A collection of personal observations: from moving paper to a creature around the corner

Story 1. As a child, around age 7, I was sitting on the floor in the evening sorting through various papers/drawings in my room. I got lost in thought and stared for a while at a crumpled scrap of paper a meter away from me. Then it suddenly moved with a characteristic sound, as if someone invisible was crumpling it, and just as suddenly it became motionless again. There was no draft.

Story 2. I was sitting at the dacha with my second cousin in the dark, talking. Suddenly, in my peripheral vision, it seemed that a big black cat was sitting on the stove. At that same moment, my cousin looked there in fright and said that she also thought she saw a black cat sitting there. A shared hallucination.

Story 3. I was about 18, walking to dance class in the dark across a large unlit wasteland. It was a frosty winter, -30⁰, and a bright starry sky. I was admiring the stars, and suddenly one star, the one I was looking at right then and which had been motionless before, tore from its place and slowly moved to the side. Along the way, 4 glowing little branches extended outward from it on all sides, with 4 small stars at the ends, which seemed to curve around it from back to front and connect in front, and as a result of this movement the star itself became much brighter and gained a halo around it. At that moment I lowered my eyes to the ground in horror, afraid to look further. After a few seconds, I raised my eyes again, but there was nothing there anymore, the star had disappeared.

Story 4. I'm 20+, my mom and I went to Thailand together. There I got severe food poisoning from shrimp and ended up in a Thai hospital. Luckily the medical insurance worked, and all the treatment was covered by the insurance. There they put me on an IV, prescribed medications and gave them to me right away, the doctor spoke to me in English with a strong accent that made her hard to understand + Google Translate. At discharge, my mom told me that this whole situation, which happened within the hospital, she had dreamed exactly one-to-one a year or two before, without context that it was on vacation in Thailand, and she was very surprised then at what a strange dream it was.

Story 5. I'm 27, I live in another city, renting an apartment alone. One day I wake up in the middle of the night because I feel that someone is silently sitting on my bed at the foot. But I desperately want to sleep, and at the same time I understand that it feels like someone of my own, very dear and safe, so I say to this someone: "Well okay, if you want, sit..." and fall back asleep. In the morning I find out that that night my paternal grandmother died in my hometown. And the second sub-story connected to this: not even 9 days had passed since her death when my mom went for a walk to the local sanatorium after work, she often does that. When she returned home, in her apartment everywhere, absolutely in every room, the lights were on. All the light fixtures that existed were turned on. Mom lives alone, and claims that when she left, she turned everything off.

Story 6. This is the story after which I treat stories about noises, knocking, etc. skeptically. Living in the same rented apartment as in the previous story, I started noticing that sometimes a random knocking would start from the cabinet under the sink in the kitchen. At first I blamed various pipes, but then it started scaring me, especially creepy-looking at night, in the silence. A couple of times I opened the cabinet, but saw nothing there. I got an obsessive idea that I had a poltergeist living with me, I started being afraid, because I couldn't find an explanation. Sometimes it seemed to me that objects on the kitchen counter moved by themselves behind my back (I literally heard the sound of them moving). A couple of times I woke up because in the room where I was sleeping, something was clearly moving and touching surrounding objects. And the knocking from the cabinet under the sink was daily. One night this knocking continued several times, I had already wound myself up enough and from fear couldn't fall asleep at all. At 5 in the morning I got sick of being afraid, and at the next bout of knocking I ran to the kitchen and sharply flung open the doors, doing it as sharply as I could to maximally catch the source of the noise off guard. And in the cabinet I saw a live mouse jumping in terror. It got scared of me too and for a while jumped around the shelf, banging its head against the cabinet ceiling, then ran away. I slid down the kitchen wall to the floor simultaneously laughing and crying, I had a real hysterical fit, that's how tired I was of being afraid at that point. After that I put poison there, and this mouse, having eaten it and gotten drunk, ran around right on my floor for a couple more nights until it died somewhere in the depths of the 5-story building. I know the solution was bad (it would rot and stink there later), but at that moment I was so creeped out by dealing with a little corpse, which would inevitably have to be thrown out of a mousetrap, that I limited myself to poison. As is now clear, objects really did move, only it was the mouse moving them. After killing the little pest, everything went completely quiet. So if you are constantly bothered by sounds of unclear origin, first do pest control for insects and rodents, it will most likely help))

Story 7. Well, and the creepiest story for me, for which I find no explanation, happened when I was 5 years old. We had just moved to a new apartment, and I got my own room. On a weekend morning I woke up, as usual, at 8 am. My mood was great, a wonderful summer day was beginning, the sun was shining, my parents had a day off. The door to my room was open. I was lounging in bed, my gaze wandering around the room, I was running some of my childish thoughts, neutrally colored. And suddenly, when I was looking at the doorway, I see how from around the corner for a few seconds a huge scary mug pokes out. The mug had big yellow eyes with vertical pupils, an open maw, from which white teeth with fangs were visible and a red protruding tongue. The mug itself was black, furry, on top either pointed ears or horns, idk. It poked out at a level of about 50-70 cm from the floor, and catching my gaze, quickly hid back. The feeling was as if the creature was spying on me, but clearly didn't expect that I would be looking in its direction, so it quickly hid. I froze in horror, and didn't know how to behave. I was embarrassed to call my parents, because the situation was clearly abnormal. How to explain it to them? I saw a monster? It seemed to me that the creature hid and was sitting there waiting. There were no sounds. I was too scared to check myself, so I preferred to stay in bed and wait for my parents to wake up and meet this creature themselves. I didn't have to wait long, dad woke up, I was happy, but he calmly walked past my room into the living room, clearly not meeting anyone. Then I in horror went out of the room, looked into that corner, but there was expectedly no one there. Later I repeatedly tried to tell adults about this, but I was in every way pushed toward the idea that I dreamed it, or I was making it up. And this fear of again seeing someone peeking from around the corner like that, I am forced to carry inside me my whole life, but it never happened again.