Creepy Encounters

About Creepy Encounters

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.

Publisher

Creepy Encounters

Category

fiction

Language

en

Explicit

Yes

First episode

17 Jul 2026

Latest episode

6 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

123 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Nov 2026

   Episode 123: A bed and breakfast lady in Galena had my coffee made right the first morning and the suitcase I gave to Goodwill in 2010 was hanging in her mudroom

   Submitted by Lynn — Fort Wayne, Indiana. 47. I drink my coffee the way I learned to drink it on night shifts at a truck stop off I-69, which is black, two pink packets of Sweet'N Low, and one ice cube so you can drink it right away. Nobody I have met since has ever done it that way. My husband Glenn calls it my waitress coffee. I quit that job in 2011. Last April, Glenn booked us three nights at a bed and breakfast in Galena, Illinois, for our twentieth anniversary. His sister Pam and her husband came too, because Pam found the place and Pam does not miss a trip. The woman who ran it was maybe sixty, short gray hair, reading glasses on a beaded chain. She said to call her Bonnie. The first morning I came down last. Everybody else already had plates. Bonnie set a mug down at my place before I sat, and it was black, there were two pink packets folded flat beside the saucer, and there was one ice cube going round in it. I said, how did you know that. She said, you look like a waitress coffee girl. She used Glenn's word. Glenn laughed so hard he had to put his fork down. Pam said Bonnie must have read people for forty years. Pam's husband said they probably look you up online now, everybody does. I said I have never once written about my coffee on the internet, and Pam said, Lynn, it is a nice thing. Take the nice thing. So I took it. I took it the second morning too, when it was there again before I came down the stairs. The third afternoon, everybody else went to look at wine and I stayed back with a headache. Bonnie was out. The house was quiet in the way old houses are, all ticking. I went down to the back porch to sit, and to get there you go through a little mudroom with a row of brass hooks where guests are supposed to hang their wet coats. There was one bag on the hooks. A small brown suitcase, the soft kind with a zipper all the way around, and a luggage tag on the handle. The leather kind with a little plastic window. I only looked because the suitcase was mine. Not one like mine. Mine. It had the white paint mark on the corner from when I helped my sister do her nursery. I gave that suitcase to the Goodwill drop box on McGalliard Road in Muncie in 2010 or so, along with two bags of clothes, when I was moving. The card behind the plastic window had my name and the address of the apartment I lived in back then, the one over the dry cleaner. In my handwriting. I remember writing it out at the kitchen table, because I spelled the street wrong the first time and had to start a new card. Under the plastic, if you looked close, you could see a second card behind the first one, with the wrong spelling. I didn't take it off the hook. It felt like somebody else's coat. I sat on the porch for an hour and then I went upstairs and lay down. At dinner I told everybody. Glenn said Goodwill sells things, Lynn, that is the whole idea of Goodwill. Pam said Bonnie probably bought it at a thrift store forty years ago, and I said it was not forty years ago, it was sixteen, and Pam said, so she bought it sixteen years ago, what are you saying. I didn't know what I was saying. I still don't. Pam's husband asked whether I had ever been to Galena before, and I said no, and he said, well, there you go, and I didn't understand what that settled. The next morning, there was no suitcase on the hooks. I checked before breakfast. My coffee was at my place, black, two pink, one cube. Bonnie asked if I had slept all right. I said I had. She said good, she worries about the ones who stay back alone. We drove home. Glenn left her five stars. Pam has already booked the same weekend for next April, all four of us, and put it on the family calendar on the fridge, and I have not taken it down.

2. 

   5 Nov 2026

   Episode 122: My rideshare driver could not read house numbers at night so I read him every one on three streets to help him find his daughter

   Submitted by Lonnie — Tulsa, Oklahoma. 41. I started nights at the hospital in September, and my car was in the shop most of that month, so I was taking a rideshare home at a quarter to one in the morning. That's the only reason any of this happened. Normally I'd never have met him. His name on the app was Gil. Older guy, maybe seventy, clean Buick, one of those little pine trees on the mirror. When I got in, he turned around in his seat and said, "Ma'am, I need to tell you something up front so you don't get scared. My eyes are going. I can drive fine, I can see the road, but I can't read a house number at night to save my life." I said that was okay, my address was in the app. He said, "Oh, I'll get you home. I just wondered if you'd do me a favor on the way." Taped across his dashboard, right under the windshield, was a long strip of blue painter's tape with house numbers written on it in black marker. Big, careful numbers. Maybe fifteen of them. He tapped it and said his daughter had moved into one of the neighborhoods off Harvard, and she wouldn't give him the address, and he wasn't going to push her, but he just wanted to know which house. He said she drives a white SUV. He said, "If you could just read me the numbers as we go by, and tell me if there's a car out front, and if anybody's up." I'm a nurse. I talk to old men about their daughters all night long. Of course I said yes. So he slowed way down, maybe ten miles an hour, and we rolled down this street I'd driven a hundred times, and I read them to him. Fourteen-oh-six, dark, truck in the drive. Fourteen-ten, porch light, no car. Fourteen-fourteen, TV on upstairs. He'd say the number back to me under his breath, soft, the way you'd say a phone number you're trying to keep. Every so often he'd ask a little more. Is that a dog bowl on the porch. Is the gate shut. I thought he was trying to picture her life. I thought it was the saddest thing I'd ever been part of. We did three streets. None of them had a white SUV. He didn't seem upset about it. He said, "That's alright, that helps me more than you know." Then he took me home. And when we pulled up, I looked at the tape one more time, and the last number on it was mine. Fifteen-twenty-two. I laughed and pointed at it, and he said, "Well, I had to write you down too, didn't I, or I'd drive right past you." Which made sense. He couldn't read it on a mailbox. He asked if anybody was waiting up for me. I said no, it's just me and the cat, and I'm on nights through Christmas, so the place is dark more than it's not. He looked at my house for a long second and said, "A dark house is a sad thing to come home to. You ought to get you a timer for that porch light." Then he waited in the drive until I got the door open, which most of them don't. I gave him five stars and wrote a little note about how kind he was. I've thought about him a lot. I've looked for his name in the app a couple of times, hoping I'd get him again so I could ask if he ever found her. I never have. That was the same month the neighborhood app went crazy, actually. Somebody went into a bunch of houses on the streets back behind mine, the ones off Harvard. Middle of the night, people sleeping right upstairs in some of them. One lady said they shut her gate behind them on the way out, which everybody thought was the creepiest part. The police think it's kids. People keep posting that we should all get cameras. I didn't get a camera. I did get the timer, though. Twelve dollars at the hardware store. The porch light comes on at seven every night now, and goes off at six in the morning, the same time every single day, whether I'm home or not. I'm still on nights through Christmas.

3. 

   4 Nov 2026

   Episode 121: The lady who sold me her sewing machine for 25 dollars on Marketplace still comes over every Tuesday to use it and she told me never to rethread it

   Submitted by Bree — Lubbock, Texas. 29. I bought the sewing machine because of trunk-or-treat. If you didn't grow up with it, that's where the church parks everybody's cars in a circle in the lot on the Sunday before Halloween, and the kids go car to car, and the moms decorate their trunks, and every single other kid in my daughter's class was going to have a costume somebody's mama made. Rosie was five. My own mom is in Oregon. I wanted to make her a sunflower. The listing said twenty-five dollars, cash, and then in capital letters, I DELIVER, NO PICKUPS. I thought that was a scam at first. Then she messaged me herself. Her name was Glenda. She said she was sixty-eight and she'd rather carry it in than have strangers in her garage, and honestly, that made sense to me. She showed up in a tan Buick on a Saturday. She carried the machine in by herself, in its case, and asked where I sew. I said I didn't, really. She said, then where will she be. I thought she meant the machine. I showed her the spare room. She set it up on the card table facing the window. She moved the table twice. When she opened the case, it was already threaded. Pale yellow thread, through every hook and guide, down to the needle, with a little square of muslin still under the foot like she'd stopped in the middle of a line. She said, "Don't rethread it. Ever. The tension's set exactly right and you'll never get it back." I said okay. She asked if she could meet Rosie. Rosie came out in her socks, and Glenda knelt down on my carpet and just looked at her for a while, and then she said, "Well. You'll do," and Rosie laughed, and I went to the kitchen for the cash. On Tuesday she texted to ask how it was running. I told her truthfully I hadn't figured out the bobbin. She said she'd come show me. She came at four, when Rosie gets home, and she didn't show me anything. She just sat down at it and sewed. I made coffee. Rosie sat on the floor next to her feet. She made the sunflower. She wouldn't take money for the fabric. Rosie won the costume ribbon at trunk-or-treat, and three different moms asked who made it, and I said my neighbor, because that's what it felt like by then. She kept coming on Tuesdays. I want to be clear that it was nice. My husband works the rigs out by Midland two weeks on, and I had a woman in my house who called me honey and folded laundry without being asked. She measured Rosie every single visit with a soft yellow tape, shoulders, waist, arms, and never wrote anything down. She made her a yellow dress, then another one. Then a yellow church coat. Everything she sewed was in that thread. I never saw her change the spool. I never saw it run out. Around February, she brought a dress that was too big. Way too big. I held it up against Rosie and it went to the floor. I laughed and said she won't fit this till she's nine. Glenda said, "That's alright. It's for later." The next one was bigger. So last week, just making conversation, I asked her the thing I'd always kind of wondered. I said, "Why'd you insist on delivering it, back in September? Why not just let people pick it up?" She didn't stop sewing. She said, "I bring it to every house myself, honey. I need to see the girl." And then she said, "This is the first one where it stayed." I asked what she meant, stayed. She said, "The other mothers rethreaded it." That's all. She finished the hem, bit the thread, and folded the dress, and it went in the closet with the others. There are eleven now. The biggest one would fit a teenager. I haven't said anything to her. I don't know what I would say. She's never done one unkind thing in my house. Rosie asks every morning if it's Tuesday. The machine is still on the card table, facing the window. The yellow thread is still in it, through every guide, down to the needle. I've sat in front of it a few times since. I haven't touched it. S…

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