25 Bone-Chilling True Stories Guaranteed To Give You Nightmares For The Rest Of Your Life

Reddit user Littel_Chubb asked the community, “What is the scariest true story you know?” Here are their bone-chilling experiences:

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Note: Some submissions include violent imagery, murder, and suicide. Please proceed with caution.

1. “I grew up in a funeral home. I helped out in the office. When I was about 15, we got a call from a man whose wife and infant baby had been murdered in cold blood. There were very few clues, but it made headlines. The cops set up surveillance at the viewing. It was heartbreaking, as the mother was holding the baby in her arms. I was asked to take the flower cards and periodically get the late wife’s husband and ask if he recognized the names. I then photocopied them and put them back. I did it because I was a ‘kid,’ people knew me, and I was unobtrusive. I talked to the husband quite a bit. He seemed devastated and shaken.”

“The cops told me they had an eyewitness to someone leaving the house the day of the murder. The witness was a three-year-old girl, and she recognized the man leaving. It was the husband’s best friend.

It turns out that the friend and the husband made a pact to kill each other’s families and run off with their secretaries. The little girl identified the friend, and I guess one of them cracked. They both went to jail on multiple counts, all on the testimony of a three-year-old.

I still cannot believe to this day that that man stood right beside me, multiple times, and I had NO CLUE. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at life the same way after that.”

—u/[deleted]

2. “One of my best friends growing up had an aunt who was the sweetest, most generous woman you could possibly know. She started dating a man who fell in love with her because of how sweet and kind she was. After a month or so of being together, he accused her of being ‘too nice’ to other people. So he bludgeoned her until she was unconscious and cut her heart out of her chest while she was still alive. He thought that it was the ‘worst example of sheer disrespect’ that she would exhibit kindness towards other people when she was in a committed relationship. He believed he owned all of the good she had to give, and by being nice to people who weren’t him, she may as well have been cheating with the whole town. He killed her for being the person he knew her to be when they started dating. The fact that people like him exist is terrifying to me.”

—u/CCWThrowaway360

3. “A woman named Lorraine fell in love with my great-grandfather while he was already married to my great-grandmother. So one day, she came to their home with a gun while my great-grandfather was at work. When my great-grandmother opened the door, she shot and killed her at point-blank range. My grandmother, then three years old, was behind her, watching everything. Thankfully, Lorraine didn’t shoot her. This was around 1930, so forensics weren’t very advanced. No evidence was left, and the case went cold. Life went on, and eventually Lorraine got what she wanted. She convinced my great-grandfather to marry her. She had two children from a previous marriage, both older than my grandmother. I don’t know what happened to her first husband, honestly.”

“My grandmother told everyone exactly who murdered her mother, but no one believed her. Who would believe a kid who obviously misses her mother and is having trouble adjusting to her new family? People just thought she demonized her stepmother for replacing her mom, or maybe just imagined it.

Years pass by, and my grandmother grows up with her mother’s murderer in her own house, sleeping just a few rooms away. Lorraine knows that she knows. She appears like the perfect housewife, swooping in and caring for the grieving father and child. My grandmother grows up tormented by her and her children. There was obvious favoritism, the stepkids are spoiled, and she’s the black sheep of the family.

She moved out and married my grandfather, and they had five sons. Lorraine became ill and landed on her deathbed. And there, she finally confessed to the truth and told everyone what she had done.

57 years had passed since the murder, and 16 years since my great-grandfather had died. He never knew the truth. No documents were ever officially amended to state that she was the murderer, as far as I know. The authorities consider the case cold, still, almost 100 years later.”

—u/batterycat

Person's hand lying on a wooden surface, with blurred background suggesting someone on the ground — Artem_Furman / Getty Images/iStockphoto

4. “I lived next to a murderer. Faye Swetlik was six years old when she was kidnapped out of her front yard. It was all over the news. I had news crews, cops, and even the FBI all over my townhouse complex. My fiancé and I met with the FBI three times — they searched our home and everything. I remember clear as day, my fiancé FaceTimed me as the cops were digging through the trash cans directly in front of my townhouse. They pulled out Faye’s boot and a bloody knife. Then they found her body, dumped maybe 300 feet from my house. He had watched them find the murder weapon. The murderer put it in a trash bag along with his other mail. He eventually went to his back porch and opened his own throat. It’s wild — I had conversations with the guy. I never knew he could be like that.”

—u/SCRhyperior

5. “A woman who went to my regular pub was out with her friend during the day, and in the evening she missed a bus home and ended up in another pub. She was tipsy and ended up going home with a man who lived with another male. They both had an obsession with serial killers and murdered her, and after they killed her, they chopped her body up. They spent the next week putting her body in plastic bags and hiding them in bushes. They were caught pretty quickly, and thankfully, they are in prison for life. The day she went missing, I saw her in the pub with her friend, and stood in the smoking area with her, laughing about a pigeon who was chilling too. I have a video where she is in it, and she makes a joke — this was just hours before her death. I think about her nearly every day. It’s traumatizing, and she did not deserve such a cruel ending to her life.”

“The police ended up going to the pub when she was only classed as missing, but they used the video surveillance footage of her. Because they could see she left alive and went somewhere else, they just used it to retrace her steps, and asked if anyone knew of her whereabouts later in the evening to come forward.

However, in the other pub she ended up at, they saw her on video surveillance with the man who murdered her. The police ended up actually randomly bumping into the man on the street with his accomplice. They recognized him and arrested him on the spot. He denied that he knew her, but his tattoos matched the tattoos of the man in the video surveillance footage.

The police also found a blood stain in their apartment under their newly fitted carpet, and the DNA matched with the woman who was murdered. The police searched an entire canal for her body, but the pair were later seen on video surveillance walking along a canal multiple times with carrier bags, which they later found out was her body chopped into 11 pieces and tightly wrapped up to conceal the smell, and hidden in a field.”

—u/craftingfirerunes

A bloody knife tip with a single drop about to fall, set against a blurred background, conveying a suspenseful or dramatic atmosphere — D-Keine / Getty Images/iStockphoto

6. “This happened to my boss’s best friend when they were teenagers. The best friend’s parents were out of town one weekend, and she had the house to herself. She went about her business, having dinner, watching TV. She then decided to go to bed. She was lying in her bed with her back to her closet when she heard the door open. She pretended to be asleep — a man was hiding in the closet and walked around her bed to the side where she was lying. She gently stroked her hair and face, then left. She immediately called her boyfriend to ask him to come over, then called her parents, and then the police. This man had been getting into their home via a doggy door (they didn’t have a dog and didn’t bother to secure it), and he’d been living in a tent in the foresty area behind their home for months to creep on her. They found a ton of video surveillance footage of pieces of her clothes and other stuff.”

—u/halfyellowhalfwhite

7. “In the 1930s, near my hometown, a man killed his wife, his mother-in-law, and his three step-children. He dismembered their bodies and hid them in the root cellar. My great-uncle and his father (my great-grandpa) were out hunting when their dog ran off barking. My great-uncle followed the dog and found a burlap bag. He opened it and found the head of one of the children. When he told us the story, he said he looked up, and the man was standing right in front of him with another burlap bag in his hands. His dad arrived, scared the guy away, and they reported the head to the local cops. They found the rest of the victims and arrested the killer, who was executed a couple of months later.”

“My uncle only told us this story once, but after he died, we found all the newspaper clippings about the murders in a trunk under his bed. I think it must have haunted him his entire life, especially since one of the kids was his age.

It’s a bit of local history I grew up hearing about, but didn’t realize my great-uncle was the one who found the bodies until I was a teenager, because he simply never talked about it except that one time.”

—u/the_owl_syndicate

8. “My cousin’s neighbor came over to visit and was acting off. First, her house was three miles away, on a dirt road, and she had walked over in the middle of the hot summer. This wasn’t normal for her. She was jittery and kept mentioning that she hadn’t heard from her husband all day and was afraid to go home. My aunt came into the room, pulled my cousin to the side, and told her to keep the neighbor talking. She was calling the police. My aunt had noticed a chunk of what looked like hamburger meat on the woman’s dress, and thought that she might be in some kind of shock and that something might be wrong at home.”

“The police arrived and took her outside. She continued to be jittery and not make a lot of sense. They checked her house and found her husband’s recliner soaked in blood, with a trail leading up the stairs.

On the stairs, they found fingers, and at the top of the stairs, in the bedroom, they found her husband dead. She had killed him with a butcher knife because he was ‘taking up too much of her time.’

As she left, he wasn’t dead yet and had started up the stairs to get to the phone. She attacked him again and cut off several fingers. She believed he was dead and took off, but he wasn’t. He almost made it to the phone.”

—u/Trawhe

Police vehicles with flashing lights are on a city street at night, suggesting an active emergency situation or incident — MattGush / Getty Images/iStockphoto

9. “My neighbor’s sister, her husband, and their two kids went up to Washington to camp every year. It’s late May or early June in 2003, and the son goes to use a rope swing to jump into the lake. The family watches the boy jump, but the rope ends up around his ankle. He falls badly, breaks a bone, and is just dragging underwater, flailing. His dad immediately springs into action to save his son and dives into shallow water. He smashes his skull open, is instantly paralyzed, and drowns. The mother goes in to save them both, dives into the water, and dies of a heart attack. The son stops flailing and is just hanging there.”

“The daughter, then 10 years old, had no idea two minutes prior that she would be sitting safely on shore, watching her family die. It was heartbreaking.

She was raised by my neighbor as a daughter. I just can’t even imagine what that would be like. Just normally mundane risks proving lethal in less than 200 heartbeats.”

—u/sugershit

10. “My mom told me about a family she once knew who all died of carbon monoxide poisoning. They lived in the end unit in a row of attached townhomes, and their next-door neighbor died by suicide by running their car in their garage. The neighbor didn’t know that the air ducts for all the townhomes were connected, so once he started the car and soon lost consciousness, the fumes traveled through the ducts into the home of the family next door and killed the mother and two children while they slept. I don’t remember if the father died as well or if he was already at work when it happened, but I know the people who lived on the other side of the units were out of town and spared. As a result, they changed the way townhomes were built so that they didn’t have common air flow with connected ducts as that development did.”

—u/Bkbirddog

11. “When I was younger, my twin brother and I would help our friend do his paper route. One summer, we could smell something gross coming from one of the houses. We didn’t think anything of it until three days later, when the smell was reaching down the driveway. We went to the back door where he normally dropped the paper and noticed it was open. We went in and looked around the house and found the owner dead. He had died of a heart attack, and his cats were eating him.”

—u/DarthTrafford

Silhouette of a person behind a frosted glass door, creating a mysterious and intriguing shadow effect — Daniilphotos / Getty Images/iStockphoto

12. “Back in the ’90s, a couple of kids went missing. About five days later, my dad was fishing one night and thought he heard a gator. He got his big spotlight and pointed it toward the noise. It wasn’t a gator: it was a bloated, dead body bobbing up and down in the water, eyes open and facing my dad. It turns out the kids had driven into the water by mistake. They found the other body a few hours later, after my dad called it in. My dad was so traumatized that he never went night fishing again and honestly didn’t fish much at all after that.”

—u/saltynotsweet1

13. “A guy I was good friends with had a party one night and invited me and my wife. It was our first day off together in a while, and our daughter was two years old. I mentioned it to my wife, and my daughter said, ‘Noooo, don’t go, daddy!’ Of course, I couldn’t resist that, so I stayed home and we had a good night. My friend, however, had the worst night of his life. His party was going well, and everything was fine, even though there was a ‘friend of a friend’ there who no one really knew. Turns out the stranger had been smoking PCP and decided to start killing people. He took a butcher knife and slashed three peoples’ throats. My friend’s wife threw their kids out of a two-story window and jumped out herself, took them into the woods, and called the police. All three people died.”

“The police found the guy walking down the side of the road, covered in blood and incoherent. He had no idea what he had just done, so he said.

Maybe not going to the party saved my life, or if I had gone, maybe I could have helped. That weighs on me even 20 years later. The fact that some guy destroyed the lives of three good families that he didn’t even know really pisses me off, and I hope he rots in prison.”

—u/Thephilosopherkmh

14. “A few years ago, a dude dressed as a clown came to a camp I went to. Apparently, he broke into the cabin I was staying in and stole stuff from some people in my cabin. He took primarily cash and a phone that kids had on them. I saw him there, but I was so young I didn’t think much of it. Apparently, they couldn’t find him because of the gloves he wore and his full-body costume. All of the kids had their stuff replaced, but the wildest part is that a few of us heard a scream that could not have come from a grown man. That dude was weird, and it was terrifying as an 11-year-old.”

—u/Smoky_Cave

Person holding a smiling clown mask in a dark setting, creating a mysterious and eerie atmosphere — Feri Ferdinan / Getty Images

15. “My dad worked in a morgue when he was in college in the ’60s. One time on the night shift, he was training a recent hire who was wheeling a body down the hallway. The body was under a sheet, but all of a sudden started to sit up. The guy immediately freaked out, ran out the door, and quit. Apparently, a dead body can have muscle contractions in the abs, causing it to start sitting up. The more you know, I guess.”

—u/PJammas41

16. “An employee at my job killed someone behind the building on his lunch break by shooting him in the head. He buried him in a shallow grave and clocked back in and worked the rest of the day. It wasn’t discovered for a couple of days. He came to work each day like normal. Then the cops showed up, they asked for his phone, and he said no. They had a warrant, searched the premises, and found the dead person out back. It was absolutely horrible. He worked there for three years before that, and not one single issue. The police found phone books on his basement walls that they think he would shoot at. He pleaded not guilty, but was convicted and sentenced to life. I guess it’s scary to me because I knew him for years, and he seemed like a ‘normal dude.'”

—u/SandyInStLouis

17. “One of my mom’s old coworkers was loading stuff into a truck when an older man came over and offered to help. Apparently, he was very nice and polite and just left when they were done. She got the man’s name, and when she told her mother, she flipped. It turns out it was Ed Gein, the guy that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is based on. He was serving time at the Mendota Mental Health Institute right next to where she worked. Apparently, he was a very nice person in his later years, but it’s still freaky having a run-in with someone so infamous.”

—u/AtomicNo9

Ed Gein in the late '50s — Bettmann / Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

18. “This incident happened where I live. A teenager was at school late for tennis practice. He was getting ready to drive home in his minivan and leaned over the backseat to grab his bag from the trunk. The seat tipped over and pinned him upside-down in the trunk, compressing his chest. He couldn’t move, but managed to use Siri to make an emergency call. A police officer came and saw the minivan, but since he didn’t see anything, he left. The kid tried calling again, but the 911 dispatcher decided he was a prank caller since they never heard back from the cop. The kid died a couple of hours later from asphyxiation in the back of his own car. His parents found him several hours later when he didn’t come home.”

—u/ferocitanium

19. “My mother wanted to sell the old family station wagon back in the mid-’70s. She had a phone call from an interested buyer, but something about him seemed off. She told my dad that she wanted him there when the guy came to look at it, and my dad was the one who went with him when he took it out for a test drive. They ended up selling it to him. It turns out later on that the guy murdered someone and used the station wagon to take the body somewhere. I don’t recall if he was a serial killer, but that was a very uncomfortable brush with danger. My mom’s intuition might have saved her life.”

—u/GreatNorthernBeans

20. “Back in 2006, when my older sister was moving to a new city for work, my parents and I helped apartment-hunt for her. My sister found a really nice apartment in a nice locality, which was absolutely perfect on paper. The residents were all working women, the landlady seemed super nice to my sister, and the location and rent were ideal. The only thing left to do was for my parents to meet the landlady and finalize the documents. However, after my mom met the landlady for the first time, she told us that she had a weird feeling about her and asked us to keep apartment-hunting. So that’s what we did. Anyway, fast forward a year or so, and we find out from the local newspaper that the landlady was into black magic and she had allegedly murdered some of the residents to use as sacrifices for her rituals. I wish I were lying. To date, it is one of the most terrifying things I’ve read.”

—u/NervousSeagull

A partially open door with a visible knob, leading into a dimly lit hallway. A fire extinguisher is on the floor against the wall — Kunihito Ikeda / Getty Images

21. “About 13 years ago, my sister came home from college for the summer. One day, she got a frantic phone call from one of her roommates (they never locked the doors in their house). This roommate was taking a shower, and when she got out to dry off, she heard a noise coming from the vent directly above her. She grabbed her phone, turned on the flashlight, and pointed it up at the vent. All she managed to see was an EYEBALL staring at her before she justifiably flipped out and sprinted out of the house in nothing but a towel.”

“She called 911, and the police went into the attic and arrested a person who was homeless. He allegedly had been walking around checking for unlocked doors.

Then it all started to make sense why food was going missing — the girls assumed someone was lying about taking food. I have zero clue how it was possible that this person was looking through a vent, but it happened.”

—u/NakedViper

22. “My soccer coach used to tell us this story whenever we were practicing heading the soccer ball. My coach said he had a player who went out of his way to head the ball as much as possible and got really good at it. But one time the ball hit him square on the top of his head, and his tongue was out. The guy ended up biting his own tongue in half. You might think he was just telling a story, but he told it with such seriousness, I 100 % believe him. It scared me off heading the ball every chance I got.”

—u/ShadowCobra479

23. “A woman I’d gone to school with was murdered by her husband in an attempt to get her life insurance and also ‘free himself up’ for the other secret relationship he had going. He tried to stage it as an accident, that she had been crushed by a round hay bale that fell off the tractor forks. But the investigators noted she had blunt force trauma to the head, inconsistent with his story. What’s even more messed up is that they had a house fire a year prior that he claimed started when he was deep frying perogies at 3 a.m., but most people now suspect it was his first attempt at murdering her.”

—u/TatterdemalionElect

Crime scene with "Do Not Cross" tape and blurred figures in the background — South_agency / Getty Images

24. “When I was a teenager, I lived in Rockford, Illinois, for a while and worked at a cemetery for a summer job. The dude I worked with was an old man who lived on the west side of Rockford his entire life. He was the type of guy who had an elephant’s memory. He knew the lore, stories, history, and rumors about every bit of Rockford. One day, we were driving to the older cemetery we took care of from our shop at the main cemetery. I took a wrong turn, and the old man pointed at a house and said, ‘Yup, that’s old [mass murderer] Simon Nelson’s house.’ I asked who the hell that was and he told me the story.”

“When we got back to our shop at the main cemetery, he pointed out [Simon Nelson’s] children’s graves when we pulled in. To this day, the house is still standing and frequently goes up for sale.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the real estate listing a while back, and it looks like each owner begins renovating it, and then it goes up for sale. I would imagine that house has some very dark energy to it and nobody can stand to be there long enough to complete the renovations.”

—u/WhitebeltAF

25. And, “There was this super eerie case in Lebanon involving a family from a village called Kfarshima. Neighbors had been whispering about them for years due to their reclusiveness and antisocial behavior. But it wasn’t until last summer that the authorities broke into their property and found five dead bodies in different states of decay in a hidden, locked room under the house. It turns out the eldest son had been quietly stashing his own deceased siblings and father down there since the ’80s, claiming it was a ‘family ritual’ and that he was just fulfilling their wish to be ‘buried at home.'”

“While some siblings died of natural causes, one brother, George Al Fata, had been killed by another sibling, Khalil, during the Lebanese Civil War. Khalil died by suicide in 2000, and a baby girl named Marie died at one year old for reasons that remain unknown. But it’s rumored that one of the brothers killed her out of jealousy.

The eldest brother, Christo Al Fata, was living there with his 90-year-old mother. He was arrested, the mother was sent to an older persons care facility, and the bodies were finally given a proper burial.

The story was absolute nightmare fuel when it broke out.”

—u/layana_n_lb

Dimly lit basement with a staircase leading to an open door, letting in sunlight. Dust particles visible in the light beams — Matthew Troke / Getty Images/iStockphoto

Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.