10 Terrifying True Scary Stories (Volume 7)

I had my first girlfriend when I was 15. We lived in an upper-class area with very quiet and peaceful streets. My girlfriend, Casey, lived two blocks away, so I could walk to her house almost nightly.

One Thursday night during break, when I had nothing to do, I started my walk over to Casey's house. It was on the later side of the night, but I didn't really have a curfew, so it didn't matter. Pretty soon, I thought I could start hearing noises from around me.

When I say "around me," I mean mostly behind me. The first time I heard it, it was the sound of a bush being shaken a bit. I only turned my head to look for a second without stopping; I just started to walk a little faster.

When I got to the next block, I heard another noise— a twig or a small stick cracking. I stopped this time and turned around. All I saw was the empty street and the bushes that lined up along each property to separate the sidewalks from people's properties.

Basically, next to the street was a wall of bushes, and I didn't see anyone or anything that could be making these weird sounds. I picked up the pace even more, and I was reaching the home stretch to Casey's house. Of course, there was another sound again, this time more like footsteps—quick, light footsteps.

I turned again without stopping—no one, nothing. I could see Casey's house now. I called, and she picked up right away.

I told her how freaked out I was getting because I kept hearing noises. I walked around the bushes surrounding her driveway and stepped onto her property. I noticed her staring out her bedroom window upstairs.

She waved at me as she got off the phone, and I waved back. Then she asked me, “Who was that guy right behind you? ” I turned right around and saw a fully grown man crouched, maybe ten feet behind me.

I screamed and ran for the door, starting to pound on it. The man grabbed me and tried to put me in some kind of headlock, but he let go and ran away pretty quickly. Casey's mom opened the door with a look of dismay on her face.

She let me in and slammed the door shut as Casey came running over. I was out of breath and felt like my heart was beating a thousand beats a minute. Casey's mom hugged me and asked a few questions, then called the police to warn of a dangerous man going around town.

Casey's mom let me stay over that night for obvious reasons, and she drove me home the next day. It was a dangerously stormy night. Everyone in my family was doing their own thing.

I was in my room watching TV, my parents were in the living room watching some comedy show, and my sister was playing video games upstairs. I usually enjoyed stormy nights like this because it made me feel relaxed. I was relaxed until there was a monstrous bang on my window.

I jumped up and looked outside. There was someone outside my window, but the large amount of rain pouring down the window kind of blurred his face. He started pounding at my window.

It sounded like he was screaming for help. I opened the window just a crack, and he screamed, “I'm hurt! ” The rain was so loud I had to scream at him to come around front.

Then I shut my window and ran outside to the living room to tell my dad that a man seemed to be in distress and was screaming for help outside. Then came the knocks and shouts for help outside our front door. My dad was about to open the front door, but I stopped him.

I said, “Wait,” because I wasn't sure if it was a good idea. When the phone rang, the TV displayed the caller ID of our next-door neighbor. My dad ran to pick it up.

When I heard him say, “No way,” I knew something was wrong. He hung up the phone and said, “Stay away from the door. ” He didn't explain why; he just went to the window to peek at the front stoop.

There is where he said he saw a guy crouched down, pounding on the door, holding some kind of large sharp tool. My dad yelled through the front door at the man to go away before the cops got there. Then he actually got on the phone with the cops.

Eventually, the man outside gave up and disappeared. The next time we checked, when my dad was on the phone with a neighbor, he told my dad that he saw some homeless-looking guy rummaging through his shed and come out with a large chopping axe. The cops found the crazed man wandering around the streets, and it made it into the newspaper a few days later.

One night, when I was a really young kid, I was in the living room watching my favorite cartoon. I had the TV pretty loud, but I thought I could hear my mom calling my name from downstairs. I called back, but she didn't answer, so I guess she couldn't hear me.

I heard her call me again, so I went down to the basement. The lights were off, so halfway down, I called for my mom. She didn't answer.

I didn't know where she could be calling me from, but one thing was for certain: she wasn't in the basement. I started going back up the stairs, but before I even got to the top stair, I heard my mom's voice again from down in the basement calling my name. I looked down into the pitch blackness and ran back up to the top step.

Turned down the lights and walked halfway back down, peeking into the basement. I didn't see my mom anywhere down there. Suddenly, I got a huge rush of horror.

I ran up the stairs, basically crying for my mom. She came rushing down the stairs from upstairs, and I cried to her that something was calling me from downstairs that sounded just like her. She swore to me that she hadn't been calling me.

She went down to the basement to check and make me feel better, but I didn't feel better. I'm sure she didn't believe me; why would she? I was a little kid, but I still know that I heard what I heard.

[Music] My grandpa recently told me a story. It was about a knight who took his dog for a walk. He used to have a small Boston Terrier named Sherry, who he named after an old friend of his who passed away.

My grandpa lives like two hours from us on a farm, and there's not much that goes on there. He lives with his wife, Mary Ann, who he married like 15 years back. Every day, Mary Ann would take Sherry for a walk in the morning, and my grandpa would take her for a walk in the evening.

On a regular walk during sunset, my grandpa was walking Sherry down the usual dirt path that ran along the woods next to their property. My grandpa passed by another person on the trail, who Sherry instinctively barked and pulled towards, like most dogs do when they see strangers. My grandpa said hello to the stranger, who had a large hood up, but the stranger just walked past without even batting an eye.

So he and the dog kept walking. Sherry kept looking back every so often and barking. However, my grandpa was home to shush and yank at the leash to keep her walking.

Eventually, my grandpa turned around to look at what Sherry could be barking at. The stranger who passed him by a few minutes earlier was stalking him from behind a tree in the near distance. My grandpa decided to pick up the pace as fast as possible.

At his old age, he always carried pepper spray in his big coat pocket just in case. He was getting closer to the house when suddenly he heard clicks from the leaves on the ground inches behind him. But before he could turn, he felt the warmth of a glove cover his mouth and nose, preventing him from screaming or breathing.

My grandpa says he could hear Sherry barking and biting at the stranger, which might have helped in loosening the man's grip a little. My grandpa says he struggled to grab the pepper spray out from his pocket, but when he did, he sprayed it at least ten times and continued spraying it even after the man who was holding him let go and started to scream. My grandpa came as close as he could to a run to escape back to his house.

He was perfectly okay. I grew up in California for the first fourteen years of my life. Our neighborhood wasn't the best, namely because it was an area that the Crips were known to reside in.

If you don't know, the Crips are members of one of the biggest Los Angeles street gangs. My best friend, who I always called Stevie D, lived two doors down. We had other friends, of course, but we would often hang out just he and I.

We'd usually ride our bikes together around town or play video games—just basic kid stuff. When we were 12, we were biking around the neighborhood one night and decided to visit a well-known abandoned house. It had been uninhabited for many years because no one would buy it for whatever reason.

When we pulled up on our bikes to the front of the house, Stevie pointed to the window and said, "Look! " I pushed my bike a little closer to the window and focused my vision on it. I could see someone peeking out the window.

I couldn't tell if they were looking at us or not, but it was definitely a person's face sitting between the curtains. It was extremely strange, considering the place had been uninhabited for years. We stared for longer than we should have, perhaps, and noticed something else that was strange: the person didn't move their face at all.

We inched a little closer onto the empty driveway. Actually, upon getting closer, it appeared to be a Halloween decoration or something like a fake head. This meant someone had snuck into the house to put it there.

Stevie D and I, being the mischievous kids we used to be, hatched an idea to sneak in through the back somehow and check out the place. We hid our bikes on the side of the house behind an overgrown bush, then snuck into the yard. To our surprise, the back door was already unlocked, but when we came to think of it, it wasn't that surprising considering it seemed someone had already broken in to put that fake head there.

We stepped into the house, but we didn't want to turn the lights on and expose the fact that we were inside. It was dark in there, but not pitch-black, so we could make our way through the house. We got to the living room first because we wanted to check out that fake head thing at the window.

It smelled really bad in that room, though, and I picked up the head from the windowsill and immediately dropped it and screamed. I dropped it not because it was surprisingly heavy, but because it also felt like real skin. I saw a dark liquid pouring out from the bottom of the head that was now on the floor.

It was blood—it was a real human head. There were two cracks in the ceiling above us. Stevie and I looked at each other with our mouths hanging open.

We ran for the back door and got back on our bikes to get the hell out of there. Anyone in our immediate area learned pretty soon that the head belonged to a victim of the Crips, who apparently placed the head there as some kind of message. I don't think anyone knew the full story, but there was a good chance whoever placed that head there was still in the house because Stevie and I both heard cracks in the ceiling above us, as if someone was coming downstairs.

Last year, a guy came to my house's door around 9 p. m. He knocked on the door, so I got my mom, and she went out to see who it was.

By the way, we live in a rural area, so visits that late are extremely uncommon and strange. The guy talked to my mom about how he was opening a business, asked whether she liked American-made products, then handed her a Clorox container as a sample. He went back to his minivan and opened it to get a "vacuum cleaner.

" When my mom saw five other men sitting inside, she told me to run and get my phone. Since we don't have a landline, I couldn't find it, so I got my knife and stood around the corner. She threw the container outside and told them to get the hell off her property, as well as that she was calling the cops.

They peeled out of the driveway, and we never saw the car again. [Music] I've always been an extreme sports person ever since I was little: mountain climbing, parasailing, scuba diving. Though I've always been an avid skier, I'd go upstate skiing at least ten times a season, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone.

My friend, who is also called Hugh, agreed to come upstate and go camping with me so we could do some backcountry skiing, which is basically skiing in the backcountry on unmarked or unpatrolled areas outside of a ski resort's boundaries. It was a three-hour drive, then a decent amount of off-roading to get to where the hills were. I parked my truck at the bottom of a decent-looking area full of hills, but I also stopped there because I couldn't really drive much further, given that there were too many trees.

Hugh and I then proceeded to unload the back of my truck of all our stuff, including ski gear and camping equipment. Then we hiked about a quarter mile, which was an incredible amount of work with everything we were carrying. We found a perfect place to set up camp right near the bottom of an uphill and in a bit of a clearing between the trees.

Setting up the tent and unloading our sleeping bags and equipment and such was the first priority. When all of that was done, we started our hike up the hill to scout the area. We did a decent amount of hiking, but we also got a lot of skiing in.

At one point, Hugh and I lost each other while skiing down a bigger hill. I assumed I'd meet him at the bottom or just find him eventually. I checked the walkie-talkie just to see if he'd answered it, but he didn't, which meant he was probably still going downhill.

At some point, while I was walking with my skis at the bottom of the hill, I ran into someone—another skier. He sounded very friendly under a ski mask, asking me where the best hills were and if we were camping and such. He had his skis strapped to his orange backpack.

I pointed to the hill I had just skied down and also pointed in the direction we set up camp. He said he and his wife were trying to find a good place to set up camp near other people and asked if I could lead him to my campsite. As much as I really didn't want to trek all the way back there, I felt I had to be a good Samaritan and help this man and his wife.

I pulled out my walkie again and set it to the speaker to cue that I was going back to the campsite for a bit. I started to lead the man, who was behind me, when suddenly I started getting some static from another end on the walkie. It seemed someone—probably Hugh—was trying to talk to me, but the connection was static; nothing I could do about that except to come back to this hill afterward.

It took a decent amount of hiking and small talk with the man before we reached the campsite. I turned around to him and smiled under my ski mask, which I realized instantly was pointless. He sounded very thankful for himself and his wife, and I finally asked him, "Where is your wife?

" He didn't answer. He started to walk closer to me. At first, I thought nothing of it, but for some reason, something about his skis and backpack just struck me; they belonged to Hugh.

For a split second, I thought, Is this Hugh? Is he pranking me? But it wasn't possible; the voice was too different from Hugh's.

The man was just a few mere feet away from me at this point, and he was picking up the pace to a more intimidating approach. I panicked and jumped into the tent to dig for my flare gun in my bag. The man grabbed my leg, which was sticking out from the tent, and then I felt a sharp, intense tingle in my leg, like a severe electric shock, followed by a burning heat feeling.

I screamed in pain as I just managed to pull out the flare gun, push aside the door to the tent, and aim at. . .

the man. He immediately backed up with his hands in the air, and that's when I noticed the knife dug deep into my leg. I ordered the man to tell me where my friend was; he answered quickly, saying, "Near the bottom of the hill he found me at.

" I told the man to stand still while I called 9-1-1 to request an immediate rescue, but the man took off quite easily while I was on the phone. There wasn't much I could do with one single flare gunshot. I felt like I was waiting there in the cold with my bleeding leg forever until finally, the reassuring sound of a rescue helicopter swooped overhead, and I shot my flare gun.

I cannot believe I was actually picked up by a helicopter, which helped locate my friend laying in the snow in the middle of the hill. He was unconscious and had also been stabbed twice in the leg, then robbed. He tried talking me through the walkie-talkie while he was losing consciousness, but the connection was bad.

We both went to the hospital but were fine today. I lived in a small college town. My apartment complex was within walking distance from the bar and downtown area.

One weekday night, I stepped out on our front porch to smoke a cigarette or two. I was up late studying; I brought my textbook with me and laid down on the stairs while I smoked. A girl who I had never met before but who lived one apartment over on the ground floor came home from downtown.

She was by herself, and you could tell from her walk that she had been drinking. She got in her apartment and barely got the door closed before some guy, who came out of nowhere, knocked on her door. She opened, and I noticed he introduced himself, which was weird because it was like 2:30 in the morning.

Who comes to a random girl's apartment at that time? So, I decided to stay outside and pay attention. They ended up talking for over 10 minutes.

She later acknowledged how weird the situation was but did not know how to end the conversation. He would do the creepiest things, like he reached up and stroked her hair at least three times, and he would try to slowly inch his way closer to her in the door. I made a point of being loud with my textbook so he would know I was there, and he disappeared as eerily as he came.

We called the cops, and days later they had the girl and me sit with a sketch artist. As soon as the sketch was made public, floods of calls came in. The guy turned out to be a serial rapist who followed lone girls home from bars and pretended to be a cab, offering them a ride.

This girl just got lucky because she lived so close to the bars; he didn't get a chance to pull the cab routine. I've only used Craigslist once in my life, and the one time I used it, I got a very sour taste in my mouth. Here's why: the guy posted an ad for a ping-pong table that I wanted to buy for my roommate and me.

We set up a time for me to come pick it up that night. I had to remove the back seats from my truck so that I'd be able to fit the thing. I pulled up in front of the dude's house and texted him saying, "I'm here.

" I saw the door open, so I got out of my truck and did a quick speed walk to his front door to greet him. I went for the handshake, but I don't think he saw my arm, so after a few awkward seconds, I put my hand back down. He said in his deep smoker's voice to follow him to the basement.

The whole house had a certain distinct smell to it—not exactly a bad or concerning smell, just a cottony, smoky kind of smell. We got to the basement, and there was the ping-pong table right smack in the middle of the room. Suddenly, he said, "Oh shoot!

I gotta find the paddles," so he ran back up the stairs and told me to wait right there. I waited for a while down there, assuming he misplaced the paddles and was having a hard time finding them. I started to snoop around his basement a little bit, looking at his pictures and such.

It was weird; he had framed pictures sitting on furniture, but they were all pictures of just him—no family members. There was one where he was at least with a dog, but that was pretty much it. I'd say ten minutes went by, and I was still stuck waiting down there, so I started to get even more snoopy.

There was a back laundry/storage room in his basement that I started to observe. For some reason, there was a drawer to his utility desk that was hanging half open. I pulled it fully open and revealed old Polaroid pictures, but these pictures were horrific and disturbing.

They were all pictures taken of some girl who was tied to a chair, and her mouth was covered with tape. There were also yellow folders stacked in a row next to the photos; they were labeled A to Z. I didn't have it in me to open the folders and see what was inside.

I took out my phone to take pictures of the contents of the drawer and planned to send it to my friends immediately, but I didn't have any service down there. It was definitely time to go. I ran back to the door at the top of the stairs, but my nightmare only became worse upon finding out that the door was locked.

As soon as I tried the doorknob, though, I heard. . .

The deep, raspy voice of the man on the other side of the door was apologizing, saying the door was accidentally locked and he would go look for the key real quick. I didn't say a word in response; I examined the keyhole closely, ran back down the stairs to the man's utility desk, grabbed three screwdrivers of varying sizes, and tried each one in the keyhole for the door. The smallest screwdriver managed to fit in the rectangular-shaped keyhole, allowing me to turn it just enough to unlock and open the door.

I didn't stop to look around; I simply ran out the door into my car. I didn't look back at the house; I simply drove to the nearest police station, showed them the pictures, gave them the address, told them where to find the photos, and that was enough for them to start their investigation. A few days later, I got all the information: the man was part of a child pornography trade on the Deep Web, which was how he made his living.

Apparently, that was why he decided to lock me in his basement. That's beyond me. I have not the slightest idea of what he intended on doing with me, but obviously, it was not anything good.

I used to babysit in my teenage years. When I was 14, I babysat for a six-year-old boy named Cody. Once, his parents left me with a few instructions other than to order a pizza for dinner and not let him go in their room.

They also left me with an interesting comment that Cody tends to act different than other kids and that he'll talk to himself or his imaginary friend, especially when he played with his toys. So it was midday, pouring outside. I was watching some old Wipeout show that used to be on TV in the early 2000s while Cody was on the floor playing with his toys that were scattered across the living room.

Cody kept using the name Agnes; he would act like he was playing with another kid who was sitting in front of him. One of his toys, which was sitting across the room from him, activated out of nowhere. I only found it weird because the toy was one of those little cube-like things with the crank, where you pull it down and some simulated moving racing background came up on the screen.

It was the kind of toy that would take effort to activate, and there it was, activated all by itself. I asked Cody how that was possible. He looked at me and said, "Agnes is playing with it.

" I have to admit, it was a little disturbing hearing him say that. I picked up the toy and turned it off. That night, in the final hour, waiting for his parents to come back, I was in the bathroom washing up when there was a knock at the door.

"Cody? " I said as I opened the door. Cody wasn't there.

I looked into the hallway for Cody. One of the doors at the end of the hall started to creak open slowly, like really slowly. I turned off the lights in the bathroom and walked into the room, expecting to see Cody playing around trying to scare me.

Instead, Cody was sitting on the bed in the far corner of the room, looking at me. I asked him who just pushed open the door. "Agnes," he said.

Now truly freaked out, I went to pick Cody up off the bed and brought him to the living room, where I spent the rest of my shift until his parents came back. I didn't mention any of the weird things that happened, but when they reached out to me to watch Cody again a few weeks later, I never called them back.