People Are Sharing What Actually Scares Them as Adults, and Now We Can’t Sleep
Halloween is this weekend; the costumes are ready, and the haunted houses are open. For many grown-ups, though, what keeps them up at night has nothing to do with rubber masks. On Reddit, people have shared what scares them as adults, and some stories are the kind that make you leave the hallway light on.
We read through them, and now we can’t sleep.
Being an Adult Comes With Its Own Ghosts
In a Reddit thread from more than a decade ago asking what scares people “as an adult,” the answers still hold up. The original poster started with this one: “I have realized I am exceptionally average.”
Others went straight for the calendar. “Having to work for the next 40 years to, hopefully, live comfortably,” one user wrote. Another described how fast it all moves. “I’m already 31. I feel like I graduated from college yesterday. I hear it only gets faster the older you get.”
Parenthood came up again and again, from both sides. “When I was younger, it was like, sure I’ll have kids one day…and now it’s like, well what if I [mess] them up? You only get one chance,” one user wrote. A parent answered with a different fear: “Got 2 kids. What scares me now is the idea of them not having me around.”
Some answers were shorter. “The fact that I am, apparently, an adult,” one user wrote. Another needed only two words: “This economy.”
What is something that, as an adult, scares the crap out of you?
by u/I_Love_Peanut_Butter in AskReddit
The Darker Fears Adults Carry
One user described snorkeling near some atolls during a family sailing trip and swimming back toward the boat, only to realize it had drifted about 50 yards farther out. The clear water below dropped into what they called “an inky deep blue abyss.”
“If the water had been murky, that would have been scary, but this water was crystal clear so I was seeing straight down into pure darkness,” they wrote. They closed their eyes and swam the rest of the way.
Others wrote about memory. “Getting Alzheimers after living a fulfilling life scares the absolute [expletive] out of me,” one user wrote. “I can’t imagine living that long and then losing your memory of all it.” Another put it in one line: “There will come a time where no one will remember you existing at all.”
Some Moments Stay With People for Decades
In a more recent thread, Reddit users answered a different question: What’s “a genuinely scary thing you’ve encountered that still haunts you to this day?”
One user was chatting with their grandmother at the gate when they felt watched and looked up at the bedroom window. “I looked up, and saw an old lady standing at the bedroom window looking at us and waving,” they wrote. When they described her, their grandmother “said casually, ‘Oh, that’s MY grandma!’”
Another user remembered a school trip to Colonial Williamsburg, where they and their dad saw what looked like a reenactment of a hanging, with a crowd gathered around a man struggling on a rope. Their dad asked the tour guide how the actors stayed safe. “The tour guide just kinda looked at him oddly and was like, ‘… we don’t do hanging reenactments. The gallows are just for display…?’” they wrote. When they looked back, the gallows were empty.
A user who grew up in northern Minnesota described walking in the woods at 12 with their golden retriever when the dog stopped and growled at a jet-black creature “bigger than a wolf, smaller than a black bear.” It ran off faster than any animal they had seen. “And it had no gait… it just moved,” they wrote. “It still freaks me out so much.”
Some of the scariest answers involved no ghosts at all. One user described stopping at a gas station during a college road trip and asking where the restroom was. A worker pointed to a door that turned out to be a closet, then followed them in and blocked the exit with his coworker behind him. Their friend walked into the store at that moment, and they pushed their way out. “To this day I don’t know what would’ve happened if she didn’t come in the store,” they wrote.
The Stories That Will Keep You Up Tonight
One Reddit user described driving from Los Angeles to their parents’ home near San Francisco to surprise them during their first year of college, usually at night, when the drive was faster. One night, their phone’s map sent them down a single-lane desert road, with no lights and no other cars. Then a shape appeared ahead. “It was an old car. And I mean OLD,” they wrote. It was turned sideways across the road and “completely burned and black.”
They didn’t get out. They steered around it, partly through the sand, and kept driving. Years later, someone told them that a car blocking the road can be a trick to get drivers out of their cars. That explanation never sat right with them. “The car was OLD. It looked like it had been there for a VERY long time,” they wrote. “How long was it there? How was I the first person to see this?”
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community on Reddit
Another user described a sleepover at a cousin’s new house. Around midnight, she went to the door to pick up the pizza and asked her younger cousin Maria, who was coming down the stairs, to help. Maria followed her without a word and stared at her with wide eyes, completely silent.” When she opened the door to the room where the rest of the cousins were, Maria was sitting on the bed in front of her. When she turned around, no one was behind her. Maria told her she had been in the bathroom.
Is La Llorona Still Out There?!
For anyone who grew up with La Llorona, the Weeping Woman of Latin American folklore, the scariest story might be the oldest one. In many versions, a man betrays her, she drowns her children, and she is left to wander at night crying for them.
In a personal essay titled “The Weeping Woman Pays a Call,” a writer from Arizona who calls herself a lover of paranormal folklore described the night she believes La Llorona came for her. After falling asleep to a true crime podcast, she dreamed that a woman dressed like a bride appeared in the corner of her room, her lovely face giving way to “death-bleached skin barely clinging to her bones.” The woman climbed onto her chest.
The Weeping Woman Pays a Call
by u/rosepriestess26 in TrueScaryStories
When she woke up, the weight was still there. “I could still feel something sitting on my chest, a something much too heavy to be my cat,” she wrote. She couldn’t scream. When she finally managed to croak out “Jesus!”, the pressure lifted. She reached for the rosary in her nightstand and eventually fell back asleep.
She has never experienced sleep paralysis again. “However, there are some nights when, lying in bed, I think I can hear her mournful wailing somewhere out in the distance,” she wrote.
Happy Halloween to every adult out there!