For over a year now, I've been asking BuzzFeed readers like you to share their creepiest, most unbelievable real-life "unsolved mysteries." If you're new here, an unsolved mystery can be any experience they just can't logically explain, from a glitch in the matrix to a paranormal encounter. Every month, I read hundreds of submissions and round up the very best ones for your combined enjoyment and terror. Well, I thought it would be fun to pick out a handful of the creepiest stories we've run thus far and see just how scary y'all think they actually are.
So, let's test just how high your "scare tolerance" is and perhaps crown one of these tales as "the spookiest of all time!" Here's how this will work: Below are 21 of the creepiest "unsolved mysteries" readers have submitted. Under each story is a poll asking you just how spooky you found it to be on a scale from 1 to 5. Be honest with your answer, and may the creepiest story win! Shall we begin?
1. "When I was about 9, I went on vacation with my family to a seaside town in the next state over. None of us had ever been there before, and we were having a great time exploring the beach and the town. We stopped at an ice cream shop and were enjoying ourselves when my dad noticed a picture on the wall. It was my older brother and I enjoying ice cream in that same shop, only in this photo, we were the same age, about 3 years old. My brother is four years older than me, so there was no way we could have looked the same age when I was 3. The creepy part that made us all certain it was us was that I had a very distinctive blonde streak in my dark hair, as well as dimples, and so did this girl."
2. "When I was about 7, my family relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina. We were staying at a hotel while my parents looked for a house in the area. Every night we were there, I had very intense dreams about a girl, but could never remember the details. I just knew that she was bad news and had something to do with Charlotte. Her face was clear; I can still see it in my head. Anyway, I spent the next few weeks trying to dissuade my family from moving to Charlotte in order to avoid the girl. Thankfully, we ended up moving to a small town outside of the city, which was a relief, because that meant that I only had to worry about her if we took a trip into town. A couple of days after moving in, the lady from across the street came to introduce herself. Her daughter was with her, and she was the girl from the dreams. Her name was Charlotte."
3. "When I was in high school, my younger brother — who was around 13 at the time — had a 'walkie-talkie' that he would always use to talk to someone. It was as if he were using it as more of a cellphone than anything else, and every time he was talking in it, he would say the person he was talking to was someone named Chris. He claimed Chris had apparently lived in that house before. Chris would tell my brother things, like that he was a teenager just like us and that he died while living there before. My siblings and I thought it was a joke, that maybe my brother and one of his friends were pranking us...until we started asking him relevant questions that no one else would know, and he could answer them."
4. "When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I visited my grandmother with my sister in Arlington, Virginia, close to Washington, DC. We had been walking into a wooded area just outside of the apartment complex where my grandmother lived, where we met a young girl. We played at her house for a couple of hours and then left to go back home. The next morning, I got up early, before anyone else was up, to go back and see if I could find the house where the little girl lived so we could play together again. I made a peanut butter sandwich to eat for breakfast, and took off to find her. The last thing I remember was walking into the wooded area near her house. This was probably around 9 or 10 in the morning. At that point, I lost hours of time. I suddenly woke up on a sidewalk in town, with ants crawling all over me from the peanut butter sandwich, which laid uneaten beside me."
5. "When I was in university, I rented a townhouse in a brand-new subdivision with three roommates. This house was less than three years old when we moved in, and I lived in the basement bedroom for four years. The main floor was the common area (open-concept kitchen, dining, living room), and my roommates lived on the upper floor. I was pretty nocturnal in my early 20s, so I woke up one winter evening around 5 p.m. and hopped in the shower. Almost immediately after I got out, the power went out. Being winter in Canada, the house was completely pitch black — especially my basement bedroom. I went up to the main floor to light some candles and wait out the power outage. The house was really quiet, so I assumed my roommates were out or in classes. I was a little scared sitting in darkness with only candlelight to see with, all alone. However, after a few minutes, I heard one of my roommates open a door upstairs, walk across the hall, and then close another door."
6. "One morning during my sophomore year of high school, I woke up with a really high fever. My mom told me that I should stay home and rest, but I had a major exam later in the day and begged her to let me go to school. She would not budge, so I conceded and ended up falling asleep on the couch in the living room. Three hours later, at almost 10 a.m., I woke up, and my fever was completely gone. I told my mom, and she agreed to let me go to school. When I finally got to the campus, I walked to the classroom for my next subject. My classmates were already outside the classroom, waiting to be let in. They asked me where I came from; I told them I just got to school. They all looked really confused. They said they saw me in the first class that morning."
7. "One night, before I was born, my dad was home alone while my mom was out of town with her sisters. At the time, he'd picked up a few books at the library and was happy to just have some time to himself to read. The first night that he was alone, he decided to read The Haunting of Hill House. He'd never read it before and distinctly remembered spending the whole night reading the book. He finished just as the sun came up and was reaching over to turn off the light next to his chair to go to bed, when he suddenly woke up."
8. "My father used to exchange Christmas cards with his great aunt who lived in Liverpool. We lived in London, but one year, we drove to Blackpool to see the lights. On the way home, he decided to go stop in and see her in Liverpool. Except when we tried to find her house, it was nowhere to be found. The street existed, but the house number did not. We asked the local postman, and he told us that it simply didn't exist anymore. Apparently, that home had been bombed in the war and never rebuilt. We never received another card from her again."
9. "My husband and I lived in student family apartments while he was working on his degree AND working two jobs. I stayed at home with our baby, who had some extra needs. I'd been up all night with the baby and kissed the hubs goodbye when he left for work around 5:30 a.m. I finally got the baby to sleep around 6 and went to lie down myself, but couldn't fall asleep. I just lay there with my arm over my forehead, begging for sleep. My husband came home around 6:30. I didn't think much of it — he was a server at a restaurant, so sometimes, he came home early to study if they were slow and didn't need him. The front door was always locked, so I heard when he came in and put his keys in the dish. I was awake but lying down, kind of hoping he'd go to his desk and work so I could try to sleep. He walked over to me to check if I was sleeping, then walked back to his desk to work."
10. "I had just started dating this guy who had recently bought a charming, 100-year-old house. I stayed over one night and had a bizarre dream where I needed his help and tried to find him, but couldn't. It was the middle of the night still when I woke up from the dream. I blinked my eyes open, only to see my boyfriend staring back at me. After a few seconds, I asked, 'Are you looking at me?' He bizarrely waved his hand in front of my face, then jumped out of bed, threw the lights on, and dashed downstairs."
11. "When I was 11, I was in Sunday school at my church, and one of the church ladies showed us her slides from her visit to the Holy Land. The pictures were really nice — lots of scenery and shots of the famous sites. Then, there was a slide of these people at the Mount of Olives. Everybody gasped and turned to look at me, including the church lady who took these pictures. One of the girls in that slide looked EXACTLY like me...even down to the clothes she was wearing. I was wearing the same exact clothes right then."
12. "I once found a ring in a cemetery. It had clearly been dropped and was not on any grave, so I took it, and my mom posted about it on Facebook. Nobody ever claimed it, so I kept it. It wasn't fancy, just a dark metal with a small eye-like pattern. It was always cold to the touch and had no gems. One day, I lost it at school. I was super sad about it because I'd gotten attached to it and worn it every day. I told my mom that I lost it, and she promised to look for it, as she worked at the school as a cleaner. We had not been outside that day, so it had to be inside."
13. "One night about four summers ago, I picked up my little sister, her friend, and my cousin from a bowling alley that we frequented. I was driving back home with them and turned into this neighborhood that I knew was a straight line to my house. Somehow, it ended up making us take turn after turn with no exit, and it seemed to never end. We started getting nervous and a little freaked out because there was no way this was possible. We'd taken this road many times before, and it always took around 10 minutes to get to my house from the bowling alley. We weren't going in circles because we had never seen anything familiar on this road. Finally, we saw an exit and checked the time on our phones. We had been on this road for two hours. We all were completely silent on the way back to my house. We somehow lost two hours of our day when it had only seemed like minutes had passed."
14. "I was in the laundry room of my house in Northridge, California. I was about to change the bottle on my Sparkletts Water dispenser when a voice in my head said, 'Don't change the water bottle in your bare feet.' It was very clear and adamant. I was in a weird mood and — looking up as if someone was above me — I defiantly responded out loud, 'Don't tell me what to do!' Then, as I was lowering the five-gallon glass bottle onto the dispenser, I suddenly felt the bottle fall straight down out of my hands as if it had been pushed down. I watched it fall in slow motion onto the knuckle of my big toe on my right foot. I watched the glass bottle shatter on impact, and five gallons of water splash out onto the floor."
15. "My dad is the oldest of four brothers. One day, my grandma — who had very bad dementia at the time — looked directly at my dad and asked him, 'Are you the one who's dying?' Two days later, his brother died unexpectedly of a heart attack. A few years before this, she rightfully predicted me flying across the country to surprise my dad for his birthday, too. I was on the phone with him that day while he was at her house, and she just kept asking me if I was on my way there yet. I was literally in an Uber on the way to the airport. She had no way of knowing I was going, as only my mom knew and swears she never told her."
16. "About 10 years ago, we lived in a small village in Oxfordshire after returning from a year in Spain. We moved into the small terraced railway cottage, just the two of us. We had been together a couple of years, and my new wife had a small but very heavy and expensive mirror. She was adamant that it needed a hefty fixing in our new place, so I installed a heavy-duty rawlbolt, which went about four inches into the wall with a large bolt on the outside. It was very secure with a thick, jagged hanger and — being so heavy — it took a great deal of effort to move the mirror up enough to remove it from where it hung."
17. "The house I grew up in had many, many unexplainable occurrences. Every single cleaning lady my mom hired quit shortly after starting because when they were in the house, they'd experience all kinds of wild stuff. One lady said she wasn't able to vacuum that day because every time she'd plug in the vacuum and go to turn it on, it wouldn't work...because it would somehow be unplugged again. I remember one time my uncle was in town visiting, and when I got home from school, he came into the living room and said, 'Did you just get home?' When I said I had, he looked puzzled and explained, 'I thought maybe you'd come home early because when I was laying down for a nap, I heard someone walking around the house.'"
18. "I had a paper route when I was 14/15. I knew most of the neighborhood but had a few streets toward the end of my route with people I didn't know. I went down a dead-end street one day, and a lady working in her garden came out and said, 'Stop delivery, and I'll pay you what I owe you.' A few days later, I was on my route and turned around before hitting their house. A man working in the garden asked why I stopped delivering the paper. I told him the lady of the house asked me to stop. He said he didn't know why and to start delivering again. A few days later, that lady came out, asking why I was delivering again. I told her about the man working in the garden who wanted to deliver again. She said that since her husband passed, she's the only one who works in the garden, and he was the one who used to read the newspaper. We looked at each other, and she told me to keep delivering the newspaper. I never saw the man again."
19. "I was 10 years old, living in a small town in Portugal near Lisbon. The house was never occupied by anyone but our family, and it was not old at the time. I always had a strange feeling living there, especially when all was quiet. It seemed like some restless energy was always lingering in the air. The apartment had three bedrooms, and there were four of us siblings. My parents had a room, my two sisters shared a room, and my brother and I slept in the last room. There was one trundle bed in our room, which meant a second mattress could be pulled out from a drawer under the bed. It was hard to pull it out, and I felt lazy, so I asked my brother if I could sleep on the top bed with him that night."
20. "When I was 19 or 20, I was commuting to college and living with my mother. My mom had a job where she dealt with many older people. She's extremely likable, so over the years, many of her clients gave her gifts for birthdays and holidays. They also would give her gifts for me, being that I was an only child and she was a single mother, and most of her clients were extremely wealthy. Anyway, one of her favorite clients had given her a music box-type statue, but it was for me. I played it once when she gave it to me, but I'm not really into that sort of thing, so I put it on top of my headboard and forgot about it."
21. And finally, "The summer I turned 17, I was lying on my bed getting ready to go to sleep at about 10 p.m. when I heard a scraping sound on the outside wall under my window. We had a big rabbit cage wrapped in chicken wire there. The entire outside of our home was coated with a mixture of paint and sand that produced a very rough texture, which made a distinct sound. This scraping business went on for several minutes, and I thought that the rabbits were being spooked by some sort of carnivore. Finally, I got up and pulled the curtain open to see what all the commotion was about."
Thanks for voting! Have you ever experienced an "unsolved mystery" you simply can't explain? If so, you can tell us about it in the comments below or via this anonymous form, and it might just end up in this month's real-life "unsolved mysteries" roundup!
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
If you enjoyed these stories, you can find a bunch more like them here.
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