What is the scariest thing you have seen/heard in the middle of the night in your home?

[emily nicole]

One really cold night I was sound asleep in my bedroom. The bedroom is right off the foyer. I heard what sounded loud enough to be a gunshot right outside my room. Scared the you-know-what out of me. I called 911, sheriff came out and found no evidence of anything. That's when I realized some of the ceramic tiles in the foyer were shattered. The sheriff thought the cold weather may have done it. It was so bizarre!

 

[BlueStarryHat]

I was woken out of a sound sleep by a loud banging noise and the smell of smoke. Our smoke alarms had not gone off, so my Mom and I quickly dressed and then went looking for the source of the smell. Then we heard the sirens and went outside to find a house three doors down on fire. We lived in a South Philly rowhouse, so the smell went through the rafters into our home. After they put the fire out, they found a man dead in one of the bedrooms, and determined that he'd been trying to kick the air conditioner out of the window to escape. I guess what we'd heard was this poor guy trying to get out.

 

[waltonmkb]

My parents live in a mountainous town in New Mexico and while staying with them for the weekend, we were awakened in the middle of the night by a mountain lion screaming/calling. It was a sound that sat me straight up in bed with every hair on my body standing up!

 

[JoeA]

A few years ago we heard sirens - a LOT of them, coming down our street and then a very loud crash and screeching. I jumped out of bed to look out the window and saw a guy running across the yard in front of us, a dog jumping on him and taking him down, and then about 10 cops appear out of nowhere trying to subdue the guy.

The guy stole a DUMP TRUCK and led the cops on a ~10 mile chase which ended practically in my front yard when he tried to take a corner a flipped the truck. The dump truck slid through a neighbors fence and just barely missed their house.'

One of the cops came over and asked if our security cameras caught anything and turns out he broke his arm trying to subdue the guy.

Yeah, the guy was on meth. Go figure!

It was a weird night.

 

[CGB]

We woke up to a random guy banging on our doors and yelling at us in the middle of the night. Apparently, he was drunk and launched his car off into the cotton field next to our house. He'd gotten stuck and muddy himself and lost his pants/shirt in the process. We lived in a duplex and our neighbor had an electronic "eye" on his light (they were brand new back then). The guy had gotten mad that we "turned" the lights on but wouldn't help him. He was walking around, banging on doors, shouting and cussing us out,... all while wearing only his underwear. We called the cops (even tho DH and I both were Air Force police) and they pulled up to his greetings...."THANK GOD you're here! These people won't help me!" The first thing the officer asked was "Where are your clothes?" It took them like two hours that night to get his car out of the field. The next morning we walked around outside to find mud smeared everywhere. That has to be one of the craziest wake-ups we ever had.

 

[SM1992]

At my parents's house one night it sounded like a baby being murdered on the back hill side. We're pretty sure it was a fisher cat.

^This. First time we heard one we thought it was a woman being attacked in the neighborhood. Scariest sound I've ever heard. We watched out the window for any police activity fo like an hour, nothing going on but, took forever to get back to sleep.

 

[Alicefan]

I have another one! Back in the late 1900's I had decided to start going to church again and we had just been the night before and I brought home a bunch of church pamphlets in a little brown paper bag and laid it on the end table in the living room. My husband at the time worked nights so it was just me and my chihuahua. At about 5:30am juuust when it was kinda blue looking outside, I heard male voices and was sort of dreaming that kids were walking to school past my window but as I started to wake up more, I realized that my room was in the back of the house and no one should be in my back yard. I started to fall back asleep and I heard something rustling in that bag I had brought home and then heard a male laugh. Kind of like a mocking laugh as if they thought the pamphlets were stupid. The strange thing was, when I heard this laugh, my dog heard it too and we both popped our heads up at the same time. We got up and oddly, we weren't scared because it was getting light outside. My dog and I walked the whole house and found nothing. My dog was looking as if she just KNEW something was there, with me every step of the way, in and out of rooms looking confused. I thought maybe me popping my head up so fast had just scared her, and that's why she popped up too. I tried and tried for days to lay still and jump to make her jump, and it never ever worked. She heard what I heard but never barked. To this day, I'll say it was the devil or a demon, making fun of my church pamphlets!

 

[NYCgrrl]

Me? Cant think of anything.
My kiddos? Putting the key in the door after curfew.

 

[MamaMermaid]

Sitting here waiting for ghost stories...

 

[NannyBeBe]

The sound of the winds of a Category 4 hurricane hitting our house. I was young, but I still remember the sound. Our house was made of concrete blocks filled with concrete and a concrete roof, so I knew we were safe, but it was the screaming sound of the wind that was frightening.