Scary Read : 15 Real Stories of Ghosts That Have Followed People Their Entire Lives

Have you gone your entire life without seeing a ghost, ghoul, or specter? Are you jealous of your friends who have woken up to something standing over them in bed? You might change your mind after you read about these real-life people who have suffered lifetime hauntings.

Ghosts that attach themselves to people always seem to have some kind of agenda. If you’re lucky, the ghost acts as a sort of protective invisible friend. But if your forever ghost is like most of the creepy crawlies on this list, then you’re in for a lifetime of chills every time you go to the bathroom, close the kitchen cabinet, or walk down to the basement to do laundry.

People who have their own ghosts can never lead a normal life. Not only do they spend every waking moment looking over their shoulders for the next scare, but they it must be impossible to let someone into their life, be it a friend or a lover. How do you casually explain the presence of the old man in your bathtub, or the shadow that lingers in the closet, every time you invite someone over to your house?

Amanda writes into the website Your Ghost Stories to share about the “dark presence” that has followed her throughout her life. She notes that since she was a child she would see a figure looming in her bedroom doorway until it zipped into her closet. The entity would come and go as she got older, but she always knew when it would be around, almost as if her body was in tune with whatever it was.

Her most recent run in with the thing occurred while she was in bed. She heard the presence rifling through her essential oils, and felt it lean over her. Amanda fears that it wants to drive her to hurt her family. “I think it attacks me mentally. I’d get images of hurting someone or seeing them suffering (I would never hurt anyone like in the images it showed me). It actually did this before years ago; it showed me hurting my son. I snapped and took pills.”

This man from Australia describes a lifetime of paranormal activity that not only got him in trouble with his parents, but that also seems to have ruined one of his relationships. The ghosts started their mischief when he was child, manifesting themselves as a white cat and splattering black paint over his bedroom walls. Years later, this man’s clairvoyant fiancée told him that he was being followed by two spooky children and a “sinister” spirit who gave her the “heebie-jeebies.”

The storyteller fast forwards 18 years and notes that his engagement had been called off. Then, one day, a stranger approached him to say that it looked like he was being followed by three spirits that gave her the “heebie-jeebies.”

Redditor Zack1392 has had a lifelong hate/hate relationship with a brood of ghosts following him from home to home under the leadership of an “oppressive demonic ringleader.” His first supernatural experience began when he was a child, and his mother heard an old woman talking to him in his room – but of course he was all alone. Following that experience, Zack saw what he describes as a shadow trying to break into his third story window, and a presence that would make everyone uncomfortable in one particular room of the house.

Even after his family moved to a new house he believed that the hauntings continued. He even thinks the ghosts talk about him: “Since I work nightshift, I would come home around four or five in the morning. I have walked in and heard someone say ‘Hey.’ I would respond and get nothing. I have seen a woman in the kitchen who looked like my great aunt. My mother was sick and sleeping downstairs and when I walked in, a voice whispered, ‘Sh, she’s sleeping.’ I have had the front door yanked out of my hand. I have even seen the dead bolt turn by itself. I have walked in on conversations only to hear ‘Sh, he’s here. Be quiet.'”

One of the most frustrating things about true ghost stories is that the people who live through them rarely get any answers when it comes to their haunting. Kelly, a woman who has moved around quite a bit, has been followed by the spirit of a young girl since she was 15. Their interactions range from full-on attacks on her ex-boyfriends to silent appearances in the kitchen to haunting whispers telling Kelly not to be afraid. Kelly doesn’t know where the little girl came from, but wonders if she is “something of a protector.”

A young woman from Florida feels certain that either a French ghost or possibly a demon has been following her since she was a baby. According to her parents, when she was an infant they would hear the sounds of people speaking in French over the baby monitor. Now that she’s older she believes that something is waiting for her in the dark rooms of her house: “I’m uncomfortable being in any room by myself when the lights are off. It just feels like someone’s watching me. When I sleep on the couch it feels like someone’s standing about 10 feet away from me just watching me. It’s very uncomfortable. And I could’ve sworn I saw someone standing literally right next to my shins when I looked down at my feet.”

A Florida Freak-Out

Angeli has been living in the same home in Florida since she was a child, and in her account of the ghostly happenings that occur around her (shadow men, giggling children, etc.) it seems like she and the ghosts had grown used to each other. But then her fiancé moved in. The moment he did, the haunting took on a malicious quality: things began to be thrown across rooms, something started banging on the walls, and one night Anton took the brunt of the ghostly force.

As Angeli tells it, one night they were in bed when: “[the ghost] literally grabbed him and threw him! He flew out of the bed and hit the wall next to the bed, and whacked his head on my nightstand. I started screaming, and he was awake now and understandably pretty freaked out…He flew off that bed like someone had shoved him and he hit that wall with a lot of force. He actually chipped some of the plaster off the wall!”

The Big Dog

Samantha’s haunting began when she was still in the womb. Her mother was set up on by what she described as “a shadow of what, to her, looked like a big dog at the foot of the bed” that ended up sitting on her stomach until her mother was able to work up the courage to get out of her bed and run away. Years later Samantha would have to deal with a similar shadowy presence that would hold her down in the middle of the night in between her horrific nightmares. 

The Voice on the Tape

An anonymous young woman claims that she’s been followed by something malevolent since she was about five years old. Her first run in with the entity came when she recorded a “radio show” with her sister. “After I was done, I rewound the tape and began to listen to it before going to play it for my parents. Mid-session, however, I heard a sound. It was a long, drawn-out sigh in a deep register. It sounded as though a man were standing in the background and [was] very annoyed with the talking and…expressing his frustration with it.”

But then when she was in college she experimented with recording the entity again and things got creepy. On the tape, things are quiet until her mother leaves the room. “So, my mother gets up and walks down the hall and into the room where my nephew was hanging out in his crib – not trying as hard to nap as I would have liked. On the tape, you hear her leave and me say to one of the dogs, ‘Lex, leave him [one of the other dogs] alone.’ Then, you hear me sigh and immediately after, you hear this deep, raspy inhale – like something is sucking all the air out of the room. I make no comment on it, but you can hear me flipping through the magazine – I hadn’t noticed anything. From down the hall, you hear my mother talking to my nephew, trying to get him to say ‘I love you.’ So, she’s saying that very slowly: ‘Iiiiii……looooove….youuuuu.’ On the tape, you hear this very odd, hissing laugh and suddenly, you hear a very, very deep man’s voice say, very loudly and clearly: ‘I love you A[…] [my name].'”

The Shadowy Figure

When you think about something following you, would you rather it have a recognizable form – or not? One woman has been dealing with a shadow person for close to a decade. One night, it appeared in her room. “I laid there for what felt like hours just watching it,” she says of the experience. “I was about to fall asleep when I saw it move…I just kept staring at the mirror, too afraid to turn around. I felt the bed shift like someone was laying down. It happened so slowly and I’ve never felt more scared than I was at that moment. I closed my eyes out of fear and when I opened them back up, it was morning.”

As she got older, the figure would occasionally stand directly behind her while she cooked, and once even pushed her down the stairs while no one else was home. Luckily, the author says the activity has died down somewhat in the past few years

Redditor smitisab writes that he’s been haunted by the same ghost throughout his life. In fact, he says it’s gone so far as to cause his vasovagal syncope to flair up and give him seizures. The paranormal activity began when he was three, when voices began to tell him to stab his mother. Then the haunting died down until he was eight, when something began walking around in his room and opening the cabinets in the bathroom while he showered. T

The activity in the bathroom only got more intense: “That night, convinced brother to sleep in my room. As we were talking around 1 a.m., something hits the other side of the wall near my head (note: the bathroom shares a wall with my room). Sounded like a fist and then nails dragging down the wall. Screamed and cried. Brother hates ghosts, refuses to talk about it.”

The Friendly Spirit

Not all stories of lifelong hauntings are dark. One Redditor actually has a nice story about their ghost. They believe that the spirit is watching out for them in every situation. “It’s not annoying or frightening, it almost seems like it’s protecting me. Every time I start to get involved in something I probably shouldn’t, I feel a tug at my sleeve or a hand on my shoulder. Every time I piss someone off and am at risk of starting a fight, I feel something pressed up against me. Like it’s shielding me or telling me to back down.”

New House, Old Scares

This young woman is seriously haunted. She believes she has been followed by an entity her entire life, and that “It,” as she calls the presence, made one of her ex-boyfriends afraid of his own apartment. Another house she lived in was said to host the ghost of an old man who would throw things from the bathtub.

A Haunting in the Family

 

Could hauntings be passed down from parents to their children? This woman thinks so. She saw many spirits as a child, including a sinister man in a black hat and a girl who floated above her head. Now, her young son seems to be experiencing similar paranormal activity.

“Today we live in a house where there are footsteps walking around upstairs and knocking on the closet doors,” she writes. “My husband has woken up to someone clicking their tongue at the side of the bed. I have walked in on my four-year-old talking to the closet door and saying he’s talking to his friend. I turned to walk out of the room and someone has very distinctly knocked on the closet door from the inside.”

A Long and Haunted Life

 

Linda’s haunted life began with a Ouija board at a New Year’s Eve party, and a ghost who told her that one of her children would die. Her chilling story has continued until she had grandchildren. According to Linda, she lost one child four hours after it was born, and her house contained something that liked to play with her husband’s feet and annoy her dog.

The entity in her home has even shown itself to her grandchildren. “That night I put both kids upstairs in same bed to sleep. They came running down the stairs white as a ghost! ‘Grandma there’s a ghost right by the fan on the dresser!’ (They had never heard any of what went on in the house; I kept it quiet because they were small kids). I didn’t know what to say!”

This self-described “simple man” from Florida has been dealing with something for over 20 years, and doesn’t show any signs of stopping. While living in Kissimmee, Florida the father of three began to be haunted by a series of knocks that would wake him up while he was sleeping. “On numerous occasions I was awoken by the sound of 3 knocks on what appeared to be a window or door. I cannot remember whether I opened a door or not on any occasion but I do know that it was a very real and convincing knock that was always in rhythm and always only 3 knocks.” His story continues after a move. “We then built a home in Saint Cloud, Florida. The knocks did not stop.” After living in Saint Cloud for a while the dad woke up to a deep “cat-like” scratch on his inner thigh.

Then when he moved to Kentucky something extra weird happened. “While standing in my bathroom door in my bedroom last night and watching a Little League baseball game on ESPN, I witnessed my work desk I have in the bedroom lift up about 1 inch and then drop back to the floor. This happened two feet in front of me. I did not get scared or jump up and down but instead stood there in disbelief. I then went to understand what could have caused this other than what has been historically following me around for the last 20 years.”