Night Owls Describe The Scariest Things That Happened While Everyone Else Was Asleep

From Redditor /u/apurplepeep:

I was a babysitter in my teens, and would often stay up until parents came home, which was usually from around 11 pm even up to 4 am. I'd stay up and watch TV, and oftentimes that'd be local channels, which get f*cking weird in the tiny hours... they'd basically put interstitial things in [instead of commercials], bits of music videos or weird local access sh*t.

Now, the strongest channel was channel 8, and so if your tuner was sh*tty, you'd pick up "ghosts" of it on channels 9 and 7, though thankfully channel 7 never had much on it, and 9 was the same as 10, so you'd never really notice or have to worry about it. I learned channel 9 wasn't just 10 stretched across two frequencies but [was] actually a mirror of it, so that 9 would go "offline" at about midnight, while 10 kept airing.

So one night, the kids are in bed, I'm sitting in the living room quietly watching whatever is on channel 9, and the program finally ends. But instead of it just cutting to black or loud beeping on a blue background like the higher channels did when they went offline, it cut to fuzz... but superimposed onto this fuzz was a skeletal face that kept shaking, back and forth, like a "no" gesture. There was no audio, just the face as it shook back and forth with no noise.

It was frightening, and so I scrambled to the TV to change it back to literally any other channel, and by sheer bad luck, I chose to click it down to 8... Something had glitched on channel 8's broadcast, wherein a woman with her hair pulled back and very heavy, smoky makeup was being interviewed, but the footage was looping about four frames, over and over and over, going "and, and, and, and, and, and-" in the middle of her turning her head. She wasn't a skeleton, she just had an expression showing her teeth and such heavy makeup that the ghost of it on channel 9 made her look like a skeletal face. Though, seeing it, it was still f*cking horrifying in a way I can't explain...

Then the channel I was on let out a loud, piercing beep... and ALL the power went off. The TV blinked off, the kitchen lights turned off, everything, even the clocks and the microwave, the fridge, everything. You could hear the electricity dissipate in a "whheewww..." noise as it all [went] down. The house had very big windows, so as soon as my vision adjusted I realized that the power was completely gone for miles around, no street lights, no cars, absolutely nothing...

The power was entirely off for another hour, [until] I saw lights from the parents' car [turning into] the driveway, [which was] the first artificial light I had seen for an entire f*cking hour. They came in and were glad everyone was okay... there had been a fire at the power station that incidentally was right beside the broadcasting station.

From Redditor /u/Pennyponyboy:

Got a house share going on right now, and every one of the lads has heard a female voice in a particular hall. Thing is, [none of] us has brought a girl home in months... We have all just assumed one of us got lucky. We've taken the cats to bed, so it can't be them... And our neighbours don't get back [until] January.

We are not as afraid of her as we once were, but there is definitely a voice coming from somewhere in the house... And we can all agree she starts by humming, although no one has made out many of the words. I've heard her four times now, and I am 90% sure she is not speaking Portuguese, English, or Spanish.

From Redditor /u/Beeboopdedoop:

I was sitting in the living room facing the stairs to my bedroom. I was watching a movie and saw legs coming down the stairs with black suit pants and really shiny black shoes. They stopped coming down the stairs, and all I could see was up to their knees. They turned toward me for a few seconds and then slowly went back up the stairs. I was home alone with my three dogs.

The next morning, [I] checked the cameras to make sure I didn't dream it, and you can see me and my three dogs staring at the stairs as the legs come down the stairs and then go back up.

From Redditor /u/HeckingWeeb:

"Will you please take this bag off my head?" says a voice in the corner of my room at about 2 am. I am alone on the third floor of my grandmother's mansion, save for her asleep on the first floor. In the corner of my room, I know there is a ventriloquist dummy in a bag that I covered because of how creepy it looks. I just went back to bed.

From a Redditor: 

Back in high school, I was watching a movie on the couch with my dad's laptop. Parents, little brother, and dog [were] asleep. Then there was this noise. It was so f*cking loud. It sounded like someone threw a chair against a wall in the basement. No one woke up. I grabbed a bat, went downstairs, and not a single thing was out of place. Spooked me good.

From Redditor /u/Activated27:

I used to share a room with my little sister. It was a huge room, and it was really dark and late, like 2 am. At some point, I hear someone clap their hands just once. I froze but didn’t do anything. Then all of a sudden, I feel two hands pushing down [on] my feet.

I ran out of the room all the way to my parents' room downstairs. We came back, and my sister was sleeping (she wouldn’t have done that, anyways), and there was nobody in the room but us. I still can’t comprehend.