We’ve all read or listened to scary stories as little kids, but have we ever experienced them? Fake or not, these accounts are some of the most terrifying experiences out there. You’ll be guaranteed to stay up all night!

#1. Hachishakusama (Eight Feet Tall)

In August of 2008, a bizarre story was posted to Reddit. The user seemingly described a first-hand account from when they encountered the local entity “Hachishakusama”, an eight-foot-tall spirit that had a hobby of eating children. Here’s a small excerpt from the original post.

“I had a bed and a TV in the room. Grandma had left me snacks. I tried to watch some TV, but couldn’t pay attention. I wasn’t hungry, either. So I just lay on the bed, wrapped in the sheets, and eventually fell asleep because the next thing I remember was waking up to a late night show on the TV. My watch said it was around 1 AM. And I heard something tapping on the glass of the window.

“I tried to ignore it. It was very persistent. I had some tea and a snack and turned up the TV to drown out the tapping. Then I heard Grandpa call from the hall, “Are you alright? It’s okay to come out if you’re too scared.” I started for the door automatically but stopped myself as I remembered how insistent Grandpa had been that he wouldn’t talk to me until seven. Again I heard him: “It’s okay, come here.” I wanted it to be my Grandpa’s voice… but somehow it wasn’t. I suddenly had goosebumps all over me; then I noticed the salt in the corner. It was becoming darker.”

#2. Writing

“After living in my new house for five months or so, I decided to take a shower. One of my friends had just slept over. I had taken a crap ton of showers in that bathroom already, so it’s not like it was anything new. So I take my shower, get out to dry off, and look at the steamed up mirror.

“On the mirror, in PERFECT writing (no human could do with their finger) read something along the lines of “Dear father, please forgive me” I completely forget the rest because I was just so freaked out. But it was terrifying. The bathroom door was locked the entire time, and no one could have got in. It had also never been there any other time I took a shower.”

#3. Mirror Mirror

Everyone knows that breaking a mirror is bad luck, but could find out that someone, or something, put it back together be worse?

“A friend of mine moved into a new home. One day while cleaning, he accidentally knocked down a hanging mirror, shattering it into hundreds of pieces. He laid the mirror frame on the kitchen table and went down to the basement to get a broom to sweep up the glass. When he got upstairs, all of the pieces had been lain, exactly to the last piece, back into the frame. My friend had only left the mirror for a minute and there was no one else in the house.”

#4. Rocking Horse

“One night, when I was maybe 10-12, I had trouble falling asleep. My bedroom was the entire top floor of our house with my bed and such being on the left side and storage closets and a play area being on the right. I was lying in bed when I heard a noise from the other side of the room and see a rocking horse begin to rock. It was sitting just outside one of the storage closet doors. It proceeded to rock its way halfway across the room and stopped dead under the ceiling light.

“At this point, I was freaking out and just buried my head under my blankets and never peeked out again until morning. It was all confirmed to not be a dream as the rocking horse was still in the middle of my room when I woke up. Furthermore, I got a stern reprimand from my parents for being up out of bed playing with my toys well past my bedtime. Their bedroom was directly below the storage closet/play area and had heard the creaking of the rocking horse shuffling across the room.”

#5. The Man with the Black Eyes

Babysitting isn’t always easy, and Reddit User FuzzyBanditz knows this fact well.

“When I was a teenager, I used to babysit my cousin Alyssa. She was little, maybe almost two, maybe a little older, old enough to say sentences.

“I’m giving her a bath before bed when she looks out into the hallway and gets a terrified look on her face and starts crying. At this moment, my aunt’s Pomeranian starts going nuts as well, barking and growling into the hallway. The atmosphere in the room became uncomfortable, and I started getting scared. I took her downstairs from the third floor in the townhouse to try and calm her down. I asked her what was wrong, and she said something along the lines of, ‘The man with the black eyes’ was there. When I continued to pry, she looked up at the second-floor stairs, her eyes getting big and looks at me, bringing her finger up to her mouth and said, ‘shh,’ while shaking her head ‘no.'”

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If you liked these stories, make sure to check out my other article on some of the weirdest or just downright terrifying sleep paralysis experiences!