Listen to “Human Shaped Apparitions and Other Terrifying California Ghosts Stories” on Spreaker.
Intro
Good evening, this is Spooky Boo from Spooky Boo’s Scary Story Time. The podcast is back and this time with with new, true and terrifying stories from listeners on the internet. These spooky, scary stories are haunting and creepy. I bring you spooky stories Monday through Friday and then on the weekend we get together on YouTube for a live chat while listening to all of the stories from the podcast.
I’d love to tell your scary stories. Send them to spookyboo@scarystorytime.com or call them in to 707-SPOOKYB. That is 707-776-6592. Details at www.scarystorytime.com.
Now let’s begin.
Story Number One
White Humanoid by Anonymous in California
When I was a child, six or seven years old, we had those old swinging café doors between the kitchen and the dining room. One afternoon I was in the family room, not really doing anything special, when something strange happened that I’ve never forgotten. I saw this human‑shaped figure pause right at the café doors and look toward me before it went into the kitchen. The best way I can describe it is that it looked like someone wearing a full‑body suit that covered absolutely everything. It was completely white, almost glowing just a little, enough that the edges looked a bit soft or fuzzy. There were no facial features at all—no eyes, no mouth, no nose—just the general shape of a head. And there were no clothes or details, just that smooth white “suit” from head to toe.
What still stands out to me is that it didn’t make any noise, but it definitely touched the café door because I saw the door move. So whatever it was, it wasn’t just a trick of the light or something in my imagination. It interacted with the physical world. Oddly enough, I don’t remember being scared at the time. I just watched it, almost like I was too young to realize I should be afraid.
Years later, when I was a teenager, I saw the same head shape a couple of times, but only out of the corner of my eye. Those moments were a lot more unsettling. It’s one thing to see something straight‑on as a kid and not think much of it, but catching a glimpse of that same blank face looking in through a window when you’re older hits completely differently. One time I even asked my friend if she saw it, but she was facing me and didn’t have a view of the window, so of course she didn’t. That somehow made it creepier.
Ever since then, I’ve always kept an eye out for stories from other people who might have seen something similar. I’ve read through alien encounter accounts, paranormal forums, anything that might match what I saw. I’ve only found a couple of references that come close. One person mentioned the figure having triangle‑shaped feet, which I honestly don’t remember noticing at all. The other examples were videos on YouTube that may or may not be real, but one of them looked surprisingly similar to what I saw—just walking on the side of a road.
Story Number Two
Night Drive by Anonymous in California
One night I left my house to go pick up my friend for a night out on the town. It was just supposed to be a normal evening, nothing unusual at all. But on the drive out to her place in the country, I started noticing something strange. An abnormal number of cars had their brights on as they came toward me.
Every single time, I double‑checked to make sure mine weren’t on, and they never were. This was long before the newer headlights that always look like brights, so there wasn’t that excuse. I only mention it because it really stood out, and it started making me wonder what was going on. It was just… odd.
I picked her up, and we headed back toward town. We took this narrow two‑lane road—one lane each way—with deep ditches on both sides. It wasn’t the kind of road where you had much room to maneuver. I remember seeing a car coming toward us and joking that it was the first one all night that didn’t have its brights on. Right as I said that, everything changed. As the car got closer, a very large vehicle suddenly pulled out from behind it to pass, straight into our lane. It was coming at us head‑on, and there was absolutely no time to react. No time to scream, no time to swerve—nothing.
The only way I can describe it is that we felt it go by. I don’t know if the air pressure from both vehicles passing each other that closely created that feeling, or if something else happened entirely. At the time, both of us were convinced it had actually gone through us. That sounds ridiculous to say out loud, but that’s honestly how it felt. We were so shaken that we started wondering if maybe we hadn’t survived at all, and this was what it was like—you just kept going, like in the movie Ghost. It sounds dramatic, but in that moment it felt completely real.
We drove another five miles until we reached a gas station where someone we knew happened to be filling up his vehicle. We parked, got out of the car, and walked over to talk to him—basically to see if he could see and hear us. That’s how convinced we were that something impossible had just happened. When he responded normally, we both felt this huge wave of relief, but also confusion. We just looked at each other like, “What on earth was that?”
I’ll never know what really happened that night. It still seems impossible that we had enough room to avoid that vehicle, considering how close it was by the time it pulled out. But whatever the explanation is, I’m just grateful to still be here to wonder about it.
Story Number 3
Night Demon by Anonymous in California
One night I was in my room about ready to fall asleep and I knew something was going to happen. When I fell asleep, it wasn’t too much longer when I woke up and my bed was was on fire. Something had my ankles together and the next thing I knew I was spun into a circle and a half in the room and thrown across the room. I hit the ground and I tried to yell for my dad but not much came out.
Then I looked over to the left and there was a demon standing there. It was about six feet. He was all transparent wearing a a top hat and old Frankenstein like clothes like a Blazer and ripped pants. When I looked at him, I smiled because he was scared to death as I was just getting ready to put the dynamite to him. And before I could put the dynamite to him. He disappeared.
That was pretty horrifying.
Story Number 4
The Spirit Woman by FriscoPLAYA49
This was a paranormal story that happened to my Mom when she was 9. Her & her family lived in the outskirts of a small town in the Monterey Bay Area in 1975. The house my mom lived in was on top of a hill with a winding road leading to it, facing a lake. There were no neighbors and the other houses were a distance away.
What my mom knew of the house, was that it was built in 1927. It was a old white wooden Victorian house. She said it was completely off to be out in the hills far away from Watsonville, California. Watsonville is small town about 25 minutes east of Santa Cruz.
It started off as a community for immigrant workers who came here for a better life. She said that the rooms were big with plastered walls with massive windows in every room and that it had been repainted so many times in the house’s history that the windows were sealed shut. Mom recalled that windows were so high off the ground that you couldn’t break into them.
I’ll warn you ahead that this is pretty disturbing. And if I sound dramatic, it’s from my mom’s point of view, so bear with me.
My grandparents worked hard as they worked in the fields. When Mom and her siblings moved to live in the United States from Mexico, they often left my mom and her siblings by themselves with my older Tia in charge.
Mom and her siblings were used to being by themselves for long periods of the day until my grandparents would come home from work. She says the property around the house had an old barn and a shed full of old rusty farming equipment. My mom and her siblings would spend the day exploring the nooks and crannies of the buildings, often pretending that they lived in those times & roll played.
But often, Mom and her younger sister, Leticia, talked about strange the things that would happen to one or the other in or around the house!
Tia Lety told my Mom about the incidents that were happening to her, she would lie on her bed looking up at the corner of the ceiling. She would tell my mom that she could see “the corner was bellowing like it had lungs.” and she was so scared that she would run out of the room. That was Tia Lety’s recollection of what happened to her. But then, it was Mom’s turn.
One evening, Mom lied in bed facing the wall while she was sleeping. She always locked the door to her room, being there in the dark by herself. She said she would be in that state where you’re half asleep and half awake. But then she felt an ominous weight at the edge of her bed. She was chilled with fear because she knew no one could possibly be in the room with her!
She said she felt a motherly presence that was watching her as she slept. Mom wouldn’t even dare turn her head to look at whatever it was that sat on beside her bed. She was too scared to look at “it” because she thought she would die of fear if she saw what it was. She spent the whole night praying that “it” would go away and leave her alone. That was one of many incidents that happened to her in that house.
There was a second mysterious situation where my mom would hear knocks as if someone was there in the house with her. Mom would run to the door, excited when she heard the knocks at first, but, no one would be there! She says it happened at random 2 or 3 times in the day alone. She thought it was someone pulling a prank but it dawned on her that she had no neighbors for miles around. That’s when she became scared. Eventually it stopped but it stayed in her. Mom was becoming increasingly frightened because nothing would add up.
She said remembered that when the door knocks stopped, there would be soft tappings between the walls. In the beginning, she thought she was hearing things and she didn’t pay attention to it. But she constantly kept hearing those soft taps from inside the house, day or night. Mom didn’t want to tell anybody because they would discount it that her imagination was working overdrive! Her mind was slowly becoming fearful to what it could be.
So one night, my grandparents left to go food shopping in another town. Mom decided to stay by herself because she thought shopping was boring. But she completely forgot of all the things that were happening in that house! So later on, Mom was sitting in the living room because they had left early and she was thinking in her mind that they would come home before dark. She was there in the living room all alone while it was completely pitch black dark outside.
She said that all she heard were the frogs croaking by the lake and crickets chirping. Mom said she was getting a feeling that she was being watched through the windows. But the windows were so high for someone to look through. At that point she was running around the house like a headless chicken full of panic & fright for her bad decision. She regrets to this day of staying all alone!
If it couldn’t get worse for my poor Mom… the tappings came back… but louder! Mom was thinking that she was becoming insane or that fear was grabbing a hold of her head. So she decided to confront whatever it was that was doing that. She started follow the noise where the tappings where coming from. It was towards the very back end of the house near the back door.
As she inched closer & closer, she put her ear against an inner wall of a small dark closet near the back door where the knocks were coming from outside. And what she told me next, gave me goosebumps typing this down! She said that she heard the loud wailing noise of a baby bawling & crying as if it was trapped inside the closet.
Mom didn’t even bother to check this because it shook her up. Then for a quick moment, the tappings inside the house came back but…much more louder as if someone was banging on the door! She ran all the way into her room & locked the door when she went to get her rosary. Mom waited for what she felt like forever for her family to come home. After that she never thought about staying alone again.
After Mom was done hearing things, she said would finally see what it was doing all ruckus to her. Yet another dark night, in the middle of summer, Mom & her siblings were eagerly waiting for her dad to come home from work. She ran to the back door, anticipating his arrival!
Mom opened the door without hesitation, & she remembers that she was completely scared of what saw next. She said that a distance almost close to her, she said she saw was a solid white soul shaped like a woman, floating across the backyard, going from one corner of the old barn to other corner where an old watershed used to be standing that was demolished right after my mom moved in. It was knocked down because my grandparents were concerned that the old dilapidated shed would cave in while Mom would play there with her brothers & sisters.
When the “woman” reached the shed, she disappeared into thin air. Mom was speechless of what she saw & ran back into the house to my Abuela. She couldn’t even speak to my abuela & after a while when the fright left my mom, she told Abuela of what “it” was. My Abuela told Mom something chilling.
Since my whole family was Catholic & they kind of believe in the supernatural, my Abuela thought, “That the “ghost” was trying to contact to my Mom.” Mom said that she didn’t want to hear anything to do with the “woman”. Abuela said that if Mom didn’t call “her” out, that the “woman” wouldn’t stop trying to communicate with my mom. It’s odd because it just happened to her only & not her siblings. Abuela mentioned to Mom say to “her”, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?!?” Mom complied & when she did it that night, the “woman” never responded to her & all the paranormal things stopped.
Now that my Mom told me this, she recalled that Tia Lety researched about the house’s history & freakishly found out… that there were 5 children that lived in the house… just like my mom’s family… of 5! But if that was scary enough, 4 of the 5 children’s names were the exact same… Jose, Anthony, Francisco, & then my mom’s name… Maria.
Disturbingly, one of the children was killed by a stray gunshot of a bullet in the house that was built in the 1920s. But the barn & the shed were built during the Gold Rush in California. I theorized that the “woman” thought my Mom was the child who died in the house & wanted to contact her to see if she was her “child”.
Just recently, last week we went to Watsonville for a family event, & Tia Lety told that the house no longer stands & it was demolished couple of years ago. Mom told me that this would be the first & last time she’ll ever tell this as she felt scared by this even to this day. I will never forget of what my mom had endured. I’m glad that she made it through up to this day, for me… to see her. To be with her. And Mom, no matter what, I will love you, forever.
Story Number 5
White Glowing Eyes by mosaic_unearthed
The following is a very true experience. I’ve never actually wrote this down before and I don’t know if anyone has experienced this too. This happened between 1989 & 1990 and I was about the age of four years old. To this day I still get chills thinking about it and I wonder if in some way unknown, it changed me.
My parents had a house in the Inland Empire of Southern California and at the time my brother hadn’t been born yet, so I was still the only child.
To give you a layout, My parents’ house was a two-story house located in a cul-de-sac. On the bottom floor there was two bedrooms, a bathroom, the living room and the kitchen. The second floor was just the master bedroom and bath. All you could see from the street was the garage and one of the bedroom windows on the bottom floor and the window of my mom’s bathroom on the second floor. To get to the front door you had to walk along the cement pathway that ran along the side of the house. You had to pass the first bedroom that you can see from the street, then you pass the bathroom window and then another bedoom window and then you would be at the front door. The backyard was beyond that point. My bedroom at the time was the bedroom next to the front door.
Now for some reason, my blinds weren’t completely down to the bottom of the window. There was about a 6 inch gap with nothing covering it. I was pretty young, so I didn’t really care much about it then. The bed was in the middle of the wall across from my bedroom door and to the left was the window.
According to my mom this all happened right before midnight. My mother was asleep in her room upstairs and my dad was a police man that worked nights in another city. I was fast asleep in my room and out of no where I suddenly awoke, looking up at the ceiling. I don’t know what woke me or if I just popped awake on my own. After my eyes adjusted to the the nights light of my bedroom, I sat up and started looking around my room. All of the sudden something caught my eye at the window, in the gap. First, I thought it was the street light reflecting on the window. But I knew for a fact that there was only one street light and what I was looking at was two obvious glowing spots that were spaced apart as if on someone’s face. Then I thought, is that a cat looking at me? And Yes I vividly remember thinking these things, trying to debunk this at four years old.
I had remembered then that my cat Chelsea’s eyes would reflect at night. But this looked different then that. The cats eyes would almost have different colors when reflecting. These were two very solid bright white glowing eyes… looking straight at me. I just stared at them frozen stiff, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing. I couldn’t see a face at all, the eyes were just so bright nothing else stood out. That void or “face” around the eyes looked blacker than the night. I thought again, well if this is a cat how could a cat be big like a person and why would a cat stand up to stare in my bedroom?
The curiosity got me and I went for it. I flipped my covers off, turned my little 4 year old body towards the window and put my feet on the floor. This is the moment the creepiest thing happened and it will forever be burned into my brain.
I got off the bed and got on my knees to get a closer look at this so called “cat.” When at this very moment, this faceless pair of glowing white eyes begins to slowly and steadily tilt to the side (very similar to Michael Myers in Halloween), eyes still locked on me. Not blinking once. The feeling of dread and fear shot through my body. Completely terrified, I burst into tears immediately and booked it down the hallway, through the living room and up the stairs to tell my mom. Although I was going as fast as I could, It felt like it took forever.
When I got to my mom I was so upset, I couldn’t get any words out. Tears were streaming down my face and my mom was becoming seriously concerned at this point. She was able to calm me down just enough for me to get out the words “There…. There is white eyes looking at me through my window, on the bottom.” Stutter crying hard. Are you sure? My mom asked. I cry out “yes!”
She didn’t even go down to look, she just called the police.
I don’t remember the time it took for them to arrive or what they said because I finally fell asleep in my mom’s bed. I do remember faintly waking up to a knock on the door and my mom going to open it. The cop speaks to her and I hear her say “Ok, thank you goodnight.” and she shuts the door. “Did they find it mommy?” I asked half asleep. “No honey, he said they couldn’t find anyone.” my mom told me softly. “It’s ok now, just try to go back to sleep.”
It’s safe to say that the next day, my whole window was covered.
Years fast forward and I’m in middle School now. Every now and then I would think about that night. Sometimes I wondered if that moment was real, if those eyes were really there. Those unforgettable white eyes.
One day a random thought came up and I asked my mom if she remembered that night. She tells me “yes of course, why?” “I don’t know, just wondering I guess.” I said. Then my mom proceeds to say “Well I never told you this but when the deputy came out that night, he told me they made it a priority to get out to our house as soon as they could because not very long before I called 911 they received another call from someone else reporting that someone was looking in their window. In our same neighborhood.”
Hearing that sent chills down my spine and to this day I wonder who or…. What was looking at me that night?
Exit
Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed these stories, head on over to my website at www.scarystorytime.com and make a comment. You can also find me on social media. Just search for Spooky Boo’s Scary Story Time.
That’s all for now.
I’ll see you in your nightmares.
Credits
Podcast background Ambiance Abyss by MYUU
Intro Music: The Order’s Theme by MYUU
Story One: Email by an anonymous listener in California
Story Two: Email by an anonymous listener in California
Story Three: Email by an anonymous listener in California
Story Four: The Spirit Woman by FriscoPLAYA49
Story Five: White Glowing Eyes by mosaic_unearthed