Transcript of 3 Very Scary TRUE Summer Night Horror Stories

My name is Chris. This happened years ago, and it's something I actually forgot about until recently. I was 17 that summer, working nights at a pizza place on the outskirts of my childhood hometown. I wasn't thrilled with it, but with no money and two parents who would have killed me for being unemployed, I couldn't complain. It was one of those jobs you take because nothing else is hiring. Slow shifts, sticky uniforms, and a beat up delivery car that barely made it up hills. At least I didn't have to drive my own car. That would have sucked. Oh, yeah. Not that this is super relevant, but I do want to mention that the pizza was god awful. Like genuinely terrible. I couldn't understand. Actually, I still don't understand why anyone in their right mind would order from that spot. If not for the technology and relatively nice atmosphere it provided, I honest to God don't think we ever would have gotten a single order. That place is definitely the thing I missed the least about my childhood hometown. And that's saying something. The one saving grace about working there was that because the pizza was so bad or because the place itself was so far away from our downtown or maybe a combination of the two, people rarely ordered from us, so most nights were dead quiet. I'm not going to bore you with the mundane details about how my nights typically unfolded. It was a pizza place. I'm sure you could fill in the blanks yourself. One night, I was restocking the fridge with drinks when the tablet buzzed with an online order. large sausage and olive pizza. I remember that distinctly because we never got olives. The address was out in the middle of nowhere, past the edge of our delivery zone, and I remember getting ready to reject it out of habit. But before I could, my manager, this 30-something guy named Russell, who mostly sat in the back scrolling through Reddit, looked over and told me to take it, saying we hadn't had a single run in over an hour. I didn't argue. So, when the pizza was ready, I typed in the directions on my phone and grabbed the pie. At least it would kill 30 or 40 minutes. As I was about to leave the store and walk to the car, I looked a little more carefully at the delivery instructions Russell had printed and stapled to the box, which I hadn't paid attention to until then. They said, and I remember this word for word, "Park on the street behind the house. Walk through the backyard. Knock on the back door only." That caught my attention a bit, but my 17-year-old brain thought of several rational reasons why someone might not want me to use the front door. Maybe they didn't want to wake an old person or a young child in the house. Maybe the front door of their house was being renovated. Maybe they wanted to hide the delivery from a parent or spouse. It really could have been any number of things. Plus, all I could think about was how slow the night was and how much longer it was going to feel if I sat around folding boxes. So, I just decided to do my job. But the second I stepped outside, I started having second thoughts. It was one of those summer nights that felt like walking through soup. Hot, humid, and completely still. Like even the air was stuck in some kind of invisible jelly. I don't know if this will make sense, but there's the stale, sour smell you get when it's really humid and still out. Sort of like old plastic and sunbaked dirt. That's what it smelled like out there. I hate that smell more than anything, but it was unavoidable. I had the windows down for maybe 2 minutes before giving up and blasting the AC. The delivery address wasn't in the direction of downtown. It was actually in the exact opposite direction, even though the pizza place itself was already kind of in the middle of nowhere. The drive was supposed to take just over 25 minutes, but it felt longer because of how empty the roads were. I'm definitely exaggerating a bit. It's not like there were no houses for miles, but it was much less dense the further I drove. When I finally got to the address, I realized I was coming up behind the house. The GPS had routed me along the skinny little side street that ran parallel to a set of backyards. There weren't any street lights, and the houses didn't have back porch lights either. It was all shadows. I remember slowing down and double-checking the house number because it looked totally dead. There were no lights inside and no cars in the driveway. Just the sagging backyard with overgrown grass and a rickety wooden fence that didn't even close all the way. But still, I followed the instructions. I parked right there on the gravel shoulder, grabbed the pizza, and walked up the incline toward the back door. I had the pizza in one hand and my flashlight in the other, angling it down toward my feet so I wouldn't trip on anything. When I got to the top of the hill, I saw the back door. It was one of those old white ones with a small pane of glass at the top covered by a cheap curtain. I knocked and waited, but no one answered. I knocked a second time, knowing that my manager would be livid if I returned to the store empty-handed. After no response, I was about to knock a third time when I saw the curtain move. Not a lot, just this tiny little twitch, like someone brushed it with their finger. It was fast, and I don't think I would have even noticed if I hadn't been staring at the glass. I stood there for another few seconds, expecting the person who was clearly standing right behind the door to finally open up. But before that happened, I noticed two unmarked cars pull up to the side street behind my car. My first thought was that I was about to get in trouble for trespassing or something. One of the car doors opened and someone stepped out. Even from the house, I could make out that it was a man in the light of the other car's headlights. The guy motioned for me to walk over to him, which is what I did, assuming that he had ordered the pizza and that I had beaten him home from work or something. But as I got closer, I realized he was flashing me something in his hand. It was a badge. The guy was an undercover police officer, which I was able to ascertain because he wasn't wearing a uniform, just normal clothes. As soon as I got within a certain distance of him, he told me to head back to my car and wait there. That was it. That's all he said. So, I did. I backed away slowly, climbed into the delivery car, and sat there watching. That's when I realized there weren't just two officers. There were five, maybe more. All of them had flashlights, but none of them said a word. They moved stealthily, circling the house like they were trying not to be seen. Not one of them knocked or announced their presence, which I found strange. It was a pretty bizarre sight. I remember one of the officers reaching for the back door handle, the same one I had just knocked on, and gently trying it. When it didn't open, he just nodded at one of the other guys and backed off. It felt like I was watching something I wasn't supposed to see, and I guess I was. Eventually, the first officer came back to my car and crouched beside the window. I rolled it down and he looked over the pizza box on the passenger seat and let out this short sigh. He was relatively vague with what he told me, but he didn't seem like a tool, just that he was trying not to say too much. Basically, he said that there was an ongoing investigation involving that property and that he along with the rest of the officers were staking it out. He apologized for taking so long to intervene and told me that I had pulled up the exact time they were repositioning their vehicles. I asked if he wanted to see the delivery order and he nodded. I pulled it up on the delivery app, but I could tell it was useless. There was an associated phone number with the order along with the delivery address and the first name, Jerry, but it didn't seem particularly helpful. The officer read it, took the number down, then told me to leave immediately. I expressed my frustration to him, saying that my boss was going to kill me for returning with the pizza, and the guy just shrugged his shoulders. Then he repeated his instruction for me to leave and started walking away from the car. I was pissed, but there was nothing I could do, so I drove off. It took me the entire ride back for the whole thing to sink in. I didn't really grasp the gravity of the situation until stepping out of the car. If the police hadn't intervened when they did, something awful could have happened. I don't even know what. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the threat of the police was probably the only reason the person didn't open the door to accept the pizza. But why would someone order a pizza if they were being staked out? Maybe the person inside the house didn't know they were being watched. Or maybe they did and I was part of some test run. Like maybe I was the bait to see if the cops were watching that side of the house or if they left. The curtain moving, the silence, the timing. I don't know. What I do know is that I will never get an explanation for what happens. And thinking back to this incident is mostly a waste of time. I probably would have forgotten all about this if one of my high school friends hadn't brought it up the other week. I didn't even remember it at first. It's probably best I forget about it again, but I figured I'd share it here before that happens. [Music] This happened just last year. I'm 40 now, married with two boys, ages 7 and five. I work in insurance, which sounds boring because it is, but we're stable and that's all I care about at this point in life. A couple years ago, my dad passed away after a long bout with cancer. He left behind a beach house down in Delaware that I had never been to before because he used to rent it out year round. It's nothing flashy or big, but it's in a fantastic spot just one block off the boardwalk. My favorite part about it by far is the upstairs back deck that provides a really nice view of the ocean. We started going there every summer after he passed, using it as our escape. A week here, weekend there. It became our little family tradition. As much as my wife and I love spending time there, the boys love it even more. They'll spend hours on end playing on the beach, riding bikes, and exploring the town. It feels like a gift, something my dad left behind for us to enjoy. This story takes place during one of those weeks last summer. We'd gone down in mid July, a Sunday through Friday kind of thing when the crowds would thin out midweek and the beach was a little quieter. I remember the night clearly. It was a Wednesday. The boys had knocked out around 9:30 after a long day in the sun and my wife and I were sitting on the back deck playing cards and sipping wine. That's when our older son, Jordan, came outside. He had this uneasy look on his face. He told me he kept hearing a scratching noise in his room and it was keeping him awake. I glanced at my wife, then set my glass down and stood up, telling him I'd go check it out. I told my wife to hang tight. I figured it was probably just generic house sounds. It is a pretty old house after all. The boys don't share a room, so I figured there was no need to wake our younger one. I followed Jordan downstairs to his room, and he pointed to the wall near his bed and motioned for me to be quiet. We both stood there for a while, and I didn't hear anything at first, but I didn't want him to think I didn't believe him. So, I stood there a little while longer. After maybe 20 seconds, I finally heard it. Faint at first, but definitely there. a soft scratching sound just like he had described. I crouched down and pressed my ear to the wall. It didn't sound like an animal up in the rafters or anything. It sounded like it was coming from inside the wall, lowered down and closer to the baseboards. That's when I heard it breathing. Not an animal. Definitely not. It was deep, slow human breathing. I flinched back and let out a sharp Jesus without even meaning to. And then, I'm not kidding about this, I heard the most guttural and angry scream I've ever heard ring out from somewhere inside the wall. It caught me so offg guard that I yelled out again, a feeling of existential dread hitting me right in the face. I grabbed Jordan by the arm and yanked him out of the room. We ran down the hall to get my younger son, Scott, who was still sound asleep. I didn't even give him a chance to open his eyes. I just scooped him up in my arms and ran. I needed to get back upstairs to the deck where my wife was. That was the only other thing on my mind at that point. As we reached the base of the stairs, I yelled for her. And then I heard another scream come from somewhere behind me, only much closer this time. I turned around and saw a man covered in filth charging down the hallway straight at us. I nearly tripped trying to get up the stairs with both my sons, but we made it upstairs and onto the deck just in time. Not two seconds after I slammed the sliding door shut, the guy hit the glass full force. I genuinely thought it would shatter. He started clawing at the door like an animal, shrieking and pounding, all the while yelling things I can't bring myself to repeat. I threw my body against the door and yelled at my wife to grab the kids and call the police. She grabbed them and covered their ears, pulling them back from the scene. I kept my eyes on his, trying to block the view of him from my family. He was wild, completely unhinged. His hand smeared something. Dirt, blood, I don't even know. He smeared it across the glass as he banged and tried to force the door open. I don't know how long I held it shut. A minute, five, it felt like forever. He seemingly had unlimited energy because it took all my strength to keep that door shut and he didn't let up once. All I could think about was protecting my family. I was fully prepared to fight the guy if the glass broke. But before that happened, the police finally showed up. They must have come around the side because within seconds, I saw two officers inside the house running at the guy who was still banging on the door. One of the officers tackled him from behind and the other one helped restrain him. The rest of the night was a blur. After getting that guy out of my house and in the back of a police car, the officers asked me for my version of things, which I told them. Together, the three of us inspected the house to try and assess how that man had been inside the walls and how he had gotten out so quickly. Turns out the house has a crawl space I didn't know about. There's an entrance underneath the back porch that you wouldn't know was there unless you were looking. From there, it leads into a standing crawl space that runs alongside the foundation and has a second access point through a loose panel in Jordan's closet. I had no idea it was there. I'd never done a full inspection of the house when I'd inherited it. Hell, I didn't even bother refinishing it. A few days later, I got more information from a detective who called to follow up. He told me the perpetrator admitted that he'd been staying in the crawl space for months, that he had discovered the crawl space entrance during the off season, and was planning to harm my family that night for intruding on his quote new home. Apparently, the guy had been stealing food from both our house, which we somehow did notice, and our neighbors trash bins. We didn't go back for the rest of the summer, not out of fear of something else happening, but out of trauma. I didn't want to bring my wife or kids back there for a while, and they didn't object. I hired a crew to seal off the crawl space completely, and once that was done, I was finally able to relax a little. We've been using the house again this summer, and I'm glad to say that things are back to normal, or at least as close to it as we're going to get. [Music] I grew up in a kind of rural area where you could ride your bike for miles without seeing another person. Like a lot of people, my favorite season was always summer. It still is actually, but it's been a while since I lived out in the country, so summer's lost a little bit of its charm. A lot of what made summer so special to me is tied to life in the middle of nowhere. There was something about the warmth, quiet, and emptiness I loved. Something I could never find in the city. It's hard to explain, but I just felt so isolated, but in a good way. Like I had my own little corner of the earth all to myself. Like I could disappear for hours and no one would know. Summer nights were always the best. The darkness added to the feeling of privacy and freedom that the little girl I used to be craved. I was 16 at the time. I had a friend back then named Taylor. She was a little more reckless than me, always pushing the limits in small ways. One random night in July, we decided to go stargazing. Just us, two bikes, and a bottle of wine. It wasn't the first time we had done something like this. Actually, it's something we did quite often. That is until what I'm about to tell you happens. Come to think of it, this was probably one of the last times we went stargazing together. We didn't have a specific plan, just a direction. We wanted to go somewhere new since the old spots were getting a little repetitive. Taylor said she knew a good spot past the edge of town, some abandoned stretch of farmland where nobody ever would bother us. It was sometime around 10:00 when we left. I'm not sure how long we biked, maybe 20 minutes, maybe 30. But we didn't stop until we were past anything even remotely civilized. At some point, Taylor just stopped her bike abruptly and told me we were here. I wasn't really sure what here meant since there were no descriptive landmarks around, but it still felt perfect. Wide open field, no buildings, no fences, no cows, just a huge patch of grass and the endless starry sky. We spread out a blanket and popped the cork with the little opener Taylor had somehow remembered to bring. It was some cheap red wine that didn't taste all that good, but it did the job. We laid there for a while, passing the bottle back and forth, pointing out the few constellations we remembered by name. Our goal on nights like this was always the same. Try and spot a shooting star. At one point, Taylor asked me if I thought we'd actually see one, and I told her probably not, but to keep looking anyway. They're not as uncommon out in the country where you can see so many stars, but you still have to pay attention. Shooting star or not, though, we were having a great night. The wine was definitely doing its job, and I started feeling myself slipping into drunkenness. It was the kind of night that made you feel like time didn't exist. Kind of like what I was talking about earlier. This isn't super relevant to the story, but it's one of the few things I remember about the night, so I'm going to quickly tell you anyway. There was a very brief moment that felt like a blip in the rhythm of the night. We were leaning back and Taylor looked at me in this way that made me wonder if she wanted something more than friendship. Growing up, I always had that suspicion about her, but it was never motivated by anything more than curiosity. But that night, it felt a little stronger than I could recall it ever being. I didn't ask, didn't say anything. That kind of thing just wasn't talked about openly where we grew up. And besides, maybe I was just tipsy and reading too into things. Either way, it passed. We laughed about something dumb, she said, and then looked up just in time to catch a shooting star streak across the sky. If anyone has ever seen a shooting star, they know the uncontrollable reaction it elicits. Like, you just can't help but laugh or shout something out into the night. The two of us giggled, and Taylor told me to make a wish. I don't remember what it was. Probably something silly. We leaned back and talked for a few more minutes, our moods a little uplifted from seeing the shooting star. I closed my eyes for a moment, not to fall asleep, just to feel the breeze on my face for a second and settle further into the stillness. I swear on my life, my eyes were not closed for more than 5 seconds. But when I opened them, Taylor was gone. Like gone, gone. Not just off to pee or fiddling with her phone. She was actually gone, which I could tell from the fact that both she and her bike were nowhere in sight, even though mine was still sitting right next to the blanket. I sat up fast, thinking maybe she was messing with me. But even after turning a full 360, I couldn't see her. In that moment, I felt this unexplainable feeling of fear wash over me. The empty field I was sitting in suddenly felt suffocating, and the gentle charm of the night was replaced by panic. The stars looked dimmer. That's the part I can't forget. The sky was still there, but it felt off, like someone had turned the brightness down or smeared something over it. And the air felt colder, too. Not like it had cooled naturally, but like I stepped into a different version of the same place. I know I'm not making any sense, but like I said, the feeling was unexplainable. I pulled out my phone to check the time. It was 3:00 a.m. exactly. That time stamp is burned into my memory and probably will be forever. I had to blink a few times to make sure my mind wasn't playing tricks on me. It hadn't even been midnight just a few minutes ago. I kept staring at the time on my phone, wondering if I had somehow fallen asleep. I knew I hadn't, but I couldn't be sure. Would Taylor really leave me there all alone, though? Even if I had fallen asleep, there was no way. She wouldn't have done that in a million years. I stood up, spun around, and called her name a bunch of times, but she didn't answer. I didn't know what to think. The only logical explanation was that she had ditched me for some reason. Maybe she'd gotten annoyed or wandered off and left me passed out, but I couldn't figure out why. We hadn't argued and the vibe had been good. Really good, honestly. I called their phone a bunch of times, too, but those were unanswered as well. After that, I started crying. I mean, can you really blame me? I didn't know what else to do. I grabbed my bike and started pedaling back towards my house, trying not to panic. That ride felt like it took forever. It was probably the scariest I'd ever felt on a bike. I didn't stop until I made it back to my driveway, completely out of breath and still not understanding what had just happened. I went to sleep immediately. The next day, I texted Taylor first thing in the morning, expecting an apology or at least an explanation, but instead she demanded one from me. She asked me word for word, "Where the hell did you go last night." I told her what I remembered, how I'd woken up alone at 3:00 a.m. and assumed she'd left me, but then she hit me with the thing that made me send the story in. She said she was the one who had woken up alone at 3:00 a.m. and I was the one who was gone. She waited for me for over an hour, then biked home angry and confused, assuming I'd gotten annoyed and left her there. According to her, I just vanished. And I was just as convinced the same thing happened in reverse. We went in circles for a bit trying to piece it together, but nothing added up. Neither of us had memory gaps beyond that moment. Neither of us had texts or calls or anything that could help reconstruct what actually happened. Even though both of us swore remembering calling each other after waking up, none of those mis calls were in either of our phone logs. Eventually, we dropped it. Or at least we stopped talking about it. But I think both of us were far more terrified than we wanted to admit. I know I was. For months, I'd find myself lying in bed looking out my window at the stars and remembering that night. Taylor and I didn't stargaze much after that night. Maybe once or twice. In a sense, things did go back to normal. We continued living our lives and that was that. But even now, I still have no explanation for anything that happened that night. I wouldn't call myself superstitious or a believer in the paranormal, but everyone I tell this story to immediately attribute it to something unnatural. And maybe they're right, but I really don't like thinking about that. I do consider the possibility that she simply lied to me. Either way, I get a really unsettled feeling like something happened to us that night that I'll potentially never figure out for as long as I live. I haven't heard from Taylor for years, but I'd bet my life on the fact that she too still wonders from time to time about what happened to us that summer night in the field.