17 Real Life Horror Stories That Will Give You Goosebumps

Now for some haunted Disney World stories!

I work at several attractions for the big Mouse that has tourist destinations in Orlando and Anaheim. When I first started working for the Mouse, I learned that most of the buildings were haunted in one form or another. Generally, I take this stuff with a grain of salt. Show me the science or prove it to me, then I’ll believe. I’ve had two separate encounters with two ghosts in two different attractions, and let me tell you, I believe a hell of a lot more now.

Experience one: In a slow-moving journey through time, you come across a scene where a famous painter is lying on his back, painting the ceiling of a building. There is a ladder going up to that scene, and the rumor was that a maintenance guy had a heart attack during his shift one night and dropped at the base of the ladder.

No one found him until the next morning, and he was already dead.

It became a tradition upon closing the ride for the night, to tell him “good night,” or else havoc would come down upon the ride the next day. Silly, I know, but we all played along. I never really believed in it, everything seemed very circumstantial.

On one particularly slow day, I was riding through the attraction when all of a sudden it stopped in that scene I mentioned earlier. Now, if you’ve ridden this ride, you’ll know that it’s basically a train car with two rows. Well, as far as I could see ahead of me, there was no one. As far as I could see behind me, there was no one. The ride system is pretty sophisticated: when someone hops out, there are pressure sensitive mats on one side that trigger the ride to stop and show on our ride display screen exactly where it is. On the other side of the ride vehicle, there are photoelectric beams that also give the exact location of this intrusion, as we call them.

Now we stop this ride pretty often. Someone takes too long to get into the ride vehicle, stop it and then start it back up again. Well, in this case, they started speaking over the intercom into the entire ride. That usually means someone is out of a vehicle somewhere on the ride. A few minutes into sitting there, I start to hear keys jingling, two sets headed in my direction. I’m completely alone, and here come my fellow Mouse employees, looking rather concerned. “Did you jump out?” Of course, I hadn’t, to which I told them. They look at each other, and back at me, both looking from the opposite directions they’ve come from. “Did you see anyone?” I hadn’t. It was just me. “The mat and the eyebeam were both triggered in this scene.” We all sort of stare at each other and sort of whisper the ghost’s name at each other. They leave, and within 5 minutes, we are moving again, but I never rode alone again.

And this one about the ride Mission: SPACE.

Another attraction I work at is a motion simulator that spins and creates G-forces to simulate space flight. When the attraction first opened, there was only one option. The story goes that a mother brought her child in to experience the attraction and when the attraction had finished, the child was unresponsive. Emergency services were called, and it was later discovered during the child’s autopsy that he had an undiagnosed heart condition. This much is true, there is a fellow Mouse employee that was working on that day and remembers the story, multiple other Mouse employees have looked up the story, myself included.

Since then, it's been said that the ghost of that little boy likes to hang around in the ride-room where he died.

There are multiple reports of hearing him laughing during opening procedures, of him calling out for his mom, of the sensors going off before the ride starts and upon checking the cameras, there being stuff in front of it that definitely wasn’t there before, since we check all of the cameras before the ride starts. Again, I’m usually very skeptical about this sort of thing.

One morning, I’m scheduled for an opening shift, which doesn’t normally happen due to my low seniority. I show up and go to open ride room number 3, which is the room where this little boy met his tragic end. During opening checks, there is one person in each of the four rooms, all completing the same tasks. Ride rooms 1 and 2 are connected by a small closet, and ride rooms 3 and 4 are similarly connected by a small closet. We usually don’t chat in the mornings with the person opening the other ride-room since we are all trying to get through our checklist as quickly as possible. I get to the part where I’m about to run the ride and check for errors at the end of my checklist and go in to start closing up my vehicles. It gets pretty loud in there, to the point where if we need to get someone’s attention, we have to raise our voices. I start to check my ride vehicles and close the first two of the ten.

That's when I start gearing laughing, a little boy.

At this point, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the other openers playing a joke on me, so I move on. Go to check the next two, they’re good, so I close them. I hear the laughter again, closer and louder this time. I turn around to check over my shoulder, and there’s a faint flicker of movement from the corner of my eye. So I go to check and see what it is. There’s nothing.

At this point, I’m spooked. I hurry and check the rest of my ride vehicles, close them up, and do a final check of my ride room before closing everything up and setting the ride to start. I hear the giggling again, turn around like last time, and there’s a faint shimmer disappearing down the hallway. Of course, I chase it to see what was there. Turns out to be nothing, again, so I go to the other ride-room to see who was opening over there. A girl that I’ve worked with before quite a bit. She normally opens and tells me she’s had similar experiences where it looks like someone is watching you, or just out of the corner of your eye and there’s no one there, and that the laughing sometimes gets to be just downright creepy. Multiple people have encountered this little boy ghost at various times during the day, mostly under the conclusion that he’s lonely.

–irridescentsong

....
.

...?.

.