I’ve been home alone and heard something in the middle of the night that made my heart start racing before…and it’s always unsettling.

Was it someone trying to break in?

Maybe it was an animal?

Or maybe it was the wind and some creaky floorboards?

Luckily, I’ve only experienced the latter…but hearing strange noises at night is always creepy.

Folk on AskReddit who investigated bumps in the night talk about what happened.

Let’s get spooky…

1. Haha.

“Thought it was the cat knocking something.

Then the cat meowed from right behind me.

Turns out it was a cat, just not mine.

Neighbor’s cat got in the kitchen.”

2. Still jumpy.

“My husband was asleep upstairs. It was 3 months ago and I was up late after a midnight finish at work.

I had kicked off my jeans and wrapped the blanket round me, decided I was bored of the TV so I muted it (it was still on) and got my kindle out to read. The cat was curled up on my feet when I heard noises of the tarp covering the garden furniture being rustled outside the back door of kitchen, didn’t think too much of it as it was a really windy night.

Anyhow a few moments later I had a scraping and popping noise which sounded like it was coming from IN the kitchen, the cat jumped up running and growling at the back door. I got up and stepped in to view of the doorway between kitchen and livingroom (which had been open, you couldn’t see me from the kitchen but could clearly see someone was up and in the next room with the TV on).

There was a man at my back door with something metal in his hand and then I just started screaming. He ran off. Husband ran down. Anyway about a month later he got in again this time while I was in myself.

It was during the day and I was about to leave for work, opened the back door to let some air in the kitchen, walked upstairs for a minute and heard someone walking in living room, thought Husband had come home early and shouted from the top of the stairs “that you babe?” only to realise when whoever it was I heard ran out the back door and smashed my cold frame in the garden when they did that it absolutely was NOT my husband.

I’m still jumpy.”

3. Scraping on the glass.

“I was 15, babysitting 3 little kids in a cottage in the middle of nowhere in the west of Ireland. Parents went to dinner, kids asleep, it’s remote so there’s zero noise.

Then I hear a bang at the front door and scraping against the glass. It was the most terrifying noise ever! I almost s**t myself. Turned off the lights, ran to the kids room, peeked out the window and could see nothing. Just the constant scraping at the glass by the front door. I stayed there until the parents came home.

When they walked in they were like Hi, how’s it going kids ok? I’m totally freaked out! There’s been some weird scraping at the front door, I can’t see anything out there, did you?!? Oh there’s a bucket of lobster one of the local fishermen must have left, how nice!

I nearly fu**ing d**d! Like wtf?! Lobster scraping the window with their claws. I had no problem eating those things the next day!”

4. What’s that noise?

“I was home alone late at night.

It turned out out to be my landlady’s big scary bearded boyfriend (whom I had never met) tearing down a wall in the basement. “

5. Burglar alarm.

“Home alone. Burglar alarm goes off at dawn. The sound drowns out anything else.

I got out my gun and called 911. I was shaking so much, I ended up putting the gun back in the safe so I didn’t sh**t myself.

Cops came, looked around the perimeter. No evidence of a break in. No harm, no foul.

Next day, Alarm goes off at dawn.

Turns out, the heat of the sun caused the alarm to go off. It hadn’t happened before due to the season and angle of the sun.

Moved to a place where leaving the front door unlocked all the time is common place and we don’t need an alarm.”

6. A ghost?

“Back in the early 90s when I was 10 or so, we had just moved into a new house. We had noticed our doorbell would ring and when we answered it, no one was there.

We brushed it off as some kids playing ding-dong ditch on the new family in town. A few weeks in my parents had gone out for a date night and left my brother and I home alone (brother was older and responsible… for the most part.)

The doorbell rang when we were suppose to be in bed…. thinking it was our parents, we ran and hid in our beds to act asleep. The doorbell rang again, and once more shortly after. My brother thinking my parents forgot a key and were trying to get our attention, decided to answer it

. As we were going to the door the doorbell started ringing again and again over and over again, vigorously now like someone one was mashing the doorbell very fast. My brother opened the door and to our horror no one was standing there but our doorbell kept ringing over and over again. Scared s**tless we slammed the door and ran back to bed to hide.

Few weeks later we noticed someone arrived at our neighbors house, walked up to their door and our doorbell rang. Apparently the previous owners owned our house and the house next door and rigged the doorbell so when the door rang next door ours would too… I guess to let the previous owner know someone was next door if he wasn’t there?

But for the first couple months we thought it was pesky kids but then we just started calling our random doorbell rings Casper before we got the lines fixed.”

7. That would be scary.

“Our house is near a home for assisted living, mostly for Down syndrome. Sometimes the night staff are either understaffed or just lazy. So they didn’t see one get out.

They made it into our lawn and started crying and moaning at 1 am. I was scared sh**less and didn’t have the guts to check it out.”

8. Befuddled.

“My sister and I were home alone in high school. I was probably 15 and she was 17. Besides my excellent ability to s**t talk, we were fairly defenseless bc of our smallness.

Anyway, we’re sitting around watching tv and suddenly hear something as if it collapsed onto our ceiling. Imagine a tree or large animal coming down above you. That sound was followed by continuous pounding and horrifying, dragging and clawing sounds.

Eventually, the pounding stopped, but the clawing worsened. It sounded like large creatures (harpies or giant eagles) were using their talons to rip through our ceiling. My overactive teenage imagination was going wild. Even the pizza man who brought our food looked concerned, but he said he hadn’t seen anything on our roof.

Fast forward a few days, and the maintenance department announced that our tiny building had attics and that a few raccoons had somehow gotten in and were running around. I was befuddled bc those noises sounded more ppl sized…but ok.”

9. Clicking.

“I play Xbox quite a bit, usually with the TV sound off so it doesn’t come through the mic but my headphones make it so I don’t really hear anything in the apartment.

While playing some video games I hear this clicking, assumed it was the game, went on without thinking much of it. But I heard it again while waiting for the next match and no one was talking so naturally I keep playing cause it was comp. After that match though I went full detective!

Checked fire alarms, refrigerator, stove, light switches, lights, garbage disposal, fans, faucets, doors, door hinges AND knobs. Nothing. Could not replicate that sound. Being the then 27 year old scaredy cat that I am, I promptly turned on every single light in the apartment until my roommate came home to save me from potential demons or worse…people. She came home and we looked again, checked cabinets this time for pots or pans that could have shifted, still zilch.

As we’re sitting there just looking around to see what else could possibly make a clicking sound, the glass window in the living room clicks. We live on the second floor. We ran to her bedroom to look outside, no one around. WTF. We sneak back to the living room, still hear the clicking.

She works up the courage to open the blinds and this bird is pecking at our window. I screamed, she screamed, birb screamed. Hasn’t been back since.”

10. Call the cops.

“I was at home.

The only two other people who lived with me were at work and out with friends. Heard something similar to knocking on the front door at 4 am.

I knew it’d be no good so I tried to ignore it. Then I heard a noise downstairs.

I didn’t have any weapons or anything near me other than a dull scissors, so I grabbed a powerful laser pointer that was bright enough to blind people with even a touch on someones eye.

Turned it on (it was bright enough to enlighten every room it shined in) and began clearing room to room. I got a chance to look out a window to the front and saw a van out front of my house. Knew nothing good was happening tonight.

Went to a room upstairs and called the cops. As I was on the phone, I saw them leaving, running away actually, almost like they heard me calling.

Cops found them the next day, don’t know much after that, but it’s nice to know they were caught.”

11. Neuter that cat!

“I was jolted out of a sound sleep around 3am by a small child screaming out “MOM!!!”

I’m not a Mom, I don’t own a small child.

As I got out of bed to investigate this creepy situation, bedroom door next to my room slammed shut… immediately followed by “Mommmmmmm!!!”

I lived alone…

Bolted to the kitchen, grabbed a giant butcher knife, and worked up the courage to confront whatever was in the spare room.

Slammed the door open, flipped on the light. My (at the time, unneutered) cat, was standing in the open window, calling into the wind “MMMMMRRRROWWWWWWWW” at what appeared to be another cat in the yard.

As I stood in the middle of the room laughing to myself, gust of wind came back through and slammed the door shut behind me.

Windows got closed, cat got neutered shortly after.”

12. A notorious past…

“The house I live in has a notorious past (no details, or you’d figure out my exact address with a quick google search), but before I found out about its history I had a series of sleep paralysis episodes in my bedroom (the area where the incident occurred, it turns out).

About once every 3 weeks or so, I am startled awake by (what I tell myself is) sleep paralysis, where there is simultaneous loud scratching and banging on the door panels to our attic’s crawl space.

Our master bedroom happens to be the in the attic, and both of the crawl space access points are fully sealed from the inside and out. One is blocked by my dresser, and the other is in my fiancé’s closet (and nailed shut), so I’ve never attempted to investigate.

We also have a basement apartment that we AirBnB, and over a 2-day span of cleaning it between a long-term tenant and an AirBnB one, I found 4 human adult teeth (2 in the den, 2 on the welcome mat the next day – one after the other, even though I should have seen the second one at the same time I found the first one).

I asked the tenant who’d moved out if they had any possible explanation, but they only offered a few dismissive options. No AirBnB guest has reported weird s**t, so I just presume whatever brought the teeth is gone now?”

13. Unwanted visitor.

“I’m a +50 year old widow. Laying in bed about 11:30 one night, reading, and I hear what sounds like someone trying to pry open my kitchen door at the back of the house.

I grab my firearm and start creeping through the house. I get in the kitchen and try to gently pull aside the blinds over the window above the sink to see the back porch – nothing there and the sound has stopped. So I think I’m crazy, start to walk out and hear it again.

A really sharp sound. So I ooze over to the backdoor and peek out that window. Nothing! But the sound keeps happening like it’s just on the other side of the wall. I sneak into the bathroom and peek out THAT window…

It’s an opossum. He’s using his claws trying to lift up the heavy but unsecured door into my cellar.

It flashed across my mind to shoot him out of spite for scaring me silly, but of course I didn’t. I did call him foul names and curse his lineage, though.”

14. Shouldn’t be doing that at night.

“I was home alone at night, watching TV quietly downstairs in the dark when I heard a loud BANG like a gunshot.

It came from the direction of our back porch, but it was dark and I couldn’t see anything out the windows when I went over and checked. So I noped outta there and ran upstairs to my bedroom and locked my door. The next morning I went downstairs and there’s a golf ball on our back porch.

I live on a golf course and some idiot golfed at night and nearly scared me to d**th.”

15. Good Lord.

“In the middle of a snow storm that would end up delivering about 18” of snow. It was 3 am and there was an incredibly loud noise that woke me up and I could hear things from my kitchen crashing across the floor.

I immediately grab a gun with a mounted flashlight, come around the bed and peer into the darkness around the door frame. I don’t see or hear anything, so I flip the light’s momentary switch on and swing slowly around the corner, sweeping the light across the room.

I flip back to the other side of the door frame and “pie” down the hallway to see if it’s clear then slowly take a step towards the kitchen.

Now I can see there’s debris all over the floor. Broken glass candle holders, K-Cups, my now shattered cigar ashtray, and various items that would accumulate on a small kitchen shelf, which was actually a cover over a radiator inside a cabinet. The shelf/cover is also on the floor amongst the wreckage.

I check the window nearby, and the back door, everything looks good. I walk to the front of the house, naked and d**k swinging, checking rooms and windows as I go. That door is fine too. What the hell. I head back towards the kitchen and see a cat inspecting the damage and another just standing there, chilling.

This was way too much damage to be done by cats, I thought, but if there was an attempt, it would have been these two.

I then take my attention to the snow outside and see the yellow warning light strobe through the falling snow from my landscaper’s plow truck and realize that I had heard the metal blade scraping across my asphalt driveway while I was looking through the house.

I put on pants, boots and a jacket and step outside into the driving snow. I see the truck sitting there, motionless, motor running, and driver door ajar, and reach back inside for the gun.

I step back out and finally see one of the employees of the landscaper staring at a giant hole in the side of my house. He backed into my f**king house.

16. Call the cops.

“Sounds of people creeping around my house.

I proceed to sneakily look out my windows to see an unfamiliar car parked under the street lamp right in front of my house.

It is two idiots pulling on car doors to steal from ones left unlocked. Called the cops and justice was served that night.”

17. The creeper.

“I heard a noise outside and went to investigate. I used my handy dandy flashlight to look around the yard and saw nothing out of place.

Decided it must have been a skunk since it was about that season where they take over the neighborhood and went back inside. It’s got to be 2 or 3 am so I go back to my room to go back to sleep. Not entirely sure why but I decided to look through my bedroom window with the lights off and using my hands as binoculars.

What do I see but a pair of creepy eyes staring right into my soul! I let out the tiniest of squeaks, run to my house phone (it was 2006 so I didn’t own a cell phone yet) and call 911. They caught the creeper and turns out he had my neighbor’s jewelery on him.

Good times!”

18. Might have been a ghost.

“One night I was sitting on my couch with my dog, only other person home was my sister who was upstairs.

My basement door in the kitchen had a very distinct noise when opening and closing…I heard that noise and subsequently heard footsteps in the kitchen.

I screamed my sister’s name and no one answered…grabbed my pug and bolted upstairs to her room where we called my dad and he came home to investigate, found nothing out of the ordinary.

To this day I’m still convinced my dad’s house has a ghost of sorts.”

19. Crazy.

“I’m gaming one night and suddenly the house starts to shake and crack in a very odd way. Look like it’s slowly sinking.

I used to build houses as a young adult living at my moms place so I did most of the foundation patch work on her old house. The house was on cinderblock pillars and was not up to code.

I thought the foundation was crumbling because of me. Freaked the f**k out, got everyone awake and in the living room where I knew it was safe.

I go check the crawlspace.. all seems ok besides a few extra cracks. When I get out people are all over the streets and the light are on, cops are running to a house down the street that broke.

Turns out I was living my first earthquake in Montreal, Canada. I had never experienced one before.”

20. Close call.

“I thought I heard someone trying to break through the side gate and get into the backyard. It turns out that there was someone trying to break through the side gate to get into my backyard.

By the time I made it back to investigate though, my dogs had scared him off and he had run clear through the wooden gate, knocking out a few slats and leaving a bit of blood behind for his troubles.”

Have you ever been brave enough to investigate a spooky sound at night?

If so, please share your stories with us in the comments.

We can’t wait to hear from you!