Haunting Ghost Stories We Dare You to Read

May 22, 2017

Ready for some scary ghost stories that will keep you up tonight?

Then look no further than these ghastly, goosebump-worthy tales. Believe it or not, these haunting stories have been experienced by real people, all around the world.

Those who are skeptical as to the existence of ghosts may struggle to come up with an alternative explanation for these creepy occurrences.

Read on … if you dare!

1. Calls from the Other Side – The Ghost Screams

Some of the scariest ghost stories do not require an apparition in order to be creepy.

A few years ago, a young man’s brother began getting a series of strange phone calls around three in the morning. At first, the calls were sporadic, but then they began to occur every morning.

Each time the brother would answer his phone, there was a high-pitched noise on the other end of the line. He described it as an eerie mixture of static and wailing screams.

Perturbed, the brother changed his cell phone number and the calls stopped coming in.

After a month of daily calls, the brother had one week of peace before the calls started up again.

Despite having changed his number, the calls always started at three, and included the same hair raising screams.

Finally fed up, the brother decided to redial the number, thinking that one of his friends may have been playing an elaborate prank on him.

To his surprise, an elderly man answered. When the brother confronted him about the calls, the man had no idea what he was talking about.

The brother hung up, and the calls kept coming in. Thinking the problem had something to do with the phone company, the brother ended his contract prematurely, started with a new carrier, got a new number, and a new phone, just for good measure.

But the creepy screaming calls persisted. The young man’s brother went to bed terrified each night. Once, he decided to redial the number again, and got a different person instead of the elderly man he was expecting.

Shortly after he started his new contract, the brother lost his job, and couldn’t afford to pay his phone bill.

As a result, his contract was cancelled by the phone company. While he was upset that he had lost his job, the brother was relieved to no longer have a cell phone. The calls stopped coming in.

Not long after, the young man’s mother pulls him into the kitchen to listen to a strange message on the answering machine. It was the same static screaming.

The brother walked in and immediately began to freak out. He redialed the number one last time, but an automated message came on, saying the number had been disconnected.

No one in the family ever got another ghostly phone call again.

2. Last Goodbye – The Many Faces of Papa

Sometimes, the scariest ghost stories deal with people we once knew.

A man’s grandfather died not long after the man’s son had turned a year old. The man’s grandfather was invited to family dinner every Friday night, so he got to know his great-grandson very well.

Often the grandfather, whom the baby would refer to as ‘Papa’, would make silly faces at the man’s son, when nobody was looking. It was clear they were both very fond of each other.

A couple of nights after the funeral, the man was woken up by his son, who was crawling into bed with him and his wife. The man began to drift back to sleep when his son started giggling uncontrollably.

The man drifted off once more, but woke up again to his son’s laughing, this time emanating from down the hall.

Concerned, the man walked into the living room and found his son sitting in the center of the floor, laughing merrily.

The man crouched down beside his son. “Hey buddy, what are you doing?” he asked softly, to which his son replied, “Papa funny!” Feeling oddly nervous, the man picked his son up and walked down the hall, back towards the bedrooms.

As the man started walking, his son shifted around to look back toward the living room. “Bye Papa!” he called out and blew the empty room a kiss.

3. A Deadly Encounter – The Man with the Top Hat

This tale involves a man and his younger brother.

When the two boys were young, they shared a bedroom. There was a significant age gap between the two, but the young brother had been born with a plethora of health issues, including multiple sclerosis.

When the boys’ parents were told their youngest son would be confined to a wheelchair, they asked their oldest son if they could look after him during the night.

One night, the older brother happened to wake up and glance over at his younger brother’s crib.

His attention, however, was immediately diverted to a strange-looking man, peering at his brother through the bedroom window.

The man had a large black top hat on and wore a strange expression. Everything about the strange man scared the older brother, and he immediately jumped out of bed and ran to wake up his parents.

When the older brother and his parents returned to the bedroom, the man with the top hat was nowhere in sight.

Their youngest son, however, was in the middle of having a seizure in his crib. The family rushed to the hospital, and the boy’s younger brother turned out to be alright.

To this day, many of his relatives believe the man with the top hat was his younger brother’s guardian angel, but the man heartily disagrees.

He is certain that the strange man in the window had been death itself, in search of his ill brother. He is still freaked out by the encounter to this day.

4. Feeling Lucky – The Man in the Canoe

During spring break of 2010, an Arkansas college student named Garrett decided to go camping with his buddies.

There was a small island on a local lake, and they all thought it was the perfect place to camp out, swim, and drink their weight in beer.

Shortly after sunset on their first night, the guys notice a man drifting around their island in a canoe. The man asks how the group is doing, and they invite him over to eat hotdogs and partake of their beer.

The man steered the canoe up onto the shore and introduced himself as Curt. Garrett found Curt to be friendly, but also inexplicably sad.

When one of the group members asked him if everything was alright, Curt waved them off. “My friends are probably worried about me, that’s all,” he replied. Then he turned to look at Garrett and winked. “They’ll find out soon enough,” he added softly.

The group ate and drank plenty of beer, including Curt. It quickly grew late, and the college students offered for Curt to stay with them for the night. But Curt quickly declined the offer.

He told them he needed to get where he was going, and he refused to consider any other options. Garrett glanced at the jet skis they had been using earlier that day and thought they could offer him a ride.

“Where are you headed?” he asked Curt. The stranger ignored this question and glanced at all the young men around him.

“You boys don’t know how lucky you are,” he murmured. Then he got into his canoe and paddled away.

Garrett and his friends woke up early the following morning. As they started to fish down by the shore, a police boat pulls up.

The officer leaned over the side of the boat and asked if they were the ones that had found the body during the search party. When it was clear that the guys didn’t know what he was talking about, the officer tells them that a man in a canoe had disappeared a week prior.

A couple of divers had found the man’s body at the bottom of the lake two days before. When Garrett and his friends asked the officer if the man had been identified, the police officer told them that the dead man’s name was Curt Clark.

The boys were so creeped out by the officer’s inadvertent scary ghost stories, they cancelled the rest of their trip.

5. The Boy in the Bed – One of the Most Unconventional and Scary Ghost Stories

For some people, scary ghost stories involve their own children.

Such was the case for one man and his family when they moved into a new house in 2002. The man’s wife was at work, and his oldest son was at school, but he had stayed home to unpack and take care of their youngest boy, who was sick.

The dad went about the house unpacking boxes while his youngest son slept in his bedroom. One box had his old Polaroid camera in it, which gave him the idea to sneak into his son’s room and take a picture of him while he was sleeping.

Once he opens the door to the bedroom, he sees that his youngest son is curled up, with his face pressed near the bedroom window over his bed.

The dad takes a picture and then quietly shuts the door behind him, careful not to disturb his son.

He watched as the picture slowly developed in his hand, but was distracted when his son emerged from the bathroom across the hallway. There was no way his son could have slipped past him in the hallway in order to get to the bathroom.

Shocked, the man yanked the door open to his son’s bedroom, but he found the bed empty. Nobody was there.

After the man ushered his sick son back to bed, he stepped into the hallway again and examined the fully developed picture.

The image should have been of his youngest son, his hand curled up by his head as he slept near the window. Instead, the picture showed an unknown little boy, his face turned towards the camera.

The lower half of his face was blurry and drenched in a strange red substance.

Profound Memories

Sometimes ghosts can be friendly… Other times they are anything but.

Regardless, encountering a spirit can be both a terrifying and exhilarating experience.

These are some of the scariest ghost stories and everyone in these encounters have lived to tell their story.

But you can bet that their lives, and how they view “the other side” will never be the same again.

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