1. Late evening maybe a decade ago, I ended up running silent to a call with additional units in tow. The caller reported hearing “footsteps” on her second floor when she was in the kitchen. She lived alone, middle aged, divorced, no kids, and had no expected company. She is outside across the street when we arrive, obviously unnerved and being calmed by her neighbor. Other units showed up almost as I did and set up a perimeter at the corners of the property. We talk with her, get permission to enter, so we decide we’ll announce ourselves and clear the house. Three of us stack up on the front door, announce and make entry while the other officers are viewing the windows from a distance under concealment. She was in the midst of making a really late dinner so the house smells really good. I remember how good it smelled. Anyway, we clear the ground level and make our way to the stairs when we hear it. Obviously footsteps on the wood floors above us. Not a panicky “oh shit I’m caught footsteps” and running to hide or escape, no, these were calm, methodic, and almost pace like. We announce ourselves again and no response, except the pacing just starts to sorta fade away. Quietly I make my way up the steps, adrenaline pumping, and concentrating on the corner at the top. I stop a few stairs shy of the corner, breathe, and proceed up. The hallway at the top was pitch black and after successfully clearing the top/ corner we make our way down the hallway clearing rooms. Nothing. Nobody. Not even a critter. Not that any critter would ever make what I describe as human footsteps on hardwood. After the initial search, a few of the other officers involved also checked every nook and cranny, bed, closet, rack, hell, even the washer, dryer, appliances and cupboards were thoroughly searched. Nothing was out of order. Nobody was hiding anywhere.

Eventually we invite the lady back into her residence and reassure her that there was nobody in there and we equated her noise to maybe wood shrinkage or expansion in the home.

None of the officers outside and after our initial search had seen anybody leave the top or bottom floors or windows. The house had no indications that anybody tried to force open a window or door.

I stayed behind for about 30 minutes once the other officers cleared the call and waited while her friend showed up to stay the night with her. I went over basic security measures with her and double checked all her windows and doors were not compromised. She fed me well done lasagna as I waited, and to this day, I’m convinced that I interacted with another dimension of life that day.

2. Mine was an old Cherokee lady who would set legit Cherokee snares and booby traps around her house for the spirits coming after her. I was talking to her in her bedroom about the children who come through the walls. I was like what children? She pointed next to me and said, “There’s one right there.” Gave me a massive hit of the willies.

3. Military policeman in the marine corps. While stationed at Camp Lejeune a dispatcher got a call from a terrified wife that kids were trying to get into her house (it was a little after midnight) we thought this was just a drunken spouse call and responded not on high alert just kinda wanted to make sure the lady was alright we knock on the door and announce ourselves. The woman is obviously shaken still with puffy eyes. She tells us “4 children with red eyes rang her doorbell and asked to come inside and when she refused they got angry” the kids terrorized her for the 5 minutes (Her own child was put to bed and her husband was deployed) I decide to do a once over of the whole housing property and it was a whole lotta nothin going on. My partner and I decide to do a little walking patrol of that housing area. In each housing area there’s usually a decent size playground as we were walking up to it we both see some kids swinging (curfew is 8 pm for young children unless accompanied by an adult on base) I’m fucking spooked at this point and I know my partner is too. They look over at us and just stare. We started backtracking and then turned and didn’t look back didn’t talk about it the rest of the night either. Later on I looked up the incident online since Lejeune is famous for lots of paranormal activity and turns out the little red eyed kids have been reported before.

4. About 4 years ago, a lady who I’ll call Lucy, called our non-emergency line and said she locked herself out of her house. I responded to take the report in case FD needed to force entry.

I arrived first and immediately noticed a burning candle and some “jesusy” statues in the upstairs window. The light in this room was also on. I can’t explain it, but it seemed a bit odd to me.

Anyways, I approached Lucy who appeared to be about 65 years old, and asked what happened. She said she walked to her car to get groceries for her and her mother but forgot her keys inside and the door had locked behind her. I asked if her mother was home and Lucy replied in the affirmative. Lucy went on to say she technically lived alone because her mom died 6 years prior but she still “lives” with her in the bedroom with the lit candle and makes her presence known by turning on/off lights, opening/closing doors, and turning on the bathroom faucet.

I then walked the perimeter of the home and found an unlocked window into the kitchen. Since Lucy never actually left home and knew no one else was inside, I radioed dispatch and climbed in through the window with her consent.

As my boot touched the kitchen floor, I heard an audible click. At the same time, the lights in the stairway and upstairs hallway to my left turned off. I quickly walked to the rear sliding door to my right and advised Lucy what had happened. Lucy laughed and said that was just her mom saying hello. I told Lucy that although I genuinely believe what she told me was true, I still had to do my due diligence and ensure no one else was inside. I radioed for a back and within minutes my buddy arrived. The first thing he asked about was the lit candle in the window.

While clearing the upstairs, we came upon the room where the candle was and immediately noticed it was blown out. There were no open windows, fans, vents, or other obvious source that could’ve extinguished the flame. We just looked at each other with a bit of unease and went back downstairs to leave. click the upstairs lights turned off behind us. We talked to Lucy for another 5 minutes and suggested getting a battery operated candle just to be safe….

Well Lucy clearly thought “fuck the police” because to this day, that candle burns in the open window most nights when I drive by. And every now and then I’ll stop and talk to Lucy to see how she and her mother are doing.

5. I worked at the Naval Hospital in Camp Pendleton in 2013, I was part of the transition team that moved the last of the belongings (that they wanted) from their old location to their new one. Along with others on my team, we were part of the final “sweep” as far as cleaning up, waxing the floors and locking up some of the higher level rooms within the old hospital. It was a nice gig because there was a ton of office supplies that was going to just get thrown away along with some office chairs. I like to draw so I took home two chairs (one for me and one for my roommate) along with a plethora of pens and paper. In my duty section there was also the security role of watching over the barracks that was just outside of the hospital. With the navy, being the navy, they didn’t transfer anyone over to the new barracks till about a full 8 months after the move to the new hospital. So someone still had to stand duty there as well as patrol the old hospital as to keep away any would be vandals from a place they thought was completely abandoned. Of course I would end up getting duty one day and would start getting people coming into the commons area telling to go look at the hospital. There was very clearly a light on in 6th or 7th floor with a figure standing motionless watching outside. I put up a sign to say that I would be leaving the office and to call my personal number should they need anything. (Usually it was just to reset their key cards, but each room had 4 rooms within it so usually people just called their roommates to open the doors instead of waiting for the process of me resetting their key card.) it was already pretty late at night so I wasn’t worried about it. I would go to the hospital and it was still completely locked all around. I checked to make sure that no windows were ajar but the hospital didn’t have any that opened. I even tried to lift the back hatch that linens and new supplies came through by truck and that was still secured. I had no other way of getting in myself so when my chief came down around 2am (as they seldomly did but were required to at least once a night) I made a report of it. By this time the figure was gone but the light remained on. I was never told if they ever found anyone or if it was even followed up on for that matter. But it was one of the creepiest things I remember from being there.

6. A few weeks ago I’d gotten dispatched to a 911 call that involved a female frantically screaming at the dispatcher “she’s going to kill me, she’s going to kill me! Come quick I’m at [address of where she was at]!”

Naturally, every unit within range of my sector and myself had radioed in a response and we were all hauling ass to get there. Once we got there we discovered the house was abandoned for some years now and so we set a cordon around with officers watching all exits, as my shift partner, myself and a female officer announced ourselves and made entry into the residence.

We cleared all of the first floor and proceeded to the second and as soon as we got to the top of the stairs a slight movement spooked us and me and my partner immediately raised our weapons into a room where there was only a noose. Both he and I thought we saw a body on it at first glance, there was nothing there. We cleared the rest of the second floor and took a closer look at the noose, some dried up blood and what i think was peeled off skin on it from an earlier suicide that occurred over a dozen years ago, we thought it might’ve been recent, but we didn’t know at the time.

Anyways, immediately after we cleared the house we determined that it was way too dead, for lack of a better word, to have been used recently however we called in some detectives. But before we all stepped out, we all agreed we didn’t see what just happened. Reason why is my Service has a policy on what could be constituted as “paranormal instances”, where the second something like that happens you are immediately suspended from duty, and give in your badge, your gun, your duty belt and your vest. Before being taken on the spot to a psychiatrist/psychologist, for a full comprehensive evaluation. Needless to say I immediately called my supervisor at the end of shift and told him about it and did the right thing by going in for evaluation. Something to be said about integrity.

I’ve driven past that house multiple times in the past weeks and I’ve always sunk deeper into my seat as I’ve driven past. Something about it, it’s like you could actually feel there was something off about it. City seems to agree with me, as of 3 days ago the house is the #1 demolition priority in my sector and will be down by the end of the month. I’m just not happy that I’m going to have to go back inside next week to collect anything that might be of interest to both the city and my superiors. Luckily I won’t be going in alone.

Also, the female who called in the 911 call was charged for Public Mischief under the pretext of misuse of 911 and misleading Peace Officers.

7. There is this abandoned day care that we have to patrol… VERY spooky. Temperature is different in each room. Sounds can be heard. Toys found in the roof panels… Sometimes those toys are seen moved from the roof to the floor in the rooms. Some rooms have more pressure than others like being at the bottom of a swimming pool. When you step inside all you want to do is leave… Some said a child died at that daycare…

8. So me and another guard became pretty good friends and would often talk to each other over the phone and earpiece for most of the night while patrolling. One time he found a door to the basement of the oldest building in our state or city or something like that, and the basement was also infamously haunted. Now he hadn’t said anything about what he was doing other than which building he was at, and we had been silent for a few minutes when I heard over the phone the word “door” being whispered/hissed in a drawn out way with an audible inhale/exhale at the end. At first I thought it was him and asked him to repeat himself and he was confused and said that he hadn’t said anything. I didn’t want to freak him out so I didn’t say anything until after he’d left the building about what I’d heard, he was pretty freaked out by it and it would have been very out of character for him to have done that to fuck with me.

Another one that was most likely just a weird coincidence, we were transporting a psych patient from an ER to a psyche facility who was completely fucked out of his mind, mostly unaware of everything around him, and verbal but not making any sense, and in an almost sleepwalking headspace from appearances. The nurses had doped him up but said he’d been in the same mental state just more agitated beforehand, the antipsychotics had only really calmed him down. The first thing he does after loading him in the vehicle and me sitting down next to him was turn to me, appearing suddenly lucid, and saying conversationally, “Well you look like you’re ready to bury another dog.” The morning of I’d found my dog passed away in her sleep and had buried her. After looking at me expectantly for a few moments while I was a little confused and shocked the appearance of lucidity on his face and eyes slowly faded away before he turned back to mumbling and rocking back and forth and trying to eat the bag of chips the nurses sent with him. Not the chips out of the bag, mind you, but the bag of chips.

My least favorite building to patrol at night very often would have doors unlocked on my second and third patrols, after I’d found them locked beforehand, many times bay doors which required a latch to be lifted from the inside would be unlocked. The building had alarms attached to every door, that I’d have to disarm every time I opened one of the doors, so they worked. The building owners were not concerned in the least and simply said that the doors did that, and that’s why they hired us to keep them locked. If it had been employees opening one of the entrance doors then I would have been able to see which employee, and at what time they’d been unlocked, which happened occasionally but I’d always been informed to expect that on the nights it occurred. I’d also hear hissing noises, thumping from the roof, and the occasional bay door being shaken, as though by wind, but with none of the bay doors next to it being shaken. That place creeped me the fuck out, the guard before me had quit at two in the morning, after ending a patrol at that site halfway through, a few weeks after getting promoted to lieutenant, driven straight back to the office and left his gear and letter of resignation and refused to return any calls. I had a friend who was good friends with that guard and asked him if he knew what happened, he just said that the guard refused to talk about it.

Another time we were going to pick up a psyche patient from an ER, and when passing the hospital morgue during either late night or early morning, heard loud sobbing coming from in there. We flagged down a nurse and told them, who called the hospital security to come check it out and they found nothing. The hallway the morgue was in had a few other rooms that were all locked and closed, but the sound had seemed to be coming directly from the morgue.

Another sight I would patrol at night was an outdoor theater at the edge of town, a body had been found on an undeveloped part of the grounds and was thought to be a victim of Ted Bundy, as the time and area of death matched up with when Ted Bundy was in the area and active, however it was never proven. This place was creepy as Fuck, and I didn’t even know about the murder until after I’d been working it for awhile. Now I’m very used to being outside at night in a rural area, where there’s no electric lights, but this place had this oppressive darkness that seemed to absorb any light, even on nights with a full moon I had to use a flashlight to be able to see anything, and even my flashlight seemed to have less reach and illumination there, apart from the weird darkness, there was only ever one unexplained incident. It was the first night I was patrolling there, I’d stopped halfway through my patrol to have a smoke break and turned off my flashlight because the battery was running low. After finishing my cigarette I went back to my patrol and turned my flashlight on, and froze. Alarm bells started to go off in my head but I wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t heard or seen anything, but I just had this strong feeling that something was off. Then I realized what it was, my shadow was being cast out in front of me, as though there was a light shining on me from behind. I yelped and jumped around, bringing my hands up, thinking there was somebody behind me but there was nothing, I didn’t see anything that would have cast my shadow that direction, and I didn’t fuck around to see if my shadow would keep on doing that. I turned my light off and returned to my car, using my much dimmer phone light to see because I didn’t want to see my shadow in front of me again lol. I never had that happen again at that property, and later tried to recreate it in the same position with no luck, and other than just being creepy and weirdly dark there were no more incidents that I couldn’t find a rational explanation for at that site, although a mountain lions screams and a guy proposing to his fiancé both about gave me heart attacks there.

9. Three years ago, I was called in to an investigation of a burglary in a cemetery. When the forensics guys and I finally went out there (it was a slow morning), none of the responding deputies had actually gone inside yet. Four deputies and a sergeant were busy “securing the scene” from the outside, because it was still dark out and they didn’t want to go into the dark mausoleum that had been broken into. Apparently they felt much safer with us overweight non-sworn employees around, so we went inside together.

The exterior door to the mausoleum had been forced open, and we started looking around for signs of anything stolen or vandalized. Eventually we did find that one of the grave sites in the mausoleum, almost 15 feet off the ground, had the cement plaque shattered and the coffin was pulled out and left sprawling on the floor. All contents of the coffin were missing, which including the cremated remains of three people, the last one who died in 2004. A person would have had to bring their own ladder to pull this out, or been at least 12-13 feet tall.

According to the forensics guy, it looked like the plaque for the coffin had been shattered from the inside, due to water damage. Still, it seems oddly coincidental that a plaque would simultaneously break on the night of a break-in to the mausoleum. It hadn’t been accessed since 2004, so almost twelve years prior. The people in the grave site had a single living relative. I called them, exchanged pleasantries, and then when I asked about the mausoleum they said “No habla English” and hung up.

It’s probably drug related, somehow, but this is the exactly the kind of thing that would happen at the start of a vampire or zombie apocalypse movie.

10. Had a couple of weird things occur one night, was working night shift in a small town and received a call to the hospital. The call was from the lone security guard on site who didn’t feel comfortable dealing with this on his own, the call was dispatched as urgent assistance. On arrival to the hospital the guard stated to me that nursing staff had heard what they referred to as “Blood curdling screams” coming out of the then closed psychiatric unit (there were no patients or staff in the unit at the time). The door to the unit was a clear glass door and there was nothing visible on the other side, I requested the keys to unlock the door, after turning the key in the door and unlocking the deadbolt, before I was able to remove the keys from the door something had forced the lock and re-locked the door resulting in my hand (still holding the key) to be physically moved as well. I was pretty creeped out myself but based on the severity of the call I still entered the room and conducted a search of the entire unit with no result. Immediately after clearing the unit another call came in but this time it was from a nurse walking to her car on the street, she also heard loud screams. I ran down to the hospital parking lot where another unit met me and we searched the area, I then came across a small park and could hear a very faint squeaking sound, I followed the sound only to come across a swing set of four swings, 3 swings were absolutely still as there was no wind and the other was moving almost as there was someone still sitting in it and pumping to gain momentum. I stood there in awe for a good 30 seconds and the swing did not lose any momentum. What a weird night.

11. Early in my career, the elevators in the older section of CIA Headquarters (known as the Original Headquarters Building or OHB) were known to have quirks (I think they still do). Occasionally, the elevator would stop and the doors would open at a floor with no one there, and no one on the elevator had requested that floor.

I heard second-hand that the “thing to do” when that happened was to say “Good day, Mr. Director,” because it was assumed that the doors opened for the ghost of Allen Dulles. OHB was his project, as many know, but he never was able to move into his office, having been replaced as CIA Director just before it was ready.

12. I am a police officer working on an emergency response team on a busy London borough. We took a call to a suspected domestic incident in a block of flats. The informant said that she could hear screaming and sounds of disturbance coming from the flat above her own.

Once we arrived my colleague and I knocked on the door of the flat the informant said the noise was coming from. I had heard nothing on my way up and certainly couldn’t hear any disturbance coming from the address. To be honest I heard nothing at all. After knocking twice we had no response. My colleague left me to go downstairs and speak directly to the informant.

I stayed by the door. I knocked again and after some time it was answered by an elderly woman. She had clearly been asleep and was alarmed to see me standing outside. I told her that someone had called saying that they could hear a disturbance coming from within her address. I asked her if there was anyone else inside with her. She looked bemused and told me that she lived alone and had been sleeping. I asked her if I could come in to satisfy myself that no one else was there.

She invited me in and I walked into what was a small 2 bedroom flat. The flat was in darkness apart from her hall light and her bedside lamp. I began searching through the flat. As I approached the final door (the living room) my colleague called me up on the radio. He told me that he was on his way and asked if I was okay. I told him everything was fine wondering why he sounded so flustered. He told me that he was with the informant and could also hear screaming and loud thuds coming from the flat I was in.

I told him that he must be mistaken as I was almost done searching the flat and that I had heard nothing whatsoever. I have to admit a feeling of unease as I opened the final door. Like all the other rooms it was in darkness but was freezing cold. My breath misted immediately. There was no one in the room and no signs of disturbance. No window was open. I called my colleague and asked him to listen out for my footfall. He said he could hear my feet as I stamped them but said that the screaming had stopped. This coincided with me opening the door. I left shortly after apologising to the elderly woman for waking her.

I have no rational explanation for this at all. My colleague and I left feeling very creeped out.