Scariest Short Stories

Scariest Short
Stories

Here are some short scary stories we stumbled upon on Reddit. 

So without further ado, here are some short (kinda short) scary stories that will keep you all night.  

I know you're awake

It was a fairly regular night. The incandescent glow of the streetlights cast long shadows into the well-manicured suburban yards. The patter of a light rainfall became a soothing din for the sleeping young boy. It was a little after midnight; the child was fast asleep, with not a single care in the world. His tranquil state was interrupted by the sound of footsteps approaching his bedroom door. Not the soft footsteps of his parents walking to the bathroom. Heavy footsteps, the kind that would come from a pair of large boots. Just as he was about to get up to open the door, his door swung open to reveal the silhouette of a man. However, the shadow was not the familiar projection of his father in the doorway. No; this shadow was larger. This was the shadow of a man who should never have been in his home. The boy was silent, trying to make the man think he was asleep.

The man was quite large, with broad shoulders, large, tattooed arms and a rather unruly beard. He seemed to be stooped over a little, as if he were carrying a heavy load over his shoulder. As the man walked by the petrified child’s bed, the boy realized what this load was. Slung over the man’s burly shoulder were the mangled remains of his parents. The man quietly propped them up in a chair in the corner of the room. He placed his hand into a laceration in the father’s collarbone, and withdrew a large amount of blood on his index finger. He then began writing something on the wall, above the bodies of the boy’s parents. The man finished his sentence, stooped to the ground, and crawled under the bed.

The boy turned slightly to try to read what the man had written. It was futile, the child’s young mind was not yet capable of decoding the messy writing on his wall. He remained silent, trying to pretend that he had seen nothing. Perhaps it was to fool the man. Perhaps it was to fool himself. He remains as silent and still as his parents, listening to the barely audible breaths coming from beneath his bed. The minutes passed by like hours. The boy continued to squint at the letters, forcing his simple mind to process the glyphs present on his wall. The little boy gasps. He has made sense of the red, dripping script. ‘I know you’re awake,’ it says.

He feels a movement under his bed.

© make_stories_better via reddit

portraits

There was a hunter in the woods, who, after a long day hunting, was in the middle of an immense forest. It was getting dark, and having lost his bearings, he decided to head in one direction until he was clear of the increasingly oppressive foliage. After a what seemed like hours, he came across a cabin in a small clearing. Realizing how dark it had grown, he decided to see if he could stay there for the night. He approached, and found the door ajar. Nobody was inside. The hunter flopped down on the single bed, deciding to explain himself to the owner in the morning. As he looked around, he was suprised to see the walls adorned by many portraits, all painted in incredible detail. Without exception, they appeared to be staring down at him, their features twisted into looks of hatred. Staring back, he grew increasingly uncomfortable. Making a concerted effort to ignore the many hateful faces, he turned to face the wall, and exhausted, he fell into a restless sleep.

Face down in an unfamiliar bed, he turned blinking in unexpected sunlight. Looking up, he discovered that the cabin had no portraits, only windows.

© dr-sommer via reddit

red eyes

A man goes to an old hotel. He gets his key from the reception and heads off to his room. As he walks down a hall to his room he hears crying coming from behind one of the doors in the corridor. He stops at the door the crying is coming from and looks through the key hole. A woman in black with wrinkled hands coved in liver spots and her face covered by a veil, is sitting on a stool in the corner of the room sobbing. The man asks if she needs help. She doesn’t answer. He asks again and the reply continues to be nothing but crying. The man decides that he’s too tired to help and continues to his room. The next morning as he is walking down the same hall to go to reception he remembers the old women. He goes to her door and hears silence. He peaks through the keyhole and sees nothing but red. The man gives up and goes to the reception to check out. As he is leaving he mentions the crying women in the room to the receptionist. The receptionist turn pale and says that that room is said to be haunted by an old women. The man laughs it off and heads to the door. He is stopped in his tracks when the receptionist says the ghost is an old women with red eyes…​

© epicaricantic via reddit

The Girl With the Green Ribbon Around Her Neck.

A long time ago there was a pretty little girl who had a green ribbon around her neck. One day she went to school and met a boy named Jim. Jim sat behind her in class and noticed the ribbon under her pig tails.

“Why do you wear that ribbon around your neck?” he asked. Someday I’ll tell you, she promised.

When they were teenagers, Jim asked the girl on a date. While they were drinking frappes, Jim asked again, “why do you wear that green ribbon around your neck?” She said, “Well maybe if we ever get married I’ll tell you.”

Jim fell in love with the beautiful girl and they got married. Jim loved her very much and they had a wonderful marriage. One day Jim got curious again and asked, “We’re married now…why do you wear that ribbon on your neck?” She said, “I’ll tell you if we ever have kids.”

A couple of years later, a baby girl and baby boy was born. Jim once again got curious and asked,” Why do you wear that ribbon around your neck?” She said, if you love me, you’ll drop it for now, someday I’ll tell you.” Jim loved her with all his heart and so he dropped it and just accepted the fact that his wife wore a beautiful green ribbon around her neck all the time.

They got old together, then the woman got very sick, went to the hospital, and the doctor said she was going to die. Her distraught husband sat by her side for days on end, and finally said, please, tell me now, why do you have that ribbon around your neck? In a croaky voice she said, okay, I’ll tell you, take it off now.”

He pulled the bow loose and her head fell off.

© f3lbane via reddit

Gateway of the mind

In 1983, a team of deeply pious scientists conducted a radical experiment in an undisclosed facility. The scientists had theorized that a human without access to any senses or ways to perceive stimuli would be able to perceive the presence of God.

They believed that the five senses clouded our awareness of eternity, and without them, a human could actually establish contact with God by thought. An elderly man who claimed to have “nothing left to live for” was the only test subject to volunteer. To purge him of all his senses, the scientists performed a complex operation in which every sensory nerve connection to the brain was surgically severed.* Although the test subject retained full muscular function, he could not see, hear, taste, smell, or feel. With no possible way to communicate with or even sense the outside world, he was alone with his thoughts.

Scientists monitored him as he spoke aloud about his state of mind in jumbled, slurred sentences that he couldn’t even hear. After four days, the man claimed to be hearing hushed, unintelligible voices in his head. Assuming it was an onset of psychosis, the scientists paid little attention to the man’s concerns.

Two days later, the man cried that he could hear his dead wife speaking with him, and even more, he could communicate back. The scientists were intrigued, but were not convinced until the subject started naming dead relatives of the scientists. He repeated personal information to the scientists that only their dead spouses and parents would have known. At this point, a sizable portion of scientists left the study.

After a week of conversing with the deceased through his thoughts, the subject became distressed, saying the voices were overwhelming. In every waking moment, his consciousness was bombarded by hundreds of voices that refused to leave him alone. He frequently threw himself against the wall, trying to elicit a pain response. He begged the scientists for sedatives, so he could escape the voices by sleeping. This tactic worked for three days, until he started having severe night terrors. The subject repeatedly said that he could see and hear the deceased in his dreams.

Only a day later, the subject began to scream and claw at his non-functional eyes, hoping to sense something in the physical world. The hysterical subject now said the voices of the dead were deafening and hostile, speaking of hell and the end of the world. At one point, he yelled “No heaven, no forgiveness” for five hours straight. He continually begged to be killed, but the scientists were convinced that he was close to establishing contact with God.

After another day, the subject could no longer form coherent sentences. Seemingly mad, he started to bite off chunks of flesh from his arm. The scientists rushed into the test chamber and restrained him to a table so he could not kill himself. After a few hours of being tied down, the subject halted his struggling and screaming. He stared blankly at the ceiling as teardrops silently streaked across his face. For two weeks, the subject had to be manually rehydrated due to the constant crying. Eventually, he turned his head and, despite his blindness, made focused eye contact with a scientist for the first time in the study.

He whispered “I have spoken with God, and He has abandoned us” and his vital signs stopped.

There was no apparent cause of death.

© saracuda via reddit

© ​FEWDIO HORROR: Mockingbird               Directed by: Marichelle Daywalt

Mockingbird

A father is laying in bed after just waking up, he grabs the baby monitor and walks to his desk in his office at home, he has his baby on the baby monitor and hears his wife singing to her, he cracks a smile as he hears his wife “Go to sleep… go to sleep…” When suddenly the front door opens up and his wife comes in with groceries.

Basement

“Mommy told me never to go in the basement, but I wanted to see what was making that noise. It kind of sounded like a puppy, and I wanted to see the puppy, so I opened the basement door and tiptoed down a bit. I didn’t see a puppy, and then Mommy yanked me out of the basement and yelled at me. Mommy had never yelled at me before, and it made me sad and I cried. Then Mommy told me never to go into the basement again, and she gave me a cookie. That made me feel better, so I didn’t ask her why the boy in the basement was making noises like a puppy, or why he had no hands or feet.”

© camkomedy via reddit

peace sign

Scariest Short Stories

A young boy is sitting in school, not really paying attention. Absentmindedly he looks out the window and notices a picture laying on the ground outside the school. After school ends he goes and picks up the picture and realizes it is a picture of a young girl, holding up the two fingered peace sign. She is the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, and he spends the entire evening asking around town if anybody knows her or where he can find her. No one knows, and he returns home disappointed. That night he is suddenly awoken in bed and sees the girl from the picture standing on the other side of the street from his window. He quickly rushes to see the girl, but is struck by a car while crossing the street and is killed. The police investigators find a picture lying next to his body, of a young girl, holding up three fingers.

© kripsykrememcdonalds via reddit

mother

scariest short stories

When I was a child my family moved to a big old two-floor house, with big empty rooms and creaking floorboards. Both my parents worked so I was often alone when I came home from school. One early evening when I came home the house was still dark.

I called out, “Mum?” and heard her sing song voice say “Yeeeeees?” from upstairs. I called her again as I climbed the stairs to see which room she was in, and again got the same “Yeeeeees?” reply. We were decorating at the time, and I didn’t know my way around the maze of rooms but she was in one of the far ones, right down the hall. I felt uneasy, but I figured that was only natural so I rushed forward to see my mum, knowing that her presence would calm my fears, as a mother’s presence always does.

Just as I reached for the handle of the door to let myself in to the room I heard the front door downstairs open and my mother call “Sweetie, are you home?” in a cheery voice. I jumped back, startled and ran down the stairs to her, but as I glanced back from the top of the stairs, the door to the room slowly opened a crack. For a brief moment, I saw something strange in there, and I don’t know what it was, but it was staring at me.

© brodyth via reddit

"Humans can lick too."

scariest short stories

So this girl is sitting in her room, and her friend calls and tells her to stay inside, because there’s a killer on the loose in the neighborhood and the cops want everyone to stay safe and out of the way. The girl, fearing for her life, grabs her dog and gets him to lie down under her bed, as a sort of safety measure. She hears the police sirens and commotion outside her house, but is consistently reassured by her dog licking her hand every so often.

Just then, a bang erupts from downstairs, and the dog scampers out of her room. There’s a loud ruckus, but eventually the door opens and the dog gets under her bed again, everything as normal as it comes.

Then, she hears the police enter through her front door.

“Ma’am? Come down here please.”

So she goes down to talk to them, only to discover a pile of bloody matted fur in the corner of her living room.

“What? No! It can’t be! I swear! My puppy was upstairs just a second ago, licking my hand!”

The cop upholsters his weapon and begins walking up the stairs, calling to her behind him:

“Humans can lick too.”

© reddit