I've worked psych for 20 years. In my first job, we had an area blocked off from the rest of the unit called the 'Short Hall'. It was locked behind a heavy door, and used to condone off violent or unmanageable clients. It had three rooms and a restroom, but nothing else, really. I always felt bad for clients back there.
But, there was a second, smaller door which we never used. It was right beside the nurse's station, where we did paperwork. There was a panel of supposedly unbreakable glass in the door, which let us see and talk to clients in the short Hall.
The state hospital was shut down, and an old school client was sent home. He was sent to us a week later, after he broke into an elderly man's house and tried to beat the man to death with a brick. The client was extremely sick, inpredictable, and violent.
I remember sitting at the nurse's station one shift, with him standing in the short hall, pressing his cheek against the window. He said, "You can rape me if you want. I won't try to stop you." To which I replied, "I don't want anyone hurting anybody." He then proceeded to punch the window repeatedly while yelling.
We had to go in and sedate him. Thank Christ he let us give him the shots, as it was just me and two, 110 pound women. Despite the shots, though, he would just start punching the glass and screaming. Twelve hours later, he was beating his head against the window when I clocked out.
The creepiest sound I ever heard was a man hitting his head against gorilla glass, who clearly didn't have anything resembling hesitation, and would have killed me in a second for no reason without a dash of remorse. The worst part was sitting there for hours listening to it a foot away as I tried to play it cool for my subordinates and the other clients.
I have similar stories from working in a mental health hospital.
One of the creepiest sounds I ever heard was the absolutely menacing growl a teen girl unleashed when she launched herself at me.
One minute she was laughing and playing, the next she was full prepared to kill me.
The only person I’ve ever met who made me believe DID is real.
She was there because she dismembered her adoptive mother and burned her in the front yard. She was found not guilty for reasons of insanity because it was incredibly apparent that she had *no idea* her mother was dead, let alone that she was the one who killed her. Well, most of the time at least. 5% of the time, she was very aware, and very dangerous.
I don't know if most people fully understand that some serious mental illnesses are fully intractable. The individual will always be unpredictable, illogical, and dangerous (even when they appear not to be).
I can deal with lots of shit. I've been in physical restraints for hours, I've had death threats, I've put myself in some really dangerous situations... but I'm always calm. It's when I had a schizophrenic go from 100% happy to 100% "I'm going to throw a chair at you and I hope it kills you" for no reason that I actually had to tap myself out and go get some air.
It's weird, how mental health stuff has changed. I've had severe PTSD for over a decade, and people used to take me seriously when I talked about severity of symptoms or trouble working or caring for myself, or my times inpatient (five or six now I think).
I had someone in a disability community tell me recently that I was wrong, no flashback looks like curling in a ball and screaming and clawing at your face while you can't tell when or where you are because you're reliving everything.
I'd like to know what has been going on for a decade by their metric then!
Everyone with mental illness has a ceiling. For some people, it's the same as an able normal-ass person. And for some it is far lower. It feels like mental health awareness is a double-edge sword and people who are less impacted by it don't realize there's a whole other level of us.
I didn’t comprehend “head banging” till I witnessed it on security cameras. Seeing someone hit their head full force on a tile floor is disturbing enough. I’m glad I didn’t have audio.
Sitting in my basement office one night years ago. Headphones on. Wife and 2 year old son sleeping upstairs.
I hear a blood curdling scream RIGHT behind me. I physically shook and felt my heart sink into my chest. I’m almost too fucking terrified to turn around and see the demon/murderer behind me.
Turns out, my son was so excited he found his daddy in the middle of the night, he screamed with excitement. I’m still traumatized to this day.
Don't know why, this keeps reminding me of the video of a guy playing a horror game and his daughter sneaking up to him and he getting scared when he sees her. I think that video is hilarious!
Playing horror games puts you on edge like nothing else. I was playing the Paranormal Activity game once and i found a book. I was so extremely tense, i decided to back into a corner in order to feel safer. A plant clipped through my head and suddenly showed up on my screen and i screamed so loud that i upset my cat!
LMAO. I don't think I have been scared of something happening in real life while playing a horror game (I guess the closest would be my chair leaning a little bit farther than I was expecting, ending in me digging my knee under the table... xD)
I remember 2 instances of big jumpscares: 1st one, I was playing Bioshock (the first one) and, when you enter a dentist's office, the whole room fills up with a gas and you end up in another corner of the room. After two times, you end up facing the wall and, when you turn around, the dentist is right there on your face. Never have I emptied a shotgun so fast in my life.
The other one was while playing Outlast (the first one as well). Right at the beginning, when you enter a room, a body falls dangling from the ceiling. I got so scared that I managed to bring up the camera and the nightvision while almost throwing my mouse up.
Good times!
There was a story on an askreddit thread about 10 years ago about a man who had his headphones on while someone broke into his home and raped his wife
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/39suml/seriousredditors_who_have_had_to_kill_in_self/cs6gu9c)
That story stinks of karma farming rage bait. The way he mentions the "burly guy with a Mexican accent," and "he wasn't TRYING, he was almost CUMMING IN MY WIFE!" Dude, who the hell talks about a traumatic experience like that?
I saw a car blow through a stop sign and t-bone a bicyclist, sending them cartwheeling straight up in the "universal man" position, screaming. Since they were spinning the scream was subject to the doppler effect so it was like a "WAAAaaaaAAAAaaaaAAAAAaaaaAAAAaaaaaSPLAT" that really viscerally affected me. They lived btw
Commented about this before on Reddit, but when my husband and I first moved into our new house, we were chilling and watching TV one afternoon when we suddenly heard a single pure note of music, like someone had pressed the key of a piano, except we have no piano and it came from our dining/kitchen area. We immediately paused the TV and looked at each other like, "wtf was that?"
Proceeded to spend the next half hour looking like crazy people walking around the house tapping everything trying to recreate that sound, going so far as to ask the friend who used to live there if he'd ever heard anything like that while living there.
No clue what caused it and it gives me goosebumps still when I think about it and it's been almost 5 years.
Edit: my best theory was that it was either the glass door to my china hutch fluctuating or a Pyrex bowl that was in the sink getting struck just right by a sliding utensil. We weren't blaring the TV or anything, so it was just weird we didn't hear any accompanying noise like a clatter in the sink or wood adjusting in the hutch.
That makes it extra spooky because that means we had an unsolicited visitor coming to our house we might have had to talk to 😱
Also, we have no doorbell 😱😱
A friend of my wife stopped by the other day and rang the doorbell. Wife goes, "Holy shit, that doorbell actually works?!" She always assumed it was too old and the landlords of this joint have just never bothered to uninstall it. Sounds rather nice, to be honest lol. But I'm the same as everyone else these days. Doorbell gets rung or there's a knock at the door and I'm like, "Nobody move! We aren't home! They'll go away..."
It sounds like something that would have happened in a Bill and Ted movie, like one of the historical characters would be freaking out about the doorbell and describing it like that while Bill and Ted are like, "it's just the doorbell, dude!" Lol
Our daughter did that for a year or so. every few weeks she would just suddenly start screaming in her sleep without really waking up. we just went over to her room, touched her and that calmed her down instantly.
My daughter is a bit more than two and a half years now and she stopped a good while ago.
he'll stop too, eventually.
i always felt really sorry for her. it seems to be quite common, but hearing your Child cry in absolute fear is not so nice.
When my eldest was really little she did this adorable laugh in her sleep, long before she started laughing when she was awake. But it was at 2am, when everything else was super quiet, so it as also pretty creepy.
I have a child that sleeps with their eyes and mouth wide open. The first time they did it as an infant, I thought they were dead! I’ve never been so scared! They still sleep like that to this day. 😅
Sleep babbling is adorable. "Behold Zuul, Azathoth, Baphomet the Destroyer, let the Worms feast". Just the cutest little nonsense gibberish every day. How she gets the clocks to read 6:66 is beyond me!
I stayed with my aunt one summer and we had both just gotten in bed when I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Her house had alarms and we didn't hear a door open. They were slow and heavy. She was in the room down the hall and I yelled out to her to lock her door. The footsteps stopped and that was the last time I heard them. I waited about 30 minutes (I was 9-10 and neither of us owned a cellphone) before slowly making my way to her room. She had heard them as well and we waited a bit longer but didn't hear anything else. She had me wait by the phone while she went down stairs but absolutely nothing was out of order. The doors were locked and the alarm was active. We stayed up a bit longer and eventually went back to bed. It's still one of the scariest moments of my life because I can't explain what happened. I don't believe in ghosts but idk what else it could be. There's a very distinct sound that comes from the stairs when someone is walking up and down them and we both heard it.
This is the exact noise, I describe it as like the sound of high tensile cables in dramatic movies when they snap.
Hearing it through the hull of a boat is even more 3D!
Once cross country skiing on a well frozen river. Friend and I kept hearing a random soft (thump). He asked me if I was farting. I said " no, that's the ice cracking all across the river"
Pikachu face from friend!
As thick as the ice was we were perfectly safe, but it weirded him out!
I was snorkeling in Hanauma Bay in Hawaii and followed a couple parrotfish around for most of my time there. I totally get what you mean, but for me it was pretty entertaining.
Due to the high traffic, the fish were pretty conditioned to being around people, but still didn't want to stay in one spot for long, so it was mostly just them taking one chomp and repositioning. Hearing it so clearly underwater was definitely weird though.
I might be the one haunted, but I've had 1) When I was in college I had the voices of various roommates call me to another room when I was the only one in the house (I checked the entire house after hearing multiple times) and 2) Visiting a friend, sleeping on the couch I woke up and heard from the window someone calling my name, asking me to come outside. Nah I'm alright on the couch gonna just go to sleep again I hope.
When I was a kid someone told me that if you hear someone calling you when you know that you’re alone it’s the devil trying to steal you away. I suppose now they would say it’s a skinwalker.
I've heard the same! The house where I heard my name was in Appalachia, so not a Skinwalker but maybe something like it. Either way this lil boy was keeping his eyes shut (I was a grown man not a little child)
My son's voice during his first seizure. He screamed in terror but then it changed and it wasn't his voice anymore. I know now why a lot of neurological stuff could be confused with possession. It was an awful sound, and much deeper than his voice, and he looked so wrong.
He was only a year and half old. He rarely slept more than two hours at a time at night. I knew his voice. That wasn't his voice.
I got more used to the seizures but that noise - it wasn't the same as his cry just before or just after - always chilled me. I don't think of it as a sound he was doing so much as just the sound of something going wrong inside him.
That's the creepiest sound. Not the saddest but the creepiest.
But worse is sounds that should be there and aren't. Like your kid breathing. That always fucked me up even when I was able to make the lack of sound stop. Then I couldn't.
Damn. I have a pretty high tolerance for reading threada like these. Your story sent cold chills down my spine.
I'm sorry to read about your son's seizures. I hope you, and him, are doing better now.
Thank you for your kindness. He passed away a little over two years ago, just after he turned 3. He was truly (not just in the euphemism way) a special kid.
I miss him a lot, but he isn't in pain or frightened anymore. It hits all the different ways on different times of the day.
I have a parent with epilepsy and a dog with epilepsy. The noises bother me much more than the tonic clonic seizure activity (flopping around like in the movies). Logically I know they're not in pain and won't remember any of it after the seizure. My reptile brain isn't buying that, though.
A bobcat screaming in the woods. We lived in the country with deep woods but we didn’t have any bobcats around until I was about 13. The first time I heard one, I genuinely thought a woman was being murdered or dying somewhere in the woods. I was extremely relieved to find out it was just a bobcat
Hahah, yes if you’ve heard this it’s not a scary forest demon thankfully. I promise that the first time I heard it, I thought my life was going to become a criminal minds episode. It’s so scary
I was going to post this same thing. I've always been told when you hear them you are usually ok as they are just letting you know they are there. It doesn't make it any less bone chilling when its dark and you have the echo of the woods throwing off your ability to figure out which direction it was coming from. We ran out of there so fast I still think its a miracle none of us hit a tree dead sprint.
I second this. Visited my friends who live off the Appalachian trail in Salisbury, Connecticut. I genuinely wanted to contact emergency services and they told me it was just a bobcat. Such a creepy noise they make…
100% this. Being an Aussie i have never seen or heard one until i played a hunting game that has Rocky Mountain Elks that when calling are supposed to mimic their real life counterparts. I could only imagine camping in the mountains and hearing one would be quite creepy if you've never heard one before.
Woke up from a dead sleep to a fawn distress call not far from the tent. I thought a lion or bear had got a hold of a teen we were camping with. I don’t think I’ve ever cleared a sleeping bag and tent that fast.
Checked into the Georgian hotel in Santa Monica after 14 hour flight from Melbourne - exhasted. Some time around midnight I heard a woman scream like she was genuinely being murdered. I sat up startled thinking dial 911, then I heard her get into a rhythm and realised she was being stabbed in a different way.
The weird reverb noise of electricity on power lines. Like a deep whomp, whomp, whomp. Fills me with dread. Also have recurring nightmares of alien ships flying really low and that's the noise it makes in my dreams.
All the top comments are animals so I really hope this one gets seen.
You know how ravens can learn to talk? I mean not literally, and I guess it helps if you cut their tongues loose like an asshole. But most ravens can at least learn to mimic human words or sounds.
And the most common sound shared by all humans is laughter.
The fun part is I learned these lessons AFTER I'd gone backpacking alone and woke up to a raven laughing at me from a tree branch.
The cutting their tongue thing is a complete myth apart from the bit where people who do it are assholes. A lot of corvids have some level of mimicking ability, but they need to be around people enough to pick up on human sounds.
Out camping in the woods with a couple of friends miles from anywhere when we heard a small child laughing at about 3am.
Some real Blair Witch shit. It turns out that my mate's wife had pranked his phone and set a kid laughing as the sound for receiving a text from her and texted him about 3am.
Scariest shit until we localised the sound to his phone, it was still quite unnerving until he read her text.
She won prank of the year for that.
A fox. I had never heard a fox before, so at first I thought it was a teenager playing a prank. Almost had a heart attack when I saw a fox running right by me
Was home alone and taking a dump one day when I heard my front door open and close. I didn't think anyone in my family would be coming back at this time so I open the bathroom door just a tad and shouted, "hello?" into the hallway. No response. My two cats were strangely sitting politely right in front of the bathroom door, so I open it more and listen closely to see if I can hear any movement coming from the front door (it's impossible to see it from the bathroom). Nothing. Not a sound.
Right when I convinced myself that I had imagined hearing the sound of my front door opening and closing, the loudest gasping sound I've ever heard comes from that direction. Not only that, but my cats hear it too. They both whip their heads to look towards the front door and go wide-eyed. They then quickly run the opposite way. I slam the bathroom door closed.
I can't remember how long I stayed in there but nothing else happened after that. It's so hard trying to tell this story to people because I always try to reproduce the gasp, but there's just no way. What I heard has to be at least 10 times louder than the loudest gasp I'm able to produce.
My son had left a toy doll outside and I guess the moisture short circuited something so right outside my bedroom window at about 2am I hear "It'ssss BLIPPI!!!"
There's a line in a book that made me laugh related to this. The novel is Lonesome Dove (great book, recommended). One of the characters is being hunted by Native Americans and the Native Americans are sending out war cries and the character thinks to himself "(He) had never approved of the way Indians yelled when they fought - it upset his nerves." A real self aware feller there not realizing they did it exactly for that reason.
Here’s what one sounds like in case you’re curious: [https://youtu.be/SKwUBtZYdYs?si=hm3cHWuWg5HEKlo8](https://youtu.be/SKwUBtZYdYs?si=hm3cHWuWg5HEKlo8)
My 3d printed pumpkin shaped death whistle is my favorite print. The shear horror observed by the entire 3 block radiuis was divine. I let all the kids know before hand, so they got to relish their parents freaking out about terrifying sound coming from the oddly shaped giggling bush
So, that sound, in context of:
My gf bought one when we went to teotihuacan. We broke up and she went to a festival i had introduced her to. I used to camp on my own and then hang out at a group camp all day and go to the festival with those guys.
My ex camped with them and refused yo acknowledge me at all which was odd because the breakup was her doing. She tried to yoyo me a bit afterwards and I cut it off. So she was saying I broke it off and started seeing someone else, but she had moved out from our home and started living a rough life of drugs and drinking. She clearly spearheaded the end for us. I just reacted to the changes.
I'm laying in my tent with my new gf and at night (festival party night, not a quiet night) I hear a death whistle outside my tent while I'm chilling inside with my gf. She stated freaking out, like what tf is that.
There's no reassuring way to say, oh don't worry, it's just my drug addled ex blowing an Aztec death whistle outside our tent 500 yards away from where she's camping at 2am
One time, I was camping alone in the woods, and I heard what sounded like a child giggling right outside my tent at 3 AM 😐
Needless to say, I didn't sleep a wink after that.
I’m so sorry about your Mum. That must have been hard to listen to. Fortunately it’s believed that the patient isn’t uncomfortable when this is happening.
I once was woken up in the middle of the night around 25 years ago by the sound of a horrible high pitched screaming sound coming from INSIDE my room. Was convinced I was having some sort of nightmare but as the fog of sleep slowly lifted, it dawned on me that the horror of the situation was real.
Didn’t have a bedside lamp at the time so had to muster the courage to get out of my bed and switch on the light to see what horrific monster was lurking in the dark.
My cat had caught a frog and was torturing it on my bedroom floor. That day, I learned that frogs scream. Literally one of the most harrowing experiences of my life.
As a missionary on the east coast, my companion woke me up in the middle of the night one night, telling me he’d heard a bloodcurdling scream from the upstairs apartment above us. We didn’t say anything for a while, trying to see if we could hear it again, to no avail.
A couple months later, my companion sat me down and told me he’d heard the scream many more times, and every time he’d hear it, he’d write about it in his journal. Well, he showed me each journal entry where the scream was recorded, and I kid you not, it was every NINE days, like clockwork since he first heard it.
About a month later, I woke up in the middle of the night to turn the thermostat down. As I was falling back asleep, I heard the most unnatural, animal shriek that lasted about five seconds before cutting off violently. My whole body froze up and I couldn’t get myself to calm down. Across the room from his bed, my companion said, “you heard it too?”
When those upstairs neighbors moved out a few weeks later, my companion and I never heard the screams again.
Every 9 days, sounds man-made. Maybe the heating system shut down and restarted, that first puff of hot air thru steam pipes? The complex finally did the maintenance *after* they drove out those tenants?
Whatever it was had to be coming from the bedroom above ours. The next couple that moved in after the one in question were loud when they had sex, and the sound came from the same direction 😂
About a year or two ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to a man outside yelling help. It sounded distant. Then I didn’t hear it again. I still don’t know what happened. I thought maybe I dreamed it, but my husband heard it, too.
I once heard a woman crying out "help" in this low pitched wobbling way and didn't know if i was dreaming it. Come to find out my neighbors husband had beaten her with a hammer. I still feel guilty I didn't call 911. :(
Was at a Costco-like place in Germany in late 2017 when there were still a lot of refugees coming in and shit was still really bad in Syria. A Muslim woman in her early 40s was walking in the store with what I assume to be her husband and sons (in their 20s). We passed them and she was on her phone. About 5 seconds later she let out a wail of grief and dropped to the floor.
I will never forget that sound of pure anguish.
When I was a kid there was a program where you could “work” at the zoo and the reward was sleeping there for a night. They had a snow leopard who would cry all night. Didn’t sleep well.
God. Bad flashback. Hid under a family car to "ambush" my parents as a kid. It was dark af and I'm on gravel. Got a weird vibe I shouldn't turn around despite being uncomfortable. So I slowly rotate and as soon as I do I hear a footstep in the gravel where I was just facing. Then more. I turned around to look, thinking I was busted. Nothing. Nothing except the sound of someone kidding to a halt in the gravel, then turning and running away in the opposite direction. Like I could hear the rocks bouncing, but nothing moved. There was no one there. Both me and my dog yelped and made a run for it.
I learned how fast I could levitate into a house that night.
I never really believed in ghosts until my GF took me to this old slave quarters shack in very rural GA. She’s told me a lot about it, what’s happened to her there, I figured she was just over embellishing and that there was a very coincidental/logical reason (not being a dick about it, I mostly just thought that in my head). This shack was also right across from the main house, where the only person was this creepy woman with long hair who lived by herself and was a straight up shut in who died in 2013. Pictures were posted of that house, and the shape was absolutely horrendous. It looked like it had been abandoned for 20 years when they were taken a year afterwards trying to sell the land. There was a children’s graveyard next to all that.
Nah, I got out of the car and stared at the decrepit building. There was a wire fence you had to hop. Was dead quiet out, middle of January. Out of nowhere I heard footsteps crunching leaves that began getting louder. Turned around and hopped back in my car faster than I ever thought possible.
Don’t know if someone was out there, was an animal or what, but definitely one of the creepiest things I’ve ever heard.
Haven’t been back.
I love this character arc for you:
1. Doesn't believe in supernatural things, must be logical explanations
2. Go to creepy house, hear footsteps
3. Nevermind, the Devil is real (speeds away)
The tripods from War of the Worlds. But not the horn, the walking/engine sound. There's this pulsing mechanical whir that never ceases to send chills down my spine.
An elephant rumbling. It's so deep and low pitched that you less *hear* it and more *feel* it, like it's vibrating you from the inside out. The keeper at the elephant sanctuary we visited says it was their equivalent of a greeting and the elephant did seem pretty calm, but still the noise was kind of unsettling.
Sitting have a glass of wine on one of the large terraces of a big villa we rented in Southern Spain. Just 4 of us quietly chatting. The villa was in a gated community on a hill with no neighbours.
We heard a manic, evil, mocking male laugh. Loud. Just once. Coming from one large part of the garden that was in darkness. It was spine tingling. It was the stuff of nightmares and I still vividly remember it after 12years.
The sound of a mother being told her kids didn't survive, car crash I think, I was in emergency care with my dad after he had had a seizure, not the type of wail you forget easily.
It's that, or Cheyne Stokes respiration/death rattles.
The sound of my tent burning. We took a field trip to a summer camp type place. Some of the kids thought it would be funny if I burned to death I guess, cause they lit my tent on fire. I got out completely fine, but what if I didn't wake up?
Yeah I woke up pretty fast but there's so many ways that could have been so much worse. What if my zipper was stuck on sleeping bag, or my tent door? What if I just slept through it completely, or what if I woke up later than I did? What if I couldn't find my way out through the smoke, or the fire spread to the tent door before I could get out? So many ways that could've gone so bad.
[Wedge-tailed Shearwater, sounds like babies crying](https://youtu.be/xJg9RQJZwrI?si=IBK-C_Mb1PuMpOF7) heard these when i was a teen in hawaii. I was scared shitless because the locals told us it was the souls of babies thrown off the cliff crying
Not me, but my husband.
He was working security at an empty, decommissioned industrial plant. There were high metal gantreys and walkways overhead and not a lot of lights up there.
At night, the walkways would creak and thump like people were walking along them. If the wind picked up, the wires would move and it would sound like people were talking up there.
He called it the haunted plant and was very happy to leave that job.
You know those kids toys in the 90's?
Cylindrical shaped and hollow with the top open. Came with slime. Playing with the slime was fun. But putting it back in the plastic toy cylinder made a funny farting noise.
You know what else makes that exact same noise?
Hearing a transmission slip out of place and crush a man's chest cavity while he's underneath it.
Exact same sound.
A rocket flying overhead about 3 seconds prior to it exploding, I cannot explain the sound but it was like a whistling buzz. I’ve only ever heard it again on a Ukrainian combat video, creepy af.
I downloaded a sleep tracking app that records sounds. The next day, I went to play back the recording and, between some snoring, there was (clear as day) the sound of a baby crying. I do not have children and I live alone.
The scratching noise of some unknown small animal that got into my bedroom walls. I could hear moving around at night. The sound kept me from sleeping and nearly drove me insane.
That’s the one I was going to post too. That is the most dystopian sounding thing I can imagine.
[https://youtu.be/LnkMSmLc6mM](https://youtu.be/LnkMSmLc6mM)
Agonal/ineffective breathing, it's a wet whoopee cushion like sound that humans make as their lungs are no longer effectively exchanging air. I've heard three times in my life (Once as a medical response, once as a 911 dispatcher, and once as my dad died from SARS/covid.)
While exploring an old gold/silver mining shaft in Arizona with my uncle we inadvertently stumbled into a rattlesnake den and one started to rattle and then another and another and so on until it sounded like about 10,000,000 rattlesnakes were going full blast. I was sure I was about to die but luckily we both got out without even seeing them
A pair of coyotes in the desert throwing their voices to make it seem like they were a whole pack of coyotes or something. Very freaky to hear that in the middle of nowhere while backpacking.
Was home alone and a violent storm came out of nowhere. Suddenly, the kitchen light dimmed and the wind sounded like an old train whistle. I remembered this possibly being the sound of an oncoming tornado. I ran into our small bathroom under the stairs, shut the door and crouched down into a corner wall covering my head with my arms. It passed almost as quickly as it came up. Looked outside and trees were literally snapped and ripped from the ground at my neighbors houses. Heard later that a tornado had passed in my area less than a mile away - causing a lot of damage to rooftops and downing many trees and tree limbs.
This was when my dog was still a puppy and we had to let him out in the middle of the night. Cops showed to my neighbors house due to the silent alarm from security company. The neighbors were heavy sleepers and didn't answer the door so the cops knocked down the door and shot the neighbors dogs. The shot followed by the yelp cry from the dog kept me sleepless for a long time. My pup would not go to the back yard for a week.
Had to run 3 miles but I didn’t want to run 1.5 miles one way and back so I had my brother drop me off 3 miles away from home. I guess I never thought about it but being in the middle of the woods at night, everything is absolutely pitch black. He asked me if I was sure and while I was bit nervous but I said yeah he drove off. It was completely pitch black but I was only 3 miles away so I shook it off not even 20 secs later I heard the loudest most blood curdling scream I’ve ever heard come from the woods , I felt the adrenaline rush me immediately and thought I was in danger. It sounded like a women , It was so loud I thought it was closer than it was. I couldn’t see a thing so I was in a panic , I didn’t know if I should turn my phone flashlight on or not. In the moment I just decided to run, I still remember the run because I was running what to me was so fast but I didn’t even feel any tiredness or nothing. The adrenaline pushed me , I ran what felt like a marathon but according to my watch it was only a mile . When I got to a point here my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I called my brother to come get me and I explained what happened. When he got to me we had a debate for like 30 minutes to see if we should go check it out. We did and we went to where I the noise came from , we couldn’t see anything from the edge of the woods so we decided to leave . On Apple Maps and Google maps when you zoom into that area you see a cabin in the directions the scream came from and I always wondered if they’re linked. To this day I still wanna go check it out but I think it’s private property.
My siblings and I couldn’t afford fireworks so we decided to go to the biggest hill in town, it’s got a lot of trees and bushes and it was nighttime. Anyway, towards the end of the night when the fireworks were starting to calm down my sister went over to some bushes because she heard a sound, apparently it was a cougar and it stalked us all the way down the hill, that rustling in the bushes is the scariest noise I’ve heard to this day.
Camping with my dad as a kind and while he's snoring away I'm listening to multiple footsteps walking all around our tent
I think they were coyotes or wolves.
The absolute silence of a mountain lion. Either that or my child who doesn't speak Spanish speaking Spanish in her sleep at like 2 in the morning in a fucked up, old lady voice.
Sesame Street put out a set of light activated dolls. Big bird said “peek a boo” whenever it went from light to dark. After about the tenth time of Big Bird giving me a stroke when I went to check on my daughter, I threw him in the basement.
About 6 months later I have to go in the creepy ass basement at night to get something. I pull the cord on the old fashioned hanging light bulb and I hear “peeeeekkaaaaaaabooooo” all slow and strangly because the batteries are dying.
I ran out a side door and halfway down a hill before I realized I’d abandoned my wife and daughter to an axe murderer. By that point I finally remembered what it was. I went in and kicked the shit out of Big Bird to get my manhood back.
To make it worse my wife had seen me running down the hill and wouldn’t quit until I told her why.
Let’s just say she was disappointed in me.
Standing outside at my grandpa's farm in the middle of winter in northern South Dakota just after a frost, the air still thick with fog: the sound you hear?
Absolutely nothing. Complete and utter silence, with visibility and normally goes on for miles, but reads like the abyss in the fog, and trees blanched with frost.
That was the moment I realized how insanely alone one can be.
An ex-girlfriend was sleeping downstairs in my shared house after a party. She'd been a bit weird all night, and when I went upstairs I, intuition tingling, moved my writing desk in front of my room door. My ex was the only person downstairs after the party was over - this is significant.
Sure enough, just after I'd dozed off I was awoken by a "thump" as my room door was tried. Someone had waited until they thought I was asleep and partially opened it and it had banged against my writing desk.
That wasn't the creepiest part.
The creepiest part was when I called out, alarmed, asking my ex if she was there. She didn't reply, but I clearly heard her slow footsteps going back down our creaking staircase as she tried to pretend she'd never been there and that it wasn't her...
The scariest thing I ever 'heard' wasn't a noise. I don't know how to describe this, and maybe some of you aren't going to believe or understand what I mean, but I promise this was a real phenomenon that I experienced. I moved to Taiwan in October of 2022 and had the first earthquake experience of my life. This was a small one and nothing very serious. First, I didn't realize what was happening, I thought maybe I was just dizzy. I was sitting at my desk in my apartment, and everything started swaying left to right. It took me a good 5 seconds to comprehend that it was a minor earthquake.
The shaking and swaying didn't scare me at all. What terrified me to my core was the silent scream being directly transmitted into my brain. I could *hear* the Earth telepathically shouting at me, "DANGER DANGER DANGER!!!!" I can only assume that it activated some primal sense from a prehistoric time. The way prey animals know things are coming ahead of time, I really felt this.
Imagine a giant with his mouth open, but no sound coming out, and yet his immense and horrifying scream is still heard in your mind. Really freaked me the fuck out.
I live somewhere where earthquakes are... not unheard of *technically* but always so minor they're just a blip on a seismograph. First and only time I've ever felt shaking was pretty much how you described it, except there was also a very tangible deep rumble that I can really only describe as being unsettling in a bizarre, almost eldritch way. It's like it made the entirety of my brain go "This is *incorrect*." at the same time.
I can't wait to describe this online..
So since I was 9 I had hallucinations. Sounds, and figures of people. One night (like 2AM) I woke up. I was going back to sleep and I heard a GROWN MAN LAUGHING. Mind you, my dad doesn't sleep at home much. So I know damn well it wasn't him. When I tell you I was terrified, I mean it.
I was upstairs l, laying in bed and trying to get to sleep and I heard my dad cough downstairs, he had a distinctive cough due to his smoking, this was in 2009 and he does in 2006
Someone dying in their sleep because they can't breathe.
Somehow he made it and is still alive today, but it'll be a long time before I don't remember the wheezing.
Getting woken up while camping to what sounded like a woman screaming. Friend said it was a mountain lion. It sounded close by too. Eventually fell back asleep
When I was in nursing school we did an OB rotation. Got to be in the operating room for a couple C-sections. I did not realize that once they cut you open enough the surgeons basically yank the stomach apart until its open enough to pull the baby out. I will never forget that sound. Flesh just ripping apart.
I was doing a reno in a hospital. We were in the cancer area of the hospital. We were working away when i heard the worst crying wailing. It was out of a horror movie kind of wailing. I found out later on that a child had passed away from cancer under 10 years old and the wailing was a mother's grief. I will.never forget that sound as long as I live
I'm from Philadelphia and was never into hunting or camping. I joined the military at 18 was was sent to the desert outside El Paso. One night I was on guard duty all by myself. It was pitch black and I couldn't see anything but thousands of stars. As I was admiring the stars, a pack of coyotes silently snuck up behind me. Then all at once they began to bay and howl to each other. They were so close to me on all sides but I couldn't see them at all. I could just hear the yipes, howls, and random localization surrounding me.
As a city boy, I was entirely unprepared. I whiteknuckled it all night long. It was the most fear I had ever felt.
As my years in the military progressed I learned that coyotes are loud and harmless....but holy shit....it was the stuff of nightmares for 18 year old me.
irl? the sound of my dogs nails skittering across the floor when i drop food, knowing i have maby 2 seconds to grab whatever i dropped before the beast inhales it. online? death rattle i think it’s called?
I've worked psych for 20 years. In my first job, we had an area blocked off from the rest of the unit called the 'Short Hall'. It was locked behind a heavy door, and used to condone off violent or unmanageable clients. It had three rooms and a restroom, but nothing else, really. I always felt bad for clients back there. But, there was a second, smaller door which we never used. It was right beside the nurse's station, where we did paperwork. There was a panel of supposedly unbreakable glass in the door, which let us see and talk to clients in the short Hall. The state hospital was shut down, and an old school client was sent home. He was sent to us a week later, after he broke into an elderly man's house and tried to beat the man to death with a brick. The client was extremely sick, inpredictable, and violent. I remember sitting at the nurse's station one shift, with him standing in the short hall, pressing his cheek against the window. He said, "You can rape me if you want. I won't try to stop you." To which I replied, "I don't want anyone hurting anybody." He then proceeded to punch the window repeatedly while yelling. We had to go in and sedate him. Thank Christ he let us give him the shots, as it was just me and two, 110 pound women. Despite the shots, though, he would just start punching the glass and screaming. Twelve hours later, he was beating his head against the window when I clocked out. The creepiest sound I ever heard was a man hitting his head against gorilla glass, who clearly didn't have anything resembling hesitation, and would have killed me in a second for no reason without a dash of remorse. The worst part was sitting there for hours listening to it a foot away as I tried to play it cool for my subordinates and the other clients.
Man, that is creepy scary
I have similar stories from working in a mental health hospital. One of the creepiest sounds I ever heard was the absolutely menacing growl a teen girl unleashed when she launched herself at me. One minute she was laughing and playing, the next she was full prepared to kill me. The only person I’ve ever met who made me believe DID is real. She was there because she dismembered her adoptive mother and burned her in the front yard. She was found not guilty for reasons of insanity because it was incredibly apparent that she had *no idea* her mother was dead, let alone that she was the one who killed her. Well, most of the time at least. 5% of the time, she was very aware, and very dangerous.
I don't know if most people fully understand that some serious mental illnesses are fully intractable. The individual will always be unpredictable, illogical, and dangerous (even when they appear not to be). I can deal with lots of shit. I've been in physical restraints for hours, I've had death threats, I've put myself in some really dangerous situations... but I'm always calm. It's when I had a schizophrenic go from 100% happy to 100% "I'm going to throw a chair at you and I hope it kills you" for no reason that I actually had to tap myself out and go get some air.
It's weird, how mental health stuff has changed. I've had severe PTSD for over a decade, and people used to take me seriously when I talked about severity of symptoms or trouble working or caring for myself, or my times inpatient (five or six now I think). I had someone in a disability community tell me recently that I was wrong, no flashback looks like curling in a ball and screaming and clawing at your face while you can't tell when or where you are because you're reliving everything. I'd like to know what has been going on for a decade by their metric then! Everyone with mental illness has a ceiling. For some people, it's the same as an able normal-ass person. And for some it is far lower. It feels like mental health awareness is a double-edge sword and people who are less impacted by it don't realize there's a whole other level of us.
I didn’t comprehend “head banging” till I witnessed it on security cameras. Seeing someone hit their head full force on a tile floor is disturbing enough. I’m glad I didn’t have audio.
r/nosleep sneak peek material right here.
Sitting in my basement office one night years ago. Headphones on. Wife and 2 year old son sleeping upstairs. I hear a blood curdling scream RIGHT behind me. I physically shook and felt my heart sink into my chest. I’m almost too fucking terrified to turn around and see the demon/murderer behind me. Turns out, my son was so excited he found his daddy in the middle of the night, he screamed with excitement. I’m still traumatized to this day.
I love this, haha.
Haha, thanks. I laugh about it too and will, unfortunately, NEVER forget that night
That’s the sort of story you need to tell at his wedding 😁
Don't know why, this keeps reminding me of the video of a guy playing a horror game and his daughter sneaking up to him and he getting scared when he sees her. I think that video is hilarious!
Playing horror games puts you on edge like nothing else. I was playing the Paranormal Activity game once and i found a book. I was so extremely tense, i decided to back into a corner in order to feel safer. A plant clipped through my head and suddenly showed up on my screen and i screamed so loud that i upset my cat!
LMAO. I don't think I have been scared of something happening in real life while playing a horror game (I guess the closest would be my chair leaning a little bit farther than I was expecting, ending in me digging my knee under the table... xD) I remember 2 instances of big jumpscares: 1st one, I was playing Bioshock (the first one) and, when you enter a dentist's office, the whole room fills up with a gas and you end up in another corner of the room. After two times, you end up facing the wall and, when you turn around, the dentist is right there on your face. Never have I emptied a shotgun so fast in my life. The other one was while playing Outlast (the first one as well). Right at the beginning, when you enter a room, a body falls dangling from the ceiling. I got so scared that I managed to bring up the camera and the nightvision while almost throwing my mouse up. Good times!
Oh thank goodness the story ends well
Right? I was almost afraid to keep reading lol.
Me too, it wasn’t even particularly scary but I’ve never had to make the effort to read the next sentence out of fear
There was a story on an askreddit thread about 10 years ago about a man who had his headphones on while someone broke into his home and raped his wife [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/39suml/seriousredditors_who_have_had_to_kill_in_self/cs6gu9c)
Worst ad for noise cancelling headphones
Yeah I instantly thought about this post
That story stinks of karma farming rage bait. The way he mentions the "burly guy with a Mexican accent," and "he wasn't TRYING, he was almost CUMMING IN MY WIFE!" Dude, who the hell talks about a traumatic experience like that?
I agree, the way it was written had my bullshit sensor going off the whole time
I saw a car blow through a stop sign and t-bone a bicyclist, sending them cartwheeling straight up in the "universal man" position, screaming. Since they were spinning the scream was subject to the doppler effect so it was like a "WAAAaaaaAAAAaaaaAAAAAaaaaAAAAaaaaaSPLAT" that really viscerally affected me. They lived btw
Your description and sound needs work, for you just made a very horrifying accident funny, with that sound effect.
oh good I'm not the only one who found this absolutely hilarious
It made me think of the propellor guy in Titanic. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH plunk
Do your best not to imagine Waluigi doing it
The juxtaposition of that horrifying yet kinda funny mental image, plus the sudden "they lived btw" really got me
Commented about this before on Reddit, but when my husband and I first moved into our new house, we were chilling and watching TV one afternoon when we suddenly heard a single pure note of music, like someone had pressed the key of a piano, except we have no piano and it came from our dining/kitchen area. We immediately paused the TV and looked at each other like, "wtf was that?" Proceeded to spend the next half hour looking like crazy people walking around the house tapping everything trying to recreate that sound, going so far as to ask the friend who used to live there if he'd ever heard anything like that while living there. No clue what caused it and it gives me goosebumps still when I think about it and it's been almost 5 years. Edit: my best theory was that it was either the glass door to my china hutch fluctuating or a Pyrex bowl that was in the sink getting struck just right by a sliding utensil. We weren't blaring the TV or anything, so it was just weird we didn't hear any accompanying noise like a clatter in the sink or wood adjusting in the hutch.
At that point what's scarier, finding nothing or finding a piano?
Definitely finding a piano, because you wondered who pressed it. If you find nothing, then it's still a mystery.
It's called a doorbell man lmao
That makes it extra spooky because that means we had an unsolicited visitor coming to our house we might have had to talk to 😱 Also, we have no doorbell 😱😱
A friend of my wife stopped by the other day and rang the doorbell. Wife goes, "Holy shit, that doorbell actually works?!" She always assumed it was too old and the landlords of this joint have just never bothered to uninstall it. Sounds rather nice, to be honest lol. But I'm the same as everyone else these days. Doorbell gets rung or there's a knock at the door and I'm like, "Nobody move! We aren't home! They'll go away..."
Humans: Just pretend no one is home The dogs: So anyway I started blasting
The thought of someone not knowing what a doorbell is, and then describing it as a "single note of music" is genuinely hilarious.
It sounds like something that would have happened in a Bill and Ted movie, like one of the historical characters would be freaking out about the doorbell and describing it like that while Bill and Ted are like, "it's just the doorbell, dude!" Lol
Are you sure it wasn't playing from the TV?
Yes, it was an episode of Futurama that was playing that we've seen countless times and we both agreed the sound came from the other room.
Recently, my nine month old baby (who hasn't spoken a word yet) sleeptalking. She sounds like legit speaking in another language.
One night, our baby was sleeping between us, and he randomly screamed in his sleep. He didn't even wake up, but we the parents sure did!
Our daughter did that for a year or so. every few weeks she would just suddenly start screaming in her sleep without really waking up. we just went over to her room, touched her and that calmed her down instantly.
It's lovely and terrifying for you isn't it?! He's 2 now, a few weeks ago I think he was laughing in his sleep which was better than screaming.
My daughter is a bit more than two and a half years now and she stopped a good while ago. he'll stop too, eventually. i always felt really sorry for her. it seems to be quite common, but hearing your Child cry in absolute fear is not so nice.
Omg, my son used to have night terrors and it was so scary. Little guy had no clue that they were happening!
When my eldest was really little she did this adorable laugh in her sleep, long before she started laughing when she was awake. But it was at 2am, when everything else was super quiet, so it as also pretty creepy.
I have a child that sleeps with their eyes and mouth wide open. The first time they did it as an infant, I thought they were dead! I’ve never been so scared! They still sleep like that to this day. 😅
Haha, my son still does this at 4 years old. The words sound like a real ones, but it's not a language I can understand.
hes just reliving memories from his past life in the indus valley.
Sleep babbling is adorable. "Behold Zuul, Azathoth, Baphomet the Destroyer, let the Worms feast". Just the cutest little nonsense gibberish every day. How she gets the clocks to read 6:66 is beyond me!
I stayed with my aunt one summer and we had both just gotten in bed when I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Her house had alarms and we didn't hear a door open. They were slow and heavy. She was in the room down the hall and I yelled out to her to lock her door. The footsteps stopped and that was the last time I heard them. I waited about 30 minutes (I was 9-10 and neither of us owned a cellphone) before slowly making my way to her room. She had heard them as well and we waited a bit longer but didn't hear anything else. She had me wait by the phone while she went down stairs but absolutely nothing was out of order. The doors were locked and the alarm was active. We stayed up a bit longer and eventually went back to bed. It's still one of the scariest moments of my life because I can't explain what happened. I don't believe in ghosts but idk what else it could be. There's a very distinct sound that comes from the stairs when someone is walking up and down them and we both heard it.
The alarm was still set because he never left the house.
Well I'm not sleeping tonight
The eerie sounds a frozen lake makes during expansion and contraction due to temperature changes
Sounds like you're whacking a high tensile cable that attaches to those radio towers?
This is the exact noise, I describe it as like the sound of high tensile cables in dramatic movies when they snap. Hearing it through the hull of a boat is even more 3D!
Used to work as a fencer, the wire for the post/wire field fencing makes such a cool noise when adding tension.
Once cross country skiing on a well frozen river. Friend and I kept hearing a random soft (thump). He asked me if I was farting. I said " no, that's the ice cracking all across the river" Pikachu face from friend! As thick as the ice was we were perfectly safe, but it weirded him out!
A parrot fish chewing coral while I was diving. It sounds like a monster from a horror film chewing on a human torso.
I was snorkeling in Hanauma Bay in Hawaii and followed a couple parrotfish around for most of my time there. I totally get what you mean, but for me it was pretty entertaining. Due to the high traffic, the fish were pretty conditioned to being around people, but still didn't want to stay in one spot for long, so it was mostly just them taking one chomp and repositioning. Hearing it so clearly underwater was definitely weird though.
Whatever it is that makes noise upstairs when I’m the only one home.
sorry that was me
You're paying rent starting NOW
I might be the one haunted, but I've had 1) When I was in college I had the voices of various roommates call me to another room when I was the only one in the house (I checked the entire house after hearing multiple times) and 2) Visiting a friend, sleeping on the couch I woke up and heard from the window someone calling my name, asking me to come outside. Nah I'm alright on the couch gonna just go to sleep again I hope.
When I was a kid someone told me that if you hear someone calling you when you know that you’re alone it’s the devil trying to steal you away. I suppose now they would say it’s a skinwalker.
I've heard the same! The house where I heard my name was in Appalachia, so not a Skinwalker but maybe something like it. Either way this lil boy was keeping his eyes shut (I was a grown man not a little child)
Lotta spookiness in Appalachia from what I’ve heard.
My son's voice during his first seizure. He screamed in terror but then it changed and it wasn't his voice anymore. I know now why a lot of neurological stuff could be confused with possession. It was an awful sound, and much deeper than his voice, and he looked so wrong. He was only a year and half old. He rarely slept more than two hours at a time at night. I knew his voice. That wasn't his voice. I got more used to the seizures but that noise - it wasn't the same as his cry just before or just after - always chilled me. I don't think of it as a sound he was doing so much as just the sound of something going wrong inside him. That's the creepiest sound. Not the saddest but the creepiest. But worse is sounds that should be there and aren't. Like your kid breathing. That always fucked me up even when I was able to make the lack of sound stop. Then I couldn't.
Damn. I have a pretty high tolerance for reading threada like these. Your story sent cold chills down my spine. I'm sorry to read about your son's seizures. I hope you, and him, are doing better now.
Thank you for your kindness. He passed away a little over two years ago, just after he turned 3. He was truly (not just in the euphemism way) a special kid. I miss him a lot, but he isn't in pain or frightened anymore. It hits all the different ways on different times of the day.
I am so sorry to hear of your loss, it's heartbreaking to hear he passed so young. I hope you're managing as well as possible.
I have a parent with epilepsy and a dog with epilepsy. The noises bother me much more than the tonic clonic seizure activity (flopping around like in the movies). Logically I know they're not in pain and won't remember any of it after the seizure. My reptile brain isn't buying that, though.
A bobcat screaming in the woods. We lived in the country with deep woods but we didn’t have any bobcats around until I was about 13. The first time I heard one, I genuinely thought a woman was being murdered or dying somewhere in the woods. I was extremely relieved to find out it was just a bobcat
Mountain lion calls are just as creepy too
Can confirm. Legitimately sounds like a woman being murdered. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kOeBt1LDcE4&pp=ygURU291bmQgb2YgYSBib2JjYXQ%3D
Just went on a late night deep dive of bobcat screams. Check this one out https://youtu.be/hipZukIHlnc?si=igfIOn2Myy1olUye
I would have shat out everything in my body and bit my hands off if i heard that at night
Dude you just answered something I’ve been wondering for years !!!!
Hahah, yes if you’ve heard this it’s not a scary forest demon thankfully. I promise that the first time I heard it, I thought my life was going to become a criminal minds episode. It’s so scary
Dude I had literally just posted the story of me hearing that and right under my comment was yours and then things made sense
Now do mountain lions or cougars
Foxes in the UK are much the same
I was going to post this same thing. I've always been told when you hear them you are usually ok as they are just letting you know they are there. It doesn't make it any less bone chilling when its dark and you have the echo of the woods throwing off your ability to figure out which direction it was coming from. We ran out of there so fast I still think its a miracle none of us hit a tree dead sprint.
I second this. Visited my friends who live off the Appalachian trail in Salisbury, Connecticut. I genuinely wanted to contact emergency services and they told me it was just a bobcat. Such a creepy noise they make…
An elk calling, first time in the mountains, in a tent.
100% this. Being an Aussie i have never seen or heard one until i played a hunting game that has Rocky Mountain Elks that when calling are supposed to mimic their real life counterparts. I could only imagine camping in the mountains and hearing one would be quite creepy if you've never heard one before.
Woke up from a dead sleep to a fawn distress call not far from the tent. I thought a lion or bear had got a hold of a teen we were camping with. I don’t think I’ve ever cleared a sleeping bag and tent that fast.
Checked into the Georgian hotel in Santa Monica after 14 hour flight from Melbourne - exhasted. Some time around midnight I heard a woman scream like she was genuinely being murdered. I sat up startled thinking dial 911, then I heard her get into a rhythm and realised she was being stabbed in a different way.
According to other posts here this could have been a bobcat
The weird reverb noise of electricity on power lines. Like a deep whomp, whomp, whomp. Fills me with dread. Also have recurring nightmares of alien ships flying really low and that's the noise it makes in my dreams.
What came first, hearing the power lines or having the spaceship dreams?
All the top comments are animals so I really hope this one gets seen. You know how ravens can learn to talk? I mean not literally, and I guess it helps if you cut their tongues loose like an asshole. But most ravens can at least learn to mimic human words or sounds. And the most common sound shared by all humans is laughter. The fun part is I learned these lessons AFTER I'd gone backpacking alone and woke up to a raven laughing at me from a tree branch.
Maybe he was laughing at your camo outfit.
You don't have to cut their tongues, and they can talk as well or better than a parrot.
Yeah someone else clarified that about an hour ago. It turns out the tongue-cutting bit is an urban myth.
The cutting their tongue thing is a complete myth apart from the bit where people who do it are assholes. A lot of corvids have some level of mimicking ability, but they need to be around people enough to pick up on human sounds.
Maybe he saw you take a leak.
Out camping in the woods with a couple of friends miles from anywhere when we heard a small child laughing at about 3am. Some real Blair Witch shit. It turns out that my mate's wife had pranked his phone and set a kid laughing as the sound for receiving a text from her and texted him about 3am. Scariest shit until we localised the sound to his phone, it was still quite unnerving until he read her text. She won prank of the year for that.
She's a keeper
A fox. I had never heard a fox before, so at first I thought it was a teenager playing a prank. Almost had a heart attack when I saw a fox running right by me
Holy shit, sleeping with the windows open outside of Philly and I thought I heard a baby crying.
What does the fox say?
I found out that day lmao
Chaos reigns.
I'm sorry, but the thought of someone being terrified of a 12 lb, cute little fox made my day. I hope you've recovered.
Was home alone and taking a dump one day when I heard my front door open and close. I didn't think anyone in my family would be coming back at this time so I open the bathroom door just a tad and shouted, "hello?" into the hallway. No response. My two cats were strangely sitting politely right in front of the bathroom door, so I open it more and listen closely to see if I can hear any movement coming from the front door (it's impossible to see it from the bathroom). Nothing. Not a sound. Right when I convinced myself that I had imagined hearing the sound of my front door opening and closing, the loudest gasping sound I've ever heard comes from that direction. Not only that, but my cats hear it too. They both whip their heads to look towards the front door and go wide-eyed. They then quickly run the opposite way. I slam the bathroom door closed. I can't remember how long I stayed in there but nothing else happened after that. It's so hard trying to tell this story to people because I always try to reproduce the gasp, but there's just no way. What I heard has to be at least 10 times louder than the loudest gasp I'm able to produce.
I think someone might have walked in your house thinking it was someone else's
My son had left a toy doll outside and I guess the moisture short circuited something so right outside my bedroom window at about 2am I hear "It'ssss BLIPPI!!!"
The sound of the foot stomping in the stairs but you're alone
One of the creepiest sounds I've ever heard is the Aztec Death Whistle.
There's a line in a book that made me laugh related to this. The novel is Lonesome Dove (great book, recommended). One of the characters is being hunted by Native Americans and the Native Americans are sending out war cries and the character thinks to himself "(He) had never approved of the way Indians yelled when they fought - it upset his nerves." A real self aware feller there not realizing they did it exactly for that reason.
Here’s what one sounds like in case you’re curious: [https://youtu.be/SKwUBtZYdYs?si=hm3cHWuWg5HEKlo8](https://youtu.be/SKwUBtZYdYs?si=hm3cHWuWg5HEKlo8)
sounds like an xbox lobby back in the day. Aztecs really were ahead of their time, huh
I closed the tab on instinct when the whistle played, holy hell
I can never hear it as a scream, it always just sounds like a bad whistle to me
My 3d printed pumpkin shaped death whistle is my favorite print. The shear horror observed by the entire 3 block radiuis was divine. I let all the kids know before hand, so they got to relish their parents freaking out about terrifying sound coming from the oddly shaped giggling bush
So, that sound, in context of: My gf bought one when we went to teotihuacan. We broke up and she went to a festival i had introduced her to. I used to camp on my own and then hang out at a group camp all day and go to the festival with those guys. My ex camped with them and refused yo acknowledge me at all which was odd because the breakup was her doing. She tried to yoyo me a bit afterwards and I cut it off. So she was saying I broke it off and started seeing someone else, but she had moved out from our home and started living a rough life of drugs and drinking. She clearly spearheaded the end for us. I just reacted to the changes. I'm laying in my tent with my new gf and at night (festival party night, not a quiet night) I hear a death whistle outside my tent while I'm chilling inside with my gf. She stated freaking out, like what tf is that. There's no reassuring way to say, oh don't worry, it's just my drug addled ex blowing an Aztec death whistle outside our tent 500 yards away from where she's camping at 2am
One time, I was camping alone in the woods, and I heard what sounded like a child giggling right outside my tent at 3 AM 😐 Needless to say, I didn't sleep a wink after that.
It's either coyotes or foxes that have a sound similar to baby humans. I remember hearing them all night sometimes growing up.
I've lived with both and they make some weird sounds. Either could make a giggling sound.
I had no idea that cougars could make some of the sounds they do.
Can't wait for the comments on this one!
😂😂😂
I found out years after the fact, that the weird bird chirps I heard as a kid while out in the woods, were actually cougars calling to each other....
They were just discussing whether you had gotten big enough to bother eating yet 😂
The tripod sound from war of the worlds
That movie is one of my earliest memories of going to a movie theater and it left me traumatized as an 8 year old.
agonal breathing
Ahhh, death rattle. Got to listen to my mom do that for several hours before she passed away. Super unsettling.
I’m so sorry about your Mum. That must have been hard to listen to. Fortunately it’s believed that the patient isn’t uncomfortable when this is happening.
"But he is still breathing". Yeah, kinda.
I once was woken up in the middle of the night around 25 years ago by the sound of a horrible high pitched screaming sound coming from INSIDE my room. Was convinced I was having some sort of nightmare but as the fog of sleep slowly lifted, it dawned on me that the horror of the situation was real. Didn’t have a bedside lamp at the time so had to muster the courage to get out of my bed and switch on the light to see what horrific monster was lurking in the dark. My cat had caught a frog and was torturing it on my bedroom floor. That day, I learned that frogs scream. Literally one of the most harrowing experiences of my life.
As a missionary on the east coast, my companion woke me up in the middle of the night one night, telling me he’d heard a bloodcurdling scream from the upstairs apartment above us. We didn’t say anything for a while, trying to see if we could hear it again, to no avail. A couple months later, my companion sat me down and told me he’d heard the scream many more times, and every time he’d hear it, he’d write about it in his journal. Well, he showed me each journal entry where the scream was recorded, and I kid you not, it was every NINE days, like clockwork since he first heard it. About a month later, I woke up in the middle of the night to turn the thermostat down. As I was falling back asleep, I heard the most unnatural, animal shriek that lasted about five seconds before cutting off violently. My whole body froze up and I couldn’t get myself to calm down. Across the room from his bed, my companion said, “you heard it too?” When those upstairs neighbors moved out a few weeks later, my companion and I never heard the screams again.
Every 9 days, sounds man-made. Maybe the heating system shut down and restarted, that first puff of hot air thru steam pipes? The complex finally did the maintenance *after* they drove out those tenants?
Whatever it was had to be coming from the bedroom above ours. The next couple that moved in after the one in question were loud when they had sex, and the sound came from the same direction 😂
Dude wtf
About a year or two ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to a man outside yelling help. It sounded distant. Then I didn’t hear it again. I still don’t know what happened. I thought maybe I dreamed it, but my husband heard it, too.
I once heard a woman crying out "help" in this low pitched wobbling way and didn't know if i was dreaming it. Come to find out my neighbors husband had beaten her with a hammer. I still feel guilty I didn't call 911. :(
A poster falling off my wall in the middle of the night
Was at a Costco-like place in Germany in late 2017 when there were still a lot of refugees coming in and shit was still really bad in Syria. A Muslim woman in her early 40s was walking in the store with what I assume to be her husband and sons (in their 20s). We passed them and she was on her phone. About 5 seconds later she let out a wail of grief and dropped to the floor. I will never forget that sound of pure anguish.
When I was a kid there was a program where you could “work” at the zoo and the reward was sleeping there for a night. They had a snow leopard who would cry all night. Didn’t sleep well.
Well shit, if I'm leopard I ain't sleeping well either -_-
[удалено]
God. Bad flashback. Hid under a family car to "ambush" my parents as a kid. It was dark af and I'm on gravel. Got a weird vibe I shouldn't turn around despite being uncomfortable. So I slowly rotate and as soon as I do I hear a footstep in the gravel where I was just facing. Then more. I turned around to look, thinking I was busted. Nothing. Nothing except the sound of someone kidding to a halt in the gravel, then turning and running away in the opposite direction. Like I could hear the rocks bouncing, but nothing moved. There was no one there. Both me and my dog yelped and made a run for it. I learned how fast I could levitate into a house that night.
I never really believed in ghosts until my GF took me to this old slave quarters shack in very rural GA. She’s told me a lot about it, what’s happened to her there, I figured she was just over embellishing and that there was a very coincidental/logical reason (not being a dick about it, I mostly just thought that in my head). This shack was also right across from the main house, where the only person was this creepy woman with long hair who lived by herself and was a straight up shut in who died in 2013. Pictures were posted of that house, and the shape was absolutely horrendous. It looked like it had been abandoned for 20 years when they were taken a year afterwards trying to sell the land. There was a children’s graveyard next to all that. Nah, I got out of the car and stared at the decrepit building. There was a wire fence you had to hop. Was dead quiet out, middle of January. Out of nowhere I heard footsteps crunching leaves that began getting louder. Turned around and hopped back in my car faster than I ever thought possible. Don’t know if someone was out there, was an animal or what, but definitely one of the creepiest things I’ve ever heard. Haven’t been back.
I love this character arc for you: 1. Doesn't believe in supernatural things, must be logical explanations 2. Go to creepy house, hear footsteps 3. Nevermind, the Devil is real (speeds away)
The tripods from War of the Worlds. But not the horn, the walking/engine sound. There's this pulsing mechanical whir that never ceases to send chills down my spine.
An elephant rumbling. It's so deep and low pitched that you less *hear* it and more *feel* it, like it's vibrating you from the inside out. The keeper at the elephant sanctuary we visited says it was their equivalent of a greeting and the elephant did seem pretty calm, but still the noise was kind of unsettling.
Sitting have a glass of wine on one of the large terraces of a big villa we rented in Southern Spain. Just 4 of us quietly chatting. The villa was in a gated community on a hill with no neighbours. We heard a manic, evil, mocking male laugh. Loud. Just once. Coming from one large part of the garden that was in darkness. It was spine tingling. It was the stuff of nightmares and I still vividly remember it after 12years.
The sound of a mother being told her kids didn't survive, car crash I think, I was in emergency care with my dad after he had had a seizure, not the type of wail you forget easily. It's that, or Cheyne Stokes respiration/death rattles.
The sound of my tent burning. We took a field trip to a summer camp type place. Some of the kids thought it would be funny if I burned to death I guess, cause they lit my tent on fire. I got out completely fine, but what if I didn't wake up?
You are lucky that tent didn’t collapse and the burning material stuck to your skin. Fuckers need a whooping. That’s horrid.
Yeah I woke up pretty fast but there's so many ways that could have been so much worse. What if my zipper was stuck on sleeping bag, or my tent door? What if I just slept through it completely, or what if I woke up later than I did? What if I couldn't find my way out through the smoke, or the fire spread to the tent door before I could get out? So many ways that could've gone so bad.
I typically oppose hurting kids but they need a personalized fire safety lesson.
Oh my God, did anything happen to the kids or did they essentially just get away with it
[Wedge-tailed Shearwater, sounds like babies crying](https://youtu.be/xJg9RQJZwrI?si=IBK-C_Mb1PuMpOF7) heard these when i was a teen in hawaii. I was scared shitless because the locals told us it was the souls of babies thrown off the cliff crying
Not me, but my husband. He was working security at an empty, decommissioned industrial plant. There were high metal gantreys and walkways overhead and not a lot of lights up there. At night, the walkways would creak and thump like people were walking along them. If the wind picked up, the wires would move and it would sound like people were talking up there. He called it the haunted plant and was very happy to leave that job.
You know those kids toys in the 90's? Cylindrical shaped and hollow with the top open. Came with slime. Playing with the slime was fun. But putting it back in the plastic toy cylinder made a funny farting noise. You know what else makes that exact same noise? Hearing a transmission slip out of place and crush a man's chest cavity while he's underneath it. Exact same sound.
Well shit. This is the only one in the whole thread that made me put my phone down and put myself back together. 😬
A rocket flying overhead about 3 seconds prior to it exploding, I cannot explain the sound but it was like a whistling buzz. I’ve only ever heard it again on a Ukrainian combat video, creepy af.
I downloaded a sleep tracking app that records sounds. The next day, I went to play back the recording and, between some snoring, there was (clear as day) the sound of a baby crying. I do not have children and I live alone.
Imagine writing that app and then putting in a 0.01% chance of inserting random creepy sounds into the recordings.
Silence is creepier than any sound. It's the anticipation that makes it creepy.
The scratching noise of some unknown small animal that got into my bedroom walls. I could hear moving around at night. The sound kept me from sleeping and nearly drove me insane.
The tornado sirens in Chicago. I believe they recently changed to something less creepy sounding .
That’s the one I was going to post too. That is the most dystopian sounding thing I can imagine. [https://youtu.be/LnkMSmLc6mM](https://youtu.be/LnkMSmLc6mM)
Agonal/ineffective breathing, it's a wet whoopee cushion like sound that humans make as their lungs are no longer effectively exchanging air. I've heard three times in my life (Once as a medical response, once as a 911 dispatcher, and once as my dad died from SARS/covid.)
While exploring an old gold/silver mining shaft in Arizona with my uncle we inadvertently stumbled into a rattlesnake den and one started to rattle and then another and another and so on until it sounded like about 10,000,000 rattlesnakes were going full blast. I was sure I was about to die but luckily we both got out without even seeing them
A ‘90s furby (also known as satan’s apprentice) activating in a toy box, in a closet in the middle of the night
A pair of coyotes in the desert throwing their voices to make it seem like they were a whole pack of coyotes or something. Very freaky to hear that in the middle of nowhere while backpacking.
Was home alone and a violent storm came out of nowhere. Suddenly, the kitchen light dimmed and the wind sounded like an old train whistle. I remembered this possibly being the sound of an oncoming tornado. I ran into our small bathroom under the stairs, shut the door and crouched down into a corner wall covering my head with my arms. It passed almost as quickly as it came up. Looked outside and trees were literally snapped and ripped from the ground at my neighbors houses. Heard later that a tornado had passed in my area less than a mile away - causing a lot of damage to rooftops and downing many trees and tree limbs.
This was when my dog was still a puppy and we had to let him out in the middle of the night. Cops showed to my neighbors house due to the silent alarm from security company. The neighbors were heavy sleepers and didn't answer the door so the cops knocked down the door and shot the neighbors dogs. The shot followed by the yelp cry from the dog kept me sleepless for a long time. My pup would not go to the back yard for a week.
Leave it to the cops to go shoot someones dog because they didnt answer the door
this is so sad and seems like a gross overreaction from the cops.
A high pitched giggle in a long empty hallway. It echoed on the walls
Barn owl while walking in woods at night alone, especially when you have no idea what a barn owl sounds like.
Had to run 3 miles but I didn’t want to run 1.5 miles one way and back so I had my brother drop me off 3 miles away from home. I guess I never thought about it but being in the middle of the woods at night, everything is absolutely pitch black. He asked me if I was sure and while I was bit nervous but I said yeah he drove off. It was completely pitch black but I was only 3 miles away so I shook it off not even 20 secs later I heard the loudest most blood curdling scream I’ve ever heard come from the woods , I felt the adrenaline rush me immediately and thought I was in danger. It sounded like a women , It was so loud I thought it was closer than it was. I couldn’t see a thing so I was in a panic , I didn’t know if I should turn my phone flashlight on or not. In the moment I just decided to run, I still remember the run because I was running what to me was so fast but I didn’t even feel any tiredness or nothing. The adrenaline pushed me , I ran what felt like a marathon but according to my watch it was only a mile . When I got to a point here my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I called my brother to come get me and I explained what happened. When he got to me we had a debate for like 30 minutes to see if we should go check it out. We did and we went to where I the noise came from , we couldn’t see anything from the edge of the woods so we decided to leave . On Apple Maps and Google maps when you zoom into that area you see a cabin in the directions the scream came from and I always wondered if they’re linked. To this day I still wanna go check it out but I think it’s private property.
Mountain Lion or Coyote.
Don't care what the noise is, any time there is a sound that causes my dog to sit up and stare in a direction freaks me the fuck out
My siblings and I couldn’t afford fireworks so we decided to go to the biggest hill in town, it’s got a lot of trees and bushes and it was nighttime. Anyway, towards the end of the night when the fireworks were starting to calm down my sister went over to some bushes because she heard a sound, apparently it was a cougar and it stalked us all the way down the hill, that rustling in the bushes is the scariest noise I’ve heard to this day.
Camping with my dad as a kind and while he's snoring away I'm listening to multiple footsteps walking all around our tent I think they were coyotes or wolves.
The absolute silence of a mountain lion. Either that or my child who doesn't speak Spanish speaking Spanish in her sleep at like 2 in the morning in a fucked up, old lady voice.
Sesame Street put out a set of light activated dolls. Big bird said “peek a boo” whenever it went from light to dark. After about the tenth time of Big Bird giving me a stroke when I went to check on my daughter, I threw him in the basement. About 6 months later I have to go in the creepy ass basement at night to get something. I pull the cord on the old fashioned hanging light bulb and I hear “peeeeekkaaaaaaabooooo” all slow and strangly because the batteries are dying. I ran out a side door and halfway down a hill before I realized I’d abandoned my wife and daughter to an axe murderer. By that point I finally remembered what it was. I went in and kicked the shit out of Big Bird to get my manhood back. To make it worse my wife had seen me running down the hill and wouldn’t quit until I told her why. Let’s just say she was disappointed in me.
Koalas fucking
Owls can be pretty creepy if you don't know what's making the sound
Standing outside at my grandpa's farm in the middle of winter in northern South Dakota just after a frost, the air still thick with fog: the sound you hear? Absolutely nothing. Complete and utter silence, with visibility and normally goes on for miles, but reads like the abyss in the fog, and trees blanched with frost. That was the moment I realized how insanely alone one can be.
My Maine Coon will babble like a deaf toddler when she encounters other cats through the window. Really freaky at 3 am.
An ex-girlfriend was sleeping downstairs in my shared house after a party. She'd been a bit weird all night, and when I went upstairs I, intuition tingling, moved my writing desk in front of my room door. My ex was the only person downstairs after the party was over - this is significant. Sure enough, just after I'd dozed off I was awoken by a "thump" as my room door was tried. Someone had waited until they thought I was asleep and partially opened it and it had banged against my writing desk. That wasn't the creepiest part. The creepiest part was when I called out, alarmed, asking my ex if she was there. She didn't reply, but I clearly heard her slow footsteps going back down our creaking staircase as she tried to pretend she'd never been there and that it wasn't her...
The scariest thing I ever 'heard' wasn't a noise. I don't know how to describe this, and maybe some of you aren't going to believe or understand what I mean, but I promise this was a real phenomenon that I experienced. I moved to Taiwan in October of 2022 and had the first earthquake experience of my life. This was a small one and nothing very serious. First, I didn't realize what was happening, I thought maybe I was just dizzy. I was sitting at my desk in my apartment, and everything started swaying left to right. It took me a good 5 seconds to comprehend that it was a minor earthquake. The shaking and swaying didn't scare me at all. What terrified me to my core was the silent scream being directly transmitted into my brain. I could *hear* the Earth telepathically shouting at me, "DANGER DANGER DANGER!!!!" I can only assume that it activated some primal sense from a prehistoric time. The way prey animals know things are coming ahead of time, I really felt this. Imagine a giant with his mouth open, but no sound coming out, and yet his immense and horrifying scream is still heard in your mind. Really freaked me the fuck out.
I live somewhere where earthquakes are... not unheard of *technically* but always so minor they're just a blip on a seismograph. First and only time I've ever felt shaking was pretty much how you described it, except there was also a very tangible deep rumble that I can really only describe as being unsettling in a bizarre, almost eldritch way. It's like it made the entirety of my brain go "This is *incorrect*." at the same time.
Peacocks.
I can't wait to describe this online.. So since I was 9 I had hallucinations. Sounds, and figures of people. One night (like 2AM) I woke up. I was going back to sleep and I heard a GROWN MAN LAUGHING. Mind you, my dad doesn't sleep at home much. So I know damn well it wasn't him. When I tell you I was terrified, I mean it.
I was upstairs l, laying in bed and trying to get to sleep and I heard my dad cough downstairs, he had a distinctive cough due to his smoking, this was in 2009 and he does in 2006
Someone dying in their sleep because they can't breathe. Somehow he made it and is still alive today, but it'll be a long time before I don't remember the wheezing.
Getting woken up while camping to what sounded like a woman screaming. Friend said it was a mountain lion. It sounded close by too. Eventually fell back asleep
When I was in nursing school we did an OB rotation. Got to be in the operating room for a couple C-sections. I did not realize that once they cut you open enough the surgeons basically yank the stomach apart until its open enough to pull the baby out. I will never forget that sound. Flesh just ripping apart.
I was doing a reno in a hospital. We were in the cancer area of the hospital. We were working away when i heard the worst crying wailing. It was out of a horror movie kind of wailing. I found out later on that a child had passed away from cancer under 10 years old and the wailing was a mother's grief. I will.never forget that sound as long as I live
I'm from Philadelphia and was never into hunting or camping. I joined the military at 18 was was sent to the desert outside El Paso. One night I was on guard duty all by myself. It was pitch black and I couldn't see anything but thousands of stars. As I was admiring the stars, a pack of coyotes silently snuck up behind me. Then all at once they began to bay and howl to each other. They were so close to me on all sides but I couldn't see them at all. I could just hear the yipes, howls, and random localization surrounding me. As a city boy, I was entirely unprepared. I whiteknuckled it all night long. It was the most fear I had ever felt. As my years in the military progressed I learned that coyotes are loud and harmless....but holy shit....it was the stuff of nightmares for 18 year old me.
irl? the sound of my dogs nails skittering across the floor when i drop food, knowing i have maby 2 seconds to grab whatever i dropped before the beast inhales it. online? death rattle i think it’s called?