Real-Life Horror Stories That Will Keep You Up At Night

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. It made headlines. 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 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. She recognized the man leaving. It was the husband's best friend.

Turns out that the friend and the husband had 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 ever looked at life the same way after that.

My great aunt woke up in the middle of the night, she heard her dog making these low growls. She was single at the time and living alone in her ranch style home. She walked out to her living room to check things out. She didn’t see or hear anything out of the ordinary, so she decided to make sure her door and front windows were locked. Door was locked, first window she checked was locked.

When she lifted the mini blind on the second window, it was wide open and a guy in a ski mask was standing there. She said he laughed this evil laugh and said “party time” then he started to climb in. She screamed that she had a gun, her dog started barking his head off. The would be rapist decided to bolt. My aunt did get a gun after that and learned how to use it.

I can’t even think about what would’ve happened to her if she didn’t have her dog to warn her :(

James Bulger was just 2 years old and with his mom running errands. She let go of his hand to pay the cashier, and he wandered away. Two ten year old boys spotted him, lured him toward them, took him by the hands and led him away. They took him to a remote location, pushing and kicking at him the whole time. Some people questioned the two kids with the crying toddler, but they lied saying he was their brother and nobody intervened further. They took him to a secluded spot and tortured him. I don't want to recount the torture details, it's just too gruesome. They left his body on some railroad tracks hoping that being run over by a train would make it look like an accident. He was found days later, his body severed in half by a train.

The boys were caught and became the youngest convicted murderers in British history. Security footage from the day they took James shows them watching children, picking out a target. And they were just kids themselves. They were released at 18. One of them is back in jail for possessing child abuse photos on his computer.

The most terrifying thing about this for me is that my own son is only 2 now, and James's murderers were just children, too. It was premeditated and intentional and entirely random. Just a momentary lapse in attention and he became a target of two murderous children. Children. To think that children younger than my step son are capable of such a thing... ugh. Everything about this case is just horrifying.

My dad worked in a morgue in during college in the 60’s. 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 doors 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.

During college, I lived in an apartment with a community pool. There were a bunch of us having beers at the pool one night over summer term, and one of my friends ran to jump in the pool but changed his mind at the last second. His feet slipped out from under him on the wet concrete and he went down. He broke his neck in the edge of the pool...never walked again and had extremely limited upper body function. I watched someone’s life be ruined and it was terrifying. Listen to the lifeguard and walk.

I had a guy tell me a story a couple decades ago about how he was hiking in an area in South America and wandered away from other hikers in the area. The ground was wet and without warning it gave away and he got sucked into a fast moving underground river- pitch black, completely submerged, and at the mercy of the current as it buffeted him against the sides of the tunnel.

After some time the current subsided and he realized he was in a larger pocket, still pitch black and submerged. He said that even as he struggled to hold his breath, he didn’t panic and realized that the water had to keep moving somewhere, so he moved around until he found another tunnel that sucked him in. At one point he began to see light so he punched upwards, broke through the ground and pulled himself out, soaking wet, gasping for air, and a bit of a distance from the other dry hikers, who were somewhat bewildered when they saw him straggling up to them.

Everything to do with Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi

He was a shoemaker who lived in Morocco in the late 19th and early 20th century. He and his accomplice, a 70 year old woman called Annah, used to drug and kill young women who came to the shop. Eventually one of the victims' parents traced her movements to the shop, and after the remains of 36 mutilated corpses were discovered nearby Mesfewi and Annah were questioned - and tortured.

Annah didn't survive, but Mesfewi confessed to murdering them, usually for a tiny amount of money. His initial sentence was crucifixion - a very unusual punishment even then. However there were many protests from powerful foreign embassies, and Morocco couldn't do much against them. Instead he was sentenced to beheading, a more common punishment. However the mood in Marrakech was that this was far too lenient, so they settled on immurement - being walled up alive.

A special cell was constructed in the wall of the bazaar, about 2 X 2 X 6 feet. Chains were attached to one wall to ensure he would be kept standing. Mesfewi wasn't told of his fate until the morning of his execution - when he was led, screaming, in chains and slowly bricked up inside. Once the last course had been laid the crowd would fall silent until he started screaming, when they would cheer.

He screamed nearly constantly for two days. On the third day he fell silent.

I served a short stint as a fireman. There was a RTA call one morning, 30 mins after I started my shift. This guy got T boned while driving home after a night of heavy drinking.

He got T boned on the passenger’s side when he ran a red light, his wife died instantly and he pretty much remained unharmed. When we arrived at the scene, he was outside his car, while the wife was still seated in the passenger seat. Her lower body was still in her seat while her upper torso splayed over to the driver’s side, looks like she was just reaching over to the driver’s side to open the door, just that she’s unconscious and nonreactive. No blood at all from what we can see from the driver’s side, the passenger’s door was caved in badly.

The driver was still tipsy and thought nothing of what’s happening, kept asking us to hurry up and extract his wife so that they can head back home. Laughing and fumbling around with the police.

When the paramedics realised that there was no pulse, we tried extracting her from the driver’s side and we realised that her lower left body, her left pelvis to her thigh, was completely crushed and she was impaled through her left abdomen by a piece of the door.

When we told him that his wife has died, probably bled out minutes after the impact, you could see the disbelief (stop kidding me) slowly morphing into realisation then ending up as desperation. He was immediately sober and ran over to the driver’s side, tried to pull his wife out. It tore her wound up and we had to drag him out. He then proceeded to the passenger side and tried to pry the caved door open.

We left the scene then and let the police handled the aftermath. Saw it on the news that afternoon.

The kidnapping of Colleen Stan. She was hitchhiking in the 70s, and turned down rides because they didn’t seem safe. A van with a young couple and a baby offered her a ride, and because it was a family, she accepted. They held her at gun point, put a giant box on her head that blocked out noise and sound, and later, kept her in box the size of a coffin underneath their bed. She was brutally beaten and assaulted daily for 7 years. They also brainwashed her to believe that they were part of a mafia called “The Company” that would kill her family if she tried to escape. Eventually, the wife helped her escape and received immunity for testifying against her husband at trial. The case is known as “The Girl in the Box.”

I lived next to a murderer. Faye Swetlik was 6 years old when she was kidnapped out of her front yard. It was all over the news. I had news crews, cops, even the FBI all over my townhouse complex. My fiancée and I met with the FBI 3 times. They searched our home and everything. I remember clear as day, my fiancée FaceTimed me as the cops were digging through the trash cans directly in front of my townhouse. They pulled out her 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. Dumba put it in a trash bag along with his other mail. He went to his back porch and opened his own throat. It’s crazy. I had conversations with the guy. I never knew he was a psycho. This all happened a year ago.

A good friend died of a brain aneurysm. One of the hardest working and smartest people I've known. She got a vet degree, got married and had a kid and three months later her husband found her unconscious on the floor when he got home. She never woke up.

As a father of two I think about that a lot.

The new London school explosion. A school in Texas in 1937 tried to tap into natural gas on their own and it ended up leaking and blowing up the school. It's the reason they make natural gas scented in Texas and probably the US now. I'm amazed I never heard of this in school because it seems like something that should be taught.

I read some survivor stories and I had fking nightmares. It was horrible. Three in particular stuck with me. One was a 7 or 8 year old girl, she saw her best friend and playmate with her entire body crushed by concrete with only her shoulders and head above it, and she still had a lollipop in her mouth like she didn't know what happened.

Another was a guy I think a 16-17 year old, helping un-dig people and bring them out of the wreckage. He saw a dad holding his daughter crying his eyes out while the back of the girls head was broken open with her brain on the ground next to her.

The last was a 9ish year old girl who went to find her mom after it happened (there was a PTA meeting going on at the time so there was a lot of parents at the scene) her mom was freaking out trying to find her but didn't even recognize her. She went upto her mom and called out to her but she just kept saying 'you're not my daughter." She was so covered in blood and ash and tears that her own mother couldn't recognize her.

It was a truly horrifying thing.

When I was 10, I regularly attended a choir club for kids. One day, I was picked up by my dad to drive me home. I was confused about it, as it was always my mum who did, but did not think much on it until half-way through the drive. My dad began to mumble about how sorry he was, and how I would never see him again. More than a bit frightened and confused at that point, I kept asking what he meant, but he wouldn't say. Until we were home, but he did not leave the car, and instead urged me to get out. Finally, he told me I would not see him again because he will be dead very soon for what he did, and that the police would answer me.

After he practically kicked me out of the car I rushed home, but no one was there. But I found the door open, and a puddle of blood on the floor.

The police was nearby and explained what had happened:

My dad was obsessively jealous and had found a pack of old condoms in the cupboard, so he drew the conclusion that my mum must have cheated on him. Never mind the fact that we only recently moved into this apartment, and they could have been left by previous tenants, or the fact that he controlled my mum's very step and never let her go anywhere alone. The police took me to the hospital, where my mum, luckily alive, was being treated.

My dad had smashed her skull in with a full wine bottle. The only reason she survived was because my little brother, 7 at the time, intervened. If it weren't for him, my dad would have killed my mum in a fit of jealousy.

When he said that I would not see him again, he meant that he had planned on killing himself shortly after dropping me off. He did not succeed, and police managed to get him into a mental ward.

This, to this date, is the scariest thing that had ever happened to me, but I keep thinking of my brother all the time. To witness your own mum being beaten half-dead by your dad. We both suffered extreme mental trauma from this event later down the line, but somehow turned into decent people. I never really told him how grateful I am he was there, but I think that I really, really should.

Germanwings Flight 9525. The copilot locked himself in the cockpit and set the airplane for a slow descent into the French Alps.

For 10 minutes, the crew desperately tried to get back into the cockpit, but in this post 9/11 world, the door was designed to withstand assault and did not fail.

This is was a daytime flight. Passengers knew what was happening. They could see the mountains getting closer out the windows. This wasn't a quick, "what's that... omg... out"... this was a long, drawn out realization of what was coming and the end was inevitable.

Another woman fell in love with my great grandfather, and he was already married to my great grandmother. So she came to their home with a gun while he was at work. When my great grandmother opened the door, she shot her point blank. However, my grandmother, then 3(ish) years old, was behind her, watching everything. I guess she concluded that she wouldn’t remember, or wouldn’t be believed, or simply couldn’t shoot a child, being a mother herself... and thankfully didn’t shoot her. This was around 1930, forensics weren’t very advanced. No evidence was left. The case goes cold.

Life continued on and eventually the woman, named Lorraine, got what she wanted. She convinced my great grandfather to marry her. She had 2 children from a previous marriage, both older than my grandmother. I don’t know what happened to her first husband, honestly.

She 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 imagined it. It’s an easy conclusion to reach, honestly.

And so years and years pass, she grows up with her mother’s murderer in her own house, sleeping rooms away. And 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 moves out and marries my grandfather the first chance she gets. she moves on and has children of her own. 5 boys. Lorraine became ill and finally landed on her deathbed. And there, she finally confessed to the truth, and told everyone what she had done. I guess she was worried about the state of her soul.

57 years had passed since the murder. 16 since my great grandfather had passed. 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.

It drives me nuts that my grandmother ALWAYS KNEW! and even after she was an adult, people just said “oh, you had an active imagination as a child.” There’s no way to live with that knowledge for so long... and have no one in the world on your side. Your whole family against you. That's what scares me.

One of my best friends growing up had an aunt that was the sweetest, most generous woman you could possibly know. She started dating a man that fell in love with her because of how sweet and kind she was. After 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 that 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 people like him exist is terrifying to me.

The story of Christopher Duntsch aka Doctor Death who operated out of the Plano and Dallas area. He maimed 33 people and killed 2. He was an alleged neurosurgeon that didn’t actually receive a proper medical education to operate, but still did so despite not fully being trained. No hospital would report him or take his license away. They would just pass him off to another hospital to continue injuring or killing people.

He was the first doctor to be formally indicated with murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

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 etc. They were caught pretty quickly and thankfully 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 - just hours before her death. I think about her nearly everyday, it’s something that is sort of traumatizing and she did not deserve such a cruel ending to her life.

This one kid back in the early 20th century named Bobby Dunbar. He went missing, and after like a year of searching for him, his parents came across a man with a kid who looked a lot like Bobby. They believed it was their kid, and after a legal battle with the kid’s supposed mother, they brought the kid home. A wilda parade happened due to the missing kid’s return. He lived and died believing he was, in fact, Bobby Dunbar.

My brother was a police officer. He had a call to check on the welfare of a mother who had not showed up for work. She had died on the sofa and her little toddler brought the little diaper pad and laid down next to her, and died of dehydration. The little kid had opened the lower cabinets and drawers in the kitchen looking for food. He still cries about it. And he’s not the crying kind.

Nirbhaya Case - 2012 - Delhi

A female student boarded an off-duty bus with a male friend. They were returning home after watching a film. The six men, who were already on board, including the driver, attacked the couple. They were then thrown out onto the roadside to die. Some passers-by found them naked and bloodied and called the police. Two weeks later - after widespread protests that demanded India reckon with its treatment of women - the victim died in a hospital in Singapore, where she was taken for further treatment after her condition deteriorated in a Delhi hospital.

All six people were arrested for the attack. One of them was found dead in jail in March 2013, having apparently taken his own life. Another, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was released in 2015, after serving three years in a reform facility. The remaining four were hanged in the capital's high-security Tihar prison.

When I was 7 I was raking rocks in my aunts front yard and a beat up pickup truck pulled up. The man got out, fiddled with something under the hood and then closed it. He asked me “hey kid do you know how to pop a clutch”? Spending my childhood on a farm, I did indeed know how. “Yes” I responded - “give me a hand real quick” he said. So I started walking towards his truck, at the last second my mom called out to me from the garage and I turned around to see what she wanted.

I heard the door slam, the truck start, and he drove away. That memory never really came up until one day, about 30 years later I jump up after laying down to go to bed when out of nowhere it came back and it hit me: This guy was trying to kidnap me. What the fk???? What bullet did I dodge?? I mean you ever have a memory come back and you get scared? I mean scared over the memory? I was shaking for at least a half hour over it. It’s still freaks me out thinking about it.

My mother’s friend left her abusive husband. My mother met her while working at a women’s shelter. They were really close, and my mother fought so hard to get her somewhere safe. They did everything right. She helped her file divorce papers. And then one morning my mom can’t get her on the phone, but they’d had plans to meet for lunch. And she checks the newspaper. And she calls in sick to work. Which she never did. And she sat my down in tears and told me what happened.

Her friend was home, with her son, when her ex broke in. He killed her and left the baby there, in his mother’s blood. And then he hung himself outside of Raley’s. Last I heard their almost two year old went to live with his uncle. I can’t imagine how terrifying it was for the baby to cry to himself, in his mother’s blood, for the almost two days until he was found.

A woman I worked with a few years ago told me how her life had changed drastically she went from having a decent job to becoming an alcoholic and working as a cleaner. She had planned to move to Spain with her husband and young daughter and had a great job lined up out there. The plan was her husband and daughter would fly over first and she would fly over a week or two later due to finishing her old job a little later than planned.

Her husband rang her on the day he arrived and said the house was lovely and the furniture had arrived by ferry etc. That was the last time she ever heard from him. Her husband and daughter was found dead by authorities a few days after she rang explaining she was concerned for their welfare as she had had no contact with them and she was extremely worried. It was carbon monoxide posioning. It is so scary to think how fast your life can change.

Happened to my boss’s best friend when they were around 17yo:

Best friend’s parents were out of town one weekend and she had the house to herself. Went about her business having dinner, watching tv 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 somehow pretended to be asleep - the man who was hiding in the closet walked around her bed to the side she was laying/facing, 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. Long story short 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 surveillance footage of her sleeping and pieces of her clothes and stuff.

If I recall correctly this happened somewhere in Alabama, most likely mid-2000s.

I read a story recently about Paulette Gerbera Ferah, a 4 year old child who went missing from her room in 2010.

Her parents immediately notified authorities, and started a social media campaign to find Paulette. Paulette's room was searched multiple times and used by her parents to do media interviews.

Here's the terrifying part: Paulette was found dead 10 days later... IN HER BED! She had wedged herself between the mattress and the footboard and suffocated. It's insane looking at that picture and knowing she is there and no one had found her.

The blue-ring octopus has a venom that causes paralysis, causing people to die of cardiac arrest or because of hypoxia. There is no antidote; the ”cure” is CPR or lif-support for the hour-or-so it takes for the the venom to leave the body.

There was a man who was bitten by a blue-ring octopus. As the life-guard was preforming CPR, he was lying on his back on the beach, facing the sky, eyes frozen open. Unable to close his eyes or communicate with the others, he lied there as the sun slowly burnt out his retinas. He became permanently blind.

The Ariel Castro Kidnappings. Basically, a man in living in Cleveland, Ohio, kidnapped three young girls named Gina DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight and kept them prisoner in his home in Tremont for 12 years. He even had a child with one, but more often than not, if one got pregnant, he would just beat them until they miscarried. Eventually, one escaped with the help of a man named Charles Ramsey who contacted police. Castro was then arrested and the other two girls were saved.

If that’s not bad enough, the mother of DeJesus went on a talk show with semi-renowned and infamous psychic Sylvia Browne, who told her that her daughter had died in Japan after being sold into slavery by Vietnamese human traffickers.

The murder of the Groene family. A deranged pedo named Joseph Edward Duncan was already on the run from the cops for a past sexual assault. He was incredibly charming and manipulative, and was truly pure evil. He camped outside a family’s rural home, unseen by them. He picked it out after driving past it and seeing children’s toys outside. He watched them from afar, got to know their routine with the intent of kidnapping the children, ten year old Dylan, eight year old Shasta.

Jed found the lock on the door was broken, entered the home in the middle of the night and tied up the mom, dad and teenage son. He put Shasta and Dylan in his car and killed the rest of the family with a hammer.

He traveled around various campsites and cabins with Shasta and Dylan captive. He eventually shot Dylan but Shasta talked him out of killing her. Jed ended up telling her she “taught him how to love.”

The scariest part is a cctv footage of Jed and Shasta at a gas station. Because you could easily believe they were just a normal dad and a grumpy daughter if you were an onlooker.

Eventually, he took her to a diner where he was finally apprehended when a waitress noticed something was up and Shasta was saved after 7 weeks in his clutches. As he was dragged away, he called to her “promise me you’ll visit me in prison” and she said she would. I don’t know if she ever did.

Jed was put on death row and found to be guilty of three previous child murders. He died a few months ago from cancer.

But the worst part of it all is how horrible Shasta’s life has been afterwards. Drug addiction, in and out of jail, losing her children etc. Just the most horrifying story ever.

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.