But sometimes, in real life, people get calls with bizarre plot-twists worthy of a horror movie, spawning some truly creepy mysteries in the process:

You all know the scene. A young, vulnerable, and preferably scantily clad woman is home alone when she answers the phone and finds herself threatened by an anonymous caller. If the screenwriters are feeling especially lazy, the big twist is that the call's coming from inside the house .

6 Teenager Disappears in the Middle of a Call

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In 2008, 19-year-old college student Brandon Swanson was driving home after a night out when he crashed into a ditch on a gravel road in Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Minnesota. He knew as well as us that this was a classic horror-movie setup, so he called his parents and asked for a ride.

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"Yeah, I'm right between the abandoned summer camp and that motel with the creepy house in the back."

Because of the whole "boonies at night" thing, Swanson's parents had trouble finding him. When they couldn't find his car at the location he provided they got back on the phone for over 45 minutes to play the world's worst game of Marco Polo. Swanson claimed he could see lights from a nearby town and was heading in that direction, but things took a turn for the creepy when he suddenly yelled, "Oh shit!"

Before his father could even scold his son for using such filthy language, the call cut off. And that's the last anyone ever heard from Swanson. Hundreds of volunteers, 34 dogs, and 120 days later, only his car was found. So what the hell happened to him?

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Slipped on a misplaced Stargate?

There was no evidence of foul play or any suggestion that Swanson wanted to disappear. Phone records showed that he was wrong about his location -- when he made his last call he was about 20 miles away from the town he claimed to be walking towards. The likeliest explanation is that he fell into a nearby river, but the search came up empty, and in the two days following his disappearance all calls to his cellphone rang. If he did stumble into the river, he didn't take his phone with him.