People Describe Terrifying Encounters With Weird Strangers

From a deleted user:

A few years ago, I was visiting my girlfriend who had just moved to New York. 

We had a long, wonderful weekend, but it came to an end. We were on the subway and it finally got to her stop. I was going to stay on the subway to head to the bus station. As my girlfriend gets up, so does a large male passenger. She gets up to the door and he stands right behind her. I wave goodbye as she steps off the train. Then he (the large male passenger) looks at me with a demonic smile, points at my girlfriend's back, and mouths the words, "I'm going to kill her."

I jumped up and try to get to the door, but it's closed by the time I get there. I tried desperately to call the police, but I can't get a signal. At the next stop, I bound through the station to the surface where I called my girlfriend. She was fine but freaked out. I ran the 14 blocks to her place and stayed with her all night rather than going home.

From Redditor /u/jake0818:

I was out hunting in Northern Ontario, with no roads (except for... logging roads) for 130 km. I was late on the bear season so no one was out hunting in my quadrant. I found a nice campsite alongside a river and hunted from there; on the second day of my hunt, I came across the bear tracks. After tracking it for about two hours, I eventually turned back around.

This is when sh*t got very f*ckin' weird. I always track on one side of the tracks and return on the other. About 200 meters down the east side of the tracks, I ran into another human footprint which disappeared across the trail and into the woods on the west. My dog (Czech Wolfdog) didn't seem to smell anything, so I returned to camp with minimal concern.

I got back to camp at around 7:30 at night, made a quick dinner, and had a cigar by the camp. At around 12:00 [am], I heard a snap of a branch. After hunting for 20 years, I know only two things snap branches: bears and humans. I grabbed my firearm and a flashlight and went out after the noise. Every 100 yards, I would scan with the flashlight. My dog freaked, started growling and advancing into the woods slowly. I pulled back on my leash to slow his advance and switched on my flashlight. I saw a pair of eyes looking right back at me; they stared for about five seconds and disappeared into the woods. On the walk back I felt anxious, scared, and uncomfortable, like I could feel someone watching me.

The next night, the same thing happened. My dog went wild, like I have never seen him, whimpering, growling, and clearly very anxious. At this point I was terrified, and I didn't go hunting that day and didn't close my eyes once. That night I sat up with my flashlight, constantly scanning the tree line. I guess I dozed off at around 1 am and woke again at 3 am, sweating, confused, and very scared. I scanned the forest, and just barely visible about 25 yards in the forest there was a man and his dog, looking right back at me. I [started] to approach him, shouting to him. I got within 10 feet - he looked awfully disheveled and [malodorous], but the worst part was that he just stared and smiled; his eyes showed zero emotion, and [he] whispered, "Goodnight."

I ran back to my tent, packed it into my pack and loaded it onto the trailer of the ATV, and drove out of there.

From a deleted user:

I worked at a campground on the nightshift from 12 am to 8 am. I would bring in my PS2 game a good portion of the night, only having to deal with one or two people on busy nights. It was just me in this little 8' x 8' shack, with nothing around but darkness. My first week there, the other third-shift guy who was quitting told me about this payphone a few feet from the shack where I worked. He said it rang every night at 4:17 am, just once. It was probably just an automated test call, he guessed. He's never answered it himself. It was the middle of summer, so most nights I had the windows closed, so I couldn't hear the payphone go off.

Mid-August I started leaving the windows open during the night. Sure enough, at 4:17 am every morning, the phone would ring once. The ring even sounded creepy, like the payphone was submerged in water.

One night I got up the nerve to answer it. I set an alarm at 4:15 [am] and would go wait at the phone until it rang. When it did, I answered it. But there was no sound. Just dead air like someone was on the other line but wasn't answering. I said hello a few times and hung up. I did this every night for a week with the same results. I didn't think anything of it and left it alone after that for about a month. The first week of October, I decided to answer the phone once again. I set my alarm and when the time came, I answered the phone, "Hello? Hello?"

Then I heard what sounded like someone inhaling through clenched teeth. The voice sounded rough and like he had gargled gravel.

He said my complete name. First, middle, and last. It was a voice I'd never heard. My voice caught in my throat and I hung up.

I rattled some change into the payphone and hit *69. The number had come from California, but I was in Indiana.

From Redditor /u/BridgetteBane:

When I was a kid, we'd go to these beach cabins in Maryland, right by the Chesapeake. They were small and rustic with basic comforts and no amenities. There were two bedrooms and a cot in the kitchen, and my siblings and I rotated on the cot.  

A small tradition was that my mom and I would have a hot cup of tea before bed in our summer jammies, which was our way of relaxing while everyone else went off to read or listen to music. One night I was settling on the cot when she picked up the tea kettle to fill it. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her flinch, then say in a steady voice, "What are you doing there?" My head whipped over to the kitchenette to see her looking out the window. Then she jumped back and started screaming for my father.

My dad ran from the back bedroom and saw my mom point towards the left side of the house. He burst out the door. I was 10 years old so I ran under my parents' bed. I still remember the smell of the old wood and the feel of my teddy bear shielding me from whatever the hell was happening. I remember seeing my 14-year-old brother, [who was] then a medium-ranking karate student, following my dad out of the cabin at full-speed.  

My father, a former Army Sergeant and MP with a bronze star, managed to tackle the guy that had been peeping into our kitchen window. He put him in an elbow lock facedown on the ground with my brother standing over both of them, while my mom ran to get the cell phone we'd bought just two weeks earlier.

While my mom called 911, I remember hearing the guy talking. He was saying things like, "The [Ouija] board told me..." and "I want the devil to suck my brains out..." and '"Satan is in cabin 10, I have to get to cabin 10... The devil wants me to kill myself," and so on. We were in cabin three, over half a mile from where he apparently intended to meet the devil.

My dad kept a grip on him for probably a good 15 minutes until the cops showed up. The first thing out of one of the cop's mouth was, "Jamie, when'd they let you out?" Jamie had been released from jail just two weeks earlier for arson, and guess where he was standing when my mom was at the sink in the kitchen? Right beside the cabin's propane tank.

From Redditor /u/ipVolatile:

I used to work for a group home, taking care of kids with autism or developmental problems. The company had multiple group homes, but none of them were within a mile of each other, and they were all in the middle of farm country. Each had a driveway of about half a mile and surrounded by nothing but open countryside. The locations were chosen specifically for this so that if a client were to escape, they would have to run through a wide-open field for quite some time.

One night at about 2 am, I was working the graveyard shift with a co-worker and we noticed some headlights coming down the driveway. We thought it was an administrator coming to check up on us, so we started frantically running around doing our work. Then we realized the headlights hadn't moved. I stepped outside, took a few steps down the driveway and noticed a white van about a quarter of the way down the driveway. It stayed there for about seven or eight minutes, then drove off.

My co-worker and I were kind of baffled and came to the conclusion that the person was just lost and had to stop to look at a map.

Three days later, a serial killer was caught in our area. He was known for picking up women on the exact road our group home was on and he drove a white van.

From Redditor /u/Devon302:

My mother works with... patients [who have a mental illness]. One night at around 9 pm, she told me she had to go to work because there was an emergency. Later, I get a phone call from her. She basically said my name and before she could finish, the phone got pulled away from her. In this high-pitch, creepy voice, one of the patients says, "Devon302 (I assumed she heard my name mentioned by my mom), Devon302? Your mom isn't coming home tonight because I'm going to do something bad to her." Then she hung up.

I started freaking out and my mom didn't call me back until two hours later. The woman ended up getting arrested but quickly released since she has a mental illness. It was creepy as hell and very unnerving.