Do ghosts exist or are they just stories of make-believe? Here are some of the most spine-chilling true ghost stories that will keep you up all night!
Be careful before you read these short ghost stories.
I’ve always believed in ghosts or spirits, or some presence that visits us long after a person is gone. It can manifest in the way you get chills down your spine when you walk into a creepy house, a shadow you see moving in the distance, when you feel someone behind you or when you hear someone call your name… but no one is there.
When my Nana passed away recently, I started finding pennies everywhere, in the most random and strangest places. I realized they were pennies from heaven, meaning she was sending me signs to let me know she was still watching over me. Some people may notice they’re finding dimes everywhere, and that carries the same meaning.
I don’t think things happen coincidentally. I think everything does happen for a reason, one way or another. I think a spirit/ghost/angel/whatever you’d like to call it, can manifest its energy, both in an angry way and in a way to represent the love that still lingers on.
Over the years, I’ve heard so many stories from friends and family, true from their hearts, in sincere moments when they were most afraid or confused about what is happening to them or in their homes. These are the stories that completely confirmed the belief I had always had in ghosts.
Related: 100+ Two Sentence Horror Stories That’ll Freak You Out
9 Chillingly True Ghost Stories And Supernatural Stories That Confirmed My Belief In Ghosts
1. A Visit From Grandma
Ever since my niece was a baby, odd and unexplainable things would often happen to her. From her vivid nightmares, seeing things nobody else did, to waking up screaming in the middle of the night, she always had, what I truly believe, to be a special connection to the spirit world.
When she was about five years old, our Grandmother sadly passed away. We really didn’t know how to break the news to her just yet. So my sister decided to wait, at least until she could be calm enough to talk about it without immediately breaking down in tears.
Death is a tricky subject as it is, let alone with someone that age on top of losing someone you were so close to. We made sure to never mention it to my niece or even around her, and we were very careful. As days went by, we knew she had no idea our Grandmother had passed.
Then, just days before the funeral, my niece woke up screaming in the middle of the night. She ran into her parent’s bedroom, breathing heavy, all the color flushed from her face. My sister woke up instantly and could see the terror in my niece’s eyes. “What’s wrong?!” She yelled.
Through the shortness of her breath, in between the quick and tiny inhales and exhales, my niece answered, “Grandma was in my room…hiding behind my curtain…Why is she in my room, Mommy? She really scared me, I don’t understand.”
My sister hugged her and could feel her little heart pounding fast and hard. They slowly walked back into my niece’s bedroom together. When they entered, no one was there…but the curtain was slowly moving back and forth. It was as if our Grandma was giving one last goodbye to my niece, even though my niece had no idea she was even gone.
2. A Real Life Poltergeist
My fiance owns a barbershop, and every day he hears all kinds of stories from a vast array of people. One of his clients, who is a regular at the shop, started to tell my fiance about the haunted happenings going on at his house one day. As months went by, the stories became more terrifying each time this client would come in.
This man, his wife, and his son moved into the third floor of a three-story home, with the two other floors remaining vacant. After a few weeks of settling in, it began. Their son, who was about five years old, began having trouble sleeping at night. He started to believe that a man in a hat would sit in the rocking chair in his bedroom in the middle of the night, scaring him to the point of being too terrified to fall back to sleep.
The man kept showing up more frequently, but the parents brushed it off as bad dreams or anxiety about moving into the new place. They let this go on for weeks, but things only amplified. The son told his parents the man was now speaking to him, aggressively urging him “to leave,” and for his family to “get out of his house.”
Finally, the dad had had enough. He told his son he would stay awake the entire night to keep watch, making sure the scary man in the hat didn’t show up and his son could get a good night’s rest. He kept his word and stayed up the following night. He sat in a chair in the hallway in front of his son’s bedroom.
The house remained quiet and still…until…he saw him. At the opposite end of the hallway stood an old man in a suit and fedora hat staring back at him. And he kept on standing there, staring, until he finally disappeared. He woke up his wife instantly and they began researching ways to rid a house of ghosts.
Things only progressed as days went by. More and more things began happening. Items moving on their own or falling off shelves, cabinets opening, lights flickering…seemingly little things. Until one day, with the husband at work, his wife was at home preparing a bath for their son.
She turned the water on, but then heard the radio turn on in the living room. Confused, she quickly ran over and turned it off, then headed back to the bathroom. After a few minutes, she heard it turn on again. It continued to turn on a few more times, so she finally decided to simply unplug it and returned to the bathroom to shut the water off. Despite being unplugged, the radio turned on again.
She shut the door of the bathroom, trying not to show the fear in her eyes as her son was playing joyfully in the bathtub. She kept on but suddenly heard noises coming from the kitchen. Listening in, she realized it sounded like cabinets and drawers opening and shutting, plates falling, crashes and bangs.
Her son became frightened, she was terrified, so she called her husband and told him to come home immediately. When he arrived home, she was still hiding in the bathroom with their son, but the kitchen was in shambles. Plates and cups shattered, utensils, scattered all over the floor, and cabinets and drawers wide open. It was as if they have been ransacked.
They left the house immediately and stayed with family until finally moving into a new home. They learned later that years ago, a few people died in the house, including, an old man who lived on the second floor of the building. This man died in his rocking chair.
He was also known to be mean and angry and spent his whole life in that house. Guests were never really welcomed, and apparently, they still aren’t.
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3. My Niece’s “Friend” Charlie
For years, my niece would talk about “Charlie,” which we all assumed was an imaginary friend. One time, I was in the car with her while my sister ran into the grocery store. We were just chatting about random things, she was about 6 years old at the time. She was saying the cutest things, so I started to take a video of her.
After a few minutes of random chatter, her face suddenly changed. A seriousness fell over her. She looked up at me and said, “Charlie’s in here.” Goosebumps ran up my arm. I asked “who?” She started to get uncomfortable and squirm and just said, “Charlie is in here. With us. Right now.” The more I pressed for questions, the more she would no longer answer me.
Now, we could just say this was her imaginary friend…except things got weird when it came to Charlie. One night, my sister was giving my niece a bath. After all this time, we assumed Charlie was a boy, but this night, my niece explained that Charlie was actually a girl. And not just any girl.
It was apparently a girl who used to be friends with our Grandmother. My sister wasn’t really buying the story. But then my niece asked, “did you used to have a bird named Tweety?” Now my niece would have no way of knowing this, but Tweety was one of my Grandma’s birds that she had when she was alive, it was my sister’s favorite.
But we hardly, if ever, talked about the birds my Grandmother used to have. My sister, completely shocked at this question asked, “how do you know about Tweety?” My niece responded, “Charlie told me about it.” We still have no idea how she knew about Tweety.
4. Uninvited House Guests
My friend and her husband moved into a relatively old house in New Hampshire. After a few weeks of living there, they began to notice a lot of strange things happening. First, my friend would find dimes all over the house with no explanation as to where they were coming from. Dimes just randomly appeared in different rooms around the house.
On many mornings, she would wake up to find all of the kitchen cabinets wide open, knowing very well that she and her husband did not leave them open the night before.
One night, they both were awakened by the sound of a loud “thump” noise coming from the basement. They instantly thought someone had broken in. Her husband grabbed his gun and went downstairs to search the basement and find the intruder. But he found nothing. They never discovered where the noise came from, but it was loud enough to wake both of them up.
Things seemed to be escalating. They were folding the laundry one night in their bedroom when suddenly, they heard a voice talking. It sounded like it was coming from the corner of the bedroom. The rest of the house was silent, they had no TV on, no radio, nothing.
They couldn’t make out what exactly was being said, but they stood there listening to the whispers ramble on. The voice slowly tapered off after a while, with no explanation as to where it came from. They slept with the lights on that night.
Terrified with everything that has been going on, my friend decided to schedule a professional sage cleansing for the house. A few days before the cleansing was going to take place, my friend and her husband were preparing dinner one evening in the kitchen.
Out of nowhere, their Amazon Alexa turned on, with no noise in the living room to provoke it, and began repeating over and over and over, “we need to talk. we need to talk. we need to talk.” It repeated on like this until she went over and disconnected it.
She later called Amazon to explain what happened. Amazon records every Alexa glitch with a certain corresponding code. However, no one has ever reported an incident remotely like this one, and they had no idea how to explain it. They ditched the Alexa. Fortunately, the activity has died down since the full sage cleansing. For now at least.
5. Ghosts Walking Among Us
My family and I were wandering aimlessly around Boston’s North End one night when we all decided we were hungry. We picked a random restaurant, one with the shortest wait, and sat down for dinner. My niece started acting really strange at dinner, almost as if she shut down entirely.
She turned away from us with her head down and didn’t say more than two words the whole time. She sat through dinner like that, not answering when we would ask her what was wrong.
We later found out that the entire time we were at dinner, she was seeing many people walking around the restaurant “dressed in old-fashioned clothing” and she couldn’t understand what they were doing there. She explained they didn’t look like they were from this time period but that they scared her.
The restaurant wasn’t very busy, and there were certainly no people walking around with that type of clothing on. When we researched the restaurant, there it was, one of the oldest restaurants in the North End with a rich history of guests. I wonder if it were those very guests that she was seeing.
Related: What Keeps Me Alive At Night – Scary Story
6. A Friendly Visitor
My uncle passed away when I was just a baby. I have no memories of him. Years ago, my sister and I were both asleep in our beds. In the middle of the night, our mother woke us up. “Were you just in my room?!” she asked in a panicked voice.
I opened my eyes to find her looking back at me, she was frantic. “What?” I asked as I was half asleep. “Were you just in my room?” She repeated. “No,” I said as I rubbed my eyes, thinking she probably just had a nightmare. She went into my sister’s bedroom asking her the same question and receiving the same response. I slowly drifted back to sleep.
The next morning, my mom was a mess. She was cooking us breakfast with this look on her face I’ll never forget. Pale, drained, and full of fear. She asked us again, “you promise me neither of you were in my room last night, even just for a second?” “No, Mom, we were not in your room. We were both sleeping when you woke us up. Promise.”
She paused, took a deep breath, then looked up at us and said, “Well, someone was standing in my doorway last night, and I think it was your Uncle. I think my brother came to visit me.”
7. The Pianist
The security guard at my work always tells me stories from working in old buildings across campus. But this one struck me the most. One night he was working late, there was no one in the building he was working in. He went to take a break when he heard a noise coming from the lounge downstairs.
He realized it was someone playing the piano. Shaking his head in frustration, he went to go yell at the person and tell them that they obviously weren’t allowed down here at this hour, let alone allowed to play the piano right now. When he turned the corner to scold them, there was no one there. No one around, and no one sitting at the piano. He looked around for a few minutes but only discovered that he was completely alone.
8. The Neighbors’ Haunted House
My fiance’s mom told me this story about their neighbor once, and I always talk about it when the topic of ghosts come up. The family in this home, a dad, mom, daughter, and son, have all experienced a lot of supernatural occurrences during their time living here.
One evening after dinner, the teenage son was going upstairs to his room. When he turned the lights on in the hallway, the light bulb suddenly blew out and when he looked at the top of the stairs, he saw the ghost of a woman in a long robe with her arms crossed, staring down at him.
On another occasion, the dad got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Everyone else in the house was asleep, but he heard voices coming from downstairs. When he went down to look, he realized the voices were actually coming from the basement.
He couldn’t believe it at first, but it sounded like a lively party was taking place. Although he couldn’t understand the words being spoken, he could hear crowds of people talking at once. As he approached the basement, it was clear no one was there, but he could still hear the noises of a party happening. He cleared his throat, and suddenly, all of the noises stopped. The room went silent.
One night, the daughter came home from babysitting. Her mother had mentioned earlier in the day that their dad would be out of town until tomorrow because he was away on business. Upon arriving at home, the daughter saw a man standing in the front of her parent’s bedroom window upstairs. She asked her mom what her dad was doing home a day early.
Her mom, confused, asked what she was talking about. She explained to her mom that she saw dad upstairs in the window when she got home. Her mom, frightened by this, told her daughter that her dad was still on his business trip and definitely not upstairs.
They went upstairs to see if anyone was up there, but all they found were the curtains drawn, wide open, and the mother knowing for a fact she shut them earlier in the night. Also, the mom and daughter were the only two in the house. No one was upstairs.
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9. The Call From Above
I’ve heard an abundance of ghost stories about my fiance’s parent’s house, the house he grew up in. I, too, have felt a certain presence on nights I’ve stayed there. My fiance’s grandma lived in that house with them for nine years before she passed away. She used to claim to always see a blonde little boy running around the house. A little boy that did not belong there. His sister would occasionally see the boy too.
His family has heard voices, footsteps, seen shadows, and encountered cold spots within the house. A few years ago, his brother was walking towards the living room and saw an old man with a long gray beard and long hair, dressed in gray, sitting on the couch in their living room. He stared at the man until finally looking away for a second, and the man was gone when he looked back.
One day, his mother heard a little boy behind her calling out, “mommy.” Assuming it was one of her sons, she said “what,” but the voice kept repeating “mommy,” “mommy,” until she finally turned around and yelled “what!” But no one was there.
She ran into the boy’s rooms to check if maybe it was one of them, but there they were both sitting comfortably, in the middle of intensely playing with their toys. She thinks it may have been the blonde little boy who was calling her.
My fiance’s aunt was visiting from Florida and she was in the house alone one day. The phone rang and she answered to find a person, not a robot, on the other line asking, “May I please speak to Muriel?” Muriel was her mother, my fiance’s grandmother.
She was taken aback by this question because she hasn’t heard anyone looking for her mom in quite some time. Confused, she replied, “I’m sorry, Muriel passed away many years ago.” The person said “I’m sorry to hear that,” and abruptly hung up. A little unnerved, she went on the caller ID and wrote the number down. She Googled it but found nothing. She called back, and the number was no longer in service.
Want to know more about true horror stories and scary ghost stories? Check this spooky video out below!
Which of the real ghost stories online did you find the most scary? Share your answer in the comments below!
Check out Nikki Rutledge’s Instagram page, Moonlight And Mindfulness.
Written By Nikki Rutledge Originally Appeared On Writings By Nikki Rae
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