Scary stories

Glitch in the Matrix (Part 2)

Years ago, I was driving home with two of my friends. We were about 25 minutes away when we turned a bend in the road. The moon was full and the road was completely empty. Suddenly, everything went completely dark in the car. The headlights turned off, the dashboard lights turned off, the radio turned off... everything. We looked out the window. There was now a vehicle in front of us that had been pulled over by the police. It hadn't been there a spilt second before. We all sat there, stunned. After about a minute, my friend who was driving said, "Did that just happen to anyone else?" My other friend in the back seat exclaimed, "I thought I just fell asleep..." Then, we realized that the clock on the dashboard was an hour later than it had just been a minute before. To keep ourselves from freaking out we tried to tell ourselves that maybe there was an electrical failure. But when we arrived home 25 minutes later, we were over an hour late. Somehow we lost one whole hour of our lives, and to this day, we have no idea how it happened.

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When I was at college, I worked at a bar. One of my responsibilities was to stay late some nights to close up. One night, around 4 AM, I closed up the bar and had to leave through the back door. It opened on a small backstreet. I locked the door behind me, but when I turned around, I saw two groups of shady looking dudes on my left and my right. I was surrounded.

They started shouting at me and I heard them say, "Let's get him!" Before I had a chance to run, I was blinded by headlights. The shady-looking dudes had to move out of the way because a car was coming through. It was a cab. The driver pulls up in front of me with the window rolled down and asked, "Are you Jeff?". I said, "Yes," and he said, "Someone called a cab for you."

I jumped into the cab and he drove off. The cab driver drove me all the way to my apartment and I paid him. To this day, I have no idea who called that cab for me. I have a sneaking feeling that, in some other reality, there's a guy named Jeff who got murdered that night because he called a cab that never came.

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I was 10 years old and my parents had taken me to visit Ocracoke Island. It's an old fishing island off the coast of North Carolina. We were staying at Blackbeard's Lodge. The legend of Blackbeard the pirate is a big deal on the island.

We had just settled into our room, and my dad had gone out to get some sodas from the vending machine. I was lying on one of the beds with my mom and we were watching TV. All of a sudden, the Television switched channels. It seemed to be a science show that was aimed at children. It was about black holes and it featured an animated cartoon character explaining everything.

Even though the TV had changed channels on its own, my mother and I didn't do anything. It was as if we were in a trance. We couldn't move and just lay there as still as a rock.

I vividly remember seeing the cartoon character getting sucked into the black hole. Then, the TV suddenly turned off and, right before our eyes, a black hole appeared on the wall beside our bed. It was just a black, swirling hole in the wall, about a foot and a half wide.

We both just sat there, frozen, staring at the black hole. Just then, my father walked in and the black hole disappeared.

Needless to say we left the hotel right then and lodged in another one on the other side of the island. When we talked about it later my mom recounted the story the same way I did, and my dad says he saw the hole on the wall.

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When I was 10 years old, my parents took me on vacation. We stayed in a nice little cottage on the edge of a lake. There was an abandoned house on the other side of the lake. One day, my father decided to check it out and brought me with him.