Creepy Encounters

Creepy Encounters
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Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.

  1. 16h ago

    Episode 72: The same account has commented nice on every single thing I have posted for seven years and I thought it was a kid from my graduating class

    Submitted by Kit — Des Moines, Iowa. 33. I should say up front that I don't post much. A picture of my dog. A casserole. The sunset over the parking lot at work, maybe twice a year when it's really doing something. I have two hundred and some followers and most of them are people I went to high school with in a town of about eleven thousand, which in Iowa means you follow everyone from your class whether you liked them or not, because that is just what you do. So for seven years, every time I posted anything, the first comment was the same. One word. Nice. Lowercase, no period. And it was always first. My friend Tasha timed it once when she was over, as a joke. I posted a picture of her holding my dog and we both watched the screen, and she counted out loud, and she got to four. Nice. The account didn't have a real name. The picture was our old high school mascot, the cartoon bobcat they retired when I was in middle school, and the handle was a string of letters and numbers that looked like something a person makes up when they don't care. I figured it was some guy from my class who didn't want his wife seeing who he followed. That's not even unusual back home. Half the men I graduated with have an account with a pickup truck for a face. I thought it was sweet, honestly. My posts don't get a lot. There were weeks when that nice was the only thing anybody said to me that wasn't about work. I'd post at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep, a picture of my kitchen light or whatever, and four seconds later, nice, and I'd think, well, somebody else is up too. I used to say goodnight to it in my head. I posted from my grandma's funeral in March. Not the casket. Just the flowers out front of the Lutheran church, the ones my aunt ordered. Four seconds. Nice. I remember thinking that was a little off, for a funeral, but people don't know what to say. After the service there was a lunch in the church basement, ham sandwiches on the small buns and a sheet cake, and a man came through the line behind me. I didn't know him right away. He was a lot heavier and his hair was gone. It was Dale. He was married to my mother for about four years when I was a kid, from when I was eight until I was twelve, and after that nobody in my family said his name, and I didn't ask, because you learn not to ask in a family like mine. He said I looked good. I said thank you. And then he said, like he was telling me the weather, "You liked the flowers. I saw." I said, "Sorry?" And he said, "I say nice so you know somebody's there. I keep the phone on the nightstand with the sound up. It's our old box number. Rural Route 2. You were too little to ever get mail." Then he took a sandwich and went and sat by himself at the end of a folding table and ate it, and nobody sat with him, and nobody asked him to leave. When I got back to my car I looked at the handle again. I had read it a thousand times. RR2 and then 41. The house outside of town where we lived when he was married to my mother. Nobody my age back home would ever think of that as an address. We all just said the house on the gravel road. It was right there the whole time. He never changed it. He never hid anything. I haven't blocked him. I don't know why. I posted my dog last week and I sat in my kitchen and counted, and I got to four. What I keep thinking about is how glad I was. For seven years I was glad. Most people have one account like that, the one that's always there first, that never says much, that feels like company when it's late. And almost nobody ever looks very hard at the name.

  2. 1d ago

    Episode 71: My ex has paid my phone bill every month since I moved out and I only found out because I tried to add my son to the plan

    Submitted by Dee — Columbus, Ohio. 40. I have had the same phone number since I was sixteen. It is a 419 number, which does not match one thing about my life now, and I have carried it through four apartments and one breakup that took longer to get over than most people's marriages. We were together nine years. When I moved out in 2019 I did it the way you are supposed to do it. I made a list on a legal pad in my sister's spare room and I crossed things off. Electric in my name. Gas in my name. Internet, renter's insurance, the storage unit in Maumee, the car note, mail forwarded, address changed at the credit union. It took six weeks of hold music and I was proud of myself, which sounds small, but I was thirty-three and had never had anything in my own name before. The phone I never touched, because the phone never stopped working. That is the part people cannot get past when I tell it. They want to know how you do not notice. But a phone does not notice you back. It just works. You wake up and there are bars in the corner and you drive to work. I figured I had set up autopay sometime back in the house and forgotten which card it came off of. I have four cards. I am not a woman who reconciles a statement line by line. Somewhere in the back of my head there was a sixty-dollar charge I had never gone looking for, and that is exactly where it sat for six years. I never got a paper bill. I never got an emailed one either, and I want to say that plainly, because it is the whole thing. In six years I never once saw a bill for the phone in my hand. In April my son started in on wanting a phone, which at eleven is less of a request than a weather system, and I decided fine, he can have my old one, I will add a line. I went out to the carrier store in the strip mall by the Kroger on a Saturday. The kid at the counter had a lanyard and about nine minutes of patience. He asked for my number, typed it in, and stopped typing. He turned the screen a little. Not all the way. The way they do when they are deciding how much to tell you. He said, ma'am, you are not the account holder here. You are an authorized user. I said that is not right, it is my number, I have had it since high school, and he said okay, okay, in the voice you use on somebody's mother, and asked if I wanted him to print it out. I said yes because I could not think of anything else to say. It came out of the machine warm. Four pages. Line one of two was his number. Line two of two was mine, with my son's tablet under it from a kiosk in 2022. The name at the top of the account was his first name and his last name in that flat all-capital printing, and the billing address was a street in Sylvania I have never lived on, and down at the bottom, in the little box they put there to be nice about it, it said ON-TIME PAYMENTS. Seventy-two of seventy-two. The kid asked if I wanted to port the number over to my own account. Twenty minutes, he said, I would just need the PIN. I sat in that parking lot a while with the pages on the passenger seat. In June I called him. It rang and went to a voicemail greeting he recorded in the house on Fassett Street, his voice at twenty-nine telling me to leave it after the beep, and I listened to all of it and hung up without saying anything, because what I had ready to say was thank you, and I could hear how that was going to sound out loud. Here is where it is now. In August a paper bill came to my apartment for the first time, in my mailbox, with my address on it. Same account. Same name at the top. I did not know what to do with it, so it is on the counter under the fruit bowl, and the phone still works, and next month there will be another one.

  3. 2d ago

    Episode 70: My name is in a bed and breakfast guest book four times from Octobers I was never there

    Submitted by Birdie — Little Rock, Arkansas. 51. I have gone to the same bed and breakfast in Eureka Springs the first weekend of March since 2006. It is three and a half hours up 23, and the house is a purple Victorian with eleven steps from the sidewalk and a porch that goes all the way around. The woman who ran it when I started was Ida, and Ida had one rule about one thing. The guest book sits on the sideboard in the front hall with a green pen tied to the shelf on a length of kitchen string. Green ink only. Every line in that book, back to when Ida's mother had the house, is green — your name, your town, and a sentence if you feel like writing one. Ida used to say she could tell what kind of weekend a person had from the sentence. I have signed it nineteen times. Birdie, Little Rock. Dogwoods came early. Rained all Saturday, did not care. This March they had the hall torn up for new paper, the old books stacked on a chair by the stairs, and my room was not ready until two. So I sat down with the fat one that starts in 2009 and went looking for myself, which is what a woman with an hour to kill will do. I found my March. I found the year it snowed on us. And then, going through pages I had no business going through, I found October of 2011. Birdie. Little Rock. My first thought was that there must be another Birdie in Arkansas, which is a thing I have been told my whole life and never once had turn out to be true. My second thought was that the writing was wrong. Mine runs forward and gets tired by the end of a word. These letters leaned backward, every one of them, the way a left-handed man writes when nobody ever corrected him. October 2013. Birdie, Little Rock. October 2014. October 2017. Four times, in the green pen on the string, in a hall I have walked through for twenty years, in handwriting I have been reading off the front of envelopes since my sister married him. I did not scream or faint. I closed the book, put it back on the chair the way it had been, went out to the porch swing, and had what I would call the worst hour of my life, and none of it was about him. Here is what I remembered out there. In November of 2014 my sister called me at work. Marla asked it the way you ask about the weather, with about that much in her voice. Was Gene down at your place in Eureka Springs last month. And I said yes. I said it fast and I said it happy. He had called me the year before wanting the number, said he was going to do something nice, and I was so pleased to be asked that I gave him all of it — the eleven steps, the bowl of butterscotch on the sideboard, Ida and her green pen, which room gets the morning sun. I talked about that house for twenty minutes. So when Marla asked me, I was not guessing at anything. I knew the place she was describing to me because I was the one who had described it to him. She said, okay. She said, that is what I thought. And she let it go, and she stayed, and that was eleven years ago this fall. I have not told her. I have picked the phone up about forty times. What stops me is not that I cannot find the words. It is that I keep landing in the same place: four lines in a book would not have held up against anybody but her, and they held up because they came through me first. He never had to be good at it. He needed a sister-in-law who loved a house and could not shut up about it, who would answer a question in one second flat and never think about it again. He had that for free, and he never had to ask me twice. Marla calls me every Sunday afternoon. She tells me about her knee and about Gene finally putting in the new water heater. And I sit there with the phone against my ear, listening to myself agree with her, and I think about how good I have always been at sounding certain.

  4. 3d ago

    Episode 69: A woman has told me I look well in three different grocery stores over nine years and I was always glad to see her

    Submitted by Bets — Lubbock, Texas. 58. There is a woman who tells me I look well. She has done it three times that I know of, in three different grocery stores, over about nine years, and until this June I thought of it as one of the nicer things that ever happened to me. The first time was at the United on 19th, the fall of 2017. I was in line with a rotisserie chicken and a sack of limes and she was behind me, and she leaned in like we were partway into a conversation already and said, "You look well." That was all. I said thank you. She reached past me and waved her keychain tag at the reader before I could stop her, so my chicken rang up at the club price, and on her way out she said it again — you look well — and I stood in that parking lot feeling better than I had in a year. I want to be honest about why it landed. That fall was the worst stretch of my life. My husband had moved out in March, my mother went into the home in August, and I had quit answering the phone. Nobody had told me I looked well in a long while. They told me I looked tired, or they told me nothing and looked at my cart. Her cart had one thing in it. I remember because it struck me as admirably efficient — a single box of powdered sugar lying flat on the bottom of a full-size cart, sliding when she pushed. There's a woman who came in for one thing, I thought, and got out. The second time was 2021, the Market Street clear across town by the loop. I had lost weight by then and cut my hair. She came up on my left in the bread aisle and said it — you look well — and I said, "You've told me that before." She said, "You did then, too." I laughed. I'm not going to pretend I didn't. I told that story at work for a month. My grocery store lady. Third time was this June, in Amarillo. My sister's, two hours up the highway, a store I'd been in maybe four times in my life. I saw her ahead of me at the registers and I was the one who waved. I was glad. I want to be clear about that part, because it's what I can't get around: I raised my hand to her. She said I looked well. I said, "Do you have people up here too?" She said, "Oh, I don't shop." She said it the way you'd say you don't drink coffee. Then she looked down into her cart, where there was a can of evaporated milk and nothing else, and said you have to have something in it or they start watching you stand around. And then she said, "And it hasn't been three times, hon." I asked how many. She said she'd never bothered keeping a count. I asked if I knew her from somewhere — church, the school, my mother's floor at the home. She said no. She said, "I just like to see how you're getting on," and she got in her line, and she paid for the can, and she went out through the automatic doors into the heat, and that was the whole of it. I've asked everyone I can think to ask. My sister doesn't know her. My ex doesn't. I described her to the woman who ran my mother's hall and got nothing back. There's no answer at the end of this, and what I want isn't her name anyway. What I want is the number. Nine years, and I've got three of them. She has the rest. Here's what I keep setting down and picking back up. For nine years a stranger watched the worst of my life and the only thing she ever did with it was tell me I was getting better, and she was right every time, and I can't make myself feel about her the way I know I'm supposed to. Everybody's got a face they're glad to see out in the world. The one at the pharmacy counter, the one in the next lane at school pickup. You nod, you say you're doing fine, you mean it. Nobody ever asks how long that face has been glad to see them.

  5. 3d ago

    Episode 68: My landlord has painted my whole apartment every spring for nine years and I was the one who kept leaving town for it

    Submitted by Tess — Toledo, Ohio. 36. I have lived in the top half of a two-family on the east side of Toledo since I was twenty-seven. My landlord goes by Marv. The rent was six hundred and twenty-five dollars the month I signed and it is six hundred and twenty-five dollars this month, and there is nothing in Ohio that says it had to stay there. He could have raised it any January he wanted. He never has. What he does instead is paint. The first warm week of April, every year, Marv and two men he knows come up my back stairs with drop cloths and put a fresh coat of off-white on every wall in the place. The trim. The ceilings. The insides of the closets. The back of the pantry door, which nobody has ever seen but me. Nine springs I have been up there, so there are nine coats on those walls, and April smells like paint to me now the way it is supposed to smell like rain. It was never only paint, either. Year three he put in new windows, the kind that tilt in so you can wash them from inside. Year five, the whole kitchen. Year seven, the bathroom: tile, a new tub, a window that opens. My friends have a joke that I must have something on him. For nine years my one lucky story at a party has been my landlord, who fixes everything and charges me nothing. He never hid a bit of it. That is the part I need you to hold onto while I tell you the rest. He calls me in February, every February, to ask which weekend in April is good for me. One year he mailed me a little note with the dates written out in pencil. He has never touched that apartment without telling me first. And every year I leave. That part was mine. The first spring, when he said it would take them two days, I told him I have a thing about the smell, that it sits behind my eyes and turns into a headache that lasts until Tuesday, and that it would probably be easier on everybody if I just got out of the way. My sister has a guest room in Perrysburg, twenty-five minutes up the highway. So I take the cat and a bag and I go Friday around eleven, and I come back Sunday evening, and the windows are propped and the whole place is white and quiet and mine, and every single thing I own is sitting exactly where I left it. This April there was a new kid on the crew, the older guy's nephew, twenty-two maybe, with his ears still pink from a haircut. I was carrying my bag down while they were carrying the ladder up, and we did that little dance on the landing. He was friendly. He asked did I want the bedroom done this year or left alone, and I said everything, same as always. Then he asked me, in the most ordinary voice, where I go. My sister's, I said. He nodded. He said, that's what he told us. He said you take the cat and you're out by noon and you don't come back early, ever. He's real sure about that part. I laughed and said nine years running. The kid stopped. He looked at me, and then he looked up the stairs, and then he looked over at his uncle, who was not looking at either one of us. After that he did not look at me again. His uncle told him to go get the tape out of the truck. Nobody said anything else. I stood on that landing holding my bag with my keys in my teeth. I went to my sister's. I need you to understand that I drove up there and I stayed the whole weekend and I did not come back early, because coming back early did not occur to me until I was already home on Sunday with the windows open, smelling the paint. He has never once asked me to leave. I keep going over it and it is always me. I call him in February. I pick the weekend. I pack the bag and carry it down my own stairs, past the drop cloths, and at the bottom I turn around and thank him. Those walls are nine coats thick now. I have never seen a single one of them go on.

  6. 4d ago

    Episode 67: My pharmacist had my prescription ready on the counter for eleven years and I never once read the label until he retired

    Submitted by Deb — Quincy, Illinois. 57. There is an amber pill bottle on the shelf above my kitchen sink, and there has been one up there, more or less without a gap, since the spring of 2015. White cap. My name printed on the label, spelled right, which not every place manages. Past my name I could not have told you a single word that label said. I don't think most people could. The pharmacy was on the corner of Eighth, one of those independent places with a hand-painted sign and a bell over the door and a side window everybody called the drive-through even though you had to put the car in park. Roy ran it. He knew my car. He knew my mother's hip, he knew when my son started at the community college, and when I came in the bag was already stapled shut on the counter with my name facing me. I want to be honest about what that was worth. Roy was the only person with medical training I could ask a question without the question costing me eighty dollars. If something felt wrong I would drive over and lean on that counter and describe it, and he listened the whole way through without looking at a screen. For eleven years that man was my healthcare. The winter I got divorced I stopped sleeping. Not tired-stopped. Stopped. I told Roy about it at the counter, on a Tuesday, the way you'd tell anybody. And then some weeks after that there was a bottle in the bag with the other things, and I took it, and I slept. I never went looking for how that started. I'd been to a walk-in clinic that March and an urgent care in November and I assumed it came out of one of them. That was a bad year and I was not writing anything down. What I know is what came after. I became a person who needs her sleep. That's how I say it, that's how my family says it. I turned down the lead position at work because it was second shift. I stopped driving after dark. I have not had a glass of wine since 2016 because of what it does on top of the other thing. My sister hosts Thanksgiving now, because Deb fades after eight. I built a whole personality out of it and I was pleasant about it. When people complained about the chain out by the highway I'd say, well, that's why I go to Roy. He retired in May. Sold the building. The pharmacy is a vape store now, which is its own kind of joke. I moved everything over to the CVS by the highway and the kid at the counter there asked me who my prescriber was for the sleep one, and I stood there and realized I did not know. So I went home to look. I keep the empties. I know people find that strange. There's a plastic basket under the bathroom sink with eleven years of them in it, and I sat on the floor and read a label all the way through for the first time in my life. The prescriber line said Dr. Hovey. I have never had a doctor named Hovey. I have never met a Hovey. Not the walk-in, not the urgent care, nobody. I went through that basket oldest to newest, 2015 up to this June, and every single bottle says the same thing, in the same little block of type, and it is a name I have never heard anybody say out loud. I have not called anybody about it yet. Here is what I keep getting stuck on, and it isn't Roy. I drove there. Nobody made me. I called when I was running low and I was so grateful, every time, and I took the bag off the counter with my name facing me and I thanked him. Eleven years of that is mine. The job I turned down is mine. Every dinner I left early is mine. I did all of it myself, on purpose, and I felt lucky the entire time. The bottle on my shelf right now is the transfer refill. The chain pulled it over from his files, so it carries the same name, because that's what transfers. I took one last night. I don't know what I am on the other side of not taking it. And I don't know who I'm supposed to ask.

  7. 5d ago

    Episode 66: I filed a complaint about the way a manager spoke to a woman at my office and it took eleven years and one question from a temp for me to understand what I did

    Submitted by Lou — Salina, Kansas. 49. I've been in the same building off Ninth Street in Salina for nineteen years. Claims processing for a regional insurer. If you've ever put in for hail damage in central Kansas, somebody two desks from me looked at your photos of your roof. Back then our HR still ran on paper. There was a printed complaint form, two pages, and you had to walk up to the third floor and ask a woman for it by name, which is its own kind of deterrent. Boxes across the top for the date, the department, anyone else present. A big open field in the middle that said DESCRIBE THE CONDUCT. And down at the bottom of page two, small print above the signature line: retaliation against an employee who reports in good faith is prohibited by company policy and by law. You signed right under that sentence. I kept my copy. Gwen sat across the aisle from me. Her manager had an office with a door and he almost never closed it, and maybe twice a week he would say her name — just her name, first name, flat — and then wait. Not loud. Nobody three rows back would have looked up. He'd say it and then he'd wait until she turned all the way around in her chair, and then he'd talk to her in a voice you couldn't quite hear the words of, only the shape. It took about ninety seconds. Afterward she would sit very still for a while with her hands in her lap before she went back to typing. Every October the company put us through an hour and a half of harassment training, actors in a fake break room, and every single scenario in it was a man yelling. That's the thing I'd say if I could say one thing. He never yelled. There was nothing on the video that looked like what I was watching across the aisle. So I filled out the form at my kitchen table in pen and I walked it back up to the third floor. I had two meetings about it. They were careful with me, and they thanked me, and they said they took it seriously, and I believe they did. Here is everything that happened. Nothing, for four months. Then in the spring Gwen transferred to the Wichita branch, and she caught me in the parking lot on her last Friday and said thank you, and that was the last time she ever spoke to me. He stayed. In the reorg that summer he asked for me by name for his team, and I took that as a good sign — I thought it meant it had been handled, that he was a professional about it, that we were all adults. I've sat outside his office ever since. Eleven years. He's never raised his voice at me one time, and I'll say that to anybody. People on my team ask me how to deal with him and I tell them he's fine, you just have to know him. I'm the one who knows him. In June we had an agency temp in for the quarter close, a girl about twenty-five, and she sat in on our Tuesday call. Afterward we were both waiting at the elevator and she was looking at the floor and she said, "Does he always talk to you like that?" I said, "Like what?" And she didn't answer me. She did this thing with her face, this little pull-back, the way you look at somebody when they've got something on their shirt and you've already decided you're not going to be the one to tell them. Then the elevator came and she said sorry, never mind, and she rode down and I stood there. I went home that night and dug through the accordion file where we keep the tax returns and the house papers, and my copy was in the back, eleven years old, soft at the folds. Under DESCRIBE THE CONDUCT, in my own handwriting: He does not raise his voice. He says her name and then waits until she turns around. She has stopped eating lunch with anybody. I read my own three sentences about four times. Then I folded it up and put it back with the tax returns, because I have a nine o'clock with him in the morning.

  8. 6d ago

    Episode 65: A driver locked the doors at every red light for two years and every single person I told said that was just good sense

    Submitted by Rae — Tulsa, Oklahoma. 33. I closed at a steakhouse off Eleventh for about two years, and the last bus out of downtown Tulsa runs at eight, so every night of those two years I got into a stranger's car. That's just how it is here. You cash out your drawer at eleven-thirty, you stand under the awning with your apron rolled up in your bag, and you watch the little car icon crawl up Eleventh. There was one driver I got more than anybody else. Older man, sixty maybe, gray sedan, AM radio on low even at midnight. He didn't talk unless I did. And he had that little black switch on his door, the master lock, the one on the driver's armrest that throws all four doors at once. Every time we came up on a red light, he hit it. Chunk. Not at stop signs. Not in a drive-through. Red lights only, every red light, for two years. I noticed it on about the third ride. Then I noticed it four hundred more times. I brought it up to my sister first. She said that's just good sense, a man driving strangers around at that hour, of course he locks up. I said it isn't that he locks it, it's that he does it every single time, like he's counting something. She said, you'd rather he left them open? Denise at work said her uncle drove a cab in Kansas City and did the same thing, and then talked about her uncle for ten minutes. The guy I was seeing that year said women always feel a thing they can't name and it's usually nothing. He thought he was being kind about it. Everybody thought they were being kind about it. So I let it go. I kept riding with him. That's the part I have trouble saying out loud, that I didn't stop, I got easier. After a while I'd hear the chunk and think, there he goes. It was almost a joke I had with myself. I'd have called him a nice man if you'd asked me. I think I did call him that. Then in October we were sitting at the light at Peoria and Thirty-First, which is a long light, and a man came off the curb on my side and walked up to the car. Not fast. He put his hand flat on my window, up high, the way you'd lean on a counter, and bent down and looked in at me. The light was still red. My driver went through it. Just eased out into the intersection and went, calm as anything, like something he'd decided a long time before. I said something like, God, people are out of their minds. I was laughing a little. I remember laughing. He said, without turning around, "He's been at that light four times this month." I asked him what he meant. He didn't answer. I asked again at my building with my hand on the door, and he looked at me in the mirror and said it back the same flat way, not one word more. Then he sat at the curb until my hallway light came on, which I had never once noticed him doing, which meant he had been doing it, and I sat down on the floor inside my own front door with my coat still on. I don't know who the man at that light was. I have gone through every person I have ever known and he isn't any of them. I don't know how my driver knew to count, or how long he'd been counting, or why in two years of red lights he never said one word to me about it. I never got him again. I looked for that car for a year. Here's what happens when I tell this now. I get about as far as the locks and whoever I'm talking to already has it solved. Good sense. Downtown. Any driver would. They say it kindly, and they're not wrong, exactly, and I let it go the way I did the first forty times. For two years I told people something about those rides was off, and every single one of them agreed with me that it was nothing. Not one of them was lying to me. That's the part I can't get past. How little a person has to know to talk you out of the only thing you noticed.

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About

Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.

Information

  • Creator
    Creepy Encounters
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    72
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Show Website
    Creepy Encounters