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Number five: Last night, a friend rushed me out of the house to catch the opening act at a local bar's music night. After a few drinks, I realized my phone wasn't in my pocket. I checked the table we were sitting at, the bar, the bathrooms, and after no luck, I used my friend's phone to call mine. After two rings, someone answered, gave out a low raspy giggle, and hung up. They didn't answer again. I eventually gave it up as a lost cause and headed home. I found my phone laying on my nightstand, right where I left it.
Number four: When I was a kid, I was always the last kid to get picked up by the bus driver to go to school. One day, I was waiting for the bus by myself, and a bus with no kids pulled up. The bus driver smiled and told me to hop on. I just had a bad feeling. I said, "Where are the other kids?" He said, "We will go get them now, just get on." He got more and more pushy but didn't do anything crazy. I just kept saying no, and he shrugged and left. The real bus pulled up a few minutes later. I went to school, and my parents didn't know until I mentioned it that night. Looking back, they were pretty worried. I remember them scrambling to make a few phone calls.
Number three: A few years back, I rented an apartment from a friend of mine. He had recently bought it and had it completely renovated. He put it up for sale but couldn't find a buyer, so I offered to rent it in the meantime. After moving in, I realized there was something wrong with the lady next door. She was about 45 but looked much older. She would sit up all night listening to Christian radio shows and talking loudly to someone. It got to the point where I couldn't sleep, so I went over to her place and asked her to keep it down. She opened the door, and I got a quick peek: her walls all had crosses painted on them in different colors, and words like "Jesus" and "Angels" scribbled everywhere. The windows were painted black, letting no light in at all. It was damp, with yellow-stained 50-year-old carpets, dog [__] and cockroaches everywhere. No dog though. I asked her to please keep it down. She just looked at me and shut the door. Then she turned up the radio even louder. The next night, I had my girlfriend staying over. I woke up in the middle of the night and see a shadow of a person next to the bed looking at us sleeping. I think I'm hallucinating, as I usually do in the dark when I'm sleepy, but then the shadow starts talking. It's my neighbor, and she's holding something in her hand. "She broke in during the night, and who knows how long she stood there," she says. "You should lock your doors at night," she says and walks out. The next morning, I hear someone making strange noises below my bedroom window. It's my neighbor talking to herself in tongues. She has a plastic bag in her hand with her rotting dead dog inside. It's hot as hell outside, and I can smell death from that bag. At this point, I'm scared shitless. She's obviously very insane. I go upstairs and knock on another person's door and ask them what the hell is going on. The guy is as scared as me; apparently, she broke into his apartment one evening as well while he was watching TV with his kids. He got up from the couch to get a snack, only to find her behind the couch staring at him, holding a power drill. Come to think of it now, I know what was in her hand. At this stage, I'm basically [__] myself. I call the cops, and they know all about her. Apparently, she's a violent schizophrenic and she hasn't taken her meds, but they can't force her or enter her apartment without her permission because she owns it. The only thing they can do is get her when she goes outside. I sit up for the next two days waiting for her to run out of cigarettes. When I hear her leave at 2:00 a.m. to go across the road to the 7-Eleven, I call the cops. They have three cars and a special van over in less than two minutes. They restrain her and throw her in the van and drive off to some institution, and in less than a minute, it's like she was never there. I never see her again. I still have nightmares about her looking at me in my sleep.
Number two: I was about 15 minutes from finishing the night shift at work when there was a massive crash on one of the windows in the office. So I get up and go check it out. Someone has thrown quite a sizable rock through one of the windows on the front of the building. This is made especially weird because I'm working in the industrial district at 11:30 at night with none of the other businesses open. I go back to my desk, put a quick call through to security to let them know, and decide to head home. As I'm leaving the building, I'm freaking myself out about it more and more and end up running to my car, getting in, and taking off. I'm almost home, and I've started to calm down a bit when I realized that I didn't unlock my car when I got in; it had been unlocked the whole time. I do a quick check with my hand in the back seat for any possible murderers that might be hanging around there, but there's nothing there. Fast forward about 30 minutes; I've called a friend of mine who says he's out drinking, so I decide I'm going to join him. I jump on my bicycle and start riding over. I'm doodling along the road on my bike; it's a nice night, and I'm in no big rush, just enjoying the moonlight when I hear someone riding behind me. I straighten up and stick to one side of the road. He passes me really slowly, and when he's right beside me, he shoots me a smile, and I can describe it as purely insane. I kind of flinch and am taken aback as he rides on. That's when I realize he's riding my mom's bike. Needless to say, I sprint the hell home. When I get there, sure enough, her bike is missing, and one of my car's doors is open—the back left one. I was driving and had no need to open that door.
Number one: I worked at a campground on night shift, 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., every night. It wasn't bad; I would bring in my PS2 and game a good portion of the night, only having to deal with one or two people on busy nights. It was just me in this little 8' x 8' shack with nothing around but dark all night. My first week there, the other third-shift guy who was quitting told me about this pay phone a few feet from the shack where I worked. He said it rang every night at 4:17 a.m., just once. It was probably just an automated test call, he guessed. He's never answered it himself. I go for a few months with the job. It was the middle of the summer, so most nights I had the windows closed, so I couldn't hear the pay phone go off. Mid-August, I started leaving the windows open during the night. Sure enough, at 4:17 a.m. every morning, the phone would ring once. The ring even sounded creepy, like the pay phone was submerged in water and then put where it sat. One night, I got up the nerve to answer it. I set an alarm at 4:15 and would go wait at the phone until it rang. When it did, I answered it, but there was no sound, just dead air, like someone was on the other line but wasn't answering. I said "hello" a few times and hung up. I did this every night for a week with the same results. I didn't think anything of it and left it alone after that for about a month. The first week of October, I decided to answer the phone once again. I set my alarm, and when the time came, I answered the phone. I repeatedly said "hello" into the phone, then I heard what sounded like someone inhaling through clenched teeth. The voice that sounded was rough and sounded like he had gargled gravel. He said my name—my complete name, first, middle, and last. It was a voice I've never heard. My voice cut in my throat, and I hung up. I rattled some change into the payphone and hit *69. The number had come from California. I lived in Indiana.