Best rated stories

Five hundred dollars. It's the only thing I can keep telling myself to continue this stupid drive. Two weeks ago I had everything I could’ve wanted. A warm bed, plenty of free time, a degree. Now, thanks to yet another family blowout, I’m stuck in this dingy car that smells like wet dog and pine needles, driving hours to housesit for my uncle's friend. The Minnesota winter is terrible, especially with a broken heater. As the drive progressed, I only got even colder. My fingers were stiff and…

Vigilantly I take one last look around the house. Making sure again not to miss any little sound or the movement of someone or something, making sure that there really is only me. My mother should be at work and my sister at school, double checking really won't hurt me. If I want to do this ritual, I need to be all alone, or at least I don't want anyone to find out or intrude. Right... the ritual... I hope it works.

Most people have never heard someone die. The moaning. The crying. The pleading. The last tortured breath before they go quiet. Most people will never hear those things. I do. Daily. No, I’m not a serial killer on a hellbent mission to cleanse the Earth. I’m a 911 operator. When I took the job ten years ago, I assumed I’d more or less be like an air traffic controller, but for emergency response teams. For a large portion of my job, that’s true. That’s the easy part. Death is harder.

There was this tiny indie horror movie that basically nobody had seen. I don't even remember how we found it. Maybe TikTok, or maybe someone on Reddit recommended it. It had one of those titles that sounded way cooler after you finished watching it than before, and it looked like it had a budget of maybe twenty dollars. Somehow it still worked. It wasn't really scary in the traditional sense. There weren't any monsters or cheap jump scares. It was just... unsettling.

What are ghost stories, anyway?

Last night, and the one before I had the strangest dreams. On the first night I opened my eyes and found my bedroom present in a dark aura despite the light being off. Above me, where my ceiling should have been blank (I have nothing in particular on my ceiling) was the outline of what appeared to be a window. I stared in shock, convinced I was asleep and dreaming. But it felt so real.

Like most people of my generation, I'm a huge SpongeBob fan. Back then, the internet was relatively new it was 2010. I was browsing through SpongeBob related stuff when I suddenly saw a strange link. I don't remember the exact details, but I do remember the website's logo; it was red, and the link read: "SpongeBob Episode “This Is Not Hell."

“Hey y’all, it’s Red, White, and Ruin here with a new ghostbox urban exploration for you to watch from the safety of your home. Lucky you! Today, we’re walking through the dead Cherry Hill Mall. Let’s take a look, huh?” I said in my chipper announcer voice. I hit stop on the video I was recording and sighed. Being this perky all the time was exhausting. I sighed, took in my surroundings, and frowned. “Jesus, what a dump.”

There's a misconception that sadness can lessen one's life. That a broken heart is the first step into the grave. We see it countless times where a true love is lost and the other follows not long after. Empty sympathies are offered, claiming the poor soul died of a broken heart. But what if I told you that broken heart was the key to everlasting life?

“Wanna hear about the weirdest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen in the ocean?” Harvey, the old salt who lived at Neptune’s Net, asked me one night. “Buy me a sip of Cutty Sark, and I’ll tell you something only a handful of people have ever heard, and all of them are dead,” he said, jabbing his finger for emphasis. His gravelly voice gave the ancient mariner a gravitas you wouldn’t expect from a drunk at the end of the bar.

“I have good news and bad news,” my boss Chester said. If there is a more butthole clenching phrase said at a struggling company during a sudden all hands meeting, I don’t know what it is. Thing was, Chester didn’t need to say a single syllable. His slouched shoulders, pale(er) face, and hangdog expression told us the entire story. The company was going under.

When we finished going through the rules Catherine decided that we should play a game of cat and mouse in the mansion, (I thought the idea was stupid) two people would be the cats while the others are mouses. Cathy and I were the mouses and Danel and Logan were the cats.

Poster: DoomBathRoom033 Subject: Weird story (?) I found in my attic This is my first time posting on this part of the forums and if I'm breaking any of the rules please let me know! Quick background: my husband and I recently bought a house and we've been documenting our DIY adventures as we renovate it. Here's a link to the thread, check it out if you enjoy questionable design choices and photos of our superstar celebrity cat, Mr. Scratch!

I’ve been an avid hiker for well over 10 years now and an outdoorsy person for my whole life. Nature has always been a place that makes me feel free. My parents always encouraged me to explore and get my hands and feet dirty outside when I was growing up. Me and my brother were always known as the barefoot kids that walked around our neighborhood and through the woods that surrounded it. As an adult, I still enjoy the feeling of walking through nature (all be it with shoes now). I’ve hiked many…

Behind the unsteady glow of a flickering candle, Gideon, a man of pallid skin and restless eyes, sat slumped in his painting chamber. He would spend his days withering away here as he grappled with the monstrous quiet of an unraveling mind. He was known to be a brilliant portraitist, capturing the essence of his subjects with confident, precise strokes. In his hands, even the smallest nuance became a revelation, bringing to light the hidden beauties within every visage.

Did you know tens of thousands of people die in their sleep each night? Most of them succumb to natural causes like heart disease, stroke, or just plain old age. But in that vast group of the fallen, a small subset of them have perished with no explanation at all. Hell, I've heard some have outright disappeared. The funny thing is they all shared one curse that led them to such a demise.

Between December 2041 and February 2042, twelve isolated incidents of extreme violence were recorded across six states. Each case involved a first-time offender with no prior criminal record, no psychological instability, and no identifiable motive. The victims varied: spouses, colleagues, children, strangers. Yet the offenders’ demeanour during the acts remained disturbingly alike: calm, focused, deliberate.

I wake with searing pain in my right arm. My left feels fine. My left hand tightly clutches my bedsheets and duvet. I squint in the silvery moonlight that flows from my white four-paned Georgian bedroom window. I can’t see much. Just the blur of the moon. I blink. My eyes are watery. My internal clock tells me it’s the early hours of the morning, but it isn’t always reliable. I feel pain. But it is feels dull, numb and distant. I breathe in. The air feels clean and pure at least.

Tommy Morgan did not have the best life. Coming from a broken home, the young 11-year-old only experienced the worst: his father would return home drunken like a skunk, and he would get into heated arguments with his wife over money and how since he was the bread maker, he could do with his earnings what he saw fit. Tommy’s mother would do chores around the house, her eyes red from sobbing.

Every marriage reaches a point where one partner looks at the other and thinks the same thing. "You are NOT the person I married." Often, this is because someone forgot an anniversary, gained a little weight, or suddenly developed strong political opinions after listening to a few episodes of a popular podcast.