30 People Retell The Scariest Story They’ve Ever Heard
1. Fly Larva in the Eye Lid
I’ve told this story before. I’m an eye doctor and I had a patient come to me with an infected eyelid two other eye doctors tried to treat and failed. They were dumping all sorts of medicine into it and it wasn’t getting any better. At this point, it was swollen and painful for weeks with no improvement despite being on tons of meds. Apparently, neither of them thought to flip the lid upside down (you know that gross trick some kids do with their upper eyelids?). It was a painful maneuver for her very swollen eyelid, which might explain it. Anyhow, there appeared to be what looked like a visible abscess inside the tissue with thick gooey material, I thought I’d give it a nudge and saw it move. This wasn’t an abscess, it was something else. I managed to remove it quite easily in one whole piece. It was a fly larva. The patient told me that she had a bug hit her in the eye a few days before she got this “infection”. I removed the larva and within two days the wound closed and she was 100% recovered on basic antibiotic eye drops. Yes, I do have the photos from this case for those interested.
TLDR: Patient had a bug lay an egg in her eyelid and I removed the larva.
OscarDivine
2. Wrong Chart
My HIV story.
I was on a trip on my first commercial flight (from Sacramento to San Diego) to visit my girlfriend, and I didnt feel well. Once I got off the plane I made it to the hotel and had bouts of nausea and diarrhea for a few days straight and finally decided to go to hospital. After waiting hours I was let into a room and some time later an Asian woman wearing a mask and gloves entered. “Please leave the room,” she told my girlfriend (let’s call Beatrice). “No she can stay it’s okay,” I said. The doctor still hadn’t looked at me, but looked back to Beatrice. “I think you should leave.” I looked to Beatrice and said “can you please wait outside.” Right as the door closed the doctor said, “you have HIV.” My mind instantly started racing, trying to problem solve. “I cant have AIDS, I got tested before being with Beatrice and I was clean,” I said. The doctor again “you have HIV” while avoiding eye contact. I looked at my palms and for the first time in my life they were sweating, really sweating. I said again, “I cant, I’ve been tested.” The doctor flipped a page and asked my name, which I responded, and finally the doctors eyes made contact with my own. “I’m so sorry, I have the wrong chart. You have strep throat and laryngitis.” I remember the world ending and then the feeling the most relief I’ve ever experience in my life. When I told Beatrice the whole story she awkwardly laughed and said, “but you dont have AIDS, right?” To this day when I tell people what happened a good portion say “but you dont have AIDS, right?” Whole lotta fuckin nope!
ALEXXRN
3. Wrong Turn in the Caves
The story of John Edward Jones getting stuck in Nutty Putty cave in Utah. He became wedged in the tight crawl when he took a wrong turn in the cave system. Rescuers could do nothing to get him out and he was stuck in there for 28 hours before he died from Cardiac Arrest because feet were above his head and his heart was pumping over time. One of The Rescuers even gave him a phone to call his wife and talk to his young daughter before he died.
xMurderMike41370x
4. Neighbor Tragedy
This thread is probably dead now, but when I was about 4 and my brother 11, we stayed at my aunt’s between moving house. Her neighbor had a son my brother’s age, so my bro used to go play with him on weekends etc. One day my brother goes over after lunch. The dad opens the door, says the kids and mum are out shopping, but come on in and have some juice and tell him about how the move is going. My bro goes in, has a drink and a chat, then comes back to my aunt’s after no more than an hour. A few days later police are all over the place. Turns out the dad murdered his wife and kids, and was in the middle of burying them in the back garden around the time my brother knocked. Crazy to think what could be different if my brother had visited a couple of hours before, or caught that guy on an off day.
stark_arc
5. Felt Like Months
I had brain surgery roughly 3 years ago. I lost my concept of time. What felt like 4 months was only 3 days. The amount of physical, mental, and emotional pain I went through was crazy. I had to find all of my memories and relearn how to walk, talk, everything. If you want to go through something terrifying that is it.
AkierraLFS
6. Not Worth a Free Ride
Off the main road of a place I use to work at, a guy decided to climb under a bus to “hitch a free ride”. Well the bus went over a speed bump and the guy fell and ended up getting caught on the back wheel. His body was dragged 5 blocks before the bus driver realized what was happening.
A police officer who came into our store regularly, told us that the guy was still alive when they got to him, but died an hour later. He said his whole back was scraped off exposing his spine. I remember driving down that road after the fact, and you could still see a deep red blood stained trail going on for those 5 blocks.
Absolutely horrifying.
nana_
7. Terrified in the Water
Irl account.
I used to love swimming, I’d go snorkeling, scuba diving, even jumped off a few cliffs into the water.
When I was about 18 I read the necrnomicon (the collection of Lovecraft short stories, not the real thing) had a good scare, giggled at how silly I was to be unnerved and went about my life.
Next year went to Crete on holiday, first day I jumped right into the ocean with my dad and went out deep. Lo and behold, I feel something tickling my legs. I dive under to see since its too deep for seaweed to reach this high and I wanted to see fish.
Tentacles. Everywhere. I was so shocked I lost my air and panicked hard, I started breathing in water as glowing eyes, sharp beaks and suckered tentacles flashed about me.
Thankfully, Dad got me to the shore and didn’t understand what was going on, he’d seen nothing but suddenly had a really grim look on his face.
Went to the doctors. Turns out I’m the victim of a family curse, Schizoaffective disorder. My dad was horrified cause since he hadn’t got it like his brother and mother, he thought I’d be safe.
They caught it early but this revelation then led to a lot of aspects of my life being thrown in the air. Entire people in my life became false, ideas I’d had were delusional, outbursts revealed to be due to mood swings.
I’m doing much better now, I still don’t go in the water.
Voidscale
8. The Boogeyman
I’m a crime writer and once interviewed a woman who told me an unrelated horror story about something that happened to her as a girl.
When she was like ten, she had trouble sleeping and imagined the Boogeyman was living in her closet, staring at her during the night. Every night she would come down and tell her parents and every night her father would tell her the Boogeyman didn’t exist and she should go back to bed.
Well, this happened for several nights and the father got tired of it. So that night he walked her back to her bedroom, turned on the light, and said, “I’ll show you there’s no Boogeyman” and went to open the closet door. But something on the other side held it shut. He sent his daughter out of the room and forced the door open to find that a man was inside. He’d been sneaking into their house every night to stand in the girl’s closet and watch her (and maybe more).
He beat the ever-loving shit out of the man and the man went to prison. When I interviewed this woman I looked him up online. He’d recently gotten out on parole and had skipped out on his weekly checks. There was a warrant out for his arrest and nobody knew where he was anymore.
JamesRenner
9. Watch Who You Call Asshole
Walking my dog and crossing the street with a green light and a guy blows throw the red light and almost hits me and the dog. I yell “ASSHOLE” and he slams on his breaks and turns around and pulls into parking lot ahead of me.
I get closer and see the car has Illinois plates( I live in PA) he says “careful who call asshole I’ve killed people” I just keep walking and he drives away.
The next day I hear spree killer Andrew Cunanan used a stolen credit card at a gas station in my town. 100% was him I called a asshole.
Whitealroker1
10. Tina Fey
I think the story of Tina Fey getting the scare on her face is super fucked up. She was a kid just sitting and playing in her front yard when a random guy pulled up got out of his car and slashed her face for no reason with a razor… Wtf.
jgbelvis
11. Studying With Ted Bundy
My mom was study partners with Ted Bundy. He invited her to go To his apartment to study. A Law professor pulled her aside after class and warned her that he was being investigated by the FBI. Shortly after he was arrested but escaped from prison. Left behind in his jail cell was my mom’s name and address. Without the law professors warning it could have turned out much differently.
peverell394
12. Stabbed While Taking a Walk
One of my dad’s friend’s wife was murdered by some crazy dude walking down the street. This guy had just been released from a mental hospital and literally just stabbed her as she walked home. When my dads friend came back he thought she had just taken the dogs out for a walk so he walked along the normal walk route and he saw loads of blue lights. He was stopped by a police officer and wasnt allowed any closer until he saw that it was his wife.
Nick_Pears
13. Flesh Eating Bacteria
When I was young, I saw a documentary about a guy who got flesh eating bacteria in his nasal cavity. It ate his face and he’s still alive. Eventually they removed the bacteria by removing the eaten parts of his face. He got a prosthetic face, which back in those days was basically a plastic Halloween mask that tried to look human. At the end of the documentary, he took the mask off. His face from his forehead down to his mouth was just a hole.
Edit: it was a fungus, not bacteria, apparently.
huggalump
14. Being Stalked
My mom was stalked by a guy in her chemistry class. This was back in the late seventies, during her first semester at college. They were lab partners, and Mom thought he seemed cute and nice, and was too shy at the time to ask him out, but she said if he’d asked her out, she would’ve went. They were friendly with each other in class, but their paths didn’t cross outside of that since they were in different majors.
As the semester wore on, however, she noticed he was often waiting for her outside of her other classes, the library, the student union, out in front where her dad picked her up and dropped her off. This continued into the spring semester. Puzzled, but not yet alarmed, she asked him how he always seemed to know where she was. He proudly said, “Oh, I asked the registrar’s office for a copy of your schedule!”
My mom went to complain to the secretary who gave out her schedule, and the secretary blew it off because “you guys are dating”. Luckily, Mom had already arranged to transfer to a different school for sophomore year, and spent the remaining time left avoiding him. She never saw him after that. But it wasn’t over.
Flash forward to grad school. Mom was at work, and Grandma gets a knock on the door. Since the man at the door was in a naval uniform, and my grandmother was a Navy nurse, she let the man in, because he looked rather sad. He starts off by saying how sorry he is for my mother’s loss, which completely mystified Grandma.
“Well, ma’am, I just got back from overseas, and I found out my friend recently killed himself. He spoke so highly of his fiancée, your daughter, and I wanted to meet her.”
My grandmother told him her daughter didn’t even have a boyfriend at the moment, let alone a fiancé. It doesn’t take too long to establish the man’s deceased friend in question was in fact Mom’s stalker. The Naval Lieutenant was pretty upset, and my grandmother even more so. She made him leave before Mom got home.
The weird thing about the stalker’s death is that it was ruled a suicide, but he hanged himself from a very high up tree branch you’d need a ladder to get to, and his hands were tied behind his back. From what my mother later learned, he had a tendency to snoop and generally stick his nose in places they didn’t belong besides the obvious stalking thing, and this didn’t win him too many friends, so it’s anyone’s guess who he might have pissed off. My mom always concludes this story kind of nonchalantly, like, “Yeah, back in those days, they didn’t really know much about stalking. They’ve gotten a little better in terms of awareness now.” It gives me the creeps to think what could have happened if he escalated his attempts to follow her after she left that school.
harperpitt011
15. Details of the Murder
I was in the drunk tank with a guy who beat another man to death. The guy didn’t die immediately, was in intensive care for 3 days then died in the hospital. The man who killed him told me specific details about it and on the third day (when the guy in IC died ) the CO’s came in the cell and put him in isolation across the hall. They left him in general pop until the guy actually died and once he was officially charged with capital murder THEN they took him out of our cell. I was 17 at the time. Never forget being scared to fall asleep right next to this dude.
liquorballsammy
16. Being Pulled Over
My mom’s best friend was driving home from work one night when she got pulled over from a police officer. She had no idea why, but figured it could be a tail light or something, so she pulled over. When the officer approached, he confirmed to her that her tail light was out, and asked for license and registration, so she gave it to him and he disappeared to his car for awhile.
Later, when he came back, he started asking her weirder and weirder questions. They started regularly, “Where are you going, where did you come from?”, but then they started getting personal. “Do you have a husband at home? Any children? Any weapons? Any daughters? Any aggressive pets?”
Once he started getting concerningly personal, she told him that it was inappropriate to be asking these questions. Then he started getting aggressive. “I’m a fucking cop! Do you know what that means?!?! It means you shut the fuck up and do what I say. Step out of the car.”
Obviously she was pretty scared at this point. She rolled up the window and started looking through her purse for her phone. At this point, the officer was straight up violent. He was pounding on her window and trying her door yelling crazy shit. “Get out of the fucking car you bitch! You dirty fucking slut I said out!”
So, in a full blown panic, she stepped on the gas and drove away. A chase occured for a short while, but the cop quickly stopped following her as she got closer to the main road. She then called 911, where she learned that there was no officers that were supposed to be in that location.
In the coming days it turned out that there was a rapist who was posing as a cop in that area. She never even had a broken tail light. But he had her address, her personal info, and even knew about her husband and daughter. She told him she didn’t own weapons, so she immediately purchased a pistol. Unfortunately she was forced to live in fear for awhile until they caught the man.
a_burdie_from_hell
17. Fell Asleep at the Wheel
A van of 6 people and a driver are on the way to an engagement. Lonely roads and the driver dozes off. He wakes up and realises that the van is gone out of his control and in the seconds he has, decides to save himself and jumps out through his door. Van out of control, runs down, tosses and rolls.
4 people in the van died on the spot, one lucky person survived with minor fractures. The other person had barely survived. She had her skull cracked, the bone under her eyes broken and caved in, glass from the window stuck to her eyes, the nasal bone broken, jaw broken and teeth fell out, shoulder bone broken and dislocated, hip bone fractured, toes broken and a huge chunk of skin gone in her feet.
She was wheeled into the hospital and performed surgeries on. She said the only thing that got her through was thinking that her kids would grow motherless. When I saw her post surgery, she was completely wrapped in bandages like the invisible man, gaps for eyes and a hole for lips. She couldn’t speak for months and couldn’t walk for a year.
This was my mom and the year was 2006. I was 9 or 10 then and the memory of her mummified form still haunts me in my dreams.
crazy_sweet_retard
18. Don’t Stop the Antibiotics
When I worked in healthcare I had a patient who got a sinus infection. He stopped taking his antibiotics after a few days because he felt better. His sinus infection came back with a vengeance. When he got to the Emergency Department he was presenting with stroke symptoms. The infection had spread to his cranial cavity. There was so much pus that it was twisting his brain. No one thought he would survive the surgery. The family was advised to expect the worst. Amazingly he actually survived. He ended up needing 3 more surgeries to wash out and spent almost 2 months in the hospital. Take your full dose of antibiotics, people!
slappy_mcslapenstein
19. Being Held Hostage at Home
When I was about 5, woke up to my house surrounded by loud voices and bright white lights. A group of robbers broke into our house after some kind of heist and were using us as hostages with rifles. The police had our house surrounded. My parents, grandparents, and I didn’t really speak English back then, so my 12 year old sister had to translate the demands to the police and instructions to us. My grandma told me to go back to sleep, which I somehow easily did.
Edit: The end of the story->
After falling asleep and waking up the next day, everything was fine. The only thing everyone kept talking about were where the robbers were standing. They decided not to have too many entrances from the house so they barricaded themselves in our kitchen. Apparently the entire kitchen floor was covered in guns.
I kept asking what happened but my family was firmly in the mindset of “Don’t tell the kids anything, ever”. Since little kid me was kind of dumb and nothing really happened to me directly, I forgot about the situation for years. I asked again but they still don’t want to talk about it. It’s still kind of scary to think that, had they wanted to, I could have died in my sleep that night.
PsychicRocky
20. Hitchhiking in Australia
I met a guy who had been travelling Australia with a couple friends, hitchhiking around as many of us had done. One of his friend told him they were near his distant uncles house, whom he’d never met before. He got a phone number from a family member and as they had hoped, the uncle offered them a place to stay. He picked them up in town and drove them out to his rural property way out in the bush. They said he seemed like a pretty normal guy, friendly and cheery. When it was time to set up a place to sleep the uncle took them to a closet that was totally full of sleeping bags and bed rolls. They didn’t think much of it at the time and all grabbed a kit and set up on the living room floor. They stayed a couple days and nothing out of the ordinary happened, and afterwards the uncle drove them to the bus station and they continued on their way. About a year later that man was arrested and charged with several counts of murder. He was the man who was picking up young hitch hiking backpackers and slaughtering them. The guy who told me this story was 100% certain he had slept in the sleeping bag of one of his victims.
pasomider
21. Saying No to the Quickie-Mart
I was about 10 years and slept over at a buddy’s house for his birthday. The next morning we’re playing in the front yard and one of his neighborhood friends asks us if we wanted to go to the local Quickie-Mart for something. It was less than a mile away and we’d have to ride bikes. My buddy asked me if I wanted to go and I told him no, so we didn’t go.
We were the last to see that kid alive.
He rode his bike and was picked up along the way. They found his body behind someone’s fence. he had been raped and strangled.
I still feel horrible. If I said yes, then there would either be three bodies or the kid wouldn’t have been taken. I don’t know.
No_Im_Random_Coffee
22. Life Long Fear
When I was about 8 years old our school was doing swimming lessons as part of the curriculum.. my Mum worked late, so we went to after school care and didn’t get home until after dark. When we got home Mum asked me to take my wet togs (bathing suit) and towel out to the clothesline to dry so I could use them the next day…. I was so confident going outside to do this and had this real feeling of being a big kid.
I walked into our backyard- only for a man to be RUNNING at me. I screamed, jumped inside and instinctively locked the back door as I did so. As this was happening, my Mum told me she heard the guy jump the gate which was next to her bedroom just after she heard me scream and came running to find me.
I slept with the light on until I was 16 and I get my husband to go outside for me while it’s dark.
CtrlAltDelusional22
23. Don’t Open the Door
Lived w 3 other girls sophomore year of college. All 3 took off early for spring break, leaving me alone in the house. First night alone, I heard someone bang on my front door at 2am. Then I hear more knocks at the back door. A man yells “Boulder police, open the door!” When I didn’t, I heard body slams against both doors. Soon I hear “little girl, open the door, we know you’re alone.” At this point I’m so scared I keep accidentally dialing 611 instead of 911. When I eventually do get the police, cars roll up (thankfully) just minutes later. Officers have 4 boys from our school hockey team face down on the grass. I had to file restringing orders against them and the kicker – one lived across the street from me and we’d never spoken a single word before then.
etrain828
24. His Loss is Her Gain
Back when I was a lot stupider than I am now, I briefly dated a guy a work friend had introduced me to. We enjoyed each other’s company, and ended up in bed (and honestly, it was some of the best sex I’d ever had). A couple days later, he calls my job, and leaves a message with the receptionist — “I want nothing to do with you, leave me alone, and never call me again.” Which was weird, since I never did call him, but I figured oh, well… his loss.
A couple weeks later, police found a girl stuffed in a well the next town over. She’d been beheaded.
Not long after that, they arrested the guy I had dated oh-so briefly. He pleaded guilty. His reason for killing her? She wouldn’t sleep with him.
Original_Impression2
25. Overturned Vehicle Off a Cliff
I was in class in 10th grade and the teacher was asking everyone how their weekend was. The quietest girl in the class spoke and while breaking down in tears said she was on a trip in the mountains with her mom. They made a stop for some reason and she looked over the cliff and saw an overturned vehicle with a dead family scattered about.
HerbertGoon
26. Living in the Attic
There have been several confirmed cases in a few different countries of people living in other people’s houses unbeknownst to them.
I believe one case went on for a couple of years. The intruder would wait until the homeowner would go to work and then sneak out and steal small amounts of food as not to be noticed. Well, eventually the homeowner did noticed and couldn’t figure out where his food was going, so he set up a hidden camera to record it.
I can only imagine how scary it would have been to come home from work one night and sit down to watch the video, skipping through hours of stillness, to suddenly come across a person crawling out of your attic. And then the slow realization that that person is still in your house at that moment.
And then the retroactive fear of thinking back to all the times you laid awake at night and heard a noise, which you just dismissed as coming from the pipes or the old wooden beams, but actually it was a fucking person just above you.
It gives me the heebee jeebees every time I think about it.
Iwillpickonelater
27. Instant Karma
I’m a little late to the party but when I was 9 years old I would get off the bus and he home alone for an hour before my parents got home from work. Well one day I went out into my pasture to go see my pony as I did every day after school. As I’m walking to the back of my three acre pasture thank god a figure in the brush caught my eye. There standing right across my fence line was a man dressed in a winter coat (in the spring time) staring me down. I froze and he started to walk towards me and I SPRINTED to my house. First call was to my mom who called the police for me.
To this day I don’t know if he was casing my house or there for me. But he got instant karma. My dad was racing home and called me and asked what the guy looked like. As I described him all my dad said was ‘he’s walking down the road, I’ve got to go’. And my dad proceeds to beat the shit out of the guy until the cops picked him up.
sociallyawkwardjess
28. Being Drugged at the Bar
One of my friends was drugged by a “nice seeming” girl at a bar that tried to sex traffic her. The girl got her an uber to an address she didn’t know under the guise of “get my drunk friend home” but she woke up on the way and told the driver she didn’t know where they were going. They called the cops, apparently that wasn’t the first time that week they’d heard the same story and they recognized the address as one they were already tracking. If she hadn’t woken up on the way she might have been trafficked by now. Apparently they use younger, safe seeming girls to do the collecting a lot of the time.
edit: to those of you who asked, this was in the US, in Washington state a few years ago. We don’t know who tried to do it. The bar was informed. To the people telling me this didn’t happen or is made up, I’m just relaying what she told me after it happened. I don’t have any reason to believe she was lying about it nor do I have anything to gain and it’d be pretty fucked up to make up something like this.
spacelordmthrfkr
29. Breaking Up
My moms best friend was murdered by a man because she broke up with him.
SpicyHashbrowns
30. Evil Step Father
I had the most likeable step father at the time. Would treat me really well. We would rent movies and plenty of nice activities for a ten years old boy.
Until he cheated on my pregnant mother and she broke up. He threatened her, but from what I recall she didn’t took it too seriously. He Waited for us one night hiding in our apartment. Luckily for me I had stayed at my grandmother place to sleep. He tied her up, raped and killed her. The baby did not survive. During trial he said he would have killed me too. After years I got more details of fucked stuff he had done. Like being abusive mentally and physically. But I couldn’t see it as a kid.
Didn’t have contact with him for 17years. From what I heard he got out of prison a couple of month ago. I have no idea if he still want me dead or not.
I want to move out to somewhere else.I’ve been living in the same neighborhood all my life. But can’t afford it right now. So I’m trying to be extremely careful and hoping for the best.
Flash_da_sloth