11 of the Scariest Stories that will freak you out

Looking for a quick scare? There’s movies that could freak you out until you’re forced to close your eyes, and there’s stories that could creep you even more if after reading them. The only difference between reading and watching is that you’re forced to impact every detail that a story gives you, which would bring us to 11 of the scariest stories that will freak you out.

1. Humans Can Lick, too:



This horror tale will cause you to shiver the longer you continue reading this short passage, which goes about a sweet old lady and a terrifying murderer who reveals himself at the end.

The tale derives from a Bible story (book of Daniel) in which a feast thrown by the pagan Babylonian King Belshazzar is interrupted by the specter of a disembodied hand scrawling a cryptic message on the wall.

As ultimately interpreted by the prophet Daniel, the message conveys God’s judgment, predicting the downfall of Belshazzar and his entire kingdom. To “read the handwriting on the wall” is to foresee one’s own impending doom.

2. The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs:

Like some folklore tales, this one takes a special place in my heart because it was one of the first stories that really scared me. The way that it’s written, the style it goes about a young teenage girl being in the house alone babysitting, and the shocking revelation at the end. All of these elements combined brings goosebumps to anyone who reads it.

So far as anyone knows it’s not based on any real-life incident, but the scenario is plausible enough to give goosebumps to anyone who has a sense of what it’s like to be young and alone in a big house caring for someone else’s children.

“The most frightening aspect of this legend is that the babysitter is not in control at any time,” writes folklorist Gail De Vos. “The caller multiplies the anxiety that the babysitter is already feeling as the responsible person in the household. The possibility that this could actually happen is never far from the mind of any babysitter.”

Nevermind the unlikelihood that police would be able to trace a phone call that lasted no more than 20 seconds at most, or that an officer could be dispatched to the house so quickly. The main purpose of the story is to frighten us, not give us actionable information.

3. The Russian Sleep Experiment:



It’s a given that human beings require a certain amount of sleep in order for our minds and bodies to function properly. Anyone who experienced insomnia knows how critical even a few hours of refreshing sleep can be to one’s health and well-being.

But what would happen if we went 15 or more days without sleep that every creature requires? Would we fall apart mentally and physically? Would we go insane like the prisoners who were experimented on? Would we die? It’s questions like these the Russian Sleep Experiment was supposedly designed to answer, with horrifying, catastrophic results.

While the premise that keeping a group of people awake for 15 days straight would end in a cannibalistic bloodbath makes for a gripping fictional horror story, it’s not borne out by scientific evidence. As far as research is concerned, this so-called Russian Sleep Experiment never took place.

To make things clear, no human experiments of this type have ever been conducted, though in 1964, a high school science fair project was conducted to observe the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, which was monitored by a researcher from Stanford University and a professor of neuropsychiatric medicine.

Randy Gardner, a student at Point Loma High School in San Diego, California, went without sleep for 11 days in a bid for the Guinness World Record for continuous wakefulness. He suffered bouts of dizziness, memory loss, slurred speech, hallucinations, and even paranoia over the course of the 264-hour experiment, but at no time did he exhibit anything resembling the extreme symptoms and behaviors allegedly observed by the Russian researchers. Gardner reportedly slept for 14 hours straight when the project was over and awoke feeling rested and alert. He exhibited no lasting ill effects.

Though Gardner did, in fact, beat the existing benchmark for days gone without sleep, his feat was never actually listed in the Guinness Book of World Records because he missed the submission deadline.

The most recent winner in that category was Maureen Weston of Cambridgeshire, England, who stayed awake for 18 days and 17 hours during a rocking chair marathon in 1977. She neither ripped open her own abdomen nor ate her own flesh. She holds the Guinness World Record for sleep deprivation to this day.

4. The Clown Statue:

This urban legend pits a lone, teenage babysitter against a male intruder who has surreptitiously entered the house. It’s disturbing on many accounts, not least the hint of pedophilia in the revelation that the “midget disguised as a clown” has been spying on, playing with, or in some versions, touching someone’s children before his presence in the house is discovered.

However, in some variants such as the one below, explicitly states that the intruder was a sex offender with designs on the babysitter herself:

A girl is babysitting a sleeping infant. She goes up regularly to check on the baby and the third time notices a life-size clown standing in the corner/sitting in the crib. A few minutes later the parents call and the babysitter mentions the clown and how unnerving it is. The parents relate that they’ve never bought a clown and the police are called.

The “clown” is discovered to be a local sex offender waiting for babysitter to go to sleep before attacking her.

5. Aren’t you Glad you Didn’t turn on the light:

In this horror story, it goes about two teenage girls in college, who both spend the night doing different activities. As one parties and have the time of the her life, the other stays in her room to study for a big test they have the next day. But by the end of the tale, you’ll discover shocking results that’ll send you an eerie feeling.

In every version of “The Roommate’s Death” someone is killed right under the nose of an unsuspecting female protagonist, but because the lights are out, or the crime takes place in another room, the victim’s body isn’t discovered until later, usually the next morning. As the story is sometimes told, the protagonist hears suspicious noises but is afraid to investigate because she thinks it could be an intruder coming after her.

On discovering the body, the main character can’t help but realize what a close call she’s had. And the murderer rubs it in with a message scrawled in blood.

While the general form of the legend dates back at least 40 years, it has a timeless appeal as a specimen of the “American adolescent shocker story,” to borrow Brunvand’s phrase. As he wrote in The Vanishing Hitchhiker,

One consistent theme in these teenage horrors is that as the adolescent moves out from home into the larger world, the world’s dangers may close in on him or her. Therefore, although the immediate purpose of these legends is to produce a good scare, they also serve to deliver a warning: Watch out! This could happen to you!

6. The Hook:

A fellow and his date pulled into their favorite “lovers’ lane” to listen to the radio and do a little necking. The music was interrupted by an announcer who said there was an escaped convict in the area who had served time for rape and robbery. He was described as having a hook instead of a right hand. The couple became frightened and drove away. When the boy took his girl home, he went around to open the car door for her. Then he saw — a hook on the door handle!

Since the 1950s, the implicit moral message of this story was that “Sex is naughty, and bad boys and girls will be punished!” Just as this moral has come to be parodied in horror films, its relevance has taken the teeth out of the cautionary tale over time.

The boy, who wants to get his “hook” into the girl, is not only frustrated by her unwillingness but afraid of his own lustful impulses — a fear heightened by the stern “voice of conscience” emitting from the radio — and has to “pull out fast” before a deadly sin is committed. The tearing off of the madman’s hook symbolizes castration. Proponents of this type of psychological interpretation find the sexual apprehensions of both boys and girls represented in the legend.

7. The Killer in the Window:

This chilling variation on the familiar trope of the threatened babysitter makes effective use of the shocking reveal. The protagonist learns after the fact that the prowler hadn’t been watching her from outside the house as she had assumed; but was inside the house the whole time, making her close call with the boogeyman all the closer, and all the more horrifying in retrospect.

To give you the tale in full details, it goes as this:

This girl was home all alone watching TV on a cold winter night. The television was right beside a sliding glass door, and the blinds were open.

Suddenly she saw a wrinkled old man staring at her through the glass! She screamed, then grabbed the phone next to the couch and pulled a blanket over her head so the guy couldn’t see her while she called the police. She was so terrified that she remained under the blanket until the police got there.

It had snowed a lot during the day, so the police naturally decided to look for footprints. But there were no footprints at all on the snowy ground outside the sliding door.

Puzzled, the police went back inside the house – and that’s when they saw the wet footprints on the floor leading up to the couch where the girl was still sitting.

The policemen looked at each other nervously. “Miss, you’re extremely lucky,” one of them finally said to her.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because,” he said, “the man wasn’t outside at all. He was in here, standing right behind the couch! What you saw in the window was his reflection.”

8. Ants in the Brain:

This is a nightmare and tabloid tale based more on imagination than reality. It goes about the story of a young boy taking multiple trips to the doctors to look into his severe headaches, only to discover that there were ants infesting his brain the entire time.

While insects do occasionally crawl into people’s ears, causing pain and discomfort, one finds no reports in the medical literature of ants chewing their way into anyone’s brain.

If one of these insects should by chance get into the ear it would no doubt be an unpleasant inmate but the membrane tympani , the drum-head of the ear, would effectually prevent the progress of the insect, and the unwelcome visitor could be either killed, or dislodged with ease by means of a few drops of oil.

9. The Body Under the Bed:

It goes about the story of a couple taking a lovely trip to Las Vegas, only to discover that a daunting smell inside their hotel room was the body of a dead woman inside their mattress. What sets this tale is how the frequent incidents resemble events that have happened in real life — just never in Las Vegas itself.

The closest encounter between fact and legend took place in Atlantic City in 1999. This account comes from the Bergen Record:

The body of Saul Hernandez, 64, of Manhattan was found in Room 112 of the Burgundy Motor Inn after two German tourists slept overnight in the bed despite a rancid smell that prompted them to complain to the front desk.

The couple told motel officials about the smell Wednesday night but stayed in the $36-a-night room anyway. On Thursday, they complained again and were given a new room while a motel housekeeper cleaned Room 112.

In July 2003, a cleaning crew discovered a dead body stuffed under the mattress in a room at the Capri Motel in Kansas City, Missouri. This report was filed by KMBC-TV News:

Police said that the man appeared to have been dead for some time, but the body went unnoticed until a guest staying the room could no longer tolerate the smell.

Officers were called to the Capri Motel in the 1400 block of Independence Avenue around noon Sunday after cleaning crews made the grisly discovery.

KMBC’s Emily Aylward reported that the man who checked into the motel room a few days ago complained to management about the odor two times over the three days. He then checked out on Sunday because he could not tolerate the smell.

In March 2010, Memphis police responded to a call from a local motel where employees had noticed a “foul odor” in one of the rooms. According to ABC Eyewitness News:

On March 15th, investigators were called back to room 222 at the Budget Inn, where the body of Sony Millbrook was found under the bed. Police say she was found inside the metal box frame that sits directly on the floor after someone reported smelling a strange odor. The box springs and mattress fit into the top of the bed frame.

Room 222, according to investigators, had been rented 5 times and cleaned many times by the hotel staff since the day Millbrook was reported missing.

Homicide investigators say Millbrook appears to have been murdered.

There’s more than one moral to these story, to be sure, but the most disturbing of all is that urban legends do sometimes come true.

10. Bloody Mary:

This is a folklore legend consisting of a ghost, whose name is called three times to appear in a mirror to reveal future events. As best anyone can tell, the legend of Bloody Mary first emerged in the early 1960s as an adolescent party game. Like so many folk rituals and belief tales, the exact time and place of its origin is nearly impossible to trace.

There’s a body of folklore and superstition that relates to the magical properties to mirrors dating back to ancient times. Such traditions typically include elements of danger and foreboding.

11. The Enfiled Horror:

On the night of April 25, 1973, a little boy by the name of Greg Garrett was playing in his backyard in Enfield, Illinois, when he was attacked. Not by a person, or any animal anyone had ever seen before—to this day nobody knows what it was, but it tore his shoes to pieces and left him in tears. Just minutes later, local resident Henry McDaniel opened his front door after hearing a light scratch, and got a good look at what would would come to be known as the Enfield Horror.

Greg and Henry’s descriptions were pretty much exactly the same: The Horror was short, no more than five feet, and had three legs. It also possessed short, stubby arms ending in claws that seemed to be placed in the center of its body rather than at its sides. It was hairy, yet slimy, and had reddish-pink eyes the size of flashlights.

Just minutes earlier, Henry’s children had insisted that a monster of some kind had tried to break into the house while he and his wife had been out to dinner. He’d laughed it off at first, but upon seeing this thing on his porch, Henry slammed the door and went directly for his gun.

Henry ripped open the door and fired four shots. He was sure he hit it on the first, and he said the thing “hissed like a wildcat” before bounding away, covering 75 ft in a few powerful leaps. He immediately called the police, and over the next few days, several more sightings were reported by searchers, sheriff’s deputies, even a radio station news director and his crew. Henry also saw it once more, a couple weeks later, out of his window as it wandered near some railroad tracks.

And then it was gone. Whatever it was, it hasn’t been seen since.