My scary Airbnb story didn’t start with a hidden camera or a weird host. It started with the Wi-Fi. There was one device on the network that didn’t belong to any of us, and it only came online after we went to bed. Of all the scary house stories my friends and I tell now, … Read more
Everybody has a dating app horror story. A guy who brought his mom. A woman who was ten years older than her pictures. Mine is about a woman who, on our first date, already knew which way my bedroom window faced. I read a lot of new scary stories online, and I never thought I’d … Read more
If you’ve ever worked the overnight at a gas station, you have gas station horror stories. Drunks, drive-offs, a guy who tried to pay with a live crawfish. Mine is about the phone calls from “corporate” that kept asking me to step outside. I’ve swapped gas station night shift stories with a lot of clerks … Read more
Most scary Ouija board stories start with teenagers at a sleepover asking a dead kid questions. I never asked mine anything. I never even put my fingers on it. The pointer moved by itself every night anyway, one letter at a time, and it was looking for somebody named Margaret. I collect board games, not … Read more
Every deer camp has its scary hunting stories. Most of them are about getting lost, or a bear, or a buck that charged somebody’s uncle in 1974. Mine is about a second tree stand that showed up across the hollow from mine, facing my stand instead of the deer trail, and moving a little closer … Read more
This train horror story took forty-one minutes. That’s how long I sat at a railroad crossing in western Kansas, in 2016, watching a freight train that should have passed in three. People around there trade very scary stories about that crossing. I never believed them until that night. I was twenty-two. I worked the closing … Read more
This is a creepy town story about clocks. In Hollins Ferry, Ohio, every public clock runs eleven minutes slow. The courthouse, the church, the bank, the diner. People call it Ferry Time and laugh about it. It took me twelve years of living there to find out it isn’t a joke. I’ve lived through a … Read more
This fake utility worker story happened to me in January of 2020, in Lansing, Michigan. A polite man with a clipboard asked to check my gas meter, and then he asked which bedroom I slept in. It was the most frightening scary experience of my life, and it started with a knock in broad daylight. … Read more
Most creepy text stories are about a wrong number that turns out to be right. Mine is about the man I sold my old phone to, and the texts he sent me about my life that he shouldn’t have been able to see. If you’ve read scary stories text threads online, you know how they … Read more
Every night nurse has haunted hospital stories. Call lights from empty rooms. Elevators that open on the wrong floor. Mine is about the whiteboard in Room 612, which kept writing my name on it in someone else’s handwriting. I’ve heard my share of hospital night shift horror stories in the break room. This is the … Read more