rSlash - r/Askreddit What's the Scariest Thing You've Seen You Can't Explain?

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

0:00 Intro 0:03 Todays question 0:09 House siting 1:36 Lizard 2:26 Basement 3:41 Outline 4:12 Checking in 5:15 Bag of stuff 5:59 Rural rail trail 7:47 Similar story 10:29 Cellar key 12:26 Biking home 14:24 London Underground Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to r slash ask reddit where people answer the question, what's the scariest thing you've seen in your life that you can't explain? Our first reply is from the feral forger. About 25 years ago, my now former wife and I were caretaking a house. We had been there for several weeks and we both noticed that we always had that feeling coming up the stairs from the cellar that something was going to grab you as soon as you turned the light switch off. Everything else about the house was normal. We slept with an analog wind-up alarm clock next to the bed, the kind that actually ticks. To set the alarm, you

move a tiny third hand to the location of the clock face for the desired time. For example, halfway between 6 and 7 to awaken at 630. It's a physical process and there's very little opportunities to get it wrong. We always had the clock set to wake us up at 6am. This was not something we fiddled with on a daily basis. One night, the alarm clock went off at like 2 in the morning to old school ringing bells. Both my former wife and I woke up absolutely terrified. I saw a small figure maybe two feet tall run out of the room. I thought I must have been crazy until my former wife screamed, Did you just see that thing? We both described it as some sort of small

gremlin. When we looked at the alarm clock, we saw that the alarm hand had been moved from 6am to 2am. That's the whole story. Scared the hell out of me. I have no explanation for it. Nothing else ever happened there, but the cellar feeling persisted. Then beneath that, a similar story from Professional Ball. My parents' bedroom and my bedroom are connected by a long hallway. You could see directly into one other room just by staring at the door of the other.

So we being kids, our parents arranged their bed so they could lay in their bed and easily look across the hallway into our room. So one night, my dad stares into our room from his, and he notices that from inside of our room, on the top side of the door frame was some ugly dark face upside down, like a lizard was on the wall peeping from our room staring back at my dad across the hallway. He, being skeptical, thought that he was just seeing stuff, until my mom asked, did you just see that thing from the kids room? My dad instantly sprinted into our room only to find nothing there. That only happened the one time as far as I know. Then, beneath that,

we have this story from Al's and Moth's. Two years ago, my fiance was working a job that required him to stay in camp for weeks at a time. This meant that I was home with just the dog. For context, my dog hates stairs and refuses to go in the basement because he's a great dane and he just never figured out large stairways. So one night, my dog is acting weird, and he's literally sitting at the top of the stairs with all the hair on his back raised, growling down at the basement. On a whim to make myself feel better, I went and stood at the top of the stairs next to him and yelled down,

"'Whatever the hell you are, just leave us alone. You don't pay enough bills here to be freaking anybody out." Then, from directly behind me, which was a solid wall, I hear, Okay, fine, I'll go. My dog whipped around and yelped. The hair on the back of my neck was standing up all night. I had my neighbor's husband come over to check the house and even go up into the ceiling crawlspace. He didn't find anything. The rest of the night was spent with every single light on in the house and an aluminum baseball bat in my hands. I like how this is like a begrudgingly polite ghost. Aww, I was gonna haunt this lady, but fine, I'll go, geez.

Our next reply is from Just The Way. Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of my bedroom door creaking open. I could see the outline of someone standing there, but when I turned on the light, there was no one there. The door was still slowly closing as if whoever or whatever had been there was leaving. Even creepier, my nest fire alarm had illuminated in the corridor sensing movement, but there was nobody there. Still gives me the chills thinking about it.

And beneath that, we have this story from Lost Dog Boulder, Utah. After my sister died in her sleep from a heart defect, my dad would wake up several times a night to check on me. My door would open, I'd hear weird, hard breathing, and then the door would close. My poor dad was trying to breathe through panic attacks to confirm that I was okay and then sneak away, believing that as long as he didn't say anything, he wouldn't wake me up. However, this scared the bejesus out of me. Me, being a dumb kid, didn't figure out that it was my dad until his nightmares got so bad that

he couldn't tell if I was breathing and he tried to take my pulse. He was shaking so hard so he jabbed his finger into my ear and my eye before I woke up enough to yell. After that, I would hear my door open and just call out, I'm okay, I love you. I am all grown and have kids of my own, but occasionally he'll still shoot a text around midnight or very early in the morning, just checking to make sure that I'm alright. He doesn't want to wake me up, but 30 years later he still worries. Aw, that's sweet. Our next reply is from Squambish.

I was riding my bike down a rural road when I was 9 and I found a garbage bag filled with red sludge and white sticks. I thought it was blood and bones, but I had a very PG childhood and I'd never even seen pretend blood and bones, so I had nothing to compare it to. I told myself that it wasn't what I thought it was. After all, why would there be a ripped open garbage bag filled with blood and bones? Two days later I thought, just go look again and if it's what you think it is, tell a grown up.

I biked back to the area and it was gone. I'm now old enough and have watched enough stuff to confirm that it was blood and bones. And beneath that we have this story from Grand Moff Tarkles. I was going for an hour long run down a gravel road back in 2013. It was a fairly well known rural rail trail, but not too busy. The closest parking spot was a couple of miles away at that point, and I was headed back to my car. In the distance, I see some guy walking towards me.

As I get closer, I can see him better, but something feels off. It's an older guy, maybe in his 70s, and while he looked clean and not homeless, his skin is grey, his eyes are grey, his hair is grey, he's wearing an all grey swimsuit, and he's smiling. He's just been smiling the entire time. This man is 200 meters away, and he's smiling but not in greeting. Just a full-toothed grin walking down the middle of this path. He also has a full black plastic bag slung over his shoulder.

I start feeling really uneasy as I get closer, and then I begin to feel nauseous. At maybe 20 feet away I wave high, but he's still in the middle of the trail. He's still smiling. He has no change in reaction to my greeting. I want to run in the opposite direction, but that would be going further away from my car. I pass by him, running partially on the grass because he's still in the middle of the trail. And this massive wave of nausea passes over me and I nearly puke. The smell was so bad. I want to say it smelled like death, but somehow worse.

I just start sprinting, maybe the 200 meters. I turn to look back, and the man is gone. It's a flat rural area. I can see for miles, and this man is just gone, along with his black plastic bag. It still creeps me out to this day. Then beneath that, a similar story from Crispy Cling the Prophet. About 4-5 years ago, I was living right outside of Detroit. To those unfamiliar with the area, Detroit actually has a lot of areas that are very nice. But the city is still very much a two wrong turns and you're somewhere very not nice. The city that I'm in is quite nice and legitimately less than 5 minutes from Detroit, so I'd work in the city.

I also like to jog at night. It's cooler and there's barely any people around. Sounds stupid in Detroit, but I know the area well and I don't keep headphones in. About 15 minutes into the jog, I hear footsteps. Not casual footsteps, but full blown sprinting and they're strangely loud. Ahead of me is a large black man wearing all black and he's in a full blown sprint. He's a block ahead of me and these blocks aren't that large. He has a full grin on his face and there's something steel in his hand and he's barreling at me. I didn't know what

to do because I'm in decent shape and I'm six foot tall, but this guy is clearly big and fast as hell. I thought that if I turned my back to him to run, I'd be done for, so I kinda just braced myself to fight for my life. When he was less than half a block from me, he just turns down an alley that I didn't even know was there and disappears. Next time I'm on the news, I see a person wanted for murder that matches the EXACT person I saw. 6'3", 220 pounds, and looked exactly like what I could see when they got close. They found the guy four days later.

I have NEVER jogged in the city since. Beneath that, we have this story from Departure Helpful. I used to hang out with this girl, Ava. Me and Ava were close friends and hung out a lot. One day we were hanging out at her house, playing games in her basement when her mother told us to take Ava's dog on a walk. So we did. We were walking to the dog park about 15 minutes away from her house when we noticed a white

van which was slowly following behind us. And our 10 year old selves found that suspicious considering white vans can sometimes symbolize kidnappers. We both panicked and picked up Ava's dog. We approached this old woman who was walking her two dogs and we pretended like we knew her. Even though we were just 10, we told her our suspicions and she took us seriously. We noticed the white van had parked about a street away.

Nobody came out of the van for as long as we waited. When we finally felt safe again, we left the woman and said thank you to her. The van began to move again when we moved. So we went back to Ava's house, who told her mom, who called the police, and the two men who were in the van were arrested, both of which had been convicted P-words. Our next reply is from Professor Beer. So in college I studied in the UK and I lived in a house with a group of other American

students that had stories of the ghost of a girl who passed away while living there. I never believed in any of it, but it was fun to play along. The kitchen had one way in and out, and right after you entered the kitchen to your right was a padlock door to the cellar where she allegedly lived. I had the only key. We were all a little homesick near Thanksgiving, so we decided to do a meal together. This required some creative cooking schedules due to a small appliance in the kitchen, so one girl who didn't have class the

next day offered to stay up late to get the turkey going. We went into the cellar for the first and only timed that evening to get larger cooking implements. At 2 o'clock in the morning, I wake up to my door rattling like someone was pushing against it. I assumed it was a housemate who just went to the wrong door. About 30 seconds later, I hear a scratchy female voice softly saying, Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?

Hello? Hello? Hello? Every 5 seconds or so. My window was open and it sounded like it was coming from outside, so I get up to close my window as I assume it's some drunk girl walking back from the pub. I get to the window and there's no one there. And then I hear, hello?

Clear as a bell behind me and my door rattles again and goes silent. I've had night terrors before and hallucinate when I have even a mild fever so I assume I'm still asleep and lay back down. The next morning at 7am the girl who's cooking tells me, I had the creepiest night. At 1.50am I heard footsteps coming up the cellar stairs. Then the door rattled. Then at 2.10 the door rattled again and I heard footsteps going down.

She told me this before I'd said anything to anyone about what I'd experienced. Our next reply is from Small Land Outdoor. When I was nine years old, I was biking home in the evening. We lived in the countryside up a small mountain. The road from the village was uphill, then a flat section, then another uphill. The road lights only illuminated up to the first part of that flat section. I was a bit afraid of the dark, so whenever I got to the end of the lights, I would stop just long enough to gather courage to bike the last section home.

The moon was out so it wasn't pitch black, and at the end of the uphill section, I saw a figure walking down the road towards me. I thought that I would wait until he or she got closer as I would feel less afraid to bike in the dark if there was someone else close. But about halfway down the hill, this person walked into a thin shadow of a tree on the road and never came back out. Just disappeared. I stood there for a while trying to figure out what I just saw and then panicked and

biked down to the village and stayed there until my parents came driving and wondering why I never came home. My parents tried to explain it with stuff like, the person might have gone into the woods or something. What they didn't disclose though, out of fear that I would never dare to bike home again was that my father had seen the same thing walking home from work. He had seen this woman, clear as day, walking down the hill for a while. When he looked down for just a second and looked up, she was gone, and there were no footsteps in the fresh snow.

I later read a book about local legends and apparently a lot of people during at least a century have seen this lady walking down the hill and disappearing halfway down. My youngest daughter loved this story, so we've been on ghost stakeouts where we buy pizzas and snacks and hang out at the bottom of the hill listening to the Ghostbusters theme song and try to see the ghost. Beneath that, John Luck Picard says, "...you keep playing that song. She's gonna think you're there to trap her.

No wonder she hasn't shown up." Our next Reddit post is from LemonFlower. So my uncle used to work on the London Underground doing maintenance to the tracks and tunnels. Once, he went into a tunnel with two other colleagues. They'd stopped to do something, and this one guy said to my uncle like, hey, uncle's name, can you show me the way out? My uncle, thinking it was one of his co-workers said, you know the way out. I think my uncle was just so engrossed in his work that he never bothered turning around. Then this guy behind him says, I'm so cold. Then my uncle said that he immediately felt dead cold and the air around him dropped,

but I'm not sure what he meant by that. So my uncle turns around and shines a light on this guy, and my uncle said to me that this bloke is what he would call a ghost standing there. He was holding a really old vintage lamp and wearing a really old dirty uniform. He said the feeling he got was so strange, like he knew this guy was a ghost. The guy just kept saying over and over, I'm so cold, I'm so cold. My uncle eventually said to this guy, I don't think you're supposed to be here, mate. Can you see a light anywhere?

And this guy looked dead at my uncle and said, can you help me? I'm so cold. I'm unsure if the colleagues came to see who my uncle was talking to, but one of them tried to approach this bloke thinking it was someone on their team playing a joke and the guy just disappeared right in front of their eyes. All three of them freaked out and ran and they refused to go back into the tunnel. My uncle and two colleagues refused to go down that tunnel again. Some other colleagues have said they've seen this bloke and he always says how cold he is.

My uncle's retired now, but he says that he thinks of this bloke from time to time. That was r slash ask reddit and if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new reddit podcast episodes every single day.