Paranormal Phenomena — Nobody Believes Me

Right, I'll be upfront, I've got no clue what actually happened, but maybe someone out there's had something similar. This was about a year ago. I was home alone, just a regular Saturday, nothing weird going on, sitting at my laptop in my room. I hadn't shut the door, I never bother shutting it when I'm home on my own, and anyway it only locks from the inside. After a while I figured I'd head downstairs, looked over at the door and was a bit thrown to see it was shut. Tried to walk out, but the door wouldn't budge. First I figured the handle was just jammed. Gave it a proper yank, nothing. The door was just... not letting me out. And there's no way anyone could've been holding it from the other side, I was definitely the only one home. Started getting a bit panicky by then. Checked my phone, had signal. Looked out the window, noticed it was getting dark, glanced at the clock, it was around 4. Thought maybe a storm was rolling in. The next three hours, I genuinely don't know how to describe what was going on. The whole time I never saw anyone outside the window, but our street's not exactly busy. But it kept flipping between day and night out there. One minute it'd be pitch black, the next it'd be bright as midday. Night fell three or four times in those three hours, and a whole rainstorm came and went. Rang a mate just to make sure I could actually reach someone, and to check if he was seeing the same weird shit. Got through, but he said everything was fine at his end. When I asked him about it he goes, "What night? Mate, did you teleport? It's broad daylight here." So I worked out he wasn't seeing anything weird, it was just me. I kept panicking, the door still wouldn't open. I also noticed the room kept swinging between hot and cold. Although, dunno, that could've just been me, panic does that to you. I was seriously thinking about ringing someone and asking them to come over. Probably would've spent ages working out who to call and what to say so they wouldn't have me committed, but then around 6 or 7 the door just opened on its own. I bolted out of the room, then straight out of the house. Just walked around town till late in the evening, didn't want to go back. For a few days after I tried to stay out of that room, only went in to grab stuff. Slept on the couch downstairs. But the panic faded eventually and I started questioning whether I'd lost the plot. Couple of months later I was back to sleeping and hanging out in my room. Nothing weird's happened since. I reckon I'm over it, but when I'm home alone I still wedge a chair in front of the door so it can't shut, otherwise I just can't relax. Most people'll think I imagined the whole thing, but nah. I took photos of all those views out the window on my phone. Doesn't prove anything, I just did it for myself so I wouldn't sit there later wondering if I was going mad. There's day, night and rain in those photos. And yeah, when I bolted out of the house, the ground outside was bone dry. I'd really love to know what the hell that was.

Something dead strange happened to me once in my life. But ever since, I've believed in spirits and all that stuff you just can't explain. It happened in 2004. I was on holiday in Thailand with my kid. December 2004 — everyone knows that one now. We were in Phuket, loving the swimming, going on day trips. Everything was great, until we went on an excursion to Khao Sok. I've always been a bit of a thrill-seeker — I especially love swimming way out, feeling at one with the ocean. My family are always having a go at me about it. But splashing around on the beach with a mob of people — that's just not my thing. So on this trip, we rocked up to Cheow Lan Lake. As usual, I wanted to get in the water. Nobody else from the group was keen — they reckoned it might be dodgy. But the guide said it was a man-made lake and it was fine. So I figured there couldn't possibly be any underwater monsters or crocs in there. Off I went. At first I was just enjoying myself. ThenI started getting a bit anxious — what if thre were snakes? But turning back felt embarassing at that point, so I kept going until I was halfway across the lake. And that's when things got strange. This absolute terror just washed over me. I felt like I was still on the lake, but like waves were crashing over me. I had this overwhelming fear for my kid, who was back on the shore. At one point I actually went under. Then everything went still. I came back up and saw the calm water again, our group on the bank. I was so shaken and frozen with fear that I couldn't even swim back straight away. That sick feeling of dread stayed with me the entire day. After we got back to the hotel, I thought I'd sleep it off and be right by morning. But that night I saw the exact same thing, only in a dream. Woke up absolutely wrecked — the anxiety was even worse after the nightmare. I went down to the hotel lobby to use their computer to check if there were any earlier flights home. Turned out there were seats on a flight back to Melbourne through Bangkok the very next day. I decided to get us home as quick as I could so I could see a doctor and get on some antidepressants. We flew out the next day. Six days later, I saw the tsunami on the news — including Phuket. I couldn't believe my eyes. We were supposed to still be there. What scared me like that? Was it trying to warn me? I'd have thought it was some local spirit, but it's a man-made lake. Still can't figure it out.

I was like 15 or 16. Just a normal night, nothing special. Me, my friend Ethan, and Sarah were hanging out at her place. Everything was pretty standard - pizza, soda, messing around, trying to find something creepy to watch before going to sleep. At some point Sarah goes, "Hey, what if we try a Ouija board?" She said she found it in a closet - like some old one that was probably left behind by the previous owners or something. We all started laughing, like, "Oh yeah, sure, let's summon a TikTok demon." But we were bored, so we were like, whatever, let's do it. We turned off the main lights, sat down the three of us, and put our fingers on the pointer. At first, nothing. Like, literally nothing. We just sat there for five minutes asking dumb questions into the void. And then it moved. Not suddenly. Super slow. Like… just barely sliding. The kind of movement where it feels like one of you is pushing it, but no one wants to admit it. I immediately go, "Okay, who's moving it?" Ethan says it's me. Sarah says it's Ethan. So yeah, we all just blamed each other. We decided to test it. Asked something really simple, like, "How many people are in the room right now?" The pointer stopped. Then it started moving again. Slowly, with pauses. 3 We all kinda looked at each other and laughed, because that didn't prove anything. Then Ethan goes, "Alright, let's ask something none of us know." Sarah asks, "What was the name of the previous owner of this house?" I definitely didn't know. Ethan didn't either. The pointer starts moving again. Super slow, letter by letter. We could literally follow it with our eyes. M A R I A And that's when it got… weird. Sarah didn't say anything at first. She just stared at the board. Then she suddenly pulled her hands back and went pale. At first we thought she was messing with us, like doing the classic "make it dramatic" thing. But she looked genuinely freaked out. I asked, "Wait… are you serious?" She nodded. And honestly, that's when I started feeling uneasy. Not like horror-movie scared, just… that weird feeling when something doesn't make sense and your brain is trying to come up with a normal explanation. We kept going. Not laughing anymore. We asked, "Who are you?" The pointer didn't move for like twenty seconds. Then slowly started going again. L I V E H E R E Ethan immediately goes, "Okay, this is dumb. One of us is just messing around." And honestly, that sounded pretty reasonable. I was almost sure it was him. So we decided to stop. Said "goodbye," took our hands off. And then the weirdest part of the whole night happened. The second we weren't touching it anymore, the pointer twitched. Not like it slid across the board or anything. Just a tiny movement, toward "GOODBYE." Like the tiniest bit. That's it. But all of us saw it. And none of us were touching it. And that part was actually scary. We shut everything down real fast. Turned the lights back on, put the board away in the box. The next day Sarah texted us saying she checked - and the previous owner's name actually was Maria. And she swears she never told us that before. I'm not saying it was anything supernatural. Maybe one of us really was moving it, or maybe Sarah mentioned the name at some point and we just forgot. But that tiny movement, when no one was touching it… that's the part that still sticks with me. Because it was just… too weird. And yeah, nobody really believes me. But I wasn't the only one who saw it.

My kid has a toy kitchen in her room — one of those ones that makes cooking sounds when you turn it on. At some point, our whole family started feeling like there was something else in the house. Something we couldn't explain. A creak here, a shadow there. Then one night… we put our child to bed, closed the bedroom door, and my husband and I started talking about exactly that — the weird stuff we'd been noticing. That's when we heard it. The toy kitchen switched on. It sounded like someone had turned on the little electric burners. For a second we thought maybe our kid woke up and started playing. We opened the door. Our child was fast asleep. The kitchen was still going. The moment we walked up to it — it shut off on its own. We left the room. Fifteen minutes later — again. This happened over and over. But the most terrifying part? When we finally decided to check the batteries and went to take them out… there were none.

My grandmother used to tell us this story. She always said it was about the time they met an alien. It happened many years ago, back in the early 1930s. They lived near a forest — just an ordinary forest. They'd go there to pick mushrooms and berries, hunt game, the usual. Then, out of nowhere, people started disappearing. Four people vanished in just one month. You might chalk it up to wild animals, but the only wildlife around there were foxes, hares, and wild boar. So naturally, people became afraid to go into the forest. And then, not long after, a man wandered into their village. They saw him come right out of that very forest. My grandmother described him as oddly dressed, carrying strange gadgets, speaking in a peculiar way. He seemed completely lost, like he had no idea where he was. About those gadgets — she said he had a metal bracelet on his wrist, and after they'd given him a good steam in the bathhouse, he pressed some buttons on it, and within five minutes all his scratches were gone. He also kept staring at some little box that had glowing pictures and numbers on it. He kept shoving it in front of the men's faces, showing them strange maps, asking where he was. So they figured a UFO had landed nearby. They called it in to someone higher up, but nobody believed them and no special services ever showed up. And then the man just vanished. My grandmother said the alien must have sensed something was off and fled. Anyway, when I was a kid listening to this story wide-eyed, I truly believed he was an alien. But now, years later, I think — come on, no alien would blow his cover like that. And that little box of his sure sounds a lot like a modern smartphone. So now I believe that man somehow ended up in the wrong time. And judging by the fact that we still don't have anything like that bracelet he wore, he wasn't even from our time — he was from even further in the future. And what about the people who disappeared? Maybe they were displaced in time too? By the way, after a while, people gradually started going back into the forest, and there were no more disappearances. So the anomaly was short-lived — it lasted maybe a month or two. If it was a time portal, as I suspect, it may have closed or moved somewhere else. As for that man, they never heard anything about him again. Maybe he found his way back, or maybe he quietly lived out the rest of his life there, in that time.