Bizarre Accounts of Real Demons in the Closet

Ah, the monster in the closet, that creature lurking there in the murk as we try to go to bed at night. There doesn't seem to be much of a more done to death trope than this old chestnut, the bane of scared little kids everywhere. Closets at night are creepy, and even many an adult may find themselves somewhat unnerved by an open closet at night, the gloom within a portal to who knows what. Yet there is the so called monster in the closet merely a figment of the imagination, or is there sometimes more to it? Here we will look at some creepy cases of people who have said they encountered actual paranormal entities and demons in their closets, and which suggest there is perhaps more to this all than the wild imaginings of scared kids.

In some cases it seems that whatever force is emanating from the closet is merely trying to frighten and disturb, taunting the witnesses to leave them in a state of panic. One such account is from Your Ghost Stories, from a commenter from the U.S. state of Virginia, who says he and his wife had just moved into a rented house in 2010. He claims that soon after moving in they began to experience very intense, realistic, and horrifying nightmares that were unlike anything they had ever seen before and startling in their sheer intensity. At around the same time, their young daughter began to complain of noises and an inexplicable sense of dread coming from a large closet area which adjoined the bathroom and faced directly towards the bed in the master bedroom, even claiming that something had pushed her down once. This was mostly thought to be the imagination of a child at the time, but it would soon prove to be perhaps something more. The father began to feel it too, and hung a crucifix nearby to try and ward it away. He says of what happened thusly:

The closet area never got natural sunlight and was extremely dark at night. I could feel that something was watching. The crucifix seemed to keep it out of the room but it still stared from the closet. So I did the usual "get out, this is my house," "I command you to leave." I felt that this thing was not going anywhere, that it was not scared at all, it was not moving. Not long after that we found a picture of our children on the floor and it had been smashed in the middle of the frame like something was thrown at it. One night while watching TV my wife left for work and I saw a rather large shadow fly out of the bedroom and out towards the car as she was leaving, almost as if it was chasing her. Not long after that she suffered a stroke and a major car accident, both of which left no lasting injuries.

 

I was again traveling and when I returned home I learned that the landlord was kicking us out. I was glad and realized that we had to get out quick to not be followed. But my wife severely scratched her eye while moving and that slowed us down. The last day as we were moving both my wife and I were out on the back lawn under the window not far from the closet, and we both heard a tapping on the window. No one was in the house. I knew what it was the whole time due to the strength of the presence, that it was a demon. The last night as I left, a neighbor stopped me to talk and I could see this shadow flittering around the yard. Unfortunately it followed us to the new house, but it was full of sunshine and good karma. It opened doors and I saw it a couple of times in the hall. It also bothered my son who saw it in the basement. I told him to ignore it, do not feed it with fear and you will basically bore it into leaving. I have seen, run into, ghosts and the like. But this was different, very different.

What was going on here, and why did it seem to be so focused on that closet? Another report comes from Reddit user “OhGanesha,” and she says that this happened back in 2005 when she was in the 5th grade. On this evening she was chasing her sister around the house, as they often did. On this occasion things would get spooky, as she would have an experience with the closet in the bedroom that she cannot explain. The witness says:

The Hall were running is only wide enough for one person, and at the very end on the right is ours. She runs into the room, and once I get there I immediately get this feeling of just this heavy, dark atmosphere. I stop at the door, the light is off but I don’t turn it on. For some reason, I can tell the feeling is coming from the closet, but I walk on the opposite room of the closet and look under the bed. Halfway up I hear, “I’m in here, come get me.” The voice is my sister, but yet it isn’t. It was high pitched, and screamed danger to me at the time while the closet door opened a inch or two. I was so damned scared, I still remember the fear I felt that day. I took off and ran into the computer room and my sister was sitting right there! I freaked out, and was trying to speak but I couldn’t get everything out. She confirmed she saw me but was scared and sat on the computer doing nothing until I showed up.

Perhaps even more menacing is a sinister report from reddit user “Melancholymacaroni,” who claims this happened when she was very young. She says on this evening she awoke in her bedroom to the sound of light rattling, which was coming from the closet door and sounded almost as if someone were pushing on it from the other side. She at first thought it was her sister playing a prank on her, and she considered shouting out to her to stop it, but things soon detoured into the realm of the paranormal. She says:

As I waited and was about to call out to them, confusion quickly turned to a fear so intense that cut straight through me to the very depths of my soul, and it still gives me goosebumps to this day. The light rattling tuned into a deafening aggressive shaking and slamming from my closet door, rather than my bedroom door or the bathroom door. Something or someone was in my room with me. My throat went dry and I suddenly couldn't speak or make any noise. I strained my vocal cords just wanting any remote sound to come out but nothing came. I could barely breathe, the only movement could do (because of the immediate rush of chemicals and the effect of shock) was to pull my blankets over my head and cry silent tears because every fiber of my being thought I was going to be killed then and there by some unknown monster lurking just beyond my closet door.

 

I was raised Christian (I don't affiliate with any specific religion now) so I was bargaining, begging, and pleading that god would intervene and save my life. The thought that there was a demon/ghost/unknown being/negative energy/ etc. with bad intentions that was in my room completely dismantled any sort of security I had in the faith that I would be saved. As I lay trembling with fear, the shaking stopped after about 1 minute or two. It felt like eternity. I was relieved for only a moment until a thought entered my head. "What if it's not gone?". I was terrified even more because of the silence. The idea that something had opened my closet door and began making it's way toward me. I became completely paralyzed in my bed and breathed so quietly frightened that maybe it wouldn't notice me. I fell asleep eventually, after being tortured by my thoughts and my fear of what was happening around me.

 

When I woke, I ran to my parents to see if an earthquake had happened the night before or if they had been woken up by the door. They said no to both questions. I don't have an answer to what happened that night, I only have the experience which still haunts me to this day.

From Your Ghost Stories we have the story of a witness from the state of Massachusetts, and who in 2002 moved into a small apartment in a semi-rural town. She describes the building as very old, with a closet door in her bedroom that didn’t properly close all the way, but her first evening there seemed fine and she was mostly happy with her new abode. This would change when the following night strange activity would begin to occur, which revolved around her closet and its broken door. She says of the weird things that would transpire:

Sometime in the middle of the night the closet door slammed open as if someone had kicked it open from the inside, smacked into the wall and slammed shut again (I know this because it happened many more times over the next few weeks). As you can imagine, I was catapulted out of sleep in a panic! I sat upright staring at the closed closet door, terrified and too petrified to reach for the light in the dark. I probably sat like that for a good 15 minutes before I could move. Once I got the light turned on I left it on for the remainder of the night. The closet door continued to do it's thing as the weeks went on accompanied by lights turning on in the middle of the night, doors locking on their own, the stereo doing whatever the hell it wanted, cabinet doors all being opened when I got home from work and other various things. I was not happy and I didn't know what to do.

 

One Friday night a friend came over for dinner and I told him all about my situation, admitting that I was scared and might need to move out already. He told me not to worry about it and that he would have a little chat with my ghost. I was a little uncomfortable with it, but he insisted. I poured myself a glass of wine and went outside to peer in through my bedroom window while my friend sat on the floor in front of my open closet and had what appeared to be a one-sided conversation. After about 15 minutes or so, he closed the closet door and signaled to me that he was finished. He wouldn't tell me what he said, but he assured me that my troubles would be over.

 

And they were. For five wonderfully peaceful years. In the summer of 2007 I was working on my computer in my bedroom, listening to music and enjoying the warm breeze through the window when I heard a loud crash from the other end of the apartment. I ran into the kitchen to find a beautiful old ceramic serving platter that I had left on the counter smashed in the middle of the kitchen floor, about five feet from the counter. That was the end of the peace and quiet. For the next ten months I endured an ever increasing amount of activity which even my friend couldn't do anything about. My boyfriend would no longer stay in my apartment alone for more than five minutes, and other friendss often said they felt uncomfortable there even with others around. In the spring of 2008 I moved to another small town in Massachusetts and haven't experienced anything at all to indicate my current home is haunted.

Is this a haunting, a tall tale, or what? An exceedingly creepy tale of something supernatural in the closet comes from the site True Ghost Tales, from a witness who says this had happened when she was a young girl. She says that on this night her father had come home drunk and had a big argument with her mother, which wasn’t particular out of the ordinary for her household, but what would happen next certainly wasn’t. She says that on this evening she had been watching TV on the sofa in the living room when she suddenly heard her father screaming in horror. Everyone in the house ran to see what had happened, and they found the usually stern and fearless father cowering in a corner in his room, claiming that “The Devil” had come out of the closet and tried to forcefully take him away. At first no one knew what he was on about, but it would become clearer and more terrifying when he was able to articulate it further. The witness says of the bonkers tale:

Anyway we all were too freaked out so we all fell asleep in the living room, and the next day my dad told us the story again, but this time he said that he heard a mans voice, then he heard some one opening my closet door, he wanted to show us where he saw it come from, and since it was day time I really wasn’t scared that much. We all went to my room then my dad opened my closet door and we saw this figure of a man standing inside my closet as if it was asleep, its arms were on his chest and he was all black, with long finger nails and he had wings. The weird thing about all this is that a few day later I saw it in my room.

 

I was watching TV in the living room. We had the hall light on so that way it could reflect light into my room, but that night the light only reflected half way. I saw a dark shadow standing in the middle of my room, then he took his hand out and started moving his index finger asking me to come to him with his reddish yellow eyes. I was so scared that I couldn’t move at all. I was screaming for my parents but they couldn’t hear me at all, how could this be they were ten feet away from me? Anyway when I turned my head back to see him he was already next to me. All he did to me was he had lifted me up and he kissed my forehead and my neck, then he left, just like that. We never say IT again, but sometimes when I’m in the dark I feel like someone is there with me. I sometimes wonder if it was a vampire or something else.

Is there any truth to this spectacular account, and if there is then what could it have been? Even more frightening than these cases so far are those accounts where the entity from the closet seems to have actually gotten physical, sometimes even quite violently so. A good example of this is a harrowing case relayed on the site Gods and Monsters, by a witness named Louisa Celeste Strutt. She says that this happened when she was 13 years old, when she began to experience what she says were attacks of a sexual nature directed at her by something dwelling within her closet. It began one evening at around 11 PM as she lay awake reading a book in bed and suddenly heard a “screeching sound” coming from her closet, which got steadily louder and more aggressive over the next several minutes. She says she warily approached the closet door even as that horrible sound spewed forth from it, somehow finding the courage to fling the closet door open only to find nothing there at all but clothes and hangers. She ended up going back to bed, still not quite sure what that noise had been, and she tried to put it out of her mind as she sat there in the dark, her eyes on that closet wondering when it would start again, and start again it did, this time becoming more terrifying than before. She says of what happened next:

I thought it was over but instead I began to hear chains moving and footsteps coming from out of the closet and right across my room past the end of my bed and over to my sister's bed where whatever or whoever it was seemed to sit down. I felt like a scared rabbit staring at where I assumed its face was, and the worst part was... I could tell it was staring back. I just sat there for a minute or so frozen in disbelief, then a wave of fear swept over me and I felt tears welling up in my eyes, but any attempts to scream or call for help where stifled before they could be uttered. Then I heard it give a long sigh, as clearly as anything, it was in a male voice, but not particularly deep, as if to say "oh great, I made her cry." Whatever grip this entity had on me was released and I bolted out the door and down the stairs to the living room where I sat behind everyone on a chair.

This would not even be the end of it, as the witness says that the entity become ever bolder over the coming days, often emerging from the closet to watch the witness from the shadows. The physical attacks would also grow in intensity to the point that it became clear to her that this entity was perhaps a type of incubus, or a demon that feeds off of sexual energy. She says of the string of bizarre experiences that would plague her:

I was sleeping having some strange dream when I was awoken by a weightiness on my chest I opened my eyes and I could see the curtains across from where I lay, it looks like the early hours of the morning then my attention shifted to what was causing the slight weight on my chest I turned my head to look directly above me and there, staring at me intently was a face; unlike any I've seen before. His skin was white, but not just pale, he was as white as my bed sheets, he had jet black hair and strangely enough I remember tiny thin black needle-like pins holding it away from his face, his eyes were what struck me most, they where extremely pale blue and his pupils resembled that of a cats only thinner. I was extremely groggy as we stared at each other both somewhat bewildered, all I can remember thinking was "he's so beautiful" and just like that my vision went blurry and I blacked out. Perhaps he put to sleep, maybe I wasn't supposed to wake up; honestly I don't know, but what I wanna know is why he was on top of me in the first place?

 

The thought of that was frightening, but at the same time I was strangely enchanted. I began seeing him regularly in my dreams he told me he was we were destined to be lovers or something to that extent I remember him kissing me and telling me things. As things progressed he began to be more sexual with me, I didn't know what to do, I was only 13 but he seemed to have no regard for my age. I began to feel as if I were being touched while I was awake, or I would feel a hand on my shoulder. My sister began to tell me that she felt there was something in the house and it was around me, I would walk into my bedroom and hear loud breathing behind me and feel eyes watching me, it was disconcerting.

Disconcerting seems to be an understatement here, and we are left with yet another extremely bizarre case that leaves one wondering if any of this really happened or not. Almost just as scary is an account from Reddit user “hwarkall,” who in the fall of 2009 had been living with his fiancé in a 1953 bungalow for a few months when she began to complain of something harassing her at night, “Touching her face, her feet, sitting on her chest, etc.” He didn’t think much of it at first, until he would witness something beyond his understanding 2 weeks later in the closet. He explains:

About two weeks later I went to bed late. She was already asleep. I climbed into bed and looked over my shoulder towards the bathroom door. There stood a seven foot shadow figure. I immediately tried to debunk it by looking at the light coming from under the door from the living room. The bathroom light was not on and there was foil over the windows since I worked nights and slept during the day. I then looked back towards it standing there motionless. Next I glanced to the left of it at our closet. It was a large walk in with a green tapestry hanging on a rod for a door. The light was on inside and what did I see. Floating in the closet was a demon, which looked male and mean as hell. It had scales like a reptile. Its arms were outstretched with thumbs pointing down. It was rotating is head to the left and right. The best I can describe it face was seething or hissing. It hand no legs. Floating from the waist up. I watched it for a few seconds. Just long enough to notice every detail of it's skin and face. Then I laid down and immediately fell asleep. Why did I just lay down and go to sleep? I think it had control of my mind. I later began to think maybe a djinn attached itself to me when I was in Iraq. I've had issues with extreme anger, rage, depression, and anxiety ever since. I am not religious and never had any thoughts of demons before this moment.

What sort of forces are we dealing with in cases such as we have looked at here? What is going on and what have these people seen? What sort of entities are we looking at here, what do they want, and why are they in people's closets? Is there anything to this at all, or are these just tall tales? It seems that there is no way to really know the answer to these questions at this point, but it certainly gives one something to thing about the next time you are lying awake in bed and that closet is open just a crack.