Some of the most disturbing stories to be heard can be found in real life, not just in books and movies. And it just goes to show that even the most ordinary-looking folks might have some deep and dark secrets hidden among all the skeletons in their closets. You can never tell what someone’s done or what they’ve experienced just by looking at them superficially.

Reddit users revealed the creepiest confessions and the most disturbing things that they’ve ever heard from seemingly-normal people. We’ve collected the most powerful stories to share with you. Scroll down to read them, but be warned—many of these are not for the faint of heart and deal with some very dark aspects of humanity.

Bored Panda wanted to learn more about our fascination with reading horror stories (whether fact or fiction), so we reached out to Bram Stoker Award-winning editor and writer Doug Murano. He is the founder of Bad Hand Books and has launched an Indiegogo campaign to inspire people based on his extremely viral ‘give me calloused hands and tender hearts’ tweet.

“Real life is absolutely terrifying right now. We’re years into a deadly pandemic. Authoritarianism and fascism are literally on the march around the world. People and institutions we once thought we could count on to do the right thing routinely reveal themselves to be opportunists and cowards. It’s not looking good right now. These are real monsters and there is no silver bullet. That’s the one thing about horror—there are rules you can follow to defeat the evil. Real-life isn’t quite as easy as that,” he told us how reality stacks up against fiction at the moment. Scroll down for our full interview with Doug.

#1

I used to help out at a nursing home. This old Russian lady would relate the same tale over and over. Her husband drank and hit her. It was sad for sure. But one day she leaned over and whispered “he was [bad] drunk, so I pushed him down stairs. Dead.”

Image credits: PowerWordCoffee

#2

When I was a cashier a guy was buying around 50 cans of wet cat food and just making friendly conversation I asked how many cats he had. Big mistake. He has no cats, he eats it.

Image credits: Tickles_My_Pickles

#3

I had an art teacher in about third grade who was really cool–or at least I thought so. At some point, she came up to me and said, “I love your red hair. I just want to chop it all off when you’re asleep and glue it to my head.”

It’s one of my sharpest childhood memories because I remember going afterward, “Uh…..thanks?” and laughing really nervously.

Image credits: [deleted]

Editor and writer Doug believes that part of the appeal of the horror genre is that it allows people to tackle the issues of the day in exciting and unexpected ways. “Look at what Jordan Peele is doing in terms of our discussion of race in America with Get Out and Us. Contextualizing that discussion within the horror genre allows him to force the discussion in an entertaining and visually interesting way that I wonder whether he could achieve otherwise. The spectacle allows the message to slip right into our subconscious,” he shared.

#4

My parents got divorced when I was 6 and my mother got full custody because my dad was super abusive. She’d always tell the story of how they were fighting before the divorce and the 3 of us were out boating and my dad tried to tip the boat so that my mother [and] I would drown.

Flash forward to 20 years later when I reconnected with my dad. We were driving to meet his family and he had a mental breakdown and confessed that he is bipolar and wasn’t on his meds but he did in-fact try to push her and [me] over the side of the boat in hopes that we’d drown. He also wasn’t taking his meds again when he confessed.

Image credits: confession0

#5

I pick someone and just find as much information on them as I can. Pictures, stories, weird accounts on dating sites. I don’t do anything with it other than wknt I know a little extra about this person than another. Honestly, I think I’m creepy for doing it.

Image credits: n67

#6

I had a friend confess that every time he stayed at my apartment (which was frequently, because we lived in different countries, sometimes he would stay for a month+ at a time) he watched me sleep. I woke with him staring at me, he was literally inches away from my face just staring and I freaked out, he broke down and confessed. My husband was asleep next to me!

That was the most creepy for sure. It also ended our friendship.

Image credits: Susansays

Doug also had some advice for amateur writers who want to give the horror genre a shot. “Write about what scares you—and be honest about it. Horror is fueled to a greater extent by empathy than terror, so if you can make your audience feel what you feel, you will bring them into your world and your fears. Just about anything can evoke terror in the right context. You have a huge canvas,” he said.

During an earlier in-depth interview, Bored Panda spoke about people’s fascination with the dark and disturbing aspects of humanity with psychologist Lee Chambers. One way that that fascination crops up is in the fascination with True Crime stories that explore evil in real life.

#7

When I was pregnant some crunchy types asked me if I was planning to eat my placenta. I said “No.” To that unambiguous answer I met with “You should,” “It’s natural and healthy,” “You will need the nutrition” and other such statements. I respond “I am not a cannibal, I do not eat human flesh.” I wish I had a camera to capture the facial expression of a person who suddenly realizes that they have committed an act of cannibalism and encourages others to do the same.

Image credits: A_bit_off_topic

#8

Not sure if she qualifies as normal, but one of my ex-gfs once confessed to me that she was linked to a cat spirit/demon/creature from another dimension that gave her magical abilities. Apparently several of her group of friends had similar links and abilities and they were all [super] serious about it. No weird costumes or contacts, they would just drop stuff about into conversation very casually.

Image credits: lawmanjj

#9

A girl I knew broke down in tears when she confessed that her dad was homeless and that she misses him.

She was the hardest, scariest most serious girl I knew.

Image credits: [deleted]

“When considering why the darker side of humanity and entertainment are so compelling, we have to first look at our evolutionary journey as human beings. For the majority of our existence, we were prey and always hyperaware of threats to our safety, which created a negativity bias that we are drawn towards,” Lee told us.

“But in today’s safe and often sanitized world, we are rarely threatened significantly, and the ability to explore evil, frightening and gruesome entertainment is one of the few ways we can visit this part of humanity while remaining safe and comfortable,” the psychologist said to Bored Panda.

“There is a level of novelty to it, it removes boredom quickly, and it helps us to discover our emotional limits while understanding the minds of those who go beyond social norms and potentially gaining knowledge of how we might avoid being victims ourselves. They also offer closure, with many stories ending with the mystery being solved, and the criminal being brought to a level of justice.”

#10

I was with some friends at a bonfire, and there were a bunch of seemingly cool/normal people there… we were all just hanging out, drinking and having a good time. The stories started flowing, and kinda out of nowhere, this pale/gollum-[esque] dude chimes in with “one time, some friends and I lit a playground on fire…”

We all kinda sat in silence, then awkwardly laughed and shrugged it off. Stories kept flowing.

Then a few minutes later he said “… yeah, back where I grew up, it was a small town… we didn’t have a lot to do, so my group of friends and I would go around the neighborhood and find stray cats, and stomp them to death” … and he kinda chuckled as he was saying it (like he expected us to laugh with him) … everyone kinda said a collective “that’s really fu***d up man…” … and again, there was awkwardness and silence…

He quite literally ended the night with his next story…

“One time we stole a car from a parking lot. It was me and one other friend, and we just noticed that the lady had left the car running while she ran into the store, so we just hopped in and drove it off… Then, right as we got out of the parking lot and on to the main road, we noticed there was a baby in a safety seat in back… my buddy panicked, and as we got on to the main highway, he just threw the baby out of the window… we never found out if it was okay or not.”

Everyone left without really responding to that one…

Later, we discovered that he ended up doing some time for shooting an 80-year-old lady in the face with a pellet gun from his balcony… just for fun. Good dude.

Image credits: defmunch1

#11

There was this girl in my school who I think was a selective mute; she only talked to a few people, and I was one of them. Then she told me that I’d never be on her hit list.

Image credits: level 1 [deleted]

#12

That they like the taste of petrol

Image credits: Stealth_Panda_

Lee stressed that seeing someone else face evil while the viewer (or reader) feels safe can even have a “comforting element” to it. “It can take us on an emotional rollercoaster, have us trying to solve the puzzle and test our fear in a controlled way. The permission to explore evil is powerful, as we so rarely get the chance elsewhere, and in itself, it is healthy and normal in moderation,” he told Bored Panda.

“The challenge we face is the fact that consuming too much of this can desensitize us, and cause us to become less empathetic to the suffering of others, more fearful of our own environment, and potentially be more likely to use aggression ourselves,” the psychologist warned that consuming too much negativity and darkness can have an adverse effect on our mental health.

“It can also cause us to be triggered by our own previous adverse experiences, make it harder to manage our own emotional balance, and increase our stress levels, so moderating our consumption is something we should have front of mind, even when we get embroiled in the latest series that is pulling us in.”

#13

When I was in middle school, about 13 at the time, I had an English teacher we will call her Mrs. L. I had a friend who would spend a lot of time with our teacher outside of school. Going over to her house, to the mall, [etc.]. My friend after awhile told me that he had been having sex with Mrs. L, who was in her late thirties and married and that he was going to tell his parents about it. They pressed charges and she was gone from school for awhile and then quit, but didn’t serve any jail time.

I don’t know much else about the court case. We kinda stopped talking after all this had happened.

Image credits: LostBoy_Bond

#14

OK, I served in the Parachute regiment in the British army and another unit (Prefer not to say) and then went on to private contracting. I went to protect Christian missionaries in Sierra Leone in the late ’90s. One of the peacekeepers had detained a young boy, maybe 8 years old. I asked what he’d done wrong to the missionary and she said ‘ask him’. I asked why he was detained and he told me he had ‘Murdered his brother, his sister and his mother for admission into the RUF’. This 8-year-old boy had killed his entire family.

Image credits: Flipper55

#15

So this is actually my mom’s story. She and her best friend in high school took an anatomy class together. They dissected fetal pigs. One day the friend confesses that she stole a fetal pig from the lab, took it home, and she dressed it up in baby clothes. She asked my mom if she thought there was anything wrong with that.

Bonus: The friend is a very successful psychiatrist.

Image credits: transdermalcelebrity

#16

I used to know a girl who would stalk people. She’d get their license plates, memorize their schedules, call/text them obsessively, and once even followed someone home. She was incredibly shallow and just… off. She would tell me she would bully other students. It wasn’t until that she started stalking my brother that I realized the extent of her crazy.

Image credits: fizzures

#17

Had an absolutely charming, incredibly smart-looking close friend for a few years. It took me about 1,5-2 years to find out everything about her life was a lie. Even the smarts, she’d read some detailed article on a subject and present ideas as if they were her own, but never knew anything deeper. Pretended to speak many languages by secretly watching a foreign movie with subs on, then “translating” some cool scenes to us.

She made up a story about her father abusing her mom to make excuses for failing her uni exams, lied to people about being a medical student to look smart, and would give them very dangerous advice, lied to her family about being a brilliant medical student (don’t know if they believed her), and about many, many other things.

She was an incredibly fun person, but an awful toxic friend. Still, I was afraid she’d lose her mind completely if I revealed her secrets to everyone. So I only quietly told the people she was abusing or potentially putting in danger, so she couldn’t do any damage anymore. Several times I tried to talk her into going into therapy, but I stopped… She was in complete denial about me knowing everything, I was so afraid she’d kill herself if she found out what everyone thought of her. One day she just packed her things, said goodbye with a hug and a huge smile on her face, and left for another country to “pursue her medical studies”. I’ve kept evidence of all the craziness in case it comes back someday.

I’d say that if you genuinely pay attention to people around you, you’ll find out many creepy stories like this. Some people see friends come and go, and actually never have any idea of what’s going on in their lives.

Image credits: astrobibliophobia

#18

My friend told me he robbed a bank…he got like $11,400 in cash and escaped by bicycle. The bank has since been closed but he had it all planned out before hand and worked out to a tee. He comes back freaking out sweating and panicked and his sister knew something was up and then heard on the news the robbery and bicycle and realized it was him but didn’t rat him out. He took his girlfriend on a cruise, paid some bills off.

Image credits: swimlab

#19

That they have had cannibalistic thoughts in the past

Image credits: Cats_Of_Olympus

#20

[My father] is a career soldier, is still in and has many more years before he gets out. (23 years in so far). Well he isn’t the most normal person anymore, after he came home from Iraq the second time he had changed majorly. He was put on alot of PTSD medications that keep him pretty normal most of the time.

However, on his 48th Birthday we decided to celebrate with some friends and have a few drinks. We didn’t know that he didn’t take his medicine that day and we got him a little too much to drink on whiskey. One of his non-military buddies said “hey man, how many of those bastards did you actually get?” we all stop and just stare not really wanting an answer and hoping he was sober enough to not provide one… he wasn’t. He answered with “You know what? I don’t give a f*ck about the [jerks] I killed, they tried to [end] me and my buddies, they deserved it. The only ones I do regret are the women and children that got in the way they didn’t deserve to die.”

We stopped giving him drinks after that and haven’t spoken about it since, but it was a shock to say the least.

Image credits: Seriously_this_again

#21

My friend has long dreads and had a pretty bad case of lice. When he came back from traveling his roommates wouldn’t let him in the house until he was lice free. Being poor he couldn’t afford treatment so he dunked his head in some sort of gasoline, then he lit a cigarette… He has no nipples, most of his body is skin grafted. He still has dreads. He is lice free.

Image credits: blahblahblahokay

#22

Out of nowhere my ma tells me my dad drunkenly “confessed” that he and his cousin (whom my mom later dated and had a kid with) picked up a hitchhiker out near the beach in the early ’90’s. They were intoxicated and one thing lead[s] to another and they ended up killing the guy and burying him in a remote location in some sand dunes. She assumed he was trying to scare her into staying with him since they were going through a break up and she shrugged it off as machismo [BS].

So the story goes, years later a story comes up on the news, they are asking for information about remains found buried in a sand dune. She’s not really paying attention until they start describing this large belt buckle that may help identify the man…she flips the fuck out because my dad had bragged about taking the guy’s belt off, which had a huge Texas-style buckle, and beating him with it…making fun of the buckle and stuff. Next day the cousin calls and tells her he or his buddies would not hesitate to kill us if she breathes a word.

Anyways, she always felt really guilty about not turning them in but after losing my sister (she [passed] very young) she couldn’t fathom losing me as well. The rest is history. They are free dudes.

Image credits: 88superfreight

#23

I worked on a psych ward for a year in a military hospital. A young man was arrested while doing push ups on the White House lawn. He said he had a meeting with the president and he was just killing time. He is lucky he didn’t get killed. Anyway, he was on our ward for quite some time. In that time, he and I got extremely close. When I was on shift, he would request to talk to me, confide in me, etc. This was fine with me, it was my job. This guy said a lot of weird stuff. He was extremely sick. He began making religious drawings everyday. At least 7-10 a day. Then he started to claim he was a prophet. Then he claimed he was Jesus. He even asked us to call him Jesus or Christ. For some reason, after all the other weird things he’d done, that stuck with me the most. After weeks of medication, he hadn’t gotten any better. He was getting worse. Eventually he got released and last I heard he said he had a manager and was getting a record deal for being a rapper. He also bought 3 brand new cars and was rumored to be homeless. I think about him often and hope he is doing ok.

Image credits: grimreefer710

#24

Told me that he used to go on forums and boards dedicated to people struggle with depression, and he’d PM the ones who were feeling suicidal with instructions on how to go about killing themselves, and give encouragement to do so.

Image credits: JohnBoddy

#25

My ex boyfriend could not handle our break up. I broke it off with him because of significant issues – drugs, stealing, etc. I finally got out of it. He didn’t. He would not give up on me. At first he was desperate at trying to get back with me, following me, waiting in obscure locations for when I walked to my car, and even threatening to kill himself if I didn’t see him. I blocked his numbers, changed my email, transferred colleges, moved a state away, and tried to move on with my life.

He was in and out of jail for drugs and stealing in addition to concealed weapons charges. Which was scary for me knowing all the times when he confronted me alone.

It was about 4 or so years later when I received the creepiest phone call. It was him calling to tell me that he was looking for me all this time. The tone of his voice, the horrific laughter, I freaked out. I called my parents and informed them, hey if I go missing this is who has me. I called campus security and made sure they had his description. He never showed up but my god, the voice on the other end of the line still brings chills.

It scares me to this day that he is out there possibly looking for me. Luckily I’ve become more aware of precautions to take. Pepper spray, learning self defense, etc. If I was in another state where obtaining a gun was easier, I would have done so. Unfortunately it’s not so easy where I am now. I do however have panic buttons and GPS locators so if something were to happen, I can be found.

I try not to let fear or paranoia run my life, I try to take the best precautions, but I will always have that fear that just around the corner, he will be waiting for me.

Image credits: drowningwithoutwater

#26

Once I was out. We were sitting side by side at dinner, and two of our friends were sitting across from us. Mid-meal, the liar’s phone rings. Since I’m right next to her, I see that it clearly reads “mom” on the caller ID, and she presses “ignore”. No biggie, she can call her back later, it’s rude to answer a call during dinner anyway.

But then, she starts talking about how it’s her ex who called her, and how she’s too afraid to pick up the phone. She suddenly tells us that her ex is this crazy stalker type person who abused her for years and who keeps tracking down her phone numbers and addresses no matter where she moves, and how the police won’t believe her and how she’s always so afraid of seeing him on the streets. She started shaking and crying and everything, it was quite the performance. If I hadn’t clearly seen that it was her mom who called her, I would have believed it. And for what? What was the point of that?

That was the day I really realised how much this chick lied. It was insane.

Image credits: frolics_with_cats

#27

Had a good friend of mine tell his crush at a party that he, “just wanted to cut her ears off and take them with him”.

He’s a great guy, married, and just had his first child (with someone completely different, that girl was gone).

Image credits: Thienen

#28

I work with a Polish dude who barely speaks English… He’s a loveable 40-something dude, who just drinks vodka and laughs infectiously all day long. A textbook carefree scamp.

Every couple of months everyone from work heads to a bar that hook us up with half price drinks for that particular night. It’s pretty sweet… So anyway, this Polish dude and i were at the end of a long 10 person bench laughing about nothing and drinking ice cold cruiser, after ice cold cruiser. It was great.

Eventually we (somehow) got onto the topic of what he did before he came to England… After a few brews his English became even more scattered, but he did try, bless him.

So he says he was in the army and so on and so forth, after which he said ‘I shoot 7 men dead’. Now that might not seem too heavy for you, but it blew me away… He was on the front-lines during the Kosovan war (from what i could gather).

I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, get too much more out of him due to the language barrier. Also, some gnarly, illegal shit happened during that war, which I don’t think i could bear to know about.

Keep smiling, Pete

Image credits: Vernon-T-Waldrip

#29

Somebody once told me, “The last thing I want to do is hurt you… But it’s still on the list.”

Image credits: Graendal

#30

There was this chef I worked with who seemed like a pretty normal dude. He was an immigrant from Haiti.

One day he brings up that he had to put his sick dog down when he was a kid. He said he did it himself since Haitians didn’t have extensive access to medical care for people, much less animals.

He said he tied a rock to its neck and dropped it in the ocean.

Image credits: Cabbizzle

#31

I work with a woman that one day during a conversation about my kitties/pets in general says “I hate all animals… I like going to the zoo to see them in cages especially when the cages are too small”. I distanced myself from her that day.

Image credits: hermanhansel920

#32

My friend who is this Grade A student goes over to all these different girls houses, not to have sex or anything. Just to steal their underwear while they’re in the bathroom or they’re elsewhere. He has a full box (Which includes a pair of my sisters underwear which he admitted to stealing) in his “Pant-ry.” I’m surprised no one has noticed in his house. But to this day, I’m the only one who knows. Well, now the whole of Reddit knows.

Image credits: Slashlespaul1997

#33

My teacher was showing the beginning footage of the leaked snowden video where a US drone bombs Iraqi civilians. I don’t know what was going through my mind when I said “Fast forward to the good part!” I meant it as a joke but the room was silent. Oh god the cringe.

Image credits: not_worth_your_time

#34

I have a completely normal friend (we’re both in our early 40’s now) that shared with me his childhood story of living with a ghost. Every night he had a ghost that would walk down the hallway into his bedroom and just stare at him … sometimes making noises, but usually quiet. He was so petrified that he would pull the sheets over his head. When this first happened, he would scream or run down the hallway to his parent’s bedroom but they would always turn him back to his own bedroom and tell him that his imagination was running wild. Over time, he actually grew accustomed to this apparition, but was still freaked out by it.

I, personally, don’t believe in ghosts and think that it must have been something else. But because my friend has such a type-A and a “no-lies” personality, I admit that I found it creepy (the hairs stood up on the back of my neck) to listen to him tell this story with such a nonchalant and straightforwardness. He eventually moved out of his childhood home when he was a teenager and these “ghost” episodes have never reoccured. There are different people living in his childhood home now, and he said that he would never go back there again.

Image credits: [deleted]

#35

Some idiot admitted to me he once hit a homeless person with his truck door as he was driving by. What a loser.

Image credits: [deleted]

#36

A really shy and timid friend told me her idea of a perfect date was [having sex] while watching the movie Antichrist.

Image credits: loptthetreacherous

#37

A bartender I used to know admitted to making fun of a depressed guy at the bar until he went out back, laid down on the train tracks, and waited for a train to come. I went to school in the same town when it happened, third-party accounts support that he did this, plus I saw the aftermath at the tracks.

Image credits: level 1 [deleted]

#38

I confessed to one of my friends that I find girls with bloody clothes or bleeding from scratches really attractive. They just sorta shook their head and said whatever.

Image credits: [deleted]

#39

After we’d been dating for about a year, my current girlfriend told me she found my school (then high school) and my home address through what could be seen by friends of friends on FB and one or two comments about my home town on a forum we were both on.

She did this before we started talking.

We’re still together, but I’ve never stopped teasing about it.

Image credits: koshekk

#40

My sister killed my pet fish when I was 11 or 12. She laughed when she told me.

Image credits: anonslore112

#41

Someone close to me killed her step-dad’s dog by feeding it tylenol PM in peanut butter because it annoyed her.

Image credits: lunchbockslarry

#42

“Yeah… I have cannibalistic thoughts. I almost had a mental breakdown last year because I kept thinking these thoughts and couldn’t get them to stop. But I’ve come to terms with it. Like, imagine a hot person… as chicken nuggets! With the skin and everything.”

He’s been recently diagnosed schizophrenic and still has these thoughts.

Image credits: fizzures

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