Whether or not you thought 2016 was actually a scary year, we now have evidence that, at the very least, some people had a pretty spooky time. A recent Reddit thread asked users to share their most remarkable paranormal experience of the last year. The discussion took place on /r/Paranormal, Reddit's hub for ghost stories, and the stories these Redditors brought to the table didn't disappoint.
We're never ones to pass up a good ghost story, so we couldn't resist rounding up our favorite responses. From maybe-possibly-haunted dogs to disappearing fruits, these stories run the gamut of scary. We just wish we could have been there to help these Redditors get rid of their unwanted ghosts. Oh, and we hope you're reading this in a well-lit area — and maybe under a blanket.
Click through to read eight seriously bone-chilling tales from 2016. Let us know if you had your own spooky encounter in the comments below.
"I walked into my bedroom with a couple of oranges to snack on. I tossed one lightly onto my bed. It landed in the middle, didn't bounce up, but appeared to vanish into the bedspread. I never found it. It didn't end up behind or under the bed."
-Reddit user ScottSierra
"I was in my room when I heard this loud crash come from the doorway of my home. I went out to where it was and I saw that an angel sculpture had fallen onto the floor.
"The thing is that this sculpture's string was placed on a metal hook, and the only way for it to be taken down is taking the string and pulling it up and over the hook. There's no way that it would just fall. The string would have to be compromised (it wasn't).
"I didn't think much of it until I looked at the settings on my iPhone, because I wanted to see how much space I had left (I was planning on going somewhere and taking lots of videos). The space left was '6.66 GB.'
"I couldn't help but think of the whole 'the devil is a fallen angel' thing. It was pretty creepy."
-Reddit user Smegma_toast
"I have Gregory the friendly ghost. He often locks the door and turns off the lights when I'm too lazy to do so. He is a total pal."
-Reddit user Isolation_
"I was inspecting a vacant home, and as I was finishing up, I heard footsteps on the floor above. I was about to leave when I heard it, so I recorded it and then booked it out of there. That's a big NOPE for me.
"Here's the link [to the recording]."
-Reddit user Beaner8127
"I have eye migraines, which means I see an aura but don't feel pain. I was lying in bed seeing shadows moving around the walls, thinking maybe I was having a migraine (I really think I was). On the wall next to me was a static shadow, stranger than the others. I was wondering why this shadow was static while the others moved with my eyes and suddenly I felt a cold breath on my hand. At that moment, my hand was too far from my face to have been my own breath. I freaked out and told my boyfriend to go [to] bed with me. Not sure if [it was] paranormal, but [it was] quite disturbing."
-Reddit user Auspicios
"[I] heard someone shaking my locked door in the middle of the night for about a minute. It woke me up. [I] opened the door and my dog started barking like crazy, looking down the stairs (that's where my room is), although she's usually asleep on a bed at the end of the upstairs hallway. Woke up my dad and we went downstairs (he's on the third floor, I'm on the second, we went to the first) and all the doors where locked. The living room light was on.
"Also, I have a doorway separating two sides of my room and I hang a mirror box that can be opened to store jewelry and trinkets. It makes a distinct noise if you quickly move it or shake it. I heard someone shaking it a few weeks ago, and it woke me up. Next morning, the baseball bat I keep next to my bed was on the ground. That was really weird, because the bat was leaning against the wall and the bottom part was inside of a box filled with junk. In the morning it was completely on the floor, but the box was untouched.
"But I don't really care, as long as it's not a robber."
"Honestly, [this was] probably just an 'in between sleep and in between awake' thing, but, like, 20 times this year, I heard a woman whisper around the corner of my bedroom near the bathroom. Only two moments it sounded like more than sighs or spooky mumbles. Once was my name, and the other was 'I don't think you should do that.' Like I said, pretty sure it's just sleepy hallucinating but still pretty creepy."
-Reddit user DriftwoodSamurai
Ed. note: As if this story isn't scary enough, user Thedeathlyhallower 's comment adds a chilling layer to it: "My immediate thought is that, since you were essentially sleeping, you weren't doing anything, which opens the possibility that whatever said 'I don't think you should do that,' could have been talking to someone or something else."
"My sister has a dog with a distinctive lip curl...a lip curl that we thought looked considerably like the same lip curl our deceased grandmother had.
"One day, we were hanging out in my sister's apartment, and the dog was curled up in her basket in front of us. I noticed the lip curl again and jokingly asked if my sister thought our grandmother might have been reincarnated into her pet. We both laughed, but then the dog suddenly looked up.
"And the look on her face was...downright weird. She was kind of tilting her head back and peering at us. Even my sister, who lives with her, said she'd never made that face before. But, we just laughed it off and my sister asked in a very not-serious voice, 'Can you give us a sign that you're really our grandmother?'
"The dog looked out the window at the bush outside and my sister said, 'Imagine if a robin landed on that bush right now!' (Robins were our grandmother's favorite bird — she absolutely loved them and had everything from ceramic robin teacups to robin-patterned napkins and back again.)
"After that, we pretty much forgot about it until my sister came home from work one day to find a nest of baby robins in the bush right outside her window. The exact same bush her dog had looked straight at that day. A bush that would be somewhat strange for a robin to choose for nesting, as robins are solitary creatures and this particular bush is right next to a bustling apartment complex.
"It might all just be an amusing coincidence, but, to be honest, I've never been a big believer in coincidences — amusing or not."
-Reddit user TheRadioKingQueen
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