14 Former Skeptics Who Turned Into Paranormal Believers After A Freaky Experience

So, when we asked the former skeptics of the BuzzFeed Community if they ever had a weird experience that made them believers in the paranormal, they responded with some truly chilling stories. Check it out...

"I got into Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures, but always felt like everything they 'saw' was bullshit. Around 2006/2007 I moved into my grandparents' house to help my grandfather care for my cousins and grandmother. My family has been the only ones to ever live in that house, but my mom, aunts, and uncles used to tell us about having strange experiences there when they were younger. My aunt would tell me that she hates to be in the house alone at night. My sister and I use to say it was because there is a cemetery down the block, but it was always sort of a joke between us."

"One day, I was alone downstairs. The house is old so you always hear when people are moving around. I heard nothing, but the faint sound of my grandmother's TV upstairs. All of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow of a head and shoulder look into the rec room and then lean back out. My heart was pounding. I sat still waiting for anything, but nothing else happened. 

I was unable to write this off, but I eventually forgot about it. Cut to Christmas time after my grandmother had died. My cousins had moved to a different city with my uncle and my mom and sister came to visit for the holidays. My mom was out with her friend, my grandfather was upstairs, and my sister and I were in the rec room talking. All of a sudden, my sister gets this funny look on her face, and she's looking over my shoulder. I asked her what was up. She said nothing, but she was still looking at the door. Again, I asked her what. She told me that she saw a shadow lean in the room and then lean back out. I knew I hadn't been seeing things."

—Anonymous

"I lived, for two years, overlooking a very infamous graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland. I never saw anything weird, day or night."

"Then, one night, I stayed up stupidly late watching a show. As I finally went to bed, I reached to pull the living room blinds when I saw the undeniable figure of a woman walking alongside the church. Cliché as it is, she looked ‘misty’, almost see-through. I watched her move slowly, until she suddenly, just wasn’t there. I’ve never seen anything like it, and up till then believed in black and white. Having no explanation for that, changed my outlook forever."

—teriebella

"So, I get home one day and all the lights in the house are on. I’m a kid at the time, maybe about 15, and because my mother used to yell about the electric bill, I assume people are home but the house is silent. I shut the lights off downstairs and head upstairs."

"I see that all the room doors were open, I shut my room light off, and head to the bathroom. I use it and shut the light off. I head to my sister's room and shut that light off. Then I head down the hall to my parents' room, I shut the light off and close the door. I turn around and see that the attic door is also open and the light on so I tell whoever may be on the third floor that I am going to shut the light off and close the door. I get no answer so I shut the light off and proceed to close the door. The door doesn’t want to close. I try again and the door still will not close.

Finally, frustrated, I use my shoulder to shove the door shut, it closes. In the exact moment I turn to walk away, some type of force kicked the door from the inside. The attic door swung open, slammed against the wall, and then slammed shut. Now the most interesting thing about this occurrence is that the moment the door swung open the light from the hallway was shining on the steps of the attic. But nothing was there. Just the steps. And behind that light was total darkness. There were three bangs: the initial kick from inside, the door hitting the wall, and the door slamming shut. I was so in shock I didn’t run until the door slammed shut.

I’ve had experiences after this but this was the first that made me say there are things we can’t explain. No windows were open and the attic was then thoroughly checked."

—Anonymous

"I grew up in a small town and one time I was coming home from the local bar. The fastest path to home was by the city cemetery. It was like 1 or 2 a.m. and I was walking with my cousin (he lived right next to me)."

"We were chatting and then I started to feel very cold and got goosebumps. I looked to the right and saw something white standing there. All I can describe was a man with a hat, hands in pockets, looking at me, but he had no facial features. It was just all white and translucent. I suddenly stopped and asked my cousin if he saw the same thing. He nodded and we started to run as fast as we could. At the end of the road I looked back and that 'thing' was in the middle of the road. I arrived home hyperventilating, scared my parents, and didn't sleep that night. The next day my dad went there to see if something made sense and then he told me what was there: a circle of stones and a cross in the middle."

—marxnotkarl

"I always kinda wanted to believe but couldn't get myself to fully commit since I had never seen anything I couldn't explain. That all changed a couple of years ago when my husband and our two young kids moved into this cute little A-frame house."

"My oldest child, who was three at the time, started talking about all the people in the kitchen. My husband and I couldn't see anything. Then weird little things started happening; like the TV would come back on after I was positive I had turned it off. Also, there was this strange tapping or clicking sound that we could hear only at night. But the scariest event happened shortly before we moved. 

My husband, two kids, my brother-in-law, and I were all outside, no one was inside. My 4-year-old needed to use the bathroom so he went inside and closed the door behind him so the cat didn't get out. Some time went by and I was getting concerned that he wasn't back outside yet so I went to go in and check on him but the door was locked. I could hear him inside crying because he couldn't get out. The only lock on the door was the ancient deadbolt and to get it to lock you have to put all your weight on the door and turn the lock at the same time. There is no way my son could have done it; he could hardly even reach it. This was the only entrance to the house, so my husband crawled through the bathroom window to get to him. My son was hysterical and said he heard the lock while he was in the bathroom but didn't see anything. Freaked me out."

—s_uffel

"A few years ago I went to a 'haunted' church with a few people that I was friends with. One of the guys was big into the pagan belief system and did all kinds of rituals."

"Anyways, once we parked on the church property he suddenly became 'possessed' by a female spirit that started talking to me and one of my other friends. That part didn't really bother me because I thought he was just faking it but then he called out to me specifically and said something about my past that I had never told anyone. He eventually snapped out of it and we went to leave but the vehicle wouldn't start and we had to push it off the property before it would start. To this day I can't explain how he knew that info and I doubt I will ever know. Sadly, I won't be able to ask the guy how he knew that info because about a year later he stabbed a girl in the bathroom at a local mall and is now in jail. So yeah, that experience kinda changed my belief in the paranormal."

—Anonymous

"I was talking to my friend about my aunt who died the previous year the morning of her senior prom."

"We were standing by one of those old touch lamps and I said I wished I knew if she was still with us. Light came on (we didn't touch it!). We laughed and I said, 'It was probably a short.' Then the light dimmed. We looked at each other and I said somewhat jokingly like, 'Beth is that you?' The light went NUTS going low, medium, high, and off over and over. I said, 'Please stop!' It stopped! I unplugged the lamp (never to be plugged in again) and my friend who was supposed to spend the night was so freaked out she had her mom come pick her up. She never wanted to speak about it again. Been a believer ever since!"