Sometimes, real life can be just as strange as fiction. The short stories you’re about to read all start out pretty normal: a sound in the wall, an eerie coincidence, a weird glitch. But as each one goes on, something starts to feel off. Nothing here is made up or impossible. These are all based on things that could really happen. And the more you read, the more unsettling they get.
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- At 3 a.m., I woke up to 18 missed calls from my daughter and a text saying, “Mom, help me!” She lives alone and is seven months pregnant. I drove over there as fast as I could. She looked surprised and said, “I was asleep. I didn’t call!”
I took out my phone, and we froze. There was a text that said: “My baby’s fever isn’t coming down. What should I do?” It was followed by a photo of a crying baby.
I checked the sender’s number, and it wasn’t one I recognized. I called it back, and a panicked young woman answered. Through tears, she explained that she was a new mother trying to contact her own mom because her baby had suddenly fallen very ill in the middle of the night and wouldn’t stop crying.
It turned out that, in her panic, she had dialed the wrong number, and her desperate message ended up on my phone.
Thankfully, I was able to calm her down and gently walk her through a few things she could try while waiting for the doctor.
The whole experience felt surreal, especially because my own daughter is expecting. I never heard from that woman again, but I truly hope she and her baby are okay.
- There was a girl who was head over heels for me, but I didn’t want anything to do with her. After school, I didn’t think about her, but one year, when I went back home for the summer, I found out she had moved to my family’s building, to the apartment across from ours (my building has two apartments per floor).
I had never told her where I lived before this. I decided to be cordial and talk to her family and all, welcome the neighbors and whatnot, and I found out from her mom that the girl had suggested they move there.
Now, I can’t tell either way if it was deliberate or pure chance, but let’s just say we live in a big city, and the odds of that being a coincidence were low. © Kenhamef / Reddit
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- My old apartment had thin walls and vents that connected the units. One night, I kept hearing a voice saying the same thing over and over: “It’s not real, it’s not real.” I thought maybe someone was talking to themselves next door. But I couldn’t figure out which unit it was coming from.
It only happened late at night, maybe between 2 and 3 a.m. It went on for weeks, always the same phrase.
Eventually, I asked the neighbor on the other side if he could hear it too. He said, “Yeah… but I thought that was you.” A few days later, another neighbor moved out — the guy two floors up who worked night shifts.
Turned out he had a VR headset and used it late at night. That phrase? It was from a horror game he kept failing over and over.
- I was adopted from South America to the US when I was a toddler and have no memory of my birth parents. I had an older friend/mentor I met in college, whom I knew as Mike.
When I learned that my birth mother had passed away, I received a few of her belongings, including pictures. Who was in these pictures? Mike. He was my birth father.
© aaareed / Reddit
© Polina Tankilevitch / Pexels
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- I picked up my usual meds from the pharmacy one Friday. Saturday morning, I took one and immediately felt dizzy and nauseous. I checked the label — my name was on it, but the pills looked different. I looked them up online. They were for a heart condition I didn’t have. I called the pharmacy, and after a long hold, the pharmacist got serious fast. He told me to go to the ER and bring the bottle.
At the hospital, they told me if I’d taken one more, my heart rate could’ve dropped dangerously. Turned out, my meds had been switched with someone else’s by mistake. They offered me a gift card. I switched pharmacies.
- I noticed a woman at a café copying everything I ordered and even how I sat. We never spoke, but it felt off. When I left, she stood like she was about to follow, then just watched.
A week later, I saw a flyer for a local art project on mimicry and social behavior. She was one of the featured performers.
- My hallway light would flicker every night at 3 a.m. I thought maybe a wiring issue, but it was only that light. I replaced the bulb… Still happened. I started to really freak out.
Finally realized it coincided with the upstairs neighbor using the microwave. Old buildings. Shared circuits. That was it.
- I saw someone at the train station who looked exactly like me — clothes, hair, even shoes. We made eye contact, and he gave a small smile. I told my roommate later. He reminded me we’d donated a bunch of my old clothes to a shelter two weeks earlier. Probably just someone wearing my old stuff.
- I went to sleep Tuesday and woke up Thursday — nothing in my apartment was touched. No memory of Wednesday, no messages, no signs I got up. Turns out, I had a mild fever and slept almost 30 hours straight. The skipped day was real — I just slept through it.
- I had a dream of my husband and me having three children. It was sweet and happy until they started slowly disappearing, Thanos style. I remember waking up and feeling “off.”
The next week, we found out I was pregnant with triplets. One of them I miscarried, the second one became suddenly unviable, and the third had to be removed because it was far undersized and a danger to my life. It was the creepiest experience of my life.
© prznmike / Reddit
- My dad was a fireman, so there were many nights that my brother and I stayed alone with my mom. One night, my mom woke up because she heard banging and shuffling downstairs, so she called the cops and waited in the locked bedroom with us.
The police arrived, entered the house, and it turns out, my brother’s RC car was on and picking up radio signals or something. It had been banging into the kitchen cabinets and knocked papers off a table. © PuttPuttStuff / Reddit
Life can be scary or overwhelming at times, but one of the greatest gifts we have is family. The people closest to us are often the ones who lift us up and hold our hands when we need support the most. These 13 uplifting stories remind us that family is one of life’s most precious treasures.