresses over a few years until you legit go insane and finally shut down. NOTHING, not even the most potent drug, can induce sleep. Even when they tried to put them in comas, the brain remained completely active.
Well Japan is OFF my travel itinerary!
Issei Sagawa, the Japanese cannibal who admitted he still fantasizes about killing and eating women (after killing and eating a woman in Paris) walks free unmedicated and unmonitored in Japan to this day. Pretty creepy to know people like that walk around freely. Here's the Wikipedia entry
Fido for the win!
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When I was younger (like 3 or 4) and she was home alone with me some guy came up to the door. This was before cellphones and people were nicer so she answered it even tho it was like 8 or 9 at night. Well, the guy was asking if he could come in and use her phone but she said no. He asked a couple more times before walking in and immediately got stopped by the family dog grabbing his hand and holding it tightly.
He started to get nervous and my dad's dog led him back to the door (he had walked further in at this point) my mom was able to push him out and lock the door before running upstairs and calling the police. The cops picked him up a little while later and they found out he had been in a bar fight and stabbed a guy a bunch of times. Without my "older brother" my mom and I could've been seriously hurt. He was the best dog ever and lived till the ripe age of 15.
Next time check for a pulse.
I lived in an apartment in Marina del Rey, California. 9 years ago, just before Halloween, a third-floor balcony was decorated with a prop of a dead man slumped over in a chair. For a few days, every time I'd come home I'd look up and think how cool looking it was and wondering why they didn't have lights shining on it at night. After a few days, people realized it was actually the resident of the apartment who killed himself. I was looking at a corpse thinking how cool it was.
What if...
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This is a incident that happened to me about 10 years ago. I live in Melbourne, Australia.
I was driving home from work one night around 9pm midweek so the roads were quiet. As I was driving downhill I heard a sound that was like a jet engine roaring behind me. The next thing I know a car goes flying past me going twice the speed limit. It looked like a fairly old crappy car. The car started to get the speed wobbles and then one of the tyres came flying off and rolled at speeds downhill whilst the car spun out and crashed. I stopped my car to make sure whoever inside was ok. A guy got out of the car and looked over at me then started moving extremely quickly towards me. I dont know why but I hit my internal locks on the car which was fortunate because no more then 2 seconds later the guy started grabbing at the drivers side door and smashing on my windscreen with his fists trying to get in, ill never forget the crazy look he had in his eyes. I put my foot down on the accelerator and drove off back home.
I decided to swap cars once I got home and drove back to see what was going on. I saw 2 fire trucks and about 4 police close to where the incident happened. When I got back to the crash site the guy was no longer there so I decided to head home.
The next day at work I was online bored reading the news when I saw an article that shocked me. The article was about a guy who had been in a police chase for 1 hour and the police stopped chasing him because it was becoming to dangerous. Turns out the guy was high on meth, had stolen a car an hours drive away and had been in a hot pursuit since. After crashing the car the guy apparently crossed to the other side of the road and hailed the first car that appeared which was a taxi. He got into the taxi and stole it, in the process he pushed the driver out of the driver side door and the driver got stuck and dragged at speeds. The driver died from the incident. I called the police and had a detectiive assigned to me. He fingerprint checked my car and got a statement.
I had to testify in the supreme court as a key witness in a murder trial. The guy got 30 years and they told me that my testimony was one of the main factors in convicting him. I often think back to that night and wonder if I hadn't locked my doors would I have been the one who got murdered.
I once received a random phone call from a girl who found my number from a google search of my address listed on a resume.
She was freaking out and wanted me to check up on her father who lived a few doors down in an apartment complex I resided in. While she was still on the phone with me I walked over to his door and knocked on it, no answer. She pleaded for me to enter the unit and I got nervous and refused, instead reporting the incident to the building manager. The manager said she would call the police to perform a wellness check. The father had killed himself.
This is why I only fly...
Guy was killed and cannibalized on a Greyhound bus by another passenger because apparently there were voices telling him to do it.
Knock. Knock. Hey neighbor.
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My grandmother used to work at a mental illness facility when I was little, it was a place prisoners went after committing crimes that were so horrific they were deemed very mentally unstable and not suitable for a prison. One of her patients (who was VERY fond of her) was put into this place because he had strangled his mum and dad one night, hid their bodies under the floor boards. He was caught after a few months because the smell of rotting corpses had reached the neighbors, and they were cornered that they hadn't seen them in a while.
My grandmother lived within walking distance from this facility and so the prisoners that were deemed well enough to roam around the grounds were able to see her walking home. One of the other patients most have told him about where she lived because one night he escaped and went straight to my grandmother's house, knocking on the door and begging to come in.
Safe to say he was caught very quickly and my grandparents later moved house. Still scary to imagine though.
Too close for comfort...
My mom stayed in a hospital for a week at the same time that a serial killer worked there that was killing patients. The scariest part is I didn't even realize how close of a call she could have had until 20 years later when I was researching famous serial killers.
It was Charles Cullen.
Always trust your gut!
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A year or two ago, I was living in the suburbs. I would walk the 20 minutes to the cheap grocery store and walk back if I didn't have that much stuff. Otherwise I would call a cab. I was a 21/22 year old boney female
Anyway, I noticed this man following me through the parking lot as I made my way across the parking lot to the store. He's huge. Probably late 30's or early 40's. Starts asking me questions, like what my name is, what my plans are and the like. I brush him off and keep walking. He's tailing me now. Follows me into the store. As I'm walking around, I notice him handling things in the produce section but not really paying attention to them.
I go to the cracker isle, and he's doing the same thing. As I go towards the till go pay, he leaves the store. I call my dad and he comes to get me. We see the man standing in a corner, where I would have had to walk through to get home. The man was waiting for me to leave.
For many childhood memories are overrun by living nightmares.
Yes, children are resilient, but that doesn't mean that the things we see as babes don't follow us forever.
The horrors of the world are no stranger to the young.
Redditor -2sweetcaramel- wanted to see who was willing to share about the worst things we've seen as kids, so they asked:
"What’s the creepiest thing you saw as a kid?"
Serious Danger
"Me and my best friend would explore the drainage tunnels under the Vegas area where we grew up. These were miles long and it was always really cool down there so it was a good way to escape the heat of our scorching hot summers. We went into this one that goes under the Fiesta casino and found a camp with a bunch of homeless people."
"Mind you we are like 11 years old lol. And we just kept going like it was nothing. It wasn’t scary then but when I look back at it we could have been in some serious danger. Our parents had no idea we did this or where we were and we had no cellphones. We could have been kidnapped and never have been found."
oofboof2020
Waiting for Food
"I was at a portillos once when I was 12 and I was waiting with my little brother at a booth while my parents got our food. This guy was standing with his tray kind of watching me then after a couple of minutes he started to walk over really fast not breaking eye contact with me."
"He was 2 feet from the table and my dad came out of nowhere and scared the s**t out of him. He looked so surprised and just said he wanted to see if I’d get scared or not. He left his tray full of food near the door and left. My folks reported him but we never went to that location again since we found a better one closer to home."
nowhereboy1964
Captain Hobo to the Rescue
"When I was a pretty young teen, my friends and I were horsing around in San Francisco and started hanging out to smoke with some homeless guys. Another homeless dude came up and began aggressively trying to shake us down for anything (money, smokes, a ride, drugs- all of it) and wouldn’t take no for an answer."
"We got in over our heads and could tell this guy was now riling the other 2 guys up and they were acting like they wanted to jump us. Some grandfather-looking old homeless man appeared out of nowhere and yelled at us to get the f**k out of here- nice kids like us don’t belong down here at this hour!!"
"Captain Hobo saved our lives that night. My parents sincerely thought we were at a mall all day lol."
FartAttack911
Survival
tsunami GIF
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"I was 7 and survived the 2004 tsunami in Thailand. Witnessed the wave rise way above the already massive palm trees (approx. 40ft?) and my family and I watched/heard the wave crash into the ground from a rooftop."
faithfulpoo
These Tsunami stories are just tragic.
On the Sand
Scared The Launch GIF by CTV
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"We were a group of kids who went to swim in a local lake. And there was a dead body on the beach with their hands raised and their legs bent unnaturally that local police just took out of the same lake. I've never put my foot in these waters again."
oyloff
Be Clever
"I was walking to school and I was about 5 or 6 years old and some guy pulled up beside me in his car and asked if I would get in. He also offered me sweets to do so. I said no. The creepy bit was when he calmly said ‘clever boy’ to me, then drove off. I’ve never even told my parents or anyone else about this as it would most likely freak them out."
OstneyPiz
Bad Jokes
"Dad's side of the family pranked me by burying a fake body on our back property and had me dig it up to find valuables. Was only allowed to use a lantern for light. They stuffed old clothes with chicken bones. Sheetrock mud where the head was... Random fake jewelry as the treasures... I was like maybe 10 or 11.. I remember digging up the boot first and started gagging because it became real at that point."
Alegan239
YOU
Who Are You Reaction GIF by MOODMAN
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"Woke up to find my little brother staring at me in the dark, asking, Are you really you?"
PrettyLola2004
Siblings can really be a bunch of creepers.
No one should talk to others in the dark though.
Not all pet owners have the same relationship with their pets.
While anyone who decides to become a pet owner, or pet parent as some say, love their pets equally, some never ever let them leave their side.
Taking their pet with them to work, running errands, even on vacations.
Many pet parents even allow their pets to share their bed with them when going to sleep.
For others though, this is where a line is finally drawn.
Redditor Piggythelavasurfer was curious to hear whether pet owners allowed their pets to share their bed with them, as well as the reasons why they do/don't, leading them to ask:
"Do you let your pet sleep in your bed? Why/why not?"
The Tiny Issue Of Water...
"Absolutely not."
"I have fish."- Senior-Meal3649
Everyone Gets Lonely Eventually...
"I adopted an eleven year old cat the day before Halloween."
"She has mostly lived in my closet since I got her, and she hasn’t been too interested in coming out."
"Last night, she came out of my closet and jumped up on my bed, and crawled under my covers and curled up by my feet to sleep."
"I was so happy!"- YellowBeastJeep
The Comforting Reminder That You're Not Alone...
"I recently lost my Greyhound but I used to let him sleep on my bed with me."
"The company was nice and he was no trouble to have on my bed."- HoodedMenace3
Hungry Cookie GIF by De Graafschap Dierenartsen
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What Do You Mean Allow?
"I have no choice."
"She is a cat, cats do whatever they want."- Small_cat1412
"He lets me sleep in my bed."- Poorly-Drawn-Beagle
Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way
"I carry my old boy upstairs to bed every night."- worst_in_show
Hug GIF by The BarkPost
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Who Needs An Alarm Clock?
"I let my two cats sleep with me."
"They're so full of love and just want cuddles all the time."
"And so do I."
"We've all developed a lil routine."
"Get to bed, oldest sleeps on my feet to keep them warm, youngest lies in my arm while I lie on my side (she the little spoon), then when I snooze my alarm for work in the morning the youngest paws at my face and meeps loudly to wake me up."- GhostofaFlea_
Whose Bed Is It Anyway?
"Yes."
"They're also kind enough to let me squeeze into whatever space they've left for me."
"Although I do get a few dirty looks off them."- Therealkaylor
"I found this tiny kitten screaming her head off under a car."
"Would not come out."
"Got some food and some water in dishes."
"I stood by the tire so she couldn't see my feet."
"She got curious about the food and water and started gobbling it down."
"I thought she would bolt when I squatted down."
"She was too busy eating."
"I grabbed her by the nape of the neck and all four legs went straight out and she tried to scratch me to death."
"I got her in the door and tossed her toward the couch."
"She ricocheted off the couch as if she was a ping pong off a table and I lost sight of her."
"I put out food and water and a sandbox and did not see that kitten for three days."
"On the third day, I came home and she was on my bed pillow."
"I thought she would bolt when I came near, but she didn't."
"I wanted to sleep so I tried to scoot her little butt off my pillow."
"She would not go."
"I put my head down to sleep and that is the way it was from then on."
"She ran the roost."- Logical_Cherry_7588
sleepy kitten GIF
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Sleeping Is A Prerequisite...
"No, he's a cat and he cannot keep still during the night."
"He walks across the headboard, opens the closet doors, jumps into the windows and rustles the blinds, etc."
"If he would sleep he could stay, but alas, he's a ramblin' man."- Spong_Durnflungle
Saying No Just Isn't An Option...
"'Let'."
"Lol."
"It's a cat's world and I'm happy to be on her good side."- milaren
Felines Only!
"The cat does, the dog doesn't and the horse certainly does not either."- Xcrowzz
Angry Tom And Jerry GIF by Boomerang Official
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Is That My Hair On That Pillow?
"My dog is perfect."
"She comes up, cuddles til we start to fall asleep, then gets down to sleep on her bed so she doesn't get too hot."
"Jumps back up in the early morning for wake up cuddles."
"The hair everywhere is the only downside but she is so cozy, what can you do."- HoodieWinchester
It is easy to understand how some people are able to fall asleep more easily knowing their friend and protector is there, in bed, with them.
Though we can't blame others who don't want to run the risk of being scratched or bitten in the middle of the night either...