“She claims that this ’tan man’ had no eyes, was completely hairless, and also had translucent skin, as if she could see partly through it in some areas. It walked ’flowy,’ as if its torso was leading it instead of its head and shoulders. She claims it made no noise when it passed, but looked directly at everyone in the room.”

I'm a Southern California-based writer on the Lifestyle team who likes to try and rank viral foods and read and recommend awesome books.

"It was completely fuzzy and dark, and I was in that very much blurred reality stage of not being able to tell if I was awake properly or not. I couldn't move at all and chalked it up to sleep paralysis and went back to sleep. I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except the police knocked on our door that afternoon (I wasn't in, my housemates told me) and said our neighbor had had their house broken into that same night. The real kicker is that at the time, our front door lock was broken — anyone could have come in and left without us knowing. To this day, I will truly never know if it was a coincidentally bad day to have a nightmare or a lucky escape. 🤷‍♀️"

I fumbled my way through the ironing room, back to the service hall in a panic. The hall lights were on, and everything was fine. That is the whole story. I didn’t see anything. However, there are some problems. To this day, I am confident that I turned the lights on in the ironing room when I went in. It wasn’t possible to move through the room without bumping into things a bunch of times, as my exit demonstrated. The light in the ironing room was controlled by a very large switch that made a loud clicking noise. I didn’t hear it click off when I was in the washing room. In the days that followed, the family and the butler returned home, and I had forgotten about the entire incident. A week or so later, I suddenly remembered it happening and said to the butler, 'I’ve never heard of any ghost stories about the castle. Are there any?' He kind of dismissively said, 'Oh, they say there is a white lady in the ballroom, and [room name redacted] is apparently haunted, but that’s it. Oh, and they say the sewing room is haunted.' I kind of gasped and told the butler the story. He seemed fascinated. He told the family, and a couple of them agreed that the laundry room was unsettling."

"Many years later, an old girlfriend would enter my room and find me kneeling down behind the bed, just staring blankly. She started talking to me, and I didn’t answer. She asked me if I was okay, and when I didn’t respond, she walked over and around the bed, but I suddenly wasn’t kneeling. I was standing straight, sticking out of the floor, and then I disappeared. She lost her shit — ran out of the room, down the stairs, out of the kitchen, and into the garden, which is where I actually was, just relaxing in a chair. She was terrified. I calmed her down, but she wouldn’t go inside that house by herself for ages, especially not into our room. We are still friends, and she still brings this up every now and then, still really unsettled by it." 

"I looked around that tree with my flashlight, but there was no sign of the other tree — like it never existed. The next day, I went there during the daytime to see exactly what happened to the other tree, but they were both there just like I remembered. I looked around them and even climbed on them to see if there was anything strange, but there was nothing out of the ordinary." 

"I don't know why I waited a couple more years to call his mother and ask about him, but I did call her. It turns out he had died in a freak accident around the time I had that dream. He had a car in his garage that he was working on. He had climbed on the hood for some reason, and he fell. He broke his neck, and it was fatal. Now, I'm always sad and a little creeped out every time I think of that dream. Probably always will be." 

"They insisted they were in and around the house all day, and that I even saw them at breakfast. I broke down crying because it was simply not true. To this day, I swear people disappeared for half a day. After my breakdown, we went for ice cream, and my city was busy again — hundreds of people doing their thing. I have no clue what the fuck happened, but I feel gaslighted by life." 

"This was in the middle of the day, so the lights were on, and it was not dark at all. The being then walked down the hall and into my wife's sister's room, but the door was closed. Apparently, at or around the same time, my wife's sister had been complaining of 'being spooned' at night as well as being pushed down the stairs when no one was around them. The entity appeared to be fixated on the sister for some reason. Sometime later, Grandma moved into the household, and when she was told about the entity, she said that she'd take care of it. True enough, she made some sort of 'prayer' (no one is religious in this household) or statement, and after that, no further occurrences happened. To this day, my wife is still shaken if you say 'the tan man' or something to that effect." 

"She called me up one evening to speak to my husband. His mother had a message for him. I passed the phone over. I never heard the conversation, but it shook him. He didn't tell me much, but again, she said things no one else knew. I still joke around about her skills, but respectfully." 

"I was as terrified as I’d ever been in my life. I froze and didn’t move, but I looked at exactly eye level and there was a cardboard box labeled 'Albums' in my mother's handwriting on the lower shelf of the closet. I am not a religious or even spiritual person, and I thought that there might be some imbalance in the hanging of the closet door. I went back to the door many times and tested it by wiggling it back and forth and leaving it in different positions, but it’s never moved that way since." 

"It turns out my biological mom and her husband had come back to visit family for whatever reason. I used to call BS because the story is just so insane, but throughout the years, it's the one story of my dad's that never changed. Not one detail. He's told it so many times that I can recite it word for word, and he's always so fucking awestruck when he tells it — like I can almost see him racking his brain, searching for the most logical explanation. I was about 2 to 3 years old when it happened, and I'm now 26. He still can't piece it all together to this day." 

Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.