We were staying in an ancient french mansion (well, probably just a big old house in the countryside near the Dordogne but I was a little kid. It had shitloads of bats and old caves nearby and it was a pretty awesome place) that belonged to my great-uncle, and there was one untouched room. All the others were modernised, but this one room, a study with an ancient desk, and it was full of old single-shot guns (like you see in the pirate movies), hunting trophies, and I remember these cast-iron mid-eval shackles (handcuffs) hanging "decoratively" on the walls.
So, being the eldest I got to sleep in the big bed in the adjacent room. Which was kind of scary in and of itself, I must've been 5 or 6. Eventually, I fell asleep.
At some point, something woke me up. It wasn't late, as my parents were still awake (the door was open so I could hear them).
It must have been a gust of wind, except that I didn't feel any.
The curtains suddenly opened, the window snapped shut, the door to the hallway slammed shut, and the door to the adjacent creepy room slowly opened.
So, I ran, and lived. I could have spiced this up but I never did look back to what came out of that room.
I'm surprised more stories like this haven't come out yet. Most people seem to have something like this in their personal history at some point. It just takes some ice-breaking to get them to admit it. I'm guess I shouldn't be surprised that this forum is waaaay more skeptical than most.
I'll go ahead with a couple more personal stories and a couple from friends. This will exhaust basically everything noteworthy I've got.
One of my best friends claims that through most of his childhood, there was a man who stood at the foot of his bed watching him every night. He never felt threatened by this person. The presence actually felt protective. IIRC, the guy was dressed in gentlemanly 19th century clothing. This only happened in his mom's house.
Another close friend claims he used to do the bloody mary thing in mirrors when he was bored. He says the lights would turn red and in the mirror he'd see dead bodies hanging in the air behind him. He did this dozens of times, and never thought it was a big deal... until one time he did it and all the dead people were looking at him, and the door began to open up behind him. He turned the light on and ran. Never did that again.
Missing some exact details of this story, but it's too good not to include. Another close friend had a really creepy experience where she witnessed what she calls "pillow people". She was at a relative's house late at night and stepped out onto their porch with her dog. She soon spotted a ring of humanoid figures in her neighbor's garden dancing around one of the centerpiece decorations. They were unnaturally tall and slender, dressed in robes, and otherwise featureless. Her dog started whining, and she felt compelled to go out and join them. The mix of paralyzing fear and compulsion kept her from running back inside, so she hid inside of or under something that was there on the porch (forget what it was) with her dog until morning. I discovered Slenderman shortly after she told me that story, and introduced her to it... aside from the business suit and solitary stalker behavior, she said the description of that character was so close to what she saw that she had trouble sleeping for a couple weeks. I had to help her out by showing her some of the really terrible slenderman photoshops out there so she could laugh it off.
There was one night in my parent's house back when we first moved in when everybody spotted a vaguely humanoid shadow in their room on the same night. I only saw it flicker across my wall, and then the next morning everyone was sort of spooked and tired and admitted to seeing something similar.
I mentioned before that my dad experienced some serious hauntings. There were lots of ghost sightings in his family, and I don't have many details on them. He has told me that his grandfather's house had a reputation for footsteps. The front door was right next to the upstairs and the living room, and he claims that he'd often be sitting on the couch in the living room and hear loud footsteps coming down the stairs and to the front door, which would then open and shut on its own. My mom claims that the one time she visited that house, she walked into the living room and she saw my dad as a child sitting on that same couch, who then looked at her and smiled. She ran and locked herself in the bathroom for several minutes.
My wife had a bizarre experience with a Ouija board in her teen years. She had a couple friends at her house and they were asking questions with the lights off and a ring of candles around them. At some point, all the candles blew out at once and the board raised up into the air, began spinning around, and then threw itself into the wall. They promptly threw the board out into the woods. The next day, it was back in her closet. So she called her friends over again, and together they cut the board up into tiny pieces and drove around, spreading the pieces out over miles. The next day, the board was in her closet again. At that point, she just left it alone there in the closet, and it stayed there when she moved away.
I swear, I'm never going near a damn Ouija board ever.
My kids have creeped me out a couple times in the condo we're currently living in. The most recent incident was when I was laying down to sleep with my older kid in his bedroom. He has had a couple scary hypoglycemic episodes late at night, so I don't like to be far from him when he's asleep. Most nights I'm awake in the next room, but if I do go to sleep, I'll usually sleep with him in case something happens. So he's already been asleep, and I've been laying with him for a couple minutes... when suddenly he bolts awake and stares terrified at the doorway, which I had left open. This is how his seizures have begun in the past (twice), so I'm watching him intently to see if he's just having a nightmare (which he has often) or if there are signs of low blood sugar. Then I hear a creaking noise from the doorway. So I stare at the doorway for a few seconds... and the door moves back and forth. I run through a critique of the situation really quickly: all windows are shut, everyone is asleep so the whole place is still, the air isn't on so there's no breeze coming from any vents, and even if there was the door would be nudged once in a single direction, not back and forth. As I'm thinking about this, it happens again. It moves back and forth by a space of a couple inches, and not a slow, subtle movement either. I say out loud to myself "ummmm..... ok". Pick up my kid and take him to sleep in our bedroom.
He claims that when he's using the restroom just across from his bedroom, he feels something like fingertips touching his back, but I attribute that to the vent that's just above and behind him when he's standing at the toilet.
The other one is about a year ago from my two year old. He and I were the only ones awake at 3 or 4 am. He was in the living room watching tv, and I was just down the hall doing some work on my computer. He comes running in and jumps in my lap, whimpering fearfully and pointing towards the door. So I sit there watching the doorway with him for a bit... until suddenly instead of pointing at the door, he begins pointing and looking all over the room as if he's following something. This goes on for a couple minutes before he stops and looks at me with his monster face (where he puts his fingers in front of his mouth like some sort of Cthulhu imitation) and making rawr noises at me, and pretending to attack me... except not playfully... like really aggressively. Then he started trying to actually bite me. At that point, I lightly scolded him and went to watch tv with him until we both fell asleep. His behavior there really creeped me out.
I have to be a little skeptical of their behavior, though, since terrible nightmares seem to run in my wife's family. Even her sister who was taken away at birth by her father and grew up in a completely different/non-traumatic environment and didn't meet the rest of her family until her late-20's apparently has terrible nightmares. So it seems to be genetic. Sometimes they'll continue experiencing the nightmare for a while after they wake up. In my wife's case, when she first moved in with me and was having an emotional breakdown, she would sometimes get up in the middle of the night and run around in terror for an hour or more, reacting to me as if I was some sort of monster. I've also read that low blood sugar tends to cause nightmares, and during Hiro's second seizure he reported seeing a "scary face", so he's especially susceptible.