A curated collection of scary ghost experiences submitted by readers of GhastlyPages — true first-hand encounters, organised by where they happened and how badly they shook the person they happened to. Not fiction. Not folklore. Just what people saw.
Ohio, United States · Terrifying
Reader submission — Anonymous
The house was cheap for the neighbourhood. First week I heard slow, heavy footsteps in the basement while my husband was at work. When I called the landlord he asked — very quickly — if I'd heard anything else. When I said no, he sounded relieved. We moved out three months later, after the footsteps started coming up the stairs.
Ontario, Canada · Unsettling
Reader submission — Leah, 29
The monitor picked up a woman singing to my son. Soft, in a language I didn't recognise. I ran in and he was fast asleep, smiling. No crossed signal — we checked. It happened four more times over three months, always around 4 a.m. My grandmother, when I hummed the melody, said her mother used to sing it to her in Polish.
Yorkshire, England · Terrifying
Reader submission — Hannah, 32
I woke at 3 a.m. to a woman in a grey dress standing at the end of my bed, hands folded, waiting for me to notice her. I closed my eyes to convince myself I was dreaming. When I opened them she was still there — didn't move for a full minute. Then gone. My mother later told me a widow had died in that house in the 1950s. I've slept with a lamp on ever since.
Scottish Highlands · Terrifying
Reader submission — Callum, long-distance driver
Two a.m., single-track road. A man in a dark coat stepped into my headlights. I braked so hard the trailer shifted. No body, no blood, no marks on the road. I sat in the cab twenty minutes shaking. A local at the petrol station said a hiker had died on that stretch in the eighties — and it happens to drivers about once a year.
Warsaw, Poland · Unsettling
Reader submission — Marta, 26
The tap ran for exactly three seconds every evening at seven. A drawer opened by itself every morning. Never violent — just habits, like someone still lived there. A neighbour later told me the previous tenant, an elderly woman, had lived alone in that flat for forty years. Every quirk matched what her family said she used to do.
Cornwall, England · Life-changing
Reader submission — Ellie, 38
At my mother's funeral I photographed the empty church before people arrived — she'd designed the flowers. Later I saw a clear figure in the back pew: a woman in a dark coat sitting in the exact seat my mother had joked years earlier she'd 'sit at the back and watch' from. Nobody had been in the church. I still have the picture. I don't show it to people anymore.
Karachi, Pakistan · Life-changing
Reader submission — Zara, night-shift nurse
Everyone on nights has a story from Ward 4. Mine is a man in a grey shalwar kameez walking the corridor at 2:40 a.m. I said salaam out of habit. He nodded and walked into the last room — a room closed two weeks earlier after a patient died in it. CCTV showed nobody in the corridor at 2:40. Just me, saying salaam to no one.
New South Wales, Australia · Unsettling
Reader submission — Marcus, 44
My two-year-old kept talking about 'the boy' in the hallway — what he wore, that he was sad. We assumed imaginary friend. Then I saw him, one second, standing outside her bedroom door at night. Same clothes she'd described. We had the house blessed. She stopped mentioning him. I've never told her I saw him too.
The scary ghost experiences readers report most often fall into three patterns: a silent figure standing at the foot of the bed at night, footsteps in an empty room that grow closer over days or weeks, and a familiar voice heard through a phone or baby monitor when nobody is speaking. What makes these encounters terrifying isn't aggression — it's how ordinary the surroundings are when they happen.
Every experience on this page was submitted by a reader who says it happened to them. GhastlyPages doesn't independently verify paranormal encounters — we publish them in the submitter's own words, with the location and rough date. Treat them the way you'd treat any first-hand ghost story: as one person's honest account of something they cannot explain.
Most reported ghost encounters cluster between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. — a window sometimes called the witching hour. Sleep researchers point to a natural spike in REM activity, sleep paralysis, and hypnopompic hallucinations during that window. Believers argue the veil between worlds is thinnest then. Both explanations agree your senses are unusually vulnerable at 3 a.m., whatever the cause.
Yes. GhastlyPages accepts reader-submitted true ghost stories through the submission page. We ask for a title, location, roughly when it happened, and the account in your own words. Anonymous submissions are welcome — most published accounts use only a first name and age. Nothing is published without your consent, and full names and exact addresses are never shared.
If something has happened to you that you can't explain, send it in. Anonymous submissions welcome — we only publish what you allow us to.
